Ep. 668’s Everything Actually IS Tickety-Boo skewers Ilhan Omar’s veiled anti-Semitism and Elliot Mealymouth’s absurd hate-group list while contrasting Trump’s record-low minority unemployment with media bias against his policies. David French rejects Trump as a moral failure, citing Stormy Daniels and unconstitutional moves, arguing evangelicals must prioritize character over "Flight 93" pragmatism—risking radical Democrats like Sanders. Andrew Klavan counters that French’s stance could empower "baby-killing communists," but French insists long-term integrity matters more than short-term wins, framing the debate as a clash between principle and political survival. [Automatically generated summary]
Democrats are arguing over a proposed resolution to condemn anti-Semitism.
Older Democrats feel the resolution is necessary to get those damn Jews off their backs, while younger Democrats feel the resolution will hamper their ability to disguise their deep hatred of Jews in the guise of denouncing Israel.
Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar explains her position to an informal gathering of pipe bomb manufacturers, saying, quote, Although I am only a freshman congresswoman, I am a veteran Jew hater and have already perfected the practice of lightly veiling my anti-Semitism in insanely illogical comments, comparing the free and peaceful nation of Israel to terrorist slave states throughout the Middle East.
This resolution would force me to issue yet another meaningless apology before going right back to what I was doing, and frankly, I just haven't got time for that, unquote.
In an interview with CNN anchor woman Shapely Nudnick, Mealymouth chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Elliot Mealymouth said, quote, while I am strongly committed to punishing anti-Semitism in all its forms, I have no intention of stripping Congresswoman Omar of her seat on my committee because that would appear to punish anti-Semitism in one of its forms.
Instead, I want to denounce all hateful people, including jihadophobes, transophobes, claustrophobes, people who look away during the graphic male sex scenes in that Spartacus TV show, people who say they hate tomatoes but love pizza, which makes absolutely no sense, and of course anyone who hates ducks.
Who on earth could hate those cute, fluffy little waterfowls that bring so much joy to any child who has a loaf of bread and a death wish, unquote.
In a statement issued to a cave somewhere in Pakistan, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib blamed President Trump for the controversy, saying, quote, Trump cleverly hides his bigotry behind his token Jewish grandchildren, who, by the way, are plotting to take over the world.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
BolinBranch Promo Code Offer00:03:18
And birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
The world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
In a country of 325 million people, there's always a crisis somewhere, and it's in the nature of news gathering to cover those crises because they're unusual and they're interesting, and sometimes things can be made better by getting the word out so people can take action.
But of course, the result is if you watch the news too much, you start to get the impression that everything is falling apart.
This becomes quadruply true when, if you don't count Brett Baer and Chris Wallace, the news media is populated by approximately 107% Democrats, for whom the existence of Republicans is a crisis in itself, not to mention the existence of a Republican president, not even to mention a pugilistic Republican president like President the Donald.
The fact is, ever since Trump was elected, there has been a crisis in this country, but it's only taking place on TV.
It's like the zombie apocalypse on The Walking Dead.
If you stop watching the show, it disappears.
If people paid attention to the genuine triumphs and real problems of this administration, they'd see that things are looking pretty good and other things could be fixed pretty easily if the media held Democrats to any standard beside the double one.
I'll show you what I mean in just a sec.
But first, when I'm lying awake at night, I like to be on bull and branch sheets because, you know, you people sleep, but I'm up all night long and I want to be comfortable and I want my sheets to look good too.
You do not need to spend a fortune to get the rest you need to get the sheets you like.
Great sleep and great lying awake starts with the right sheets and they're more affordable than you think with bowl and branch.
With Bolin Branch, the upgrade has never been more affordable.
These are incredibly comfortable sheets.
They get more comfortable as you wash them for some reason.
I'm not sure exactly why that is.
What makes them unique is that each sheet is crafted from 100% organic cotton, which means Bolin Branch sheets not only feel incredible, they look amazing.
And since Bolin Branch sells exclusively online, you don't pay expensive retail market.
Try them for 30 nights, see for yourself.
If you're not impressed, return them for a full refund.
And go to BolinBranch.com today, and you'll get 50 bucks off your first set of sheets plus free shipping in the U.S. when you use the promo code Clavin.
That's 50 bucks off, plus free U.S. shipping right now at BolinBranch.com, spelled B-O-L-L-and-Branch.com.
You say, I told you how to spell Bol, but how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
All right, the Claven this weekend's coming up.
Still some time to get Another Kingdom, the novel, the first novel in the trilogy.
If you pre-order it now and go to AnotherKingdomBook.com and give them the receipt, you'll get all kinds of free stuff.
It's going to come out, I can't even remember now what the data is, but it's only a week or two away.
