Andrew Clavin mocks California politicians like Jerry Brown and Bill Monning for sexist remarks on women’s board mandates while dismissing the Times’ anonymous op-ed as hysterical, praising Trump’s deregulation and tax cuts despite his chaotic image. Henry Olson predicts Democrats will win the House but Republicans hold the Senate, citing Trump’s polarizing appeal to working-class voters while alienating suburban moderates—mirroring Sweden’s far-right gender divide. He warns elite disdain for populist concerns fuels backlash, from Sweden’s 400,000 refugees to U.S. midterm risks, framing tech censorship as a threat to free speech over globalist priorities. The episode ends with a defense of Trump’s policies against unelected elites undermining democracy. [Automatically generated summary]
The state of California is preparing to pass a law that would require all California businesses to put at least one woman on its board of directors.
Governor Jerry Brown, who was preparing to sign the bill, told reporters, quote, it is important for big, strong men like myself to protect the right of women to be on boards.
How else will these gentle, delicate creatures attain positions of power in a cutthroat business world that was never intended for the sweet, helpless likes of them, unquote.
Bill Monning, the majority leader of the state senate, which has already passed the bill, issued a statement saying, quote, no longer will California businesses have to deal with messy boardrooms, sloppy conference tables, or hastily made lunches.
With this bill, we plan to make sure that each and every board in California will feel the civilizing touch of a woman, as well as that fragrant, flowery smell that wafts into the room every time a lady enters.
I feel sure that from now on, every man who runs a business in this state will be a little better behaved, a little better dressed, and yes, maybe a touch more charming, just knowing a member of the fairer sex is in the room with him.
I know from personal experience that every time I see a woman enter my office, her intriguing grace, her smooth, shapely limbs, and the unsettling curves of her outline.
I forgot what I was going to say, unquote.
The bill also got a push from chairman of the California Democratic Party Women's Caucus, Christine Pelosi.
Pelosi, who is often said to take after her mother house minority leader Nancy Pelosi, said the California bill would provide, quote, a fine reminder that every woman in California must have left her purse somewhere, but can't remember where, and that raises the question, who am I?
unquote.
Ms. Pelosi then drew a mouth on her forehead with lipstick and walked into a broom closet where she remained for the next seven hours.
In short, California remains a symbol of all that America can and will be if Democrats regain power.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety boom.
And birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped tipsy topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, a short week is coming to an end and the Clavenless weekend is upon us.
So you'll want to suck all the clavin-y goodness you can out of the next 45 minutes or so so you can make it through.
It's like being a camel.
Stay Safe, Subscribe, Get Bucks00:02:26
You want to store that up.
We've got Henry Olson coming on.
Henry, we will stay on so you can hear him.
But that doesn't mean you shouldn't go to the website and subscribe.
It's all the more reason why you should feel guilty and hand over your lousy 10 bucks a month or 100 bucks for the year to us.
Just hand it over and you can subscribe.
But we'll stay on so you can hear, Henry.
One of the best election observers out there, really, he really is.
One of the very few people who saw Donald Trump coming.
He didn't predict his victory, but he said it was going to be very, very close at the end.
And he's just always right about stuff.
So we're going to ask him about the midterms and other stuff and a couple other things.
Oh, yeah, you know, if you want to read, I have a novel named Killer in the Wind, which was not one of my most popular thrillers, but I think it's a really good one.
It's on sale for $1.99 at bookscream.com, bookscream.com, and go to their bargains page and get Killer in the Wind.
And also, just so you know, we are now posting the transcripts of my openings on thedailywire.com.
So if you, a lot of people have written in, said, where are the transcripts to the opens?
They will now be published on thedailywire.com, and we'll see how many people will take them seriously.
That's what I'm terrified of.
I'm terrified that people will actually believe them.
Meanwhile, you want to stay safe in your neighborhood.
I know I think about this all the time.
I probably read too many crime stories, too many true crime stories.
I get a little bit nervous.
I want my house protected.
And Ring is the way to go.
Over a million people are using the amazing Ring Video Doorbell to help protect their homes.
It works on your phone.
You can see what's going on.
And now Ring is extending that same level of security to the rest of your home with the Ring Floodlight Cam.
Just like Ring's amazing doorbell, Floodlight Cam is a motion-activated camera and floodlight that connects right to your phone with HD video and two-way audio that lets you know the moment anyone steps on your property.
You can see and speak to visitors, even set off an alarm right from your phone, no matter where you are.
Ring Floodlight offers the ultimate in-home security.
And you can save up to $150 off a Ring of Security kit when you go to ring.com slash Clavin.
Ring.com slash Clavin.
That's Ring.com slash Clavin.
