Ben Shapiro and Andrew Klavan dissect the 2020 Democratic debates, mocking Kamala Harris’s misleading busing attack on Biden and Elizabeth Warren’s hypocrisy praising Trump’s economy. They frame U.S. politics as a clash between "friends of the founding" (constitutionalists) and leftist "enemies," citing Antifa’s assault on Andy Ngo and media bias as proof of systemic hostility toward conservative principles. Klavan argues Democrats exploit crises like border security—ignoring Clinton/Obama-era support for enforcement—to push socialist policies, while Shapiro highlights AOC’s boycott of Wayfair as Leninist tactics. The episode concludes that the left’s virtue-signaling and identity politics undermine America’s radical individualist ideals, leaving voters with no true choice but to reject both parties’ extremes. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, I am back from a spectacular holiday hiking in the Alps with the girl of my dreams, which is even spectacular when I just say it out loud.
But traveling through the mountains of a foreign country made it so incredibly difficult to get straightforward, honest reporting of the news that I almost felt like I was still here in America.
As far as I could gather, Donald Trump decided to launch a military assault against Iran and was therefore a mindless hawk leading us into an endless war with an innocent nation.
Then he decided to call off the attack and was therefore a pueling coward letting himself be pushed around by a terrorist regime.
The Democrats held either two debates or one debate that just seemed to go on night after night.
The Democrats promised that each and every American would be able to pay untold amounts of taxes to ensure that illegal immigrants got free health care.
And this was important because when black Americans find out how badly the Democrats have screwed them for the last 50 years, America will need to import more Mexicans fast or else Democrats will never be elected to anything ever again.
Beto O'Rourke added to the discussion by speaking Spanish to remind us of exactly what America needs to sound like for Democrats to get elected.
Kamala Harris attacked Joe Biden for opposing forced race-based busing.
And everyone said Harris had a great night because while Biden was absolutely right to oppose race-based busing, Harris signaled her virtue and launched unfounded accusations of racism.
And isn't that what being a Democrat is all about?
Elizabeth Warren said the Trump economy was going great, but she had a plan for that.
And Bernie Sanders just stared into space, wondering how he'd fallen in with all these lunatic commies.
Finally, Marion Williamson said that time was a flat circle and everything that happened would go on and on forever, which turned out to be the truest word spoken about the debate.
It's good to be home, I think.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Well, you know, you've had a good vacation when you hike like 10 to 15 miles a day and you don't lose any weight because you spend the rest of the time eating everything you see.
There are entire cows missing from the Alpine countryside.
There's nothing left but these cowbells because I ate the cows.
And of course, the best thing, besides being with my wife and not having to watch the Democrat debates, was limiting my access to the internet and the news and just taking time to think about the big picture and where the country's at and how I feel about it.
And here are some of my thoughts.
We know that our country is divided, but I think we're using an old template to describe how it's divided.
I stopped using the word liberal a long time ago because there's nothing liberal about the left.
They oppose free speech, free thought, free markets, freedom of religion.
The only freedoms they support are the unbridled fulfillments of physical desires, which are guaranteed to turn you into a dependent slave.
So I call them leftists now, but maybe leftists isn't quite right either.
It's kind of an old-fashioned word to describe a European phenomenon.
And what about conservatives?
Are we really conservative?
Well, we're sort of conservative, but in America, conservatives aren't about blood and soil or even really about tradition necessarily, except insofar as our traditions preserve our essential American ideas.
Unlike conservatives and other nations, American conservatives are trying to conserve the most radical political document ever written, the Constitution, which guarantees a limited government of specified powers tasked with guaranteeing the individual's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
So that's not really conservative in the usual sense of the word.
In fact, what I think we're seeing is a division between friends of that founding and enemies of that founding.
Those of us who believe the creation of the United States in the image of our Declaration and Constitution is the greatest political event in history and therefore worth saving.
And those who think no, we should return to the age-old habit of top-down government or race-based identity politics rather than the radical politics based on our founding ideas.
You can tell Friends of the Founding because they talk about founding ideals.
They quote Jefferson, they quote Madison, Adams, Franklin.
They wrestle with the original intentions of the Constitution and the underlying principles of the Declaration.
We can have passionate but civilized debates about whether a new idea like gay rights is antithetical to those founding intentions or, in fact, in keeping with them.
Because we have source materials and writings and foundational ideas, we can compare our arguments and then move ahead, abandoning out-of-date practices or clinging to those practices that still hold true to the founding.
But the anti-founders, they got nothing.
All they have is an amorphous sense of their own glowing compassion, tolerance, and virtue.
So they use empty phrases like, that's not who we are, which literally means nothing.
They invent mean-sounding words like Islamophobia or transphobia, which describe utterly non-existent phenomena.
