The Rule of Lawyer skewers 2020 Democratic candidates with absurd satire—Bernie Sanders as a "Stalinist gunman," Kamala Harris in a drug-fueled CNN sleepover, and Warren’s fabricated Native ancestry—before pivoting to litigation culture: Nick Sandman’s $250M defamation suit against The Washington Post and 16 states’ challenge to Trump’s border wall emergency. Jenna Ellis argues courts lack authority over policy disputes, while the host critiques media bias, from CNN’s Republican hires to Clinton-era intimidation tactics. The episode blends legal analysis with mailbag chaos—defending explicit storytelling, dismissing vegan activism as fringe, and praising John Wayne’s films despite modern moral outrage, all while warning against UBI’s welfare-state expansion. [Automatically generated summary]
It's time to take a look at the latest Democrat candidates for president.
Among the frontrunners so far is Bernie Sanders, who announced his new campaign slogan, Forward Into the Past.
The sprightly 77-year-old Stalinist dramatized his entry into the race by taking a campaign worker into the cellar and shooting him in the back of the head to remind the public how things were done back in the Soviet Union when he was honeymooning there during his youth.
Sanders is running on a platform of destroying the American economy and creating a new American life of breadlines and drudgery until the inevitable collapse into chaos.
Another Democrat hopeful is Senator Kamala Harris, who announced her candidacy with an all-girl sleepover with a group of giggling CNN reporters during which they tried on some cute clothes, smoked some dope, and dished the dirt on whether party muckamuck Willie Brown was good in bed when he cheated on his wife, slept with Kamala, and then gave her coveted political appointments.
Harris also released her music mood tape before detailing her platform of universal free poverty, saying that every American had a right to live on a street paved with homeless people with at least one cat to cook for dinner in every trash fire that kept them warm.
Third in line is Senator Elizabeth Warren, whose campaign slogan is, I'm not lying about my ancestry anymore.
Warren announced her candidacy with a touching speech about how her mammy and pawpaw would sit around the campfire under the totem pole, telling the kids tales about their struggle to get married amidst all the prejudice against Native Americans, which they'd heard about for some reason.
Mammy and Pawpaw were two of the biggest liars I ever met, Warren told an audience of U.S. cavalrymen.
And if I'm elected, I will hunt them down and make them pay for their crimes.
So far, approximately 417 Democrats have announced they won't be running.
The rest are in.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is ippitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, it is a cliché to say that Americans are a litigious people, people who like to sue each other.
It's also not actually true.
In the Western world, we rank somewhere in the middle in litigiositude, somewhere between the people in France who are too busy drinking and screwing each other to go to court much, and the crazy Jews in Israel, who, as we know, are all lawyers.
It's a joke.
But it does sometimes feel that Americans sue each other over stuff that shouldn't be decided in court, like whether you need a warning on your coffee to tell you it's hot because it's coffee and you're an idiot, or whether you should be compensated after you got scared at an amusement park Halloween funhouse.
The answer is no, and you're an idiot.
Two important lawsuits are heading for the courts right now, but it's possible that the issues at hand should be decided not by lawyers, but by sensible adults in reasonable conversation.
So my suggestion is instead of suing, we should travel back to ancient Greece, find some sensible adults, and bring them into the present.
Failing that, I guess we're going to court and we'll talk about it.
It's also mailbag day.
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Actually, it's K-L-A-V-A-N.
And speaking of K-L-A-V-A-N, Another Kingdom, the novel, the first novel in the trilogy will be out on March 5th, so you only have a little time left to pre-order it and get all the free stuff.
There's lots of free stuff.
My favorite free thing they're giving you is a novella-length prequel that tells the origin story of one of the major characters in the story.
But there's also pictures you can put on your phone and all kinds of video and stuff like that and a map, I believe, of the kingdom.
Why The Press Is On Trial00:10:15
Go to anotherkingdombook.com, anotherkingdombook.com.
You can buy it there.
It'll take you to Amazon.
But if you've already gotten it at Amazon, you can go there and register and they will give you the free stuff for pre-ordering.
Please do that because it also helps the book and it helps move the book up the rankings on Amazon, which helps me.
So two lawsuits.
One of them, a really interesting lawsuit as far as I'm concerned, Nick Sandman, or lawyers for Nick Sandman, have filed a $250 million lawsuit against the Washington Post for defamation for the things they said.
Nick Sandman is the Covington school kid who was confronted by that supposed native elder and was called all kinds of things were told that just wearing a MAGA hat was a bad thing and that he had a smirk on his face that made him just showed what a bigot he was.
He was just absolutely slandered all over the press.
They're promising, his lawyers are promising this is just the first suit and there are more to come.
And you know, what happens usually is a lot of newspapers get away with saying stuff about people because the Supreme Court has basically decided that if you're a famous person, right, or if you are somebody who has injected themselves into a big news story, okay, then they can't just say that they lied about you.
They have to show that they lied about you maliciously, that they had a reason to really want to destroy you, to hurt you.
They didn't just make a mistake.
Very, very hard to prove.
Now, personally, I think Donald Trump can sue all these people and prove malice, but obviously that's not something we want people to do.
We don't want people suing newspapers because they attack the powerful, even if they're wrong.
