Andrew Clavin’s Ep. 627 dissects Trump’s legal battles—Carl Bernstein calls hush-money claims "worse than Watergate," while Mueller probes perjury risks over his "best administration" boasts—before pivoting to Kavanaugh’s confirmation as a victory over media-driven anti-male hysteria. He contrasts Democrats’ immigration weaponization, citing a border child’s death, with Stephen Miller’s blame on congressional inaction, then mocks Trump’s SNL tweet while defending press attacks as justified. The episode spirals into Linda Fairstein’s revoked MWA award for her Central Park Jogger prosecutions, framing it as left-wing bias, and ties it to Nick Cannon’s Oscar backlash against Kevin Hart, warning conservatives must embrace Black voices like The Equalizer 2’s Denzel Washington or risk irrelevance. Clavin ends by linking these culture wars to corporate media’s suppression of dissent, setting up next week’s focus on left-wing exploitation of immigrant deaths and gender identity controversies in pageants. [Automatically generated summary]
Intrepid federal investigators continue their deep dive into every aspect of President Trump's existence in their efforts to find Russian collusion or some other made-up thing that will magically erase the last election.
So far, they've managed to uncover the fact that President Trump paid off several beautiful women to say they didn't sleep with him when they did, as opposed to most of us guys who would have paid them to say they did sleep with us when they didn't.
Former Washington Post reporter Carl This Is Worse Than Watergate Bernstein told reporters, quote, this is worse than Watergate.
For years, Donald Trump flew under the radar, pretending he was a self-effacing, quiet-living family man when all the while he was actually a billionaire playboy.
When the public finds this out, impeachment will be the only option, unquote.
Federal investigators have now moved on to explore even murkier depths of the president's wrongdoing.
Sources tell CNN, who tell sources their sources say that sources are telling CNN that special counsel Robert Mueller is now looking into whether Trump lied when he recently said that his administration was the best administration in American history.
According to NBC legal analyst Crackpot McSillyface, since Trump made this statement while an episode of Law and Order was playing on a nearby TV, it would constitute an act of perjury according to the laws of Grand Fenwick, a country from the hilarious comic novel The Mouse That Roared, and who didn't enjoy that endearing classic.
Carl Bernstein issued a statement about the new investigation saying, quote, this is worse than Watergate.
Man CratesRedux00:04:43
It's all well and good that Trump has reinvigorated the economy, destroyed ISIS, restored our friendship with Israel, and appointed constitutional judges.
But once the public finds out that he's engaged in self-aggrandizing hyperbole, impeachment will be the only option, unquote.
After that, Bernstein dozed off in his chair, waking only occasionally to cry out, this is worse than Watergate, making him indistinguishable from the rest of the Democrat Party.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky-doo.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Ho, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
So I had a revelation over the weekend.
I was thinking back to the Clinton administration.
I was remembering, I was out of the country for most of the time, but I remember a lot of the screaming and yelling, the desperate anguish that tore the country apart over his affair with Monica Lewinsky.
Remember, and the economy was doing well.
And I always thought Clinton, for reasons that didn't all have to do with him, was actually a good domestic president, though a terrible foreign policy president.
But he was a solid domestic president, pressed to become a right-winger by Newt Gingrich and the right.
And the country was doing really well.
And everybody was just ripping each other to shreds over the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the impeachment trial and all this stuff.
And then shortly after that, shortly into George W. Bush's administration, 9-11 happened.
And there was this genuine, terrible tragedy that shattered, I mean, ultimately, it shattered everything.
It shattered the peace.
It destroyed the concept of multiculturalism.
It destroyed the age of irony.
Remember the age of irony?
And finally, killed the Reagan boom under this kind of shroud of war, an unpaid-for war that we went into.
And right after 9-11 happened, The Onion ran a funny headline, Americans long to care about stupid crap again, reflecting back that all that stuff that had been so much turmoil and so much anguish that it created was really just stupid crap when you compared it to the real terrible things that can happen in life.
And I was thinking, that's exactly what these last two years have been like.
These last two years have been terrific years for America.
The economy has been good.
Employment has ramped up.
The whole manufacturing base has come back through Trump's administrations.
The administration of the government has been less, what's the word I want?
Well, it's been more legal, more constitutional than it was under Obama.
Obama's foreign ideas and his leftist governance has passed away.
And whatever was left of his legacy has been erased.
It's been really two good years.
And all this anguish and all this craziness has really just been stupid crap.
And if a tragedy, God forbid, happened to this country, the first thing we would think is, I long to care about that stupid crap again.
Let us talk about man crates, or as we say it here, man crates.
It's man crates.
I think it's, you know, when you ask your boyfriend, I know this is true of my wife, when you ask your boyfriend, your husband, what do you want for Christmas?
He says what I say to my wife, I know.
I know.
You know, that's the way guys think about the things.
We don't really know what we want, but you cannot go wrong if you get him a gift from man crates.