And you can save up to $150 off a Ring of Security kit.
So stay safe and want to answer the important question, how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
And anyone who can't spell that, don't let them into your house.
Anonymous Op-Ed Revelations00:05:50
That is the first sign that they shouldn't be there.
So we got to talk about this anonymous op-ed in the New York Times and also Corey Booker making an absolute spectacle and fool of himself by breaking the Senate rules to release papers that he hopes will embarrass Brett Kavanaugh.
And I just want to say, I am so glad, I am so glad that the rule of law and decency are being protected by chuckleheads like Corey Booker, an anonymous unelected New York Times guy, who are breaking the rule of law and the rules of decency in order to protect the rule of law and the rule of decency.
I mean, that's basically what's going on.
And before you let any of this get into your head, because I've been telling you all week, America is in the grip of a non-crisis.
This is not a crisis.
We're not.
It's not a constitutional crisis.
It's not a political crisis.
Not any kind of a crisis.
Everything is going fine.
I just want to remind you of this.
Let me read to you.
Let me read something to you about a book being published.
In this stunning expose, the author pulls back the curtain on one of the most secretive White Houses in history.
He reveals a callow, thin-skinned, arrogant president with messianic dreams of grandeur, supported by a cast of true believers, all of them united by right-wing politics and an amateurish understanding of executive leadership.
Okay?
This tells you how the president has taken more of a personal role in making foreign policy than any president since Richard Nixon with disastrous results and how his family are the real powers behind the White House throne.
Now, I've changed that a little bit because it was actually about Obama.
It's actually from a book called The Amateur by Edward Klein about Obama.
It was a number one New York Times bestseller, and it made no splash whatsoever because, of course, the CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times didn't highlight it every single day.
And that atmosphere of hysteria is what they are trying to create.
That is the whole point of what they're doing.
And of course, they're doing it right now when Brett Kavanaugh is up for confirmation to the Supreme Court and they can't lay a glove on him.
They can't get him.
So they're just going out of their way to just make everything, oh my God, it's chaos, it's crisis, it's this, it's that.
Eh, not so much.
I want to really take a look at this anonymous, unelected New York Times guy writing an op-ed in which he says, basically, don't worry, folks, unelected, anonymous New York Times guy is secretly running the country.
Okay, this is what he says.
And, you know, it is absolutely, well, let me talk about it.
First, you know, they asked the New York Times, they went to the editor of the New York Times Blitherine Prevarication III, and they said, why would you publish, take it, you know, take this extraordinary step of publishing an anonymous op-ed attacking the president?
Here's his response.
I can't stop when I get like this.
I can't stop.
I'm hysterical.
I'm a daddy.
I'm sorry.
That's why they're doing it.
They're hysterical.
All right.
So it says, many of the senior officials, this is supposed to be a high-level administration official.
We have no idea what that means.
There are hundreds of people who would fall under that category.
I would be willing to bet, I would be willing to bet a certain amount of money that it's nobody we've ever heard of.
They're talking today about Mike Pence in a pig's eye, in a pig's eye.
You know, it's not Pence.
It's not Mattis.
It's nobody like that.
It's some minor functionary.
Many of the senior officials in Trump's own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.
I would know I am one of them.
Thanks, anonymous unelected New York Times guy, for trying to overturn the will of the people to save America, sort of kind of, I don't understand what you're doing.
All right.
But I believe this is happening.
First of all, I believe this always happens.
I believe this happens in every administration.
There are people kind of, you know, maneuvering behind the scenes.
It's a complex machine, and there are people who think they're more important than they are.
All right.
And at Axios, where they actually have some decent reporting, it's not like the New York Times at Axios, they have some sources.
They say that other people called them up and said, you know, there are a lot of us who sort of do things like this, sort of Trump is out of control, so we do all those things.
So anyway, the guy goes on.
To be clear, ours is not the popular resistance of the left.
We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.
But we believe our first duty is to the country and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.
That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump's more misguided impulses until he is out of office.
The root of the problem is the president's amorality.
So that's the first clue to who this is.
Obviously, an all-seeing creature who can look into the president's soul and find that there is no guiding principle there.
He says anyone who works with him, so that's the first clue.
We're just trying to narrow this down.
I think we've got, it's now, it's not a human being, right?
It's an immortal creature.
Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision-making.
Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives, free minds, free markets, and free people.
At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings.
At worst, he has attacked them outright.
I bet this was written by somebody at the Times.
I mean, obviously they had a source.
I'm not accusing them of making it up, but I bet it was written by them.
In addition to his mass marketing of the notion that the press is the enemy of the people, ooh, that was bad.
President Trump's impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic.
Don't get me wrong.
There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture.
