Ep. 769 pits Robert O’Brien’s hostage-negotiation expertise against Trump’s indecisive Iran stance, clashing with Lindsey Graham’s hawkish push for strikes and Rand Paul’s isolationist warnings while Zarif denies Saudi attack responsibility. Illinois’ unaccounted bodies and Ed Buck’s scandal expose Democratic hypocrisy, while Christopher Rufo blames progressive policies for West Coast addiction crises—50% of King County’s homelessness tied to opioids—and rejects "new urbanist" infrastructure fixes as authoritarian. The episode ties escalating tensions to systemic failures, from geopolitical missteps to domestic policy collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
President Donald Trump has named his new national security advisor and says he's looking forward to firing him.
The soon-to-be-dismissed replacement for John Bolton is Robert O'Brien, who previously served as the nation's chief hostage negotiator, negotiating the release of such hostages as Danny Birch, Andrew Brunson, James Mattis, and Jeff Sessions.
The families of the released hostages welcomed the appointment, although Sessions still remains hospitalized for shock after the trauma of his experience.
In a statement made to either the Press Corps or a ravening pack of hellhounds from the fires of perdition, it's become difficult to tell the difference, President Trump said he was glad to have O'Brien temporarily on board.
The president said, quote, many, many people whose names I can't remember have said this is a very respected man, so I feel confident he will be utterly humiliated when I toss him out in some particularly public and unpleasant way.
I look forward to listening to Robert's stupid opinions until I just can't stand it anymore, and then firing him in the tradition of that great, great show, The Apprentice, which died when Arnold Schwarzenegger took it over because I was the whole reason for the show's success, even though Arnold was telling himself what a big star he was in that ridiculous accent of his.
I mean, how long has the guy been in this country and he still talks like that Mike Myers German character on Saturday Night Live, which hasn't been funny in years?
Unquote.
While the president made his remarks, O'Brien stood beside him wondering what the hell he had gotten himself into and thinking no matter how quickly he was fired, it couldn't come soon enough.
Addressing either the press corps or a writhing tangle of poisonous snakes from an old Indiana Jones movie, it's become difficult to tell the difference, O'Brien said, quote, I look forward to working with the president, and I just want to say that when he tells you he fired me, I really will have quit.
Trick warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is ippitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
You know, so many of the questions facing our country today are questions in some sense of identity.
And I don't mean identity in the false and stupid way the left uses the term.
What color are you?
What gender are you pretending to be?
How can your sexual preference be used to distract you from the fact you're being taxed out of existence?
I'm talking about real identity, who we are as a moral entity, what we believe and how we're going to bring those beliefs to fruition through real world action.
For instance, on the question of border security, the question is, is immigration a responsibility we have or a privilege we confer?
Do we have some responsibility to take in the wretched refuse of the earth because someone wrote a poem and put it on a statue?
Or do we have a deeper responsibility to ensure that our country and our people are served by the immigrants we choose to let in for our purposes?
It's a fair moral question, and you can't determine what to do until you know the basic values under which you're operating.
The same is true with war and peace.
Are we the policemen of the world or do we only have to act when it serves our particular interests?
Or is there some third way of determining when we have to resort to violence and what kind of violence we resort to?
To me, there seems no escaping some sort of U.S. peacekeeping function.
We're the most powerful, free nation on earth and have both a responsibility and an interest in ensuring that other free nations remain free.
We can't do it always and we shouldn't have to do it alone.
But if you leave it too late, one day you look out your window and there's a guy with a swastika and a tank on your front lawn.
The question is what sort of lawman do we want to be?
Are we liberty valence from the old John Wayne movie who draws his gun at the drop of a hat and rules through violence and fear?
Or are we Shane, the man who is determined to hang up his guns until the bad guys make that impossible?
If you're Shane, you're going to get taunted.
You'll be called weak and a coward when you refuse to fight.
You'll be laughed at and mocked.
And then, if you make the decision to fight, the same damn lookers on or Democrats who called you a coward will call you a violent killer and a war-mongering tyrant.
I didn't have to tell you that was the Democrats.
You probably guessed.
But Shane has this advantage.
Shane acts when he chooses to act, when he feels there's no other choice, and he stays true to his values, no matter what the Democrats say.
It's not a bad model.
And we'll look at how it applies to the present moment in Iran.
But first, let us talk about rockauto.com.
And I love these people because I love to say rockauto.com.
If your car needs a part, needs something, you can go to rockauto.com and you can even say it like that.
And you don't have to drive down in a car that isn't working to the auto parts store where they don't know any more about it than you do.
Rockauto.com is a family business serving auto parts customers online for 20 years.
Go to rockauto.com to shop for auto and body parts from hundreds of manufacturers.
They have everything you need and you can find it in a few easy clicks and they will deliver it directly to your door.
And since your car isn't working, that's the best way to do it.
The rockauto.com catalog is unique, easy to navigate.
