Ep. 648 – American Psychos skewers U.S. Afghanistan withdrawal as a farce, with Pentagon’s "Warren" mocking 18 years of war while the Taliban’s "Mohamed Mohamed Mohammad Mohammed" celebrates "mindless slaughter." Andrew Clavin frames modern culture—abortion debates, transgender policing, and Howard Schultz’s centrist threat—as proof of a "psychopathic" silence enabled by complicit media. Alex Narwasta debunks border crime myths, citing Texas data showing illegal immigrants have half the conviction rates of natives, and slams walls as useless against asylum seekers under U.S. law. The episode ends with a warning: cultural shifts thrive in the absence of dissent, and America’s immigration crisis is less about numbers than unenforced laws and ideological suppression. [Automatically generated summary]
The United States has negotiated a peace deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
According to the terms of the deal, the United States will withdraw its forces from the country and the Taliban will terrorize, rape, murder, and oppress their fellow Afghans until everything's back to normal.
Pentagon spokesman Warren incessantly said the military was opposed to the move.
In a statement fired at the White House from a rocket launcher, incessantly said, quote, We've only been at war in Afghanistan for 18 years and this heedless rush to withdraw before the job is done can only result in the country becoming the primitive tribal battleground it's been since the beginning of time.
If we only had just another 50 or 60 or 120 years to fight, I believe we could transform Afghanistan into a civilized nation and then leave so it could become the primitive tribal battleground it's been since the beginning of time, unquote.
The New York Times, a former newspaper, also objected to the peace plan in an op-ed saying, quote, when President Bush sent troops into Afghanistan, we warned it would be a quagmire.
When President Obama sent troops into Afghanistan, we praised his brilliant military strategy.
If President Trump ends the war, we'll be forced to find a way to argue that we should have remained there forever and people will begin to suspect we're just lying about stuff to support Democrats.
And we wouldn't want that, unquote.
The leader of the Taliban, Mohamed Mohamed Mohammad Mohammed, supported the plan in a statement released to a cave full of skeletons and severed heads saying, quote, the presence of the Americans in our country has given purpose and logic to our warfare, and we prefer to return to mindlessly slaughtering everyone in sight in the name of the Quran because we're psychopathic animals, unquote.
President Trump applauded the peace deal.
He said it was difficult to negotiate with a bunch of homicidal cave-dwelling troglodytes, so it was a relief to stop talking to the Democrats and chat with the Taliban instead.
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-dunkity.
Ship-shaped hipsy-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.
Here's a handy tip for freedom fighters.
Ring's Mission00:03:16
The majority doesn't win.
The culture wins.
Look at this.
Here's a picture of the presidential election map for 1972, the election between incumbent President Richard Nixon and George McGovern.
Nixon won in a tremendous landslide.
He took every state except Massachusetts and McGovern also won the District of Columbia.
Nixon also took more than 60% of the popular votes, nearly 61%, a whopping 18 million more votes than the challenger.
Now, here's a picture of some hippies the same year.
There weren't really very many of these guys.
Their program of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, dropping out and getting high and some garbage about the age of Aquarius was a childish and irresponsible nonsense, almost a perfect prescription for a useless and unhappy individual life and for forcing a heretofore vibrant country into decline.
As I say, there weren't a lot of them, but ask yourself this.
Who won over time?
The majority that elected Nixon or the tiny minority that believed in promiscuous sex, legalized marijuana, socialism, foul language, and disrespect for our traditions and founding principles.
Even we, the conservatives I'm talking to and the conservative who's talking, are in some ways more children of the hippies than of the people who voted for Richard Nixon.
Polls mean nothing.
Majorities mean nothing.
Facts and logic, morality mean very little.
Culture means everything.
Culture is that mysterious intellectual atmosphere we don't even know we're breathing.
Today, the philosophical descendants of the 60s radicals are selling a psychopathic culture of death and pseudo-virtuous dishonesty.
And if you think the polls and the majority and the facts are on our side, just remember, majorities don't win.
Culture wins.
And we're going to talk about that and what that means in just a second.
But first, let us talk about Ring.
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And he will, if he doesn't know, he'll just run away.
But if he does, he'll say K-L-A-V-A-N, because there's no E's.
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The Clavenless Weekend.
This is it.
So please go on to Amazon.
Use your Clavenless weekend.
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If you listen to the original podcast, it's worth rereading.
Child Health Care Vote00:16:01
There's some changes, but that's not what I'm selling.
It's just you'll get a better experience, I think, reading the book directly.
What do I mean when I talk about the culture?
The culture, when we ever talk about the culture, we devolve into talking about movies and TV, and that's part of it.
It definitely is.
All the arts contribute to the culture.
But it's more than that.
