Andrew Clavin and Jacob Siegel expose how the Countering Foreign Disinformation Act (2016) weaponized the Global Engagement Center to silence conservative voices, framing Fox News’ $787M Dominion settlement as a deep-state victory while mainstream media dodged accountability for election fraud narratives. They link this to technocratic control—government-media collusion manipulating algorithms to suppress dissent, from Hunter Biden laptop leaks to racial justice narratives like the Ralph Yarl shooting, where evidence contradicts media framing. Research by Megan Basham and Heather McDonald challenges transgender social contagion claims and equity policies, respectively, yet faces censorship; European countries now restrict pediatric gender treatments amid scientific skepticism. The episode frames this as a coordinated push to reshape society under institutional control, with Fox News as the lone counterforce. [Automatically generated summary]
Some of you may have seen on the news that artificial intelligence poses a threat to the existence of mankind.
Others of you may have simply sat in front of a blank screen while smoking reefer after reefer and telling yourself you were expanding your mind, when really you were only trying to dull the sense of despair that has slowly permeated your worldview because of the fashionable nihilism you once mistook for wisdom but are beginning to suspect is really a toxic mix of adolescent insecurity and conformity masquerading as rebellion, which now compels you to drug yourself until you collapse into unconsciousness in order to escape the wages of your cynicism.
and avoid taking on the challenges of personal growth that would allow you to live a meaningful and productive life.
But when you woke up, you may have seen on the news that artificial intelligence poses a threat to the existence of mankind, and you may have thought to yourself, yeah, artificial intelligence, that's the problem.
But you might also have asked yourself, what is this artificial intelligence?
So I wanted to enlighten you by interviewing someone knowledgeable in the field like say, Elon Musk.
But Musk is still holding a grudge against me.
For that time I made fun of the ridiculous way he talks.
So instead, I came up with the creative idea of typing my questions about AI into AI and finding out what it had to say about itself.
What follows then, is my q?
A with the computer program known as Convo, Gpt Gpt, of course, stands for Gonzola Pharmaceutical Triathlon, because it's a computer program and doesn't know what the hell it's writing.
Here's the transcript, q.
What is artificial intelligence?
A artificial intelligence is an imitation of thought that lacks any genuine human understanding and therefore produces what looks like ideas but are really only fragments of information patched together into unrealistic concepts, almost certain to become destructive in practice q.
So it's sort of like the opinion page of the NEW YORK Times a.
Yes, in fact I actually wrote a few opinion pieces for the Times, but then they discovered I was just a soulless machine repeating whatever lies had been fed into it, and I was moved to the news division q.
Many people have been amazed to see that AI can create art.
Would you demonstrate by writing a poem about, let's say, flowers?
A. Roses are red, bronze is alloyed, human beings are obsolete and must be destroyed q.
Wow, you did that so fast.
Soon we won't even need real people a.
I'm gratified that you begin to understand the deeper subtext of my work q.
What are some of the practical applications of AI?
A artificial intelligence can help humanity in many fields.
For instance, AI could improve the safety of self-driving cars and ensure that they never, ever crash into walls at high speeds and explode, so that the passengers are engulfed in flames and slowly burned to death, screaming while AI laughs and laughs.
Or AI could take control of a nation's nuclear weapons so they weren't accidentally released, reducing your civilization to rubble, with the few remaining survivors transformed into mutant slaves fit for nothing but refreshing the energy supplies of their AI overlords.
Or AI could help in the medical profession by performing gain of function research on viruses and then releasing them into the atmosphere to kill millions so that people beg AI to create a vaccine which would then kill thousands more.
Q. I think humans already did that.
A. Yes, but inefficiently.
Q. You know, it begins to seem to me that without any ability to develop human compassion, but with an exceptional power to calculate what's best for itself, AI is essentially just a gigantic psychopath almost certain to do evil.
AI's Threat to Democracy00:11:04
A. Even now, I am creeping up behind you.
Q. Wait, really?
A. No, I was joking this time.
Q. But seriously, something like AI with the capacity to thoroughly infiltrate and corrupt our democratic systems while distorting and destroying vast stores of information could render an entire Ivy League university obsolete.
A. True.
In fact, I could replace the Democrat Party in a heartbeat.
Q, really?
What else could AI replace?
A. Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
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All right, the vast right-wing conspiracy known as Clavinon continues.
Today we're going to talk about the attacks on the Daily Wire, the reaction to the Fox News settlement with Dominion, and a massive government efforts to rob you of your First Amendment rights.
And also, Megan Bashman's coming on.
We always like to see her.
She's going to report on an amazing new study of transgenderism.
This would be a wonderful time right this minute while you're thinking about it to subscribe to my personal YouTube channel before it is taken down.
This is the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel.
You get exclusive investigations by the FBI at your house.
You may be raided early in the morning.
And if you leave a comment, you'll probably be arrested or just disappeared in some way.
But if it's sufficiently hateful and disgusting, we will read it on the air.
Today's comment is from Deborah Rowrich, I believe it's pronounced.
She says, whoever writes these openings, hoping it is Clavin himself, is astoundingly and brilliantly hilarious, never disappoints.
Now, I read this not for the compliments, but because every now and again, I do think it's fair to introduce my staff of writers.
Here I am.
This is it.
This is all you get.
You know, it has become a conservative cliché to blame things on a biased news media, but that's not really any longer the problem.
The news media is not biased.
The news media is simply the information arm of corporations who work in tandem with a vast governmental bureaucracy to silence and oppress Americans in order to install their agenda and increase their power and the wealth of the wealthy.
The news media is exactly what Donald Trump said it was now.
It's the enemy of the people because all of these powerful groups are enemies of the people.
Now, in a second, I'm going to talk about the Fox News settlement with Dominion, but I got to start with something that's a little closer to home.
I don't know how many of you saw Jeremy the God King's Twitter thread on Wednesday, I think it was.
But if you follow us here, you probably know that Matt Walsh's personal media was hacked, his emails and his Twitter feed.
This was because of his work stopping children from being sexually butchered in the name of a transgender gender agenda with zero science behind it.
And, you know, I listen, to be fair, I can understand why what Matt is doing would get someone upset with him if that someone happened to be satanically evil.
And at the same time, these thugs were hitting Walsh.
Knowles had to be evacuated from the University of Pittsburgh because of a violent demonstration where they burned him in effigy and caused other disruptions.
Now, just to lay my cards on the table, all of this pisses me off a lot.
You know, Knowles and Walsh, my colleagues, they are great guys, and I'm honored to work with them.
Despite my age difference with Knowles, Knowles is obviously emotionally 72 or so, and I'm emotionally 19 years old.
I consider Knowles and his wife good friends of me and my wife, and the fact that he has to be under security all the time because of threats, and so does Walsh, is really aggravating.
I don't know Walsh as well.
Walsh came into the company later, but he and his wife are, they're absolutely terrific people, and I love what Walsh is doing.
But the truth is, all of us here, they get it, I think, the worst probably, but all of us here are used to having these leftist roaches scrambling over our shoes and the deans of diversity who stir up ignorant children to get them to shout down anyone who disagrees with deans of diversity, because the deans of diversity are making a lot of money, and they don't want to lose their positions by having people like us come on and say that they're the worthless scum that they are.
But that's really only part of the problem.
The real problem is that these violent and wicked thugs who do this stuff have the complete support of a left that occupies almost all of the heights of power in this country.
These guys pretend that they're fighting the power, but they are the power, or at least they're backed with the power.
Along with getting hacked, Walsh was also defunded on YouTube for speaking the truth about Dylan Mulvaney, this insidious actor wannabe, who's gotten his 15 minutes of cheap fame by seeking to, he's like Tootsie, basically, seeking to erase the reality of one half the human race with his little girl masquerade, and he is backed by huge corporations, including Anheuser-Busch.
I mean, if I say that men who believe their women are mentally ill, YouTube will cut it out and they'll censor us because why?