You can quickly see all the parts available for your vehicle and choose the brand specifications and prices you prefer.
Amazing selection, reliably low prices.
That's rockauto.com.
Go to rockauto.com right now and see all the parts available for your car or truck.
Write Klavin in their How Did You Hear About Us box so they know we sent you and so they know how to spell Klavin because it's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Not everyone knows that.
Some people think there's an E in Claven.
What can I say?
So Trump is appointed a guy to replace John Bolton and he's kind of a hawkish guy too.
I mean, nobody is as hawkish as John Bolton.
John Bolton, I believe, carries an actual nuclear weapon in his pocket.
And if anybody bothers him, he just blows the guy off the face of the earth.
So nobody is quite as hawkish as Bolton.
But O'Brien is a kind of typical Republican who wants, you know, is ready to fight if he has to fight.
And he was this guy who has helped with the very successful, or as Trump would say, very successful hostage negotiations that Trump has been carrying on, making sure he gets people out.
He helped get Pastor Andrew Brunson out of Turkey.
He helped get that rocker, ASAP Rocky, out of Sweden.
I'm not sure we should have done that, but he did it.
And he's tough on Iran.
He calls Iran the sworn enemy of the United States.
So it's going to be an interesting mix until, of course, Trump fires him.
So what we're dealing with here is Iran seems to have bombed the Saudi oil fields.
And the only reason this isn't a much bigger deal, the only reason this isn't the front page headline every single day is because we are producing so much oil because of wonderful fracking and all our new technologies and because Trump has pulled off the regulations that were keeping the energy industry suppressed under Obama.
The world is awash in energy so that we were able to fill up the gap.
The Saudis have got their oil production stuff back online very quickly.
And so we haven't seen this huge spike.
But the Saudis are still the major supplier of oil to the world and Iran knows it.
And Iran is, you know, this is the whole thing.
What is Iran trying to do?
You hear people say, well, they're testing us.
They're testing us.
Well, that doesn't make total sense to me.
They are testing us.
They're seeing how far they can go.
But what they're hoping is that if the world starts to have an oil shortage or prices go up, that the Europeans will make good the money they're losing from the sanctions that Trump keeps hitting them with.
Trump hits them with sanction after sanction after sanction.
Now, Iran is claiming this is the Houthi rebels in Yemen, but the Houthi rebels in Yemen basically are Iran.
The civil war in Yemen is a proxy fight between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
And there's now evidence that some of the missiles that hit the oil facilities in Saudi Arabia actually were fired right out of Iran.
So they're not even bothering to cover it up, right?
And Trump, as opposed to Obama, has been just hammering them.
He has been really tough on them.
And Obama was coddling them and everything.
And so it's really interesting to me, because these questions of war and peace are such essential national questions.
It's interesting to me to look at the sides and what they say and how each side falls short.
Because each guy, of course, sees things through this particular lens.
And he doesn't want to give the public any reason to look at it from the other lens, right?
So you have Lindsey Graham, ultimate hawk, guy who's become very admirable ever since John McCain died.
John McCain was his best friend, and I think sort of ran him a little bit.
And somehow, Lindsey Graham, since McCain died, has become a free man, Lindsey 2.0 they call him, and has been a much tougher customer.
He's been the Trump whisperer.
He knows how to deal with Trump.
He knows how to disagree with Trump without losing his friendship.
And he knows how to call him out a little bit without humiliating him.
He's really been handling himself well.
But Lindsey Graham is a hawk, and Lindsey Graham feels that we have got to give it SOC Iran a good one.
It's time to make them pay a consequence to what is more provocative, more dangerous behavior.
The sanctions are crippling their economy, but they're not changing their behavior.
And the question is, why would they do this?
Why would they have their fingerprints so obviously, I think, on an attack of an oil fire owned by Saudi Arabia?
They're clearly testing the region and President Trump.
So the only thing that will make them change the calculation of being provocative is that the costs are too high.
So that's the one side of it.
When they say they're testing us and provoking us, I mean, it seems to me, it is true.
Remember, they blew up that drone, our drone, and Trump ordered an attack and then called the attack back.
And so obviously, in the Middle East in general, in Iran in particular, if you're not strong man, if you don't punch the guy when he punches you, he takes that as weakness.
It is the Shane factor.
It is when Shane is trying not to punch a guy, when he's trying to keep friendly, when he's trying to hang up his guns, they make fun of him, they call him names.
You know, that's the way it is between us and Iran.
But at the same time, Iran wouldn't be doing this, I think, if they didn't want a fight, if they didn't want some kind of confrontation, which is the other side of this.
Once we bomb them, once we get entangled with them, we lose our blood and treasure, we become involved.
This is a fight between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
We give the Saudis, we sell the Saudis a lot of weapons.
They have a lot of backing from us.
We also back Israel, who could go to war with Iran at any minute.
