Andrew Clavin dissects America’s fractured identity, mocking progressive policies like open borders and critiquing Trump’s chaotic Syria withdrawal—contrasting it with Obama’s Iraq blunder that fueled ISIS. He slams bipartisan failure on entitlements and debt while exposing media bias framing Trump supporters as Nazis. DJ Jaffe reveals California’s $2B mental health funds wasted on prevention over treating severe cases like schizophrenia, linking untreated illness to mass shootings and homelessness. Clavin ties political chaos to cultural decay but pivots to faith, urging listeners to seek joy in Christianity amid the crisis. [Automatically generated summary]
Christmas is almost here, and that means you'll be sitting down with your relatives in the spirit of bright goodwill in order to share a holiday meal and crush their political positions with your searing insights, your cutting wit, and your knowledge of the porn searches they tried to erase, but which you uncovered and are more than willing to reveal to the entire family in the middle of dessert.
And isn't that what Christmas is all about?
For it's written in the gospel according to YouTube, the Lord sat down to dine with sinners and absolutely destroyed them.
And that went totally viral, so I'm sure your family dinner can do the same.
Here then are some tips on how to deal with your leftist relatives over Christmas dinner.
I think you can be pretty sure your sister will bring up that ridiculous old idea that Christians should be loving and caring toward those in need and that therefore there should be no borders, but anyone should be able to come into this country, take jobs away from the American poor, and rape and kill innocents as Jesus intended.
You can, of course, easily counter this argument by saying that Jesus did not expect America to destroy itself, or if he did, it was probably some sort of Jewish plot he got involved in by mistake when he was younger.
And a believing Christian could show charity to refugees by going down to the border and doling out food, which you have absolutely no intention of doing.
Then there's your uncle Bob, who loves to make snide remarks about how evangelicals supported President Trump, even though he committed adultery with Playboy bunnies.
But of course, you can smash him by pointing out that Playboy Bunnies weren't even invented when Jesus was around.
And not only that, Jesus wasn't married.
So if there were bunnies, it wouldn't have been adultery.
I hope these helpful hints will ease your Christmas dining and will, in the true spirit of the season, help you destroy all your relationships with those closest to you.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Shipshape, 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, hurrah.
All right, stop laughing.
Let's get serious.
One of the things you find out in life, or at least should find out in life, is that it's very hard to know what you ought to do if you don't know who you are.
Many of us may waste many years of our lives trying to force the world and God to accept us as we wish to be rather than making the best of what we've actually got in the situation we happen to be in.
This is happening to America on the world stage and at home.
We don't know who we are, and it's affecting our ability to decide what to do.
Candid Co. and Self-Discovery00:02:48
Overseas, we let our emotions get ginned up by some crisis somewhere, and we send in the troops only to find out we have no way to get out and no interest in staying in.
And as a result, the finest fighting force that has ever existed on the face of the planet repeatedly suffers defeat and humiliation at the hands of our politicians.
Here at home, we either rip at our fellow Americans as if they were enemies, or we listen to them with real civility and find out, holy crap, some of them are actually enemies.
As this Clavin year comes to an end, we find our divisions and confusions rising up again in ways that are bound to play themselves out in the clavin year head.
We're going to talk all about it.
But first, let us talk about Candid Co. because this is an easy and inexpensive way to fix your teeth the way you have always wanted them to be fixed.
We used it on Knoll's and look at him.
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Candid makes clear liners that are sent directly to your home and are customized specifically for you to straighten your teeth.
The first step is to purchase their modeling kit, which will be sent to your home so you can take impressions of your teeth.
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After you send back your impressions with some photos of your teeth, Candid's network of orthodontists reviews your specific case and provides you with a 3D preview of what your treatment will look like.
You're one step away from getting straighter, whiter teeth.
Take advantage of Candid's risk-free modeling kit guarantee.
Plus, when you use my dedicated link, candidco.com/slash Claven, you'll save 25% on your modeling kit.
That's candidco.com/slash clavin to get 25% off the price of your modeling kit.
Candidco.com/slash clavin.
Your teeth will look beautiful when you say, how do you spell Clavin?
That's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So this is the last show I should mention before the end of the year, right?
Now we plunge you into clavenless weeks, but Christmas is coming, which actually does trump even the presence of God actually trumps even the presence of Clavin.
Don't forget to get yourself a copy of the lefties dictionary for somebody you really want to tick off for the holidays in the spirit of the system, the season.
And of course, you can pre-order another kingdom at anotherkingdom.editorsexclusives.com and they'll send you all kinds of free stuff, pictures for your phone and a video, I think.
Oh, and a prequel that I wrote my very own self, which is, by the way, absolutely great.
