Ep. 530 dissects Trump’s immigration executive order, where Jenna Ellis frames it as a congressional provocation while exposing media hypocrisy over Obama-era separations and ACLU lawsuits. W. James Antel III warns Democrats’ "resistance" may backfire in midterms, with Trump’s border rhetoric energizing GOP voters despite mixed polling, while bipartisan efforts to shield journalists clash with DOJ surveillance of leaks like Allie Watkins’ case. The episode ties free speech battles to cultural shifts—from Starbucks’ progressive stances to Gilgamesh’s timeless themes—and ends by questioning whether Trump’s chaos will solidify conservative momentum or fracture it ahead of 2018. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, we're going to talk about President Trump's new executive order, but before we do, we are honored to have one of the most famous and most respected people in the world to address the question of whether countries should build walls on their borders.
Yes, Aristotle is here.
All right, not Aristotle, but a little bust of Aristotle, because obviously Aristotle has been dead for like thousands of years.
But he was so eager to be here, he just said, California or bust.
He's a, but never mind.
Here is Aristotle in his famous book, Politics, as translated from the Greek by Spencer Clavin, because the Greek is all like Greek and stuff.
So here's Aristotle.
Some people say city-states that are trying for virtue should not have walls, but those people's beliefs are out of date.
They can see proof of that for themselves by looking at what happens to other city-states that put on that kind of display.
True enough, when your enemies are evenly matched and similar in number, it's not the best thing to rely on the strength of your walls for safety.
But sometimes there are just too many attackers for human beings to fight back with virtue alone.
And so, if we want to be safe from disaster and embarrassment, we have to make up our minds that the best thing for war is to have the strongest, most secure walls.
Asking city-states not to put up walls is like trying to make your territory an easy target by flattening all its hilly terrain, or like not even putting up walls around a private citizen's house because you think the people who live there will become cowards.
And we shouldn't forget, city-states that put up walls can use them in two ways.
They can act as if they had walls and as if they didn't.
City-states without walls can't do that.
So, in fact, people shouldn't just put up walls around their city-states, they should also work hard to make sure that those walls are as beautiful as the city-state deserves.
The Trump Wall.
Oh, will that be a beautiful war?
The wall to meet every military need.
Attackers work hard to find out how they can gain the upper hand, and defenders should work just as hard at defense.
They should use state-of-the-art inventions, and they should study and try to prevent new technology of their own.
After all, people don't even try to attack opponents who are well prepared to begin with.
Thank you, Aristotle.
Congress's Court00:15:48
You're welcome.
All right, that was me doing an Aristotle voice, but the rest was actually Aristotle.
Truly, trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are wingy, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
It's a wonderful day, hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing!
Oh, hurrah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hurrah!
Is that amazing or what?
That was Spencer Clavin, no relation.
Well, he says he's no relation.
I've never heard of him.
He says, But you can find him on Twitter at Spencer Clavin, S-P-E-N-C-E-R, and you know how to spell Clavin, K-L-A-V-A-N.
Remember, there are no E's in Clavin, I just make it look easy.
We've got a couple of guests today.
We're going to bring back Jenna Ellis, who's the author of the Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution.
She's the director of public policy for the James Dobson Family Institute.
She wrote a really interesting piece looking at the new executive order on immigration.
We also have James Antel III, III.
James Antel III, it's like the sequel to James Antel.
This time it's personal, W. James Antel from the Washington Sam.
W. James Antel III.
He's going to talk about the midterms.
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So, you know, I'm here quoting Aristotle, the guy that died maybe almost 2,500 years ago.
And here he is saying the wisdom of the world.
This is why the left tries to destroy our education because the wisdom of the world is conservative.
I'll tell you somebody else who said something important.
Abraham Lincoln, who said the fastest way to get the best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.
And that is what is happening now.
Have you got Jenna?
Great.
So yesterday, Trump signed an executive order saying that children can stay together, even though he says that he's going to still be strictly enforcing our immigration laws.
So everybody is saying, oh, well, he's caved in.
He turned around.
Now they've got him on the run.
But I am wondering whether he has actually outsmarted the opposition on this.
Do we have Jenna?
Okay, there she is.
Hi, Jenna.
How are you doing?
Hi, Andrew.
Thanks so much for having me back.
Let me just remind people that you are the director of public policy for the James Dobson Family Institute, an accomplished constitutional law attorney with also a background in criminal law and the author of the Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution.
Hello.
So explain to people, what exactly does the executive order say?
Yeah, Trump was incredibly brilliant here.
When this news first broke yesterday morning, I was frankly a little bit concerned, going, what is going to be the substance of this executive order?
But if you actually read it, don't just read all of the people talking about it and the different perspectives.
I mean, definitely read some of the good ones, including mine, but definitely read the executive order.
And it's titled Affording Congress an Opportunity to Address Family Separation.
And that's really all that it is.
And so an executive order is just a formalized executive action.
