Ep. 817 – Oh, Comey Unfaithful skewers James Comey’s "sleazy weaselism" over FISA abuses, exposing Horowitz’s report of 17 errors favoring Trump’s opponents while media like CNN ignored systemic bias. The episode contrasts Comey’s hypocrisy with Schiff’s open partisanship, dismissing impeachment as a 22-month partisan scam amid Trump’s trade wins and USMCA labor shifts. It mocks Labour’s UK defeat under Corbyn as socialism’s collapse, framing Boris Johnson’s victory as a global realignment toward "new conservatism"—protectionist, welfare-adjacent, and nationalist—while critiquing corporate exploitation of foreign labor as modern slavery. The host ties this to feminism’s decline, blaming career-focused women for cultural degradation, before pivoting to censorship fears, promoting subscriptions to bypass tech monopolies. [Automatically generated summary]
Fascist anti-fascist demonstrators have taken to the streets of London to protest the fact Britain held a free and fair election and they lost.
Shouting slogans and strange accents that made them sound kind of gay, the gay-sounding protesters demanded that the results of the election be overturned because they reflected the will of the people instead of their will.
Not that there's anything wrong in being gay, by the way.
It's kind of strange to have an entire country where everyone sounds like that, but again, really, it's totally fine.
In fact, a country filled with gay-sounding fascists who call themselves anti-fascists and think they should wreak havoc when they lose elections might be kind of a fun place to visit, especially if you're like really stoned and everyone looks like a sparkly little gay Hitler.
What was I talking about?
Oh yeah, the British election was a massive defeat for the Labour Party in their policy of total economic destruction, national self-hatred, and virulent anti-Semitism.
It was a major victory for some orange-haired guy who says crazy things all the time.
So he's sort of like an English Donald Trump, except he went to Oxford and can recite Homer in Greek and sounds gay.
The Greek-speaking gay-sounding Trump is a supporter of Brexit, a plan to leave the EU, an organization dedicated to total economic destruction, national self-hatred, and virulent anti-Semitism.
So an electoral theme begins to emerge.
Many of the protesters felt cheated because the election was won by older, wiser voters instead of by spoiled young ignoramuses like themselves.
So they ran around the city committing acts of vandalism and violence to show how ready they are to govern the nation.
Many political observers here in the States have been watching the British election closely, feeling it may be a sort of gay-sounding preview of the 2020 election here.
Although one big difference is that no one here wants America to be dragged down by becoming part of a dying Europe.
Except, of course, the Democrats.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
Owen Benjamin's Fall00:03:28
It's a wonderful day, hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing!
Oh, hurrah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hurrah!
All right, here I am broadcasting in beautiful New York, where I am for the Christmas holidays.
Last week of the last Clavenly week before the Christmas holidays come along, but then, of course, you'll have Jesus, who's probably better than Clavin.
One of the gazillion ways in which politics makes us stupid is by obscuring the fact that good aims conflict.
Essentially, good things like free speech and capitalism come into conflict with other good things, like civil discourse and fair treatment of the less powerful.
Most of us, by nature and by philosophy, support one conflicting good more than the other.
And in the heat of politics, we often forget that compromise is not always a sin.
Now, I'm a freedom guy, first and foremost.
I'm always wary of restrictions on free speech, for example, because I don't think our elected officials are even a little tiny bit more wise or good than your run-of-the-mill steelworker or homemaker, and so they shouldn't be given the power to silence them.
But right now, my commitment to free speech conflicts with my commitment to another good, the good of free enterprise.
When a business essentially monopolizes a central means of communication, like Google or Twitter does, it becomes a power center like unto government itself.
And at that point, though the business may be technically exempt from the First Amendment, I'm in favor of forcing them to comply with American values of free expression.
The other day, Instagram and Facebook suspended the account of Owen Benjamin.
Benjamin was a right-wing comedian.
I had him on this show twice, I think.
And he was edgy and funny back then, pushing the envelope, as comedians do, but not really hateful.
Then, in my opinion, something terrible happened to him.
If I had to guess what it was, I would say he'd been on medication and stopped taking it, but that's just my guess.
In any case, he started spewing the ugliest anti-Semitic filth and lunatic conspiracy theories, often including utterly despicable attacks on my pal, Ben Shapiro.
If I have any sympathy for Owen, it's only in the sense that I believe he's in need of serious psychiatric treatment.
But that could be said of a lot of very, very bad people, so my sympathy is extremely limited.
I don't think the world will be any the worse for having less Owen Benjamin than, rather the opposite.
But this censorship worries me all the same.
