Ep. 1132 – The Biggest Lie of All mocks Mayor Witless’s shoplifting "solution"—kiosks and de-escalation—while exposing his hypocrisy after stealing press equipment, then pivots to demonizing the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence as "anti-Christian" at Dodgers Pride Night. The host claims progressive movements like trans rights and fat acceptance are "shame denial," blaming systemic failures on individuals while praising DeSantis’ policies but mocking his Twitter launch flop. Criticizing media bias via Krakauer’s Uncovered, he warns of neural implants as surveillance tools, then dismantles She Said as a politically skewed "lie by context," contrasting it with All the President’s Men’s omissions. The episode ties cultural wars to corporate complicity—Anheuser-Busch’s Mulvaney campaign and Target’s Pride Month—as proof of systemic deception, ending with a call to reject "woke" products like Jeremy’s Razors’ "anti-woke" branding. [Automatically generated summary]
Whitless New York City Mayor Eric Whitless Adams, who made history in January of last year by becoming the city's first entirely witless black mayor since David Dinkins, has announced his new witless plan to control the city's swiftly spreading plague of shoplifting by not controlling the city's swiftly spreading plague of shoplifting.
The plan, entitled the Witless Plan to Stop Shoplifting by Not Stopping Shoplifting, includes such witless innovations as giving first-time offenders intervention programs instead of prosecution and installing kiosks in stores that would connect thieves with social service programs.
Mayor Adams announced the plan to reporters in order to distract them while his aides stole their cameras, microphones, and other expensive equipment.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, O'Clavin, you colossal cascade of curmudgeonly comedy, only you could dream up a Democrat response to crime so insanely ineffective.
It causes us to laugh ho-ho-ho like Santa Claus, right up until the moment we're gunned down by six youths speeding by in a tranzam who are then charged with misdemeanor reckless driving and released without bail so they can get back to their day job, which is shoplifting.
But no, i'm not making this up.
Mayor Witless called the new Witless anti-shoplifting plan a crackdown, possibly because he was downing crack when he designed the plan.
The plan includes giving store employees de-escalation training.
And you may ask what the flying fiddly-d is de-escalation training and how will it not stop shoplifting?
Good question, shoplifting, de-escalation training trains store employees so that whenever they see a shoplifter they get on the escalator and de-escalate to the basement until shoplifters are finished cleaning out the first floor.
When the shoplifters leave the store, employees can re-escalate to the first floor and relax by standing in the break room because all the chairs have been shoplifted.
The Witless plan also includes installing kiosks that connect thieves with social service programs so the thieves can connect to the programs and say hey, look at this cool new kiosk I put up in my apartment after I shoplifted it from the store.
Another part of the Witless plan and i'm still not making any of this up, by the way, so help me is to establish neighborhood retail watch groups so neighbors can get together and watch retail stores get shoplifted, which is cheaper than going to the movies.
So you can use the money you save to buy some t-shirts which have all been shoplifted, so you can save even more money.
The Witless plan to stop shoplifting by not stopping shoplifting has already been so effective in not stopping shoplifting that witless mayor Witless is planning to introduce another Witless plan to stop murders.
Portions of the plan have already been leaked to reporters by inscribing the details on the sides of bullets and then firing into a crowd of reporters.
The Witless murder plan includes a new buddy system in which New Yorkers travel in pairs so that when someone witnesses a murder he can turn to his buddy and say hey look, that guy just got murdered.
There will also be kiosks erected on street corners where you can apply for a new buddy when your last buddy got murdered and you have no one to tell about it.
Witless mayor Witless says he eventually hopes to put all his witless anti-crime crackdown plans together into one big crackdown plan that will crack down on all crimes by not cracking down on any crimes at all.
Under the new Whitless umbrella anti-crime crime plan, criminals will be able to rob a store, kill a passerby, and assault multiple women, and then bring all those crimes to one kiosk and contact an all-purpose social worker, beat him senseless, and steal his wallet.
Left-wing critics of the mayor say this plan puts an undue burden on criminals by forcing them to steal wallets when they don't need wallets because they can shoplift things for free.
Though some people have criticized Whitless Mayor Whitless's Witless plan because it's witless, billionaire evildoer George Soros says he endorses the plan because he's evil.
Journalists immediately attack Soros for saying Soros was evil, accusing Soros of being anti-Semitic, although they praised him for being evil because they're evil.
Why We Think It Makes Us Virtuous00:12:43
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped C-Topsy, the world is a bibby-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, here we are yet again, laughing our way through the fall of the Republic.
Today, we're going to talk about the worst Twitter launch of a campaign since Oliver Cromwell's Twitter launch in the 17th century.
Plus, we'll discuss how funny it's going to be when the management of the LA Dodgers discovers there's no pitch clock in hell and eternity goes on almost as long as a 2022 baseball game.
And I'll explain why the movie she said is both not bad and totally sucks.
Remember, we've got, I think, two more weeks.
We're going to have two more weeks before we change from the old mailbag to the new comments box you can send to, which is clavinclapbacks at dailywire.com.
That's clapbacks spelled K-L-A-P-B-A-C-K-S.
Clavinclapbacks at dailywire.com.
What we want is we want you to send not just questions, but also comments on the show, what you thought of what we were talking about, good or bad.
And if they are absolutely disgusting and make all of us ashamed that we know you, we'll read some of them on the air.
This is a good time also to subscribe to the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel.
This is my personal YouTube channel.
We'll still be, by the way, the show will still be on YouTube, even though it's going to also be on Twitter now.
But the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel is my personal one.
You can get exclusive Andrew Clavin content there.
In fact, it's so exclusive, even I don't see it.
I don't know what it is.
I just say these things, but nobody ever tells me what I said.
And if you leave a comment, and likewise, we want comments that are genuinely evil and disgusting, and we will read them on the air today.
Today's comment is from Kay Lafon, who says, I really like the new Mario movie, enough references to appeal to all of us who remember older Mario games, but you don't need to know video games or Mario to enjoy it.
I noticed that too.
It's good.
It's a cute movie that's fun and doesn't have any of that woke BS that drowns every damn movie.
You know, I just bumped into at a conference, I bumped into Ted Baer, who runs the movie guide for Christians.
And he said he believes that the Mario movie is a Christian parable, basically.
And the guys hanging over the fire are being threatened with hell and sin and all this stuff.
So I had a revolution, a revolution, a revelation about it a couple weeks ago.
And I didn't talk about it on the air then because I didn't find it relevant to what I was talking about.
But I want to talk about it now in the wake of this decision by the LA Dodgers to invite a group called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to Dodgers Stadium to celebrate Pride Night, because we all know that gay pride, I think it's six months they get for being proud, is coming up in June.
They originally canceled their invitation to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
And then when they came under fire from the alphabet crowd, they decided to invite them back.
Now, there's a lot of gay people in L.A. In fact, I think everybody in L.A. is probably homosexual.
But, you know, so if the Dodgers want to have a pride night, that makes perfect economic sense.
But these indulgence people don't represent gay people.
They are actually wicked, hateful, sick, disgusting deviants.
They're anti-Catholic.
They have drag nuns.
They do things like they pretend to smear semen on the body of Jesus Christ.
They purposely denigrate the Christian faith, which is the faith of most people still in our country.
They don't represent gay people at all.
They certainly don't represent my son or Guy Benson or any of the gay people I've known and worked with all my life who are not like this at all.
So it's just representing hatred.
It's just representing anti-religious hatred.
And remember, this is a team once run by Tommy Lasorda, proud Catholic, and announced by Vin Scully, also a proud Catholic.
I strongly, strongly urge you to contact Dodger executive Eric Braverman at ERIKB at ladgers.com, E-R-I-K-B at ladgers.com, or call him at 323-224-1502.
And please don't curse Adam or scream at him or say evil things.
Just tell him he is doing what's wrong.
So anyway, to get back to this revelation I had, it wasn't one of those revelations where you suddenly realize something you never realized before.
It was the other kind where you actually have been thinking about something a lot and you kind of get it and you understand it.
And then suddenly your understanding becomes visceral.
It hits you in your viscera, in your guts, and you suddenly know what you were thinking in a way that you didn't know it before.
So I was taking a walk.
I take these very, very long walks.
And unlike other people, I don't hook into anything.
I'm not listening most of the time.
I'm not listening to anything.
I just, you know, the inside of my head is basically the most entertaining place in town.
The jokes are hilarious.
The girls are beautiful and the drinks are free.
So I'm walking along.
And it suddenly struck me with just this physical force.
No one believes in all the lies.
No one believes in the lies.
No one believes that men can become women, women.
Not one person believes it.
Richard make-believe Rachel Levine does not believe he's a woman.
Dylan Mulvaney does not believe he's a woman.
William Make-Believe Leah Thomas, the swimmer, he doesn't believe he's a woman.
None of them believes it even a little bit.
Gay people are not proud of being gay.
Not one of them.
Not one of them thinks that he is proud of being gay.
Absolutely not one gay person is proud of being gay.
And this is not being on the hate the gay train.
You know, I don't feel like that at all.
But the human body is made to make more human bodies.
That's why people have sex.
That's why sex is part of our lives, right?
