Andrew Clavin and Alan Dershowitz clash with the left’s weaponized racism accusations, from Dan Rather’s Orwellian Trump attacks to The New York Times’s "How to Talk to a Racist" op-ed labeling dissent as bigotry. Dershowitz slams Mueller’s tweet-based obstruction charges as a civil liberties violation and warns impeachment without criminal proof risks setting a partisan precedent, comparing it to Rod Rosenstein’s baseless targeting. He rejects the ACLU’s post-Trump ideological shift, defending even unpopular speech while criticizing campus intolerance—like his exclusion from Martha’s Vineyard debates. Clavin mocks LeBron James’ systemic racism excuses and contrasts liberal racial definitions with conservative skepticism, ending by exposing salary-lie studies that undermine feminist equality claims. The episode frames modern progressive narratives as both hypocritical and legally dangerous. [Automatically generated summary]
The man who inspired the phrase fake but accurate says Donald Trump is Orwellian.
That's right.
I'm talking about Dan Rather.
He's the CBS anchorman who was so full of anti-Republican hatred that he sacrificed his career and reputation by using forged documents in an attempt to prove that President George W. Bush had gotten up to some minor mischief in the year 1973.
And now he's criticizing the current president for not being truthful.
Speaking in his trademark down-home style, in an attempt to make himself seem something other than a reptilian Democrat mouthpiece, Rather said, quote, you might find this as ironic as a horny toad on a saddle stirrup at the break of dawn, but I think President Trump is as Orwellian as a dust storm on a West Texas prairie on a July day in 1893, unquote.
Rather's attempt to slime George W. Bush was made into a movie by Robert Redford.
The film was called Truth because it was about lies, which leftists called truth because Trump is Orwellian.
MSNBC anchorman Brian Williams joined in Rather's attack saying, quote, trust Dan, I trust Dan Rather, because we were both war correspondents back when I single-handedly defeated Sauron's attack against the kingdom of Gondor.
If Trump isn't Orwellian, then I'm not James Bond, unquote.
Rather responded to Williams saying, quote, Brian's words touch my heart like a drop of gym beam on the luscious lips of an underage girl I never went anywhere near, unquote.
Brian Anderson responded by saying, quote, I'm as grateful for his remarks as I was that time I flew my biplane into the underside of an alien spaceship to end the devastating invasion of Earth, unquote.
With that, the two men went on blithering and lying until Robert Redford announced he was going to portray them both in a sequel to Truth entitled, No Really, This Time It Really Is the Truth, because Trump is Orwellian.
Helix Sleep Offer00:03:40
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
And birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunking.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
That was the weirdest opening ever.
Who writes this stuff?
Oh, I do.
I guess that explains it.
There.
The mailbag is tomorrow, is it not?
The mailbag is tomorrow.
Therefore, you must get your questions in today if you want your problems to be solved.
I mean, you want to sit there and live with your problems forever or you go on thedailywire.com, you hit the podcast button, you hit the Andrew Clavin podcast, then hit the mailbag picture and put in your questions.
But, but, you have to subscribe.
For a lousy 10 bucks a month or 100 bucks for the whole year, you can ask me questions about your personal life, about politics, about religion.
I will answer, and my answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life now and then for the better.
The rest of the time, you're screwed.
All right.
Also, we have Alan Dershowitz coming up in an interview.
Really interesting interview.
I have to say that it was a genuinely fascinating interview because the guy is a liberal.
He's a stone liberal, but he is appearing on Fox News because the left has gone so far down the drain that he cannot follow them with it.
You know, that reminds me we should be talking also about Helix Sleep.
Now, for me, it should be called Helix Awake because I never sleep.
But when you never sleep, it's all the more important that you're comfortable.
You're lying there staring up at the ceiling, wondering about the big existential questions.
You want to feel good, right?
And not every, everybody's different, so you don't want to have the same mattress, the same pillow as everybody else.
Working with the world's leading sleep experts, Helix Sleep developed a mattress that is customized to your specific height, weight, and sleep preferences so you can have the best sleep of your life, or in my case, the best awake night of your life at an unbeatable price.
Here's how it works.
Go to helixleep.com, fill out their two-minute sleep quiz, and they'll design your custom mattress.
They can even customize each side of your mattress for you and a partner.
The all-new pillows are fully adjustable so you can achieve perfect comfort regardless of sleep position or body type.
I have one of those and they are great.
They really are.
Go to helixleep.com/slash clavin right now, and you'll get up to $125 toward your mattress order.
That's helixleep.com slash clavin for up to $125 off your mattress order, helixleep.com slash clavin.
And while I'm lying awake, I frequently say to myself, how do you spell Claven?
And this is the answer that comes back to me.
You should check our sponsors.
You'll love what you'll be saving.
But you must remember, there are no easy clavens.
There's jobs and flowers, dates, and wine, and all the folks are raving.
But you have to spell it right.
There are no easy clavens.
There's stamps and sheets and mattresses.
There's magazines and shaving.
But if you want the discount, there are no easy claven.
Well, you can even have them bring the meals that you are craving.