Is It Worth Risking Sons?00:14:58
So you want to take advantage of that as well when you're sitting around not doing much over the holidays.
So obviously we're talking about Trump.
Trump has declared that he's pulling out of Syria.
There are about 2,000 troops.
This is the place where ISIS went nuts.
They had, you know, remember that Obama pulled out of Iraq in 2011.
That was what he had promised to do.
I said at the time, he promised it.
I said he was making the wrong promise.
He should promise to pull us out of Afghanistan and to double down in Iraq.
But did he listen to me?
No, he didn't.
And as a result, ISIS took off and spread.
And you remember, this is when he said, oh, it's the JV team of Al-Qaeda because he was a pompous pseudo-intellectual ass who didn't know what the hell he was talking about.
And by 2014, ISIS controlled about 40,000 square miles of territory.
And we have been bragging on Trump on this show because he sent Madison there and it took him about 20 minutes to wipe these guys off the face of the earth, destroy their caliphate, and get rid of them.
And now he comes out and kind of suddenly, apparently, according to people close to the administration, this happened suddenly without too much consultation.
He released a video saying he's pulling him out.
Let's play that video one.
We've been fighting for a long time in Syria.
I've been president for almost two years and we've really stepped it up.
And we have won against ISIS.
We've beaten them and we've beaten them badly.
We've taken back the land and now it's time for our troops to come back home.
I get very saddened when I have to write letters or call parents or wives or husbands of soldiers who have been killed fighting for our country.
It's a great honor.
We cherish them, but it's heartbreaking.
There's no question about it.
It's heartbreaking.
Now we've won.
It's time to come back.
They're getting ready.
You're going to see them soon.
These are great American heroes.
These are great heroes of the world because they fought for us, but they've killed ISIS who hurts the world.
And we're proud to have done it.
And I'll tell you, they're up there looking down on us.
And there is nobody happier or more proud of their families to put them in a position where they've done such good for so many people.
So our boys, our young women, our men, they're all coming back and they're coming back now.
We won and that's the way we want it and that's the way they want it.
Now, let me say first off, and this is going to tick some of you off, but I don't care because I hated this video.
I just hated it.
And this has nothing to do with whether you think it's a good idea to pull our troops out or not.
It was calling on the fallen soldiers to support his policy.
And the reason I hate this is the fallen soldiers were real men.
They were actual men.
They were actual human beings and are still with us in another kingdom.
They're still there.
But some of them were liberals.
Some of them were conservatives.
Some of them were Democrats.
Some of them were Republicans.
They had all kinds of different political points of view.
They are not little drawings of angels that Donald Trump or Barack Obama or anybody else gets to call to the service of his policy.
That is wrong.
That is a misuse.
That is a misuse of these guys who sacrificed their lives as the sharp end of the spear of American liberty and American values in the world.
It's just the wrong thing to do.
Now let's talk.
I have to say, I had to say that because it made me gag.
But now let's talk about the policy itself.
Of course, let's hear the other side.
And we can always rely on Lindsey Graham to hear it.
I'm not knocking him.
He is consistent.
He is a hawk.
The guy would invade Porto San if he thought there was an Iranian and they're taking a leak.
This is a guy who believes this, but he makes a very concise argument for why he thinks this is utterly the wrong thing to do.
When Obama pulled out of Iraq, I knew exactly what was going to happen.
The military told President Obama, if you leave now, the radicals that are still around are going to regenerate.
And all the people that helped us in Iraq, a lot of them died.
Same thing's going to happen in Syria.
This came out of left field to me.
Congress hasn't been informed of this decision.
Congress needs to call the administration over like we did in Iraq and ask the Trump administration, what are you doing and why?
The one thing I can assure everybody, that the Kurds are at risk.
Our American personnel on the ground, aid workers and diplomats are at risk.
We're going to be seen as having abandoned an ally.
Good luck getting somebody to help you fight this war in the future.
Iran's going to be really happy.
And the ISIS folks have got a shot in the arm in Turkey is licking their chops.
If you're a Syrian Kurd today, it's a bad day for you.
If you're an American who believes that we need to keep the war over there, not here, bad day for you.
And I know the military commanders have advised the president that withdrawing this 2,200 force would create a lot of national security concerns for our country.
And on top of the list is the jeopardy we put the Kurds in.
The Kurds always get screwed.
I mean, we say we're going to protect them.
We call them to our service.
We say we're going to collaborate with them.
Then we dump them and they get killed.
Erdogan in Turkey is just waiting to slaughter these guys.
And he is not our friend.
And he is not the friend of our policies, either over there or here.
He is an Islamist tyrant moving a country that was once more or less secular within an Islamic context toward more and more oppression.
And he wants to kill off the Kurdish rebels.
And they've been protected by the fact that they're with us, they no longer will be.
