Megyn Kelly and Andrew Clavin dismantle Biden’s $600 billion student debt cancellation as a legally dubious, inflation-fueling power grab benefiting lawyers and elites while punishing taxpayers, citing Pelosi’s 2021 denials of executive authority. They expose the policy’s hypocrisy—excluding low earners, rewarding credentialism—and link it to broader socialist erosion of contract law, comparing it to no-fault divorce. Clavin warns Trump’s legal battles risk escalating polarization, framing Garland’s Mar-a-Lago raid as a politically weaponized overreach akin to Central American instability, while urging conservatives to avoid revolutionary chaos and instead rebuild tradition through self-education in classical texts. The episode ends with a call to arms: mastering Western thought is the only antidote to ideological corruption. [Automatically generated summary]
Joining me now, one of my favorite guests, one of the most brilliant minds alive today.
Andrew Clavin, host of the Andrew Clavin Show for the Daily Wire.
So happy to have you back, Andrew.
Thanks for being here.
It's great to see you, Megan.
Can we just start with this?
It's such a joke.
I mean, it's like, I love the names that they give it.
It's like forgiveness.
Oh, who's not pro-forgiveness?
You know, this policy works very simple.
You take out a loan and then you pay it back.
with interest.
That's how it goes.
It's how it's gone from the beginning of time up until this guy was facing a midterm prospect that he didn't like.
And suddenly, in the way Barack Obama took out his pen and his phone and did things on illegal immigration that he said he couldn't have done for months and months prior, did something he and Nancy Pelosi and others, including in the Obama administration, have all said he does not have the power to do, which is just erased debt, which essentially means transferring it onto the rest of us.
What do you make of it?
Oh, economically, obviously, it's horrible, but that's not the thing that bothers me the most.
I mean, they're saying it's going to cost, it could cost up to $600 billion, which is just fuel on the fire of inflation.
But it really is the moral part of it that bothers me.
And it bothers me on a lot of different levels.
The most basic thing in the world is you borrow money, you pay it back.
I mean, that is one of the most basic obligations.
It is lawless to just sweep it away with a wave of your hand.
This is not a congressional act.
This is not a law that's been changed.
It's just a decision by one kingly chap who happens to be in the White House.
And I don't see how it can withstand any kind of judicial scrutiny, any kind of moral scrutiny.
And it's just so wicked at that level.
It's wicked to say you can borrow money, but you don't have to pay it back.
And it's wicked to say it to anybody when Bernie Sanders says, well, they do it to corporations.
Well, don't do it to corporations either.
I mean, when you borrow money, you should pay it back.
But it's also terrible in the sense that it is subsidizing this credentialized society, which has rendered, among other things, has rendered our press corrupt and idiotic.
I mean, in the old days when you were a reporter, you were probably a guy without a college education, but who was smart and who could write.
And you probably had a bit of a chip on your shoulder and you wanted to take down anybody with power.
And that was a good thing.
You didn't care if he was Republican or Democrat.
I was a reporter, you know, in a small town newspaper.
I worked with leftists.
I worked with right-wingers.
All we wanted to do was make powerful people look bad.
But once you started going to journalism school, once you started credentializing reporters, they became part of the ruling class.
And so they support whatever supports the ruling class.
The reporters you see now are not tough guy journalists with their snap brim hats and their press cards in the band.
These are guys who are aspiring to be the people that they cover.
And you also have people who don't know anything, but they have their credentials.
I mean, we all remember Obama's aide, Ben Rhodes, telling the New York Times, frankly, you guys don't know anything, so we could sell you anything we wanted.
You don't know anything because you're children.
And meanwhile, those children can storm into the offices of the editor-in-chief and tell them the way they want things covered because that's the way they were taught in college.
All of that is being subsidized by the government to cover up the fact that it actually has made people more incompetent.
It has actually made people's lives worse.
And finally, why is college so expensive?
It hasn't gotten more expensive because the professors are just so brilliant and really are educating our children at new levels.
It's gotten so expensive because of these layers upon layers of administration, many of them with briefs like diversity or finding rooting out bias.
And they also make our lives worse and they make college life worse.
You pay somebody hundreds of thousands of dollars to find bias, the one thing you can bet is they're not going to find no bias.
That's not what's going to happen because their job depends on finding bias.
It depends on stirring up trouble.
I've had at least one riot start because of me giving a speech at a college.
I've had people vandalize the places where I was going to speak.
And every single time, people who incited that violence were not the students.
It was not radical snowflakes who just got it into their heads that they had to take me down.
It was always flyers that were sent to them by the administration, pulling things I had said out of context to make me sound hateful and small-minded and cruel.
And that stirred the students up.
So it really is funding.
What we now have is government funding people who want to be part of the ruling class and then get jobs in the culture.
You have government funding these layers of administrative aides who do nothing but basically condone left-wing points of view, the kind of thing you were just talking about, about people condemning each other for their races.
And then finally, you have government subsidizing dishonesty, taking out loans and not paying them back.
It's a moral disaster.
It really is.
I think it may well be the worst thing this administration has done up there with its chaotic retreat from Afghanistan.
There's so much in there I want to talk about.
I really want to get to your thoughts about colleges and universities and the ruling class and what they're teaching now, because you're the best read person ever.
So how do we get like that without going to college is one of my questions.
But let's table that for right now because I want to stay on the hard news before we get to the more philosophical questions.
There was a report in March 2022 via the Bureau of Labor.
