Dr. David Azerod and the host dissect Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitic tropes—"dirty Jews," "Benjamins," and calls for Israel’s erasure—while exposing Democratic hypocrisy in condemning her while shielding her from consequences, unlike Republicans with Steve King. They link left-wing identity politics to tribalism, warning it risks backlash as it expands beyond protected groups, and contrast superficial diversity with intellectual debate. The episode frames anti-Semitism as a litmus test for moral decay, arguing assimilation trumps divisive ethno-politics while critiquing Democrats’ border and historical amnesia, like Ralph Northam’s blackface defense. [Automatically generated summary]
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has apologized for tweets that were deemed anti-Semitic by Jews and other sentient humans with the ability to read.
Omar's gracious apology came after a meeting with Nancy Pelosi, during which Pelosi twisted Omar's arm behind her back, drove her face first into the floor, then stuck her high heel into the back of her neck, screaming, apologize to the Jews, you feckless clown.
After the meeting, a smiling Omar issued her apology in a speech to a group calling itself Islamics Sorry for Insulting Semites or ISIS.
The statement said, quote, I am deeply sorry to the dirty Jews for offending their greedy hook-nosed sensibilities.
While I will continue my principled opposition to the international Jewish conspiracy of bankers, I do regret if anything I said was so poorly phrased that it seemed to imply to Jews that I wished to wipe every single one of them off the face of the earth.
Of course, all I really want is for Jews and Palestinians to live together until there are no Jews left, unquote.
Nancy Pelosi, in a separate statement she released to a mop she mistook for the good witch from the movie Wizard of Oz, said, quote, it is time for all Democrats to renounce the expressions of anti-Semitism which are interfering with our party's plans to destroy the state of Israel.
In the same way the Republicans stripped Steve King of his committee posts after he made a remark that could be misinterpreted as racist, we have forced a meaningless apology out of Ilhan Omer for her rampant Jew hatred, which we'll now proceed to ignore, unquote.
In keeping with Pelosi's statement, Congresswoman Omar will continue to hold her coveted position on the Foreign Affairs Committee and will also continue to call for the abolishment of the Department of Homeland Security, which, she says, has repeatedly interfered with innocent Muslims who were simply trying to board commercial jets for the last time in their lives.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-ducky.
Ship-shaped ipsy-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.
So let's talk Jews.
Despite my conversion to Christianity, I remain a fan.
Jews represent about 0.2% of the world's population.
Not 2%, 0.2.
About 13 million people, a little more than half the population of the city of Shanghai.
Yet if you made a list of the 10 most influential people to have ever lived, approximately 11 of them would be Jews, including Moses, Jesus, St. Paul, Albert Einstein, and Sigmund Freud.
Not to mention Karl Marx, Moore's the Pity.
You can't win them all.
About one-fifth of Nobel Prizes have gone to Jews, more than that if you only count the science prizes.
Jews have also made huge contributions in the realm of entertainment, business, and more, and they've accomplished all this while being the very model of the persecuted other, at least here in the West.
Every victim on the left wing's favorite victim list can only aspire to being as hated, excluded, and oppressed as the Jews have been throughout Western history.
All through the Middle Ages, the Jews were declared the killers of Christ, the abandoned of God, the enemies of faith.
Criticism Without Double Standards00:15:23
When the Crusades began in the 11th century, the Crusaders decided they couldn't expel the infidel from Jerusalem while infidels still lived in Europe, so they stopped off on the way to Outremer to slaughter the local Jews.
When Mongols invaded Europe in the 13th century, the Europeans declared them one of the lost tribes of Israel, and in revenge, they slaughtered the local Jews.
When the Black Death wiped out a third of Europe's population in the 14th century, you guessed it.
They blamed the Jews for poisoning the wells and slaughtered them, and so on, right up to the last century when the Nazis added technology to the old tradition and very nearly eradicated God's chosen people altogether.
That gave you some victim status, so people were nice to them for a couple of decades, but you just can't keep a mindless hatred down.
And today, wherever people abandon the best principles of moral reasoning, anti-Semitism rises up like the devil's flagpole, which brings us to today's Democratic Party.
We're going to talk about that in a minute, but first let's talk about Express VPN.
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So Congressmanwoman Ilhan Omar, in one of the least gracious apologies in the history of apologizing, she apologized for her anti-Semitic tweets.
She had gone on and said that IPAC was the reason that so many politicians, the Jewish PAC, the Israeli PAC, was the reason that so many politicians supported Israel, ignoring the fact that Israel is the only free nation in the Middle East and the only nation that shares our values.