So President Trump could have done this just by directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Secretary of Defense himself.
He could have just done this, but he wanted to tell the American public what he's doing.
And all he said is that our policy as the executive branch is to enforce the law.
We can't do anything that is over and above what Congress legislates.
And that's entirely constitutional.
So if you actually read this, all he's saying is we are going to enforce the law.
And to the extent that is allowed by law and available resources, then we will keep families together.
And that's a very good thing.
But he's saying Congress and the court system, which is a nod to the Flores case, Florida's version, then that's really the extent that's allowed by law.
So this was a brilliant move where he's saying our hands are tied here.
If you don't like this, by the way, Kamala Harris, who said the executive order does nothing.
Well, of course it doesn't, because President Trump actually isn't a dictator and he isn't acting like one.
And this is a good thing.
He's saying, Congress, in Article 1, Section 1, you have all legislative authority.
This is your job to do something about it.
They're begging him to be a dictator, basically.
When Chuck Schumer's shaking that pen at him, he's basically begging him to be a dictator.
Now, the Wall Street Journal keeps saying, oh, this is a new policy.
This separating children is a new policy.
And the way they write it is very foggy.
They make it sound as if Trump just invented this idea.
Oh, I have a good idea.
Let's pull kids away from their parents.
But that's not right, is it?
No, not at all.
I mean, this has been an issue that has gone back.
I mean, the Flores versus Reno, Janet Reno, who is, of course, Bill Clinton's attorney general.
This issue and immigration generally has been an issue since the founding of our country.
And immigration and naturalization is given to Congress to legislate on.
But this particular issue goes all the way back to the Clinton administration and that particular settlement in 1997.
And so it's amazing to me, Andrew, that this is just suddenly some kind of peak crisis moment, right at the same time that the Inspector General's report is coming out that shows the bias of the FBI that shows really, really negatively on Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.
Now, all of the sudden, it's Trump's fault.
And like you said, everyone's saying, we want him to act like a dictator, yet he's literally Hitler, who was a dictator, but somehow, you know, we're supposed to reconcile the two.
They're trying to put him in a no-win situation.
And that's why this executive order was so brilliant because it didn't go outside the line of his actual constitutional authority, but it puts him on record as saying, hey, I'm saying, Congress, you better do something about it.
And if Congress doesn't, that will be the problem.
Now, the order does instruct or ask Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, to go to the judge who did the florist decision.
Does it not, am I wrong about this, that he wants them to try and change the florist decision to give them a little bit more leeway?
Yeah, he instructed the Attorney General in Section E of that last part of the executive order, which, by the way, is only one page.
Everyone should read it.
Take five minutes out of your day and just read the actual text.
And he instructed Attorney General Jeff Sessions to file a request to modify the settlement.
That's going in front of Judge G.
And this will be a very interesting decision to say, will the judge make a politically activist decision here?
Or will this actually be able to modify that agreement, which is where we get the 20-day holding period and allow then Congress to modify the law and give us more than 20 days where we're holding families together.
So that's a good thing.
And it shifts the responsibility for housing people to the Department of Defense.
Does that get around Flores at all?
Or is it still the same problem?
I think it's still the same problem.
And that's where, you know, the INS and law enforcement, we have to remember that the executive branch can't legislate.
They can't just interpret the law however they want.
They can't just enforce it however they want.
And yet, I mean, that's what Obama's Department of Justice really did.
And that's why everyone was so upset about the DREAM Act and DACA specifically, because if we remember what Obama tried to legislate, the deferred action for childhood arrivals, that was supposed to go through Congress.
And whether or not we like that as a policy or disagree with it or not, that can't come through executive action.
It can't come through the executive branch.
And so Trump is being very wise here by saying, I recognize the limitations of my constitutional authority.
We are here just to enforce the law.
And this remains true even if Chuck Schumer shakes a pen at you.
That's what you're telling me, right?
It does.
I mean, I recognize that that's kind of a really big let, but Trump is holding firm, and I'm super excited about that.
Janet, thank you so much for coming on and explaining this to us.
I really appreciate it.
And I really do want to have you back to discuss your book, The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution.
Jenna Ellis from the James Dobson Family Institute.
Thanks a lot, Jenna.
Thank you, Andrew.
See, this is what I think, because I don't think anybody quite has caught on to the fact that he has now put the Democrats on the line.
And he's exposing the fact that they want an open border.
So he goes off to Minnesota, right?
And Minnesota is a big, big Democrat state.
So he's really walking into the lion's mouth.
He's really putting them on notice for the midterms.
You know, guys, I am, Trump is here.
I am here.
So he had this, oh, there it is.
So play the cut where he's talking to this rally.
This is cut number five, talking about the Democrats.
So the Democrats want open borders.
Let everybody come in.
Let everybody pour in.
We don't care.
Let them come in from the Middle East.
Let them come in from all over the place.
We don't care.
We're not going to let it happen.
And by the way, today I signed an executive order.