So you want to do it now.
Three clips.
I'm going to play three clips in a row that show you, that illustrate the news of the week.
What you are seeing is the news of the week, which you're probably thinking about, maybe the anti-Semitism flap that the Democrats cannot bring themselves to condemn hating Jews because so many of them do.
Hearing on Impeachment Investigations00:05:18
That's one thing, but mostly it's been about these investigations.
So here is your president and mine, Donald Trump, talking about his attitude toward the investigations.
The witch hunt continues.
The fact is that I guess we got 81 letters.
There was no collusion.
That was a hoax.
There was no anything.
And they want to do that instead of getting legislation passed.
81 people or organizations got letters.
It's a disgrace.
It's a disgrace to our country.
I'm not surprised that it's happening.
Basically, they've started the campaign.
So the campaign begins.
But the campaign's actually, their campaign's been going on for the last two and a half years.
So it's a shame.
And the people understand it.
When they look at it, they just say presidential harassment, but that's okay.
No administration has accomplished probably you could say this with absolute surety in the first two years anywhere near what we've accomplished, whether it's the tax cuts, whether it's regulation cuts, whether it's the Veterans Administration.
So that's Trump's take.
It's a witch hunt.
It's ridiculous.
He points out, by the way, that Obama was investigated and stonewalled, didn't turn in documents, whereas Trump, according to sources, Trump has been incredibly cooperative, even with this Russian thing, which, as he says, is a witch hunt.
Here's Al Green, not the good Al Green who could sing.
This is Al Green, the Democrat congressman from Texas, explaining that he wants Trump impeached, but he doesn't have to find any crimes to impeach Trump.
He says, you know, people come and they say, oh, you've got to find some crime or a high crime or misdemeanor to impeach Trump.
But no, no, no.
Still, he rises.
There are those who would want me to withhold my thoughts until after there has been an investigation when we have clear and convincing evidence before our very eyes of the misdeeds.
Separating babies from their mothers, who happen to be of color, I might add.
Talking about ass-hole countries that happen to be where people of color live, I might add.
Talking about good people or very fine people in Charlottesville among those who are bigots and racists and xenophobes and homophobes, Islamophobes.
Yes, the evidence is there because the president was putting in his policies these bigot bigoted statements.
These statements went beyond his words.
They became a part of his policies.
And for this, he can be impeached.
He can be impeached for his policies.
He's going on to say that he's, what is he?
He corrupted society.
He's corrupted society.
So that's basically it.
They hate Trump.
They take everything he says is racist, whether it is or not.
They make sure it sounds racist, and Trump doesn't care whether they think so or not.
So he says whatever he wants, and sometimes is insensitive and loudish, no question about it.
Though if he's a bigot, he's one of the worst bigots ever since people of all colors are doing very well under the economy that he created.
But that's their attitude.
Their attitude is: Trump can be impeached for being Trump.
Trump should be investigated for being Trump.
You saw Jerry Nadler, the House Judiciary Committee, saying, Yeah, we'll find out something.
We're just going to investigate everything.
We'll get something on him.
You know, there'll be something there.
You know, it is.
Trump has a point.
It's a witch hunt.
Finally, one cut that kind of just slipped under the radar.
This is a Sean Hannity exclusive.
He was talking to Devin Nunez or Nunez or Nonos or who knows what his name is.
But he was talking to him, and Nunez says, Nunes says that they are going to make a criminal referral about the investigation itself, about the FBI's behavior and their abuse of FISA.
Criminal referral means they go to the Justice Department and say, hey, you ought to investigate this.
Listen.
We're going to continue to call people in for interviews.
Just last week, the new chairman of the committee said that he's going to reopen the Russia investigation.
We offered about a dozen subpoenas of people that we wanted to subpoena.
We don't expect for them to subpoena the people that we want, but at every attempt that we can, at every opportunity that we get, we will make attempts to subpoena these people to come in and speak.
We'll also ask for people to voluntarily come in and speak.
Look, we need the new Attorney General to get in there, and then we will be making criminal referrals on many people who lied to Congress and did other bad things.
So that's actually news.
I mean, and all of this is the news.
That's what you're hearing.
You're hearing about investigations.
You're hearing about Trump spitting back at the investigations.
And now, kind of under the radar, is this other thing, which I think is a huge, huge scandal, the way they investigated this president while he was running because he was Trump, because they didn't like him, because basically Obama and Hillary felt that they owned the White House from here on in.
But what's the real news?
Okay, what's the real news?
If you just turned that TV off and you just looked around and had eyes that could span across the country, what would the real news be?
We'll talk about that in just a second.
