Andrew Clavin and Jenna Ellis dissect Oregon’s satirical shroom legalization push, mocking "PC" as a tool to stifle speech while exposing left-wing hypocrisy—like Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s infanticide remarks and the Washington Post’s selective Fairfax-Kavanaugh coverage. Ellis predicts Trump’s State of the Union will rally against Democratic abortion extremism, framing it as a fight for sovereignty over partisan gridlock, while Clavin warns free speech is under siege by "social justice mobs." They argue conservatives are winning the abortion debate through legal and public pressure, but media bias—like Don Lemon’s Super Bowl snub—exposes the left’s war on conservative values. The episode ends with a call to unite against ideological overreach, blending policy, culture, and Clavin’s product pitches. [Automatically generated summary]
With marijuana now legal in states ranging from California to I forget the other ones, but I'm sure I'm hungry, several localities are now moving to legalize so-called magic mushrooms in order to create a vortex of sparkling lights whirling in a spiraling stairway to Nirvana.
Movements have been started to legalize the hallucinogens in states like Oregon, cities like Denver, and imaginary crystal kingdoms on the banks of Scarlet Seas, where gigantic seahorses ride on rainbows up into the higher reaches of consciousness.
One Denver shroom activist, Hiawatha Dances with Blowfish, says he feels it is way past time mushrooms were legalized in order to prevent innocent people from being jailed in the dark oubliettes of their own brainstems.
In a statement released to an imaginary polar bear, Mr. Blowfish said, quote, surely it's melted time to inflate gigantic balloons into the furthest realms of unknowing before more unicorns are bent into radioactive pretzels and then devoured by hideous cockroaches with human faces.
That's not who we are as Americans, unquote.
Some experts warn that the hallucinogenic shrooms could cause unpleasant side effects.
Harriet Raj Kandahalaranomoma, MD, spoke of the dangers in a 14-hour conversation with her big toe, saying, quote, I have personally witnessed people who use mushrooms.
I didn't think I was going to make it through this.
I have personally witnessed people who use mushrooms suffer such side effects as having tentacles sprout from their nostrils before they shrank into infinite space and came out the other side larger than the entire universe, only with spikes growing from their eyes, unquote.
Miss Kandahalaharanoa later clarified.
Later clarified that the MD after her name stands for mmdaddy.
As the legalization of ever more powerful drugs spreads from sea to shining tangerine trees and marmalade skies, there are some hopes that hallucinogens will help stem the tide of opiate addiction by causing some opiate addicts to see fiery whirligigs floating in midair before stepping out a window shouting, look, I can fly, and falling 14 stories to their deaths.
Meanwhile, I personally am experiencing a hallucination in which I see the American founding fathers weeping inconsolably.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this, I guess, is the Andrew Clavin show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety-boom.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dee-doo.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Well, you know, the most important thing about the show is that I'm having a good time.
I don't know if anybody else can understand what I'm saying.
I don't know why that story struck me as so funny, but it did.
You know, there are times nowadays when I feel like the most radical right-winger in the room, which is very odd because I have almost no radical right-wing opinions.
My most rigid so-called conservative belief is that you shouldn't kill your children, even if they happen to be in the womb where you can't see them die.
But other than that, there are very few issues in which I wouldn't be willing to compromise with our idiot friends on the left.
I oppose racism in all its forms.
I think it's a sin against the image of God.
I've always been a supporter of the rights of gay people.
And while I wish we lived in a free world of uplifting private charities instead of a world of debilitating welfare and government entitlements, that seems to me for now at least a political pipe dream.
But there is one thing on which I am completely uncompromising.
I oppose silence.
I oppose censorship.
I oppose deplatforming.
I oppose social media mobs teaching Americans the fear of speaking their minds.
I am so radical on this issue that as deeply as I hate racism, I would rather hear a man speak a racial slur out loud than hide his prejudice inside where it would fester and gather the power of secrecy and the forbidden.
I am such a purist here that while I despise segregation, whether for left-wing or right-wing reasons, I would rather a person be able to join a restricted club or run a racist business than be forced to live a lie.
He would lose my friendship, but he'd be able to consort with his fellow knuckleheads.
I've never understood why gay people should be excluded from our social arrangement, but to run a man out of business because he disagrees with me seems to me a sin against liberty, which is our most precious possession, more precious than life itself.
As a rapidly aging man, I think I've aged about 15 years in the last two minutes, I am sorry to see a rising generation of young people who are afraid to speak their minds lest their careers, reputations, and lives be destroyed.
