Ep. 614’s Andrew Klavan dissects the White House’s satirical "reporter rules," mocking CNN’s legal threats and Jim Acosta’s antics while framing media bias as a partisan power grab. He ties this to the migrant caravan, accusing Soros-funded groups of orchestrating it and exposing leftist anti-Semitism by ignoring Saudi abuses. Jenna Ellis warns the U.S.-Canada trade deal’s SOGI language—embedded without federal law—sets a dangerous precedent for judicial overreach, arguing Congress must reject it to preserve sovereignty. The episode ends with a sharp critique of progressive tactics using LGBT rights to bypass constitutional checks, leaving the administration trapped between congressional backlash and activist demands. [Automatically generated summary]
The White House has restored the press pass of Jim, look at me, I'm Jim Acosta, but has also issued new rules of journalistic decorum that some say are directed at catching Acosta out so they can take his pass again.
For instance, at the top of the list of rules is this one, quote, no White House reporter shall begin and end his last name with the same vowel or act like a three-year-old buffoon in order to get attention, unquote.
Another rule is, quote, when asking a question, reporters must actually be searching for information, not just trying to shout out their stupid opinions, which nobody cares about anyway, especially if they begin and end their name with the same vowel or act like a three-year-old buffoon, unquote.
Yet another rule is, quote, reporters will not be permitted to shout a follow-up question after wrestling the microphone away from a female intern while screaming, look at me, damn it, I'm Jim Acosta, unquote.
And one final rule is, quote, no reporter shall be allowed into the press room who has a particularly stupid-looking face and gets on our nerves and is Jim Acosta, unquote.
CNN is threatening to sue over the new rules, claiming they are unfair because they specifically target empty-minded leftist pseudo-news organizations with lower ratings than that show on Nickelodeon where they dump green goo over some teenage goy box and are therefore clearly aimed at CNN.
A federal judge says he will overturn the new rules as violating the First Amendment just as soon as he reads the First Amendment and finds out what it is, assuming it's not too long and doesn't have a lot of big words in it.
As for Acosta himself, he stood in front of a bathroom mirror holding a plastic loving cup with a sticker, reading best journalist ever and announced, quote, Jim Acosta would like to thank Jim Acosta for Jim Acosta's Jim Acosta, unquote.
So things at the White House are pretty much back to normal.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Rams and Man Crates00:06:15
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
Hooray, hurrah.
Tomorrow, my friends, is the last mailbag before Thanksgiving.
That means if you want your problems solved before your relatives show up and really grind your nose into them, you're going to want to write here and ask any question you want about anything you want, your personal life, religion, politics.
All my answers, guaranteed 100% correct, will change your life sometimes for the better.
You have to be a subscriber if you are.
If you're not, go to dailywire.com and subscribe.
If you are, and then you will be, go to dailywire.com, hit the podcast button, hit the Andrew Clavin podcast, hit the mailbag image, and just type in your question.
Subscriptions cost a lousy 10 bucks a month or 100 bucks for the year, and then you get the leftist tears tumbler, which you'll need because you'll be so happy.
You'll just want to, all your questions will be answered.
You'll just want to drink leftist tears.
Meanwhile, Another Kingdom is on hiatus for Thanksgiving.
We did put out a really, I think, pretty interesting conversation between me and Knowles about Another Kingdom and some of the stuff that might be coming up.
There are no spoilers, but we talk about a lot of the story and how we're relating to it as writer and actor.
You also, if you want to order the book of Another Kingdom, the first novel in the trilogy, and you want to pre-order it, you get a lot of extra stuff.
They have stuff you can, you know, pictures you can put on your phone that Rebecca Shapiro made.
They were great.
There's a sequel that I wrote.
You just go to anotherkingdom.editorsexclusives.com, anotherkingdom.editorsexclusives.com.
Then it's time for man crates.
You've got to have man crates.
The holidays are coming up.
You want to give man crates.
You want to get man crates.
They are incredibly cruel.
Cool.
I recently got the Grill Master crate, and the reason I got it is because I have this friend, Owen Brennan.
He's the guy who does a lot of ads for like Ted Cruz over at Madison McQueen.
Every time he comes over, we grill, and every time we grill, I always say, I'll grill.
And my wife says, No, let Owen do it because Owen is just a master griller.
So I got the Grill Master crate from Man Crates so I could just smash him over the head with the crate and then open it at a crowbar.
And then you bring it out.
It's got great stuff, gifts sealed up in a wooden crate.
The crowbar lets you pry it open so you feel incredibly manly.
I felt manly before the crowbar, but the crowbar doesn't hurt.
And every man crate comes with a 100% satisfaction guarantee.
Listen to this show, buy a gift, and you will get the second gift for 25% off when you go to mancrates.com/slash clavin.