It's the Overton window, which is what we're meant to, what is acceptable to discuss and debate that moves around, right?
People can move the Overton window in a lot of different ways.
It's also the way we behave.
I mean, do you go to church?
Do you smoke dope?
Do you sleep around?
All of those things.
And, you know, do you speak up fearlessly for the things you believe and promote the things that you believe as a way to the good life?
Not by getting in people's faces and screaming at them, but just saying this is a way to the good life.
Let's look at this week.
I mean, the way that the Overton window has changed in terms of abortion and what you're allowed to say.
I don't want to beat a dead child, as it were.
But yesterday we were talking about the abortion bill that lost.
It lost in the Virginia House of Delegates.
But this was a bill, an infanticidal bill, a psychopathic infanticidal bill.
That's what it was.
And we showed that delegate, Kathy Tran, I believe her name was.
She was being questioned about it and how late you could do it.
And basically, you could abort a child on the grounds of mental health, right?
What does that mean?
That kind of depresses me to have a baby, you know, like you could abort it in the moments of birth.
The governor then went on radio to explain himself, because he's a Democrat governor, Ralph Northam, and he was asked about that, and he just dug the hole even deeper, essentially supporting infanticide.
Here it is.
When we talk about third trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of obviously the mother, with the consent of the physicians, more than one physician, by the way.
And it's done in cases where there may be severe deformities.
There may be a fetus that's non-viable.
So in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen.
The infant would be delivered.
The infant would be kept comfortable.
The infant would be resuscitated if that's what the mother and the family desired.
And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.
So I think this was really blown out of proportion.
But again, we want the government not to be involved in these types of decisions.
We want the decision to be made by the mothers and their providers.
And this is why, Julie, that legislators, most of whom are men, by the way, shouldn't be telling a woman what she should and shouldn't be doing with her body.
So you heard the whole left-wing array of arsenal right there.
It's consent, right?
So, you know, you want to kill your four-year-old child.
This is not something the government should get into.
If you want to kill your four or five-year-old child, he's being a pain in the neck.
Maybe he's got ADHD.
Do you want that poor child to live with ADHD for the rest of his life?
No, of course not.
It should just be, the government should not get involved.
If you have consent, you should be able to strangle that kid and dump his body in the trash.
I mean, that's just the way, basically, that's the argument he's making.
He's just making about someone a little bit younger than that.
So it seems, I don't know why it seems to him.
By the way, this guy's a pediatrician, and he got very upset when people attacked him.
It's disgusting.
I've worked for children all my life.
He is putting forward a psychopathic idea.
That is the idea.
He's not a psychopath.
It's the idea that is a psychopathic idea.
And what was the other thing?
Oh, you're a man.
You're a man.
So you can't talk about this.
And what if he had deformities?
You know, and the one part of the arsenal, the one part of the left-wing arsenal I left out is silence.
The power of silence is the power of lies.
If you wonder why I'm for free speech, even for people I dislike or even hate and disagree with strongly, it's because the power of silence is the power of lies.
Lies live in silence.
All three networks did not cover what you just saw.
All three of them.
They've dumped it up.
According to newsbusters, all three of them did not cover it.
Of course, CNN and MSNBC buried it, but we expect that from them.
Fox did a, Brett Baer on Fox did a whole segment on it with his panel and covered it in the news.
But they were on the panel, I think it was Mark Thiessen, you know, really smart guy, very bright and very passionate about this, but he's citing the fact that this is unpopular.
He was citing a Marist Knights of Columbus poll, which showed that only 15% of America support abortions at any time during pregnancy.
74% of respondents wanted some kind of restriction on abortion, such as first trimester, rape, incest, and so on.
Very few people support third trimester.
And probably if you were talking about what he was talking about, which was infanticide, he said the baby could be born.
And if they decide to, Lord, I'm only laughing because it's so nuts.
If you don't laugh, you cry.
I mean, he's basically saying you can leave it there to die.
What I'm telling you is it doesn't matter what the polls say.
It doesn't matter what the polls say.
He has moved the Overton window to where a governor of a state can talk about murder, legalized murder, and people just say fine.
And you know, I know so many liberals, and they all say the same thing.
Whenever I talk about the radicalism in the Democrat Party, the liberals all say, well, most of my friends don't agree with that.
Most of my friends don't agree with it.
It doesn't matter.
It's not how many people.
It's where they are and what they do and how they change the culture and whether you speak up.
Because if you're sitting there going, well, I don't agree with that, but I'm voting for him.
I'm voting for him because, you know, that's radical.
See, he won't get away with that.
Then you just made that acceptable.
If you vote for a guy like that, in fact, if you vote for his party, as far as I'm concerned, you have made that statement acceptable.