You know, every song, every movie ever made, every story ever told is about a man and a woman coming together to create new life.
No one's proud that the way they are excludes them from that central human enterprise.
I have talked to many honest gay people about this.
They will tell you it's painful.
It's not something they would have chosen.
It is something that they have and are and they're trying.
A lot of things in life are painful and unfair for almost everybody has something painful and unfair in his life.
And we try to live honorably and joyfully in spite of that.
But we're not proud of the thing that is like that, right?
All pride movements are lies and no one believes the lie.
And here's another one.
Lizzo is fat and ugly and everyone knows it, including Lizzo.
It doesn't make her a bad person.
I'm not saying fat people are bad, but fat people aren't being fat shamed.
They feel ashamed because they know they're not controlling themselves.
They're eating in an unhealthy way.
They don't look as attractive as they could be.
You know, it's not kind to pretend.
It's just another lie and no one believes the lies.
This is what suddenly struck me with physical force.
I'll make one more and then I'll make my point.
There's too much crime in black neighborhoods and it's the fault of the criminals.
It's not the fault of society.
It's not the fault of slavery.
It's not the fault of, you know, it's the fault of crime is the fault of criminals.
People, women get nervous when a black man gets on an elevator because of crime.
You know, white people moved out of neighborhoods when black people, not because they hate people with brown skin.
It's just not true.
It's just not true.
They move out because of crime.
And the people, of course, who suffer most from crime in black neighborhoods are the vast, vast majority of black people who are not criminals and who are being misrepresented by these terrible people in the same way gays are being misrepresented by these horrible perpetual indulgence people.
If you don't punish people, if you don't punish people for committing crimes because it's their fault because they have free will and they did it, if you don't punish them, it makes cities unlivable.
It makes people more race aware and creates more race hatred.
And of course, it punishes all of the good people who are living in those neighborhoods.
So why do we live like this?
Why has San Francisco allowed these leftist policies to take the most beautiful city in the country, it really was once the most beautiful city in the country, and turn it into a toilet?
Why do we have to argue about men becoming women when not one person, not one, not one thinks this is a real thing?
You know, why do we have to say a gay pride?
You know, it's like, you know, I'm perfectly, I want gay people to live and be happy and be well.
You know, why do I have to lie about how they feel about it?
You know, I mean, or fat people, the same thing.
And, you know, why do we have to let our cities get unlivable and let people feel suspicious of black people when they don't have to feel that way, when they wouldn't feel that way, if all of the vast majority of law-abiding citizens would say, no, we just don't like criminals.
I don't care what color they are.
Well, obviously, the obvious answer is they think it makes us virtuous.
They think it makes us virtuous.
It's like when Christians say, well, I'm a Christian, so I'm not going to boycott Target.
No, boycott Target.
That is not being loving to not boycott Target.
Boycott Target when they do the wrong thing.
Boycott the Dodgers.
Call them.
Tell them what you think of what they're doing because that's the right, honest thing to do.
Honesty is the Christian thing to do.
But the thing about feeling virtuous is that it actually is, we're looking at it from the wrong end.
People are utterly desperate because nobody's virtuous.
Not one person is virtuous.
Not one person is righteous.
So if you don't want to face that, if you want to feel virtuous, it's because we're desperate, absolutely desperate, to escape the feeling of shame.
Now, everybody has been ashamed, especially as a kid.
I'm sure you've done something that made you ashamed or you were called out something or embarrassed yourself in some way.
And shame is agony.
It may be, seriously, besides physical pain, it may be the worst feeling in the world.
And we all feel it, not just trans people and gay people and fat people and criminals.
We are all in an agony of shame, every one of us, and hiding it from ourselves because we can't face it.
And we feel that way because none of us, not one of us, is who we're supposed to be, right?
That's the secret of life.
The secret of life is that none of us is who we're supposed to be and all of us know it and all of us think we're hiding it from the other guy even while we're lying awake at night struggling with it ourselves.
This is why the LA Dodgers could disgrace a baseball institution that used to be led by Tommy Lasorda and Vince Scully by blaspheming the God of 200 million Americans to celebrate the deviance and anger and self-hate and religious hate of a tiny remnant of a tiny percentage of American people, the hateful gay people, not gay people, just these hateful gay people.
Again, like I said, these perpetual indulgence freaks, they don't represent gay people, but they think, they think that somehow this is going to alleviate them of their shame.
And why do they hate Jesus?
Why are they desecrating Jesus?
Because they think he's the guy who is making them feel ashamed.
They think it's Jesus who makes them feel ashamed by showing them that they're not, like all of us, that they're not who they should be, right?
They think, oh my God, if he shines that light on me, if he shines that light on me, I am going to have to face my shame and I will die.
And all of these guys, have you noticed how many of these guys start worshiping Satan because Satan is saying, oh, no, no, you're great.
You're terrific.
You're fabulous.
I love you.
You're great, just the way you are.
And they all say the same thing.
I've got to be who I am.
But no, you don't have to be who you are.
You have to be who you're supposed to be.
And in order to do that, you have to face your shame.
And people think, oh, my God, if I face this shame, I die.
I'll die.
I'll just be eaten up.
I'll explode.
But this is what the Christian religion is supposed to be about.
I understand that oftentimes when you hear people talk about it, it's not about that because people think if they can judge other people, that's another way we avoid our shame by judging other people.
This is why Jesus said, don't judge other people.
It's because you're supposed to be paying attention to yourself.
You're supposed to be facing your shame.
But the promise, and I can testify to you that this promise is kept, the promise is all you got to do is turn around.
He's trying to get you to see where you are so you can start moving toward where you're supposed to be.
And all you have to do is take one step in that direction.
It's like the parable of the prodigal son.
You just have to come over the horizon one step and God will come to meet you where you are.
Live With Open Eyes00:03:19
He will drop what he's doing.
The king of the universe will drop what he's doing and come to welcome you just for taking that one step in the right direction.
But the first thing you have to do is open your eyes.
And the thing is, otherwise, we have to live in the dark.
And who wants us to live in the dark?
People who want power over us want us to live in the dark.
Because otherwise, if you close your eyes to your shame, if you close your eyes to the fact the biggest lie of all, right, the biggest lie of all is that you're a righteous, virtuous, wonderful guy, you're not.
You're not.
If you face that, then you can open your eyes.
And when you open your eyes, that's when you start to become free.
That's when you start to see life as it is.
That's when you start to see how beautiful life can be.
And that is what everybody wants you not to do.
They want you not to do it so they can have control over you and they can start to get rid of their own shame by crushing you.
And I think that this is why we have to start calling out the lies about ourselves and about other people and just start telling the truth so we can see where we are, so we can live with our eyes open and live like free men and women.
Father's Day is a coming.
If you're looking for the perfect gift to show your dad you love him, look no further than Moink.
Moink delivers grass-fed and grass-finished beef and lamb, pastured pork and chicken, and sustainable wild-caught Alaskan salmon straight to your door.
Moink lets you choose the meat delivered in every box, select an existing box or create your own, set your delivery cadence and enjoy delicious meat.
You can cancel any time, but you won't want to.
If you're not sure where to start, check out their standard box.
It comes with a little bit of everything, chicken, ribeye, burgers, and steak.
Now, if you want to know why I haven't personally endorsed this, it's because my moink box did not arrive until late last night.
I just unpacked it before I went to bed last night.
I'm absolutely certain my producer, Danny, has been stealing the box.
They keep telling me they send it, and it kept being gone.
He says the bacon is the best he has ever eaten.
And my box just kept disappearing, but now I finally got it, and I will tell you all about it next time we meet.
Moink is all about supporting the family farm.
Think about this.
2% of Americans are farmers, but 100% of us eat.
So what are you waiting for?
Give the gift of meat this Father's Day.
Go to moinkbox.com slash Clavin, get a free package of that delicious bacon in your first box.
That's moinkbox.com/slash clavin free bacon.
That's like those two words put together.
It's like a kind of magic.
My wife promised me she's going to make the bacon for our Sunday brunch.
And I know you're thinking, M-O-I-N-K, anybody can spell that.
It's part Moo, it's part oink.
But what about Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N, moinkbox.com slash Clavin.
The other reason people keep their eyes shut and live in the dark is because they can't stand the feeling of suspense, fear.
They don't like the feeling of fear.
You know, I always complain about conservatives who say, it's over.
I despair.
This country is not worth saving.
That's to keep, that's to stave off suspense.
That's to stave off the suspense of not knowing whether we're going to win the day or lose it.
I mean, I made a living, I still make my living writing suspense stories because people love to experience suspense when there is no suspense.
Skepticism and Suspense00:10:20
You know, that great movie, A Quiet Place, was so suspenseful when the monster might eat the pregnant lady.
And you know why people love that?
It's because there is no monster and there is no pregnant lady.
It's all made up.
But when the suspense is real, we want to avoid it.
So I want to talk about the president presidential race, especially, of course, on the right, because the Democrats candidate is probably set as long as he's still walking around and alive.
But Ron DeSantis, or now he says it's DeSantis.
So I guess it's just D, right?
Because if his name was DeSantis, but he's been DeSantis, then he's just D. That's very confusing.