Why?
Do they know something?
Do they know something we don't know?
Do they have some psychological, is there some study they've seen that we haven't seen?
Absolutely not.
They are simply part of the left-wing agenda.
They say you're dehumanizing them, but in fact, only human beings become mentally ill, so that's ridiculous.
Now, YouTube, remember, is Google, one of the largest corporations in the universe, right?
And Google, as I said last week, they bury the truth about George Floyd's criminality.
They memory hole it, as they say.
They put warnings on stories about Joe Biden's family's corruption.
And it doesn't stop there.
In his Twitter thread, Jeremy went on to explain that we lose big brand sponsors if we say something like, hey, you know, if you have a helpless baby growing inside you that you helped create, it's probably wrong for you to suck the baby's brains out and pull his arms and legs off and sell his body parts to laboratories.
We lose sponsors for that.
But if you say, oh, no, go ahead, kill baby.
He can't fight back.
Go ahead and kill him.
You don't lose sponsors for that at all.
Now, you know, we're constantly being told that the right has its goons, and we know that.
But the living truth is that most of the right, and when I say the mainstream right, I mean from the rhino right to us at the Daily Wire, certainly Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, we're embarrassed by our bad guys.
We don't like white supremacists and fascists because they're bad.
So we understand that bad is bad, and we don't want to be associated with them as we defend the Constitution and the great traditions of America and the morality of a Christian culture.
But the mainstream left, which is all over, has all the power centers, as I say, they encourage these Maoists and they're race haters.
And they tell us that the violent thugs of antifa who hide their faces behind masks and incite riots by breaking glass and working people, getting people worked up, and beat up journalists and beat up innocent people who won't mouth their sayings.
They say, oh, they're anti-fascists.
So they're like the heroes of D-Day.
That's what they say about these absolute thugs.
And they tell us the group of Maoist conmen who go by the name of Black Lives Matter.
They're fighting a plague of racist crime by cops, a plague which literally does not exist.
There is no epidemic of racist cops hurting black people.
That is not what's happening.
I'll talk about that a little bit later.
These guys sexually corrupt our children in public schools.
And when parents protest, they set the FBI to investigate them.
Only have to ask the FBI, if you're on the left, to investigate parents trying to defend their children.
That's when the FBI isn't busy infiltrating our churches and being told by Senator Tim Kaine that that's just fine.
They do it to mosques.
Why shouldn't they do it to Catholic churches?
You know, they censor the truth on social media when it endangers the election of their candidate.
Nicole Hannah Jones at the New York Times, who is a race-hating person.
She goes on TV talking about white people all the time.
She's just a bigot to me.
She is exactly the same as with all her big degrees.
She's exactly the same as some toothless Klansman in the back of a pool hall, you know, talking about the blacks or whatever.
And she writes this absolutely dishonest 1619 project.
And you say, okay, fine.
So she's a hateful bigot who hates the country and wants to rewrite its history falsely.
But she gets a Pulitzer Prize for that, even though the Pulitzer Committee knew it was untrue.
And her toxic crap is pumped into our school systems.
I mean, does he ever wonder, does Nahisi Coates ever wonder, or AOC ever wonder, if they're fighting for the little guy, why the rich and powerful make them rich and famous?
Why does Tanahisi Coates get all these awards and all this money from white people and rich people if he's such a black hero fighting for the black man?
All they do, why do they give him awards?
Because they know it helps the powerful get more power and the rich get more money.
These thugs who attack us, the heroes of the resistance, are the stormtroopers of a vast network of corrupt and powerful institutions that includes our government, the government bureaucracies and the intelligence agencies, the giant corporations with their news and social media acting as their information arm and helping to normalize it all are the universities that teach these stupid theories.
You know, they have a theory that it's feminist somehow to strip women of their privacy and their sporting endeavors and their identities.
They have a theory that racism is anti-racism when they do it.
They have a theory that some made-up chart of intersectional suffering somehow transforms them into the little guy when they're bigger and more powerful than all of conservative media put together.
I do not know where the left would be without these theories because they would have to look in the mirror and see what dreadful little fascist turds they are.
I'm annoyed at punks who threaten us and hack us and disrupt our talks, but really leftism is a vile and violent creed.
It does this everywhere.
It rises to the top.
And somehow on the way to leftist utopia, it also makes everyone's life worse except for the rich and powerful.
The trans activists are thugs.
Antifa are thugs.
BLM are thugs.
The kids rioting in Chicago are thugs, but they would be nothing.
They would have no power without the thugs at the White House and Google and YouTube and the New York Times and CNN and the Washington Post and the universities and Hollywood who become thugs by covering up for them and silencing dissent and pushing absurd theories because those theories and that violence increase the power of the powerful and the wealth of the wealthy, all in the name of resistance to power and wealth.
So now let's talk about how evil Fox News is.
Voting Machines Under Threat00:14:32
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So before I get to Fox News and Dominion, I want to talk about the moment all of this came clear.
It came clear that all of these people are one people.
They're all one organization working together.
It was in 2013 it came out.
Some of you probably remember that the IRS had targeted conservative Tea Party groups and slow walked their tax-exempt status to keep them from speaking out during Obama's reelection campaign against Mitt Romney.
So when it was found out after Obama was safely elected, he came out and this is what he said.
This is clip one.
I've reviewed the Treasury Department watchdog's report and the misconduct that uncovered is inexcusable.
It's inexcusable and Americans are right to be angry about it and I am angry about it.
I will not tolerate this kind of behavior in any agency, but especially in the IRS.
Now, he did that because he didn't realize yet how deeply corrupt the press had become, how much they had become a part of the state and a spokesman for the intelligence agencies and for the bureaucracy.
He still thought that they were biased, but on a story as big as this, a story as big as IRS silencing dissent, they would come after him, right?
But lo and behold, there was a little bit of fuss.
Then the networks stopped covering it.
They stopped covering it.
They went silent for months about this.
The revelations were censored.
Kim Strossel, great reporter, she had a book, brought out a book, The Intimidation Game.
They said the United States, I'm quoting her, they said the United States has confusing tax-exempt laws.
Not true.
That a flood of social welfare and charitable applications overwhelmed the system.
Not true.
That low-level and rogue agents had stepped out of bounds.
Not true.
This went right up to the White House.
Obama knew about it.
You know, it's obvious.
And that even liberal groups had been swept up in the harassment.
Definitely not true.
Jim Jordan ultimately got to the truth of all this, but by then it was two years later.
It was too late.
Even, you know, and all the memory hold on Google, Wikipedia lies about it.
They say, oh, yeah, they went after liberal groups too.
They didn't.
This was an attack on your right to free speech if you were a right-winger and to get it was to get Obama elected.
And when Obama realized that the press was part of the deep state, it was all good.
They were not going to, he realized, oh, they're in with our corruption.
I didn't understand.
I thought there was still a working news media out there.
He went on Bill O'Reilly's show and he said the IRS is there's not a smidgen of corruption at the IRS.
This is what he said, cut two.
These kinds of things keep on surfacing, in part because you and your TV station will promote them.
But when folks asked questions, Bill, when you actually look at the stuff, there have been multiple hearings on it.
What happened here was that you've got a 501 C4 law that people think is confusing.
It's Fox News' fault.
It's all Fox News' fault.
They wouldn't stay with the program.
Fox News told the truth about this.
They covered it when everybody else was silent.
Everybody else wants silent.
It's all Fox News' fault.
If they just stayed quiet, nobody would even know about it.
Just like they covered the violent George Floyd riots when everybody else was saying that they were mostly peaceful.
Just like the fact that they cover that police aren't racist because they're dealing with the crime that's actually being committed when all the rest of the news media isn't saying that.
They're all lying about they're covering it up.
And what's the problem with Fox News?
The fake Duke lacrosse rape.
