Ep. 578 mocks the EU’s absurd ban on movie memes while exposing Democrats’ "well-played" Kavanaugh smear—35-year-old, evidence-free claims—contrasting it with Trump’s FISA declassification and Swalwell’s hypocrisy. Jenna Ellis then dismantles secular legalism, arguing the Founders’ God-based natural law (not evolving consensus) grounds rights, warning modern courts weaponize "penumbras" to justify abortion and same-sex marriage. The episode ties leftist tactics—intersectionality as power consolidation—to a broader erosion of objective truth, urging constitutional limits over federal overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
The EU Parliament, sometimes accused of being a useless pack of intrusive busy buddies who sit around passing absurd regulations to enhance their own sense of power and prestige, while having absolutely no sense of the regulation's realistic effects or expenses, because the parliamentarians are out-of-touch elites who despise the people they're supposed to govern and really should be tarred and feathered before being tied to a rail and tossed in the Zen River, then pelted with rotten vegetables as they float out of Brussels into the North Sea.
I guess I sort of lost track of where that sentence was going.
But anyway, the EU passed a law that would make it illegal to post screen grabs from movies and TV shows on Facebook or Twitter.
This would mean Europeans, or serfs and slaves, as they're now called, would not be allowed to make those little visual slash verbal jokes that enliven the internet with their rollicking hilarity.
In a statement issued after the ban, EU President Klaus von Blunderschmuck said, quote, although these so-called memes may appear fun and harmless, they are in fact the beginning of a slippery slope that could lead to the sort of satire that mocks and belittles absurd abuses of power like this one by petty politicos like ourselves.
We must protect the leaders of Europe from the wit of the common people, unquote.
Dutch MEP Junk have Dunkforbrains addressed reporters under the moosehead on the wall at his hunting lodge saying, quote, a Europe that can recklessly publish pictures and ideas is only one dangerous step away from becoming a land of widespread artistry and free thinking.
And those are not the sorts of things we want to see going on in Western civilization, unquote.
Previous to this, voters in the United Kingdom reacted to the EU's officious intrusions by voting to exit the union entirely.
But elites are calling for that referendum to be held again until those darn voters get it right.
ZipRecruiter: Apply or Sorry?00:03:54
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Also singing, hunky-dunky, dipsy-topsy The world is a zippity-zing It's a wonderful day, hooray, hooray It makes me want to sing Oh, hooray, hooray Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, before we start the show today, I have to say I'm sorry for something stupid I did yesterday.
I got a story off Grabian, usually an incredibly reliable site, conservative bent, but I always adjust for that.
But they're very reliable, and they had this story that I reported here and actually tweeted out that the accuser of Brett Kavanaugh, Christine Blasey Ford, who is a research psychologist who teaches at Palo Alto University, and I quoted some attacks on her by students, students criticizing her, saying all kinds of things about her.
That story, the Grabian put out, they later corrected and said they had gotten it wrong.
The woman who was the teacher who was being criticized had the name, the same name, Christine Ford, but was actually a different person.
So I'm really sorry.
I'm sorry I did it.
And I'm really sorry I said nasty things about the woman that weren't actually, that didn't actually apply to her, had nothing to do, obviously, with the story.
It wasn't true.
You know what bugs me about it particularly is as I was reaching to tweet it in the morning before I came in, I had that little twinge I sometimes get before I tweet something.
Whenever I get that twinge, I don't tweet it.
So I actually went back and checked the story three times.
I said, no, this is what they're really saying, they're really saying.
So I went with it and I was sorry.
This is why I can't understand how people work for the New York Times.
Like, that was an innocent mistake and I feel really bad about it.
Imagine how you feel if you were doing it on purpose.
All right, tomorrow is the mailbag.
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You hit that.
And if you are a subscriber for a lousy 10 bucks a month, you can ask me anything you want.
Ask me about politics, religion, your personal life.
And I think we're doing Ben Show tomorrow.
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So that will actually help your life by ruining it.
Oh my God, there it is.
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We'll be hearing that about 15 times tomorrow or until I have a heart attack, whichever comes first.
All right, a lot of people ask me, you know, how did you get a show on the Daily Wire?
And the answer is they forgot to use ziprecruiter.com.
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You stooped to the lowest possible stratagem, coming out waiting till the Brett Kavanaugh hearings were over, then releasing this anonymous attack about a supposed sexual event that happened 35 years ago in high school.
There is no way, there is no possible way that this should matter.
If the guy's life has been as clean as it seems to have been for the last 35 years, there's no way it can be proved.
And so there's no way to address it, you know, personally.
And yet, because of this Me Too garbage that's going around, some of it's garbage, some of it's not, but because in this case, it is being used in a garbage-like way, well-played, slimy Democrats.