Anyway, he announced his candidacy on Twitter, and it was an absolute catastrophe.
Here is just a clip, a brief clip, cut three.
All right, sorry about that.
We've got so many people here that I think we are kind of melting the servers.
So we can just keep crashing, head.
See, I think we're back online here.
Great.
All right.
Well, it's certainly an incredible honor to have Governor DeSantis make this stark announcement.
Are you there?
Can you hear us?
I think you paid the internet.
I'm here.
I know.
I think you broke the internet there.
We had over half a million people in one Twitter space, and it was growing by like 50,000 a minute.
So congrats on breaking the internet there.
It was just embarrassing.
And they didn't really get that many people on.
They did get a lot of money.
They raised a lot of money.
Probably that money was being held back.
So it just came rushing in no matter what.
And you know, you can't say, listen, I really like DeSantis.
I think he's done a lot of good work.
But you can't say, oh, it doesn't matter.
Oh, it's all about the substance because it's politics.
Since when was politics all about the substance?
When did that happen?
When did I miss that change in thousands of years of political nonsense?
You know, no, it's about the show, too, and the show matters.
You know, and you've got to do the job.
And this was really a mistake.
And of course, Trump hit back hilariously by retweeting.
Trump is still the funniest president we've ever had, except for maybe Lincoln.
And he tweeted out this parody where Hitler and Satan, George Soros, are all helping with the launch.
It's cut to hi, everyone.
Welcome to our Ron DeSantis Twitter space.
Hello?
Is my microphone working correctly?
George, can you just wait while we know?
Can you hear me?
We can all hear you, George.
Can you just hold on for a second?
I'm here you fine, George.
Just speak to me.
I don't think George knows how to use Twitter.
Hello.
Can you hear me now?
Can I please make my big announcement now?
Everyone, just hello!
Just shut up, George.
Can somebody just mute, George?
Dick, could you try not to cough on the bottom?
Okay, so how are we going to take out Trump, you guys?
Guys from the FBI, this is not a private call.
This is a public Twitter space.
Everyone can listen in.
Damn it.
That was from the NPC show, I think it was from.
Trump put that out.
But then, to be fair, playing this fair, you know, Trump then went out and he responded, you'll be shocked to know, in a very graceless way.
He then attacked, unleashed an attack on DeSantis that was totally unfair.
When the Ron DeSanctimonious facts come out, you will see that he's better than most Democrat governors, but very average at best compared to Republican governors who have done a fantastic job.
How about the fact that he had the third most deaths of any state having to do with the China virus or COVID?
Even Cuomo did better.
He was number four.
He shut down everything, including the beaches.
Other Republican governors didn't do that.
They kept it open.
It was their choice.
I gave them all their choice.
The Democrats blew it big.
A lot of Republican governors did a fantastic job.
And look at Disney and what a mess it is.
Could have worked out an easy settlement, but no, he wanted to show the fake news how tough a guy he is.
He's not.
And the whole Disney thing is really very unfortunate.
Now thousands and thousands of jobs are being stopped.
And a lot of people are very upset about it.
That's all, so much of that is untrue.
He's comparing numbers.
Florida's a much bigger state.
DeSantis did close down, but he did his own research, and then he fought to keep that state back open.
You've got to remember they called him Death Santis.
He was sued.
He got rid of the mask mandates.
And remember the incredible social pressure the media and the government were putting on people about those stupid masks that didn't do a single damn thing.
Here's just a sample, cut one.
In the schools, everybody should wear a mask.
Asking kids to wear a mask is uncomfortable, but you know, kids are pretty resilient.
Kids are resilient.
And if anything, this is going to build resilience in our children.
Women have long-term psychological effects on young kids, do you think?
I don't think so.
I think, in fact, it's good.
Masking is very important, particularly in the schools.
Masks are safe.
Masks do work.
I have a nine-year-old.
He tolerates masks for everything.
I don't hear him whine, just like I don't hear him whine about his seatbelt or his bike helmet.
Children have no problem with what is going on.
They want to deal sensibly by way of the science with COVID.
They've said we have no difficulty with students wearing masks.
So, of course, all of those, not one of those people has been fired for what was very, very damaging to children, completely useless, completely did nothing.
And look, DeSantis was good.
He was good.
The death tolls, it's very hard to tell the death tolls, but basically, even the Washington Post admitted the death tolls in Florida were no worse than states where they just made everybody miserable and closed down.
He opened the schools, the people who lived there.
I'm away.
Just today, I sent Carol Margaret a story from the Daily Wire of a guy being eaten by an alligator or having his arm bitten by an alligator.
And even Trump, before he was running against DeSantis, said this.
This has got 15.
One of the greatest governors in our country, and I know a lot of good ones, and I can tell you there's some really bad ones, too.
But this is a great one, Governor Ron DeSantis.
He loved him.
He was always really good to him.
And DeSantis got universal school, near universal school choice, tort reform, which is hugely important, tax cuts, free speech in higher education, and he resisted woke ideology.
And maybe, you know, just politically, the most important thing is he took this massive swing state and turned it into a red state.
I mean, now the Republicans outnumber Democrats by hundreds and hundreds of thousands.
So that just wasn't true before.
So he did a good job.
And yeah, he screwed up.
You know, it's not how you start.
It's how you finish.
But still, this is a major screw-up.
Trump took advantage of it.
That's his job.
That's what he's supposed to do.
And so, you know, right now, I'm going to just say that I'm undecided.
And the reason I say this is it's not like being undecided between the left and the right.
That's stupid.
When people say, you know, I'm undecided whether they're going to vote for Trump or Hillary.
That's ridiculous.
But, you know, I'm going to be undecided about all the Republicans for a little bit because I want to see, you know, now they're in the cauldron.
Now they're in the test of fire with the media and with each other and all these things.
And I want to see how they behave.
And I don't believe a lot of what a lot of what the media is saying, even the mainstream right-wing media like the Wall Street Journal, they hate the culture war stuff, but the culture war stuff is important and it's everything.
I'll talk about that in a couple of minutes.
And, you know, like if you think the left doesn't hate Ron DeSantis, the NAACP is issuing a travel advisory against black people going to Florida.
And the reason for that is that DeSantis actually one of the few Republicans who actually goes into black neighborhoods and says, what do you need?
And so they're afraid, you know, he'll attack them.
Or I don't know what it is.
So all of this stuff, you know, and on the Trump side, look, I think the people who love Trump and the people who hate Trump both get him wrong.
Okay.
I think Trump, you know, Trump has transformed the Republican Party.
By his courage, by his boldness, by the things that he was willing to say that nobody else was willing to say, by the heat he was willing to take that nobody else was willing to take, he transformed the Republican Party.
And in some ways, that's kind of biting him in the neck right now.
It's kind of biting him in the butt because Trump is not a man of strong political principles, obviously.
I think he's shaped by his situation and where he thinks he can win and where he thinks he can get ahead.
The first time he was elected, he was shaped perfectly for me, right?
He was shaped to be against abortion, which he never had been before, and he's not now.
He was shaped to fight for the border, to fight for lower taxes, to fight for good justices, all those things, because that was where his audience was.
That was where his base was, and he played to his base.
Now, because he's created so much concern.
He did it.
This is his achievement.
There would not be Ron DeSantis in this position if it had not been for Trump.
Trump is right about this.
And DeSantis is making a mistake when he runs on the great American comeback, which just sounds like mini Trump.
That's a silly thing to do.
He's being badly handled so far, and really he should look into it.
But still, still, he has created this world in which the Republican Party has become more conservative.
So now he's shifting to the left to fight with them because he just does it automatically.
He's just a warrior.
And so now he's saying, oh, the ban on abortions in Florida, it's too harsh.
What's he talking about?
You know what it's suddenly he's talking about?
He's hitting DeSantis on wanting to cut back, on wanting to impose the Ryan cutbacks on entitlements, which was Trump's worst policy, not doing that.
It was his worst policy.
So suddenly he's moving to the left.
And I think that that makes him a lot less important than he was.
Basically, he has kind of made himself obsolete so far, so far.
Genuicel's Good News00:02:40
But the game is on.
And the thing about winning is you have to win the race you're in.
And now the race is the Republican primaries.
And if DeSantis can't do better than he did on that Twitter opening, he's not going to last very long.
He's going to get wiped out.
And if he can't establish his own identity and not just kind of piggyback on Trump's identity, he's going to get wiped out.
I like him.
I think on the substance, he is better than Trump.
I think he's a better politician, a better statesman, a better thinker, a more principled man.
But still, this is politics.
This is politics.
And this is how it's played.
And I'm going to give everyone a chance and see what they say.
I don't hate anybody.
There's nobody I openly oppose yet on the right.
Nikki Haley, I think, is a little empty, but still, the rest of them, I'm not afraid.
I'm not afraid to endure a little bit of suspense, a little bit of indecision.
I'm going to keep my eyes open, see what happens, and then make up my mind.
Did you know our friends at Genucell have upgraded their most popular package to feature their top-selling deep firming vitamin C Serum Plus ultra-retinol moisturizer with natural retinol alternative?
Right now, you can take advantage of this limited-time package upgrade for 70% off.