So it's not necessarily in our interest just because obviously Graham is right that they are testing us and pushing us and shopping us, just like when they seize tankers in the Gulf, you know, that they're doing the same thing.
They're trying to show that they can manipulate the oil market and that they're a danger.
But they're also trying to draw us in.
I think they want to fight.
I think that's pretty obvious.
So then you have the other side, which is Rand Paul.
And of course, Rand Paul never wants to fight anybody about anything.
As far as he's concerned, he's basically an isolationist.
I'm not a big Rand Paul fan.
I think there's a lot of virtue signaling in there.
And I think that some of the stuff he says doesn't make sense, but let him make his side of the story.
I think an escalation of the war would be a big mistake.
This all comes from the Yemeni civil war, where Saudi Arabia is heavily involved in another country indiscriminately bombing civilians, killing children.
And then the Houdis are supported by the Iranians.
So it's back and forth.
But really, the answer is trying to have a negotiated ceasefire and peace in Yemen.
And bombing Iran won't do that.
The other thing I would say is Iran's military spending is about $17 billion.
Saudi Arabia spends about $83 billion.
The Gulf sheikhdoms around Saudi Arabia that ally with Saudi Arabia spend another 50 some odd billion.
So really the Saudis and their allies dwarf the spending of Iran.
And this is a regional conflict that there's no reason the superpower of the United States needs to be getting into bombing mainland Iran.
It would be a needless escalation of this.
And those who love the Iraq war, the Cheneys, the Boltons, the Crystals, they all are clamoring and chomping at the bit for another war in Iran.
But it's not a walk in the park.
So Paul makes some good points there.
I really think these are armed people.
These are people with weapons.
These are people in a fight with each other.
I didn't really agree with what he said about Yemen.
We should be negotiating.
This is a proxy war.
They are fighting for control of the Middle East.
We have an interest.
The Iranians are bad guys who want to destroy us.
The Saudis are bad guys who work with us.
Easy choice.
Easy choice.
Work with the bad guys who work with us.
You don't have to trust them.
You don't have to like them, but you work with them.
That's just real politic, right?
So we do have an interest in the region, but he makes a good point that these are armed nations with a lot of spending.
He seemed a little too sympathetic to Iran in that conversation, but still, still, he's absolutely right about that.
What isn't necessarily right is targeted airstrikes worked really well in Bosnia.
You know, I mean, these are things that can be done without escalating the war.
To compare a bomb strike on Iran to the Iraqi war doesn't make any sense.
We had boots on the ground in Iraq, as they say.
And I think that that's a really, really different, different situation.
So we'll get to Trump where he stands in just a minute, which is always the most interesting question because he's such an interesting character.
But first, let me talk about my friends at the Manhattan Institute.
I love the Manhattan Institute.
I'm a contributing editor to City Journal, which is one of the great, great magazines of urban policy and all kinds of different politics.
They've got great writers like Heather McDonald and Steve Malanga, Nicole Jelinus, who I just saw, who I love, Kay Heimowitz, who I just saw, who I love in New York.
They have me, who is absolutely fantastic, one of the greats.
And they also have this wonderful podcast of their own called 10 Blocks with my pal Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal, where he interviews some people, some of these writers, to get more in-depth into the story.
It is really good.
You can listen and subscribe to 10 Blocks at iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, wherever you get your podcast.
Or you can visit cityjournal.org slash 10blocks.
That's the number 10.
And the way it works is city-journal.org slash 10, number 10 blocks, city-journal.org slash 10 blocks.
And it's just, it is a really in-demp, in-depth podcast without getting wonky.
It just tells you what's going on.
One of the things I love about working with the Manhattan Institute and working at City Journal is they're not so partisan, but they talk about what works, what makes things better, what makes life better, what improves life.
And that's why Heather McDonald does such a great job there.
All the writers there are really terrific, especially me.
So go over there, listen.
We'll have a Manhattan Institute guy on later in the program.
Loud Statements, Unnerving Tone00:15:40
So Donald Trump has a tendency, as we all know, he reacts big.
He always has the first thing out of his mouth.
The first thing he said when this bombing took place in Saudi Arabia is, we're locked and loaded.
We're locked and loaded.
We're ready to go.
And then he starts to think, well, wait a minute.
I don't, you know, he doesn't, he's not a war guy.
He doesn't want to go to war.
And who can blame him?
Who does?
You know, who, anybody who is eager to go to war, you know, so this is John Bolton has been talking behind closed doors and saying how dumb Trump is about not standing up to Iran.
And if we don't stand up to him, they just get worse and worse and worse.
There's some wisdom to that.
But Trump tries to figure this out.
And what's interesting about Trump and what gives him such problems is that he thinks out loud, right?
He doesn't go into his room and stroke his chin and consider.
As you've got the microphone in his face, you're listening to the guy's mind work.
So here he is talking about it while he appointed O'Brien.
You said that the failure to strike Iran in the summer was a sign of a ticket by Iran as a sign of weakness.
