Andrew Clavin’s Hate vs Hate dissects Twitter’s toxic "screw you" culture, where 280-character vitriol replaces debate, while exposing media bias—like the NYT rewriting headlines to demonize Trump post-El Paso. He contrasts the El Paso mayor’s moral clarity with leftist paranoia (e.g., warning against "aggressive scents" at socialist conventions) and critiques figures like Warren for weaponizing grief. Guest Rafael Manguela counters decarceration hype, citing Chicago’s recidivism data, while Clavin ties economic debates to family values, slamming Biden’s outdated gender roles op-ed as hypocritical. The episode argues civil discourse dies when both sides weaponize outrage—leaving only ashes. [Automatically generated summary]
Twitter users from around the world are convening in an international conference to find solutions to our worst problems like Twitter users from around the world.
The first annual meeting of the most vocal Twitter users has adopted the theme, screw you, I hate you, now die, and will be held at a venue meant to represent a real-world analogue to the Twitter environment, namely a seething lake of fire under a sign reading, abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
In speeches of 280 characters or less, Twitter experts will address such pressing problems as, why don't people you disagree with get cancer when you wish they would?
And if people can't be civil and have a reasoned argument, why don't they just shut up and go to hell?
Various Twitter experts will put forward fresh ideas for solving the world's problems, such as writing the same sentence five times in a row in order to alter the nature of reality, banning anyone who won't admit that the nature of reality has in fact been altered, and researching anyone who achieves anything of worth until you find some offhand statement they made when they were 15 years old so you can destroy their lives.
Some Twitterers will deal with more philosophical questions like, why do people celebrate the achievements of great men when anyone can go on Wikipedia and see they were not as woke and high-minded as someone who never achieved anything except tweets about how great men weren't as woke as they are?
And why do people still listen to the music of Mozart when he was born in the same country as Hitler, which obviously makes listening to Mozart the same as being a mass murderer of Jews, not that I like Jews all that much in the first place.
At the conference's final ceremony, more of the world's worst problems will be solved by locking the conference hall doors and setting the place on fire.
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-dee-dee.
Ripship-shaped, ipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day, hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing!
Oh, hoorah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
So if you ask me, so far this election cycle, the only person who said anything illuminating at all has been goofy cat lady Marion Williamson, who opined that a dark psychic force has been unleashed in our country.
Now, as someone who identifies as a dark psychic force himself, I don't like to see dark psychic forces demonized, unless, of course, they're actually demons, in which case, it's okay.
Some of them may actually be demons.
There are certainly demons of hatred on the right.
You find them on the dark web, mouthing off in comment sections and at underattended neo-Nazi gatherings that get more news coverage than they deserve.
And there are demons of hatred on the left.
You find them hosting the network news and running for president.
Yesterday, it was this mainstream left that utterly disgraced itself by continuing to distort the president's statements to make them sound racist, by linking Trump to the rightest murderer in El Paso while ignoring the leftism of the murderer in Dayton, and by repeatedly proclaiming that anyone who disagreed with leftism is a supporter of white nationalism.
Now, I've said this till I'm tired.
Trump is rude.
Rude is bad.
Trump's rudeness addresses the serious problems of political correctness and lily-livered conservative cowardice, which are real problems.
But it degrades our dialogue and makes us almost as ugly as the people we're opposing, which is a problem in itself.
Trump should work on this and the people around him should talk to him about it.
But having said that, the mainstream left really is appalling, using the bodies of the innocent dead to push their agenda, using grief to obscure their bad arguments, hoping fear and panic will lead us to give up our freedoms and the weapons we need to defend our freedoms, demonizing every point of view that's not their own.
Shame on Elizabeth Warren, shame on Beto O'Rourke, shame on Chuck Todd and Joe Scarborough and Christian Amonpour and anyone else who can't address the tragedy at hand without maneuvering for political position.
It's disgusting.
Every one of these people should retreat into solitude for a year of penitence before coming back to speak in public.
However, we cannot let the noise of the left, which is the noise because they own at least 90% of the communications apparatus in this country.
We cannot let the noise of the left turn us into the mirror image of the left.
We can't let them make us forget that there are many who oppose us in terms of policy who want the same things we do in terms of results.
We all want a nation of freedom and tolerance, of health and wealth and safety, compassion and progress.
There is a way to discuss these issues, even to argue about these issues, without tearing each other to pieces.
Rock Auto Revolution00:02:16
And if NBC and ABC and the New York Times won't help us find that way, and they won't, we'll do it ourselves.
To paraphrase the immortal final line from the film Jagged Edge, screw them, they're trash.
Let's not become trash ourselves, but start to try to think this through among ourselves.
Among I mean, the remnant of Americans who treasure our founding, support our ideals, and are willing to reason together.
All right, we will get started and talk more about this in just a sec, but first let's talk about rock auto.