I mean, even if their stories are just, you know, like it's just bias like CNN or New York Times or The Washington Post or ABC or, you know, NBC or basically everybody.
You know, but still, but still, this is different.
This is different.
A lawyer for the Covington kids, Robert Barnes, explains the rules in this case.
Because these are all private citizens and in many cases minors and kids, the law is that if saying anything false about them is libel and you don't have a defense of actual malice, all you have to prove is negligence.
So a lot of these journalists have been saying false statements about these kids, false statements about the kids that are at the Lincoln Memorial, false statements about kids that were in various photographs related to the school, slurring and libeling the entire school and all the alumni for the school.
And all you have to prove is that they were negligent in doing so.
And by this standpoint, by this point in time, it is clear that anyone who continues to lie and libel about these kids has done so illegally and can be sued for it.
And you know, they gave them a chance to apologize, which they didn't do.
Obviously, they're going to stand on their First Amendment rights.
You know, it is a big issue.
In England, where I lived for many years, in England, it's much easier to sue people.
You just can't lie about people.
One of my favorite lawsuits was a lawsuit by Elton John, who felt he had been lied about.
And when he won the lawsuit, he came out and he said, you know, poof is a British word for a gay guy.
You know, it's kind of a slur.
And he came out and he said, you can call me a fat, untalented poof, but you can't lie about me.
Which I just thought was one of the great lines of all time.
But this is something, you know, Donald Trump has been saying we ought to relax the libel laws.
Clarence Thomas and Admin Scalia actually agreed with that.
They said that people should not be protected.
They should not be disallowed from lawsuit that just because they're famous, it's too broad and people should not be able to lie about you no matter who you are.
Anyway, this suit, though, is a big, big takedown of the Washington Post.
Okay, it says it called it the first and loudest media bully.
It says in a span of three days in January of this year, commencing on January 19th, the Post engaged in a modern-day form of McCarthyism by competing with CNN and NBC, among others, to claim leadership of a mainstream and social media mob of bullies which attacked, vilified, and threatened Nicholas Sandman, an innocent secondary school child.
And it goes on and says, let me just find this.
Oh, here it is.
It said they ignored basic journalist standards because it wanted to advance its well-known and easily documented biased agenda against President Donald J. Trump.
So they are really going after the Post for being the New York, the Washington Post.
They are going after the Washington Post for being the Washington Post.
Washington Post, where democracy dies in slavering hatred of Donald Trump.
Basically, they're saying this was part of the agenda, but this guy, this guy, is an innocent kid, and he got caught in the crossfire while they were trying to take down the president.
That's a really interesting lawsuit.
And, you know, the guys, well, here's the guy, the actual lawyer, McMurt Murdy, I believe it is.
Yeah, Todd McMurdy, saying this has had real-life consequences.
People were driving by, media vans were showing up.
There were all types of Twitter threats.
And so they basically left their house in an emergency state and went and stayed with a friend.
After that, our local Commonwealth attorney, who is Rob Sanders, had to coordinate a fairly extensive security project for them so that he was in touch with our Homeland Security people here in this region.
And also, he was, you know, checking on threats, providing for police protection when they did move back to their home.
And thank God at this point, a lot of that has calmed down.
So, you know, the problem they have, as I keep saying, is that they are surrounded.
The Washington Post, all these news people are surrounded by people exactly like them who think exactly like them.
They don't know that being for abortion is an opinion.
They don't know that, you know, that saying that not every conservative is a racist or that conservative ideas themselves aren't racist.
They don't know that their definition of racism is a left-wing definition and that the right is not being racist when they disagree with it.
They don't know that because there's a great story at CNN, and I'm reading this from the Daily Beast, a liberal paper.
CNN staffers are upset and confused about the net.
I know you're, I don't want to hurt your feelings.
I know you're brushing away a little tear that the CNN staffers are upset and confused, but wait till you hear what it's about.
They're confused about the network's decision to hire a partisan political operative to oversee its 2020 campaign reporting.
On Tuesday, a CNN spokesperson confirmed to the Daily Beast that the network has hired Republican political advisor Sarah Isgur as the politics editor, helming CNN's 2020 coverage.
The move was first reported by Politico.
Throughout her decade-long career in Republican politics, Isgar has served as an advisor to Ted Cruz and Mitt Romney and was Carly Fiorina's deputy campaign manager.
Until last year, Isgar was a top spokesman for former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Department of Justice.
A CNN spokesperson said Isgar will not be involved in the network's DOJ coverage, but will guide TV and digital coverage of the election.
It's extremely demoralizing for everyone here, one network editorial staffer told the Daily Beast.
People are generally confused.
Another editorial employee said it's very bizarre.
Okay, it's very bizarre.
Now, this is CNN, right, where Chris Cuomo of the Cuomo dynasty, the left-wing Democrat Cuomo dynasty, is a commentator, but he's absolutely, completely non-biased.
There's no problem there.
You know, this is the thing.
They don't know.
George Stephanopoulos is the chief newsman at a major network, and I know I kind of use him as a whipping boy, but still, it is amazing, an amazing act of corruption to appoint this guy to head your news staff on a network.
This is not cable TV.
