Andrew Clavin’s episode skewers 2024 Democratic frontrunners—Beto O’Rourke’s performative apologies, Pete Buttigieg’s absurd LGBTQ+ slogan, and Biden’s flip-flops on Iraq and borders—as proof of leftist "loon" governance. Clarence Thomas’s originalism is framed as a weapon against the "administrative state," with Kavanaugh’s alliance accelerating its dismantling, while Myron Magnet ties progressive policies to historical despotism. The show contrasts Trump’s working-class appeal with Democrats’ bureaucratic overreach, ending by warning that liberal "social justice" undermines actual freedom. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, every now and then I like to stop and take a look at the ever-developing field of Democrat presidential hopefuls because I feel there should always be time in this busy life to stop and share a quiet smile over the hapless stupidity of blithery knuckleheads.
The latest to join the campaign is Beto O'Rourke, who will be replacing Beto O'Rourke, whose campaign faltered when people found out he was Beto O'Rourke.
The original O'Rourke's campaign was launched with a cover story in Vanity Fair in which he announced he was, quote, born to do this, unquote.
His new campaign was launched by apologizing for being on the cover of Vanity Fair and for saying he was born to do this and for being male and for being white.
Then he live streamed himself getting a massage from a Mexican barber.
Beto promises he will overcome his white privilege by selecting a minority female as his running mate and then stepping down to let her be the president.
When asked why he didn't just skip a step and get out of the race, Beto apologized for not having thought of that and relaunched his campaign without himself in it.
Mayor Pete Budajej is running on a platform of being homosexual while being under vicious attack by Vice President Mike Pence in his imagination, because Pence has always been very kind to him in real life.
Budajej's campaign slogan is, get Mike Pence out of my head.
It's driving me crazy.
It's been a big hit with homosexual schizophrenics who hear Mike Pence's voice attacking them and want it to stop.
Budajej will also be relaunching his campaign just as soon as he admits that this one is over.
And of course, the frontrunner remains Joe Biden, who is running on his record of being vice president under Barack Obama and therefore having had no real power while Obama was screwing up the country.
His latest campaign slogan, it wasn't me, it was the black guy, is playing well with people who will be voting for Donald Trump.
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 it bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
When I lived in England, there used to be a cliché about talking to cab drivers.
The idea is when you get in a cab, the driver sometimes tells you what he's thinking about, about politics and life.
And for a lot of urban elites, that's the only time they would get to hear what working-class people had to say.
So the cab driver's opinion became the opinion of all working-class people.
I take a lot of Ubers when I travel.
And while in LA, a lot of drivers are struggling actors, in the rest of the country, they're very frequently workaday Americans trying to make a living.
And I'm always incredibly impressed with the things they've accomplished and the sacrifices they make.
People of every background who pulled the extra shift for 20 years and now just want to tell you about their son or daughter who made it through graduate school and has got a big new job and is too busy to visit.
Visit your mother.
Or they want to tell you about how their wife wants to work, but she's too sick, and so they have got to have a side hustle because they're never going to leave her behind.
And of course, these people are conservatives and they're leftists, Trump supporters and Trump haters, men and women, and like I said, all colors from all backgrounds.
And when I disagree with them politically, which I do maybe half the time, it's because I think conservative policies, freedom, capitalism, non-racial thinking will benefit them more than they think they will.
A lot more, actually.
My point is, when I look at Donald Trump, I don't see the savior of the world.
I see an outsized American original, a big flawed guy, doing a good job for these people, whether they like him or not.
And when I look at the Democrats, I see loons.
I see loons serving their base.
I see loons doing nothing that will help normal people, but just holding out free stuff to normal people in order to take the power of choice and self-determination out of normal people's hands.
We have to remember this.
It's not the people we're fighting.
It's the leadership.
And on the left, the leadership sucks.
And I will talk more about this in a minute.
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The first thing you have to know, first thing, how do you spell clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no E's in Clavin, as you should all know by this time.