Why waste time and money to go get work done on your face when you can get Genucelle skincare shipped right to your door?
Here's a Genucell.com review from Robert in Blessing, Texas.
Quote, I purchased Genucelle as a gift from my girlfriend.
She said she saw the results so fast.
Her skin is noticeably softer and smoother.
I can see and feel a difference too.
She was already beautiful, and Genucell has made her more beautiful.
Genucelle's Secret is a family recipe for over 20 years that makes it safe for all skin types and perfect for both men and women, made by a compounding pharmacist in small batches and always safe, cruelty-free, and natural.
My marketing manager loves Genucelle's under-eye bag cream.
She said she cannot go a day without it.
Go to genucelle.com slash Clavin and try Genucelle's most popular package for 70% off, featuring both Genucell's ultra-retinol and Genucelle's firming serum.
Get a complimentary spot, essentials box with every package order, plus free upgrade to priority shipping.
That's genuicel.com slash clavin.
Genucelle.com slash clavin.
You're probably thinking, yeah, sure, that sounds great, but how do I spell clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N no Ease in Claven.
So here is what I think is good news.
I think this actually this week there was a lot of good news and over the past weeks there's a lot of been good news that we kind of miss because we're so wrapped up in this cloud of lies and in keeping our own eyes shut and people telling us to keep our eyes shut.
Good News Missed00:08:19
But if you want to see, you know, as I was saying, the Wall Street Journal and other kind of mainstream old-fashioned Republicans, pre-Trump Republicans, don't want to fight this culture war.
They think it's a loser.
I think they're wrong.
I think you can do it too far.
Not every state is Florida.
Every candidate, every presidential candidate moves a little to the center when he's running for the whole country.
You've got to do that.
That's just realism.
But if you don't think this is a mind virus, if you don't think this is a compulsion, a desperate thing, take a look at this clip from Nebraska, where they were passing a bill to keep children from being sexually butchered by these savages so desperate to confirm themselves in a lie.
They don't even believe that they're willing to sacrifice children to the lie as people have done since ancient days.
And Nebraska Senator Michaela Kavanaugh is upset that they're going to pass this thing banning butchery of children.
And this is the eloquent speech that she makes.
We need trans people.
We love trans people.
Trans people belong here.
We need trans people.
We love trans people.
Trans people belong here.
We need trans people.
We love trans people.
You matter.
You matter.
And I am fighting for you.
And I will not stop.
So, yeah, because lies drive you insane.
Lies drive you insane.
Here's the way it works.
They come up with these lies and the temptation of these lies is that they give you a sense of virtue and they protect you from your sense of shame.
That's what they're there for.
They are the anti-Christian thing to do.
Lies are like the Antichrist.
That's why they say Satan is the father of lies.
It is the anti-Christian thing to do to lie.
The Christian thing to do is to accept the truth about yourself, have compassion on other people, and start moving in a different direction.
Start moving in the direction of God.
That's the Christian thing to do, okay?
Otherwise, you are driven insane.
So what happens is they tell these outlandish lies, and normal people are not ready for them.
When somebody says, oh, yeah, man, this guy in a dress is a woman.
We go, what?
And it wrong foots us.
There's a hesitation, but slowly people begin to strike back, and that is what is happening.
This boycott on Anheuser-Busch is killing these people.
I mean a couple of weeks ago, it's now about three weeks ago, the CEO of the company gathered together one of those company phone calls.
His name is Michel, I think, Duke Karas.
And he tried to distance the company from this thing where they put out a Bud Light can with Dylan Mulvaney's face on it.
And here's what he said to them as cut five.
Let me share some thoughts on the Bud Light situation and put it in the context of our global company.
Let me start by clarifying a few facts.
This was the result of one camp.
It was not made for production or sale to general public.
It was one post, not a formal campaign or advertisement.
Bud Light campaign is easy to drink, easy to enjoy.
Easy to think, easy to enjoy.
But here's the thing.
It sounds like he's backing down and he sort of is, but as the phone call goes on, he says, you know, this is only 1% of our business.
We're an international company.
So they really haven't learned the lesson, right?
They've learned the lesson here in a narrow way and we should keep forcing it down on them.
We shouldn't stop with this thing.
This is important.
These boycotts are important.
It's important to contact the L.A. Dodgers and tell them what you think of this thing.
Like I said, we don't have to curse at anybody.
We don't have to be savages.
We just have to say, you are doing the wrong thing because of this.
So now, just to make this point, Dylan Mulvaney is playing the victim in this, and he says this stuff, which is the language they use to censor opposition.
YouTube will immediately, if you say anything about transgender people, they'll immediately say, well, you're dehumanizing them.
So this is what Dylan Mulvaney says, cut six.
I've always tried to love everyone, but what I'm struggling to understand is the need to dehumanize and to be cruel.
I just, I don't think that's right.
You know, dehumanization has never fixed anything in history ever.
So here's the thing.
That's a nonsense.
That's projecting.
Nobody, I don't care how Dylan Mulvaney lives.
I really don't.
He wants to be Tootsie.
You know, let him be Tootsie.
But he's not a woman.
It's offensive.
It is offensive to people who love women and to women to say that you're a woman when you're not.
I mean, that's just offensive blackface.
It's sexual blackface.
You know, I've seen babies born.
Dylan Mulvaney is not a woman.
You know, I've seen periods and menopause and Dylan Mulvaney is not a woman.
Most importantly of all, I've seen the way that wives and mothers give themselves to husbands and children and Dylan Mulvaney is not a woman and it's dehumanizing to women, to half of the world, to say that he is.
So now, Target.
This is really bad, I think.
Target is having their Pride Month because it takes a month to convince gay people that they're proud of being gay when they know they're not, right?
So we have a whole month of shame denial.
That's what they should call it.
Shame denial.
Shame denial month.
And, you know, again, this is not ordinary gay people, but now they're putting trans stuff into their clothing.
So they'll have a bathing suit that helps you tuck, right?
So you can tuck your penis in and pretend you're a girl.
And they're lying about it.
They're saying they're not doing it for children.
They are.
We know people who have been in their stores and have seen these outfits in the children's section.
Okay, okay, still, you want to have your Pride Month.
But here's the other thing.
Target's gay pride collection has been linked to a designer named Abraham Eric Carnell.
He's an outspoken Satanist whose brand features occult imagery and messages like, Satan respects pronouns.
And I'll bet that's true, actually.
At least he's not lying.
He also is known for aggressive messaging and phrases including burn down the system, C-I-S-TEM, and homophobe headrest with an image of a guillotine.
Carnell explained in an Instagram post, I'm reading this from Fox Business, explained in an Instagram post that Satan represents passion, pride, and liberty.
Yes, well, not liberty.
He represents libertinism, but close.
Passion, yes, pride, yes, libertinism, yes.
So now, this is how NBC, remember, there's NBC that covered up the Harvey Weinstein story and NBC that covered up their own Matt Lauer abusing women in their institution.
Here's the way they reported this story on the nightly news.
This is cut for.
A controversy over Pride Month products is causing headaches for retail giant Target.
It says safety is behind its decision to halt some sales.
Miguel Almeguer explains.
Tonight, Target, one of the nation's largest retailers, is pulling some products that celebrate Pride Month off store shelves.
Citing threats to employees, the company says, given these volatile circumstances, we are making adjustments to our plans, including removing items that have been at the center of the most significant confrontational behavior.
The retailer removing LGBTQ brand Abrowlin from their stores and website, whose products featured satanic themes.
Target also reportedly reviewing its adult collection of talk-friendly swimsuits that allows trans people who have not had gender-affirming operations to conceal their private parts.
Those items have been at the center of misinformation.
Where's the misinformation?
They held up a thing saying Satan does it, you know, and all that blithering lie, gender-affirming, all that blithering language to disguise the lie.
And Target is lying.
Furthermore, they keep saying, well, we're pulling this stuff not because we're afraid, but because our staff has been attacked.
They've been attacked and they've been confronted.
Where's the video?
Show me the video.
Misinformation and Its Dangers00:04:50
Show it to me.
Because it's crap.
They're just lying.
The fact is they got caught out putting sick, satanic stuff out there and stuff for kids.
They got caught and they're going to do it again.
They have not learned their lesson.
They have not.
They are actually lying about it.
You know, I'm going to talk about something just for a second that's completely different than this and pull it together.
There was a miracle this week that was underreported.
A guy named Gert John Oskown, who was paralyzed from the hips down in a motorcycle accident in 2011.
And researchers in Switzerland implanted a digital bridge in this guy's brain that read his thoughts and spoke to his spinal cord.
And he was able to walk.
He needed a walker, but he was able to walk up a slope.
Elon Musk has just gotten approval to start testing out wetwork, stuff that's going to be injected, put in your brain.
All of these miracles are coming down the pike.
They're going to be good and they're going to be bad for one simple reason.
They're going to be used by people.
Computers, good and bad, because they're used by people.
The internet, good and bad, because they're used by people, because people are good and bad, because people have to choose whether to do the right thing or the wrong thing.
And the choice now is going to be between being a human being who might be enhanced in beautiful ways so that a guy who's broken his spine will be able to walk.