This offer is only for the holidays.
Buy one gift and get the second 25% off at mancrates.com/slash clavin.
That's mancrates.com/slash clavin.
You got to open that crate yourself, and you got to figure out for yourself how do you spell clavin.
Actually, I'll tell you, it's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So I almost never do this, but I got to talk a little bit about sports.
Last night there was a game on television, Monday night football, and it was particularly important to me because it's the Rams, the Los Angeles Rams, who are doing a great, having a great, great season.
And I know a lot of people don't care about football, so I won't get into too much of the high weeds about it.
But it was the two top teams, the Los Angeles Rams and the Kansas City Chiefs.
Kind of cool because they both have these incredible quarterbacks who are going to be probably championship quarterbacks for the next 20 years or whatever.
They're going to have great, great careers.
And they have these two cool coaches because Andy Reid is kind of the old man.
They call him Big Red.
He's like 60 years old.
But he's a very innovative coach.
And then, of course, Sean McVeigh for the Rams is like 12 or something like that.
And he's just one of the youngest, but also incredibly innovative.
Anyway, what was incredibly cool about it was they were going to have it down in Mexico City, but there was a concert and the stadium got all dug up, so the field was bad.
So they brought it back to LA.
But since it was coming back to LA, they decided to honor all the first responders who have been, you know, there's been a bad, bad couple of weeks here in California.
Again, didn't want to bring it up, don't want to bring it up too much because I know a lot of you are from other places, but the fires have been awful.
There was the shooting in Thousand Oaks.
You know, people have lost their lives.
I think there are close to 80 known dead in the fires, which is insane.
And a thousand are still missing.
Hopefully, some of them are just out of cell phone reach.
But these people who go out there, and like, I like to pay tribute to the guys because guys come under so much fire today, but these are all kinds of people, the firefighters, the cops, doctors, nurses, Red Cross people.
The pilots, I got to say, I have a, I earned a pilot license at one point.
I don't fly anymore, but I had a pilot license at one point.
And watching these guys come in hot and low over these flames so they can dump the retardant accurately.
It just brings tears to my eyes.
The courage of these people, the dedication they're out there sleeping in the grass to fight because they just want to go back and fight the fire again when they wake up.
So they gave like a thousand tickets away to the stadium and let them watch this game.
And they were also ordering, of course, honoring, of course, Ron Hellis, this county sheriff sergeant who was killed in the shootout in Thousand Oaks.
And it was just, it was beautiful.
And then it turned out to be one of the great games, a game for the ages.
It was a game for the ages.
It was incredibly high scoring, and yet the defense was good.
There were every possible play, fumbles and scores and interceptions and everything that you could ask for.
It just went on and on, one of the highest scoring games in NFL history.
I think it was the third highest scoring, and the Rams won it 54 to 51.
The two quarterbacks were unbelievable.
I'm Suspicious00:14:38
Anyway, the thing I just wanted to point out is that there were no politics.
I mean, they had a beautiful national anthem sung by the California Lutheran University Choir, and they were joined by first responders.
I have to be honest and say I forgot to press the DVR, so I missed the first five minutes of the game, and I'm not sure.
I don't think anybody protested or did any of that stupid stuff.
It looked to me like it was politics-free.
It was just pure sports.
Nobody seizing the moment to make a pompous left-wing statement, nobody's saying anything.
They just play the game.
And it reminded me of the fact that there are certain things that I like to call meta-professions.
Sports is one of them.
I think that comedy and entertainment and even novel writing and movie writing are meta professions.
Certainly the news business is a meta-profession.
What I mean by meta-professions is they are professions that are above the fray.
They are professions that should encompass the fray.
If you're a reporter, you should tell both sides of the story.
You shouldn't just deliver this crap left-wing garbage that comes out of the New York Times and CNN and NBC and ABC all the time.
That's all they deliver.
It shouldn't be that.
It should be a meta-profession where you look down on it above.
And when it comes to the arts, you can't help people being political, having their political point of view, and everything an artist does comes out of himself.
So maybe that's going to be in there.
But that means that the people who pay for the arts and the publishers and the movie companies should make sure that all kinds of people come in and produce art.
They shouldn't blacklist people the way they do in Hollywood, the way they do in publishing.
They shouldn't graylist them.
They should let everybody come in and make the stories that they want to make.
Nobody would care if there were a million left-wing movies, if there were also a million right-wing movies.
These meta-professions bring us together by saying, hey, there is a point of view, a platform, from which we can look at the situation as one.
We can both say, yeah, that's what the other guy is saying.
Boy, I think he's an idiot.
But, you know, obviously he deserves to have his story told.
When they do that, you know, this is the thing that really gets me, especially when I watch the late-night comedians and they're just cursing out Trump day after day, show after show, each and every one.
