Ep. 1095 dissects media distortions around Gorbachev’s legacy, framing him as a Soviet enabler while crediting Reagan’s "Star Wars" with collapsing the USSR, then pivots to 2020 election grievances—FBI whistleblowers, Hunter Biden claims—and warns Biden’s "threat to democracy" rhetoric risks civil unrest. It contrasts Cosby’s downfall from progressive darling to convicted abuser after conservative critiques, questioning why Epstein and Weinstein faced less scrutiny, before interviewing Carol Markowitz on New York’s leftist exodus to Florida under DeSantis. The episode ties these threads—media bias, political polarization, and cultural backlash—to a warning: elites weaponize outrage while ignoring systemic failures. [Automatically generated summary]
Scientific American now says that Western science did not recognize the existence of two sexes until the late 18th century.
I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, oh, Clavin, you marvelous merchant of mirth, your combination of hilarious satire and shattering good looks just makes me want to forget my marriage vows and do you as if we were some sort of wild animals.
And okay, maybe only some of you are thinking that, but the point is, no, I'm not making this up.
This claptrap was actually asserted in a series of tweets from Scientific American, which was once a respected magazine that explained the latest theories and discoveries for the improvement of its readers and is now a pile of shiny pieces of paper covered with markings that resemble words but are actually meaningless symbols representing the images created by random electrical activity in brains that have been rendered fatally defective by a catastrophic collision with an American university.
These meaningless symbols, when translated into something like English, say the following, quote, and I swear to heaven, this is a real quote word for word from Scientific American, quote, Before the late 18th century, Western science recognized only one sex, the male, and considered the female body an inferior version of it.
The shift historians call the two-sex model served mainly to reinforce gender and racial divisions by tying social status to the body, unquote.
Now, of course, this is not entirely fantastical, politically inspired falderall.
Historically, there were some men who considered the female body inferior to the male.
But the popularity of this idea declined after God wiped most of them off the face of the earth by raining fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah.
In an ancillary tragedy, Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt, which meant Lot's food tasted better, but there was no one to cook it for him.
Lot ultimately became a laughing stock when he would settle into his armchair shouting, hey honey, don't forget to put some salt on my sandwich, and would then just sit there watching the big game with nothing to eat.
After that, people were forced to admit that the female body was far superior, if only because of the way it giggled adorably when you chased it around the room.
To be fair, the great philosopher Socrates also found the male body superior, but whenever he left the Agora, people used to whisper behind his back that Socrates, great philosopher, but, you know, gay, and his ideas were ultimately dismissed.
To give Scientific American its due, before setting it on fire and then urinating on the ashes to make sure the flames don't spread to something valuable, the idea that the two sexes were invented in the late 18th century mainly to reinforce gender and racial divisions may be derived from the great gender invention meeting of 1785, held by the Dead White Male Society in their secret castle hidden deep within the lightning-laced fog that shrouds the craggy reaches of Mount Bigotry.
It was in that fateful meeting that this gathering of powerful but shadowy figures voted that from that day forth, all people except Oscar Wilde would be divided at birth into either males or females, and the females would be cruelly forced to bear all the children and to take so long to dry their hair that every home would need a second bathroom, while the men would be free to grill steaks and use curse words while laughing loudly at jokes that aren't really all that funny when you come to think about them.
Fortunately, this evil plot was finally foiled by critical gender theorists who broke the tyranny of the gender binary through a brilliant strategy, technically known as talking complete crap.
Hoorah Hooray! It Helps Us00:02:26
And today, young men and women are at last free to choose whatever gender they wish and to live full, rich, liberated lives from their birth right up to their suicide.
So thank you, Scientific American, for bringing this little-known watershed of Western science to light.
Your work will stand alongside the 1619 project as one of the great landmarks in the history of human mendacity.
Oh, and by the way, watch out for the fire and brimstone.
And please pass the salt.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dee-doo.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray.
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, we are back laughing our way through the Second American Civil War.
Mikhail Gorbachev has died, and I want to take a look back at the lies that we've been told about both him and Reagan by both the left and the right, actually.
And also, One Man's Cosby, a personal reflection on a documentary about my childhood hero, a great American entertainer who, I believe, raped at least 60 women.
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Like, you know, just ringing in my ears and people whispering to me and telling me, kill, kill, kill.
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Leave a comment.
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Mike says, call me crazy, but Clavin systematically killing off his listeners by throwing them into a pit of despair for six days every week seems like a flawed business model.
I never thought of that.
Good point.
Listen, I want to tell you and thank you, this strange habit of mind.
You can see a model of its cover here.
My new book, the sequel to When Christmas Comes, A Strange Habit of Mind, which is a Cameron Winter mystery, the second in the series.
Ring Alarm Pro Launch00:02:33
It's being published by Mysterious Press, which is a prestigious house, but a relatively small house.
And they just got their first order from Amazon, which is the largest order they've ever gotten in their history.
And that is because of you pre-ordering it.
And I beg you to continue doing that because I've recently finished the third book in the series.
My wife says it's literally the best crime novel I've ever written.
But you'll never see it if this book, if this does not become a series, it will not become a series if you do not buy this book.
So we're trying to get it pre-sold, which will encourage the publisher to print more of them, which will encourage us to sell more.
One guy, Habakkuk, who identifies on Twitter as an Old Testament prophet, and I'll just take him at his word, he won an advanced copy of Strange Habit of Mind, and he actually wrote a review talking about how entertained and energized he was by the novel.
He said, I recommend the novel without reservation.
I can now see why Mr. Clavin is so excited about a Cameroon Winter series.
The books seem to me to be systematically exploring the Christian life while also delivering walloping fun plots, heart-aching romance, and spy thrills.
Highly recommended.
I can hardly wait for the next entry.
Please pre-order A Strange Habit of Mind.
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How, oh, how?
Oh, please tell me how do you spell clavin, you are saying?
It is K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no E's in Clavin.
There are no E's in Clavin.
So last week I talked about three words you're not allowed to say, and that was conservatives were right.
Mikhail Gorbachev's Impact00:15:28
Every study shows that married people and religious people are happier.
Those who experiment with free sex, casual sex, generally wind up unhappy, especially women.
But no one ever says, you know, that pencil-necked preacher with a southern accent that I saw on TV, he was actually right, while the sophisticated Ivy Leaguer in the New York Times was totally wrong about everything.
Maybe we should hear more about what these goofy evangelists have to say.
People want to be in with the in-crowd.
They want to be part of the elite.
And restraint and distrust of your own desires, natural values like patriotism and marital devotion, humility, hierarchy of values, female modesty, male chivalry, they're never in fashion because they take effort and they require self-restraint.
The rewards of the flesh are immediate and they're destructive.
It's like chocolate cake or lust, you know.
You get a lot of pleasure out of them right away, and then the destruction comes pretty rapidly on the heels of that.
And the rewards of the spirit really take a long time to develop into a life of joy.
They enhance everything about your life, but it takes time for that joy to blossom inside you.
When I say that no one will admit the conservatives are right, it's not just true, though, in your personal life.
It's also true in the news and in history, right?
It's fake news becomes fake history.
And when Mikhail Gorbachev died this week, he's 91, I think, the last leader of the Soviet Union, was a perfect example of how nobody on the left, nobody in the clericy, let's just call them the cultural elites, the people who have the voices, the people who do the talking.
Nobody would tell the truth about him.
Here's some of the coverage of Gorbachev after his death.
This is just one piece of coverage, cut two.
Remembering Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, credited with lifting the iron curtain.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union who oversaw the end of the Cold War, has died at 91.
Henrietta Mitchell now on his legacy.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the communist leader whose brief six-year reign transformed the map of Europe and the world.
The first Soviet leader with a larger vision for his country, and who was willing to hold a summit with Ronald Reagan, the American president who called the Soviet Union an evil empire.
I interviewed Gorbachev back in 2001 and I asked him what his legacy would be.
First he laughed and said they will be big.
Then getting serious, he answered, my ideas go well beyond the time when I was president and I believe they are still important.
Let's see what happens next.
Well that certainly proved to be prophetic.
The breaking news tonight about Mikhail Gorbachev, the consequential world leader who took down the Iron Curtain.
He took down the Iron Curtain.
Some credit him with ending the Cold War.
It's a half truth, but it really is a lie in a lot of ways, and I'll explain why.
But it only repeats the coverage from the time.
Nobody will go back and say that conservatives were right and that's the reason the Berlin Wall came down.
Here's some coverage from the time of Mikhail Gorbachev, cut one.
This is from MRC.
Gorbachev is the symbol of democracy around the world.
And I think that must give our own George Bush a little pause.
Remember not only the end, but the beginning of the Cold War and the 40 years of fear Gorbachev more than anyone else ended.
He seems to me to have done more good in the world than any other national leader of my lifetime.
By American presidential standards, Mikhail Gorbachev accomplished enough in his seven-year term to qualify for a bus on Mount Rushmore.
He can still light up any room that he walks into, the eyes are flashing, you know, into the great command of the language and the feel that he had the very physical presence of him.