Now, remember, all the objections about what Trump is doing have to do not with what's happening now, but what people fear will happen, which is that the area will descend into chaos and murder as it did when Obama pulled out of Iraq.
And I think that's kind of guaranteed.
Why?
Because that's how they roll in the Middle East.
The Middle East is an oppressive, violent, bloody place.
And so the question is, is it in our interest, is it in America's interest for us to risk our sons keeping the peace in some of these places.
And here is my problem, okay?
We don't know who we are about this, and we never do.
So what we constantly do is we see a crisis and we send troops in with a mission, then a new president comes in with a completely different idea of who America is, and everything changes, and who gets screwed?
The troops get screwed, our allies get screwed, the world kind of gets screwed again and again.
President George W. Bush, after 9-11 and the shock and trauma after 9-11, basically came up with a huge, I think maybe a little bit overhuge, policy where we were going to spread democracy in the Middle East.
It wasn't a senseless policy.
The idea was if we spread democracy, terrorism won't take root and all these terrible Wahhabi versions of Islam won't get radicalized and we won't be the villain anymore.
And so now they'll have democracies over there.
You know, in some ways, it came close to working.
The Arab Spring was a tremendous upsurge and call for more freedom in the Middle East.
George W. Bush almost pulled it off.
What was the problem?
The problem was he was gone.
He didn't do it fast enough.
He was gone.
And a new president came in with an utterly different idea of what America should be.
You know, they're comparing what Trump is doing pulling out here to what Obama did in pulling out of Iraq.
And that may be a fair comparison tactically, but it's not a fair comparison philosophically because the two men have utterly different visions of what America should be.
What Obama saw in the future, because he always knew what the right side of history was, what Obama saw in the future was that we were just going to become another state in the world nation.
He said it himself.
It's not fair for one country to be ahead of everybody in the world.
And we have, oh, we apologize because we've been arrogant and all this stuff.
And so that's why he was pulling out.
He was not pulling out for the same reason.
He was doing the same thing that Trump is doing, but not for the same reason.
Trump has a different vision.
Trump's vision is we live in a great big world of competiting nations in which we are the best nation and our responsibilities stop at our boundaries.
The New York Times, a former newspaper, attacked him today or kind of dug at him today by saying that he'd rather use his troops on the American borders than in Syria.
He would.
He would.
And that's his philosophy.
That's absolutely right.
Most people don't know where Syria is.
They don't know why we should be in Syria.
He won't pay right now any political price for pulling out.
The problem is the next time these guys rise up, and they will, the next time you turn on your TV or your phone or whatever you're looking at for your news and you see guys dressed in black and masks beheading people who you're sympathetic toward, whether it's Yazidi women being sold into slavery or some American guy who's over there for some reason who gets beheaded, when you start seeing that stuff, what are you going to do?
The same people who are saying, ah, yes, America first, are going to be saying, we've got to go in there and we've got to do something about this.
And the same Democrats who said, oh, what a wonderful guy Obama was keeping his promise pulling out are going to say what a terrible guy Trump was keeping his promise pulling out.
We don't know who we are on the world stage.
Here's what I think.
I am kind of an imperialist.
Actually, believe that America is a de facto empire that doesn't take the benefits of empire, which is control of the countries that we have to fight with and some kind of profit out of them.
We don't do that, but we take on all the responsibilities of empire that are what bring empires down, which is the military responsibility to fight things out.
To me, we're in there.
We're stuck with it.
We have an interest.
Our interest is that if ISIS spreads again, and it's not just ISIS in Syria, they're still there and al-Qaeda is still there.
Pardon me, if they spread again to take territory, they inspire and invite terrorists to act on their behalf.
We remember people killing people saying, oh, yes, I'm acting on behalf of ISIS.
I believe the gay bar that got shut up in Florida, that's what he said, because they were inspired by this dream they have of an Islamic caliphate that seemed to be coming true.
We have a responsibility to that.
Do we have a responsibility to keep Iran back and to keep Russia from using its influence?
Russia has a naval base over there, I believe, but they certainly want influence in that territory.
Look, there's no walking away from history.
There just isn't.
I think Israel and Saudi Arabia are more responsible for taking care of Iran than we are, but 2,000 troops, I don't know, that doesn't seem like such a big investment.
This seems to me like a mistake.
It seems to me like a mistake, but we're going to find out.
But the thing is, you have to decide before the crisis, before the crisis, who you are, just like a girl has to decide before she gets into the backseat of a car with a guy.
She's got to decide who she is.
We have to decide who we are on the world stage.
What I think is we are, you know, it's all well and good to say we're not the world's police, but we are the big dog for freedom.
We're not the only big dog.
Russia may be a paper tiger, but there's still a big dog.
