Ep. 765 dissects Democrats’ $1,000 "freedom dividend" as proof of their distrust in self-sufficiency, mocking Yang’s mixed signals on free markets while slamming Harris’s constitutional ignorance and Castro’s healthcare flip-flops. It ties this to Brexit’s EU power grab—where unelected judges overruled Parliament—and warns U.S. conservatives about judicial overreach, then pivots to the Times’ politically timed attack on SNL’s Shane Gillis, exposing media hypocrisy. The episode frames Democratic policies as eroding individualism while Brexit’s chaos reveals the cost of surrendering sovereignty. [Automatically generated summary]
The New York Times, a former newspaper, has set a new record for the most shameless distortion of the truth ever packed into a single journalistic sentence.
In commemorating the attack on the United States on 9-11, the Times tweeted out a sentence from their news story saying, quote, 18 years have passed since airplanes took aim and brought down the World Trade Center.
The Times story had an immediate effect.
Assistant head of Homeland Security Richard Tracy announced the department would change its policies, saying, quote, up until now, we were investigating any young men who were named Mohammed more than three times and who blame their crap hole countries on everyone but themselves and who therefore go around randomly murdering people who have nothing to do with anything.
But now that we realize it's the actual airplanes that targeted the buildings, we're centering our investigations on suspicious flying machines, especially if they have those weird grins painted on the nose cones.
I just find those really creepy.
All this time, we thought we were dealing with a medieval religious philosophy that has threatened the existence of the West for over a thousand years and kept entire regions of the earth in theocratic religious oppression and poverty.
But now we finally realize it's the planes.
Thanks, New York Times, and please renew my subscription, unquote.
The Times took the tweet down after being ridiculed as lying buffoons, but woke reporters at the ex-newspaper celebrated the new distortion record and say they soon expect to win the Pulitzer Prize for biggest lying buffoons.
In a meeting held in the middle of the street, Times editor in charge of Wokeness, Charles Woke, told a gathering of homeless people, quote, by using nonsense terms like Islamophobia, racial profiling, and toxic masculinity, we on the left have managed to pack more dishonesty into fewer words than anyone outside the novel 1984.
But we have now outdone ourselves in.
Mr. Woke left the thought unfinished when my car aimed itself at him and ran him over.
Beto's Gun Promise00:12:03
Don't blame me.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dee-doo.
Ship-shaped itsy-topsy, the world is a bitty-zing.
It's a wonderful go, hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, we are here and broadcasting to you from New York City.
The Democrat debate was last night, and I want to start off with a moment that made a lot of news.
Andrew Yang announced his guaranteed income sweepstakes with Pete Budiged's comment coming on at the end.
In America today, everything revolves around the almighty dollar.
Our schools, our hospitals, our media, even our government.
It's why we don't trust our institutions anymore.
We have to get our country working for us again instead of the other way around.
We have to see ourselves as the owners and shareholders of this democracy rather than inputs into a giant machine.
When you donate money to a presidential campaign, what happens?
The politician spends the money on TV ads and consultants, and you hope it works out.
It's time to trust ourselves more than our politicians.
That's why I'm going to do something unprecedented tonight.
My campaign will now give a freedom dividend of $1,000 a month for an entire year to 10 American families.
Someone watching this at home right now.
If you believe that you can solve your own problems better than any politician, go to yang2020.com and tell us how $1,000 a month will help you do just that.
It's original.
I'll give you that.
That was Pete Buttigieg at the end.
It's original.
I'll give you that.
And I play it right at the top because I found it both funny and sad in so many revealing ways.
This isn't personal as a person.
I actually think Yang is the Democrat who comes across as the most likable, although Marianne Williamson also seemed kind of sweet and reminds me of a lot of lovable liberal ladies I've known in my life.
But Yang's proposal points to everything that's wrong with our politics.
Yang has hit on the fine conservative principle that people can spend their money better than the government can spend their money.
But he no longer has faith that those people can make that money better than the government can take it from someone else and give it to them.
As he looks into the future and thinks about automation, he fears that working people will become obsolete.
He's lost faith in ordinary Americans to find their way in new situations.
Now, some of the other Democrats laughed as you heard at his proposal, but what are they offering?
They're offering the same thing, but worse.
They not only want to give you money, they want to spend the money they give you themselves on healthcare, on college, or whatever else they say is going to be free.
See, under the Democrats, everything will be free except for you.
If you don't believe in people, you can't trust them to do for themselves.