They had to put off the vote on Thursday, and they are now going to have a hearing where the lady will be able to come forward and state her case.
And Kavanaugh, who not only says the thing never happened, he says he wasn't even at the party where it was supposed to have happened.
He will also testify.
Of course, the Democrats do not want this to happen.
They are just trying to delay the whole thing.
Diane Feinstein has already said, oh, we're rushing to judgment.
They're not rushing to judgment.
They're just going to have the testimony.
You can bet they will do everything to obfuscate and delay.
They will do everything they can to hold this off.
That's all it's about.
But you got it from Thursday to Monday.
Well-played, slimy Democrats.
And just so we remember that this is who the Democrats are.
It is not, for all I can tell, who the Republicans are.
They have their own problems, their own things that I yell at them about.
They can be spineless.
They can be inert.
But they do not do this stuff.
Just to remember who basically made this a steady standard operating procedure in Congress.
Let us go back to Harry Reid during the Mitt Romney, Barack Obama election.
He went out on the floor of the Senate and maligned both the Koch brothers and Mitt Romney.
He said Mitt Romney didn't pay his taxes because on the floor of the Senate, you can't be sued.
You can't be sued for slandering somebody on the floor of the Senate.
And here was Harry Reid when he was questioned on CNN about these tactics.
He used the Senate floor to go after GOP mega donors, the Koch brothers, and accuse Mitt Romney of not paying his taxes with no evidence.
Let him prove that he has paid taxes because he hasn't.
Oh, I don't regret that at all.
The Koch brothers, no one would help me.
They were afraid the Koch brothers would go after them.
So I did it on my own.
So no regrets about Mitt Romney, about the Koch brothers.
Some people have even called it McCarthyite.
Well, they call it whatever they want.
Romney didn't win, did he?
Romney didn't win, did he?
So it doesn't matter that I lied about him.
It doesn't matter that I stood on the Senate floor, the floor of the United States Senate, and said he did not pay taxes.
Romney didn't win.
That is all this is about.
So this is the thing that, you know, this is why I say well-played, slimy Democrats, because now we're all discussing, well, does it matter?
Who do we believe?
Me too, sexual, high school, this and that, whatever.
All that stuff.
It's not about any of that.
It is about they do not want a conservative vote on the Supreme Court because they believe the Supreme Court should be a super legislature that will churn out left-wing law.
Five people churning out left-wing law because they cannot get approval from the populace.
So they don't need it in the Supreme Court.
It's all this is about.
Look, one of three things is true, right?
One of three things.
Either it didn't happen, that's one.
Two, it happened and it speaks to his character.
So for 35 years, Brett Kavanaugh has been a secret abuser of women.
Soon all these women will come out and finally he will rip off his mask and reveal that he's really Bill Clinton in disguise or Ted Kennedy or one of the other scurrilous Democrats.
The left and the media rally round when they're the ones who are in trouble.
And then in that case, I would say, get rid of him, get rid of him.
If he's really Ted Kennedy, if he's really Bill Clinton in disguise and this whole 35 years of absolute perfect reputation means nothing, then I'll say get rid of him.
Then there's the third possibility that I talked about yesterday that for 35 years he has been an unimpeachable, terrific guy doing what was right, trying to live an honest life.
And once in high school, he got drunk and mauled this girl.
In which case, again, I just don't care.
I do not care.
I think you have to be able, if I was there the day after, that would have been a different thing.
But we live in time, not just in space.
That's why abortion's wrong.
We lived, we're not only who we are now, we're who we will be.
He has erased that with his life.
And I don't think he should be used.
Now, the other thing is, it's simply, after 35 years, it simply cannot be proved or disproved.
And I mean, I wrote a memoir.
I wrote a memoir with no motive but to speak honestly about my life and my conversion to Christianity, the great good thing.
And now and again, I would bring the manuscript in and my wife would read it and say, that's not how that happened.
It happened totally differently.
And we'd have to discuss it.
And sometimes she was right.
Sometimes I was right.
We forget things over 35 years.
The accuser says she was drunk, that her memory is hazy.
There's no way to prove it.
And of course, all the left has to do is what Kamala Harris, former prosecutor, what she did the way she put it on TV yesterday is cut number two.
It comes down to credibility, to your point, Gail.
And it's going to be about listening to what each party has to say.
But I believe her.
Listen, first of all, anybody who comes forward at this point to be prepared to testify in the United States Senate against someone who is being nominated to one of the most powerful positions in the United States government, that takes an extraordinary amount of courage.
And frankly, you know, I have personally prosecuted sexual assault cases, and my concern is, and she knows this, she is putting herself out there, knowing that they're going to try and excoriate her.
And she's doing it, I believe, because she knows that this is an important matter.
It's a serious matter who serves on that court.