Nobody's phobic about transgender people or Islamic people.
They just want to demonize legitimate concerns about whether violence is inherent in Islamic theology and whether so-called sexual identity is eating away at morality and even sanity.
They address issues of high emotion and zero importance, like use of pronouns or abortion rights for girls who are actually guys.
They are guided and manipulated by emotive pictures on the left-wing news.
Babies dying at the border is a crisis, but babies dying in Chicago, not so much.
Most of all, the enemies of the founding define everything that opposes them as hate.
Of course they do.
Since they're defined by their love and their virtue, anyone who's against them must be hateful and therefore can be opposed by any means necessary.
So the enemies of the founding call the friends of the founding not just wrong, but evil, and they license their own evil in the process.
They call us hateful while they obviously seethe with hate.
Babies Dying at the Border Crisis00:14:56
They call us violent while they assault us and scream at us and spit on us in restaurants.
They call us racist while they see everything in terms of race.
And they call us fascist while they try to undermine every freedom our founding defends.
Momentary issues and the huge presence of Donald Trump distract us from the essential nature of this division.
But in each issue, each crisis, each argument, it's important to remember what exactly we're fighting for so we can defeat these forces of violence and hate.
And that's what we're going to be talking about.
But first, let us talk about Express VPN.
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I know, it's been so long.
You thought, I forgot.
How do you, how, it's clavin, how do you spell that?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
No E's, no E's in Clavin.
I just make it look this easy.
So look, I'm sure you heard about this.
This Quillette journalist, Andy No, it's pronounced, it's hard to pronounce.
It's N-G-O.
The guy is a gay guy with, I believe, Cambodian ancestry.
So you'd think he's the guy that the left would love and his many, you know, put-upon identities.
But he was viciously, viciously assaulted by Antifa in Portland.
Portland, which is now basically a lawless city.
The police stand back and let Antifa do whatever they want.
They were there to protest some right-wingers who showed up.
You know, I guess the Proud Boys were involved, and the Proud Boys sometimes can be violent themselves.
But this violence was just a vicious attack on Noah on a journalist.
And by the way, No, before he went there, said this was going to happen.
He said, I'm worried about covering these guys.
They've been talking about attacking me.
They've been talking about me specifically, Noh specifically, going after him.
And they attacked him with what was apparently milkshakes, but there were chemicals and cement involved.
He has a brain bleed.
He was hit so badly, they threw things at him.
They hit him with these assault gloves, essentially brass knuckles.
It was just as vicious and violent an attack, assault on a journalist as we have seen within the confines of the United States.
And what's so upsetting about this is, of course, you know, we understand that these guys are thugs.
These guys are fascists.
They call themselves Antifa, meaning anti-fascist.
And I joke that the FA stands for fascist and the anti-stands for nothing, because when you're wearing a mask and when you're attacking people violently, you're the bad guy.
You are the bad guy.
There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
Unless you are the Lone Ranger, don't be wearing a mask because that is just showing that you're ashamed of who you are, that you're breaking the law, that you're committing acts of violence.
And they do.
They put the stuff they put up on social media basically calls for violence and says, we understand if you personally have some reason why you can't commit violence.
It's like, you know, each one of us has our task, but we are going to be committed violence.
Three people were arrested.
If they send them to prison, they'll meet some real white supremacists.
They'll find out what that experience is like.
It's not like dealing with these guys.
They're not going to like that very much.
And, you know, but the terrible thing is we know these guys are thugs.
It's the people who stand by and let it happen.
The press that doesn't hit the roof.
They hit the roof when Donald Trump makes jokes with Vladimir Putin about the press, but does nothing to stop them.
But they don't say a word about this.
In fact, Snopes, Brian Stelter, I'll give him, he said something about how it was unacceptable.
But remember, CNN, Chris Cuomo, has said, anti-Fa is good because they're anti-Faz.
They must be good.
They must be good because they are anti-fascist.
And yeah, they wear masks and hit people for what they believe, but they must be good because it's right in the name.
You know, that kind of stupidity is the level of news and commentary we get about this.
And, you know, I mean, we've seen our pal Steve Crowder get assaulted by this guy, Carlos Maza, at, where is he?
He's at Huffington Post.
And he's what?
Sorry?
Vox, Vox.
I'm sorry, my mistake.
He's at Vox.
And Carlos Maza has been trying to silence Crowder.
Maza puts out, yes, we have to milkshake them all, humiliate them at every turn, make them dread public organizing.
This is what the level that Trump has ginned these people up toward.
But it's not Trump, really.
Trump incites them, he excites them, but this is their philosophy.
Their philosophy is they should be able to do whatever they want because we are the hateful one.
And they have to define us as hateful because their philosophy is defined simply by the love and compassion in their souls that shines out of them like a light or like brass knuckles, hard to tell the difference.