This is a beautiful, beautiful thing.
A child who can hear, who was born without being able to hear.
Jesus said you're going to do miracles even greater than mine.
That prediction is coming true.
These are beautiful, beautiful things, but they're also dangerous.
Put something in your head.
They can control your thoughts, read your thoughts, direct your thoughts, spy on your thoughts.
All of these things are also dangers.
AI is fine as long as it's a help to man.
It is not fine if it starts to replace man or do damage to man.
We have choices we have to make.
And to make those choices, you've got to keep your eyes open and know who you are and who you're supposed to be.
All of these lies, all of this blithering language, all of these things we're pretending to believe or supposed to pretend to believe have got to be fought back.
Because, you know, I'm not saying this is the end of days, but the end of days is going to be a choice.
The choice that is coming to us now is the choice whether we are going to be human beings miraculously improved or human beings erased and become machines and become tools of the powerful.
We have to keep our eyes open.
And to do that, we have to tell the truth and tell it fearlessly.
We have to hear the truth and hear it fearlessly.
And while we have to pass judgment on what is right in society, we have to stop judging other people's souls and start taking a really good look at our own.
We have to keep our eyes open so we know which way to go.
The big choice is coming and it's coming fast.
Let me ask you this.
What if there was someone out there who kept a log of every single thing you did every minute of the day?
It would be creepy with a big C. What if I told you that's exactly what happens every time you go online?
That would be two big C's.
That's how creepy it would be.
Internet providers like ATT or Verizon are allowed to store logs of every website you've ever visited.
Then they stitch together detailed profiles which include your browsing history, online searches, and location data.
They can legally sell this data to anyone.
That's why I use ExpressVPN.
ExpressVPN reroutes your internet connection through their secure servers so your internet provider can't see or log what you do online.
I love ExpressVPN because it is incredibly easy to use.
Fire up the app, click one button.
I can do that.
Plus it works on all devices so you can stay secure on the go.
Stop letting people keep logs of what you do online.
Visit expressvpn.com slash clavin.
That's expsvpn.com slash clavin.
Get three extra months free.
Expressvpn.com slash clavin.
How do you spell clavin?
I know you're wondering.
K-L-A-V-A-N, no rest for the wicked and no ease for Claven.
There are no easy things.
So we're talking about keeping your eyes open, keeping your eyes closed, lies of context that make it hard for us to see.
Steve Krakauer has written a new book called Uncovered, How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People, a story about how we lost the news media and how they've been using that, the news media, to create a context in which their lies make more sense than they should.
Steve has been a journalist and media executive for 15 years.
He's been at CNN, The Blaze, Mediaite, and he's the author of this book.
Steve, thank you so much for coming on.
Thank you so much for having me.
Appreciate it.
Media's Cozy Relationship With Power00:15:18
So you're a guy who's watched this firsthand and you've seen this transition because I was in the news media back in the 1980s and it really was not like this.
What happened?
Yeah, look, I was a CNN executive back as late as 2013, the end of 2013.
So not that long ago.
I mean, less than 10 years ago.
And when I was there, there were, I think, valid criticisms of CNN at the time.
I think that, you know, it was populated by people that leaned left for sure.
It mostly voted for Democrats when they voted at all.
So that was true.
But there was still a mission when I was there.
And I was, especially during the 2012 campaign, in all the top executive meetings going on, there was a mission to try to get it fair, to try to be fair to both sides.
When you get it wrong, you want to try to correct it.
That was the ethos there.
Never was it always the case that it was going to be perfect, but that was what we were striving for.
That significantly changed, not just at CNN, but throughout the media in 2014, 2015, certainly with Donald Trump coming in.
I think that completely upended it entirely.
And it's not just Trump.
I think there are a lot of external factors as well.
The business model changing, the rise of social media.
So it's a whole confluence of things, but something significantly changed about seven, eight years ago, and it has not gotten better.
So let's go back to this because I agree with you about this Trump thing.
It's not the Trump thing.
And I also agree with you.
I remember working as a reporter with some guys who went on to be some of the most liberal left-wing reporters in the world.
I remember them yelling at me if I got too far left, if I was not fair to the right-wing candidates.
But it's not just Trump, is it?
I mean, when you say the business model, can you unpack that a little bit?
What changed about that?
Yeah, one of the chapters that I lay out, I kind of lay out five major problems here that caused us to get to this massive place where no one seems to trust the media anymore, is this broken financial incentive structure.
I look at companies like a CNN, but also ESPN, which I write about in the book, the New York Times, which I spent a lot of time on in the book with the Tom Cotton op-ed and others.
These were businesses that they may have had a little bit down years and some really good years, but for the most part, the business model was solid.
It was clear where their audience was coming from.
And then it's something significant started changing.
It happened slowly at first with people going to streaming or to just the viewing habits changing, not really understanding the digital landscape to the extent that they have.
And so suddenly there's this panic, if you will, when it comes to the business.
How are we going to keep these people?
How do we hold on to the lowest hanging fruit and make sure they don't go away for fear of losing everybody?
And so suddenly these giant businesses didn't try to appeal to everyone.
That was one thing.
But also in the void that was created by this just panic over the business model, mistakes start getting made or different incentives get changed.
Instead of what's good for the bottom line, that's no longer what matters most.
Now it's the Twitter mob.
Now it's your youngest staffers can really influence the most powerful people in these organizations.
With a little bit of a galvanization on Twitter, suddenly you can affect big change because the business model is no longer strong.
And that is something that has some relation to Trump, but ultimately that was going to happen either way.
What is it about these young people?
I mean, young people, youth and ignorance are kind of synonyms, right?
Why should the editor of the New York Times quail when a 25-year-old comes in and tells him that Tom Cotton should be running an op-ed in his paper?
Why is that happening?
Yeah, and they shouldn't be.
I mean, that's the thing.
The media these days, I think, is full of partially because the business model is so broken.
They're fearful of their own jobs.
They no longer feel that they can just stand firm on the principles that maybe they once had and maybe they still do.
But they just give in to these younger staffers, to the mobs that they can get together easily on social media.
And I think it really is a fear.
There is a real fear these days in what feels like this very amplified world that we live in with Twitter in particular, but social media more broadly, where it used to be, you know, 15, 20 years ago, maybe you send an email if you have a complaint, or even before that, you send a letter to the editor or like a literal letter, letter to the station.
It was all behind the scenes.
No one could see it.
But now there's such a performative nature to the way people complain about their media these days.
It all happens out in the open.
And suddenly an editor who maybe is not too familiar with the demographics of Twitter, let's say, can see what 50 people yelling at them looks like.
Well, that can feel really scary.
That can actually start to change things.
And they no longer can understand the context of which they're actually living in their own business.
And they start to just give in to these mobs.
That's, you know, we experienced that at the Daily Wire as we were coming up.
And people would just like swamp us on Twitter.
And it was upsetting.
You know, it's upsetting, especially the names they call you.
It was upsetting to be called a racist.
Or, you know, I think Ben like broke the record for anti-Semitic tweets and all that.
And, you know, it gets under your skin.
There's no question.
So now I don't want you to, you know, tell tales out of school, but you were at CNN.
Were you there during the time when it shifted over to what it then became?
I really wasn't.
Like I did share a single year with Jeff Zucker.
Jeff started in 2013, January of 2013.
And I worked really closely with Jeff during the nine months that I was there still before I left to go to the Blaze.
And, you know, Jeff came from NBC.
He has an entertainment background, also news and the Today Show.
And when I worked with Jeff, there were some traits I would say that I recognized that would be exacerbated during the Trump years, let's say.
He was really about this single story.
He thought of the CNN world as what used to be was, let's cover all the big stories going on.
Jeff was saying, there's one big story.
And in some cases, like the Boston Marathon bombing, I remember, I worked really closely with him in that, poured all these resources into it.
And it was good because that was a real big story.
And then other stories, there was the missing plane or the poop cruise that he poured all the resources into.
That was our one big story.
Well, then Trump came along.
And I think those instincts that Jeff had about this one big story started during the primary where he made Trump into, if you will, a star.
I mean, they would just show the empty podium and they would just give him these interviews.
And some of them were a little tougher than others.
But for the most part, he got a pretty easygoing time during the primary from CNN.
And then, of course, what happened next was there was the business decision, but it was also personal.
Trump turned on CNN, turned on Jeff.
He knew Jeff from the NBC days, The Apprentice and others.
And then suddenly it became, we need to be the antagonist to this.
And I do think that there are certain people in that newsroom.
I mean, I know for a fact that believed that democracy was under threat.
There was this existential threat and they were doing Watergate every day with what they were doing with Trump.
I mean, it was so ridiculous.
But if you really believe that, and this is what I told them during the Trump years, if you really believe that that's the case, then you need to double down on your standards and principles.
That's when you need to actually adhere to these principles to try to convince more people.
They went the opposite direction.
The guardrails were off.
Oh, we don't need two sources.
Maybe one source.
Oh, the New York Times is a source.
Let's run with that.
It was completely off the rails because of just how spun and addicted they were to the Trump phenomenon.
You know, you mentioned the business model, which I think is such an important point.
In CNN's case, at least, it seems like that business model has failed utterly.