No, I actually think it's a sign of strength.
We have the strongest military in the world now, and I think it's a great sign of strength.
It's very easy to attack.
But if you ask Lindsay, ask him, how did going into the Middle East, how did that work out?
And how did going into Iraq work out?
So we have a disagreement on that.
And, you know, there's plenty of time to do some dastardly things.
It's very easy to start.
And we'll see what happens.
We'll see what happens.
I think we have a lot of good capital.
If we have to do something, we'll do it without hesitation.
It's easy to get in.
That is basically the Shane way.
He's thinking out loud, which is always kind of unnerving with Trump.
He's always kind of going back and forth, and we hear him going back and forth.
And again, that's unnerving and unsettling.
But basically what he's saying, Pompeo, Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State behind the scenes, is trying to build a coalition with the UN, trying to work with our allies to get some help on this.
The Israelis are starting to say, you know, Iran is a real threat to us, and we may have to go in.
And Pompeo is telegraphing, saying out loud that we will support the Israelis.
They have a right to defend themselves.
We're on their team.
No matter who wins the election over there, no matter who builds the coalition, we're going to be with Israel.
Trump said we're with Israel, not with Netanyahu.
We support Israel.
And he's going to stick with that, obviously.
Just compare all that.
So big choices.
It's never cut and dried.
It's never black and white.
You never know when to go in and when not to.
We certainly should not be on the ground at war with Iran, but whether we punish them, whether we start to get a little tough with them, is an open question, especially if we can get allies involved on a strike.
Again, there's absolutely no way we want to be invading Iran.
That would be a terrible, stupid thing to do.
But still, you know, some targeted airstrikes might not be a bad idea.
But compare all that to the Democrats.
Compare this to Tim Kaine, okay?
This guy came within an ace of being vice president of the United States of America.
Listen to whose fault he thinks it is.
They're going around saying the attack was unprovoked.
The U.S. is provoking Iran.
We were in a diplomatic deal with them that allowed them to sell their oil.
We pulled out of the deal.
The U.S. pulled out, and we've punished their oil economy.
And so Iran, and again, Iran's not a good actor.
You don't have to like this, but we are provoking Iran every day with the sanctions and with military action, and they're responding.
We need to stop the provocation, and the United States needs to return to trying to be a diplomatic broker.
Are you suggesting that Iran had to do this attack when you're saying the attack was somehow provoked?
Are you somehow victim blaming here for this?
No, what I'm saying is I don't, I have voted for sanctions on Iran in the past, and they're a bad actor.
But when the administration says the attack was unprovoked, that's what LBJ said about the Gulf of Tonkin back in Vietnam.
And it was a lie.
And the administration is lying to the American public by saying this was an unprovoked attack.
The guy reminds me of Alvin the Chipmunk, except without the testicles.
I mean, the guy is really, you know, he uses this opportunity to attack the president, who's certainly the one person who's not to blame here, is the president.
And I don't know what he's trying to get across there, that we're not supposed to put sanctions on Iran, that we're supposed to follow through with Obama's plan to give them a path to nuclear weapons, that we're just supposed to be resigned to that and let that go and not try to bring them into line by force because they're not going to understand.
Let's take a look at the Iranians for a minute.
Let's take a look at Iran's foreign minister, Mohamed Zarif.
He was asked, this is a CNN exclusive.
He was asked how he would respond to an attack.
And just listen, I mean, when you look at this guy, and again, remember, Yemen is a proxy war.
When you look at this guy, is this the sort of guy that we want to make excuses for?
What would be the consequence of an American or a Saudi military strike on Iran now?
An all-out war.
You make a very serious statement, Nassau.
Well, I make a very serious statement about defending our country.
I'm making a very serious statement that we don't want war.
We don't want to engage in a military confrontation.
We believe that a military confrontation based on deception is awful.
We'll have a lot of casualties.
But we won't blink to defend our territory.
Put yourself in Saudi Arabia's shoes.
If there was an attack on Iranian sovereign territory with cruise missiles launched from Saudi Arabia, what would Iran's response be?
Well, they're making that up.
Why do they want to make that up?
That it was from Iranian territory.
The Yemenis have announced responsibility for that.
They have provided information about that.
They have answered all the Saudi disinformation campaign about the fact that they launched this attack against Saudi Arabia in self-defense.
I always wonder why these guys don't just burst into flame.
You know, you just look at that man with his dead eyes saying we will kill everyone and it's a lie and we never do anything.
But we, yes, well, we fired off.
Why would they make that up that we fired the rockets from our territory just because we fired the rockets from our territory?
I mean, these guys are like almost like some kind of cartoon villain and Tim Kaine is blaming Donald Trump, you know, who he just hates and is using this for political capital.
It really is awful.
I think Shane is the right model.
I think though Trump speaks out loud and it thinks out loud and it makes it very unnerving to watch him do it, it creates a lot of uncertainty and it creates a lot of trouble.