Nowadays, there are so many different types of cars on the road.
There's just no way the auto parts store can stock everything.
Why wait in line to find the right parts that's probably overpriced when you can do it all with the convenience of rock auto.
Rockauto.com.
I love rock auto.
It sounds great.
Rockauto.com.
I know it's, you know, I myself get, want to go to the experts.
I'm insecure.
I want to go and see somebody with a computer in front of them who says, yes, I'll find you the right part, but you don't really need to do that.
Go to rockauto.com.
It's a family business.
It's been serving auto parts customers online for 20 years.
You go in, you can shop for auto and body parts from hundreds of manufacturers, whether it's for your classic or daily driver, get everything you need in a few easy clicks delivered directly to your door.
The rockauto.com catalog is unique.
It's remarkably easy to navigate.
And best of all, prices at rockauto.com are always reliably low.
And the same for professionals and do-it-yourself selfers.
Why spend up to twice as much for the same parts?
Go to rockauto.com right now and see all the parts available for your car or truck.
Write Clavin in their How Did You Hear About Us box so they know we sent you.
And also they have a little box that says, how do you spell Clavin?
No, they aren't making that up, but you spell Clavin, K-L-A-P-A-N.
There are no E's in Clavin.
Tomorrow is the mailbag.
Tomorrow is the mailbag.
If you go to dailywire.com, hit the podcast button, hit the Andrew Clavin podcast, you will find a little picture of a mailbag.
If you are a subscriber for a lousy 10 bucks a month, a lousy 100 bucks for the year, you can ask me any question you want.
Ask me about religion, ask me about politics, ask me about your personal life.
All my answers, all my answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life.
Possibly for the better.
Possibly you're screwed.
Reporting Both Sides00:15:50
But it's worth finding out.
So go on over to dailywire.com and get your question in the mailbag for tomorrow.
You were a little late.
Maybe you're just waiting for me to relax thinking you weren't going to do it today.
There you are.
All right.
So let me start by showing you two videos that are, to me, the difference between wisdom and unwisdom, wisdom and foolishness, all right?
First of all, here is the El Paso mayor.
Obviously, this is where the right-wing shooter went off and killed so many people.
This is Mayor D. Margot talking about the tragedy in his town.
We're dealing with a tragedy of 22 people who have perished by an evil, hateful act of a white supremacist supremacist that has no bearing or belong in El Paso.
It was not done by an El Pasoan.
No El Pasoan would ever do this.
And I can't, I don't know how we deal with evil.
I don't have a textbook for dealing with evil other than the Bible.
I'm sorry.
You know, I mean, obviously, I'm sympathetic to the idea that the Bible is his textbook to deal with evil, but that's not what makes that wise.
What makes that wise is he understands that he is dealing with something that is eternal in human affairs, that he doesn't have the answer, that people are hungry for an answer, and looking for an answer will get you into trouble.
He is being wise.
I also want to point out that this wisdom is coming from the mayor of El Paso, which is a honorable position, but obviously not a big national position.
It's not a network news position.
It's not a senatorial position.
It's not the president's position.
And, you know, we were just talking before the show started about this new Tarantino film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which I, you know, I enjoyed.
I like it's a very thoughtful film, very interesting film.
It's got a lot of flaws, a lot of self-indulgence.
But one of the things I loved about it, what I think is maybe the center piece of the movie, is the character played by Brad Pitt.
And Brad Pitt plays a kind of loser.
He's the stuntman who's become a driver to this kind of washed-up TV star.
He's kind of the TV star is kind of like the Clint Eastwood character before he starts making spaghetti westerns.
And Brad Pitt plays this guy, and yet you find out as the show goes on that this loser, this guy with no ambition, this guy who's satisfied just to be a factotum, a follower, is the decent moral heart of the movie.
And that's a very Christian point.
The Christian point that the people who run the world, the people who are the most important in the world, are not always the best people in the world.
And I look back over our presidents for the last couple of years.
You know, and the last one, Obama, was a narcissistic ideologue who wouldn't change his mind about his policies even when he saw they didn't work.
He just went to the old Democrat playbook of dividing us over race.
The guy before that, of course, was George W. Bush, who was a decent person, but also just not really equipped to deal with what he needed to deal with.
And before that, we had Clinton, who was credibly accused of being a rapist.
Our presidents, our top people, are not always the best people.
And sometimes you got to turn, you know, you shouldn't be confused by the fact that the people who get paid the most, the people who have the most power, the people who are in the news, the people who are held up to us as idols, are frequently false idols.
And maybe it's the mayor of El Paso who has something really to speak to us.
And we have to follow the wisdom and not the people who are necessarily in the news.
One of my many hilarious brothers that I have once made a really funny comment talking about someone he hated.
He said he's the worst person on earth who doesn't run a country, which I just always thought was a great line because it tells you the powerful people are not always the wisest, not always the people we should follow.
