Ep. 696’s Andrew Clavin exposes Democrats’ panic as Barr prepares to investigate FISA abuses, with Clinton admitting she paid a foreign national for anti-Trump disinformation while Comey and Brennan flee. Legal expert John Malcolm counters media attacks on Barr, emphasizing Mueller’s no-collusion findings, while Mark Gregorian of the Center for Immigration Studies warns of a U.S. border crisis mirroring Europe’s 2015 surge—fueled by asylum loopholes and welfare incentives. The episode reveals partisan cover-ups and immigration policies that prioritize open borders over enforcement, leaving America vulnerable to both legal and systemic exploitation. [Automatically generated summary]
Top officials are deeply upset about Attorney General Bill Barr's announcement that he's investigating the reasons the FBI spied on Donald Trump's campaign.
In a statement made while he was pasting on a fake beard and disguising himself as an Egyptian goatherd, former FBI Director James Comey said, quote, it's a very sad day for this nation when I have to leave town as quickly as possible in this ridiculous get-up.
I can't believe that anyone could doubt the righteousness of the most righteous person this universe has produced since Paul Schofield in A Man for All Seasons, and you can't get any more righteous than he was, believe you me, unquote.
Mr. Comey then excused himself, climbed out the bathroom window, and has not been seen since.
In a statement delivered to the underside of a table in O'Malley's bar in Chappaqua, Hillary Clinton vehemently denied any collusion with the Russians, saying, quote, yes, I paid a foreign national to gather Russian disinformation on Donald Trump, and yes, I passed that completely false disinformation to the FBI, and yes, they used that totally invented slander to get a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign, but the crucial element of intent was not there.
Just ask James Comey if you can find him, unquote.
Former CIA Director John Brennan, in an impassioned speech delivered from a car speeding toward the Canadian border, said, quote, I am so aggrieved by this odious calumny that I have decided to change my name and live in an undisclosed location until the heat's off.
He'll never take me alive, John Law, unquote.
Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page could not be reached for comment without dodging a fuselade of machine gun bullets from the abandoned warehouse in which they were holed up.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
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Democrats Slandering Barr00:15:16
You know, call me crazy, but it seems to me kind of obvious that the Democrats' attempts to slander Attorney General Bill Barr over absolutely nothing are really attempts to discredit him with the public before he exposes their insane abuses of power.
The Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign.
The Hillary campaign spread Russian disinformation about Trump.
The FBI used that disinformation to get FISA warrants to tap the phones of American citizens.
I mean, holy crap, what a bunch of snaky dirtbags.
Should anyone who cares about freedom be indifferent to the stupendous abuse of federal law enforcement?
Is it possible that any honest journalist should be completely incurious about what went on here?
It's not at all surprising that governments are abusive.
It's a bit dispiriting that our press has joined in the cover-up.
I mean, you can love Donald Trump, you can hate Donald Trump, I get all that, but setting the feds on him to protect your candidate while letting your candidate off the hook for her lawbreaking, it's bad.
It's bad, it's corrupt.
And Barr says he's going to look into it.
So the Democrats say Barr is the worst guy ever, which is like Al Capone insulting Elliot Ness.
I mean, media, please ask some questions.
Do some research.
Stand up for your country instead of your party.
Did I mention that you're snaky dirtbags?
I'll get back to that in a second.
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So let's review what happened, right?
Barr, Bill Barr is being questioned by the Senate yesterday.
And the day before he's going up to talk to the Senate, amazingly, astoundingly, someone leaks Robert Mueller's letter to the Washington Post.
No one asks who leaked it.
Why was it leaked right now?
Why is the Washington Post allowing it where democracy dies in blithering sanctimony?
Why is the Washington Post publishing the letter?
It's fine that they publish the letter, but without putting it in the context of, oh, somebody's putting a hit out on the Attorney General, right?
Obviously, this is a political hit.
And what's the letter say?
The letter says, oh, you put out a summary.
Barr asked Mueller if he wanted to look at his summary before he sent it out, and Mueller said no.
And then he gets this kind of whiny letter saying, well, you know, the media took this out of context and it didn't really, it didn't really have the feeling of my report, of my 19-page preface to my report.
I mean, look, it's pretty clear that Mueller doesn't like Trump, that Mueller wanted to get Trump, but he couldn't, you know, he couldn't turn this dead horse into a pony.
He just couldn't do it.
It just wasn't going to happen.
There was no Russian collusion.