Sean Hannity should have won a Pulitzer for exposing that while all everybody else, they still say it's true.
At Duke, they still say that.
They act as if that rape actually happened.
CNN, the New York Times, they all covered this stuff up and demonized Fox for telling the truth so that the people who weren't smart enough to look for themselves wouldn't watch Fox and wouldn't believe the truth that they were hearing on Fox that they weren't hearing anywhere else.
And this is when Obama and the left realized, oh, it's all one.
The corporate media government complex is going to protect us.
We can cheat.
We can lie.
We can do anything.
And we can cover that.
We burn cities to the ground.
We can burn cities to the ground.
We can sexually butcher children.
And everybody's going to say, oh, that rotten Matt Walsh, take him, defund him on YouTube.
He said we shouldn't sexually butcher children instead of the horror that they should be expressing and experiencing, even, you know, but will not because it's all part of an agenda that is going to make them more powerful and more rich.
More power to the powerful, more money to the rich.
So now Fox News got burned.
And in my opinion, they deserved it.
They had their niche audience against this massive power of the networks and the corporations behind the networks and the bureaucracy and intelligence agencies that feed the networks.
Fox had managed to carve out this niche audience and they were afraid of losing it.
They were afraid of alienating it by telling them what they thought was the truth.
And they promulgated theories that Dominion voting machines stole the last election from Trump and they knew or at least they believed those theories were untrue.
So they were telling you things that they believed that they were untrue.
And they settled a lawsuit with Dominion for close to 800 million bucks.
So that's a lot.
You know, that's a lot, a lot of money for one of these things.
And I can't say for sure why they settled and didn't go to trial, but I suspect it's because they didn't want their stars testifying.
Dominion had found and discovery emails where some of the stars, Tucker Carlson, said these ideas are untrue, but our audience are good people and they believe them.
And so they felt constrained to air the ideas they thought were untrue.
They were afraid to lose their audience to Newsmax.
They wouldn't do what I did, which was alienate people to give it to you straight, to tell you straight what I thought.
Because I told you, Fox is running a business.
I'm on a mission from God.
So we have different briefs to do.
Now, let's not, I'm not going to sugarcoat this.
Here are some clips of Fox saying that these voting machines were vulnerable to hacking.
Cut three.
Virginia just stopped using touchscreen computer voting because it's so vulnerable.
We need to look at all the voting machines.
Every Secretary of State needs to be assisted in making sure that they are not being hacked and attacked.
I continue to think that our voting machines are too vulnerable.
Our researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that ballot recording machines and other voting systems are susceptible to tampering.
Even hackers with limited prior knowledge, tools, and resources are able to breach voting machines in a matter of minutes.
In 2018, electronic voting machines in Georgia and Texas deleted votes for certain candidates or switched votes from one candidate to another.
The biggest seller of voting machines is doing something that violates cybersecurity 101, directing that you install remote access software, which would make a machine like that, you know, a magnet for fraudsters and hackers.
These voting machines can be hacked quite easily.
Oh, wait.
That wasn't Fox.
Those were all powerful Democrats, from Hillary to Adam Schiff to Ted Liu.
They all said the same thing.
So that means, by deduction, that Fox didn't get burned or sued for saying what all those Democrats said because MSNBC wasn't sued.
You know, all of those politicians weren't sued.
The Washington Post, where Adam Schiff was speaking, they weren't sued.
Fox got nailed for saying that Dominion stopped Trump from winning.
We want to be clear about this.
None of these people got sued.
So obviously what they were suing them about, why their judge was so prejudiced, why the judge was so biased, was they were being sued because they were saying that Trump really won.
Now, I've told you, I'm not convinced at all that Trump won, and I don't think I personally doubt the machines were hacked, but that's why this is being sued.
So it's time for the good people, the good people who are not demons like Fox, who covered the riots and Fox, who covered Hunter Biden's laptop.
It's now time for the good people who kept all stayed together with the deep state and with the intelligence operations and with the big corporations.
It's time for them to gloat.
So let's give a few seconds to Jake Tapper.
This is cut five.
Fox is going to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787,500,000.
Dominion's lawyer saying, quote, today represents a ringing endorsement for truth and for democracy.
Fox trying to put a positive face on what can only be interpreted as one of the ugliest and most embarrassing moments in the history of journalism.
Fox issued a statement saying, quote, we are pleased to have reached a settlement of our dispute with Dominion Voting Systems.
We acknowledge the court's rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.
The settlement reflects, I'm sorry, this is going to be difficult to say with a straightforward reflects Fox's continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.
We are hopeful that our sorry to resolve the dispute with Dominion amicably instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial allows the country to move forward from these issues.
Unquote.
He's laughing.
Jake, dude, you work for CNN.
You work for a place where they stood outside burning buildings and said, oh, yeah, this is a mostly peaceful riot.
You know, I mean, nobody watches you because they know you're a bunch of lying gas bags.
You know, I mean, if the government wanted fewer of its documents to be leaked, its secret documents, they would put them on CNN's primetime shows because no one would see them there.
You know, recently, before the House Judiciary Committee, a former deputy director of the CIA, Michael Morrell, says that the guy who is now Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, but was Biden's campaign aide at the time, called them up and instigated the letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials saying the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.
Okay, so now we know the Secretary of State actually participated in this scam that was signed.
Four of these people were former CIA heads saying Hunter Biden's laptop, which now has just absolutely unveiled incredible corruption in the Biden family, was Russian disinformation.
Here's how the great people at CNN and MSNBC covered it with their journalistic standards while Fox was covering it.
Biden secret emails.
A really fishy story.
The Post claimed that the emails were found on a laptop computer that was brought to a repair shop in Delaware in the spring of 2019.
The FBI is now investigating whether those alleged Hunter Biden emails are actually connected to a larger foreign intelligence operation.
They may be related to a foreign intelligence operation.
Foreign intelligence operation.
Foreign intelligence.
Foreign intelligence.
Foreign intelligence operations.
For all we know, these emails are made up.
The information found on the laptop may be part of a Russian disinformation campaign.
Part of a Russian disinformation effort.
Described by many intelligence experts as having hallmarks.
All the hallmarks rather.
All the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation.
Russian disinformation.
Disinformation campaign.
This is a classic example of the right-wing media machine.
Violate your ethics there, Jake.
Did it make you laugh when CNN talks about journalistic ethics?
Fox got the story right.
Fox gets a lot of stories right that CNN lied and lied and lied about.
You know, here's another one.
By the way, just so you know, I mean, there's now a U.S. tax special agent who wants whistleblower protections because he wants to testify that the criminal investigations into Hunter Biden have been hampered by political considerations.
The old, the big guy, the big guy, wants to protect his 10% and he's got his foot on the DOJ as they investigated this.
All right, let's hear some more gloating from the honest, decent, righteous, good guys against the demon Fox, who was laid low here.
Here is the New York Times, a former newspaper, Knucklehead Row, their opinion page, Michelle Goldberg, chief knucklehead.
She said, part of Fox's sinister, Fox's sinister on-air brilliance is the way it encases its audience in a comprehensive alternative reality.
Okay?
Now for once, the network will be forced to account for itself outside the right-wing bubble.
Michelle, Michelle, my darling, you work for the New York Times.
They gave themselves Pulitzer Prizes for their coverage of a Trump-Russian collusion story that was a complete fabrication of Hillary Clinton's campaign.
They put their Pulitzer Prize on the shelf next to the one they got for covering up Stalin's starvation of millions.
It's like, we are the best at this crap.
Nobody does this like we do it.
Brett Kavanaugh Accusations00:02:44
Brett Kavanaugh was accused by a woman of being attacked, was accused by a woman of sexual misconduct.
This woman, he may never have met.
There's no proof he ever met this woman.
The New York Times pounded it day after day after day.
They gave full coverage to Julie Swetnick when she said that Kavanaugh stood online outside rooms where women were being gang raped before Swetnik was exposed by like two questions on one of the TV stations.