You can't love freedom if you don't love the common man and they don't.
We on the right always attack the left for losing faith in God, but they've also, not coincidentally, lost faith in people, especially regular people.
They've lost faith in the power of ordinary Americans to make their way and live their lives and grow the country from the ground up as they always have.
Now, by ordinary Americans, I mean, to quote the movie, It's a Wonderful Life, the people who do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this country.
All colors, all religions, both sexes, we, the people.
I think a lot of leaders on both the left and right have lost faith in them and think the government has to do for them what, if they want to be free people, they have to do for themselves.
This country is operating at historic deficits.
So if the Democrats are right and income inequality is growing worse, doesn't that tell you something?
It tells me that we don't have a people problem.
We have a government problem.
They've got to stop taking our money.
They've got to stop spending our money.
Stop helping us.
Enforce the law.
The border would be a good place to start.
Keep the peace and shut up and leave us alone.
That's the solution to most of the problems facing us today.
Less of these clowns, less of their five-year 30-point plans to give us stuff.
Less them, more us.
The day anyone from either party gets up on stage and promises me that, he'll have my vote.
But I'm not holding my breath.
All right.
Let us begin by talking about, we'll get to the debate and the rest of the debate in just a second, but let me talk about Vistaprint.
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And I know what you're thinking, who is Clavin1?
It doesn't matter if you can't spell Clavin.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So who won the debate?
I think the only people in a position to win the debate anymore are Biden and Warren and Bernie.
And Trump just said this himself.
He says those are the guys who are now the last people left standing because of the polls and the way they're placed.
I'm still a little worried.
I got to be honest, a little worried about a late entry from Michelle Obama.
I'm not sure she wouldn't look bad if she did that, but still, she's a powerful person.
Her book is selling a lot.
If you watch Bill Burr's new special on Netflix, you'll see why that wouldn't be such a good idea.
But I'm still a little concerned about it.
But anyway, I think Biden and Warren both came out of it looking good by not doing anything, essentially.
Biden fuddles around and he makes all kinds of mistakes and he sounds ridiculous at times, but he doesn't make any big errors.
And the places where he was attacked, he was actually often in the right.
And Warren makes these big, idealistic, sweeping pronouncements and never answers any real questions.
How are you going to pay for it?
Doesn't it crimp people's style?
Isn't it unconstitutional?
It never answers any of those questions.
And I think that's working well for her.
You know, that's kind of typical of a candidate who's in the lead.
Don't take any chances.
Don't step out.
It's the guys who are down on the bottom who have to make the big have the big moment that brings them into the foreground.
But debates are not the only way that people see people.
And especially these debates where there are 10 people in line, I think that where there are so many people on stage, it's really hard for anybody to make an impression.
I think it's kind of ridiculous.
I've picked Warren for a long time.
Trump has indicated that he sort of thinks that's the way it's going, that Biden is falling behind.
I could be wrong, but I saw nothing at the debate to change my mind that it was going to be Elizabeth Warren at the end.
Let me give you some of my favorite moments.
Beto O'Rourke, for one thing, he is toast.
He's done.
That was the end.
This debate was the end of him.
You know, I hate the phrase beta male.
You know, I think this alpha male beta male is about apes.
It's not about human beings.
But Beto, he just walks right with that name, right?
He walks right into it.
He's so desperate for attention.
He's gotten more and more ludicrous.
If he doesn't stop flinging his hands around, somebody's going to have to tie him down.
I mean, at least Yang is offering to give me something, but Beto is going to take something away.
He's going to take away our guns.
So this is what I think was his last hurrah.
Are you proposing taking away their guns and how would this work?
I am.
If it's a weapon that was designed to kill people on a battlefield.
If the high-impact, high-velocity round, when it hits your body, shreds everything inside of your body because it was designed to do that so that you would bleed to death on a battlefield and not be able to get up and kill one of our soldiers.
When we see that being used against children, and in Odessa, I met the mother of a 15-year-old girl who was shot by an AR-15, and that mother watched her bleed to death over the course of an hour because so many other people were shot by that AR-15 in Odessa in Midland.
There weren't enough ambulances to get to them in time.
Hell yes, we're going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.
We're not going to allow it to be used against our fellow Americans anymore.
So here's why I think that's the end of Beto O'Rourke.
First of all, it's absurd.
We do have a Constitution.
The Constitution is the law.
We do have courts that enforce the law.
Unless these guys are really talking about tyranny, you're not taking away anybody's guns just because you decide that you're going to do that.