There is an E in Andrew, but there are no E's in Claven.
Are no E's in Claven.
K L A V A N. There are no easy clavens.
I guess that's how you spell Claven.
All right.
Blaming America Excessively00:15:13
All right.
You know, in my business, the business of being a freelance writer, you do a lot of waiting.
This is really true.
You do a lot of waiting because you send things in to your editor or your agent, and you have to wait to hear back a response.
Even giving your wife something.
My wife is my first and my best editor.
And even when I give her something to read, I do a lot of waiting, waiting to hear what she has to say.
And we have a saying in my house, my wife and I, which is that what happens is as you wait, things become distorted.
As you wait for news, things become distorted.
You start to think, well, you know, it's taken them two weeks to get back to me.
Maybe they hate it.
Maybe they can't tell me.
Or maybe they haven't even read it because they don't care about me.
And maybe they don't, you know, you start to like, your mind goes a little crazy.
And so my wife and I have this slogan, no news is no news.
So, you know, people will say no news is good news.
We say no news is no news.
If you don't have anything to say, there's nothing to say.
So right now, deep into the summer, heading deep into the summer, there is no news.
There is like nothing, nothing is happening.
And so everything gets distorted.
Everything that people say gets blown out.
So yesterday, I think it was, yeah, I think it was yesterday, Trump was saying, oh, you know, I would be willing.
Yeah, he met with the Italian prime minister, and they both are very big on keeping control over their borders.
And he made some comment like, oh, yeah, if I don't get a border wall, I would shut down the government.
And today, on like a front page of the magazines and on the big op-eds, you know, Trump has destroyed the chances of Congress for the midterms, of Republicans keeping hold of Congress for the midterms by shutting down the government, by threatening to shut down.
He's not going to shut down the government for the midterms.
What is he?
An idiot?
Of course, he's not going to do that.
People get really ticked off when the government shut down.
And it really depends who gets the blame.
But if you say, I'm going to let the government shut down and then the government shuts down, you'll probably get the blame.
So he's not going to do that.
So it's like a non-story, but you have to listen to it.
Then Rudy Giuliani.
Rudy Giuliani, I'm beginning to wonder a little bit if he's drinking a little bit of what Nancy Pelosi is drinking because he comes on.
I mean, Rudy is one of my heroes, by the way, because he cleaned up New York, like Wyatt Urban Dodge City.
And I don't care what anybody says.
I mean, when he went into that town, it was a crime-ridden cesspit of a town.
I was there.
I know when he left, it was the greatest city on earth.
I mean, when he left, it was the greatest, cleanest, safest city on earth.
So he's a hero, but he's always been a little loopy.
And he was on TV yesterday saying, Trump is not guilty.
Trump is not guilty of collusion, and collusion's not a crime anyway.
I'm not even know if that's a crime, colluding about Russians.
Okay.
You start analyzing the crime.
The hacking is the crime.
That certainly is the original.
The president didn't hack.
Of course not.
That's the original.
He didn't pay them for hacking.
And as you know, it has led otherwise the meeting with the Russians.
If you got the hacked information from the Russians here at CNN and you played it, would you be in jeopardy of going to jail?
Of course not.
So people are saying, well, he's not guilty of collusion.
What does the difference does it make if it's a crime?
It doesn't make any.
He's just talking off the top of his head and he's blithering it, making everything worse.
So this is the stuff that is passing for news.
So let us not waste our time with some of this stuff because it really is.
I want to look at something because, you know, one of the ways, one of the chief ways that the left has secured the narrative is with the charge of racism, is charging people with racism.
And even brave speakers of truth grow pale when they are threatened with charges of racism.
It costs you your job.
It costs you your respect.
People parse every little thing.
Well, you know, he did say, you know, you're out of your cotton picking mind and slaves picked cotton.
And so maybe it was, you know, it's all nonsense, but this is what they do.
There is an article on the New York Times op-ed page today that tells you everything you need to know by accident, by accident, reveals everything you need to know about the way the left thinks about racism.
And it's on the page that I like to call Knucklehead Row.
So let us take a trip to Knucklehead Row at the New York Times.
So it is it is kind of ironic that the Democrats are the ones who are constantly harping on racism.
This is the party of slavery.
It's the party of the KKK.
It's the party of segregation.
It's the party of the high crime black neighborhoods and cities and the high illegitimacy rates, which were spawned by Democrat welfare policies.
And they're going to preach to us on race.
Now, you know, I'm not, I know Dinesh D'Souza sort of holds them, kind of says they're still the same people.
And no, I'm not accusing them of still being the KKK.
I'm not accusing them of that.
It does sometimes occur to me that maybe their obsession with race is partly out of guilt.
Maybe it's partly a guilt reaction because of their own history as truly a racist party.
And their narrative, of course, that the script has flipped and now we're the racists is utterly untrue.
There is a piece in the New York Times today by a woman named Margaret Renkel who writes about the South for the New York Times because they need somebody to cover the South because they've never seen the South or been anywhere outside of 57th Street.
It's called How to Talk to a Racist.