So he and he couldn't really get him on obstruction.
So he wasn't going to put his reputation in the crapper, basically, to get Donald Trump, but he wanted to hurt him as much as possible.
The New York Times said it.
The New York Times said, Barr took control of the narrative because that is what the Democrats are worried about.
When I say the Democrats, I mean the New York Times, I mean the Washington Post, I mean all of these people who are working for the Democrats because they ain't asking any questions, any questions about what the Democrats did.
All right, so Barr goes before the Senate and he tells them, yeah, he got this letter from Mueller and he called Mueller up.
Here he is talking to Richard Blumenthal.
This is cut number three.
I said, Bob, what's with the letter?
You know, why don't you just pick up the phone and call me if there's an issue?
And he said that they were concerned about the way the media was playing this and felt that it was important to get out the summaries which they felt would put their work in proper context and avoid some of the confusion that was emerging.
And I asked him if he felt that my letter was misleading or inaccurate.
And he said no, that the press, he felt that the press coverage was, and that a completer, a more complete picture of his thoughts and the context and so forth would deal with that.
Who cares, by the way?
Just by the way, who cares what Mueller thinks?
Mueller's job is to go out and make recommendations.
He didn't even do his job.
He didn't even make a recommendation about obstruction of justice, so Barr had to make the recommendation.
But he's just, he works for Barr.
He works for Barr.
brings this thing into bar.
He makes a recommendation.
Barr has a, you know, decides what to do with that recommendation.
He said there was no Russian collusion.
After that, everything else is absurd anyway.
So now we've got to really question, we really have to question the integrity of this man who said that there was no Russian collusion, which is in the report, and who said that he was not going to charge Trump with obstruction of justice.
We really have to question.
So here's Blumenthal questioning him about whether or not there were notes on this telephone call.
Did anyone, either you or anyone on your staff, memorialize your conversation with Robert Mueller?
Yes.
Who did that?
There were notes taken of the call.
May we have those notes?
No.
Why not?
Why should you have them?
I'll tell you, we got to end this, but I'm going to write a letter to Mr. Mueller, and I'm going to ask him, is there anything you said about that conversation he disagrees with?
And if there is, he can come and tell us.
It's Lindsey Graham, who's been great about all this, by the way, because this is getting absurd.
So, all right, so that's the thing.
And at one point in another hearing, Barr had said something about the fact that, oh, you know, Mueller had no complaints about my letter about his report.
And so now they turn.
So anyway, the thing is, that's basically the story.
What you just saw is the story.
Mueller wrote a letter.
Barr called him up.
Mueller said, well, the letter was true, but I just wanted my feelings, my context to be put before you all.
And so this is what they turned it into.
I'll just say one example, because they were all doing it.
Here's Maisie Hirano from Hawaii.
She's the woman, remember, who says men should shut up and we should ban all jets and then you can just build a train to Hawaii.
This is the level of intelligence of this woman.
And here she is unleashing on the Attorney General.
When you finally did decide to release the report over a congressional recess and on the eve of two major religious holidays, you called a press conference to once again try to clear Donald Trump before anyone had a chance to read the special counsel's report and come to their own conclusions.
But when we read the report, we knew Robert Mueller's concerns were valid and that your version of events was false.
You used every advantage of your office to create the impression that the president was cleared of misconduct.
You selectively quoted fragments from the special counsel's report, taking some of the most important statements out of context and ignoring the rest.
You put the power and authority of the Office of the Attorney General and the Department of Justice behind a public relations effort to help Donald Trump protect himself.
Finally, you lied to Congress.
You told Representative Charlie Christ that you didn't know what objections Mueller's team might have to your March 24th so-called summary.
You told Senator Chris Van Holland that you didn't know if Bob Mueller supported your conclusions, but you knew you lied.
And now we know.
Wow, that's really, that is really telling.
You know, he's telling that, I mean, so, I mean, unbelievable.
And just to show you, of course, that the Democrats and the media are the same person.
And the reason it's important that the Democrats and the media are the same people, okay?
That they're the same party.
They're just one party, one of them wearing a press card in his fedora and the other one sitting in the committee.
But they're just the same.
It's just the same party.
And the reason it's important is because something really bad might have happened here.
I can't say for sure that the FBI targeted Donald Trump at Obama's behest.
But come on.
I mean, you don't have to be Sean Hannity.
I know Sean Hannity is always on one side.