And if you don't, get out of the business because you're in trouble.
You know, one of the Uber drivers I was talking to was talking to me about getting out of debt and how she had gotten herself out of debt and how important that is.
And that, of course, that's a conservative principle is getting out of debt.
And what the left says to you is, oh, we'll get you out of debt.
We will get you out of debt.
Bill de Blasio announced that he's running for president, which is nonsense.
The guy's a, you know, the guy is a communist mayor of New York.
But he has this phrase that he uses again and again that he loves to use, and he uses it here on Good Morning America.
I say it very bluntly.
There is plenty of money in this world and there's plenty of money in this country.
It's just in the wrong hands.
We have to do things for working people.
We have to put working people first.
That's the difference here.
I've actually done it.
I've proven it can be done.
We're doing things like guaranteed health care for all New Yorkers, including mental health care, the issue that Shirley has focused on, paid sick leave, pre-K for all.
These are things that change working people's lives for the better.
All Americans deserve that kind of opportunity to live a better life.
It's a tough city.
We're hearing it outside.
Some protesters get a lot of people.
A little serenade, George.
A little serenade.
But it's not only that.
There's a poll about a month ago, Kwinipiak poll, that showed 76% of New York voters, 73% of New York Democrats say you shouldn't run.
So what should the rest of the country think when so many of your fellow New Yorkers are saying don't run?
You know, I got elected mayor by 73% of the vote originally, re-elected with 67% of the vote.
I think you'd agree that the poll that actually matters is the election.
The reason the New Yorkers don't want him to run is because they see their city slowly deteriorating.
New York is slowly deteriorating from what Rudy Giuliani turned it into, which was one of the great cities in the world.
Rudy Giuliani turned it from one of the hellscapes of the world to one of the great cities in the world that's slowly deteriorating under the leftist ideas of Bill de Blasio.
But listen to what he's saying.
He's saying there's plenty of money around.
It's just not in the right hands.
Let me put this in the simplest possible terms, okay?
Maybe a little simplistic, but not too much.
When you have a dollar in your pocket, who decides where that money goes?
Who decides where that money goes?
You decide.
You decide where their money goes when you have a dollar in your pocket.
When that dollar is taken away from you and put in the hands of the government, who decides?
They decide.
The government decides.
So they're not giving you stuff.
They're taking stuff away from you, right?
I want you to decide whether you are an Uber driver or a head of a business.
I want you to decide where that dollar goes because for three reasons.
You're a better person than anybody serving in government.
You're a smarter person than most of the people serving in government.
And you earned it.
It's your money.
It's not for them to decide.
When you have this mass of people deciding where the money goes, it goes to the right places.
When you have what Myron was talking about, that Woodrow Wilson idea of the experts, Barack Obama used to talk about this all the time.
I'm going to lock myself in a room with experts and we'll solve all the problems.
The problems don't get solved.
The problems get solved by all the true experts, the true experts, each person who knows how to do his job doing his job.
That's how the problem gets solved, with a few exceptions that we admit the government has to handle like the military, which it handles worse than an ordinary than a private military, but that's where the power has to be, or else you have crazy people running their own militaries.
The other thing that we have from the left is this incredible, incredible cult of personhood, which of course, you know, it's a kind of narcissism that comes out of tyranny.
Beto O'Rourke relaunches his career.
He relaunches his campaign because after the wonderful, oh, he's Ted Kennedy or he's John Kennedy or whoever he's supposed to be, after that, everybody started to say, what has this guy got?
Besides waving his hand around and saying a lot of stuff and apologizing for being white.
And so Beto puts out first he did, I think he was at the dentist, wasn't he?
That the first one that he did where he live streamed himself at the dentist.
Now he live streams himself after going on the view and apologizing for being a white male privileged guy.
He goes and live streams himself getting a haircut from a Latino barber and a massage.
He's getting massaged by the Latino and he's apologizing for his privilege.
