On Thursday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan talks about the difference between heroism and basic civic responsibility. Video and partial transcript below:
I’m probably too charitable, but I like to think that the editors of Vanity Fair sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, in a cold sweat, remembering how they once put Beto O’Rourke on the cover of their magazine. O’Rourke, who somehow became a Democrat hero by losing to Senator Ted Cruz in Texas, has now revealed himself to be a desperate panderer who trails the field of socialist presidential hopefuls, like an annoying younger brother who won’t go home but just keeps hanging around saying stupid things that embarrass you in front of your friends.
Beto was recently questioned about a really stupid thing he said by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
BLITZER: You said the other day in an interview with Al Sharpton [that] President Trump, perhaps inspired by Goebbels and the propagandist of the Third Reich, seemed to employ this tactic that the bigger the lie, the more obscene the injustice. The more dizzying the pace of this bizarre behavior, the less likely we’re able to do something about it. Is that not going too far, to make a comparison between the president of the United States and the Nazis?
O’ROURKE: Find me a better analogy.
He can’t find a better analogy than Hitler. Some of you may remember Hitler, the guy was an absolute riot in those YouTube videos from the movie “Downfall.” But in real life, he caused the deaths of over 65 million people, some of them in a mass extermination campaign so evil even the devil was impressed.
In fact, if Trump were even a little tiny bit like Hitler, Beto wouldn’t be saying Trump was like Hitler, because [then] Trump would be like Hitler, and no one would be saying much of anything against him, not to mention the fact that Wolf Blitzer’s chair would be empty. There are no Hitlers in American presidential history — not a single one, not even close. Beto can’t find a better analogy because, well, for one thing, he’s an idiot. But for another, he’s a spoiled American who has never faced political evil in his whole spoiled American life, but is nonetheless looking to cast his absurd presidential bid in a heroic light it in no way deserves.
Now there are, of course, individual heroes in America and everywhere, and everywhere else — people who risk their lives for the good people. Pete Buttigieg served as a naval intelligence officer at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. That’s pretty heroic — too bad about the crappy policies. But there are no political heroes in America because this is not a politically heroic moment. We’re not facing oppression, we’re not facing fascism. We weren’t facing those things under Obama either.
As I said at the time, we faced incompetence. We face government creep, we face a mainstream press that has been corrupted by crony capitalism so that the media’s corporate interests and the interests of big government align. And as always, we face the slow collapse of our extraordinarily free Republic under the weight of slavish human nature.
We are called upon to have enough courage to speak up, to have our videos restricted on YouTube, to get shadow banned on Twitter, to get blacklisted from Hollywood, to get our grades marked down by Leftist professors, to lose sponsors to offend China, maybe at the very worst, to lose our jobs by not toeing the left-wing line. That’s not heroism, that’s basic civic responsibility in a democracy.
Heroism is when you risk your life against evil, which we don’t have to do here because our government is incompetent, overbearing, overspending, and stupid — but evil it ain’t. You can tell it’s not evil because when you say it’s evil, you don’t wake up dead like you do in China, or Russia, or North Korea, or evil places like that.
All our political heroism is fake, and fake heroism causes real danger. The idea that the opposition is evil makes you overreact to election losses. It makes you break the rules of civil engagement, it tempts you to engage in violence where debate is called for, and to hate your fellow Americans instead of seeking to understand what they’re trying to say.
I support President Trump’s thus far impressively successful presidency, and most especially I support his shakeup of cultural business as usual. I’m appalled by Adam Schiff’s McCarthyite attempts to unseat Trump by non-electoral means, but Adam Schiff is the congressman of my district in California, and you don’t see the cops bursting into the Daily Wire to shoot me down or carry me away when I criticize him. He is a seriously schmuck dude, in my opinion, but he’s not evil. And I’m not a hero for criticizing him.
The Democrats have lost their minds, the press has lost its integrity, even some on the Right have lost their sense of basic decency, all in the name of fake heroism.
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