Now, let me play you unwisdom or foolishness.
Yesterday, I ended the show with an absolutely hilarious cut from the National Convention of Democratic Socialists in Atlanta.
And it was this cut.
The poor woman who was trying to chair the meeting couldn't even get out a sentence without saying, oh, you used gender language.
Oh, you're doing this.
Oh, you're doing that.
So here is the guy at the National Socialist, the Democratic Socialist National Convention, a super cut of him announcing the rules to the delegates.
We have quiet rooms that are available.
There's a range of options in these, right?
One thing to note there, please don't go into that space with anything that's like an aggressive scent, for instance, right?
First and foremost, use the proper doors.
Don't try and exit through these or any other sort of like fun shortcuts you see.
You have to have your credentials at all times.
There are right-wing infiltrators who are trying to get in here and generally try to be chill, right?
Take a deep breath.
Feel better before you say anything.
Please don't tweet photos of your credentials.
If you have friends here that you would like to be here and they don't have credentials, don't let them in.
Don't make exceptions for those people.
Don't really talk to anybody who doesn't have a credential, especially if they claim to be from the press.
Please do not talk to anybody who identifies themselves as a member of the press.
Don't talk to cops.
Don't talk to MAGAs.
Don't talk to cops if there are cops there for any reason at all.
If you do see someone talking to cops, let the Marshals know.
Socialism doesn't really seem all that relaxing, does it?
And of course, this is the left in a nutshell, and this is unwisdom in a nutshell.
The idea that you can control events to the extent that you can overcome the passions, evils, corruption that are endemic to being a fallen human being in a fallen world.
I mean, that is almost the definition.
It's sort of picture of unwisdom in the dictionary.
The picture of wisdom is a guy whose modesty, whose knowledge that there are things that can't be controlled, things that can't be fixed, things that are going to be what they are going to be.
That is wisdom.
And this other thing leads to tyranny.
It's this idea that somehow we can create something that is powerful enough to stop accidents, to stop tragedy, to stop evil.
I mean, that's how you get warnings on coffee cups, that coffee is hot.
You know, that's how you get into these things.
Oh, don't use this word.
Don't gender your language, because then all the problems that exist because of the wonderful division of the genders, all those problems will disappear if we just pretend those genders don't exist.
You know, there's a piece in the Wall Street Journal today by Christian Snyder of College Fix, which is a great website, talking about bias response teams and how they try to stop there from being any bias.
And they turn the college campuses into a surveillance state.
And he went out and he got transcripts of them to find out what kinds of things are reported as bias.
He says at the University of Utah, a male student was joking around with his friends, complained that his computer battery was dying.
Someone gave him a plug to plug it in.
He couldn't get it in.
They said, jam the cord into the power socket.
And he said, that's rape.
And I'm not raping my computer, he joked.
And a female student overheard that and filed a complaint.
The reporting then becomes ideologically biased.
And this is the thing, right?
You start out just trying to control what you think is evil, but then you realize that you, in order to do that, you must be the arbiter of good and evil.
So everything becomes your opinion writ large and you try to shut everybody down.
He has a Michigan State University student reported his dorm roommate for watching a video of conservative commentator Ben Shapiro.
Now, that I understand, of course.
We don't want people running around listening to Ben Shapiro.
But when a University of Oregon professor defended Justice Brett Kavanaugh's nomination, a female student reported she was deeply offended, and that completely discredited sexual assault survivors like myself and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.
A Portland State student filed a complaint against a woman who jokingly described herself as being schizophrenic.
An Asian American student at the University of Minnesota reported a food service worker for saying hello in Japanese.
Creepers.
An Indiana University teaching assistant filed a case against a guest lecturer who tried to explain the role of the FCC by citing the Janet Jackson Nipplegate controversy and so on and so forth, trying to stamp out evil becomes tyranny.
It becomes this idea that you are the arbiter of where good and evil lies.
And that's the thing about libertarianism.
Libertarianism as a religion, even as a party, is not a good idea.
But a little bit of judge not lest you be judged, a little bit of live and let live is the way forward for freedom.
You have to have that for freedom.
Cultural problems need cultural solutions.
If you think there's something wrong with the culture, you have to solve it that way.
This is what our news media has now done.
Our news media is now trying to shut down any conversation, and they are well willing to use these tragedies in El Paso and Dayton to use the murder of innocent people.
I mean, these are real people, right?
These are real people who have lost relatives, who have lost loved ones, who have lost the closest people to them, who have lost children, which is the worst thing that can happen to you on this planet.
You know, to use that, to gin up enthusiasm, Democratic candidates are fundraising off this.
And the news, you know, we played some of this.
I'm not going to go into it.
Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden compared Trump to the KKK.
Beto O'Rourke has been absolutely appalling.