We already know for a fact that the left would like to silence all those who disagree with them on the spacious grounds that disagreeing with them is somehow hateful.
And we know that Silicon Valley is leftist, and many there hate us conservatives so much they'll violate essential principles of Americanism to shut us up, especially if they think it will help Democrats beat Trump in the next election.
YouTube already restricts videos by Dennis Prager, as decent and civilized a conservative as ever lived, and they frequently even demonetize me, one of the nicest people I know.
These monopolistic corporations cannot be trusted with our free speech rights.
The time has come for government, yes, the government, to make some free speech laws governing search engines and social media.
These are not publishers with rights and responsibilities for their material.
They are platforms like the phone company that everyone should be able to use.
We should not give up our first and most important freedom on a capitalistic technicality.
We will be talking about more stuff, including these hilarious interviews with James Comey and Adam Schiff that shows just how far our press has gone bad.
Fisa Warrant Controversy00:16:27
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Also, Another Kingdom is now available to everybody.
And now we're doing some of the greatest episodes in the story.
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Another Kingdom is available to everybody.
So over the weekend, Clint Eastwood's new film, Richard Jewell, about this guy who was burned by the FBI and by the press.
He was accused of being a bomber when, in fact, he had been a heroic security guard who saved lives during the Olympics.
And the picture bombed, which was a little touching to me because it was noted that it was Clint Eastwood's worst bomb since True Crime, the movie he made based on my book.
And the only difference is True Crime was not one of Clint's best movies.
This is a really good movie, and I'm sorry to hear it bombed.
And of course the press had been attacking it relentlessly because it made them look bad and they felt it made them, it reminded people of how badly they're treating, how badly they're treating Donald Trump.
Speaking of which, speaking of which, I keep going through this Horowitz report, which just completely debunked the Steele dossier and the FBI FISA process with which they used to bug the phones and spy on four Americans associated with Donald Trump.
Now, Steele's, let's start with this.
Steele, this is the dossier that had all this OPPO research that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats paid for, APO research from Russian sources that had these ridiculous attacks on Donald Trump.
In the report, Horowitz says that Steele misstated and exaggerated the sources of his statement.
And he said the report was full of rumor and speculation.
And some of it was, he said it was word of mouth and hearsay, and some of it was even jokes that were taken seriously.
So it was completely debunked, except for stuff that everybody knew, like Carter Page took a trip to Russia.
That was in there, but everybody already knew that.
Everything in it was totally debunked.
Here's how it was covered by the press, especially CNN and MSNBC.
Your intel community has corroborated all of the details in there, the media.
Some of the subsequent content of the dossier we were able to corroborate in our intelligence community assessment, which from other sources in which we had very high confidence.
We know that with the FISA application, the relevant parts of Christopher Steele's dossier were corroborated.
If the application included information from the dossier, it would only be after the FBI had, in fact, corroborated information through its own investigation.
We also know that as time goes on, more and more parts of the Steele dossier get corroborated.
So when the president just refers to the speak dossier, that is false.
I don't think that is an accurate characterization for the entirety of the dossier.
Other investigators have corroborated part of the dossier.
Dossier has been corroborated by the intelligence community.
U.S. investigators have corroborated some of the allegations in that dossier, although we do know that parts of it have been corroborated.
It's not been corroborated, but it hasn't been disproven.
So that's the press.
And of course, they completely, completely blew this story as they blew the Russia story.
Funnily enough, blowing it in the same direction, in an anti-Trump direction, which I'm sure, I'm absolutely positive was just a coincidence, the coincidence being that they all happened to be a bunch of anti-Trump liars.
But here's the thing.
They're never going to apologize.
They keep talking about the way they're reporting on the Horowitz report makes it sound as if there was some there there.
And James Comey was on Chris the Chris Wallace show on Sunday.
And James Comey has now started a new school.
I call it the School of Sleazy Weaselism.
The School of Sleazy Weaselism is where you not only keep lying about what happened, you try to lie in such a way that it makes you sound not just like you're not a bad person.
He's trying to sound like he's actually our moral guide.
He's the North star of moral action.
So remember, Comey said that the FISA warrant process was absolutely fine, nothing wrong with it.
He said that the Steele dossier just played a small part in it, where it actually was the center of the dossier.
It was almost everything.
Just played a small part of the FISA warrant request, where it was actually a huge part of the Pfizer warrant request.
He called it essential to the FISA warrant request.
So Chris Wallace, in a fairly tough interview, I mean, I had some complaints about it, but it was a fairly tough interview.
He starts, he plays a cut of Horowitz being asked why there are these 17 errors and omissions that all go against Trump and Carter Page.
