KLAVAN: Where Britain Goes, America May Follow  

By ANDREW KLAVAN

 @ANDREWKLAVAN

September 6, 2019

 8.9k views

The most meaningful political story in the United States this week wasn't unfolding in the United States. One of our potential futures was instead being played out in England, where Prime Minister Boris Johnson was fighting a pitched battle to bring the will of the people to fruition against the entrenched power of a multi-national elite.

Ever since a 2016 referendum in which British voters chose to leave the European Union by a 52% to 48% margin, the voters’ representatives have been doing everything they possibly can not to represent the voters. Prime Minister Teresa May swore that "Brexit means Brexit," then managed to fashion a leave deal so bad that even Brexit supporters thought it worse than staying. After May staggered off in tears, Boris Johnson took over the premiership swearing that the Brits would be out of the EU by the October 31stdeadline — a deadline already once extended.

BoJo made it clear that his willingness to "crash out" on Halloween with no deal would help him negotiate a better deal with an EU that does not want to let its grip on British power go. But Parliament — with the help of a largely anti-Brexit press and elite — has so far managed to stymie Johnson's strategy and may extend the deadline yet again — maybe forever.

The reason I say this is the most meaningful political story here in the U.S. is because it's the first real test of whether the English-speaking peoples can wrest back their power of self-governance. If Brexit fails, the situation here will not look good. If it succeeds, there's hope.

As Christopher Caldwell points out in his excellent Brexit piece in this summer’s issue of Claremont Review of Books, Britain's entry into the E.U. did not just result in a diminution of British sovereignty over its own affairs, it also transferred power from the people's representatives in Parliament to the elite’s representatives on and before the bench. British judges could now invalidate British law that conflicted with laws concocted in Brussels.

"Quangos [advisory bodies with government-appointed members] and foundations began designing cases — concerning migrants' rights, gay rights, search-and-seizure — that unraveled the centuries-old fabric woven from the rights and duties of British citizenship. A new fabric began to be woven, based (as are all such systems in Europe) on post-Civil Rights Act American law and on the litigative ethos of the American bar."

Here in America, a similar shift has taken power out of the hands of our representatives in congress and put it into unelected administrative bodies like the EPA and the Department of Education. These bodies serve the same "rights" oriented obsessions of the elites — and can make rules and enforce rules in a completely unconstitutional and anti-freedom manner that, so far, has had the support of a feckless Supreme Court.

Legislators love this system. They no longer have to study issues and fashion laws that have a specific effect. They no longer have to take real stances that could get them voted out of office. They simply have to pose for the cameras, use big, emotional words, take money from entrenched interests and then announce that they "did something" about the big issue of the day. The "something" is some 2,000 page collection of vaguely worded gobbledygook that can be interpreted by some drone at the EPA to mean he can do whatever he wants. When the EPA guy then rules that you can't go to the bathroom because your toilet is a public waterway, you've got no one to appeal to but the same petty tyrant at the EPA. Your property rights, your rights to due process, not to mention your vote, essentially mean nothing.

Donald Trump has done an excellent job of cutting regulations, but they'll bounce right back once the next person, Democrat or Republican, takes his place. The entire system needs to be dismantled, probably at the level of the Supreme Court.

With the election of Donald Trump and with the vote for Brexit, the English-speaking peoples are demanding their age-old representative systems back. If Boris Johnson succeeds in Britain, it will be a hopeful sign. But if the combined power of the elites and their press can prevent the crash out, then Trump, instead of the change we need, may turn out to be just a bump in the road that leads to the end of the republic.

Related: HAWORTH: Americans Must See The Brexit Betrayal As A Warning

Klavan: The Democrat Mob's Endgame Oct 2018

Klavan: The Democrat Mob's Endgame

"If it walks like a mob, talks like a mob, sounds like a mob — it's a mob!"

By JACOB AIREY

October 12, 2018

The Democrat mob does not like being called exactly what they are: a Democrat mob. But if they don't like it, why do they keep calling for intimidation and violence? That seems like a pretty good indicator of being a mob, according to Andrew Klavan.

On Thursday's episode of "The Andrew Klavan Show," the host explained why the Democrats have adopted this mob mentality, and what their true endgame for it is.

After playing a clip of former Attorney General Eric Holder telling Democrat Party insiders, “When they go low, we kick them,” while discussing Republicans, Klavan said. “You can't say it's not a mob when you're encouraging people to be a mob."

