On Tuesday, The Daily Wire’s Andrew Klavan spoke at the University of Central Florida. During his speech, which was sponsored by the Young America’s Foundation (YAF), he spoke about the real cost of freedom.
Klavan first noted that in order for one person to be free, that person must allow the freedom of others – even if they don’t like it:
<blockquote>I want you to be free to speak your mind, even when your opinions are unpopular and seem hateful to other people. I want you to be free to choose your path in life, even if somebody else thinks it’s wrong. I want you to be free to decide how you spend your own money. This is a big part of freedom, how to spend your own money. Money is not just money, money is your time. You use your time to make money. When they take your money, they take your time. When they take your time, they take your life – your life is made of time – and when they take your money, they are taking control of your life.
The definition of slavery is that you do the work, and someone more powerful than you decides how to spend the money. That’s also the definition of socialism&#8230;
I want you to be enthusiastic, eager participants in this unique American experiment in limited government and personal liberty. And so, I want to be honest with you when I tell you that the kind of freedom I’m talking about is not easy. It’s hard. Everything good, as you must know already, in life is hard.
Love is hard; peace is hard; wealth is hard; staying in shape is hard. It’s all hard. You have to work at it. One hard thing about freedom &#8230; is that in order for you to be free, you have to allow other people to be free&#8230;
You can’t be free by stepping on another guy’s throat because one day, somebody&#8217;s gonna come along who’s bigger than you to step on your throat. It’s that simple, right? You have to have a system, an agreement, that everybody is going to be free. That has to be in place.
If you want to speak your mind, you have to let other people speak. You can’t define somebody else’s ideas as hate speech because eventually, the bigger guy’s gonna come along and define your ideas as hate speech. There’s only free speech, and speech governed by the powerful&#8230;
You want to go your way, other people have to go their way. You’re gay and you wanna get married, go ahead – but if somebody doesn’t want to cater your wedding, you’ve got to leave them be, even if it hurts your feelings. Freedom is hard on the feelings.</blockquote>
Klavan then spoke about how freedom is inherently “unsafe” because it requires risk and responsibility:
<blockquote>Another way freedom is hard is that it’s very unsafe. It’s risky; it’s frightening; it entails taking responsibility for yourself and paying your own way. If you can’t decide how other people spend your money, you can’t take their money to spend it on what you want to spend it on.
If you want to build a business &#8230; and it fails, you shouldn’t be able to bail it out with taxpayer money because that’s not your money. That’s somebody else’s money. Somebody else earned that. If you want to sleep around, knock yourself out, but when you get pregnant or get an STD, or when you’re miserable and enslaved in the drugs you took – it’s not my fault. You can’t take my money. I earned that money. That’s my time; that’s my life. You have to pay for yourself.
If you went in debt to go to school, you can’t suddenly turn around and say, “Pay my debt.” I didn’t take out the money. You took out the debt. Its dangerous. Every time that Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders says, “I happen to believe that everybody should have free health care” &#8230; he is taking somebody else’s freedom – and when he takes that freedom, he’s taking your freedom because if their money’s not safe, your money’s not safe. All this free stuff they’re giving you is not free. Conservatives are always saying, “How much is that gonna cost?” Never mind how much it’s gonna cost in money. What’s it gonna cost in freedom? You are handing over to the government the right to take your earnings away.</blockquote>
But Klavan’s final point about the difficulties of freedom was that, as humans, we often find it easier and more comfortable to be taken care of by someone more powerful than we are:
<blockquote>Maybe the hardest thing about freedom is that nobody really wants it. This is another founding story of the west, and they don’t tell it enough. It’s the founding story of Exodus in the Bible&#8230;
People don’t want to be free. They want to be fed; they want to be safe; they want to be taken care of; they want to be children forever – except for Pharoah. Except for the people who want power. And the people who want power know one thing. They know most people don’t want to be free. They know if they offer to feed you; they know if they offer to keep you safe; they know if they offer to treat you like children, you will give them power, and you will lose your freedom. And by the way, that’s the way it’s always been until folks got here. I lived in England – one of the freest counties on Earth – they’re nothing like as free as we are. There is nothing on Earth like the freedom we have here. It’s unique. It pops up only every now and again in history, and it dies fast, and it doesn’t come back for a long time.
So when you ask yourself what people want when they stir up your passions, and point at one another and say, “There a fascist! There’s a sexist! There’s a black person! There’s a Jew! There’s a homosexual! There’s a hater!,” what they’re doing is they’re pointing you away from the main thing you have, which is your freedom. They’re trying to get you angry, divided, passionate, and unthinking so that you will give them [your] freedom. And they do this sometimes sounding like it’s the best intentions&#8230;</blockquote>
Klavan concluded his speech with a rallying cry for freedom, kindness, and joy:
<blockquote>No matter what happens; no matter what new things come along, the old truths are going to remain exactly the same. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Judge not, lest you be judged. Love your neighbor as yourself. All your joy is going to be found in love and virtue – and there is no true love, and there is no true virtue unless you’re free to choose them.</blockquote>
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Andrew Klavan.

WATCH: Klavan On Why Freedom Is So Difficult And Fragile

Andrew Klavan

First Amendment

Free Speech

On Tuesday, The Daily Wire’s Andrew Klavan spoke at the University of Central Florida.
Following his speech, which was sponsored by the Young America’s Foundation (YAF), there was a Q&amp;A, during which a journalism student asked a salient question.
<blockquote>STUDENT: I myself am a journalism major here at UCF, and something that I aspire to do throughout my career is kind of shine light [on] a lot of the media bias and media corruption that&#8217;s going on. There’s a lot of examples – like Jeff Zucker at CNN right now, and ABC&#8217;s cover-up of Epstein, and everything. How would you recommend I go about my career with integrity and staying true to myself and my values without pissing off everyone that I want to work for?</blockquote>
“Well, first of all, the corruption at the mainstream news level, at the level of the networks, is so extreme that I don&#8217;t know if you can actually do that at that level,” Klavan began.
He then noted that ABC “killed the Epstein story” when “Hillary Clinton was running for president.”
“George Stephanopoulos, who helped Bill Clinton shut up the women who were accusing him, is now the chief newsman at ABC. We don&#8217;t know if he had anything to do with killing [the story], but that&#8217;s how corrupt they are,” Klavan added.
He continued, indicating that the corruption runs even deeper, as “CBS then fired somebody for ABC who they thought might have released the information.”
“They’re not investigating Epstein at ABC. They’re investigating who released the information that they [ABC] killed the story,” Klavan stated. “That is incredible corruption.”
According to Klavan, such corruption is “deeply connected to the Democrat Party.” 
To the student’s question regarding the ability to find work in journalism while keeping your integrity intact, Klavan spotlighted The Daily Wire itself as an example that, due in part to the breadth of new technology, almost anyone can find a place from which to cover the news.
More specifically, Klavan advocated for the dissemination of “actual information,” saying that the craft of investigative journalism, while difficult, is essentially “priceless.”
“The great need in journalism, as far as I&#8217;m concerned, is for actual information. There’s plenty of opinion work, and that&#8217;s the easiest work probably to get, but there are very few good reporters out there, there very few people on the scene, very few people who go through this stuff you have to do where you go through documents because that is expensive,” Klavan said.
“If you can become good at that, you become priceless. Somebody like Sharyl Attkisson, [a great investigative reporter] who was fired from CBS for running bad stories about Obama even though she had run bad stories about Bush – she lost her job for that,” he added. “She now has basically her own little network because she is somebody who knows how to get a story.”
“So that&#8217;s what I would say. It’s the same thing I tell writers – learn the craft, learn the craft of journalism. Everybody has an opinion, but if you can go out and get the news, you&#8217;ll get work,” Klavan concluded.
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WATCH: Klavan Tells Journalism Student How To Produce Work That Really Matters

Journalism

Media Bias

On Wednesday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan tells the story of how protesters at Boston College failed to shut down his speech. Video and partial transcript below: 
Boston College, first of all gave these kids — these conservative kids are already under the gun, they&#8217;re already having a problem, and they gave them the runaround. They were always nice, kind of like Nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over the Cuckoo&#8217;s Nest, always talking them in soft voice and meanwhile, they delayed, and they delayed, and they delayed. They wouldn&#8217;t sign the contract. They wouldn&#8217;t make it happen.
So the kids didn&#8217;t have enough time to actually advertise and promote my coming there. So they made it as difficult as they could. They were so petty, they wouldn&#8217;t even give us a microphone. They wouldn&#8217;t let them invite — like everybody else does this, they&#8217;re not supposed to invite people from off-campus — but most people do invite people from off-campus, and they made it explicit that they couldn&#8217;t invite people from off-campus. They wouldn&#8217;t let them record, they wouldn&#8217;t let them stream live, all of which other people do on the Boston College campus. But they specifically wouldn&#8217;t let them, the conservatives, the Republicans, do it. 
Then when the contract came, there was a clause in the contract saying I couldn&#8217;t criticize Boston College, which is just gutless. If you aren&#8217;t going to stand up for free speech, if you&#8217;re against free speech, if you&#8217;re against people saying what they have to say and having new ideas and ideas that you don&#8217;t like — if that&#8217;s how small-minded you are, own up to it. Be a man. Stand up and say, “Yeah, we don&#8217;t like free speech. We only want you to hear our ideas because if you hear other ideas, you might disagree with us and then we&#8217;ll be exposed as the frauds we are.”
So stand up, at least say what you are. So before I get there, the newspaper, I think it&#8217;s called “The Heights,” runs this story: “Boston College Republicans to Host Speaker With History of Islamophobic Comments.” It was a genuinely, cleverly crafted story — crafted to be incendiary. It made it sound like everywhere I went, everyone was horrified by my Islamophobic ideas. All of the quotes, I believe — no, that&#8217;s not true — most of the quotes were from satire.
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The things that I really satire when I talk about Islam is the Left giving Islam a privileged position of not being able to be criticized, right. Because you’ve heard me, you know I love the Catholic faith, I’m not a Catholic person, but you know I have a great respect and knowledge about the Catholic faith. But I&#8217;ve also wondered aloud whether maybe some of their sexual attitudes contributed to the scandal in the Catholic Church. I have also exactly done the same thing, wondering aloud, talking about the ideas that I worry in Islam may have contributed to the fact that Islam has been a part of every major conflict since 1978 except the Mexican drug war, which we&#8217;ll be talking about later on. So I&#8217;ve asked all these questions, I&#8217;ve made jokes about Islam because I make jokes about all these things, and anything that is irrational or evil to me seems to me absurd and funny. 
So they they tag me as “Islamophobic,” which is also just, it’s a cowardly word. It is essentially delegitimizing any attempt to discuss the fact that Islam is at war with everybody on Earth — with Buddhists, with Jews, with other Muslims — and it has nothing to do with whether there are nice Muslims or whether Islam can reform. Of course, there are. Muslim people are no worse than any other people, it&#8217;s just you have to question these ideas. And if you can&#8217;t question ideas, why build a college in the first place? If you&#8217;re not going to talk about good ideas versus bad ideas. 
So I go to give my speech, and this is why I say it was almost a parable, it was almost like it was a written thing. My speech was about how the Left uses narrative — because I&#8217;m a writer. I&#8217;ve made my living as a fiction writer for 30 years, and there aren&#8217;t very many people who can say that. I mean, there are more Major League Baseball players than people who have made their living writing fiction, so I feel they have a certain expertise on how stories work and how people use stories. And my whole speech was about how narrative is used to let your emotions carry you away, so you stop paying attention to facts and that makes you angry at the people across the aisle from you. It means that you&#8217;re so emotional, you can&#8217;t debate anything and then you get stupid because you can&#8217;t listen to other people. And while I&#8217;m making the speech, a virtual riot starts outside. Over a hundred people were outside. 
Now I was, and I want to say thank you to the god-king, Jeremy Boreing, he sprung for two security guys who were &#8230; absolutely terrific. But the Boston College police showed up, too — about three of them were there when I arrived — and they were excellent, as well. I mean, they were just terrific and really on-point, and when this thing started, they were pounding on the walls, they were screaming. I could see these twisted, angry faces of these essentially children yelling, and they were chanting all these hateful things, that I was a hateful person and all this stuff, banging on the walls. I think at one point they climbed upstairs. 
They were pounding on the ceiling. The police wanted to get rid of them; Boston College would not allow them to be removed. This is not free speech, by the way. It is not free speech to assault, essentially assault people — I&#8217;m not saying they physically assaulted anyone, saying that they made it impossible for us to speak, to break in and disrupt things like that, that is not free speech. That is an action and can be stopped and should be stopped at Boston College &#8230;
So as I&#8217;m giving this speech and I&#8217;m using the rioters as an example of what I&#8217;m saying. I&#8217;m saying, “Look, this is what I&#8217;m talking about. This is how they become these people. This is what they are turned into by the Left’s tactics.” As I&#8217;m making this speech, I can see the faces of the police and of my security guys getting kind of serious and a little wider than they were before, and at one point, they had told me how they were going to get me out. And finally, I answered all the questions. I wasn&#8217;t gonna leave until I was done, I wasn&#8217;t going to be chased out, I answered all the questions, and then the security guy said, look, we got to go. 
At this point, I didn&#8217;t know this, but when I walked outside, there were a lot of police and they surrounded me. I felt like Reagan after he was shot. They ran me to the car. Look, I didn&#8217;t come anywhere near the rioters, but there&#8217;s no question if I had, they were so worked up that something bad could have happened. So the police were acting completely responsibly, doing completely the right thing. I got a police escort off the campus, and this is shameful. This is a shameful thing to do to children — to teach them that everything they disagree with is hate. 
There&#8217;s no such thing as Islamophobia. There&#8217;s a lot of violence from the Islamic community. Some of it has been directed catastrophically at America. Some of it has been directed catastrophically at the West. There is nothing wrong with discussing the ideas that may lead to that and discussing why this is such a problem in the Islamic world. I hold no hostility against any Islamic person. But look, these are people who scream and yell at you if you say a man is not a woman. If you say any facts about reality, they lose their stuff because they&#8217;ve been taught to do this. Children are not born like this — they&#8217;re taught to do this in the same way I was taught to have civic civil conversations. 
You know, I&#8217;m watching some of this stuff. I mean, they are being made stupid. They are. And these are, in a sense, privileged kids — I don&#8217;t know each individual kid&#8217;s background, but I know Boston College is not a cheap college, and only like a third — the top third of Americans go to college in the first place. So they&#8217;re already the elite. They&#8217;re not oppressed, they&#8217;ve never been oppressed and not having any problems, any real problems, unless they have some personal problem that has nothing to do with politics. 
They have been turned into zombie instruments of the Left by people who don&#8217;t want them to hear other opinions, because once they hear other opinions, they&#8217;re going to realize that their Boston College professors have feet of clay and they&#8217;re teaching them things that really aren&#8217;t true. 
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ben-shapiro-show/id1047335260">Listen to full episodes of “The Andrew Klavan Show” on iTunes. </a>
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KLAVAN: Privileged Leftists Tried To Shut Down My Speech At Boston College. They Failed.

