Ep. 1228 – White Lotus America mocks a 1968-style protest on Capitol steps, where Corey Booker’s speech mocked "perverse pornography" claims while pushing virtue-signaling, exposing media bias against Trump’s first 100 days—92% negative coverage despite border crackdowns (180K→3/month), price drops, and China tariffs—contrasted with Biden’s 59% positive ratings. The segment ties media failures to Democratic collusion, like ignoring Biden’s alleged dementia while hyping Trump’s election fraud lies, and warns that abundance breeds complacency, mirroring The White Lotus’s critique of privilege and modern materialism’s emptiness. Ultimately, it frames conservative principles as a bulwark against cultural decay, urging direct truth-telling in relationships and strategic legal battles over media narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
Democrats have been trying to come up with a fresh, original way to express their political positions, and this week they finally found one.
A sit-in.
An idea so fresh and original, no one has thought of it since 1968, when leftism was still cool.
Because everyone was taking hallucinogens.
Not only was leftism cool, but there was also a giant pink rat eating your feet while you screamed for mercy.
The 12-hour sit-in on the steps of the Capitol came on the heels of an eight-hour sleep-in, where individual protesters expressed their views by lying unconscious on their beds at home for an entire night.
That was followed by a 45-minute eat-in, where the group gathered at various coffee shops and restaurants to defiantly drink coffee and eat some eggs and bacon with buttered toast and maybe a touch of strawberry jam.
They then proceeded to the Capitol steps and in a stunningly brave statement of opposition to something or other, actually sat down and continued sitting in a way that would have made it very difficult for people to walk up the Capitol steps if they hadn't been on their way to Michigan for the Trump rally.
The event was intended to inspire more support for Democrat policies, like allowing gangster illegals to remain in our country, cutting the testicles off little boys so their mentally ill parents can pretend they're little girls, reading perverse pornography to kindergartners in public schools, and destroying our energy supplies and replacing them with gigantic windmills so that when China takes us over, they won't have any electricity either.
To raise the inspiration level to even greater heights, the sit-in included a homosexual rabbi who led a sing-along while everyone around him joined in by averting their eyes and pretending they were someplace else where something different was happening.
After the sing-along, Corey Booker, the senator from the state of Completely Ridiculous, made a speech to the imaginary multitude who would have been there had they not been on their way to Michigan.
Booker said, quote, First of all, I want to thank the rabbi for violating every Old Testament precept to show his support for homosexuality today.
It takes tremendous courage for a Jewish man to stand up in opposition to the law God gave to Moses, since in the past that has never worked out very well.
Even now, there's a man with a free Palestine sign sitting right behind him, so things are not looking good because as we all know, the Palestinians would happily behead the homosexual rabbi and everyone he loves given half a chance.
And so thank you for your courage, homosexual rabbi.
And I say this even though I myself am not at all homosexual.
In fact, I have a girlfriend in Canada where I sometimes visit her to have sex in a very manly male-to-female way that is not homosexual at all.
Because I am Spartacus, or at least I enjoy wearing a short leather skirt and prancing around without my shirt on, which amounts to the same thing in my book, a book that should be read to every five-year-old in public schools across this country so we can begin to change this culture until I don't have to live this lie anymore.
But in the meantime, let me just say, this is a moral moment.
And no, I don't know what that means exactly either, but it makes me sound very strong and masculine, so I guess it's sort of like having a girlfriend in Canada.
And in a moral moment like this moral moment, it is time for everyone to sit down like we're doing here today and then continue sitting down until we have been sitting down for a very long time.
That will surely improve the messaging for our insane and evil policies.
⁇ After Booker's stirring speech, the sit-in continued for another half hour, during which President Trump deported more gangsters, killed more terrorists, brought down prices, isolated China, ended government censorship, dismantled racialist hiring practices, protected women's sports, and lifted an ABC anchorman by the ankles, then dipped his head in tar.
But the sit-in was important too.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
All right, we are back, laughing our way through 100 days of laughing.
If you have a comment here, no matter where you are getting the show, if you're buying it on the street from a guy in a raincoat or watching it on YouTube, wherever you are, leave a comment.
And if that comment is absolutely despicable, racist, sexist, just completely unacceptable among any polite or even decent human being, we will read it on the air because that's how we are here.
Today's comment comes from Coffee Man Andrew, who says, last week's opening monologue was so funny that I pre-ordered the Kingdom of Cain.
Sometimes I look around society and shake my head, muttering, those poor clavenless bastards.
That's funny.
I do that too.
I walk around all the time saying those poor clavenless bastards.
Also, this is my last chance to ask you to pre-order Kingdom of Cain.
Pre-orders, for some reason, help the publishers possibly push it onto a bestseller list, which is what we're looking for with this book.
Very hard to get a religious book or a book concerning religion on the bestseller list, but we'll give it a shot.
And I wish you would if you can.
If you'd like to buy the book, which you do want to do, you may not know it yet, but you do.
Go out and pre-order on Amazon, Kingdom of Cain, Finding God in the Literature of Darkness.
It comes out Tuesday, so there won't really be any delay in your getting it.
And the book is about very famous real-life murders that have been made into stories, movies, novels, even poems again and again.
Even one of the murderers' hands was put on display, mummified, and put on display in a museum.
And it's really about how art and artists can turn even human evil into profound, wise, illuminating works of beauty that point towards God.
So it will change your life, maybe for the better.
I hope for the better.
I think you will really like it.
If you like the show, you will love this book, I promise.
Kingdom of Cain, Finding God in the Literature of Darkness.
If you could go out and pre-order it, we would be grateful and you will be ultimately grateful too.
Now we will get to today's episode, which is White Lotus America.
And just for those of you who haven't watched White Lotus on HBO, it's the third season of a series, a mini-series.
It's a black comedy about very wealthy patrons of various high-priced hotels at exciting locations around the world.
That's the White Lotus.
That's the White Lotus Chain.
And it's written and directed by a guy named Mike White.
And I finally, it took me a while to get to watch the third season because I was watching Severance.
But I liked this third season a lot more than most people did.
I thought it was actually the best season.
Some people thought it was slowly paced, but I just really liked it because the characters were absolutely fascinating.
The scenery was fascinating.