The Press's Role in Disparities00:15:28
First, you know, when I was a young reporter, I was like 19 years old, I was a reporter in Berkeley, and Patty Hearst was kidnapped.
It was one of the crimes of the century, really.
And I wound up as a 19-year-old sitting around the biggest reporters in the country covering the Patty Hearst case.
Stories about hostages are intensely interesting.
They have so many moving parts.
And there's now a podcast, Hostage, from the ParCast Network.
Every Thursday, the Parcast Network's podcast, Hosk Hostage, tells the complicated stories behind the world's most intense hostage situations and the people inside them.
Hostage explores the psychological tactics used in hostage negotiations and what the human brain does when a person is held captive.
You can find out how hostage situations transpire and what strategies negotiators use to find a peaceful resolution.
Hostage highlights the moments where things went tragically wrong, as well as techniques that miraculously saved lives.
They have a two-part episode coming up on Captain Phillips.
He was in that subject of that movie with Tom Hanks.
They have a three-part episode on the Hearst kidnapping, which I covered.
So search for and subscribe to Hostage wherever you listen to podcasts, and don't forget to rate them and review them.
Dan Henninger writes a column in the Wall Street Journal today called The Big Story, The Big Story.
And he says, The great political challenge of our time is sorting out what matters from what's just chatter.
So I just pledged a lot of stuff that right now is chatter.
He says, serious people would like to believe that something real in politics is going on, and the good news is something is.
This past weekend, the Wall Street Journal published a series of stories titled Inside the Hottest Job Market in Half a Century.
I read this.
It was an entire section of the paper.
He says, as far as I'm concerned, this job record is the story of the year.
The journal's articles transformed a year of economic data into the new daily reality of getting paid to work in America.
And here's a quote.
All sorts of people who have previously had trouble landing a job are now finding work.
Racial minorities, those with less education, and people working in the lowest paying jobs are getting bigger pay raises and in many cases experiencing the lowest unemployment rate ever recorded for their groups.
They are joining manufacturing workers, women in their prime working years, Americans with disabilities, and those with criminal records, among others, in finding improved job prospects after years of disappointment.
Remember Obama saying you'd need a magic wand to bring these jobs back?
Abracadabra.
The unemployment rate for high school dropouts, a status many depressing books and studies show puts one close to the bottom of the barrel for getting ahead in America, is 5%.
Unemployment rate among high school dropouts, 5%.
Their median wages the past year rose 6%.
He says, let's cut to the chase.
This is Henninger.
From left to right, socialist or conservative, most of a nation's political debates are ultimately about one thing, making life better for people.
Whatever else that may mean, it first requires giving people something to do with their daily lives, a job, which is to say, aspiration and opportunity.
If what has happened inside the U.S. labor market the past two years doesn't qualify of the point of all this effort of politics, those of us in and around politics might as well pack it in.
He says, he says anybody, he says it takes a lot of work to ignore this, but the Democrats are doing this.
And the problem is, is the press are the Democrats.
The press are the Democrats.
Now, listen, this is an amazing fact.
This is an amazing thing.
This is after eight years of an Obama who could not even get a dead cat to bounce.
After, historically, after a crash like we had in 2008, the economy comes roaring back.
There is a boom that corresponds to the bust.
That was a big bust.
It should have been a big boom.
But Obama, with his health care, that idiot health care bill, with his regulations, with his hatred of business, with his misunderstanding of where wealth comes from, you know, that it doesn't come from the ground up.
It comes from the top down.
And that's why we don't punish billionaires because they spread the wealth.
They do it by creating jobs.
After eight years of that, all Trump had to do, he didn't have to be a genius.
All he had to do was the Reagan policy, cutting taxes, cutting regulations, letting business do what it does, letting America do what it does.
That's all he had to do, and he did it, and it's been amazing.
It is amazing.
Changes people's lives, takes away their despair, takes away all kinds of, you know, their sense of being trapped.
It means they travel.
It means they create more wealth.
It is an amazing, amazing thing.
This is, you know, after Nancy Pelosi saying the biggest cause of wealth in America is unemployment insurance.
No, no, no.
Actually, the money comes from business.
The money goes to people who work.
They spend the money.
If you don't take it away from them, they spend the money on other people who work.
It's an amazing little system that we like to call capitalism, right?
Listen, there are also problems.
There is a tremendous spending problem in this country.
There's a debt problem.
The federal budget deficit is up 77%, which is huge.
The debt is $22 trillion, which is up $2 trillion since Trump took office.
And, you know, you can't say, oh, Trump is doing a bad job on this.
He is, but who would take his place?
I mean, if the Democrats take his place, they've got the Green New Deal, which basically is to, the deal is to erase all wealth, all business, all progress, so that, you know, I don't know what, so that we can sit on the ground and tell old tales to each other while we, you know, put tattoos on ourselves and hunt brontosauruses.