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&#8217;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&#8217;Rourke on the cover of their magazine. O&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;s Wolf Blitzer. 
<blockquote>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&#8217;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. </blockquote>
He can&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;s chair would be empty. There are no Hitlers in American presidential history — not a single one, not even close. Beto can&#8217;t find a better analogy because, well, for one thing, he&#8217;s an idiot. But for another, he&#8217;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. 
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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&#8217;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&#8217;re not facing oppression, we&#8217;re not facing fascism. We weren&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;s not heroism, that&#8217;s basic civic responsibility in a democracy. 
Heroism is when you risk your life against evil, which we don&#8217;t have to do here because our government is incompetent, overbearing, overspending, and stupid — but evil it ain&#8217;t. You can tell it&#8217;s not evil because when you say it&#8217;s evil, you don&#8217;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&#8217;re trying to say. 
I support President Trump&#8217;s thus far impressively successful presidency, and most especially I support his shakeup of cultural business as usual. I&#8217;m appalled by Adam Schiff&#8217;s McCarthyite attempts to unseat Trump by non-electoral means, but Adam Schiff is the congressman of my district in California, and you don&#8217;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&#8217;s not evil. And I&#8217;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. 
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-andrew-klavan-show/id1045171376?mt=2">Listen to full episodes of “The Andrew Klavan Show” on iTunes. </a>
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-andrew-klavan-show">Watch “The Andrew Klavan Show” on-demand!</a>

American Flag

KLAVAN: America Doesn&#8217;t Need Political Heroes Right Now; We Need Responsible Citizens

Beto O'Rourke

On Tuesday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan talks about a Texas dad who is losing a legal battle to protect his 7-year-old son from his mother, who wants her son to be a girl. Video and partial transcript below: 
I want to be careful about this story [from Texas] because I only have it from one side. I have it from Life Site News, which of course, is a very powerful pro-life site. I know, I&#8217;ve covered trials as a reporter, and I know that what people hear in the jury box is not what people hear when they read the newspaper. Okay, so sometimes the jury makes a decision and everybody goes that makes no sense at all, but it does make sense and it would have made sense if you had been there. 
So I want to be careful about it, but what I&#8217;ve got so far is that there is a man named Jeff Younger, who is trying to protect his 7-year-old son, James, from his mother — they&#8217;re obviously apart. And the mother doctor, and I think she’s called Dr. Georgulas, is transitioning him into a female — this is a little boy. The jury decided that they would not give the father sole custody, and the judge still has to come out with more of this decision and how this decision is going to work. But it could result in this little boy being given hormones, which will essentially chemically castrate him.
It is a terrible thing, and the father claims that this mother is a loon, okay. The mother sends him to school and treats him like a girl and calls him Luna. The father claims that the mother would frighten him about being a boy, would tell him that there were monsters who would come and eat him if he was a boy, but he&#8217;d be protected if he was a girl. She claims that the fact that he liked Frozen means that he&#8217;s a girl, and here is him, the father, in this interview talking about what this experience has been like for him trying to get custody away from this woman who may destroy this child&#8217;s life. 
<blockquote>YOUNGER: And imagine that your ex-wife has addressed him as a drag queen to talk to you. He has false eyelashes and makeup, his hair has got glitter in it, he&#8217;s wearing a dress. Now, imagine how you would feel seeing what I believe is actual sexual abuse — I believe this is not just emotional abuse, but is the very most fundamental form of sexual abuse — tampering with the sexual identity of a vulnerable boy. 
YOUNGER: Every single day you have to see your son sexually abused, and you have to maintain your calm. You have to be the one who&#8217;s calm, because the courts are not going to be fair to you. And the only way you can survive this and get your son through this alive, is to calmly allow your son to be tortured right before your eyes and outlast the opposition. </blockquote>
It&#8217;s a heartbreaking, heartbreaking story. The thing is, the only reason it&#8217;s imaginable, the only reason it&#8217;s imaginable is because of this empire of lies — the news media, Hollywood, the academy selling this garbage. The fact that Democrat candidates, all the Democrat candidates would stand and pretend to be charmed instead of horrified by dressing little girls up as boys during that gay LGBTQ town hall on CNN, and saying, oh, yes, my little girl is really a boy. I mean, that that would happen. 
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1508&amp;v=QSiuZApZr44">https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1508&amp;v=QSiuZApZr44</a>
Procter and Gamble announced that it&#8217;s going to remove the female symbol — you know, that circle with the “X” underneath — they&#8217;re going to remove that from its sanitary napkin packaging in Europe because trans activists object because men can have periods, too. 
In England, if you say that a man is not a woman, the police can come to your house and question you about it, as it might be a hate crime. [There’s] a crazy story in the Sun about a woman who is a man, who was asked to be in porn, and then when they found she had a penis, they said, Oh, no, we were actually wanted a real woman, we don&#8217;t want you to be in porn. She&#8217;s saying that&#8217;s a hate crime, and she reported that to the police. 
The thing about this is it is so degrading to women. I mean, in spite of being incredibly dangerous to children, it is so degrading to women. To essentially strip them of their identity and say anybody who raises his hand and says Ooh me, I&#8217;m a girl, gets to be a woman, too. I mean, you don&#8217;t just sign on to be a woman. They are stripping women of their identity, their unique experience of life, of their unique womanhood in what that means to be a feminine person in the world. They&#8217;re stripping that away from women and saying it belongs to anybody who claims it. 
Have you ever noticed that all this Woke stuff that pretends to be attempts to hurt the powerful and bring the powerful down, it always, always, always winds up hurting the underclass. If I may call women, you know, the people who are less powerful than men throughout history. It hurts women. It hurts children. It hurts unborn children. All this Woke stuff always ends up hurting the weaker half. 
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-andrew-klavan-show/id1045171376?mt=2">Listen to full episodes of “The Andrew Klavan Show” on iTunes. </a>
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Empty Swing

KLAVAN: A Texas Father May Lose The Right To Raise His Son As A Boy

Transgender

The following is an excerpt from the second episode of the newly released fantasy-suspense podcast epic “Another Kingdom III” written by bestselling author and Daily Wire podcast host Andrew Klavan.
Austin&#8217;s Hollywood success begins to go sour as he realizes he hasn&#8217;t just lost his memory, he&#8217;s also lost his courage, his integrity and his manhood.
I said, “Hey, Ri. How you doing?” I kept my voice as upbeat as I could. Cheerful and calm. Like the dutiful brother of a mentally ill kid sister.
Riley slowly licked her pale lips. “Fine…” she said, gaping at me. “I’m… fine…” She blinked dully.
I tried to speak again. I tried to say: That’s great, Ri. That’s great. But my eyes filled and the words wouldn’t come. In my exhaustion, in my shame-filled, fear-filled state of mind, I could no longer pretend I wasn’t seeing what I was seeing. She was worse. Every week, every time I came here, she was worse than the time before. The drug-haze was thicker. Her mind was duller, her eyes emptier. It’s for the best, my parents kept telling me. It’s for the best, my brother Richard said. But how could this be for the best? I mean, look at her! How could it be?
“Damn it, Riley!” I said softly. “What the hell are they doing to you here?”
Well, I was sorry the moment I said it. Exactly the sort of thing I was not supposed to say. Don’t get her excited, my parents told me. Don’t get her started on her crazy conspiracy theories, my brother said.
But it was as if the shame—the growing fungus of shame—forced the truth up out of the depths of me and onto my lips.
And it was too late to take it back. Almost instantly, my words seemed to rouse Riley from her stupor. Her fingers fumbled to find my wrist. She clutched it with both hands. She peered at me with her hollow eyes. “They’re killing me, Austin.”
I tried to slip back into calm big brother mode. “No, no…”
But she wouldn’t let go. “They’ve drugged me all up so I can’t think, so I won’t tell.”
I choked out the words, “Riley, don’t…”
She leaned toward me and her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “Look at me, Austin. You know. You know about Orosgo. Orosgo and the Illuminati.” Oh, this was bad. This was the stuff she wasn’t supposed to talk about. The loony theories from the Ouroboros videos she used to post online. Her dreamy, child-like rants about a conspiracy of space aliens and elites who had joined forces to take over the world. This was the very crap that had gotten her stuck in this place to begin with.
I began to shake my head at her. I was about to try to talk her back to reality. But the look in her eyes: the yearning, the urgency, the desperation. I couldn’t bring myself to say what I was supposed to say.
And so Riley went on. “You have to remember, Aus! Why don’t you remember? They’re all in it. Orosgo. Mom. Dad. Richard… They’re killing people, Aus. You know this. For years and years. They’ve been killing them and blackmailing them and… and ruining them with scandals. Heads of countries, heads of TV stations and newspapers, universities, movie studios. Killing them and destroying them and replacing them with Orosgo’s followers. Please, Aus. Please remember. They make laws and write articles and make movies and teach students to believe that Orosgo and his people should run everything, the whole world. You have to remember. The book—remember the book you read? Another Kingdom. Please, Aus. You have to.”
This was also part of her delusion. She kept insisting there was some magic book that I had read and somehow forgotten. A book with the same title as my screenplay. It was all confused in her mind.
For another moment, she went on gazing at me urgently, desperately—with such painful hope. I didn’t know how to answer her. I patted her hand weakly.
She gave up. Her shoulders slumped. She turned away from me and gazed longingly out the high window at the lawn and the hills beyond. “The mad girls know,” she murmured gently, as if to console herself. “It’s not just me. The mad girls hear their voices.”
I didn’t want to encourage her, but this was new. I hadn’t heard this part before. Curiosity got the better of me and I said, “What mad girls? You mean the other patients here?”
My question seemed to reinvigorate her. When she swung around to face me again, her eyes were very bright, eerily bright. There was a small smile on her lips as if she were about to reveal a secret to me. She leaned close. She whispered: “Sometimes they don’t swallow their meds. Then they hear voices. They can hear them calling.”
“I still don’t get you. Calling what?”
“Calling you, Aus.” &#8230;
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-2-the-girl-in-the-madhouse">Listen to Another Kingdom III, Episode 2 on The Daily Wire here</a>.
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/another-kingdom/id1296074241">Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts here</a>.
Trailer for &#8220;Another Kingdom III,&#8221; performed by bestselling author and Daily Wire podcast host Michael Knowles, below:
<iframe title="Another Kingdom Season 3 Trailer" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/videoseries?list=PLlVjFVMet3OWO-Prku9hsbuBtK3begsZw" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/another-kingdom">Another Kingdom</a> is a fantasy-suspense epic by award-winning, internationally bestselling novelist Andrew Klavan — who also happens to host a popular podcast on the Daily Wire. The story follows Austin Lively, a Hollywood wannabe, whose nowhere career spirals into madness and adventure when he walks through a door into a magical land of swords, sorcery, monsters and magic. Bizarrely, his desperate fight to survive in this other world leads him to uncover an international conspiracy in this world so that he’s not only the target of dragons and wizards on one level of reality, he’s hunted by assassins and the police in the other. Two fast-paced adventures heading toward one explosive conclusion both in Los Angeles and in another kingdom.