You know, I like Sean a lot, but he's always on one side.
It just looks very suspicious here.
I mean, questions that aren't being asked.
When did this investigation really start?
There is evidence now that it started way before the Papadopoulos thing happened.
That's what they're saying.
Papadopoulos made this comment.
There are questions about whether even what Papadopoulos said was fed to him so he would say these things.
All of this.
But here's the media just echoing.
We'll take Joe Scarborough as representative of it.
Here's the media just echoing this Democrat line.
Mike Barnacle, again, you look at this testimony yesterday.
And again, when Barr is saying a president, if he doesn't like an investigation, if he thinks he's wrongly accused, he can shut it down.
That's how autocrats think.
That's how lawyers for autocrats talk.
You look at everything else that Barr did yesterday, stumbling and hesitating, the lies that he told in front of everybody.
I understand that it doesn't make political sense to impeach Donald Trump, but for the life of me, I don't know why Democrats would not start gathering evidence to impeach this man.
He is actually as dangerous in the position of Attorney General as Donald Trump is as President of the United States.
And he's unfit and unworthy to be there.
And if you asked any judge these questions, they would not answer them the way that Donald Trump's defense lawyer did, Barr.
Barr is not an Attorney General of the United States.
He is Donald Trump's defense attorney.
He's his lackey.
He's his stooge.
So we start out with the charge that Donald Trump committed treason by selling us out to Putin.
That's what we start with.
Now we're down to, oh, they sent you a letter.
Mueller sent you a letter complaining about something.
You had a phone call with him and you didn't mention.
I mean, by the time we're finished, it's like you're wearing brown shoes with white socks.
You know, you've got to be thrown out of office.
The charges have gotten smaller and smaller and smaller and more trivial.
And all it is is this constant, constant attempt to keep us from saying, hold on, you spied on the opposition party's campaign?
What was your reasoning for this?
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You know, I just want to play a couple more clips, and then we're going to bring on a guest from the Institute for Constitutional Government to talk about what he saw in these hearings.
But I just want to play the clip that I think is key.
First, let's play Ted Cruz.
Ted Cruz just completely destroying this argument.
And the first time I saw Barr actually laugh, because Cruz just put the Democrat argument exactly where it belongs.
So their entire argument is, General Barr, you suppressed the 19 pages that are entirely public, that we have, that we can read, that they know every word of it.
And their complaint is it was delayed a few weeks.
And that was because of your decision not to release the report piecemeal, but rather to release those 19 pages along with the entire 448 pages produced by the special counsel.
Yes.
If that is their argument.
I have to say that is an exceptionally weak argument.
Because if you're hiding something, I'll tell you right now, General Barr, you're doing a very lousy job of hiding it.
That is basically the argument.
Let's bring on John Malcolm.
He's the vice president of the Institute for Constitutional Government, director of the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, and a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
We love the Heritage Foundation.
John Malcolm oversees the Heritage Foundation's work to increase understanding of the Constitution and the rule of law.
Are you there, John?
I'm here.
It's good to be with you.
It's nice to have you.
Thanks so much for coming on.
You know, I don't want to be a total partisan because I do try to be fair, but I'm watching this thing.
Did Barr do anything wrong?
I mean, is this, it seems like total nonsense to me.
Am I missing something?
No, I don't think so.
Let's Talk About Mueller00:07:31
I mean, that whole, a huge part of this hearing was taken up with this letter that Bob Mueller sent him three days after, you know, Barr sent out his four-page summary letter.
Bill Barr referred to Bob Mueller's letter as snitty.
And I thought it was all very strange because it was really like they were having a debate about how thorough and accurate a movie trailer was after the movie has now been released for everybody to see in the theaters.
And instead of talking about what's in the 448-page report, they want to talk about whether or not Bob Mueller was satisfied with the four-page summary that Bill Barr had put out.
It seemed very, I guess Bill Barr referred to it as mind-bendingly bizarre, and that's how it struck me, too.
Let's talk about the Mueller report for a minute.
I mean, I read it.
It sounded like, as I said at the time, it's not like Trump acted like an innocent man.
He acted like an innocent Donald Trump.
He was yelling, he was screaming, he was protesting.
He was doing all the stuff that Trump does.
Is there, how can you make a case for obstruction of justice when the original crime didn't exist and when nothing obstructed the investigation?
Well, look, an investigation is undertaken to determine whether or not a crime was committed.
