Constantin Kissen critiques UK comedy’s decline under woke identity politics, contrasting it with America’s rejection of "wokeness," while Maureen Callahan exposes the Kennedy family’s mythos, highlighting Chappaquiddick victim Mary Jo Kopechney’s ignored suffering and media bias. Batya Unger Sargon argues elite-driven polarization undermines democracy, with journalism now serving credentialed audiences over working-class needs, like antibiotic overuse (80% unnecessary) and medical dogmas. Matthew Goodwin notes Boris Johnson’s Brexit betrayal—record immigration despite promises—while Dr. Marty McCary blames the Tories’ loss on ignoring voter priorities like borders and culture. Dreer’s Living in Wonder explores Gen Z’s occult turn, Hungary’s resistance to woke totalitarianism, and a transformative exorcism experience, warning America risks exporting bad ideas instead of enduring truths. [Automatically generated summary]
Over this past year, I've interviewed some of the brightest minds and most influential figures in the culture today.
So I wanted to make a compilation with some of the most compelling moments from those interviews.
Here they are.
Hey, everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Constantin Kissen.
Constantin is a Sunday Times best-selling author, satirist, social commentator, and he's creator and co-host of Triggernometry, which if you've never seen it is really a wonderful series of interviews.
I should mention, by the way, that you also are, you are co-hosts with Francis Foster, and both of you kind of have roots in comedy, right?
I mean, it's kind of strange that you're now moved over.
What brought you from comedy over to this?
Well, yeah, so Francis still does stand up.
I don't.
But you say it's interesting.
I mean, actually, if you look at some of the people who are doing interview shows nowadays, you know, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, the two examples of comedians, or in Dave's case, former comedians, who do that.
And I think, you know, it's a combination of perhaps not thinking you're an expert, but also being interested in ideas, being willing to ask questions and the ability occasionally to inject a bit of humor to lighten the mood, to take a kind of different direction, which I think is helpful as well.
Did you come up against the kind of humorless wokeness working as a comedian that, you know, that we've seen here a little bit of anyway?
Well, you guys are very fortunate in America.
And, you know, I think that the American attitude to comedy and freedom of speech more generally kind of chewed wokeness up and spat it out.
And now you have, you know, great scenes like the one in Austin, in New York, where you're not really going to get in trouble for telling offensive jokes because no one really cares.
In the UK, however, we've got a gigantic issue with that.
I don't think that I wouldn't claim that, you know, I was ever canceled for doing offensive material.
But then the thing is, I was never that offensive as a comedian.
I just thought I was looking around and I thought that this industry, which in the UK is one industry, there's five people who control the entire thing.
It just seemed to me like it was going in the wrong direction.
By the way, not to blow my own trumpet, but I would certainly say I've been proven right on that over the last six years because pretty much every single major comedy TV show that we have in this country has since stopped being in existence.
It ceased to exist.
Really?
And that's because they basically stopped making the main thing the main thing.
They stopped caring about what's funny and they started caring a lot more about, you know, what the writers have between their legs and how much pigmentation they have in their skin and all of these other things.
And very good shows that we had, Mock the Week, MASH Report, which I actually used to write for, they've all disappeared because they can't compete, particularly with the online world where no one really cares about who you are.
They care about whether you make them laugh or not.
That's really interesting.
I mean, that reminds me of Robin Williams on German TV.
He was asked why Germans had no comedy and he said, you killed all the funny people.
And in England, it's amazing because when I lived in England in the 90s, some of the stuff I would watch there that never made it over here was as funny as anything I had ever seen.
And I remember lying on my floor in my apartment, laughing so hard because of the wit of English people to hear that that wit has been snuffed out is really depressing.
Well, that's good.
We've DEI'd all the funny people.
We haven't killed them.
We've just DEI'd them out of the mainstream and now they're doing stuff elsewhere.
But look, I'm a big believer in the market.
I think the American example shows that if you push people out, they will find a way, particularly with the internet.
And so, you know, I'm not someone who's whining and complaining.
Life is great.
I'm not complaining.
But they did kill the golden goose.
And it's sad to see because a lot of the people actually who watch mainstream television in this country, they're the older generation who are less likely to go and find stuff online.
And they're now effectively deprived of good comedy, which, as you say, is actually a British staple and a quintessential aspect of the British character.
But this is kind of what I want to talk to you about.
I mean, you, you came over here from basically from Russia, and you wrote a book that was a love letter to the West.
Talk a little bit about that.
I mean, just your attitudes.
Before we start to talk about England and what it means for America, talk a little bit about that, how your attitudes were shaped and why your attitudes are different than people who maybe took a lot of this for granted.
Well, I grew up in the Soviet Union.
So first and foremost, I had that experience.
And, you know, one of the things I talk about in an immigrant's love letter to the West is my parents sending me off to school at the age of seven with two sets of instructions.
Number one, do not repeat outside the home anything we discuss here because we'll all be in trouble.
And number two, you're going to get taught a bunch of BS at school about, you know, the ideology, the dominant way of thinking in society, you know, what's a good communist, why you should be one, all of that.
And that's all BS, as I say.
Don't buy into it.
If you have any questions, ask us.
But when you start getting indoctrinated about this, this and that, don't believe it.
So I had the kind of inoculation.
They had to have the chat with me.
And I'm starting to think without exaggerating too much that both of those things are increasingly starting to apply to our society today, where, you know, parents are having to inoculate their children against some bad ideas that they're being increasingly exposed to in schools, in colleges, and frankly, in the culture, broader culture out there.