This is a network.
I've played this before.
I'm going to play it again.
Here is George Stephanopoulos during the Clinton, Bill Clinton campaign.
His job was to defend Bill Clinton from what they called, their words, bimbo eruptions, namely women who came forward saying Bill was chasing them around the room or even raping them, which was, they were popping up all over because Bill mistreated women.
And this was what he was doing.
And with Hillary's absolute encouragement and conviction and involvement, here is just a video that they were proud of at the time of him intimidating a reporter into silence.
I guarantee you that if you do this, you'll never work in Democratic politics again.
Maybe you don't want to.
I'm not saying it matters.
You will be embarrassed before the National Press School.
People will think, nobody will believe you.
And people will think you're scum.
The alternative is don't do it.
It causes you some temporary pain with people who tomorrow aren't going to matter.
And you have a campaign that understands it in a difficult time.
You did something right.
And that's important.
I mean, it doesn't mean anything, or we can't do anything for you specifically or anything like that, but you know that you did the right thing and that you didn't dishonor yourself.
You know, that's Stephanopoulos, who heads ABC News.
Maggie Hamerman, who was exposed in an email hack as a friendly for the Clinton campaign, who they used to plant friendly stories, is now the White House correspondent, ran a ridiculous piece, I think it was this morning, about Trump is trying to stop the Russia investigation, which was basically about Trump complaining about the Russia investigation.
You know, people, all these people left the news business and went to join the Obama administration, and then some of them came back.
A former retirement magazine correspondent was Jay Carney.
He was the Obama's spokesman.
ABC News Linda Douglas joined the White House to help push Obamacare and then returned to the Atlantic.
The Chicago Tribune's Jill Zuckman, a political correspondent, became spokeswoman for Ray LaHood, the transportation secretary.
Jim Scudo, who left ABC News to work for U.S. Ambassador to China, Gary Locke, before returning to a media job at where?
CNN.
They do not know what they do not know.
They do not know they're inside the bubble.
And it's not a bubble.
Joybird's Beautiful Furniture00:02:02
It's an iron lung.
They don't know that they are surrounded by people who agree with them.
My only problem with this lawsuit is that I don't like to see the press on trial.
I want the press to be free, even though I despise them.
Even though I despise how they use their freedom, I want to defend that freedom.
That freedom is more important than the fact that they're corrupt and despicable.
I want them to reform themselves.
I think the guys have a case on this.
I think they have a good case.
I think they're doing something that in a way needs to be done.
I wish it didn't have to go through the courts because I do not want to see our First Amendment rights abridged in any way.
I wish this were the kind of thing where the lawyers had gone to them and said, you messed up and what we want you to do is hire some conservatives and have a balanced report and they did it.
That would be reasonable adults talking reasonably and taking reasonable action.
When it goes to the courts, it's dangerous, but I think they have a case.
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And I know what you're thinking.
Constitutional Concerns00:15:56
I know what you're wondering.
You're wondering, how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
No ease.
In Clavin, I just make it look this easy.
For the second case we want to talk about is the lawsuit about the National Emergency Declaration by the president.
He's being sued, I think, by 16 states.
We have with us, as always, she doesn't even leave anymore.
She just actually sleeps in this studio.
Jenna Ellis, the constitutional law attorney.
She contributes to the Washington Examiner, the Federalists, and someplace called the Daily Wire, but that's just when she's slumming, basically.
She's a frequent guest on Fox and the author of The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution, a guide for Christians to understand America's current constitutional crisis.
And Jenna, I hope you notice we're back in the studio.
We're back.
They've actually brought us out of bin Laden's cave back to the studio.
Which is great.
You know, and the couches are so much more comfortable there.
So I really appreciate that we're back in the studio.
It's also not 30 degrees and it stinks.
It really stank in there.
And I told the guys, don't worry, you know, we're leaving the studio, but we'll always, we're leaving the outside studio, but we'll always have our mesothelioma or whatever.
There you go.
That's another potential lawsuit.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So let's talk about this.
How many, it's like 16 states are suing the president over his declaration of a national emergency.
Do they have a case?
No, absolutely not.
And what's so sad about this is that the states are really filing this.
And this was instigated by the Attorney General of California, who is known to be a liberal activist and has lost actually a lot of cases recently.
The NIFLA case that went in front of the Supreme Court that was about California's controversial free speech case for crisis pregnancy centers.
That one, NIFLA versus Becerra.
That one specifically was another case that he wanted to just take and was absolutely activist of California.
And so at his instigation, now he's roped in about 16 states for this lawsuit.
But the federal government and the state governments have a separation of powers pursuant to the Constitution.
And that's the way that our Constitutional Republic works.
And so if the states don't like the fact that the president can declare a national emergency pursuant to authority that Congress has given them, their remedy is to go and lobby Congress.
And this is why, by the way, I think that the 17th Amendment should be repealed and state legislatures should be able to appoint and then recall senators.
And that was one of the ways of having that check and balance on congressional authority.
But because of the 17th Amendment, we don't have that anymore.
But the remedy here is not a lawsuit.
It's to go through the viable constitutional mechanism.
So you're not arguing about whether the national emergency is constitutional.
You're arguing that they have no standing.