Usually, people who attempt to obstruct investigations do it because they know very well that they are guilty and an investigation is likely to conclude that they were guilty.
So one of the major things that Bill Barr took into consideration when he made his recommendation on the obstruction charge was there ended up being no underlying crime.
They also were trying to figure out what was the president's intent.
Did he have a corrupt motive to try to end this investigation?
Or was he just frustrated that for two years his presidency was hampered by half of the people in the country thinking that he was a traitor?
And so he said, look, there's just not enough there.
He was surprised that Bob Mueller did not make a recommendation.
That was, after all, what he had been charged to do.
But having been left with that task, Bill Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein undertook it.
They did it in a professional way.
They consulted with career attorneys, people from the Office of Legal Counsel, and came to the conclusion that it was not a prosecutable case.
Still, what the president did in terms of his public actions and comments is there in the Mueller report.
It's there, warts and all, for the American people to see, and Congress can make whatever hay out of it they wish to.
Is your impression of Mueller, I mean, Mueller gets a lot of flack and he also gets a lot of praise.
I mean, it all depends on what day it is, how people feel about him.
Did you feel that Mueller did a good job?
Yes.
I mean, look, he was head of the criminal division.
He was a line prosecutor.
He was a U.S. attorney.
He's a head of the criminal division, and for 13 years, he was FBI director.
He is a dogged investigator.
The criticism I thought that was a fair criticism was that he surrounded himself with a lot of lawyers and investigators who had a track record of giving money to Democrats.
However, having done that and they're having concluded that there was no collusion coordination or conspiring with the Russians, that ought to give the American public extra dose of security that that was in fact an accurate finding.
Now, I don't want to play what about ism with Barr.
I can't help thinking about Obama's Attorney General saying he was his wingman and he was there to support his boy.
They keep calling Barr a hand-picked attorney general.
All attorney generals are hand-picked.
Is he, I mean, in your estimation, has he gone out of his way to protect Donald Trump?
I mean, that was a line in the news coverage in the New York Times today.
They said, it looks like Donald Trump has finally found an AG who will protect him.
That's not what I'm seeing.
I mean, do you feel that Barr is behaving as an attorney general should?
Yes, he's been attorney general before.
He is a consummate professional.
He is not about to have his integrity or professional reputation impugned by any of his actions.
So Elizabeth Warren, for instance, has said that he's trying to hide the Mueller report.
Well, he issued the whole darn thing with the minimal number of redactions there.
And he has said, look, you know, prosecutors, we're not the Department of Propriety.
We're not the Department of Good Manners.
We are here to make determinations about whether crimes were committed.
And at the end of the day, after we examine the facts in the law, we are left with a binary choice of is there a prosecutable case or not.
He has now made that determination.
And now it's up to Congress and the American people to decide what else they want to do with respect to this stuff.
And he pointed out, of course, that Congress can conduct hearings and there is an election in a couple of years.
You know, I can't help feeling, and again, I can't prove this, obviously, but I can't help feeling that the point of slandering Barr like this, and it really is, is brutal.
You know, he should resign.
He's lying to Congress and all this about absolutely nothing.
I can't help but feel that they're trying to discredit him because he says he's going to investigate how this whole thing started out.
The press seems completely incurious about this, but it does seem curious to me.
It does seem curious when an administration sends people in to spy on the opposing campaign.
I mean, should we, is it me?
I'm asking you because you're an expert and I'm just a guy reading the papers.
But is it me or is something stink here?
Well, trying to ruin someone's reputation is just blood sport in Washington.
And I think that people are just appealing to their base.
And you make a very good point, which is Barr has said, look, spying occurred here.
And he said that spying is not a bad word or a good word.
People spy all the time.
It's a question of whether or not there was a factual predicate that made this a legitimate investigation that was worth undertaking.
And he is going to look into that.
And it's certainly true that the Democrats might or might not like the outcome of that investigation so that if they can impugn his motives and his integrity, that's what they'll do to try to appeal to their base.
John Malcolm of the Heritage Foundation, thank you very much.
I'm glad.
At least I feel like it's not me being crazy.
I appreciate your coming on.
Thanks.
Good to be with you.
Thanks a lot.
You know, let's talk about this whole thing of the use of spying, the use of the word spying.
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Let's take a look at this thing spying for a minute.
I just got to play you this.
Here is the way that they have reacted to spying.
Spying Reactions Explained00:06:04
The media, the media has reacted to spying ever since Barr used the term that somebody spied on the campaign.