We're going to keep families together, but the border is going to be just as tough as it's been.
Democrats don't care about the impact of uncontrolled migration on your communities, your schools, your hospitals.
Your jobs are your safety.
Democrats put illegal immigrants before they put American citizens.
What the hell is going on?
Illegal immigration costs our country hundreds of billions of dollars.
So imagine if we could spend that money to help bring opportunity to our inner cities and our rural communities and our roads and our highways and our schools.
Think about this for a minute, okay?
No matter what you think about Trump, think about this.
We opened up the week with every minion the Democrats have.
And that means CBS, NBC, ABC, the New York Times, all their minions, all their little talking heads that they send out there who pretend they're journalists but are actually just Democrats with press cards.
Every single one of them on the border with crying babies.
And that's always their big thing.
What about the children?
They got the crying babies.
They thought they had this played, right?
They had it played.
He's on the offensive now.
He's out there in Minnesota, their state, talking about what bums they are and how they want open borders.
And all they've got is this kind of grumpy, like, you know, well, here's Eric Swalwell, a congressman, talking to Wolf Blitzer.
I mean, just listen to the tone here.
Do you give the president any credit at all for at least changing his mind, changing his position, and allowing the families to stay together from now on?
They're not going to be separated.
Zero credit, Wolf.
He should have done the right thing in the first place.
I give him zero credit.
And now I'm just concerned, Wolf, that we are going to move to indefinite detention of families at our border and that we're not going to solve this.
Congress now has an opportunity because the imminency of this has been addressed and fixed.
But now we have an opportunity to put long-term immigration policies that have consensus among the American people in place.
And we should welcome that opportunity so we don't find ourselves in a horrible situation like this again.
You're a mean mad white man.
He's a mean man white man.
But you heard him say it.
It's now in Congress's court.
You know, Jennet got it just right.
It is now in Congress's court.
He is not, you know, this is the guy.
He's literally Hitler.
And yet he keeps saying, you know, I can't make this law.
I mean, this is what Obama did until he realized the press would not hold him to account and would let him make law.
Obama would say, I can't do it.
And then he would just do it when he realized the press wouldn't do anything.
So now Trump is on the offensive against the Democrats.
And though I'm essentially repeating myself, he is also on the offensive against the media.
But the media never talks about the American victims of illegal immigration.
I know them well.
I know so many of them.
I campaigned with them.
What's happened to their children?
What's happened to their husbands?
What's happened to their wives?
The media doesn't talk about the American families permanently separated from their loved ones because Democrat policies release violent criminals into our communities.
We need safety.
We need safety.
They don't bring cameras to interview the angel moms whose children were killed by criminal aliens who should have never been here in the first place, not even close.
They don't want to talk to the angel moms.
But as your president, I will always fight to protect American families.
I mean, that is exactly what I've been saying all this week, that babies are crying everywhere.
It depends which babies you cover.
He's just hammering the media there.
Stop the hammering!
They can dish it out, but they can't take it.
Stop the hammering.
So now, you know, what are the options here?
There are legal challenges to this executive order, and then it gets struck down, and Trump says, hey, you know, if it's challenged in law, who makes the law?
Or maybe it's the lawmakers.
That's maybe why they call them lawmakers.
Or if we're going to talk, since we're talking about all this ancient stuff, legislators, you know, this is why they call them lawmakers.
It really is amazing.
And again, you know, I've said this all week long.
It's not that I want children separated from their parents.
I want the law enforced.
And if, and as Abraham Lincoln said, you want to get rid of a bad law, just enforce it.
And that's what Trump is doing.
And he's doing it right.
Because the thing is, people don't, look, Americans are the nicest people in the world.
They really are.
If you travel, you got to get outside of the coasts.
You got to get out of LA and New York.
But the minute you get into the middle of this country, people are incredibly nice.
They do not want to see crying babies.
They don't want to see children being hurt.
But they're smart enough, and the media doesn't know this.
They're smart enough to know that the border has to be sealed in order to protect us.
So, of course, the press is bringing it.
This also is because there's a little bit of a delay in action and then newspapers coming out.
ACLU Hammering Conservatives00:09:06
This also catches the press with its pants down, hurling everything they've got at Trump.
Let's take a little trip to our friends over at Knucklehead Row, because you've got to hear this one.
This is perfect.
Knucklehead Row, of course, the op-ed page of the New York Times.
And one of the chief knuckleheads there, Nicholas Kristof, writes a piece.
Trump wasn't first to separate families, but policy was still evil.
Now, just pause for a moment and ask yourself, what is in this op-ed?
All it is is a list of quotes.
Trump wasn't first to separate families, but policy was still evil.
A list of quotes describing children being taken away from their parents throughout history by slavers, by the people who hold slaves, and by Nazis, and then by Donald Trump.
Okay, that's all it is.
Except, except there's one or two in there that come from someplace else.
Okay, so you get the picture, right?