It is all right if all the doctors agree and the mother agrees and men don't get a say because what have they got to do with humanity?
It's all right to leave that baby to die.
If you vote for that, if that's acceptable, talk to you.
If you're not outraged, you're part of the movement of the culture in that direction.
It does not matter whether you agree or disagree.
It doesn't matter what the polls say.
It matters that you allow that atmosphere like poison, like miasma, to seep into the culture and people breathe it in and the next generation of people sitting here will go, you know, the majority didn't want to be killing children, but somehow here we are all killing children.
I killed mine, but it's different.
I disagreed with it.
I thought it was wrong.
You know, it's just in the same way.
I don't wear a tie.
You know, in the old days, of course, I would have been wearing a tie, but the 60s culture won.
Even I use a lot more foul language than I think is right because the 60s culture won.
The culture is dominant.
It dominates everything.
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So I'm just talking about the way that these things affect the culture almost without you knowing it.
And this silence thing is a big, big deal.
I mean, there was a story out of Britain that the guys here pointed out to me.
A man said he was questioned by police for over 30 minutes after he liked a tweet that appeared to mock transgender community.
He liked the tweet.
Harry Miller, who believes trans women are not women, says the formal probe by Humberside Police was into his thinking and his reasons for liking the limerick on Twitter.
The limerick referred to trans women as stupid and made comments about vaginas and synthetic hormones.
Harry Miller said police wanted to know his thinking for liking the limerick.
Mr. Miller, who used to be a policeman himself, says an officer told him he was investigating reports of a hate crime.
The cop said he was, this is a quote, the cop said he was in position of 30 tweets by me.
I asked if any contained criminal material.
He said no.
I asked if any came close to being criminal, and he read me a limerick, honestly, a limerick.
A cop read me a limerick over the phone.
After telling the cop he did not write the limerick, he reportedly said, ah, but you liked it and promoted it.
Harry Miller said he was questioned over the phone for over 30 minutes.
He concluded it's not a crime.
The cop said it's not a crime, but it will be recorded as a hate incident.
Why?
Because transgender women aren't women.
That's why.
And the only way you can maintain that fallacy is if you silence people who disagree.
I'm not in favor of hating people for their piccadillos.
I'm not in favor of hating people for their problems.
But why do you have to have the silence?
It's because it's not true.
The power of silence is the power of lies.
And that has a big, big effect on the culture.
What you don't say, what you don't say.
This is why this guy, Howard Schultz, the Starbucks guy who's been talking about running as an independent, not running in the third party, this is why he's driving the Democrats crazy.
I mean, they're afraid he'll split the vote and let Trump win again.
But there's every reason to believe he might split the vote and let the Democrats win.
I mean, anything could happen, really.
I mean, everything is so up in the air.
Here is his announcement.
I mean, look how quickly people reacted to this.
Here's his announcement that he made.
I think it was in a bookstore.
This is a really short, that really short clip.
I am seriously considering running for president as a centrist independent.
And I wanted to clarify the word independent, which I view merely as a designation on the ballot.
And help elect Trump, you egotistical billionaire.
I mean, that's the level of rage you're getting because.
See, the thing is, the Democrats think that Trump is a crisis, right?
And you know how the Democrats think, never let a crisis go to waste?
Because when people panic, you can push anti-freedom moves on them like Obama did, basically, because of the panic over the financial crisis.
And Rahm Manuel said, we don't want a crisis to go to waste.
And that's how they crammed that stupid, lousy health care bill down people's throats in a completely non-bipartisan vote.
So here's Schultz talking about why he does not identify as a Democrat.
And this is part of the reason why he has to be silenced as cut one.
I'm not a Democrat.
I don't affiliate myself with the Democratic Party who's so far left, who basically wants the government to take over health care, which we cannot afford, the government to give free college to everybody, and the government to give everyone a job, which basically is $40 trillion on the balance sheet of $21.5 trillion.
We can't afford it.
We can't afford it.
Remember, you know, one of the things, a lot of people have commented on this, one of the things that the Democrats do so well is label things, make up names for things.
Oh, you're objectifying women.
Oh, it's racial profiling.
Things that are perfectly normal, they make sound evil.
And things that are not very good, they make sound good, like a woman's right to choose, a woman's right to choose.
You know, killing babies is a woman's right to choose.
They're just great at this because that's how the culture works.
Culture doesn't work on what you're doing.
It works on what you think you're doing and how you feel about what you're doing.
And what he's talking about, they have come up with this wonderful idea of Medicare for all, Medicare for all.
People like Medicare, people like things that everybody gets.
So Medicare for all, great, great selling point.
It's government health care.
And government health care is bad everywhere.