Here's cut number eight.
But if you're the sitting attorney general and you've actually sat as the country's attorney general before, you don't mix up the word spying.
This is, of course, loaded language to use language like spying.
Spying is a loaded word.
It's only used to refer to what foreign governments do to us, for example, when you're trying to stop spy, stop foreign threats.
Okay, evil Barr using the word spine.
Here is how the media, and this is from our guys at Newsbuster's indispensable site.
Here is how the media talked about this before Barr brought it up.
Sources tell CNN that that famous or infamous dossier, depending on your partisan stripe, that it was used by the FBI to help obtain a warrant to spy on a former Trump associate.
This memo delves into the secretive process under which the FBI obtains a warrant to essentially spy on Americans suspected of acting as a foreign agent.
This FISA warrant to surveil, to spy on Carter Page, is in October 2016.
The application to spy on Carter Page was 50 pages long.
When they spied on former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page.
The application to spy on Page was approved by the president's own Deputy Attorney General.
This spying on Carter Page.
And in fact, they didn't start spying on him until a month after he left the Trump campaign.
What if a judge would have decided to reject this warrant for spying on Page?
The spying on Carter Page.
Warrant applications to spy on FISA warrant to spy on former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page.
So it wasn't so bad until here's what changed everything.
Okay, here's what has changed everything.
Lindsey Graham 2.0, the terrific Lindsey Graham who has emerged, to be honest, ever since the death of his pal John McCain, this fighting Lindsey Graham that I really enjoy, here's the way that he concluded this hearing.
He said, this thing is over.
We're done.
The Russian investigation is done.
But not everything is done.
This is cut number five.
We're going to, in a bipartisan way, I hope, deal with Russia.
But when the Mueller report is put to bed, and it soon will be, this committee is going to look long and hard at how this all started.
We're going to look at the FISA warrant process.
Did Russia provide Christopher Steele the information about Trump that turned out to be garbage that was used to get a warrant on an American citizen?
And if so, how did the system fail?
Was there a real effort between Papadopoulos and anybody in Russia to use the Clinton emails stole by the Russians, or was that thought planted in his mind?
I don't know, but we're going to look.
And I can tell you this, if you change the names, y'all would want to look too.
Everything I just said, just substitute Clinton for Trump.
So if you substitute Clinton for Trump, you start to understand that the person who colluded with Russia was Hillary Clinton.
Now, she's not an asset.
She's not, I'm not accusing her of treason.
I'm seriously not.
But this is bad stuff.
It is bad when an administration uses the federal law enforcement arm to spy on the opposition campaign.
I mean, again, I feel, I'm beginning to feel like this kind of like crazy men in the wilderness, you know, shouting in the wilderness because I think like this is so obvious.
It's so obviously bad.
It may not be as bad as it looks.
You know, I can believe that.
It's not proved.
It's not shown.
But certainly, I'm a reporter.
These are the questions I would begin asking.
So Lindsey Graham asks Barr if he shares these concerns.
Do we have that cut?
Yeah.
Do you share my concerns about the Pfizer warrant process?
Yes.
Do you share my concerns about the counterintelligence investigation, how it was opened and why it was opened?
Yes.
Do you share my concerns that the professional lack of professionalism in the Clinton email investigation is something we should all look at?
Yes.
Do you expect to change your mind about the bottom-line conclusions of the Mueller report?
No.
Do you know Bob Mueller?
Yes.
Do you trust him?
Yes.
How long have you known him?
30 years roughly.
You think he had the time he needed?
Yes.
You think he had the money he needed?
Yes.
You think he had the resources he needed?
Yes.
Do you think he did a thorough job?
Yes, and I think he feels he did a thorough job and had adequate evidence to make the calls.
Do you think the president's campaign in 2016 was thoroughly looked at in terms of whether or not they colluded with the Russians?
Yes.
And the answer is no, according to Bob Mueller.
That's right.
So, I mean, this is to me what this is all about.
It is about the fact that these guys are now going to turn their attention on how this investigation got started.
And before that happens, the Democrats and the press, but I repeat myself, want to discredit Bill Barr.
But you know, they've got the Horowitz investigation, the Inspector General's investigation coming first.
They can't discredit him because he's been praised by all sides as an impartial observer.
So really, I think that this is just this kind of increasingly hysterical attempt to protect an effort that really was wrong and corrupt, the abuse of the federal government and the federal arm of law enforcement to investigate an opposing campaign.