Another Kingdom 3 Ep 2

Another Kingdom III, Ep. 2: The Girl in the Madhouse

Michael Knowles

The following is an excerpt from the first episode of the newly released fantasy-suspense podcast epic “Another Kingdom III” written by bestselling author and Daily Wire podcast host Andrew Klavan.
Austin suddenly finds himself a Hollywood success, awash in money, success and babes. But who&#8217;s that mutant squirrel-woman peering in his window?
With a savage battle cry, the knight in silver armor plunges into the swirling snow. As he rushes from the darkness of the cave into the blizzard, he is nearly lost to sight in the vortex of white and wind. His weirdly flowing armor becomes one with the storm. His sword, clasped in both his mailed hands, raised to deliver a slashing strike from behind his right shoulder, is nearly invisible. Only his face, bared beneath his lifted visor, shows clearly through the wild weather. His dark eyes blaze with fury and fear. His mouth gapes wide on a ragged and murderous cry. He rushes toward the beast.
The white beast is part of the weather too — also lost in the weather: a hulking, hungry presence as it moves to reclaim its den. The knight can see the creature clearly through the tempest only because its eyes—its ravenous eyes — glow an unnatural red and shine out of the depths of the maelstrom. The knight can hear the thing as well. Even over his own hoarse shout, even through the hoarse and steady roar of the wind, he can hear the Yeti growling low. That growl — it’s not a fierce sound. No. It’s a growl of satisfaction. The beast can smell the knight. He can see him with his red eyes, see him charging. He’s growling with anticipation of a fresh kill, a fresh feast, a new pile of bones to add to the others already scattered in the shadows of the cave.
As the knight draws back his sword for the attack, the Yeti flexes his massive paws so that the claws switchblade out of them with a whispered snap. The claws are curved and sharp and daggery and, like the knight’s armor, nearly invisible in the snow.
Another split second of swirling white confusion, of shouting and growling and the roaring wind. Then the two opponents clash, the knight’s sword swinging, the beast’s claws slashing.
The whirling storm turns red&#8230;.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1-the-graveyard-of-memory">Listen to Another Kingdom III, Episode 1 on The Daily Wire here</a>.
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-1-the-graveyard-of-memory/id1296074241?i=1000452622473">Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts here</a>.
Trailer for &#8220;Another Kingdom III,&#8221; performed by bestselling author and Daily Wire podcast host Michael Knowles, below:
<iframe title="Another Kingdom Season 3 Trailer" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/videoseries?list=PLlVjFVMet3OWO-Prku9hsbuBtK3begsZw" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/another-kingdom">Another Kingdom</a> is a fantasy-suspense epic by award-winning, internationally bestselling novelist Andrew Klavan — who also happens to host a popular podcast on the Daily Wire. The story follows Austin Lively, a Hollywood wannabe, whose nowhere career spirals into madness and adventure when he walks through a door into a magical land of swords, sorcery, monsters and magic. Bizarrely, his desperate fight to survive in this other world leads him to uncover an international conspiracy in this world so that he&#8217;s not only the target of dragons and wizards on one level of reality, he&#8217;s hunted by assassins and the police in the other. Two fast-paced adventures heading toward one explosive conclusion both in Los Angeles and in another kingdom.

Another Kingdom 3 Ep 1

Another Kingdom III, Ep. 1: The Graveyard of Memory

On Wednesday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan talks about the difficulty of facing and remembering harsh truths. Video and partial transcript below:
It&#8217;s the 18th anniversary of 9/11, and every 9/11, someone says we will never forget. These words, like the words “unicorn” or “free health care” or “Islamophobia,” are nonsense words: Words that describe things &#8230; that simply don&#8217;t exist. We always forget; we have to forget. It&#8217;s the way societies move forward, and it&#8217;s the way they die, and these things have to be. It&#8217;s God&#8217;s will.
Here are some of the things we learned on 9/11 that we&#8217;ve forgotten. Multiculturalism is crap. There are better cultures, bad cultures, and even worse cultures. Ours is better not because we&#8217;re better people, but because we&#8217;ve inherited better ideas like individual freedom and equality before the law. Those are better ideas than government by Allah, and dressing up women like the Spirit of Christmas Yet To Come so they can&#8217;t fully participate in life. Better ideas make better cultures, and better cultures must be defended by both wisdom and force of arms — or worse cultures will conquer and destroy them.
On 9/11, we also remembered briefly that men must be men. The policemen and firemen who charged into the burning buildings to try to save people were essential men, necessary men — men worthy of our honor and respect because they lived up to the responsibility of their manhood, which reminds us of another inescapable truth. There is only one necessary task of human life, and that is to make and nurture more human life. This is a task that nature has assigned to women. It is in order to protect and preserve that task, and the women who do it, that men must be men. Brave, protective, supportive, and dispassionately wise.
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When societies feel rich and safe and prosperous, they put such truths out of their minds and they turn to fluffy nonsense like “irony” or “pumpkin latte” or “redefining marriage” or letting boys dress up as girls or promising everybody everything for free. The essential divide between conservatives and leftists is that conservatives want society to always live under the restraints of the essential truths, and leftists want to take advantage of history&#8217;s little holidays when some nation like ours becomes strong enough and rich enough to make everyone feel like it&#8217;s safe to forget the rules and party.
There&#8217;s some wisdom on both sides. If your society is so powerful it can spare a few men to do inessential tasks like writing books or musical comedies, that&#8217;s better than everyone having to man the front lines. If you can allow some women to leave off baby-making and child-rearing, maybe some of them will enjoy doing something else more. That&#8217;s fine. It&#8217;s tolerant and kind to accept gay relationships if you&#8217;re living in inessential times, so why not do it. But the gods of the copy-book headings, the gods of the essential truths, are always waiting to return with terror and slaughter as they did [on] this day 18 years ago. And when you denounce motherhood or manhood, when you squander your resources and disrespect your traditions, those gods start sharpening their swords.
This is a very sad world, and one of the saddest things about this world is also one of the most comical: People lie. Everyone lies, everyone lies to himself and to everyone else. We say things that are absurd and ridiculous and then we insist that they&#8217;re true. People lie when they can, and only face the truth when they must. On 9/11, we were forced to face the truth — a lot of truths — and now, by the necessity of human nature, we have forgotten. We always do.
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-andrew-klavan-show/id1045171376?mt=2">Listen to full episodes of “The Andrew Klavan Show” on iTunes. </a>
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/show/andrew-klavan-show">Watch “The Andrew Klavan Show” on-demand.</a>

Rubble At World Trade Center on September 12, 2001.

KLAVAN: The Essential Truths We Have Forgotten

Conservatism

New York City

Radical Islamic Terror

Terrorism

On Monday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan talks about a leaked transcript from a New York Times staff meeting in which they discuss how to cover the news for the next two years. Partial video and transcript below:
So let&#8217;s stick with the [New York] Times for a minute, right? After the shootings in El Paso and Dayton — the Dayton shooting doesn&#8217;t exist in the New York Times. They haven&#8217;t written a single thing about it because the Dayton shooting was committed by a leftist — whereas the El Paso shooting was committed by kind of a rightist — who was kind of an eco-terrorist, an eco-fascist. So without this environmental craziness on the Left he probably wouldn&#8217;t have been as crazy as he was. But let&#8217;s grant the New York Times that — as I&#8217;ve said repeatedly — white supremacy, or whatever you want to call it, is a disgusting philosophy. So I&#8217;ll condemn it, but that&#8217;s all the New York Times talks about. Only the El Paso shootings. Article, after article, after article. However, after the El Paso and the Dayton shooting, Donald Trump came out and condemned racism. He condemned the racism on both sides. So let&#8217;s play cut number six. This is Trump after the shootings.
<blockquote>TRUMP: The shooter in El Paso posted a manifesto online consumed by racist hate. In one voice our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy. These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hate has no place in America. Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart, and devours the soul.</blockquote>
So The New York Times runs the headline: &#8220;Trump Urges Unity Versus Racism.&#8221; And the readers of The New York Times, who are now all lefties, because who would read The New York Times except a satirist like me and a leftist, right? Who would read it because all it has is left-wing news? That&#8217;s all that&#8217;s in there, and a left-wing point of view just dominates the paper. It is not a newspaper anymore, it is a college rag basically selling socialism. But [the readers] got angry and they had to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/50277/democrats-blast-nyt-after-outrageous-trump-speech-james-barrett">rewrite the headline</a> to &#8220;Assailing Hate But Not Guns.&#8221; So we had to make sure that Donald Trump was somehow failing. &#8230;
So they have this meeting and, at the same time, one of their minor editors and a Deputy Washington Editor Jonathan Weisman is putting out some tweets that they interpreted as racist. They were just kind of dopey tweets saying that, you know, some of these urban candidates in the Midwest don&#8217;t actually represent the Midwest. You could understand what he was saying. But Roxane Gay, who is &#8230; just horrible. Her description is she&#8217;s a New York Times op-ed writer and other things, but her description is that she covers the &#8220;intersections of identity and culture.&#8221; Tells you everything you need to know about her. So she starts attacking this guy on Twitter. He gets demoted.
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So they have to have a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/50728/leaked-transcript-nyt-staff-meeting-reveals-james-barrett">crisis meeting</a>. Dean Baguette, or whatever his name is, The New York Times editor, calls a crisis meeting and then the reporters, so-called reporters, are up in arms, right. And this is what — Baquet? I guess it’s Baquet. Dean Baquet says he comes out and he&#8217;s apologizing for the fact that they had this headline and this guy was tweeting stuff and oh my gosh we&#8217;re not being tough enough. And he says the problem is that the story we just spent two years covering was crap. It was nonsense. And now we&#8217;re stuck on how to attack Trump. This is essentially what he says. I&#8217;m going to read you the transcript that was acquired by Slate:
<blockquote>BAQUET: We built our newsroom to cover one story.</blockquote>
He&#8217;s talking about the Russian collusion story.
<blockquote>BAQUET: And we did it truly well. Now we have to regroup.</blockquote>
Truly well? There was no story! The truth — if they had done it &#8220;truly well,&#8221; what they would have said is, oh the Democrats arranged this illegal investigation into a political campaign. Then when they lost, they turned it into an investigation into Russian collusion. All of it, all of it, utter nonsense. And so, that would have been covering it well, but instead they pumped up the Democrat point of view. And so that&#8217;s what they call it covering it &#8220;well.&#8221; And of course they got two Pulitzers for it because that&#8217;s what the Pulitzers are for. You know, here&#8217;s a Pulitzer for promoting the Democrats. All right. So he says we&#8217;ve covered it &#8220;truly well, now we have to regroup.&#8221; Why? Because the story was a hoax, right. [He continues], We have to…
<blockquote>BAQUET: &#8230;shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story. I&#8217;d love your help with that&#8230;This one is a story about what it means to be an American in 2019.</blockquote>
He&#8217;s deciding what the news is. This is — the guy is in a newsroom deciding what the news is going to be. He doesn&#8217;t know who&#8217;s going to be tomorrow — it might be about Hong Kong. But it doesn&#8217;t matter, it&#8217;s about what it means to be an American in 2019.
<blockquote>BAQUET: It is a story that requires deep investigation into people who peddle hatred. But it is also a story that requires imaginative use of all our muscles to write about race and class in a deeper way than we have in years. In the coming weeks, we&#8217;ll be assigning some new people to politics who can offer different ways of looking at the world.</blockquote>
As if, as if they will assign somebody with a different way of looking at the world, right?
<blockquote>BAQUET: We&#8217;ll also ask reporters to write more deeply about the country, race, and other divisions. I really want your help in navigating this story.</blockquote>
He&#8217;s asking a bunch of Millennials — or actually younger than Millennials — he&#8217;s asking a bunch of kids, basically, what he&#8217;s supposed to put in the paper. What does he think they&#8217;re going to say? Is there one Republican among them? Is there one person who voted for Donald Trump? Is there one person who doesn&#8217;t share the attitude who has a different point of view? Has the attitude of the other half of the country — forget about it. So still, this is Dean &#8220;Baguette&#8221; still talking.
<blockquote>BAQUET: Chapter one of the story of Donald Trump, not only for our newsroom, but frankly for our readers was, &#8220;Did Donald Trump have untoward relationships with the Russians and was there obstruction of justice?&#8221;</blockquote>
No question about whether that&#8217;s a valid story or not, just that&#8217;s what it was, that was the story — that was really hard story, by the way — and let&#8217;s not forget that we set ourselves up to cover that story, and I&#8217;m going to say it. We won two Pulitzer Prizes covering that story, and I think we covered that story better than anybody else — almost as well as the Brothers Grimm covered Hansel and Gretel — which was also made up&#8230;
<blockquote>BAQUET: The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened. Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, “Holy [expletive], Bob Mueller is not going to do it.” And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think. Because, you know, for obvious reasons.</blockquote>
He wasn&#8217;t guilty. Because the whole thing was exposed as exactly what he said it was, exactly what Donald Trump said it was. [Baquet] says we&#8217;ve got to change.
<blockquote>BAQUET: We&#8217;ve got to change. I mean, the vision for the coverage for the next two years is what I talked about earlier: How do we cover a guy who makes these kinds of remarks? How do we cover the&#8230;</blockquote>
I mean, it&#8217;s so completely reactive. Trump defines their news coverage.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/show/andrew-klavan-show">Watch more of The Andrew Klavan Show here.</a>
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-andrew-klavan-show/id1045171376?mt=2">Listen to more of The Andrew Klavan Show on iTunes here.</a>