Man crates bring you wonderful gifts in a wooden crate that has to be pried open with a crowbar.
So let me tell you, your guy's not going to care what's in the crate as long as he gets to pry open a crate with a crowbar.
That's what we want.
But inside they have great crates like man, the knife making kit and the grill master crate.
I have that.
I love the grill master crate, and I especially love the whiskey appreciation crate, which I also have.
Great gifts that your man will like whether he knows it or not.
So listeners to the show can buy one 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, so buy one gift and get the second 25% off at mancrates.com slash clavin.
That's mancrates.com slash clavin.
You can pry open that thing and roar to the heavens.
How do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So the end of the year is coming.
The Clavenless Christmas is coming.
Now, the Clavenless Christmas isn't so bad because you get Jesus.
If you don't have Jesus, you're just screwed.
You don't have Jesus or me.
You're just screwed.
But you can get by without me if you have some Jesus for your Christmas.
And, you know, I thought we'd take it.
I was taking a look back at the year and what I thought of the year.
Bus Load of Minors00:05:17
And I really did think, you know, like all this time, it's been all this craziness.
Oh, did Trump, you know, did Trump pay off to bimbo's this not?
Yes, yes, that's the answer.
Yes, he did.
He did it.
And we can now move on and try and solve the problems of the country.
And I was just thinking, these really have been good years.
For me, the peak of the Trump administration was the Kavanaugh confirmation.
It was a beautiful, beautiful thing to see Republicans stand up to a genuine wave of anti-due process, anti-fair, anti-male, anti-truth hysteria that was so well organized and so general among the press.
You now forget how every single press outlet, except for Fox, obviously, was on this bandwagon of, oh my goodness, you know, Bette Kavanaugh has to be stopped.
And of course, they never cared whether Christine Blasey Ford was molested in high school.
They never cared about that.
It was never about that.
It was just stopping a conservative justice.
That's all it was about.
But it was enough, especially to play on the hearts and minds of women.
Women, you know, are the Democrats' prime target with this stuff.
And their people were screaming.
And the New York Times, if the New York Times, if the editors at the New York Times during this period of Kavanaugh hysteria had just gone out and stuck their, gone out into a cow pasture and stuck their heads in a patty, they would have stunk less than they stunk putting out article after article about how, oh, I was raped and therefore Kavanaugh is guilty, which is insane.
And yet the Republicans stood up to them, won the day, and actually the voters seemed to agree with that.
And the voters seemed to say, yes, you know, this was wrong.
This was hysteria, and we want our due process.
We do believe in innocent until proved guilty.
It was a beautiful, beautiful thing, and I don't think it would have happened necessarily without Donald Trump.
So now, here come the Democrats.
The Democrats are on their way, and so we can say goodbye to a lot of whatever was going to get accomplished.
They didn't get a lot accomplished, but they did some stuff in Congress.
And that you can pretty much say goodbye to it.
Now we're going to talk about the wall.
This is the new thing right now.
Is the government going to shut down over the wall?
I doubt it, but no one knows.
That's what they're arguing about.
And at the heart of this argument now has come the death of this seven-year-old girl.
I talked about it last week.
She was from Guatemala.
She came over with one of these horrible coyotes.
They dropped her and like 160 people, her and her dad and 160 people in New Mexico in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.
And the border guys, all they have is one bus.
They brought the bus.
The first load of people they brought back was, I think, unattended minors.
So it was just kids, went in the first bus, and then they came back and they put this girl in the second bus.
They said to the father, is she okay?
She was okay.
She wasn't exhibiting any signs of the fact that she was actually dehydrated.
She got on the bus.
They're driving back on the bus and she starts to have problems breathing.
They radio ahead to get EMT.
They flew her to hospital for help.
They revived her several times and she died.
And obviously, just an absolutely, absolutely heartbreaking story, not the sort of thing.
You know, I mean, look, look, there are children dying all over the country, children dying all over the world.
We focus on this one because this is what the news, the news media is interested in.
But that doesn't stop it from being a tragedy.
It doesn't stop it from being a terrible thing.
And of course, the news media immediately, immediately went into blame Trump mode, blame the administration mode.
And you always have to ask underneath this, well, what do you want?
In the same way you had to ask about Kavanaugh.
You don't really care about Blazing Ford.
So what do you want?
You want to stop Kavanaugh.
In this, what do you want?
Do you want open borders?
Is that really what you want?
Do you really want the floodgates to be open?
And are local people to have to vie for jobs with people who just wandered in?
Do you really not want there to be an immigration system?
So, of course, it was all blame the administration.
The NBC immediately reported fake news.
She didn't receive medical help.
She did.
She got medical help right away.
You know, these guys save thousands of lives.
Our border guys save thousands of lives every year.
And it is not their fault that people are coming over and doing this.
Politico says a lot of people use the headline, administration refuses responsibility for the death of seven-year-olds, of course, implying that they had some responsibility for the death of the seven-year-old.
