Andrew Klavan on DC Siphoning Off America’s Wealth, and the ‘Make-Believe Value’ of Washington | Facts Matter

Thank you so much for joining us. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks. So, let me ask you this. People say elections have consequences, okay? You just told me you live here in the Washington, D.C. general area. One of the consequences of the election seems to be that if you go on Zillow right now, there's like 4,000 new listings, and the median household price has fallen by $139,000. What does that mean? Well, it should, right? Many of the richest counties in America surround Washington, D.C. Many of them surround New York. Many of them surround L.A. Think about that. New York is the financial center of the world. L.A., of course, is the movie business, which is one of the great businesses in America. What do people make here? Nothing. They don't produce anything. They don't build anything. They just take stuff, you know? And so, all the money that has come flowing in, I've been coming to D.C. all my life, and I remember the day during the Obama administration when I was walking down the street, and suddenly I realized the girls were more beautiful. Everybody was better dressed. Suddenly, it looked a lot more like Hollywood than it should have, and I thought, oh, because they have all our money. And the fact is that when you have a government that taxes to a rate of 50%, which the founders would have just started two wars over, not just one, when you have a government that does that, and when we see what the kind of garbage now that they're spending it on, we always knew that they weren't making the world any better, what is the value that suddenly gave this property such high prices? Now that they've been exposed, now that they know that they're running for their lives because their jobs are about to disappear, suddenly this property isn't worth that much, and why should it be? And so, it's all been kind of propped up on the back of the American taxpayer, and it really has not delivered. It has not delivered. And this is why every time I would hear Joe Biden say, in that raspy kind of creepy voice from the horror movies, he'd say, pay your fair share. I thought, my fair share of what? My fair share of Sesame Street in Iraq is zero. My fair share of sending money to spread LGBTQ ideas throughout the universe is nothing. So, I understand there's going to be a bit of a welfare state, but it has just grown out of control, and now that there's a chance for the first time, really, in my lifetime, because even Reagan couldn't do it, now that there's a chance of cutting that back, the make-believe value of being in Washington is vanishing, and good riddance. I hope my house price doesn't drop too far, but that's the way it goes. Yeah. You know, alongside the people listing their homes and the median price going down, if you look at the Google trends, I don't know if you saw this recently, but the Google searches in this area for things like Swiss bank account, how do I wire money, and criminal defense attorney, all these Google search results are just going through the roof in Washington, D.C. That's wild. Because for me, I sort of wonder, is the media overplaying the effect that Doge is having? Because they're also saying Trump is going to be ineffective, he doesn't know what he's doing, but other people are saying, oh, he's doing this, so it's like, what's the reality? I feel like the Google trends show us the reality. I think you're absolutely right. Look, they all knew. They all knew. And the fact that so many of their philosophical buildings, their philosophical cathedrals collapsed to ashes the minute the election results came in, showed that everybody knew. Nobody ever thought a man could become a woman. Nobody ever thought that. Nobody thought that there was some reason that there were people pouring over our borders. You know, they would come and say, our borders are secure, because they knew we didn't want that. They knew it. And yet they let it happen for their own reasons, which you can speculate about, but we don't really know, you know? And so they all knew that they were doing the wrong thing. When you investigate parents, when you have the FBI investigate parents as if they were terrorists because they asked to have pornography taken out of their elementary schools, you know you're doing something wrong. So this is not like, oh, that evil Trump is going to put us away. They tried to put him away because they knew that they were doing something wrong. And for me, these last four years, but in a way it's been more like ten years, have been like a kind of weird dream where I would talk to people and I would say, this is insane, right? I mean, they have men and women's sports and men and women's bathrooms and things. And people would kind of back off. They didn't want to say, oh, no, this is crazy. They had been intimidated after years, decades, of being called racist, being called sexist, being called deplorable, and all the things that broke the spine of the American spirit. They had just decided they were going to give in to that dream, and Trump woke them up. You know, when Trump first came along, like everybody, I had a hard time getting used to it. But even then, even when he put me off with his brashness, I would say to myself, maybe it takes this to break through this atmosphere of fear that they've created over just saying what you mean, you know? I mean, like, think about the fact that college students don't argue anymore. They don't sit up at night in their dorms and argue about the big picture because they're afraid. Well, one reason they might be afraid is, like, great example, Trump is doing something. The president of X university comes out, gives a statement saying, oh, Trump is wrong. You know, he shouldn't be doing this. He's racist or whatever it is. It's like, imagine you're a conservative student in that college. You have the president coming out so strongly against the president of the college coming out so strongly against the president. Like, how do you feel as a student? You probably don't feel comfortable expressing your viewpoints. When I was a college student, which I'll admit was back in the Jurassic period, but still, we talked about everything. We argued about everything. You know, we fought over everything. And conservative ideas might have, you know, sounded kind of odd to us because most students are on the