And these are things like lying to the judges, withholding exculpatory evidence, not telling the lawyers at the DOJ that this exculpatory evidence existed, so they didn't include it in the FISA warrant.
So he was asked, Horowitz was asked why they made these 17 mistakes, and Chris Wallace played that cut for James Comey.
He was asked how he explains it, Horowitz.
Is.
It's unclear what the motivations were.
On the one hand, gross incompetence, negligence.
On the other hand, intentionality.
Gross negligence, or they intended to do it.
They intended to lie to the FISA court.
You were in charge during a lot of this, sir.
And in fact, you signed the FISA applications.
Sure, I think I signed at least two or three of them.
He doesn't conclude that there was intentional misconduct by these career special agents.
He just said.
He says it's one of two things that he can't decide.
Gross negligence or it was intentional misconduct.
Well, I've read what he said.
I've read his report.
He says, we are not concluding that there was intentional misconduct by FBI.
Did you hear what he just said here?
I did.
I don't know the context of that.
He was asked specifically, how do you explain it?
And he said, gross negligence or intentionality.
Yeah, well, I'm sorry, he doesn't find intentionality, but that doesn't make it any less important.
As director, you are responsible for this.
I was responsible for this.
And if I were still there, I'd be doing what Chris Ray is doing, is figuring out, so how did this happen?
How, how, how did it happen?
Now, one thing that I didn't hear Chris Wallace say, and I was watching this on a plane, so it got interrupted a couple of times, but one of the things I did not hear Chris Wallace asked him is how do you explain that every single mistake went in one direction?
Say, how, how on earth did this happen?
This is the James Comey School of Sleazy Weaselism, because he will, he's like, it's like he doesn't hear it.
It's like, I don't know.
He was asked, Wallace asked him, were you vindicated?
And he said, yes, I was.
And then he played Horowitz saying he wasn't vindicated.
And he said, well, I think we're using the word in different ways.
It's like, yes, one is using it to mean vindicated, and the other is just practicing the James Comey School of Sleazy Weaselism.
So the thing is, in my personal opinion, Michael Horowitz fell down on the job to some degree here.
His research is thorough.
He actually gives you all this stuff.
But if you're doing an investigation, you have to draw some conclusions.
I think it's on you to draw some conclusions.
If I'm the prosecutor and I find that somebody came to you and sold you home insurance and told you that it was going to cover you if your house burned down, and then it turned out your house burned down and you looked at the insurance and said, no, it doesn't cover that.
And I said, well, I don't know why he told you that it would cover you if your house burned down.
I can't speculate as to his reasons.
That's absurd.
That is absurd.
17 errors, all of them based on getting the FISA court to give a warrant.
It is pretty clear that this was bias.
It is pretty clear that these were a bunch of guys who thought they had something or who thought they could destroy this guy or were looking for something to destroy this guy.
And Horowitz should have said so.
And Comey, practicing sleazy weaselism, is sneaking through that little opening, that little tiny opening that Horowitz left for him and shouldn't have left.
So Wallace should have hit him harder on that.
But Comey, I really believe he has convinced himself that he is the actual sanctimonious, you know, the actual high-level of moral person that he pretends to be in his sanctimonious way.
So this is the part that made news.
I don't think it should have.
When Wallace asked about the fact that Comey said, oh, the FISA process was fine.
It's nonsense to say anything was wrong with it.
And then Horowitz came out and said, you know, it was a mess.
It was absolutely a disaster.
Wallace asked him about that.
17 significant errors in the FISA process, and you say that it was handled in a thoughtful and appropriate way.
Yeah, he's right.
I was wrong.
I was overconfident in the procedures that the FBI and justice had built over 20 years.
I thought they were robust enough.
It's incredibly hard to get a FISA.
I was overconfident in those because he's right.
There was real sloppiness.
17 things that either should have been in the applications or at least discussed and characterized differently.
It was not acceptable.
And so he's right.
I was wrong.
But you make it sound like you're a bystander, an eyewitness.
You were the director of the FBI while a lot of this was going on, sir.
Sure.
I'm responsible for that.
That's why I'm telling you.
I was wrong.
I was overconfident as director in our procedures.
And it's important that a leader be accountable and transparent.
If I were still director, I'd be saying exactly the same thing that Chris Ray is saying, which is we are going to get to the bottom of this.
Because the most important question is, is it systemic?
Utter crap.
That is utter crap.
And I'll tell you why.
First, he says how hard, how terribly hard it is to get a FISA warrant.
In the entire 33-year period the FISA court has existed.
The FISA court has granted 33,942 warrants with only 12 denials.