Blue Apron: A Better Way to Cook00:02:25
Effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military, and more.
Let's just pause for a minute there to talk about the more in President Trump's first year.
Let me quote Dan Henninger in the Wall Street Journal because he puts his name on what he writes.
In President Trump's first year, those policies included the immigrant travel ban, news of which spread throughout the world.
But with the help of a Republican Congress, his policies also included the reversal of the Obama era's multitudinous economic regulation.
December, a 40% reduction in the corporate tax rate.
In the six months between December and summer vacation, the U.S. economy achieved full employment.
We now have a labor shortage.
Unemployment rates for blacks and Hispanics at historic lows.
After eight years of suppression, a still powerful U.S. economy has been liberated.
Here are three headlines from Tuesday's online journal.
U.S. factory sector clock's strongest growth in 14 years.
Consumer sentiment boosted by job optimism.
U.S. auto sales maintain momentum for now.
But thank heavens.
Thank heavens.
Anonymous, unelected New York Times guy is on the scene doing whatever the hell he thinks he's doing.
I got to pause for just a minute, talk about Blue Apron.
I love Blue Apron.
Great food delivered to your home.
It's the ingredients delivered to your home, allowing you to do home cooking, but at a level that brings you a meal straight out of a restaurant.
Blue Apron's mission is to make incredible home cooking accessible to everyone.
You choose chef-designed recipes.
They deliver fresh, seasonally inspired ingredients.
They cook incredible meals in as little as 20 minutes.
And it's quick, easy recipe options here.
It's like this, right now they have crispy chicken tenders and mashed potatoes.
Just not the thing you usually cook at home, right?
Pasta and creamy tomato sauce, perfectly portioned ingredients delivered right to your door.
You can skip meal planning and shopping and get straight to cooking with Blue Apron.
Whether you're looking for a quick and easy meal or a full culinary cooking experience, Blue Apron lets you choose from a range of recipe options.
Here's what you do: check out this week's menu and get your first three meals free at blueapron.com/slash Andrew.
That's blueapron.com/slash Andrew to get your first three meals free.
Blue Apron is a better way to cook.
What do I have to do?
I'm giving you free food.
I mean, free food usually gets people to do what you need them to do.
All right.
So let us go on.
Public Perception Matters00:15:47
He says, he says, yes, all these successes, says anonymous unelected New York Times guys, but these successes have come despite, not because of, the president's leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty, and ineffective.
Well, obviously not ineffective, right, since all this stuff is happening, but okay.
From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit that their daily disbelief at the commander-in-chief's comments and actions.
Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.
Meeting with him, meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails.
He engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed, and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.
There is no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next.
A top official complained to me recently.
So, how many of you are going like, what?
President Trump?
President Trump says things and then changes his mind.
What?
What?
You know, this is this is they had to publish this anonymously because no one would come forward and say President Trump is difficult to deal with and has a big mouth.
I mean, no one would say that except everyone, the entire country would say that.
They're like 325 million people in this country.
They'll go, yeah, Trump doing a great job, but he's got a big mouth and he changes his mind a lot.
All right, the erratic behavior would be more concerning.
I mean, this is the stupidest editorial.
The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren't for unsung heroes in and around the White House.
Who do you think he's referring to?
I bet I know who he's referring to.
I think it's anonymous unelected New York Times guy he's referring to.
Some of his aides have been cast as villains by the media, but in private, they have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they are clearly not always successful.
It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era.
Is your life chaotic?
My life is very smooth.
I don't know.
Things are, you know, the work is good.
You know, the stock market's up.
Everything is, you know, ISIS is gone.
Remember ISIS?
Remember Obama's ISIS that he created by pulling out of Iraq too soon and not doing anything about the red line?
Yeah, that's gone.
I'm feeling pretty good.
But okay, it's a chaotic era at anonymous unelected New York Times guy's house.
But Americans should know that there are adults in the room.
We fully recognize what is happening, and we are trying to do what's right, even when Donald Trump won't.
So don't worry.
Don't worry, America.
You elected a guy by legal means, but he's not in charge.
Do not worry.
Our democracy is being protected by unelected anonymous New York Times guy who is controlling everything behind the scenes.
He says there's a two-track presidency.
Take foreign policy in public and private.
President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, but astute observers have noted that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals.
Think about that for a second.
Who's punishing the Russians?
An unelected anonymous New York Times guy or Trump.
I mean, it's Trump doing it.
You know, he's got to sign off on this stuff.
This isn't the work of the so-called deep state as if.
It's the work of the steady state.
Oh, that's a new term for unelected anonymous people controlling our government instead of the people we send to control it.
That's a new word.
It's the steady state, not the deep state.