And then, of course, then, of course, we got the Democrats.
Here is Representative Norma Torres.
She had this subtle take on the issue.
They murdered this child.
They did that.
They murdered the 18-month-old little girl that died a few days after they released her back in June.
And they murdered many other children and are separating families.
They must be held accountable.
So that's basically the take we're going to be hearing from the Democrats.
As the Democrats come into office, as they come into majority in the House, we're going to be hearing anything that happens, any tragic thing that happens at the border, obviously Trump's fault.
And again, what do they want?
Do they want open borders?
Is that what they want?
They say they don't.
They say they don't, but do they?
Why are they making that kind of fuss?
Wait till you hear, wait till you hear who told the truth about this.
Democrats vs. Border Crisis00:15:04
Wait till you hear this because it's amazing.
But first, let's talk about Grove Collaborative because the holidays are coming.
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Check out Grove and our special offer at grove.co slash clavin.
That's grove.co.com, C-O slash Clavin.
And I know you know how to spell C-O, but how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
No ease, no ease in Clavin.
I just make it look easy.
Who do you think told the truth about this?
Guess.
And you know what?
It wasn't on the right.
Because on the right, we sometimes get into this position where we say, oh, it's the fault of this father for bringing his child over.
We don't know what the guy's situation is.
We don't know what that guy's situation is.
Who told the truth?
Chris Cuomo.
And I go after Chris Cuomo a lot and I lump him together with Don Lemon, which after this, this actually changed my mind about the guy.
Don Lemon has never said anything like this.
He has never said, Don Lemon, as far as I can tell, if they just like put up one of those test patterns, like you would get just as much intelligent commentary as you get from Don Lemon.
Chris Cuomo, some light went on, and I'm not even going to run the guy down.
I'm not even going to make jokes about it because what he said was true for both sides and it was true addressing both sides.
Here is what he said about the death of the seven-year-old girl.
Don't demonize people working on the border with false allegations.
Don't demonize those desperate enough to do something like this father did for his daughter from Guatemala.
Walls matter.
But this stare down between the president and the Democrats is a deadly distraction.
It's not a single issue problem.
We're not a wall away from safety.
This system is killing people.
The rules allow a flow that the agencies cannot handle.
There is desperation on both sides of this.
Change is a must.
We will see more of this.
I hate to say that.
I am not an alarmist.
God forbid I'm right.
But there's no other reasonable conclusion.
If you can't accommodate the flow and people are desperate enough to come any way they can, you're going to have more extreme situations.
We can do better.
You don't have to let in more people to treat those who apply with humanity and to have a system that has rules that correspond to the resources needed.
You know, I have nothing to add to that.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but I am.
I mean, that was good stuff from Chris Cuomo.
You know, on the right, we waste a lot of time demonizing the people who come over because we say, well, if you cross over, you're a criminal.
But of course, we know that, and we know there are criminals.
And when the people on the left say, oh, there are no criminals, that's ridiculous.
We know that criminals come over.
Why not?
It's a criminal act to break into the country.
That's true.
But we also know people who are coming over who are desperate.
They are tricked by these coyotes.
They're told it's easy to get in.
They told once they're in, they're going to be, you know, full citizens, whatever they're told.
They don't know.
How do they know what the truth is?
And you come over with your kid and your kid dies.
You know, that's a tragedy.
It's a tragedy either way.
None of us can sit and say that, oh, none of us can shrug that off.
And he's right about this.
He's right too that Trump is stuck with the wall.
He promised the wall.
He made the big issue over the wall.
The wall would be helpful.
I do believe the wall would be helpful.
I'm not sure it's the most helpful thing.
I'd rather see that e-verify really put into effect.
But the wall would be helpful.
But it's not the only thing.
And the issue is, as guess who also says this, Donald J. Trump, who is president of the United States, also says this.
The problem is Congress.
The problem is Congress.
And the problem with Congress is to some degree the people.
The people will not let them compromise no matter what they do.
If anybody on the right says, hey, you know, ultimately, ultimately, the people who are already here are going to have to have some kind of path to legitimacy, if not to citizenship, the right goes insane.
But that's the truth.
That's the way it's going to be.
I've told you this from before Trump was running for president, that at some point, the people who are here are going to have to have a path to legitimacy.
And if anybody on the left says, oh, you know what, we actually do need security, and here is what it looks like, and here's what we're going to do.
I mean, we heard Chuck Schumer in that meeting in that argument with Trump say, we're offering you the same thing as last time.
I mean, if it was good last time, but of course it wasn't good last time.
So they are cowardly, they're mealy-mouthed, they're lying about what they want, and Chuck Schumer's waving his pen around and saying, we let King Donald make a law.
What do you expect?
You don't expect us to make laws.
We're just legislators, legislators.
When you have Chuck Schumer saying that, that's a problem too.
Chris Cromwell was absolutely right.
You know, Stephen Miller, who I always admire, I think the guy gets hit a lot because he's kind of a wonk.