That they've, you know, without Trump, they're nothing.
They can't really get back in the game with him and all that.
Is there going to be a reaction to that or are they too blind now to see what's going on?
I think it's really, it's kind of a nuanced situation, I think, with what's going on at CNN.
Chris Licht has come in and the mandate is to make CNN a news network again, which is like, that would be nice.
You know, that's kind of what we, I think, need in a perfect scenario.
But the ratings are failing.
I mean, they're seeing some of their lowest ratings in certainly since before Trump.
So it's been a very long time since they're this low.
But the problem I would say, and what they're trying to address, even more than the daily Nielsen ratings, which are kind of a bit antiquated in how we look at what the business is, is they need people, the average person who's not super political to think of when news happens, I need to turn on CNN because it's news.
It's just boring old news.
And they need to show cable providers, satellite operators, that they are worthwhile because they are trusted and they are news.
And they lost that during the Trump years.
And then their brand was tarnished.
They were no longer as valuable to those.
They could no longer get as much money when it comes to that.
So they need to reestablish that they are just boring old news.
Then they can try to make it look good.
But that's much more important than the daily ratings to them.
Interesting.
What is the transparency paradox?
I have not gotten to this part yet, and I found that an interesting thought.
What does that mean?
Yeah, I think a lot about this because I spend a ton of time on Twitter, even though I hate that I do that because I'm part of the media myself.
And that's just, it's where the media is happening.
And I look at it, and in some ways, there's a real transparency to it.
For the first time, you can actually see what news reporters who in their look, New York Times has some really bad journalism, but it also has some good journalism.
And that good journalism, which is just normal journalism, then those same reporters then go on Twitter and put their opinions out there, not just on the stories they're covering, but on all sorts of things.
And you think, why are these people doing this?
Why are they treating it like it's their diary?
And everyone can see that now.
It's going to undermine their credibility.
And it absolutely has.
I give an example in the book of Astid Herndon.
This was after Governor Yunkin won in Virginia.
He tweeted immediately after Governor Yunkin won that it was white grievance politics, which is the reason that Yunkin was able to win.
Not school closures or anything like we could look at the exit polls.
There was actual, no, no, this is what he believed happened.
And this is a news reporter.
Three days later in the New York Times, there's a story by him and another reporter talking to eight people on some border town between Virginia and West Virginia about white grievance politics.
That's why they did it.
And you can see the sausage getting made in that way.
So on one level, it's great, transparency.
I'm glad that these reporters do that, but it's to their own detriment.
It's destroying their own credibility by putting it all out there in that way.
Interesting.
We're talking to Steve Krakauer about his book, Uncovered How the Media Got Cozy With Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People.
Let's talk about this cozy with power thing, because one of the things that I do remember fondly about being a reporter is that we hated everybody.
We hated anybody who had even a little bit of power.
We just wanted to catch him with his pants down.
It did not matter if, you know, what side he was on.
If he had the power to make laws or control other people, we wanted to nail him.
And so, how did it happen that the Twitter files could happen?
I mean, that to me, to me, that's one of the most important stories, at least of the decade, to see the media cozy up to intelligence agencies to help silence individual people.
That's insane to me.
It's almost like living in kind of a mirror world.
How did we get there?
I completely agree.
Look, the Twitter files came out after the book was published.
And at the same time, the Hunter Biden laptop is how I start the book because I think it is the single most important story in the media for a very long time.
And I think it's important because the Hunter Biden laptop story, it's kind of a Trump story, but it's really what happened next.
It was the beginning of the next phase, the censorship phase of what happened when it comes to COVID and lots of other examples since then.
That is where things went.
And it relates very clearly to coziness with power because what it really boils down to it, journalists used to be antagonists to power, like you talk about.
I mean, that's the game.
They're going to speak truth to power and they are going to be essentially cozy and they're going to be close to the people, to the people of the country that they serve the people.
It has completely switched now.
They are cozy to power and they are almost disdainful of the audience and even potentially their own audience.
But certainly certain people, they are so distrustful, so disdainful.
These people should not even be able to look at information.
We need to remove that from them.
They become these, what I call anti-speech activists.
When they should be about free speech, they are now about anti-speech.
The less speech, the better.
That is really alarming.
And that is the complete antithesis of what journalism should be and what it used to be not that long ago.
And I think it really is relating back to the rise of social media and the way that they can see that their own power, their own institutional power has evaporated.
There's no longer a need for gatekeepers.
And that makes them really afraid because now the information can get directly to the people rather than through them.
I've only got a minute left.
Can you tell me, do you see any resolution to this, any way to reform the media, or will it just happen naturally or will it not happen at all?
I've got, I'm actually a kind of glass half full.
And I'll tell you why.
I think that we've seen places like the Daily Wire, places like the Megan Kelly Show, where I'm the executive producer of, lots of independent outlets propping up and performing extremely well to the detriment of institutional corporate media.
And it's hurting the bottom line.
And I think when that happens, they have to pay attention to it.
Now, are they going to adjust and start to fix what they need to do and get back?
I talk about geographic bias.
Can they get back to maybe getting people from the middle of the country rather than the coasts?
No, I don't know if it's going to happen overnight, but I do think that they are seeing that something is broken here and there are real winners out there that they would never have thought would infringe on their property and infringe on their actual real power.
And so I'm hopeful that by seeing that, they will be forced into action.
They will be forced to adjust, at least in some ways, if for no other reason than from a business decision, they need to get this in the right place because they're losing.
And this could be catastrophic for them long term.
Once again, the book is uncovered, How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People by Steve Krakauer.
It's just one of the most important stories of our time.
Steve, thanks so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Thanks so much, Andrew.
All right.
You can never start thinking about Father's Day gifts too early, I'll say.
And a gift of Jeremy's Razors is dual purpose.
Not only are you helping your dad look his best each day, you're also kicking woke out of his bathroom.
There is no other razor that can do that.
It's the razor I use when I'm shaving Claven.
Shaving isn't just about grooming.
It's about embracing masculinity and feeling like a real man.
Save 30% off on Jeremy's Razors.
Select bundles and razor starter sets as part of our Father's Day sale.
Go to jeremy'srazors.com today and help dad kick woke out of his bathroom.
Lies by Context00:14:09
So I watched this movie, She Said, which is about the two ladies at the New York Times who, along with The New Yorker, broke the story on Harvey Weinstein.
And it's really interesting because it's what I found to be, I thought it was a pretty decent movie, pretty fun movie to watch, and it's a true story based on their books, the reporter's books, but it is what I call a lie by context.
And this is a very, very important thing that we have to learn about the culture, lies by context.
The way I first kind of started thinking about this was years ago when they were making all the movies about the wars on terror.
And this is one of the reasons I became an outspoken conservative because I felt it was so wrong to make propaganda for the enemy while our soldiers were in the troop, but were in the field.
Never happened before.
The anti-Vietnam War movies, anti-World War I, anti-World War II, all those movies that were made, that were anti-war were made after the wars were over and the guys were safely home.
These movies were being made showing Americans as bad people, and there were a lot of them.
You know, Lions for Lambs and Redacted, Redeemed, whatever.
They all had the same name.
It was Green Zone.
There were just a lot of them.
They showed us as the bad guys while our guys were in the field.
And I wrote about this repeatedly and it ended my Hollywood career, as far as I'm concerned.
But the reason these were lies by context.
There was one instance, a Brian De Pama film called Redacted, and it was about a group of American GIs who raped an Iraqi girl and killed her family.
And it was basically De Pama trying to restore his glory days from a film he made about Vietnam called Casualties of War, which was also with Michael J. Fox, also about a rape in Vietnam.
And the point of it was we were raping Vietnam by being there.
And when people said, you know, this is an unfair way to represent our troops, he said, well, it's based on a true story.
And it was.
It was based on a true story.
But, you know, that's absurd.
There are 160,000 coalition troops in Iraq at the height of the fighting.
That's, you know, the population of a small city.
The fact that one or two or three of them were criminals does not mean that the war was wrong and does not mean that it's a fair metaphor for the war or for the way those soldiers were behaving.
And it wasn't.
It was an unfair way of saying it.
So it was a lie by context.
Another movie that's a lie by context, a terrific movie, is All the President's Men, about Woodward and Bernstein going after Nixon.
And yes, the Washington Post exposed real dirty tricks by Richard Nixon, but they never exposed very similar dirty tricks by JFK.
They hated Nixon because he hunted communists like Alger Hiss and because they liked Alger Hiss because they were left-wingers.
And Nixon was right, and they never forgave him for it.
And now we know from the Durham Report that they're perfectly happy for a politician to commit dirty tricks with the help of federal agencies as long as it's a Democrat.
So All the President's Men is a good movie, maybe even a great movie.
It's a true movie, but it's a total, total lie.
And that's the way it is with this movie, she said.
It's the story of Zoe Cantor and Megan Touhey.
They got the, it was Ronan Farrow, the name I was looking for.
He was also working on the story, and they helped bring the rapist movie producer Harvey Weinstein to justice.
Now, let me say, as a non-feminist and an anti-feminist, destroying Harvey Weinstein is like one of my favorite things that's ever happened.