Let's talk about Ring.
Ring's mission is to make neighborhoods safer.
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I've told you about our pal, Jay Hay, Jonathan Hay, who put one of these up on one of his doors and had to deal with some people trying to talk their way into his house at 3 o'clock in the morning.
But because he could see them and communicate with them, he could keep them out.
He then literally put a ring around his house of ring devices to keep him and his wife safe.
And really, they help you stay connected to your home anywhere, anywhere you are.
If there's a package delivery, a surprise visitor, you'll get an alert on your phone.
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These are really good.
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The starter kit has everything you need to start building a ring of security around your home.
Just go to ring.com slash Clavin.
That's ring.com slash Clavin.
Anywhere you are, anyone comes to the door, just stop them and say, how do you spell Clavin?
And if they know, it's K-L-A-V-A-N.
If they know that, do not let them in.
They are obviously suspicious people.
Byron York is writing at the Washington Examiner, always a good writer, a good observer.
He writes, the toxicity of the resistance to President Trump has risen in recent days with the nation's most respected newspapers publishing rationalizations for denying Trump supporters public accommodation and for doxing career federal employees while a journalist found himself under physical attack.
The point here is it's not just the physical attacks against No, it's a kind of violent ideation that justifies everything.
And as I say, Trump is maybe the inciting incident.
He's the one who gets them all ginned up.
He's the kind of symbol.
But it's their philosophy that does this.
This is the natural outcome of a philosophy that defines itself as virtue, that defines itself by its virtue.
York goes on to say the justification for denying public accommodation came from the Washington Post and an op-ed by Stephanie Wilkinson, the owner of a farm-to-table restaurant in Lexington, Virginia.
She became famous in June of last year when she refused to serve White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders and told Sanders and her family to leave the restaurant and then followed her staff followed the Sanders group in protest as they tried to find another place to eat.
She told the press she ejected Sanders because the Trump administration is inhumane and unethical and because the Red Hen has certain standards and that she feels it has to uphold those standards such as honesty and compassion and cooperation.
You hear those empty, those are empty phrases because if you're not, if you don't, you don't have compassion if you're chasing somebody out.
Those are just defining yourself as virtue, so you're virtuous because you don't have the founding scriptures, the founding ideas, the founding traditions that you can refer back to and say, am I doing the right thing?
Am I acting in keeping with the founding?
The anti-founding is empty.
The anti-founding is simply anti and it's defined by its own virtue and therefore anyone who opposes it is hateful.
And in a new article, Byron York goes on to say, Wilkinson discussed the case of the Aviary, a trendy bar in Chicago, where a waitress recently spat on Eric Trump, the president's son.
Wilkinson wrote that the incident, along with her own decision to Al Sanders, shows that in the age of Trump, new rules apply.
Well, you bet they do.
These are not new rules.
These are old rules.
These are the oldest rules of all.
These are the rules of hatred and violence and not having a democratic Republican system defined by its laws so that you've got no laws.
All you got is your virtue.
All you got is your violence and spitting on people and shouting on people.
That's all you got because you've got nothing to guide you.
You have nothing to show you the way.
So it's a wonderful system, really.
It makes all this evil justifiable.
He goes on to say there was also an apology for doxing in the New York Times a piece by Kate Cronin Furman, an assistant professor of human rights at University College London.
So if you're a professor of human rights, you know you have nothing to do with human rights.
And the article focused on the treatment of illegal immigrant children in detention centers near the U.S.-Mexico border.
Cronin Furman discussed the detentions as well as actions by employees of U.S. Customs and Borders Protection in terms of the Holocaust and genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda because there is no Holocaust or genocide.
So that's how they're comparable.
The way we're enforcing the law at the border has no genocides.
It's not like the Holocaust, but that's why I guess I don't know.
I don't know what they're thinking.
But those are the kinds of reasoning, that's the kind of reasoning they use.
He says, those are, of course, contexts which most Americans would likely dismiss as preposterous and offensive, but which Cronin Furman in the New York Times apparently take seriously.
Her idea is that opponents of the administration should publicly identify and shame low and mid-level customs and border protection employees who care for migrant children.
So these guys who are defending, who are defending the border, who are keeping some of these kids alive when they have to be put in detention centers because they've been brought in here illegally, they should be doxxed.
You should be able to find them and shame them and do these things, spit on people and scream at people.
And all of that basically is justified by the fact that these people are defined by their virtue.
So let's go back a little bit in time.
I think this is important.
It's important to remember this stuff and not to let it slip away.
Remember in January, Donald Trump came out and he made a speech from the Oval Office saying there was a humanitarian security and humanitarian crisis at the border.
Remember, the government closed because he was trying to get money to build the wall and the Democrats made the issue about the fact that the government was closed and government employees weren't being paid.