China, ever-increasing big dog, but we are the only big dog for freedom.
I think sometimes we have to live up to that responsibility, and I think this was a case where we could have done it without doing much.
I know Trump wants to bring people home.
I respect that.
I respect the idea that we shouldn't be involved.
But once we're there, once we're holding up the roof, we shouldn't let it come caving in.
The other thing that happened yesterday that also speaks to this was Paul Ryan's farewell.
He made a kind of lovely farewell speech about who we are now and how our politics is broken.
That's the way he put it.
I may be the last fan Paul Ryan has.
He didn't want to be Speaker of the House, and he wasn't a very good Speaker of the House.
I don't think he got enough accomplished.
But to me, if you don't like Paul Ryan, you're not into conservative politics.
When I say that's two words, not just conservative, but politics.
Politics is getting 100 people, 300 people who disagree to vote on the same thing, all of them with huge egos and constituencies at home.
And Paul Ryan was trying to do that.
And he started out as a policy guy.
He started out trying to fight the debt and reform entitlements.
I think that that is a huge, huge conservative issue.
I think that it is a big issue.
Right now, we are making more tax money because of the tax cuts than ever.
We're taking record amounts of money, and we're in record debt.
That's a spending problem.
That's a provable spending problem.
Paul Ryan had the guts to talk about doing that.
He failed.
Failure is not a sin.
He tried, but he failed.
And the fact that conservatives jumped on his back because he wasn't a big hawk on the borders, because he couldn't get the dogs in line.
He couldn't wrangle the cats well enough.
I think that that was wrong.
He braved what was called the third rail of politics by standing up and saying we've got to reform entitlements.
And I respect him for that.
Despite his failures and moments of incompetence, I respect him for that.
So here's his speech.
He got up and talked about how our politics is broken.
Let's play cut number three.
You know, we have a good sense of what our politics should look like.
A great clash of ideas, a civil, passionate discourse through which we debate and resolve our differences.
A system of government, our system doesn't just allow for that.
Our system depends on that.
One side may win, one side may lose.
We dust ourselves off and then we start anew, knowing that each one fought in pursuit of their honest ideals.
But today, too often, genuine disagreement quickly gives way to intense distrust.
We spend far more time trying to convict one another than we do trying to develop our own convictions.
Being against someone has more currency than being for anything.
And each of us, each of us has found ourselves operating on the wrong side of this equation from time to time.
So he goes on to talk about how social media fuels the kind of outrage machine, which is fair enough.
But it is also fair to say that the divisions in the political world reflect the divisions in the country.
There was a USA Today Suffolk University poll that showed we don't agree on almost anything.
Untreated Mental Illnesses00:15:15
Republican voters worry that the newly empowered congressional Democrats will go too far in investigating Trump.
Democrats worry they won't go far enough.
Republicans want Congress to start the year by reducing illegal immigration and funding the border wall.
Democrats want Congress to begin by addressing health care.
Just about everybody agrees that we are divided.
An overwhelming 78% said the country has become more divided since Trump took office, not more united.
I'm not even sure that's true.
I think that maybe we were divided under Obama just as much.
Ryan ended on a note of hope.
Let's play that.
It was a really interesting thing to say.
Cut number five.
If we do these three things, make progress on poverty, fix our immigration system, and confront this debt crisis, we can make this another great century for our country.
Look, I recognize that these challenges are ones we haven't made much progress on in recent years.
But I got to tell you, I am confident we still have it in us to solve them.
A good friend of mine recently commented to me that amid the frenzy of politics today, he's got more faith in our system of government than ever before.
As he put it, in our system, really bad ideas, they get killed.
And good ideas, they just take time.
Our problems are solvable if our politics will allow it.
You know, he talked about how close we came, for instance, to an immigration compromise.
It was the Democrats who walked away from that because they want this issue.
They don't want to lose the issue.
They don't want to give Trump his wall.
If they give him his wall, then he has a victory and he can go back.
Even if it means resolving the DREAMers problem, they don't care.
They want the issue.
And the Republicans have their heads up their rear ends because they can't come together and decide that they're going to make some compromises, that they're going to face down their base and say, look, something has to be done about the people who are here illegally.
We have to give them at least a path to legitimacy, if not to citizenship.
And in return for that, we get the wall.
We get the kind of security that we need.
The brokenness of our policies reflects the brokenness of the country because we don't know who we are.
And the left, I think, has gone insane.
And the right has kind of is in division.
The right is in division because the right is in division for one reason because a wider spectrum of people belong in the right.
The left, I think, is really moving more and more solidly into real left-wing craziness territory.
On the right, we have our right-wing crazies, but we have a lot of people blending even to classical liberals, people who really not that long ago, 10, 20 years ago, would have been typical Democrats.