I think they're being schooled in an un-American sort of diffidence.
I would rather hear the truth of their hearts, even when it's wicked, and trust in God and good ideas to win the day.
And that's why these constant gotcha stories like the one happening in Virginia are incredibly dispiriting.
I'm going to talk about that a little more.
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Why Political Correctness Matters00:15:37
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
No E's in Clavin, believe me.
Tomorrow is the mailbag.
So come on to dailywire.com, hit the podcast button, hit the Andrew Clavin podcast, hit the little mailbag symbol, and you can ask me anything that is in your mind.
I will answer questions about your personal life, about politics, about religion, and all my answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life, sometimes for the better, a lot of times, it's ugly.
But be there.
And also, please go on amazon.com and pre-order Another Kingdom.
I would really love it if you would, and it's very helpful to the future of the book, which is the first of a trilogy.
I'm working on the third one now, and just realizing that I could write it forever.
I could write this story forever.
It could go on forever, but it will be a trilogy, at least.
So the whole thing about political correctness, the thing that I find so depressing about political correctness, it's just an instrument for silence, and it's a one-edged sword.
Silence in politics is a one-edged sword.
It is meant to cut down people like me who believe in liberty, individual liberty, thinking, saying, doing what you want, spending your money the way you want, not the way Elizabeth Warren wants or Alexandria Casional Cortex wants.
The way you want to spend your money, it's yours.
You made it.
Spend it the way you want, not on something the government thinks it should be spent on.
That's what I believe.
And that is what I think the sword of political correctness is meant to cut down.
Sometimes, as in this Virginia story, it swings the other way, and the dull end of the sword maybe knocks a left-winger in the head, but that is not what it's intended for.
It is really just intended for cutting down right-wingers and silencing them.
You can't think of a left-winger who's been banned from a campus.
You can't think of a left-winger who's been deplatformed or kicked off Twitter or kicked out of Facebook.
You can't think of a person who is looking at the, who is making those decisions who's not a left-winger.
It is all bent on silencing the people who believe in individual freedom because that's the whole point of it.
It is to not let you know, not let anybody say that the whole point is to take control of power for elites.
That's what it's for.
That is the only thing that it is for.
So, you know, you've got this guy Northam, and obviously the issue should be that his radical stance on abortion, his idea that you can let a baby die, if it just affects the mental health of a mother, he said it on the radio.
It wasn't taken out of context.
He said, you know, if they make this decision, the government should have no say in this.
The doctor and the woman should just decide if they want to leave that baby to die.
You know, that's what he should be under fire for.
But the left will do anything, anything to turn the corner.
So even in this case, even though in this case the political correctness is being used against a left-winger, it really is being used to save the central sacrament of the left, which is abortion, because that is once you have the power of life and death over people, you have all the power there is.
And even now, I mean, if these guys did not have a double standard, they would have no standard at all, even though a lot of Democrats, a lot of Democrats are calling for his resignation.
Why?
Because they would lose the hammer they use against Donald Trump of misinterpreting everything he says as racist.
They would lose that hammer if they let Northam stay in power, and he will not go.
He is clinging to the governorship so far.
He says he doesn't want to leave because then he's just a racist forever, which I, and I sympathize with that, even though I think he should go for the baby comment.
But just take a look at MSNBC, where, let me just get my clip sheet here, where two, you know, you have two left-wing reporters, Andrew Mitchell and Washington Post's Ruth Marcus, saying, well, maybe we're going too far in asking him to resign.
And just as they're talking, imagine that this was a Republican governor, as CNN tried to say it was.
Is there a potential blowback here?
A risk of appearing too politically correct?
Something that may turn off attempts to woo the Trump voters, the Trump Democrats, back in?
I think that the actual real-world risk seems to me to be whether we're moving with just way too much rapidity when there is a little bit of factual development to figure out here.
And I don't want anybody to get too alarmed by what I'm saying.
In other words, he first admitted or said that it was him.
And apologized.
And then he came out with this other explanation.
Is there any reason whatsoever to credit this other explanation?
It has not emerged yet.
So maybe there is some risk in being precipitous.
So, you know, I mean, they weren't talking about this with Brett Kavanaugh.
They wouldn't be talking about this with any Republican.
And by the way, I'm not, it's MSNBC, so I'm not hitting them for being left-wing, although the Washington Post, you know, which spent $5 million on a Super Bowl ad to make them look like heroes, which they could have saved simply by reporting the news, honestly.
They wouldn't have had to do that.