The New York Times Headquarters Ahead Of Earns Figures

KLAVAN: The NYT Already Decided Next Year&#8217;s News

Donald Trump

Fake News

New York Times

Trump Administration

On Thursday&#8217;s episode of &#8220;The Andrew Klavan Show,&#8221; Klavan talks about why the elite, like wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein, always seem to be the subject of conspiracy theories. Video and partial transcript below:
Here is the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/autopsy-finds-broken-bones-in-jeffrey-epsteins-neck-deepening-questions-around-his-death/2019/08/14/d09ac934-bdd9-11e9-b873-63ace636af08_story.html?noredirect=on">Washington Post</a> — I&#8217;m sorry, I can&#8217;t quote a more reliable source, but this one sounds like a reliable story [on Epstein&#8217;s autopsy] &#8230; I trust the [medical examiner] who&#8217;s doing this, the lady who&#8217;s doing this. And also I know Epstein&#8217;s lawyer has a very talented and generally well-regarded doctor watching this.
<blockquote>An autopsy found that financier Jeffrey Epstein sustained multiple breaks in his neck bones, according to two people familiar with the findings, deepening the mystery about the circumstances around his death.
Among the bones broken in Epstein&#8217;s neck was the hyoid bone, which in men is near the Adam&#8217;s apple. Such breaks can occur in those who hang themselves particularly if they&#8217;re older, according to forensics experts and studies on the subject, but they are more common in victims of homicide by strangulation, the experts said.
The details are the first findings to emerge from the autopsy of Epstein, a convicted sex offender…</blockquote>
You know, the thing about this is the word &#8230; &#8220;strangled&#8221; himself — he hanged himself by tying a bedsheet to the upper part of a bunk and then basically kneeling down and strangling himself. Hard to imagine that breaks a bone, right? It&#8217;s a soft cloth and you&#8217;re not — it&#8217;s not like dropping off a ladder or dropping through a trap door like when you&#8217;re being hanged. So if these findings pan out, if this story pans out, again, it&#8217;s just really suspicious. You don&#8217;t need to be a conspiracy theorist to think, wait what the hell is going on?
There was another story recently from CBS News. On the morning of Jeffrey Epstein&#8217;s death, there was shouting and shrieking from his jail cell. So I mean, all we need here is video of Bill Clinton, like running down the hallway and escaping, and suddenly Donald Trump is going to sound a lot more perspicacious than he did when he basically tweeted this.
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From <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/congress-rushes-to-respond-to-jeffrey-epstein-death-before-conspiracies-take-over">The Daily Beast</a>, yet another story. I&#8217;ve got to read these stories because this is just the stuff that&#8217;s been piling up. I didn&#8217;t cover this yesterday, and this is the stuff that&#8217;s piling up (formatting adjusted):
<blockquote>Members of Congress, furious over Jeffrey Epstein’s death in federal custody, are set on getting to the bottom of it before the many conspiracy theories swirling around the accused serial sex offender’s demise completely overshadow the facts. They are, obviously, running far behind. By the time the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the Federal Bureau of Prisons on Monday demanding answers about the circumstances of Epstein’s apparent suicide, the country already had two full days to marinate in President Trump’s retweet of a conspiracy theory that former President Bill Clinton was somehow to blame.</blockquote>
So it&#8217;s all President Trump&#8217;s fault. Listen, it doesn&#8217;t take President Trump to see a conspiracy here. Again, we&#8217;re talking about a media that gave us the Russian collusion conspiracy. All this time, there was simply no evidence — zero evidence — that Donald Trump was in some kind of coordinated relationship with Russians to throw the election. All the evidence now — really all of it — is on the other side, that it was Barack Obama and his spy organizations that were colluding and conspiring against him. Andrew C. McCarthy has a new book out about this called &#8220;<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ball-Collusion-Election-Destroy-Presidency/dp/1641770252">Ball of Collusion</a>.&#8221; We&#8217;re trying to get him on the line for today, hopefully he&#8217;ll be here later in the show.
But you know when you talk about this stuff &#8230; this story about sexual abuse of young people, and I know I&#8217;ve talked about this a lot, but I think about it a lot. As I said, it&#8217;s part of the plot of &#8220;Another Kingdom: Part 3,&#8221; which will be starting as a podcast in September. And it&#8217;s part of the plot because I think it is at the core of the kind of corruption that&#8217;s going on among our elites. We have an elite that has lost its idea that there is some kind of religious meaning to life. We have an elite that is so separated from the rank-and-file of Americans that they think it&#8217;s perfectly fine to run a scam to throw a president out because they don&#8217;t like him — because he&#8217;s not one of them. We have this elite that has lost its way, and [that is] one of the things that people do when they are so powerful that no one can touch them — that no one wants to touch them.
&#8230; The press is in their pocket because the press is part of them. The press is the elite, right? Where the press reporters used to be working class guys who just loved taking down the powerful, no matter who they were, now when that happens, the upper-middle management — who has control over the editorial — they kill those stories. That&#8217;s why Sharyl Attkisson isn&#8217;t at CBS anymore. That&#8217;s why there were no stories about Obama abusing his power. &#8230;
When you have that, young people are going to get abused. Because, as Roman Polanski said after he raped and drugged and sodomized a little girl, he said, &#8220;What&#8217;s the problem? We all like young girls.&#8221; Well, yes we do, we all are attracted to young girls. That doesn&#8217;t make it right. I know this is such a tough thing for elites to understand. I mean I remember Woody Allen, when he was in that scandal going off with Mia Farrow’s adopted child. He said, &#8220;Well the heart wants what it wants.&#8221; Well, screw your heart and what it wants. We all know — I mean, all you have to do is go back to Aristotle who says all ethics— all ethics — goes against our desires. That&#8217;s what ethics are. That&#8217;s what morality is. But once you get so powerful — once you lose the plot of religious life and metaphysics — you stop thinking about that stuff, and it just seems right. Those girls are there, they&#8217;re attractive, you want them. Why shouldn&#8217;t you have them? And the heart wants what you what it wants. I&#8217;ve got the money. I&#8217;ve got the little island where nobody can find me. I&#8217;ve got the private jet. Why not?
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/show/andrew-klavan-show">Watch more of The Andrew Klavan Show here.</a>
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-andrew-klavan-show/id1045171376?mt=2">Listen to more of The Andrew Klavan Show on iTunes here.</a>

A Conversation With President Bill Clinton

KLAVAN: Conspiracies Thrive Because The Elite Is Corrupt

Bill Clinton

Jeffrey Epstein

On Monday&#8217;s episode of &#8220;The Andrew Klavan Show,&#8221; Klavan discusses the Left&#8217;s double standard when it comes to conspiracies. Video and partial transcript below:
A lot of the stories in the press today were saying things like, &#8220;Well, this case is not over.&#8221; I will bet money this case is over. They will never find another witness like Epstein, who has the proof. Now anybody can make any accusation — against anybody — from now on. And there&#8217;s nobody around to say that did or didn&#8217;t happen. From now on it&#8217;s all going to be he said, she said. Maybe they can get this [gal] Ghislaine Maxwell. Maybe they can go after her, that&#8217;s what some of the people are suggesting.
But who else? Who else is going to have the evidence? How are they going to construct the evidence they need to get these people? People so powerful, whose lawyers are so good. This case is over, this guy. I&#8217;m telling you; I will be shocked if anybody pays the price for this. And so now everybody starts to say, &#8220;Oh the conspiracy theories, instant conspiracy theories.&#8221; Everybody is going to have a conspiracy theory, and of course President Trump, you know, he&#8217;s got to be there. He retweeted something that said, &#8220;The Bill Clinton Body Count.&#8221;
Michael Knowles is going to come on and talk about &#8220;The Bill Clinton Body Count&#8221; because it is a funny story. But Donald Trump, who you know, one of the things about Trump is that he has no sense that he&#8217;s now President of the United States with special responsibilities. That sense has grown on him a little bit, but he&#8217;s still doing [it]. It&#8217;s one thing for a billionaire playboy to be tweeting out about Barack Obama&#8217;s birth certificate. It is another thing for a presidential candidate to be saying that Ted Cruz&#8217;s father killed Kennedy or whatever crazy stuff that was really bad. But now you&#8217;re President of the United States … .
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He has this moral power, this moral voice now that he doesn&#8217;t actually take into account, when he tweets something like this. I sincerely doubt that this was a murder committed by Bill Clinton&#8217;s agents, but he tweeted that around. But here&#8217;s the thing, Jake Tapper went after him. Play the piece of Jake Tapper excoriating the president for this.
<blockquote>TAPPER: This is of course, not the first time that President Trump has chosen to use his amplified voice to spread conspiracies. He lied about President Obama&#8217;s birthplace. He suggested Ted Cruz&#8217;s father might&#8217;ve been involved in the JFK assassination. He lied that he saw American Muslims in New Jersey, on TV celebrating 9/11, when there is no such tape.</blockquote>
Fair enough. Fair enough. But Jake Tapper is part of the problem, and I don&#8217;t mean to pick him out personally. He is in a corrupt business. He is in a business that now lies every day. They are in the business of lies, many of them are lies by omission, but they&#8217;re still lies. So, he is now the representative of a business that legitimizes what Trump does because there are so many lies opposed to him … .
You want to talk about a conspiracy theory, talk about Russian collusion. Two years of Russian collusion, you know that montage — I don&#8217;t have it setup now — but that montage of like the end is near, the walls are closing in, this is the beginning of the end, this is the end of the Trump presidency. Two and a half years, and The New York Times just as responsible. Every single one of those [people] on CNN. Jake Tapper is on CNN. So, when you talk about the president using his powerful voice, his massive platform, to put forward, to retweeting a conspiracy theory. Fair enough. But you&#8217;re in a business that did that every day, every single day … . The press are continually still saying that Donald Trump said that there were &#8220;fine people&#8221; among the neo-Nazis, which he did not say, which he clarified he wasn&#8217;t saying, when he said the words &#8220;fine people.&#8221; They&#8217;re still selling that; they&#8217;re still selling that lie.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/show/andrew-klavan-show">Watch more of The Andrew Klavan Show here.</a>
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CNN Donald Trump