I mean, if you go back even further and listen to a John F. Kennedy speech, he sounds like a Republican today.
I mean, the Republicans are not that far out, you know, far away from what Democrats used to be back in the 60s.
It's really the left that has drifted left, despite what the press says.
Speaking of the press, that is the one group in our country that we can depend on to know their identities.
They are a bunch of lying leftist scum.
I just want to play, before I close, we have a guest coming on, a really interesting guy you're going to want to hear from named DJ Jaffe, who's going to talk about violence and mental illness.
I got in touch with him after the mass shooting at the synagogue, and he has really fascinating things to say.
But before that, I just want to play, this is from Grabian News.
They put together a couple of montages of some of the press.
How can I put them?
The press overstepping throughout the year.
And I put some of them now.
I had our guys put together a montage of Trump derangement syndrome in the press throughout the year.
And here it is from Grabian.
A bombshell report.
This is a bombshell.
This is a bombshell.
This bombshell.
Dropped the bombshell.
Dropped the bombshell.
The bombshell.
That's a bombshell.
Yeah, this latest bombshell.
Who put out that bombshell accusation?
Bombshell accusation.
Well, that was the bombshell.
It's obviously a racist.
He's obviously a demagogue.
He obviously condones anti-Semitism.
That's what happened in Nazi Germany.
This is Trump's Reichstag fire.
We're going to see if this reign lasts for 30 days or two years or a thousand-year Reich.
Republicans have to call this out because their souls are on the line.
It's not even a question of whether it's presidential behavior or not.
It's not minimally human behavior.
This has now become a struggle about good versus evil.
And the president of the United States is evil.
We can no longer say Trump's the bad guy.
If you vote for Trump, you're the bad guy.
Tens of millions of people voted for him.
Are you suggesting that they're racist?
Yes.
The people who vote, all the people who voted for Donald Trump are right.
Yes.
There is something to be said about that the folks calling for stability might need to check their privilege.
These policies that this administration is putting forth are intentionally cruel.
They are racist.
And it is our job as citizens to speak out against that.
If you vote for Trump, then you, the voter, you, not Donald Trump, are standing at the border like Nazis.
Those people who are supporting what he's doing here are racist, period.
I love it.
So here's what we can look forward to.
The Democrats are taking over the House.
More division as we try and figure out, as this country goes through what I think is going to be a 10-year process of finding out what the new normal is, who we are, what we believe, both overseas and at home, and where we stand.
That will be worked out both in our politics and in our culture.
We each have a responsibility to be part of that fight.
But the one thing we can all depend on is the press is going to lie to us and try to move us to the left.
So we all have at least a responsibility to fight back, and at least we'll get some laughs out of it.
All right.
We're going to go into our interview without breaking, but please go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
It's allows you 10 bucks a month, allows you $100.
You get the whole year.
That upcoming year, you're going to need it.
You're going to need it.
And hopefully you're going to need this too, the leftist tears tumbler, so you can drink the tears of leftists.
I know it's cruel, but they taste so good.
All right.
You know, one of the big stories, of course, of this year and certainly of last year was the mass shootings.
This year we had the Parkland School shooting, the Tree of Life anti-Semitic shooting, Santa Fe High School, just a lot of shooting.
And one of the things that is galling to me about these shootings is, of course, they're so tragic.
They break your heart.
Sometimes young people taken away from us.
It's just awful.
And it is so awful to see the press and their Democrat allies.
I mean, the Democrats and the press are basically the same people.
It is so awful to see them using the bodies of the dead to push their anti-gun agenda and to push all their agendas, whatever agenda they can put forward.
Now, you know, after the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, they started trying to defend George Soros.
Oh, it was anti-Semitic to attack George Soros.
It is good American policy to attack George Soros.
The guy's a moron.
But the thing is, it's terrible to watch people play with our policy over the bodies of the dead.
So I got in touch after this after the Tree of Life shooting, I believe it was, with DJ Jaffe.
He is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
He's executive director of Mental Illness Policy Org, Mental Illness Policy Org, which produces nonpartisan policy analysis.
He's also the author of Insane Consequences, How the Mental Health Industry Fails the Mentally Ill.
And I called him up to talk about the one thing that unites so many of these shooters, so many of these shooters, the fact that they're obviously mentally ill.
Have I got DJ Jaffe?
Oh, there he is.
DJ, can you hear me?
How you doing?
I can hear you beautifully.
Thanks so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Let me begin with this.
When I got in touch with you, you wrote me an email that said that you are a stone liberal, but the only people who will talk to you are conservatives.
Why is that?
100% of the population can have their mental health improved.
18% have something in the diagnostic and statistical manual, but there are 4% who are seriously mentally ill.