But don't they have standing if he's going to build part of the wall in California?
I mean, can't they say, well, our land is going to suffer and there's going to be problems here?
I don't think that they have standing even in that instance.
And what about, so Colorado, my home state, is joining that, and we're certainly not a border state.
So what standing would they have?
You know, so this is just, it's just a political maneuver here.
But even for the states that are on the border, this is, again, why immigration and naturalization, as well as border security and military operations are specifically given to the federal government because we are part of, the states are part of the United States of America.
And they still are under Article IV when they join the Union.
And they are still subservient and under the U.S. Constitution as supreme law of the land.
And so they don't have any standing to challenge what subject matter our U.S. Constitution provides to the federal government to determine.
If they don't like policy, well, they can go just like any other regular citizen can and go and lobby Congress and go through those mechanisms.
But they can't challenge something simply because they don't like the policy and say that it's unconstitutional.
Because remember, the liberals use that term unconstitutional to mean I don't like your policy.
The actual definition of it means can the federal government use its specific limited authority in this particular way?
And all of the law and the Constitution says absolutely.
So about this law, the emergency declaration, every emergency declaration up till now, I mean, not everyone, but most of them have been about stopping tyrants in hostile countries from moving funds around.
This is really different.
I mean, it's different in kind.
And it does feel, it feels like he is expanding maybe not the law, maybe not the written law, but it feels like he's expanding the use of it.
Is there any problem constitutionally in your mind?
I mean, if the lawsuit goes forward and they say, oh, well, California does have standing, there was a very funny clip of Trump saying, yeah, they'll sue and then we'll go to this court and that court.
Finally, we'll go to the Supreme Court and then we'll win.
Will he win at the Supreme Court level?
He should.
If this case actually reaches the merits and they don't dismiss it on a procedural issue like standing and just say, you know, you can't sue on this basis anyway.
If the Supreme Court reaches the merits, then absolutely.
I mean, the declaration of national emergency pursuant to the 1976 law, as well as others, that Congress never said first, here is the limits of what you can and can't declare a national emergency on.
That's implicit in the Constitution anyway.
What powers are actually given to the federal government?
So when Nancy Pelosi and others are saying, well, all of a sudden, you know, this will open the floodgates that he can declare, a future president can declare a national emergency on gun control or health care or climate change.
Well, that's just ridiculous because none of those subject matters are given to the federal government as limited powers to do anything about anyway.
So we don't have that problem.
But even if we reach the merits here, we still have precedent from President Reagan as well as President George W. Bush right after 9-11, temporarily declaring a national emergency following 9-11.
So we have some analogous precedent, but we also have the law that if Congress wants to change, it absolutely can.
And I think that that's a legitimate question for Congress to consider, but not after the fact and not just because they don't like this particular president.
Yeah, the New York Times had a really interesting line.
I mean, I don't think that they were lying.
I just think that they were wrong where they said basically Congress could override what he's doing, which they just can't.
I mean, Congress cannot veto the president.
The president can veto Congress.
Right.
And there's actually a, I believe it's a 1981 Supreme Court case that dealt with this very question that said if Congress has delegated specific limited authority to the president under their own acts, then if the president decides to use that power that's been delegated in a certain policy way, Congress then can't go back and veto it because that would, they're basically circumventing their own law that they created.
So we already have Supreme Court precedent on that level as well.
And I wrote a piece just yesterday in Washington Examiner that discusses this.
And the headline is, you know, sorry, Democrats, President Trump isn't creating this president that's just going to open the floodgates.
But I think people really need to understand the Constitution in context and understand what a declaration of national emergency is and what it is not.
And also what an executive order is and what it is not.
So my last question, just as one conservative to another, setting the law aside, does it bother you to see Trump use the executive power in this way?
And compare it for a minute to Obama's executive orders.
I mean, it is different in kind from Obama's executive orders, but it kind of bothers me in the same way, just instinctively.
Well, it doesn't bother me because he's actually using his authority pursuant to a subject matter that is given to the federal government, where President Obama was issuing executive orders on education, on social justice issues, on things that absolutely were outside the scope of what the federal government is vested with in power.
And so when conservatives are objecting to President Obama, we're not objecting to the use of executive orders, period.
We're objecting to what is he actually doing with the executive order.
And here it is very different in kind because the subject matter is different.
National security, border protection, defense spending, those are all things that the federal government constitution has power to determine.
So it doesn't bother me.
Jenna Ellis, always great to see you, the author of the Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution.
You can see her just about everywhere, but why would you when you can always see her here, I think?
Absolutely.
And great to see you again, Drew.
It's always great to talk to you.
Thanks, Jenna.
Thanks.
All right, we got the mailbag coming up.
You want to come over?
Oh, my God.
No, I can't even remember what I was saying.
We got the mailbag coming up, but I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
Then you can be in the next mailbag.
It's a little stuffy and uncomfortable in there, but you do get to ask questions.
It's only a lousy 10 bucks a month, 100 bucks for a year.
We solve all your problems.
What else could you ask for?
And again, please go to anotherkingdombook.com and pre-order the first novel in the series today for a lot of cool, free stuff.
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All right, the mailbag.
Yeah.