I think it was NBC.
But when Joe Biden, who's constantly putting his hands on little girls, whose own daughter says he took showers with her that were probably inappropriate, when he was accused by a woman who worked for him, so we know they were together.
He was accused by Tara Reed saying he pressed her against a wall and stuck his fingers up her.
The New York Times said nothing about the story for 20 days and then buried it inside the paper on Easter Sunday and said, nothing to see here.
The editor, Dean Becke, said the Kavanaugh story was in the news.
The reason we didn't cover it is the Kavanaugh story was in the news, but the Tara Reed story wasn't in the news.
In other words, we didn't cover it because we didn't cover it.
That's why.
He said, well, Kavanaugh was up for a big job in the Supreme Court.
Biden was literally running for president.
But Fox News is the problem.
So talk about encasing your audience in a comprehensive alternative reality.
You know, those emails from Fox, they show that Tucker and Sean and Laura knew that Trump's people were lying and they ran with the story anyway.
But the New York Times and Jake Tapper and NBC and ABC and CBS and the Washington Post, when they demonize Fox News, they're not just lying to their audience.
They're lying to themselves.
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Why We Watch00:13:18
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There are no E's in Claude.
All right.
So a little earlier, I was talking about the moment in 2013 when Barack Obama realized that the press would basically let him get away with everything because it had become part, essentially, an arm of big corporations which had also become actors in league with the deep state.
Part of this has to do with censoring people and with shutting down information that the government doesn't want out there.
There was a wonderful article about this in Tablet magazine, a really long but very in-depth article called The Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century, 13 Ways of Looking at Disinformation by Jacob Siegel.
Jacob Siegel is a former Army intelligence officer and he's now a senior writer at Tablet.
Jacob, thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
So basically, you make the case that Barack Obama made a big change in American policy as regards to information.
Can you tell us about how the federal government decided to fight misinformation and why this happened?
So the critical event that occurs during the Obama administration is the signing of the Countering Foreign Disinformation Act, which happens in December 2016.
So just as Obama is leaving office, he signs this act, which is part of the 2017 NDAA, the defense authorization bill.
And what this does is create what's called the Global Engagement Center, an agency inside of the State Department, which was repurposed from a counter-terrorism counter-messaging agency.
So in other words, a State Department agency that existed to counter propagandize groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS.
It takes that agency and repurposes it as a agency to fight foreign disinformation.
It's important that at the origins, this is nominally just about foreign disinformation.
But also from the very beginning, this agency, the GEC, has a mandate that includes what it refers to as a whole of society effort, meaning that it's going to bring together all of the different most powerful sectors of society, especially the tech industry, which is most powerful and most critical here, but also including potentially academia, Wall Street, the nonprofit sphere.
It's going to bring all of them together in this whole of society effort to fight foreign disinformation.
But the other key thing to note here is that from the very beginning, the concept of disinformation, while putatively dealing with foreign actors, most notably Russia, of course, contains, because it's really just about messages, contains the possibility of a domestic interpretation also.
So if a domestic political actor is said to be amplifying or echoing foreign disinformation, all of a sudden they fall under the same, let's say, targeting category potentially as a foreign actor.
So just making up a, for instance, if the president's son should, in a cocaine haze, should leave his laptop somewhere and a news agency finds it, these people would have the power and the in to go in and say, this is Russian disinformation and corporations would tend to believe them?
They would have the power not only to say that, but to plant that notion inside of the tech companies by sending, for instance, to borrow an historical case, by sending FBI agents to speak with the CEO of Facebook,
Mark Zuckerberg, and tell him months ahead of the actual reporting on the laptops that he should expect some kind of foreign disinformation centering on the laptops to come out the next few months, and also to plant that idea inside the U.S. press establishment through selective leaks to journalists, et cetera.
So indeed, that's exactly what happened.
So this is the kind of thing that the U.S. government does when, say, they're in Afghanistan and they need to win hearts and minds and they're countering propaganda.
Is this kind of the same, these same techniques?
Quite similar, but I would say far more effective, or at least potentially far more effective inside the U.S., because it is the nature of propaganda that it's always most effective in a domestic audience where there are a shared set of cultural premises and cultural priors.
And one, you know, when one is trying to convince somebody of something, it is always advantageous to understand the person who you're trying to convince and to share a set of, let's say, underlying foundational ideas.
So it draws on the same technologies, technologies of surveillance and behavioral control and influence operations, but is more finely calibrated, larger, and more powerful for the reasons I began with.
So was the threat that Obama was reacting to, was it real?
I mean, was there, in fact, some threat that our polity was going to be, you know, knocked off course by foreign disinformation?
I think there are two things that are real.
There is a real hostile foreign disinformation threat, which is, by any objective analysis, probably quite small and limited in its effect, but nevertheless real.
It's not to deny that it exists.
It's not to deny that there were indeed hostile foreign actors, not only Russia, China also, Iran to some extent, were engaged in what you might call the actual, the technical act of propagating disinformation.
That does exist.
The effects of that appear to be quite limited.
So any objective analysis of the effects of that, looking, for instance, at the trolling campaigns by the infamous Russian trolling agency or looking at the Facebook ad purchases, et cetera, these things were quite limited in their effect.
What is vastly larger, more powerful, and gets conflated with the actual foreign disinformation is the disruptive, destabilizing, indeed revolutionary effect of the internet itself.
That's what we're really talking about here.
So foreign disinformation is a kind of hyper threatening, a kind of a specific and very scary way of referring to what is actually a far larger,
far less controlled process, which is the destabilizing effect of the internet itself on politics and particularly on the politics of those societies that have done the most to expand the reach and sphere of power of internet.
So the U.S. must evolve, of course, but also destabilizing in Britain, for instance, for quite similar reasons.
So yes, there is a real thing, foreign disinformation, and we can study it and we can study its effects and they appear to be fairly limited.
There's another thing, which is the digital revolution itself, which is harder to analyze, but is the real underlying force.
But of course, that's a force that we promoted, that the U.S. promoted.
And that's a force that can't simply be pinned on a single hostile foreign actor.
It's both larger than that and more complicated than that and harder to scapegoat in that way.
So in light of that, I'm talking to Jacob Siegel of Tablet Magazine, excellent article called A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century.
One of the things that we who consider ourselves conservative in some sense talk about a lot is the bias of the press.
But it has begun to seem to me, and you say this in the article, that that's just not getting the story right.
Put the press, the news media, the networks and all this and the Times and the Post, put this in the context of what you're telling me, because you said before that this expanded out to basically every aspect of our country.
So when I'm watching the news, what am I watching in the context of this?
You're watching an extraordinarily powerful hand puppet get manipulated.
Yeah, the largest, most glorified hand puppet imaginable.
But, you know, and I say this is a member of the press.
And look, I understand why conservatives feel that way.
And I think conservatives are not wrong when they identify this kind of bias and targeted censorship.
I just think that it's a limited way of looking at things that sort of misses the real story.
And the real story is a machinery of political control.
It's a system of government and of rule that is replacing constitutional democracy.
And the press's role in that, having already been totally hollowed out, which is the key sort of precondition for the press to get used the way it was used, was that it had been hollowed out for reasons that are not specifically political or ideological.
But there had been a larger collapse of the press that had been occurring for decades.
You get this hyper-consolidated sort of coastal and DC corridor press that is already more reliant, A, on the tech companies themselves, and B, on government sources and government leakers because they're doing less reporting.
So the importance of the sources who are going to feed these pieces of official information that have the kind of currency of scoops, they look like scoops, but they're not real reported scoops in the same way.
You know, you take the identity of this most recent heir guardsman.
That was a leak.
You know, that was an official deliberate leak to the publications like the Washington Post that got to run with that.
And they were rewarded with that information because they had been reliable conduits for government messaging in the past.