She said it's, oh, it's all about the Benjamin's baby.
It's all about the money.
She's being accused of retweeting a tweet that said something about hook-nosed Jews, but I think she did that by accident, to be fair.
But it's the old trope that Jewish money controls politics.
It's the international conspiracy of Jews dealing out those shekels and controlling our politics.
And, you know, I'm cautious about this all the time because I don't like it when the left uses this dog whistle garbage to twist anything any conservative says and make it sound racist.
Oh, it's secretly a dog whistle.
He wants border security.
He wants the rule of law.
That's secretly, secretly an anti-Hispanic dog whistle.
You know, I hate when they do that.
This woman, though, is the real deal.
She has called, she's constantly calling on a boycott of Israel, which would, the purpose of which is to destroy Israel essentially.
She has called Israel evil.
She says it's hypnotized people, so they ignore its evil.
She's compared it to Iran, the theocracy in Iran, ignoring the fact that Israel gives equal rights to Muslim citizens who live there.
This whole idea of the genocide, which they accuse Israel of or apartheid, which Jimmy Carter has accused Israel of, just total, it's total nonsense.
There are occupied territories where people do not have full citizenship, but if you don't attack Israel, they don't conquer your land.
Israel has always been just been trying to defend itself, and that is why it has taken over other parts of the Middle East.
You can criticize Israel without being anti-Semitic.
It should go without saying, right?
But it's always a little suspicious.
And there's a way to tell.
You know, Natan Sharansky, I think it was, he had what he called the three Ds.
It is, let's see what they were.
There's delegitimization.
In other words, it's not a legitimate country.
It doesn't have a right to exist.
Where else?
What other country has to argue for its right to exist?
What other country has to argue for its right to exist, except maybe America with the left, because they want us to be washed away by illegal immigration.
But no other country has to argue that they have the right to be who they are.
So it's delegitimization.
And the BDS movement is definitely a delegitimizing movement because it's basically saying it is not right to do business with this country.
This country should not exist in its form.
And Ilhan Omar has said it cannot be a Jewish state and a democracy.
That's delegitimizing right there.
The other one is demonization, and she has called it evil.
So that's the other one of the two D's when you say, you know, it's evil or it's apartheid.
That's demonizing Israel.
And the other one is double standards.
And boy, oh boy, has she done that because, you know, she just ignores the fact that of all these other countries, as one of our first two Muslim women congresswomen, she ignores the fact that all these Muslim countries oppress people of other religion if they don't ban them outright.
And so Israel does not do that.
Israel has Muslims and other people in very high offices of government, and they can be elected, they can vote, they can do all these things.
And that's just not, and women.
You remember women?
Half the world.
Israel treats women equally.
A lot of these other countries don't.
So it's double standards, demonization, delegitimization.
She has done all that.
And that is the way you tell that you're dealing not with a careful criticism of an ally, of one of America's allies, which is one thing.
You can say the British do bad things, but that's different.
You're criticizing an ally.
You can say Israel does bad things, but you're talking about anti-Semitism.
So anyway, the Democrats realize they've got a problem in Ilhan Omar.
She has gone off the reservation.
They get a lot of money from, a lot of donations from the Jews, and Jews support them, though God knows why at this point.
I do not know why Jews support the Democrat Party.
I do not know why Jews remain liberal when it's the liberals, the leftists.
I won't call them liberals because they're not liberal about anything, but the leftists are increasingly anti-Semitic.
But we'll get to that.
So here's Nancy Pelosi.
This is the whole Democrat leadership put up out a statement, and I do applaud them for that.
This is from Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer, Majority Whip, James E. Clyburn, all the gang.
Anti-Semitism must be called out, confronted, and condemned wherever it is encountered without exception.
We are and will always be strong supporters of Israel in Congress because we understand that our support is based on shared values and strategic interests.
Legitimate criticism of Israel's policies is protected by the values of free speech and democratic debate that the United States and Israel share.
But Congresswoman Omar's use of anti-Semitic tropes and prejudicial accusations about Israel's supporters is deeply offensive.
We condemn these remarks and we call upon Congresswoman Omar to immediately apologize for these hurtful comments.
As Democrats and as Americans, the entire Congress must be fully engaged in denouncing and rejecting all forms of hatred, racism, prejudice, and discrimination wherever they are encountered.