And she starts out, the subhead is, white liberals, you're doing it all wrong.
So let's just start there.
Why is it a white liberal who is talking to racists?
Why isn't it what do we on the conservative side, do we not talk to racists and try to convince them not to be racist?
So we, when we see a racist, ah, good, give me some of that racism.
I love it because I'm a conservative.
I'm a conservative and I want some racism.
No, you know, but that's immediately her assumptions.
The only person who would be trying to convince a racist not to be racist has got to be a liberal.
Got to be a liberal.
All right.
So here, let me read some of this because it's just so packed with arrogant, sequestered, small-minded liberal thinking.
All right.
She begins.
There are still, and she's writing from Dateline, Nashville.
There are still white Southerners who honestly believe that American culture worked better for everyone, white and black alike, under segregation.
There are still white Southerners who question how bad slavery really was.
When an enslaved black person's health and strength are needed to guarantee the slaveholder's livelihood, this argument goes, it just wouldn't make sense to whip them or starve them or rape them or work them to the point of collapse.
Now, I believe this.
I believe there are people who still believe this.
There are people who believe just about anything.
And this is some of the stupid stuff you sometimes hear from people saying, you know, slavery wasn't as bad as people say it was, or the workers in the North were treated just as badly and all this stuff.
You know, but slavery, as I've said, wasn't evil because of the whipping and raping.
They had to whip and rape the people because slavery was evil.
Same thing with socialism.
Socialism doesn't devolve into tyranny.
It isn't evil because it devolves into tyranny.
It devolves into tyranny because it's evil.
Socialism is evil by its philosophy.
The same thing is true of slavery.
So anyway, I believe her so far.
There are true bigots in the world and true people who invent these silly narratives to get rid of the sins of the past.
She says, I have exhausted my ability to understand why, deep into the 21st century, I'm still hearing otherwise good-hearted people use the same arguments that white southerners used to discredit Uncle Tom's cabin more than 150 years ago.
It couldn't possibly have been that bad, they say.
But worse in many ways are the white people who will tell you point blank that the world today, the world they actually live in and can see with their own eyes, can't possibly be as unfair as black people say it is.
Okay?
Grab this next sentence.
Maybe this is what happens when a person's only news source is the alternative universe of Fox and Friends.
So that's what makes you, they're talking about people who think that slavery wasn't all that bad and segregation wasn't all that bad.
That's on Fox and Friends.
That, I mean, Knowles is on Fox and Friends.
That's where that's the burbling source of bigotry in our country is Fox and Friends.
Has she ever seen, has you ever watched Fox and Friends?
I mean, all right, you know, it's the assumption.
If liberalism is the party of anti-racism, then conservatism must be racist.
And boy, oh boy, I can't wait to hear how she's going to talk to me about my racism.
I can't wait for her advice on what she's going to do.
Now, she says all these people are racist, the people who say these things are racist, but they don't believe they are.
They don't know that they're racist.
And you can't write them off because if you scream at them and call them white supremacists, they're not going to change their mind.
So what to do, what to do.
And she says, here's the thing.
Prejudice is endemic to humanity itself.
Human beings are tribal creatures.
We trust the familiar and are drawn to it.
We distrust the unfamiliar and keep our distance.
White people, liberal and conservative, often claim not to notice another person's race, but it's just not true.
So if all, why is it only white people then?
If it's all human beings, are black people not human beings?
If it's everybody, it's everybody.
We all have the same problem.
All right, but not to her.
This is only about white people.
We're hardwired to recognize difference and to view it as an aberration.
I'm talking only about garden variety prejudice.
The difference between an unconscious liberal racist and an unconscious conservative racist is only a matter of degree, not of kind.
The difference between an unconscious liberal racist and an unconscious.
So in other words, we're both racist, but the conservative is more racist, okay?
She says, what about the grumpy old neighbor?
I'm not talking about evil racists.
She's talking about people who can be saved.
Let's hear the people who can be saved.
The grumpy old neighbor who voted for Donald Trump out of frustration with Washington.
He's your first racist.
The high school classmate who posts an Obama joke on Facebook.
A race.
I mean, he's black.
You don't like him.
It must be because he's black.
You're racist.
Here's another one.
Another person who might, you might be able to save this person from her racism.
The white woman on the plane who tenses up when a Middle Eastern man sits down in the seat beside her.
Why on earth would anyone tense up when a Middle Eastern man sits down on a seat beside you with a shoebox muttering alohu akbar and a clock that's ticking?
You know, I mean, try not to, she says, try not to give up on these people yet.
Do not give up on the Trump voter.
Do not give up on the person who makes an Obama joke on Facebook.
I mean, can you imagine the depths of racism it takes to make an Obama joke on Facebook?
I mean, how amazingly, it's just amazing.
And by the way, the thing about the Muslims she's talking about, when she says a Middle Eastern person, she means Muslims.
Ideas are not a race, okay?
Ideas are not a race.
All right.
She says, before you say a single word to these poor, benighted, racist conservatives, think of all the times you made an assumption.
Think about all the times you made an assumption about a stranger that proved to be untrue.