And she has the courage to come forward.
She has nothing to gain.
Well-played, slimy Democrats.
Seriously, I mean, she looks credible.
I believe her.
Who cares if you believe her?
Who cares if she looks credible?
Doesn't matter.
Doesn't matter.
You are innocent until proved guilty.
There is no way to prove this.
There's no way to disprove it.
There were no witnesses.
The one witness she says was there says it also never happened.
Guy named Mark Judge.
He says it also never happened.
Kavanaugh has been adamant about this.
He says it absolutely, I never did this to anybody.
Nothing like it ever happened.
So it's brilliant.
Now we're sitting around discussing, well, should we, women must be heard.
Why?
Why?
Women needn't be heard any more than men need to be heard after 35 years saying something that cannot be proved.
You should not, your career, your life, nothing should be based on a person coming forward with information like this.
And we know how the press is going to play it.
We know because they've already started.
Yesterday, Matthew Dowd, who bills himself as chief political analyst on ABC News, he certainly, we have a picture of him, but put the picture up just so you know who he is.
Matthew Dowd, right, former Republican guy, calls himself a proud independent.
This is what he tweets.
Okay, listen to this.
This is in the United States of America.
This is what this media guy tweets.
Enough with the he said, she says storyline.
If this is he said, she said, then let's believe the she in these scenarios.
She has nothing to gain and everything to lose.
For 250 years, we have believed the he in these scenarios.
Enough is enough.
Now, that tweet raises an interesting question.
What the hell are you talking about, you stupid knucklehead?
What the hell?
What on earth is he talking about?
For 250 years, we believe one thing.
You're innocent until proved guilty.
You know, I'm not aware that women have been unfairly treated in these things.
It's just that if you can't prove it, you can't prove it.
You can't send a man to prison.
You can't destroy his career or a woman, anybody, to prison.
You can't destroy his career with unsupported allegations.
I mean, that is the very, very basis of Anglo-American law.
And he's saying, well, enough of that.
We've had quite enough of that justice for 250 years.
No more.
We don't want any more of that justice here.
We want to delay this nomination.
So we have, you know, again, well-played, slimy Democrats.
It cannot be proved.
And now, and now, too, they have managed to maneuver Kavanaugh into a situation where there actually is an issue.
There actually is an issue.
I said yesterday, and I say it again, that if he did this in high school, he got out of hand.
I don't believe he did.
I don't believe it at all.
But if he did, I don't care.
But now there's an actual issue.
Susan Collins, who has been very fair about this, I mean, she's liberal for my taste, but that doesn't mean she's dishonest.
And she has been stalwart and steady about what she said.
She gave this comment to the press and listened to what she says because it actually raises an important issue.
We need to know what happened.
It's my understanding that the staff is doing interviews or has proposed to do interviews.
And then that, I assume, would be the prelude to some sort of hearing.
Senator Collins, how do you believe Dr. Ford?
I don't know enough about Dr. Ford and her allegations yet to reach that kind of judgment.
That's why having the opportunity to observe her being questioned, read a transcript or a deposition and make that kind of assessment is so important.
Obviously, if Judge Kavanaugh has lied about what happened, that would be disqualifying.
See, that's the well-played slimy Democrats.
Well played, because now you wait till the hearing is over.
Then Dianne Feinstein releases this anonymous charge.
Then the woman is forced to come forward because she wants to be heard.
I understand that.
And she has this memory.
I don't have no idea what it refers to, but she has this memory.
She didn't talk about it for 30 years, but then she did.
No one else in the room corroborates, but there it is.
She wants to come forward.
And Kavanaugh says, and says he will say under oath, this never happened.
I wasn't there.
If he's lying, if it can be shown that he's lying, then of course that is disqualifying.
Even I would say, you know, you can't go to your hearings in the Supreme Court and commit perjury.
After all, you're not Bill Clinton.
You're not above the law.
You know, you're not a Democrat.
You're a Republican.
You have to obey the law.
You know, it's not, you can't just like drive your girlfriend into the drink and leave her there to drown while you set up an alibi and change clothes.
My God, you're a Republican.
What's wrong with you?
What on earth made you think that you could transgress the law like a Democrat?
Well, you can't.
You can't.
Why?
Because we Republicans, we conservatives actually have principles and we will hold you to them.
So well-played, slimy Democrats, you have now put the guy in a position where there is something on the line, which is whether he's lying.
But it's not whether you believe the woman, it's whether she can prove, whether she can prove these allegations.
That's the only thing that he has to stand up to.
Only proof.
Only proof, not allegations.
You know who else is playing this well, though, I have to say?
Donald Trump.
Donald Trump has been unlike himself.
He has been really restrained, really measured.
His comments have been excellent.