Beto O'Rourke has got 0% or something like this.
And I guess he's getting desperate and he's just screaming about what a racist Donald Trump is.
But all of this stuff would not exist without the media.
And at least I can understand that the Democrats, the Democrat candidates, are trying to win power.
So like all people who try to win power, they're willing to do anything they can to get their hand, anything they can get away with, to get their hands on power.
So Elizabeth Warren, it's disgusting to connect Donald Trump to these shootings.
It is absolutely appalling to twist everything he says to make it sound racist.
But it's the media that gets me because the media has a job that I understand.
It's a meta-job.
It is a job to report both sides.
It's a job to tell the facts, not the truth.
Guess why?
Because you don't know the truth.
The facts are the only path to the truth.
The media's job is to lay those facts down, not just the facts that appeal to them.
So let me take a look at some of these guys before I get to what I want to say about how we can talk about this.
But this is the noise that is drowning out civilized conversation.
It's not so much politics.
Politics is an ugly business.
You know, Donald Trump can be ugly.
The left can be ugly.
I get that.
But the media has a higher responsibility and they are not fulfilling it.
They have become so corrupt.
And remember, the reason they're corrupt is not because the individuals are corrupt.
It's because the corporations want the left to win.
They want big government.
They want restrictions on speech.
They want women in the workplace, whether the women want to be there or not, so they have more workers and can pay them less.
These are things that corporations love.
They want control over the conversation.
These are things that corporations want.
And so they only hire people on the left.
The people on the left are surrounded by people who agree with them.
They do not know how biased, how corrupt they've become.
They really don't.
I think many of them are perfectly decent people, but they're simply in this soup of leftism and they cannot see out of it.
Here is Dan Rather.
Now remember, Dan Rather is a guy who disgraced himself.
I always thought he was a show-off.
I thought he was Jim Acosta before there was Jim Acosta.
But he's on with Don Lemon.
So it's the Dan and Don Show.
And just remember, Dan Rather is a guy who reported what he thought should be true about George W. Bush.
He got forged documents to, quote unquote, prove that George W. Bush had made some minor, minor mischief in the National Guard when he was a kid.
So that was the thing he sacrificed his career for to show that George W. Bush hadn't always done the right thing.
And he got forged documents.
And even if the forgeries were proved, he said, well, it's not the forgery.
They're forged, but they're telling the truth.
So he reported what he called the quote-unquote truth in spite of the facts.
And here he now is recommending that to Don Lemon as the way to do journalism.
My fellow members of the press, I suggest we refrain from quoting the president's words from prepared speeches into headlines and tweets without context.
He sometimes says the right thing.
The real questions are what he does and what he really believes.
So you've been watching this all along.
What does he really believe, you think?
He believes that fear conquers.
That's his basic belief.
He's all about fear.
You know, Don, this moment in our history, which I want to make clear, I'm here with a strong sense of compassion and grieving for all those families who suffered in these most recent shootings.
But this moment in our history reminds me a great deal of when I was covering the civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King in the early 1960s.
It was clearly, definitively, right and wrong.
That was the truth of the situation.
Then and now, it's the job of journalists not to try to hide or obscure, but to speak the truth.
And that's where we are now.
People say, well, I'm not sure President Trump is racist.
Well, racist is as racist does.
It's just the Forrest Gump school of reporting.
Racist is as racist.
He's not going to report what the president says.
He's going to report what he is, what he means, what he thinks, what he feels.
I mean, that is exactly the opposite of how you do journalism.
You report what people say, you report what people do.
You don't have to tell people the meaning.
And he does not know the truth.
He does not know, he's not the arbiter of the moral truth.
He has a job.
His job is a meta-job.
It is above the questions of truth and of good and bad that we have to decide.
We the people have to decide.
His job is to deliver the facts.
That's a meta-job.
And he doesn't do it.
And he didn't do it.
And that's why he lost.
That's why he was disgraced.
And that's why he's talking to Don Lemon, which is as low as you can sink in media.
The other one, and by the way, this thing, not only is it the corporations who only hire leftists, so the leftists don't know that they're corrupt and don't know that they're just repeating this stuff.
Once you do that, right, your audience is now narrowed to leftists and you can't do anything but serve them, right?
Because you have to, it's a commercial business, you got to make money.
The New York Times yesterday, after Donald Trump came out and said we have to get rid of racism, we have to condemn racism, which is what everybody called on him to do.
The New York Times ran a headline, Trump urges unity versus racism.
Trump urges unity instead of racism.
And their audience went nuts.
How could you say this?
How could you say what?
They told the truth.
They told the truth about what Trump did, what all these people say he never does and he did it.
They told the truth and they didn't want to hear the truth.
They can't handle the truth because they're all leftists.
They've limited their audience to leftists.
So they changed the headline to Trump assails hates but not guns.
So here is what one of the people I think is just a person who should not be on TV is Christian.