So that was the first bit.
The second bit is I watched the Soviet Union collapse.
So unlike most people who assume that the way things are today is the way they will always be for perpetuity, with nothing ever changing, no matter what else we mess around with, I'm fully aware that societies are not permanent.
Systems of thought are not permanent.
Economic systems are not permanent.
And so the idea that what we enjoy in the West today will last for a thousand years seems to me to be a little bit naive.
And more importantly than that, I believe that whether the West remains powerful and dominant and strong and prosperous and confident is highly dependent on the things that we do as individuals and on the people we elect and on what we do as a culture and what we do as a society.
So I learned those two lessons early on.
And then I came to 1990s Britain.
You know, I don't know if it's just the fact that I was young, but 1990s seems like a pretty good period in the history of our nations to me.
And I then watched this society to which my parents sent me at great personal cost.
What happened with my family was my father was, my parents rather were very, very poor when I was born to the point where, and again, something I talk about in the book, my mother would go and pick apples in the university courtyard to make food, to make rice and apples.
That was the dish that we would have quite regularly because we couldn't afford to buy food.
We went from that to being very, very rich very quickly in the 1990s Russia, and then back to being very, very poor in the space of about 10 years.
In that interim, my parents had the opportunity to send me to school in England, and they used all the money that they'd made basically to do that before becoming poor again.
And so they sent me over to England.
I'm thinking this is a great place, you know, freedom of expression, do whatever you want, be whoever you want to be, all of this great stuff.
And then as I start to get into my mid, you know, late 20s, early 30s, I'm doing stand-up and I see the world around me start to change.
I see a lot of the things that we used to take for granted and frankly celebrate.
You know, the idea that we are all free to have our own opinions, we're all free to express our opinions in public.
All of these things start to deteriorate very quickly.
And most importantly, you know, the idea that we should all be treated as individuals on the content of our character, that became just completely controversial all of a sudden.
And instead, we were supposed to look at each other through the prism of our identity.
And I thought that was incredibly strange.
And then when Brexit happened, people just started saying all this ridiculous stuff.
You know, I was a Remain voter, which for your American listeners is the equivalent of voting for Hillary in 2016.
And then, you know, Brexit happens.
And I'm like, well, what the hell happened?
And then all the people around me started saying, well, yeah, you know, the reason this happened is, you know, half of Britain is racist.
Half of Britain hates immigrants.
And I was like, well, I came here as a young dark-skinned boy in the mid-90s when people were less tolerant of difference than they are today.
And almost universally, my experience in the West, in the UK, particularly, but in the West more broadly, has been a kind of welcoming curiosity.
If you tell people, well, you know, I'm from abroad, they'll say, oh, really?
Where are you from?
And start talking to you about that.
So then to go from my experience, lived experience, which we're now told is very important, to, you know, half the country is racist.
Kennedy Legacy Revisited00:16:02
That made no sense to me.
And that is around the time when we decided, Francis and I, to start having conversations with people who could open our eyes to things that we didn't understand because we just knew that the mainstream narrative about what we were being told could not possibly be true.
Hey, everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Maureen Callahan, the author of Ask Not, the Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed.
Now, authors usually like coming on this because I do read a lot of their books before I get there.
But after the interview is over, I usually have to move on.
I'm not with this.
I'll be listening to this for the next week or so until I finish it.
Thanks.
I also have to bring up, before we get into the meat of the book, I have to bring up the New York Times review because I was looking at this.
I thought, I wonder what the New York Times thought of this.
And not only did they attack you personally and said things like you had written bad things about some women, so you weren't a good sister, which I thought was absolutely wonderful.
But they accused you of not really getting the nuances of the Kennedys, which by the way, isn't true.
You talk about the nuances of the relationships a lot.
But it seems to me the Kennedys have still got the left by the throat.
I mean, the fact that they could not just accept that you had written a good, entertaining book about how horrible these people were to their women is amazing.
They still are enchanted by them.
Oh, my God.
So, Andrew, that review, I mean, it was such a broadside.
It was such a, it was such a like hysterical, it was partly a review of the book and partly a review of me.
Yes.
But, you know, what's so fascinating is what that review omitted, which was how much the New York Times has to answer for in doing the Kennedy family's dirty work and cleaning up their messes while smearing the names and sexual reputations of the women that they have harmed, if not completely almost ignoring them.
I mean, one of the women I write about was a teenage girl when she was left paralyzed for life by a Kennedy.
The Times called her one of two girl passengers who was injured.
Didn't name her till the last paragraph.
So I welcome the sanctimony of the New York Times.
Well, speaking of that, in regards to my book.
Speaking of that, let me read you Teddy Kennedy's obit in the New York Times, just a little bit of it.
Oh, this is Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a son of one of the most storied families in American politics, a man who knew acclaim and tragedy in near equal measure and who will be remembered as one of the most effective lawmakers in the history of the Senate, died late Tuesday night.
He was 77.
President Obama said Mr. Kennedy was one of the nation's greatest senators.
So let's start with Chap Aquittick.
Give us a good account of what happened on the night of Chap Aquittick.