Slavers, mean, ugly slavers taking children away from their family, mean, ugly Nazis taking children away from their families, Donald Trump, you're figuring this out, right?
You're getting the picture.
Donald Trump, mean, angry Donald Trump taking children away from their families.
And then there's one in here.
The description is, all I can remember is how much my son and I were both crying as they took him away.
It has been about six months since I last saw my son, and that is a detainee in an ACLU lawsuit filed in April describing the seizure of his 13-year-old son in October, okay?
A detainee in A.
So let's take a look at this ACLU lawsuit, okay?
Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, this is the ACLU saying this, featured in a new report released today show the pervasive abuse and neglect of unaccompanied immigrant children detained by U.S. customs and border protection.
The report was produced in conjunction with the International Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School.
Okay, this is where the quote comes from.
These documents provide a glimpse into a federal immigration enforcement system marked by brutality and lawlessness, said an ACLU border litigation project staff attorney.
All human beings deserve to be treated with dignity and respect regardless of their immigration status, and children in particular deserve special protection.
The misconduct demonstrated in these records is breathtaking, as is the government's complete failure to hold officials who abuse their power accountable.
The abuse that takes place by government officials is reprehensible and un-American.
The report is based on over 30,000 pages of documents dated between 2009 and 2014.
Rutro, what is the missing word from Nicholas Kristoff's op-ed?
There is a missing word.
You know what I think just happened?
Hey, Nick.
Hey, Nick, you know what?
Look, I'm letting you off the hook.
What happened was he forgot to spell the name because his legacy has been blown away like ashes on the hurricane winds of history, Barack Obama.
What do you think?
How do you think Barack Obama reacted when he looked at this and thought, once again, the press has left me off the hook.
Here's his reaction.
You bet Obama is laughing because Nicholas Kristoff, he got the Nazis right.
He got the slavers right.
He got Donald Trump right.
But there was one name.
Did you hear the ACLU hammering these people like this?
Let me just, I got to play this piece.
This is so, so great.
This is almost always from our great friends at Newsbusters.
Love that site.
But Brooke Baldwin, and this is just to give praise to a CNN left-wing reporter.
This is the second time she has come into our ken as somebody actually doing her job against her own opinions.
Brooke Baldwin is interviewing, I assume no relation, Tammy Baldwin and Senator Tammy Baldwin, she's from Wisconsin, and asks her whether she raised any objections during the Obama administration.
You have got to listen to the senator's answer.
I mean, listen carefully.
Listen carefully to the question from Brooke Baldwin.
And she asked it twice, which is good for her.
And listen to this answer.
The answer is wonderful.
But here's a question for Democrats, because you hear the president now, you know, a lot on a lot of topics.
And this one included, you know, looking back to previous administrations.
Well, they should have done more, right?
And so as so many people in this country are certainly outraged by the cages and the thermal blankets and the facilities housing these kids, you know, they were all there in 2014 under President Obama.
And my question to you, Senator Baldwin, is did you speak up against them then?
You know, on this issue that we get into a moment where we're making progress and then when it stalls, we turn around.
I think we all need to continue to be focused on it and press it through.
The American people need confidence that we can solve problems.
Nobody believes that we have an immigration system that works.
It is broken.
It needs fixing, but we've just got to resolve to do that.
But were you worried about it then?
Did you raise your voice under the Obama administration?
You know, in numbers of cases, usually I remember a constituent who was in detention at the border, arguably very inappropriately.
And we, you know, we raised our voice in that instance and many others, but that's we've got to do this now in unison.
Yeah, You just can't get the word no out.
You just say, no, I didn't do it when it was Obama because I was protecting Obama like the rest of the press.
No.
You know, I just want to add here, by the way, that it would not bother me one bit if they attacked Trump spokesman like this if they had done this to Obama and continued to do it to Democrats today.
If Brooke Baldwin always behaved like that, if CNN always behaved like that, it wouldn't bother me one bit.
I want them to go after the powerful.
It's just not right when they only go after one side of the powerful.
It's only the powerful who are doing conservative things that they go after.
So if she were always asking questions like that, I would say, fine, do it.
You know, speaking of the ACLU suing the government over Obama's mistreatment of children at the border, there is an article today, an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, from Wendy Kamener, a former ACLU board member.
It's a headline, the ACLU retreats from free expression.
The American Civil Liberties Union has explicitly endorsed the view that free speech can harm marginalized groups by undermining their civil rights.
Speech that denigrates such groups can inflict serious harms and is intended to and often will impede progress toward equality.
The ACLU declares in new guidelines governing case selection and conflicts between competing values.
This is amazing.
The ACLU, who once defended Nazis in Skogee, Illinois, I believe it was, they defended them saying, look, free speech is free speech.
You don't have to like it, but you got to let it go.
They are changing that, essentially.
The 2018 guidelines claim that the ACLU is committed to defending speech rights without regard to whether the views expressed are consistent with or opposed to the ACLU's core values, priorities, and goals, but directly contradicting that assertion, they also cite as a reason to decline taking a free speech case the extent to which the speech, this is a quote from them, the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values.