Here he is talking about this just as the press shout at him.
They had this information for many months, and they shouldn't have waited until literally the last days.
They should have done it a lot sooner.
But with all of that being said, we want to go through the process.
One thing I will say is that as I understand it, Judge Kavanaugh spent quite a bit of time with Senator Feinstein, and it wasn't even brought up at that meeting, and she had this information.
So you would have thought certainly that she would have brought it up at the meeting, not wait till everything's finished and then have to start a process all over again.
But with all of it being said, we want to go through a full process.
I have great confidence in the U.S. Senate and in their procedures and what they're doing.
And I think that's probably what they're going to do.
They'll go through a process and hear everybody out.
I think it's important.
I believe they think it's important.
But again, he is one of the great intellects and one of the finest people that anybody has known.
You look at his references.
I've never seen anything quite like it.
Smart.
Don't back down, but don't jump the gun.
Plus, plus, he finally declassified some of these documents that will tell us whether the FISA warrant in the Russia collusion case was actually a political document or not.
He said he's going to, he called for the immediate declassification of selected portions of the FISA application on former Trump foreign policy aid Carter Page, as well as all FBI reports prepared in connection with the FISA warrant request.
People have been calling for him to do it.
I think it's a great idea.
And I love the Democrat reaction.
The Democrat reaction is basically, you can't interrupt our baseless innuendos with the truth.
We're lying here.
Hold down the truth, please.
Hey, could we have some cover-up to cover our, as we slander you, please?
So this one guy, one guy, Senator Eric Swalwell, one of ours, he's one of our senators in California, Congressman, sorry, Congressman Eric Swalwell in California.
In 2017, he called for, he said, if the president wants to say that Susan Rice committed a crime, he has the power to declassify.
Let him declassify the documents.
No one else has that power.
He could actually show us where the crime was.
I don't expect he will because I think this is just more obstructionism.
Yesterday, when he heard the news that he was going to declassify governments, same guy, Congressman Swalwell, goes, lawless.
He's absolutely lawless.
Donald Trump is the subject of an investigation.
Using his power to selectively release classified information is an abuse of power.
It's like, do not interrupt our baseless innuendos with the truth.
One thing I got to say, the Democrats, they are slimy, they are low, but they won the day yesterday.
So well played, slimy Democrats.
Judeo-Christian Foundations Debate00:14:44
My congratulations to you all.
You can pick up your Emmy at the ME program, but no one will be watching.
All right, we got the Lefty's Dictionary is back.
Hooray, it is back.
This is one of my favorites.
It's I is for intersectionality.
I.
I is for intersectionality.
Intersectionality is the theory that people can be understood through intersecting social identities such as race, gender, class, and sexual orientation.
It's only when the effect of all these interwoven identities is fully understood that a person knows how much he's allowed to blame his crappy life on white men.
Blaming one's crappy life on white men is called being oppressed.
And being oppressed gives you the right to shout stupid stuff while wearing a pink hat that makes you look like a complete idiot.
This is a good thing because it keeps you from having to take responsibility for yourself, which can use up a lot of your social media time.
If you don't have enough intersecting social identities, then you are designated as just some schmuck or a white man.
As a white man, everything's your fault.
And you now have to work for a living to pay taxes to support intersectional people so they have more free time in which to blame you for their crappy lives.
Now, you may say, well, wait, in America, people aren't really oppressed very much, and they can improve their lots by rising above the dysfunction in their communities in order to live productively.
These are called facts.
And under the rules of intersectionality, people using facts are fascist and can be shouted down and beat with sticks.
You may say, what?
If you shout people down and hit them with sticks, then you're the fascist.
That is called logic.
And under the rules of intersectionality, people using logic are fascist and can be shouted down and hit with sticks.
Some people object to the underlying ideas of intersectionality.
These people say that intersectionality is just a way of organizing Americans into random interest groups in order to turn them against one another so that leftists can seize power by pretending they're alleviating various forms of oppression that don't actually exist.
These people go on to say that each person's identity is unique and God-given, and that what you make of your life depends on your choices and the natural luck of the draw.
These people add that in fact, if you were lucky enough to be born an American, you've already been given a head start and have no business complaining about anything.
So take off your ridiculous pink hat and stop shouting stupid things and go get a job.
This is called truth.
And under the rules of intersectionality, people who speak truth are fascist and can be shouted down and hit with sticks.
So now you understand that intersectionality is a new and original way of weaving together facts, logic, and truth and beating them to death.
I is for intersectionality.
I'm Andrew Clavin with the Lefties Dictionary.
This is great.
Rebecca Shapiro, the talented Shapiro, as we call her, does the great artwork on those.
They really are good.
They really came out well.
I'm incredibly happy with them.
And are we making these into a book?