I was ready for it that time, although I could have done an incredible spit take.
All right.
All right.
Just knock it off.
Just knock it off.
From Ball.
Why do you want more sex and swearing in the movies?
The Bible says no foul language should come from your mouth.
It is possible to have great stories without them.
Many great films have been made without them, as the golden age of Hollywood attests.
Are you possibly afraid to get close enough to God that you think your personality and writing will suffer?
There will be a change, but for the better.
The Christian entertainment industry needs talent, not more B-movies like we have too much of.
And the Christian body needs authentic biblical Christians with substance and power.
It seems that you endorse Christian principles to a degree, but you're avoiding having an up-close personal relationship with God.
That is just what comes across to me.
Love your show, except for the complaining about sex and swearing in the movies.
All right, let me explain.
The reason that we have so many B movies coming out of the Christian community is because the Christian community serves people who, when they are thinking of themselves as Christians, will not watch real life.
They think that God is the God of Candyland, where people don't swear, where people don't have sex, where if people have sex, they get pregnant or they get punished.
None of those things is true.
And so all those stories are not representing real life.
That's what makes them B movies.
To give you an example, when I wrote the first draft of Another Kingdom, so it's not like I haven't explored this, I felt Another Kingdom, I still feel Another Kingdom is a novel, now almost a trilogy, that would have a lot of appeal to people with a Christian worldview.
It's not a Christian book per se, but I thought Christian people would understand it at a different depth than other people.
And so I thought, well, why offend people?
Because I know they feel the way you feel.
And I thought, well, I offend people.
I'll leave out all the swearing.
I had to rewrite the book and put the swearing back in.
I actually put in too much because I overcompensated.
Then when I went back to the novel, which is coming out March 5th, when I came back to the novel, I took some of it out again because I felt I had overdone it.
It didn't sound real.
It didn't sound right.
It sounded absurd.
It sounded like I was making up a squeaky, clean character who talked in a way that no one today talks.
The golden age of movie, during the golden age of Hollywood, people did curse, but they didn't curse in polite society, and the movies were part of polite society.
Now, people have foul mouths all the time.
They can't even, on CNN, they can't even go for a couple of weeks without uttering a four-letter word on TV.
So the world has just changed, and I cannot realistically represent the world of which God is king without putting in sex and sex and swearing.
And by the way, there's plenty of sex in the great old movies.
They just did it off-screen, but it all happens.
I mean, Casablanca is about an act of adultery.
That's the center, the central moment in the movie.
It just happens off-screen.
So, you know, look, I don't write, you know, graphic sexual scenes, but I do write things that people think about and they think sexually.
Men especially think sexually all the time and they think of women in sexual ways.
And without recording that, I cannot write reality.
And that's what writing is about.
It is about writing reality.
God is God of the real world.
He is not God of Candyland.
And that is why these Christian movies don't move the ball downfield at all.
I don't hate them.
I think they're like rom-coms.
Girls like to go to rom-coms because they show them their fantasies played out.
There's nothing wrong with that.
Christians like to go to Christian movies because they show them their fantasy of what the Christian world is like.
And then when they're not being Christians, they go watch Game of Thrones because it shows them the real world.
If you want good Christian work, you want Christian work in the real world.
By the way, at its greatest, at its greatest, Christian art was filled with sexuality and with violence.
I always say that the book that really made me a Christian was Crime and Punishment, which is the story of an axe murderer who falls in love with a hooker.
That's the greatest Christian, in my opinion, that's the greatest Christian novel ever written.
Try selling that in a Christian bookstore today.
You couldn't.
And that's a loss for Christianity.
That's my answer.
Dear Professor Claven from Jacob, a wise teacher of men who know nothing.
I finally manned up and asked the girl in my microbiology lab out last Friday.
Unfortunately, she told me that she has a boyfriend.
My question for you, is it possible to move on and still be friends while I'm still wildly attracted to her?
I can't help but feel a palpable personal and sexual attraction to her every time we interact or if I even think about her.
She's been sending me all kinds of mixed signals like long looks.
She's on my Facebook page.
It feels kind of wrong to go after another guy's girl, but I haven't felt this kind of passion or natural attraction to a girl since my first love in high school.
Another question that comes to mind is, should I tell her how I feel about her so I can get some solid closure?
As always, your advice is greatly appreciated, and your show is a light to my path.
Well, thank you.
Well, you've got a couple of problems here.
First, no, you can't be friends with her.
You're not going to be friends with her.
It's very hard to be friends with a woman anyway, you know, just friends, but if you're attracted to her, that's out the window.
You know, it's just not going to happen, and it's the wrong thing to do, and it can only take you to bad places.
Another problem you have is if she's really flirting with you and you're not just imagining that, remember that she has a boyfriend and she's flirting with you.
So if she became your girlfriend, that might be a problem for you in the future.
Finally, all is fair in love and war.
You do not want to get in a cheating situation with her.
But I certainly, if I were in your situation, I would do one of two things.
I would either go to her and say, look, this is the way I feel about you.
If you ever dump your boyfriend, I really am attracted to you and I'd love to take you out.
So let me know if you break up with your boyfriend.
And maybe she'll respond one way or another.
You don't know.