The unemployment rate right now for people who have a bachelor's degree or higher, the people who are getting this quote, forgiveness, is the lowest of any group.
It's 2.2%.
Lowest.
The unemployment rate for people 25 years and older who only have a high school degree is 4.5%.
They will be paying for the other group.
So the people who, the working class, who Biden said yesterday, this is for the working class.
No, it isn't.
That's not true.
The working class is going to be paying off the loans of the so-called upper class or upper middle class.
This helps people, families, it could be just a couple that makes up to $250,000 a year that have advanced degrees from Wharton.
They can get this relief.
Why should some trucker listening to us right now on Sirius XM have to pay for those two?
Well, you get what you vote for, is all I can say.
I mean, listen, I have two sons-in-law who are attorneys.
Both of them have had college debt, and I'm looking forward to Uber drivers paying off their college debt because that is exactly what's going to happen.
You know, it is a remarkable thing, and it wouldn't happen if our press weren't so corrupt, but it's a remarkable thing that the Democrats and socialists in general have repeatedly been able to sell socialism to the people it hurts most.
Socialism, every time it's put into operation, and even when it's only put into operation piecemeal, like we're doing it here, it eliminates the middle class.
I mean, they've got $80 billion to send to the IRS for new auditors.
Who do you think they're going to be going after?
Jeff Bezos isn't losing any sleep about that.
But people who make $200,000 to $400,000 are definitely going to get hit because that's where the money is.
So if you're making $70,000, $60,000, you can be sold on the idea that those people are rich.
But if they were rich, they wouldn't have to worry about the IRS because they could dodge the payments.
What happens is it's the middle class that goes.
It's the people, the Uber drivers are going to lose their money paying for the college educated.
The college educated are going to lose their money being audited by the IRS.
And ultimately, what socialism always does is it leaves you two classes instead of a step of classes, several steps of classes.
All it leaves is the poor and the powerful on whom they depend.
And that works really well for dictators.
It works really well for socialists, but it doesn't work well for the rest of the country.
The thing about capitalism is you can always point to the unfairness of capitalism.
And life is unfair.
There's no question about it.
But it's a graded unfairness.
There are people who are at the bottom, but there are also steps upwards, and you can move up those steps through capitalism.
The more the government takes over, the more they pay for things, the more that middle class has to be sucked dry of its money to keep those payments afloat.
And the more that middle class disappears, the more you have a poor class dependent on a powerful class.
And that is exactly what the Biden plan is doing.
You can see it.
I mean, you can see it.
The IRS agents are there to take out the upper middle class.
And these loan transfers are there to basically take out the lower class, giving their money to the upper middle class who will then be taxed, will have it taxed away.
And so it really is a disturbing idea that people are so gullible that they can be ginned up emotionally by cultural issues and let their freedoms be taken away.
The government is never ever paying for something.
It's always buying.
It is always buying something.
There's nothing, there's no such thing as free.
The word free is not an English word.
It doesn't describe any realistic thing except maybe the moon and the stars are free to look at.
But nothing else is free.
And so when the government tells you free health care, your first question should be, what's it going to cost me?
And what it's going to cost you is your independence.
That's so true.
You know, the Charles C.W. Cook of National Review is pointing out, the guy who paid off his loans yesterday is not helped by this, right?
The guy who's taking out loans tomorrow is not helped by this.
But think if you were in that first category.
You paid off your loans, you worked hard, you paid them off yesterday.
If you had just waited, that's $10,000, potentially 20, that you could have done something else with.
I mean, you could have gone and had a grand old party.
I mean, just imagine like the penalty to those people for being these stupid chumps who paid their bills.
That's the lesson Joe Biden would like America to learn.
He was asked just a bit about this by reporters.
Here's a bit of how that went.
Listen to this.
Is this unfair to people who paid their student loans or chose not to take out loans?
Is it fair to people who, in fact, do not own multi-billion dollar businesses if she wants these guys to give them all the tax things?
Is that fair?
What do you think?
What about people who pay their loans, though, struggle to pay their loans and now others don't have to?
Yeah, so it's a non-sequitur.
It's a dodge, right?
It's just corporations got tax breaks.
Bye.
It's not a dodge.
It's the dodge.
It's what they always do.
It's the idea that some people are rich.
You're supposed to resent them.
And by resenting them, you let the government do whatever they do in the name of taking them down.
The response that Elizabeth Warren gave when somebody said, you know, am I going to get my money back because I paid up my loan?
She basically disdainfully said, no, you know, absolutely not.
That punishment for honesty, that punishment for hard work is really part of the plan.
It's always been part of the plan.
I mean, the idea that people should be industrious, competitive, that they should want to succeed, that they should get up a little early in the morning, that they should want their kids to do better than they do.
Those are all things that get in the way of power for the powerful.
And, you know, the people who want power, they don't think they want it just like a drug.
They think they want it because they're going to do such wonderful things with it.
You know, they're gathering together in Davos talking about, you know, they're flying their private jets to Davos so they can talk about how we shouldn't drive our Volkswagens.
And then basically they, yeah, exactly.
They point to the guy who is a little bit over us.
The guy is a little bit richer than we are, and say, oh, you know, he's cheating you.
But it's only, it's always them.
It always is them because our independence, which leads to good behavior, our independence, which leads to hard work, our independence, which leads to paying off our debts, all those things get in their way.
They do not want our good behavior.
They're punishing our good behavior on purpose.
When you punish something, they get less of it.