We do have the right to bear arms, the right to defend ourselves, and that right was given to us.
It was protected for us.
It was given to us by God, but it was protected for us by the Constitution so that we could remain a revolutionary country, a country that can fight back if the government gets out of hand.
That's why people have military-style weapons.
Most of the people who have military-style weapons have them for that purpose because they want to be able to protect themselves in the event, in a horrible event, hopefully unforeseeable, unbelievable event, that our country becomes that oppressive and that bad.
They want to remain free people, and that's what it's for.
So he doesn't have the, you know, I mean, it would start a civil war, basically, to go around abducting, trying to take people's guns.
100 million people in this country own guns, and I don't think the police are going to be any too happy about storming their houses, trying to take their weapons away.
And once they do, it won't be America anymore, and that'll be the end of that.
So anyway, that's not going to happen.
But here's the thing, all right?
A lot of people have said that Beto is running for Senate, and he just doesn't know it.
If he ran for Senate, I assume he would run for Senate in Texas as he did before.
When he was running for Senate in Texas, he had a, it was singing a much different song because in Texas, everyone's strapped.
Everyone has a gun, right?
And they love their guns as people should love their guns and take care of their guns and be careful with them.
And here is what he said in a radio interview with Chad Hastie when he was running for senator in Texas.
I own an AR-15.
A lot of our listeners own AR-15s.
Why should they not have one?
To be clear, they should have them.
If you purchase that AR-15, if you own it, keep it.
Continue to use it responsibly.
So what you have there is a beto male basically saying whatever he thinks he needs to say.
And now you heard the audience cheering for destroying the Second Amendment.
You know, so that's now he's saying that.
And that just makes him look absurd.
It makes him look insincere because he is insincere.
It makes him look desperate because he is desperate.
And it also means when he goes back to Texas to run for Senate, good luck to you, pal.
I don't think so.
Maybe he's going to run.
Maybe he's going to declare he's a resident of Connecticut or something like that.
But I don't know where he goes from here.
I think he really, you know, the guy didn't need a gun to shoot himself in the foot, but I think that that's what he did.
The thing that is really disturbing, that was really, really disturbing is Kamala Harris, who I also think is fading from the scene.
And the reason she was the one I really feared at the beginning because she's got a good resume.
She's smart.
She's sharp, but she just is sinister and insincere.
And every time she opens her mouth, I think a chill goes up my spine, but this was the moment.
This was the moment that to me kind of encapsulated the Democrats, but she said the quiet part out loud.
In recent days, former Vice President Biden has said about executive orders, some really talented people are seeking the nomination.
They said, I'm going to issue an executive order.
Biden's saying there's no constitutional authority to issue that executive order when they say I'm going to eliminate assault weapons, saying you can't do it by executive order any more than Trump can do things when he says he can do it by executive order.
Does the vice president have a point there?
Wise Foods in Emergencies00:03:51
Some things you can.
Many things you can't.
Let's let the senator answer.
I mean, I would just say, hey, Joe, instead of saying that we can't, let's say, yes, we can.
Let's be constitutional.
We got a constitutional.
Yes, we can.
Unbelievable.
Poor Biden going, don't we have a constitution?
We have a constitution.
So, yeah, she's just going to laugh.
She is the most sinister person.
And I mean, that really is a sinister moment.
But she did, she was saying what they all want to do.
They all want to get rid of the Electoral College.
They all want to get, you know, stock the Supreme Court so they can get the Constitution interpreted out of existence.
They all want to do it.
She just said it out loud, but that's what makes her, I think, unviable as a candidate.
I think she's finished too after this.
Julian Castro made his desperate bid to get attention, and he stepped in it too.
He stepped on a landmine too.
He went after Joe Biden, and it sounded like he was picking on him for his age.
But the difference between what I support and what you support, Vice President Biden, is that you require them to opt in, and I would not require them to opt in.
They would automatically be enrolled.
They wouldn't have to buy in.
That's a big difference because Barack Obama's vision was not to leave 10 million people uncovered.
He wanted every single person in this country covered.
My plan would do that.
Your plan would not.
They do not have to buy in.
They do not have to buy in.
You just said that.
You just said that two minutes ago.
You just said two minutes ago that they would have to buy in.
You said they would have to buy in.
If she qualifies, are you forgetting what you said?
Are you forgetting already what you said just two minutes ago?
So you heard the audience go off on that.
And I will come back to that in just a minute.