He's kind of super wonk.
And they make fun of his hair.
You know, when they're making fun of your hair, you know that you're on the right track.
But he was on Face the Nation with, what's her name, Margaret Brennan.
And she is basically trying to load the fault on the Trump administration.
And he's taking the partisan tack.
But the partisan attack is also true.
Play the first cut of this.
Who bears responsibility for her death?
Our hearts break for the tragic death of the seven-year-old girl.
The loss of that precious life is horrifying.
It is a painful reminder of the ongoing humanitarian tragedy that is illegal immigration and the misery that it spreads.
A coyote dropped off 163 migrants in an extremely remote section of New Mexico.
Those individuals were found by Border Patrol, who, in many cases, act as first responders.
In fact, Border Patrol saves about 4,000 lives every single year.
Unfortunately, hundreds die on the dangerous trek up.
Smuggling organizations profit off death and misery.
They are vicious, vile organizations.
And so she now asks him, this is cut number three.
She asks him, is there going to be a shutdown over the wall?
Everybody's obsessed about the shutdown over the wall.
To me, the entire issue, if you're going to shut down the government over that, is so political.
It's so much for show.
What are you going to get?
There's $5 billion at stake, which in our government at this point is chump change, I'm afraid to say.
What's going to happen?
Are they going to shut down the wall and get $3 billion?
I mean, I think it's going to cost so much more than that to get the wall going.
Trump is just looking for a win on this.
Obviously, the Democrats cannot give it to him.
So it's an empasse.
It's an impasse.
And so it's really just show.
But here's his response, just to put it on the record.
When I get to this question of the border wall, which I know you're a huge advocate for, we are about five days from potential government shutdown.
And Republican leadership says there's no plan.
What is the president's plan?
And will he shut it down to get this $5 billion in border wall funding?
We're going to do whatever is necessary to build the border wall to stop this ongoing crisis of illegal immigration.
And that means that.
This is a very, if it comes to it, absolutely.
This is a very fundamental issue.
At stake is the question of whether or not the United States remains a sovereign country, whether or not we can establish and enforce rules for entrance into our country.
The Democrat Party is a simple choice.
They can either choose to fight for America's working class or to promote illegal immigration.
You can't do both.
Is there wiggle room on that $5 billion?
I'm not going to negotiate the details on air with you right now.
Well, Senator Simmer said this morning, you're not getting the border wall in the middle.
If the Democrat Party wants to, if the Democrat Party wants to go down the road of continuing to preserve a model that enriches smuggling organizations, that spreads misery on both sides of the border, that kills 300 Americans a week through heroin overdoses alone.
By the way, illegal heroin costs our country $230 billion every single year.
So what is the Democrat Party going to do?
I think we know.
I think we know what the Democrat Party is going to do.
With the raid on Michael Cohen's office, with the conviction of Michael Cohen, with Michael Cohen turning, you know, I mean, he was a sleazy guy before.
He's a sleazy guy now.
Now he's a sleazy guy pretending to be the savior of our country.
But with him turning evidence, they're now going to investigate every single aspect of Trump's life.
When I started the show that getting around about that, that's no joke.
That is what we're going to be looking forward.
There's going to be a subpoena every day.
Adam Schiff, the closest thing we have ever had to Joe McCarthy since Joe McCarthy.
I call him Tailgunner Adam.
They used to call Joe McCarthy Tailgunner Joe.
He is just any innuendo he can use, anything without proof, any charge he can make without proof, he will make.
He is just, he's going to be the head of the House Investigation Intelligence Committee, I believe.
Yes, he will be the head of the House Intelligence Committee.
And well, here's what he said.
Remember that Trump said, they asked Trump once, because they're always trying to get the future from Trump, what crazy thing is he going to do next?
Is he going to fire Mueller?
And at one point, Trump said it would be a red line if they started to investigate my personal finances as a way of getting at me.
And here's what Schiff said on Meet the Press.
Is there any entanglement with a foreign power that might influence U.S. policy against national interest?
And what we saw in the Michael Cohen revelations, some of the Michael Cohen revelations, that the president, while he was denying any dealings with Russia, his business actually was pursuing a multi-multi-million dollar deal in Moscow, hiding it from the country, seeking the Kremlin's help with it.
That's deeply compromising.
Now, the president has wanted to draw a red line and say, you can't look at my business.
But if the president's business is trying to curry favor with the Kremlin, we can't ignore that.
And the president should not be in a position to say, you can't investigate certain things, only other things that I don't care as much about.
So that's what I mean.
If Mueller is not looking into this, and I don't know whether he is, someone needs to, because otherwise we are being derelict with our security.
So that's what, so a seven-year-old girl dies at the border.
That's what Adam Schiff is going to be doing for the next two years.
That is what he is going to be taking care of.
Not going to be taking care of the border, not going to be taking care of the economy, not going to be taking care of anything else.
That is what the Democrat Party is going to be doing for the next two years.