And that's what they want.
They are.
They are definitely teaching new lessons.
And they're exactly the wrong lessons when it comes to integrity, honor, contract law.
I mean, you try this, try doing this with any other loan, see how it works out.
The question of whether this is just step one, they always want more, you say, they always want more.
And already we're hearing that.
I mean, they're open about it.
I said in the intro, they're not happy.
The Democrats aren't celebrating this.
They're mad that the numbers as small as it is.
10,000 per person is not enough.
Could be up to 20, still not enough.
And here's a little montage of some of that reaction, Sat 3.
Well, I keep fighting for more.
Of course, I will.
So, respectfully, Uncle Joe, because I do love you, but you have not needed my money in two years.
More than two years.
So, why do I have to give you anything?
What this is telling us is two things.
Number one, Biden does have the power to cancel all federal student loan debt.
He's just choosing not to.
10K is an arbitrary number.
It could be 65,000.
It could be 80,000.
It needs to be all of these.
Him canceling some student loan debt is important.
We need more.
Every penny of student debt should be erased because college is a public good and it should be free.
This is like iconic and truly historic.
I know a lot of us wanted more, but I'm going to take what I can get.
Why does everyone who comments in that way look the same, right?
They all like, I'm sorry.
It's not nice, but they look like they could have used a turn through hair and makeup before they went on screen.
I'm just going to say it.
They also have those big bright eyes and that weird fascist smile.
Have you noticed this?
All these fascists, they have that weird, dreamy smile on their face, kind of bright eyes.
It's very strange.
I think they may be possessed.
I'm not saying they are.
I'm just saying that they may be possessed.
I love it.
It's like it's the distinction between the people who work and the people who loaf.
You know, it's like, oh, you just want the degree because you want to hang in the right cocktail party circus.
You want to impress people with the letters after your name, but you don't want to do the work that comes with that degree that would require you to pay off the loans that came with that degree.
You want me to pay for it.
You want Andrew to pay for it.
You want the trucker to pay for it.
And you want to sit back there and say everything should be free because it's what's best for America.
So they'll look down at that same trucker who doesn't have a college degree who just paid off theirs, right?
Can't Fix Talent00:04:37
You know, I believe that so much of the misery that comes out of politics comes out of this from the simple fact that human beings have a very sharp sense of justice and fairness, but the world is totally unfair.
And that allows politicians to point to natural unfairness, the fact that LeBron James can play basketball and I can't, which is just naturally unfair, and then say, therefore, I am going to commit an act of unfairness.
I'm going to force LeBron James to play with one hand tied behind his back so Clavin can compete with him on the court.
And of course, life just gets worse and worse.
Basketball gets worse and worse because he got me out there instead of LeBron James.
If you want excellence, you have to accept a bit of the unfairness of life because not only is life unfair, but unfairness is life.
It's the differences between us that make for competitiveness.
It's the differences between us that make for marriages.
It's the difference between us that makes for creativity.
All of that unfairness feeds into the actual lifting of humankind.
So this kind of idea that you can eliminate all unfairness is where the misery comes from.
And these guys have what even, you know, even welfare workers talk about welfare psychopathology.
They talk about people going welfare insane where they begin to believe that they deserve someone else's money.
And that is the fact that you have the money.
Why don't I have the money?
And the idea, well, maybe I worked harder.
Maybe I was luckier.
Maybe I got born in a nicer place than you did.
All of those things are unfair, but the government can't fix them.
It can't fix the past.
It can't fix the present.
It can't fix anything.
All it can do is treat everybody equally and let people rise as they will.
And that is what we've gotten away from.
That was kind of the idea, the basic idea of the country, that the government to keep its hands to itself and let each person rise and fall on his own work and his own merit.
And that idea is being crushed under this idea that somehow, somehow, the government is going to make everything fair.
It can't be done.
And the fact that we're helpless to do it is something that the press will never talk about.
They never talk about the fact that you just can't do it.
You can't fix the fact that there used to be slavery.
You can't fix the fact that some people win and some people lose.
You can't fix the fact that some people have talent or better looking than other people.
All of those things are unfixable.
And so when the government promises to fix them, hold on to your wallet because they're coming for your dough and they're not going to be able to do it.
I may say, though, you can fix the fact that you do not look good before you post your Instagram video.
You can, I'm telling you.
Just a little bit.
Honestly, my friends have been talking to me.
So over when since I've gone independent, I don't work for a channel.
I get a hair person who comes every other day, but I do my own makeup.
And my friends have been like, MK, you're doing a good job on your makeup.
Did you learn that from all your years sitting in the makeup chair?
And I said, no, I followed some twit on YouTube.
She was actually very interesting.
She showed me how to do it.
I mean, obviously some random video and I learned just like anybody else can learn.
I'm just saying it's a small point, but it's indicative of a larger one, which is a little effort goes a long way.
And yes, you might choose to put your efforts into getting a college degree or a law school degree or an advanced degree of some kind and then work your ass off because you want to make a lot of money.
That's important to you.
Okay, that's fine.
Then you don't get to turn around and say, I want somebody to pay off all my loans.
I'm mad that I do this.
But to sit as somebody who makes a different choice who says, I want to sit on my couch.
I love watching reruns and I want to sit here with my chips and my beer and I don't really want to work very hard.
I get it.
But you can't then be resentful of the other people and think that you're entitled to something.
Everybody sacrifices, right?