So we will defend anybody except people we disagree with.
And this is just, it is a perfect example of what is called O'Sullivan's first law.
Pal of mine, John O'Sullivan, a great conservative journalist from England, his law is all organizations that are not actually right-wing will become left-wing over time.
And this is true.
And the reason it's true is two reasons.
It's true.
One is because we conservatives will allow leftists into the conversation, but they won't allow us.
So if you're in a writer's room at the TV show Law and Order, which started out as a very conservative show and they hire and the old writers leave and new writers come in, each one of them will always be a liberal writer.
They're not going to hire conservative writers.
And once the liberals take over, right, once the liberals take over, they will not hire conservatives.
Conservatives will say, sure, let a liberal in.
He'll give us another point of view.
But liberals will not say that.
I call them liberals, leftists, because there's nothing liberal about them.
The other thing is, is that leftism is a form of decay.
Leftism is a form of making all things equal.
All things are equal when you are dead.
When your civilization is dead, everybody's equal.
When you are dead, everything is equal.
When people are alive, they strive, they succeed, they fail, they fall, they get ahead, and it's all unequal.
Republicans' Gains in the Senate00:13:57
Everything is up and down.
It just looks like a skyline of a city.
That's what life is like.
That is a living thing.
Freedom is alive.
Equality leftism is dead.
Have we got W. James Antel III?
Okay.
James Antel is the Washington Examiner's politics editor and was previously the managing editor of the Daily Caller.
He is also associate editor of the American Spectator and senior writer for the American Conservative.
You can find his book, Devouring Freedom.
Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped?
It is now on Amazon.
Do I call you James or W?
Jim, you can call me anything but late for dinner, I guess.
Fair enough.
So, you know, we're talking about, we were talking about this immigration thing, and obviously a lot of Republicans were in a panic looking at the midterms.
Where do we stand now on the midterms?
You wrote a piece for The Examiner saying things do not look like they used to.
Yeah.
What happened is in the beginning of the year, things looked really bad for Republicans.
But as the year has gone on until pretty recently, things started looking up for Republicans.
So you had a situation where we started the year with Democrats up in the generic ballot by double digits, with President Trump's approval rating sometimes hovering around the upper 30s.
Democrats favored in a number of competitive races.
You had a lot of Republican incumbents in the House heading for the exits, retiring.
And you now had that redistricting issue in Pennsylvania, which should allow Democrats to pick up some seats.
So things weren't looking very good, but gradually the Republicans' numbers improved.
They're starting to dip a little bit again, but still, you're looking at a situation where it's not entirely clear that the House has lost, so it will be tough to keep it.
And the Republicans' prospects in the Senate actually look pretty good.
So typically, historically, right, the party in power loses a lot of seats.
Is that fair to say?
That's fair to say.
In 18 of the last 20 midterms, the president's party has lost seats.
Okay.
So when you have these generic ballots, I mean, I assume that especially in congressional races, aren't the issues kind of local?
I mean, are people fighting over really looking at the big picture or are they looking at the local races?
Which do you think it is?
Well, that's really the question of when you get what people are talking about, a blue wave.
So if you have a wave election, what typically happens is they get nationalized and national issues tend to dominate.
But in a more typical election, local issues are a bit more important.
So you have a situation, though, where both the Democrats and President Trump are trying to nationalize these elections.
And so the Democrats want to nationalize it as a rejection of Trump, a rejection of the Republican congressional leadership.
Trump is trying to nationalize it from the perspective of the Democrats being weak on the borders, weak on immigration, weak on national security, and obstructing the things that he's trying to accomplish for the economy and other areas of public policy.
How important is that?
I mean, it's kind of considered wisdom.
It's typical common wisdom that the economy is all, basically.
Everybody is voting their pocketbook.
Do you think that's true?
I think it's less true than it used to be, but obviously the economy is important, and President Trump's job approval rating has climbed as we've had more and more sustained economic growth and as the unemployment rate has gone lower.
But by historical standards, with the economy doing as well as it is doing right now, President Trump should be above 50 percent in job approval rating.
And it's been quite a while since he's had such numbers in public opinion polls.
So it's the economy stupid isn't totally wrong, but voters do seem to look at more than just how they're faring at the pocketbook when they make their voting decisions.
This whole thing of the resistance, you know, that we are in the resistance, which it always struck me as nonsense.
I mean, it is, after all, we are still America.
We are still voting for people.
We don't really need a resistance as you do when you've been taken over.
Is that hurting the Democrats?
Is there any sign that that's an effective strategy?
Well, the concern, I think, for the Democrats is one that the resistance mentality might make them nominate some candidates in their primaries who aren't the strongest general election candidates, so they might end up not winning some seats that would otherwise be winnable for them.