God knows, you might have even thought of an Obama joke.
Think of the times you found yourself feeling uneasy in the company of strangers of another race.
Think about how you were forced to interrogate that uneasiness.
Think of the plank in your own eye.
Start there.
I mean, this is an unbelievable piece about just assuming that people who disagree with you, anyone who would make an Obama, if you disliked Obama, it had to be because of his race.
It's the only reason.
It wouldn't be because he said he's going to fundamentally transform the greatest country on earth.
It wouldn't be because he was a communist, socialist, I should say, who wanted to redistribute wealth, who said, you know, you want to spread the wealth around.
Wouldn't be because he corrupted the IRS and the State Department and the Justice Department.
No, all that stuff was fine.
It's just a brown I couldn't stand.
It was just that cuddle skin color.
It drove me crazy.
It drove me crazy.
Unbelievable.
And if you want to see where they get this stuff and where it plays out, let us turn to our old friends at CNN, Don Lemon, who I think is the biggest race baiter in the country who has a show of his own.
Okay.
I mean, and I'm not talking about YouTube shows.
I'm sure there are people saying horrible things on YouTube.
But this is insane.
He plays some, he had an interview with LeBron James.
And LeBron James, a couple of years ago, maybe a year ago, a couple of years ago, had somebody vandalize his home here in LA and wrote the N-word on his garage, I think.
Obviously, an act of criminality and just absolutely disgusting.
We can all agree on this.
So here is LeBron James talking about this cut four.
I don't know if I was hurt.
I don't know if I was disappointed.
It was so many different emotions.
More importantly, it was the conversation that I had to have with my boys that it was, that hurt me.
But at the same time, it also enlightened me, no matter how big you can become, no matter how successful you are, no matter what you do in the community, no matter what you do in your profession, you know, being an African-American in America is always tough.
And they're always going to let you know that you are the N-word, no matter who you are.
And that was just a reset.
Now, I got to say, obviously, it's very upsetting that a guy of this level, I mean, a man of true excellence and hard work and who's just such an entertaining athlete should be attacked like that.
It's disgusting.
But to blame it on America is really going a little bit far.
I mean, is that really true?
You know, certainly I've been attacked for my race.
I know Ben has been attacked viciously for his race.
You know, I mean, I think that there's racism in the world.
And I simply think when you put the word America in front of everything, it always seems like we somehow are worse.
A criminal got to his house.
A criminal got to his house.
Criminals get to white people's house as well.
Criminals say all kinds of terrible things and do all kinds of terrible things to people.
It's the extrapolation, the generalization that I don't like.
And then, of course, he blames it on Trump.
This is cut number three.
You know, we are in a position right now in America, more importantly, where this whole, this race thing is taking over.
You know, and because, one, because I believe our president is kind of trying to divide us.
But I think kind of.
Yeah.
He is.
He is.
I don't want to say kind of.
He's dividing us.
And what I noticed over the last few months that he's kind of used sport to kind of divide us.
And that's something that I can't relate to because I know that sport was the first time I ever was around someone white, you know, and I got an opportunity to see them and learn about them.
And they got an opportunity to learn about me and we became very good friends.
And I was like, oh, wow, this is all because of sports.
And sports has never been something that divide people.
It's always been something that brings someone together.
Well, you know, I agree with that, but I don't see why Donald Trump.
Why is it Donald Trump that is dividing people?
I mean, wasn't it divisive when they stopped standing up for the flag?
I mean, isn't that a generally accepted thing that we all stand up for the flag, that it's everybody's flag?
I mean, this was my complaint about the NFL when they allowed players under their guys standing there speaking essentially for the NFL to diss the flag was the reason, the very reason my black neighbor can come to me and say, I'm not being treated fairly is because we understand as Americans what fairness means.
It's as Americans that we come together.
It's not the sport that brings us together.
It's the ideas of America that bring us together.
And if those ideas are being violated, it's not like you can't reach me if you say that.
If you can tell me, oh, in my neighborhood, the cops are doing such and so and they're treating us unfairly.
It's not like I'm not going to respond to that.
But you're appealing to me under the flag.
So don't diss the flag while you're doing it.
That's the thing that brings us together.
It's not the sport.
Defending Ideas Not Flags00:15:03
I found this a little disappointing because I really admire LeBron James.
I found, you know, Hank Aaron, I don't know how many people remember Hank Aaron, a great, great baseball player for the Atlanta Braves, broke Babe Ruth's home run record.
And he suffered some racism while he was doing this way back in the day.
And there were some people who didn't want a black man to get the home run record, but most of us were mesmerized.
I mean, he was another one of these great, great athletes who just hammered those home runs day after day after day, had the greatest wrists I ever saw in baseball, greatest swing I ever saw.
And then years later, I heard him interviewed, and he said he saved a box of all the racist letters he got.
And I thought, really?
I thought, why didn't you save a box of all the cheers you got?
Like, well, and I know negative things hit you harder than positive things.
And I'm not blaming the guy for it.
I just found it disappointing that he did so much to sort of bring people together with his achievement that all he got out of it were these few people, these few knuckleheads who were hating on him, you know.