And unfortunately, my fellow liberals won't admit that that means certain things.
So liberals won't admit that the untreated, seriously mentally ill are more violent than others.
They won't admit that some need hospitalization.
They won't admit that involuntary inpatient commitment is better than incarceration.
Involuntary outpatient treatment is better than homelessness.
And there's a bunch of politically correct ideas they have that everyone recovers, no one's more violent, hospitals aren't needed.
That prevents them from helping the seriously mentally ill.
That really is tragic.
Because am I right in thinking, I mean, even in this, even in the synagogue shooting, obviously anti-Semitism is a curse throughout the world.
It doesn't care if you're on the right or the left.
It finds its way into people's hearts.
But the guy who did this struck me as not just a hateful anti-Semite.
He struck me as an anti-Semite who was mentally ill.
And am I right in thinking that many, many of these shooters are, in fact, suffering from mental illness?
Well, two publications, The Washington Post and Mother Jones, have both kept databases of actual shootings, mass shootings.
They define them slightly different.
And in both cases, they do find that a very large percentage has untreated serious mental illness.
In almost all cases, the individuals are known to the mental health system, but weren't being given treatment.
And that's the area that I try to focus on, is to get the mental health system to focus on the most seriously ill.
The ability to get help has become inversely related to need.
The least seriously ill are going to the head of the line, and the most seriously ill are going to jail, shelters, prisons, and morgues.
And what my fellow liberals tend to do is they want to criticize police when they intervene with someone with mental illness, and it works out unfortunate, but they don't want to recognize the culpability of the mental health system in allowing these people to go untreated.
So, I mean, mental illness also, I mean, in LA, I drive around.
We have these homeless cities.
It's just insane.
Is that also mental illness?
Is that what I'm looking at?
Because it seems to me there are so many ways in America of helping people in dire need.
It seems that if you're living on the street, there may be something wrong with you mentally.
Am I right about that?
Well, there's a variety of reasons, but about 30, 40, maybe up to 50% of those who are homeless are seriously mentally ill.
And California is really unique.
First of all, I did a book tour for my book in California, and everywhere I went, they wanted to take me to visit their homeless camps, which are full of seriously mentally ill.
It was like a tourist attraction almost.
But what makes California unique is that they have raised, they put a 1% tax on millionaires, and they raise $2 billion a year.
That's legislatively required to go to help the most seriously mentally ill.
It was beautifully written legislation.
But then they put mental health advocates in charge of distributing it, and they're basically preventing the $2 billion from going to the most seriously mentally ill.
California is a tragedy.
And the state auditor has investigated this.
Associated Press has investigated this.
We've issued a report on it.
But it's not money that's lacking.
It's leadership.
We have to end mission creep and replace it with mission control.
It is the most seriously ill who are most likely to become homeless, arrested, violent, and incarcerated.
Those are the things we should be working on.
So I'm going to get right back to that, but I want to ask you, whenever we talk about the mentally ill, I always feel obligated.
I mean, we've all had experiences with the mentally ill.
I always feel obligated to say most mentally ill people aren't violent.
Is that a true statement?
The 18% who have something in a diagnostic and statistical manual are not more violent than others.
Even the 4% with serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar are not when treated.
But the untreated, seriously mentally ill are clearly more violent than others.
And when people ask, are the mentally ill more violent than others?
I don't think they're asking about the guy in the next cubicle or the next station on the assembly line who's taken Zoloft or Prozac.
They're identifying with the seriously mentally ill.
And 40% of those most seriously mentally ill do go untreated.
Okay, now to get back to what you were saying before about California, because just using California as an example, it's always a good example of the stupidest policy possible.
You raised $2 billion, which is a substantial sum in a state, and it is directed toward the mentally ill.
By what logic?
By what logic does it get misused?
Well, for instance, what they did, and I hope this isn't too obscure, but the legislation said it had to be used on evidence-based practices.
So what they did is the regulators defined what evidence-based is.
And they said, well, if something's used widely, that's considered practice-based evidence.
So as long as it's popular, it's considered evidence-based, no matter how useless it is.
They're also funding prevention.
Now, the reality is schizophrenia and bipolar, which make up the bulk of the seriously mentally ill, cannot be prevented.
There'll be a Nobel Prize to whoever figures that out.
But in California, they've got it figured out and they're allocating money to prevention.
They decided that basically they're wrapping every social service, every cause of sadness in a mental health narrative and diverting funds to it.
So poverty, unemployment, bad grades coming from a single family household, being unsure of gender identity are now all considered mental health issues worthy of mental illness funds.
When I was a kid, if I got bad grades, they gave me a tutor.
Today you get a social worker.
If I misbehaved in school, I got put in detention.
Today you get a social worker.