I'm a poor journalist.
And Christian, I'm a poor journalist.
I think she's been a terrorist supporter.
I think she is one of the most biased dishonest reporters on TV.
And she goes after Kellyon Ann Conway.
And listen to this.
What she does is they created these distorted code words of what Donald Trump says.
So Donald Trump said there are good people on both sides, which he didn't, of meaning that there were not good people in the Nazis, which he didn't say.
He said infested when he talked about rats, but he really meant the people were infested because the people were, you know, all this stuff is nonsense.
But it now becomes code words.
And she simply hammers Kellyanne Conway with this and will not let her answer the question as if somehow she is bringing this great moral force instead of this great force of distortion and dishonesty to bear.
Now the words, because most people who study this, including FBI, including the experts on this, not the chattering classes, not the armchair, you know, observers, but the experts say that there are climates of hate that are created and usually from the top.
Code Words and Consequences00:15:22
So I'm asking you, will you and the president's advisors seek to restrict his Twitter use and his other use of these, no, of these words, of these words.
What he said about Elijah Cummings, what he said about Baltimore, what he says about migrants.
Christianne.
Yes or no?
It's simple because it's no, it's state.
Here is why.
No, I'm not telling you what I discussed with the president.
No, I'm asking you, do you agree with that?
Do you agree with it?
Infestation, invasions.
These are important words.
Keep repeating it.
Get back in history, Kellyanne.
Because a day ago, because a day ago, your network insisted that this president would not come out and denounce racism, white supremacy, bigotry, call this evil, call him a monster, try to fix our mental health.
So the simple question of follow-up is, will he then not say those things on the air, on Twitter, on social media again?
What trash?
What trash?
Infestation, Baltimore, Elijah, you know, these things.
They're just code words to them.
It's just to them because they're surrounded by more them.
And she won't let Kellyanne Conway say, yes or no question, whether you're going to take my lies and distortions and echo them back to me or you're not.
You're going to make yourself look like a bigot on my show.
That's the yes or no question.
That's the only choice.
Instead of letting her answer the question and saying, you're distorting everything the president says, and then you just repeat it to me as a code.
You know, I got to give a knock.
The Wall Street Journal is basically my favorite newspaper.
I think they do a good job.
But yesterday, they repeated this thing about the good people on both sides.
It was buried in one of their stories on hatred and white supremacy and white nationalism.
And it really was a terrible, terrible thing to do.
Go on, Prager You.
I'm not going to play it now, but go on Prager You and take a look at Steve Cortez.
He's the conservative commentator on CNN, and he does a good thing exposing the lie of the Charlottesville.
And Dennis Prager's written a good piece about that today as well.
So the thing is, when we have these people, this incredible noise, this incredible hammering of noise coming at us, like how do we talk about this?
How do we begin to talk about the fact that there are, we know there are bad people on both sides?
It does seem to me, it does seem to me that only the right is condemning the hate on the right, but the left is not condemning the hate on the left.
The left exemplifies the hate on the left.
The left amplifies the hate on the left.
But that is leaving out all the people, all the, I believe many, many people, who probably are saying the same thing.
I told you I had a conversation with a liberal where he said to me, you know, I don't like this anti-free speech stuff either.
And I neglected to say to him, well, what else is there on the left?
What do you stand for?
What does the left stand for?
And I think we should talk about this.
I think we really should.
I wish more leftists would come on.
I asked them that they won't come on because they've been trained to think that people like me are white supremacists.
You know, the guy who shot up El Paso, he was a white nationalist.
Knowles made this point yesterday.
He was a white nationalist, which is different than a white supremacist.
These guys put forward this idea.
It was the same thing with the New Zealand shooter.
They put forward this idea that, no, it's not that I hate people of other races.
It's not that I hate people of other races.
I just think each person to his own neighborhood, each person to his own country.
And the thing about that is, that has been the opinion of most of humankind for most of human life.
You know, the French or the French because France is called France because it was inhabited by the Franks, and England because it was inhabited by the Angles.
Countries were named after their races.
All countries were assumed to be the neighborhood of that particular race.
And in cases where they weren't, they developed a mythology.
Like Germany developed a mythology of their pure, of some pure race that was living in Germany that actually was never there.
But that was the idea.
The idea was a nation was not just a nation.
It was also a race of people.
And you could talk about what the Italians were like, and you could talk about what the English were like and the Spanish.
And that had some valence because, of course, they shared a culture and culture does shape who we are.
When did that change?
It changed with us.
It's us they're all trying to imitate.
When they talk about multi-ethnic countries, forget about multiculturalism.
We don't want a multicultural country.
We want a culture of freedom.
But we don't mind having multi-ethnic countries.
We don't mind people coming over who are all kinds of different colors.
But it's not diversity we're looking for.
We're looking for unity of ideals.