And everything about it that works works because we subsidize it from our country where it takes place in other countries by paying more for medicine and by having a military paying for a military that they don't have that can protect them, that keeps them safe.
So they don't want that logic going out there.
But here's also something important about his underlying philosophy.
Howard Schultz is a self-made billionaire.
So this is cut to him talking about that.
I've also been criticized for being a billionaire.
Let's talk about that.
I'm self-made.
I grew up in the projects in Brooklyn, New York.
I thought that was the American dream, the aspiration of America.
You're going to criticize me for being successful when in my company over the last 30 years, the only company, America, that gave comprehensive health insurance, equity in a form of stock options, and free college tuition.
And Elizabeth Warren wants to criticize me for being successful?
No.
See, that is the thing.
This is a different culture.
You know, one of the things that happened in the 60s is you had this culture of the age of Aquarius, but it morphed into the Reagan culture of Wall Street.
All those people remember the bonfire of the vanities and the movie Wall Street with Michael Douglas, this thing, greed is good.
And so those two ideas have kind of come together.
We have a much looser, much more promiscuous, much more drug-friendly culture, which is what the hippies wanted.
But we also have a culture where during the 90s, during the Clinton era, people got rich and enjoyed getting rich, and they got rich doing things that all of us like, like Steve Jobs inventing the iPhone and Bill Gates creating the computer revolution and this guy creating coffee.
Where would we be?
I mean, I pick on Starbucks because of their silly political correctness all the time.
But where would we be without Starbucks?
I live off the stuff.
And it's so easy.
Most of the people in this country, I truly believe, are probably capitalistic.
They want free enterprise.
And they want to leave other people alone.
They don't want to bother transgender people.
They don't want to be forced to call them what they don't think they are.
They don't want to be forced to cater a gay wedding if it's against their religion.
But basically, nobody's kicking down gay people's doors anymore.
That's not going to happen.
Really, it didn't happen in the past.
But yeah, I mean, gay people were excluded.
Now, nobody's doing it anymore.
They just want to be left alone to have their opinions and have their beliefs.
But the left can't do that because they're lying about what they believe.
And the power of silence is the power of lies.
So here is Obama's speechwriter, Jonathan, as a representative, reacting in sheer absolute panic to Schultz's candidacy.
There's no substantive reason why Howard Schultz couldn't run as a Democrat, which is unfair because, you know, for all the sh that some people give Bernie Sanders about being an independent and yet running in the Democratic primary, at least Bernie Sanders is running in the Democratic primary and not as an independent, which would f everything up.
I'm pulling us all left.
Mike Bloomberg, same thing.
Mike Bloomberg looked at what it would be like to run as an independent, realized he could hurt the Democratic candidate's cause and thus help elect Trump.
And so Mike Bloomberg said, all right, are you either running as a Democrat or not at all?
These two people, Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg, on very different ends of the spectrum, are both thinking, yeah, we could both run in the Democratic primary and we'll just see if anyone likes our ideas.
Howard Schultz thinks that he doesn't have to do that, that he gets to just run on his own as an independent and do it that way, even if it means hurting the Democratic candidate and helping to re-elect Trump.
And that's just a awful thing to do.
Now, remember, we're talking about a Democratic Party.
He says, oh, it's just be a fair debate of ideas.
We're talking about the Democratic Party that squeezed Bernie Sanders out of winning to support Hillary Clinton.
And we're talking about a Democratic Party where all the vitality, all the power, all the culture, the culture of the Democratic Party is with Alexandria Occasional Cortex.
Why You Deserve Better00:05:20
Now, listen, the overreaction to Howard Schultz is helping Howard Schultz has brought him into the forefront, just like our overreaction to Alexandria Occasional Cortex has brought her to the forefront.
But it's important.
It is important to call these people out because they represent the culture.
So I want to just play you why, why Howard Schultz could not run as a Democrat or shouldn't run as a Democrat.
Here is AOC talking about identity politics and privilege.
Just remember Howard Schultz saying, I'm a billionaire.
That's a good thing.
That's part of the American dream.
Here's AOC.
This is the first cut three.
The idea that you can be poor and benefit from the color of your skin does not compute for a lot of people.
And going through that realization is very painful or even just economically for people that are that were born with silver spoons.
It's very painful to admit that you had advantages and it's just look what happened to Brett Kavanaugh when he was confronted.
Oh my God.
No, it literally, it literally is an identity meltdown.
That is an amazing statement, a double amazing statement.
She's saying, even if you're poor and you made it, you're a self-made man and you are white, it doesn't matter because you had privilege.
And then the guy references Brett Kavanaugh, who got angry when he was falsely accused of raping somebody.
I mean, would you not get angry?
Who would not get angry at that?