So nothing to fear there, nothing to worry about there.
Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment.
The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency, but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us.
We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.
And here's the giveaway.
Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter.
All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation.
We may no longer have Senator McCain, but we will always, this is like the 15th day of his funeral in the New York Times.
But we will always have his example a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue.
Mr. Trump may fear such honorable men, but we should revere him.
This is a giveaway, right?
This is a giveaway.
This is a guy.
John McCain promised to repeal Obamacare, then voted not to repeal it for absurd reasons.
He tried to limit free speech through McCain fine gold.
He was no one's idea of civil to anyone.
Even at his funeral, they were talking about what a pain in the neck he was and how nasty he could be.
This is what I'm trying to say about this is this is a meaningless op-ed that could have been written during the Obama administration, but wouldn't have been published.
Just that Edward Klein thing I read at the beginning tells you there were people then there then.
Although Obama, unlike Trump, Obama surrounded himself with sycophants.
Obama surrounded himself with like, oh, you want to silence people through the IRS?
Okay.
Oh, you want to use the Justice Department to spy on a rival campaign?
Okay.
You know, Trump at least has people who push back, and they wouldn't be there if he didn't want him there.
Look, I'm not pushing Trump.
I think everything this guy is saying about the chaos in the White House, probably true.
I think we all know that Trump is a chaotic character.
In a lot of ways, Trump is like, shares some of Obama's bad features in that he is arrogant, narcissistic.
Like Obama, he doesn't know what he doesn't know.
Unlike Obama, he's following great policies that are doing great for the country.
And remember, remember, when they talk about John McCain, BS, I call BS on this because there's still, last time I checked, only two parties in this country.
There's still two parties in this country, and one of them is pulling off this clown show.
This, you know, remember in Woodward's book, they called the Trump administration Crazy Town?
They called it Crazy Town.
Well, the RNC has put out this advertisement showing you what Crazy Town really looks like.
This is Crazy Town ad.
Run it.
Please get up in the face of some Congress people.
You see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant?
In a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you stay a crowd.
Those Republican leaders and President Trump don't give it.
I just don't even know why there aren't uprisings all over the country.
Yeah.
Yeah, so the problem is Trump.
Trump is crazy town.
The problem is Trump is he's endangered.
Let's just go over to Kavanaugh, the Kavanaugh hearing, where Corey Booker, who is obviously running for president, an office he will never hold, not in my lifetime, not in your lifetime, he will never be president of the United States.
But he is doing everything he can.
So they're questioning Kavanaugh on Roe v. Wade.
He says, yes, it's a precedent.
It's a very strong precedent, but precedents can be overturned.
They question him on guns.
He has the answer on guns.
He's just not giving them anything to tear him apart on.
So thank heavens, thank heavens, if unelected anonymous New York Times guy is not running our government, Corey Booker is going to take matters into his own hands and protect the rule of decency in law by violating the rules of the Senate and the rules of decency and releasing private papers, classified papers, from the Bush administration.
And here he is announcing, telling you what a hero he is.
I knowingly violated the rules that were put forth.
And I'm told that the committee confidential rules have knowing consequences.
And so, sir, I come from a long line, as all of us do as Americans, and understand what that kind of civil disobedience is, and I understand the consequences.
So I am right now, before your process is finished, I'm going to release the email about racial profiling.
And I understand that the penalty comes with potential ousting from the Senate.
And if Senator Cornyn believes that I violated Senate rules, I openly invite and accept the consequences of my team releasing that email right now.
And I'm releasing it to expose that, number one, the emails that are being withheld from the public have nothing to do with national security.
Nothing to jeopardize the sanctity of those ideals that I hold dear.
Instead, what I'm releasing this document right now to show, sir, is that we have a process here for a person, the highest office in the land, for a lifetime appointment.
We're rushing through this before me and my colleagues can even read and digest the information.
Everything in that statement is untrue, especially the high.
It's not the highest office in the land.
They're not rushing through it.
They've got all the papers they need.
They've had them for a long time.
The papers that they are looking for are mostly classified.
They're just trying to delay things, hoping that the midterms will turn everything around, not going to happen.
Mitch McConnell is very much in control of this process.
And unless something explodes, this guy's going to be confirmed to the Supreme Court.
And then they will have wasted their panic because I think Trump is going to continue to be president.
And there's going to be one of the older Supreme Court justices is going to kick.
And then they're really going to have reason to panic.
We're going to go to Henry Olson in just a minute and talk about the election.
Before we do, I just want to read something.
I meant to read this yesterday, but I want to read it today that every American should read.
Every American should read Antonin Scalia's dissent in Obergfeld, the decision of the Supreme Court that decreed gay marriage a right.