He's actually doing the right thing.
You do not want to strike until it's absolutely necessary.
It is still an open question whether it's absolutely necessary.
Obviously, Iran wants us to hit them and wants to draw us into this fight.
So I don't think that that's necessarily the right thing to do.
If you do finally decide you've got to pull your gun, pull them and kill them and walk away.
There's a couple other stories I want to talk about today.
One, of course, is just this hilarious one about the fact that Justin Trudeau's running for re-election in Canada was caught with having done a, having been in a, when he was a teacher, he was in blackface.
And you know the story is hilarious because they keep saying he was in brownface and both Knowles and I, without referring to each other, both tweeted out that the definition of a man in brownface is a liberal when he's wearing blackface.
Now, you know, this is something that drives me crazy.
I don't think we should be doing this to people.
I don't think we should have canceled the Shane Gillis from Saturday Night Live for doing funny Chinese accents.
I don't think we should cancel, hurt somebody or fire somebody when he uses the N-word not as a slur but referring to it, which is absolutely ridiculous.
I don't think we should bother people about the fact that they wore blackface.
A lot of people have done that.
It's not necessarily an insult to anybody.
And actually, in a hilarious comment, Justin Trudeau said this, which is actually a good excuse.
The matter is that I've always, and you'll know this, been more enthusiastic about costumes than is somehow is sometimes appropriate.
But these are the situations that I regret deeply.
He's always into costume.
It's true.
He's always dressing up as somebody.
The guy's a little metro-sexual.
We don't want to say anything behind his back.
I'm not saying, hey, whatever it is, it's all right.
There's nothing wrong with being Justin Trudeau.
But I'm just so sick of this stuff.
Are black people made of glass?
They won't break if somebody mocks them or pretends to be them or all that.
We're all in this together.
We're all here together.
We're all flawed people.
We all have funny things about us.
Our races make us funny.
Everything makes us funny.
We should be laughing at each other.
We should be imitating each other, mocking each other.
This is absurd.
This is just increasing the hate.
It increases the hate and increases the tension.
When you bring people into your circle, you start to make fun of them.
We always tease Knowles, and everybody says, why do you tease Knowles?
We tease him.
I tease him because I love him.
Ben teas him because he wants him dead.
You know, it's different motives.
But still, still, this is part of being the gang.
When you're in the gang, people are going to make fun of you.
People are going to imitate you.
People are going to do all this stuff.
It's like that's part of being a multi-ethnic country, a great big, beautiful country where we're here for our ideas and our freedom, not because of what color our face is.
Part of that is letting off steam with humor, and it's just absurd to let the left impose this Hannah Gadsby, whatever her name is, humorlessness on us with this kind of culture.
And, you know, I don't think, I think Justin Trudeau should be thrown out of office, but still, not for that.
Now I want to cover something that a story I'm calling Murder Most Democrat.
You remember that old Agatha Christie movie with, who was in it?
Oh, I can't remember now, but Margaret Rutherford, Margaret Rutherford.
She made a couple of Agatha Christie movies that are very funny and very entertaining.
One of them was called Murder Most Foul.
Well, this is Murder Most Democrat.
And I wanted to come back to it because I covered it when it first started, when it first started this guy, Ed Buck.
He's a prominent Democratic donor.
He has helped out, oh boy, he's helped out the governor, Gavin Newsom.
He's helped out Adam Schiff, my particular congressman, who I think is a McCarthyite, Ted Liu.
He's helped out a lot of money.
He's given a lot of thousands of dollars to these things.
And he has this nasty habit of having black men, black gay men, turn up dead in his West Hollywood apartment, right?
So the black LGBT community, God love them, has been saying, hey, this guy has a fetish for giving overdoses to his black lovers, for enticing people in.
And these are like the least of us.
These are homeless people he brings into his house and they die of overdoses.
And somehow, Ed Buck is never to blame.
Scratch your chin on that.
Why on earth is Ed Buck never to blame?
Well, finally, he has been arrested and charged with operating, not with murder, but with operating a drug house and providing methamphetamine to a 37-year-old man who suffered an overdose at his West Hollywood apartment.
Okay, this means that Ed Buck is now up on a charge that could cost them five years in the pokey.
That's what this means, which is not what you should be getting if you've in fact been killing people.
I mean, he seems to have, he's been accused of having, allegedly has, this weird fetish where he brings gay men into his apartment and he likes to dose them and sometimes they die.
And the question is, why has it taken years for the black LGBT community, and it's not just the blacks, it's also the gay, it's the gay community in general.
This is West Hollywood.
West Hollywood is gay central.
West Hollywood is to the gays what the jewelry district in New York is to the Hasidic Jews.
Okay, this is a place, I live here.
This is a place where you drive down the street, they have rainbow flags next to American flags.
You can look out the street and it does.
It looks like almost a ghetto.