That person's got a lot more fun time, free time, relaxation time, probably a lot less stress in his life than the people in the first category.
Everything's a trade-off, right?
Why is like the fact that you're making more money than I am necessarily an inequity that needs to be solved?
How about the people who have greater joy and relaxation in their lives because they're not stressed out all the time?
What government authority is going to solve that for me, right?
Like we could take this to an insane, nonsensical degree.
Well, you know, not only that, you know, no one ever asks the question.
It's kind of amazing.
No socialist ever asked the question, where does money come from?
It's like, you know, kids not wanting to know where children come from.
They never ask that question.
Where does the money come from?
Why?
Why does everybody in America richer than everybody everywhere else?
Even the poor in America are still richer than the poor in other countries.
Where does that come from?
They never ask.
And it kind of is strange that this kind of willed ignorance is spread through the media.
People Don't Question Basic Things00:05:08
It is encouraged by the media.
And nobody ever says, stops.
Well, you know what?
The one person who does talk about it is Alexandria Casey-Cortez.
She's the one person who says, I don't care where it comes from.
I don't care.
If we can spend it on the military, we can spend it on everything.
You know, she just basically is open, openly socialist.
I don't care where it comes from.
Bernie Sanders says it too.
They live in this fantasy where money, you know, you just print it and there's more of it and prices will never go up.
And it has nothing, you know, that inflation has nothing to do with the fact that we've been printing money like crazy for 10 years.
It is really weird that people don't question basic things like that.
And while they're sitting on their couch, while they're playing video games all day, and while they're saying, send me the money, nobody ever says, where does that money come from?
Who do I thank?
No, it's just a sense of entitlement.
Just raw entitlement.
It's so unattractive.
Weakness, apathy, laziness, grossly unattractive.
In the meantime, there is a real question about whether this president can do that, can do this in the first place.
And you need look no further than Nancy Pelosi, who's on record is raising this very question.
Here she was in July of 2021 saying, Biden doesn't have this authority.
Watch.
People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness.
He does not.
He can postpone.
He can delay, but he does not have that power.
That has to be an act of Congress.
The president can't do it.
So that's not even a discussion.
Not everybody realizes that.
Oh, really?
Listen to her now.
Tweet from Nancy.
At POTUS's, bold action is a strong step in Democrats' fight to expand access to higher education.
Strong step, bold action.
Really?
What happened to he can't?
By delivering historic targeted student debt relief to millions of borrowers, more working families will be able to meet their kitchen table needs as they recover from the pandemic.
What happened to he does not have the power.
He can postpone, he can delay, but he does not have the power absent an act of Congress.
Well, maybe, maybe it's that he's using this pandemic relief valve as the excuse to be able to do it.
He's saying, you know, this has given me extraordinary emergency powers and that's how I'm sort of getting this power.
Well, as far as I recall, the pandemic was underway in July of 2021 when Nancy Pelosi said, he doesn't have the power.
It doesn't exist.
And so this will be challenged in court.
And it's very likely to be struck down, this executive overreach.
I actually, I'm not at all confident it's going to stand.
And I'll tell you, I don't know if it does stand, how we recover exactly.
I'm not, I think this is like a deeply, this is a deep tear at our basic principles.
That's part of the fabric that was holding us together.
Rule of law, contracts, obligations that you undertake willingly and then must live up to.
That is the way, you know, you're the lawyer, so I didn't want to go off about that, but it just seems to me that contract law is a kind of sacred vow between two people.
I mean, obviously, if you're making a legal contract, that's one thing.
But if you make a legal contract, isn't that a kind of part of the sacred relationships of freedom, one of the sacred relationships of freedom, that if you and I enter into an agreement together and sign that agreement, put our signatures on that agreement, that agreement stands.
If I haven't cheated you in some way, that agreement stands.
And so I don't understand.
That's the part, the moral part of it that just kind of baffles me.
I don't understand where the president just says, oh, yeah, forget that, forget that agreement.
It's kind of like no-fault divorce.
I've always thought, like, is there really such a thing as no-fault divorce?
I mean, if you have a vow that you are going to live together forever, isn't there some kind of fault that isn't somebody at fault when those vows collapse?
I think that war on contract law is part of the war on freedom.
You know, it just seems to me, again, you're the lawyer here, so I don't want to step on your territory, but it just seems to me that contract law is kind of sacred.
It's not just something you study in law school.
It actually is one of the binding relationships between two free human beings.
And to just kind of crush that with a wave of your hand seems incredibly morally dangerous.
But then again, I'm not sure they care.
And I almost feel like he's our fiduciary.
This is our debt.
This is owed to us, the American taxpayers.
He's our fiduciary, Joe Biden is.
He's in charge of managing this debt, among other things.
And he doesn't have our consent to just write it off.
We didn't agree to that.
We're owed the money.
We want the money.
And if he doesn't make them pay back the money, we have to pay the money.
And we didn't agree to that.
You know, there's a reason he doesn't have that power.
So it's another lane of sort of legal reasoning that should stop him from doing this morally, yes, but also as a matter of law, he should be challenged.
I'm not at all sure that he will win.
He's lost several of these attempts at overreach under the COVID emergency release valve.
January 6th's Dangerous Legacy00:10:47
This could just be the latest in an effort to appease his base, again, right before the midterms, as the Democrats creep closer to doing better than they were, to almost equaling Republicans in the generic congressional ballot, which we'll get to in just a bit.