Well, I'm so glad you brought this in via Ted's obit in the Times, Andrew, because that was this germ of this book was watching and reading the media coverage of Ted Kennedy's three-day-long statesman's funeral and never hearing the name Mary Jo Kapekny,
who was the 29-year-old campaign aide that Ted left to die in three feet of water at Chappaquittick while he made his escape running past a fire station, lighted residential homes, pay phones, going back to his inn, sleeping it off, waking up the next morning, having a hearty breakfast, showering, shaving, making small talk with the other vacationers,
and then deciding he's going to take himself over to the police station and report that he had a little mishap the night before.
And this was successfully re-spun, and we still hear it all the time, as Ted's tragedy, the thing that kept Ted from ever becoming president.
Or, as spun by, say, Arthur Selesinger Jr., a longtime Kennedy water carrier, iron had gone into Ted Kennedy's soul that night.
I mean, the most purple prose, the most disgusting stuff.
A young woman died needlessly.
She could have been saved.
She was alive.
She drowned in the car while he was sitting around with his pouch.
She actually suffocated.
She didn't drown.
She was breathing through a tiny air pocket for hours.
And the diver who recovered her body the next day said that she could have been saved.
Wow.
Wow.
I mean, that's homicide, right?
That's murder.
I mean, to leave somebody knowing that she's there.
It's incredible to me.
And he was never, I mean, he never, were charges ever brought against him?
I can't even remember now if charges were brought against him.
No, he was never charged.
And in my research, so I went and visited with Mary Jo's family, surviving family members in Pennsylvania, and I found that no less an American icon than Muhammad Ali had written the Capechnis who never recovered from their only child's death.
He wrote them a handwritten letter in which he encouraged them to sue Ted Kennedy.
He called him a fake and a phony who read from a pre-written script that he had not authored himself.
That was the famous speech to the American people in which he tried to weasel out of what happened or what he did in the hopes of saving his Senate seat.
And in that speech, he perseverates on the Kennedy curse and the Kennedy curse and this thing that looms over them.
Like no thought to Mary Joe.
So yeah, that's Chapaquittick.
It's amazing.
You mentioned in the opening of the book, you mentioned the fact that a lot of these women are not perfect people and that that doesn't give anybody the right to abuse them.
I have to be honest with you and say there were some of the stories that I've gotten, I haven't finished the book, but I have some of the stories that I've gotten to where I do lose sort of sympathy for them because they pursue these guys avidly.
I mean, they know, they know who they are.
They know that they're never faithful.
They know that they cheat almost as an obsession.
And yet these women set their caps for them and go to great lengths to win them over.
And as they mentioned in this Times review, Jackie had herself buried next to JFK, who endlessly cheated on her.
What is that?
I mean, is that charisma or is that?
Well, I think in regards to Jackie, I think she paid at the office.
When you read what Jackie went through.
And when you read the way in which she held the nation together in the aftermath of JFK's assassination through her own deep trauma, I think that Jackie was a very, she was a very shrewd woman.
She understood history, celebrity, and she understood her earned place in that.
And she was going to be buried at Arlington next to Jack and two of her babies.
I don't think, you know, that was a male reviewer.
I don't think a female reviewer, I don't think I've seen one who picked up on that.
And I think also you may be referring to Carolyn Bassett as well, who is a fascinating character.
I agree, completely flawed.
Even her friends who spoke to me said, I loved Carolyn, but boy, she could be difficult.
She was a lot.
And, you know, despite all the protestations, she so badly wanted to be Mrs. JFK Jr.
You know, she endured a lot of humiliations.
And I completely get it.
It is frustrating, but it also, I think, speaks to the way in which the Kennedy men have long been valorized and held up as the ultimate.
So if you're a woman who snags JFK Jr., well, that redounds to you, right?
You must be special.
There must be something so unique about you that sets you apart.
And, you know, of course, that ended.
She got her look behind the curtain.
She realized the guy she married wasn't really a prize at all.
He was a booby prize.
He was kind of dull.
He was entitled.
He had really nothing going on inside.
And, you know, it ends with their completely avoidable deaths because, you know, he's piloting a plane.
He has no business piloting.
Hey, everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Batya Unger Sargon, who is the author of, she's not just the wife of the Prince of Persia for you video game fanatics, but she is also the author of Bad News, How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy.
Let me start with this.
I would say you're more on the left than on the right.
What moved you to write this book?
Wow, that's a really good question.
I really hate bullies and I hate liars and I hate people who lie to hide their bullying, which is what our news media does every single day.
And I think that's probably the main motivation behind it.
I tried to write another book before I wrote bad news.
I'd been doing a lot of traveling during the Trump years and especially in the South.
And I had been surprised in a big way to find that actually more unites us as Americans than divides us.
And I wrote a whole proposal about that based on my reporting from the South.
And I just couldn't sell it, Andrew.
I had editor after editor after editor telling me there is no market for a book.
I wanted to call it a more perfect union about how Americans are much more united than divided.
And finally, a very kind editor said to me, look, I can't sell this book, but you keep telling me we're more united than divided.
Why do I think we're so polarized?
Maybe you should write that book.
And that's, I think, what bad news is.
It's an explanation for polarization because we actually aren't polarized, but our elites are very polarized.
And because they are very polarized, they try to convince the rest of us to hate each other because they get a lot of money and a lot of power out of doing so.
And so that led to bad news.
And then after I wrote bad news, I really did want to explore the class divide more fully because the central thesis is basically that we're divided along class lines, not political lines.
And so that was my second book, Second Class, How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women, which came out this year.
And they're really companions to each other because that is really the central feature of American life is the class divide.