left. You know, they haven't learned anything yet, you know? But still, we were ready to hear it. We were always ready to hear it and always ready to argue and fight into the wee small hours of the morning. The fact that that culture disappeared is purely an engineered event, and it was engineered through fear. And the fear and the reason it was engineered through fear and the reason the censorship and the intimidation happened is because they also knew their ideas don't work. There has never been a time when the left has taken over a country and things got better. It just doesn't happen, right? When you have leftism, and I'm not talking about arguing over the 50-yard line between liberals and conservatives. I'm talking about this true leftism where the government is going to solve all the problems, where suddenly the world is perfectible if only we let the geniuses of the elite take over. That has destroyed every country it's ever touched. And so the only way to stop people from saying, oh, wait, this is that crappy idea that has been used, done a hundred times and destroyed every country it touched, was to intimidate them into silence. I mean, that's why you don't censor people because you're right. You censor people because they're right and you can't argue with them. And that's really the culture that is dissipating before our very eyes. But it did take, you know, I like to think it would have broken anyway because of the American spirit, but I think it took a guy like Trump who was willing to be prosecuted, convicted, shot at, and still just spit in their eye and didn't care what they called him and kind of inspired people to say, oh, if he can do that, maybe we can do that a little too. That's a really good point, yeah. It's like somebody who can get back up after so much, he will inspire a lot of people. Let me ask you this. One of the criticisms that people are lobbying right now, well, among the many criticisms that people are lobbying against what Doge is doing is that the things they're finding, like you gave the example of the $20 million that USAID spent in Iraq to make a localized Sesame Street, right? Now, the counter-argument might be like, okay, $20 million is only like 0.00% of the national budget. Another way to look at it, though, is $20 million, if you look at the average amount that an American household pays in taxes, that's the equivalent of 400 families' entire taxes, right? So a family worked half of the year to pay for Iraq to have a Sesame Street. I think if you switch that around, you realize like, oh, it doesn't matter what little percentage, it's like 500 families worked like all their taxable hours just to fund that one program. Do you feel like one thing that might come out of this is that after Doge is done, people will no longer think of this taxation scheme where it's like, yeah, we're just going to give to the giant slush fund pile, they're just going to go everywhere. Maybe people will go back to like a more, how much is this going to cost and who's going to pay for it? That kind of thinking. Is that possible? Well, of course it's possible because once you see just how bad it is, you start to think about other things. Like take, for instance, the Inflation Reduction Act, which even Biden admitted after it was passed, was really the Green New Deal. It's $1.6 trillion that they lied out of us by telling us it was going to bring down inflation. Now, anybody who knows anything about economics knows that inflation is caused by government spending so that the idea that the government could pass a $1.6 trillion bill called Inflation Reduction Act was already a punchline. But the fact that they lied about it and then bragged about it afterwards, we put that over on you, is things that we should go back and look at. Well, wait a minute. If this was supposed to reduce inflation and it's just the Green New Deal, which is just graft, by the way, shouldn't we get rid of that? Shouldn't we take that money back? I mean, the thing that always bothers me is when they use words like free healthcare or government single-payer healthcare. This is healthcare that somebody else went to work and earned the money, and then that money was taken away and given to you because you didn't work and earn the money to give you healthcare. Now, I'm not a complete extremist on either side. I believe in a slight welfare state to make sure that nobody, you know, dies in American streets. I think that's important. But still, once you give politicians that power to transfer the money that I earn to somebody else who they think, for some reason, should have it more, you have given away the Freedom Store. You've given away everything that makes the country as great as it is. The country is about people saying, I've got this idea. I think I can build a computer that's faster than your computer in my garage. And then he becomes the rich guy, you know? And then the government says, oh, well, we've got to tax that. We've got to regulate it. We've got to, you know, do anything we can to kill it and then break up the monopoly, whatever they do. And no, we've got to stop and just say, well, hold on. It's really not that they're spending too much. It's that they're spending anything on anything that does not support the whole. If it's not a road, if it's not defense. You know, people keep saying, why doesn't Elon Musk cut the defense budget? Well, he can cut the defense budget, but at least we know we need defense. Why do we need a Department of Education? Why do we need the Department of Energy? Why do we need, you know, the EPA? Those are things that I would not only bulldoze, I would salt the ground where they used to stand so they never come back. You know, so that's the kind of attitude that I hope we're moving toward. And you're right, to start with the obvious ways, to start with the Sesame Street in Iraq, to start with the transgender opera, wherever that was, you know, that's a good place to start. But I think once you pull the string on that suit, the entire suit unravels. Last question. If Doge goes and audits Fort Knox, which has not been audited, I think, in the last 60 plus years, I think 60 years, do you think all the gold is there? No. No? No, and I'm expecting to find Sean Connery chained to a, you know, a rack or something. So with the laser being going there, it'll be an Elon chain, chained to that bed. No, it's good, it's nice to meet you. Yeah, nice to meet you as well.