And that was the big issue because the crisis was not real.
So here's Trump, a little slice of Trump's speech from the Oval Office in January.
My fellow Americans, tonight I am speaking to you because there is a growing humanitarian and security crisis at our southern border.
Every day, customs and border patrol agents encounter thousands of illegal immigrants trying to enter our country.
We are out of space to hold them, and we have no way to promptly return them back home to their country.
America proudly welcomes millions of lawful immigrants who enrich our society and contribute to our nation.
But all Americans are hurt by uncontrolled, illegal migration.
It strains public resources and drives down jobs and wages.
Among those hardest hit are African Americans and Hispanic Americans.
So he's talking about what the problem is, and he uses this term.
It's a crisis.
He uses both the security crisis, which obviously it is, and a humanitarian crisis.
And just to remember, here is the response from Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi in that wonderful moment when they looked like the painting of the two farmers at Grant Wood painting, American Pastoral, I think it's called.
American Gothic?
Is it?
Yeah, that's right.
American Pastoral is the novel.
American Gothic.
Good heavens, I've been away too long.
All right, American Gothic with his standing out there with those two serious faces.
They looked hilarious.
But this is just a snippet of their response.
President Trump must stop holding American people hostage, must stop manufacturing a crisis, and must reopen the government.
Most presidents have used Oval Office addresses for noble purposes.
This president just used the backdrop of the Oval Office to manufacture a crisis, stoke fear, and divert attention from the turmoil in his administration.
And what is incredible about this, and just remember, they diverted from this manufactured crisis.
It wasn't a crisis at all.
They diverted from this manufactured crisis to the idea that federal employees were not being paid.
That was really what we had to deal with.
And now, now that there's so many people pouring in because there's not enough security, because they're not giving security, they want it to get even worse.
And I just want to, while we're going back in time, I just want to go back further in time.
And this is from The Daily Caller, a montage of what Democrats used to say before there was Trump.
And this is important because they're lying.
Okay, they're lying.
Each and every one of them is lying.
They have no intention of doing the things they say.
But this is the thing when they were trying to echo what the American people thought, give them at least the sop of pretending to believe them.
You'll hear Clinton.
If you can't see who they are, you'll hear Clinton.
You'll hear Barack, what was his name?
Orama Ohama.
I can't remember anymore because his legacy has been blown away to little sparkles of iridescent light that just you can't see anymore because Donald Trump has destroyed his legacy so entirely.
And what's her name, Hillary?
You'll hear her drunken rants as well.
Obama's Legacy Debate00:04:32
It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws, not only in the states most heavily affected, but in every place in this country are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country.
That's why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more, by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before.
Families who enter our country the right way and play by the rules watch others flout the rules.
People who enter the United States without our permission are illegal aliens and illegal aliens should not be treated the same as people who entered the U.S. legally.
And because we live in an age where terrorists are challenging our borders, we cannot allow people to pour into the U.S. undetected, undocumented, and unchecked.
We've got to do several things, and I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants.
Certainly, we've got to do more at our borders, and people have to stop employing illegal immigrants.
Now, the one thing about Obama, putting Obama in there, Obama did deport a lot of people.
And Obama did, you know, just like Clinton, they did build these detention centers that now are only becoming a problem because Trump is president.
This is really important because a lot of people, a lot of liberals who are like decent, you know, decent old-fashioned Democrats who don't really realize what's happened to the party and don't really realize how they're being manipulated, I hear a lot of them say, they'll say, well, you know, I didn't know about this before.
I didn't know that it was going on during Obama, but now I know.
So now I have to show my compassion.
Now I have to show how compassionate I am by protesting what's going on at the border.
But that's essentially accepting the manipulation of a corporate left that owns about 95% of the communication territory in this country.
The corporate left, these powerful corporations, NBC, the corporations that own all the TV networks, the corporations that own the New York Times and the Washington Post, the corporations that are Facebook and Google and Twitter.
These people have so much communication power that they tell you when to care and they tell you when not to care.
And it's not enough to say, oh, now I care, because what they're doing is they're targeting Trump.
They're not targeting the problem.
In fact, they want the problem to get worse.
They have taken, the left has taken, I think there's no way to argue this, the left argue against this.
The left has taken a Leninist position.
Lenin basically said he wanted things to get worse and worse and worse so that communism could come.
wanted capitalism to collapse, even if it meant suffering, so that socialism, communism could come in and replace it in the ensuing panic.
So they had to fight.
The Democrats had to fight to send 4.6 billion humanitarian aid package from the House to the Senate.
Pelosi was trying to stop it because she said it didn't go far enough.
It didn't have all the things she wanted.
All the things that would have kept the Senate from actually passing it.
They want it to get worse and worse and worse.