But that was an identity breakdown, the idea that he ⁇ the idea that you're not allowed to accuse a white man of a crime that he didn't commit, you know, where does he get that privilege?
What the hell is going on here?
But listen to her definition of privilege, and this is why, this is why the Democrat Party is going insane.
I mean, because as I say, you follow a bad idea, you follow it right down the road into complete insanity.
Listen to her definition of privilege expand and expand and expand.
It's because if you haven't had a transition in your life where You were maybe born poor or born without certain privileges.
And then especially as you transition into having certain privileges in your life, you actually see and feel and sense and taste and smell all of the differences.
If you've never experienced different treatment in your life, you wouldn't know what different treatment feels like or looks like.
And it's really, really hard.
I mean, it's like, and we can all, almost every single person in this country can acknowledge some privilege of some type, you know.
I'm a cisgendered woman.
I will never know the trauma of feeling like I'm not born in the right body.
And that is a privilege that I have no matter how poor my family was when I was born.
But it's really hard for some people to admit that they, you know, it's part of this weird American dream mythology that we have that for a lot of, in a lot of circumstances, isn't as true or isn't as clearly communicated as we'd like for it to be.
We wish it was.
One of the things I have to say about her that really does bother me is the culture of ignorance and stupidity.
I don't know if she's stupid, but she's certainly an ignorant woman.
She's a woman who knows absolutely nothing and yet talks insistently.
And I think that that is, I've seen this in her generation of people sort of saying, well, this is the way I feel.
This is what I, you know, this is my point of view.
This is my lived experience.
Instead of these are the facts, these are the ideas.
Here's my logic.
Let me lay out my argument.
That really bothers me.
But listen to what she said.
She said basically just the fact that she was a straight woman, a cisgender woman, as she put it, was a privilege.
So that's basically, you know, telling, and then she said everyone in America has some sort of privilege.
In which case, by the way, no one has a privilege.
I mean, if everyone has privilege, what difference does it make?
What are we going to do?
Measure our privilege?
Who's going to make that measurement?
All she's saying is you are guilty and therefore all your stuff are belong to me.
That is what she's saying.
What she's telling you is there's something wrong with you.
You don't deserve your success.
You don't deserve to be doing what you're doing.
You don't deserve the good life you have.
You need to let me take that and spread that around because you're guilty and I am Alexandria Casional-Cortex.
The problem with this is that she didn't make any sense.
She was babbling.
She did not make any sense.
But that moves the Overton window into this nonsensical radicalism where you are supposed to be guilty and have your head hung and not be proud you're an American and not be proud of your accomplishments, not say what Howard Schultz said.
He's, yeah, I'm a billionaire.
That's a good thing.
That's the battle we're in.
It's that.
It's the culture.
And just remember, the majority doesn't win.
The culture wins.
So if you're not speaking out, if you're not being honest, if you're not promoting your own life and you're not living your life in the way that you believe you are part of that culture and you are part of the culture that will have the victory in the long run.
All right, I want to bring on a guest.
We are not going to break because I want you to see this.
You're going to hear some ideas you disagree with, so you might want to put something in your ears or just make sure that people are standing back so when your head explodes, no one is killed.
Border Barriers and Immigration Rights00:14:22
But do go to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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But here, I want you to meet Alex Narwasta.
He's a senior immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.
His publications have appeared on the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Post, and many others.
He's also the co-author of the booklet, Open Immigration Yay and Nay, which he wrote with Mark Krikorian.
He has really interesting ideas about immigration, and they're based on fact, which I kind of find interesting.
I hate having facts on the show, but we're going to let them get in.
Alex, good to see you.
Good to see you too.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Let's begin.
I mean, they're debating border security as we speak and trying to keep the government open and trying to keep from there being a state of emergency.
Is there a crisis on the border?
Kind of.
So there's two different ways to think about this.
One is taking a look at the total number of illegal immigrants who are being apprehended on the border.
And the second is taking a look at who they are.
So if you take a look at just the total number, we're basically down to the same numbers that there were in the early 1970s.
Somewhere around 400 to 500,000, not nearly that many.
When I was in high school in 2000, there were about 1.6 million.
So we're way down compared to that.
However, the type of person who is coming has changed dramatically.
Whereas when in the year 2000 and previous years in the 70s, it was mostly single individuals, mostly single men who are coming to work.
Now it's overwhelmingly family units, parents with their children, women with children.
And that is an entirely different scenario.
They're coming here to ask for asylum.
The vast majority of them are at least asking for it, which means that instead of trying to avoid border patrol agents, which has been like the history of immigration on the border and illegal immigration forever, they're coming in and then turning themselves into border patrol agents asking for asylum.