I don't even know what the Green New Deal, what the upshot of the Green New Deal.
So you can't count on them.
And unfortunately, Trump, he understands how the economy works, but he doesn't care about this.
And he also knows the people do not want him to touch things like Social Security.
The problem is, I mean, this is the problem in France too.
You can't retire at 65 if you're going to live to be 80.
You have to create enough wealth to pay for your own retirement.
That is the way it works.
Because where else is it going to come from?
You have to create enough wealth.
So as people, as our health has improved, as our lifespans have improved, as our active lives have improved, you got to work a little longer too.
That means that's where the meaning of life comes from.
You can't retire at 65 if you're going to live to be 90.
You know, it just doesn't work that way.
You have to create the wealth you need for retirement.
And this is all about entitlement spending.
That's where the debt comes from.
And Obama isn't doing it.
The border issue, though, because we have this press that is all Democrats, because they do not hold the Democrats to account.
And I don't mind them holding the Republicans to account.
I don't even mind them tormenting Trump if they had tormented Obama in the same way.
But because they don't hold the Democrats to account, everything becomes simplistic.
Problems don't have to be solved.
Everything, you know, Thomas Soule, the smartest political thinker in the country, possibly in the world, was on, what's the name of the show?
It's on the Fox Business Network.
It's, oh man, give me his name, David Asman, I think it is, right?
And Soule has written this book, which I've read, called Disparities and Discrimination.
And his whole point about it is that disparities come from lots and lots of different things.
But what the Democrats are always saying is, oh, it's racism.
If blacks aren't doing what must be racism.
Must be racism.
And he talks about that, the simplicity of that.
And in the book, he talks, for instance, about the fact that 90% of tornadoes take place in America.
Is there some prejudice against tornadoes elsewhere?
No, there are natural disparities in the world.
Here is him talking about looking at the world through the single issue lens.
Well, this is one of any number of one-factor explanations as to why everyone doesn't have the same outcome.
100 years ago, it was genetics.
At other times and places, it was exploitation.
But again, these are ideas that sound plausible.
But when you do research, you discover that everywhere you turn, there are a thousand reasons why people don't turn out the same.
It goes right down to the family.
In the first chapter of this book, I point out that the firstborn has higher IQs than his siblings and later life has more achievements.
Among astronauts, for example, of the 29 astronauts in the Apollo program that put a man on the moon, 22 were either the firstborn or an only child.
Now, if you can't get equality among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why in the world would you think you're going to get it among people who've had such different histories and cultures around the world?
I mean, that is complex, but reasonable thinking.
And if you have a press that is dedicated to selling the Democrat line, and the Democrat line is what?
Racist, racist, racist.
Everybody who's not us is racist.
Everybody who's not, you know, thinks, doesn't want the government to take care of everything is racist.
Racist, you know, when you have the press echoing that, people become stupid.
You know, one of the wonderful parts of this book, Disparities and Discrimination, I can't never remember if it's discrimination, disparities, or disparities and discrimination.
And it's a tiny book, by the way.
It takes you about an hour to read, so it's really worthwhile.
One of the brilliant parts of it is where he talks about three different kinds of discrimination.
He talks about individual discrimination, which is where I look at you, I don't like you, something about you, I find you kind of shifty.
You know, maybe you're dishonest.
I don't know what it is.
Maybe I've had dealings with you and I don't like you or I've heard about you.
That's good discrimination.
That means that that is helpful to determine that in each individual case.
And that's why I don't hire you or I don't let you near my daughter or I don't become your friend or whatever.
Then on the other side of that scale, there's bigotry.
There's like, oh, you look like this, so I don't like you.
Oh, you're a Jews and I'm a Democrat, so I hate you.
You know, that's stupid thinking.
That is the kind of stupid thinking that you get from the press about Republicans.
But then there's another kind in between these two where you have to calculate something quickly that and there's a large cost for being wrong.
So you're a TSA guy.
You got a minute to look at a person coming through a line, walking through your metal detector.
You know that most terrorists these days are Islamic, young Islamic men.
You see a young Middle Eastern man coming down the line and you think, well, I'm going to take a little extra time here just because the cost of being wrong is so high.
I know most young Islamic men aren't terrorists.
I know that.
I know that there are plenty of wonderful, patriotic Islamic people.
But I've got to make a decision in a moment about this guy that could cost 300 people their lives.
So I'm going to take a little extra time here because of the stats.
That's the kind of decision you make if you're in a neighborhood where a lot of the criminals are black.
And a black guy gets in the elevator and you think, hold on to my purse.
Those are decisions that you have to make in a minute.