It's still fun to be around him.
And we hope that you'll have a long and happy life.
And perhaps one day again we'll see you in political office in Russia.
We know that you've devoted your life to peace and to changing your country.
And those of us who have gotten to know you count ourselves among the privileged.
As the former head of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev was widely hailed as the man who brought an end to the Cold War.
He's only the most important political leader alive in the world today, historically speaking, I guess I would maintain, don't you think?
Gorbachev?
Yeah.
If you look at what he did.
You know, for me, if I look back over my lifetime, who is the world leader who changed things the most?
And I don't actually think it's a close call.
As far as Reagan's much-vaunted role in winning the Cold War, the lion's share of credit goes to Mikhail Gorbachev, a true visionary, and it turns out the real Democrat.
This is utter crap.
Utter crap.
Complete crap.
I was there.
I watched it.
I saw it happen.
It's garbage.
But it is the way they were reporting it at the time.
I want you to compare that coverage.
I want you to compare that coverage to what happened when Ronald Reagan died, June 5th, 2004.
The press was shocked.
If you don't remember this, or you were too young at the time, the press was absolutely shocked by the outpouring of grief.
I mean, all the times they tell us that America is grieving some half-baked left-wing jerk who nobody liked.
These people lined the streets for Reagan.
People poured out.
The grief was immense.
This was the kind of coverage it got.
At the end of his presidency, a great many people believed he'd made the wealthy wealthier and had not improved life particularly for the middle class.
Can you tell, Thelma?
Now, clearly this is unscientific, but if the crowds really look like America, are they ethnically diverse, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, or is it largely white?
There were some fairly contentious issues, and he was a fairly controversial president.
We've more or less overlooked much of that over the past week.
But I suspect as his friends and supporters try to raise him to the very heights there and perhaps find a place for him on Mount Rushmore, that some of that controversy and some of the debate will come back.
No doubt about it.
You know, the mad Emperor Caligula once said, I think, that he wished the Senate had one neck so he could cut off all their heads at once.
I wish the press had one butt so I could kick them in the butt all at once.
It's just, I'm not, you know, and I'm not going to do a hitchhob on Gorbachev, and I'm not going to do a hagiography of Reagan.
You know, they were men, they had their faults and all those stuff, but those headlines are simply lies.
The simple truth is this.
If Mikhail Gorbachev had been left to his own devices, the USSR would be standing today.
He did everything he could to save it.
And if he hadn't done everything he could to save it, the transition after its fall would not have led to the gangsterism that led in turn to a thug like Putin who was needed basically to put the gangsters back in the box.
I mean, that gangsterism was there because he didn't build a democratic society to take the place of the one that was falling because he didn't want there to be one.
He wanted socialism to stand.
He wanted the Soviet Union to stand.
People, and by that I mean conservatives, because who cares at this point what the left thinks, people attack Reagan now for all kinds of things, you know, the liberal things that he did or not seeing how civil rights law was skewing against the Constitution.
But his main task and his main purpose was to win the Cold War.
That was the issue of the time.
That was what conservatives were caring about at the time.
And no one else thought it could be done.
People have totally rewritten this.
He was the one guy who said, we are going to win the Cold War.
His own Secretary of State, George Schultz, said to him, what do you mean?
What do you mean?
Reagan said, I mean they lose, we win.
Nobody else had that vision.
Gorbachev certainly didn't have that vision.
It was Reagan who forced Gorbachev into a position where the USSR unraveled.
Any honest shorthand of history would say that Reagan won the Cold War, that it was, if you're just talking shorthand, obviously all kinds of things played into it.
But Reagan won the Cold War with Maggie Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, now St. John Paul II, as formidable allies who did their part.
The Soviet Union was a slave state.
It was a slave state.
At least 20 million people were murdered.
The Gulag system crushed dissent.
You can read all about it in Alexander Solsenism.
Other countries like Hungary and Czechoslovakia were crushed under their iron heel.
They're held in thrall.
Free speech was punished.
Dissidents were hunted down, jailed, killed, all to hide the fact that the God that they had used to replace the God, socialism, did not work.
And it drove people into terrible poverty.
People sharing apartments, families sharing apartments.
And Gorbachev was dedicated to saving it as late as 1991.
That's minutes before the Berlin Wall came down.
He supported suppressing the independence movement in Lithuania with troops.
I think 15 people were killed in that event.
And then there were these massive demonstrations that obviously showed that the time when they could do that, as they had done it to Hungary and Czechoslovakia, were over.
Gorbachev was still sending in troops elsewhere to try and crush independence movements.
Reagan's relentless pressure maneuvered him into a position of increasing liberalization.
The turning point is usually said to be the Reykjavik summit in October 1986.
You heard, I think it was Andrea Mitchell saying, oh, wasn't it wonderful that Gorbachev agreed to meet with Reagan after Reagan insulted his wonderful country by calling it an evil empire?
Gorbachev needed a win because everything was going wrong.
His missiles, his jets were being destroyed by the Israelis.
The economy was cracking.
You know, all kinds of, there was the Chernobyl disaster that he did everything he could to cover up.
And they had this meeting and biased, self-obsessed little reporters like Dan Rather were asking him questions like, were asking Reagan questions like, you know, Gorby is so young and energetic.
How are you going to keep him from eating you and us for lunch?
That was a question that Dan Rather actually asked.
And when Gorbachev showed up at Reykjavik for the meeting, he was freezing cold and he wore a big overcoat and a hat and everything like that.
And he got out of the car and Reagan came prancing down the stairs in a jacket.
He didn't wear a coat and escorted him up the stairs to show that he was young and vigorous, was really good, smart, negotiating.
And look, I'm not saying it was bad that Gorbachev showed up.
It was good that Gorbachev showed up.
It was good that he talked, that they talked together.
And a lot of people basically found out that Reagan and Gorbachev could get along.
The people, their entourages could get along.
And that was a good human thing.
That really did change history.
But what it was all about was Reagan's strategic defense initiative, which was derided as Star Wars by the press.
They called it Star Wars to say it was just a fantasy.
But he had this vision that nuclear weapons could be neutralized by a space system that would shoot them out of the sky.
And Gorbachev and the Russians, the Soviets, were just obsessed with this because it meant we were so far ahead of them.
Reagan wanted to share it.
He wanted to invent it and then share it to neutralize nuclear weapons.
And the press just was making fun of them.
And because Reagan wouldn't give in, wouldn't say, I will get rid of it.
Gorbachev wanted him to keep that in the laboratory for 10 years.
And he said, no, we're going to do our best to get it out there.
And that's why the Reykjavik talks collapsed.
And what the New York Times said, Reykjavik now blocks the way to useful arms limitations with grand illusions about space-based defenses in a world without nuclear weapons.
Mr. Reagan seems so possessed by the remote possibility of rendering nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete that he ignores Moscow's offer to cut its nuclear forces in half now.
In other words, he let go of a great opportunity to defend this crazy Star Wars thing.
But because the Soviets then thought he's going to keep Star Wars, we've got to keep spending to keep up with them.
That's what started to drive the economy further and further into the dumpster where people started to rebel.
And as things got worse, Gorbachev did respond by loosening the laws, by letting people talk more.
There's glass nosed, people were allowed to criticize the Soviets, which they hadn't been allowed to do before.
And all of that sort of unraveled under him as he tried to keep it together.
And that's why there was no democratic structure under the falling Soviet Union.
Even Bush, the vice president, the first George Bush, he didn't want to see the Soviet Union fall because guys like that, regime guys, deep state guys, they always want things to stay as they are.
Only Reagan had the vision.
It is only Reagan who had the vision to see that this thing was going to fall.
And the bottom line, that's the bottom line.
Without Reagan, the Soviet Union doesn't fall with only Gorbachev, the Soviet Union, with only Gorbachev, the Soviet Union doesn't fall.
The man who won the Cold War and brought down the Iron Curtain was Reagan.
The conservatives were right.
And the fact that the press and historians and the elite, the clericy, have put so much energy to covering up that fact, to telling the people who loved Reagan so much.
He won by such a landslide, telling the people who loved him so much that he was a bad guy, that he was a minor guy, that he hurt the poor, which was another lie, just completely alienated, completely alienated huge segments of the country.
It was basically the elites slapping the normal people in the face and saying, your leader sucks, your country sucks, you did nothing.
It was the evil empire that actually disassembled itself.
Crap.
It was crap.
Conservatives were right.
The three band words, conservatives, were right.
So they keep changing the meaning of the word recession, but you know when prices are going up and the economy is going down.
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And I know what you're saying.
You're saying, wow, what a great deal.
If only I knew how to spell Klavan, it's just K-L-A-V-A-N.
So a very brilliant journalist, and I'm not going to name him because I can't remember, a while back, and I can't remember whether he told me that he didn't want to be quoted as saying this, but he once told me, he's a top-tiered guy.
told me that he felt that Reagan's election was the turning point that convinced the press that the public was out of control and they had to make sure that nothing like that ever happened again.