And you know where I stand on this.
You know that I'm perfectly happy for there to be gay marriage.
I don't care about that at all.
But here is something I do care about.
And I want to read this because it is the vision that we're trying to defend.
It is not about Roe v. Wade.
It is not about Obergfeld.
It is about who runs America and what America is supposed to be like.
I'm just going to read the first two paragraphs very quickly.
This is Scalia dissenting on the gay rights decision.
The substance of today's decree is not of immense personal importance to me.
The law can recognize as marriage whatever sexual attachments and living arrangements it wishes and can accord them favorable civil consequences from tax treatment to rights of inheritance.
Those civil consequences and the public approval that conferring the name of marriage evidences can perhaps have adverse social effects, but no more adverse than the effects of many other controversial laws.
So it is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage.
It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me.
Today's decree says that my ruler and the ruler of 320 million Americans, coast to coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court.
The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact and the furthest extension one can even imagine of the court's claimed power to create liberties that the Constitution and its amendments neglect to mention.
This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the people of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the revolution of 1776, the freedom to govern themselves.
And this is the part that always breaks my heart.
Everyone should read this, and you should read it from beginning to end.
Scalia says, until the courts put a stop to it, public debate over same-sex marriage displayed American democracy at its best.
Individuals on both sides of the issue passionately but respectfully attempted to persuade their fellow citizens to accept their views.
Americans considered the arguments and put the question to a vote.
The electorates of 11 states, either directly or through their representatives, chose to expand the traditional definition of marriage.
Many more decided not to.
Win or lose, advocates for both sides continued pressing their cases, secure in the knowledge that an electoral loss can be negated by a later electoral win.
That is exactly how our system of government is supposed to work.
It is that system of government.
This is me talking now.
It is that system of government we are trying to defend.
It is that system of government Corey Booker, an unelected New York Times guy, are fighting against.
And whether Trump is an obstreperous, chaotic doofus or not, the system right now is delivering more of that American way of life, that way of life people fought and died for in 1776.
And you know what?
I don't care what an anonymous unelected New York Times guy says, and I don't care what Corey Booker says, and I hope he is thrown out of the Senate just for my own personal amusement.
But that is what we're fighting for, and we shouldn't be distracted by all the craziness on either side.
Have we got Henry here?
Fantastic.
Henry Olson is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C. His pre-election predictions are the best.
I mean, the guy is one of the great observers of electoral politics.
He writes regularly for American greatness.
His last book is The Working Class Republican, Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism.
A really different look at Ronald Reagan.
You can find it on Amazon.com.
Henry, it's good to see you again.
Good to see you.
So let's begin.
Well, let's get to the thing, to the important point immediately.
What are you seeing in the midterms upcoming?
Well, I mean, right now it looks like the Democrats will take the House.
Republicans will hold the Senate.
They might gain a seat or two.
But it's all very fluid.
You've got all of these announcements about the president's supposed mental state.
You've got the plea bargain that seems to have dropped his job approval slightly, but it's already started to rebound in polls in the last few days.
So right now it looks good, but not great for the Democrats.
So if if the economy is as good as it is, if we're at peace, you know, things are going well, is this all about Trump's personality?
Well, it's about Trump's personality, Trump's character, and for many people, Trump's policies. that there are a lot of people who mask their disagreement with his policies, especially on immigration and trade, by reference to his character or his personality, when they would be 75 to 90% as opposed to somebody who was completely the most literate person since Shakespeare who had the same thing.
So it's all of that mixed in.
Where do you see the power lying in terms of the electorate?
If you were a Republican candidate, what would you be looking at in your district?
Obviously, you have to speak generally because you can't speak to every district, but what would you be looking for in your district?
Who would you be looking to sway?
Well, there's basically two types of districts.
There's districts where the key voter is the former Republican who doesn't like Donald Trump.
They tend to be in the suburbs and high-income educated.
So if you're in Orange County and you're one of the endangered Republicans there, that's who you're looking to.
The rest of the country, it's the Obama Trump voter, the person who didn't like Mitt Romney, the person who didn't vote for John McCain, but voted for Donald Trump.
And in those places, you want to look at them and you want to ignore all what the Washington people are saying, which is all focused on the wrong type of voter.
Okay.
When you say focus on the wrong type of voter, you mean the base?
Yeah.
The Washington people will tell you to focus first on the base and then on the defective Republicans or the defecting Republicans.
Whether they're defective depends on how you feel about the president.
Focus On The Base00:14:38
But for a lot of these people, success is going to come by winning the voters who didn't like Obama and put them in office in 2014 or 2010, who happen to be the same people who also crossed over to vote for Donald Trump, but don't generally like national Republicans.