By the way, the Department of Education also ruled in 2021, quote, the president does not have the statutory authority to provide blanket or mass cancellation, compromise, discharge, or forgiveness of student loan principal balances and or to materially modify the repayment amounts or terms thereof.
That's exactly what he just did.
This is a problem.
And you've got one of the thing I was going to mention is Jason Furman, he was the former chair of Council of Economic Advisors under President Obama, Joe Biden's old boss.
And he pointed out a couple things.
Number one, pouring roughly half a trillion dollars of gasoline on the inflationary fire that's already burning is reckless.
Number two, why design a policy that would provide up to $40,000 to a married couple making $249,000?
Why include law and business school students if you want us to believe this is about the construction worker making 38 grand?
And so even people from his former administration are saying, this makes no sense.
It's unfair.
It's boneheaded.
And it's obviously the messaging full of lies.
Okay.
So I want to talk to you just for a bit about the raid.
You know, still, I think Republicans are very fired up about this issue.
But I also think that Trump being back in the news to the extent he has been for the past month has been a good thing politically for Democrats.
As much as it fires up the base to see Trump persecuted yet, yet again, making no comment on whether he has records he shouldn't have.
The guy, it's a string of persecutions against him.
It's an unprecedented move.
It wasn't warranted.
It wasn't justified.
And it shouldn't have been done.
But my point is, I think the Democrats and the media are loving having him back in the news.
And I think it's helping them on that generic congressional ballot.
So what are your feelings today about the raid, the court proceeding, and the politics that are coming out of it?
I'm wild-eyed about it with rage.
I got to be honest.
It drives me insane.
I would like Trump now to step off the scene.
I don't think that's going to happen, but I would like him to crown his successor and say, MAGA is now part of the Republican Party.
I've done my work and now I'm going off into the sunset.
It's time, if nothing else, it's time for younger men to take it and women to take the helm of the country.
So that's the first thing.
And I agree with you that his presence is all in all probably a benefit to the Democrats.
But the recklessness of this, you know, a million times during the Trump administration, I got emails from people saying, when is Hillary Clinton going to go to jail?
And I would say, you know, Hillary Clinton has broken the law repeatedly, but you don't actually want her to go to jail.
You don't want your political candidates to go to jail if you can help it.
You don't want them persecuted by the DOJ because it makes the DOJ more political than it is in danger of being to begin with.
They would storm into a former president's home, a duly elected president's home, no matter what story they want to tell themselves, is so incredibly reckless that it genuinely makes me concerned that what they're trying to do is demonize half the country.
They are trying to declare half the country terrorists.
Already on MSNBC and other left-wing outlets, they are saying the civil war is here.
We're not in danger of a civil war.
The civil war is already on.
And I'm worried that they're trying to do this, that they'll gin up a couple of nutbags, will go after the FBI in a violent way, and then say, see, we were right.
It was these right-wing crazies who are showing up at school board meetings, demanding that we can't change the sexes of their children.
We knew they were terrorists, and now we've proved that they're terrorists.
Unless Trump, I don't care what Trump papers Trump had, and they can pull all these leaks to the press.
Oh, he was holding the nuclear code.
He was going to call up the White House and tell them to launch a nuclear weapon.
Here's the code, guys.
So you've got to launch the weapon.
I mean, it was insanely stupid, their ideas.
But unless he's training a militia at Mar-a-Lago, I don't want to see the DOJ with armed men storming a former president's house.
It is incredibly incendiary, incredibly reckless.
We're already at each other's throats.
It just was unwise.
And Merrick Garland, who had this reputation for being a company man, a guy who took care of the institutions, a guy who obeyed the law, has shown himself to be just an absolute pushover for the left.
And, you know, not only did he go after parents and start investigating them as possible terrorists for taking care of their children, but now he storms the home of a former president.
I mean, really, I feel like I'm living somewhere in Central America, some unnamed country in Central America.
It is just incredibly disrespectful.
You know, even though I oppose the left with all my heart, I understand that some of the people on the left are good people.
I understand they're my fellow citizens.
I have to pay them at least the respect of arguing with them.
But the left just feels that they're going to snap their fingers and turn us and declare that we're all terrorists, we're all white supremacists.
You know, January 6th is the violence to end all violence, but the violence of the George Floyd riots that burned down half the country, that doesn't count.
That was justified violence.
I don't think that's going to turn out the way they want it to turn out.
But I don't think a civil war in this country is going to be as pretty as they think it's going to be.
They think it's going to be them rounding us up, but I don't think that's the way it's going to shake down.
And I don't want to see any more political violence in this country.
Merrick Garland should be ashamed of himself.
If Mitch McConnell gets into heaven, it's going to be because he kept that guy off the Supreme Court.
He has let himself become completely corrupted.
That's true.
My old impressions of Merrick Garland when he was nominated by Obama for that seat are so different from what they are today.
And to your point about encouraging or baiting, baiting the Republicans or the MAGA crowd into doing something violent, couldn't agree more.
Jared Kushner was on the show on Tuesday.
He has a new book out, and he makes the point in the book about how unfortunate January 6th was.
Yes, for the obvious reasons, but also for this reason, because the media had been painting the Trump rallies as this carnal, debased, disgusting, violent, awful gathering of people, deplorables, right?
And if you actually looked at the Trump rallies, it was a bunch of truly patriotic people who loved Donald Trump and they loved the country and they were waving flags and they were wearing flag regalia.
And with one or two small exceptions, there really wasn't violence at these things.