So Ilan Omar, who has, you know, I have to say, all these young women in their white dresses who showed up, their white suits who showed up for the State of the Union and are so self-congratulatory and kind of affirmative, affirming the fact that they're women, they're in Congress, and they're in Congress and women at the same time.
They're not at one time women and also in Congress.
They're actually doing them both together.
They all seem incredibly entitled to me.
They all seem incredibly self-assured in their stupidity and their empty-headedness, their ignorance.
And not all of them, but the ones who are coming to the fore, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Occasional Cortex, they just seem like incredibly confident for people who don't know anything.
It's just amazing.
I mean, even I, who actually know something, if I were a first-year congressman, I would keep my head down a little bit.
I would kind of learn the ropes, find out what's going on, and then put myself forward as I got more experience.
But these people just know what they know, which is nothing.
And then they go forward and they're just so confident and really, they're really bad news.
I mean, Alexandria Occasional Cortex, I love this.
They're saying, you know, it wasn't, she released that New Deal thing, and they're saying that Green New Deal.
They're saying the Green New Deal wasn't bad.
It's just the way she released it.
So basically, we're supposed to believe that she can't handle a press release, but she will be able to handle taking over the entire economy.
So here is the apology, the non-apology apology.
Anti-Semitism is real, and I am grateful for Jewish allies and colleagues who are educating me on the painful history of anti-Semitic tropes.
Now, remember, this is not the first time this has happened, right?
She's been called out for this before, but she's always just finding out that these things, saying the Jews are using their money to control politics.
She's just now finding out that this is a bad thing to do.
My intention is never to offend my constituents or Jewish Americans as a whole.
We have to always be willing to step back and think through criticism, just as I expect people to hear me when others attack me for my identity.
This is why I unequivocally apologize.
If it had stopped there, it would have been, it might have been a little bit ill-natured, but still.
But she goes on, at the same time, I reaffirm the problematic role of lobbyists in our politics, whether it be APAC, the NRA, or the fossil fuel industry.
It's gone on too long, and we must be willing to address it.
So in other words, I apologize for everything I said, and then I say it again.
I said it's all about the Benjamins, baby.
That's the only line she left out.
It's all about the Benjamins.
By the way, lobbying is a guaranteed right in the Constitution.
That is the right to redress government about your grievances.
And it only is a problem.
Lobbying is only a problem when it's lobbying about NRA fuel things that they don't like, like freedom and the Jews, basically.
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So they're complaining about lobbying.
She goes back to complaining about lobbying.
So the press now, of course, is going to give her a pass.
And the thing that everybody keeps bringing up is Steve King.
And Steve King said these things.
And they said, oh, Steve King claims that the New York Times basically rejiggered his comments by falsely punctuating them.
So they sounded like he was saying something he wasn't saying.
That he was saying that white supremacism wasn't offensive.
It sounded like that's what he was saying from the interview.
But he said that's not what he said, that they repunctuated it.
He was not saying that.
He was saying that Western culture, Western civilization, was not offensive.
And he has renounced, entirely renounced, any notion of white supremacy.
He was not, you know, there's no, he didn't leave any space there.
He actually renounced it.
And he was stripped of all his committee posts.
Nothing has happened to Omar Ilan.
So the press and the left, but I repeat myself, are trying to draw a false equivalence.
Here is CNN.
You know, what's his name?
King, Steve Peter King, is that his name?
Anyway, this is CNN fronting for Ilhan Omar.
In the case of Leader McCarthy, I just want to make clear.
He himself had to delete a tweet just a few weeks ago where he said we cannot allow Soros, Steyer, and Bloomberg to buy this election.
So as he now says, there's anti-Semitism on the Democratic side.
He faced this himself not that long ago, so he should be careful how high he jumps up on the box.
But to your point about the committee assignment or what sanctions would there be, Elliot Engel is the chairman of the committee.
He just put out a statement that says anti-Semitism in any form is unacceptable.
And it's shocking to hear a member of Congress invoke the anti-Semitic trope of Jewish money.
He goes on to say he hopes the committee will focus on policy.
Nowhere in here does he say anything about she shouldn't be here.
And this isn't the first time that Congresswoman Omar has responded to criticism of the way she talks about the Israeli government by saying, hey, I'm willing to learn.
I'm open to it.
So to Carl's point, there may be some formalized counseling moment.
But it's clear that Republicans, even though let's just also be clear, they took a long time to condemn Steve King the way that they did.
Everybody knew for years.
Several decades, I think.
Several decades.