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You have to know, how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no E's in Clavin.
It just looks easy when I do it.
So this was roundly attacked.
This is what's his name?
Castro going after Biden was roundly attacked.
The press went after him.
Everybody, it was evil.
It was mean.
It was a low blow.
And, you know, it kind of was.
It's unfair.
It's unkind.
On the other hand, Biden brings it on himself.
I mean, last time he was on CNN, his eyeball exploded.
This time, his teeth almost fell out.
He funnels around.
You know, it's not like going after Trump for being old because Trump is so vital and awake.
Reagan, they would go after him for being old, but he was clearly on point.
I mean, Biden makes a lot of mistakes.
And there was this one moment that was absolutely hilarious.
Biden's Blunders And Beyond00:06:04
They asked him, they were asking him about schooling.
And he said, one of the things about schooling, and this is a fair point, although what he was saying was ridiculous.
But one of the things about schooling is that teachers, like cops, get blamed for all the things that come to them.
But people in their homes, a lot of kids have problems in their homes.
And poor kids have problems, especially.
They don't hear as many words.
They don't get as well taken care of as middle class and upper class kids.
And so they come to school with deficits starting out.
And so he said they've got to train parents on what to do at home.
And here was his solution.
It's not that they'll want to help.
They don't know quite what to do.
Play the radio.
Make sure the television, excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night.
Make sure the kids hear words.
A kid coming from a very poor school, a very poor background, will hear four million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.
Thank you, Mr. Vice President.
No, I'm going to go like the rest of them do, twice over, okay?
Yeah, hey, if you're going to play that radio, Abbott and Costello, they're very funny, but you crank up the old radio, then crank up the record player, listen to little bangers.
I love the way that man's.
I mean, come on.
Oh, you're talking about, you want to listen to the radio?
I'm sorry.
But I thought, you know, he brings it on himself.
He brings it on himself.
Anyway, I just, a couple more points, just a couple more points.
I'll move on because there's another important story I want to talk about.
Kamala Harris.
Well, here's something that really does matter.
Kamala Harris went after Trump about China.
So here's that club.
We have to hold China accountable.
They steal our products, including our intellectual property.
They dump substandard products into our economy.
They need to be held accountable.
We also need to partner with China on climate and the crisis that that presents.
We need to partner with China on the issue of North Korea.
I am on, and I think the only person on the stage, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
We need a partner on the issue of North Korea.
But the bottom line is this.
Donald Trump in office on trade policy.
You know, he reminds me of that guy in the Wizard of Oz.
You know, when you pull back the curtain, it's a really small dude.
Yeah, Dorothy did get back to Kansas.
I'd like to remind you.
But secondly, you know, what was interesting here, two things.
One was, as everybody says, they've gotten the memo on Barack Obama.
Last time they attacked Barack Obama, he wasn't good enough.
Now, Barack Obama was the most wonderful thing ever, and suddenly nothing he did was wrong.
And they just want to make it a little better.
They want to tune it up a little bit.
It was not, you know, never mind the wars in the Middle East.
Never mind the bad economy, the slow, slow, slow recovery.
Now he's the best.
That was one thing.
But the other thing, of course, is going after Trump is the thing, although they didn't talk about the economy.
And I would like to point out that what Kamala Harris is saying is basically she would do what Trump is doing and what nobody has done before.
She would do what Trump is doing, but no one has had the guts to do it.
So Kamala out again.
I'll end with Warren because I think she's the one who did the best and this is why she does the best.
Stephanopoulos comes after her with a big question.
Is she going to raise middle class taxes?
And of course the answer is yes.
Always, always, socialism eliminates the middle class.
It's just the poor and the people they elect who have power and therefore have money.
That's what it always does.
But listen to her, Dodge of the - Direct question.
You said middle-class families are going to pay less, but will middle-class taxes go up to pay for the program?
I know you believe that the deductibles and the premiums will go down.
Will middle-class taxes go up?
Will private insurance be eliminated?
Look, what families have to deal with is cost, total cost.
That's what they have to deal with.
And understand, families are paying for their health care today.
Families pay every time an insurance company says, sorry, you can't see that specialist.
Every time an insurance company says, sorry, that doctor is out of network.
Sorry, we are not covering that prescription.
Families are paying every time they don't get a prescription filled because they can't pay for it.
They don't have a lump checked out because they can't afford the copay.
What we're talking about here is what's going to happen in families' pockets.
What's going to happen in their budgets?
And the answer is on Medicare for all.