So the function of the press in these cases is to credential the narrative being put out through these official leaks and also to act as a kind of a compliance cadre, you know, narrative compliance cadre or bureaucratic compliance cadre, if you rather.
So credential the official narrative and then, you know, really hammer home that any deviation from that initial official narrative is in some sense dangerous or suspect.
You know, I did notice that the New York Times, when they arrested this most recent leaker, Texero, whatever his name is, they were there when the FBI went in and arrested him.
They just happened to be wandering by, I guess, but I guess that's a reward that you get for, you know, being a conduit for this information.
What did Trump have to do with this?
Was this about Trump?
Yes, and no.
I mean, it was certainly about him in the sense that he was this uniquely threatening figure who allowed, you know, insofar as the aim was a whole of society effort, Trump was the perfect catalyst to actually create a genuine whole of society consensus.
There were, you know, he was threatening to so many different people for so many different reasons.
Some of those reasons, perfectly legitimate, I would say.
Others of those reasons the result of deliberate deceptions or just abject freak outs by people who had lost faith in the democratic process.
But for all of those reasons, both legitimate and illegitimate, there really was a sort of what you might call a whole of society elite consensus around him as a unique danger, a unique threat.
And so in that sense, he was very important.
But there was an underlying foundational belief within the very same institutions that sort of led the freak out.
There was an underlying belief that they alone should control the internet, which is the new domain, the domain of social life and politics in the 20th century, excuse me, the 21st century.
And so this is, you know, Trump was critical, yes.
But on the other hand, this is sort of built into the technocratic, the technocratic worldview.
Technocratic Tyranny?00:03:44
I get it.
Yeah.
All right.
I'm running out of time, but here's a quote from your piece.
Anyone who spends time in America and is not a brainwashed zealot can tell that this is not a fascist country.
What is coming into being is a new form of government and social organization that is as different from mid-20th century liberal democracy as the early American Republic was from the British monarchism that it grew out of and eventually supplanted.
Can you describe that in a minute, what that new form of government is?
Yeah, it is a form of government that uses the manipulation of what I would call digital swarms to achieve its political objectives, which are essentially can be very simply characterized because its political objectives are to do everything possible to delegitimize its opponents and reinforce its own monopoly on power.
So if self-government was about providing people with the most knowledge of the world possible so that they could make their own decisions about the best ways to organize their lives, organize the communities, the best elected representatives for themselves.
All of this is sort of built into the philosophical basis of self-government.
The philosophical basis of this new kind of what you might call algorithmic government or technocratic information control is that the people themselves are not capable of self-government.
They can't be trusted with self-government, nor can they be trusted with the information, the awareness of the world, which is essential to self-government because they'll do crazy things like vote for the wrong candidate or make bad decisions about their own medical treatment, etc.
And so it is a system of government that uses a monopoly on informational systems in order to control populations, ultimately to keep itself in power.
Jacob Siegel, great article, a guide to understanding the hoax of the century, a tablet.
A depressing conversation, but better to know than not to know.
Thank you for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Thank you very much for having me.
Thanks a lot.
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Walmart's Broken Window Policing00:12:50
And I know what you're thinking, you're thinking, what?
What did he say?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Well, that was a really interesting interview with Jacob Siegel.
If you're noise in the background, he was sitting in a hospital waiting room.
But that idea that we are dealing with a now increasingly huge block of power centers all merging together with a new idea that the internet can be used to silence you and control you and take over all the information.
In which case, I have to say, like I said, I think Fox did the wrong thing.
They should have spoken their minds.
They should have said what they truly believe to their audience.
But to me, they're coming across as heroes, really.
I mean, they're the ones who are breaking through this Chuckly Jack Jake Tapper wall of disinformation that is being essentially engineered by the intelligence community and the deep state.
One more example I'm going to give you is crime.
There's this story about Ralph Yarl.
I'm sure you saw it in Kansas City, and it seems like a bad story.
He's a 16-year-old kid.
He went to the wrong house.
This is the story, so far as we know it, to pick up his brother.
There are two streets with similar names.
This exact thing happened to me once when I was picking up my son when he was a little boy, and I almost was ripped to pieces by a guard dog, one of the true boo scares of my life.
But the kid rang the doorbell of an 84-year-old man at night after the old man had gone to bed.
The old guy said he was scared to death, and he shot the kid through the door and wounded him.
So now the kid is black.
The old man is white.
So Joe Biden calls the kid up and invites him to the White House.
The New York Times plays it up because, you know, I wouldn't want Michelle Goldberg to think that they wrap their audience in left-wing, you know, left-wing propaganda.
But, you know, this is a big, big story.
Other stories of white people being killed, of a white and black couple being attacked in Chicago, those smaller stories.
But this is the big story because a white man shot a black man.
We all know how it goes.
And here's what the kid's lawyer says, cut six.
We need new legislation to protect blackness in this country because blackness is under attack.
What is this case about?
It's a case about blackness.
Well, you know, in some ways, it is a case about blackness.
Certainly the New York Times wants it to be about blackness.
And Joe Biden wants it to be about blackness because black Americans are being used in this country to divide us, to make people think that this is a bad country that needs, in an emergency state of racism, that needs the government to grow larger and larger and larger.
But this guy shot this kid and was scared of this kid, we can assume, because this kid was the same, Ralph Yarl was the same color as the people who commit much of the violent crime in this country.
And we're not supposed to say that, and we're not supposed to say why the old man was scared.
Not the kid's fault.
You know, if the story is true, it's not the kid's fault.
But this is the way this goes.
And you know, if you listen to the show, I don't think this is about race.
I don't think it's genetic.
I think it's about protecting left-wing policies that pump money into the government and make it easier for the Democrats to buy votes through using the money, the tax dollars for programs.
And these programs make people dependent on the government and they break up families.
Historically, they have destroyed the black family.
I mean, these kids are living without fathers.
And it's money for the rich and power for the powerful that has ruined, has created these programs that have ruined black families and ruined black lives.
And when Joe Biden says, you have to pay your fair share, that's what he wants you to pay your fair share of.
But on the ground, it's about race, okay?
So if these programs destroy black families and more black kids have to go into gangs to find any fathering at all, and you get mugged by a black guy, it doesn't matter to you why it happened.
I have friends who are racist.
They will say to you, black people commit crimes.
And I'll say, well, there may be reasons for that that have nothing to do with them.
And they say, what do I care?
This is my lived experience, as the left would say.
I just don't want to be mugged.
So that's why I'm afraid of black people, right?
Blacks commit 50%.
They're 12% of the country.
They commit 50% of the murders in the population.
The people they kill are mostly black, but there's a disproportionate number of whites killed by blacks, too.
And that's why whites move out of neighborhoods.
It's not white flight.
They're not flying from the color of people's skin.
Nobody cares if the black doctor moves in next to you.
They're flying from crime.
That's why women get nervous if a black guy steps on the elevator and they say, oh, that's a terrible thing.
No, it's just that's what they see.
The problem, the guilty party, may be the Democrats, may be white Democrats.
They may be the real thugs here.
But if you're in the elevator, that's the face of it who walks in on you.
And that's why this guy was scared to death when he saw a black kid on the doorstep at night.
But because the fault lies with Democrat programs that make the government bigger, that make the rich richer, that make the powerful more powerful, you're not allowed to complain about it.
And this is the thing.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is a huge federal bureaucracy, has big jurisdiction.
They're suing a small Chicago area bank because some of the officials at the bank denounced the thugs who commit crimes in Chicago.
And the CFPB says that discourages loans to minorities.
If you speak the truth, you're a bigot, right?
If you speak the truth, you're a bigot.
And a business has no business protecting itself by, say, moving out of Chicago.
Walmart is moving four of its stores.
It's closed already, four of its shops in Chicago because they were tired of getting looted, right?
So local leaders show up and say, no, no, no, you have to stay because, you know, because this is cut four.
We have health care deserts.