That's kind of why I think I'm a leftist because I'm obsessed with class and I'm obsessed with this idea that people can work much harder than me, like backbreaking labor at two, three jobs and not be able to feed their families.
I think that that is an outrage.
And I think it is an outrage that the Democrats lost the working class.
And so that obsession, I think, is what led me sort of certainly more to the center, more to the Trump camp for sure.
But from that leftist point of view, somebody recently joked and said, we need to get you a t-shirt that says commies for Trump, you know?
You know, that's exactly why I became a conservative.
I hate bullies.
That's exactly why I became a conservative.
And I always tell people I'm a conservative because I'm a liberal and that's where the liberalism has gone.
That's great.
So like I'm fascinated.
I'm fascinated by the media.
And I want to talk to you about the class thing more, but I am fascinated by the idea that the media is suffering from elitism, that elitism, that everything they're doing is for the elite.
Explain how that works out in questions of race.
I mean, you think when your people are talking about questions of race, they're talking about people who are underserved, but then you come up with ideas like defund the police.
And you think, have you ever met a poor person?
Have you ever met gone into a neighborhood where there are poor people?
I mean, that's such an insane idea.
Why do those two things go together like that?
Right.
And the perfect example of this, just so your audience has like an object in mind that really solidified it.
Back when I used to get the New York Times in 2020, it arrived at my house one Shabbat morning.
And, you know, on Saturday, you get like a lot of the Sunday paper and it has a magazine in it.
So I pull out the magazine and on the front cover of the New York Times magazine was Angela Davis, the sort of big black activist.
And on the back cover of it was an ad for a Cartier watch.
And like that, you know, people would say, those don't go together.
No, of course those go together.
Those are two sides of the same coin.
That radical activism, the radical chic, as Tom Wolf called it, you know, all those years ago, you know, that is part and parcel of economic privilege today.
So we've seen this massive realignment that you talk about a lot in your show.
You know, the Democrats used to represent labor.
Working class people used to be the majority of journalists.
They came from working class backgrounds.
They didn't go to college.
In 1930, only a third of journalists had a college degree.
You know, the kind of person who would become a journalist was the kid who sat like in the back of the room, classroom, like cracking wise, making fun of the teacher, getting kicked out of class.
And so when all of his friends went to work the line at the local factory, they wouldn't take him, you know, because he doesn't follow orders.
He'll be a danger to everybody.
So instead, he went to Washington to hold the powerful accountable in the name of his friends who were working the line.
And they would live in working class neighborhoods and working class communities.
Actually, the vast majority of journalism for most of the 20th century was local journalism.
People were accountable to their local communities and they were working class.
And what happened was there was a status revolution among journalists, just like the status revolution among who the Democrats cater to.
So if the Democrats used to cater to labor, over the course of the 20th century, they really abandoned the working class to cater to highly credentialed college elites on the one hand and then the dependent poor on the other hand, right?
It's this sort of uneasy coalition between the two, although it's actually quite easy because if there's one thing rich liberals love to do, it's pay higher taxes and redistribute them to the poor, right?
So those things really work pretty well together, right?
You know, so they abandoned the working class and journalists, because they tend to be liberal, they tend to have bleeding hearts, they still saw themselves as the heroes, right, on the side of the little guy, even though they were part of this radical assent of Democratic voters who used to be middle class and now are upper middle class.
Now they're really part of the top 20% because they created an economy that really rewards having a college degree in a big way and really penalizes people who work with their hands for a living.
And the status revolution in journalism specifically was one of the primary enablers of this.
And the way you can think about this is, you know, it used to be journalism was created for the masses, but as journalists started to become more and more highly educated and as a result, be able to command higher and higher salaries, they started producing journalism for themselves and their friends who were other college educated elites.
And so when Bill Clinton showed up and proposed something like NAFTA, journalists no longer lived in communities where their friends from high school were going to be put out of a job by something this terrible.
And so they saw NAFTA from the perspective of a highly credentialed consumer who, of course, wants cheaper goods, right?
Rather than from the perspective of the working class, which is how they would have seen NAFTA if this had happened in the 50s or in the 40s or even in the 60s.
So you had this status revolution among journalism that became one of the sort of lubricants of the Democrats' abandonment of the working class.
Immigration's Impact on British Politics00:08:47
But of course, they didn't want to admit that, right?
They didn't want to say, well, now we write journalism for, you know, the corporate lawyer who lives next door to us, whose kids go to the same kindergarten as us, right?
So what they did was they shifted the center of gravity of their activism from being class-based to being race-based, because then they could still pretend that they were on the side of the little guy, the little guy now being anybody who had darker skin or, you know, I don't know, different chromosomes, right?
Or identified as gay or transgender or what have you, right?
They created a kind of object of pity to replace their fellow Americans who actually had lost the ability to achieve the American dream despite working much harder than them.
And that's really the story that I tell in Bad News is how this status revolution and the abandonment of the working class reached its apex in the woke discourse because the woke discourse enabled them to still masquerade as on the side of the little guy while themselves benefiting in massive economic terms from the Democrats' plunder of the middle class on behalf of the top 20%.
Hey, Andrew Clavin here with this week's interview with Matthew Goodwin.
I lived in Britain for most of the 90s and it's interesting because the politics, of course, is very different.
The system is different.
But it always turns out to be some kind of funhouse mirror of what's going on in America.
And sometimes it leads us and sometimes it follows us, but you can always tell a lot by looking at what's happening in Britain about what is happening here.