Yeah.
It's clear that Republicans are going to keep harping on this.
Oh, yes.
Republicans pounce.
They've been talking about this.
The New York Times actually ran the headline today about AOC's new Green Deal.
She messed up the release and Republicans pounced.
Not she tried to take over American freedom.
She just tried to destroy American freedom on the basis of a complete panic that they've already tried, a complete phony panic about the environment.
But Republicans pounce.
And, you know, it's nonsense.
I mean, Steve King, when he said what he said, even though he claimed it was taken out of context, he was severely punished by the Republican establishment right away.
They jumped on him right away.
They're saying, well, he was always like this, but that's because they hear everything as a dog whistle.
That has nothing to do with the reality of what the guy is saying.
Just take a look at Omar Elon.
She's being chased by reporters and being interviewed about it.
Take a look at if this looks like a person, A, who's sorry, or B, who's worried about any kind of real punishment other than this kind of finger wagging.
Look at her.
I'm pretty sure that was stated in my statement.
Were you surprised by the criticism?
Always surprised.
Are you worried about losing committee assignment?
Absolutely not.
I mean, absolutely not worried about losing a committee assignment.
Oh, I'm always surprised by criticism because she has, like AOC, she has this utter confidence born of ignorance and maybe nastiness as well.
That's not a woman who looks sorry to me.
That is not a woman who looks like she made a mistake.
This is something she knows she's going to get away with.
Why?
Means of Delegitimization00:03:23
Because the Democrat Party is increasingly an anti-Israel and thereby, through that, an anti-Semitic party.
Okay?
79%, almost 80% of Republicans sympathize more with Israel than the Palestinians, according to a Pew survey last year.
Democrats, it's 27% for Israel and 25% for the Palestinians.
I'm not sure what the rest of the people think.
In 2016, I'm reading this from the Wall Street Journal, dozens of Black Lives Matter groups released a platform accusing Israel of genocide and apartheid.
There's the demonization part again, and endorsing the boycott.
There's the delegitimization part, divestment and sanctions.
In 2017, the Democratic Socialists of America overwhelmingly endorsed BDS, the divestment and boycott movement, at its national conference, upon which the room erupted in chants of from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
And that means pushing five to six million Jews into the sea.
That's what it means.
It means destroying those people and destroying that country.
Two Democrats.
The socialist group has propelled, has propelled to Congress Rashida Talib and Alexandria Ekasio-Cortez.
They are also anti-Israel.
And you know, in a lot of ways, all week long, I've been talking about losing the idea of original sin, losing the idea that the founders knew so well.
You only have to read the Federalist Paper, that people suck, that people are flawed, that people given power will misuse power.
If you read the Federalist Papers, every word virtually is trying to create this device in the Constitution that will keep people from doing what they naturally do, which is abuse each other.
Okay?
That notion comes to us through an idea of God, which comes to us through Jesus, who comes to us through the Jews.
And, you know, even the idea of the Jews killing Jesus, which makes no more sense than saying white people held slaves, all white people held slaves, or all black people commit crime, saying the Jews killed Jesus is nonsense.
But even that idea is a way of denying what is the real truth, which is that mankind killed God because mankind doesn't like God, because in the face of God, they understand their own smallness and their own sinfulness and their own brokenness.
The Jews and the religion that the Jews spread through the West, that formed the West, that shaped the West, that gave the West most of the good things that it has through Jesus Christ.
That's why people hate the Jews.
They want to get rid of that because then they can do what they want.
And then they can say, oh, you know, we don't have to reserve any power to God.
We don't have to worry about original sin.
Just give me all the power.
I'll take care of the energy.
It's going to be fine.
I'll run the businesses.
I'll do what needs to be done.
It's all related to the same thing.
It is this idea of perfection, which makes people the enemies of God and makes people the enemies of the Jews.
That's why every time, and by the way, this has happened on the right too.
You know, William F. Buckley expelled the Jew haters from the conservative movement and really improved the conservative movement by doing that.
But it happens wherever people go wrong, wherever people lose sight of the moral realities that the West has taught them.
Anti-Semitism springs up.
It is not reserved to the left, but it is part of the left going crazy.
The Devil's Flagpole00:15:35
It is a marker.
It's the devil's flagpole.
Anti-Semitism is the devil's flagpole.
It goes up wherever bad thoughts, bad ideas, bad philosophy are infesting a movement, and that's what's happening to the left now.
I just want to take a moment.
We have a guest coming on to talk about identity politics.