And from the president, I got to say, I have just said that under his administration, we have had two of the best years that I can remember, certainly politically, economically.
It's been two great years.
But he sent out a tweet.
I got to score him on this.
So stupid over the weekend.
On Saturday Night Live, they did a skit, It's a Wonderful Life.
They stole this.
I don't know if they did it intentionally, but you know, Hugh Laurie from House, he had a show when I lived in England called A Bit of Fry and Laurie, and they did one of the funniest skits I've ever seen against Rupert Murdoch.
It was, it's a wonderful life.
And the idea was, what would happen if Rupert Murdoch never was born and everything would be great.
And it was this attack on Rupert Murdoch.
It was hilarious.
And so they stole that and did it about Donald Trump.
Trump tweets, a real scandal, he says, a real scandal is the one-sided coverage hour by hour of networks like NBC and Democrat spin machines like Saturday Night Live.
It is all nothing less than unfair news coverage and Dem commercials.
Should be tested in courts, can't be legal, only defame and belittle collusion.
This is what he sends out.
Now, listen, to me, one of the greatest things about Donald Trump has been his attacks on the press.
Okay, I think the press needs to be pummeled because we can't touch them because of the First Amendment and we should not touch them.
The First Amendment only guarantees that we don't touch them, but their rights come from God.
Our right to freedom of the press comes from God.
It is protected by the Constitution and by the First Amendment, but it comes from God.
There's no way that we should lay hands on the press, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be slapped silly until they decide to reform themselves and tell both sides of the story.
He's right about that.
But the idea that the president is sitting around and worrying about unfunny Saturday Night Live, a place with absolutely zero cultural resonance at this point.
I mean, who cares?
You know, it's like the New York Times every day they say the late night comedians are saying this.
And I think, let me guess.
They're against Donald Trump.
Because I know that comedy is cutting edge.
You know, I know that comedy on late night is cutting edge.
So it's hard to guess, but I think I'm just going to take a flyer here that they don't like Donald Trump.
So who cares what they say?
And the idea that the president, that they get under his skin is unnerving.
So that's what we can look forward to for the next two years is Adam Schiff, tailgunner Adam, going after every little stupid thing that he can find and slowing the government down and trying to slow Trump down.
And Trump letting it get to him, you know, letting it get to him, letting it get under his skin.
He shouldn't do it.
He should ignore it.
But listen, we've had two great years.
That is not Trump change.
Most presidencies end after six months.
Most presidencies do what they do in the first six months.
We have had two really good years and there will still be judges coming because we have the Senate and Ruth Bader Ginsburg forever, not wishing her ill.
I'm not, but nope, we all go.
And so there's more, more to come.
Hey, listen, you know, what's his name?
What's that guy's name?
The funny looking guy?
Knowles.
Knowles isn't here today.
So I wanted to get somebody who, instead of Knowles playing a cultural correspondent, I want to get somebody who really knows something about the culture, namely me.
And I have some really interesting cultural news to put forward, and we'll get to that in a minute, but I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Two Years of Change00:15:26
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All right.
I have a lot of cultural stuff I want to talk about, but I want to start with something about an institution that's actually near and dear to me, which has done something terribly, terribly wrong.
It has committed a breach of justice.
The Mystery Writers of America, where they give the Edgar Awards for Best Crime Writing.
I've been nominated for it five times.
I've won a couple of them.
They're an organization largely of lovely people, but they did something truly wrong.
And I got to talk about, you know, I believe that I am the youngest person ever to join the Mystery Writers of America.
I lied about my age and joined.
I think you have to be 18, or you did then, and I lied about my age.
And I joined when I was 15.
And my major memory of that period of the time, because I think I let my membership lapse and then came back and joined legally, but my major memory of belonging to the Mystery Writers of America at 15 was I went into New York to a cocktail party, which was very sophisticated for me at Mystery Writers of America.
And mostly it was in those days.
It became a much bigger organization over time, but in those days it was mostly old ladies who did write mysteries.
And I went to a cocktail party in Manhattan and this elderly gay guy, I call him elderly, he was probably 50, but to me, I was 15, started to chase me, like chase me around the room.
He tried to pick me up, and I said to him, I was, even at 15, I was cool, I was so cool.
I just said to him, hey, I'm really flattered, but I'm completely unI can't tell you how uninterested I am in sleeping with you.
And I walked away and he started to follow me.
And wherever I went, whatever conversation I went, and here I was, this 15-year-old trying to be a sophisticated guy at a writer's party.
I wanted so desperately to be a writer.
And here I was hanging out, and this guy just would not leave me alone.
And I kept saying to him, please, you know, I'm not interested.
And I get it.
I have nothing against you.
And in those days, I could have called the police.
But please leave me alone.
And he just kept following me, kept following me around.
And finally, I turned to him and I said, dude, you know, if I were a girl, I didn't say dude, because in those days we didn't say that.
I said, but if I were a girl and you were doing this, you would understand you're a creep.