That's a rejection rate of 0.03% or zero, basically, of the total request.
So they hand these things out like candy, like gumdrops, basically.
And this other thing that he is responsible for finding out if it's systemic.
Here's the thing.
They made rules for Pfizer warrants.
It doesn't matter what the rules are if you break the rules.
It doesn't matter what the rules are if you lie.
So either they lie on all the FISA warrants, that would be systemic, or they lied on this FISA warrant, which would be even worse, because this affected our free speech rights and affected an election.
I mean, everybody's talking about Russia meddling with our election when they took out a couple of Facebook ads.
This is meddling with our election.
This is the FBI meddling with our election.
And if our press weren't so corrupt, if it weren't, you know, they thought like Richard Jewell made them look bad.
They're much, much worse than that.
If they weren't so corrupt, this would be the story.
This is a major, major blow to civil liberties.
One of the true major blows to civil liberties in American history.
It really is.
This is really meddling with an election.
And this clown, this sleazy weasel, is basically telling you, oh, I had not, you know, I had nothing to do.
I was just the director of the FBI.
How did I know?
I have to say, I almost have more respect for Adam Schiff.
Comey has convinced himself and is trying to convince us that he is a moral person.
Schiff is just being a villain.
I actually have more respect for that.
Adam Schiff.
He's like, Richard III.
You know, Richard III says, well, I'm no good at being a lover, so I'm determined to be a villain.
Adam Schiff is like, well, we can't win, so I'm just going to be a villainous, terrible person.
George Stephanopoulos had him on and asked him about all this FISA nonsense, basically.
This is cut number four.
I certainly accept that two years later, 170 interviews later, and Tilbyan documents later, the Inspector General found things that we didn't know two years ago.
And I certainly concur with the Inspector General's conclusion that there need to be significant changes to the Pfizer process.
We just didn't have that evidence available two years ago.
But I think equally important, those that have made the argument, including many that are fond of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, that somehow this investigation was tainted from the start, improperly begun, driven by political bias, that it was all essentially a deep state conspiracy.
They were spying on the Trump campaign.
All of that was debunked by the Inspector General.
They're f ⁇ ing lying to your face!
Straight to your face!
Fing lying to you!
Or this guy's an idiot!
It's a complete lie.
It's a complete lie.
You know how we know it's a complete lie.
And if George Stephanopoulos were not a Democrat hack, he would have pointed this out.
You know how I'm always making fun of Devin Nunes' name?
Nunes knew.
That's not a joke about his name.
Nunes knew everything that was in the report because he was on that committee and he filed a memo saying that everything that the report said.
He filed the memo telling the Congress that everything that happened in the Horowitz report happened.
And Schiff filed a counter memo saying, no, it didn't.
So Schiff lied then, and he's lying now.
Well, how could I have possibly known?
Nunes knew, so he should have known.
And the fact that Schiff is such a liar, the fact that he's such an open villain, throws impeachment, this impeachment thing, into a whole new light.
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There are no easing payments.
I hope you were following that because I just make it look this easy.
Listen, the thing is, the narrative that we've been hearing from the press, or at least from the right-wing press, is that the impeachment, this impeachment process that's going forward, is bad news that is obscuring all the good news that Trump had last week, all the news of Trump's accomplishments.
New Trade Deal Revealed00:09:06
And let me just give you a list from the Washington Examiner of everything that happened just in one week in this Trump administration.
He got the agreement on the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal, the revised NAFTA.
And we'll try and talk about that a little bit more.
But first, he got a new budget, including more than $1.3 billion for a border wall that blocks a government shutdown.
House approval of the U.S. Space Force, a brand new branch of the military, government family leave that will be a model for a proposal for the public.
This is something that he's been working on for a long time.
Tentative agreement on trade with China.
It's kind of a truce in the trade war with China where we get some guarantees from the Chinese.
Approval of Trump's 50th federal appeals judge.
Confirmation of a new Food and Drug Administration chief, and the signing of that pro-Israel anti-Semitism executive order, which has the New York Times, a former newspaper, so in a lather because they know a lot of their readers are Jewish and will like this thing, that they've been explaining it away for four days.
There have been articles about the fact that it's not really a good thing, which it is.
There have been articles about it for four days in the New York Times.
So the idea is all these are obscured by the negative impeachment news.
And my question is: if this is a completely political, completely one-sided, completely partisan effort to overturn an election, is it really bad news for Trump?
Is it really historic in any way?
Isn't it just only historic in the fact that the Democrats have amped up their desire to overturn this election to a new level?
But it's not historic like it's a real impeachment.
There are no laws being broken.
He's not accused of having broken any laws.
