Dr. Phillip C. McGraw, commonly known as Dr. Phil, told Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) that the political fringes in U.S. politics were responsible for tearing the country apart and not the traditional “Left versus Right” fighting.

McGraw made the remarks during a special appearance on Cruz’s “Verdict” podcast while discussing things that can get a person “canceled” in today’s world.

“Whether you’re talking about science, history, biology, you pick it,” he said. “What’s happening right now, in my opinion, is the narrative in America is being hijacked. And it’s being hijacked by the fringe. It’s not even, it’s not like the Left versus the Right. It’s the fringe. And I call it the tyranny of the fringe.”

McGraw said that the “factions in the fringe” use emotional extortion to try to bend people to their way of thinking on issues ranging from toxic masculinity to transgenderism to the history of slavery in the U.S.

“And if you don’t fall in line, then that’s where canceled culture comes in, and you get attacked, and you get attacked on the internet, to the point that they’ll contact your job, they’ll contact your church, they’ll contact your friends,” he said. “And there’s something that I know, a lot of people listening, read ‘1984.’ Which by the way, was written in 1948, by Orwell, how prophetic was he in writing this, and he talked about how people would be ‘unpersoned.'”

“We call it canceled culture, they call it ‘unpersoned,’ where they would just, they would just delete that person, they would just take away everything from them. And that’s what happens in canceled culture,” he continued. “You take away people’s livelihood, you take away their support system, you take away their friends. And I’m not saying there aren’t people in this society that have done terrible and egregious things that don’t deserve to play in the game. But there are also a lot of people that get swept up into not buying into the rhetoric.”

McGraw said that “a tiny percent of fringe tyrants” will single out and attack anyone online who doesn’t fall into line and will try to “eliminate them.”

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Now that the first Republican debate is over, it’s time to take a look at the overall state of the upcoming election while weeping quietly into soggy pages torn in a fit of anguish from the Book of Revelation.

On the Republican side, those who attended the debate included the Dull Guy, the other Dull Guy, the Fat Guy, the Girl, the Black Guy but he seems nice enough, the Irritating Skinny Guy plus the What’s-His-Name Guy and the Who The Hell Even is That Guy. One or two of the candidates got a bump in the polls after the debate when they distinguished themselves by having certain opinions, but no one can remember which candidates or what opinions and by now the bump is gone so, really, who cares?

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez has dropped out of the race, sending shock waves through Miami when people there learned that the city had a mayor, and his name was Francis Suarez and he had been off somewhere running for president instead of getting the locals to speak English and stop killing each other.

This means that, as of today, the 2024 presidential race seems likely to come down to the Democrat, who’s a Dead Guy, and the Republican front-runner, a soon-to-be-convicted Felon. The Felon is slightly ahead in the polls except on those days when the Dead Guy is ahead but many people are convinced that the Felon is the country’s only hope, unless it’s the Dead Guy.

The News Media, of course, heavily favors the Dead Guy and has gone to great lengths to prove to the public that he’s not really dead but only looks dead because he’s so corrupt his soul is full of a moral emptiness that resembles death, sort of like Macbeth when he makes that Tomorrow and Tomorrow speech at the end of the play, except silently because obviously this guy is dead.

In order to prove that the Dead Guy is not really a dead guy, reporters at USA Today were pulled off their usual beat of drawing colorful pie charts for blithering idiots and were assigned instead to study pictures of the Dead Guy for signs of life. To do this, they enlarged the pictures of the Dead Guy until it finally became clear that he was not in fact a corpse but merely a vague haze of pixels designed to obscure the conspiring cabal of leftist authoritarians standing behind him and working day and night to destroy every last American freedom in order to change the climate to one of Depression-era levels of total misery. However, in the event the Dead Guy turns out to actually be dead, his party will need someone else to beat the Felon and will have to choose between the Vice President, who spends most of her time reading colorful USA Today pie charts, and the Obviously Sinister Guy, who would have to run on his record of turning California from a Paradise into something like a Port-o-san only without the amenities.

As for the Felon, he continues to travel the country baiting and insulting federal prosecutors and judges, because he feels that’s the legal strategy that worked so well for John Dillinger. Other than that, the Felon continues to run on his record, though not on his criminal record, but on the record where he kept employment high, prices low, cut regulations and taxes, wiped out Isis, brought peace to the Middle East and didn’t start any new wars — although apparently some people think that IS his criminal record, but they’re already voting for the Dead Guy.

So it seems the American people have a tough decision before them: whether to repeatedly hit themselves in the face with a brick until everything seems fine, or to dress up as a woman and catch a plane to Amsterdam in time to become only the second Miss Netherlands to have a penis, unless you hang out in the Red Light district where that’s actually pretty common. You might also try escaping to Hungary where low immigration and Christianity-based governance has turned the place into a crime-free wonderland, or to Uganda, where they put homosexual pedophiles to death, making it virtually impossible to form a teachers union.

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Andrew Klavan is the host of “The Andrew Klavan Show” at The Daily Wire. He is an award-winning novelist, Hollywood screenwriter, and popular satirist. Klavan is the author of “When Christmas Comes” and “Strange Habit of Mind,” the first two novels in the USA Today best-selling Cameron Winter Mystery series. The third installment, “The House of Love and Death,” releases on October 31, 2023, and is now available for Pre-order.

Follow Klavan on Twitter: @andrewklavan

This excerpt is taken from the opening satirical monologue of “The Andrew Klavan Show.”

The views expressed in this satirical article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.