But the Washington Post reporter is showing herself to be a left-winger, but I'm not hitting them for being left-wing.
I'm hitting them for being hypocrites.
And that came out even more, even more, as the lieutenant governor got in trouble, which is kind of a comedy.
I mean, they're having their comedy of errors at this point.
By the time they're finished, the only guy they're going to have left to take the governorship is going to be like a 150-year-old guy who's actually a racist, who's actually back from the old South.
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So now, Justin Fairfax is the lieutenant governor, and everybody was very excited because how appropriate that you'd be able to replace the guy who posed either in blackface or as a Ku Klux Klanman on his 35, 36 years ago.
You'd be able to replace him with the black lieutenant governor.
He is now, now the story comes out that in 2004, a woman accused him of attacking her in her hotel room.
He says it was a consensual sexual relationship.
And he also hinted that it may be, this is the part I kind of like, that it may have been Ralph Northam, the governor, who leaked the story.
Here's Justin Fairfax talking to the press about this.
Collective PAC, they said that you believe that the governor's team is spreading misinformation about your team.
Can you comment on that, please, Sam?
Collective PAC has made its statement and I don't know precisely where this is coming from.
We've heard different things, but here's the thing.
Does anybody think it's any coincidence that on the eve of potentially my being elevated, that that's when this uncorroborated smear comes out?
Does anybody believe that's a coincidence?
I don't think anybody believes that's a coincidence.
Again, particularly with something, this was not the first time this was brought up.
It was a year ago this was brought up.
And yet, the post who investigated it for three months dropped the story, did not do it, and they did not do it because it was uncorroborated, and it's uncorroborated because it's not true.
And so it goes away for a year and it crops back up right at this moment.
You don't have to be cynical.
You don't have to understand politics to understand when someone's trying to manipulate a process to harm someone's character without any basis whatsoever.
That's pretty amazing.
It's pretty amazing to have the lieutenant governor of the state of Virginia blaming the governor of the state of Virginia for this leak to keep him, as he says, from being elevated.
I mean, he wasn't elected governor.
You know, it's like he obviously has a lot of concern over the governor.
Gee, I'm sorry he's going through this.
Could he leave now so I could be elevated?
It actually is like a total soap opera if that is in fact what's going on.
Virginians should be asking themselves, maybe you should vote Republicans, Virginians.
I mean, maybe you'd have a little bit less of this.
Although, I'm not sure that's true either.
You certainly have seemed to elected a group of backstabbing scoundrels.
But he said in there that the Washington Post killed the story.
Now, the Washington Post didn't say they thought the story was untrue.
They said there was no corroborating evidence.
And we know the Washington Post has a very strict policy of never publishing accusations by women without corroboration if the person being accused is a Democrat.
That's their journalistic integrity rests on that.
I mean, just remember, go back in time.
I know it's a long time.
Many of you were only a few months younger than and can't remember so far back.
But remember that incredible, incredible assault on the reputation of Brett Kavanaugh when story after story after story came out saying we must believe all women.
The New York Times must have run three pieces, if not more, of women saying, well, I was attacked and therefore Brett Kavanaugh was guilty.
That was the line.
This happened to me, therefore Brett Kavanaugh was guilty.
And why isn't that happening now?
Surely other women have been assaulted.
Why aren't we believing the woman who accused Justin Fairfax?
Why didn't the Washington Post run with that story?
Democrat.
That's why.
That's the whole answer.
Because he's a Democrat.
They didn't want to hurt a Democrat.
They never do it to a Democrat.
That's why.
And so for the Washington Post to come out and take out that story, standing on dead journalists, standing on the reputation of journalists who lost their lives and say, oh, look at us.
We're the Washington Post.
Democracy dies in darkness.
Democracy dies in phoniness and self-regard.
I mean, they are just complete, complete phonies.
The silence is a one-edged sword.
It is meant to silence people who believe that the individual, no matter who he is, should be allowed to speak, allowed to live, allowed to think for himself, even when things get ugly.
Even when he does things that even I would disapprove of, he should be allowed to speak.
And that is who they use the silence for.
And by the way, you know, it's funny.
When I started out, I started out to be a mystery writer.
I wrote a series of pseudonymous mysteries, the John Wells mysteries.
They were nominated for the Edgar twice.
One of them won for the Edgar book called The Rain.
You can still get them.
They're still online on Amazon.
The reporter was a hero.
He was my hero.
I used reporters as heroes because I had been a reporter and because they kind of spoke to me about what I was doing, the idea of searching for the truth and all that.
And then one day I consciously stopped.