And unlike most Hollywood shows now, what makes this show special and what makes it gripping is that Mike White makes fun of his own culture.
He makes fun of the elites, the Hollywood people, the rich people, which is largely leftist culture.
Leftists are now the elite people, not the working class people as it used to be.
And so, you know, most Hollywood stuff, as we all know, is, you know, Trump bad, you know, and people who like Trump are bad.
Those stupid people out in Kansas.
You know, we're going to make them, but if they're nice, they'll be liberals.
But in this latest series, it even features a Trump supporter who doesn't turn out to be mean or cruel or anything.
In fact, he was one of the more likable characters in the show.
And despite the fact that Mike White himself is famously a bisexual, he had a man he was living with.
I think that may have ended.
He does not have what we would call a conservative sex.
But the sex in the show, interestingly enough, he has a lot of respect for family and for marriage.
And most of the really satisfying sex scenes where the people like each other are between traditionally married people.
And even though there's no strict theology in the show, there's a sense of the sacred, which gives it a kind of realism that most modern TV shows don't have.
But the reason I want to talk about it today is because it tells us, like all good art, it tells us something about our current situation, I think.
And in particular, it is about the price we sometimes pay for living in a time and place of abundance.
You know, I have absolutely nothing against abundance.
I'm in favor of abundance.
But my experience, wherever God puts you, he gives you choices.
And he, you know, he puts you in a situation, might be a good situation, might be a bad situation, but whatever it is, there are choices.
And whatever choice you make, there's going to be a price you pay.
So, you know, you can choose whether you're going to pay this price or that price and whether it's worth it to pay that price.
And in abundance, when you're rich, when you're safe and when you're healthy, there are many more choices and you can absorb certain prices without really feeling them.
They'll affect your soul, but you might not feel them because you can buy your way out of them.
So, you know, a perfect example is a woman can sleep around, but when she gets pregnant, she's going to have a choice.
Do I keep this baby?
Do I get married?
Do I go forward alone and raise the child?
And whatever she does, there will be a price to pay.
And we live in this time when the corrupt world, which is represented by the media, will tell you there is no price.
There's no price for having an abortion.
The baby will just be gone.
It'll be fine.
It's just convenient.
And you can go on and live your life and start your career.
And you won't have this.
You won't be punished by a baby, as Barack Obama once said.
But the fact is, the fact is, whatever you do, there will be a price.
If you have an abortion, whether you are clutched by guilt by recognizing what it is exactly that you've done, or you have to rework your mind in order to call evil good because you can't face what you've done.
You can't actually bring yourself to repent.
Whatever you do, there will be a price.
With antidepressants, same thing.
You can change your life or you can take a pill and never not feel your depression anymore.
But whichever you do, there will be a price.
And those prices can be disguised and they can be hidden.
And that's kind of what the show is about.
You know, abundance is dangerous.
In fact, you might even say, how can I put this?
You might even say that you can get tired of winning.
We're going to win so much.
We're going to win at every level.
We're going to win economically.
We're going to win with the economy.
We're going to win with military.
We're going to win with healthcare and for our veterans.
We're going to win with every single facet.
Zip-ba-dee-doo-dah, zip-ba-dee-ay.
My, oh my, what a wonderful day.
We're going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning.
Yay!
You say, please, please, it's too much winning.
We can't take it anymore.
I feel pretty.
Oh, so pretty.
I feel pretty and witty and gay.
We have to keep winning.
We have to win more.
I don't know.
We weren't supposed to play that anymore.
I don't know how that got in there.
Today I want to look at some of the negative ways in which our national life is affected by abundance in this moment of politics and the first 100 days of the Trump administration.
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Chapter 1, 100 Days.
So ever since FDR, he had these flurry of New Deal plans as his administration started.
The first 100 days of a president's term is supposed to be indicative of something, something, something.
It's an absolutely meaningless, stupid tradition.
But who am I to not be meaningless and stupid?
That's one of the things we aim to do here.
So let's take a look at the first 100 days.
But I actually want to take a look at it in terms of this idea of abundance, because this is one of the things that's making me a little bit crazy because the media has learned nothing.
They've learned nothing from their complete humiliation in the last election, even more than the Democrat Party, although the Democrat Party and the media are inseparable, but even more than the Democrat Party itself, the media was rendered utterly irrelevant, but they haven't changed at all, which is really interesting.
Media Research Center says the new Trump administration has faced a withering 92% negative coverage from ABC, CBS, and NBC.
And a lot of people say, well, who cares who's watching them anymore?
But they have 19 million viewers and more, which makes them the most widely watched news programs in the country.
I always remind people of this: that everybody goes, Fox News, Fox News.
They have nowhere near the audience of the networks.
And the network's highly negative coverage, again, reading from MRC of President Trump stands in stark contrast to the mostly positive coverage they provided Joe Biden four years ago, which was 59% positive.
That's 60% of that guy who's barely even president.
And it says, even on immigration, the issue where the public gives the president his highest ratings, the network spin was 93% negative.
And out of nearly four hours of evening news airtime devoted to immigration, these newscasts spent just 3.5 minutes letting viewers know just how much Trump has reduced border crossings, which basically was like winning a battle.
I mean, 180,000 people in one month came across, and now it's nobody, like three people come across.
That's like winning a battle.
You know, it's an invasion, and he won a battle.
And yes, that should be big news.
And of course, it's not.
And so you get this nonsense.
Trump was interviewed by Terry Moran at ABC.
And Trump legitimately, you know, he goes after these reporters.
And sometimes he's right, and sometimes he's just giving them a hard time.
This time, he was just completely in the right.
Here's just a quick clip of Trump and Moran.
Let's cut three.
Since I came in, gasoline is down, groceries are down, egg prices are down, many things are down, just about everything.
You know, you don't have the drop in fuel and energy and oil like we did.
I took it from maybe $3.20, maybe more than that, down into a much lower number.
Ukraine's Economic Predicament00:10:25
When you have that kind of a drop, you're not going to have inflation.
Not now.
But it's the tariffs, right?
We still have 145% tariffs on China.
Your Treasury Secretary said, we basically have an embargo on China.
Look, you're trying to say something's going to happen.
No, sorry, no, okay, well nothing's going to happen.
You know business.
I want to ask you.