And they doubled down on their bias and on their propaganda and on their nonsense and on their alienating and demonizing conservatives.
I don't know if that's true, if that is true, if it was Reagan that started it, but it's certainly whatever started it, it has become a disease made worse by the internet, made worse by the fact that the internet has democratized speech or is trying to democratize speech or will ultimately democratize speech.
And the fact that the people who poured out at Reagan's death and who couldn't give a damn that Gorbachev, after trying his lifetime to keep the Soviet Union together, you know, Gorbachev was always talking about socialism with a human face.
Internet's Democratized Speech00:15:13
But to paraphrase Garry Kasparov, the anti-Soviet chess master, he said Frankenstein has a human face, but he's still a monster.
And so it was really the fact that this press, the press has been, through history, through the history of that time to this, has been telling conservatives that they were wrong about things that they were right about.
And that has just gotten worse and worse and worse.
And when we say the country is divided today, I don't actually think it's divided between Democrats and Republicans.
I think 70% of Democrats and Republicans, real people, could get along.
If they were in a room together, if they talked to one another, they would find they shared a lot of interests.
But I think the real division is between people who have a voice and people who do not.
And the people who don't have a voice are not blacks, they're not gays.
They're anyone who doesn't share the opinion of the cleric.
They're the only people who are in danger of being canceled.
They're the only people who are in danger of being fired.
Yeah, fired, canceled, kicked off, social media censored.
You know, you can have all kinds of problems with Donald Trump.
You know, I've said it before, and I keep getting attacked for it, but it's true.
Donald Trump is a hugely flawed character, did wonderful things.
But as I said on backstage the other night, he was a godsend, but Godsend, some pretty interesting characters when he wants to.
He's not being attacked, and he hasn't been attacked for his flaws.
He's been attacked because he's not part of the cultural regime.
He is a piece of grit in the machinery of growing government and growing leftism.
They never say they're wrong.
They only say we're devils, and he's the devil because he won't sign on.
Trump's tax cut made the economy work, but they never say they were wrong.
His tax cut did more to lift blacks out of poverty and to narrow the gap between blacks and whites than anything leftists have ever done, ever, ever done, ever.
But they will not say that they were wrong.
Trump wanted to reopen the economy by Easter during the pandemic.
They won't say they were wrong to rail about him and basically bully him into not doing it.
So this raid on Mar-a-Lago, which is really infuriating to me, it's not about whether Trump is doing the right thing.
I don't think they have a case against Trump because he was the president.
He could have just declassified anything.
However, however, let's not pretend that Trump does things right and dots every I and crosses every T. That's not it.
But the FBI just overstepped in keeping in terms of how they treated Hillary Clinton, right?
If you're going to treat one half of the country one way, you've got to treat the other half of the country the same way if you're going to be a fair department of justice.
That's why they call it justice.
It's supposed to deal justly with the people.
So the FBI is now running this leak war.
They're releasing pictures of the documents spread out over the Mar-a-Lago, kept clumsily around.
They're saying, you know, they're showing that they have top secret marks on them and all this stuff.
And I'm not going to say that Trump is blameless because I don't know.
I don't know what laws he violated or not.
We haven't figured that out yet.
And we know he sometimes behaved badly.
That means, according to the Democrats' values, James Comey should be brought back to lecture Trump on television and then let him off the hook.
This is what he did with Hillary Clinton.
It's cut 16.
From the group of 30,000 emails returned to the State Department in 2014, 110 emails in 52 email chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received.
Eight of those chains contained information that was top secret at the time they were sent.
Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.
So why he was making that judgment instead of the Attorney General, I don't know, but still, he said basically, we judge intent, and if you don't have a criminal intent, you haven't committed a crime, nobody can claim that Trump, what was he going to do with these papers?
He probably didn't even know what he had knowing him, and it's just an absurdity.
And so you're demonizing half the country.
What do you think the result is going to be?
What do you think is going to happen?
What exactly is the plan here?
This is what really bothers me.
I mean, Trump says, well, you should get what they call a master to come in and look at the evidence and take an unjaundic, subjective view at all the evidence and how the FBI behaved.
And the New York Times, the guardian of our rights, the guard of the newspaper, the guardian of the people against the power, says, well, that would just delay.
It's just a delaying tactic.
And you think, like, it's the rule of law.
It's his absolute right to do it.
And the DOJ is saying, no, no, we'll take care of it.
We'll see if we acted badly.
Great, great thinking.
The FBI, we can always trust the FBI and the DOJ to police itself, right?
And I mean, that's been the New York Times attitude all these years when the FBI bugged Martin Luther King.
They said, well, you just figure out if it's right to bug him.
I mean, it's only with Trump.
It's only with people who are outside of the regime of the cleric.
And that means you and me.
So now, now Lindsey Graham comes out.
This is unbelievable.
He's on Fox's media show, and he comes out and he says this.
Most Republicans, including me, believes when it comes to Trump, there is no law.
It's all about getting him.
There's a double standard when it comes to Trump.
What happened with Hunter Biden is that the FBI weighed in to make sure a story didn't break for the 2020 election.
We now have whistleblowers at the FBI telling Senator Grassley that they were told to slow down and back off Hunter Biden.
And I'll say this.
If there's a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information after the Clinton debacle, which you presided over and did a hell of a good job, there'll be riots in the streets.
Okay.
Now, that's a stupid thing to say for a senator, but you can understand, you know, after a while, you make people angry enough, they're going to make a flub.
So now President Unity, Mr. Unity, comes back and he says, oh, we've got to be unified here.
We really need everyone to pull together and stop talking like that.
It's cut nine.
We are the United States of America.
And when we are united, there is not a single thing we can not do.
Not a single thing.
I mean it.
So folks, let's remember who in God's name we are.
I really mean it.
What our values are.
What we believe.
We the people.
That's how our Constitution starts, the Declaration.
We the people.
It's who we are.
And by the way, no one expects politics to be a patty cake.
It sometimes gets mean as hell.
But the idea you turn on a television and see senior senators and congressmen saying, if such and such happens, there'll be blood in the street.
Where the hell are we?
You know, where the hell are we?
Because here's another guy who just says basically half the country are dangerous.
This is cut eight.
I respect conservative Republicans.
I don't respect these MAGA Republicans.
The MAGA Republicans don't just threaten our personal rights and economic security.
They're a threat to our very democracy.
They refuse to accept the will of the people.
MAGA Republicans don't have a clue about the power of women.
Trump and the extreme MAGA Republicans have made their choice.
to go backwards, full of anger, violence, hate, and division.
But we've chosen a different path.
Forward.
So the MAGA Republicans are about 90% of the Republican Party, right?
So Mr. Unity, President Unity, is now telling us that we are basically extremists who are a danger to the Republic.
And here's what he thinks is going to happen to us as CUT 13.
Right now you can't go out and buy an automatic weapon.
You can't go out and buy a cannon.
And for those brave right-wing Americans who say it's all about keeping America, you're keeping America's independent and safe, if you want to fight against the country, you need an F-15.
You need something a little more than a gun.
No, I'm not joking.
Think about this.
Think about the rationale we use that's used to provide this.
And who are they shooting at?
Shooting at these guys behind me.
So listen, if we need F-15s, I guess that's what we got.
I got to register my F-15 now.
You know, he's talking about civil war.
They're starting this.
They mean this to happen.
They want this kind of division because they know if we're fighting with each other, we're not paying attention to them, you know?
And the press says, when Lindsey Graham says what he said, and I agree, it was a stupid thing to say for a senator to say it, but it's only as stupid, I mean, it's only half as stupid as what Biden is saying.
And the press is like, oh, Biden is coming out fighting.
You know, he's supposed to be making a speech later today where he's going to talk about the MAGAs and how extreme and how dangerous we are.
And, you know, he says he's going to bomb us.
My suggestion, really, if we want to settle this, is we put Biden and Graham in a room together and let them slug the hell out of each other.
And we can sit down and have a cup of coffee and figure out what we're going to do with the rest of the country.
See, once you demonize people, once you demonize people, all bets are off.
That's the whole thing.
And once you do that, once you do that, when they react to the way they're being treated, when you say, well, we're going to raid your president, but we're going to let our president off the hook, they're just going to get angry.
And finally, they're going to do something stupid, like storm the Capitol, which is a stupid thing to do.
And then they're going to demonize that without ever mentioning that they called for violence.
They called for violence with George Floyd.
They overlooked the violence.
They lied about the violence.
They celebrated the violence with George Floyd.
They've put up statues of this creepy little drug addict criminal who was killed, I'll admit, by a piece of sloppy policing, but it had nothing to do with his race.
There's never been a shred of evidence that George Floyd killing had anything to do with his race.
You know, once you say that, then anything is possible.
You know, there's this clip by Sam Harris, which I haven't played.
I've been meaning to play it.
Sam Harris, obviously the atheist intellectual who's gotten a lot of play on the right because he is in hating all religions, he has hated Islam.
So people on the right say, oh, we celebrate that.
But here's what he says about the press conspiring to hide the Hunter Biden story.