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You know what I forgot to talk about?
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All right, we've got to take a break.
We have Dr. David Azerod coming up.
We're going to take a break from Facebook and YouTube.
good time to come to thedailywire.com, subscribe, then you can watch the entire show streamed there right on the site.
All right, Dr. David Azarod, we asked him on his He's a scholar with the Heritage Foundation.
We asked him on because he has been studying the American political tradition from the founding until today.
And lately, he has had an emphasis on political movements.
And lately, he's been studying identity politics, which I think is a really, really important subject.
He teaches on American conservative and progressive political thought at American University.
And he writes just about everywhere, the Claremont Review of Books, which is a great review.
If you're not subscribing to that, you should.
National Affairs, The Times of London, Real Clear Politics, The Federalist, all the good places.
Dr. Azerod, are you there?
Yes, I am.
Thank you for having me.
Well, welcome to the show.
Thanks very much for coming on.
Let's talk about identity politics.
It seems to me to be an almost primitive tribalist movement.
How did it rise after all the time when we talked about the melting pot?
How did identity politics rise and basically replace that ideal?
It basically started to grow out of the 60s of various radical black power, black nationalist, and women's liberation movements that were very critical on the one hand of the civil rights movement and the integrationist assimilationist push of MLK, and on the other hand, of the, by comparison, more modest feminism of Betty Fredan.
That was basically saying, you know, women should go out into the workforce.
And you had this radical streak.
It began with the African Americans and the women, and then it spread with Asians, Hispanics, homosexuals, and has blossomed into, I mean, what is probably, I think, the most dominant ideological current in America today.
And you see it by the unsurpassed power it has to silence people.
The fear lives within all of us.
You can criticize big government, you can criticize climate change.
What you cannot do in America today is deviate from the accepted script when you're speaking of protected identity groups.
It's absolutely true.
I find that in and of itself egregious.
I find that awful to censor people's thoughts and to kind of imprison them in their own minds with fear.
But it works.
It really does work.
And when you can silence your opponents, you have power over them.
Is there any reason they should abandon it?
Unless we stand up to them and demonstrate more courage.
No, why should they?
Because at this point, they barely need to silence us.
We first of all silence ourselves.
And then, you know, the American conservative movement and Republicans have become very good at shooting their own people on the head when they say something that the left finds offensive.
I challenge you to name the last time a Democrat had to resign because he said something that conservatives.
Now, Ilan Omar now is in trouble because she said things that Democrats find offensive.
But the power of identity politics remains.
So what we really need on the right is more courage, and we need to find a better way to talk about this.
What I found is they want you to believe that you either do identity politics or you are callously indifferent to the well-being of citizens who don't look like you.
I reject that premise.
I say you can sympathize and feel solidarity with any number of your fellow Americans who have been mistreated without going down this poisonous and divisive route.
I mean, one of the things that is seriously affected, and this affects me, is humor.
People get very, very nervous when you start to make racial jokes, and yet it's always seemed to me that racial humor has been a wonderful part of America and a way of dispelling the kind of natural hostility that rises up.
When is there a way of speaking that can't be twisted to seem bigoted?
I mean, you need to be extremely careful.
I should say I wholly agree with you with the humor, and I found that it's been a wonderful coping mechanism for minorities.
I mean, Jews tend to be pretty funny.
When you look at who's dominated comedy, it's mostly been Jews and African Americans, and Catholics to some extent too, I think because it's a coping mechanism for adversity.
And America has completely lost its sense of humor.
I mean, you know this.
We all know this.
But I think this, again, creates an opening for certain comedians, whether it be Seinfeld or Chris Rock, who are not conservatives, but to start to speak up against this.
Because where we have an advantage is I think that the common sense of the American people is very much with us.
And that the bullies have a lot of power, but they don't have large numbers.
Do you think that there's when you talk about this, because this has been such a powerful force for the left, because the left has been able to use this, is there anyone on the left, seriously on the left, who's willing to let it go?
You know, there was one person who I kind of have an odd soft spot for, at least I did, which is a strange thing to acknowledge when you work at the Heritage Foundation, and that's Bernie Sanders.
Because his heart and soul is not in identity politics, it's in traditional progressive class-based politics.
He cares about the working class regardless of their skin color.
And after the election, he said something really interesting, namely, one of the great challenges confronting the Democratic Party is whether or not we go beyond identity politics.
He also said that, you know, I come from the white working class and I'm deeply ashamed that the Democratic Party no longer knows how to talk to my class.