There is just so much mission creep going on that federal, state, and local dollars are not going to people who have the most serious mental illness.
And as a kind and compassionate society, that's who we should be helping rather than trying to improve mental wellness in the masses.
Ludicrous Mental Health Pipeline00:05:18
This is, I mean, this is a kind of madness in itself with what you're describing.
When, as happens again and again, when somebody living on the street or somebody in a school who the police know is a problem, but they can't do anything about it, when that person finally decides that he's got to stop the invasion from Mars and he goes and attacks somebody, they get sent to prison.
What happens to the mentally ill in prison?
Well, there's a real lot of groups who are focused on improving care for the mentally ill once they're incarcerated.
Incarceration is obviously a horrible place for them.
They're often put in segregated units.
They're beat up by other prisoners.
They're left to smear their feces on the doors.
But what I'm saying is that we have to reduce the mental illness to jail pipeline by forcing the mental health system to focus on the most seriously ill rather than the least seriously ill.
I mean, just look at civil commitment laws.
Pretty ludicrous.
Rather than preventing violence, our civil commitment law requires it.
I mean, that's totally ludicrous.
As a kind, compassionate society, we should help people.
Being psychotic is not a right to be protected.
It's an illness to be treated.
Freeing someone of their psychosis through the use of medications and talk therapy and other treatments can enable them to engage in a meaningful exercise of their civil liberties.
What would it look like if you had your way?
What would our policy look like?
What would it look like on the street?
What would a policeman be able to do?
How would the treatment take place?
Well, first of all, most seriously mentally ill, even the seriously mentally ill, don't need hospitals.
But we still don't have enough hospitals for those who need it.
So we have this ludicrous Medicaid policy.
It's an obscure provision of Medicaid that says to the state, you can use Medicaid money for anyone who's eligible except for one group, the seriously mentally ill who need hospitalization.
It's an exact opposite of what federal policy should do.
It should help the most seriously ill, not preclude them from receiving help.
So we have to eliminate that provision in Medicaid.
And there's a group called the Treatment Advocacy Center, which has been working on that to make more hospital beds available.
And I have to say, Secretary Azar just issued some regulations which get at the issue but don't solve it.
At the state laws, what we need is more clubhouse programs, places for people to go, and we need more housing, congregate housing facilities.
And by the way, those are very hard to do because of NIMBY groups.
But the groups that fear violence are not wrong, but they wouldn't fear violence if we would require the people to be treated.
So when I go to a police conference, they know instantly what has to be done.
They'll say, DJ, we need, when I take somebody to the hospital, I need the hospital to admit them.
I need them to keep them long enough to be stabilized.
I need them to keep them in treatment when they leave and they need housing.
But when I go to these mental health advocate conferences, they say, well, DJ, we have to fight stigma and we have to educate the public and we have to help people who are unsure of gender identity.
And they come up with these things which are totally irrelevant to the cause of helping people who need help the most.
Yeah, that is just amazing.
You know, I'm really glad that you have fallen in with the Manhattan Institute.
They are an absolutely great organization.
They do what works regardless of politics and policy.
And I hope you make some headway because I think that this is really at the core of these shooting incidents and the homeless incidents.
I think it is absolutely where the problem can and will be solved if it is solved.
DJ Jaffe, the author of Consequences, How the Mental Health Industry Fails the Mentally Ill.
Thank you so much for coming on.
And I'd like to talk to you again.
I hope we do.
Good.
And they can visit us on Facebook, Twitter, our website, all those places.
Great.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
So we're coming to the end of the show.
This is it.
You know, I feel a little bit like I'm plunging you downriver into the exterior darkness where there is great wailing and gnashing of teeth.
I have to say, I've heard that our audience has been steadily increasing over this year, which I'm delighted by.
And I want to thank you for listening because if you don't, I'm watching, because if you don't, I won't be here.
You can actually make me vanish by not paying attention.
I am grateful to the Daily Wire both for supporting the show and also for being a tremendous place to work full of absolutely terrific people and my personal staff, which is, you know, the dregs, obviously.
Rob and Mike and all the people who have been, and Austin, all the people who put this show on and do such, I know it's awful.
Who is?
Dylan.
Oh, Dylan and Nick.
I got to mention them too.
Come on.
This is ridiculous.
Christmas in Political Terms00:03:03
It's like, it's like everybody wants something.
It's like they won't leave me alone.
But I just, they do.
They actually do a great job and they do it while I pick on them like this.
So it's pretty amazing.
Let me finish by talking about this.
This is something I've been thinking about a lot.
You know, it's not that long ago that our federal government was actually operating more or less within the bounds that our founders imagined for them.
You know, there's been steady government creep since at least the First World War, but the checks and balances that the framers built into the clockwork of our government were enough to keep the DC elites in line.