And I think, really, I mean, do the people who voted for Trump have a chance to laugh at politics?
Is nobody on the left doing anything funny?
Is Nancy Poland, you know, when Colbert has on left-wing judges and left-wing politicians says, oh, please save us from Donald Trump, like he's a two-year-old.
You know, I think that is so divisive.
I do.
You know, I think that, like, I understand if you want to be a political comedian, if you want to be a political comedian, go on the road and do your show.
But when you command the heights of a late-night television show on the public airwaves, really, you can't find anything funny to say about anybody.
For eight years, nobody could find anything funny to say about Barack Obama.
We were told by the writers at SNL he was like an obsidian wall.
You just couldn't find a place to put a joke in.
I mean, this dope-smoking, corrupt Chicago poll and they couldn't find one single place to find, to put a joke in.
I mean, politics is funny.
Politics is funny.
And it just seems to me that, you know, that when you abandon the meta-professions, when you abandon your meta-responsibility to professions to take a look at everybody, to make sure you understand that everybody's a little corrupt, everybody's a little stupid, everybody has a point of view that has flaws in it.
When you remind people of that, it brings people together.
When you do what Colbert is doing, when you do what Jim Acosta does, when you do what CNN and the New York Times do, you actually are driving this wedge in between people.
And because these people never talk to anybody but themselves, because the only story they hear is their own, they think they have developed the art of projection to a fine art.
They've developed projection is when you have something inside yourself and you see it in other people.
So if you're angry all the time and you go around saying, ah, this guy, he's really angry, you're projecting your own anger onto other people.
And that is everything the left does.
Everything the left does.
Every charge they make now is projection.
And there's nobody to say them nay.
There's nobody to tell them that that's what they're doing because they have insulated themselves in the news business, in Hollywood, in the academy.
They've insulated themselves from other opinions.
No right-winger, no right-winger is insulated from other opinions because he's constantly having this garbage showered down on him from this amazing communication industry.
And I'll show you what I mean by projection in just a minute.
But first, let us talk about podium.
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Podium is a system of communication that comes between businesses and their customers and facilitates that communications.
For instance, 90% of consumers prefer messaging and 99% of texts get opened.
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Your customers will be able to text you right away and say, how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Am I ever going to get tired of that joke?
No.
Never going to get tired of it.
So just live with it.
You're just going to have to live with it.
So, you know, what do they say?
Oh, Trump lies.
This was the Jim Acosta thing.
The Jim Acosta story is that the White House said, all right, we're going to give you your pass back, but we are going to make these rules of decorum.
So Jim Acosta thinks he won, but actually now all these reporters who used to be polite enough to not have to have rules like three-year-olds now have to have the Jim Acosta Memorial nursery school rules.
That's what we'll call them.
The Jim Acosta Memorial nursery school rules.
Now everybody has to live with them, so it's easier for Trump to throw you out if you break the rules because you'll have due process.
And remember, the ruling giving Acosta back his trespass was a temporary ruling.
The guy said he wasn't going to rule on the First Amendment of it.
He just thought Acosta hadn't had due process.
It's absurd to think that Trump has to give anybody a hard pass.
So if he violates these rules, he'll be bounced.
And probably eventually they'll probably stop having cameras in there.
So he won't even get his mug on television, in which case he'll probably just change professions.
But remember, the thing that he was saying to the president was for some reason it was important to Jim Acosta to tell us that he didn't think that the caravan coming in was an invasion.
Oh, and it was so far away.
Well, now here they are.
They're coming here.
They're Tijuana.
They're ready to break through the wall.
They're having problems in Mexico with them.
They're attacking the Mexican police.
And Fox yesterday had a real, Fox News, the Brett Baer Show, had a really good report saying that Homeland Security says that they have identified more than 500 criminals in these.
Now it's close, it's around 8,000, 8,000 to 10,000 people.
They've personally identified over 500 criminals.
They say most of these people coming in are males, and they put the women and children at the front of the line because they know the news media will cover it.
And Fox interviewed Mexican people, people in Mexico, who are objecting to their presence there.
And you just hear a couple of quick interviews they did with him.
We are here because our government has not taken control of these what we call invasions.
I'm not really in favor of them coming the way they did.
You know, to me, it feels like they invaded.
So what's the matter, Jim?
Don't you like Latino people?
I mean, are you calling them liars?
When they call Trump a liar and Trump plays fast and loose with the truth, you'll never hear me say differently.
He says the first thing that comes into his head.
But when they call him a liar, it is sheer projection because it is what they have been doing to Republicans for years, not just the news media.
Now they've got Christian Bale playing Dick Cheney.
He's going to play him as a drunken, power mad, crazy person.
Wow, that'll be original, won't it?
You know, you've never seen Hollywood diss a Republican before.