The problem is he's kind of gone soft since then.
And he got attacked by the left for saying this.
And it's always worth remembering that he is not a Democrat.
I mean, he caucuses with them, but he's not in the party.
And he seems kind of shut up about this, which I think is disappointing.
But I'm not seeing very many voices.
If anything, I'm seeing words like intersectionality that you would find in obscure lesbian journals are now being tweeted out by elected U.S. officials in the Democratic Party.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Isn't there a danger?
It always seems to me that there's a danger that once you accept the idea that it is right and proper to group people according to their race, which seems to me an offense against morality and certainly an offense against my religion, once you accept that, there's every reason to expect a backlash.
I mean, if you're going to say, I define myself as a black person and demand my rights as a black person, what's to stop white people from saying, well, you know, I define myself as a white person and all white people are going to stick together and see how you like them, apples.
Andrew, you've hit the nail on the head.
So right now, the only reason this whole insane thing is still working is because we have identity politics for certain groups, namely women, racial minorities, the LGBTQ, but not for men, for white people, for Christians.
But what happens when these groups get tired of being constantly berated, of having identities that they need to be ashamed of?
What happens if they say, we're sick and tired of this, we want identity politics for everyone?
Then you get tribalism.
Then you get competitive ethno-politics.
And then it seems to me you just no longer have a country.
I don't see what still binds the people together.
You know, the unnatural thing for human beings to do is to overcome our differences and to view each other as fellow American citizens.
So I think we should emphasize the commonalities.
And you know what?
The differences will naturally take care of themselves.
The Jews will want to live with Jews.
The Irish will want to live with Irish.
That's fine.
It's a free country.
You don't want the law segregating people.
But we're doing the exact opposite.
We're taking this dark side of human nature, the tribal side, and we're adding fuel to the fire.
It is amazing to me because it's also illogical because people say they want us to be inclusive, but in order to be inclusive, there has to be something that you include people in.
So there has to be a thing that unifies us.
The idea of diversity, which has now become virtually a business, I mean, if you can make a career in diversity at colleges and even in HR departments and businesses, is diversity, is there anything positive about diversity?
I mean, obviously, I like the fact, I like the fact that we live in a country with all kinds of people in it.
That's wonderful.
But is it the diversity that we're celebrating that we should be celebrating?
I mean, I love intellectual diversity.
You know, I would love to be in a room with, I don't know, let's pick an example, six left-handed gay black men who are all Mormons, but who have radically different views on Western history and on philosophy.
Actually, that they're all Mormons is not a good idea.
Say that they all come from different religions and could have serious, spirited theological and political debates.
That's my kind of diversity.
What you end up having at the universities is people look different in a superficial way, but they all think the same thing.
So, you know, if by diversity you mean counting beans and judging people by the color of their skin, not the content of their character, I don't see how that's a what's the greatness in that.
The diversity we ought to be emphasizing is the diversity of ideas.
And of course, we're an inclusive, free republic, and we recognize that Americans come in a variety of skin colors and shapes, and you name it.
So that to me is, I don't see why you need to label that diversity.
That's the idea of equal rights under the law.
Okay.
I want to circle back.
Before I let you go, I feel like I have to circle back to this because it's something I get asked all the time and think about a lot.
For the right, for a conservative, how do you fight back?
What is a strategy?
I mean, you've obviously been studying this.
You've obviously been thinking about it a lot.
Where do we look for the strategy?
Instead of waiting for the left to abandon what is working for them as a power grab, what do we do?
How do we face this down and turn it around?
So it's not easy, and I'm not going to give you the 30-second quick solution to all of this.
But I would say the first thing we need to do is to do our homework.
Let me give you a simple example.
Have you ever met an elected member of Congress, a Republican, who cannot explain free markets and explain what's wrong with socialism?
They may come from the most podung district that you've never heard of.
For some reason, the movement has prioritized the defense of markets, or for some reason.
The reason is obvious.
It was the Cold War and the looming threat of communism.
And as a result, everyone is equipped to explain this wondrous phenomenon of markets that just don't make any sense on the surface of it.
You mean if people do what they want, we generate prosperity.
We've got to do our homework on this one.
And the risks are even higher, because if you flub an answer on free markets, the club for growth is not happy.
If you flub an answer on identity politics, you lose your job.
So I would say that the point is to do one's homework and then to realize that you don't need to debate whether or not certain groups have been mistreated in the past.