And the second concern is even in districts where the resistance plays to their advantage, which is some of these college-educated suburban districts where it seems to be centered and where they do have some opportunities, especially in districts at Hillary Clinton won that have Republican incumbents representing them in the House.
The worry, I think, for Democrats there is that the enthusiasm cuts against them by having primaries that are so crowded that, again, you end up in a situation where maybe your better candidate for November doesn't make it out of the primary, doesn't win the nomination, and then you sacrifice some winnable seats that way.
You know, on this immigration thing, I've been kind of, it's been kind of stunning to watch this this week because the typical playbook is the press gins up hysteria.
You get the children crying, whatever it is they've got that's going for them emotionally, and the GOP runs for the hills.
Trump has been incredibly aggressive.
I mean, that speech he made in Minnesota really had my eyebrows flaming.
Do you think I know that people don't want to see children cry, but I also think that this idea of borders, strong borders, is pretty popular.
Is there any way of telling where this is going to break or you have any sense of where it's going to break?
Well, the polling on it doesn't look very good for President Trump and the Republicans, and that's why congressional Republicans are panicking a little bit.
But the question really is, and I don't think we know the answer to this yet, but the question is, what intensity do voters feel about this?
Is this actually an issue that's going to move people's votes?
Because if you look at DACA, the polling numbers on that looked very bad for President Trump and the Republicans.
A lot of surveys found it an 80-20 issue going against Trump.
But in point of fact, it didn't really seem to spark much of a political backlash, didn't seem to be moving very many votes.
And it was actually the Senate Democrats who caved in the DACA-related government shutdown, not once, but twice.
So, you know, sometimes you can look at these polls and people will give the answers that they're supposed to give, but it doesn't necessarily tell you what the intensity level is and whether it's salient for people making their voting choices.
And maybe in this case, it is because they're going to see the images of the children crying.
But I still think that's an open question.
Really interesting.
You know, I'm reading that book, The Great Revolt, about who the Trump coalition is.
Is there any sign that that coalition is fading or getting stronger?
You have any idea where that's going?
Well, it's going to be a real big question for Republicans in the midterms.
Are they going to have a problem similar to what the Democrats had under Barack Obama, where there was a coalition that was big enough to win elections, but it was only really turning out when Obama himself was on the ballot and the Democrats couldn't replicate it without him?
Can Republicans replicate what Trump did without him at the top of the ticket?
That's why you're seeing Trump go out to all of these swing states, and that's really where these battleground states, where a lot of the Senate races in particular are going to be fought, is where he tends to be having all of these rallies now.
Trump is trying to transfer his appeal to down-ballot Republicans.
Will it work?
There are parts of the general Republican message that are a little distinct from Trump that might not be as appealing in the industrial Midwest, which was really how Trump pierced the blue wall to win the presidency.
Interesting.
You know, I'm not going to put you on the spot.
I am going to put you on the spot, but I will not hold you to any predictions.
I am very much, I really believe the future is not ours to know.
If you had to bet 20 bucks, do you think the Republicans will hold the House?
I do not.
You don't?
Wow.
I think they'll pick up seats in the Senate, but I don't think they'll hold the House.
Wow.
Okay.
W. James Antel III from the Washington Examiner.
Thank you very much.
It was really informative.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
You know, we were talking before about free speech, and I have an actual good news story.
This is really interesting, because when you get away from all the crisis stuff, which is basically generated by the press, because the country's not in crisis, the only crisis is the press didn't get what they wanted.
The left didn't get what they wanted.
That's the crisis.
But the left is in the minority, you know.
I mean, if you look at things like Starbucks, the NFL, these are incredible companies that are killing themselves by buying into what the press told them, that we will keep quiet, that we won't fight back, that we will let them do their social justice garbage, and we're not going to say anything.
When you watch that, the people are very different than the noise, all this noise that is going on around us.
And here's another good story and another piece of praise for a left-winger.
Never say that I will not praise a left-winger when he's in the right.
You know, there's this story over at the New York Times, and Allie Watkins, 26, who was not, this was before she was at the Times, she was having an affair with the 57-year-old James Wolfe.
I believe that they should have the swimsuit competition taken out of journalism.
I think there's a little too much banging going on in the old journalistic world.
So James Wolfe worked on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and he is feeding his lover information, and he's sending her all these leaks.
And it's all anti-Trump leaks, okay?
So he tipped her off that Russian spies had attempted to recruit Carter Page.
That was one of his tips.
And this was when they release these things when it'll most help the Democrats.
So last week it was revealed that the Justice Department had seized Allie Watkins' communications records without her knowledge, okay?
And this is the first time we know of that the Trump administration was secretly surveilling a reporter.
The Obama administration did it all the time.
And so I am like incredibly opposed to this.
I believe that reporters should be left to do their job.
If somebody leaks something, that's on the leaker.
It is not on the reporter to not receive, you know, the idea is basically he's receiving stolen goods, he or she is receiving stolen goods.
But no, they are actually, I know they do their job badly, but that doesn't mean we should abandon the principle of a free press.