I thought, you know, true crime has a reporter as hero, although he's the reporter that everybody hates because he's politically incorrect.
But still, there came a point when I said, I will not use reporters as heroes anymore because they're dishonest, because they're all on one side, because they will not report a story that hurts the Democrats.
They will not report a story that is left-wing.
And, you know, it's a little unfair to accuse the reporters, the guys in the street, because a lot of them would report anything.
A lot of reporters are just kind of natural animals going after the powerful.
It's the people in charge.
It's the people at the editorial level and the people at the management level who are silencing those reporters.
In the old days, those reporters would quit, but now there's nowhere for them to go, so they don't quit.
They are being taught the lesson of silence.
This is the lesson that the deplatformers, that the social justice mobs, that all of these people are trying to teach us, the people who take Kevin Hart off the Oscars, they're all trying to teach us the lesson of silence in which, in that silence, they will get the power.
That is the idea.
You know, it's really interesting.
The other thing that happened yesterday that really got to me was Liam Neeson coming out with this story.
He is promoting a new movie.
What's the name of his movie?
It's called Cold Pursuit, and it's a revenge story.
And so somebody on the Independent, a British newspaper, asked him how he got into that part.
And he said, well, let's see if he'll tell the story here.
He's retelling it on Good Morning America.
I remembered an incident nearly 40 years ago where a very dear friend of mine was brutally raped.
And I was out of the country.
And when I came back, she told me about this.
And she handled the situation herself and her rapist incredibly bravely.
I have to say that.
But I had never felt this feeling before, which was a primal urge to lash out.
I asked her, did you know the person?
It was a man.
No.
His race?
She said he was a black man.
I thought, okay.
And after that, there were some nights I went out deliberately into black areas in this city looking to be set upon so that I could unleash physical violence.
And I did it for, I'd say maybe four or five times until I caught myself on.
And it really shocked me, this primal urge I had.
So, you know, this is a funny story because the GMA interviewer is a black lady.
I don't know her name.
Do you guys know who that is?
She gives a very sympathetic interview, you know, and Liam Neeson said, well, you know, if she had told me the guy was a Scotsman or a Welshman, I'd have gone after Scotsman and Welshman, so it wasn't black racism and all this stuff.
And Twitter lit up briefly, and they were going after him.
But let me tell you something.
Liam Neeson knows what he's doing.
He's a movie star.
He's been a movie star for a long time.
He knows that no matter what people say, no matter how they scold him, the girls are going like, wow, Liam Neeson went out with a sap to get revenge for a rape because he was protective.
He was manly.
He was being tough.
He knows he's putting himself forward as a badass, basically.
And the racial thing is going to get him some press, but he's not going to be taken down because the silence has a purpose.
Political correctness has a purpose.
It's not to destroy men like Liam Neeson, though they'll do it if they can get away with it just for the power.
It is to silence people like me, silence people who say, you know, that the individual has a right to make his own decisions.
Silence is a one-edged sword, and that is the reason, the reason I think the most important fight we're in, the most important fight, is the fight to keep the right to speak without being destroyed.
Border Wall Debate00:15:05
It's not enough.
It's not enough that the government can't silence us.
You have to be able to keep your job.
You have to be able to feed your family.
You have to be able to keep some shred of your reputation.
You shouldn't be torn to bits every time you are caught out in some stupid thing that happened 30 years ago.
It's just insane, and it has only one purpose, even when it ricochets and hits a left-winger in the head like it did in Virginia.
Just to take a look, we're going to talk to Jenna Ellis in a few minutes about the coming state of the union, but it looks like it's going to bring back the fight over the border wall.
It really has been very, it's really kind of interesting at this point where they're going to go because everybody can see.
I mean, Trump has been really interesting of late, and nobody else has really talked about this.
Everybody sort of said, well, he's not working hard.
I mean, they released a part of his schedule yesterday.
Somebody leaked a part of his schedule that said he had 60% of his time was spent, you know, not just on executive time, they call it, not knowing what he was doing.
Maybe he's just watching TV or something like this.
Trump, I've said this from the beginning.
Trump learns stuff and he changes.
He is very, very changeable.
He uses his strategies in the moment and he changes his strategies.
And he has kept an extremely low profile of late.
It has been going on for a long time because he knows, he knows that the extremism of the left is the best thing he's got going for him.
So he has kept a really low profile.
And the stuff he's saying, you know, one of the things we were talking about how the abortion debate, the abortion stuff that Ralph Northam said is really the reason that the left is loving this distraction onto this ridiculous racism thing.