KLAVAN: Media Demonizes Trump’s Conspiracy Theory After Peddling One For Two Years

Democratic Party

On Wednesday&#8217;s episode of &#8220;The Andrew Klavan Show,&#8221; Klavan discusses the mainstream media&#8217;s egregious claim that President Trump has called for &#8220;exterminating Latinos.&#8221;
[Trump] is talking in the way you want him to talk. He&#8217;s saying, I don&#8217;t blame the Dayton shooting on Elizabeth Warren (even though the guy was an Elizabeth Warren fan). [He’s saying,] I blame the people who do these things.
Meanwhile, the press and the Left has gone nuts. Joaquin Castro, [the brother of] one of the Democrat candidates, he doxxed Trump supporters — and what can that lead to, what’s the point of doing that, except putting a target on their backs, what is the point of doing that except having them harassed? People are outside Mitch McConnell&#8217;s house screaming incredibly violent, incredibly disgusting things. And, you know, the way the press is talking, it’s irresponsible. It is irresponsible.
Nicolle Wallace, who is on MSNBC &#8230; she got in this conversation, I want you to listen to this. Not only does she say that Trump has called for the &#8220;extermination&#8221; of Latinos — this is what she says, extermination of Latinos — but then her [guest] commentator goes on to basically negate anything Trump says. This is a strategy they are now using. Trump comes out and denounces hate, denounces bigotry, denounces racism — as he has done repeatedly throughout his administration — but no, no, no. [The media is] reporting on what he really feels in his heart. Listen to this conversation, it really is awful.
<blockquote>WALLACE: President Obama used the power of the presidency to try to pass comprehensive immigration reform with the Latino community [with] Latino leaders at the table. You now have a president, as you said, talking about exterminating Latinos.
REYES: &#8230;to me, it&#8217;s not even a question of what this president could do — and it brings me no pleasure saying this. I just think [that] with this administration, it is too late&#8230; this goes, to me, it&#8217;s not even a political question because Obama, George W. Bush, [George] H. W. — all of the presidents in modern history have made sincere outreach to Latinos. Whether or not their views happen to align with mainstream Latinos, [modern presidents] wanted them in their party, they wanted their support. This president — it&#8217;s beyond like the slightest minimum, modicum of respect — but really, [he] virtually has no regard for our communities. And we see the way he&#8217;s treated some of the most prominent people, some of the Latino achievers in this nation. So when I watch his speech, and I hear these words, they strike me as utterly insincere, completely inauthentic. If you paid five minutes worth of attention over to Trump over the last few years, that&#8217;s not who he is.</blockquote>
[They’re] reporting on who he is, not what he says, not what he does, and not the effects of his policies, which have been good for everybody. Nicolle Wallace issued a non-apology apology. She said, &#8220;I misspoke about Trump calling for an extermination of Latinos. My mistake was unintentional and I&#8217;m sorry. Trump&#8217;s constant assault on people of color and his use of the word invasion to describe the flow of immigrants is intentional and constant.&#8221;
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Scott Adams, you know the cartoonist, the Dilbert guy, joked that he also was apologizing to anyone he accidentally accused of genocide, which is a very good joke because &#8230; why would you say that about somebody? It is a terrible thing to say, but it&#8217;s only the beginning.
I&#8217;ve got to just play some of these so you see how nutty it is, so you just see that I&#8217;m not just going off on people. Here is Frank Figliuzzi, who is a former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI. If you didn&#8217;t already feel bad about the FBI, here is the security analyst for NBC. You know I don&#8217;t like to play MSNBC because I think it&#8217;s fair for them to be left-wing. Although they do go over the top, like with that Nicolle Wallace thing. But this is the NBC analyst talking about the fact that Donald Trump is going to put the flag at half-mast and raise it on August 8th.
<blockquote>FIGLIUZZI: We have to understand the adversary and the threat we&#8217;re dealing with, and if we don&#8217;t understand how they think, we&#8217;ll never understand how to counter them. So it&#8217;s [the] little things and language and messaging that matters. The president said that we will fly our flags at half-mast until August 8th — that&#8217;s 8/8. Now I&#8217;m not going to imply that he did this deliberately, but I am using it as an example of the ignorance of the adversary that&#8217;s being demonstrated by the White House. The numbers eight [and] eight are very significant in the neo-Nazi and white supremacy movement. Why? Because the letter H is the eighth letter of the alphabet and to them the numbers eight [and] eight together stand for Heil Hitler. So we&#8217;re going to be raising the flag back up at dusk on 8/8. No one&#8217;s thinking about this. [Either] no one&#8217;s giving him the advice, or he&#8217;s rejecting the advice.</blockquote>
I can’t imagine why no one’s thinking about this. Frank, back away from the microphone. Back slowly away from the microphone. I got a bunch of these I&#8217;m running out of time, but let me just play one more because it is hilarious. I guess let&#8217;s play the one of NBC. They’re trying to find how Trump is inspiring haters. They have to go to Germany, first of all, to find enough of these neo-Nazis — and if you&#8217;re going to look for Neo-Nazis, where [else] do you go? They can’t find them here, so they go to Germany, and I love this Nazi’s response to their reporting. Listen to this.
<blockquote>NARRATOR: We found the ideology that can inspire some to mass murder is taking inspiration from the president. We went to a neo-Nazi festival in Germany a few weeks ago. But what surprised us most is what organizers were handing out at the door.
REPORTER: So they&#8217;re giving out hats — MGHA — Make Germany hate again.
NARRATOR: We found the man who made the hats.
REPORTER: So people are using his hats as inspiration? Do people here like [Trump]? Do you like him?
NEO-NAZI: I like his style.</blockquote>
So they travel to Germany, they&#8217;ve got to travel to Germany to find the Nazis, right? That&#8217;s the first thing. Then they find a hat based on the MAGA hat and then they say, well do you like Trump? &#8220;Well, I like his style!&#8221; You know, he doesn&#8217;t like his policies. He doesn&#8217;t like what he&#8217;s actually saying, what he&#8217;s doing. But he likes the shouting! &#8220;You know, I like shouting. Shouting is good when I hate people. I like to shout, so I like that Trump talks loud!&#8221;
C’mon! This is NBC, again, this is not MSNBC. Again, they said, oh yes, Trump is inspiring the kind of extremism that leads to hatred around the world. That&#8217;s what they&#8217;re saying about the President of the United States on NBC News. And they find this clown, this neo-Nazi clown, out in Germany who doesn’t even attribute— It&#8217;s not about [Trump’s] philosophy, he just likes the style. &#8220;I like red, red is good. I like a red hat. When I put on a hat, a red hat, I feel like a Nazi!&#8221;
You know, what kind of nuttiness is that? I mean, it’s dangerous. It really is dangerous, and it&#8217;s a textbook case of radicalization. They&#8217;re sacred ideas. [The press is] secluding themselves among themselves. The press needs to be reformed, it really does need [it]. It needs to reform itself because the First Amendment protects it from us reforming it, which is a good thing, but they really, all they have to do is hire people in positions of editorial power who voted for Donald Trump. Not [just] one of them. They need to hire 30 percent at least of their staff — of their editorial staff — should be people who voted for Donald Trump, so they can turn to them and say this story — where you went to Germany and accused the president of inspiring mass murder because some clown is wearing a red hat — this is a stupid story. Do not put it on the air. Unfortunately, that&#8217;s not going to happen because the corporations who employ them want it this way.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/show/andrew-klavan-show">Watch more of The Andrew Klavan Show here.</a>
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-andrew-klavan-show/id1045171376?mt=2">Listen to more of The Andrew Klavan Show on iTunes here.</a>

Today &#8211; Season 64

KLAVAN: Media, Democrats Go Nuts Again In New Attacks On Trump

NBC News

Nicolle Wallace

White Supremacy

This week, the heroes at Media Matters released a <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/daily-wire/daily-wire-cesspool-hatred-and-bigotry">stunning exposé</a> about the website you are currently reading. In a report subtly titled &#8220;The Daily Wire Is A Cesspool Of Bigotry And Hatred,&#8221; Media Matters sifts through seven months&#8217; worth of podcasts to highlight the most egregious statements made by Michael Knowles, Andrew Klavan, and this author.
Accompanying the report is a helpful <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/daily-wire/daily-wire-cesspool-hatred-and-bigotry">video montage</a> of the offensive material. Some might argue that the montage is more like a greatest hits album and it actually makes The Daily Wire seem way cooler and may even drive more people to become <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">premium subscribers</a> for a low price of $9.99 a month or $99 a year (free tumbler included). But those people are mistaken. Having watched the video and read the report, I am aghast and stunned by the horrific bigotry of my co-workers and myself.
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The comments highlighted by Media Matters truly shock the conscience. For example, in reference to the blackface scandal involving Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, Michael Knowles claims that Northam&#8217;s support for killing infant children after they are born is morally worse than the insensitive costume he wore decades ago. Knowles should realize that killing babies cannot be morally worse than anything because babies have no value. Obviously, we would all agree that, say, destroying endangered sea turtle eggs or shooting a bald eagle would be morally abominable and possibly even worse than blackface, but the execution of an infant child does not rise anywhere near that level of severity. Knowles&#8217; failure to understand this basic truth is unacceptable and inexcusable.
In another clip, Michael Knowles is documented claiming that pedophilia is being &#8220;normalized&#8221; in our culture. This, again, is an outrageous statement with no basis in reality whatsoever. Just because <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/39409/11-year-old-boy-dressed-drag-dances-gay-men-bar-amanda-prestigiacomo">young boys are dancing in drag at gay bars</a> and <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/42081/10-year-old-boy-dressed-drag-pictured-naked-amanda-prestigiacomo">posing with nude men</a> doesn&#8217;t mean pedophilia is being normalized. Rather, we are normalizing sexually charged interactions between prepubescent children and grown adults, which is completely different from pedophilia for reasons that GLAAD can surely explain.
Andrew Klavan, who seemed to get the most screen time in the hate montage, makes a number of wildly bigoted statements. For instance, he observes that men are attracted to the female body. I can&#8217;t quite figure out how to be offended by that remark but I trust that there must be a reason, so I will be offended by default. In one especially misogynistic outburst, Klavan claims that feminism has given women the false idea that their opinions matter because they&#8217;re women. Klavan seems to be arguing that all opinions should be judged not on gendered grounds but on the actual merits of the opinions themselves. That, at least, is one way to interpret it. The other way to interpret it is that Andrew Klavan hates all women and wishes they would die. Media Matters urges the latter interpretation, and I&#8217;m afraid I must agree. Elsewhere, Klavan calls Somalia a &#8220;hellscape.&#8221; This is appalling. Somalia is a lovely country and I plan to vacation there with my family this fall.
Finally, there is yours truly. As I watched the selected footage of my own show (which you can subscribe to on iTunes or SoundCloud, or watch live on YouTube or Facebook every day, Monday through Friday), I was stricken with sorrow and remorse. The very first clip shows me arguing that drag is essentially female blackface. My point was that drag queens are making a grotesque mockery of femininity, turning it into a degrading and sexualized caricature that demeans women. This argument is perfectly coherent and obviously correct, but it gave the people at Media Matters a bad case of the frownies, and so for that reason, I apologize. It is not enough for a statement to be &#8220;true.&#8221; What good is truth if it makes someone&#8217;s tummy hurt? Truth, as Media Matters has long insisted, is overrated.
At another point in the video, I claim that abortion doctors aren&#8217;t doctors but &#8220;medical assassins.&#8221; I regret this because of the pain it may have caused the very fine and decent folks who crush the skulls of children for a living. As the old saying goes, scalpels and suction tubes may dismember babies, but words will really hurt you. I will be more careful in the future.
I likewise regret saying that some of the women who made MeToo accusations were &#8220;also culpable.&#8221; At the time, I thought that perhaps some of the actresses who chose to sleep with Hollywood producers in order to get film roles are at least somewhat responsible for their actions and probably shouldn&#8217;t have used sex as a tool for career advancement. I now see that women can never be held accountable for anything. Women are strong, independent, competent, and not responsible for their own behavior.
There are many other offensive remarks included in the compilation. I am so filled with disgust at myself and the other hosts that I can&#8217;t continue writing about it. The tears are flowing onto my keyboard as I type. Everyone at Starbucks is staring at me. Let me close by saying this: I disavow The Daily Wire and everyone who works here. I don&#8217;t disavow the paychecks, to be clear. I still like those. The paychecks didn&#8217;t do anything wrong, so it would be inappropriate to penalize them. I should also stipulate that I will continue working here and saying all of the same kinds of things I&#8217;ve said all along. But just know that in my head and in my heart I stand in solidarity with Media Matters. I hear them. I believe them. I appreciate them.
Editor&#8217;s Note: Because the internet is filled with foolish and utterly dishonest people, the editors of The Daily Wire wish to note that this column utilizes a literary device called sarcasm.