There's a company, Wayfair.
They're making beds for the kids so that the kids have mattresses in the detention centers.
AOC, Alexandria Occasional Cortex, mobilized to stop them.
And this is Leninist policy.
She says, you know, the Wayfair workers have to unite to stop them from sending the mattresses to the kids.
They want it to be as bad as humanly possible so they can attack Donald Trump.
It's a Leninist policy meant to make this as bad as it possibly can.
And meanwhile, meanwhile, they keep telling us that they're against open border.
You know, I got to tell you something.
When I left Switzerland, I left Switzerland.
I flew to London.
My wife and I almost missed the plane because they checked our passports so many times between the lounge where we were waiting for our plane and the gate where we got on the plane.
They checked it again.
First of all, there was one long line just to get to the gate.
This is inside where they checked our passports for the luggage.
When we got our tickets, they checked our passports.
Then we went inside.
We went through security.
Then we went to the gate and suddenly we found, oh my gosh, we're on this long line to have our passports checked again.
We almost missed our plane.
We get to the plane to get on the line to board the plane.
We have to show our passports.
While we're on the line, we have to show our passports.
Then the place where you reach the lady who takes your ticket, we have to show our passports again.
Passports and Planes00:02:43
All right.
So this is like normal procedure, making sure that the people who come into and leave your country are doing the things that they're supposed to be doing, are obeying the laws.
Because the laws, you know, when you say you're a nation of laws and not of men, what you're saying is you're defined by the rules.
The rules apply to everybody instead of this kind of amorphous feeling of virtue that you have that can be turned on, yeah, it's turned away from Chicago and it's turned toward the border, right?
If you're all you are is this amorphous compassion, you can be manipulated and moved around any way they want to move you around.
And, you know, when you watched, I didn't get to watch all the debates, thank God.
I mean, it was the best part of my vacation was not watching the debates.
But at these debates, they asked them, should illegal aliens get health care?
Everybody raised their hand.
Absolutely.
We should be taxed to pay for the health care of people breaking into our country.
What does that do?
It just makes more people come in.
It's this Leninist policy of making the border worse and worse until finally all you've got is people screaming and crying.
Oh my God, these babies are being hurt.
We've got to set them free.
And it feels like charity, but it's actually a disaster for the country.
I got to stop for a minute.
One of the joys of coming home, of course, is returning to your own bed, especially if you have got a Helix mattress, which I have.
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You can lie awake at night asking yourself again and again and again, how on earth am I going to know how to spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Here's the thing about this border situation, though, that ties it back to what I was saying before.
Border Debates Founded00:14:53
The idea that we are somehow the only country on earth that should have no border, that we are somehow guilty for what happens to people when they break our laws and come in to this country.
The idea that we should be taxed to pay their health care, that we should speak their language instead of them coming in and assimilating to us and learning to speak our language.
All these ideas reveal that these are the enemies of the founding.
These are enemies of the founding who think this country is the problem.
They don't think this country is a gift, is a glorious moment preserved in a nation, a glorious idea preserved in a nation that goes back over 250 years and that needs to be preserved and that needs to be referred back to and thought about.
How do we move into the future as new things come up?
How do we refer them back to these founding principles?
They're not thinking about that at all.
This is something that we should be guilty about.
It was built on the backs of slaves.
It was founded as somebody, we played somebody before I left, some crazy lady on CNN ranting that it was founded on racism.
It was founded on the opposite of racism.
Every other country was founded on race.
Every single other country was founded on race.
This country alone was founded on an idea.
That's the idea that the friends of the founding are trying to defend.
It doesn't matter, you know, I don't think I'm a very conservative guy, to be honest with you.
I don't care who people sleep with.
I don't care how they live their lives.
If they want to use drugs, I think they're fools, but I don't want to get in their way.
It has nothing to do with that.
But I do believe this founding is a precious gift and needs to be preserved.
I'm a friend of the founding, and I stand with guys who are more conservative, like Ben.
He's more conservative than I am in some of those social issues, but he is a friend of the founding, and that is what defines us.
That's what defines our side.
The people who are not friends of the founding have nothing to refer to except their own virtue.
It is a fool's game.
It's a fool's game that causes you to hate the opposition, causes you to do violence against the opposition, and causes you to misunderstand yourself because you're not that virtuous to begin with.
And it makes it easy for you to be manipulated.
All right, we're going to talk some more about the debates with Michael Knowles because he saw the debates.
I didn't.
And so I'll find out what the hell happened.
But first, I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
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All right.
So I didn't watch the debates because I was in the middle of the Alps and I just didn't care enough to make the effort.
But the moment that every hilarious moment, as far as I was concerned, that everybody said was the turning point, was when Kamala Harris launched this attack on Joe Biden, Sleepy Joe, who really did seem to have lost all sense of energy and purpose and was just kind of standing there.