Here's Trump talking about the way he feels about it, which I'm sure you already know.
It's a scam.
It's something that shouldn't be allowed.
And it's a very bad thing for our country.
And you're trivializing impeachment.
And I tell you what, someday there'll be a Democrat president and there'll be a Republican House, and I suspect they're going to remember it because when you do, when you use impeachment for absolutely nothing other than to try and get political gain.
Now, with that being said, my poll numbers, as you know, have gone through the roof.
Fundraising for the Republican Party has gone through the roof.
We're setting records.
Nobody's ever seen anything like it because the people are disgusted.
The people are absolutely disgusted.
Nobody's ever seen anything like this.
And I watched yesterday, I got to see quite a bit of it yesterday, and I watched these Democrats on the committee make fools out of themselves.
Absolute fools out of themselves.
The problem that the Democrats have is they have turned Trump into a flat-out truth teller.
Like Trump has this way of being a carney barker, of overstating everything, of everything.
You know, he says his polls have gone through the roof.
That's not true.
But his polls have risen about, his job approval rating has risen about 3%.
What I'm sure is true is that the donor base is going nuts.
I'm sure they're just funneling money to the GOP with this.
They must be furious, and the base must be totally lit up.
So I'm sure he's absolutely right about that.
But everything else he said is just basically true.
So if this is just a pure partisan effort, if this is just a pure partisan effort, is it really a blot on his presidency in any real way?
I mean, you can say he was impeached, but at this point, as he said, impeachment really means nothing.
Another win that Trump had this week, aside from the fact, oh, by the way, that the stock market has now just broken, just as I was coming in, broke another record, had another record day, which made me remember Paul Krugman's statement after Trump won and the markets dived.
Remember that?
And Paul Krugman in the New York Times said, when will they recover?
My first guess is never.
So I guess they gave him another Nobel Prize for economics.
But here's the other thing that happened this week.
Nancy Pelosi was at a friendly meeting, you know, a friendly interview where she had a moderator asking her questions.
And the moderator asked her, how come impeachment is going so why are you rushing the impeachment?
Here was her response.
One of the biggest criticisms of the process has been the speed at which the House Democrats are moving.
If this is, but seriously though, seriously.
It's been going on for 22 months, okay?
Two and a half years, actually.
There has been some criticism, though, I will say, about whether or not you should move forward before the end of the year or wait for the courts.
Why do you think now is the time to move?
Well, I think we're not moving with speed.
This, was it two and a half years ago that they initiated the Mueller investigation?
I feel the need.
The need for a speed.
Two and a half years.
She is admitting that this has nothing to do with Ukraine.
Two and a half years ago, they started the Mueller investigation.
That came a cropper, so they went to Ukraine.
This is why from the beginning, you know, I'm perfectly willing to criticize Trump when he's wrong.
I'm perfectly willing to say he needs to be impeached if he does something impeachable.
And I'm perfectly willing to say that he shouldn't have mentioned Joe Biden on that phone call, on the phone call with the Ukraine.
You know, it's kind of typical of Trump.
He went over, he stepped over a line, but it's only a line of politeness.
He could have easily just said, I want you to investigate corruption, including corruption, with burisma, and nobody would be able to say anything.
But the fact that he mentioned a political opponent was careless.
Okay, it's careless.
You impeach a president for that in a pig's eye, right?
But the fact that this has been going on for two and a half years and she admits it just shows that this whole thing is a scam.
Trump is absolutely right about it, which is the reason the minute it started.
I remember we were on the backstage show and everybody was saying, well, should he have said this?
Should he have mentioned Joe Biden?
And I just said, I don't care.
I don't care.
This is an attempt to overthrow an election.
And it's not even that at this point.
It's an attempt to gain political points, and I think it's costing him.
And what's really interesting about it, too, is that with this new NAFTA deal, the Democrats worked with Trump, and they got a lot of concessions.
They got a lot of concessions to get the deal done, as you would with a House that is majority Democrats.
And so some Republicans are complaining.
Here's Robert Lighthizer, who is Trump's negotiator, talking about the concessions he made and why he made them with the Democrats.
We had an election, and the Democrats won the House.
Number one.
Number two, it was always my plan, and I was criticized for this, as you know, it was always my plan that this should be a Trump trade policy.
And a Trump trade policy is going to get a lot of Democratic support.
Remember, most of these working people voted for the president of the United States.
These are not his enemies.
So what did we concede on?
We conceded on biologics.
Yes, that was a move away from what I wanted for sure.
But labor enforcement?
There's nothing about being against labor enforcement.
That's Republican.
The president wants Mexico to enforce its labor laws.