He continued: "Donald Trump riles up his base, there's no question about it, but he doesn't rile them up to violence, he doesn't rile him up to attack people, he never said that, he never said go kick 'em. I mean, when he was campaigning I used to rail at him against this, when he was campaigning he sometimes skirted the edge and it really bugged me, and it bugs me still, that he did it — but since he's become president he hasn't been doing that, and they are. They have become his worst self, as I always say, Trump at his worst is the Democrats, that's why they hate him."

"But more important than the mob is the fact that what they are fighting for, what the left is actually fighting for, is to destroy constitutional governance," said Klavan.

 If it walks like a mob, talks like a mob, sounds like a mob - it's a mob! Don Lemon, who is a just a lemon-head, Don Lemon was saying "oh, we have a constitutional right to go into a restaurant and harass a senator." No, you actually don't, that is not what free speech is, that is not how free people behave. It is absolutely not within the realm of free speech to go screaming at people, to dox them so that people go to their houses, it is absolutely mob rule and they're encouraging it! We played Hillary Clinton the other day saying "no we can't be civil anymore until we win!" Now there is Eric Holder, Holder is obviously thinking of running for president, this is the former attorney general under Barack Obama - the only attorney general in the history of the United States to be held in contempt of Congress. He got caught out and investigated for running guns, essentially, the Fast and Furious operation in which they allowed Mexican gangsters to buy guns because they were gonna trace the guns, that was the idea, they were gonna trace the guns and they just lost the guns, and the Mexican gangsters got the guns while the feds were sitting there watching them, and finally a border agent was killed by this. So they investigated, he refused to hand over the documents so they could see it, and Barack Obama refused to have the Justice Department investigate him and prosecute him for contempt of Congress because he claimed it was executive privilege - the old Bill Clinton trick, like everybody from his mother to his cook had executive privilege under Clinton, because he didn't want to admit this.

I got a lot of feedback about the Max Boot interview that I did, the never-Trumper Max Boot, and you know there were two kinds of feedback I got, one was "why did you play that, why did you let him say those stupid things?" And the other was "I'm glad you let him say those stupid things so I could hear them." But the one thing that everybody found incredible was his idea that Barack Obama was somehow a great, honest guy who didn't violate the Constitution, which is my big argument - that Trump, for all they yell about him, and all his rudeness and his strange sometimes behavior - he hasn't violated constitutional governance at all, and Obama did it routinely. He transformed the government into a Democrat machine, like in Chicago.

So here's Eric Holder telling people what he wants them to do:

Eric Holder: "They have used the power that they have gotten for all the wrong things, they want to keep themselves in power, they want to cater to the special interests, it is time for us as Democrats to be as tough as they are, to be as dedicated as they are, to be as committed as they are. Michelle always says, Michelle Obama, I love her, you know she and and my wife are, like, really tight which scares me and Barack. She says when they go low, we go high - no, no. When they go low, we kick 'em"

They're encouraging people to basically attack congressmen and senators. Cory Booker, Spartacus, is telling people they should go after people and get up in the faces of Congresspeople:

Cory Booker: "Please don't just come here today and then go home. Go to the hill today! Get up and, please, get up in the face of some Congresspeople!"

You can't say it's not a mob when you're encouraging people to be a mob! Donald Trump riles up his base, there's no question about it, but he doesn't rile them up to violence, he doesn't rile him up to attack people, he never said that, he never said go kick 'em. I mean, when he was campaigning I used to rail at him against this, when he was campaigning he sometimes skirted the edge and it really bugged me, and it bugs me still, that he did it - but since he's become president he hasn't been doing that, and they are. They have become his worst self, as I always say, Trump at his worst is the Democrats, that's why they hate him.

But more important than the mob is the fact that what they are fighting for, what the left is actually fighting for, is to destroy constitutional governance. One of the things that I keep saying, people say "well Donald Trump had all these women who said he did these nasty things." Well all of the women who accused him, they accused him of things that were creepy mischief, you know of putting his hands where he shouldn't have put them, of looking up their skirts when they were walking above and that kind of thing, kind of creepy stuff but not assault. Only his ex-wife during a divorce proceeding accused him of really raping her and then said "no that was the lawyers talking, it was just part of the divorce settlement." The thing is, he was running against a career criminal, a woman who was - you know you listen to Ken Starr talk about her, he was this close to going after her for perjury after her testimony - she stonewalled everybody. But a career criminal, who openly did not support the first and second amendment, she openly did not support the Heller decision which said the Second Amendment guarantees your personal right to bear arms, and she didn't support the Citizens United decision which basically supported your right to have political speech, I mean it was the First Amendment. This is what they're going after. Listen to some of the stuff that they've been saying.