Matt Walsh

WALSH: I Disavow The Daily Wire

Ben Shapiro

LGBT

Media Matters For America

Satire

On Tuesday&#8217;s episode of &#8220;The Andrew Klavan Show,&#8221; Klavan discusses wisdom and virtue in our leaders after the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton. Video and transcript below:
So, let me start by showing you two videos that are, to me, the difference between wisdom and un-wisdom, wisdom and foolishness. First of all, here is the El Paso mayor, obviously this is where the right-wing shooter went off and killed so many people. This is Mayor Dee Margo talking about the tragedy in his town.
<blockquote>MARGO: We&#8217;re dealing with a tragedy of 22 people who have perished by an evil hateful act of a white supremacist that has no bearing or belong[ing] in El Paso. It was not done by any one from El Paso. No El Paso [resident] would ever do this. I don&#8217;t know how we deal with evil. I don&#8217;t have a textbook for dealing with evil other than the Bible. I&#8217;m sorry.</blockquote>
I&#8217;m sympathetic to the idea that the Bible is a textbook to deal with evil, but that&#8217;s not what makes that wise. What makes that wise is he understands that he&#8217;s dealing with something that is eternal in human affairs. He doesn&#8217;t have the answer that people who are hungry for an answer and looking for an answer will take, that will get you into trouble. He&#8217;s being wise. I also want to point out that this wisdom is coming from the mayor of El Paso, which is an honorable position, but obviously not a big national position. It&#8217;s not a network news position. It&#8217;s not a senatorial position. It&#8217;s not the president&#8217;s position.
And, you know, we were just talking before the show started about this new Tarantino film, &#8220;Once Upon a Time In Hollywood,&#8221; which I enjoyed. It&#8217;s a very thoughtful film, a very interesting films, but has a lot of flaws, a lot of self-indulgence. One of the things I loved about it, what I think is maybe the center piece of the movie, is the character played by Brad Pitt. And Brad Pitt plays a kind of loser. He&#8217;s a stuntman who&#8217;s become a driver to this kind of washed-up TV star. The TV star is a kind of the Clint Eastwood character, before he started making spaghetti westerns. Brad Pitt plays this guy. And yet you find out as the show goes on that this loser guy with no ambition, this guy was satisfied just to be a factotum — a follower — is the decent moral heart of the movie, and that&#8217;s a very Christian point. The Christian point that the people who run the world, the people who are the most important in the world, are not always the best people in the world.
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I look back over our presidents for the last couple of years, you know. And the last one — Obama — was a narcissistic ideologue, who wouldn&#8217;t change his mind about his policies, even when he saw they didn&#8217;t work. He just went to the old Democrat playbook of dividing us over race. The guy before that, of course, was George W. Bush, who was a decent person, but also just not really equipped to deal with what he needed to deal with. And before that, you know, we had Clinton, who was credibly accused of being a rapist. Our presidents are our top people and are not always the best people… The people who are in the news, the people who are held up to us as idols, are frequently false idols. Maybe it&#8217;s the mayor of El Paso who has something really to speak to us, and we have to follow the wisdom and not the people.
One of many hilarious brothers that I have once made a really funny comment talking about someone he hated. He said, &#8220;He&#8217;s the worst person on earth who doesn&#8217;t run a country,&#8221; which I thought was a great line because it tells you [that] the powerful people are not always the wisest, not always the people we should follow. Now let me play you un-wisdom or foolishness.
Yesterday, I ended the show with an absolutely hilarious cut from the National Convention of Democratic Socialists. &#8230; The poor woman who was trying to chair the meeting couldn&#8217;t even get out a sentence without saying, &#8220;Oh, you used gender language! Oh, you&#8217;re doing this or you&#8217;re doing that!&#8221; So here is the guy at the Democratic Socialist National Convention, a super cut of him announcing the rules to the delegates.
<blockquote>DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST: We have quiet rooms that are available, there&#8217;s a range of options for these, right. One thing to note there, please don&#8217;t go into that space with anything that&#8217;s like an aggressive stance for instance, right. First and foremost, use the proper door, don&#8217;t try and exit through these or any other sort of like fun shortcuts you see. You have to have your credentials at all time. There are right-wing infiltrators who are trying to get in and generally try to be chill, right. Take a deep breath. Know better before you say anything. Please don&#8217;t tweet photos of your credentials if you have friends here that you would like to be here. Don&#8217;t let them in. Don&#8217;t make exceptions for those people. Don&#8217;t really talk to anybody who doesn&#8217;t have credentials. Especially if they claim to be from the press. Please do not talk to anybody who identifies themselves as a member of the press. Don&#8217;t talk to cops. Don&#8217;t talk to MAGA. Don&#8217;t talk to cops, if there are cops there, for any reason at all, right. If you do see someone talking to cops, let the marshals know.</blockquote>
Socialism doesn&#8217;t really seem all that relaxing does it. And, of course, this is the Left in a nutshell, and this is un-wisdom in a nutshell. The idea that you can control events to the extent that you can overcome the passions, evils, corruption that are endemic to being a fallen human being in a fallen world. I mean that it is the almost the definition, the picture of un-wisdom in the dictionary.
The picture of wisdom is a guy whose modesty, whose knowledge that there are things that can&#8217;t be controlled, things that can&#8217;t be fixed, things that are going to be what they are going to be. That is wisdom and this other thing leads to tyranny. It&#8217;s this idea that somehow, we can create something that is powerful enough to stop accidents, to stop tragedies, and stop evil.
I mean that&#8217;s how you get warnings on coffee cups that the coffee is hot. You know that&#8217;s how you get into these things. So, don&#8217;t use this word and don&#8217;t gender your language because then all the problems will exist. Because of the wonderful division of the genders — all those problems will disappear — if we just pretend those genders don&#8217;t exist.
There&#8217;s a piece in &#8220;The Wall Street Journal&#8221; today, by Christian Snyder — of &#8220;CollegeFix,&#8221; which is a great website —talking about bias response teams, and how they try to stop there from being any bias. They want to turn the college campuses into a surveillance state. And he went out and he got transcripts of them to find out what kinds of things were reported as &#8220;bias.&#8221; He says, &#8220;At the University of Utah, a male student was joking around with his friends. He was complaining that his computer battery was dying, someone gave him a plug to plug it in. He couldn&#8217;t get it in, they said, &#8216;Jam the cord into the power socket,&#8217; and he said, &#8216;That&#8217;s rape and I am not raping my computer.&#8217; He joked and a female student overheard that and filed a complaint.&#8221;
The reporting then becomes ideologically biased and this is the thing. You start out just trying to control what you think is evil, but then you realize that in order to do that, you must be the arbiter of good and evil. So, everything becomes your opinion writ-large, and you try to shut everybody down.
He has a &#8220;Michigan State University student, who reported his dorm roommate for watching a video of conservative commentator, Ben Shapiro.&#8221; Now, that I understand, of course, we all don’t want people running around listening to Ben Shapiro. But when a University of Oregon professor defended Justice Bret Kavanaugh&#8217;s nomination, a female student reported, &#8220;She was deeply offended, and that completely discredited sexual assault survivors like myself and Dr. Christine Blasi Ford.&#8221; A Portland State student &#8220;filed a complaint against a woman who jokingly described herself as being schizophrenic. An Asian-American student, at the University of Minnesota, reported a food service worker for saying hello in Japanese. An Indiana University teaching assistant filed a case against a guest lecturer, who tried to explain the role of the FCC by citing the Janet Jackson &#8216;Nipplegate&#8217; controversy,&#8221; and so on and so forth.
Trying to stamp out evil becomes tyranny. It becomes this idea that you are the arbiter of where good and evil lies. And that&#8217;s the thing about Libertarianism, as a religion, even as a party, is not a good idea. But a little bit of &#8220;Judge not lest you be judged,&#8221; a little bit of &#8220;Live and let live&#8221; is the way forward for freedom. You have to have that for freedom. Cultural problems need cultural solutions. If you think there&#8217;s something wrong with the culture, you have to solve it that way.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/show/andrew-klavan-show">Watch more of The Andrew Klavan Show here.</a>
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-andrew-klavan-show/id1045171376?mt=2">Listen to more of The Andrew Klavan Show on iTunes here.</a>

gettyimages-646469882.jpg

KLAVAN: The Most Important People Are Not Always The Best People

Barack Obama

Leftism

On Thursday&#8217;s episode of &#8220;The Andrew Klavan Show,”&#8221;Klavan discusses what&#8217;s really behind the Democrats&#8217; desire to have Michelle Obama run for president. Video and partial transcript below:
You know, it&#8217;s funny. Just my take, I was watching some of the Democrats reacting to the Democrats, [by that] I mean the press. [They were] reacting to the debate, and I think they have this sinking feeling. There is this idea that the left-wing ideas of the people who are being reasonable, who don&#8217;t want to spend all our money, and don&#8217;t want to offer people all the stuff that we can&#8217;t pay for, and that wouldn&#8217;t work, and would take our freedoms away — those people are the second-tier candidates. It&#8217;s the Elizabeth Warrens and the you know, Bernie Sanders, who are in the lead. And then there&#8217;s Joe Biden and Joe Biden is in this weird position, in that people like him because he looks normal. He represents normalcy. He&#8217;s been around for 150 years, so he&#8217;s not a swamp creature. He is just basically saying, &#8220;You can trust me. I&#8217;m your old pal Joe,&#8221; even though he obviously stands for nothing. He caves in whenever he&#8217;s under pressure. He judges the audience, he judges the voters, without really having any principles to bring to bear. Even so, he reminds people of normalcy. But he&#8217;s kind of dull, and a little bit doddering, and no one knows whether to believe anything he says or not.
And so, it was really interesting, Michael Moore, he was on either CNN or MSNBC. What&#8217;s the difference? Michael Moore the filmmaker, the radical filmmaker went on a 12-minute rant. It was MSNBC which ended with this. Before I play it, I just want to remind you that Moore, as he reminded people, said that Trump was going to win in the last election. Moore&#8217;s superpower is that he is from Detroit Michigan. He is from a working-class background, and so he has some feel — unlike a lot of these people — he has some feel for what ordinary people are thinking, and that&#8217;s why he knew Trump was going to win. And this is what he said:
<blockquote>MOORE: Who can crush Trump? Who&#8217;s the street fighter? We saw it in Bernie last night. Who&#8217;s the street fighter that can crush Trump? And frankly I think there&#8217;s a person that could do this if the election were held today. There is one person that would crush Trump. And she hasn&#8217;t announced yet. And her last name rhymes with Obama, [it] is Obama. Michelle Obama. Everybody watching this right now, knows she is a beloved American. And she would go in there and she would beat him. She would beat him in the debates; he wouldn&#8217;t be able to bully her. He wouldn&#8217;t be able to nickname her. She is beloved.</blockquote>
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You know, it&#8217;s interesting. He&#8217;s making a good point and it could happen. I mean, we all have noticed that Barack Obama has not endorsed Joe Biden, and why not, you know? Is he holding fire? Does he hate Joe, no. I mean, he may be waiting to see what Michelle wants to do. Plus, Michelle&#8217;s autobiography which I have not yet read, but I hear that every conservative should read it because it really sells her as kind of the all-American story. The true up and comer.
She&#8217;s got all the identity politics that the Left wants, she&#8217;s a woman, she&#8217;s black. They loved Obama, and it&#8217;s an interesting thing because she is a beloved American. There&#8217;s just no getting around that, Moore is just telling the truth. She&#8217;s a beloved American. The question is are people going to fall again for [Obama]. I think people voted for Obama, a lot because it made them feel good about themselves. It made them feel good about America. We&#8217;ve gotten past the racism. We&#8217;ve elevated this guy, and I think they got burned.
And it is interesting that even though Obama won re-election, and even though he remained personally popular in the polls; the Democrat Party under Obama was gutted. There was nobody left. There were no governors, there were no state assembly people, there was no senators. They lost both houses. I mean it was amazing how he destroyed the Democrat Party, while remaining popular himself. People liked him. People maybe, like themselves, when they liked him. Maybe they would feel the same way about Michelle. Or maybe they would feel, yeah thanks very much. You know, get a talk show and that&#8217;ll be fine and we&#8217;ll love you there. But we don&#8217;t want you destroying this stuff that Donald Trump has done like increase our wages, and increase our jobs, and keep the peace. Do all the things that Obama failed to do. &#8230;
So, it would be the ultimate left-right race if you think about it for a minute because it would be an attractive, nice, beloved person — whose policies have been proven failure. They have a proven track record of failure. And it would be a mean, belligerent, nasty Donald Trump — whose policies have worked. And that&#8217;s the ultimate Right and Left fight because the Right is the daddy party. It&#8217;s a mean party. It&#8217;s the party who tells you the truth. It&#8217;s the party who gives you a shot in the head when you&#8217;re misbehaving. It&#8217;s the party who thinks people who break the law should be arrested. It&#8217;s the party who thinks what works should be there, instead of what makes us feel good about ourselves.
And the Left is the party of we&#8217;re nice. Here&#8217;s some money, we&#8217;ll take that money from that evil rich guy, and we&#8217;ll give it to you.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/show/andrew-klavan-show">Watch more of The Andrew Klavan Show here.</a>
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KLAVAN: Why The Democrats Are Now Turning To Michelle Obama To Be Their Nominee