And yet this group got baited into January 6th, right?
By what?
It could be Trump's rhetoric.
It could be the media.
It could be, you know, Rudy Giuliani, take your pick.
Okay.
But they did.
And that stain remains.
It was the stain the media had been waiting for.
Oh, they wanted it so badly, Andrew.
And finally, they got it.
And that was like part of the horror of watching it is it's like, oh my God, you've now, you've now given the media the excuse to sit back.
And they did.
If you watch CNN on Jan 6, you know this.
They sit back and say like, I told you so.
I told you this would happen.
I told you this is who they are.
Right.
And so this is another one of those moments where the right cannot be baited into doing this.
Like even right now, I think it's contained.
But if they indict Trump, we're back in another one of those moments where it's a before and after.
And the whole narrative about a half of the country is going to depend on how people behave.
That's right.
It's incredible.
You know, there used to be a saying that there's the stupid party and the evil party, and we're clearly the stupid party.
I mean, I think that if we really do feel, as I do feel, that we are the party more likely to stand up for the Constitution, more likely to stand up for American freedoms, more likely to stand up for American traditions, then we have to take conscious care of how we behave.
They can stomp back and forth and they can rage and they can burn down cities and get away with it because they don't care.
They're not trying to preserve anything.
To be a conservative is to try to conserve something.
To be an American conservative is to try to conserve something extremely specific, which is the Constitution and limited government.
And you can't do that.
You cannot do that by losing your cool.
It is hard to be the good guy.
It's hard.
You can't shoot a man in the back when you're the good guy.
You cannot behave like the left behaves when you're the good guy.
It's hard to do it.
It takes a certain amount of restraint, a certain amount of self-discipline.
Donald Trump has inculcated a lack of self-discipline in the right.
And that is the worst.
I think he's done some, did many, many wonderful things.
But one of the worst things he did was tell us that we could become them and get away with it.
And we can't because we're fighting for something entirely different.
We're fighting for a world of self-discipline liberty.
That's a hard sell.
People don't like being self-disciplined.
They don't like liberty, really.
What they want is to be taken care of.
They want to be able to have their pleasure and exercise their lust and their greed and all the things that human beings do.
And what we're saying is, no, you have to actually be self-restrained.
That's a hard sell from the very beginning.
And once you start storming the Capitol, once you start looking like a bunch of idiots, once you start allowing the worst of the worst to join your movement, you basically weaken yourself.
That feels like strength in the moment because it feels like, yeah, we're going to be just as tough as they are.
But in the end, it weakens you.
And January 6th was a shame.
And the fact that it came after a summer of riots, which the press and the left, but I repeat myself, the press and the left encouraged, not just said was okay.
They encouraged that violence.
Nobody cares because they're not the good guys.
We are the good guys and we have to behave like the good guys.
January 6th was a mess, but, you know, like basically it is the Reichstag fire.
I mean, not to compare anybody to Hitler, but it was, you know, the a socialist burned set fire to the Reichstag and Hitler used that to seize absolute power.
The left has played this January 6th card until I hope it's basically run out.
It's like a credit card that is way over its limit.
Right, but they see a new application.
They got an application for an American Express black card sitting right there.
They're like, oh yeah, I want it.
Oh, Trump indicted.
Feeling angry.
Storms and riots.
You know, like they want to see it.
They want another reason to dismiss an entire half of the country.
All right.
Andrew's got thoughts on Brian Stelter.
He'll share them right after this.
And then we've got to talk about this amazing message that he delivered to the Young Americans Foundation, this group of young conservatives, which my team and I read in every single word of it.
Challenging the Establishment00:09:11
I'll explain why you'll love it too.
So back to your speech, Andrew, you write, you said, and I have the transcript, the establishment has collapsed.
And you may say to me, so what?
Who needs the establishment?
They're just what the poet Yates called old, learned, respectable, bald heads who all think what other people think.
After all, didn't Western culture begin when the establishments in Athens and Jerusalem executed Socrates and Jesus for failing to toe the traditional line?
Why shouldn't a revolutionary country like ours have an establishment that calls itself the resistance, even if what they resist is free speech and equality under the law?
And you acknowledge there's some truth to this.
Priests and scholars and political leaders who become too wedded to the way things used to be sometimes fail to recognize legitimate innovation when it comes along.
But there's a downside to losing the establishment dedicated to the preservation of tradition.
How so?
Well, first of all, great revolutions don't actually come from revolutionaries.
All of history bears this out.
Great revolutions come from great traditions.
Jesus was expanding the tradition of the Jews.
He wasn't just trying to destroy it.
Socrates was expanding the traditions of Athens.
He wasn't trying to destroy it.
That was the mistake the establishment made in those cases.
The American revolutionaries are the perfect example of this.
They weren't actually revolutionaries in that sense.
They weren't trying to destroy the British legal system, British legal rights.
They were trying to claim them for their own and take them to the next level.
It was the French revolutionaries who were genuinely revolutionaries.
And that's why they ended up knee-deep in blood, killing everybody they could get their hands on who wouldn't toe the utopian line.
And so, yes, an establishment can be fussy.
It needs to be a little bit traditionalist.
And yes, sometimes people have to stand up to the establishment and say, no, in order to actually fulfill our dream, in order to live into the meaning of our creed, we have to do something a little bit new.
But that's different.
Innovation is different than tearing everything down and declaring a utopia.
And you need an establishment to teach you, to teach you the tradition that you are going to innovate in.