You know, you know that not everybody of that color or that persuasion is a bad person, but you've got to make that decision because the costs are so high.
Now that's complex thinking, right?
That's a way of looking at things where people are people and they have to make decisions.
They have to stay safe and you don't try.
You know, the Democrats do this with everything, everything except Jews.
They want to make everything completely fair.
So you've got to look at the old lady in a wheelchair the same way you look at the young Middle Eastern man coming through the line.
That's absurd.
That is absurd.
And yet, as Jonah Goldberg pointed out brilliantly last night, he said, you know, they do that with everything except when it comes to Black Lives Matter.
When people said all lives matter, they say, oh, that's racist.
That's racist.
So they have their special groups.
But when you say you shouldn't be anti-Semitic, they say, oh, well, you shouldn't hate anybody.
You shouldn't hate anybody.
But that's not the point, right?
So Soule was talking complicated stuff.
And because the press doesn't cover issues like that, maybe they're not smart enough, but also they're just biased.
They are just biased, too biased to get the facts, to look at things in that complicated way, to even have people on who will look at them.
How often do you see Thomas Sowell interviewed?
I mean, the guy is really a national treasure, and you never see him on.
Most people don't even know he exists.
And at the end of this, Asman asked him if he thought that we were going to have to go through a period of socialism.
And his answer was chilling coming from a guy this brilliant.
The future of America.
I mean, do you think that we are destined to go through a period of socialism, a period where these ideas that have not worked no matter where they've been tried and certainly wouldn't work here will be tried here and could bring down our country?
Well, the predictions of economists do not encourage me to go far in that direction.
But I do have a great fear that in the long run, we may not make it.
And I hate to say that, but and the one thing that keeps me from being despairing is, of course, we don't know.
There's so many things we can't possibly know.
And so we may make it, but I wouldn't bet on it.
So you've got a press that is in crisis mode when the country is actually not in crisis.
I mean, all of this Russian collusion thing is nonsense.
You can investigate Trump forever.
I'm sure you'll find something about him or anybody, and certainly anybody who worked in the New York real estate market, you'll find something eventually.
That's not a crisis.
It's not a crisis.
Trump being president is not a crisis.
I don't care what they say.
I don't care what Trump says.
Trump is not a crisis.
The country is doing well.
It's got problems, and those problems would be fixed.
You know, I mean, it's like the border.
It's like the border.
If they would stop, if they just didn't hate Donald Trump so much, they could fix the problems at the border immediately.
I mean, it needs some barriers.
It needs some more enforcement.
It needs to change the laws about sanctuary, about coming in and asylum and asking for asylum.
That's the big problem we have on the border: it's not people sneaking in, it's people can come in and ask for asylum.
And there have been laws and court rulings that force you to release them.
You can't hold them for, I think, more than 72 hours.
And as a result, they disappear into the country.
So, this is all a problem of the press.
If people were more informed, people have gotten less informed.
As we've had more and more media, people have gotten less informed.
And the media likes to say, well, it's because we have all this stuff like Fox News, Fox News.
Hey, listen, Brett Baer does a better job than all of the networks put together.
You know, Chris Wallace, a better job than all of the networks put together.
So, what do the Democrats want to do?
They want to demonize Fox News.
They want to silence Fox News.
They want to have that monopoly we always talk about about information.
That is the whole game plan of the Democrat Party because their policies never work, because they can have a president in for eight years who can't even get a dead cat to bounce.
They depend on your ignorance.
They depend on silencing you on Twitter and on Facebook and on the news.
I mean, now the Democrat National Committee has banned Fox from hosting any of the party's 2020 debates, right?
They've already got like 14 candidates.
They're going to have more than 20 before they're through.
But Fox can't host any of those debates.
Questions That Silence00:15:42
Here's Perez, the head of the DNC, telling why.
Our second North Star principle in these debates is to make sure that whichever network runs them ensures that our candidates are treated fairly.
Now, you had the video before of Chris Wallace.
I have great respect for Chris Wallace, and my concern is not about Chris Wallace, it's about people above Chris Wallace.
Because what we have seen now, and it's been really most recently now in the New Yorker story, is that at the highest levels of Fox News, they're not playing it straight.
And again, this isn't about Chris Wallace.
I have respect for him.
But I do not have the confidence that we need to take such an important part of the nomination process, these debates, and trust them to folks who, at the top levels, are consulting Donald Trump before they do anything.
You couldn't do that.
All of which, by the way, would make a certain amount of sense if all the other networks weren't Democrats.
They're all Democrats.
They're guys like George Stephanopoulos, who they have fronting the network, who's a Clinton hack, and they have been fronting the network because they're so corrupt.
They're so ideologically corrupt.