You focus on that voter and you can win.
But if you don't know that voter's out there, you're not going to be sending the message that they'll hear.
And, you know, if you're just the same old Republican versus the same old Democrat, these people like same old Democrat.
I have this theory that Trump is more popular among blacks than blacks will admit to pollsters.
I saw today in the LA Times, I think it was a new poll showing that over 90% of blacks are going to vote Democrat in the upcoming races.
Do you believe that there's any possibility that there is a hidden tide in Trump's favor?
People who don't want to support, openly support Donald Trump, but see that they have jobs and see that the economy is going well and might go behind the curtain and vote for him?
You know, maybe, but it's not going to be large.
Generally, people tell the truth to pollsters.
We know that people who are supportive of a character or a party or which is disapproved of by the people who run media or business will tend to shy away from that.
But the effect is only a couple of points.
So if Trump and the Republicans are sitting at 40, maybe the real figure is 43.
But that's a far cry from 50.
So yes, but it's not very large.
Okay.
Now, Trump has done a lot of the things that you've talked about in your book, The Working Class Republican, Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue Collar Conservatism.
You say what you've been saying for years, basically, which is that the Republican Party has been ignoring a working class that is no longer as religious and is more concerned about social programs that will keep them from falling off the bottom rung of the ladder and that Reagan was concerned about.
Trump seems to have appealed to them.
Has he not?
And if so, why isn't he fulfilling your idea that this would win back a majority?
Because he's alienating the suburbanites.
The thing is, Ronald Reagan found a way to unite suburban, moderate to moderately conservative Republicans with these working class voters and keep them in the same tent.
Donald Trump not only has a problem with attracting those suburban voters, he actively seems to relish driving them away.
And what you're doing is swapping out Romney suburbanites for Obama Trump working class voters.
You're just rearranging the deck chairs on the losing Titanic.
You're just going from first class to steerage as far as your passengers, but the ship's still going down.
Okay.
In Sweden, they are predicting that there could be a real big swing to the right.
But at the same time, the populace there is divided by men and women.
Are you seeing that here as well?
I mean, it's a really wide divide.
It's a huge divide.
I mean, I follow Sweden intently, and you're going to have whether the party there that's populist and anti-immigrant finishes first or second.
It'll be an amazing achievement that will destroy the ability of the governing alliances to govern without their consent.
But what we know is that anti-immigrant populist parties attract men.
They attract them in Britain, they attract them in Sweden, they attract them in Italy, and they attract them in the United States.
They tend to repel women.
And that's what you're seeing in another place in Sweden and other places is that women would like to have a they always across the world tend to lean a little bit to the left.
But when you're dominated by these sorts of passions, they tend to lean more to the left.
And then you've got Donald Trump's issues with his past with regards to women, which is particularly exacerbating that.
And you have a lot of independents who are women who are not willing to give the Republican Party the time of day.
The question of immigrants, I mean, in a country the size of Sweden, that incredible influx of immigrants is going to be felt very hard.
We tend to absorb immigrants better, both because of our philosophy and because of the size.
And yet, it does seem to me that there is an elite, you know, they called it the steady state in that New York Times op-ed, but it's this elite state that will not hear the people's concerns about this.
Does that seem to you to be true, or is that just an illusion thrown up by the fact that they can't make a decision, that no one can make a decision?
I call them the ins.
I wrote a piece for Unheard, an English website that I write for called the Ins versus the Outs.
And what you're finding across the world is that if you're educated and you're relatively affluent, you tend to be less culturally conservative.
And you're coming together because you're defending your privilege.
And they don't view the rest of us very kindly.
They don't like average people.
At best, they disdain them.
And at most, they despise them.
And so consequently, there are, you know, in the Sweden Democrats, it used to be a neo-Nazi party, but 19% of the Swedes who are going to vote for them are not neo-Nazis.
They're upset at immigration.
And the problem in Sweden is so large that they've had 400,000 people join their country as refugees in the last few years.
Well, given the size of their country, that would be the same as if 13 million people showed up in the last three years here.
What do you think would happen if 13 million people came across the Canadian border?
You think would take it easily?
Yeah, yeah.
But for the ins, they're so insular and they dislike so much the assertion of popular sovereignty or popular government or Republican self-government that they'll drop appets at the people who are concerned about this at the drop of the hat.
And that just makes more people angrier and angrier because they're not what they're being called.
So let me return finally.
I know you have to go and I will get you out of here, but let me return finally to the midterms.
Your take now is that the standard idea is the GOP holds the Senate, but probably loses the House.
How fluid is that?
I mean, we're only now two months out?
Yeah, two months out.
How fluid is that, in your opinion?