That's a very different scenario, a very different situation from what we have seen in the past.
So is it a crisis?
It is if you take a look just at the family units and children.
But in terms of total numbers, we're doing pretty well.
So is Trump right when he says his new thing sounds like Johnny Cochrane, build the wall and crime will fall?
Is that accurate?
Does that have any relationship to the facts at all?
I don't think it does have any relationship.
First off, just because the nature of this flow of illegal immigrants into the U.S. has changed, in fact, that they're asking for asylum, a wall wouldn't stop them from being able to ask for asylum.
It's their right under U.S. law.
U.S. law grants them that power.
So a wall is not going to really stop them from doing so.
Secondly, there is no evidence that illegal immigrants increase crime in the United States and plenty of counter evidence that shows that illegal immigrants are less likely to commit crimes in the United States, less likely to be convicted of those crimes, less likely to be incarcerated, and that crime along the border, especially homicide rates, are below the national average in those 23 U.S. counties along the border than they are in the interior of the United States.
There's a vast amount of research.
I spend like all my time reading this research from peer-reviewed academic studies, going back some of them over a century, to look at the evidence.
And overall, immigrants are less likely than natives to be incarcerated or commit crimes.
And that still holds for illegal immigrants.
Now, I've heard that some of these studies that it's very hard to get the information on who's illegal and who's legal when it comes to crime because the agencies don't release that.
Is that true?
So that is true in 49 out of 50 states.
There is, however, one state which counts the convictions of people by crime and their immigration status, and it keeps that data by year.
That is the state of Texas.
The state of Texas has the second highest illegal immigrant population of any state, right behind California.
It's a border state with Mexico.
It's a Republican governed state.
It has a tradition of the rule of law and of enforcing criminal laws.
So they're not, you know, hiding these numbers.
And what we found there is in the year 2015, the criminal conviction rate for illegal immigrants was one half that of native born Americans.
And the homicide conviction rate was 16% below that of Native born Americans.
So it's true, you know, in any large population, you're going to have people who are criminals.
But when we take a look at it overall, they are less likely in the state of Texas where we have this data to commit crime, to be convicted of crimes overall and to commit homicides.
So what about people who say, you know, just by coming into the country illegally, they become criminals?
It really does bother me.
The only thing really about this issue that bothers me is the disregard for the rule of law, that we have legislators who are basically, I mean, I was stunned when Chuck Schumer waved a pen around and said, you know, Donald Trump could solve this problem with his pen.
I thought, you're a senator.
You're supposed to be making laws.
It cannot be good for a country to have laws like prohibition or border laws that people just don't obey and don't get punished for disobeying Canada.
I mean, isn't that a problem in and of itself?
Of course, yeah, it's a huge problem in and of itself.
You know, mass illegality, whether it's in immigration or, you know, gun laws or drug laws or anything else is always a problem.
But I think if you want people to respect the law, then the law needs to be respectable.
It needs to be enforceable.
It needs to comport with our values as both human beings and as Americans.
And it needs to be enforceable.
Like when I take a look at really bad laws in America's past, you mentioned, for instance, prohibition.
I don't blame the huge black markets that arose in the 1920s due to prohibition on a lack of the government for trying to solve it.
No, the problem was the law was bad.
And they learned and they fixed the law and they changed it.
And I think we need to do the same thing when it comes to immigration.
It's very difficult to come to this country lawfully, especially if you're a low-skilled worker who doesn't have any American family here.
That's the reason why the vast majority of illegal immigrants come.
I think if we fix that law, we can take this pressure off of the border, take the pressure off Border Patrol agents, channel most of those folks into the legal system.
We know who they are.
We can check them out.
We can exclude criminals.
And that will restore, I think, trust in the law, trust that the system works, and really clean up this entire mess.
Isn't there, when you say that, though, it strikes me that there's an overarching debate to that that we just aren't having, which is whether immigration is a, is our responsibility, is it our responsibility to open up our borders to people who want to come in?
Or is it their responsibility to be the kind of quality people that we want to allow in?
In other words, is it a privilege for them or is it a response, a moral responsibility for us?
Where do you stand on that?
Well, I think it's both.
And I think there's a third group that you missed in there.
And that is the desire and demand for American citizens to deal with the contract to hire to sell to people who want to come here legally and work but aren't allowed to.
So there's also this other third group, the forgotten man in this.
I mean, I think that obviously the United States government has the power and should have the power to write immigration laws and to determine who can come into this country.
And immigrants should have to enforce those rules, but we need better rules.
We need better laws.
And we're not going to get that situation by trying to enforce the bad laws that we did.
I mean, I take a look at the immigration system in this country, and it reminds me of something designed by a person in the Soviet Union, by an apparatchik who wants to centrally plan the demographics and population of this country.