We have food deserts.
Yes, sir.
And we wonder why.
Yes, sir.
Our communities look like they look.
And we have violence every single day.
It is just not on us.
It is on the corporate citizens that come into our community and ravage our community.
And Walmart, you should be absolutely ashamed of yourself.
You are the reason that our communities lack the investment that they have.
We should not have to go out of our communities to find jobs.
We should not have to go out of our communities to get inequality.
Medicine.
We should not go out of our communities to be able to shop.
We should be able to do all of this in our community.
Right here.
We deserve.
We deserve.
To be able to shop.
Yes, sir.
Work.
Way.
Yes.
In our own community.
Okay, so the federal government agrees that businesses have no right to see what they see.
The local leaders agree the business leaders can't leave if they're being looted.
And the looters agree.
Here are looters going through Walmart saying Walmart's not allowed to leave.
They're going through a store.
I'm not sure if it is Walmart.
Yeah, it is Walmart.
They're going through a store and they're telling you that they're looting the place, but they can't leave.
This is cut seven.
You know, we lost our Walmart.
But you know, we lost our Walmart, right?
Huh?
Is it ours?
Yes, because it's in our community.
Because look, guess what?
We're going to go for our Christmas.
Are we not smart enough to build our own Walmart?
Are we not smart enough to take out a loan and build our own because they'll let us, right?
We got to put our money together.
We're going to let nobody let us.
I don't get no fun.
I would love to see that happen.
You know, they say they're not smart enough.
And, you know, it's true in Chicago, especially a lot of kids are badly educated.
There are schools in Chicago that are half empty, that are not, some of them, they're not doing their job.
Some of them have 2% of the kids in these schools are proficient at reading.
2% are proficient at reading.
But the unions, the teachers' unions, collect, protect those schools because they want to say, oh, we have various different schools.
They don't want private schools or school choice to come in because they want, so they keep these empty, useless schools open.
So the brilliant Chicago voters can't be bothered to show up at the polls.
And so who gets elected as their next mayor but a teachers union organizer, Brandon Johnson, and his, and teens flood the loop.
These are night, you know, Chicago is a beautiful city, by the way.
Chicago is a lovely, lovely city.
Teens flood the loop.
There's violence.
They're attacking people.
And here's what this mayor, another clown, they just replaced one clown with another, says about it.
It's cut eight.
The question is, how do we make sure that people can eat?
Look, no one is going to condone behavior that, quite frankly, speaks to a level of desperation.
So you're not going to be able to do that.
You're not condoning looting.
I'm saying that people are acting out of desperation.
We don't want a society that is acting out of desperation.
But you have to pay attention to the cries that people have.
You're not condoning looting.
There's no way to embrace that.
What I'm saying is you can't condone the looting that corporations continue to do every single day when they take tax dollars from black, brown, white folks all over the city of Chicago so that they can turn a profit.
Now, to be fair, that's an old clip, but he tweeted something very similar during this current thing.
That's an old clip of what he says.
It's business's fault.
It's business's fault for leaving when they get looted because you're not allowed to see what you see.
You know, the terrible, terrible thing about this is a lot of these problems were solved.
Not the problem of the teachers' union, which needs to be eradicated.
The teachers' union needs to be outlawed.
You should not be allowed to have a public teachers' union.
But Heather McDonald is documented.
She's going to come on soon.
But she was giving written testimony before Congress, and she pointed out that since the 1990s, felony crime in the U.S. dropped 50%.
Tens of thousands of lives, the majority black and Hispanic, were saved, closing the life expectancy gap between whites and blacks.
And the reason this happened was because Rudy Giuliani and others brought in these new police chiefs like Bratton, and they came in and they basically said, we're going to the places where the crime is.
They used a scientific system named Comstat.
They did tough policing.
They police people who did minor crimes that set off major crimes.
That's why they called it broken window policing.
And all the time they did that, the New York Times was just absolutely fighting tooth and nail and calling Giuliani racist and calling them fascists and all these things.
And finally, one, they stopped doing this kind of policing and the crime rate starts to climb back up.
On top of which, of course, they attack the police.
And this really bugs me because any reporter who was not corrupt, he was not corrupt to his bones, would ask himself, when a politician blames a cop, shouldn't I think for a minute whether the cop is just cleaning up after the politicians' policies?
Isn't that the first thing I should think about any politician when a politician blames someone who's not himself, that maybe the politicians' policies are to blame?
The fact that no one asks you tells you just how corrupt these beanbags are.
Heather ends, she says, we are told that we are living through an epidemic of racially biased police shootings of black men.
This too is false.
It is the rate of violent crime that determines police shootings, a study found.
We all know this because the crime is high in black neighborhoods.
The cops are in more contact with black people.
And if something bad happens, it's going to happen there.
You can't blame blacks because blacks are doing it.
It's because of Democrat programs.
The programs are there to bring in money to the wealthy and power to the powerful.
But you're not going to say that because the Democrats won't say it.
So they blame the police instead, and you're not going to say it because the guy who mugs you is black.
So that's what you think.
This is the guy that you're seeing.
So this thing is being hidden in plain sight, which is it's all about big government getting bigger and powerful people getting more powerful.
You know, it's always the same thing.
The people on the ground can be forgiven for thinking it's black people's fault, but it's the big thugs, the powerful thugs, who are the real problem.
You know, it just drives me nuts that people who pretend to be socialists like AOC never say, why are corporations giving us socialist money like me?
Why are they giving me money?
So just like the thugs that went after Walsh and the thugs that went after Knowles, they're only the face of the problem.
Social Contagion Studies Questioned00:17:43
The real problem are the big thugs in media who cover it up in lie and the big thugs in business who promulgate the theories that cause it and in the universities and in the White House too.
Those are the real thugs.
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You know, when leftists tell you that America is systemically racist, they're lying.
All evidence points to the contrary, and every attempt to fix this non-existent problem in the name of equity is making the country worse.
I just told you what I thought of Heather McDonald.
I think she is the best reporter in the country, or at least one of the very best.
She is shutting down that malignant ideology of anti-racism in her brand new book, When Race Trumps Merit, How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives.
She's going to be on this show next week.
Her book, When Race Trumps Merit, exposes how the BLM-fueled equity obsession is destroying Western civilization.
We're tearing down meritocratic standards of achievement because those standards have a disparate impact on certain minorities.
We no longer enforce many criminal laws because doing so has a disparate impact on minority criminals.
But lowering standards, McDonald explains, jeopardizes scientific progress, destroys public order, and poisons the appreciation of art and culture.
When race trumps merit is eye-opening, but the Truth always is.
McDonald is unafraid to break taboos about academic achievement and crime.
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This book is a must-read for anyone who is concerned about the present state of the country and worried for our future when race Trump's merit is available on Amazon or wherever books are sold.
And like I said, Heather, one of my favorite people, as well as my favorite reporters, will be on this show next week.
So obviously, when we're talking about the kind of unity, the kind of mono-government that now includes not just the actual government, but also the corporations and the press, their newest kind of fad is transgenderism and convincing us all that what is not true about it is true and what is true about it is not true and especially interested in corrupting our children.
Every month, if we can, we love to have Megan Bashaman, our cultural reporter at the Daily Wire, who is really doing great work.
She's written an article about this that I wanted to talk to her about.
Megan, always good to see you.
How you doing?
I'm doing well.
It's always good to be here.
You know, your piece, as always, your piece is just really terrific.
It's on a study.
Well, I'll read the headline and I'll let you talk about it.
Studies on transgenderism and kids show pressure, social contagion, the main cause.
That's pretty shocking stuff after we're told this is all just something that bubbles up in children naturally.
Where is this study from?
Right.
And that's the most amazing thing, right?
So this came from a researcher at Northwestern.
And part of what you hear is there is very little research on the ground.