Well, it's not fluid in the sense that there's going to be a red wave, you know, that the president said back when he was campaigning for Troy Balderson outside of Columbus a month ago.
About the only way there would be a red wave is if we had something like a Cuban missile crisis.
You know, if we have the North Korean missile crisis where we think we're going to all die, and then we have an agreement on October 27th, then maybe that would produce that.
But other than that, we're just talking about magnitudes.
If the president could get control of the news cycle in a way that favors him, maybe the losses could be stemmed to where the Republicans could barely hold the House or barely lose the House.
Maybe they'd gain a couple more seats in the Senate.
But people have pretty much made up their minds, and it's only the margins that we're really talking about now.
Okay.
And my last question, how does that trickle down to local government?
I mean, one of the things about Obama is he gutted the party to the state house level.
Are we in danger of giving it back?
Yeah, very much so.
That, you know, first of all, anybody who is a Republican who is running in a seat that Hillary Clinton carried ought to have a good insurance policy because there's a good likelihood they're not coming back.
There are 7,500, roughly, give or take a few hundred legislative seats in the country.
500 of them are Republicans in Clinton-held districts.
And then you've got all the governorships.
Over the last decade, Republicans have basically taken almost all of the blue and purple territory that they could win.
It's natural that they'd give some of that back.
And if this year is going to be pro-Democratic, the only question, again, is how many governorships fall on that and where they are.
It's a lot better for the Republican Party to lose the governorship of Maryland, although it looks like Larry Hogan is going to be fine, than to lose the governorships of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Florida, all of which are large states, all of which have lots of seats that Republicans require in Congress when the redistricting comes up next time.
And right now, Republicans are behind or running even in all of those four races.
Henry Olson, one of the best commist political observers in the country, writes at American Greatness.
His book is the working class Republican Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue Collar Conservatism.
Thanks a lot, Henry.
I hope you'll come back as the midterms get closer.
Love to come back.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks a lot.
Always like talking to him because he's like actually keeps a level head.
I just want to talk about one more thing before I go on to stuff I like, which is what was happening in the questioning of Twitter and Facebook yesterday in Congress and this really interesting exchange that took place between Tom Cotton and Jack Dorsey.
Dorsey came in and he said that, yes, conservatives had gotten nailed on Twitter by an algorithm that affected them unfairly.
Here's the description of Dorsey talking about that.
What did the algorithm take into account that led to prominent conservatives, including members of the U.S. House of Representatives, not being included in auto search suggestions?
We were using a signal of the behavior of the people following accounts.
And we didn't believe upon further consideration and also seeing the impact, which was about 600,000 accounts.
So he later admitted this was unfair.
In other words, if I come on and I make some comment about constitutional conservatism and a bunch of people get on my and react to me with racist comments, I get nailed because of the comments, according to the old algorithm.
Dorsey has admitted that he is left and that his people skew left.
But to me, the really telling moment was between Tom Cotton and Dorsey when Cotton asked this question.
This is cut eight.
Is Twitter an American company?
We are an American company.
Do you prefer to see America remain the world's dominant global superpower?
I prefer that we continue to help everywhere we serve, and we are pushing towards that.
But we need to be consistent about our terms of service.
Huh?
I don't even know what that means.
So Cotton is asking him, basically, do you support America?
Do you support American power?
Do you support the American way?
And Dorsey can't answer that because while they are American companies and while they wouldn't exist if it weren't for America, and while you couldn't build a business like that anywhere but America, they are international platforms and their loyalties are not necessarily to the values here.
Google didn't even show up for these conferences.
I wanted to point that out because I also wanted to show one other clip of Alex Jones confronting Marco Rubio.
Now, Rubio and a lot of other members of Congress are very concerned about the Russians and other foreign powers' use of social media.
I don't think they should be concerned about that at all because I don't see the difference between Russians coming on and pretending to be Americans and Americans.
I just don't see the difference.
We're all at each other's throats.
We're all yelling at each other.
So some of them are Russians.
Who cares?
I don't think that that's really a big deal.
But Rubio is upset about that.
And Alex Jones comes and starts screaming about the fact that he has been deplatformed.
I've said before, I don't like Jones.
I think it's really, really unfair and dangerous that he's been deplatformed and listened to this exchange.
That's why you didn't get elected.
Do they need to be regulated?
Marco Rubio and Snake.
Little friend boy here.
All right, man.
Who are you?
I swear to God, I'm not going to be able to do that.
You're going to be deplatforming.
Tens of millions of views.
InfoWars.
Better than the Russian ball.
He knows who InfoWars is.
Playing this joke over here.
That's why the deplatforming didn't work.
But here's the question.
Here's the question.
Don't touch me again, man.
I'm asking you not to touch me.