I want to ask you.
I do know business.
And so 145% tariffs on China.
And that is basically an embargo.
They deserve it.
It'll raise prices on everything from electronics to clothing to building housing.
I mean, this is the thing they're all doing.
It's like getting the news from the ghost of Christmas yet to come.
Remember in the Christmas Carol where he tells you the things that might be, but not the things that will be.
If you read the Wall Street Journal, which is the business paper and it's supposed to have a slightly conservative tilt, but it really doesn't anymore.
It thinks it does, but it doesn't.
And it's just so anti-Trump.
And their headlines are like, prices have not gone up, but they might.
You know, Trump signs deal with Ukraine, but challenges persist.
Like, in what field do challenges not persist?
When do challenges end, except for death?
You know, the stock market ends tumultuous April.
That was a headline.
And I thought, yeah, but they left out one word.
It ends in tumultuous April up.
You know, just two words, UP, just stick them in there.
And that would be a more honest headline.
But they never, never do it.
Basically, the Wall Street Journal has decided to differentiate itself from the rest of the news media by becoming exactly like the rest of the news media.
It's like watching Homer Simpson sink into the ivy.
So they do all this negative news, and then they relish the fact that Trump's approval polls are going down, and they are going down.
But Trump pointed out in his Michigan rally that these are fake polls to the extent that Trump won about 50% of the electorate, but his voters made up around 38% of the polls.
So they're actually are slanting the polls.
But he still has lost, you know, because of the economy, he has lost some ground with people because he hasn't done, because he's doing something long-term.
It's causing some turmoil.
It's causing some problems.
He said it was going to.
He said during his campaign that it was going to.
But, you know, he says it won't last long.
And so people don't have a lot of patience because we live in a time of abundance.
But he has a lot to brag about.
He gave his Michigan speech.
It was very powerful.
Here's just a clip of that cut for.
The last administration engineered a massive border invasion, allowing gangs, cartels, and terrorists to infiltrate our communities and rape and murder our citizens.
And that is being nice about it.
That's actually being nice about it.
They are the worst.
But standing before you today, I can proudly report that this heinous betrayal is over and that we have achieved the most secure border in American history by far.
I mean, that's the thing that got him elected the first time.
And it was with the economy, one of the two things that he ran on this time.
And add to that, he just struck a mining deal with Ukraine that has the Russians going crazy.
The Russians saying, Ukraine will cease to exist.
You know, that just means that he got him because this is without asking him to join NATO, which would be an unnecessary provocation of Russia.
I think Russia has a point about not letting Ukraine join NATO, but it still gives America some skin in the game there, which makes it harder for Putin to maneuver.
And he did this because Putin wouldn't listen to him and wouldn't come to the table and sit down.
He kept saying, yes, yes, I'll come to the table and then throwing missiles into Ukraine.
And this was an absolutely clever response.
Maybe it grew out of that kind of iconic picture you saw in St. Peter's where they met and they were huddling over the chair with a beautiful painting of the baptism of Christ in the back rock.
Howard Lutnik at Treasury says he's made a big tariff deal, which is probably with India.
He won't name it, but it's probably with India.
And that would be huge news for the markets because everyone wants to make sure that people are going to gather.
But with Trump, the big thing, as I keep saying, is always China.
China is in the back of his mind.
Even the way he says it in the back of it, China, China, it's in the back of his mind.
He is betting, as he just said to Terry Moran, that they can't afford to have their goods tariffed into oblivion.
Now, you heard what Moran said.
He said, oh, but prices will go up.
Now, first of all, I think we should point out China has said just now, just yesterday, I think, that they are now willing to come to the table.
You know, China, the Chinese have a big thing is saving face in that culture.
And Trump understands that, and he's not trying to humiliate them, but they do have to sit down and talk because they've been basically just taking money out of our country and we're in debt to them.
They're handling our debt.
They're buying up our debt.
So let's just pretend for a minute.
Let's just imagine, you know, close your eyes, put on your imagining cap.
Let's just imagine that China is a predatory imperialist slave state where nobody is free.
Everything they do is recorded on the cloud and is seen by the Communist Party.
And if they even criticize the president or they criticize the party, their kids can't go into school.
They can't get jobs.
They are just completely controlled by social means.
And so it's a slave state.
It's predatory and it is imperialist.
It wants to take over everything.
It wants not just to compete with us.
It wants to crush us and ultimately take us over.
And, you know, they'll take over Taiwan and that'll cripple us.
And eventually their economic domination will become military domination.
And because as we found out during the pandemic, their supply, our supply lines go through them.
So even if we want to fight a war with them, we'll have to ask them, please, to sell us the bullets.
You know, that is the situation.
So Trump is trying to change that.
We are in a Cold War and he's trying to change that.
And I want you to listen to the level of stupidity that journalists question this move.
Here is Martha Raditz interviewing Scott Bassant, the Treasury Secretary.
And she shows a film of a small businessman who has bought all these tchotchkis from China and he says, I'm going to have to set them on fire because they're going to cost so much because of the tariffs and I'll go out of business.
And here's the interview she has with Bessant from the Treasury Cut 5.
The administration says it's worried about Main Street, not Wall Street.
But you heard that small businessman saying his inventory in China might as well be lit on fire because already what has happened and the concern about what's happening next.
How do they plan for things if they don't know what's going to happen?
Well, what they know is that the China tariffs are unsustainable because the Chinese cannot sustain this.
That if the business people, like the gentleman you interviewed, stop ordering, China has no business model.
Their business model is predicated on selling cheap subsidized goods to the U.S.
And if there is a sudden stop in that, they will have a sudden stop in the economy.
So they will negotiate.
Well, look, some of the leaders of the big box stores, Walmart, Target, delivered a warning to President Trump that some of the shelves could be empty within a matter of weeks.
I know you're looking forward, but this is a concern right now.
It's a concern right now.
We have no business looking forward.
China, because it's a slave state, can have a 100-year plan.
Your plan has to work by close of business day today.
Okay.
Here's just another one of Trump being asked about toy stores, you know, not getting little Chinese-made toys is cut too.
When you speak to President Xi of China, what happens?
I mean, look, right now, and I told you before, they're having tremendous difficulty because their factories are not doing business.