We're trying to.
Come on, come on.
Get with it.
We got a lot coming up.
Jenna Ellis, one of our favorite guests.
Yesterday was Constitution Day.
Today, we're going to talk about her book, the legal basis of a moral constitution.
We had a great interview with her.
Really interesting argument that she makes.
Later today at 6.30 p.m. Eastern, 3.30 Pacific, our next Daily Wire backstage will be going on with Ben Shapiro.
You may have heard of him, the Daily Wire God King, Jeremy Boring, me, Alicia Kraus, and our special guest, Glenn Beck, who we have brought in simply to, because we like blowing smoke at him and drinking in front of him because it drives him insane.
But he's got a new book called Addicted to Outrage.
I just got my copy.
I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I've talked to him about the stuff in it.
It is really fascinating.
We might even let Knowles come in.
Well, maybe.
Okay.
No, he will be there with us all and we'll be taking questions, but only from Daily Wire subscribers.
So make sure to become one today, which will also get you in the mailbag tomorrow.
Again, that's today at 6.30 p.m. Eastern.
Join the Daily Wire Backstage with our special guest, Glenn Beck.
Become a subscriber and you can ask us questions.
All right, we got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Remember, tomorrow is mailbag day.
So go on thedailywire.com if you're a subscriber.
Hit the podcast button, hit the Andrew Clavin podcast, hit the mailbag, ask me anything you want, and all your questions will be answered.
Answers guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life for the better.
Who knows?
All right.
Come on over.
If you are a listener or viewer of this podcast, you have probably seen the excellent Jenna Ellis talking about the law.
She is the director of the Dobson Policy Center, a contributor to the Washington Examiner, the Federalist, and the Daily Wire.
She also has her book, which is a lot of what we're talking about today, The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution, a guide for Christians to understand America's current constitutional crisis.
I read it and I talked to her about it.
Here it is.
Jenna, it's so nice to finally meet you.
Thank you, you too.
Yes, it's great to have you here.
And I finally get to talk to you about your book, The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution, which is really interesting.
Before I talk to you about that, though, I want to ask you a little bit about a comment you made on the show a while back that you yourself had kind of lost some faith.
You had had a crisis of faith, had become kind of a feminist.
How did that happen and how did you come back?
Yeah, that's a great question.
So I grew up homeschooled all the way through.
I had parents who were absolutely, and they still are absolutely amazing.
And I grew up very founded in the Christian worldview, understanding truth, being a Christian.
And then I went to law school.
And I went to law school with the intention of being a career prosecutor.
That's what I wanted to do.
And law is taught in law schools today as whatever the legislature sets is legitimate.
So it's completely arbitrary.
Whoever is in authority now, then they can enact whatever they think is okay.
And whatever is not permitted today could be permitted tomorrow.
Whatever is prohibited today, we could be fine with tomorrow.
And so there were no objective truths that were taught in law.
And so I didn't get a sufficient answer from professors of mine who actually were Christians about how we can go into the court system today and advocate for objective truth and morality.
And that really spun me into a crisis of faith because I had loved law.
I upheld justice as probably the prime virtue, which now I understand truth and objective truth is really what we're striving for.
And so that's really bifurcated to me my faith in one corner, but then the law in another.
And so I didn't see how, well, why shouldn't we have civil unions?
Why shouldn't we do all of the social issues?
Why doesn't the left have a point?
And so I would have identified, and I did as a feminist, and saying, you know, these types of social issues, there should be no moral basis to the law.
And that question kept really nagging at me.
And so once I got into practice, I had to find out for myself, what is a real answer to this question?
And so through my study and research for about five years, that became why I wrote this book is to actually have a genuine answer that's better than just, well, whatever the legislature says and whatever civil society decides today that they want, now that's okay.
And I wanted a more satisfying answer.
And so the curve back, if you will, into faith was through understanding where law's origins are from and where morality genuinely comes from.
Really interesting.
I mean, one of the things I really liked about this book, and the minute I read it, I thought, gee, I haven't heard this argument before, was you say that when we discuss the Judeo-Christian basis of our society, we always get into an argument about whether the founders were Christian.
And many of them were deists and some, many were Christians.
But you say that that's not really the issue.
The issue is whether they were lawyers.
Why do you say that?
Yeah, so if we look at even law today, when I go into a courtroom and I, as a prosecutor, and I would say, we need to enforce this particular law, there is no defense or argument about the people who enacted that law, whether or not they were sincere Orthodox Christians.
That's not the basis of legitimacy in law.
It matters where does the authorization and authority to enact those laws legislatively derive from.
And so in looking at the profiles of our founding fathers and what they actually did in our legal documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, it doesn't matter as much whether or not they were sincere Orthodox Christians in their personal lives.