Well, sure.
I'm just bad at you nicely.
I know, but I don't want to be afraid of that.
You want me to get arrested?
It's not just going to take me to get arrested.
It's not just enough to take my first command.
Oh, he'll beat me up.
I didn't say that.
I know who I am, but he's so mad.
You're not going to silence me.
You're not going to silence me.
But there are people.
You are literally like a little gangster thug.
There are people in this country.
Rubio just threatened to physically take care of me.
There are people who feel that they're being silenced.
They feel like it's telling you China's a problem, which it is, but they're taking our free speech right now.
Social media platforms, Facebook.
There goes Rubio.
What a jerk.
I'd have loved it if Rubio clocked them.
But I'm glad he didn't, but I would have loved it.
You know, all I want to say is that guys like this don't help our cause.
I mean, it is hard.
It is hard to say like that guy deserves a platform, but he does.
He does deserve a platform.
I wish Rubio had clocked him and they carried him out on his platform.
But no, I mean, when you silence him, you give him more power.
And that is what you're seeing in Sweden, too.
When you make an opinion sooutre, when you say your opinion is so unacceptable that you can't even express it, you give people power.
You don't take it away.
The New York Times is celebrating the fact that Alex Jones is losing his following.
He's not losing his following.
It's going underground.
It's getting more frustrated.
It'll get more powerful and it'll come back with a vengeance.
Let him speak.
Let him speak.
We will take him down right here.
America is well able to take down all those forms of voices if we can speak.
If the Supreme Court stops making law, if unelected anonymous New York Times guys stops running the government or pretending to run the government, if they just let the people speak, they will run the government according to the Constitution, and we will be fine.
I mean, this is really, really, it really is the difference between the two sides is that, you know, we want to argue.
They want silence and to rule.
Jason Starr: Worth Discovering00:03:31
We want to pass laws, win or lose.
They want to impose fiats from the Supreme Court.
We want to be governed by the Constitution.
They want to be governed by whatever hysteria makes you forget your rights.
We want America, you know?
We want America.
They want Crazy Town.
All right, stuff I like.
Stuff I like, oh, stuff I like.
Stuff I like, a stuff I like.
All right.
Marvel Lee Higgins.
They're still coming in.
still a chance to get to be the official Stuff I Like theme song.
I am, as you...
Rob has completely lost it here.
I...
I am, as you know, a big fan of hard-boiled fiction, movies and books and TV shows.
And sometimes they call it noir after the French, the darkness, you know, the black fiction.
And the thing is that noir is like jazz.
It is really an American invention that Americans have never really liked all that much.
I mean, jazz, you know, when you say jazz, everybody thinks, oh yeah, the popular jazz, but jazz has never been that popular.
Neither has film noir, neither have tough guy writers.
And there are a lot of really good tough guy writers who never get noticed.
And I want to mention one of them who is a pal of mine, but that's not why I mentioned him.
I mentioned him because I haven't seen him in a long time.
And I was in a used bookstore and I picked up a book of his I had not read before.
And it reminded me of just how terrific he is.
Jason Starr is S-T-A-R-R, is by no means one of the most famous writers in the country, but you probably, if you like comic books, you've read him.
He's written some, I think Wolverine, he's written, and a couple of others.
And he has won some awards and been nominated for awards for his tough guy writing, but he writes this stuff that is just as dark as you can imagine.
And his characters are almost all of them like kind of psychopathic guys who just push the line.
They just go over the line.
He's in the tradition, I would say, of James M. Kaine.
That is who he's in the tradition of.
The book that I discovered was called Fake ID.
It's one of these series of books called the Hard Case Crime Books, which are absolutely terrific.
It's an absolutely terrific series, especially terrific for its covers.
The covers of the hard case crime books are great.
But Fake ID is about a bouncer, a wannabe actor.
He dreams of owning his own horse.
And it's just about the way he kind of pushes his dreams forward, even as he is descending into this kind of hellish world.
It has one of the great last lines.
I just really enjoyed it.
I picked it up at a used bookstore, and I must have read it in a couple of hours.
I mean, it's just really good.
Jason Starr, worth discovering, Jason S-T-A-R-R.
I'm pretty sure he must be a left-winger, so he'll love having all you Trump-smoking and crazy people descend on his books, but really worth reading if you like hard-boiled fiction.
A really good writer.
That's it.
You guys are, you're screwed.
I mean, the Clavenless Weekend is here.
I hope you have sucked all the Clavin-y goodness you can get out of this show and keep it with you.
Hold it close.
Hell is unleashed upon you.
Survivors gather here on Monday.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
The Andrew Klavan Show00:00:19
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring, senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Technical producer, Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And their animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.