But Don Lemon, Don Lemon is not like good enough to be on television.
He really isn't.
He's not good enough at his job to be on television.
He's a knucklehead and he is indeed a race baiter.
And he goes off and he says all these people who say that it's not so bad.
Because by the way, my problem with what LeBron said is that the race division got worse under Obama because Obama used it to cover up his failures.
Uh-oh, did I just make a joke about Obama on Facebook?
Oh my goodness gracious.
Listen to the way Don Lemon sells this thing.
I know people watch and they say, why are you guys talking about race?
Erase Baiten, we don't hear about it.
It's not that bad.
It is that bad.
And stop saying that.
Start examining yourself.
Why don't you want to talk about it?
Maybe I should be more open to talk about it.
Maybe I should learn more about my neighbors of color or people who are not like me.
What is it that I don't know?
What is it that I'm not exposed to?
What am I not learning?
Rather than every single time saying there is no racism, it's all behind us.
Slavery was a long time ago.
That's all really bad if you're watching at home and you're saying that.
And why is he cursing?
Oh, I know why he's cursing because when leftists curse, that's how you know to take them seriously.
Because if you just listen to their ideas, you'd think they were knuckleheads, you know?
But when they curse, they really mean it.
So, you know, look, first of all, it's not that bad.
I know this because I've been alive for a long time.
I remember when it was bad.
I remember when it was that bad.
It is not that bad.
That said, that said, I just want to add that I understand that the life of a black person in America may well be different than the life of a white person in America.
It may be difficult, just like the life of a Jew, I think, is different than the life of a Christian in America.
I've been both, and I can testify that, in fact, it is.
It is different to be a Jew than it is to be white.
And I get it.
It's not that I think things are perfect.
That's absurd.
I just think it is not that bad if you're constantly bringing it up.
You're the one who's opening the wound all the time.
We have some responsibility.
You know, you know my feelings about this.
You know my feelings about racism.
I believe, it's not that I believe that man was made in the image of God.
It's that man was made in the image of God.
It doesn't have nothing to do with what I believe.
It's just the truth.
I mean, it's not just in the Bible.
All nature proclaims that man is made in the image of God.
When you hate on somebody for his race, you are slapping the image of God in the kisser.
I mean, you are spitting on the image of God, which go right ahead, just don't sit too close to me when you do it.
But that, you know, I truly believe that.
And I think it is, you know, whenever somebody starts whispering in your ear this crap genetic stuff, people who don't have PhDs in genetics start whispering this stuff into your ear about genetics or about IQ and all that stuff.
Yeah, you know, that is garbage.
You should really read Bill McGurn, William McGurn in the Wall Street Journal, has a piece about the cardinal, Theodore McGarrick McCarrick, who was just thrown out of the College of Cardinals because it came out that he molested an altar boy as well as another teen and he was doing a lot of this terrible stuff.
And he points out that when a priest does wrong, it gives credence to materialism.
That just like the guy who was selling indulgences back in the 16th century gave power to Martin Luther to start the Reformation, but he was just a guy.
He wasn't doing what the Catholic, he wasn't doing official Catholic doctrine.
Just like that, when these guys rape people, essentially, and when the church covers it up, it gives credence to the opposite side, the materialists who say that man is just a here.
Let me read it.
He says, in our day, the battle is no longer between competing versions of Christianity.
It's not even so much about God, though it's often characterized that way.
The real fight has to do with who's right about the reality of the human person, those who posit him as but a physical combination of matter and energy, or those who believe him, as the eighth psalm puts it, only a little lower than the angels.
And the way people are treated has a lot to do with the way we think of them.
So we do, it is inherent, it is incumbent upon us to make sure that we're not racist, but it is not incumbent upon us to live by the standards of the left, that making a joke about Obama is racist.
Crap.
That being nervous about Muslims on planes is racist.
That's garbage.
It's not incumbent upon us to do that, using a phrase that they don't like, like cotton pick and mai out of your cotton pick and mine, that that's racist.
It is not incumbent upon us.
It is incumbent upon us, yes, to make sure that our hearts are true and that we're not hateful, but it is not incumbent upon us to pay attention to their nonsense.
If they set the rules, then all that means is they think their politics is anti-racist and ours is racist, and that is garbage.
All right, we got Alan Dershowitz coming up.
Really interesting interview.
Got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come on over to the dailywire.com.
And while you're there, subscribe so that you can ask some questions for tomorrow's mailbag.
Hit the podcast button, hit Andrew Clavin podcast, hit the mailbag, ask any question you want.
I will answer as many as I can, and my answers are guaranteed correct and will change your life for the better.
Wait and see, my friends.
All right, Alan Dershowitz, one of the most famous lawyers in the world.
He's a professor of law at Harvard University.
He's been called one of the nation's most distinguished defenders of individual rights.
He's got a new book out called The Case Against Impeaching Trump, and it is getting him in trouble with his former liberal friends.
He says it seeks to reorient the debate over impeachment to the same standard that he has continued to uphold for decades, the law of the United States of America as established by the Constitution.