And to innovate means to renew, and you can't renew something that's not already there.
And what we have now is we have an incredible, incredible depth of ignorance.
Professors, you were saying this before the break, the professors now not only don't teach something because it's written by white people, which is absurd, they also muffle it.
They muffle, say, a Shakespeare by telling you what their theory is about it instead of what Shakespeare was trying to say.
Listen, you can disagree with Socrates, you can disagree with Shakespeare, you can disagree with anybody you want, but you have to understand what they were trying to say.
And that's what teachers are there to teach you.
That's what the establishment is there to teach you.
Not there how their brilliant new consciousness is going to reinterpret Socrates, but what the hell was Socrates saying in the first place?
If you don't know that, you can't argue with it.
If you don't know what the tradition is, you can't actually innovate with it.
And this is the thing.
Ultimately, ultimately, they're going to teach you to be somebody.
All of us learn who to be from our tradition.
We're born with a nature.
We're born with an inner soul and somebody who we are.
But that somebody lives in a tradition and that tradition shapes who he is.
If you don't have that tradition, then basically you've left yourself open to being shaped by whoever happens to be in power at the moment.
And the people who have been in power for the last 50 years are materialists who want to teach you that basically you're just a meat puppet filled with a chemistry set.
And therefore, the most important thing about you is how you have sex and when you want sex and whether you get the sex you want when you want it.
That is a tradition in Western philosophy.
Schopenhauer called sex the lord of the world.
Freud obviously thought that sex was behind everything.
The Marquis de Saad, from whom we get sadism, believed that sex was the essential engine.
But there's an entire other tradition which teaches us that we are spirits.
We are actually, our body is the expression of something greater than itself.
And that tradition teaches us that love is at the center of everything.
That's the Christian tradition.
It's the Jewish tradition.
It is the tradition that really made freedom what it is.
It made the idea of freedom what it is.
And that's the tradition we have to learn.
If the old people aren't going to teach it to us, we're going to have to teach it to ourselves.
You write about something that I was asked about this past weekend.
I was talking to a group of Republicans, and one man came up and said he has two kids going off to college now, one going to the military, I think, and one going off to college.
And they were very worried that they were going to be downgraded if they let their conservative freak flag fly.
You know, if they were openly conservative in their views at these institutions for good reason, for good reason.
And it just so happens that I read your remarks right after this.
And I had said, and the gentleman was asking me, what do you think I should advise them?
And I said, I know other people disagree, but I believe they should stand by their true beliefs.
They should stand up for themselves.
And if they get downgraded, they should confront the professor, ideally on tape.
And they should wear that C like a badge of honor.
And when they go out there into the real world applying for jobs, they can show that C with pride and explain how they got it.
This is what you write.
You have academics who either won't teach the great books or silence those books by smothering them under their own banal and unfounded critical theories.
Even worse, they threaten you with bad grades if you don't lie and pretend to believe those theories.
That's a sin.
It is a sin for an old person in authority to coerce a young person into compromising his integrity.
It is a double sin to do that to young men because while integrity is good for both sexes, it is the essence of being a man.
To be a man, you have to be who you say you are and do what you say you will do.
I love that.
Can you keep going?
Yes.
I mean, I think that this is the, you know, we talk about manhood nowadays as if it's about eating a steak and punching people.
It's not.
Anybody can punch anybody and anybody can sneak up on anybody and anybody can eat a steak.
But to be who you say you are and to do what you say you will do is the definition of manhood as far as I'm concerned.
I mean, you talk about my son Spencer.
That is what I taught him.
That is what he exemplifies.
That's why I'm so proud of him.
That when you say, I will stand for this, you stand.
And when somebody says, tells you to lie, you don't lie.
And I have gotten very disappointed in conservatives who say, keep your head down until you get out of college because then you've got the degree and you can do anything you want.
It doesn't work that way.
It doesn't work that way.
I'm not talking, telling anybody to put their head in the cannon's mouth.
I understand you have to pick your fights.
I understand you have to act cleverly.
You have to act intelligently.
But you cannot.
You cannot say what you don't mean.
And you can't put what you don't mean down on paper.
And you can't put your name to lies.
You simply can't do it.
And if it means it's going to cost you, that is the lesson of the gospels.
The lesson of the gospels is if you speak the truth, if you exemplify the truth, you're going to pay a price.
That is the lesson for the gospels, but you're also going to get a reward.
And so I think you just have to live by that and take the hits.
And listen, Megan, you know, I'm not saying this.
I lost millions of dollars in Hollywood by being who I am.
I don't think that anybody can actually argue with that.
No one ever said I'm blacklisting you, but I was making a whole lot of money writing screenplays until I started speaking politically.
And then my phone stopped ringing on the instant.
And so, and, you know, I got to be honest, like, I wasn't happy about it, but I never lost a minute's sleep about it.
The idea that I should be going up to guys like Harvey Weinstein and pretending one thing when I knew something else was true would just be despicable to me.
And I feel really good about my life because I've lived that way.
And I know the people who didn't live that way.
This is the other thing.
I know the guys in Hollywood who basically mouthed off and said things they didn't believe.
And I can look in their eyes and see that they paid a price that was much worse than money, a price that I would never want to pay.
And so, yes, if you don't actually start to teach yourself your tradition, why you believe what you believe, you're not just a conservative because you're a cantankerous, you know, old person or because you're crusty or whatever.
You're actually a conservative because you under, you know, American conservatives are very different than European conservatives.