So when they're so fast to call people liars, so fast to say this stuff, it really is projection.
It's all them.
They've been lying about people and they just don't like getting it back.
You know, the other thing that has come out, the Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez told Mike Pence that this caravan was organized by leftist organizations.
We kind of knew that already.
And he says left-wing organizations are providing assistance and at least three of those groups are funded by George Soros' Open Society Foundation.
George Soros has openly said that the biggest problem in the world is the United States.
He's clearly out to get us, clearly out to break down our civilization.
But if you criticize him because he once was Jewish by blood, suddenly you're anti-Semitic.
This is another act of projection.
The left has suddenly started accusing Donald Trump with his three Jewish grandchildren of being anti-Semitic.
And by extension, everybody on the right is anti-Semitic.
Now, anti-Semitism knows no politics.
It will go to the right and left.
But the left is simply infused with it.
There are anti-Semites on the right, but leftism has become anti-Semitism.
And when they talk about George Soros, again, being anti-Semitic, when they talk about that being anti-Semitic, it's because they are projecting their anti-Semitism on us.
I mean, the ceaseless attacks on Israel.
People have written to me and said, well, you know, attacking Israel is not anti-Semitic.
True enough.
True enough.
There's nothing wrong with criticizing the acts of the government of Israel.
But when you think a country the size of a shoebox is to blame for the problems in the Middle East, which is the size of the United States, it's nonsense.
When you think the only democratic, the only free country, the only country that has gay rights, the only country in the Middle East that has rights for women, when you think that's the problem, I'm suspicious.
I'm suspicious that there's anti-Semitism at the bottom of that.
When you start talking about divesting in them, when you start talking about boycotting them, but you're not boycotting Saudi Arabia where women are not allowed to breathe practically without getting permission from their husbands, I'm suspicious that you are anti-Semitic.
And it's coming out now in the Women's March.
Some of the women who organized the march originally are leaving, saying the thing is infested with anti-Semitism.
The left is totally infested with anti-Semitism.
And every time they say, oh, you criticize George Soros, and he happens to be a Jew, so you're an anti-Semite, which is nonsense, every time they say it, it's projection.
Corruption.
This is a huge one, huge projection.
All we've been hearing when Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is a big mouth, you know, some of the stuff he says is not, it's not right, and I'm not going to defend it.
But when Donald Trump comes out and says they're trying to steal the election in Florida, and they say, well, he said without evidence that they're trying to steal the election, where are they now?
Where are they now that Stacey Abrams, who lost the governorship in Florida, is making these charges, play these charges.
Now, first, she made the least gracious concession speech ever made, saying, I'm not conceding because the election was stolen, and now she's doubling down on MSNBC.
It was not a free and fair election.
We had thousands of Georgians who were purged from the rolls wrongly, including a 92-year-old woman who had voted in the same area since 1968, a civil rights leader.
It was not fair. to the thousands who were forced to wait in long lines because they were in polling places that were under-resourced.
Or worse, they had no polling places to go to because more than 300 had been closed.
It was not fair to the thousands that were put on hold with their registrations.
And it was not fair to those who filled up absentee ballots.
And depending on the county you sent it to, it either was counted or not counted, assuming you received it in time.
Brian Kemp oversaw for eight years the systematic and systemic dismantling of our democracy.
And that means there could not be free and fair elections in Georgia this year.
Totally untrue.
Everything she just said is totally untrue.
But let's just get to remember the incredible hysteria when Donald Trump said he wasn't sure whether he would accept the results of the election.
He would have to see what happened during the election.
And we all remember this.
Hillary Clinton went mad.
That's awful.
That's terrible.
And what have we got from them?
Instead, we have gotten this Russian collusion thing that's not, you know, that's supposed to delegitimize Donald Trump.
You know, it is.
Everything is this projection.
And the projection arises from the fact that they are surrounded only by themselves.
They're surrounded only by their own.
So whenever they have that instinct to project evil from themselves onto us, there's nobody around to say, well, hi, hey, we do that too.
Or we do it, not them.
Which is also true because this thing in Georgia, I may have said Stacey Abrams was in Florida.
She was obviously running for governor of Georgia.
And this whole thing was that the governor there was, in fact, obeying the law.
There was a law that said you have to clean out the voter rolls if people don't vote for a certain period of time, if their information isn't correct.
There were all these different laws that they were obeying in clearing out these voter rolls.
It had nothing to do with her not getting elected.
In fact, there was a huge turnout.
If he was trying to suppress the voters, he was not doing a very good job.
Kemp, if he was trying to suppress the voters, because they came out in droves and Stacey Abrams benefited from their coming out.
But she lost.
She lost by like 55,000 votes, which is something like 1.4% or something like that.
They counted it a million times.
She lost.
She lost.