But I'm not a girl.
And because I'm not a girl, I'm going to knock you into the middle of next week if you don't get the hell away from me.
And that finally chased him away and he left.
So I didn't get screwed by the Mystery Writers of America, but somebody did, Linda Fairstein.
Linda Fairstein was an intrepid prosecutor, Manhattan prosecutor.
She specialized in rape cases.
She was a very brave spokeswoman, sometimes saying, listen, you've got to understand that some of the people who come in and say they've been raped haven't been raped.
You can't believe all women.
But she prosecuted rape fearlessly.
And from 1976 to 2002, and I'm reading this from a city journal piece by Paul Hawthorne, but I know a lot of this stuff anyway, but I just want to make sure I get the facts right.
Linda Fairstein headed the Sex Crimes Prosecution Office under Robert Morgenthau, the Manhattan DA, and she wrote a book on sexual violence, our war against rape, and she became a mystery writer.
And she wrote mysteries based on her knowledge of being a prosecutor.
And last month, the Mystery Writers of America named her a Grand Master, which is the highest honor of the organization.
And they gave her the Grand Master Award.
And she started to get attacked because she was a prosecutor during the Central Park Jogger case in 1989.
Now, the Central Park Jogger case was an atrocity.
A group of kids went out, beat up several people in Central Park, raped and beat this woman into insensibility.
And they were largely black, and she was white.
Her name, let's see if I have her name.
Her name was Tricia Melley, and she was just brutally, brutally injured.
And several of these kids were sent to prison for it.
And at the time, at the time, this was a gang attack, right?
It was a gang attack.
And at the time, the jury knew that the DNA did not match the people who were being convicted, but it was a gang attack.
They didn't say that they had personally raped her.
But later, they were released because it was shown that the DNA was attached to somebody else, and somebody else confessed to being the guy who actually did the rape on this woman.
But to me, it is an open question.
These guys have sued, and the city settled with them for millions of dollars.
They made out like bandits, basically.
But there were other people who were six men who were viciously attacked in the park that night, and these guys admitted to doing it.
They admitted to doing it.
So people at the LA Times, Steve Cha, a Korean-American writer and editor of the crime section of the Los Angeles Review of Books, wrote in the Los Angeles Times, Fairstein shouldn't be the toast of a black Thai literary gala.
She should be notorious.
She was personally involved in securing the false confessions that formed the prosecution's entire case, fueled by racist tensions and racist rhetoric.
I remember this case.
There was no racist rhetoric except on the left, except the left claiming that this was a problem.
He compared them to the Scottsboro Boys, the Central Park V. It was five juveniles convicted.
And they started this big furor about this, and they took away Linda Fairstein's award.
Absolutely disgusting.
My friend and heroic editor, Otto Penzler, wrote them a furious letter.
Otto runs the mysterious bookshop in New York.
If you're ever in downtown New York, you should go and see it.
It's one of the great bookstores in the country.
And he just told them, he says, I've been a proud member of the MWA.
He too has won an Edgar Award.
I've been a proud member of the MWA for more years than many of you have been alive.
This is a letter he wrote to them, but that pride no longer pertains.
I am ashamed of you and of the organization for taking such a cowardly stance.
For many years, I've welcomed the celebration of the incoming board with a party at the mysterious bookshop.
That board does not deserve a celebration of any kind, and it would be a hypocritical of me to host one.
You are no longer welcome in my bookshop.
This is coming from a guy who makes his living publishing and selling mystery stories, and he has the guts to go up.
This is the kind of guts we need in the culture.
This is an attempt that what there really is, is doing culture while conservative.
That is what is being penalized here.
They do not want the narrative to be given over to the right at all.
Why?
Remember, we started out talking about the Kavanaugh hearing and what a triumph that was for justice, what a triumph it was for fairness and due process, and what a triumph it was over hysteria.
And so we feel, oh, we won.
We've won that.
But think about this, and I've mentioned this before, but it's worth mentioning again.
Think about Clarence Thomas.
Think about the fact this man who grows up speaking a Cajun dialect.
He's a descendant of slaves, comes from a single-parent household, makes his way to Yale, makes his way onto the Supreme Court, is a tremendous Supreme Court justice, has been constantly, constantly degraded by the left in racist terms as being sort of the just the follower of Antonin Scalia, which wasn't true.
He was to the right of Antonin Scalia, and there were times when Scalia followed his lead and not the other way around.
I remember a liberal, a liberal friend of mine saying to me, unbelievably saying to me, he was the shoeshine boy of Scalia.
I mean, something, you know, this is the way the left actually talks about black people.
You know, here's this brilliant jurist.
HBO makes a movie in which Anita Hill is the hero.
Not this man who, not this, you know, role model to any American who comes out of nowhere and out of nothing in a world that's still very bigoted against blacks and in an area that's still very bigoted against blacks and makes his way to Yale and makes his way to the Supreme Court.
He's not the hero.