And, you know, that's a big deal because the D.C. elites are always, always thirsty for more power.
They didn't get there by not wanting power.
They love that power and they're always absolutely certain that their wisdom is more, is greater than your wisdom, greater than the individual in his state and in his home.
Back in the day, back in the day, because the government was a little bit more restrained, you could pretty much watch the news, read the paper, shake your head at the gormless stupidity of the elite, and then go about your business with some sort of assurance that as idiotic as the self-aggrandizing clowns who think that their elite were, they weren't going to do too much damage.
You know, I think that that changed in 1973 with the Supreme Court decision known as Roe v. Wade.
That decision obviously arbitrarily, I feel, stripped the states of the power to defend their children from legal extermination.
And it marked the moment, more as importantly, it marked the moment when government creep became this kind of tidal wave of arrogance and a matter of life and death.
And today, even under Republican administrations, it just takes a mighty effort of popular will to keep the Democrat-leaning deep state, which is buoyed and protected by the big corporations that run the news and social media, to keep them from seizing control over every aspect of our lives.
You get a Chicago machine paw like Barack Obama in the White House, and he actually feels empowered to issue fiats over who can use bathrooms in some elementary school in some far-off neighborhood that he knows nothing about and who should have no control over.
You get a sanctimonious, overreaching, arrogant FBI director like James Comey, and he decides it's up to him to protect a Democrat candidate from rightful prosecution and unleash holy hell on the Republican.
And all the while, we have these huge corporations like Comcast and Twitter, Disney ABC, and Google that not only defend such un-American misuses of power, but they do their best to marginalize and silence those who speak out against them.
So it sometimes feels now as if the fight to remain free has to occupy our minds constantly, and as a result, politics just consumes us.
And even when we talk about Christmas, I noticed this this year, we tend to talk about Christmas in political terms.
Christmas In Political Terms00:03:44
We tend to talk about the war on Christmas and chasing Christmas out of the public schools and the public square and how Hollywood is slandering Christians and Christian doctrines and how the elite is trying to create a narrative that anybody who's enlightened and wise should have disdain for spiritual truth.
The other day, I went to church to hear what's called Lessons and Carols, which is the jewel in the crown of the liturgy of the Episcopal Church.
It is an absolutely beautiful service that intersperses Christmas carols with Bible readings.
It's Bible readings from Isaiah and Luke, the ones that prophesied the coming of the Savior and then describe the birth of Jesus Christ.
And I was listening to this, this service about 90 minutes long, and for 90 minutes, suddenly I was out of politics.
I was swept out of myself.
I was out of, swept away from the world and the workings of the world.
And I found my mind resting in the realm of what truly matters, which is the story of God's sacrificial love and his forgiveness.
And I was reminded by these songs and these readings that this temporary life is meant to be lived into the logic of eternity.
And all these things that link us to the workings of the world, our judgmentalism and our anger and outrage and our envy over each other and our littleness, they can all be handed over to God to make room for joy.
Politics, even if the Republic falls, politics is nothing compared to the song of salvation.
And the carol that brought this home to me this year more than any other was one of my absolute favorite carols, Jesus Christ the Apple Tree.
It has this incredibly wise lyric that goes, for happiness I long have sought and pleasure dearly I have bought, I missed of all, but now I see tis found in Christ the apple tree.
And as I heard those words, I was thinking, you know, sometimes that has been the story of my life, but really sometimes I think it is the story of all our lives.
We chase after happiness, we chase after pleasure, and we forget that all of that is found in Jesus Christ and in our God.
And as I was listening to those words, I stopped worrying.
I stopped being annoyed at the lies from the press.
I stopped being upset about what the government was doing.
And I had one of those sweet moments when you have this kind of intimation of paradise, when you realize, oh, if I would just let it all go, I would be there right now, not just in the next life, but in this one as well.
I think that that joy is always available to us, available to us every minute because of the birth of Christ, because of the incarnation of God that opened a door out of politics and out of history and out of ourselves into the perfection of present reality, which is the kingdom of heaven that is within us and among us even now.
Let me bid you, as I say goodbye to you for the year, let me bid you to walk through that door at Christmas and every day.
And by doing that, I think we can remember in the Hurly Burley who we are.
We are beloved children of God.
We were bought with a price.
And therefore, now, no matter what the government does, no matter what any government does, we are free.
We are free men and women forever.
Listen, have a Merry Christmas.
Have a happy new year.
Survivors will gather here in January.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
We Are Free Men And Women Forever00:01:28
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.
Coming up on the Ben Shapiro Show, President Trump announces a precipitous Syria pullout, the Trump Wall remains mythical, and President Trump pushes a bump stock ban.