You can learn a lot about the U.S. At least that's been my experience.
Matthew Goodwin, who we're going to talk to today, was recently praised by John O'Sullivan Claremont Review as one of the few political scientists who interpret the ongoing realignment of British politics in ways favorable to the right.
And I do as well, but I'm not as knowledgeable as he is.
Let's talk about, before we get to America, I want to actually understand the whole thing here.
Let's talk about this kind of betrayal.
Brexit was a huge victory for the right and has seemed to be, as I understood it, the votes came from a kind of a wide spectrum of people.
I'm not sure what unified them, but it was to get out of the EU, which is an oppressive, unrepresentative form of government.
And it seemed to me from far away that immigration was at the center of this.
But since when the Tories took over, immigration skyrocketed.
So what's going on there?
Was that unwillingness to do what the people wanted, or was it incompetence?
What happened exactly?
Well, I think the UK and the US had a similar 2016.
Just take your minds back.
America elected Trump.
We voted for Brexit.
Now, what were those two moments ultimately all about?
I think they were about wanting to live in a self-governing, independent nation-state that is fully in control of its own borders, that has some immigration, but manageable immigration, which returns political and cultural power to the masses, to voters, not just an elite minority in the big cities, and which takes our distinctive history, identity, and ways of life very seriously.
And I think those are the similarities between those two movements.
Now, what happened thereafter is that America and Britain went in fundamentally different directions.
In Britain, what happened is Boris Johnson became the beneficiary of that current, that mood.
In 2019, he won an enormous majority on the back of Brexit.
He said, let's get Brexit done.
Let's reduce immigration.
Let's control the borders.
He won the biggest majority since Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.
But basically, he lied to the British people.
That's the story here.
What happened after winning power is Boris Johnson liberalized the immigration regime.
He sent legal immigration to record levels, levels that we've not seen before in our history, at any time in our history.
He lost control of the borders.
He refused to leave international courts, the European courts that would have allowed us to take back control of our national borders.
And he really treated the people who had voted for him in 2019 with contempt.
I mean, he did not treat them in a serious way.
He didn't treat them with respect and recognition.
So what happened this week in Britain, what we're living through currently, is really the reaction to that.
So a lot of Conservative voters are now saying, well, look, we lent you our vote in 2019.
You took that for granted.
And a large number of those voters, about one in four, decamped to Nigel Farage, Donald Trump's friend in the Reform Party.
They said, look, if the Conservatives aren't going to deliver lower immigration, if they're not going to control the borders, then we're going to go over to this new party on the right, the Reform Party.
And a large number of other Conservatives just stayed at home.
They just gave up on politics.
We've just had the lowest level of turnout in this country since the 1800s.
So look, the story here is, the way I see it is a story of two political realignments.
You've got the realignment in America, where Trump is arguably expanding his electorate.
He's winning over Hispanic Latino voters.
He's winning over African-American voters.
He's doing really well in small towns, in flyover country and so on.
He's giving them the messages that they want to hear.
He's going to build the wall on the southern border.
He's going to put American interests first.
He's going to stand up to China, et cetera, et cetera.
And then the British Conservatives who kind of won over a very similar coalition, more working class, more dependent upon people who might not have passed through the colleges and universities, but then completely lost all those voters by failing to give them actually what they wanted.
So I think, as you said in your opening comments, we can learn a lot actually about American politics from looking at the UK.
And I think the lesson that you would learn is the British Conservatives have shown you how not to handle political realignment.
I mean, that is the story here.
That's the basic story.
What were they thinking?
I mean, why?
Obviously, people are so upset about it's a big change to leave the EU.
Brexit was a big deal.
They're so upset about immigration.
What are they getting out of it that they won't make a change?
Well, look, I can tell you, I gave a number of presentations over the last few years to some of our prime ministers, including Boris Johnson.
And one of the things that always struck me when I would leave the number 10 Downing Street and sort of, you know, walk along Whitehall and think about what just happened is for a lot of conservative elites, I basically think they don't really understand who's been voting for them and why they've been voting for them.
I think the Conservative Parliamentary Party, the people who dominate the apparatus of the Conservative Party here in Britain, I think they lean much further to the cultural left than their new voters.
They are much more socially liberal than their new voters.
They don't see issues like immigration, gender ideology, woke ideology, the borders as high status issues.
They look down on them.
They see them as low status, as things that are a little bit inconvenient.
Whereas what I would say is what could be more conservative than defending the sex-based rights of women, than defending the rights of children, defending strong borders, defending our way of life.
And the British Tories, I think, have fundamentally lost sight of who they are.
So what I'm trying to say to you, Andrew, is this isn't just a party that has suffered an election defeat.
This is a party that is now in the midst of an existential identity crisis.
It is philosophically, ideologically, electorally lost.
It doesn't really know what it is anymore.
And when I compare and contrast the British Tories with, say, what we've seen at the Republican National Convention this week in Milwaukee, well, I see a conservative movement that looks ideologically coherent, very unified, very clear about what it wants to do, very clear about how it wants to try and change America, whatever your personal view of Donald Trump and the policies, et cetera.
It looks to me like a pretty united, coherent political party.
And it looks like it has a very strong understanding of who has been voting for it since 2016.
And the British Conservative elite, I don't think, have really studied how their movement has evolved in the same way as the U.S. Republicans have.
Hey, everyone, it's Andrew Claven with this week's interview with Dr. Marty McCary.
Blind Spots in Medicine00:13:11
He is a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and New York Times best-selling author.