Here it is.
Hey everybody, we're at Chemas in El Paso getting a haircut after being on the road for almost two weeks.
We were in New York, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Iowa, Dallas, Fort Worth.
And actually last night we were at Houston before we flew into El Paso.
But now back at home, started out the day with the Great Run with Artemis down working around Utah.
Back home.
See, and I point this out, not just to point out that Beto is a moron, which he obviously, I mean, come on.
But not just to point out that he's a jerk, but they all do this.
They all do this.
You know, Elizabeth Warren having a beer with her husband and, you know, Kamala Harris talking and going out and trying on clothes and all this stuff.
Who cares?
Who cares, right?
I mean, the thing is, they are going on the idea that you are stupid, especially if you're working class, you're stupid, and you're just going to respond to the image that they put forward.
And the problem they have, the way that Beto gets into a bind doing this, is that once it's all about you, once it's all about you, then it's fair to start attacking you, right?
So once it's about you, it's fair to say, well, you are kind of privileged and you've done that.
But who cares?
Who cares if your ideas are good?
You know, if your ideas are good, then your ideas are good.
You may be from the richest place in the world.
You may never have done a day's work in your life.
You may have better ideas than a working class person, better ideas for that working class person.
So it's really not about who you are as long as you're not a tyrant, which a lot of these guys are.
And then, you know, and this just affects everybody, and it becomes, it just becomes utterly ridiculous.
And it all becomes about, you know, now I have to apologize because of who I am because I was running on who I am.
And then, of course, you've got Joe Biden.
Now, Joe Biden is far and away ahead in the polls.
That doesn't mean he'll stay there, but right now, he's far and away at the head of the polls.
And of course, he's got the name recognition.
And a lot of these early polls are about name recognition.
But they're selling him this way.
Like, here's Chris Matthews.
Here's the way they're selling him.
He is the working guy because that's, you know, he's a working class guy.
But also on Saturday, coming up the 18th, he's going to the Rocky steps at the Philadelphia Art Museum.
He's going to the essential blue-collar guy from South Philly, Italian guy, Italian stallion, the one that never got a shot, and he finally gets a shot at the title against Apollo Creed.
That is the dream of the working-class guy in Philly.
And Biden seems like a guy, you know, he once said, I wasn't part of the 60s.
I wasn't a burning guy with a bullhorn yelling at the administration building.
So he's rocking fighting apollo creed.
What's the matter, Chris?
Don't you like black people?
Coming out rooting for Apollo Creed.
All right, just a little leftism seeping into the show there.
But that's the way they're selling him.
He's Lunchbucket Joe.
He's an ordinary guy.
And you're supposed to fall for that.
But my problem with Biden, interestingly enough, I mean, I do think he's way too far to the left for me.
But my problem with him is he's a fraud.
He's always been a fraud.
He was a plagiarist.
He plagiarized speeches.
He plagiarized papers in school.
He's a phony guy.
And when I say this, what I mean by that is he's a weather vein.
He goes in the way that he thinks he should go.
There is a new tape that's resurfaced of him in 2006 when he was a senator.
And let's not talk about him as an outsider, right?
He's been a senator for 150 years.
And here he is saying that he supports a border fence and strict restrictions on people who hire illegals.
I voted for a fence.
I voted, unlike most Democrats, some of you all like it.
I voted for a 700-mile fence.
But let me tell you, we can build a fence 40 stories high unless Chadigan said Mexico.
And you will not like this.
And punish American employers who knowingly violate the law when in fact they hire illegals.
Unless you do those two things, all the rest is window dressing.
And I know I'm not supposed to say it that bluntly, but they're the facts.
They're the facts.
And so everything else we do is in between here.
Everything else we do is at the margins.
So everything else we do, if we don't transform Mexico, if we, you know, we should build a fence, if we don't transform Mexico and penalize people who hire illegal aliens, we're not doing everything else we do is at the margins.