On Monday, a senator blocked a Democrat senator, Senator Patty Murray, blocked a Senate bill that would require doctors to give aid to babies who survived abortions.
This is the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.
And Ben Sasse said, you know, come on, give it this support.
And she blocked it.
It's that kind of extremism that is serving Trump.
And so Trump has pulled this board.
You know, nobody wants to talk about the border security in Congress.
Trump has pulled this front and center.
He has done it by his main, by main will.
He has done it himself.
He's controlled the media as he always does.
And now he's got Pelosi in a position where she looks like the extremist.
He was on CBS, I believe it was, for a Super Bowl interview.
And the woman there was trying to make him make it look like, oh, well, Pelosi beat you up, didn't she?
And Trump's response is very, very calculated.
Here's the exchange.
You had quite the showdown with Speaker Pelosi.
What did you learn about negotiating with her?
Well, I think that she was very rigid, which I would expect, but I think she is very bad for our country.
She knows that you need a barrier.
She knows that we need border security.
She wanted to win a political point.
I happen to think it's very bad politics because basically she wants open borders.
She doesn't mind human trafficking or she wouldn't do this because, you know, she offered you over a billion dollars for border security.
Excuse me?
She offered over a billion dollars for border security.
She doesn't want the border security.
She's costing the country hundreds of billions of dollars because what's happening is when you have a poor border and when you have drugs pouring in and when you have people dying all over the country because of people like Nancy Pelosi who don't want to give proper border security for political reasons, she's doing a terrible disservice to our country.
So I love the interviewer.
I mean, she starts out basically.
You can tell that what she wants to say is how she wants Trump to say how tough Nancy Pelosi is.
And he really goes after Pelosi and paints her as an extremist, which in this case, she is definitely being.
There is an absolute compromise to be made here, some stuff for the dreamers, some stuff for the wall.
She won't make it.
And the interviewer actually says, well, she offered you a billion dollars.
I mean, a billion dollars in government budget terms is a nickel.
You know, I mean, that's nothing.
So what is she talking about?
And now Lindsey Graham has come out in support.
It's hard to tell here in this comment that he makes whether he is supporting the idea of Trump declaring an emergency or simply declaring the idea of using the military to put up barriers.
But he's basically sending the message to his fellow Republicans, stand with the president, because if you desert him now, no matter where you stand on this issue, you're going to lose everything, which is politically, absolutely true.
I think shutting the government down is not a good way to get the wall built.
The best way to get the wall built is to work with Democrats, if they will work with the Republicans, to build a wall and do some other things.
But it doesn't look like Nancy Pelosi is going to give Democrats much space.
So if I were the president, what I would do is use the power of commander-in-chief to go down to the border, not just send troops, but actually erect barriers.
What's the difference between a soldier being sent to secure the border and a soldier being sent to put up a barrier to secure the border?
Legally none.
To my Republican colleagues, we do not need a war over the wall.
The Democrats are pushing back to the president.
The last thing we need as Republicans is for us to undercut his ability to go alone if he has to.
You know, the one thing also, just as a point of interest, because I'm interested in this, is if you step back a little bit, Trump is really changing the entire conversation on foreign policy, which is where a president has his most power.
And Walter Russell Meade, this guy I like so much in the Wall Street Journal, had a really good column about this, how he's essentially refocusing American foreign policy on our own hemisphere.
He's saying, let's get out of the Middle East where we can't do all that much good.
Let's get rid of this endless war in Afghanistan, a point on which I actually agree with him.
And let's focus on these countries that are right here in the hemisphere and are giving us problems on our borders.
And that is a real change of pace.
He's basically dissing the State Department and the diplomats and all this.
He's basically saying the people in charge don't know what they're doing.
I have a better idea.
I'm going to change things.
And he's kind of making a dent.
I mean, I think it was interesting when Congress recently voted, oh, no, we should stay in Afghanistan.
And you thought, like, why?
For what?
What are we going to get out of this?
Is it really true that we can keep Afghanistan from descending into the chaos that has been its history and its tradition forever?
You know, when I was there, I came back from Afghanistan.
I was only there for a brief time, but I came back from there thinking we should get out.
I mean, I felt that Barack Obama got this exactly wrong.
Iraq was the right war.
Afghanistan was a war we could never win.
We should have gone in, caused some havoc, killed some people, and left.
And I feel that Trump is right about this.
But he's shifting this thing about the border is part of a large shift in foreign policy that actually does have a shape and a reason behind it.