It matters what did they put into our legal documents so that 200 plus years later, we can look back and say that is the basis of our law.
That's what they meant because lawyers kind of have a language.
They know what each other are talking about all the time, right?
So they were very specific.
Explain to people, because a lot of people do not know this, what is the relationship between the Declaration and the Constitution?
Because people think, well, the Declaration just said we're free and then the Constitution is the law, but that's not really true, is it?
Right, it's not because the Declaration was the first legal document that essentially effectuated our national sovereignty.
And so a lot of people will say today that the Declaration is just this, you know, wonderful historical document we celebrated on the 4th of July, if that, if they didn't know that.
But really the Declaration set out our worldview statement and it legitimized why our revolution and our separation from England was an exercise of legitimate authority.
And so when they started out and they said, we hold these truths to be self-evident, they were saying truth is discoverable.
All men are created equal.
They're endowed by their creator, not their government, with certain unalienable rights.
And among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
And that was their premise to say this is the only proper role of government is not for the government to give us our rights like most of the other societies today, and certainly England then, but rather saying that our unalienable rights are what the government is designed to preserve and protect.
So they provided in the Declaration the only mandate for government.
And as really good lawyers, they appealed to the highest authority of the law that they knew, which is the supreme judge of the universe.
Because they were going over the head of the king, too, right?
Exactly.
And that was their name for God in the Declaration.
And so just like, for example, if you and I had a contract dispute, right?
And we had, you know, there's a contract that you're going to sell me your leftist tears mug.
And you will, I want to take that with me.
Yeah.
And you're going to sell that to me for $500, right?
Because it's so amazing.
And then 200 years later, our heirs and our posterity are going to litigate that contract.
Nobody is going to come in and say, oh, well, the terms of that were so completely different.
How could we possibly know this?
This evolves over time.
Nobody in the contract world will ever, ever say that the terms didn't mean what they meant to the two parties that entered into the agreement.
So why is our Constitution somehow just this magical document that we can say, oh, well, the terms just evolve over time.
Our rights evolve over time.
They're not looking at the five pages of the document.
So they are establishing in the declaration that the authority for the Constitution is the authority of the supreme judge of the universe.
But they obviously didn't mean for the church to be that judge, right?
They meant when they said God, they meant God, right?
What does that mean in real terms?
Yeah, so that's a question I often get is, well, you're advocating for a theocracy, Jenna.
Well, that's not true because if we look at the reality to which we're presented and we also look at scripture, God has ordained three spheres of government, the civil government, the church government, and the family government.
They have very different delegated authority from God himself.
If we look at Romans 13, then the civil government is supposed to bring about justice in society and can carry the sword, meaning capital punishment.
Capital punishment is not given to the church or the family.
Thankfully, a lot of families, you know, a lot of people would say, thankfully my parents didn't have that.
Oh, yeah.
I thought I had it.
My family did.
Right.
So we see they're very different authority.
So that's what Jefferson meant by the separation of church and state is a separation of delegated powers, which is what our founders recognized.
Delegated powers to government have to be under the authority of what God's design and purpose for government is.
And that doesn't mean that Christians or people of faith can't participate in all three spheres.
It's just that the church's authority structure and what their role is in society and in humanity, just like the family, is very different from the civil government.
But when they talked about nature and nature's God, they meant that God's will was discoverable in life, right?
That it was not necessarily had to be based on scripture according to the documents.
It could be natural law, essentially, those things that we know to be right and true.
Absolutely.
You talk about that idea being replaced by the idea of the social contract.
What does that mean?
Yeah, so C.S. Lewis actually has a great definition and argument for what natural law means.
And if we look just at the reality to which we're presented, there are certain things and legal principles that we just can't avoid because we are in our reality.
And so, for example, if our, and one of the examples I give in my book is if Congress tomorrow said, you know what would be really great?
Let's just pass a resolution that says that gravity no longer applies.
We all can fly because it's too expensive to go transatlantic.
We would all laugh, right?
And we know that they don't have that authority.
They are bound by the rules of the universe.
And God, for his own sovereign purposes, ordained and established our reality.
And so what has been replaced in thinking is to say that the origin of law is not reality, but man himself is the divine lawgiver.
Limited Federal Powers00:13:07
It's just an agreement between folks.
It's just an agreement.
And so if we look at where does law come from, it either has to come from man or something outside of man, meaning God.
And we can have the conversations about who God is, obviously.
But when we're looking at what the replacement for the social contract theory is, what our society today would like is just the ability of contract and to say whatever man consents to, and this is what they teach in law school, law is totally arbitrary.
If Congress wants to say this is abortion is fine, it's legal, it's permissible, they can do that.
They have all authority to determine morality on their own whim.