Is he going to stand for that, still be that guy?
You watch, you watch, because he drifts whatever the wind blows.
He drifts wherever the wind blows.
One of the things I really hold against him is the way he treated the war in Iraq, because after all, many people, including one of his sons, I believe, was in the war on Iraq.
And he started out with George W. Bush and every other Democrat, every other one, including Barack Obama, including Hillary Clinton, every one of them believing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
This is cut number six.
He was saying the same thing as everyone, because that's what the intelligence community was telling them.
We know he continues to attempt to gain access to additional capability, including nuclear capability.
There is a real debate how far off that is, whether it's a matter of years or whether it's a matter of less than that.
And so there's much we don't know.
By the way, it's really hard to find this stuff on YouTube.
It gets cleansed from YouTube when you go back and look for it.
I happened to know where this cut was so I could find it.
Constitutional Crisis and the Surge00:07:19
But then later, when things started to go sideways in Iraq, he was not so big a supporter.
And when Bush, George W. Bush, finally said we need a surge, he was with the Democrats wholeheartedly in opposing it.
Here's another very difficult to find clip of Biden begging Bush not to go for the surge.
funding limitations on the president of the United States, which we constitutionally couldn't do during the Vietnam War.
And again, this is not to embarrass him.
This is not designed to say, Mr. President, aha, you're wrong.
This is designed to say, Mr. President, please don't go do this.
Then the surge worked, okay, and it worked.
And it was as Obama was taking office, not when he was in office.
It was as he was taking office that the surge clearly worked.
In the last month before Obama took office, I believe there were no American casualties.
I may be wrong about that, but there were very few or no American casualties in Iraq.
The surge had worked.
When the Iraqis saw that we were going to come in in force, they started to join us, the Iraqi people, and they started to forge a political solution that they would not have forged had it not been the surge.
And Biden, in one of the most unbelievable moments, gave the credit for that to Barack Obama.
This is cut number eight.
I am very optimistic about Iraq.
I think it's going to be one of the great achievements of this administration.
You're going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer.
You're going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.
I've been there 17 times now.
I go about every two months, three months.
I know every one of the major players in all the segments of that society.
It's impressed me.
I've been impressed how they have been deciding to use the political process rather than guns to settle their differences.
It's amazing, amazing to me that he then credited Obama, who then pulled out of Iraq, dumped the achievement of George W. Bush, and let ISIS be born by pulling all our guys out.
That was on Biden's watch.
He was the vice president, and he was crediting Barack Obama with that the entire time.
I mean, that is who the guy is.
Robert Gates, who was Defense Secretary under Biden, wrote in his memoir that he loved Biden.
He thought he was a great guy, and he was wrong about every single foreign policy decision.
And he was asked about that comment on Face the Nation.
I stand by that statement.
He and I agreed on some key issues in the Obama administration.
We disagreed significantly on Afghanistan and some other issues.
I think that the vice president had some issues with the military, so how he would get along with the senior military and what that relationship would be.
I just, I think it would depend on the personalities at the time.
He's a peer of yours.
He's about a year older.
Yes.
You think he's right for this moment?
I think I'm pretty busy and pretty active, but I think having a president who is somebody our age or older, in the case of Senator Sanders, is, I think it's problematic.
You know, this is the problem, again.
It is not the people.
Obviously, I'm a conservative because I think my ideas work better.
I think freedom works better.
And I think freedom is important.
This is a new thing on the face of the earth.
The stuff that the Democrats are selling, it's an old thing.
When Woodrow Wilson came and called himself a progressive and said, you know, oh, now we need the experts running things.
That's not progress.
That's regress.
That is going back into the past.
And I think that the freedom of the people, the freedom that gives you dignity, that means that you got to figure things out.
It means you got to take responsibility.
It means you got to pick yourself up when you fail.
It also means, it also means that you've got to depend on your neighbors.
And your neighbors have to form communities.