You do not want her cheating on her boyfriend because then you know that that's the kind of person she is.
Another thing you might try is asking somebody else out.
You might find, even if they're not the love of your life, you might find that asking somebody else out takes care of the problem and diverts your attention elsewhere.
But if that doesn't work, I wouldn't have a moral objection at all.
I would do it.
I would go up and say to her, I really am attracted to you.
And so if you break up with your boyfriend, I would like to know.
Vegan Politics and Welfare00:14:54
All right, from Timothy, question, which of your novels would you recommend for a middle-aged adult who's never read your fiction books?
Well, of course, I want you to read Another Kingdom because that's the new one coming out.
And if you pre-order, you get all kinds of good stuff.
There's also Werewolf Cop.
You might like Empire of Lies.
True Crime still holds up very well, I think.
Identity Man, what's another one?
There are a bunch of them.
I don't know.
Some of them are more violent than others.
I'm not a big violence guy.
I have violence in them, but I'm not like a particularly gore-fest guy.
Werewolf cop is probably a little more gory than others.
But all those are good.
Empire of Lies has a really strong political theme, which is cool.
And so does Identity Man, but Identity Man is a kind of underrated book.
I don't think that's sold very well, but I think it's a really good book.
From Justin, Dear Overlord Clavin, a few conservative friends of mine who also happen to be Daily Wire fans were a little annoyed with many conservative political commentators such as yourself and Ben because they think the right is giving too much attention to Alexandria Occasional Cortex.
In addition, they think that if the right had not freaked out about AOC initially, the media would not be giving her the attention she got and would not be continuing to receive so much media attention if the right were still not freaking out so much.
What do you have to say about that?
You know, the news and commentary doesn't work the way you think it does.
There's a lot less leeway for choice than you might think.
That's why Trump was so able to get all the free media that he got because he was news.
You have to cover the news.
A attractive young woman who comes out of nowhere is an open socialist and an idiot and kind of vicious.
It is news.
You know, you cannot not talk about it and hope it goes away.
I generally believe, I understand what your friends are complaining about, but I generally believe that more information is better than falsely not paying attention to her.
She is news.
She beat a guy who was like a kind of a steadfast candidate who nobody thought would get beaten, including him.
He didn't take the time to go out and run.
She stole the seat.
I don't mean that like she did anything dishonest.
I simply mean politically she stole the seat.
She is a self-certain, extremely good-looking and sexy, ignoramous, and I think, and a socialist.
And I just think that's news.
And she is obviously the new face of the Democratic Party, which also makes her news representationally.
She actually represents something true about the Democratic Party.
You can't not talk about that.
You can't just say, oh, it would be better for my side if we didn't talk about it.
You have to tell the story that's being told by the world.
That's why we're here.
We're here to tell that story.
From Charles, hey Andrew, love the show.
I'm vegan and would vote Republican if not that the party as well as conservative media seem to enjoy mocking me and those of my ilk.
I have heard this even on Daily Wire.
I love God as well as his creatures.
20 years ago, I witnessed a factory farm wherein workers were slamming the heads of newborn piglets onto the concrete floor because they were underweight, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Not long after, I became aware of dog fighting.
Science is revealing there's a little difference between a dog and a pig.
Anyway, I became vegan, shocked by the tortures taking place every day.
Thereby, apparently, I'm not qualified to be conservative.
My question is, why do conservatives have such disdain for animals and those who are heartbroken over their torture?
That's not what's happening.
Conservatives naturally, by virtue of being inherently conservative, they react to anything that's outside of a certain norm.
I'm kind of not like that because I'm an artist, but their first reaction of a conservative is to say like, well, that's weird.
That's really far out there.
That's incredible.
And the left will say, oh, why don't we just try destroying America and see if that makes it better?
You know, they'll just say that because that's their flaw.
Our flaw is saying, you know, like, yeah, this is this narrow world that we want to live in and anybody who goes outside it must be evil.
But, but while they do that, they will also defend to the death your right to be vegan.
And many of us on the right do feel for animals and do understand that we need to treat animals better.
We simply feel that people come first.
I mean, I do think that the farming industry, the mass meat farming industry should be better run.
I do think animals are God's creatures and we owe them, you know, we don't have to stop eating them, but we might want to stop treating them like garbage.
I mean, I think that we were meant to eat them.
I think we're made to eat meat.
But, you know, that doesn't mean we have to torture the animals.
Anyway, your veganism may make some conservatives make snarky remarks about you, because like I say, conservatives' idea of normalcy is more limited, I think, just naturally.
But they would defend your right to be a vegan to the death, whereas the left, if they thought you were wrong to be a vegan, would try to stop you and they tried to stop you legally.
So that's a big difference.
I mean, I think your long-term future is with the right.
And if you agree with them, you shouldn't take a few jokes about your being a vegan.
From Tyler, I am a 23-year-old Canadian struggling with depression.
I have dealt with depression since I can remember.
Two years ago, my father died, and things have gotten much worse and then much better.
Two years on, I feel as though I'm running out of options again.
I have a steady job.
I'm engaged to be married to a girl I love.
On the good days, I'm more than capable of handling life's challenges.
Those days are becoming fewer and farther between.