They made a trillion dollars with Biden, a trillion dollars, even a trillion one with Biden selling this stuff.
Much of it we don't need.
You know, somebody said, oh, the shelves are going to be open.
Well, maybe the children will have $2 instead of $30, you know.
And maybe the $2 will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.
Now, think about that for a minute.
Maybe a child will have $2 instead of $30.
And this made headlines that he would dare, dare to tell Americans that for a period of time, they might only have $2 instead of $30.
That's talking about abundance.
Because the thing is, whatever situation you're in, you adapt to that situation.
So we've been in this situation for years where our elites have been selling ourselves, selling our country to China.
That's what they've been doing.
And some of them have been profiting off it as well.
If you read some of the books that have come out about the corruption, and this is on both sides of the aisle, by the way, this is not Republican and Democrat.
Nancy Pelosi, for whom I have no love as a politician, has been very good about China and obviously is not bought off by them, but a lot of other politicians on both the right and the left are.
And so we adapt to this and we say, yeah, I'm going to bring in these cheap goods.
But obviously, if this is a predatory imperialist slave state that wants to take over the world, it might be a good thing to stop them.
It might be a good thing to have a little bit less, have things that are a little less expensive.
You know, Apple is now not going to make their iPhones in China.
They'll make them in India, which is a friendly country and the largest democracy in the world.
They're our fellow democracy.
That's a better situation that Trump engineered with these tariffs that we have heard nothing but disaster about all this time.
So we are in a Cold War with a massive, massive, powerful, predatory country that is building up its military at rates that have nothing, you know, that we can't even begin to match.
And we can't fight that Cold War.
Why?
Because our cities are being bombed?
Because we're being called like the British during World War II to have a stiff upper lip while our towns are being destroyed?
Because our food supplies have been cut off like we're in a siege or because it's like our women are being carried away and we have to surrender in order to keep our fat.
No, it's because maybe things are going to cost a little more for a while.
Maybe you're not going to be able to sell tchotchkes as cheaply as you could before.
Maybe you might have a little double.
That's why.
Because we might lose a bit of our abundance to stay America, to stay free, to stay, to keep our values alive that have been handed down to us from ancient Greece.
No, no, no.
That's the future.
That's the future.
We can't do that right now.
The media wants us to act like a gigantic fat man who can't have as much ice cream as he wants and thinks that that is a disaster.
It's abundance is a beautiful thing.
I'm not knocking it, but abundance, like everything else in life, has a price.
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Soul Searching Online00:08:41
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Chapter two, the corrupt media is corrupt.
Now, here's something else that is absolutely amazing.
The media had its annual White House correspondence dinner where usually I think the president shows up, but of course he didn't.
It would be ridiculous to do that.
And they usually have a comedian, but the comedian was like such a communist, they canceled her.
So much soul-searching among the media.
One of the things the media loves to do is pretend that it's soul-searching.
Their positive credibility rate is down now to like one old man who sits by the window remembering how pleasant it was to watch Walter Cronkite with his wife.
You know, that's like basically the people who still trust the media.
So you've got some very, very serious soul searching.
Here is, let's make sure I've got the right guy.
This is from Axios.
This is Alex Thompson talking about some of the things they might have overlooked during the Biden administration.
This is Cut 6.
To my bones, I believe that reporting and the White House Correspondence Association is as necessary as ever.
President Biden's decline and its cover-up by the people around him is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception.
But being truth tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves.
We, myself included, missed a lot of this story.
And some people trust us less because of it.
We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows.
All right.
Now, remember you heard this here, all right?
Because you're hearing this a lot, that people are sort of soul-searching about the fact that they missed, as they say, they missed Biden, the fact that Biden had dementia and he was sagging really from the beginning of his presidency, okay?
That admission is a cover-up, okay?
They didn't lie about Biden's abilities.
They lied about everything.
They got caught lying about Biden's abilities.
So they have nothing to lose by admitting it because we all saw it during that debate with Trump when the guy was wandering around.
He wasn't even sure where he was.
But they're admitting to that to cover up the fact and obscure the fact that they lied about Russian collusion.
And then they gave themselves political prizes for lying about it.
They lied about Trump saying there were good people on both sides.
Remember that one?
They lied about the COVID-China leak.
They lied about the COVID vaccine.
They lied about Fauci and whether he contributed to the pandemic, which he did.
They told us it was dangerous to go to church, but it was magically fine to have a race riot.
They told us the race riots weren't riots.
They lied about the election, that it was the most honest of all time.
They lied about January 6th and how much violence there was and who committed it.
They have lied about everything.
They just got caught lying about Joe Biden.
And after they finished their soul searching, they're all going to agree with Chuck Todd.
Listen, this is Chuck Todd talking to Chris Saliza.
Listen to how Todd plays this, Cut 7.
This is not a media failure.
This is a failure of the Democratic Party.
And I just sort of the virtue signaling that some people have done to try to say that the media missed this story.
They didn't miss this story.
David Ignatius wrote, I just refuse to accept this stupid premise because it's a right-wing, manufactured right-wing premise in order to stain the media.
The media has got plenty of things to attack them for.
And there are MSNBC and CNN and pundits that absolutely carried water for Joe Biden.
But they're not journalists.
They're former strategists that carried water for Joe Biden.
The journalist, David Ignatius, wrote a very high-profile column in October of 23 saying, is he really running again?
This doesn't seem like a good idea.
People like me were promoting Dean Phillips' campaign because he was running Wall Street Journal.
So reporters couldn't possibly see what every conservative in America could see, what I was writing entire satires about, because the Democrats lied to them as if the Democrats were, I don't know, politicians.
So it's the Democrats' fault that journalists believed politicians and didn't look into what they were saying because they didn't look at what was right in front of their eyes.
And my favorite part of that is that last part where Chris Saliza says the Wall Street Journal covered this.
Yeah, the Wall Street Journal covered and was slammed by every outlet for daring to say that Joe Biden was not doing so.
Well, Robert Hurr, when he investigated him, said we can't prosecute Joe Biden because he's just an old, nice old man without a good memory.
They slammed him for that.
So this is another problem with abundance.
It feeds your pride and it freezes you in place, even when you're wrong.