And they have to be in communities that will turn to you and churches that will help you.
You know, that's why all of the founders said this is a constitution for a religious people because they knew we needed community, we needed faith, we needed the ideas that come out of Christianity and come from Jesus of loving our neighbors and taking care of the least.
And all the left tries to do is sell you the idea that we are in a crisis.
Donald Trump is this evildoer.
He's a crisis.
Everything is a crisis.
You know, I talked about, I think it was last week, I was talking about this constitutional crisis that is completely made up.
Well, once it's amazing, once the left started to say it, the press, I mean, it's always about the press.
The press starts to sell it to you big time.
This is another one of these newsbusters montages that I love so much.
It's cut number 15, where they just, they hear that idea that there's a crisis and they sell you that idea.
If it's a constitutional crisis, that sounds bad to me.
So now you hear the term constitutional crisis.
You know, you hear this word constitutional crisis.
A little constitutional crisis.
What exactly counts as a constitutional crisis?
Are we in a constitutional crisis?
Is this a constitutional crisis?
I think it's a constitutional confrontation.
Constitutional stress test.
Constitutional showdown.
Constitutional confrontation.
Confrontational crisis.
Can you agree with Chairman Natler that the country is currently in a constitutional crisis?
Yes, it's a constitutional crisis, okay?
Constitutional crisis?
You know, Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal has an op-ed today, or his column today, where he says, you know, now they're starting to call Trump a dictator and they're talking about a constitutional crisis.
But he asks the question, when have the Democrats ever talked about limited government?
They never talk about checks and balances.
He says they're weeping crocodile tears for checks and balances.
They're trying to hide from public view unprecedented ideological differences between the Trump presidency and the ascendant progressive edition of the Democratic Party.
The ideological divide is between a government of limited power, which Mr. Trump represents, and a government with wide coercive powers represented by Jerry Nadler and Alexandria Casey-Cortez and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and all the rest.
This is the thing.
You know, I do not, I think there are ways to live that will make you happier than other ways, but I do not want to control the way you live.
I understand that people get pregnant when they don't want to be pregnant.
I understand that people need help and they fall down and their communities collapse.
I think when the government comes in to help you solve those problems, it is actually taking things away from you.
Federal government, not the local government, the local government can often be very helpful.
State governments can be helpful to run the world as you want it to be run in your locality is what we are looking for.
And I just think that these leaders on the left are serving a very, very small percentage of their party, including Joe Biden.
I think they're serving a very small percentage of their party, not the people, not the people that I meet who are working so hard and making so many sacrifices.
Supreme Court's Role in History00:14:37
Those people, I think, are served by freedom.
I think they're served by independence.
I think they're served by keeping their money in their pocket and letting other people keep their money in their pocket.
I do not think they're served by government charity, which is actually government slavery.
There are not people, not that many people that I am proud to know.
I'm happy to know almost everybody, but there's not that many people I am proud to know.
Myron Magnet is, in fact, one of those people.
And Myron, you know, he's one of the most brilliant people I've ever met.
He gave me my start as a commentator, as a cultural commentator.
It's a long, long story.
I won't tell it now.
But basically, I went to an old friend of mine who was a conservative and told him that I'd sort of become a conservative.
And he said, you really have to talk to Myron Magnet.
And Myron started publishing my stuff in City Journal, where I still publish and I'm now a contributing editor.
Myron is no longer the editor of City Journal, but he made that magazine into one of the great and most important magazines on the right.
And now Brian Anderson has continued that tradition and expanded it in all kinds of ways.
Myron is just a guy who understands what happened.
He wrote a book called The Dream and the Nightmare, which describes the way that the ideas of the 60s became the mess that we have today.
The dream was the dream of what people were trying to do in the 60s, and the nightmare, of course, was what actually happened.
He's got a new book out called Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution.
And typical of Myron's brilliance, but also one of the things that I can actually say that he and I are alike in, he shares my genius for self-promotion because he's got a new book out, and this is a fairly popular podcast.