Costs are going to go up for wealthier individuals and costs are going to go up for giant corporations.
Now, this brings me back to where I started, right?
Because whenever they talk about costs, they always talk about this great big globe of money.
It's all this money and it's going to cost less overall.
You may die because the government doesn't think you're worth keeping alive anymore, but oh, that big ball of money is all going to be so much better than it was before.
Instead of thinking the way the country was supposed to be, instead of thinking small, start with individuals, move to towns, counties, states, then the last person who has any power over you and should have the least power over you is the federal government.
And that has all changed as a lot of people feared it would, but it has changed much worse than they could have imagined because of TV, basically, because we are all so linked together.
The world is so global that we no longer think of ourselves as neighbors, as communities, as towns, as states.
We think immediately that the president is the guy we should be looking for, looking to.
And so when she talks like that, she, all of them, and too many on our side too, have given up on the idea that the individual is the way things should work, that the individual and his local association, his local church, should take care of people.
We think big all the time.
We're thinking globally.
We're not thinking locally anymore.
And that's the thing.
If you don't think locally, you can't be free.
You can't be free if the government with the most power over you is the government that's furthest away from you.
That doesn't make any sense.
FBI's Forward Move?00:03:46
It should be a guy.
You should be able to knock on a guy's house and say, hey, you know what?
That thing you did at the town hall meeting, I didn't like that very much.
And I'll tell you why, because you're a kid and Mike, and so on, and be able to make those arguments.
But they're always thinking in these big, big ways.
So anyway, I thought she does the best because she's the most difficult to, she's the slipperiest.
She's the hardest to pin down.
And they don't know when, of course, they've got George Stephanopoulos there, you know, Clinton Hack, George Stephanopoulos.
They did ask a couple of hard questions this time, but still, still, they're never going to get the tough questions like about the FBI malfeasance going after Trump or about the fact that none of them has ever done any of the things that Trump has gotten done.
Speaking of this, though, I do have to cover this one story because I think it's important.
Federal prosecutors, this is from USA Today, recommended seeking criminal charges against Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI and a frequent target of criticism by President Trump.
McCabe was fired from the FBI just before his retirement after the Justice Department's internal watchdog concluded that he improperly authorized a leak about a federal investigation into the Clinton Foundation in the final weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign.
He lied about, investigators concluded that he displayed a lack of candor when asked about the leak.
So now it looks like he could actually get prosecuted.
I'm always saying these guys are never going to get prosecuted, but it looks like McCabe may get prosecuted.
And remember, this is two IG reports back.
This is not the last IG report that came out with that.
This is the one before that.
And there's still the big IG report that covers the whole investigations supposedly coming forward, other investigations into what happened.
This is a big story because it means that this is a Justice Department that if it remains the Trump Justice Department, is willing to move forward on some of these prosecutions.
And it's also telling about, I don't know if I covered this, I'm not sure I've covered this spy story that went around a few days ago as Jim Scudo on CNN blew the story.
The idea was that we had this very top-notch super spy in the Russian organization, so top, so top flight.
He had worked his way so far up that he was actually meeting with Putin.
And he was giving us all this information and he had to be pulled out for his safety.
That's the story that came from sources.
Jim Scudo, stupidly put forward the idea that somehow, this story had been going on for a long time, according to these sources, put out the idea that somehow this was Trump's fault, that Trump, they were afraid that Trump would misuse.
He had one source who told him that Trump would misuse classified information, so they had to pull this source because he was in danger.
The CIA and virtually every other media outlet said no.
In fact, it was more likely that it would be the media who would blow this guy's cover.
But Kim Strassel at the Wall Street Journal has been covering this very carefully.
She points out that just before some big reveal on ObamaGate comes out, there's a leak.
And the leak is meant to give cover to the FBI and the intelligence community who investigated Trump in order to get him out of office, basically, who came up with this whole Russia collusion fantasy that we had to live with for two and a half years.
And what Strassel is saying is these leaks come out from sources and the dutifully left-wing press goes out and writes these stories that make the FBI look better.
Because if we had a super spy in place who was talking to Putin, well, maybe it wasn't just the steel dossier that they used to get this Pfizer warrant.
Maybe they knew more.
And this whole thing stinks.
And so it may mean that the IG report coming up is going to look really, really bad for the Obama administration.
I certainly hope so.
I think they have earned it.
All right, we have got an interview.
Now, I've told you about this piece in the Claremont Review of Books.