And now we know the FBI helping to conspire to hide the Hunter Biden story.
This Cut 10.
At that point, Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement.
I would not have cared, right?
It's like, there's nothing.
First of all, it's Hunter Biden, right?
It's like it's not Joe Biden.
But even if Joe Biden, like even whatever scope of Joe Biden's corruption is, like, if we could just go down that rabbit hole endlessly and understand that he's getting kickbacks from Hunter Biden's deals in Ukraine or wherever else, right?
or China.
It is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in.
Now, that doesn't answer the people who say it's still completely unfair to not have looked at the laptop in a timely way and to have shut down the New York Post's Twitter account.
That's just a conspiracy.
That's a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump.
Absolutely it was.
Absolutely.
Right.
But I think it was warranted.
It's warranted.
It's warranted.
It's a conspiracy to get Donald Trump in this warrant because his vast corruption that we know about, what vast corruption that we know about.
People have been after Donald Trump for 50 years.
They still haven't gotten him on anything.
So we don't really know that much about him.
Is he a nice person?
In a lot of ways, no.
But is he as criminal as Hunter Biden?
And does Hunter Biden's criminality reach up to the White House, which I think it does?
All evidence is that Joe Biden participated in it.
I don't know that, but that's where the evidence is pointing.
So what's he talking about?
What is he talking about?
You know, the thing about Sam Harris, and I don't mean to attack, this is not an attack on him personally.
The guy came out with a book.
I reviewed it for the Claremont Review, his first book when it came out.
And I said, this book isn't very good.
I said, he's a smart guy, but he's not making a very good argument that we should stop.
His argument was we should stop being tolerant of religion.
It was basically during the wars on terror, and he thought that Islam was dangerous, but he thought all religion was dangerous.
All religion was equally dangerous.
We should stop tolerating it.
Well, that made him a hero to the left.
So he became famous because of that.
But because he also would bravely say that Islam was a violent religion, the right started to love him.
But the right wouldn't have loved him if the left hadn't used their cultural power to make him a star.
It's the same thing we do with Bill Maher.
Now, I have respect for Bill Maher because he lets other people speak.
That is a remarkable thing about Bill Maher, and I've always respected him and said so about it.
But it's because the left has made him a star that we quote him all the time as if we need their approval, as if we need their approval.
And we feel that we need their approval because for 50, 60 years, they've been telling us that we're wrong about all the things we've been right about.
And we too want to belong to the culture club.
We too want to belong to the elite club.
We pretend we don't.
We say we don't.
We resent them so badly.
But I keep hearing people, I hear a lot of people diss the New York Times, but when the New York Times calls, they go running.
And when the New York Times says something nice about them, they quote it.
You know, seriously, at this point, if the New York Times says something nice about me, I think, uh-oh, what have I done wrong?
You know, I mean, it's like, this is a corrupt system that is demonizing us repeatedly.
And when we start to fight with each other, when we start to fight with reasonable people that we might compromise with, that we might find a common ground with, they love it.
They love it.
They want us to hate one another.
They want Americans to hate one another.
If you talk to, you know, people don't know people from the other side.
They just think they do.
They see them on television.
They hear things taken out of context.
You know, people were always quoting things from Rush Limbaugh that some fellow liberal had sent them and say, well, Rush Limbaugh said this.
And I say, listen to his show.
Listen to his show for one show for three hours and come back and tell me what you found.
Because if you actually listened to him, you found he was a very funny, intelligent, insightful guy.
But nobody does that.
And we don't do it either.
We really don't.
Now, I happen to know a lot of liberal people because of the jobs I've worked in in the field of the arts.
And most of them think this stuff, this woke stuff, is crap.
They're afraid to say it, but they think it's crap.
A lot of them do.
They want us hating one another because when we hate each other, the powerful keep their power.
We should be fighting with them.
We should be fighting with them.
These people who lie, these people who tell us when we line up for a great leader like Ronald Reagan, we should be lining up for a communist like Gorbachev.
We should be fighting with them.
We should keep our eyes on the activists, on the cleric, on the elite, and take our eyes off each other because when we're fighting with each other, we're not fighting the people who are really doing the harm to this country.
Passion vs. Politics00:08:46
You know, there are so many makes and models of cars now.
It's impossible for a traditional chain storefront to stock all the parts you need.
But who cares?
Because you want to go to rockauto.com.
Why?
Because at a traditional store, you can't say, I'm going to rockauto.com.
Hey, honey, guess what I'm doing?
I'm going to rockauto.com.
Try it.
It's amazing.
Not only will you get great parts for your car at excellent prices right in your computer, but your wife or girlfriend or whoever you're trying to charm will fall down at your feet and say, say that again.
And you'll say, rockauto.com.
Look, their catalog.
Look how easy it is to use.
Look how great their prices are.
And they won't change their prices.
They're the same with your DIY or professional.
Go to rockauto.com, get brakes, shocks, carpet, wipers, headlights, mirrors, mufflers, lug nuts, any part you need, rockauto.com and also get the girl.
Be sure to write Clavin in there.
How did you hear about us box so they know I sent you?
be sure to write it in that same tone of voice.
Okay, there's something we were talking about on Backstage the other night.
Ben and I were talking about, and I had already planned to talk about it on the show.
And this is going to make some people a little angry.
But before you write me angry letters, I want you to think about it.
I want you to think about what I'm actually saying.
There's a question now about whether the red wave that we were hoping for, this landslide for Republicans in the midterms, is going to happen or not.
So I contacted my friend Henry Olson, and I've had him on the show, and people get angry because he doesn't always say things that they want to hear because he is completely governed by the numbers.
His integrity about this, I've read him for years, and his integrity on this is just undeniable.
And he's right more often than anybody else.
Everybody's wrong sometimes.
Nobody knows the future, but Henry is right more often than anybody else.
So I said to him, what do you think?
Is the red wave receding?
And he wrote, this is what he wrote to me.
He says, it's clear the Democrats are now energized.
This is primarily why Biden's job approval has risen by nearly five points in a month.
He remains, however, one point below the job approval rating on the day of the November 2021 elections that saw a big GOP win.
State polls have tended to overstate Democrat strength in recent years, especially in the Midwest and Florida.
The more important number to look at is the level of support for the Democrat candidates.
In almost every case, it remains below 50%.
Most, 70 to 80% of undecided voters disapprove of Biden.
The biggest number of undecided voters are among those who only somewhat disapprove of him.
Historically, these voters opposed the president's party and its candidates by 20 to 38 points.
The polls do not show that now, in part because of the high undecided share.
This is the battleground.
Red wave looks less likely than I thought in June.
I'd still be surprised if the GOP holds under 230 House seats after the election, and I think 240 is still reasonable, which is a hefty majority.
He says, I give the GOP a 55% chance of a Senate majority, which is all good news coming from Henry because he's just a lot more accurate than anybody else.
But two things are important here.
All right.
Now, and they have to do with passion and emotion versus politics.
People are always writing to me about it with this passionate conviction about politics, and they don't understand that what I'm talking about when I talk about politics is winning.
And I understand that winning doesn't always happen right away.
It doesn't always happen.
You don't always score a touchdown on every play.
Sometimes you move the ball one yard.
One yard is better than no yards.
Two yards is better than losing yards.
Three yards is better than two yards.
That's what you're trying to do all the time.
On the air with a microphone, it's great to pound your fist and say, you know, my principles, and it's got to be exactly this.
And no, we can't give an inch and we have to be just as mean as that.
But that's untrue.
It's just untrue.
Winning is the point.
I mean, this is the thing about the stolen election idea, is if you can't prove it in court, you're just talking.
And if you're just talking is going to cost us the next election, you've done a stupid thing.
That's it.
It's it.
I know it's frustrating, but the fact of losing an election doesn't care about your feeling about being frustrated.
Okay, that's my only point about it.
It's just if you can't prove it in court, it's unactionable.
If it's unactionable and you're talking about it is going to hurt you and lose Georgia as it did, as I told you it would, while Trump was telling you he was going to be reinstated, I told you you were going to lose Georgia.
I was right, because of course I was right, because it's not an actionable thing.
All right.
So two things.
Shapiro made a point on Twitter that when we're talking about Trump, we're not talking about the right things.
And he said, you know, because the independents don't like Trump.
And he was roundly attacked on Gateway Pundit.
They said, right on queue, Ben Shapiro blames President Trump for Republicans losing steam in midterms.
Good thing he sucks at predictions.
Well, everyone sucks at predictions, right?
I mean, that is the whole thing about the future.
But this is their argument.
Ben says when Republicans focus on Trump, they lose.
Trump holds a 209 to 17 record in the 2022 primaries.
That's at least a 92% winning record.
Now, clearly, you can see the flaw in that argument, right?
He's talking about independents.
They're talking about Republicans, right?
Republicans, yes, are very much in favor of Trump.
They're following Trump.
They're following his recommendations.
They like his recommendations.
The Lynn Cheney path to fame and fortune in the Republican Party is over.