And I swear, has there been a Democrat, has there been a Democrat who has accepted the outcome of an election with any grace whatsoever?
But if any Republican complains, if any Republican complains, he is a villain who is destroying America's trust in our institutions.
Watergate's Shadow00:03:02
It's insane.
It is insane acts of progression, of projection, of corruption, of dishonesty.
It's really bad.
You know, Michael Barone, who is not like, I mean, he's a conservative guy, Michael Barone, but he's very numbers-driven, very freedom-driven, and hardly a radical.
He wrote a piece about what Obama did to the Trump campaign and how close it was to Watergate.
Remember in Watergate, Nixon tried to bug George McGovern's campaign headquarters.
And that, oh my God, that was the worst thing ever.
I mean, he really, he was cast out of office by the cover-up he put in place to stop people from finding out about this.
So here's Barone writing about this, talking about projection.
Barone says, the crime at the root of Watergate was an attempt at surveillance of the DNC after George McGovern seemed about to win the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, just as the government misconduct in Russia Gate was an attempt at surveillance of the Republican Party's national campaign after Trump clinched its nomination.
In both cases, the incumbent administration, Nixon and Obama, regarded the opposition's unorthodox nominee as undermining the nation's long-standing foreign policy and therefore dangerous to the country.
McGovern renounced the Democrats' traditional Cold War policy.
Trump expressed skepticism about George W. Bush and Obama administration policies on NATO, Mexico, Iran, and Russia.
There are two obvious differences.
This is still Barone.
There are two obvious differences between Watergate and the Obama administration's infiltration.
The Watergate burglars were arrested in Flagrante de Licto, and their wiretaps never functioned.
And neither the FBI nor the CIA fully cooperated with the post-election cover-up.
That is quite a contrast with the Obama law enforcement and intelligence appointees' promotion of Christopher Steele's Clinton campaign finance dodgy dossier and feeding the mainstream media's insatiable hunger for Russia collusion stories.
In other words, in other words, under Obama, the intelligence agencies were corrupted and became Watergate.
They became the Watergate burglars, and the press who exposed Watergate became accomplices in Obama's Watergate.
That's how bad it is.
That's how bad it is.
And that's what they've done to themselves because they have forgotten the principles of meta-professions, of meta-professions, professions that are supposed to be above the fray.
And it casts a shadow backwards over the Watergate investigations themselves.
It makes you wonder, was the press just being anti-Nixon?
They hated Nixon with a passion.
Would they have done that?
Would they have covered up for Kennedy?
They did cover up for John F. Kennedy.
I mean, that's true.
They did that.
And then they went after Nixon with a vengeance.
It really is, it really is a corrupting, divisive fact of our lives that these guys have simply no responsibility to the meta-nature of their profession.
Congress And Trade Sovereignty00:14:14
And the only thing I can say is in fighting back against them, in fighting back against them, we really have to be careful that we don't turn into them because it's like a system.
You get caught in the system.
Once you start fighting back, you too don't want to give any credence to anything they say.
You want to be fair, you want to be fair, but you're so over outnumbered and outgunned by the networks and the Times and all these people, this huge echo chamber that they have supporting them, that you just feel you don't want to give them any quarter whatsoever.
So the big thing is how to fight back against them.
This is the thing we're going to have to figure out, how to fight back against them without becoming them.
Because the last thing I want to do is become somebody like these guys, the Jim Acosta media or Hollywood or any of these people who have just turned themselves into dishonest machines, dishonest machines who are no longer serving their professions.
Speaking of dishonest lowlifes, Michael Knowles, no, I'm joking.
Today at 5.30 p.m., why don't you guys stop me before I do that to poor Knowles?
Today at 5.30 p.m. Eastern, 2.30 p.m. Pacific, all of your questions will be answered by Daily Wire's own Michael Knowles.
Ask him lots of questions, come up with embarrassing subjects, ask him about his sex life, his Catholicism.
Ask him about his sex life and his Catholicism and how his Catholicism, never mind.
Remember, we don't want to make this easy for him.
And as always, the lovely and talented Alicia Krauss will be hosting it and will even be sitting in the same room with Knowles, so the suspense will be killing us all.
This month's episode will stream live on Daily Wire's YouTube and Facebook pages.
It will be free for everyone to watch, but only subscribers can ask the questions.
So subscribe, ask Knowles your questions.
Then if you want to get the truth, oh, stop me, stop me before I kill more.
Send them in to the mailbag, which is tomorrow, last mailbag before Thanksgiving.
Go to dailywire.com, hit the podcast button, hit the Andrew Clavin podcast, hit the mailbag, and ask your questions.
Answers guaranteed, 100% correct, will change your life.
For the better, who knows?
All right, we got to say goodbye.
We got Jenna Ellis coming up to talk to us about something, a really interesting subject about the new trade deal with Canada.