I mean, it was, you know, whatever gray areas there may be about transactional sex in Hollywood, Harvey Weinstein was a monster.
I'm delighted to see him hung by his thumbs, okay?
And as a non-feminist and an anti-feminist, I also think reporters like Cantor and Touhey should be home taking care of their small children.
The movie shows them repeatedly being called away from their small children.
And I think they, morally, morally, they should have not been working at the New York Times and taking care of their children.
However, I don't run the world, and I'm not the judge of the world.
I have nothing to say about it.
I'm glad that while they were immorally neglecting their children and leaving them probably, they never show you, they pretend they always leave them with their husbands, but that can't be right.
I'm sure they were leaving them with minority women who had to leave their children behind to take care of Cantor Touhey's children.
I don't know that for a fact, but I'm sure that was in there.
But I'm glad that while they were doing this immoral thing, they were at the New York Times getting Harvey Weinstein.
All right.
Now, and another thing, as always, in our artistic community, we have so many talented people.
Cantor is played by Zoe Kazan from the famous Ilya Kazan family.
Touhey is played by Carrie Mulligan, a terrific, terrific actress, and they're both wonderful.
Andre Brower is in it as Dean Biquet.
He's fantastic.
Jennifer Ely, one of the greatest British actresses.
I just love her.
Everybody's just absolutely terrific in it.
Writing direction is good.
It plays a little bit like Girl Ghostbusters.
It plays like Girl, All the President's Men.
You know, it's like the same movie but with girls in it, and it does that.
However, the film hagiographizes makes a saint out of the New York Times.
The New York Times logo is in the picture so often it should have gotten a screen credit, okay?
And it's all the usual reporter tropes.
You know, you haven't got the story, go back and get the story.
I've got the top editor saying it, here's the editor, here's Dean Becket, totally in control as they show him the story.
This is the first cut, whatever.
Rose is still off the record, but she has given us permission to write about her settlement.
We're just trying to figure out a way to confirm it.
Harvey offered her a million dollars recently for her silence.
And Rose refused.
But she doesn't want us to quote her.
There are still no on-the-record sources.
NDAs are a problem.
Laura Madden didn't sign one.
She's the only ex-assistant who is technically free to speak.
Ashley and Gwyneth didn't sign one either, but they're not ready to go on the record.
But Laura Madden has to deal with something very different right now.
She has breast cancer.
She has to go to surgery, so it's not likely.
I'm still leaving messages for Rowena Chu, but there's no engagement.
So no more proven settlements.
Ambrabati Lana Gutierrez almost certainly settled.
And John Schmidt confirmed that Miramax settled with the woman I visited in Queens.
Anything more on the article from The New Yorker?
No.
So Brower is great.
He plays Dean Bequet as if he's this dignified king of the world.
I hope Andrew Brower will one day play me.
I mean, he's so good at it.
The New York Times has always been a liberal newspaper, but it wasn't always a crappy third-rate newspaper, which is what it is now.
And it has never been as crappy as it has been under the crappy leadership of Dean Bequet.
And that's why one of the reasons I call this a lie by context.
Under Becket, sexual assault charges against women were covered in an entirely political way.
I've talked about this a million times.
It's worth saying again.
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was accused of a teenage assault by Christine Blasey Ford, an obvious political ploy to derail his appointment.
It was only pulled out after it was clear that he was going to pass.
And there was literally, as Molly Hemingway points out in her book, there was literally no evidence that Ford and Kavanaugh had ever met.
Nonetheless, I went through the New York Times preparing this, and I could not find a single editorial or opinion piece defending Kavanaugh.
In fact, it was the same.
Constant, every article is the same.
Constant calls for Kavanaugh to step down.
Even when Kavanaugh lost his temper at being unfairly accused of sexual assault, they said, oh, he's gotten angry.
He doesn't have a judicial temperament, so he should step down.
The ugliest piece under Dean Becket, it was such an ugly piece of attack journalism, was as a rape survivor, I was shaking in my chair, as Christine Blasey Ford testified.
The idea being all of these people hadn't been listened to and now Christine Blasi Ford was being listened to.
Who cares if you were shaking in your chair?
What the hell does that mean?
How come there was no article saying I was, Andrew Claven was shaking in my chair as Brett Kavanaugh was falsely accused?
I've been falsely accused.
I was shaking in my chair.
Who cares if you're shaking in your chair?
A man was being accused of something.
They had a responsibility to cover it honestly.
Now, if the New York Times covered all unsupported charges against men in the same way, then at least we'd say they're creepy, stupid, incompetent, but at least we know where they stand.
But when Joe Biden was running for president, it was still the primaries, I believe, Tara Reed, who worked on Biden's staff in the 90s, said that in 1993, Biden had pushed her against the wall, kissed her, put his hand under her skirt, penetrated her with his fingers, and asked, do you want to go somewhere else?
20 days of silence, and then on Easter Sunday, they buried a thing in the paper saying, We don't think it ever happened.
Okay.
Heroic Dean Bequet, played by Andrew Brower, who should, all of us really should be played, men, women, everybody should be played by Andrew Brower if we want to look dignified and heroic, okay?
Dean Bequet, they run an interview with him in the Times explaining why he didn't cover the story, because it's still Me Too time, so you're supposed to be covering everybody, and they didn't.
Listen to what he says.
This is a quote from the story.
I thought that what the New York Times could offer and should try to offer was the reporting to help people understand what to make of a fairly serious allegation against a guy who had been a vice president of the United States and was knocking on the door of being his party's nominee.
Look, I get the argument.
Just do a short, straightforward news story, but I'm not sure that doing this sort of straightforward news story would have helped the reader understand, have all the information he or she needs to think about what we make of this thing.
How come they didn't do a story saying I was shaking in my chair when Tara Reed did this?
I wish I was shaking in my chair.
I was saying, oh my goodness, this is so terrible.
Where were the chair shakings?
Well, suddenly he has to help people understand.
Did he help people understand Brett Kavanaugh?
No, he convicted the guy in the press.
This movie that hagiographizes the New York Times is a lie by context.
Now, the interviewer asks him, he says, I've been looking at the Times coverage of Brett Kavanaugh, and I want to focus on Julie Swetnik.
She's the one who made these outlandish claims that there were gang rapes that Kavanaugh was standing online for and all this stuff.
And then her whole story fell apart.
He says, the Times wrote the Swetnik story, the same day she made the allegation, why was Kavanaugh treated differently?
Dean Becke, played by Andrew Brower.
Kavanaugh was already in a public forum in a large way.
Joe Biden was running for president.
He says, Kavanaugh's status as a Supreme Court justice was in question because of a very serious allegation.
He says, when I say in a public way, I don't mean the public way of Tara Reids.
If you ask the average person in America, they didn't know about the Tara Reed case.
I wonder why.
Why didn't the average person know about it?
Oh yeah, because they didn't cover it.
The guy is so dishonest in this interview.
It really is corruption.
It is not just lies.
It's corruption.
And one more thing I got to say about this film, because it really did drive me crazy, because they're so talented and they do such a good job.
That's why.
And because I respect the women who did the actual reporting.
The movie goes all out to feminize these characters.
That is to point out the things about them that are specifically, womanly.
Some of them get breast cancer.
They have postmortem depression.
They miss their children.
The reporters giggle when they show up wearing the same dresses.
Ooh, like the reporting twins.
They say their men need female attention and their children need their attention.
All of these things.
They get assaulted by men.
A man comes up to them and bothers them in a bar.
If it had been William Thomas, the swimmer who calls himself whatever, Leah Thomas, they wouldn't have done that because he's six foot two and a muscle man.
He could take them down, but they felt fine.
So all they're saying throughout this whole movie is women are not men.
Women have special problems.
Is that really the attitude of the New York Times?
Will the New York Times come out and say women are not men, even when they dress up like women, even when they have their bodies operated on, that men cannot become women because women have special problems?
No.
They lie constantly about this until they needed to manipulate you politically in a movie like this.
The question I have, I guess, for us is why are we so bad at this?
How long have they been trying to make the Ronald Reagan story?
How long have they been trying to make witness about Alger Hiss, which Nixon was right about and we were right about, the Wright was right about?
How long have they been doing this?
How come there's no story about Hillary Clinton's corruption, but Nixon, George W. Bush, all these guys get taken down.
It's all a lie by context because they own the context and that's on us.
That really is on us.
They own the media and they're good at lying and they're good at creating a context in which their lies seem like the truth.
This is why we've got to really work at taking back the culture.
This is why the Daily Wire is important, but there should be 100 Daily Wires out there.
We should all be trying to do this so we can create a context and tell the truth.
All right.
For those of you who are not members of the Daily Wire, not subscribers to the Daily Wire, you are careening like bats out of hell into the hell of the Clavinless Week.
It is still, we're still, later on, we're going to cut the show on Friday to an hour and release the interview in the middle of the week so it'll be a little better, but you're not going to survive till then anyway.
So this is a good time to subscribe while, meanwhile, out of the loveliness of our hearts, we are solving all your problems with the mailbag.
We need trans people.
We love trans people.
Trans people belong here.
Yeah!
I knew that one was coming.
I could tell that was the cut of the week.