I often find myself lacking a true purpose in life.
This results in me feeling empty, hopeless, increasingly agitated, and at times lashing out at those who care about me the most.
Is this something I am meant to move on from?
How do I begin?
And where am I supposed to end up?
Many thanks, Tyler.
Yeah, it is something you're supposed to move on to.
You're not supposed to feel like this.
This is not the way you were meant to live your life.
You should be, if you've got a job and you're happy and you've got a girl that you love, you should be a happy, grateful guy every day.
I'm not saying that to blame you.
I'm saying that to tell you that this depression is a sign that something is wrong.
This is a situation where I'm going to recommend professional help.
Don't go to a psychiatrist.
Psychiatrists now are drug dealers.
That's all they are.
As far as I'm concerned, they should be standing out in the corner peddling their stuff.
Go to a psychologist, find one you trust and one you like, and just, you know, and also a doctor.
Maybe you get a checkup with a regular MD.
Just find out what the source of this is, okay?
Because you're not depressed for no reason.
Probably there are reasons in your life that make you depressed.
They may go back a way.
They may start out in your childhood.
It's possible, it is possible that there is also an actual normal chemical imbalance here.
The fact that your father was also depressed means there might be a genetic component there.
It's possible that at some point your psychologist will send you to a psychiatrist to prescribe a drug.
Don't just go, but don't just say no either.
Think it through, talk it through, find out about it.
You shouldn't be feeling like this.
There's something that's not right in your life, and it can be fixed.
I mean, there are people who study this and do this for a living, just like there are people who replace, you know, who operate on your kidneys or whatever.
There are people who can work with your mind and help you out about this.
You don't have to live like this.
And you don't have to, and you shouldn't feel like this is just the human condition because it's not.
I mean, most people, I've been depressed, so I know.
I mean, I'm not talking, you know, it's a long time ago now, but still, I can remember it very, very well.
And I know that you do not have to be like this.
It can be fixed.
And like I said, it's probably something in your past, something in the way you were brought up, some things that have happened to you that make you feel like that.
And maybe there's a chemical aspect to it too.
But you should just get a full checkup and find out about it.
Don't just sit with it.
It's not worth it.
It's not a good way to live.
From Michael.
Hello, Wise Master Clavin.
That is a private name of mine.
Many countries around the world are now considering a universal basic income in replace of welfare programs, with Alaska being the only state currently having one.
I have been curious on whether or not it would be a good idea to apply this to the United States.
What is your opinion on universal basic income?
Thanks for everything you do.
You know, I'm basically against it, and here's the reason why.
The only person who's ever suggested it, who had any sense whatsoever, is the guy I was talking about yesterday, is Milton Friedman.
Milton Friedman suggested it in a very specific way.
He wanted to get rid of the welfare system.
He wanted to get rid of the welfare state, which I think would be a good thing if we could do it.
He also understood, as I understand, that you can't.
It can't be done.
The welfare state is too entrenched.
It's a pipe dream to think you could get rid of it.
So his suggestion was a universal basic income based on, it was an anti-tax, it was like an anti-income tax that would replace every other program.
That was his condition.
It had to replace every other program.
Now you use your imagination for a minute and you tell me if our government would be willing to give a guaranteed income and replace every other program.
No, they wouldn't.
So that's why I'm against it, because it would just become one more government giveaway.
And government giveaways are not free.
The government is never selling.
They're buying.
They're buying your freedom.
They're buying your independence.
They're buying the things that you should be doing for yourself.
So look, I don't think we can actually get rid of the welfare state.
I think too many people are dependent on it.
I would like to see it start to get smaller and smaller.
I would like to see it be an actual safety net and not a way, you know, not something that was going to send you to college or pay for your health care or anything like that.
Everything works better.
Freedom works better for everything, virtually everything.
There are a few things that government should be doing, but very few.
So this would, I just think it's a goat rodeo, basically.
I think it would be a good idea if we did it like Milton Friedman said, but I just don't think we will.
I just don't think that's realistic.
All right, I got to stop there, but I want to end with a final reflection about John Wayne the Duke.
You know, leftists almost never make me angry.
The stuff they say on Twitter, the stuff they do, even their Green New Deal attempt to destroy America, I just think it's what we're here for.
It's part of the fight.
You've got to fight, and it's never going to go away.
It's always going to be this.
This is politics in America and politics in any free country is always going to come down to two separate sides.
But when you pick on John Wayne, you've lost me.
You have lost me entirely.
This is something that's going around on Twitter to distract people from the Jussie Smollett case.
Jussie Smollett, his story is falling apart.
He could face jail time.
He seems to be getting cut back on The Empire Show.
And so they want to distract it with an anti-conservative cause.
And they picked on John Wayne, a guy who was born, I think, in 1907.
He's been dead since the 70s, I think.
And they found an old 1971 interview in Playboy magazine in which he said he picked on the film Midnight Cowboy because he said it was about gays and he used a gay slur.
He said this stuff about, he was talking about Angela Davis, and he was talking about a lot of blacks have a lot of resentment along with their dissent.
And he says, and rightfully so, the blacks should be resentful, but we can't all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks.
I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility.