Oh, Canada, come on over to dailywire.com and listen and subscribe.
So there's a really interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal.
One of my favorite writers there now every Tuesday is Walter Russell Mead.
He writes a piece called The Three Stages of Trump's Foreign Policy, and where he points out that Trump has been getting a lot of flack from what we'll call the establishment for destroying all their fun, liberal globalist ideas.
But he hasn't started the process of rebuilding yet.
And we're going to see whether this is actually creative destruction, because in order to have creative destruction, you actually have to create stuff.
So Trump is clearing away a lot of dross, but will he be able to put things together?
And our friend Jenna Ellis has already an objection to something that is happening in the new trade deal that he is negotiating with Canada.
You know Jenna Ellis.
You know and love Jenna Ellis, as do we all, the director of the Dobson Policy Center, a contributor to the Daily Wire and the Washington Examiner and the Federalist.
Three great venues, by the way.
And her book is The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution.
Jenna, how are you doing?
Can you hear me?
I'm great, Jerry.
Thanks so much for having me on.
That's all.
I feel like you and I have been arguing on text all weekend.
So like, continuing to be aware of.
It's been a great conversation.
It has.
It's true.
Yes.
So what's your beef?
Lay out your beef with the new Canada deal.
Yeah, well, really, at this point, it's Congress's beef.
And led by Congressman Doug Lamborn, a 46th member signed a letter last week to President Trump that expressed concern that what's happening essentially is that the United States trade representative has embedded social policy, Canada's social policy, into its trade agreement really for the first time.
And this is completely unprecedented.
And so Congress is expressing, and we would agree, and there are a lot of conservative policy groups that agree, that social policy belongs nowhere in a trade agreement.
So in Article 23, that is talking about gender discrimination in labor, that particular article, what the United States Trade Representative did was embedded in the definition of gender to also include sexual orientation and gender identity language, which there is no federal law.
This is still an ongoing national conversation that is highly controversial.
We saw all of the media coverage with the HHS memo.
We've seen what the administration has done to preserve and protect policy space for Congress to actually legislate on this issue and determine under their constitutional authority.
But now the United States Trade Representative is conceding to Canada and is saying, you know what, we're going to go ahead and include this definition of gender as including sexual orientation and gender identity for the United States to agree to in a trade agreement.
This is absolutely nowhere to have social policy.
So members of Congress are pushing back and so are conservative policy groups.
All right, so I have two questions that spring to mind immediately.
The first is, does it even matter if this language is in a trade agreement?
Is it constitutional for Canada to dictate our policy, our social policies?
I mean, can't we just ignore whatever they put in there when it comes to this?
We should.
We should have ignored it.
And the United States trade representative should have said, Canada, take a hike.
No, this is not somewhere for you to poist your social policy onto the United States.
But what happens when Congress has to ratify a trade agreement is that essentially a future activist court or future trade agreements now were setting up a very dangerous precedent to continue to cement this language that Congress will vote either up or down on the entire trade agreement.
And so there's a potential and what Congress is concerned about, these members of Congress, is that future courts will see that now Congress has approved this agreement as a whole, and that that would set up the precedent that, hey, maybe Congress is okay with this without them actually legislating.
So it is unconstitutional.
It's Canada trying to circumvent Congress.
It's the United States trade representative trying to circumvent Congress.
And really, this sets up the administration to be in a very difficult position because their trade representative made these concessions, frankly, I think ignorantly probably, because Canada wanted something even bigger that's been reported.
And so they thought they were doing, they were just minimizing the language.
And now the administration is in the position of do we remove this and maybe have Canada push back on us or do we keep it in there and have Congress potentially vote down the entire trade agreement as this letter suggests and that we would urge Congress to do is to vote down because this language has absolutely no business in a trade agreement.
But also, Drew, what's really important is this shows why the administration has to make sure they are getting people in these offices that know what they're doing, that know the constitutionality of these issues, and make sure they're preserving the policy space and are not circumventing Congress.
I mean, this is what Mead was talking about.
He was saying it is yet to be shown that while he is not, he has not, he's been very fair to Trump and that while Trump is clearing away, you know, stupid stuff like the Iran deal and the Paris climate deal, it's also going to be very difficult to form a new relationship with Iran.
What are we going to do about the Middle East?
And these are the things that have yet to be shown that the Trump administration can do.
Now, these rules that Canada has inserted into this, they basically affect whom?
Anybody who's dealing with Canada through us?
Is that basically who would be affected by them?
Yeah, it would affect the trade agreement and our compliance with the trade agreement.
And it may affect, and it likely will affect future trade agreements because anyone in Europe then who's dealing with the United States is saying, hey, you gave this definition to Canada.