They don't care if you know it.
They don't care.
It's just like government in Chicago.
At some point, you get so corrupt, you just don't care that everybody can see what you're doing.
You know, even some of the lefties, Kirsten Powers, Anderson Cooper, were talking about this.
Have we got that clip?
And listen to what they have to say.
There are good journalists there, and I think that they could negotiate to have a debate with a Chris Wallace, for example, a Martha McCallum, a Brett Baer.
And I think they would be smart to do it, frankly.
I think that they would have access to a large audience.
And, You know, that's what I would do if I were them.
But they have for a long time, you know, not wanted to do anything with Fox News.
Senator Central, I mean, it sounds like the kind of thing that pleases, you know, the liberal part or the left, you know, far-left part of the Democratic Party and sort of makes them feel good.
But just in terms of, you know, trying to sway voters who could be reached, it seems short-sighted, no?
Yeah, what are they afraid of?
I mean, as Kirsten mentioned, there's legit journalists over there.
It really is.
Of course, what they're afraid of.
They're afraid of the questions, the questions they will not get asked.
They will not get asked tough questions by guys like Stephanopoulos.
It's just not going to happen.
They'll ask questions.
They'll ask hard questions of the guys they don't like, but they won't ask questions about the essential attitudes and policies of the Democrat Party, which do not work.
You know, life in America right now is pretty good.
Like I said, there are problems.
A lot of those problems could be addressed and solved.
If we had a media that reported the world as it was, one, and two, held both parties to the same standards, held them to account, and looked at the world a little bit more with a little bit more complexity, like someone like Thomas Sowell, man, this country would really be rocking right now, and you wouldn't have that feeling you have that things are going out of control.
They are not.
Hey, we're going to stay on for our guest, David French from National Review.
Great guy.
I have all kinds of questions I really want to bug him about.
But please go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
That way you can watch all the shows right there, streaming live on the website, dailywire.com.
For $100, you get a year's subscription, plus you get the leftist tears tumbler, plus you get to be in the mailbag where all your problems are solved.
David French is a senior writer for National Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and a major in the United States Army Reserve.
David, are you there?
Yes, I am.
It's great to have you here.
Mostly I brought you on because with my beard, we now look so much alike.
I just want people to see we can be in the same place at the same time.
Well, I have to tell you that I was at a National Review event not long ago, and I'm walking up next to somebody, and they just walked up and they just threw their arms around me and they said, Andrew, so wonderful to see you.
I'm not making that up.
That's correct.
Well, it's good to know I have a fan out there somewhere.
Yes, exuberant, an exuberant fan, no question.
That's hilarious.
When they put the picture up, I thought, what's that picture of me doing?
Listen, I brought you on.
Here's why I brought you on.
I brought you on because I know you're a good guy.
I know you're a smart guy.
And I know you love this country and you're a moral guy.
And I literally do not understand your moral position at this point.
And I mean that absolutely literally.
And I know you can explain it.
The thing that really got me was a tweet you sent out after the Michael Cohen hearings or during them that said the porn affairs and hush money payments.
You're a never-Trumper.
I think it's fair to describe you as that.
The porn affairs and hush money payments by themselves are enough for me to never ever vote for Trump.
And that's just one thing of many.
I remember the days way back in May 2015 when that would have been a consensus evangelical position.
Now, that position made perfect sense to me until Trump was running against Hillary.
So that's, I guess, what I want to ask you.
If you get rid of Trump for the fact that he's sleazy and lived a sleazy life, which we can agree on, what are you left with?
I think you're left with a whole lot better party, a whole lot better conservative movement, and a whole lot better country.
So other than that, not much.
No, I mean, look, you know, we have to go back a little bit.
So, you know, I come at this as, as I said, you know, it's pretty plain from the tweet as an evangelical Christian.
Right.
somebody who's been, you know, part of the Christian conservative movement for a really long time, my entire adult life.
And, you know, one of the things that I think one of the more powerful documents that sort of our side of the aisle has crafted was the Southern Baptist Convention statement on the importance of moral character in politics.
And this was a document crafted in 1998.
Now, what was happening in 1998?
This was the height of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandals.
And that document, which I'd urge everyone who listens to this podcast to read, and especially if you're a Christian, read it and ask yourself, let's just put aside the identity of Bill Clinton, put aside the identity of Donald Trump.
Is what it is saying, is what that document's saying, is it theologically true?
Okay.
And one of the things that it says is it says that tolerance of serious wrong in public officials sears the conscience of a nation and it fosters additional, it fosters and spreads additional corruption in a culture.
So one of the problems that we have is the evangelical movement, for example, went from the community of people most likely to say that character mattered in a politician and character was important in a politician to the community of Americans least likely to say that during the 2016 election.