Whether you agree with it or not, there are parts of it I agree with, parts that I disagree with.
But it's really interesting to me that people, because they hate Trump so much or love Trump so much are not considering the philosophy behind it and what he's actually doing, which really is kind of interesting.
And like I said, Mead wrote a really good column about it today.
We're going to talk to Jenna Ellis more about the State of the Union and what we can expect.
And then tonight at long last, it's our episode of Backstage, State of the Union.
Nancy Pelosi finally reinvited us to come backstage.
She said we couldn't come, but now she's let us back.
And Daily Wire, God King, Jeremy Boring, Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, and me will be taking on all the pressing issues of the day.
As always, the lovely Alicia Krauss will be doing whatever little she can to class up the joint once we get in the room together.
She hasn't got a chance, but she'll try her best.
And we hope we will finally see Trump deliver the State of the Union.
Tune in tonight.
And you can ask questions if you're a Daily Wire subscriber.
And since the mailbag is tomorrow, think of what you could get for a lousy 10 bucks a month, a lousy $100 for the entire year.
Go to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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Do I have to introduce Jenna anymore?
I mean, we know her so well, but I will anyway, because Jenna Ellis is the director of the Dobson Policy Center, a contributor to the Washington Examiner, to us, the Daily Wire, the Federals.
She has a book, The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution, which I read and which I found fascinating.
Jenna, it's always good to see you.
Great to see you, Teacher.
Thanks for having me.
So we're looking at this.
First of all, what are you expecting to hear in the State of the Union today?
Well, the White House has released some insightful points.
And so we know that the theme tonight will be choosing greatness.
And so President Trump will be inspiring, I think, and focusing on what America is doing positively and what he's accomplished over the last two years.
And the emphasis, of course, will be on border security and coming together as not Democrats versus Republicans.
But I think the three key words that he said from the Rose Garden were country over party.
And that's really going to be the emphasis here is we need to come together and actually understand, like you were saying, Drew, about the philosophy of what's behind this and conserving our country, conserving our rule of law, conserving the fact that we are a nation that has borders that is sovereign.
So I expect that a lot will be driven home about border security.
But I really also hope that he's going to address the abortion issue because this has been so prolific throughout the past couple of weeks with just the absolute extremist positions from the Democrats who are openly supporting infanticide.
And to see that they are shamelessly doing that at this point must be called out.
And I hope that he will do that forcefully, dramatically, and pointedly.
You know, I want to get back to that.
I'm going to come back to the abortion issue because I think you're certainly right about the extremism on the left.
One of the funny things about Trump is when you lay aside all the obstreperousness and the loudmouthing and the insults and all the funny jokes and all that stuff, when you lay that aside, he's a non-ideological figure, which is really strange.
I mean, and Americans are kind of non-ideological people, which is sometimes frustrating to conservatives like me, as I know it's frustrating to leftists as well.
They're people who want to solve problems.
They want things to work and they want to go forward with their lives and they want government to make things get debris out of the way.
And Donald Trump, weirdly, weirdly, after the leftism of Barack Obama and the rightism of some of the other Republican candidates, Donald Trump really is not a guy who's so easy to pin down ideologically.
And so when he calls for people to come together, he's got this weird problem.
On the one hand, he takes a lot of positions that I think a lot of people would agree with.
On the other hand, he himself is a divisive figure.
Do you see any chance, any chance that he can start to mend this country, which really is at daggers drawn at this point?
Well, I think that it goes well beyond Donald Trump.
And one of the reasons that Americans are just problem solvers rather than having an underlying philosophy is because we as conservatives really need to do our part to genuinely teach the philosophy of government and what we're built upon.
And that it's not just a matter of convenience.
Government is not here just to simply arbitrate contract disputes between two consenting individuals.
It's not here as a fundamentally evil mechanism that is just, it's a necessary evil, as some would say, but it's also not here to run our lives or make decisions on our behalf.
We can pursue happiness within the context of government.
And so what's been lost largely is a general understanding of civics.
And I don't think that President Trump alone will accomplish that sort of perspective and reinvigorating the American will and our values-based premises.
Because this is what it comes down to.
I mean, I've talked to a lot of my friends who are Democrats, but they're Christians, and they have the same values that I do.
They just simply approach the problem solving differently.
And I think there's a disconnect there between their Christian values and how they see the mechanism of government.
And so if we can come back and we can say, what's the worldview premise of government?
Why are we a nation?
Why do we understand the legitimate role of government is to preserve and protect our innate pre-political fundamental values that are given by our creators our declaration recognizes.