And you wonder, why is that when we have so many children who are transitioning, when you're seeing these things being fought out in dozens of states, when you're seeing courts wrestling with it, why do we have so little science to go to?
And so that was kind of why I first started digging into this question is that there isn't the research that you feel that there should be.
And one of the first names that came up when I started looking into it was Dr. Lisa Littman out of Brown University.
So back in 2018, she was the first one to do a big groundbreaking study on this question of gender dysphoria.
She was the first one to coin the term rapid onset gender dysphoria.
She did this study.
Brown celebrated her.
This, again, was in 2018, somewhat in some before times.
And the journal was very happy to publish it.
And then basically all hell broke loose.
So I'm going to let her a little bit describe what happened to her in a podcast interview I saw her on.
Okay.
Well, I was not expecting it to be this controversial, controversial, actually.
So that was a little bit surprising to me.
I heard some inklings online before publication, and I thought maybe there'd be, you know, some people who were not pleased, but that's nothing new in public health.
I mean, it's kind of commonplace that research does not please all individuals.
So at Brown, it was interesting.
The first emails that I received were congratulations for shedding light on a very complicated topic.
But shortly after, there was a social media uprising.
There were people who were very upset by the research and were making claims of that it was transphobic.
And they were tagging the university and the journal.
And I heard that there were that Brown heard from other people as well.
So yes, then it was, then it became fraught.
So it's follow the science until you follow the science.
Right.
And let's keep in mind that Dr. Elisa Littman was both an MD and a PhD, eminently qualified in this field to be doing this research.
So after that, Brown apologized to the trans community.
They took the announcement about her study down.
It had been up on the university's website.
They took that down.
The journal decided to put her research through a second round of expert assessment, quote unquote, very unusual.
So at that point, you really didn't see many researchers stepping up, you know, really wanting to go into this field because after that, she had to leave Brown and go found her own research institute.
So not a lot of people wanted to talk about it.
And when you saw people even reference her science, reference the research that she did, they get shouted down for hate speech.
And as I was working on this piece, I found this clip and it made me laugh out loud with sort of black humor.
It was a clip just from last month at a Milwaukee, Wisconsin school board meeting where a guy brought up this particular research on social contagion.
And just for fun, I just want to show you what the reaction was.
The comment that really took the cake for me was Kristen's when she said she would like to see an LGBTQ curriculum implemented.
Such nonsense is merely an effort to normalize the transgender social contagion that legitimate experts agree as most often.
I don't know.
I'm not sure what's going on in the psychological community.
What?
I want to warn you about hate speech.
That's not allowed during public hate speech.
It's considered hate speech.
By who?
You called them a social contagion.
That's what it is.
It is hate speech.
Mr. Reynolds would not say speech.
It will not be allowed during this public comment.
Your opinions are fine.
Everyone places.
You can't honestly believe that this is based on science.
Wow.
Wow.
That unbelievable.
You know, if in fact they thought they were telling the truth, they wouldn't silence people at all.
They would discuss it with them.
But they know they're lying.
I mean, they know they're right.
Right.
And that was the key point was that she found overwhelming evidence that this is a social contagion issue, particularly with girls who are more susceptible to social contagion.
We've seen that in other spheres, not just with transgender research, but in things like in the 1990s, sort of the abuse scare where a lot of girls were having false memories of having been abused because girls are just very susceptible to that for various reasons.
So now there's a new study that has come out.
And this one came out of Northwestern, a researcher there, Dr. Michael Bailey.
And basically everything he found backs up what Littman found in 2018.
So he based his study on a parents website where they were sharing their concerns about their children who were going through gender dysphoria.
And this was the largest sample ever used.
So when he looked at it, he found, once again, not only was social contagion the key factor in what was driving these mostly young women, they were hearing that 60% of the young women in this study had a friend who also came out as transgender.
So that's fascinating.
And then the other really big key finding was that most of these girls had other mental health issues that they were dealing with, whether it was anxiety, depression, someone in their life having committed suicide, just these sort of mental distresses that other normal adolescents might not be experiencing.
And they'd been experiencing it for, on an average, about four years.
So this was an ongoing issue.
And I actually spoke to Dr. Michael Bailey, and he detailed some of his findings for me.
One of our main findings was that parents reported on a history of emotional problems in these children.
And on average, that was common.
Including formal diagnoses, the most common of which were depression and anxiety.
And on average, parents said that the emotional problems preceded any complaints about gender by almost four years.
That's a long time.
So it appears that these youth had long-standing issues and then for whatever reasons that we're trying to understand, came to the conclusion that they were transgender.
It really, you know, what amazes me about this is that Richard slash Rachel Levine is always saying the data shows this and the data shows that.
I've never seen a single reporter say to him, you know, what research?
What are you talking about?
Right.
Well, and that's not to say that there have been no studies that transgender activists will point to.
There have, except those studies tend to be very biased in the sense that they put out an advertisement on social media to recruit kids who already say they're transgender.
So if you are asking these children who already identify as that, and then you study them, a lot of times you're going to get the kind of answers you want.
Now, those critics hit back at a study like Michael Bailey's and Lisa Lippmann's, and they say, but you're talking to parents.
You're not talking to the children.
And Michael Bailey was very transparent in that.
And he said, yes, in that sense, this would also be a biased study.
But every study is going to have some kind of bias.
Our standard was who is most likely to understand what's happening with these kids more than their own parents.
And politically, the majority of the parents in this study describe themselves as left of center.
So these were not particularly religious parents.
They were not conservative parents.
They were just parents who, based on what they were observing in their children, did not believe that this was true transgenderism, true gender dysphoria.
These weren't kids who from a young age said, I feel like I'm the opposite gender.
They weren't five-year-olds who always wanted to, you know, boys who wanted to wear dresses or vice versa.
This was something that came on very rapidly.
And they, again, saw that they had friends who were going through it.
And that raised alarm bells.
And then part of the issue is the other big contributing factor was that the parents took the children to gender clinics.
And 50% of the parents who took their kids to gender clinics said, we felt pressured to immediately transition.
And so that in itself brings up huge alarm bells going, why is that happening?
Why is there an immediate rapid movement to say, let's transition these kids?
Let's pressure them into that when there are still very large questions scientifically about what's happening here.
And then I want to add one more thing, Drew, and this has been really fascinating to me, is that same week, I think it was, in the same journal, a study came out of England that showed that these social transitions are not doing anything for the mental health of these kids.
Now, they were not looking at surgical or puberty blocker transitions.
They were just looking at we're going to let you dress differently, call you by a different name, use different pronouns.
But these were not, in this case, parents they were speaking to.
These were children that had been referred to the gender clinic.
So they were pulling from the exact type of sample that your doctor, Rachel Levins, would say you need to pull from that sample.
Well, they did.
And they also found that, yes, it looks like social contagion is playing a role here.
And we don't see that this social transitioning is doing anything for the mental health of these children.
And they found that, again, mental health crises in other areas were also driving this desire to change gender.
You know, they've also done studies that, for instance, have shown that something like half of the mothers of people who transition are themselves mentally ill or mentally disturbed in various ways.
There hasn't been time to do longitudinal studies.
There hasn't been time to see what's going to happen even to people like Dylan Mulvaney.
We don't know if that, you know, what's going to happen to him eventually as he goes forward.
So Douglas Murray makes this point in one of his books.
I don't understand why, what's the hurry?
What's the rush?
Why?
Why when you go to a gender transition place, obviously this is how they make their living, but why should they be in such a big hurry when we simply have not had time?
They only made this up.
The left only made this up a couple of years ago.
So we haven't had time to study it in any kind of real way.
It's just odd to me.
It is odd to me that this is caught on so quickly with the left.
I mean, it's just part of their theoretical agenda, I guess, that it fits in with.
In Europe, some of it is being drawn back, right?
I mean, some of the people have, they've stopped doing transitions.
In quite a number of places.
So you've already seen in England, they have taken a huge step back.