And I'm out to dinner with a friend, and he says to me, you know, there's this brilliant new book out on Clarence Thomas.
And I thought, gee, you know, that's an interesting subject.
Maybe I should get the author on the podcast to come on the podcast.
So I look up the book, and it's Myron Magnet.
It's my pal.
He doesn't even let me know that he's got a new book out.
This is a biography, obviously, of the Supreme Court justices.
It examines how he became an independent, self-reliant person and had just the kind of character the founders assumed would always mark Americans and how that helped him change the court.
You know, Myron, this is one of the things that Myron knows a lot about.
His last book was about the homes.
A really weird subject, but such a good subject was about the homes of the founders and what they had to say about the founders.
We have Myron on the phone, and let's talk about it.
Myron, one of the most brilliant guys I know.
Myron, are you there?
Yes, and I'm so happy to hear your voice, my dear old friend.
It is great to hear from you.
The only way I get to talk to my friends is by interviewing them at this point.
Good, that's success.
There you go.
It is so nice to hear from you, to hear you.
Truly, it is.
And I'm really excited about this book.
I can't think of anybody better able to write about Clarence Thomas than you.
Why did you pick this subject?
Well, you know that my last book, The Founders at Home, was what, you know, I wrote it in order to find out what kind of republic did the founding fathers envision?
What kind of constitution did they want?
And having discovered that they had brought about something unexampled in history and that even 230 years plus later is still not only up-to-date but really avant-garde, I realized we didn't have it anymore.
And so my next question was: okay, well, how do we lose it?
And how do we get it back?
And that led me to Justice Thomas because actually in his opinions and in his speeches and in his memoir, he answers both those very important questions.
You know, one of the things that fascinates me about Clarence Thomas is he seems to be, I'm not a lawyer, but he seems to me such a brilliant legal mind.
The left has paid him no respect at all.
I mean, Anton and Scalia used to get a little respect, but they've basically treated him as Scalia's, just his follower.
Is there any truth to that?
No, no, no, none at all.
You're right in thinking of him as a brilliant legal mind.
I mean, here's kind of what he, here's what he thinks.
He thinks that we have this extraordinary Constitution that does something unexampled in history.
It wasn't perfect when framed because the framers couldn't get rid of slavery if they wanted to get the document ratified.
But nevertheless, it was improved by the Bill of Rights.
It was perfected by the Reconstruction Amendments and by the 19th Amendment that gave women the votes.
And what does this Constitution do?
It guarantees the individual American citizen the right to forge his own happiness in his own way in his own families and community.
That's something so utterly different from what any other regime in which people were ruled allowed.
And so what he's trying to do in his jurisprudence is make that constipation again.
And what he says is that that Constitution was subverted by – Drew, can you hear me?
Yes, I hear you.
Fine.
Yeah, okay.
So, all right, so that Constitution got subverted in a variety of ways, and he wants to undo the subversion.
The first way is very, very meaningful to him.
He says, hey, it's personal to me.
And that was that there were two 1870s Supreme Court decisions that essentially took the 14th Amendment and said that it wasn't what it was.
The 14th Amendment aimed to give the protection of the Bill of Rights to freed slaves against any depredations by state governments.
The Supreme Court said, no, no, no, that's not what the 14th Amendment means.
And so we got this Jim Crow system for almost 100 years after that.
And Clarence Thomas said, hey, I grew up under segregation in Savannah, in segregation.
I couldn't walk across this park.
I couldn't drink from that water fountain or go to that library.
So he says, I know about oppression.
Well, after that, then we had Woodrow Wilson who comes along and says, wait, I know, I have a better idea than the Founding Fathers, who are these antique guys who lived in the Newtonian universe.
This is Darwin time.
And we need a Constitution that keeps up with the times.