The free press is abusing their privilege, but they're right.
I shouldn't say their privilege.
They're abusing their rights.
But the rights remain.
The rights come from God.
They have nothing to do with the fact that these people are lowlifes who are just lying all the time.
So James Raskin, who is a far left congressman, says we've got to do something to protect the press.
And he goes and he finds an old shield bill, is what they're called in journalistic terms.
They're called shield bills that shield reporters from being prosecuted from revealing their sources.
It basically protects reporters.
Who wrote the old shield bill?
A congressman by the name of Mike Pence, the evildoer Mike Pence, who eats gay people for lunch with mayonnaise.
He puts mayonnaise on gay people and actually eats them on his sandwiches.
But he had written a bill supporting freedom of the press and protecting reporters from this.
So Raskin goes to who?
Jim Jordan, as far to the right as he can.
He crosses the aisle and he brings this and he says, will you support it?
And Jordan and Raskin, the two most unlikely political bedfellows, have gotten together to protect free speech.
And that is a beautiful thing.
This is the way the government is supposed to work.
You know, we're supposed to stand for our meta-values, no matter what side we're on.
And here is Jordan and Raskin talking about the bill.
My concern is we've seen so many encroachments on our liberties from the government.
I mean, I was concerned when the IRS went after conservatives, Tea Party conservative groups out there and targeted them.
I'm concerned about what I see at the FBI.
And so when Jamie came to me and said, look, let's shield reporters from having their First Amendment freedom of the press rights violated, I said, I'm all in.
And then we have this situation which developed just two weeks ago with Ms. Watson and the former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer.
So this is why this is so important.
We're looking to have hearings on this.
We're looking to get this passed and we're picking up co-sponsors each and every day.
Congressman Jordan, it's interesting because I know and I've heard you talk about leaks before.
You know, everyone is critical of leaks, but you are mostly critical, if I understand it correctly, of the people doing the leaking.
You do not feel it's a problem for journalists to report what we learn, correct?
Of course not.
The government should go wholeheartedly with everything they got after people who are leaking information, particularly if it's classified.
Let's go get those and do bring the full force of the government and the law on people who do that.
But you cannot go after the reporter.
That is his fun.
Freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom to practice your faith.
Well, this is the First Amendment, for goodness sake.
So you cannot do that.
When I see these two guys sitting together talking about this is the First Amendment, we've got to protect it.
You know, my heart leaps up, man.
It's like good things are happening in this country.
Good things are happening in the country.
And a lot of the noise, this is just an assault on Donald Trump, an assault on the right, an assault on conservatism, an assault on the West, an assault on the Constitution.
But those things are actually blossoming under this assault, in this storm.
All right.
That's good stuff, you know?
I mean, come on.
Stuff I like.
It's the kind of thing that makes me feel so ships and hips and topsy and piggity boom.
Yaza.
Who is that?
Do we know?
Norman Young.
Norman Young.
That's his second.
What are we going to do?
We're going to have like a vote or something?
I think so.
All right.
Yeah, we've got to do this.
Gilgamesh and the Flood00:08:08
All right.
You know, when I started Stuff I Like, I started it as a way of sort of selling to the audience the classics that I loved, the classic literature I loved, the classic movies that I loved, the classic music that I loved, and talking about its relationship to the way it developed my worldview.
And after a while, I started to feel, you know what, a lot of people are not going to go out and read War and Peace.
So if you keep going out and selling them like an 800-page Victorian novel, you're not going to get anywhere.
So I modified it.
First of all, I stopped doing it every day.
And I said, you know, if I go out and see a movie and I like that, I will include that in stuff I like.
But now and again, I got to go back to the things that really our whole civilization is built on.
And the other day, I reread the Epic of Gilgamesh in a new, well, relatively, no, it's 2005, so it's 10, 13 years old, by Stephen Mitchell, an excellent translator who translated the New Testament.
He translated the wisdom books of the Bible.
He's translated a lot of stuff.
And Gilgamesh is one of the oldest epics in extant.
Maybe the oldest written story in the West.
It may be.
And it's interesting because it was translated in 2005 and Mitchell writes a very, it's a short poem.
You can read it in, I don't know, a couple hours.
But Mitchell writes a long essay about it that is infected with his left-wing enthusiasms during the W. Bush administration.
So he interprets the poem as basically an attack on George W. Bush, a pro-environmental.
He gets it utterly wrong.
He gets the meanings of the epic utterly wrong.
It is such a profound, profound story and beautiful.
His translation, which is not really a translation because he doesn't speak the language, so he just put together other translations and maybe filled them into places, rearranged things that he thought was out of order, and he does a great job.
It's the best.
I've read it, I've only read it twice, so this was much, much better than the first time.
But Gilgamesh was an historical king of the Sumerian city-state of Uruk, which I believe is now in modern Iraq.
And he probably ruled sometime between 2800 and 2500 BC.
So we're talking like a long time ago.