Now, those apparatchiks probably sat back and were like, hey, why isn't everybody conforming to our five-year plan?
It's their responsibility to do it.
And, you know, I guess that's true, but they could also make a better plan and a better law.
And that's where I see the situation now.
A lot of this is done by our own government making mistakes, which I'm sure is no surprise to you.
No, let's talk about that.
You got 17 guys, a bipartisan committee.
They're now debating this.
If you could have your wish list, what would you see come out of that debate?
So I think the number one thing that will, you know, that I'd like to see is a way to one, I think, for the DACA kids, the kids who are brought here as children or under the age of 18 who have signed up for this program for them to get legalized.
I think that's important.
I think trying to make a serious show, perhaps, of some kind of border security initiative is probably important as well.
But the number one thing, the most important thing is to expand the number of lower skilled guest worker visas so that these folks who are coming up to the border right now, who are coming there, can actually come in legally and work rather than going through this mostly fictional facade of applying for asylum and trying to get in that way.
If you do that, you take the pressure off the border.
The idea that it's a crisis goes away, and we can have a much more sort of calm and rational discussion about it rather than being confronted with pictures of like, you know, scary looking caravans.
It does seem to me that, I mean, this has been going on for decades.
It's not Donald Trump causing it.
And they have been absolutely stagnant in this.
And one of the problems is, is that we frequently hear, oh, we have to give amnesty to the DACA kids or whoever are the problem at that time.
And then down the line, we're going to deal with border security.
And people, you know, I believe that people are simply offended by the fact that people can come in illegally.
I think that just offends people's sensibilities.
They feel we should be in control.
So isn't there going to have to be a genuine commitment to border security?
I mean, and wouldn't that include some kind of barrier in some places?
It probably would.
I mean, right now, the border is 1,954 miles long.
There are about 350 miles of, you know, barriers, fences currently to keep out pedestrians, about another 300 miles of, you know, fencing and vehicle barriers, basically to keep out vehicles, but you and I could climb over them.
I mean, adding to that might make sense in some places.
But I really think that that debate misses the thing that will actually work.
In the 1950s, we had over 2 million illegal Mexican immigrants in the United States.
And President Eisenhower was able to shrink that number by 90% and cut the number coming in illegally by 95% by creating a low-skilled guest worker visa program that allows Americans to hire them, allows these workers to come in legally.
That's the thing that worked.
That's what I wish we were having this discussion over.
In 1986, they said we're going to increase border security, interior enforcement, and we're going to amnesty these people.
They did do all of those.
We had six times as many Border Patrol agents by 2010 than we did in 1986.
We have more barriers than we ever did before.
We have interior enforcement.
We actually have to fill out paperwork whenever you hire somebody.
Now, none of it works nearly as well as anybody wants it to, but we do have a lot more, and it's simply not working.
I think we should try the thing that Eisenhower did, which is to allow more people to come in legally on temporary worker visas so they can go back and forth so we can know who they are.
We can check them out.
We can keep out criminals.
And then Border Patrol can focus on a small number of people who are left who are trying to come in illegally and stop those folks.
And what about the argument that those people are taking jobs away from poor Americans?
Yeah, there's really not much evidence of that.
The vast majority of empirical academic research on this finds that immigrants have a slight positive effect on the wages of Americans because they're not just workers, but they also buy the goods and services produced by other Americans.
And they primarily purchase the goods and services produced by lower skilled Americans because, you know, we can't import a haircut from China yet or a hamburger, but low-skilled Americans produce those things.
Now, just to put that in perspective, the most negative finding in the entire academic peer-reviewed literature on the effect of immigration on wages is by George Borjas.
He's at Harvard University.
He found that wages of high school dropouts in the United States, about 9% of American adults at high school dropouts, by the way, declined by about 1.7% from 1990 to 2010 due to immigration.
But the wages of every single other American group by education, 91% of us, went up as a result of immigration.
So I think there's a lot of other things we can do to help poor Americans other than trying to diminish the number of poorer immigrants coming in who are trying to work and making the rest of us wealthier in the process.
And my final question, what about their use of government services?
I mean, they frequently say you can have open borders or a welfare state, but you can't have both.
Is there a drain on services that illegals use?
Yeah, so this literature is called the fiscal impact literature or the net fiscal impact.
And generally the findings are in the peer-reviewed literature is that immigrants about pay their own way in this or they produce a very small surplus.
Part of the big reason is when they come in.
So for instance, I was born in California.
I went to public school in California.
I cost $10,000 to $30,000 per year of public school that I used before I could pay any taxes as an adult working.
But if you come in here at the age of 19 and you're from Mexico, and even if you're a high school dropout, you don't get to consume that high school benefit.