We all want people who believe in liberty.
If they don't believe in liberty, they shouldn't be here.
And all these conversations that we have, are they about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
Are they about our ideals?
Once we have those conversations, we can debate anything.
You know, I understand.
I don't want people abused at the border.
I don't want to see children hurt at the border.
And I know that a lot of people say, well, the guys bringing them over are to blame.
I get it, but we're here.
We've got to deal with this.
That's fine.
But I also don't want to see the rule of law thrown away because equality, equality under the law is another great American ideal.
And you can't have equality under the law unless the law applies to everybody, including sad-faced people who come over from the other side of the border.
So fix the laws.
That's Congress's job.
They're not doing their job.
And then for them to blame law enforcement is despicable.
All of these things can be debated.
We can talk about all of these things.
We can talk about gender.
We can talk about homosexuality.
We can talk about all of them.
But we can't talk about them under this barrage of news media telling us that one opinion is love and one opinion is hate.
I mean, that's the idea of a child.
That's the way children think.
There's one idea is love and one idea is hate.
We're all, all the best of us, all people of goodwill, and there are people of goodwill on both sides, are trying to get to the good thing.
What is the good thing?
And by the way, and you've heard me say this a million times, and sometimes people in this very office yell at me about this.
I'm willing to compromise.
I understand that in principle there should be no redistribution of wealth, that redistribution of wealth is unfair.
It's anti-freedom.
But I also understand that maybe in reality we need some of that.
And maybe in reality, there are ways to do it that don't have to do with government.
Maybe there are things that there are bookends on capitalism.
No system can control human evil, right?
Including capitalism, including free markets.
Free markets are the best system, but maybe there are ways to control free markets too.
Maybe there are ways to take care that progress doesn't leave people behind.
I don't want to see people paid a guaranteed income so they go away and die.
I want them to be useful.
I want them to have meaning in their life.
And I want to make sure that our economy does that.
That doesn't necessarily have to be done through government.
It can be done through communities, but it's not like we can't talk about it between the right and the left.
After all, you know, I often compare this time to the Industrial Revolution.
There were rules that governments made then, rules against child labor, rules about how long people can work, rules about factory safety.
Maybe we need rules now about technology and how people can keep their jobs and how factories can promote people and educate people.
Maybe we don't do it through laws.
Maybe we just do it through programs that the government supports and says are good things and maybe gives you tax breaks over.
But we can talk about compassion.
We on the right should not talk about morality.
We should talk about morality.
We should talk about compassion.
All these things can be debated, but they can't be debated as long as this constant spewing of hate comes out of NBC and ABC and CNN and the New York Times.
They are shutting down the discussion by not letting the people they disagree with speak without being demonized.
All right, got a great guest coming up, but I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come over to dailywire.com, hit the podcast button, hit the Andrew Clavin podcast, hit that little mailbag, and then if you are a subscriber, which you should be because we want your money, if you're a subscriber, you can ask me any question you want.
All my answers, guaranteed 100% correct, will change your life, and it'll just be a matter of incredible suspense and interest to find out whether it changes your life for the better.
All right.
Rafael Manguala is a fellow and deputy director of legal policy at the wonderful Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of Citi Journal.
He has authored and co-authored a number of Manhattan Institute reports and op-eds on issues ranging from urban crime and jail violence to broader matters of criminal and civil justice reform.
And he has written a really, really interesting article, which you should go on and look at about whether there are too many people in prison.
Rafael, thanks for coming on.
It's good to see you.
Oh, thanks so much for having me on.
You know, this was a really fascinating article, and it's obviously answering these cries on the left that we have incarcerated too many people.
Basically, you're saying maybe not so much.
Can you outline that for us?
Yeah, look, I mean, I think it's important to start out by acknowledging that there's certainly a subset of America's prison population whose incarceration may not be serving a penological end that's legitimate, right?
For either because they shouldn't have been incarcerated in the first place or because they've been incarcerated for too long.
We should be, through our system of government, through our checks and balances, doing everything that we can to identify who those people are and securing their releases with haste, right?
But that reform movement is one of marginal reforms, right?
That's wholly different in character and scope from what is being called upon or called for on the left, and that is the large-scale sort of decarceration.
You see things like the hashtag Cut50 initiative.
You hear people like Joe Biden promising that his criminal justice plan will have the prison population in X amount of years.
When we start getting into that territory, I think the underlying assumption of those arguments is that not only do we incarcerate too many people, but we incarcerate so many people more than we should that you can literally release 50% of prisoners today and not have any backlash in the form of a decline in public safety.
And that's just not the case, right?
The data are very, very clear that the vast majority of people who are behind bars in America are very serious, very violent, very chronic offenders whose incarceration provides the communities that they came from a real tangible benefit in the form of that criminal capacitation.