Christopher Caldwell.
Caldwell is a journalist.
He's written everywhere.
He's written The Post, New York Times, The Wall Street Journal.
He was a senior editor at the Weekly Standard.
Parliament's Grip on Brexit00:13:54
And he wrote this spectacular piece on Brexit and the meaning of Brexit and why it's so hard to go forward with it.
I asked him to come on.
He was gracious enough to come on and did an excellent interview explaining some of the things we're seeing in Britain right now.
Here's Christopher Caldwell.
Christopher Colwell, thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Delighted.
Your piece in the Claremont Review of Books was one of the best pieces.
I think it was the best piece on Brexit I've read.
I think it was just so insightful and explanatory.
Explain to people what's not to like about being in the EU for Great Britain.
Well, it's pretty much a bedrock thing.
It's a matter of being ruled by people like you.
I think it's the same problem that any sort of province has within a larger empire.
Britain joined the European Economic Community in 1973 at a time when it was really a set of regulatory and trade arrangements and voted on it, voted to go in in its first ever referendum.
But in 1992, after the Maastricht Treaty, the European Union became a totally different thing.
And Britons do not feel that they ever consented to this more and more ambitious political project of Europe.
And they demanded a referendum to decide whether they belong in Europe or not.
Parliament granted one.
And in 2016, they voted to leave the European Union.
But now Parliament is obstructing the carrying out of the referendum that it okayed.
And so it's become very contentious.
All you hear, even in the American news, but certainly in the British news, at least through the BBC, is a kind of panic that if they leave the EU, all trade deals will collapse.
English friends of mine said to me, we won't even be able to fly a plane into Orly Airport and land there.
Is any of that realistic?
I think it's realistic to be worried about it.
But the fact is that people were worried about it, have been worried about it for the last couple of years.
And what we're talking about is a what we're talking about is some short-term inconveniences that could be larger inconveniences.
So the normal ones are a backup of trucks at the Dover-Calais tunnel entrance.
That would last for about three hours.
On a more serious level, a short-term cutoff of medicines, certain important medicines, which could be dangerous for certain people.
But all in all, we're talking about an event that is much less grave than, say, our own.
I don't know if any of your viewers remember the Y2K bug.
But, you know, it's that type of thing.
It's not a very serious thing.
It's a useful rhetorical strategy, I think.
One of the things you talk about in this piece in the Claremont Review that I haven't seen, I don't think I've seen anyone else talk about, is the way that joining the EU not just not only transferred power from Parliament to Brussels, but also transferred power from democratic institutions to legal institutions, to judges, basically.
Can you explain how that works?
Right.
Well, you know, Britain has a slightly different, of course, our constitutional system arises from Britain's, but it's, and we have its idea of freedom, but they administer it in a very different way.
And one thing that's very different about British democracy and American democracy is this absoluteness of parliamentary sovereignty.
I mean, we, I mean, Walter Badgett wrote about this in the 19th century.
You know, the American ideal is balance.
You know, it's like executive, legislative, and judiciary branches.
The British idea is kind of a streamlined power that works through parliament.
And their executive and their judiciary have traditionally worked through parliament too.
Now, when you join the European Union, the European Union, a lot of people describe it as a treaty, like, well, you know, if we can join NATO, why can't we join the European Union?
It's very different.
It's not a treaty.
It's a merger.
So there are some obvious ways in which this really harms Britain's sovereignty and makes it a country that is much less in control of its own destiny.
For one thing, when you join the European Union, you must grant that the European Union's laws, that the laws decided in Brussels, take precedent over your own.
Now, if that is true, then Britain is really no longer a monarchy because the Queen is a subordinate.
If you're a subordinate, you're not a monarch, right?
That's the obvious way in which Britain is taken down a peg.
But it also created some constitutional changes that look more qualitative, that are more qualitative, but utterly alter the British way of governing themselves.
And that is, once you have European, once your parliament has assented to a law that someone else's laws are superior to your parliament's, then someone else's laws are your laws.
And so you started having judges entering the political fray, as in the United States.
The British system became more like the American.
You had judicial review.
You had judges coming in and overturning laws that they didn't like, laws that were in conflict with, say, the European Union's ideas of human rights.
And so Britain's self-rule eroded not only from without, but also from within.
Wow, that is amazing.
Now, Theresa May obviously came in and she said Brexit means Brexit, but she clearly didn't mean Brexit means Brexit and she wasn't committed to it.
Boris Johnson has made a lot of noise about this, but I've talked about that he's pulling out.