And so the social contract theory is based in the worldview of secular humanism, basically meaning that man is the sovereign and we can do absolutely whatever we want and we can define morality on our own terms.
And so people use that term, we the people, to mean, oh, we the people are the moral lawgivers.
We can determine our own reality.
But in fact, we the people in the Constitution in the preamble is referring to the very same people in the Declaration that are endowed by their creator, not their government, with those unalienable rights.
Among them the right to life, right?
So that is actually right in there.
It is just said as a natural right.
And our posterity as well.
When we talk about in the preamble of the Constitution, it refers to ordaining and establishing this Constitution for ourselves and our posterity.
We still in American law, in property rights, we will just have heirs apparent because we understand that there may be future children born to a certain family that will then inherit some of the property.
And so even before they're born, they have property rights.
How much more should they also have the right to life?
So your argument is that there has been a concerted effort by the left to replace natural law with social contract law, and that this has come up in a number of cases through the years that have actually managed to kind of do this, to replace one idea with the other in our constitutional law.
Am I giving a fair description?
Absolutely.
So let's talk about some of the cases.
What would you say are some of the cases that people don't know that have affected that exchange?
Right.
So when people are looking at a lot of the cases that they disagree with, they're looking only at the outcomes.
So for example, Roe versus Wade, everyone knows and they disagree or agree with the outcome of that case.
But what they're not looking at is what led up to that and why does the Supreme Court think that they have the authority to determine those types of outcomes?
So with the rise of the sexual revolution and with this idea that man can determine his own reality and that our rights, rather than being pre-political, unalienable before our Constitution, and if you think about that, the Declaration was referring to rights in 1776.
The Constitution wasn't ratified until 1787.
How could they possibly be talking about constitutional rights?
And so what happened with the rise of the sexual revolution is that the progressive left wanted to legitimize their immorality.
And they had rejected the church sphere as an authority and the family as an authority.
So they're only left with the civil government.
And so with that, they wanted the so-called right to contraceptive, to abortion, to same-sex marriage, all of those things.
But that's not actually in the Constitution.
The Constitution only gives powers to the government, limited powers, to operate to preserve and protect our fundamental rights.
So what happened in 1965 with a case called Griswold versus Connecticut, it was one of the very first contraceptive cases, and it led to Planned Parenthood versus Casey, Roe versus Wade, all of the sexual revolution cases have outflowed from that one case, which the panel of justices looked at the Constitution and said, really, we don't have any authority to determine this.
But what they did is said that there is a so-called vast penumbra in the Constitution where we can literally read between the lines of the text of the Constitution and find rights that emanate from the Constitution that then we can regulate and we can enforce that whim.
So it was entirely a legal fiction.
And what was the issue this was?
It was a contraceptive one.
It was a contraceptive one.
Okay.
Now, you talk about the case where we got the penumbras and the emanations, which I love.
I always thought that was so creative.
And that leads, that really does lead to Roe v. Wade.
And not, I don't even know if it leads to Obergfeld, the gay marriage decision.
That seems to just come out of nowhere, out of Anthony Kennedy's ear.
I mean, he just seemed to pull that out of his ear.
Am I wrong?
Well, but it's a whole line of the progressive left wanting to use the judicial branch to legislate their activism and their agenda.
And so as a conservative, myself, what conservatism is, is conserving the rule of law, conserving the limited powers and the actual proper role of government.
So unlike capital L libertarians that say government is essentially evil, its only purpose is to enforce and moderate contracts, right, that consent, that's still a secular humanist principle.
But then the left will then say, well, big government should be able to regulate everything.
Conservatism is not about a political party.
It's about conserving objective truth.
So so much of this, and you do point this out in the book, so much of this revolves around sex.
Now, sex has changed because people have birth control.
It has made people more free to make decisions.
I can't imagine us ever going back to a world in which the states legislate against certain kinds of sex.
Is it inherent in sexual freedom that we lose our political freedom?
Are those two things related?
Or can we have a world in which I don't have to care about what my neighbor is doing, which I deeply want?
I deeply want not to care about what my neighbor is doing privately.
Can we have a world in which we don't care about that and remain free as the founders intended?
And I think your question is to the heart of can we legislate morality?
And the answer to that is that we do every day.
I mean, every single criminal law that's on the books is society's designation of what we believe and understand to be wrong.
There is always a moral implicit understanding in our law of our society saying certain acts are prohibited.
And so when we're looking at the sexual revolution and this whole idea that mere consent and you have to be a person of the age of consent to say, you know, we're going to enter into this contract, that divorces any sort of moral component to that.
And so the question becomes, at what point does the civil government have a mandate and an obligation to protect and preserve our fundamental rights, but then also with that, enact justice in society.
And so I don't think that those two premises are mutually exclusive.