Well, so we need the Supreme Court sitting as a permanent constitutional convention and this core of non-political, highly educated administrators, because now we're in the age of administration, who will tell us how to live, who will give us clean water, clean air, a good financial system, whatever.
And who was his model here?
Frederick the Great.
In other words, an enlightened despotism, right?
And this is supposed to be in advance on the Founding Fathers.
Of course, anybody who had studied history, ancient and modern, would know perfectly well, as James Madison knew in framing the Constitution, that enlightenment tends to evaporate, leaving behind only the despotism.
And that's what we've got.
Did you read about this case, Drew?
There's a rancher in Montana who has this trickle going through his mountain acres.
So he dug a couple of ponds.
The EPA comes down on him and says he's polluted the navigable waterways of the United States, fines him $130,000, imprisons him for 18 months.
The nearest navigable waterway is 40, 50 miles away.
And now all of this happens without a grand jury indictment, without a petty jury finding of facts, without a real Article III judge.
It's an administrative judge who reports only to the EPA.
He's just a bureaucrat.
And he can do this to a citizen of the United States.
This is not liberty.
This is just plain star chamber tyranny.
So in a series of 2015 opinions, Justice Thomas has started chipping away at the foundations of the administrative state to say something that makes laws like a legislature, carries them out like an executive, and adjudicates and punishes infractions of them like a judiciary, has, he says, no comfortable home in our constitutional structure.
And he really does want to get rid of it.
And now that Brett Kavanaugh has joined him on the bench, a real critic of the administrative state, we might get somewhere in that direction.
It is amazing.
I mean, people don't understand, because I harp on this all the time.
They don't understand the administrative state is such a bland term that they do not understand that that's where their freedom is going.
Down the drain.
Down the drain.
Yeah, I mean, has Thomas made any headway with the left, with the liberal judges?
No, but he has made headway with the law professors, funnily enough.
And I mean, ten years ago, you know, they thought he was a complete crank off the charts.
But now they realize that he is a very profound and coherent legal thinker and that he has laid out a roadmap, really, for how the court in future can get back to the original Constitution.
And now we've got a more conservative court, and I think we're most certainly going to be going in that direction.
Here's something that's kind of one of the reasons that the left really hates, hates Clarence Thomas, is that he says, as far as the Supreme Court is concerned, there's really no such thing as constitutional law.
You've got a whole bunch of opinions by judges, by courts, judgments by Supreme Courts, but they may or they may not be wrong.
And if they're wrong, since we don't have any hesitation in overturning laws passed by the people's elected representatives and signed by the president, if our predecessors have been wrong, it is our duty as the high court to say, hey, we are overturning.
This is not constitutional.
So, you know, the left is always talking about, oh, settled law, settled law, settled law, by which they mean Roe v. Wade.
And, you know, and Clarence Thomas says, look, settled law was Plessy v. Ferguson that says that separate but equal facilities for blacks in public accommodation is constitutional.
No, he says, they were wrong.
They were wrong, and we needed to overturn it.
They were just hammering him on this for that obscure states, you know, whatever it was about suing people in different states where he said Sari deceases can basically be overturned.
Of course, it makes so much sense.
You know, one of the things they've always said about him is that he must be just a follower of Scalia because he never asks any questions during the arguments.
Did you get any insight into why he's such a quiet man on the bench?
I think he's very—no, I don't really know.
Okay.
I don't know.
Because he's given many different answers to that.
But that he's just a follower of Scalia, no, no.
I mean, Scalia himself said that by comparison with Clarence Thomas, Scalia is just a faint-hearted originalist.
Clarence Thomas is the real thing.
When you look at his decisions, is there a way that you can take originalism too far?
This is an argument I've heard from liberals that you can go back to where cruel and unusual punishment doesn't include knocking people's ears or whatever.
Is there a sense in which you can take originalism to be almost literalism in that sense?
No.
Why would you do it?
The Founding Fathers didn't cut anybody's ears off.
They were highly civilized people.
That's not our tradition.