If you ever notice, I mean, I've seen a lot of people who get successful, they get rich, and they have no motivation to change because they think, well, if there's something wrong with me, I wouldn't be so rich.
I wouldn't have been successful.
My flaws were part of what made me great, which is almost always untrue.
It's like people who think, it's like alcoholic writers who think alcohol is stirring their creativity until they're about 45 and then they can never write a good book ever again.
The media developed a business model because they were leftist.
And because leftism was collapsing, the leftist model was collapsing and was making things worse.
The media developed a business model of playing only to the left, of selling leftism and hoping everyone would come along.
And if you didn't come along, they started to attack you and demonize you.
You were sexist, you were racist, you were all these terrible things, and then finally silence you by having you taken down off social media and not allowed on YouTube.
And they were finally foiled by the fact, two things, the invention of the internet, and this is America.
This is not Great Britain where you can arrest somebody for praying silently.
They want to, they'd love to, but now they've been caught with their pants down and they can't change their minds without sacrificing the audience they have.
They're in the same way as people who don't want their little souvenirs from China to cost a little more because that's their business model and they've been doing great on it, even though it's destroying the country.
And the same thing is true with these, I can't even use the words that I would use to describe the media.
As they always say online, you don't hate the media anywhere enough.
And just to put a word of cautious caution in so we ourselves don't become proud.
We're in a little bit of the same pickle with these Jew haters online, these anti-Semites who, you know, listen, I really try in life, I do, to be a nice guy, but I have a mean streak.
And so I kind of enjoy watching the anti-Semites twist their souls into something damnable.
You know, I think, oh, look, he's going to hell.
That's funny.
But I shouldn't be that way.
But what I don't want is I don't want them to destroy the conservative movement because the conservative movement is mostly about freedom.
That's what I think it's about.
It's about preserving the system that we have that actually preserved our freedom and is so under the gun right now.
But the thing is, there aren't that many Jew haters in the right-wing movement, but they form a piece of a lot of our audiences.
And we don't want to alienate them unless you're me, because I'm on a mission from God.
So I'm happy to alienate them and lose audience, but it's bad.
You know, nobody wants to lose audience.
And so a chunk of your audience, if you're on the right, hates the Jews.
And so nobody wants to say anything and say, you know what, like Israel is a good country and we should help them with their defense, just like we should help every free country stay alive.
And so, you know, there is a price you pay for everything.
We are winning right now on the right.
There's no question that we are winning right now.
That is not an illusion.
But it doesn't mean you don't have to hook your wagon to the star of God.
You know, you still have to do the right thing and follow not the, you don't follow the success.
You Follow the Principles That Gave You Success00:03:08
You follow the principles that gave you the success.
And sometimes that means it's going to cost you a little bit of success in order to get to the next stage of even greater success, which is what Trump is saying in terms of the tariffs, right?
He's saying he's not trying to be protectionist.
He's trying to stop people who are being protectionists and closing their markets to us and then using our markets to sell their goods.
That's what he's trying to do.
That makes sense because then you can get back to free markets and capitalism.
And then the Wall Street Journal will be happy again because all their rich readers, their stock portfolio will go up again as we want it to.
It's not that I'm against that.
It's just that sometimes you have to sacrifice for something bigger.
You have to sacrifice a little bit to keep things alive.
And that is true on the right as it is on the left.
The left won't do it, but we have to keep to our principles, which are about liberty, about ordered liberty, about morality, about the Constitution, about our traditions.
So we cannot forget in our abundance, in our winning, that sometimes you got to lose a little to keep on winning.
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Chapter 3, Congress is Useless.
Now, the thing I was saying before about abundance is like people are always asking, you know, are you better off than you were, you know, when, remember that was Reagan's line, when he was running for president, he said, are you better off than you were four years ago?
And what everybody always means by that is abundance.
They mean, is your money going well?
Is your finance going well?
Very important, very important that the government keeps the economy on a fairly good track and hopefully leaves people free to do business and all these things that that's what makes the economy work.
Congress Is Useless00:07:41
But the question I'm always asking myself is, am I more free than I was before?
And I am more free and you are more free.
You have more free speech.
You have more freedom to express your opinion, more freedom to do what you want to do than you had under Joe Biden.
You know, Marco Rubio, who's doing a great job as Secretary of State and now is temporarily going to be the national security advisor because Mike Walsh has been moved, isn't being moved to the UN.
And they should put Sebastian Gorka in that national service.
That would be funny.
Mr. President, we must kill them right away.
I think it would make those cabinet meetings a lot more fun.
Marco Rubio came in and they have these wonderful cabinet meetings, these public cabinet meetings where everybody comes in and brags about what they're doing.
And Rubio came in and said he found in the State Department a bureau dedicated to censoring Americans, to censoring Americans.
Listen to this.
And the voice you hear in the background is VPJD.
It's Vance.
He chimes in on this as cut 11.
Something else we got out of the business of why it wasn't widely reported, or maybe it was.
We had an office in the Department of State whose job it was to censor Americans.
And by the way, I'm not going to say who it is.
I'll leave it up to them.
There's at least one person at this table today who had a dossier in that building, of social media posts to identify them as purveyors of disinformation.
We have these dossiers.
We are going to be turning those over to these individuals.
We can fall over the media.
Well, we are going to turn over these dossiers to the individuals, and they'll decide whether they want to disclose it or not.
But just think about the Department of State of the United States had set up an office to monitor the social media posts and commentary of American citizens to identify them as vectors of disinformation when we know that the best way to combat disinformation is freedom of speech and transparency.
And so that's what we're going to be in the business of doing.
We're not going to have an office that does that.
So Trump is Hitler because he's letting people speak.
As we heard before, remember when they told us on the news, was it CBS or ABC?
I can't remember.
They told us on the news that Hitler rose to power because of free speech.
Complete historical nonsense, but also just commonsensical nonsense.
So one of the people, a group of people who are also not doing anything, along with the media and along with businesses who are all complaining about making this transition so we can protect ourselves from China is Congress.
Obviously, Congress is at work on the Big Beautiful bill, and that is a wonderful thing.
But Kim Strassel, who had a great piece, I think it was today, actually, saying that as Congress pushes forward on the Big, Beautiful Trump economic bill that has to be put in place for his overall plan to work, you have to cut things in order to cut taxes.