2020 Election

Joe Biden

Michelle Obama

Republican Party

On Wednesday&#8217;s episode of &#8220;The Andrew Klavan Show,&#8221; Klavan discusses a recent admission by &#8220;Sex in the City&#8221; author Candace Bushnell that she regretes choosing her career over having children. Video and partial transcript below:
This is a story about Candace Bushnell. She&#8217;s now 60. But back in the &#8217;80s, I guess it was &#8217;80s and &#8217;90s, she wrote &#8220;Sex in the City,&#8221; a column that later became the famous TV star series starring Sarah Jessica Parker. And the TV series &#8212; which I only saw once or twice, I kind of sampled it because it was such a big deal; it wasn&#8217;t something that I was interested in. But a lot of people [have] said, and I actually think this is true, that it was written by gay guys and it was actually not about four women. It was about four women fronting for the opinions of these gay guys. And some of the conversations about sex really did sound like gay guys and not like women talking about sex. But the point of this was the idea of really enjoying yourself, having sex, and being free to have the kind of sex you want. There was a romantic strain in it. People were looking for love. But there was this continual idea of sex not having a moral component. That in other words, if you had sex promiscuously, you were not violating any kind of a moral code.
This is an idea that was being sold to people for a long time. Anyway, the story here is that Candace Bushnell now says she regrets choosing a career over having children. As she is now at 60 [and] truly alone. She divorced her husband, a ballet dancer, in 2012 and said it made her realize the importance of starting a family. She&#8217;s worth around £18 million. This is a British paper reporting this. And she says, &#8220;When I was in my 30s and 40s, I didn&#8217;t think about it then. When I got divorced and I was in my 50s, I started to see the impact of not having children and of truly being alone. I do see that people with children have an anchor in a way that people don&#8217;t, who have no kids.&#8221; And she goes on to talk about the fact that there is no one to care of you in your old age. She has to rely on girlfriends instead of the children to take care of her.
I couldn&#8217;t help but notice, and I don&#8217;t mean this as an attack on her because we&#8217;re all guilty of this to some degree. I couldn&#8217;t help but notice that even now, the same reasons that she followed the promiscuity path, which were selfish reasons, are the reasons she wants to have had a child. The selfish reason is she&#8217;s alone. She wants someone to take care of her. And it points out to me the essential materialism of leftism which I&#8217;ve talked about before.
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Leftism is a materialist creed. It is a creed that says I can fix this. If two people have unequal amounts of money, I can take money away from one and give it to the other, and then they will be equal. And of course, the flaw in that is it doesn&#8217;t look into the idea of why one person has more money than the other. Why taking the money away and giving it to this other person might hurt that person. As if that person were not just a material entity, who when he gave them more money, had more money. But was also a spiritual entity, who was going to behave in certain ways that might hurt him, whether he had the money or not? This is central [to the] materialism of leftism, and the essential selfishness of materialism.
Under materialism there&#8217;s really no reason to do anything for anybody else. Truly there&#8217;s not, except [when it&#8217;s] to your own advantage. You have kids because they&#8217;ll take care of you in your old age and you won&#8217;t be truly alone. But the thing is, if you have a spiritual idea of life. If you have an idea that we&#8217;re not just physical entities, we&#8217;re not just meat puppets, who can be controlled with drugs, who can be satiated with food and sex, [and] who can be made equal with money.
If you don&#8217;t look at it that way, as you look at us, as entire entities, entities who are &#8220;selves,&#8221; you start to think about other things. The religious point of view, the spiritual point of view, is that things have a purpose. Things are whole and have a purpose. Sex has a purpose. It has a lot of purposes, it has varying purposes, but it does have a purpose. Your profession has a purpose. Life has a purpose…
One of the purposes of life is to create life. To give the gift that you&#8217;ve been given, to someone else. That is one of the reasons that you have children. It&#8217;s not, you know, people who say, &#8220;Well parents with young children are not among the happiest people.&#8221; That&#8217;s true, but that doesn&#8217;t mean they&#8217;re not among the most fulfilled people. Having children opens up a wall that you didn&#8217;t even know was there — turns your two-dimensional life that you thought was a three-dimensional life into a truly three-dimensional life. It deepens your sadness and it deepens your joy. It deepens everything about your life because it is the purpose of your body. The purpose of your body and its life is to create more life. And when you do things for their purpose, you suddenly find they&#8217;re harder. The world may not be as kind to you as it would be if you do it for the world, but you&#8217;ll find you are much more richly fulfilled and happier.
I don&#8217;t sit down and write to make money. I don&#8217;t sit down and write so that people will applaud me. I sit down and write because I think there&#8217;s something inside me that is trying to communicate itself — that I was given, it was given to me, to do this. And I try to do it with that spirit. I really do every day. I like making money off it. I like the fact that I can make a profession out of it. I like the fact that sometimes it wins me praise. Writers want to be read, and writers want to be praised. I&#8217;m not denying any of that, but I know that the purpose of it is something other than that.
The purpose of life is to make life. And I think it&#8217;s something that we have been talked out of — especially women — by feminists, who are idiots. They have been talked out of their own purpose, their central purpose. It is the central purpose of your physical being. And I thought when I read that about Candace Bushnell, the first thing that occurred to me is: you know what, there&#8217;s no going back. There&#8217;s no going back, that&#8217;s a mistake you cannot correct, and it is an essential mistake. And I think that everybody should be thinking about it and breaking out of the chains that the Left has surrounded us [in] — the material chains, which are also chains of selfishness.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/show/andrew-klavan-show">Watch more of The Andrew Klavan Show here.</a>
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KLAVAN: ‘Sex In The City’ Author Regrets Not Having Children, But For Wrong Reasons

Bible

On Thursday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan discusses the hysteria that the mainstream media has created around President Trump’s administration, as was demonstrated once again by the Robert Mueller hearing Wednesday, and what they miss about why Trump was elected. Video and partial transcript below:
We&#8217;ve all heard the old expression that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts its boots on. Never has that been more true than today. When search [engines] and social media have joined the Democrat news media complex, the entertainment industry and the academies, with the express intention of spreading the left-wing lie: that our elites can govern us better than we can govern our racist sexist “unwoke” deplorable irredeemable hateful selves.
But here&#8217;s the thing, lies do move fast, but once the truth does get its boots on, they are big, big boots. They are Godzilla-sized boots. They’re city-crushing, earthquake-causing, lie-flattening boots that tend to leave the lies that raced around before, crushed beneath them, like cockroaches or rats or commentators on CNN.
Yesterday was a good day, a two-and-a-half-year lie was exposed: the lie that Donald Trump won the presidential election because of some shenanigans he pulled with Russia. Trump won the election because his opponent was a crook, he outsmarted the opposition on the debate stage and on the electoral field, and because he broke the rules of political correctness that have held us all in mental chains too long — and we appreciated it.
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Listen, while our journalistic community has betrayed its own principles, sold its integrity, and replaced its sacred mission of truth-telling with political propaganda. It&#8217;s not that I enjoy seeing them publicly disgraced and humiliated and dragged through the mud of their own dishonesty; with their hopes crushed and their dishonesty exposed. Oh wait, yes, that’s exactly what I enjoy. In fact, it makes me laugh like some old movie villain, I love it. But I would also love seeing, if only for one day, if technology has not become so advanced, media so loud, and confusions so rampant that the truth cannot still have its day and destroy everything in his path.
Because the truth is this, we voted for Trump because of all his flaws. He is better than the establishment, better than the elites, better than the academics, better than the America-hating Left, and the tremulous weak-kneed Right. If the elites hate Donald Trump so much and we like Trump better than we like them, maybe it&#8217;s time the elites started asking themselves how they sank so low. That we, the people, prefer even the man they despise to them. Because then, they too will know the truth about themselves, which is that they are silver spoon mediocrities, who are not there to rule us, but to serve us — deplorably normal though we may be.
Man, oh man, I laughed yesterday. I haven&#8217;t had a laugh like that in a long time. You know, I know what you&#8217;re thinking, &#8220;How can you, a Christian, full of love in your heart for all mankind, how can you revel at these smoking ruins that yesterday left the Democrat Party in and their media?&#8221; And here&#8217;s the thing, I do revel in it. You know that thing, “I feel pretty, I feel pretty,” that was me yesterday, except for the purple dress. The thing is, it&#8217;s not Trump they hate, it really isn&#8217;t. I mean they hate Trump, but they keep saying it over and over, “If you supported Trump, if you support this, if you don&#8217;t believe us, [that’s who we hate].” They’re such mediocrities.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/show/andrew-klavan-show">Watch more of The Andrew Klavan Show here.</a>
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KLAVAN: How Mueller Hearing Delivered The Truth, Just Not The Way The Democrats Planned

Media

On Wednesday&#8217;s episode of &#8220;The Andrew Klavan Show,&#8221; Klavan discusses the disastrous congressional hearing with Robert Mueller, who led the independent investigation into alleged &#8220;collusion&#8221; between Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. Video and partial transcript below:
Now remember, this whole thing is because of the Democrats, who live within the media bubble, just like the Republicans do. They just have their imagination fed back to them all the time. If they believed in Green Dragons eating the Empire State Building, the media would say that&#8217;s what was happening. And it would shock them to find out that everyone in New York is looking at the Empire State Building, and there&#8217;s no Green Dragons.
In other words, they don&#8217;t know. What they think is that we read the report, but we didn&#8217;t get the report. We&#8217;re not smart enough to get the report. We need the visuals, we need it on TV. We&#8217;re not going to read the book, we need to see the movie. They keep saying this, they keep actually using those terms. Trump keeps saying, &#8220;No obstruction no collusion, no obstruction, no collusion.&#8221; There was no obstruction and there was no collusion. So that&#8217;s the end of that. But, just in this one point, that he was not exonerated, John Ratcliffe (R-TX) really went after him [Mueller] on this. Listen to this clip.
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<blockquote>Ratcliffe: &#8220;Your report and today you said at all times the special counsel team operated under, was guided by, and followed Justice Department policies and principles. So, which DOJ policy or principle sets forth a legal standard that an investigated person is not exonerated if their innocence from criminal conduct is not conclusively determined?&#8221;
Mueller: &#8220;Can you repeat the last part of that question?&#8221;
Ratcliffe: &#8220;Yeah. Which DOJ policy or principle set forth a legal standard that an investigated person is not exonerated, if their innocence from criminal conduct is not conclusively determined? Where does that language come from Director? Where is the DOJ policy that says that?&#8221;
Mueller: [Silence]
Ratcliffe: &#8220;Let me make it easier. Can you give me an example, other than Donald Trump, where the Justice Department determined that an investigated person was not exonerated, because their innocence was not conclusively determined?&#8221;
Mueller: &#8220;I cannot, but this is unique situation.&#8221;
Ratcliffe: &#8220;Well you can&#8217;t, time is short. I&#8217;ve got five minutes. Let&#8217;s just leave it at you can&#8217;t find it because, I&#8217;ll tell you why, it doesn&#8217;t exist.&#8221;</blockquote>
Of course it doesn&#8217;t exist, the principle that you have not been exonerated does not exist in law. I mean think about it for yourself: You&#8217;re accused of some horrible thing you didn&#8217;t do. You go to trial, they either find that you are not guilty or you&#8217;re guilty. You either did it or you didn&#8217;t, you are innocent if they can&#8217;t prove it. And that&#8217;s the standard, that&#8217;s the legal standard. It is such an important legal standard because you can ruin anybody with innuendo. You can charge anybody with anything, as they always say, you can indict a ham sandwich. &#8230;
How would it be if you got charged of some terrible thing and they said, &#8220;Well we couldn&#8217;t prove you were guilty, but you&#8217;re not exonerated.&#8221; You never do that. You say, &#8220;Not guilty, I was found not guilty.&#8221; Even if it&#8217;s a miscarriage of justice, you are innocent until proven guilty.
This just blew up in the Democrats&#8217; face…. I mean I was going to come on the show, I didn&#8217;t know whether the hearing was going to start before I came on. And still I was going to tell you it’s going to blow up because I read the report. There&#8217;s nothing they can get out of this except for him saying something that he shouldn&#8217;t be saying like, &#8220;Oh yes, I think he&#8217;s guilty, but I couldn&#8217;t do anything about it.&#8221; Which would be absurd, I mean it would just be an absurd thing for him to say.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/show/andrew-klavan-show">Watch more of The Andrew Klavan Show here.</a>
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KLAVAN: Mueller Hearing Just Blew Up In Dems’ Faces