His latest book has been on the Times bestseller list for five weeks.
It's called Blind Spots, When Medicine Gets It Wrong and What It Means for Our Health.
I have to tell you, I've been reading it.
If I had hair, it would be standing on end.
It's a really fascinating book.
And it's, you know, one of the things that's exciting about it is it really digs into some of the things that are wrong with the medical profession without being an act of crack pottery.
In fact, it's the exact opposite of that.
I want to get started with a big picture for a minute, because you start out in the book telling certain detailed stories.
But everything I'm hearing, I hear a lot online about big pharma and the corruption at the CDC and all the medical profession is corrupt.
I don't know.
I grew up with a lot more trust in medicine than that.
And it still seems to me that I take a lot of pills that have been very helpful to me over the years.
So, give me, if you can, a sort of big picture of what the ordinary human being going to his doctor should be looking for and hearing about medicine in the news should be looking for.
Well, first of all, I grew up with that same deep respect for this ancient craft of medicine.
My dad was a doctor and practiced in a way that people in the community loved him.
They trusted him.
And so I love it that we can practice this incredible profession with a sense of impartiality where people will trust us to put a knife to their skin or tell us secrets they've never told their spouse just because you're the doctor within a minute of meeting you.
That's an incredible tradition.
And so I'm proud of it.
But the devil in American healthcare is not any one stakeholder group, as we're often told.
There's a blame game going around.
And the reality is that everybody's getting rich.
The system is expanding.
And no one's talking about the root causes of all these chronic diseases that are going up.
No one's talking about the most powerful and dangerous force in medicine, which is groupthink, a psychology by which people just surrender to the conventional thinking without thinking independently.
And that got an epidemic during COVID.
We saw the danger of groupthink of silencing civil discourse, even censoring doctors.
And as a result, in our latest medical journal and a study that just came out, trust in doctors and hospitals plummeted from 71% just before the pandemic to 40%.
That's a 31-point drop.
People are hungry for humility, for honesty, and for civil discourse in medicine.
That's amazing.
You mentioned antibiotics.
We're talking about Marty McCary's book, Blind Spots When Medicine Gets It Wrong and What It Means for Our Health.
It's been on the bestseller list for weeks.
You talk about antibiotics, and there's all kinds of medications that come out.
I mean, I've used antibiotics to great effect at times.
It seems to me these are miracle drugs sometimes.
Statins seem to me to be things that have kept people from getting heart attacks.
And yet, everything you take, everything you put in your body, has other effects.
What are some of the things that people should be thinking about when they are prescribed pills?
Well, one of the biggest blind spots of modern medicine is the microbiome.
That is the millions of different bacteria that normally reside in the gut.
They line the GI tract.
And they're not just sitting there.
They're busy.
They are involved in absorption and digestion.
They train the immune system.
They make most of your body's serotonin, involved in mood and mental health.
They conjugate estrogen.
They even make a little bit of ozempic at low levels naturally.
They make GLP-1.
And we've ignored the microbiome in modern medicine.
Now, antibiotics save lives, as you pointed out.
I've seen it, but they're also massively overused.
60% in most studies are unnecessary.
I think it's more like 80% from my clinical experience.
And what are these antibiotics doing?
They're carpet bombing the microbiome, the lining of the GI tract with all these different bacteria that normally live in a balance.
And so we alter the microbiome.
It alters gut health.
And it has been associated now with obesity and learning disabilities and asthma and celiac.
They've compared at the Mayo Clinic kids who took antibiotics in the first few years versus kids who did not.
And in that matched study of 14,000 kids, they found a strong association with many of these chronic diseases that are going up.
And researchers that I talk to in this field actually believe autism is caused by alterations of the microbiome in the modern world.
It's not just from antibiotics, it's from ultra-processed foods, pesticides.
Pesticides kill insects.
Well, what do we think they do to the bacterial lining of our GI tract?
They are also contributing to altering that gut health.
And the final point is, you know, we've assumed fluoride is good for us because it kills bacteria on teeth and slightly reduces cavities.
Well, if it's killing the bacteria on our teeth, what's it doing to the microbiome every single day when we drink fluoridated water?
So we've got to challenge deeply how assumptions.
That's always been a part of medicine.
Unfortunately, people don't like it sometimes, but there are a lot of medical dogmas that are not based on science.
They're based on assumptions.
They need to be challenged.
What do you think is the cause of that, though?
I mean, I was just shocked during COVID by very, very talented, obviously, and intelligent doctors like Jay Bhattacharya, Stanford, I believe, came out with these incredibly sensible ideas about who should be isolated, who should be protected, and who shouldn't.
I know Jay, and he told me stories of how he was hounded, his family was hounded, his career was threatened until he almost was ready to give up.
When did that get started?
And where is that coming from?
Well, now we are seeing this incredible pride of the medical oligarchs.
We've always had a priesthood, but never before have we had a few doctors at the top with so much centralized power.
And they just didn't like it when people would point out differences of opinions or even things that were true but embarrassing, like the fact that the United States government was funding the Wuhan lab.
No one suggested that our dollars actually went to buy the test tubes that resulted in this virus leak, but it's embarrassing.
Why weren't we funding research on school lunch programs or basic cooking instructions for patients with diabetes, basic things that address our chronic disease epidemic?
We saw where the money was going.
And when people were pointing out things that were not false, but they were just a little embarrassing, natural immunity, the damage of putting cloth masks on toddlers for three years.