When you say that an individual should have liberty and freedom, that's true, but our liberty and freedom isn't the ability to do literally anything that we want.
Our criminal law tells us that.
Now, I have the liberty to make bad choices and accept the civil society consequences for those choices.
That's what we do in court every day in the criminal context.
But for the government to say, we have to completely step out of any sexual issue is not enforcing and enacting not only justice, but also preserving and protecting certain rights.
And so, for example, when we look at something like pedophilia, when we look at the progressive left, how they are wanting to separate this idea of personhood and say, you're only a person after you're born.
Well, if you do this, and Ben Shapiro talks about this really well, if you designate personhood at any other point than the time of conception, then there's no reason not to draw the line anywhere you want arbitrarily.
So what's to stop someone from saying, well, personhood doesn't attach until 16 or 18.
So now you're left with there's no crime because love is love.
And if I then, if a pedophile would go and perpetuate that act, well, it's not really harm because that child is no longer a person.
So you can see how the understanding and the philosophy will get us so far down the road unless we understand the legitimate role of government.
Which would be, but it would have to be at the local level, right?
I mean, the federal government is given no right to legislate our private lives.
Absolutely.
And that's something where the federalism model, we have to understand that there's two dual arguments here.
One is what can the government and should the government do?
And what are the limited powers that are actually granted to the federal government?
So the easiest way and the most proper way to overturn something like Roe versus Wade or Abergafell is to simply say that the federal government doesn't have domestic relations or health care as their ability to legislate and to leave that to the state level.
But then on the state, then they still have to go by the declaration's mandate as well.
Okay.
I don't have any more time, but I want to ask you one last question.
What would you like to see conservatives doing to reverse the trend?
Is that even possible?
That is a great question.
And first, we need to be educated.
We need to actually understand, like I did, I wanted to understand what is the genuine argument here.
Because if it's just what I believe versus what you believe, that's not getting us anywhere toward truth.
We have to understand where does law come from?
Educate ourselves, have not just some arguments, but have the best and most accurate and truthful arguments.
So we have to first educate ourselves, then we have to get involved.
We need to be involved in our government process.
We need to be speaking on these issues.
But then the best, and the last chapter of my book talks about the Convention of States project, which is a way that the state legislators can propose amendments to our federal constitution for the purpose of reining in the federal government's abuse and overreach.
And so if the state legislators pass a petition in two-thirds of the states, then they can call a convention for the purpose, solely the purpose of proposing amendments.
They have to be ratified the same way as congressional amendments.
All of our previous 27 amendments have gone through Congress, then the ratification process.
But what we've never done is call a convention of the state legislatures.
And they're the ones that really need to be determining all of these social issues.
They need to call a convention of the states, and they need to rein in the federal government.
There's a great project right now called the Convention of States Project, conventionofstates.com, and that is for three different areas, for term limits on Congress, a balanced budget, and then also for judicial activism and overreach for reform of the judiciary.
And we absolutely could deal with some of these issues and some of these cases that we're talking about through a convention of the states.
Great.
Jenna Ellis, the legal basis for moral constitution.
Where do people find you?
Where's the best way to look for it?
Yes, I'm with the James Dobson Family Institute.
And so you can find us at DobsonFamilyInstitute.com.
There's a profile under the public policy tab, and my email address is out there.
So if you have any questions, or certainly on Twitter or social media now that you're following me on Twitter, yay.
You can find me there as well.
All right, great.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
All right, Jenna Ellis, we will always have her back.
And there's so much stuff going on about the Supreme Court.
I'm sure we'll hear from her again soon.
Good interview.
I'm going to skip.
It went long, so I'm going to skip sexual follies, but I do have to mention this one story.
You know, there's this movie coming out, Gosnell, the Trial of America's Biggest Serial Killer.
I wrote the screenplay, and it comes out in theaters October 12th.
So the producer, the executive producer, John Sullivan, who is, he's worked on Dinesh D'Souza's movies as well, he reached out to NPR, National Public Radio, to get a sponsorship for Fresh Air, for the show Fresh Air on NPR.
And he wanted to put an ad copy to publicize Gosnell, the Trial of America's Biggest Serial Killer.
And they told him he could not describe Gosnell as an abortionist, which is what he was.
So he changed it to abortion doctor.
And they said, no, we can't say that.
And they said, sponsor credits that run on NPR are required to be value neutral.
The guy was an abortion doctor who killed people.
That's like, you know, how value neutral are we going to get about that?
Anyway, that's NPR.
You know, it's like no truth speaking in here.
This is national public radio.
But that is, it really is a, you know, how that's the whole point.
How far will they go to cover up what this is, what abortion is?
It is an amazing thing.
All right, tomorrow, mailbag.
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How Far Will They Go?00:00:37
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