So, you know, I mean, think about it.
We do have a political tradition.
And one of the things that I keep thinking of is how Reconstruction got subverted by these horrible 1870s decisions of the Supreme Court that then loosed not only, I mean, that not only loosed Jim Crow, but let these terrorist groups, the KKK, the Knights of the White Chameleon, the White Liners, right, all over the South.
And what General Grant said after he had retired from the presidency is, well, you know, all things considered, all things considered, we probably should have occupied the South for a generation to make Reconstruction work.
He said, but you know, it's not our tradition.
The voters wouldn't have it.
This is a democracy.
And we had to pull them out.
So, you know, it is a democracy, responsibly.
The Front Room Mystery00:03:33
Myron, I got to stop here.
It's great talking to you.
I hope we can get together next time I'm in New York.
I will make a special trip to see you.
I can't wait.
The book is Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution.
I can think of nobody better to write it than Myron Magnet.
Myron, thanks so much for coming on.
Pleasure.
I'll talk to you.
Bye.
You know, talk about a guy, you know, talking about the people versus the leadership.
Talk about a guy who cares deeply, who is obviously an elite thinker and an urban character, but a guy who cares deeply about the effect that these things have on people.
You know, the effect that the bad leadership has on people.
Myron is that guy, and it sounds to me like Clarence Thomas is that guy as well.
Hey, you know, a lot of times I talk about the arts and how the arts shape minds.
If you get a chance, I want you to take a look at something.
You know, I love ghost stories.
And if you don't like scary stories, don't look at this because it is a really, really scary story.
I've talked about it before.
You know, The Woman in Black.
It was made into a big movie.
It's been one of the longest running two-people plays, two-person plays in the West End in London.
It is a really, really frightening play.
It was written by this lady, Susan Hill, who also writes detective stories.
You know, I don't know.
I think she's a Tory.
She's English, obviously.
I think she's a Tory.
I don't know very much about her political opinion.
I don't care.
I'm not ascribing any political opinion to her.
But she wrote a very, very frightening ghost story called The Front Room, which is in a collection called The Traveling Bag.
And The Front Room is doubly frightening, not just for the things that happen in it, but because the people in it make a terrible mistake by trying to do the right thing, by trying to follow Christian principles.
And I think when you read this story and you think about immigration, for instance, I think that You can understand why it is that even a Christian person, even a charitable person, might think that Donald Trump is talking more sense about immigration than the left.
And it's also just, you know, just a story about how complicated doing the right thing is.
And I think it's a wonderful story, The Front Room by Susan Hill.
Also, by the way, I've noticed that one of my favorite, favorite spooky stories, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, has been made into a movie and the movie is being dumped.
And I don't know why.
I don't know if it's no good.
It's got a fairly high critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but it's coming out.
Like I couldn't even find it in LA.
It's in one theater apparently out in Santa Monica.
But I'm going to try and find it.
I hope you try and find it.
If you don't find it and you've never read the book, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, it is just a wonderful book by Shirley Jackson, who wrote the famous story, The Lottery, also wrote the famous ghost story, The Haunting.
I got to stop there at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific, Knowles is doing the conversation.
I did not know this before I leave you.
The episode is free to watch on Facebook and YouTube, but only subscribers can ask the questions.
So subscribe and tune in today at 7 p.m., 4 p.m. Pacific.
Join the conversation.
Make sure to ask Knowles really hard questions.
We want to humiliate him in any way we can.
When I was at Stanford, two different people yelled at me for our mean treatment of Michael Knowles, and they kept telling me I shouldn't call him execrable.
I never call him execrable.
That's Ben does it.
I just think it quietly to myself.
But join him on the conversation, 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific, and subscribe so you can ask him questions as well.
The Clavenless weekend begins.
You're screwed.
The Andrew Klavan Show Finale00:00:56
I'm Andrew Clavin.
Survivors gather here on Monday at The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Adam Sajovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
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