He doesn't want American manufacturing workers to have to compete with people who are operating in very difficult conditions.
See, this is, I actually agree with this.
I mean, some of the things in this bill, in this treaty, are very questionable.
Like, it requires a certain amount of cars to be manufactured in the U.S.
It's got some protectionism in there, which I've never really been fond of.
But we'll see how it works.
You know, we don't know whether these things, it's very complex.
Trade is a very complex thing.
But at one point, it says that the Mexicans have to pay workers $16 an hour.
In other words, it is not right for an American businessman who is living off the fat of the land, who is making money in America, who's living with the freedoms of America, who's living the good life in America, to be building factories in places where they treat their workers like slaves.
It's un-American to begin with.
It's un-American not just because he's moving his factory out of the country.
It's un-American because we don't treat workers like slaves.
And it's not fair to do that.
And to say, oh, well, you get a cheaper iPhone if you use Chinese slaves to manufacture it.
You know, come on.
You know, we talk about this country being built on Christian principles.
I don't think that that is a fair thing to do.
And I think the government can say we can make treaties like this about it.
On the other things, the one thing we can say about this, it's too soon to tell whether this is going to be better than NAFTA.
The Wall Street Journal says they think it's worse than NAFTA.
It's too soon to actually tell in its results and the way it's going to work.
But at least it's Trump's thing.
It is something he wanted.
And it's funny.
I think back to this conversation I had with Ben way back in the beginning of the administration.
We were in Dallas at the site where JFK was killed.
And Ben said to me, what do you think is the best thing that can happen?
And I laid out this thing where I said he'll cut taxes and the economy will go through the roof.
And then he'll start to do things that will drive you crazy.
And I'm sure a treaty like this, I haven't talked to Ben about it yet, but I'm sure a treaty like this, there are things about it that drive him crazy.
And I think the leave for women, which I'll talk about more later on, the parental leave for women probably drives Ben a little crazy.
And I have sympathy with that.
It's a Democrat thing.
It's a thing that Democrats would support.
Normally not a thing that you would get from a Republican.
But that is because there is a new conservative coalition.
And that's what I'll talk about in just a minute.
New Center Conservatism00:09:57
But first, I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, which will give you a moment to go to dailywire.com and subscribe, which you should be doing anyway, because we want your money.
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I just made that up.
Don't pay any attention.
See, this is what I mean.
If I said that, and we don't have your subscriptions, I'll be taken off the air.
Come on over to dailywire.com.
Who says things like that?
That's disgusting.
In this election in England, very important, obviously, not just to them, but also to us as a bellwether.
Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party, they just shattered Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party.
It's the biggest Conservative win since Margaret Thatcher gives them a huge majority, I think.
And Labour's defeat is the worst defeat since the 1930s.
And basically, it means that socialism is a dead issue for now.
So here's Boris Johnson making his victory speech.
To all those who voted for us for the first time, and those whose pencils may have wavered over the ballot, and who heard the voices of their parents and their grandparents whispering anxiously in their ears, I say thank you for the trust you have placed in us and in me.
And we will work round the clock to repay your trust and to deliver on your priorities with a parliament that works for you.
And then I want to speak also to those who did not vote for us or for me and who wanted and perhaps still want to remain in the EU.
And I want you to know that we in this one nation conservative government will never ignore your good and positive feelings of warmth and sympathy towards the other nations of Europe.
So there's, you know, the Prime Minister Boris Johnson reaching out to the other side, talking to Labour voters who may have voted Conservative for the first time.
Many, I'm sure, voted against Jeremy Corbyn as much as they voted for Boris Johnson and his folks.
But then there was an argument made by this leftist.
Not my Prime Minister!
Not my Prime Minister!
Fascist!
Not my Prime Minister!
You're not my Prime Minister!
Not my Prime Minister!
Fascist!
Fascist!
You're fascist, racist!
Sexist, fascist!
Sexist, racist!
That's wrong!
He makes a good point.
You know, when you put it that way, I see things totally differently as I'm backing up and running away.
It was like condensed leftism.
Not my prime minister, fascist, fascist.
It's like leftism just condensed to its basic arguments.
I hate you because you didn't do what I wanted and you did what you wanted.
It's like leftism is like a two-year-old.
It's the embodiment of a two-year-old.
But what's interesting to us is twofold.
First, there is this sort of parallel movement between the English and the Americans.
It's kind of like they had Thatcher and we had Reagan.
We had Bush and they had Majors.
We had Clinton, they had Tony Blair.
We do sort of seem to move in this kind of dance, this two pas deux, where we go in similar directions at similar times.