That path is closed.
Trump has changed the game, and the people who don't get with the game are going to lose.
However, the independents personally do not like him.
They don't like Donald Trump, and they're the ones who are going to decide the election.
So all I'm saying about this, and I think this is the point Ben was making, if we're not talking about Biden, that's who they hate.
If we're not talking about Biden, we're talking about Trump, we're doing the wrong thing because most people don't, you know, people don't care about Trump.
They care about their gas prices.
They care about their food.
I don't care about Trump.
If Trump can help win this country back, I'm for him.
If he's passed his time, I'm against him.
I just want to win the country back.
He's just a guy.
He's just a guy.
So the thing is, if we're talking about Trump, we're talking about something that aggravates the independents, the middle-of-the-roaders, the guys who haven't made up their minds yet.
We don't want to be doing that.
We want to be talking about Biden and the crappy things he's doing to the country.
And passion doesn't matter.
How angry you are doesn't matter.
Politics is what matters.
And this brings me to the more important point.
This is the big point I want to make.
Abortion.
Is abortion energizing the left?
Yes, more than I thought it would.
I don't know how much that's going to count in the actual election, but right now in these primaries and special elections, it is energizing Democrat turnout in certain states.
You know how I feel about abortion.
I think everybody who works at the Daily Wire and is on air at the Daily Wire feels as passionately as I do that this is something that has to be stopped.
This is an atrocity.
It is a terrible, terrible thing that has been going on in this country.
We can't win all at once.
Most of the people, a majority of people, believe that abortion should be limited after the first trimester, which is what?
That's 12 weeks.
If we can win that, even 15 months, if we can win that, we should win it.
In places where we're going to lose, where candidates are going to lose for calling for absolute bans, we should back those candidates calling for lesser bans.
We have to change the culture before we change the law.
If you're going to lose, it doesn't matter how righteous you are.
It does not matter in politics, how righteous you are.
It matters to God how righteous you are, but in politics, it doesn't matter.
Your passion doesn't matter.
Your belief, your purity, your virtue, none of it matters.
What matters is winning.
And if we can't win in certain states a full victory, let's win the victory we can win.
That's politics.
I'm sorry.
Believe me, believe me, I would like to see every abortion turned off right now.
But if you're going to lose, as we did in Kansas, where we actually had a chance to win a small victory, but instead lost a big victory because we went too far, if you're going to lose, you're not going to get there at all.
So all I'm saying is a little bit of tactics, a little less passion.
Keep your heads, keep your heads.
We can win these midterms.
I know we can, you know, because Henry tells me we can, and he is always, he's as close to being always right as anybody is about these things.
But we can't do it if we let our passions govern our common sense.
To say that Trump has been great in picking candidates for the primaries is not to say that talking about Trump is not going to alienate independents.
To say that abortion must be stopped is not to say that it can be stopped in every state today.
You know, we have to win the fights we can win.
And again, this is the thing.
By making us angry, by demonizing us, by calling us names, by lying about us, they make us so angry that we make mistakes.
You've got to be cool, Handluke.
You've got to stay cool through the election because that's how you win.
You win by strategy, you win by tactics, you win by staying cool.
Don't let their demonizing of you turn you into a stupid demon.
Genius Comedian Allegations00:15:20
So last week, I forced myself finally to watch a four-part documentary called We Need to Talk About Cosby.
It wasn't easy.
I'll tell you why in a second, but the doc was released 2022 on Showtime.
It's made by a comedian W. Kamal Bell.
And it tells the story of Cosby's career and his alleged serial rapes of women and gets reactions from various people.
Most of them kind of woke leftist black Americans.
Not all of them, but most of them woke leftist black Americans.
And I call my reaction One Man's Cosby.
And to begin with, let me say Cosby was convicted of three counts of aggravated indecent assault against one woman.
A lot of the women's statute of limitations had run out, but he was accused by around 60 women who said he drugged and raped them.
He was released from prison after three years of a three to ten year sentence on what you might call a legitimate technicality.
The court found that statements Cosby had made, incriminating, self-incriminating statements he'd made under the promise of immunity, were unfairly used to convict him because he'd been given immunity.
And that is unfair, but obviously it doesn't mean that he didn't commit the crimes, right?
It's just an unfair, it's a true technicality.
It's something they should have done, but it still doesn't mean he didn't commit the crimes.
Now, I just want to state my belief at the outset that I believe he committed these crimes.
They were horrible crimes.
The descriptions in the documentary made my eyes bleed.
And if I'm right, and he did these things, and what it means is one of the most important and most brilliant and consequential American entertainers of the last, certainly of the 20th century, was an absolute villain.
And that's what I want to talk about.
And the reason it was hard for me to watch is because this guy, between the ages of 10 and 13, I worship this guy.
This guy was my hero.
And I kind of think he appealed to me.
My father was a comedian, and I think he was who I couldn't use as a role model.
And I think he was a comedian who I could use as a role model and somebody who didn't hate me and oppressed me.
My wall was plastered with Cosby pictures the way another kid might have used, had sports heroes up there.
I actually wanted to be a comedian for a brief period of time just because of wanting to imitate him.
When the TV show I Spy came out, it was a spy show where he was the first lead in a TV, a weekly drama.
I watched every single episode.
There was this thing with his co-star Robert Culp where they would ad-Lib this kind of jazzy, cool dialogue, and I just ate it up.
I just loved it.
Culp wrote one of the episodes.
He wrote all of the best episodes, I think, but one called Home to Judgment, I thought was the greatest television show.
And remember, I'm a little kid.
My father was in show business, and he helped me meet Cosby when he was filming the opening to his first special.
I shook his hand and I was awestruck, obviously, and he got me in through his contacts to see them filming a scene of ISPY, which was then obviously my favorite show.
I got to see Cosby perform at least twice.
It may have been three times.
I just worshiped the guy.
When I got to be 13, around that age, I discovered girls and I moved on.
And Cosby's whole second career as America's dad in the Cosby Show meant absolutely nothing to me.
I was happy my childhood hero was doing well, but I didn't really care what he was doing.
I wasn't interested in that part of his career.
But still, when the rape allegations came, I felt it like, you know, he was my hero as a kid and it hurt, you know.
Now, obviously, all of this meant something different to black people than it did to a relatively privileged white guy, right?
To black people, he brought their lives into the mainstream, and they felt proud of him.
And that's a totally natural thing.
I felt proud that the great Dodgers pitcher, Sandy Kofax, was a Jew.
It made me feel that Jews were being welcomed into America, were part of the American scene.
I'm sure Cosby made a lot of black people feel the same way.
But I can honestly say, in my worship of this guy, his blackness meant almost nothing to me.
And it's not like, oh, I'm colorblind.
I don't see Kyle.
I could see perfectly well that he was black.
I thought it was cool that his comedy came from a grittier scene than my life, which was a suburban life.
And I thought it was cool that blacks were moving up in the world.
It made me proud of Cosby.
It made me proud of America.
Still makes me, I still think it's a wonderful thing about America, but it was just one more group of people to me.
It was like Irish, Italians, Jews, now blacks.
And so I understand there are differences, but still, that's the way I looked at it.
And where the commentators, like I said, they're mostly leftist people, and the commentators in this documentary talk about the fact that Cosby's comedy at first was relatively unracial.
And they talk about making whites comfortable and ignoring the race.
But to me, I see it still.
I'm not sure I would have thought about it then, but I see it now as a power move, right?
If there is such a thing as white privilege, what white privilege is, is the privilege of any majority of not having to think about themselves.
Blacks talk about being black.
Jews talk about being Jewish.
Gays talk about being gays because they're in a minority.
And being in a minority is an experience, right?
Where being in the majority is not.
It's just being normal, right?
So that's the way whites feel, not because they're white, but because they're the majority in that country, in this country.
And so they feel like it's just normal.
What are you complaining about?
And I think what Cosby was saying with his comedy is, I'm the same way.
I'm normal.
I'm just an American.
I'm just a guy.
Yes, I'm black.
Yes, it's part of who I am.
But that's not what I'm going to be talking about.
And I think it was a power move.
It was using, it was claiming that privilege for himself.
Who was it?
Jack Benny, famous Jewish comedian back in the old days of vaudeville and all this.
He was a Jewish comedian who used classic Jewish clichés, like he was cheap.
He played the violin.
He had classic kind of Jewish clichés, but he never mentioned that they were Jewish.
He was just Jack Benny.
And I think Cosby did the same kind of thing.
So when these sex allegations started to come out, my first reaction was kind of not, it wasn't to defend him in any way, but it was to sort of feel sorry for him because he knocked women out a lot of times and then raped them.
And I thought, what kind of compulsion is that?
I thought I'd had every sexual fantasy there was.
I didn't think I'd left any out.
But yeah, that doesn't even seem interesting to me.
It just seemed like a sort of weird addiction that you had to do this to women.
But that's still putting your kind of feelings into Cosby's camp because he was my hero and I didn't want to actually think about it.
But then when I listened to some of these descriptions, here's one of them.