I mean, there are streets here where everybody looks like he's gay.
That's the community.
And they're saying to the city, this is supposed to be big liberal city.
This is supposed to be big liberal California.
Hey, Just because this guy is a Democrat donor doesn't mean he gets to take guys off the street and they turn up dead and nothing happens to him.
And now they've got him on this minor charge because I think probably they just have to get him on something.
And I think it is, it's a story I covered two or three times before because it is absolutely disgusting that you can give a lot of money to Democrat Candidate.
You know, it is amazing to me.
It is amazing to me that over the last few years, while we've screamed about Russia collusion that didn't happen, while we've screamed about how Donald Trump is destroying our country, that the corruption that has come out about the Democrat Party, who is it?
My pal Michael Walsh is always saying it's not a party, it's a criminal enterprise.
I mean, the sex offenders, the Harvey Weinsteins, the guys in media, you know, they keep making stories about Roger Ailes, Roger Ailes, Roger Ailes.
Well, Roger Ailes may have been a lech if all these stories are true about him, then he may have been chasing women around the desk.
But that's one guy.
As always, they find the one conservative guy and they drive that story home.
But the Charlie Roses and all the other people who have been on the left, they've all been Democrats.
And this story is just, it has got to be, I mean, where is Adam Schiff?
Why isn't he talking about this?
Where is Gavin Newsome?
Why aren't these guys come forward and say, hey, this is something that has to be covered?
And the same is true with this damned abortion doctor.
What's his name?
Something like Ulrich Klopfer, who was burying the bodies of preserved, bagged fetuses, thousands of them, in his backyard, apparently without his wife knowing.
And so now, and Pete Buttigej, this guy operated in Pete Boutigez's territory in Indiana.
They found the bodies in Illinois, but he comes, he has been loath to say anything about it.
When he does, he comes out with this ridiculous statement.
Like everyone, I find that news out of Illinois extremely disturbing, and I think it's important that that be fully investigated.
I also hope that it doesn't get caught up in politics at a time when women need access to health care.
So he says, I hope it doesn't get caught up in politics.
What does that even mean?
What does it even mean?
I mean, is this or is this not a crime, a moment that speaks into the practice of abortion in the same way, in the same way that the Gosnell story did.
You know, Ross Duthot wrote a piece.
I was on morning radio in Chicago today with Dan and Amy, and they were quoting this beautiful, beautiful piece by Ross Duthot about this.
And he says, and he's talking about Pete Buttigeg, who keeps making biblical arguments for things that the Bible is obviously against.
And he says, the unapologetic grisliness of a Klopfer or Kermit Gosnell haunts a Budijegian abortion politics more than it does a safe, legal, rare triangulation, because it establishes the most visceral of contrasts, a contrast you can feel in your guts, right?
The Traffic Problem in Cities00:15:37
The contrast is between the mysticism required to believe that the right to life begins at birth and the cold and obvious reality that what our laws call a non-person can still become a corpse.
That's what somebody should be asking Pete Buttigieg.
If those are corpses in this guy's backyard, how come there weren't people when they were alive?
You know, this Democrat Party has a lot to answer for, and some of it is hidden away like Ed Buck, and some of it is in plain sight, like abortion.
Let me ask you this.
Are you the guy who they take a picture of and he doesn't open his mouth because he's afraid to smile?
Do not be that guy.
You do not have to be that guy.
You can get a photo-ready smile right now, starting right now, and it's easier than ever with clear aligners from Candid.
We forced Michael Knowles to use these, and he is now the most beautiful, still the most hated man in the world, but he looks great and his smile is great.
Candid's aligners can help straighten your teeth faster than traditional wire braces.
Treatment takes just six months on average.
An experienced orthodontist who is licensed in your state will create a custom treatment plan.
They'll show you a 3D preview so you can see how your teeth will look after you're done.
Candidates' aligners are comfortable, removal, completely invisible.
Candidates ships your aligners directly to you, so you don't have to dedicate an entire morning or afternoon going to the orthodontist.
Plus, they cost 65% less than braces.
And each aligner purchase candidate donates $25 to SmileTrain, which brings safe, free cleft-lipped and palate treatment to children around the globe.
Get your photo-ready smile by the holidays.
Go to candidco.com/slash clavin and use code claven to get the 75 bucks off.
No matter how many times you spell it, there is still no ease in clavin.
All right, we're going to stay on so you can hear our guest.
But come over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
That way you can get to be in the mailbag.
We had a great mailbag yesterday.
So many people with their problem solved.
You probably saw some of them skipping down the street and making that woohoo shrieking noise we always make here.
That can happen to you too if you subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month, lousy 100 bucks for the entire year, which I think is cheaper, but I can't do the math.
But you get the leftist tears tumbler.
How beautiful is that, right?
And that'll be worth it all.
Christopher F. Ruffo is a contributing editor of City Journal, which we were talking about before.