You allowed the insertion of gender being defined as including what's called SOGI language or sexual orientation gender identity language.
And so we want you to continue to do that.
It also further cements two executive orders that came from the Obama era, where Obama unilaterally inserted this type of language and sexual orientation gender identity language when again has not created law.
And that would further cement these two executive orders to continue to be policy and potentially put the onus on Congress to make it further down the road for them to legislate against this issue.
So this is actually a very big deal to the United States.
And the main reason is that we need to protect our sovereignty.
We do not want to have countries like Canada telling us what our social policy should be and how we need to define gender discrimination under our law.
That is a matter constitutionally that only Congress can determine.
So to put this into a trade agreement is absolutely unconstitutional and sets up a very bad precedent for the future.
Do we not already have rules about discrimination, sexual discrimination?
We do, but that's just policy right now.
If you go to usajobs.com, for example, that will include some of this language, but that's only policy.
We don't have federal law that defines gender discrimination as anything but male versus female.
That's what Congress intended to do.
And again, this is a national conversation.
We have never included in federal law the requirement that sexual orientation and gender identity is included.
We need to have that conversation in Congress, not in a trade agreement.
Do you think there's a chance?
I mean, one of the things that I saw when I saw the story of the congressman going forward, Republicans have a tendency to walk jaw first into a stationary fist, you know, that like they tend to politically beat themselves, allow themselves to get beaten up without the other side ever having to take a swing.
When you talk about this as a question of sovereignty, it makes perfect sense to me.
I worried when I read what they were saying that it was going to come across as kind of anti-gay people or, you know, you know how the left always reacts to everything as if it were discriminatory.
It made me wonder, are they setting themselves up for that?
Are they leading jaw first when maybe they should have used more careful language about the sovereignty issue?
Because the sovereignty issue is clearly an important one.
I don't think anybody in the United States is interested in excluding people from trade deals because of their sexual orientation.
Well, if you go to Congressman Lamborn's website, which includes the full letter that he led and 45 other members of Congress signed on to, it's lamborn.house.gov.
But he released a statement regarding the letter, Congressman Lamborn, that said, it's insulting to our sovereignty to submit to social policies in a trade agreement and goes on to say Congress has refused to accept this.
If you go to his Facebook page and you see the outrage from a lot of people who aren't really well versed in this issue, they do think that.
They do think that this is just anti-LGBT.
But what this really is, is a question of sovereignty.
And we need to have this conversation in Congress because if we want to, if Congress wants to legislate certain protections for LGBT members, that should not just rationally come under gender-based law.
And so, I mean, it would be the same thing as defining gender, which is an immutable biological characteristic that HHS has now recognized.
There was a letter from the Attorney General's office last year that talked about this.
We shouldn't be including that in the definition of gender.
That needs to be a separate conversation, how we as the United States are prepared to move forward in dealing with that issue.
But again, it belongs nowhere in a trade agreement, and it absolutely does not belong in the bureaucratic offices of the executive government to undermine Congress.
It's a classic left-wing bait and switch.
This is what they do with the Supreme Court all the time, is they get things that might sound sympathetic to people, but in fact, they break the very system or abuse the very system that's there to protect our rights.
So they throw away our sovereignty and say, oh, but look at the poor gay people.
Or they throw away our right to make law and say, look at the poor gay people or look at the poor pregnant woman who needs an abortion.
And that's using our kind of compassion and sympathy for people in trouble.
They take away our actual rights and our systems.
It's an amazing tactic and amazing how often it works.
I don't think it would work as well as it does if the press weren't so entirely on board.
Absolutely.
And I think that, you know, if the if the U.S. trade representative was seeking to define this in any other way outside the scope of Congress, we would still have the same issue.
And we would still have the same objection to say that definitions of law, things that matters of law that have not been determined by Congress belong nowhere in a trade agreement.
But like you said, Drew, just because people are sympathetic to that type of language, they're willing to sell out Future sovereignty and our separation of powers, why we elect our senators and representatives to go to Washington, and we have governance to be able to say we're voting out if you go outside the margins of the Constitution.
And so, if we concede on one issue and we say, oh, that's fine just because we happen to like this issue, if we like an activist court, for example, just because they're willing to side with us on one policy issue, then that sets up a very dangerous precedent.
And what if the LGBT community doesn't like what a future trade agreement looks like?
They're going to have the same objections.
That's why conservatism is conserving and protecting not only our national sovereignty, but the rule of law and the separation of powers.
It's such a good way.
Why These Hallmark Stories Work00:05:09
I have to give them credit.
It's a great trick.
They keep using it.
It keeps working.
Let's see if it works this time.
Jenna, it's great to see you.
We'll continue our argument on the air next time about the libertarianism.
I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving.
That sounds good.
All right.
Thanks so much, Joe.