Let me play one description of what he did to a woman that really just made me very upset.
He kept ignoring me and then he started getting this irritated look on his face because I was distracting him.
And then he finally started getting so annoyed and I could just see this whole his face changing, you know, this anger coming over and he stood up and he came walking towards me and I got panicky and I stood up and then lost my balance and grabbed onto him.
And the next thing I knew, I was on my knees in front of the sofa.
Bro.
He orally raped me.
And then he stood me up and bent me over and did me doggy style and split.
And as he's going out the door, I said, how are we getting out of here?
And he's, how are we getting home?
And he just pointed, he didn't even look at me.
He pointed to the desk and he said, call a cab.
And he slammed the door.
All right, so that's, you know, that's evil, right?
That's evil.
Here's a woman in late middle age, if not in an older age.
And this happened to her when she was young and very attractive woman, and she's still choking up over it.
Of course, of course she is.
She's been brutally abused by this guy who had all the power in the world, all the fame, all the money.
He could have had women coming and going, but, you know, this is the way he treated women.
And so this is a terrible thing.
And the other thing about him is I was confirmed in my feelings, because there were some comedians in this, that the guy was a genius.
He was a genius comedian.
There's very touching scenes of them watching his famous concert film, Bill Cosby himself, and they're watching it on iPads for the documentary.
And they're just going, God, this guy's so good.
He was so good.
He was so creative.
Seinfeld says he's basically the definition, the lynchpin of modern comedy.
And he just was.
And it was all clean like Seinfeld.
And that's the thing that is so disturbing about it, that this great genius of a comedian was doing these things to people.
And he would set himself up as a mentor and promise these people things.
And, you know, another thing that, one thing I came away with is that everybody had to have known.
Everybody had to know he was doing something.
They had to know he was doing something.
It's just like Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein, they knew.
And I hate feminism.
I think it's bad for people.
I think it makes them unhappy.
But I always tell leftists, you know, just because you've identified a problem doesn't mean your solution is the right one.
Well, same thing goes in reverse, that just because you don't like the left solution doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist.
And the way that women are treated, the hatred, the anger that Cosby was expressing and that was legitimate to express, that Harvey Weinstein expresses, that Jeffrey Epstein expresses, the fact that not one of Epstein, of the men who took advantage of Epstein's pimp power has been arrested or accused.
I mean, just some people have been accused, but no one's been brought.
No one's been brought before the law.
It just tells you something about the society that's off, that's wrong.
And I don't think it's just our society.
I think it's been true maybe throughout history.
And I think it's something we should really think about.
And I think politics and feminism keep us from thinking about it in a real way.
It's something that actually does need philosophical reflection.
I'm going to reflect on it, not today, but I'm going to come back to it because I think it's really a disturbing fact.
But the thing is here, Cosby was not caught because he raped women.
The fact of these women's accusations were in the wind.
They were out there and none of them touched him and nobody picked them up until Cosby left the regime, the clericy regime, and started to talk about the responsibility of black people for taking care of themselves, started to rave about how they had to take responsibility for themselves.
They had to learn to speak English.
They had to stop calling their children weird names like Lahasha and Lahana.
They had to stop, you know, have to start getting married and give these kids homes and all this.
And the reaction to that on this show was exemplified the reaction of the left and the media in general.
Here's this clip.
For the first time in his career, Bill Cosby divided the black community.
It's on us.
To be fair, some black folks loved it, but many of us hated it and felt betrayed.
And it hurt even more when he wrote a book about it and took this new act on the road.
What's the problem here?
Why are we worried about dirty laundry?
I'm talking about dead young males.
Believe a child when she says somebody's fondling her.
Bill Cosby turned this one speech into the next phase of his career.
And a lot of the people who loved what he was saying did not have the best interests of black people at heart.
What are you going to do about the war in the inner city?
One, about the war in the inner city, number one is to get more moms and dads.
That's number one.
And thank heavens Bill Cosby said it like it was.
That's where the root of crime starts.
The idea that Mitt Romney doesn't have the welfare of black people at heart is just garbage.
It's just garbage.
Of course he does.
Of course he does.
He just doesn't have leftism in his heart because leftism doesn't work.
And the thing about black people taking responsibility for themselves is it's not fair.
Things have been done to them that can't be undone.
And it's not fair that they can only rise by taking responsibility for themselves.
It just happens to be a fact.
It's frustrating, not fair.
It's a fact.
That's the only way up.
The only way up is to leave the past behind because the past ain't going to change one little bit.
Not one day of the past is going to change.
And not one ramification of the past can be corrected.
You just have to change yourself.
You just have to.
So Cosby was right about this, but it drove them crazy.
And this is what happened.
I'm taking this from Wikipedia.
I knew it already, but I just got reading it off there.
Cosby social commentary led to the unsealing of documents in a previous civil suit by a woman who had accused Cosby of sexual assault, which in turn sparked renewed interest in older allegations.
The judge ruled that releasing the sealed documents was justified by the, quote, stark contrast between Bill Cosby, the public moralist, and Bill Cosby, the subject of serious allegations concerning improper and perhaps criminal conduct.
That's why he unsealed it.
Cosby was not caught for what he did to women.
He was caught for what he said about black people.
And what he said about black people was unfair, but true.
You know, then after all these things were unsealed, a comedian named Hannibal Burris mentioned the allegations in a routine, and that became a big thing.
So what do I take away from this, this hero of mine, who now, it really does seem to me, I'll say it's alleged because he got off on that technicality, but it seems to me that he raped more than 60 women and treated them like garbage.
Well, first, I think we have to talk about at some point the way people actually feel about women and treat women in this country from the transgender movement, who is basically eliminating women, to the people who don't do any, didn't say anything about Harvey Weinstein, which is all of Hollywood, to the people who don't say anything about Jeffrey Epstein, which is the entire establishment, who are not going after these guys.
That's something we have to talk about.
But the other message about Cosby is this.
It's not that there are no heroes.
It's that heroes aren't what we think they are.
Heroes are people who rise above themselves.
Cosby was a genius comedian.
And if that, I'm not sure that makes him a hero, but it makes him a genius comedian.
But that genius is the spirit.
And the spirit goes where it will.
Talent is blind.
Spirit is blind.
It lands on people you just can't believe who suddenly say things that are meaningful, who suddenly do things that are beautiful.
And when we, you know, T.S. Eliot, the poet, said, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.
The more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.
The thing is, the man who did these things is not the spirit who spoke through him.
And when we look at talent and when we see performers who do beautiful things, artists who do beautiful things, even politicians who do great things, all the kinds of heroes that we have, sports people who do great things, we have to remember, we have to remember that what we are seeing is the spirit in action.
We have to worship that spirit, but we have to let the guy go because if you follow human beings, if you put your trust in human beings, you're going to follow them right into the darkness.
Cosby's darkness was darker than most.
I mean, really dark.
But he was a genius comedian and a guy who did a lot of great good through his comedy and through his performances.
It's just a very hard thing to keep in your mind.
It's a very hard thing for me to keep in my mind.
This guy who meant so much to me in my youth turned out to be, I believe, a very, very great villain.
It just shows you, it shows you that when the spirit moves in us, what we're seeing is the spirit, not the flesh.
So some of you will be shocked, shocked to find that corporate media presents the news in a biased way.
I know, who would believe it?
But we all know it.
We all know it's true.
But thankfully, there's a way to get the most important news of the day without their narrative.
Why Florida Families Sigh Relief00:14:06
And that's by listening to one of the top news podcasts, Morning Wire.
I listen to Morning Wire all the time because they tell you the stories that aren't getting out there.
The corporate media is kind of smothering, and they give you insight into them, and they talk about them in a deep and exploratory way.
New episodes are available every morning, seven days a week.
They cover stories other media outlets won't touch.
You will find Morning Wire on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Daily Wire Plus, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
So just a little while ago, the governor of New York, Kathy Hochl, made a very interesting comment about local New York Republicans.
Here it is.
And we're here to say that the era of Trump and Zeldon and Molinaro, just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong, okay?
Get out of town.
Get out of town.
Because you don't represent our values.
You are not New Yorkers.
That seemed like a pretty good offer.
So I wanted to talk to somebody who had actually taken that advice.
And I couldn't think of anyone better than my pal, Carol Markowitz, who is a terrific columnist at the New York Post.
She also writes, I'm reading this, but I didn't know this.
He also writes for Fox News, Real Clear Florida, Spectator Magazine, and many other outlets.
Carol, it is great to see you.
How are you?
So good to see you, Andrew.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I have to, this is the only way I can talk to you because now you live in Florida where there are alligators.
Again, you have a standing offer and a guest room.
Now, actually, the reason I wanted to talk to you, aside from the fact that you're a great political observer, is because you are a true New Yorker.
Is that a fair comment?
Absolutely.
I grew up in Brooklyn.
My husband grew up in Queens.
We were going to raise our kids in Brooklyn.
We had a life plan.
And then the pandemic hit and we saw things that we could not unsee.
Okay.
All right.