He is definitely going to pull this off.
But I've talked to conservatives in Britain who feel don't entirely trust him.
Where do you stand on the Boris Johnson question?
Well, there are people who believe that.
I would say that, you know, Boris Johnson has had a lot of, he's had a lot of political personalities over the years.
Remember, his first, I mean, he was a member of parliament, but his first major national job was as mayor of London.
Now, London is a very multi-ethnic, very culturally liberal, very cosmopolitan, very complicated city.
It's not running a big city is not a place for dogmatists.
So just by the fact of having got himself elected mayor of London, Johnson has proved himself a guy who is totally willing to compromise when he must.
That's part of the job.
That said, he is the most prominent British politician.
And there were only about three of any stripe who declared themselves for Brexit when the referendum came up.
He was the obvious candidate to become Prime Minister after Brexit passed and David Cameron resigned.
But for reasons of internal party politics that probably needn't detain us, he was denied that job.
He is the obvious next in line.
And I can understand a few misgivings about his willingness to see it through to the end, but he's all they've got right now.
So, as I'm watching this thing unfold, it's gotten so complex that it sometimes seems that they're pulling laws that were passed in 1066 to maneuver against each other.
Can you give a nutshell view of where we stand right at this moment?
Oh, well, it's an interesting thing.
Okay, so Johnson has come to power.
We've had a series of votes.
Johnson has asked the Queen to prorogue parliament.
Now, on the one hand, it's a totally normal thing to do in the sense that this previous parliamentary session is the longest parliamentary session, I believe, in 400 years.
So it's time for it to end.
On the other hand, you are in the middle of the greatest constitutional crisis in 400 years.
And so Johnson is being suspected of using this to his own advantage, of trying to shorten the window for Brexit.
One thing you can say in Johnson's defense is: if that was his aim, then he didn't shorten the window enough because he's just lost six consecutive votes that make his position very difficult.
His position is: all right, you don't like Brexit, let's take it to the country, dissolve the government, and let the people vote.
I'm going to run as a representative of Brexit.
These other people can run as the representatives of the European Union.
May the best party win.
The problem is that due to new legislation, the opposition has to consent to that.
And they are worried that they will lose this election.
And so they're not consenting.
So the way it stands now is Johnson is in a legislative trap.
The parliament, largely thanks to the maneuverings of the Speaker of the House, the opposition has been able to seize control of the legislative agenda in the parliament and pass a lot of laws that essentially ban Brexit for now.
That can all be overturned in an election, but it looks like Johnson cannot get to an election.
But the central thing is there has to be an election because should Johnson resign, let us say, and this is the scenario that more and more people are looking at.
Should he resign, then the other side will need to form a coalition of some sort.
And that is, it's very hard to see how the two big opposition parties, the Liberal Democrats, who are basically hardline anti-Brexiters, and the Labor Party, which has come under control of Jeremy Corbyn, who's a sort of a, let's call him a Bernie Sandersite guy.
It is hard to see how they could form a majority.
And so Johnson is trapped.
On the other hand, the whole logic of the situation is going to lead it to evolve in his favor.
Okay.
Obviously, we care about this because Britain is our pal and our ally.
But beyond that, what are the lessons that Americans, especially conservative Americans, constitutional Americans, let's call them, what are the lessons that we should be taking from this?
How should we see ourselves in this mirror?
It is very interesting.
It's not just that Britain's our buddy and our ally, but it's that in a way it's our model.
And I think that the ways in which Britain differs from us while resembling us are very interesting.
It's been the broad sweep of Britain's evolution in the last 50 years has been to become more American.
And I'd say if there's one central lesson of this, it's the power of the power of the judiciary as a representative of the sort of society's better elements, the few, the rich, and the well-born.
In a way, you know, once we got rid of the Senate, I think the Senate in the United States Constitution was explicitly intended to fulfill that function, and it didn't for various reasons.
That's a different argument.
But the judiciary came to replace it in a certain way.
I think Britain is sort of imitating our use of the judiciary as an explicit check on the democracy of the country.
Interesting.
I'm out of time, but let me ask you, I know no one can predict the future, but will Brexit happen?
Oh, that's a tough one.
I mean, you know, it hasn't happened so far.
The tools that the minority side in this referendum has to thwart the will of the Democratic majority, they seem sort of like ad hoc and here and there, but they've been sufficient so far.
And okay.
Well, thank you, Christopher Corbwell.