And he became a legendary king.
And the story is that Gilgamesh, who is part God, has kind of become a tyrant in the city of Uruk.
And it's a city-state.
And he's kind of become a tyrant.
He's using other people's women.
He's oppressing people.
He's just too big a character.
So the people cry out to the gods.
And the gods create a guy named Enkidu, who is, as Gilgamesh is part God, part man.
Enkadu is part animal, part man.
And Enkadu becomes a kind of Tarzan-like figure out in the woods.
He's huge, but he's out living with the animals.
And he's freeing the animals from traps.
So one of the trappers goes to Gilgamesh and says, look, this guy, there's this wild man out there ruining, taking my animals out of the traps.
And Gilgamesh sends a beautiful temple prostitute, a woman who gives her body in order that men may worship on her, the gods, right, that may worship Ishtar, the god of love.
And she goes out and she sleeps with Enkidu in this incredibly sexy scene, which goes on for a week.
He basically doesn't lose it for an entire week because these guys are epic, right?
He just goes at her for a week.
But as the poem says, she teaches him what a woman is.
And when she teaches him what a woman is, he becomes civilized.
He learns to dress.
He learns to drink beer.
He learns, you know, and she brings him into the city and he and Gilgamesh kind of have a wrestling match and they become brother-like friends.
I mean, and there's this whole argument about whether there's a homoerotic element, but who cares?
I mean, that was their civilization.
The point is that they become one.
The God-man and the animal man become the full man together.
And they go off to fight a monster.
The monster is guarding the woods.
And when Ishtar, the goddess of love, sees them fighting this monster, she falls for Gilgamesh.
Gilgamesh turns her down and Ishtar just throws a woman-scorned snit, and she sends a bull, the bull from heaven after him, and Gilgamesh and Enkadu just fight this bull.
I mean, it's a great poem.
It is just filled with action, filled with adventure and love.
But what happens then, and I'm going to give it away, it's ancient, so it's not like you're not going to be in suspense or anything.
But what happens then is Ishtar is so ticked off that they killed her bull.
She goes to the gods, and the gods say, all right, well, we'll punish them.
We will kill Enkadu.
And Enkidu gets sick and he dies.
And Gilgamesh just says, holy cow, not only has my best friend died, it's a beautiful, beautiful passage of grief, but I'll die.
I'm going to die.
And so he goes off on a quest to find the one man who will never die.
And this, by the way, when these were discovered, I believe, during the Victorian era, and a guy, a scholar, was sitting in the library looking at the tablets on which it was inscribed, and he came upon this passage because the one man who's immortal that Gilgamesh is looking for has lived through the flood.
And the description of the flood, I won't say it's virtually identical, but the similarity to the Bible flood is so intense that it's clear that there's some kind of shared heritage here.
And this guy, when he discovered it, he got up and danced around.
This is a Victorian, so it's kind of funny.
Danced around the room, pulling off his clothes because he just had found this incredible piece of writing that related to the Bible description of the flood.
And it's Gilgamesh going in search of eternal life.
And this thing still resonates because scientists who are working on elongating human life call it the Gilgamesh Project.
But the end, I won't give away the ending, but it is just so deep and so profound.
It is the story of how people commit themselves to the culture.
It's a beautiful poem in this version by Stephen Mitchell.
And you can ignore his essay.
I'm sorry.
It's just absurd.
His interpretation is absurd.
But the idea, the idea that when In the Bible, when God sees it's not good for a man to be alone, he invents women, but a woman.
But in this, the man has to find his other self, a man, and the man sort of represents the animal self versus the God self.
And the two together become a whole man.
And it's just about death and sex and love and friendship.
And it is a beautiful, beautiful poem, Gilgamesh.
I highly recommend it.
And if you can get it, by the way, if you like Audible, there's a wonderful version of it on Audible.
They read it.
The guy who reads it does a great job.
Well, this is going to be a really interesting Clavinless weekend.
I think that Trump has come out of this really well.
I've just been fascinated.
I got to say, this is one of the most entertaining presidencies of my lifetime.
Good or bad, forget all about that.
But I am here to be entertained.
And it has been incredibly entertaining to watch a guy take these people on.
And what happens next is going to decide so much.
What happens in the midterm is going to decide so much of the future of this country and the future of conservative thought.
And it is just remarkable to see.
And right now, I'm feeling pretty good.
But now, it's the Clavenless weekend, so you're screwed.
But survivors can gather here on Monday.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Here is the great Frank Sinatra singing the words of the even greater Cole Porter, Anything Goes.
In olden days, a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking.
Now heaven knows anything goes.
Good authors too, who once knew better words, now only used for letter words, writing prose.
Anything goes.
The world has gone mad today, and good's bad today, and black's white today, and days night today.
When most guys today that women prize today are just silly cigars.
Anything Goes00:00:43
Although I'm not a great romancer, I know that you're bound to answer when I propose.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring, senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Emily Jai.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production.