And again, you can love Donald Trump, you can hate Donald Trump, but that is wrong.
Different View on Immigration00:10:58
It's corrupt.
It's un-American.
All right.
We have a guest coming on to talk about immigration, which is really one of the great subjects of the moment.
I got to say goodbye to Facebook.
You know what?
I'm not going to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
We're going to stay on so you can hear Mark Rickorian.
I want you to hear what he has to say.
We'll stay on, but that is no reason not to subscribe.
In fact, it should make you feel so guilty that you go to dailywire.com and subscribe.
It's allows you $10 a month, $100 for a year.
For the $100, you get the leftist tears tumbler.
And most importantly, we get your money.
All right.
Mark Gregorian is a nationally recognized expert on immigration issues and has served as executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies since 1995.
The center is an independent nonpartisan research organization in D.C. and it examines and critiques the impact of immigration on the United States.
Mark, thank you so much for coming on.
Great to be here.
You guilted me into actually paying, buying a subscription.
Good.
That's what I'm here to do.
I think I've now justified my experience.
So we're all watching this thing of people pouring across the border.
But it's only TV.
Maybe it's not as bad.
Are we in the crisis?
Yeah, we're definitely in a crisis.
It's sort of a slow-motion version of what Europeans saw because it's not, you know, whenever that was, 2015.
It's not happening quite as fast, quite on a big scale all at once, but it's the same kind of problem.
We're sending incentives.
We're sending a message to people who live in, let's frankly, lousy places.
But being in a lousy place is a necessary but not sufficient condition to come pouring into another country.
We have sent them the message that if you come here with a kid, it doesn't even have to be your kid.
It's supposed to be your kid, but you can lie about that.
Or if you say the magic words of asylum, I fear, return to my whole country, you're basically just going to be released into the United States.
And you'll have a piece of paper that says you're supposed to show up three years from now for a hearing or whatever it is.
And some people do, although mainly they do it because if you apply for asylum, if your case goes on for six months or more, you get a work permit.
So they'll actually be able to work legally, get a social security number.
Some of them don't even bother to do that.
They just use it as a way of getting past the border patrol.
And, you know, the grapevine works.
They call home, they say, look.
And then the smugglers know what's going on and they say, look, you know, all your neighbors are doing this.
It's working.
They're letting them go.
And then ICE has enough trouble trying to find criminals to deport.
They're not usually looking for regular ordinary people who got turned down for asylum.
If you get turned down, then what?
Nothing.
They just ignore you.
So, you know, they've accidentally put up Alex Nawasta's book in back of you.
We had Alex on.
It's the other side.
It's the other side of the question.
He says, let everybody come in.
What's the problem?
But you wrote a book for the same encounter as well, saying that basically this is an attempt to transform the country.
What do you mean?
Yeah, I actually wrote the flip side of that book.
If you flip it over, it's my half.
Oh, is that okay?
Yeah, and my basic point is that today's immigrants aren't really that different from the immigrants of 100 or 200 years ago.
There's some differences, obviously, but basically that's not the important thing.
What's different is us.
We're in a modern society.
We have a post-industrial knowledge-based economy so that in the old days when it was agricultural or manufacturing, Americans didn't have a lot of education either.
Neither did immigrants.
But there was opportunities for people who weren't skilled or educated particularly.
It's different now.
It's not their fault.
It's not our fault.
It's just different.
We have a welfare state now.
And, you know, I want a tighter, I'm a conservative, I want a tighter, more responsible system of social provision for the poor.
But you can't let in people who literally, no matter how many jobs they work, are never going to be able to pay to feed their own children.
And the fact is, if you have a sixth grade education from Honduras, you come to a modern society like ours, there's nothing wrong with you.
It's not morally critique.
And you're going to work.
I mean, the overwhelming majority of immigrants, even those who use, who collect benefits, food stamps and what have you, work.
It's just that they're a mismatch with a modern economy and they're never going to be able to earn enough money.
We're letting in 19th century workers into a 21st century society.
You know, I've never heard that argument before and it makes perfect sense.
In other words, when they go back and they look at the boats coming over and my ancestors coming over and that was a different world, that they were not as far behind the society they were coming into.
Right.
The image I use, my grandfather immigrated, my grandparents did, and he came from a place where there was horse manure in the streets.
And he came here and there was horse manure in the streets.
He would scoop it up and use it for fertilizer in his garden, but it wasn't really that different.