This woman who says, oh, he mentioned dirty things in front of me, who he asked me on a date, where he never, by the way, never got in the way of Anita Hill's career.
That was never an issue.
He never did anything professionally.
Even if what she said was true, and Clarence Thomas denied it vehemently, but even if what she said was true, it was nothing.
It was zero.
It was weaponized gripes made to stop, as with Kavanaugh, just designed to stop a Supreme Court.
a Supreme Court justice who was conservative, and they make her the hero, and they do not want to cede that power even a little bit to the right.
And that's why, that's why Linda Fairstein lost her award that she deserves, her Grandmaster Award, an award I will never be given.
You know, listen, the last time, I think it was the last time I was nominated, I was nominated for a very politically incorrect short story called Her Lord and Master.
It is published in a book, it's published in several books, it's published in the best mysteries of the year that year.
It's published in a book called The Greatest American Noir of the Century.
Okay, so it is a well-regarded short story.
When I was nominated for that, one of the judges pulled me aside and said, look, you obviously deserve this award.
You're not going to get it.
And I said, thank you for letting me know.
I appreciate it.
And I knew exactly why I wasn't going to get it because it was politically incorrect.
I was practicing culture while on the right.
And they don't want to give that up because they want the narrative.
Remember, even after Clarence Thomas won, even after he became a Supreme Court justice, even after he has laid his mark on the court, they reserve the power to denigrate him and to make Anita Hill the hero of his story.
And speaking of this, speaking of this, there are now voices on the right that we have to start listening to.
I'm sorry, voices, black voices on the left that we have to start listening to.
There are black voices speaking in the culture on the left that are saying things that are conservative.
And, you know, I have been asked before and was recently asked whether the Republican Party could survive with the demographics of the country changing.
In other words, as there are fewer white people, as more colored people came in, could we survive?
Could the Republican Party survive?
And what I said was, sure, we can, because who cares what color Americans are as long as they're Americans, but you have to go in and talk to people.
And a lot of conservatives don't know this, but talking to people doesn't actually mean wagging your finger in their face and explaining the principles of conservativism to them.
It means sharing with them the things that we know that work and that help people and listening to them about ways in which maybe our theories and our philosophies don't fit necessarily like a glove with the situation that they're in, okay?
And that's part of talking to people is also listening to people.
So recently, two things that came across, came to my attention over the weekend that really got to me.
One was Nick Cannon, an actor and comedian who talked about Kevin Hart being banned from the Oscars, being forced to quit the Oscars, a job that Kevin Hart wanted, like Clarence Thomas, not comparing the two, but like Clarence Thomas, came from a very tough upbringing.
His father, a criminal cocaine addict, you know, and he worked his way into show business, very difficult to do, became a star in show business, got this dream job, had to give it up because of something he said about gay people.
Now, a lot of this, you will notice, a lot of stuff that's happening is gay people attacking black people.
Why?
Because it's not, when I say gay people, I mean gay activists.
There are plenty of gay conservatives, and gay people, in my experience, are naturally conservative in a lot of ways.
But these are gay people who want to stop black people from drifting in any way, becoming in any way conservative.
And why is this a problem?
Well, listen.
Listen to what Cannon says about what happened to Kevin Hart.
Let's play cut number five.
It's a little reminiscent of McCarthyism when you think about times like this where everyone's just scared to move, scared to speak.
And I'm not.
I'm very unafraid.
I'm very fearless when it comes to.
So, and go on.
He goes on in cut six.
He and I are both from the schools of the Richard Pryors, of the George Carlins, of the Robin Williams, these people that were allowed to say whatever they wanted to say because the job of a comedian is to hold the mirror up to society and say, look.
And I believe all those people I retweeted have done that in the past.
I believe Kevin has done that.
I believe I do that.
What I believe, though, is that we have to be very careful with our power because we all come from communities that have experienced great pain.
And when we start to compare our pain, that's the wrong thing.
We're just doing it for a victory.
We're looking for progress here.
And I believe that this conversation needs to be had.
But I need this conversation to happen on an open base where no one's afraid to say how they ultimately feel so we can grow from these experiences, opposed to talking about it in quiet, talking about it in our private sectors, and then we come and then we want to be politically correct.
That's my problem.
I have a problem with the politically correct aspect.
Okay, so everything this guy is saying, I agree with.
Now, he probably thinks I'm the bad guy, right?
He thinks, oh my gosh, an old white male conservative Republican.
And yet, here we have common ground.
We want free speech.
The people that he's comparing himself to, just look, an artist is an artist first.
Being an artist, I am an artist.
I'm going to tell you, it is like your skin.
It's like your lungs.
It's like your brain.
It's like when people ask you, would you rather have a happy romantic relationship or would you rather be happy in your work?
If you're an artist, saying you're not happy in your work or you're not doing your work is like saying you have no lungs.
It's like saying you have no heart, no blood.
You're dead.