He's a documentary filmmaker, a research fellow at Discovery Institute Center on Wealth, Poverty, and Morality.
He has been writing some fascinating stuff at City Journal about the state of our cities and some of the new liberal approach to cities.
Christopher, how are you doing?
It's good to see you.
Very well.
How are you?
All right.
Thanks for coming on.
I just got back from New York, and everyone I talked to said to me, the quality of life in New York is going down.
And except for one liberal who said to me, look, the crime rate is still incredibly low, murders low, rapes low.
What's wrong with the quality of life in New York?
I thought it was slipping too.
Am I wrong?
Who's wrong here?
You know, I think in a way you're both right.
Obviously, if you look at it historically, since the 80s and 90s, crime has dropped and has basically stayed about half of what it was at its peak.
But the question is not really, is it as good as it was 30 years ago?
The question is, can it still be better?
And is it actually getting worse over the last few years?
And if you look at especially cities on the West Coast from Seattle, Washington down to Los Angeles, the answer is very clear.
It is getting worse.
And I think this is really happening because of a few things.
One is you have an addiction crisis from both heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamines combined with progressive policies that have really turned into a regime of permissiveness that has only compounded this problem.
And there's really a refusal to look at it straight in the face.
So you talk about, you talk about the new urbanists.
What do you mean?
What is that?
Who are those people?
Yeah, the new kind of new left urbanists are a new faction of the left in major cities that their goal is to essentially implement policies that reshape the physical infrastructure.
So for every problem, whether it's an economic problem, a cultural problem, a social problem, they think that there's a physical infrastructure solution.
So they want to do everything from build subway cars and trains and bike lanes.
And then they're even proposing that the federal and municipal governments take over all new housing construction to provide 10 million new public housing units in the next 10 years.
So these are folks that are kind of been on the left for a long time.
But if you look at like Jane Jacobs back in the 60s and 70s, she was really about the kind of social and cultural formation of cities.
These folks are adding a more authoritarian perspective where they say, if the problem's homelessness, build public housing.
If the problem's traffic, you know, build bike lanes.
If the problem's the environment, you know, ban cars.
So it seems like a solution in search of a problem.
And the problem is that two things.
I don't see those things really lining up.
I don't think that you can build your way out of a homelessness and addiction crisis.
And secondly, these things are enormously expensive.
And the greatest irony, though, is that there's so much passion about trains and subways as the kind of technology of the future when in reality, this is the technology of 100, 150 years ago.
There's nothing new here.
So when you shoot down solutions, do you have solutions of your own?
I mean, the homelessness here in LA is becoming obscene.
And I've asked numerous people on both the left and the right what they think the causes are and gotten numerous, very unsatisfying answers.
Do you have a viewpoint on this?
Do you have a viewpoint of what the problem is and how it can be solved?
Yeah, I do.
I think, you know, first of all, you have to look at, there are some things that we all know, right?
If you're extremely, if you have severe mental illness, like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, we've got to get the conservatorship laws put in place at the state and local levels.
So you can actually take people who, for example, might be suffering from schizophrenia, untreated, on the street, may also have a drug addiction on top of that.
You've got to get those people into facilities, off the street, and get them the care they need.
But the much larger population is the population of people addicted to heroin and methamphetamines.
You know, this is a little-known fact, but it's very important.
In King County, Washington, prosecutors and law enforcement estimate that at least 50% of the people who are homeless are addicted to heroin and fentanyl.
So right there is about 50% of the problem.
In Seattle, Washington, according to data from the county and the city, you also have 51% of people migrating to Seattle from areas outside the city.
So you have a huge part of the problem is addiction.
Another part of the problem is kind of a magnet effect, permissive policies, decriminalization policies, you know, kind of no strings attached benefit policies that draw in the problem.
And if you look at LA, where you are, according to the latest one-night count in January 2019, more than 20,000 people became homeless somewhere outside of Los Angeles County and then moved to basically set up camp within Los Angeles County.
So right there is a huge part of the problem.
And I think the solution is fairly simple.
One, you have to build, quickly build emergency shelter facilities.
San Diego built almost 1,000 beds in 60 days.
In Modesto, California, they built 400 beds in about just a week.
You can build these kind of temporary emergency shelters quickly.
Second, you can start enforcing the law, basically saying we have a place for you to go, but it's not okay to camp on the streets.
And then third, you have to really try to change the whole incentive structure to get people to make those choices where they're either going to enter shelter, enter services, reunite with family, or face the consequences.
Well, is there a right to be on the streets to people, are homeless people's rights violated when we take them forcibly off the streets?
Yeah, well, the Supreme Court has ruled on that.
I'm sorry, the 9th District has ruled on that in a court decision called Martin versus Boise that concluded it's unconstitutional to force people off the streets if you don't offer them a place to go.
And I actually think that there is some real kind of logic to that.