This is not your usual flash-in-the-pan drive-by interview.
This is a really in-depth interview and really interesting.
Take a listen.
Alan Dershowitz, thanks so much for being here.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
So, your new book, let's start with your new book.
It's called The Case Against Impeaching Trump.
It has one of my favorite reviews ever on Amazon.
I haven't read this book, but the very title is offensive.
What is the case?
Why should we not impeach Trump?
Well, first of all, you should see the reviews tend to be either five stars or no stars, depending on whether you're a Republican or a Democrat.
I'm actually looking for some five stars from Democrats because I started to write this book when the Republicans were screaming lock her up and impeach Clinton.
Remember, the Republicans were planning to start an impeachment campaign the day Hillary Clinton was sworn in.
And I started writing and talking about this issue to defend Hillary Clinton.
And in fact, I would have written the same book had Hillary Clinton been elected president and was she impeached.
In fact, to make that point, the publisher came up with a mock title and a mock cover called The Case Against Impeaching Hillary Clinton.
And so, you know, I started doing this research really back when Bill Clinton was impeached.
I helped advise part of his legal team and I did the research and came to the conclusion, which was then against the weight of the evidence of scholarship, that in order to impeach a president, you had to prove that he committed an actual crime, either treason or bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.
And misdemeanors meant serious crimes that affect office holding and the ability to hold an office.
And I rejected the concept of Gerald Ford that impeachment was whatever the House says it is, or Maxine Water, who says there's no law.
It's just whatever the House wants to say.
No, the law is very clear.
You need two-thirds of a vote in the Senate based on fulfilling the criteria in the Constitution.
That's not a liberal Democrat, a liberal, conservative, conservative, Republican issue.
That's a constitutional issue, applying equally to liberals and conservatives.
Today, the Republicans are trying to impeach Rod Rosenstein.
And I wrote an op-ed saying, no, you can't do that.
You haven't charged them with any crimes.
And you're actually playing into the hands of your opponents, because if you try to impeach Rod Rosenstein for non-criminal conduct, that will be used as a precedent to try to impeach Trump for non-criminal conduct.
So I think everybody should support my position that it should be very hard to impeach and remove a duly elected official.
Does this imply an attitude toward the Mueller investigation?
Does it imply that you don't see much there there, that there's not going to be a high crime or misdemeanor coming out of that investigation?
Well, today's New York Times reports that they're trying to stitch together, quote, stitch together an obstruction case from tweets and conversations.
That's every civil libertarian's nightmare.
Any civil libertarian should be concerned when the government is trying to stitch something together from public tweets.
I don't know whether they'll find anything, but I don't think they'll find a, quote, real crime.
I have been opposed to the appointments of special counsel since the experience with Bill Clinton when they started out with Whitewater and ended up with an Oval Office, you know, a perjury charge.
And so this is a long-standing opposition.
I think it would have been much better to have this investigation conducted by a nonpartisan expert commission of the kind that was appointed after 9-11 without fingerpointing, but stopping the Russians from intruding on elections.
This election, 2016, was a disaster for America.
We have Pomes possibly influencing the election.
We have Russians influencing the election.
We have charges that there was voter fraud.
There should have been a general nonpartisan investigation to avoid recurrence of these problems, to set out clear Justice Department rules as to what FBI directors can say, what attorneys general could say, to make sure that we're insulated from influence from Russia.
All of those things would have been better instead of operating behind the closed doors of a grand jury and trying to stitch together a case out of constitutionally protected activities.
Do you give any credence to Trump's complaint that there's at least the appearance of bias with the, what does he call them, the 13 angry Democrats or whatever he calls them and Strzok and Page and all this.
Do you believe, yourself, do you perceive bias in this team?
I don't think there's any partisan bias.
I don't think that they care whether it hurts Democrats or Republicans.
I know that Mueller and Comey are non-partisan.
They may not like Trump personally, but they're non-partisan.
They don't prefer Democrats over Republicans or Republicans over Democrats.
So I think it misconceives it to say that there are 12 angry Democrats.
Democrats can do complete justice.
Who you vote for has nothing to do with what kind of fairness you can have.
But Strzok is a different story because Strzok said, we have to do something.
We have to stop this man from being president.
We need an insurance policy.
We'll stop him.
That's the kind of attitude that should result in refusal.
Strzok should have realized that he has such strong views that he should have reduced himself from the investigation at the very beginning.
He didn't do that.
You know, a million years ago, back in the 1980s, I was a low-level writer at ABC Radio News Network, and I interviewed you.
And I remember you at the time were kind of a liberal icon.
You were the guy we turned to for a liberal court.
What the hell happened to you, Alan?
No, I didn't.
I'm still a liberal.
That's my liberal.
I'm still a liberal icon.
What's happened to the liberals?
They have stopped being liberals when it comes to Donald Trump.
They've stopped being civil libertarians.
Look, my positions haven't changed.
I support a woman's right to choose.
I'm in favor of gay marriage.
I'm in favor of gun control.
I'm in favor of fair taxation.
I'm in favor of health care broad as possible.