It was different, but the sort of social and developmental distance you cross is much greater now than it was before.
And again, it's nobody's fault.
It's just that it's a mismatch.
It's a really fascinating argument.
Now I have a bunch of questions I want to ask.
Let's see how many of them I can get in.
First of all, what do we do?
I mean, we've got all these people who are here already.
I watch Congress and they never move.
They get lost in these arguments.
What do we do with the people who are here?
We're never going to deport all these people.
What's the plan?
The way I look at it is: first, with attrition, we can shrink the size of the illegal population to a certain degree.
You're right that a lot of them are pretty rooted here.
But there's a good amount of churn.
And if we do a better job of keeping new illegals out and getting less rooted people to leave, first the thing is we can shrink the population.
Once we've shrunk it some, I'm okay with amnesty.
I mean, I don't like it, but we have parking ticket amnesties and tax amnesties.
You're cleaning up the mess of a past.
The issue is never this amnesty.
It's is it just teeing up the next amnesty?
That's the key issue.
That's why the enforcement mechanisms we need to have have to be in place, up and running, and proven before we amnesty people.
Because the problem with 1986, the big amnesty that Reagan signed, is that everybody got amnesty up front.
And the bill promised to enforce the law down the road, and those promises were abandoned.
And that's both a Republican and a Democrat thing.
They just weren't followed through on.
It's that betrayal, basically, that has created this lack of trust.
Because, you know, John McCain used to say, this immigration bill, whatever the next one is, because he was behind one under Bush and then one under Obama.
This is going to fix the problem, and we're not going to have any more illegal immigration after this.
Nobody believes that.
And with good reason.
And so the issue is never this amnesty.
It's, is there just going to be another one 10 years from now?
So wall or no wall?
Yes and no.
I mean, I'm not against border barriers, but they're just a tool.
They're not a magic solution.
And as we're seeing now with this asylum crisis, if you're in U.S. soil, you can claim asylum.
Well, the fence is always built back from the border.
It can't be built right on the border because how would our Corps of Engineers or what have you, they can't stand in Mexico and build the thing.
And in some places like El Paso, it has to be 50, 100, 200 feet back because of the river moving around.
In El Paso recently, just a few weeks ago, a whole group of Central Americans were brought by smugglers up to the fence, but on the Mexican side, but they were in the U.S.
The Border Patrol had to go through the fence, apprehend them, bring them through the fence onto our side, and then let them go.
Of course.
I mean, it's crazy.
So the answer is fences, walls, that sort of thing, they work, but they're just one tool in a toolkit.
Why won't Congress do anything?
The Democrats won't agree to changes that are necessary.
I mean, we are nonpartisan in the fact that there's Republicans and Democrats that hate our guts.
We obviously have more relations with the Republicans just because they're more open to this.
But the fact is, Democrats are not willing to do the things that's necessary to control the border.
They say they're against open borders.
Some of them do anyway.
We're for border enforcement, Pelosi and the others say.
I think they believe that what they're saying when they're saying it.
But then you say, okay, well, what are you willing to do to enforce the border?
If somebody violates whatever new limits are, let's say we double immigration, there's always going to be somebody who's going to break the rules.
Let's say somebody, you know, we double immigration to 2 million a year, let's say, because it's about a million or so a year now.
Let's say the 2 million and first person sneaks in.
Are you willing to deport that person?
Now, he's not a criminal.
He's not a terrorist.
He's just a regular working stiff.
Are you willing to take that guy into custody, detain him, and return him to his home country?
Democrats aren't.
And if you aren't, then you're for open borders, objectively, as the Marxists would say, even if you pretend not to be.
So this raises to me the bigger question.
There's a question I put to Alex Nawasta too.
What is the American theory of immigration?
In other words, are we a country that has a moral responsibility to take people in when they're in trouble?
Or are we a country that says, we'll let you in if we need you?
I mean, is there a conflict there?
Are we both?
How does that work?
I mean, I've debated Narasta a number of times.
We don't get along anymore, but we used to debate quite a lot.
And there is a, and I thought it was really useful because I was able to present people two basic, two different basic approaches to immigration.
His approach, the libertarian open borders approach, and this is really a lot of people on the left, too.
Everybody in the world has a right to come here, although we can make exceptions.
In other words, Narasta is willing to say, no, no terrorists, that sort of thing.
So everybody gets to come with exceptions.