I think that is a grave problem.
And now let's also add to that that there are consequences to a culture when a nation tolerates serious wrong in its public officials.
So there's consequences to a culture.
And then also the other thing is I strongly believe, as Andrew Breitbart says, that culture, that politics is downstream from culture.
In other words, when you are making sacrificial sacrifices for the sake of political gain, you are forsaking the greater thing for the lesser thing.
I do not buy the Flight 93 construct in the 2016 election.
I thought that was ridiculous and stupid, actually.
I do not buy the nonstop crisis mindset that besets so many people.
I actually find it to be faithless and to be, again, in many ways faithless and in many ways foolish and not informed by facts.
And so it's not to say that politics don't matter, but it is to say that culture matters more than politics.
And if we degrade our culture for the sake of a short-term political victory, we lose.
Well, now, there's certainly a lot of truth in that.
And I have always said and always believed that there's going to be a price we pay for having a president like Donald Trump.
There's just no question about it.
However, the place where I think we diverge is the idea that the gains, the losses that we would have taken in a Hillary Clinton would have been short-term.
Already, we can see that she would have appointed two Supreme Court justices, probably three.
She was opposed to the First Amendment, you know, she had hostility toward the First and the Second Amendment.
It did seem to me, it didn't seem to me like Flight 93.
I think there's always another day to fight, but it did seem to me quite a serious moment when after eight years of Obama, the American experiment could be in peril.
Since that time, it seems that Trump hasn't been anywhere near as bad as I feared he would be.
Do you feel that's not true?
Do you feel that Trump has been a terrible president all around?
So, no, let me say this.
I had three main concerns about Trump.
Trump's character, Trump's personnel, and Trump's policies.
Other than that, I was optimistic.
I would say that Trump's character has been worse than I had hoped it would be.
I had hoped that he would at least grow some into the office.
He's, if anything, behaves worse than he did in the campaign in some respects.
His personnel is better, was for a while better than I thought it would be.
I was very nervous that you had Steve Bannon that close to the Oval Office.
But then when he was gone and you had Kelly as chief of staff and you had Mattis as Secretary of Defense, I had more confidence.
I'm back to being a little bit more shaky about it.
And then his policies, I would give him a B or a B minus.
I like his judges.
His tax cut was a B minus.
I think his emergency declaration is unconstitutional abomination.
I think his North Korea policy is incredibly foolish.
And I think he's constantly teetering on the edge of incredibly rash decisions in foreign policy that could really make America less safe.
So I'm kind of at a B or a B minus.
But let me go back to the electoral analysis.
And this is something that I think is important for people to understand.
We have to, when you're talking about someone in my position, someone who has, for example, works for a conservative institution, at National Review.
I mean, we've been around for 60 plus years and we sort of are, we try to be and try our best to be stewards of Buckley's legacy and stewards of the health of the conservative movement and the health of conservative ideas.
And a disastrous president can set back a movement a really long time.
So let me give you a great example.
In 1976, Democrats were rejoicing when Jimmy Carter became president.
And Carter had some policy victories.
We may forget about it now and the fact he was buried by Reagan.
But at the end, we look at his presidency and we say, would Democrats right now say, man, I'm glad Jimmy Carter won in 76?
Almost to a man, they'd say no, because what happened next was 12 years of Republican control of the White House, in which those 12 years, the Republicans selected 570 judges and five justices of the Supreme Court.
And so one of my problems with the Trump era is that I have real fear that what will have happened in 2016 is a short-term gain and a long-term enduring loss.
And that's my real concern.
What about long-term losses?
I mean, the Democrats seem to me to have actually lost the plot of America.
I mean, I don't say that lightly.
I'm not like a I'm actually kind of middle of the road when it comes to my policies, probably to the left of you in some ways.
But when I look at people voting who can't vote to defend babies who have actually been born, who can't vote to decry, to denounce anti-Semitism, who literally introduce a Green New Deal, which is simply a blueprint for tyranny and poverty.
I mean, it's Venezuela on the page.
I do think to myself, well, if we undermine this president, you know, and I'm not talking about criticizing him.
We always criticize the president.
But if we undermine him, if we take away his legitimacy, if we say that, gee, the fact that he slept with a porn star, which, by the way, like, I don't even.
Porn stars.
Porn stars.
Yeah.
Probably committed felony campaign finance violations to cover it up.
I mean, it just goes on and on and on.
And I think that's a good question.
Well, I mean, you know, I don't know, campaign finance violations.
Even the fact the guy was a billionaire, you know, lover boy.
That's what those guys do.
We knew that when he was elected.
But I don't see, I do not see how that really is in the balance against the lives of babies, the lives of the unborn.