I don't like what Trump said at Charlottesburg.
I don't like what he says about immigration.
I'm still a liberal, but I'm a civil libertarian first.
And as a civil libertarian, I defend Nazis.
I defend communists.
I defend O.J. Simpson.
I defend the most despised people in the most despised causes because my civil libertarianism comes before my liberalism.
I'm a civil libertarian, whether it hurts liberals or helps liberals, whether it hurts conservative or helps conservative.
My own personal political views, I'm a centerist civil libertarian liberal.
I want to see the country move away from extremes on both sides and to the center.
Those are my personal political views, but they don't influence the cases I take or the causes I defend when it comes to civil liberties.
When you say, you have pointed out that the ACLU, for instance, has abandoned the defense of free speech, which used to be their hallmark.
You've just said that the left has moved away from civil libertarianism.
Is there something in current leftism that forces them to move away from civil libertarianism?
Is it just an accident or is it part of their philosophy?
Oh, no, I don't think it has anything to do with the philosophy.
It has to do with money.
Usually things have to do with money.
When Trump got elected, the ACLU got a bonanza.
They raised their budget from, I think, $30 million to $130 million.
Everybody joined the ACLU because they wanted to get Trump, which meant that the ACOU had to prioritize getting Trump over for civil liberties.
It also means they attracted a lot more people from the hard left who have no sympathy for civil liberties, who don't care about speech on college campuses as long as it's only conservatives who are being censored.
You know, I grew up during McCarthyism.
I hated communism, but I defended the rights of communists to speak on campus.
I defended the rights of Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois.
That's who I am.
And people hate me when I do that.
My mother wouldn't talk to me.
Whose side are you on?
The Jews or the Nazis?
My university president wouldn't write me a recommendation for law school because he thought I was a communist sympathizer.
People don't understand what it means to be a civil libertarian.
It means to defend people you disagree with.
As H.L. Mencken said, first they come after the SOBs.
They establish the precedents on their back.
Then they come after the rest of us.
Defending Rights Despite Hatred00:06:35
I'm there to stop that from happening.
Wouldn't you say, I mean, this is obviously in the great American tradition, John Adams at the Boston massacre, defending the British.
Wouldn't you say, though, that this tradition is now more alive on the right?
Am I wrong about that?
I mean, I see you on Fox News where they're happy to talk to you, but they're also happy to talk to leftists.
There are more leftists on Fox News than there are right-wingers on CNN.
Well, I'm one of the very, very few people who refuses to be paid by any of the stations.
And I'm routinely both on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox because I call it straight right down the middle.
I have to tell you, I do think today that conservatives, moderate conservatives, are more sympathetic to issues of free speech and due process, maybe because it benefits them, because they're the ones who are being censored.
They're the ones who are being accused and they want due process.
So for me, it's always across the board.
I always apply the shoe on the other foot test.
If the shoe were on the other foot, if it were conservatives who were limiting liberals, what would I be saying?
The same thing.
I wrote a book called Supreme Injustice, railing against the Supreme Court in Bush versus Gore, because the justices didn't pass the shoe on the other foot test.
If it had been Gore versus Bush, they would never have stopped the recount.
They did it because they were conservative Republicans, not because the Constitution demanded it.
So I demand neutral application of civil liberties in all contexts, and that gets me in trouble.
Today, when I wrote an article saying that Rod Rosenstein shouldn't be impeached, the right wing jumped all over me.
Oh, you don't know what you're talking about.
Of course, he should be impeached.
He's terrible.
He's done terrible things.
They're making the same arguments against Rosenstein that the left is making against Trump.
Well, I'm right-wing, but I completely agree with you.
I thought that was a total mistake trying to impeach him.
Let's talk about this vendetta against Trump, which obviously it's not a vendetta from everyone who opposes him, but there isn't a vendetta.
When Michael Cohen tapes his client and then that tape gets released, is that not problematic?
Is it just me who's appalled?
It's you and me, but nobody else.
I was on CNN last night saying we have to find out who leaked that tape.
It's a terrible thing to have lawyer-client conversations leak.
And everybody was saying, oh, no, that's not the issue.
That's not the issue.
Yes, that is the issue.
That affects all of us because if you can leak lawyer-client confidences, you can leak priest-penitent confidences, psychiatrists' patient confidences, doctors' confidences.
We have to protect confidences.
That's a civil liberties issue.
And I'm going to stand up for any civil liberties issue, no matter who it hurts or who it helps.
But didn't Trump essentially waive attorney-client privilege or did he do that afterwards?
Afterwards.
Afterwards.
Afterward.
He really waived it after it was leaked.
He waived it because it was leaked.
Giuliani made that point very clearly.
And when you look at this, the very fact, I know it's legal to tape somebody in New York, but should a lawyer be taping his client without the client knowing?
No, of course not.
I've never taped a client in 53 years of practice.
And the idea of then after it being taped, somehow it being leaked, that has to be investigated and looked into.
Everybody says that's beside the point, but it isn't beside the point.
Today, you can't get an issue to be considered unless it either helps one side or hurts the other side.