Jay and many of us spoke till we're blue in the face to say, look, we need an honest discussion.
But it was, I think, the pride and hubris of the medical establishment that prevented these sensible opinions from being out there, even though they have been vindicated now with data.
The data has caught up with public health officials.
We've heard no apologies.
And it's not just COVID.
We got the opioid epidemic was basically ignited by a dogma that opiates were not addicted for 22 years.
The food pyramid, we got it wrong for 70 years.
We still get it wrong.
Antibiotics won't hurt you.
We got that wrong for 50 years.
Separating babies from their mothers at birth, we got that wrong for about 50 to 60 years.
You don't see the humility that people are hungry for, where people say, we got this wrong.
We feel terrible.
This is what people should know.
And this is what's based on science.
The most dangerous thing you can do in the medical profession is to issue a strong recommendation with such absolutism and suggest that it's based on science when it's not.
We're seeing that now with transgenderism.
You're seeing that with so many areas you are not allowed to question.
There are sacred cow topics.
And I think it's a very dangerous thing.
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Rod Dreer, who has a new book out, Living in Wonder, Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age.
A very insightful book, I think.
It's like all your books and very interesting and dynamic in that you're always moving.
You're actually searching.
As I say, the infinite is infinite.
There's always something more to know and something that's going to wrong foot you along the way.
You mentioned something that I've always thought was important that the scientific age for a moment there, it was easy to extrapolate from the scientific age that all things would be explained through matter.
If you thought it through, it wasn't true, but it was easy to extrapolate from what you were seeing that the Bible had been disproved and the way things worked was totally different and all this.
Do you think that was a necessary step?
I mean, I often feel that people get angry about these advances and these movements, but in fact, mankind, just like individual people, has to work out these ideas.
I mean, these ideas have to go through a journey to get to the other end.
Was this a necessary phase in the development of humankind?
You know, it's hard for me to say, but it also is hard to see a certain point at which we could have decided to turn.
We as a culture, as a civilization, could have decided to turn the other way because the benefits of throwing ourselves into science and the scientific and enlightenment way of seeing the world were so great.
The problem is, Ian McGilgris, he's one of the heroes of the book.
He's a contemporary British psychiatrist who's written a lot about the way the divided brain, the left hemisphere and right hemisphere, have shaped culture.
Ian says that we as a civilization lean so heavily into the left hemisphere, that is the analytical, mathematical, scientific side, that we have starved the knowledge of truth that comes to us through the right hemisphere and those ways of knowing, that is through religion, through poetry, art, music, that sort of thing, that we have now made ourselves utterly miserable and lost.
The answer to this is not to throw off the rational and embrace the intuitive and the emotional wholeheartedly.
The answer is to achieve balance, because that is how a healthy brain works.
But what we have to do is stop seeing poetry, art, religion, that sort of thing as mere add-ons to reality, which is scientific and mathematical.
There's actually so much more going on in reality than the hardcore rationalist and materialists want us to think.
And to be honest, man, you know, the thing that concerns me more than anything, more than even the survival of my country's democracy, is the survival of the Christian church in this era of dechristianization.
One of the things I've learned in working on this book is that the younger generation, Gen Z, they're done with new atheism.
That shocked me.
But a young man approached me in Oxford, an Anglican seminarian, 27 years old from London.
He said, the thing I want you to know as you're working on this book is that the new atheism is dead, my generation.
That's for your generation.
I said, so what are they replacing it with?
He told me the occult.
Like, damn, what do you mean?
Yeah.
And he said that, you know, nobody want in his generation wants God.
They want the experience of the transcendent, of the numinous.
They want the woo, but they don't think they're going to get it in churches.
And in many churches, they might not, you know, churches that suppress this sort of thing.
But it's also the case that they want this experience without having to sacrifice themselves and surrender to God.
So they end up going to the occult and they end up going to psychedelic drugs to have this experience.
And they're opening up doors that should not be open.
But this young man was trying to convince me that this is Both a terrible danger for the young, but also a great opportunity.
Because if you have young people or anybody, but especially young people who are open to the transcendent, to experiencing the transcendent, that allows us to have, we Christians, to have an audience with them and help them to understand that what they're really looking for is there in the Christian faith.
Unfortunately, we Christians make it too hard for them to find it nowadays, but I really do think that that's starting to change.
That's a really, I was thinking they want the woo, but not the who.
Well said.
Fictions And Truths00:03:54
But it is, you know, it is interesting.
And this connects to something that obviously is very important to me, which is the arts.
One of the things that Yuval Harari says is that all these things that we take to be truths are in fact just fictions.
And I reacted to that immediately by thinking that's not how fiction works.
Fiction is bad when it doesn't refer to something unspeakable that cannot be spoken in any other way, but through painting, but through a novel, but through a story.
I mean, that is what fiction is doing.
It is telling truths.
It can't be spoken directly.
And to just sort of say, well, it's just a fiction, therefore it's not true, is to miss what fiction is.
And it plays into this kind of disregard for the arts that I think has infected our society.
I have to ask you, when we came on before we started recording, I asked you where you were and you said you were in a foreign country.
I don't know how much you want people to know about where you were.
You're in Budapest.
You're in Budapest.
But what made you leave and what are you looking for?
And will you come back?
Well, I fell in love with Hungary when I was over in this part of the world, the former communist countries in 2019 doing research for my book, Live Not By Lies, which is about the message that people who survived communism have for us in the West about how to resist the new coming totalitarianism we're dealing with now.