And to the extent that we let these people out in large numbers, I think we're going to, you know, I think we're already seeing what that looks like in jurisdictions around the country, namely Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia, St. Louis, where you have huge chunks of murders, for example, being committed by people with an active criminal justice status, which is to say people who were either on bail at the time or on probation or on parole.
You know, there was a piece in NBC that just came out saying that over the last 60 days, six people have lost their lives at the hands of parolees alone.
So these are real considerations that I don't think Democrats are really grappling with in a serious way.
And it was what I was hoping to raise with my piece.
You know, when they beat up on Joe Biden because he helped pass the Tough On Crime Bill, he makes the point, which I think is a fair point, that people have forgotten just how bad crime was in this country.
That's how we got here in the first place.
Not only have they forgotten how bad crime was in the country, but they've forgotten how depoliticized that issue was.
There was near unanimity on both sides of the aisle that we needed to do something drastic and serious to address violent crime in urban America.
I mean, people point to, for example, his support for the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which actually often gets conflated with the 94 crime bill that he's been getting hit with.
And what they don't understand is that when they characterize legislation like that as racist and overly punitive, what they never address is the fact that it passed the Senate.
I think it was 97 to 3.
16 of the 19 members of the Congressional Black Caucus at the time co-sponsored the bill that set the 100 to 1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, right?
You had Charlie Wrangel on national TV debating William F. Buckley, you know, not only arguing that we shouldn't legalize drugs, but actually offering up at one point in the discussion that we should consider life in prison for certain drug dealers.
So the temperature of the American public at that time, namely the 80s and 90s, was one that was very much elevated by virtue of the fact that, you know, for example, in New York City, there were 2,200-plus murders in 1990.
When you look at criminal justice policy through 2019 eyes, it's very easy to claim from the safety of an ivory tower or a safe suburb that we can just start releasing prisoners willy-nilly.
But the data say that that's dangerous.
You know, we're talking to Rafael Manguel from the, am I pronouncing your name correctly?
You are.
There you go.
From the terrific City Journal.
You should check out his latest piece, which is really interesting.
And one of the things you write about in this piece is the fact we do seem to incarcerate more people per capita than other nations.
So is there something there that can be addressed?
I mean, is there some problem there that we have that other countries don't have?
You know, there is, unfortunately, right?
And this is something that you're hearing a lot about now in the context of the gun control debate, right?
I mean, Democrats never hesitate to point out, for example, that Western European democracies and other developed nations have significantly lower gun crime and murder rates than the United States does.
And they do this in conjunction with the call for gun control.
But there's a tension there in that argument with their positions on criminal justice reform because they also, at the same time, lament the fact that, for example, we have 25% of the world's prison population, but only 5% of the world's general population.
Well, a large part of that is because we have so much higher levels of serious violent crime, namely gun crime.
So that elevated level of violence translates to a larger prison population.
The other thing that I think plays a big role in this too is resources, right?
The United States is a uniquely rich country.
We have an ability economically to devote a significant amount of resources to our criminal justice apparatus that other countries around the world can only dream of having.
I mean, we have a higher per capita incarceration rate than El Salvador, but that's not because El Salvador doesn't wish they could imprison more of their criminals, right?
They have a significantly higher rate of violent crime, but they simply don't have the economic ability to do that.
And so these international comparisons, I mean, I don't really think are being made in good faith, especially in light of the implicit recognition in the gun control debate that we have higher rates of violent crime than a lot of these nations.
Is that something?
I mean, are you, do you think that gun control is part of the answer?
No, no, I don't.
You know, and one of the things that's often pointed out in this debate, right, Chicago is often pointed to as an example, right?
The First Step Act Controversy00:03:20
Where they say, look, Chicago's murder rate is so high because Indiana has such loose gun laws that they're feeding guns across the state line into the city of Chicago.
And that is why we have so many murders in Chicago.
But there's no real comparable jurisdiction in the state of Indiana with a murder rate high.
I mean, Gary, Indiana, you know, is pretty dangerous and parts of Indianapolis have struggled, but nowhere near on the scale of what you see in Chicago.
And there was actually a study done in the city of Chicago of the origin of guns that were used in crimes.
And it turns out that twice as many crime guns originated in the state of Illinois as compared to Indiana.
And the guns that came from out of state came from as far away as Mississippi in some cases.
So The idea that this is something that you can control through top-down gun regulation, I'm not sure has real support in the data.
I think Democrats would have a much easier time making a dent in serious gun crime if they were smarter about the criminal justice policies that they pursued.
I mean, you can't say on the one hand you want more gun control, but on the other hand, say that we should lower the penalties for people found violating those very laws that are already on the books today.
What do you think of Trump's criminal reform initiative, or maybe it's Kim Kardashian's or the Kanye West?
Yeah, Kanye West.
But where do you stand?
Yeah, the First Step Act is actually, I think, one of the reasons it got so much bipartisan support is because of the limited scope of it, right?