And I think that it I actually think that that makes sense in a way, in the sense that you can't tell people who have nothing, no place to go, no place to sleep.
you know, you have to get out of here.
I think that it really is compassionate.
It does make sense.
Both whatever kind of political persuasion you're from is to say we have constructed quick, kind of FEMA style emergency shelter facilities, and then you can start enforcing the law.
So on the one hand, I think you have to give people a place to shelter.
But on the other hand, I don't think that that means that you can let people do whatever they want on the streets.
I'm running out of time, but there's just one question.
I'm talking to Christopher Rufo, a contributing editor, City Journal, terrific magazine.
You can get it online, and it's really great.
You should listen to their podcast, 10 blocks.
But the traffic, I mean, here, obviously, the traffic is a joke.
There are streets here where they call them parking lots.
It is like a parking lot.
But I was just in New York where the traffic is now bad all day long.
Do these urbanists have a point that we need to eliminate cars entirely?
Yeah, that's one of their slogans.
One of their kind of most provocative slogans is ban cars.
And it comes from a kind of utopian environmentalist idea that cars, you know, I've heard people say that the personal automobile is the most destructive invention in human history.
I mean, there's a really extreme hatred of cars.
And, you know, I think their idea is that we can ban cars and replace it with kind of 19th century train technology and then bike lanes everywhere.
But the problem is in Seattle, Washington, I'm working on a new piece.
We've actually built hundreds of miles of bike lanes over the past 10 years, but bike commuting has actually gone down and it's never been more than 3% of all commuters.
So traffic is a problem that every politician says that they'll solve.
But I'm afraid that we just haven't invented the kind of creative ideas to truly solve it.
And in a world where 95% of commuters depend on their automobiles to get where they need to go and a finite amount of road space, there's going to be traffic.
I hate to break it to you.
There's no magic solutions.
Ah, rats.
All right.
Christopher Ruvo, read his stuff and City Journal.
It's good stuff.
Thank you so much for coming on.
We'll talk again.
Good to be with you.
All right.
Thanks.
All right.
The Clavenless weekend is just about upon us, which means this is my final, final reflection before all of you are plunged into despair, darkness, where there is great wailing, gnashing of teeth.
I hate the gnashing of teeth.
It really hurts your jaw.
But when I first started the show, it was a cultural show, and we found out, unfortunately, that there just weren't enough people who wanted to talk about the culture all the time.
And I had this feature at the end of the show called Stuff I Like, in which I talk about some of the great works that have affected me, some of the not great works that have affected me, some of the stuff that was going on now that I liked and just offered up stuff that I liked and hoped that people enjoyed it.
I stopped doing that because it got a little tiring and because I didn't feel that enough people were interested.
But I did think back about it, about what it was trying to say, what I was trying to say to people, which is simply this.
One of the reasons we talk about politics is that so we don't have to talk about politics.
Politics is very addictive and can be very destructive.
And as I always say, it makes you stupid because it means that you have to make binary choices about subjects that are filled with shades of gray.
And there's, look, that's something you have to do, but it's not something you want to be thinking about all the time.
You have politics, Democrat politics, free politics, because in a free country, you want to be thinking about other things.
You want to limit the power of the government so much that no matter what stupid thing they do, it won't do too much harm.
We have lost that because we have allowed the left-wing Supreme Court to rewrite the Constitution, to give the government almost unlimited power to interfere with our lives so that when some jerk like Tim Kane has some idea, we are in danger of having our lives manipulated and destroyed in ways that we don't want to happen.
But it is good to remember that we're talking about this so that we don't have to talk about it, that we're thinking about it, so that we don't have to think about it.
So let me give you one thing that I like.
My son Spencer sent this to me yesterday.
It's from 2014 and went triple platinum, but I had never heard this song before.
A great song by Andy Grammer called Honey, I'm Good.
And what I love about it is the incredible, just how catchy the tune is, how smooth the lyrics are.
And yet it's really a very serious and realistic story about a guy in a bar turning down that last drink so that he doesn't do something stupid and ruin his life.
It's just a really, really good song.
So I want you to take this message with you into the Clavenless weekend where you will be tempted, where you will want to drink yourself into oblivion to not have to experience my absence.
Suck up all the Clavenly goodness you can right now and hold that with you to maybe, maybe, maybe survive and come back on Monday.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
And here's Andy Grammer with Honey, I'm Good.
I've got somebody at home.
It's been a long night here.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Hey, if you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe.
And if you want to help spread the word, give us a five-star review and also tell your friends to subscribe too.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show, the Matt Walsh Show, and the Michael Knoll Show.
Thanks for listening.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Austin Stevens and directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
And our supervising producers are Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
Assistant Director, Pavel Wydowski.
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.
If you prefer facts over feelings, if you aren't offended by the brutal truth, if you can still laugh at the nuttiness filling our national news cycle, well, tune on in to the Ben Shapiro Show, where you'll get a whole lot of that and much more.