So, well, first, let me ask you, what's your reaction when you hear Kathy Hochl say that?
What is your first reaction to that?
Well, from my perspective, it's like, welcome.
I would love to have more conservatives move to Florida, turn this into an even redder state.
And I, you know, I root for New York to do better and to succeed because I still have family there.
I still love that stupid place.
You know, it was my home for so long.
And I really did have a very warm feeling about it throughout my whole life.
I mean, I always knew it was kind of kooky and leftist, but until the pandemic, that kind of stuff really didn't bother me on a day-to-day basis.
And so for Kathy Hochul to chase away sort of the saner voter in New York, the people who are going to bring that state back, if it ever does come back, it's really their loss.
It's their loss and Florida's gain.
Explain to people, and you really do have to explain this to people.
What you like about New York?
I lived in New York for 10 years.
I dreamed about getting out every day, but I have three brothers there, one of whom, two of whom I think, if you took them out of New York, they would simply suffocate and die like fish pulled out of the river.
I thought I would.
Yeah.
I thought for sure that we could never live anywhere else.
And look, for a long time, that would have been a hilarious proposition that we would be leaving New York.
That just would never happen.
But what happened is the pandemic forced a lot of things to the forefront that had been sort of hidden.
I think one of the main things is that there is a lot of inequality in New York, and it all comes from the left.
The left forces this inequality.
So they closed schools, for example.
And then I lived in Park Slope, a very, you know, wealthy, well-to-do, very, very left area.
And they all got their kids private tutors or pods, or they sent them to private school.
They went to live at their beach house and sent them to public school there.
And none of them spoke up for the kids that they knew must have been suffering with these school closures.
And so stuff like that, I could no longer just not care that everybody was a crazy leftist around me.
It was having a direct impact, not just on my family, because look, I can get it, I can get my kid a tutor.
I can get them a pod, but it wasn't about that.
It was about their silence about for all the people that couldn't.
And I couldn't live with that anymore.
And so, you know, what I loved about New York is it was a crazy, free, amazing place to grow up.
Even when the crime was high, even when things were bad, we were all kind of in it together.
And the pandemic really showed that that was not the New York anymore.
We were absolutely not in it together.
People were calling police on their neighbors for having too many people over at their house.
I saw insanity.
I mean, I saw really people screaming at children for not being masked, outdoors, obviously, and so much, so much craziness that I like, you just couldn't come back from it.
You know, one of your best lines, I thought, during that period, you know, I lived in New York.
I was there during the worst period New York had ever seen, the 70s and the 80s, the late 70s and the 80s.
And I was there during the blackout and the riots and all this stuff.
And New York always had this reputation of being crazy but tough.
When things went bad, everybody got together and they toughed it out and all this.
We had a sense of humor.
But you pointed out that really New York was weak during this.
New Yorkers were weak.
They were weak and snively.
And now, my question is this.
Every time I bring this up to New Yorkers, and I know a lot of New Yorkers, they say, well, you weren't there for the first part of this thing.
It was such a trauma.
It was so bad.
Bodies in the street, people dying, grandparents being carted off that we got it worse than anybody else.
And maybe we overreacted.
Is there any fairness to that?
Well, so for a long time, I thought that that was the truth.
I thought that, okay, yes, we did get hit harder than anybody else.
It was very traumatic.
I also, we did not leave New York in 2020.
We were there the whole time.
And I thought, okay, but my city comes back from this kind of thing.
9-11, I was there for that.
Blackout of 2003, I was there for that.
So we do bounce back from things, but this was something else entirely.
I still don't see New York bouncing back.
And again, it wasn't so much the trauma.
So like 9-11 happened or any of these other incidents happened in New York.
And that really was about the trauma.
We all went through it together.
This was about what the trauma exposed.
And it was like, it wasn't just that something bad happened to us.
It showed that we were like bad people to each other and that we didn't care about each other in a way that we had previously cared about each other.
It was like 9-11 happened and nobody ran into the buildings and nobody tried to save anybody.
And everybody just kind of went their own way and was like, well, maybe you shouldn't have been in that building that day.
It was really that kind of thing.
It was like, maybe this is your fault that your kids aren't in school.
Maybe you should care about other people.
Maybe you shouldn't want grandma to die or the teachers to die.
Or maybe you should think about homeschooling them or whatever it was.
It was like, it was your fault for wanting the normalcy that everybody else seemed to have around the country.
That's really interesting.
When I was there for Christmas time, I was there for a bunch of parties.
And I think all of them but one, of course, it was the reason party.
It was the libertarian.
I saw you there.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
But all of them were canceled because Omicron started.
And I would say to people, you know, I'm going to Nashville and they're not masking up for this and their numbers are the same as yours.
And kind of a veil would fall over people's eyes.
They were just like, they couldn't take it in.
So, all right.
So how did you wind up in Florida?
Besides Kathy Hochland.
Florida became, well, you know, she didn't tell me soon enough.
You know, I wish she had let me know earlier.
Florida became this beacon of freedom.
You know, we kept hearing that this governor that was sort of not that well known at the time, Ron DeSantis, was moving to open schools.
And the headlines, all the headlines were, Governor DeSantis tries to open schools as COVID cases rise.
And this was not summer of 2020.
This is summer of 2021.
This is like, you know, Florida schools open earlier than everybody else.
My kids have been in school for weeks at this point.
And so they had this thing happened.
So four teachers died in Florida, summer 2021.
School had not started yet.
So the fact that four people died and they happened to be teachers were, it was completely irrelevant.
It was like four plumbers died.
We can no longer have plumbing.
And so you saw him kind of defy this rhetoric.
I think a lot of weaker politicians would have folded.
That's a moment that I keep coming back to where these four teachers in Miami Day died over summer break.
And everybody kind of looked at him and said, you know, well, Governor DeSantis is not going to open schools now now that these teachers died.
And he was like, no, we need to put kids first.
Kids need to go back to school.
And he just proceeded on and did the right thing.
And so a lot of these moments, my husband and I were watching from afar and we were like, that is what we want.
We want that sanity for our kids.
And we did sort of a test run in 2021.
We lived in a different part of Florida than we do now.
Sent our kids to full-time in-person school while school was like sometime school in New York City.
And we really loved it.
And it is from the governor.
He definitely sets the tone.
But Floridians just bring an aura of normalcy to raising children that I hadn't seen in New York in a very, very long time.
It didn't matter if you were on the left or the right.
You weren't wearing a mask outside.
You weren't forcing kids to mask in school.
And you were surely arguing that all schools should be open.
You have, as I recall, like 47 children.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
Somewhere.
I can't remember, somewhere in that vicinity.
You have three children.
But it does feel like 47.
And so they're fairly widely spaced.
And so you're dealing with all levels.
Is there experience in school?
I mean, would you say, are these public schools or private schools?
They're public, public schools.
And my three kids are very different.
They're three super different from each other children.
And we found that Florida schools really met their needs.
It was like they were meeting them where they are.
If the kids, you know, one of my kids is pretty advanced.
One of my kids is like kind of behind mostly due to the pandemic.
And one of my kids is like pretty on track.
And the schools really adjusted to them.
I had no idea because in New York, we, you know, we talk a lot of smack about other state schools, but Florida schools have been phenomenal.
I've been very impressed.
Well, one of the things that got me about that Kathy Hochl thing is they go to Florida where you belong.
That phrase is, you know, kind of like, it reminded me of like on the waterfront.
You know, you come from Greenport, go back to Greenport.
Now, as a New Yorker, you come to Florida.
Obviously, there's no culture.
No one can read.
I'm sure they're all, everybody's illiterate, right?
Now, what is it like culturally?
How is it culture shock for you?
So, I mean, I would say that the biggest culture shock is that like you can't call for Chinese food and have it like at your door before you hang up the phone.
And that's, you know, we joke, but that's actually been a really tough adjustment for our family.
It's like 630 on a Tuesday.
We're like, wait a minute, what are we eating?
And now, you know, we have to wait an hour.
But no, it's, like, I think Florida is in such a great moment right now.
It's really flourishing.
There's so many people, the constant people, flow of people coming through and staying and moving.
I have people reaching out to me all the time and saying to me, like, where should I move in Florida?
And I'm like, I really don't know.
I only know like three places.
So I recommend the same three.
Sorry to those three towns because that's all I got.
But, you know, it's really, it's having a moment.
And I hope that moment lasts a while.
But even if it doesn't, our family is very happy and settled and normal here.
And it's fantastic.
Do you think you'll ever go back?
I mean, is there anything that New York could do that would make you go back?
So it's funny because my husband and I, our plan was always to raise our kids in Brooklyn and retire to Manhattan.
So like, I don't say never.
Maybe, you know, when I'm retired and we move back to Manhattan or something, I can't say never.
And I don't want somebody to find me in 50 years and be like, you said never.
But not for my children's, like, you know, until I will commit to not until they go to college, if ever.
And I find that, you know, Florida also turns out one or two people have retired here in their lives.
So maybe we'll stay.
So you're finding it livable.
I mean, you find that.