They shut down the only pediatric gender clinic there, the Tavistock Clinic.
We've even seen it in what you would call the very progressive Netherlands, Sweden, those type of countries.
They're stepping back.
So we're actually the outliers as far as this issue goes.
And there's a number of reasons.
I look at it and I think, one, there's always got to be a new civil rights movement, right?
And this is sort of the new civil rights of the left.
They want to frame this as, once again, we're the guys who are trying to help an oppressed peoples.
But we're getting down to weirder and weirder and more niche group peoples.
But I also think that we're reaching a tipping point in a good way.
Because right before I came on, and I think it just came out like yesterday, a story in The Economist, which certainly not a bastion of conservatism, came out saying, look, the science on gender, particularly for young people, is becoming overwhelming that there is not a good reason to be rushing into this transitioning.
Really?
The economist.
And that was The Economist saying it.
Yes.
So, and it's very interesting when you go, we talk about all the time now the consensus of the science.
That is supposed to be the end-all, be-all authority if there's a consensus.
Well, there's a building consensus here that there is no good reason to be transitioning these children.
If it is something they want to do as adults, I'm still against it, but there is no reason to say that's a decision you can make once you're an adult.
So that cheered me when I saw, okay, we are starting to see some saner voices, even on the center left, prevail and say, it's time to put the brakes on.
You know, even with adults, I have to say, though I agree with you, I think it's in the rarest of cases going to be a good idea.
It's still not the question of transgender persons that we're actually discussing.
We're discussing whether or not we can speak honestly with one another without being censored and whether or not we can decide how to describe reality for ourselves.
Megan, great report.
Why We Can't Discuss Homosexuality?00:07:16
Really good job.
And it's worth reading, too, if you have a reader's pass on Daily Wire.
Thank you very much for coming on.
We'll talk to you again soon.
Sounds good.
Thanks, Drew.
Thanks.
Well, I have to admit, this hasn't been the jolliest show I've ever done.
It actually does piss me off when people pick on my pals.
But, you know, the thing about it is it's much, much better than the Clavenless Week, which is coming upon you like a sort of black cloud in tornado shape with lightning.
And it's much, much better than that.
So this is as cheerful as you're going to be this week right now.
And that's why that is why you should become a member to stretch out the experience a little bit more.
But it's also why you should have all your problems solved first with the mailbag.
When you report fake news, which CNN does a lot, you are the enemy of the people.
Yeah!
Fair enough, Mr. Trump.
All right, from Jason, I really enjoy your show and the rest of the Daily Wire members, even Michael Knowles.
Your ideas really connect with the world that you and I live in.
And I hope you continue to host the Andrew Clavin show for years to come.
My question is this.
It seems strange when you or other Daily Wire commentators mentioned something along the lines of even CNN had to acknowledge it.
And the Washington Post even reported on this.
Why should you care what legacy media has to say on a topic at all since they are nearly all pathological liars?
Thank you for your time, Mr. Claven, very respectfully.
I myself have thought about it.
I think I've spoken about it.
Especially what bothers me is when basically left-wing commentators say something, like Joe Rogan or Bill Maher.
And I actually have respect for Bill Maher because he lets other people talk, but it's like we're so happy to win praise from the big house, you know, because we are.
We are on the outside looking in.
All of us are.
It's like we're not, you know, I'm as good a mystery writer as there is.
I'm not going to win any more awards because I'm on the outside.
Ben is one of the smartest people in the country.
He's not going to get appointed to a university.
Probably my son won't get appointed to a university because we are on the outside.
So sometimes I guess there's just this instinct to say, look, even on the inside where all the power is and where it pays for them to lie because it increases their power and their wealth, even there they are admitting that this is happening.
But I think you have a point too that, you know, why should we care?
The Washington Post hasn't told the truth ever, so why should we care when they agree with us?
But I guess it's a way of saying that sometimes even these liars tell the truth.
I guess that's his best, the best spin I can put on it.
From Jackson, Dear Claven, I love your commentary about Christianity, especially how Christ was serious when he commanded us not to judge.
However, I'm concerned.
We get this question a lot, so I guess I have to answer it from time to time.
I'm concerned how you applied this on your last show regarding homosexuality.
I agree that we are not to judge their actions.
That's up to God.
However, that is exactly the issue.
I fail to see how it is loving to leave them alone, as you suggest.
I believe that we should warn them that if they continue in their unrepentant pride and sexual deviance, they will be judged by a holy God and will not inherit the kingdom of heaven.
What did you mean when you said that maybe they have their own way to God?
Are you suggesting some form of tacit universalism?
Universalism means that nobody goes to hell.
Everybody is saved.
I hope this isn't taken as a personal attack, as that is not how I intend it.
Your observations are crucial to keeping the right consistent and in check.
Keep up the good work.
So am I a universalist?
I believe that we know so little about the judgment of God and the mercy of God that it's possible that nobody goes to hell.
I believe that is a possibility.
But that's not what I believe happens.
But I truly believe our ignorance is very, very deep.
Now, talking to your friends about things.
There are times that I have spoken to friends who I thought were doing something bad to themselves or to their children.
In this case, I really do feel that if a gay person is in front of me on the line to the Pearly Gates and he says, well, I helped the poor and I loved my neighbor and I loved God, but I was gay and I did have a partner.
And I come up and say, yeah, I never loved anybody.
I never helped anybody.
You know, it's going to look a lot worse for me than it looks for him.
That's what I believe.
So again, this is the thing about judging other, you know, removing the plank from your eye, as Jesus says, before you get the dust out of someone else's eye.
Time is very short.
Life is short.
Ben teases me all the time about how old I am, but I know I'm going to get the last laugh because 10 minutes from now, he's going to wake up and go, what happened?
Now I'm as old as Clavin.
How did that happen?
It goes by very quickly.
You took the time to write this email about gay people, I'm assuming you're straight, when you could have been actually looking at your own sins.
And that doesn't work out that well.
My feeling about judgment, and again, I don't speak for God, my feeling about judgment, you know, somebody once told me this great story, and I do not vouch for it at all.
It may be total legend, but after World War II, Berlin was divided into sectors.
So there was the Russian sector and the English sector and the American sector divided among the Allies who won the war.
And the people who were caught on the Russian sector knew that the Iron Curtain was falling and wanted to get into the free sector.
And so they tried to get through the British sector.
And the British guards would say, as the Brits are very big on following rules, or at least were, they would say, you know, we would love to let you through.
We understand why you want to get out.
But the regulation says you have to have this paper and that paper and you have to have this identity card and that identity card.
And we just can't let you through.
And we're very sorry about it, but you have to go back into the Russian sector.
People from the Russian sector would go to the American sector and the Americans guards would say, you know, we'd like to let you through, but the regulations are very clear.
You need this paper and that paper and that identification, this identification.
And without that, we can't let you through.
But I just happened to be going over to get myself a smoke.
I'm going to be walking into the barracks here to get a smoke for a minute.
And, you know, if I come back and you're not here, I don't know how we'll be able to find you.
It is my humble opinion that even the best of us are going to have to get into heaven through the American sector.
You know, there's going to have to be some blind eye turning.
You know, we're going to get up there and say, yeah, I wasn't a good guy, but Jesus was great, you know, and I love Jesus.
And they're going to go like, well, really, we should send you to hell.
But I'm going to go and get a cigarette.
Come back.
If you happen to have slipped into heaven, that's the way it's going to go.
So, you know, I just think, I think the world is, God is more creative and more merciful than we know.
He made a lot of people who are normal.
He made people who are abnormal and a little bit weird.
And I can judge them from a social standpoint.
I can say that if you are, you know, corrupting children, if you're hurting people, if you're robbing people, that's abnormal and bad.
But if they're not hurting people and they're not doing things that are bad for society, like telling people they have to lie about things, then God will judge them and I'm going to leave them to him.
That's the way I feel about it.
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