So you start paying taxes and working immediately.
Furthermore, there are lots of restrictions on the ability to use these benefits that should be, you know, these restrictions should be higher.
It should be more difficult to get.
I've helped Representative Growthman, who's a Republican from Wisconsin, do that by writing a few, helping him write a few bills on this.
But the net, the evidence from the peer-reviewed academic literature is that immigrants are either break-even, they pay their own way, or they produce a very small net benefit.
Well-Written Fulfillment00:03:55
Alex Norosa of the Cato Institute, I'm going to have Ann Coulter come on later to curse the day you were born.
No, really interesting conversation, really interesting arguments.
I appreciate your coming on.
Thanks a lot.
You're welcome.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks.
Let me end talking about culture with, I'm going to have to digest some of that and get back to you about how I feel about it, but really interesting.
And obviously reading up on the information knows what he's talking about.
Last night I watched a little bit of the marvelous Mrs. Meisel, and I want to say something very specific about it.
It is about a woman in 1958.
She's a housewife.
Her husband leaves her.
Her husband kind of wants to be a comedian.
And she becomes the comedian.
Here's just a little bit of the trailer.
Who gives this host at her own wedding?
I didn't.
I love this man.
And yes, there is shrimp in the egg rolls.
Babbai, just kidding.
We need downtown people close to the clubs.
I thought you wanted to be a cool chick.
I could be a cool chick with a doorman and a Calvinada Fooderama refrigerator campaign.
Yes, you can.
Joel left you.
Why?
What did you do?
Did you ever think you were supposed to be something and you suddenly realize you're not?
Yes.
Married.
I was a great wife.
I was fun.
I can't believe I'm losing him to Penny Pan.
That's her name.
Penny Pan.
So I've been watching this for a long time.
It's not my kind of show, I'll be honest with you, but I want to be very clear about what I want to say about this.
This has nothing to do with the quality of the show.
It is a beautifully written, beautifully acted show.
Tony Shaloub is in it, who is just absolutely great.
Rachel Broznahan is the star, and she just could not be any more charming and delightful.
It is written, created by Amy Sherman Palladino, who did the Gilmore Girls.
What a talent.
She really is incredibly talented.
I've never seen The Gilmore Girls.
My wife likes it.
She says it's just really well written, but this is so well written, so well imagined, and it's terrific.
It was really good.
And if you like this kind of thing, I'm not sure I'll watch it again, but like I said, I didn't have anybody with a gun shouting, Let the Girl Go, so I'm a little limited in my taste.
But still, it was really, really talented.
But I was watching it, and it opens with her as a housewife.
And as a housewife, she is taking care of her husband.
She's building a home, but not only that, she's the linchpin of her community.
She's the linchpin of this Jewish community in the 50s that is very intensely aware of home life and children and is very connected, parents to children to grandchildren.
And she is at the center of it, and she's happy and she's fulfilled and she's delighted to be doing what she's doing.
And she has a lot of privilege, which she's obviously unaware of, a lot of economic privilege, that real economic benefits that she gets from her husband working in a corporation.
And I was watching it and I thought, gee, I'd like to see she's so powerful and so fulfilled and so delightful as a 50s housewife that the idea of watching her devolve into a group of people I happen to know is angry, neurotic, abusive, just miserable people, namely stand-up comics, is kind of sad.
You know, I don't actually want to see that.
What if they did a show about a stand-up comic who suddenly had to become a homemaker and found it was incredibly fulfilling and uplifted her?
The only thing I want to say about this, again, no criticism of the show whatsoever.
Blacklisted Show00:02:01
You couldn't make that show.
That show is blacklisted.
That show, the show of a corporate woman, a corporate CEO, who becomes a housewife and finds, oh, you know what, this is more important.
I'm more powerful now.
I'm actually more fulfilled now.
That show can't be made.
And all I'm saying is the power of silence is the power of lies.
And that is the power that the left uses to affect the culture.
It's all the people they will not let speak, that they push off Twitter, that they push off Facebook, that they move down the algorithm on Google.
All of those people.
And the person who could not write the show that was the opposite of Mrs. Meisel, the talented, incredibly talented, conservative woman who might write that show, won't be allowed to do it.
That's my only point about it.
Not what the terrific stuff that the left sometimes makes is terrific, but the idea that the opposite idea, that you are just a wash, a wash in left-wing cliché, that you are breathing in left-wing cliché every single day.
And if you're not aware of it, it just will sweep you away and take you over.
That's it.
The Clavenless weekend begins.
There's nothing now but darkness and chaos.
Sorry.
But survivors will gather here on Monday.
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.
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Edited by Adam Sajovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
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The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2019.
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