I found that the people generally in the Eastern Bloc are much more sensible about the dangers we face.
They can see the soft totalitarianism coming out of wokeness.
And I found it really, I wanted to live among these people.
Plus, I'm an admirer of the Hungarian government, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is demonized as a fascist and all these terrible things in the West.
When I actually got here for a fellowship in 2021 and lived here for a short time, I realized this is a great country.
What do they mean fascists?
The streets are safe.
They're not, migrant crime is not a thing and on and on.
And I told our friend Tucker Carlson, said, you need to come over here.
There's a story here that our media aren't telling.
Tucker came that summer, broadcast him here for a week, and it began to change the narrative about Hungary.
I began to think as a conservative who's interested in politics that the experience of the Hungarian government and Viktor Orban, they have a lot to teach us American conservatives about how not to get rolled by the left, even when we take power.
But the real reason I came is because in 2022, my wife filed for divorce.
My oldest son needed to get out.
He finished college and just wanted to get out of the U.S.
I had an opportunity to come to Hungary, do work over here, trying to understand this country and how its politics might relate to ours back in America, and also to travel around Europe, building a network of conservative thinkers, especially conservative religious thinkers for future conferences.
And I thought, why not?
You know, let's see what God has for me in this foreign country.
And it's been great.
It's been a place to heal from divorce.
I do expect to come back to America at some point and maybe live half time once I can reconnect with my children who are still back in America.
But I tell you, man, I have learned so much about my own country, our country, from living over here.
One of the most disturbing things I've learned, Andrew, is how rotten our popular culture is and how much we are inflicting on the rest of the world.
Whenever I would travel promoting the foreign language versions of Live Not By Lies, when I would travel to the Czech Republic and Poland and so forth, inevitably I would get a question from somebody around my age or older.
They would say, sir, when we were in the Cold War under Soviet domination, we looked to you Americans for hope and for light.
And now we're afraid of you.
A Journey Filled with Hope00:04:03
What happened?
And all I could tell them was, you know, people like me in America, religious conservatives, we're afraid of the people in power too.
And we are in this together.
That, I would tell them, is why I'm coming here and trying to tell your stories to the American people.
So we can learn from you about what we're dealing with and how to resist it.
Happily, Andrew, Angel Studios is funding a documentary film about Live Not By Lies.
It's almost finished.
And we're going to be able to spread the wisdom that these good men and women, these heroic men and women who stood up when it was, when you could get thrown in jail or lose your life for standing up, I want them to be known to our people.
So maybe they can help us as we once helped them.
Yeah.
No, Doug Murray says we used to be an exporter of good ideas and now we're the exporter of bad ideas.
And I think that's unfortunately, sadly true.
I only got a minute or so left.
I want to ask you a final question because I'm really interested in this.
You talk about the things that people see, the angels that they see, the demons that they see, the reality of the numinous world that can be seen.
Have you ever seen it?
And is there something that you do that you hope will help you see it?
I mean, I'm very much, I reject the idea of this ayahuasca and these drugs.
I mean, you can drug yourself into seeing anything.
And yet it does seem that these things are available to some and not to all.
How do you deal with that?
Well, I believe that ayahuasca and all these psychedelic drugs are dangerous because they work.
I think we don't know how they work, but I think they do open up doors that shouldn't be opened.
But I've had things happen to me, small miracles, things like that, that have brought me closer to God.
But most of my own enchantment is in the everyday and learning to see God and other people and beauty and things like that.
I'm drawn closer to him.
And of course, through prayer.
But I can tell you this, man, this is something that just happened.
It's not in the book.
I have been struggling for all my life with a sense of shame because of the way I was raised.
My dad, I knew I was a disappointment to my dad, and I worked really hard to deal with that.
My dad died 10 years ago.
He was one of the greatest men I've ever known, but this was a legacy of my childhood.
And with the divorce and everything, I've been struggling with depression.
I had this intuition in prayer recently that maybe there's something spiritual here, a form of spiritual oppression.
And when I went back to the U.S. about five weeks ago, my confessor was there, who is also a trained exorcist.
And I said, look, maybe I'm crazy, but would you please pray over me that if there are any dark spirits, a spirit of shame or anything else, that they would depart.
So he prayed for 20 minutes over me.
He said, any spirits, go to the foot of the cross where Christ will deal with you.
I didn't feel anything.
Nothing happened.
Next morning, I woke up in a different world, Andrew.
I'm not kidding.
I'm getting tears even thinking about it.
I felt that the dark cloud that had been over me for all my adult life was gone.
I felt that I had been wearing this heavy, wet woolen blanket, and I thought it was my skin.
It was gone.
I was so filled with joy and the light of the Lord.
And I can't even believe I'm talking to you like this.
I sound like a Bible thumper, but I cannot deny what God did for me.
I don't know why it took the prayers of a priest like that to set me free when I've been praying all my life for this release, but it happened.
And that was five weeks ago.
Every morning I wake up in the same way, just filled with gratitude for life.
I have not had a single compulsive suicidal thought since this happened.
I was never at real risk for suicide, but I thought about it all the time as a way to escape the pain.
Gone, gone by the grace of God and through the prayers of a priest.
This is the kind of enchantment that sustains me.
I may never see an angel.
I hope I never see a demon, but God has touched me in a miraculous way.
And I hope this book I've written gives him glory and helps other people to know there is hope.