This helps all Americans, but it doesn't either advantage the Republicans or the Democrats and nobody's interested.
You know, As a right-winger, it seems to me that the treatment that Trump is getting is a little bit more extreme, but not of a different kind than the treatment given to Mitt Romney, who was accused of every minor thing he did.
Probably one of the most moral men who ever ran for president.
And every little thing was blown into a scandal.
George W. Bush, the same thing the first two years of his administration, one fake scandal after another.
When you look at Trump, as a liberal, as a classical liberal, when you look at Donald Trump, is he such an anomaly that the panic is justified?
He's different than any other president in the sense that he has coarsened the dialogue.
He talks in a way that no other president has ever spoken, both when he knows he's being recorded and when he doesn't know he's being recorded.
That's had an impact on people's perceptions of him, but it's not impeachable and it's not a crime.
I'm not here to defend President Trump's policies.
I'm here to defend his legal and constitutional rights.
And that's all I care about, the legal and constitutional rights.
You want to attack him?
You want to criticize him?
That's political.
That's what America is all about.
But, you know, people say Trump's different.
We have to suspend civil liberties because Trump's different.
No, no, no, no.
I remember when they said the Japanese invasion is different, so we have to put 110,000 American citizens in concentration camps.
I remember when they said communism is different, so we have to have McCarthyism.
I remember when they said terrorism is different, so we have to suspend people's civil liberties.
I've lived through all of those.
Trump's not that different.
We'll survive Trump.
Our system of checks and balances is working and it's working well.
And we dare not compromise anyone's civil liberties because we don't like a particular president.
Because what's good today for the Democrats will be used against the Democrats in the years to come.
One last question.
When you look at college campuses and you see guys like my friend Ben Shapiro getting shouted down and the Aunt Tifa going after people with sticks and masks, do you have optimism that we can correct course and return to the kind of philosophy, which is the philosophy I remember as kind of representing what America was, no matter which side you were on?
Can we return to that philosophy or have we totally lost the plot?
I think there's a risk that we can lose it because we're educating young students who are going to be our future leaders not to tolerate different ideas.
I experienced it on Martha's Vineyard when I wrote my book and talked about civil liberties.
People said, we do not want to talk to Dershowitz.
A campaign was begun to try not to talk to me and to try to create an atmosphere where I was regarded as outside the tail.
In fact, what we did is we came up with a special cover for my book from Martha's Vineyard, Brown Paper Wrapper, like we used to put around little pornographic books that we read as kids.
And it's called the Martha's Vineyard Edition.
You can read it on the beach without anybody knowing you're reading my book, The Cases Against Impeaching Trump.
That's how bad it's become.
Women Out-Earning Men00:02:21
That's really funny.
Well, you should try working in Hollywood as a conservative.
Alan Dershowitz, the author of The Case Against Impeaching Trump.
Thanks very much for coming on.
I really appreciate it.
Really enjoyed talking to him.
He was a very, very intelligent, civilized human being.
Sexual follies.
So here's something.
Two stories I just would like to run by you.
New research from the U.S. Census Bureau that compared the earnings between husbands and wives and the current population found that men and women both lie about their salaries if the wives earn more.
Both men and women lie about their salaries if the wives earn more.
And add that to another story.
When a woman out-earns a man in a heterosexual relationship, it can influence more than just who's in charge of the household finances.
According to Farnouche Torabi, author of When She Makes More 10 Rules for Breadwinning Women, in relationships where the woman is the breadwinner, both men and women are more likely to cheat.
A 2010 study conducted by Cornell University looked at 18 to 28-year-old married and cohabiting couples who had been together for more than a year and found that men who were entirely dependent on their female partner's salary were five times more likely to cheat than men who made an equal amount of money.
Maybe because they're pimps.
No, that's.
But if you are, women who rely entirely on a man's salary are half as likely to cheat as women who earn the same amount as their partner.
So obviously, this is a case of nature thrown out the door coming back in through the window.
It's like, you know, this is what people don't understand.
The reason men work is because women have children.
That is the reason men work.
I mean, if women didn't have children, do you think men would go out and earn money?
You know, do you think they'd build cities?
Do you think they'd invent computers?
All that stuff they did because women have children to protect women, to build a world for women, to build a world around women.
And I get it.
I get it.
The world is fun.
The world that men made in order to surround women has a lot of fun stuff in it.
Things have changed and all that stuff.
But, you know, the thing, I guess, that gets me about this is everything feminists tell you will make you happy, makes them happy and you miserable.
Everything Feminists Tell You Makes You Miserable00:01:07
That's what I'm saying.
If you have to lie about who's making what money, if you're cheating on your spouse because of the money you make, everything feminists told you was going to make you happy makes them happy, but makes you miserable.
And that's something you should remember the next time you see a feminist mouth moving.
You know, every time a feminist mouth moving, an angel loses its wings.
It's like you're going, what they're telling you makes them happy, you miserable.
All right, the mailbag is tomorrow.
Do not miss it because you'll still have your problems.
If you miss it, I mean, if you hear it, all your problems will be gone.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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.