Robert Mueller

On Tuesday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan discusses the importance of compromise in the heat of political discourse and how the ultimate goal should be to keep people free. Video and partial transcript below:
One of my biggest beefs with commentators, on both the Left and the Right, is they had this idea, they put forward this idea, that there&#8217;s some system that somehow is going to fix everything, that humanity can be fixed.
On the Left, it&#8217;s like some big-government idea is eventually going to suppress all evil. They&#8217;re always talking about racism as if they want you to believe there&#8217;s some kind of emergency of evil and all it takes is for the wings of big government to come floating down on top of you, take that evil in its talons, and carry it away. Just ain&#8217;t so, there&#8217;s no government big enough to suppress the broken human heart, it just can&#8217;t be done. So, it&#8217;s just a way of getting more and more government forever &#8230; that&#8217;s their intention.
Well, we do it on the Right, too. We talk about capitalism, we talk about democracy, we talk about our Constitution as if those things are complete systems that either get rid of human evil or somehow nullify it, and nothing does. I mean, we all want businesses to thrive, we all believe in a free market, but things get out of hand. Right? It&#8217;s funny how the Left used to know this, but now they&#8217;ve forgotten it. Everybody supports these corporations that are so huge that they take away your privacy. They take away your right to free speech. They completely control people, and the Left used to say, &#8220;Oh, those corporations we must bring them down.&#8221; Bernie Sanders still says it, but he doesn&#8217;t mean it &#8230; We all want our Amazon, we all want our Apple, we want our iPods, we want all this stuff.
At some point, somebody has to say it&#8217;s too much, you have too much power. You shouldn&#8217;t be allowed to reach into my bedroom and find out what I&#8217;m doing or follow my searches and find out everything about me until you can control my life and control my speech. You really do not want that to happen. We want free markets; I want free markets. We even want global markets. When we talk about globalization that&#8217;s kind of a vague term, it&#8217;s a global world. We&#8217;re all in this one small planet floating in the vastness of space, we&#8217;re all going to be dealing with each other. But there are different ways to do that. Do we want to have separate markets? Do we want to have an American idea that stays alive? Or do we just want to open up our borders and let all these people pour in whatever their ideas are and completely change the nature of our country? We know what one side thinks, we know what the other side thinks, but no idea covers everything. Because even though we want free markets, they can destroy communities and communities are important.
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If you want to keep the values alive the preserve conservatism, preserve Americanism and preserve free markets in fact, the underlying atmosphere for free markets, the underlying ground in which free markets grow, are good communities, churches that people can go to, families that are kept together. You can&#8217;t just keep saying to people, &#8220;Oh well, business has to be free, so your community is gone, your church is gone, your family&#8217;s gone, your wife has to work. Too bad.&#8221; It doesn&#8217;t work that way, everything needs bookends.
No system can control all things, it just doesn&#8217;t work that way. So, you have to feel your way. I mean I don&#8217;t like the idea of a welfare state, in principle, I&#8217;m against it. In principle, I&#8217;m against the idea that you take money away from one person and give it to another without a welfare state. You can&#8217;t keep freedom alive. Even Hayek, this Fredrick Hayek said this, he said, &#8220;you have to have a welfare state where people will be too afraid to be free. You don&#8217;t want people so afraid of what&#8217;s going to happen to their children if they lose their job or if they get sick that they will not be free.&#8221; You know it&#8217;s all well and good to go on the radio and sit in front of a microphone and slam your fist into your palm and say &#8220;this welfare state is destroying everything.&#8221; Everything needs bookends, no principal will keep you alive.
I get in these conversations when I go to colleges and speak because young people obviously are idealistic. They should be idealistic, and they say to you, &#8220;Well aren&#8217;t you violating your principles?&#8221; Yeah, I am violating my principles, I’ve got to. I’ve got to violate my principles to keep the ground on which my principles stand alive. If people are too afraid to be free, they won&#8217;t be free, so you need a bit of a welfare state. There&#8217;s no such thing as an age of republic or an age of democracy that doesn&#8217;t have some kind of welfare state.
We have a twofold problem; one is that the Left uses that fact to keep selling us a bigger and bigger welfare state. I believe that people shouldn&#8217;t starve in the streets if takes government action, I wish it could be done through our churches, I wish it were done through churches and communities, but if it takes government action just to keep people from being too afraid to be free, I&#8217;ll violate my principles and do it. But what we know is, the left is constantly adding things to the pile, right? We got to pay for college, you&#8217;ve got to pay for childcare, you&#8217;ve got to pay for this and that, you know you got to pay for choice, and we&#8217;ve got to pay for birth control. Choices that people make that they don&#8217;t have to make, that I shouldn&#8217;t have to pay for.
Because of that, because they say black, we say white, because they say up, we say down, we start saying well there shouldn&#8217;t be any welfare state, it just doesn&#8217;t work. So, we know that they&#8217;re going to use these places where freedom needs to be a little bit shored up by government systems, they&#8217;re going to use those to try and expand and expand and expand government. It&#8217;s the thin end of the wedge, it is a slippery slope. We have to stand on that slippery slope, plant our feet, and keep people from sliding down.
Those are the only choices we have. We don&#8217;t have a choice that we can keep people free. I mean like during the Depression that&#8217;s when things like communism and fascism became popular because when people panic and they become afraid, they buy into those systems. That&#8217;s why the Left is always selling panic. That&#8217;s why they&#8217;re telling you &#8220;Oh it&#8217;s hot outside, this is the end of the world. Run for your life and get a bigger, bigger government.&#8221; I mean that is why they do that all the time.
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KLAVAN: What Both The Left And Right Get Wrong About Freedom

Progressivism

Social Justice

Socialism

Welfare

On Monday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan discusses Kathy Zhu losing her crown as Miss Michigan. Zhu claims it was because of her pro-Trump activism on social media. Video and partial transcript below:
Kathy Zhu was crowned Miss Michigan by the Miss World America organization and she has been stripped of her title now. Whatever your opinion is of beauty contests, whether you like them, whether you don’t, whether they&#8217;re interesting to you or not, girls who go into beauty contests work extraordinarily hard.
Obviously, it&#8217;s a big test. They have to look perfect; they have to act perfectly and they have to walk perfectly; they have to stay in shape. It is a lot of work. So, when you take away somebody&#8217;s crown, you&#8217;re doing a big thing. Yet, it&#8217;s the kind of thing it would be news for a day, and it will disappear. But, in her life, this is a big deal, that she is stripped of something that she earned. Why was she stripped of it? Well, first of all, she&#8217;s a conservative activist. She&#8217;s a University of Michigan senior and the social media director for the national group Chinese Americans for Trump. She shared on social media an email she had received on Thursday, when she was told that she could no longer be Miss Michigan, because of some tweets she sent out.
For instance, she tweeted, &#8220;Did you know the majority of black deaths are caused by other blacks? Fix problems with your own community first before blaming others.&#8221; Here&#8217;s another one, &#8220;There&#8217;s a try a hijab on booth at my college campus. So, you&#8217;re telling me that it&#8217;s now just a fashion accessory and not a religious thing or are you just trying to get women used to being oppressed under Islam.”
These are perfectly valid opinions. You may disagree, you may not. I mean, it is true that black violence against other blacks does account for more deaths than white violence against blacks. It is true also, that a hijab is a religious thing. When you say try on a hijab, you&#8217;re not just saying, “Oh, here&#8217;s a fashion accessory,” you are communicating an entire philosophy, which if women find oppressive you know that&#8217;s not a head-scratcher for me. But still, I can see you disagree, but she loses her crown for this. She loses her crown for speaking her opinion. Here&#8217;s her response to the people who supported her.
<blockquote>Kathy Zhu: Hey everyone this is Kathy Zhu; I just want to say thank you so much for all your support. It&#8217;s been a heck of a two days, honestly. Yesterday I was crying when I first saw the messages and emails from the organization, but today&#8217;s a new day, and today was amazing, honestly. I&#8217;m so glad this story got brought into the public eye and the media because this is so much bigger than pageantry. This is about, you know, an organization that discriminates against people with different opinions, calling people racist even when they&#8217;re not. Just literal attacks like those, really, really diminishes the value and the truth of the word &#8216;racism&#8217;. So, you know, there shouldn&#8217;t just be diversity of skin color, there should be diversity of thought, of mindset, of political affiliation. I&#8217;m so glad to be able to be the voice for this right now and I hope that other pageant organizations could really learn from this story and the situation to not discriminate others based on opinions. So, don&#8217;t worry, I&#8217;ll still stand firm, stand my ground. I&#8217;m still going to continue fighting for what I believe in. So yeah, thank you guys so much for the support once again. See you later.</blockquote>
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Well, shame on them, right? I mean it is a beautiful girl, obviously extremely intelligent, very articulate, who knows exactly what she&#8217;s saying. Plus, she has the courage of her conviction, she has integrity. They didn&#8217;t even give her a chance apparently, didn&#8217;t give her chance to defend herself, but she could have come out and cry, &#8220;Oh I&#8217;m so sorry.&#8221; She could have tried to get back in their good graces. Instead, she stood firm. She has a picture of herself wearing the &#8220;Make America Great Again&#8221; MAGA hat. That actually is the kind of woman who should be winning contests, that&#8217;s an American woman, that is somebody where we all sit back and say &#8220;Yes, that&#8217;s the kind of woman we want America to be made up of.&#8221; People who stand for what they stand for. She&#8217;s not attacking anybody, she&#8217;s not &#8220;milkshaking&#8221; anybody, she&#8217;s not throwing anything at anyone. She&#8217;s simply expressing her opinions; you don&#8217;t like them, disagree. It&#8217;s an amazing thing how the Left has managed to make a disagreement a matter of hostility.
I mean, look, I disagree with a lot of my friends, a lot of people I love. I disagree with them, we argue sometimes, even our voices go up when we argue, but it never changes anything. I remember once, that Ben and I got into a political argument and I went home and the &#8220;god-king,&#8221; Jeremy, called me and said, “The people who are watching that argument were afraid that you guys were angry,&#8221; and I said, “Angry? I&#8217;m not angry at all.&#8221; We were just passionate about what we were talking about and debating.
That&#8217;s part of being an American, it&#8217;s part of being free, it&#8217;s one of the joys of life to debate people of goodwill and things that you disagree with. I&#8217;m at this very moment have been talking to a lot of people who disagree with some of my points of view, and I&#8217;ve expanded my points of view on certain things that are very important to me about the culture. I&#8217;ll talk about that another time, but that&#8217;s because of debate. To silence a woman like that is shameful, and to take away the thing that she worked for and earned is shameful.
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