My perspective, and I think this is what most people would agree with, is that no one has a right to come here, but we make exceptions.
In other words, no one can come if we don't let them come.
Or everyone can come unless we specifically say you can't.
Those are the two diametrically opposed approaches to immigration.
And, you know, I say, let's put it to a vote.
I mean, I think most people, even the Democrats, acknowledge, at least openly, that no one has a right to come here.
And then we decide how many come in.
But that's not the way they operate and that's not the way they vote.
Right, right.
Now, many people think the most important thing about you is your expertise, but I can't help noticing that you're carrying another kingdom, which I think is far more important.
I brought it so you could autograph it from me.
I listened to the podcast and I wanted to read the book.
Well, thank you very much.
Really, really interesting conversation.
I mean, I have to kind of digest some of this because you're putting forward a different view than I've normally heard, that the actual appeal to the way this country has been, we're a country of immigrants and all this, is actually out of date.
It's actually kind of obsolete.
And we're in danger of bringing in people that we can't possibly support and maintain.
Artists And Their Responsibility00:03:39
The image I used, I had it in the manuscript of my book, and the editor took it out.
So every time I talk about it, I say it anyway.
I got nothing against you.
She was great.
Is doughnuts.
When you're seven years old, donuts are good for you.
You need the fat, you need the calories, you need the sugar.
When you're 57 years old, like I am, it's the same donut.
And there's nothing wrong with it.
There's nothing wrong with you.
You've matured in a way that you just can't eat as many donuts.
And this is not insulting anybody.
Nothing's bad.
Nothing's good.
It's just that the body politic has changed in such a way that it's a bigger challenge now than it used to be.
Okay.
I'll ask you to wait here while I wrap up the show and I'll happily sign up.
A final reflection.
You know, two of the stupidest articles on the arts that I've ever seen came out this week, I believe.
One is on Game of Thrones.
Somebody complained that Game of Thrones keeps killing off entire immigrant populations and it's a problem.
They were talking about the battle scene where the Dothraki ran off to fight the armies of the dead and were just kind of wiped out.
But this is really a terrible, terrible thing.
It's a big problem, except for the fact that the Dothraki don't actually exist and it's not a problem at all.
Another is the Avengers Endgame was brilliant, but the fat shaming broke my heart.
Apparently, now, I don't know what this is.
I'm not sure.
I don't think it's a spoiler, but apparently one of the characters who's a superhero comes on at some point, and he's got a belly, he's been depressed, and he's been eating.
And this is a joke, and this is a terrible, terrible thing.
Now, this is going to annoy some of my own audience.
I know, I know it is.
But this attitude is the exact same attitude that I see when Christians say to me, how as a Christian can you write characters who do terrible things and say terrible things and who curse the way people curse and who sleep around the way people sleep around.
This is my whole point, right?
An artist is actually not responsible to your sensibilities.
He's only responsible to delight, entertain, and amuse you.
That's all he is.
And he's responsible to his muse and he's responsible to life.
An artist is trying to recreate the experience of life so that you have it there in front of you.
It's a way of giving you more life, more wisdom, more chances to live, more ways of looking at the world.
And he can't do that if he is responsible to some guy who thinks, oh, I don't like to see those people die, or I don't like to see that superhero get fat, or I don't like to see a Christian author deliver people who do things that Christians don't do.
You know, there's an old theory about artists that is called the mirror and the lamp.
In Shakespeare and Hamlet, he says the artist is supposed to hold the mirror up to nature.
But around the time of the Romantic era, artists started to think of themselves as a lamp that shines a light from their inner light and shines it on the world so you get to see more of the world.
That has been transformed into artists who stand up and win Oscars and tell you how you should vote.
That's nonsense.
As Plato said, the artist is inspired when he works, but the rest of the time, he's usually kind of an idiot.
And so what you want from an artist is you want his inner life showing, holding, actually holding the mirror up to nature in a new way, a fresh way that comes from his vision.
And so these complaints about art, that they don't supply the political vision that you want, or they don't supply the religious vision that you want, are actually anti-art.
If you don't want to use the arts, don't use them.
But if you use them, use them with an open mind and an open heart the same way you should approach life so that it can teach you instead of you telling it what it's supposed to mean.
The Clavenless weekend is upon us.
It doesn't matter that I've said all this stuff because very few of you will survive.
But if you do, we will be here on Monday.
Mathis Glover's Role00:00:50
I'm Andrew Clavin.
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