I'm loving it.
And I'm not making fun because I just know you're a dietable New Yorker.
I really was.
I really was.
I miss my family and that's about it.
I maybe like spicy Asian food, really those two things.
That's it.
But everything else is, I wake up happy every day.
And it's, I really can't convey.
And then I know other parents of like small children really get this, but like I worry so much less about my kids here.
And, you know, for a long time, it was COVID pandemic related things.
But now it's things like, I don't worry about my first grader learning gender theory in school.
Just not something that I need to like watch out for.
Nobody's asking him his pronouns in first grade and other things like that.
I have a weight lifted off of me where I don't have to be this extremely monitoring parent who has to like look at every single thing that the school presents because I'm looking for that sneaky leftism that you know is in there and you know is coming.
It's a giant weight lifted off me.
I sleep a lot better.
So talk about the governor.
Is he popular there?
I mean, I can see they're just like gearing up to rip him to pieces every single day.
How do the people feel about him?
I have yet to meet anybody who doesn't like him.
Even, I mean, I meet people on the left also.
And again, I think that what happened during the pandemic has so shaped people.
I mean, you have like restaurant owners who are maybe liberal, but are so grateful to him for keeping their businesses open.
They know how it went in other places.
And I know so many parents that feel that same level of gratefulness that closing schools was just not an option in 2021.
And that was the way it was.
And that's the way it was going to be.
They see him as brave.
And I fully see that also.
He has stood up in so many different ways to so many different people and said, this is the way it's got to be.
Judgment and Gratitude00:08:29
And again, it wasn't easy.
I come back to that, the four teacher deaths.
I think a lot of other politicians would have folded.
I think they would have said, like, okay, maybe we'll start at a hybrid.
Maybe we'll start with masks and see how it goes.
And he was just like, no, no, this is how it's going to be.
And he turned out to be right.
And I think a lot of people owe him an apology that's not coming.
But he knows how grateful my family is.
I, you know, tell him all the time.
And I feel like a lot of families like mine.
I also run into people who are like, I know you.
I know who you are.
I've seen your story.
We also moved here and we followed basically the same path as you where We were thinking about it.
And then one day we just up and left.
You know, Carol, it's always interesting talking to you.
So I was expecting this to be interesting, but it's actually quite a remarkable conversation to hear somebody talk about the weight lifted off of your shoulders of moving to a blue state.
I always wonder why people, for instance, in San Francisco tolerate the increasing dysfunction of a Democrat government, why people in New York tolerate it.
And now that I listen to you, I wonder even more.
They probably just don't know how good it is when it stops.
It's great to see you.
And it's great to hear.
It's great to hear it's going so well.
And believe me, if it weren't for the alligators, I'd be right there with you.
Come on, Dan.
Thank you, Andrew.
Thanks a lot, Carol.
All right, we're running a little over, so we will get right to the mailbag.
There'll be blood in the street.
Where the hell are we?
Yeah!
All right, from Emma.
I love that name.
Emma is a beautiful, beautiful name.
I write to request your guidance regarding the challenges of transitioning into motherhood.
Prior to becoming a mother, I had a promising career as a musician, which was exhilarating and rewarding at times, though I was accompanied by, but it was accompanied by personal crises such as debilitating perfectionism and financial uncertainty.
I eagerly anticipated the coming of my firstborn as an opportunity to step into a new role, nurturing mother, wife, and keeper of the home.
Since the birth of my daughter 18 months ago, I've come to realize that what I want to want and what I actually yearn for are not always aligned.
My love for my child is more potent than I could have possibly imagined.
As long as she is thriving, I will tolerate any compromises.
However, if possible, I would like to do better than merely tolerating the compromises.
Instead, find a way to feel that I too am thriving.
In principle, I fully agree with you that raising children is a noble and sacred occupation.
However, this worldview is incongruent with my residual male typical ambitions to apply my intellect and creativity and to be recognized and appreciated for the work I produce, that is my music.
Though it may be selfish and immature to focus on my own fulfillment, I'm wary of becoming chronically resentful if I mismanage my competing appetites to be a perfect mother and a successful artist.
I trust that your candid response will help to set me straight.
Well, yeah, first of all, it is not my opinion that, it's not even my opinion that it's male typical to want your intellect and creativity to be put to use.
If you read my book, The Truth and Beauty, I talk about how the Industrial Revolution stripped women of their industries, their at-home industries, and my hope that the computer will make those at-home industries possible again because raising children is a beautiful, beautiful thing, but it has a lot of routine work in it that sometimes can be mind-deadening.
And it's a good thing to be able to do some work that actually uses your creativity and other parts of your ability, if in fact you feel that way.
I mean, you may feel, oh, no, I'm completely immersed, especially if you have a lot of kids and running a home becomes an actual business.
But still, it can be something where you want to do other things.
So look, your child comes first.
You're not going to go on tour as a performer while you're raising your child, certainly not in the first five years.
But there are certain, you know, you can certainly compose.
You can play sometimes.
You know, my daughter uses nap times to write in and has done quite well with that.
You know, I mean, you shouldn't feel that this is some kind of, you know, it's a responsibility.
You have something to do.
That baby needs you.
A little, an 18-month baby needs the mommy.
There's just no question in my mind about that.
But still, you know, there are times when you can do stuff and you should and you should use that time and you have to put in your own energy.
The one thing that I would warn you about, and this is a hard saying, I'm going to say something tough here.
If you had debilitating perfectionism and financial uncertainty, I question whether your career was as promising as you think it was.
And I'm just saying you shouldn't convince yourself that this baby stripped you of a great career.
I knew an actress once who used to tell me how she gave up her career.
And when I really questioned her, her career consisted of sitting in the movies, avoiding auditions because she didn't have the courage to go to auditions.
And so I just want to say, don't put it on your child that you gave up this promising thing for her.
Instead, look at it as, no, this is a beautiful thing in your life, but you still have this talent and you want to utilize that talent.
Utilize it in ways that you can that will not take you away from your main idea.
You know, it's not a black and white situation.
It's just you're going to have to make compromises to do your first job first.
From Parker, I enjoy your show and think you're a really smart guy, but I just don't understand how you can say that the Bible says not to judge, especially after you spend an entire show judging Merrick Garland as corrupt.
You judge abortion as wrong and evil.
You quote the Bible saying it says not judge, but that's not what it really says.
It says to judge with right judgment.
So what do you say to this?
Thanks for taking my question.
Thank you for your show and thanks for your great books.
Well, thank you for all of that and for being civil in your disagreement.
I've talked about this before, but it's worth talking about again.
Your thesis is essentially that the creator of the universe took human form and suffered death so that he suffered something that we all have to suffer, but he suffered it at a level that we can't even imagine because he was a God, so he could experience everything at its highest, most pure level.
So he suffered death, torture, and justice in ways that even the people who suffer terrible deaths don't suffer them.
And he did that to tell us to judge rightly instead of wrongly.
Did we need him to do that?
Couldn't he have sent a letter to tell?
I mean, don't we all know we should judge rightly, not wrongly?
See, I think my thesis is this.
I understand that we have to make judgments in life, obviously.
We have to judge good actions and bad actions.
What we can't judge, and I've said this before, what we can't judge is a person's position in terms of God, of where a person stands with God.
We cannot say that this person's soul is polluted.
We have to say you're doing the wrong thing, but God loves you and I love you.
And that's the radical thing.
The radical thing, when he says, judge not, and he doesn't just say judge rightly.
He says, judge not lest you be judged.
Don't take the moat out of your brother's eye.
Take the plank out of your own eye.
And people say, well, it's just after you take the plank out.
No, that's not what he means.
What he means is, yeah, come back to me when you've taken the plank out because that's not going to happen.
You're never going to be able to get all the planks out of your eyes.
Concentrate on that.
He's telling you to concentrate on yourself to transform yourself instead of judging.
Listen, I've said this before, but I have had many good friends who say things that I think are immoral and who've done things that I think are immoral.
And they know that I think that.
They know that I believe that.
But that's not what I spend my time doing.
I spend my time loving them and being their friends and being there for them when they need me to be there for them.
If they come to me and say, help me get out of this, or am I doing the right thing?
Or ask my opinion, I tell them my opinion.
I tell them what I think they should do.
But if they don't, all I can give them is my love.
That's the thing.
You know, I take them as they are.
I take them where I find them because I believe that's what God does.
What I think Jesus wants us to do is see the world through God's eyes because then we will see that it is good.
It was created good.
When we give up the knowledge of good and evil and we see the truth of God's creation and we see that it is good even in its fallenness, even in its brokenness, then we begin to have the joy.
We have what Jesus said he was going to give us, which is the joy that is in him will be in us.
And I have had that experience.
I have it every day.
I understand that this is what, you know, I understand that that's why he was saying that stuff.
To say to judge rightly, well, of course, we want to judge rightly.
And of course, we have to judge actions in the world.
But that's not, I think, what this massive act of dying for us was about.
I think it was about something far, far more radical than that.
I'm running late.
I got to stop there.
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