In the case of African Americans, it's undeniable.
Undeniable.
You want to focus on what do you propose?
Do you want to promote alienation, say that America is hopelessly racist and demand special treatment?
Or do you want to say the promise of America is justice for all?
You are my fellow citizens.
Let's fight to give you equal rights under the law.
Okay.
I think, I mean, you're making a good point about arguing over the markets.
It really is something that we have not embraced because I think they have succeeded in terrorizing most of the right.
Dr. David Azerod from the Heritage Foundation, really interesting.
Thank you very much for coming on.
I hope we get to talk again.
My pleasure.
Thank you, Andrew.
Rants About Walls00:09:39
I should mention, by the way, because it's kind of breaking news, and I don't like to talk about breaking news because I want to digest it and find out what I think before I say anything, but that there is supposed to be a deal for border security.
It looks like Donald Trump has already said that this is not a deal that's going to do the job.
He doesn't like it, but he hasn't quite come out and said that he won't sign it.
The word is that it gives $1.375 billion for the wall, a lot less than the $5.7 billion that Trump was asking for.
The president said this is from USA Today.
His most recent request he said we pay for 234 miles of new physical barrier.
But late last year, when the administration indicated that we'd use the money to build about 215 miles of barriers, only 100 miles of which would be new.
So anyway, the Democrats have been pulling all this trickery as a negotiation.
They have a right to negotiate too.
They've been pulling all this stuff about trying to limit the number of beds so that they won't be able to incarcerate people who come over.
They'll just have to let them free or they'll disappear.
So it's very clear the Democrats do not want border security.
There's lots of strategies for Trump now.
He can shut the government down.
He can wait until December when he'll have a little bit more leverage because some of Obama's sequestration cuts have kicked in.
You know, I was watching yesterday, Trump went to El Paso and he had one of his big rallies, and it was amazing.
I mean, it was really cold, and there were thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of people waiting outside who couldn't get in.
They said there were about eight or 10,000 who came into the arena, but all these thousands of people were outside, and Trump was really singing it.
He was really doing the wall thing.
Play cut number three.
Juarez had 1,200 murders.
El Paso, right next door, a few feet away, had 23 murders.
That's not good either.
But 23 compared to 1,200.
Walls work.
Actually, there's nothing like them for what we're talking about.
We want to stop drugs.
We want to stop traffickers.
We want to stop criminals from coming in.
Walls save lives.
Walls save tremendous numbers of lives.
The biggest proponents of open borders are rich liberals and wealthy donors.
These are hypocrites who oppose security for you while living their entire lives.
I do too, to be honest with you.
I'm guilty.
I'm guilty.
I also live behind walls, okay?
They live behind walls and gates and they have guards all over the place.
Me too.
Me too.
And, you know, the thing about it is there's something about this argument.
This has never been a big issue for me.
I think that they should pass some laws and enforce them.
I think having laws that people ignore is very, very bad for the country.
It's a rule of law issue for me.
It's not a matter of how many people come in.
I just think we should be in control of who comes in.
I think we should decide whether immigration is a privilege that we are according to those people we care about or is it a responsibility?
Do we have a responsibility to take people in?
That's a debate that I think we should have.
But I do think that Trump is making more sense than the opposition.
Beto O'Rourke held a protest meeting.
I think seven people showed up.
And he made this argument.
It just doesn't make any sense to me.
Listen to this.
stand for america and we stand against walls we know that there is no bargain in which we can sacrifice some of our humanity to gain a little more security we We know that we deserve and will lose both of them if we do.
We stand for the best traditions and values of this country, for our fellow humanity and who we are when we are at our best.
And that's El Paso, Texas.
I'm glad the country's here to see us.
Yeah, why does he bounce around like that, bounce around on his toes like a seven-year-old kid?
You know, you ever talk to a seven-year-old when they just kind of keep moving, you know, a little boy, he just keeps moving around, bouncing around.
It just doesn't make any sense to me.
It doesn't seem to me that it's necessarily humane to let people come into the country to break our laws, to take the jobs away from our poor.
You know, I do want a compassionate immigration system.
So I think does Donald Trump.
I just want the laws to be enforced.
It seems to me a wall, not the worst idea if you put it.
Obviously, I don't want a wall across the entire border.
Neither does Trump.
He said a million times he doesn't mean to build a wall across the entire border.
But at this place is where it would help if you go down and ask the border security guys, would it help to have a wall there?
If they say yes, put up the wall.