So if you cut taxes, you're going to, you ultimately make more money, but if you cut taxes, you also have to cut spending.
So here's what Kim Strassel says.
She says, it's go time in Washington for the GOP reconciliation bill as House committees this week begin to flesh out their respective pieces of a plan to cut both taxes and spending, which means Republicans finally must grapple with an ugly truth within the party of quote-unquote limited government.
Most of them don't want to cut spending on anything, but it's the cuts that must come first.
Republicans have a solid idea of what needs doing in the tax realm, yet the final configuration will hinge on what they drum up in new revenue or offsets.
Committees have each been assigned spending reduction targets with an aggregate goal of at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years, which is nothing.
Okay.
It's nothing compared to the debt we have now.
So here's what happens.
Kim Strassel is still writing.
The Green New Deal, right?
The GOP can at least agree that Joe Biden's green energy handouts, which were called the Inflation Reduction Act, one of the great lies that also wasn't covered by the press.
The Green New Deal, the architecture of the left's Green New Deal is wasteful and distortionary, right?
Nope.
Just ask the 21 House Republicans led by New York's Andrew Garberino, whose districts are raking in the cash and who recently wrote a letter to House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith demanding the party retain hundreds of billions of dollars of green tax credits.
This is what the Democrats know, that the Republicans won't admit, that once you give Republicans money, they won't give it back.
Start Obamacare, they won't let you repeal it.
All of these things, as they always say, conservatives basically conserve what the liberals do, what the left does.
Trump wants to change that.
The Congress won't do it.
They're going to have to do it.
Medicaid outlays have increased by 51% since 2019.
The program is outpacing even Social Security and Medicare, pumped up by state scams, Biden-era waivers in the program's expansions to populations it was never meant to cover, yet Republicans are balking at any reforms.
And, you know, this is a problem.
Trump promised he was not going to cut Social Security and Medicare.
He's going to have to do that.
But Republicans believe in cutting, but they're not going to cut anything.
And the same is true, by the way, with all of these things.
You know, there's judges who won't let Trump deport these criminals.
A judge the other day just said, oh, no, you know, you can't deport criminals under the law because that would be unlawful.
You know, Trump is hoping, and he's doing this on purpose.
He's hoping the Supreme Court will stop these judges from doing that.
But why doesn't Congress just say they can't do it?
These are created judges.
The judges are created by Congress.
They can curtail them.
The fact that Congress has never been able to pass an immigration bill.
They never seem to pass anything but bills that make life worse, like Obamacare, and then they can't repeal them for fear that people will lose their government money.
They're afraid of Trump because he endangers the midterm.
So he's not, they make it impossible for him to do anything.
They're afraid of the media, and so they give the media power it actually no longer has with the people.
They pass everything off to these agencies.
That's why Elon Musk has to do what he's doing and Doge has to do what he's doing because they say, well, we won't do it.
It's these bureaucracy.
And then we go on Trump on Fox News and say how bad the bureaucracy is, but we won't shut those bureaucracies down.
We're not going to get rid of the Department of Education, which they could do by a vote.
They're going to leave it all to Trump.
They're going to leave it all to let Trump take the hits.
And, you know, I've said this before, the fall of the Republic looked a lot like it did now because the branches of government wouldn't do what they did and the Senate became frightened and wouldn't do anything.
They have an abundance of power.
People who will get into Congress have an abundance of power and they can't use their power if they want to hold on to it.
And that takes a little courage.
It means losing your seat, maybe losing an election, maybe having to work for a living.
But that's the thing you have to do.
And that's why I'm so in favor of term limits.
I think term limits are a great, great idea and we should get them right away because then at least we can say to them, you're leaving anyway.
Do your job.
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Pleasure Above Everything Else00:14:39
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Final chapter, The White Lotus.
So the White Lotus this season, this third season, took place in Thailand.
It's always the same thing.
These wealthy people, a group of wealthy people, it's one week always.
They show up in this incredibly gorgeous spa.
And the scenery is beautiful.
The titles are beautiful.
Everything about it is beautiful.
The people are beautiful.
And because it takes place in Thailand, there's a lot of nods to Buddhism.
And I have to say right away that Mike White didn't seem to do, I practiced Zen Buddhism a lot for many, many years.
And I have to say that he didn't really do a lot of research about this.
I think the Buddhism is really kind of cut and paste from Wikipedia.
Part of it is Hinduism.
But anyway, that doesn't matter.
It's just an entertainment.
But the thing is, there's one of the groups of people who are here is a wealthy family that has sunk into meaninglessness and dysfunction, even though they still love each other.
You know, there's always in the White Lotus, there's always a lot of respect for family and the bonds that hold us together.
And so it's a mother, a father, a daughter, and a son, and two sons, sorry.
And all of them in one way or another have dysfunction.
Jason Isaacs plays the father, and he is a businessman who has made a lot of money, but somewhere along the line, he has become, he has done something corrupt.
And on the phone, he's finding out that this is being exposed by the FBI, and he's in serious trouble.
So he's watching his family, you know, kind of love their, he's watching what money has turned his family into and realizing he may be about to lose all this money.
And so at one point, the daughter is trying to get away from this materialist lifestyle.
And she goes to visit a monastery in the hope, a Buddhist monastery in the hope that she can one day go and live there, or at least for a year.
And she finds out it's so difficult and she's so spoiled she can't do it.
And she goes back crying to her mother, who doesn't want her to do this at all.
And she goes back and says, I hate to say that I might be this spoiled person, but I am.
So the mother is played by Parker Posey, who turns in a lot.
There are a lot of great performances in this.
And Parker Posey does a great job.
And this is what she says to her daughter when her daughter starts to cry and says, I'm a spoiled princess.
And this is what she says, cut eight.
We're lucky.
It's true.
No one in the history of the world has lived better than we have.
Even the old kings and queens.
The least we can do is enjoy it.
If we don't, it's offensive.
It's an offense to all the billions of people who can only dream that one day they could live like we do.
Now, there's a lot of wisdom to that in some ways.
You know, you should enjoy your luck and your good luck.
And of course, you should be charitable and share some of your good luck with people who don't have it.
But at the same time, they're not really enjoying it.