So we have to go back before we can even solve any of the problems.
We have to step back and say, what do we understand human beings to be here for that purpose?
And what's the legitimate role of government?
So Trump is going to solve that, but I think we need to have that conversation.
That's really interesting.
You know, he is better on these scripted speeches, I think, than he is talking off the cuff.
He's delivered some great speeches, actually.
His first State of the Union was a great speech.
His Polish speech was a great speech.
Is there at this point, just your personal opinion, I'm interested, this thing with Trump and Nancy Pelosi.
They're both big figures.
Pelosi is a smart, vicious political character.
She knows what she's doing.
Trump, I believe, is a really good politician.
Is there some level where we're just not going to be able to get past the Gorgo versus Godzilla fun of two people going at each other?
I mean, is there some point where the personal fight between these two is going to override the actual issue?
I would hope so.
And you know what this reminds me of?
If you've ever read Dr. Seuss, there is, and my family loves Dr. Seuss.
And there's the story of the Zachs, where there was the North going Zachs and the South going Zachs, and they like butted up against each other.
And neither one would step to the left or right to just let both of them keep on going, right?
And the moral of the story is, but the world around them grew.
Life went on.
And so the whole idea is you have to find that compromise and not just be so stuck in your one direction that you're not willing to compromise to move on to accomplish your goals.
And I think that what President Trump has actually been so successful at doing is to push this problem solving back in the hands of Congress and say, listen, I could issue a national emergency.
I could, and he in fact is sending more troops to the border.
I could do X, Y, and Z.
But really, if the government is functioning properly according to the constitutionally vested powers, this is something that Congress should do.
And you know what?
They have veto override power.
They are not beholden to Trump.
If McConnell and Pelosi would sit down and actually have a good faith conversation and people would forget about Democrats versus Republicans for a while, they could come up with a solution that would have a two-thirds veto override that they could solve this problem.
But they're the Northgoing Zach's and the Southgoing Zachs, and they're not going to budge left or right.
All wisdom is in Dr. Seuss.
He was one of the great writers of his day.
National Anthem Disrespect Debate00:09:29
So let's get back to abortion.
This has been appalling these last few days, the idea that a Democrat would actually vote against a bill to save the life of a baby who had actually escaped an abortion.
It's like, don't let him get away.
It's like you've got to kill him after he's actually out in the open.
The idea that a governor of a state would say it was all right to leave a baby to die.
The Democrats do seem to be trying to move the Overton window and the fact that nobody is addressing it.
Nobody on CNN, if you bring it up, they actually silence you.
On the other hand, there was this huge march for life.
It seemed like somewhere between 300 and 500,000 people were out there marching.
Who do you think is winning this argument?
Is the left winning simply by moving the window on what is acceptable to talk about?
Or is this really a generation, a pro-life generation?
I think it really genuinely is a pro-life generation.
And we're seeing that not only is the Supreme Court now a majority of originalists that regardless of their personal ideology have to affirm the fact that there is no right to abortion or even any sort of health care, if you want to frame it in that view, or right to privacy, within the federal purview in the Constitution.
And so I think that genuinely conservatives and pro-lifers are winning this, not only because of the Supreme Court, but because we are having this debate so openly now.
This is something where not only, you know, the march for life is great that's been happening since the first anniversary of Roe versus Wade, but we're seeing the Democrats have to push these extremist, just brutal bills.
And their true agenda is showing through.
And I think that that is mobilizing some of my generation, the millennials, who are seeing really for the first time how brutal and evil this is.
Because we know that babies, even after heartbeat, we can see the science.
We can see that these are tiny humans that deserve protection.
And so for the extremist bills that are being pushed through, because they know that Roe versus Wade and its progeny is about to be overturned in the very near future, they are scrambling and they don't even care that they are now being so transparent in their agenda.
So I think that over the next year or two, conservatives and pro-lifers can be strongly encouraged.
We're having this conversation, maybe not yet on CNN, but we're having it on social media where all the millennials are.
We're having it in the legislatures, and we're having this on a national level.
And I hope we'll have it on a national scale tonight with State of the Union.
So if Roe v. Wade were overturned, and we've talked about this before, but still, you would still have states like New York who were basically, you know, you should be able to kill your kid till he's five or whatever they're now saying.
Is that what you foresee for the future?
I mean, do you foresee a country in which some states are pagan, baby sacrificing states, and some are still have some grasp of what morality means?
Well, it is a state issue, to be sure, but that doesn't mean that states then can legislate however they want according to any sort of code of morality they want.