We're not supporting lordship.
We're not supporting bloodlines.
I don't care what color.
I swear I do not care what color you are or where you're from.
All I care about is that tradition of freedom that's embodied in the Constitution and the Declaration.
That's what I'm trying to conserve.
And if you don't know what that is, and you don't know why it's good, it makes it very hard to stand up to people when they lie to you.
And it also makes it very easy for you to be fooled by their lies.
And so to me, you know, I'm a bit of a sexist on this.
I think that men, if we lose men, we've lost.
Actually, frankly, I think if we lose feminine women, we've lost our humanity.
And if we lose men, we lose the front line of tradition and freedom.
And I think that you just can't.
Start Reading Plato00:05:14
You can't give it away.
You have to hold on to it or you lose it for all of us.
I love what you said.
I have got to end on this point because it's sort of where we began.
You end the piece as follows.
The good news is this.
The priests and teachers and artists of all the generations past are still right here walking by your sides.
For thousands of years, the best of them have been working in the midst of life's suffering and evil to write books and compose music and develop religion that are still lying at your feet like a bright trail through the present darkness.
It is up to you to do what the old men have not done for you.
Read those books, listen to that music, practice that religion, follow that trail.
It will lead you back to who you really are.
I love the way you see the world.
But here's the question.
If we're not going to go to the colleges necessarily that they want us to go to, because we're all going to be indoctrinated, we do not have the professors of yore.
Or even if we are going to go, we're going to have to find a way to sort of educate ourselves on the side.
Or if you're somebody like me who I went to college and I went to law school, but I wasn't taught the classics.
I want to know.
I realize I'm a lifetime behind.
I want to know what you know.
I want to know what Spencer knows.
I want a reading list.
I want an assignment list.
I want a syllabus from Andrew Clavin.
So how do I get that?
Well, I'll tell you something.
You know, I went to a very good college, but I was a very, very bad student.
And I didn't get my education in college.
I got it afterwards.
I bought all the books while I was there.
And when I got out of college and realized that I squandered four years of my life, I surrounded an easy chair with those books and I spent the next 15 years reading them.
Those books are there.
They are there.
You can still buy them.
They haven't been edited.
They haven't been blacked out.
They haven't been redacted by the FBI.
They're still there and you can read them.
And there are wonderful self-improvement places like the Great Courses tapes that are, you shouldn't never be ashamed to listen to those.
They teach you what the books are.
And you don't have to listen to their opinion and not check it for yourself.
Listen to their opinion and then go read the books.
Reading books, I always tell people this, especially young people, that you're not reading if you're just reading the internet.
You're not reading if you're just reading a magazine or a blog or a bite.
You have to read books.
You have to go to the places where people have expressed themselves in their absolute best way over a period of time, over a length of time.
So read a little, you know, make that part of your day.
Make it something you exercise.
You know, you eat right.
You do all the things that you have to do to keep yourself around.
You know, make it part of your day to read.
Like I said, it took me 15 years before I walked.
I remember I was on a street in London and I thought, you know what?
I'm now an educated person.
I now know what I need to know to have a picture of you.
But let me ask you, because for the people out there who, you know, like where do you start?
Where do you get the reading list?
There's only a limited number of hours in the day and years left in our lives.
Like, how does one choose what to prioritize?
What I would do is I would go back to something like the Great Courses or something that was written before wokeness.
So even go back to the 1950s and just find a list of great books and start reading them.
And one of the things that does is it makes you think like, well, I really enjoyed reading Plato.
I love Plato.
He's a wonderful writer.
He's very entertaining.
But what is he talking about?
You know, and then you find a book that tells you, well, what was Plato talking about?
And maybe you find two books when they say something different and you start to think about it and go back and read them again.
It kind of becomes like the branches of a tree.
And that's how you start to learn stuff.
Maybe go for what you're interested in.
Maybe you're interested in history.
Maybe you're interested in a period in history.
If you start reading about World War I, which I was fascinated by for quite a long time, then you start to wonder, well, what happened before World War I?
How'd they get there?
And you start reading about the Victorian era.
You know, I would say start with the West because that's your tradition, but you shouldn't be afraid to branch out and read about other things too.
You know, it doesn't take that long.
If you can give half an hour of your day to reading, you'll find that you get through a lot of books in a year.
And I'm a very slow reader, too.
I mean, I don't have Spencer's gift.
He just zips through that stuff, but I almost move my lips when I read, but I just sit there doggedly and get through it day by day.
And at the end of the year, I've read maybe 50, 60 books.
That adds up over time.
There aren't that many great books.
There aren't a million great books.
There may be a thousand, but there aren't a million.
So you can read them all if you want to.
And then you will find that you actually know stuff that other people don't know.
One thing that happened to me as I began to become an educated person, I would be reading magazines and think, oh, this guy's talking about Rousseau, but he's never read Rousseau.
I've read Rousseau, but he's just he just took a class in Rousseau, you know, and so that that was you put you make that point in your in your remarks about and let the words Thomas Sowell come out of his pen, but has clearly never actually read Thomas Sowell like you have.
Listen, I want to say that.
Even I sit up straight when I mention Thomas Sowell.
Oh, I mean, we all have to.
I know what he is.
It's a national treasure.
This is so wonderful.
Again, I encourage everybody to go and read the actual piece on the Daily Wire.
It's well worth your time.
It's a short eight pages.
Claven, who do you think you are at dailywire.com?