And so the guys he's comparing himself to, the Robin Williams and the Richard Pryors, he doesn't care what color they are.
They're his color.
They're comedian colored.
They're comedian colored.
And if you're committed to being a comedian, you're committed to being an artist, you're going to be committed to free speech.
And that is one of the linchpins of conservatism, conservatism, and one of the linchpins of keeping conservatism alive in a world, a corporate world, where all the powerful corporations, the Twitters, the Facebooks, the NBCs are standing against you.
Conservative Comedy Challenges00:05:48
I saw this again in a movie I watched, The Equalizer 2 with Denzel Washington.
And I saw the first one of these, and I didn't like it.
I loved the first half hour of the first one.
And then it got kind of sadistic in its violence.
He was in like a Home Depot and using all these kind of DIY, do-it-yourself tools to kill people.
And I thought, just shoot him.
I don't want to see a nail gun.
I don't want to see a guy riddled with a nail gun.
I love action films, but it just got a little too much for me.
This one is a much more measured story, but it's really complex.
I'm running out of time, which is too bad, because it's worth talking about.
It's filled with identity politics stuff.
The Equalizer is this guy invented, I believe, by my pal Joel Cernow, who did 24.
The Equalizer is a guy who is a CIA assassin who now goes around just helping ordinary people.
And it starts out with him going to Turkey to get back from an abusive Muslim guy to get back a child that he stole.
But in everything he does, there's an aura of identity politics.
So he helps an old Jewish guy who's been separated from his sister in the Holocaust.
He helps a Muslim woman who has suffered from vandalism.
He helps a black guy who is a black kid who's being sucked into the gangs.
So it's like everybody has a sort of a problem that is according to their race.
Like, you know, it's like Jewish people have never had any other problems but the Holocaust or anti-Semitism, but everybody has a problem with this race.
So there's identity politics in it.
But the values in the picture are incredibly conservative.
He's a Marine.
He's a patriot.
He believes in good and evil.
He talks about manhood throughout.
Almost his first line is he says, I'm looking for a man, an abusive man, and therefore not a real man.
So he talks about what real manhood is.
He talks about responsibility, a personal responsibility, all of these things.
And when he pulls, and in it, he's selling Tanahese coats.
They plug Tanahese Coates' books.
And I don't like Tanaheshi Coates because I feel he's a grievance guy.
He thinks that the past can be restored.
He thinks that giving money to people to pay them back for money they didn't get because of bigotry is going to work.
That's an absurd, absurd notion.
It's never, that never works.
But okay, okay.
I'll listen.
I'll listen.
If there's something black people find in Tanahese coats that I don't see, I'll listen to that because listen to this speech he makes to this young kid after he pulls him out of a gangland situation.
Listen to what he tells him.
What do you see when you look at me?
Tell me, you better give me a right answer.
Tell us what you see.
You don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Man, they spell GUN, son.
You got a choice.
You got talent.
You got a chance, and I want to hear about your environment and what your mama didn't give you, and the white man won't give you no shot.
You got a chance.
Use it while you're still alive.
You don't know what death is.
You have no idea what death is.
If that's not conservatism in a nutshell, you don't know what death is.
Use your talent while alive.
Don't worry about what the white man won't give you.
Don't worry about what your environment, what your mama wouldn't do for you.
I mean, is there anything in that?
Is there anything in that we disagree with?
Now, Denzel is a Christian, I know, but I also know he's a liberal.
And yet, and yet, where do you get that message?
You never get that message from the left.
It is all about the game is rigged.
You've got no chance.
You've got to right the wrongs of the world.
The world, the wrongs of the world will never go away.
They're never going away.
They can get better.
You can do work to right the wrongs of the world.
But if you've got talent and you've got a chance, you do it just what he said.
These voices, these voices are our voices.
These voices are our voices.
I'm an old white guy telling you that that voice speaks for me.
What the comedian Nick Cannon was saying, that speaks for me.
That is our voice.
If we can't talk to those people and listen to those people who are saying these things, then we have no future.
Then we have no future.
But the culture is speaking.
The culture is speaking in spite of every effort on the left to shut it down.
It is saying conservative things.
We need to hear those things.
We need to answer them.
We need to listen to the people saying because they're going to say things that don't fit in with our philosophies.
And we need to shape our philosophies to fit them and help them.
That can be done.
All that can be done.
But as long as we do that, we have hope.
If we act like stupid conservatives, not paying attention to the culture and just paying attention to the next congressional election, we'll blow it all.
We will blow it all.
Hey, I haven't got time for our crappy culture.
I am out of time, but I'll be back tomorrow.
So be here.
Then I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Technical producer, Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And their animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production, copyright forward publishing 2018.
Hey guys, on the Matt Wall Show today, we'll be discussing the latest in the left's attempts to exploit the death of a seven-year-old immigrant girl.
Also, a man appropriated womanhood last night and competed in the Miss Universe pageant.
Why won't the left apply its logic on appropriation to situations like that?