And she ripped him apart for his previous support of busing, one of the worst, most unconstitutional and disruptive and ineffective policies ever put in place against our founding principles.
Okay, so she's attacking him for doing the right thing, which was being against busing.
But she used the whole emotional, you know, the emotional appeal, and it really worked for her.
Her poll numbers have gone up.
His have gone down.
Here's that cut.
I'm going to now direct this at Vice President Biden.
I do not believe you are a racist.
And I agree with you when you commit yourself to the importance of finding common ground.
But I also believe, and it's personal, and I was actually very, it was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country.
And it was not only that, but you also worked with them to oppose busing.
And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools.
And she was bussed to school every day.
And that little girl was me.
So I will tell you that on this subject, it cannot be an intellectual debate among Democrats.
We have to take it seriously.
That's my favorite quote, by the way.
It cannot be an intellectual debate.
It just has to be me tearing up and talking about my past.
It's just about the emotion.
Forget the intellectual debate.
It's got to be wiped away.
I felt sorry for Biden.
He's like from the old days when people actually argued about stuff.
You know, I think the cruelest thing, it's great to see you.
Good to see you.
Welcome back.
Thank you very much.
I think the cruelest thing I've ever done to you is leave you here alone to watch these debates.
I sat there.
I did play a drinking game, though.
I was going to say we could have played a drinking game.
What was your game?
My drinking game was when they talked, I drank.
So it was really fun.
I really enjoyed that.
You just better hope they win than we can spend the entire administration smashed out of our minds.
That clip, the Joe Biden Kamala Harris thing, was so unfair.
Totally unfair.
It was the highlight of the debates.
It was the nearest thing to an intellectual moment in the entire debate.
That's sad.
It really was.
And what's funny is she also is not being truthful there.
The Berkeley schools were never segregated by law.
They were not.
Now, is it true that the elementary schools might have been more segregated?
Is that?
There was a sort of de facto segregation because there was redlining.
So there were neighborhoods where black people just could not buy houses or very few of them could buy houses.
So as a result, you had as early as 1962, I believe, the year before Kamala Harris was born, you already had a decent amount of racial mixing in the middle school and high schools, but you had very little in the elementary schools.
That had changed by years before Kamala Harris ever got there.
Yeah, I mean, even the year before she got there, the number of black students at her school was up from 10%, which you've got to remember, only 12% of America is black.
It was up from 10% to about 37% or something like that before she ever got there.
So to even use the word segregation, what she's trying to do is position herself as this civil rights icon.
You know, she's Martina Luther King, but she isn't.
And the hit on Joe Biden is just so unfair.
It really was unfair.
I mean, you know, the other thing is, like, did they see, was there any point when they said something that a guy sitting at home who just wants to do his job and feed his family and have his life would help him do that?
I mean, it all seemed to be about these people coming in the border who don't live here.
Well, that's because you probably couldn't understand half the debate because it was in Spanish.
So they, beginning on, there's two nights.
Not to say they were pandering or anything like that.
You know, there were two nights.
The first one, Beto O'Rourke, from the very first question, starts speaking in Spanish.
Well, Spanglish.
He tries to speak in Spanish.
And the look on Corey Booker's face, he looks at me, he says, are you seriously pandering more than I pander?
So then Booker says, I'm not going to let you get away with that.
So then Booker says something to the effect of, yo, quiero Taco Bell or something.
was trying to get the Donde Estala Bibliotheca.
And then after that, Julian Castro, who actually sort of speaks Spanish, he starts doing it.
Then the moderator, Jose Diaz-Belart, starts doing it.
Oh, my God.
I was going to turn it to Telemundo so I could watch it in English.
So they all started doing that.
But the real pandering toward Hispanic, what they think are going to be future Hispanic voters, came the next night when the moderator asked, would any of you raise your hand, give free health care to illegal aliens?
Every hand went up.
So you think you're talking about the regular old voter, regular old American Joe sitting there at home watching this, says, oh, the only thing you all agree on is you're going to give away my money as an American citizen and a taxpayer to illegal aliens who are breaking our laws.
And you know, you have to think that when people are facing an election, they think, what are my problems, right?
The only problem that that solves is guilt, is a sense of guilt that they inculcate in us.
We have nothing to be guilty about.
This country has freed every free person on earth.
Owes this country a debt.
What are we supposed to be guilty about?
Of course, and not just that, even on the immigration question, we take in more immigrants than any country on earth by like an order of magnitude.
I mean, there's like not even a second place.
And treat them as Americans.
I mean, I moved to England for seven years.
I could have lived there 150 years.
I never would have been an Englishman, not ever.
Here, like 10 minutes after you get your citizenship papers, it's like, you know, slide over to the bar and have a beer.