Thank you so much for coming on.
I hope people will read your piece in the Claremont Review of Books, and I hope you'll come back and talk again.
I'd love to.
Thank you very much.
Thanks a lot.
Yeah, really, really great piece.
And you should read it.
You should read Claremont Review of Books anyway.
That and City Journal from Manhattan Institute are two of the best magazines out there and a lot of places where a lot of the can't disappear and you just get the information.
A final reflection before the Clavenless weekend sucks you all into the oblivion and destruction you know so well.
Jokes Over Journalism00:03:57
You know, I started out by attacking the New York Times and I'd like to finish off by attacking the New York Times because they stink.
They did something, I guess it was September 12th, so it's yesterday.
There's a new comedian who has been named as one of the newest Saturday Night Live cast members.
And I'm sure you can understand that that in the life of a young comedian is one of the great days of his life, right?
This is a wonderful, wonderful thing that happens.
The New York Times, in a story written by Nancy Coleman, runs a story saying a comedian named on Thursday as one of the newest Saturday Night Live cast members made racist remarks mocking Chinese people and used a racial slur in a podcast episode last year.
The comments were uncovered by a comedy journalist.
That's something we really, really need.
We really need comedy journalists to uncover funny things that people said.
That's really important.
It came out several hours after NBC announced that the comedian Shane Gillis, 31, would be joining the cast along with two other performers, one of them, the show's first Chinese-American player.
Unbelievable.
This is an unbelievable piece of cruelty and nonsense that the New York Times would essentially join with these Twitter buffoons who go on and hunt up things when some guy wins the Heisman Trophy or wins an award or gets a part or is going to host the Oscars and they dig up these things that they can skew to look like he's a bad guy.
They look like he said something.
You know, the comedian's job is making fun of people.
It's making jokes about people.
It's making stupid jokes.
It's making silly jokes, making jokes the rest of us wouldn't make.
It's doing all those things.
So Shane Gillis, when he did this, was doing his job.
The people who were reporting on this were supposed to be reporting on important things that matter to us in life and matter to the good and furtherance of our republic are not doing their jobs when they do this.
This is just, it's just made to make people afraid of disagreeing.
And people are afraid and they are succeeding in this and shame on them.
Shame on them.
It's a disgusting thing to do to a young man at this moment in his career.
If he had killed somebody, yes.
If he had buried a body in his backyard, yes.
That he made jokes about Chinese people.
We live in this wonderful multicultural, multi-ethnic society.
We should be making jokes about one another.
It's a great way to dispel hostility, and it's also part of the comedy of being here.
And I just want to remind you, I just want to remind you that the New York Times just last month, just in August, ran this story complaining a loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House is pursuing what they say will be an aggressive operation to discredit news organizations deemed hostile to President Trump.
Remember this?
They went on, let's play the guy, play the guy, Jeremy Peters, I think his name was, who wrote this story and what he was complaining about.
This is just the latest escalation under a president who has called the media the enemy of the people.
And what that has effectively done is embolden the president's allies, this group of people who are connected to Donald Trump Jr., to start looking at the online histories going back, in some cases more than a decade, of journalists who, in some cases, don't even cover this administration.
And what they've done is they've tried to pull embarrassing things, find unflattering things in the social media histories of these journalists.
And I'm talking about journalists at the nation's top news organizations like the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, entities which have already been targeted by these conservative allies of the president's.
And what they do is they publicize unflattering things that they found in these social media histories when they want to retaliate against an outlet for publishing a story that is unflattering to the president.
So what you have here really is something very different from what basic journalism is.
It's very different from what so they don't like it when it happens to them.
And of course they don't like it when it happens to them.
But it's okay when it happens to this young man who's never done anything to anybody, who got a big break in life.
Conservative Retaliation Tactics00:01:49
It doesn't matter when they do it to Kevin Hart, whose dream was to host the Oscars and they chased him out.
It is just absolute rank, stupid cruelty.
And if that's what your leftist philosophy turns you into, you should change your philosophy.
Look in the mirror and change your philosophy because that's a skanky thing to do and shame on the New York Times.
I got to stop there.
It's the Clavenless weekend.
You're done.
It's a little shorter though, a little shorter this time.
So some of you may survive.
If you do, I'll be here on Monday, still in New York, I think.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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Last night, the top nine Democratic presidential candidates and Julian Castro met in Houston to debate all the top issues and promise the American people a future with two cars in every garage, few teeth in every mouth, and a record player in every living room.