And I would also just urge everyone to contact your congressman, tell them you want them to preserve our national sovereignty on this.
And thanks so much, Jude.
I really appreciate it.
It's great to see you.
Thanks.
Just have to hit one more story before we go into sexual follies, although I suppose this qualifies as sexual follies.
The actress who charges Michael Avenatti with smacking her around has now asked for a restraining order against the attorney.
Here's a cut of CNN's coverage.
Oh, wait, they're not covered.
Nobody's covering this story.
They just suddenly, suddenly, Michael Alvinati became not the biggest thing since sliced bread.
I mean, this guy was on TV again and again, but this story just has vanished.
Her name is Morelli.
Miniuti, I guess.
She's an actress in her 20s.
She had a small cameo in Ocean's Eat, and she says that she wants this guy to stay away from her.
He continues to insist that he didn't do it.
And of course, we will grant him the presumption of innocence and due process because we know that's what he would want for anybody else who he made outrageous charges against on every channel that TV has, including some that are in the 400s.
So, all right, that is Michael Avenatti.
goes to sexual follies.
Well, this is the time of year.
I cannot resist talking about this again.
Hallmark Christmas movies come on.
They've been so popular that now, like, we does them, and a couple of other stations, Lifetime, I think, does them.
They all have these same stories.
Basically, a lady finds love during Christmas.
I once sat up with, I have to admit, a stiff drink and watched one after another after another of them.
I could not take my eyes off them.
It was the first time I discovered them because it actually felt like I was being allowed into women's daydreams.
You know, it was like kind of like when that 50 Shades of Gray came out and like guys read it and went, Really?
You know, really?
Oh, wow.
But this is kind of the benign form of that.
It's just like what daydreams look like because they are constructed exactly like daydreams in the sense that there's no suspense.
Usually, when people have daydreams, they don't really have a lot of suspense.
They'll pose a problem, but then they'll solve the problem almost in the next second because it's a daydream.
Why should you daydream that things go wrong?
You daydream that things go right.
And these stories are one after another.
So, Bray Payton over at the Federalist, and I was mentioning this before with Jenna: the Federalist and the Washington Examiner have become two exceptional venues.
Federalists, because of Molly Hemingway, I'm sure, and the Washington Examiner is who's running, who owns the Washington Examiner?
I can't remember.
This guy used to be at National Review.
Anyway, they both have done spectacular jobs of making these into excellent venues.
Anyway, Bray Payton, writing humor at the Federalist, writes, Hallmark tropes that will help you bag a man in time for Christmas.
And she just uses the plot of Hallmark Christmas stories of how this is how you find a man.
One, get snowed in together.
Use the bad weather to your advantage.
If there's a cold snap set to roll in, use a busy rental property manager's booking mix-up to spend the holiday snowed in with a hot single dad.
Two, embrace strange inheritance requirements.
If there's one thing you can bet on in these movies, it's that rich people are eccentric AF and they will make their heirs jump through bizarre and romantically involved hoops to secure their fortunes.
Number three, recognize your sexual chemistry with your longtime rival.
I love this one.
This one's almost every story.
Maybe the real reason why you can't stand that one guy in your professional sphere is because you actually have the hots for him.
Be sure to fall into a situation where you have to spend a lot of time in the same space together so you figure that out.
Charm the stiff corporate guy into not being a Grinch.
That super corporate guy who rolls into your hometown with the intention of replacing your co-workers with robots is actually a softie deep inside.
You just have to touch his heart with Christmas cheer to get him to open up.
You know what I would love women to explain to me, though, seriously, two things that, well, the one important thing is what is it about seaside towns that women love so much?
I mean, it must be 40% of these stories take place in seaside, little seaside villages where the heroine runs a little quaint coffee shop or a cookie shop or something like that.
And the guy is this kind of rugged outdoors, maybe runs a boat or something.
But there's something about these seaside towns that women just love.
If I had known this, I would have made out like a bandit.
I would have moved to a seaside town.
I'd have done anything.
I was so lonely.
But I just want to know why these things work.
You've got to watch these Hallmark things.
Why Women Love Seaside Towns00:01:22
You really do.
Especially if you're a guy and you want to know what women are thinking about.
You really have to sit and watch these things for a couple hours because they are just absolutely revelatory.
And of course, you find out just how much people want to be loved.
I mean, I think women have an especial yearning for this, but men, of course, too, want to be loved.
And it really is kind of a reminder that that's what we're here for.
You know, all the rest of the stuff is just taking up time.
This is really what we want to do.
All right.
Last mailbag before Thanksgiving.
You want to get those questions in, especially if your relatives are on the way.
They're down the street.
They're knocking at the door.
They're climbing in the windows.
They're coming to get you.
Get your answers now before the disaster strikes.
Be here tomorrow.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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