And that's, oh my gosh, the end of, you know, all we really, we should go dig him up and drive a stake through his heart.
John Wayne was a gift to America.
He was one of the greatest of the great American actors in the great days of America.
Was he a troubled guy?
He was an artist.
Being an artist is hard.
It's internally hard.
I'm here to tell you.
It is difficult.
You bleed inside in ways that other people don't because you have to.
All right, I'm not complaining.
It's a great life.
He had a great life.
He did great stuff.
One of the most popular, you know, he had opinions to disagree with.
He was born in 1907.
Live with it.
Deal with it.
Go suck an egg.
What the hell?
There are plenty of people who have opinions you disagree with, plenty of people whose opinions moved into the present are not polite.
So what?
The thing that bothers me most about this, though, is even the people defending him are talking.
What they're trying to do is make him say that he represented the make-believe America that people believe in when they say make America great again.
And that's crap.
His body of work as an actor is spectacularly complex and rich and deep.
And if you don't think so, you've never seen his great films.
When he started out, he was in these kind of dime westerns and they're garbage.
He knew they were garbage.
He wanted to get out, but he was trying to make a living as an actor.
He was trying to break into the field, so he had to do all these things.
I'm sure I've seen a couple of them.
They're just, they're what they used to call odors.
You know, they're just like, you know, cowboy and Indian stuff.
But when he got with John Ford and when he started to make his great movies, he made movies that were really complex discussions, not just on the West and on America, but on the legend of the West, on the legendary aspects of the West.
He made Hondo, which is a wonderful story about how lies are part of civilization.
And the reason the Indian culture was ending was because the Apaches couldn't lie.
I mean, it's a very complicated idea.
It's a 70-minute film.
It's a terrific, terrific film.
Fort Apache is about the abuse of the Indians.
In a way, Martinette Henry Fonda plays a Martinette who has no sense of what the Indians are like, where Wayne plays the Indian scout who goes out to talk to them and make peace with them.
The searchers, half of the searchers is one of the greatest American movies ever made.
The other half is kind of a waste of kind of comedy.
I don't know even why they put it in there.
But Wayne plays an anti-Indian bigot who has plenty of reason to hate the Indians.
And he goes out to take vengeance on them and to take vengeance on a girl who's been kidnapped by them.
And it's about his journey.
And it's an amazing film about how you live in a time of war, in a time when people are killing each other.
His career is a career that's really worthwhile.
And one of my favorite films is The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.
Even the name of it, Liberty Valence, is about, Valence means the reaction that something has, a special reaction, a unique reaction.
Liberty Balance is about the way liberty becomes civilization, the way liberty turns into America, the way the West becomes America.
And it's about a bad guy, Liberty Balance.
He is the bad guy, played by Lee Marvin, and a lawyer, Jimmy Stewart, who comes to town to bring law to the West, and the old tough guy, John Wayne, who has to defend him.
Here is a scene where they start to mock.
Jimmy Stewart is playing a lawyer who's working as a waiter in this restaurant, and Lee Marvin trips him and makes him spill the steak on his plate.
Here is the scene.
That's my stake, Valance.
Valance's Pick: Three Against One00:02:28
You heard him, dude.
Pick it up.
Pilgrim, hold it.
I said you, Valance.
You pick it up.
Three against one, Donovan.
My boy, Pompey.
And the kitchen door.
I'll get it, Liberty.
I said you, Liberty.
You pick it up.
What's a matter?
Everybody in this country, kill crazy!
Here!
There!
There!
Now!
It's picked up!
There's Jimmy Stewart as the liberal.
He doesn't want any violence, but John Wayne knows if there's no violence, he knows that Jimmy Stewart is going to be the slave of Liberty Valence for life.
And in the corner is the reporter who sits there who has the famous line.
I'm quoting it from memory.
I won't get it exactly right.
The line is when legend overtakes the facts, print the legend.
That's what the story is about.
It's about the legend of the West and the reality of the West and what that means for America.
All I'm saying about John Wayne is he's dead.
His opinions don't matter anymore.
If you don't want to agree with him, disagree with him.
If his words make you flutter and you don't feel safe, go hide in the corner.
But this is one of the great gifts to America.
Artists are like this.
Rodin beat his women, you know, but his statues are brilliant.
If this is the way you're going to live your life, you're going to live a very tiny, small life in which you feel like a moral person, which you're not, and your outrage just carries you away into dishonesty.
That kind of anger is the devil's cocaine.
By the way, if you want to read a great, great biography of John Wayne, there's one by Scott Iman.
I joked with my wife when I read it that it was so entertaining.
I expected one day she was going to just find the book and my shoes because the book would have swallowed me whole.
That's how entertaining it was.
Rob, we should get Scott on.
I really, I've talked to him on Twitter, and I think he would be a great guest to talk about.
Anyway, don't pick on John Wayne.
You know, in the Army, they have what they call John Wayne toilet paper because it's rough and tough and it won't take crap off no one.
You're not going to beat him.
He's going to be here after you're gone.
All right, I'm Andrew Clavin.
Produced By Robert Sterling00:00:50
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
We'll see you again tomorrow.
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 Sayovitz.
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.
Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, AOC gets herself in hot water by funneling money to her boyfriend.
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