Remember, now we're going to be moving mailbag to clavinclapbacks at dailywire.com.
That's clapbacks with a K, Clavinclapbacks at DailyWire.com.
And we'd like you to, if you'd like to change it up a little bit and get more comments on the content of the show, what you like, what you don't like, why you think I'm an idiot and why you realize I'm a genius, why you mistakenly think I'm an idiot and why you rightly realize I'm a genius.
So that's ClavinClapbacks at DailyWire.com from Jamie.
Hello, Mr. Clavin, my favorite, most bigoted Daily Wire host, closely followed by Shapiro.
Oh, Shapiro can't even touch me in bigotry, I think.
ClavinClapbacks: Mailbag Edition00:09:45
Other ways, he's great, but bigotry is all mine.
First of all, I wanted to tell you that I'm enjoying very much the uncanny and that I've always been drawn to ghost stories.
I got gripped by the story right from the first page.
It's nice to hear.
My question is about something that I can't get out of my head and could even seem a little trivial.
It is this.
Why on earth does everyone refer to the Jews as a race?
And by everyone, I'd also include you yourself, as I think I've heard you once or twice refer to the Jewish race.
This idea is so widely spread in the culture that no one questions it.
Isn't a Jew a Jew?
Because he, she identifies as a follower of Judaism, which is a religion, a set of ideas, but not a race.
Cheers, Jamie.
Good question, but in fact, Jews are a race.
For instance, when I sent in one of our sponsors was, I think, 23andMe, and I sent in some spit or whatever, and they looked at my DNA and came back and said something like I was 97% Ashkenazi Jewish.
So there is a racial component to it.
And one of the things that happened over time, in the Middle Ages, most anti-Semitism was keyed toward belief.
It was keyed toward religion.
You had a religion and you were a Jew.
And if you read, for instance, Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, they attack the Jew, Shylock, for his religion, for the things that he believes, while saying his daughter, who is just the same blood as he has, she's a wonderful person because she embraces Jesus Christ.
So it was very much a, it was more of a religious thing.
But over time, it also became a racial thing.
Hitler cemented that, that you were a Jew, even if you were a Catholic and only one of your grandparents was Jewish.
You were still a Jew and you were in trouble with the Nazis.
And so that changed.
But there is a confluence there.
So that's why they can get away with saying you're anti-Semitic if you point out that George Soros is evil.
George Soros is evil, but he does have Jewish blood.
He is not a Jew in the sense that you and I think of being a Jew.
Ben is a Jew in the sense of being a Jew and doesn't stop anybody on the left from criticizing him.
No one has ever on the left said, you know, that it's anti-Semitic to criticize Ben Shapiro, but they say it about George Soros.
So there is a confluence and there is, you know, a confusion about it, but you're absolutely right that in truth, a Jew is not George Soros.
It is Ben Shapiro, who practices Judaism.
From Sean, I've been with my wife for 15 years.
We have four kids between the ages of seven and 12.
After our first pregnancy, my wife completely let herself go.
When I met her, she was an NCAA athlete.
She now weighs twice what she weighed, which is now she's near 300 pounds.
And I believe because of the shame of it, she has turned herself into an almost asexual androgynous person.
The quality of our sex life is bad.
I've struggled with it.
She'll perform reluctant maintenance sex.
I came to her about five years ago and told her that I needed something to change with our sex lives.
And she did up the frequency of the maintenance sex, but has since thrown it in my face during arguments.
What can I do?
I feel like elevating my sex life to the highest priority would make me a hypocrite.
Accepting the left's hedonistic sexual morality is the highest good.
I know that, but I still struggle.
And if I'm honest, I'm angry about it.
Any advice?
I fully accept the possibility that I'm the a-hole and I'm just being a whiny baby.
And this is just how sex lives go in most marriages.
No, not at all.
Not at all.
You are not being whiny, and it is deeply, deeply important.
The sexual life of a marriage is very important, if only because, well, no, I was going to say if only because it keeps you from going elsewhere, but it's much more than that.
It's an intimacy and, you know, connection and becoming one flesh and all of those things.
It's very important.
Doesn't mean you're not looking at this from a selfish point of view, however.
And that is, I think, something that you need to really think about before addressing this.
Your wife had a pregnancy and she went up, she gained 150 pounds.
She's 300 pounds.
She's 300 pounds.
That's deeply unhealthy.
It's unattractive and it probably makes her feel unattractive.
And she suddenly stops wanting to have sex.
Now, that tells me that something happened with her.
And it tells me that something was touched off in her, maybe by a pregnancy, maybe by, maybe she was, I don't know if she was a virgin before she was married, but maybe just becoming a sexual person.
Maybe something in her past.
I'm totally guessing here, but maybe there's some abuse in her past that has come up.
But she's in trouble.
Your wife, the partner in your life, the mother of your children, is in trouble.
And what you're going to her and saying is, where's my sex?
Where's my sex?
Well, that's an issue.
That's an important thing.
You're not being selfish for wanting to have a healthy, active sex life with your wife.
You should have an active, healthy sex life with your wife, but you're approaching her in a selfish manner as if this whole thing were about you.
And really, it's about her.
Something terrible has happened to her.
And she doesn't know what it is, obviously.
And she's being angry at you because she's trying to protect herself from whatever it is.
She's trying to protect herself by getting fat and becoming sexless.
And she's trying to protect herself by being angry at you.
And instead of going and saying, where's my sex?
You really need to sit down with her in the most sensitive way possible, in the kindest way possible, and saying, look, you know, something's wrong here.
Something is wrong with you.
You're in pain.
You shouldn't be this way.
It's unhealthy.
I'm unhappy to see you in pain because I love you.
And I want to come back to the person I married and to the person that I know you are.
But I think something is truly bothering you.
And I'm willing to go into marriage counseling.
I'm willing to pay to get you into individual counseling.
But I think you have to face this because we're becoming unhappy and that's bad for our children.
It's bad for everybody.
And it's especially bad for you.
Something has happened to her that has made her do this.
And I think that's what you need to address.
You know, you're not being a jerk for wanting to have sex with your wife, but you're addressing it in a bit of a selfish way.
And I think you need to think about before you go talk to her and then talk to her as if it were about her because it is.
For Michelle, first, big fan of the show and everything the Daily Wire is doing.
Subscribe for Ben.
Stayed for Michael.
Got a membership for you.
I admire you so much.
Thank you.
Flattery aside.
I have a question.
I'm asking for advice.
I recently have gotten a desire to write a book.
I have so many thoughts and ideas I want to share and commenting on random things on socials and YouTube isn't really doing it for me.
Sure, you may catch the eye of a person here or there, but are you really making people think?
Most likely not.
I want to challenge people in a good way and make them contemplate.
I have too many thoughts and ideas.
So I guess my question is, can you give me some advice on how to take all of these thoughts I have, put them on paper in a cohesive manner with a recognizable theme so it doesn't read like someone who's on drugs?
Yes, I can.
I can definitely give you advice on this.
Don't do it.
That's not a book.
What you think is not a book.
Your philosophy of life is not a book.
Nobody cares.
And it's probably not that interesting.
If there is a subject that you feel passionate about, that you can research, that you can bring something into my life about that subject that I don't know while presenting your opinions, that's a book.
That is a book.
The philosophy of you, everybody wants to write that book, but it's not a book.
Nobody cares.
You're not a professional philosopher.
Most of what you think has been said by somebody else.
But if you can do research and write a nonfiction book on a subject that is of interest to you, that people don't know about, that you now, because of the intense research you've done over the course of, say, a year, if not more, you now know a lot about, that's a book.
Less is more when it comes to this.
Less of your opinion, more information.
You know, insights that come through information are the way you create a book.
All right, one more from Bobby.
I miss having your podcast available every day, but I agree that your longer form weekly show is better and I loved another kingdom.
The other day, Ben was talking about he was on the verge of quitting Lewis's Space trilogy before he finished, but I recommended that he finish the final book, That Hideous Strength, which I said was dramatically better.
And you had just finished the first two books, and you thought that Hideous Strength was not, it was very bad.
It was not the best book.
It seemed the weakest in the series.
Why do you think that book is so much better?
Personally, I'd have advised Ben to stop after the first two.
No, to me, the first two were just theology disguised as a novel.
There was no drama.
It wasn't interesting.
The characters were setups for representatives of Christ and sin and Adam and Eve.
To me, that's just really boring.
Whereas that Hideous Strength could have been a drama out of the newspaper.
It was so real and so alive and so interesting.
And it was about a married couple and how sin was keeping them apart.
And I just found it gripping and interesting and more of a novel.
It's not, I love C.S. Lewis.
I'm fascinated by the way he weaves his theology into fiction, but I don't always think it makes good fiction for the same reason I don't like the Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe books, the Narnio books, because the Lion is Jesus and he solves everybody's problems.
And that's not the way life works.
So I really liked the way that that Hideous Strength depended on the married couple and the mistakes they made and the righteous things they did.
And I thought the villains were really villainous and the evil was really horrific.
I'm going to stop there.
But this is a good time so that you don't get plunged into the Clavenless Week so quickly.
You can become a member.
Go to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Use code Claven at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.