So it does, just as pure tea leaves, it does suggest that the Democrats are going too far to the left, that they've shot their wad, that they really are making people sit back and think like, no, that isn't what we meant.
You know, we meant like a little bit of welfare if we're a little bit of unemployment if we're out of work, but that's not, we're talking about paying for everything that we ever do.
We do like our freedoms, in fact.
But it also points, and this is more important, I think, for the moment, it points to this new conservatism, which is not the conservatism we're used to.
I mean, our conservatism was less government, more self-reliance, support the creators of wealth because the wealth trickles down.
But this is more like Henry Olson conservatism.
He claims, Henry Olson claims that this is the real Ronald Reagan conservatism, that Ronald Reagan believed in that safety net and those features that kept workers from being so afraid that they would sell their freedoms for free stuff.
This is the old argument of the road to serfdom by Hayek, you know, that you need some safety net, even though it's against your pure Ayn Randian principles.
You need that safety net so that people don't panic in downturns and will not throw their freedoms away like they have in Europe and like they did in Germany in the 30s when the economy was so bad.
You don't want people to do that.
There's an article in City Journal, Oliver Wiseman.
He says, Britain's two major parties now answer to very different sets of voters than they did before.
The conservative base has become more working class, older, and whiter.
The Labour Party's constituency is getting wealthier, younger, more metropolitan, and more ethnically diverse.
And that's important.
It's important that the conservatives are now supporting the working man, and the leftists are actually supporting the wealthy, which makes a lot of sense because socialism is good for the wealthy.
It's good for the powerful.
The people that eat guts are the middle class.
It destroys the middle class so that you only have the powerful and the poor.
That is what socialism does.
The conservative, this is going back to City Journal Oliver Wiseman, the Conservatives leaned into this realignment.
And not just by promising to get Brexit done, which is the other part of this election I haven't even talked about, but a set of modest spending pledges, in particular on health care, paired with an increase in the minimum wage and a tough stance on crime and immigration, revealed an understanding that the unoccupied center ground of British politics was not a fusion of social and economic liberalism, but something very different.
And of course, that bears a lot of comparison to what is happening here, that we now, on the conservative side, are dealing with a lot of working class people who want their entitlements in place, who want there to be a safety net that will catch them when there's a downturn, so that they don't panic.
And the other part of this, of course, is the nationalism.
This is a Brexit vote.
It means that they will have been, they will be out of the British will, if all goes well, be out of the EU by the end of January.
And so finally, the people are going to get what they want done.
And that's going to be really interesting because, first of all, it will give them back their freedom, their self-governance, but it will also be a sign.
Right now, the other nations of Europe are saying, oh, this Brexit thing caused so much trouble, we don't want any part of leaving the EU.
That's why the EU made it so hard on the British.
They didn't want other people to get the idea that they could leave.
But once they leave, and if it goes well, and it probably will go well, and Donald Trump will probably help them with a great trade deal.
But if it does go well, then the other nations of Europe, the other nations of the EU, are going to say, well, maybe we should leave as well.
So, you know, what we see here, like when we look at this with the maternal leave, when we look at concessions on the new NAFTA for unions that have Republicans nervous and me nervous.
I mean, I'm not saying that like I like all these things either, but we're looking at a new coalition.
And politics is a matter of winning, as Cocaine Mitch McConnell said.
Winners make policy, losers go home, and Donald Trump knows that.
And Donald Trump has a lot of liberal leanings.
He's been a Democrat most of his life.
He has a lot of heart for the worker.
He has a lot of heart for the common guy.
And even though he's a billionaire.
So what we're seeing is a new thing.
And it's going to be difficult.
One of the reasons so many people on the right, like at the National Review, have thrown up their hands in horror at Donald Trump is not just the way he comes across, not just the way he talks, but they know it means that the kind of conservatism they supported may be over for a long time to come.
We'll see, because there also is, you know, there is some new, more left-wing aspects to the new conservatism.
Protectionism is very left-wing and this leave for women, very left-wing.
But constitutionalism remains, low regs, low taxes, all very right-wing.
Patriotism, also basically now a right-wing principle.
Protections for religious people, also a right-wing principle.
So look, you know, as I said at the beginning of this, politics, especially on the radio, especially when you're listening to talk radio or Fox News or all this stuff, there's always the sense that you should never compromise.
There's always a sense that you should never roll with the punches.
You should never go with the flow.
But that's what democracy is.
I mean, that's basically what democracy is.
And our friends on the left, well, forget about the leftists.
Forget about the leftists.
But think about for a minute of those people who are a little left of center, who are liberals.
You know, they have things to say.
They have complaints to make that are justified.