Marker Posey's character is living on sedatives, that one of their sons is living on this kind of empty life of trying to go after every girl he can meet and using porn when he can't get a girl.
The other guy, a kid, is repressed.
We don't know what he's repressing, but he's obviously having some kind of trouble.
And the father has obviously committed a crime.
You know, he lost his way.
So they've all of them been sucked into this kind of world where consequences seem not to exist.
That is the problem with abundance.
You still have to make choices, but it seems like you don't have to pay the price.
There's a reason that Jesus said it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven.
It's not that being wealthy is bad in itself.
It just means it disguises the price you pay for doing the things you do.
So you don't feel those prices as much.
So the father goes and meets the Buddhist monk that his daughter wants to know.
And this is what the monk says to him about his monasteries, cut nine.
Many young people come here from your country.
I think because maybe spiritual malaise lost connection with nature, with the family, lost connection with the spirit.
What is left?
The self, identity.
Chasing money, pleasure.
Yeah?
Yeah, well, I see money and pleasure.
And by the way, the right wing is just as guilty of elevating this kind of lifestyle as the left.
I mean, there's a lot of people who think that basically libertarianism is all about, you know, America.
Yeah, America, we got the biggest cars.
We got the biggest dollar bills.
We got all the pleasure and all the girls and all that stuff.
And if you listen carefully to what he says, he says, all that's left is the self, which of course is a Buddhist idea and also a Christian idea that you have to give the self away.
You give the self away in order to find the self.
You lose yourself to find yourself.
And he says, you're obsessed by the self-identity.
And that's a hit.
That is a hit at the identity politics that basically says your flesh, you know, the color of your skin or your incidental thing is the incidents of your life are actually what define you instead of the spirit is what he's talking about.
And you have to, once you start to grab hold of that stuff, you have to keep your fists closed.
You can't change.
You can't examine the self.
As I said before, you can't look at your flaws because you think your flaws are what gave you that stuff that you've got clutched in your fist.
And again, this is not about money.
It's not money that's the root of all evil.
It's the love of money.
It's not pleasure that's bad.
It's putting pleasure above everything else.
The crowning moment of this show, and one of the crowning moments of any show I've seen, is a speech delivered by one of my favorite actors, Sam Rockwell.
He is just unbelievable to another one of my favorite actors, Walton Goggins, who has the role of listening to the speech, which he does incredibly well.
Walton Goggins, if you've never seen the last season of The Shield, he's a sensational actor.
And this is a terrific scene.
It's a man, these two guys are kind of petty thieves and they've made him enough money.
We don't know how exactly, some kind of heist that has brought them to Thailand, so they have some money.
And they sit down together and they used to party together.
But now Sam Rockwell's character says he is, he came here and started sleeping with Asian girls because he always had a thing for them.
And now he has become celibate, he's become Buddhist, and he's given up, he's become sober.
And this scene, this speech, some of it is so filthy, we can't play a lot of it, but let me just play a little bit of it.
The urgent part of it is cut 10.
I always had a thing for Asian girls, you know.
And when I got here, I was like a kid in a candy store.
If you got money, no attachments, nothing to do.
I started partying.
It got wild.
I was picking up girls every night.
Always different ones, petite ones, chubby ones, older ones, sometimes multiple ladies a night.
I was out of control.
I became insatiable.
And, you know, after about a thousand nights like that, you start to lose it.
I started to wonder, where am I going with this?
Why do I feel this need to f all these women?
What is desire?
The form of this cute Asian girl.
Why does it have such a grip on me?
Because she's the opposite of me.
Is she going to complete me in some way?
I realized I could f a million women, I'd still never be satisfied.
Maybe, maybe what I really want is to be one of these Asian girls.
He wants to be one of these Asian girls.
Of course, he winds up having homosexual relations.
He just gets crazier and crazier and crazier as the speech goes on.
So a lot of people on the right commented on this scene because they felt it was a sort of attack on transgenderism, which is the theory that transgenderism is really a fetish among men.
It's men who are turned on by the idea of being a girl.
And that is a fetish called autogynophilia.
And that is part of the speech.
That is part of what he's saying, but he's saying something a lot more than that.
The whole thing about life is that we are thrown up out of the great nothingness into ourselves.
And if our individual selves don't matter, then nothing that any of the religions ever said matter.
Remember what Jesus says: if you lose yourself, you'll find yourself.
He's not telling you to get rid of yourself.
He's telling you to find out who you really are instead of believing that your desires are who you are.
The incidents of your life are who you are.
There's something that you were made that is invisible, this spiritual thing that is who you are and it's unique.
But that's true of everybody else as well.
So when you start using people for sex, they start to lose that.
It starts to lose meaning.
Look, every guy who has been single and has lived an active sexual life when he is single starts to think about this for a minute.
You know, I'm really getting the same thing from every girl.
The only difference is the face because you're not paying attention to the human being who is in bed with you.
You're only paying attention to the body.
And that's what he's saying.
And what he's saying is ultimately what happens is everything disappears but one thing, you.
When he says, maybe I want to be one of these Asian girls, what he's saying is he's doing something holy for this body that he has and these desires.
And if you live only into your desires, if you glut yourself on sex or food or money or porn or video games or whatever it is that is filling that aching hole inside of you where God wants to go and fill you up and inflate you into who he made you to be, the more you discover to your horror that all you really desire is the you that you can't have because you've blocked that you through following your desires instead.
And both Buddhism and Christianity basically tell you to renounce those desires, but they tell you in different ways.
I mean, Christianity, I think, really understands that you're going to desire things, that your desires are tangents of your spirit.
They tell you where your spirit wants to go, but you can get confused.
You write a book because you love art and then you make money and think, oh, I really want to make more of that money.
That's not why you wrote it in the first place.
So, you know, we see this in all these journalists who won't admit they lied because they don't want to, they're hanging on to their power.
All these congressmen who won't do anything because they're hanging on to their power.
But let's not forget, this is a democracy.
We get what we deserve.
And that brings up us, you know, the people who put these people in power, the people who watch these people, the people who let the hatred filter in from social media and think like, yeah, that makes sense, hating everybody who's not myself or disagrees with myself, the anger that they try to gin up in us so that we'll be divided.
All of us, we are responsible for ourselves.
We too were put into a place and given choices to make.