He's been a good abortion president, an anti-abortion president.
You know, the lives of the unborn and things.
This is where I lost.
This is where you lost me on this tweet.
This is where I thought he was going to be able to do this.
What is Stephen thinking here?
So he undermines himself.
I'm not undermining him by pointing out the facts of his behavior.
he undermines himself constantly.
He undermines himself with his lack of character.
He undermines himself with his impulsiveness.
He undermines himself with, quite frankly, his ignorance and often his stupidity.
And so he's constantly undermining himself, constantly, which is one of the reasons why we're sitting here in a time of relative peace and prosperity with him just hovering around at 40, 41, 42% approval.
Yeah, that's his personality.
And one of my problems here is, again, so one of the problems that I had was in 2016, and one of my arguments against him in 2016 was I think that this guy is a long-term disaster.
And I fully recognize the Democrats are not doing anything to win over the middle.
They are stampeding to the left.
And now here's the thing that I think that is so disturbing and disturbing in so many ways about the way Trump constantly undermines himself, constantly displays his bad character, is that he may end up paving the way for a Democratic successor who is more radical than any president we've had in the modern era.
And that is something that I think, again, going back to this very notion about who Donald Trump was, who he is, this idea that our nation would end unless we put that guy in office.
The Cost of Low Character00:03:52
And I'm sitting here thinking, what would I rather be facing for the long-term health of the conservative movement?
Is it possible that we're going to sit here and have a president Bernie Sanders sworn in because this guy undermined himself so much?
And then we're going to be left with a conservative movement that's credibility to so many members of the American public is shredded by the fact that they could see us with their own eyes justifying and excusing behavior that we would never justify and excuse in any other politician ever.
And there's cost to that.
So your position, your moral position is that the long-term, even though it is a moment of peace and prosperity, and Trump has to be given some credit for the prosperity, I think, and even the peace maybe, but your idea is that the long-term loss of having a man of his obvious low character is more than the cost of having another person of low character, but who wasn't ours, I guess, Hillary Clinton, in office for maybe eight years.
Well, I mean, my position is I was not going to be a party to putting, and I was not going to lend my voice to putting either one of those two people in the applause.
Now, this is the part I want to ask you about, because I do understand.
Now I understand at least what you're thinking, which makes me feel a lot better.
But here's the thing that you are not going to be a party to it.
A lot of the people attacking never Trumpers, guys like Rush and Hannity, are basically accusing you of preserving your own honor at the cost of the country.
In other words, you feel good about yourself.
You feel virtuous, but you are setting up a victory of baby killing communists, essentially, by your actions.
Is there any validity to that?
I mean, is there any validity to that?
Well, you know, I would say, you know, look, I mean, you know, one of the things, I have a standard about a person I will vote for.
And both of these are non-negotiable.
The person has to have a character that is at least somewhat commiserate with the office that they seek.
And they have to share my political values.
Not perfectly.
Nobody's perfect, you know?
So there are these two elements here.
And what I would say is one of the easiest and fastest ways to make sure that we continue to have crappy candidates and people of low character is by voting for them.
You know, that's one of the things that is we saw in the Holroy Moore debacle in Alabama.
And that is the primary voters of that state served up one of the worst candidates in modern American senatorial politics.
I think that's fair, yeah.
Right?
And so then the argument is, well, we gotta, we have to.
Because if you don't, then you've got that baby killer Doug Jones in and, you know, mass hysteria.
It's all going to be awful.
And so and so you continually end up in a situation where if you do not impose a cost for selecting low character, low quality people, you get more low character and low quality people.
And the problem that I have with the Hannity and Rush argument is that, you know, the Hannity and Rush argument essentially says, okay, 2016, we had the only thing to consider in 2016 was 2016.
And I'm sitting there looking and I'm saying the thing that I'm considering in 2016 isn't just 2016.
It's 2020.
It's 2024.
Stopping Short00:01:32
What does my movement, what does my, what is the witness of my faith going forward?
And which I have to stop you here.
I'm actually out of time.
But no, but at least now I understand.
Come back and let's talk more about this because you're eloquent and I can at least understand what you're saying now, which as I say, makes me feel better.
It's great talking to you, David.
And let's do it again.
Yeah, I'd love to.
Thanks so much.
All right.
You know what?
I'm out of time.
I wanted to finish talking about video games.
I think I'll do it Monday, right?
Is that the smartest thing I can do?
Yeah.
All right.
Come back.
Listen, most of you aren't going to make it through the Clavenless weekend anyway, so it doesn't really matter.
But if you survive, come back here.
We will be here on Monday.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Adam Sajovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, Democrats Green Light Anti-Semitism in the Most Disgusting Possible Way.