They point out injustices that are really there.
And so this may be a truly good thing in that it may create a new center that will survive things like the change in demographics, that will survive downturns in the economy, that will give us a new kind of conservatism that will have things in it that old-fashioned conservatives like me may not like, but may give a new conservative to a new generation that will hold on to it.
Thinking About Women00:04:53
And that would be a very good thing, and that would be a triumph of the Trump revolution.
I want to end with a final reflection.
I've been thinking a lot during this Advent series.
I've been thinking, Advent season, I've been thinking a lot of Mary and the role of mothers.
And I had this interesting thing because my wife was in New York a week ahead of me, and so we were separated for a week.
And we both had the same, noticed the same thing.
I was in church when I started to notice the intense importance of the love that mothers give their children, because you sit there and you see a child who has glommed onto his mother, a mother who is 100% there for her child, and you realize they are receiving something that is, how can I put it, it's priceless.
That people who have it, I did not necessarily have it, and people who have it have an advantage in life that other people don't have.
It is something that will make them solid their whole life long.
And people who don't have that instantaneous, deep connection with their mother in the first few years of their life never get over it, or if they do get over it, they have to work incredibly hard.
And I was thinking about that, about how what a beautiful thing that is.
And then last night on my way back to my hotel, I stopped in a bar for a glass of wine.
One of my true pleasures in life is sitting in a bar with a glass of wine and watching football on TV.
So I thought I would do that before I went to bed.
And I stopped into this very nice but basically empty bar where there was a nice girl behind the bar tending bar who looked like she was in her 20s.
And they were playing the football on TV, but they were playing rap music.
They were playing rap music on the speakers, on the audio.
And once again, I don't listen to this music.
Once again, I was absolutely bowled over by the vileness of it, by the filth of the language, the repeated use of the F-word, which was just blaring.
And the treatment of women, the treatment of women as objects, of basically things that were there for the pleasure of men.
And I was watching, because a couple of other young women came in with their boyfriends or with their escorts in any case.
And I was watching them because when there's a beat and you're a young girl, women move to the music and they were sort of doing that, but also sort of not.
I thought I sensed a little discomfort.
I wish I had been able to ask them how they felt about having this tripe come over that really was, I mean, I would have left if I'd been with my wife, but I couldn't figure out a way to ask them without being creepy.
And I was thinking that, you know, there is a reason that feminism rose up in the 18th century.
I mean, there really is.
Women lost a lot of their home industry that gave them economic power and economic meaning in their life because those home industries like making clothing became factory-based.
And I'm hoping some of that will come back now with the computer age where you can work out of your home.
But the other thing is the fact that children live longer, which is a wonderful thing, also reduces the value of women as producers of children, right?
Because before you needed 12 children just to get two.
Now you have two children, you have a very good chance that they will live.
And so that really means that the work of motherhood has become less economically urgent, that you can do it less.
And that has a funny effect.
Of course, children living is a wonderful thing, but it has a funny effect of making women, the fact of motherhood less economically viable.
And so you're thrown back on your values.
Technology does this.
It sometimes makes it possible for you to do things that are against your values without consequence.
And so you're thrown back on asking yourself whether your values were good in the first place.
And I think women have been sold a bill of goods by feminism.
I think that they've been told that work, going to work in an office, for instance, is more important.
Leaning in like men do when they work is more important than this motherhood job, which I think is the most important job.
And so it's a good thing in the same way, it's a good thing for employers to give leave to mothers who have children.
But it sends the message that the employers, that the work a woman does for her employee is their first job and they're allowed to go home for a little while to take care of this other job when really employers are there to employ men so that men can pay for women to do the thing that they do best and most importantly, which is raising children.
And I think that they've been sold a bill of goods.
I think that without motherhood as their center, I think women become these objects that are reflected in rap songs.
And I think that for women to have to sit and listen to that in a public place, listen, somewhere between acceptance of that and censorship, there's got to be a place where it simply becomes unacceptable.
And maybe the fact that one of these songs was by Kanye West, and I'm sure you know what song it was.
It's called something like I Love That or I Love It.
Maybe the fact that one of these songs was by Kanye West and Kanye West has become a Christian who has denounced some of his own work.
Maybe that shows that we are on a trend where this will become unacceptable as it should.
Andrew Clavin's Perspective00:01:26
And then you can censor it without giving government too much power.
I got to stop there.
I will be back tomorrow, last of the Clavin weeks before the end of the year.
So you want to suck up as much Clavin-y goodness as you can.
And I am Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Oh, hooray!
Hooray!
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The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Austin Stevens and directed by Mike Joyner.
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