And we have to make those choices every single day, sometimes every single second.
And we don't, you know, we want less government, but we don't want our entitlements to go away.
It's us who won't let them reform Social Security and Medicare.
It's not them.
If we said to them, we're going to elect somebody only if he tells us they're going to reform the entitlement so we don't all go broke.
So we don't, they're going to reform our trade program so we don't have to become servants to China.
If it's us who's complaining, it's us they're afraid of.
And you can see it personally too.
People are terribly unhappy.
I mean, don't you notice this?
You know, you go, I go to colleges sometimes and talk and the women, the girls are so unhappy.
We're not having children.
We're taking drugs to cheer ourselves up.
We take antidepressants instead of exploring our souls.
I think one in four women or something like that is on antidepressants.
Women are so unhappy right now, but they don't want to give up their careers for babies because that would be hard.
That would be hard.
It's like a guy who once told me, you know, I'm going to cut my throat.
And I said, well, maybe you should just see a psychiatrist.
He said, that would be hard.
It's like men don't want to give up their porn or their casual sex for marriage.
We don't want to do the difficult things that make life worthwhile because they make us who we are.
We've been put in this abundant place.
And that woman is right in the white lotus when she says, we are richer than kings.
Even the poor in this country are fat.
You know why?
Because there's more food available than Pharaoh ever saw.
I mean, look at the hieroglyphics.
Look at the kings, the pharaohs in the pictures.
They're all skinny because they're not eating the way we can eat, even if we're poor.
And we've all been put in this place of abundance and this time of abundance.
And now we're given a choice about how to live in it.
We're given a choice, but we have to pay the price.
Whatever choice we make, you pay a price.
You have pleasure.
You're sitting there watching porn in your room forever.
And suddenly you go out and you try and make love to a real woman and you can't do it anymore because she doesn't look like pornography and she won't act like somebody in a porn.
You pay a price.
You know, there's always a price to pay.
You abort that child.
Your mind is going to be warped and then you're going to have to repent.
And that's a price you have to pay too.
There's always a price.
Do something good, do something bad.
There is always a price you're going to pay.
Don't forget all of Jesus' followers, they all got killed.
There is a price you pay for everything good and bad.
And the thing is, we have developed this system for hiding the price.
And you can only do that when you're so rich, when you're so safe, when everything is so great, you're so healthy that you think there is no price to pay.
But even at the door of your tomb, there is a price to pay.
And that is what we have to decide.
You have to look at yourself first and say, what price am I paying?
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Clapbacks and Community00:05:12
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All right, Clavin Clapbacks.
Just because people are rich doesn't mean they're not trashy.
Most rich people are trashy.
I wouldn't go that far.
Yeah!
All right, Clavin clapbacks at dailywire.com, Claven with a K, clapbacks at dailywire.com.
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Today, the Clapbacks from Kay loved your show today, as I often do.
You helped me see things from a different perspective.
As a strong-willed woman who used to be always right and could do everything myself, but also wanted to stay home and raise babies.
I want to say that your assessment of men needing to tell women and explain the truth is right on.
It won't be easy, but men must try.
Now that I'm older, I find it easier to listen to my husband, a wonderful man.
I think he doesn't like to tell me what I need to hear, though.
You know, one of the things that wise husbands learn, you know, is that you can change the things that you say to your wife, but you can't change what she hears.
And this is one of the tricks because women will say to you, you know, it's not that I mind what you're saying.
I mind the way you say it.
But it doesn't matter what you say.
They're going to hear the same things because what they hear are their own insecurities and neuroses and fears.
So if you keep changing the way you talk, trying to accommodate your wife, of course, I mean, first of all, you should be respectful and loving and polite and kind to your wife at all times.
It has nothing to do with that.
But if you keep trying to change things and say things the way she wants to hear them, it just encourages that behavior.
So you're actually encouraging the worst stuff in her.
You're encouraging the neurosis, the thing that's making her unhappy in the first place.
So speaking directly and telling the truth to your wife is, in fact, a must.
So that is actually a good observation from Scott.
Andrew, I love your show.
You quoted founding fathers stating that strict adherence to the Constitution is at times suicidal.
Is President Trump following the avalanche of district court injunctions, which are clearly politically motivated, not suicidal, also is telling the judiciary branch to pound sand, a wise move.
I think Trump is doing this exactly right.
And it is very frustrating, although predictable, to watch the media trash him and say, oh, he's causing a constitutional crisis.
He is trying to get this to the Supreme Court where he hopes and believes that they will say, hey, you know, you can't, in a district court, you can't shut down the entire country just because you don't like the president's policies.
That is taking away the power of the executive branch.
We just have to hope John Roberts, that Trump is right on his bet and that John Roberts has the wherewithal to do that.
And we have to hope so.
And if he doesn't do it, we have to hope Congress finds the wherewithal to do it, which they do have the power to do.
And if that doesn't happen, then we are in a constitutional crisis because he's going to have to defy these courts because the courts are doing the wrong thing.
They are actually violating the separation of powers and they have no right to do it.
So we have to hope that John Roberts, who cares a great deal about the reputation of the Supreme Court and all the federal courts, you better hope that he gets rid of this thing, oh, there are no Obama judges.
There are plenty of Obama judges and they're doing what's wrong and they're breaking down the separation of powers and is dangerous.
But Trump is doing the right thing by waiting for Roberts to step up.
Catherine Anderson says, I am in a book club with several ladies, most of whom hold liberal views.
Because you state that the arts influence culture, do you have suggestions for books that would point us in a more conservative direction?
Books we have read thus far include When We Had Wings, Hello Beautiful, The God of the Woods.
I actually read The God of the Woods.
Thank you for your time.
Sure.
The God of the Woods was pretty good, I thought, but it wasn't great.
And there are much better books that I think people will like.
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, I think, is his best book.
And it has things that you can talk about in a conservative way.
That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis is fantastic.
It is his best fiction writing.
And that Hideous Strength is good.
And if I can sell you one of my books, Man and Wife by me is also a much underrated one of my novels and worth taking a look at.
All right.
Again, clavinclapbacks at dailywire.com and become a member and come and we'll talk poetry.
We'll talk art.
It's beautiful.
It's a beautiful thing.
Go to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
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