They are still under Article 4.
They are states in the United States of America, and so they are still obligated to preserve and protect life, as our Declaration acknowledges as well.
So this isn't something that from state by state is still a legitimate role of the legislature.
We just need to have better conversations.
We need to have legal challenges to this.
And you're right.
I mean, this is basically ancient Rome with its pagan sacrifices for children.
And it's absurd that in 2019 with all of the technology, we are still back in ancient Rome with these types of child sacrifices that we're not preserving and protecting life.
So for everyone in their 50 states, we have to get out and do something in our state legislatures, challenge these issues, and make sure to protect life.
It's wonderful that they call it progressivism.
Jenna Ellis is the director of the Dobson Policy Center.
It's always great to see you, Jenna.
Thanks a lot.
You too, Jude.
Thanks.
So let me end with a wonderful story that I call Gladys Knight and One Pip, because Gladys Knight, if you didn't watch the Super Bowl, Gladys Knight sang the national anthem, and she did a great job.
She did a lovely rendition of the national anthem.
She's obviously one of the great stars of her day.
Gladys Knight and the Pips were a huge, huge act.
Don Lemon, who calling him a pip is being unkind to pips at this point.
Don Lemon has her on to question her about her decision to go on and sing the national anthem when, you know, I don't know what, when the NFL is so evil as to not let people, you know, disrespect the flag.
I'm not sure what he's saying, but I just want to play this because to drive home the point of how far left the left has gone, of how they have really left the American building.
This is Don Lemon talking to Gladys Knight.
First, listen to what she says and then listen to his next question.
People are going to have their opinions, you know, about whatever.
And all I can deal with, all I can deal with right now is what my heart says.
Okay.
I believe in fairness.
I believe in truth.
I believe in all of those things.
And as far as this is concerned, I grew up with the national anthem.
We used to sing it in school before school started.
We used to say prayers in school before school started.
And we just don't have that anymore.
And I'm just hoping that it will be about our country and how we treat each other and being the great country that we are.
I don't know if you remember the controversy during the inauguration when Chrissette Michel saying at the inauguration.
And I just read an article in the New York Times how she basically lost her career for doing so.
You have a much longer history and resume, right?
And a legend in this business.
Is that a concern for you at all, given the controversy surrounding this?
Don Lemon.
First of all, this is a woman who's known as the Empress of Seoul, right?
She was born.
She's 74 years old.
She was born in Atlanta.
She has seen stuff that Don Lemon doesn't know anything about.
She has seen stuff that Don Lemon doesn't know anything about.
If you listen to what she said, was there any word coming out of her mouth that any right-thinking conservative American would not agree with?
That we used to say prayers, that we used to say the national anthem, that we used to have, that this is a great country.
Was there anything coming out of her mouth that was not conservative?
And Don Lemon, the pip, is going to explain to the Empress of Seoul that she is putting her career in danger.
He's going to give career advice to Gladys Knight.
And on top of this, what's his career advice?
That by singing the national anthem, by paying tribute to the country that has made all of us, given all of us everything that we have, that she is risking her career.
That's where Don Lemon's head is at.
That's where the left's head is at.
That's where CNN's head is at.
That if you should go up against Colin Caprafink and if you should say, oh, you know, I love my country and I'm going to sing the national anthem.
I'm not saying whether I'm left or right.
I'm not saying whether I'm Democrat or Republican, just love my country.
I'm an American and I love my country.
That you are risking your career because you have violated the sacrosanct right of Colin Kaepernick to make a fool of himself by disrespecting the flag under which he has gotten everything that he has ever had.
That's who they are now.
And no wonder, no wonder they want to silence everybody else because as they say, liberals want to shut conservatives up.
Conservatives just want the left to go on talking because every time they talk, they reveal themselves.
All right.
State of the Union tonight, backstage State of the Union tonight.
And I'll be there.
I hope you will be there too.
And then come tomorrow for the mailbag.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
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.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Adam Sajovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today, we're going to talk about this thing with Justin Fairfax.
It's a whole mess down there in Virginia.
But the interesting thing is Fairfax has been accused of sexual assault.
The media didn't want to rump the story.
The Washington Post didn't run with it because it's uncorroborated.
Yet they did run, obviously, with the Kavanaugh allegations, even though the allegations against Kavanaugh are far less credible than the allegations against Fairfax.
We'll try to sort that out.
Plus, I'll answer your emails, including one interesting email from someone who wants to know how to respond to claims that Jesus Christ never existed at all as a person in history.