On Monday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan talks about the corruption that runs through the press. Video and partial transcript below:
Juvenal was an ancient Roman satirist who mocked life in Rome after the fall of the Republic. I like to think of myself as his rogue descendant, sort of a juvenile delinquent.
Juvenal is the guy who famously accused the Roman people of giving up their political power for bread and circuses. That is, they sold their freedom for welfare and entertainment. Fortunately, that could never happen here, so we don’t need satire anymore and everything is fine.
Anyway, there’s a line in Juvenal that some scholars say was inserted in his work later: “Who will watch the watchmen?” It refers to the problem of trying to keep your wife from committing adultery by surrounding her with guards. What’s to keep her from sleeping with the guards themselves? Who will watch the watchmen? And yes, that’s where the name of the famous graphic novel comes from, Watchmen, yet another fun fact to know and share.
Wherever the phrase originates, it’s frequently used to refer to Plato’s concerns and his work on government, the Republic. Who will guard the guardians of the state? Who will police those who police the powerful? Today, we have an answer to that question in America: No one.
Our press is not only dead as a government watchdog — it has become part of the corrupt government it is supposed to watch. Kim Strassel, the excellent reporter of The Wall Street Journal who’s been covering and trying to uncover the full story of how the Trump-Russia collusion hoax got started by corrupt Obama officials, recently noticed a disturbing trend: Whenever a new chapter in the story of the Obama administration’s apparent corruption is about to surface, an anonymous intelligence source leaks a story meant to create a big fuss over alleged Donald Trump misbehavior. The media amplifies the story with several days of Jerry Nadler, Adam Schiff, or some other McCarthy wannabe calling for impeachment, and by the time the whole thing blows up in the Democrats’ faces, the real story, how the intelligence heads of the Obama administration tried to scuttle Donald Trump’s election with Russian misinformation, has once again been swept under the table.
So the first draft of the Department of Justice’s inspector general report on Obamagate has been handed in, and the public release presumably is on its way. And suddenly, surprise surprise, we have an anonymous intelligence leak about some Trump phone call to the president of Ukraine.
Obviously, the important story here is how the press is now colluding with our spies to undermine the duly elected president of the United States and cover up the malfeasance of the last administration. This includes the press actually launching attacks on anyone who dares to question the actions of anti-freedom intelligence weasels like James Comey, John Brennan, and James Clapper. …
This is a big story. The real story of how corporate interests aligned corporate news media with big government to secure power for the elites over the people. It’s essentially the story of how the press, our watchmen, became the enemies of our freedoms — the enemies of the people. Where have I heard that before? Luckily, this isn’t true of everybody in the media, so welcome to The Daily Wire.
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