You know, it really is amazing.
These days, it's 10 minutes before you get your citizenship papers, 10 years before maybe.
You set foot on the soil.
So you had all of these guys.
I mean, Biden went in as the front runner.
He got knocked down at Peggy.
He's down either five or 10 points, depending on which poll you look at.
Liz Warren was fairly strong.
She, you know, she's an old battle axe.
She's an old battle tomahawk, and she has this issue, though, which is her voice.
I'm going to pretend you didn't say that, by the way.
She has this issue where her voice is so constantly shrill.
I think so, too.
It's really, really off-putting.
So I don't, she was the strongest in that first night's debate, strongest of that very weak bunch.
All of the, you know, there was that woman, Marianne Williamson.
I love her.
I love her.
She should be in the next True Crime.
Yeah, the true detective.
I mean, she is so- Times are flat.
All right, all right, all right.
Did you see?
She's Matthew McConnell.
She is Matthew McConnell.
Those memes were all going around her quotes over Matthew McConney's sort of stoned face.
And she is just a great relic of the new agey 70s, hippie-dippy times.
She was a highlight.
You look at all of them.
I mean, she wasn't even the craziest person on stage.
She was like in the middle of the pack compared to Eric Swalwell and some of those other people.
You look at it and you say, President Trump has some vulnerabilities.
If the economy crashes, he'll have a real vulnerability.
Certainly someone could beat Donald Trump.
But which of those people could beat Donald Trump?
I don't, you know, I mean, of the clips I saw, Buttigieg came across as sort of sane.
Yes, he's impressive.
Yeah, he's an impressive guy.
He is a radical.
I mean, for all the kind of, you know, clean-cut image and all this stuff, he is kind of a radical guy.
And he's a killer.
I mean, he's a total jerk, you know, political monster.
I mean, this guy's been running for office since he was about two years old.
It's hilarious to me that he has adopted, he's a Christian and has adopted all the worst aspects of Christianity, the judgmentalism.
Moralizing.
Moralizing.
And, you know, you sit there and, you know, how could anybody call himself a Christian and let this happen at the border?
Says the supporter of abortion who's sleeping with a guy, you know?
Which, by the way, like, again, you know, I don't care about that, but still, it's not traditional.
You have some self-awareness, you know.
Speaking of sleeping with guys, you know, Willie Brown had this.
Willie Brown, in whose bed Kamala Harris started her career.
He had a piece today up in the Sacramento Chronicle, I think it was, where he said, none of these people can beat Donald Trump.
I think that that seems to me absolutely true.
And Brett Stevens said the same.
I want to talk about, after this, I want to talk about Brett Stevens because he just got slammed for saying essentially the same thing.
Because the question that you leave these debates with was what issue did they actually talk about?
They said they're going to give away free stuff.
Yeah.
They kind of walked, I mean, Elizabeth Warren did not answer a question.
They said, do you have a plan for how to deal with Mitch McConnell?
She said, I do.
That was it.
That was our whole plan.
Yeah, I have a plan for that.
She never says what the plans are, of course.
The nearest thing to an issue was Kamala Harris said that we need federally mandated busing, which is, by the way, not even all that popular among black voters.
No, it's not, I mean, it's.
It didn't help.
I mean, schools are more segregated or as segregated now because people tend to gather with their own, and there's nothing the government should, could, or should do about that.
That's a lot different than saying you can't come into this school is people just kind of flocking together.
So is that that's going to be our answer now?
We're going to say, I mean, they actually came out, the Democrats around the debate and said it is immoral to have borders.
We need to decriminalize that.
This is the other thing.
They basically said decriminalize border crossings.
They literally said that.
I was just talking about to get out of Switzerland.
I had to show my passport five times, I think it was.
Right.
I mean, just to get out of the country.
Right.
Imagine getting in.
I mean, if the Democrat debate, if the issues come down to we need to rehash a failed policy from the 70s on busing and we need to erase our borders, who are they going to win?
Let me ask you this.
What happened to Bernie Sanders, the founder of the modern Democratic Party?
Who?
Who was that guy?
I mean, when I looked at the pictures of his face, he just looked like, how did I get surrounded by all these radicals?
I didn't want to go that far to conversation.
Maybe I'm in the wrong primary.
You happen to believe that I've walked into the wrong place.
Well, you know what it is?
It's because now he's a millionaire.
So all of a sudden he's looking around.
Wait a second.
Let's not talk about giving away all of our money.
You know, I was looking at the top clips from the debates.
I mean, I must have pulled 20 or 30 clips and thought this is.
Bernie wasn't in any of them.
He's not in the debate.
He's sort of, I mean, he's 150 years old.
Well, that is the other thing at the moment.