I think it's a good way to kind of look at a way to do somewhat of an experiment through relatively small-scale legislation, right?
This First Step Act only applies to a subset of the federal prison population.
When people talk about prison populations, they often think that the federal prison population makes up a big chunk of who's behind bars in the United States, but it's only about 10 to 12 percent of our national prison population.
So, you know, and it's and it's relatively limited mostly to drug offenders and people who have already served a significant amount of time in prison.
So I do think it does some good things.
However, there are some things in it that I'm not so sure about.
And I mean, one of my biggest sort of hang-ups with the way that that legislation was drawn was, you know, one of the things that it does is it sort of develops this risk assessment tool where it's supposed to give prisons and the department, the federal Bureau of Prisons, the ability to assign a risk score essentially to prisoners.
And, you know, I'm not convinced that the algorithms being used to do that are all that reliable.
And what the First Step Act lacked, which I think it should have had, was any kind of sunset provision that would have been triggered by a lack of success, right?
So if it turns out that these risk assessment scores aren't doing a particularly good job of predicting who's going to reoffend when they get out, there's nothing in the language of the legislation that says, well, it goes away and you have to sort of start over.
I would have liked to have seen something like that.
But again, I think what we saw in the First Step Act is a far cry from what mainstream Democrats are now calling for on the debate stage in the way of criminal justice reform.
Why Moms Matter00:04:00
Rafael Manguel, I've got to stop.
I have a lot more questions I want to ask you, but I'll look for more from you in City Journal and hopefully you'll come back.
I would be happy to.
Thanks very much, Rafael.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
All right.
A final reflection.
You know, at one of the debates, Joe Biden, who's obviously the big target because he's the frontrunner, came under fire from Kristen Gillibrand for an article he had written many years ago, an op-ed he had written.
Do we have that piece just?
Yeah, go ahead.
He wrote an op-ed.
He voted against it, the only vote.
But what he wrote in op-ed was that he believed that women working outside the home would, quote, create the deterioration of family.
He also said that women who were working outside the home were, quote, avoiding responsibility.
And I just need to understand as a woman who's worked my entire career as the primary wage earner, as the primary caregiver.
In fact, my second son, Henry, is here.
And I had him when I was a member of Congress.
So under Vice President Biden's analysis, am I serving in Congress resulting in the deterioration of the family because I had access to quality, affordable daycare?
And this is a typical leftist technique of, are you going to call me to my face, say that I did something wrong, where the individual case is used to obscure the greater point?
There's a terrific op-ed today, I think or yesterday, in the Wall Street Journal by Erica Commissar, a psychoanalyst and author of Being There, Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters, who says that Biden was right.
She says this was a cheap shot in the op-ed in the Daily Times of Salisbury, Maryland.
Then Senator Biden called for government to help families of modest means to adequately provide the material necessities of child rearing.
He also warned that a cancer of materialism was eating away at the family.
And that, she says, is exactly what has happened over the past 40 years.
Parents come to my practice regularly to discuss symptoms their children exhibit due to their families having busier and more distracted lives, premature separation, children being placed in daycare as early as six weeks old, and their parents' lack of interest in nurturing.
In other words, what she's saying is children need moms.
She says families are best, even extended families are good, but obviously moms are best.
You know, we started this show talking about the fact, talking about the Brad Pitt character in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, talking about the fact that the people who are the best people are not always the most powerful people, are almost never the most powerful people.
The most famous people, the richest people, the people who exemplify the values that we are supposed to hold dear, that we tell ourselves we hold dear, that we make speeches about holding dear, are sometimes the people who don't become famous.
And among those people, I would say first among those people are moms.
All those bumper stickers you see about how good girls don't make history, no, that's true.
Mostly madmen make history.
Mostly horrible people make history.
Mostly horrible people become movie stars.
Mostly awful people make it to the top, where it is the moms.
It is the decent people who hold up the world and who exemplify the values we are supposed to love.
And if you read your old friend the New Testament, you will find that Jesus had a lot to say about this, that the world is not to be the arbiter of our values.
And with mass media, with a materialist left in charge of all communications, that is the idea that they're putting forward.
And if it seems that I say to women, you should stay home and be moms, do I think most, many, many women would be happier doing that and more valuable doing that and do something more important with their lives?
Yes, I do.
I have no power over your life.
Do what you got to do.
You know yourself.
You know who you should be and what you should be doing.
I'm simply saying that the idea that the people who get paid the most, the people who get on TV the most, the people who get the most power, that the idea that those are the best people is exactly the opposite of the truth.
Mailbag tomorrow.
Get your questions in.
Executive Producer's Note00:00:42
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
And our supervising producers are Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
Edited by Adam Sayovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
Animations are by Cynthia Ngulo.
And our production assistant is Nick Sheehan.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2019.