It just seems like that logic is going to win out over time if Trump keeps pushing at it and he will.
I got to end.
I want to end with a final reflection.
You know, yesterday, the Babylon B, which I just found to be the second funniest satire site next to this show, it has really Trump the Onion as much better now.
They ran a thing that said, a headline that said, minority man, thankful white guy is around to tell him what jokes he should find offensive.
Stating that his help is invaluable.
Local man, Henry Green, confirmed Monday just how thankful he is that he has a white friend around to tell him exactly what jokes he's supposed to find offensive as a black man.
And I laughed at that because I think a lot of this stuff is because of fear, intersectionality, people imposing, you know, wanting to rush out before the black people protest in order to preserve their own reputation.
And this thing that's happening in Virginia, this Ralph Northam thing, Ralph Northam, I think, should have been impeached for recommending that babies can be left to die if you don't want them.
I thought that's a terrible thing.
But this thing there, he had a picture of a guy, a Klansman, and a guy in blackface on his med school yearbook just seems to me something stupid that he did in the past, something stupid and insensitive he did in the past.
And at the same time, I do wonder, as I wonder when I talk about women, when I say, gee, it seems to me that women are making a big mistake dedicating themselves to a work life that is going to take them away from raising their kids.
That seems to be a mistake to me, but I don't know what women think.
If a woman tells me that's really what she wants, hey, it's none of my business.
It really isn't.
So I don't want to sit around and tell black people what's offensive or not.
But in fact, the majority of black people in Virginia do not find Northam to be a racist guy, don't want him to resign over this.
They think it's stupid.
They think it's a bad thing that he did when he was in his 20s.
But they don't want it.
They don't feel that offended by it either.
You know, I know a little bit about this because when I was a kid, I learned about Western civilization through literature.
That is what brought me into the West, which I loved so much.
I loved this country.
I loved it as a kid.
I love it now.
But what taught me the traditions was literature.
I read my way into the traditions.
And a lot of literature, because of what I said at the opening about Western civilization, a lot of it was anti-Semitic and I was a Jew.
You know, I mean, there was a lot of stuff, Shylock and Shakespeare, Fagan and Dickens, the Jewish thief in Dickens.
Robert Cohn, Hemingway, I was a huge Hemingway fan when I was a kid, and Robert Cohn was the evil, you know, what did he call him, Jewish, he has his Jewish superiority and is kind of a wimp in the sun also rises.
So they were all there, and I realized that there was a substantial section of Western civilization that harbored anti-Semitic memes.
You know, we didn't call them memes back then, but that's, but they did.
Why wasn't I offended?
I wasn't offended because I did not think that that was what I loved about America.
I thought that was antithetical to what I loved about America and about the West.
I thought it was a mistake because people are sinful.
There are mistakes involved in everything.
And I think that that's true too with blacks.
Every day, every day that we held slaves, every day that we had Jim Crow, we were violating the principles of America.
People do that.
They violate their principles, but the principles tend to creep up on them and force them into line over time.
And I think that that has happened to America.
And so when somebody says something, you want to know if that thing that he says, which might be insensitive, it might be stupid, it might hurt your feelings, you want to know if that represents who he is.
I determined that the anti-Semitism that was deeply embedded in Western culture still did not represent what Western culture was.
And I think black people have to ask themselves now, do they really believe that this country is irredeemable, that this country is just—they always talk about racism in America.
Have they been anywhere else?
Do they know what it's like anywhere else?
I've traveled around a lot.
I lived overseas for seven years.
I find this the least racist country on earth, the least racist country on earth.
And maybe being offended all the time is not really the way to go.
I mean, maybe being afraid of assimilation, being afraid it's going to take something away from you is not the way to go.
Maybe the melting pot was the right idea, and intersectionality and identity politics is a bad idea.
I mean, the one thing I've noticed about progressives, they tend to progress into really bad territory, and I think they've done that here.
It is something I think blacks and whites should be talking about to each other without calling each other names.
Daily Wire Questions00:01:10
Anyway, tomorrow, the mailbag.
We will be here.
I hope you will be here with your questions.
I will be here with the answers, so I'll want the questions to go along with them.
Otherwise, I'll just have to make up the answers.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Andrew Clavin 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.
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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 examine the rampant bigotry in the Democratic Party.
Also, we'll get the latest on the Jussie Smollett alleged hate crime attack, which is a story that is falling apart right before our eyes.
And finally, Bill Nye makes the dumbest case for abortion that you will ever hear.