The moment that I thought should have been like the pull-out headline was when Joe Biden, I don't have the exact quote, but he said something like, my time is up.
I'm finished.
I thought, I was pretty self-aware for him.
The end is near.
I see the sun setting on my.
That's right.
The stars are fading away.
I'm getting dinged.
Joe, Joe.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, you and I, I think, to be fair to me, too, we have both said that he's a tremendous.
Biden is a tremendously weak candidate.
I think Sanders is finished because the party has just gone to the left of him.
The party has gone to the left of Sanders.
Liz Warren has actually just plagiarized all of his plans.
And so when she says, I have a plan, she's really saying it's Bernie's plan, but I'm not going to talk too much about it.
And Brett Stevens, one thing he did was he listed how much each of her plans.
See, the thing is, each one of their plans, one of their plans might be affordable, even though we're incredibly in debt.
But it's the same dollar they're spending over New York.
All right, what are you talking about on your show?
Today we'll break down a little bit more of that second debate because we haven't done it yet.
And then I want to talk about Antifa on the show because there was that poor journalist, Andy.
He got his head cracked in.
But the issue is not the getting the head cracked in.
People get their heads cracked in.
The issue is everyone making excuses for it.
You're absolutely right about this.
Excellent.
It's great to see you.
Good to see you.
Let's get a stogie quickly.
Let's do that in about, I don't know, two hours, three hours?
Sounds great.
Okay.
I got to talk before we stop about Brett Stevens.
Brett Stevens, you may remember, was Wall Street Journal columnist, very smart guy.
I admire and respect him.
Binary Choice: Trumpers vs. Never Trumpers00:03:04
But he hated Donald Trump so much and Ted Cruz, by the way, hated them both so much that he simply could not tolerate the Republican Party anymore and went to the New York Times, which you may have heard used to be a newspaper.
So he watched the debates and he wrote a column called A Wretched Start for Democrats.
And he said, here's what a party, he tried to say what people were seeing who weren't of the Democrat base.
And he said, this is what they saw.
They speak Spanish.
We don't.
They are not U.S. citizens or legal residents.
We are.
They broke the rules to get in this country.
We didn't.
They pay few or no taxes.
We already pay most of those taxes.
They willingly got themselves into debt.
We're asked to write it off.
They don't pay the premiums for private health insurance.
We're supposed to give up ours in exchange for some VA-type nightmare.
They didn't start enterprises that create employment and drive innovation.
We're expected to join the candidates in demonizing the job creators, breaking up their businesses and taxing them to the hilt.
Well, he was not beaten up like Andy No, but he was beaten up on Twitter.
He was mobbed on Twitter, called a white supremacist, called all kinds of terrible things.
This is a guy who's married.
I believe his wife is from Mexico.
He himself was raised part of the time in Mexico.
He's Jewish.
He's not, he's anything but a white supremacist, very intelligent guy.
It highlights, though, what the Never Trumpers got wrong.
The Never Trumpers are constantly saying it's not a binary situation.
And what they mean by that, though they may not know it, is in the long run, of course it's not a binary situation.
In the long run, there are compromises, there are third ways, there are middle ways, there are all kinds of different things.
But at each moment, it's a binary choice.
At each moment, you have to say yes or no.
And when you walk into a voting booth and there are two candidates with a chance to win, that is the dictionary definition of a binary choice.
You're either for the founding or you're against the founding.
What Brett Stevens has done is he has now placed himself in the position of the mob.
He is either going to succumb to the mob and start adopting their opinions, or he's going to find he has no friends.
Because defeating Donald Trump is a fool's game in a binary situation.
If it weren't a binary situation, it wouldn't even be interesting.
It wouldn't even be interesting because we'd all just do the right thing.
You know, we'd all just find our way to the exact right candidate that we want.
But we always get faulty candidates.
And in Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, we had big-time candidates with big-time flaws.
And it turned out, in the case of Donald Trump, with big-time virtues that some of us didn't see right away.
But he has lived out those virtues more than those flaws.
That's the problem.
In every given moment, it's a binary choice.
Over the long term, and we'll talk about this more tomorrow, I hope, over the long term we have some big decisions to make, ways for the friends of the founders to go, which way they should go in the future.
And as Donald Trump moves forward and as he leaves us behind, we will have to find new ways to go forward.
Those are not binary decisions, but at each moment it's a binary decision.
And Brett Stevens made the wrong one.
That's it.
Glad to be back.
Nice to see you all.
I'll see you all again tomorrow.
Technical Producer Austin00:01:01
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is 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.
The second night of last week's first Democratic presidential primary debate ended with Sleepy Joe's campaign in free fall.
We will examine the attack from Kamala Harris that knocked the frontrunner Danipe.
Then conservative journalist Andy No was brutally beaten by Antifa in Portland.