Ian Millhiser, who is a George Soros guy from the the site Think Progress, so he is the justice editor there, and he writes this piece after Kavanaugh gets confirmed, "the Constitution of the United States has failed" - and this thing is amazing, it is really like a a 19-year-old who's just read that idiot Howard Zinn, and he's like "wow you know sometimes bad things happened in America, it's not all good!" and so he hates America, and he says:

Ian Millhiser: "Americans speak of our Constitution as if it were a religious text. To label a law unconstitutional is not simply to say that it violates some procedural rule or legal technicality, it is to label it fundamentally un-American."

He has a problem with this? This is exactly right! It is fundamentally un-American.

Ian Millhiser: "But our Constitution has not served us nearly as well as we would have been served by other systems adopted by our peer nations."

In other words, in Europe and Scandinavia, all of which live under our protection, under our umbrella, using our machines, our innovation, our financial security, all of which are essentially client states of this great country, and none of them would even exist at the level of diversity and freedom that they exist in if it weren't for our inspiration, which gave it the first birth of true freedom on the planet.

Klavan: The Madmen Are Running The Asylum At The U.N.

Mariano Sayno/Getty

ByJACOB AIREY

December 5, 2018

 10.8k views

We know nations in the European Union have already outlawed speech against Islam – but could the United Nations be trying to limit negative speech concerning immigration? On Tuesday's episode of "The Andrew Klavan Show," Andrew Klavan spoke about why the elites are refusing to listen to the people on this issue, and in some cases trying to censor them all together.

"The U.N. next week is going to hold this meeting in Marrakesh, and they have this global compact on migration – it’s called 'the global compact for safe, orderly and regular migration,'" he explained. "You can tell by the name it’s all about being in favor of migration. It pays a little bit of lip-service to the sovereignty of the nations who are being swept under by the people from failed states; it doesn’t pay any attention to the people who want to keep their culture intact, to whether they can handle and afford these people, all the services that western nations provide."

 Klavan said, "They don’t talk about that at all, all they really talk about is ‘don’t you insult these poor migrants’ who get to sweep into their countries. Essentially this is all these clowns who sit around at the U.N telling the west that we have to take these migrants in, because other countries won’t do it, instead of chasing some of these tyrants and idiots out and establishing a rule of property law, free trade, capitalism, all those things that help people come out of poverty. Instead of doing that, they let the tyrants and madmen run the asylum, and now they want everyone to sign on."

There is widespread rejection of the UN’s measure from all over Europe, he said, but the elites within the U.N. and the E.U. are choosing to ignore the opposition voices.

"The E.U. Migration Commissioner said he doesn’t understand why anybody would oppose the pact, because it’s not binding, so why wouldn’t you sign it," Klavan said. "That is absurd, if you don’t agree with it why would you sign it? Once you sign it you accept the terms of the pact, which is that basically migration is a human right, and anybody should be able to do it."

The bestselling author of "The Leftese Dictionary" noted that there is growing frustration from Europeans who want their nations protected, but officials are choosing to expand "hate speech" into including any anti-immigration sentiment.

He continued: "The people want to protect their nations, they want a right to say who comes into their nations. Even welcoming nations like ours can be taxed beyond our ability to take people in. The elite hear these voices, and they want them to shut up. They are telling you, 'Don’t tell us what to do, we’re the elites.' The way they do it is by defining speech they don’t like as hate speech."

Video and transcript below:

The U.N. next week is going to hold this meeting in Marrakesh, and they have this global compact on migration – it’s called “the global compact for safe, orderly and regular migration”. You can tell by the name it’s all about being in favor of migration. It pays a little bit of lip-service to the sovereignty of the nations who are being swept under by the people from failed states, it doesn’t pay any attention to the people who want to keep their culture intact, to whether they can handle and afford these people, all the services that western nations provide.

They don’t talk about that at all, all they really talk about is “don’t you insult these poor migrants” who get to sweep into their countries. Essentially this is all these clowns who sit around at the U.N telling the west that we have to take these migrants in, because other countries won’t do it, instead of chasing some of these tyrants and idiots out and establishing a rule of property law, free trade, capitalism, all those things that help people come out of poverty. Instead of doing that, they let the tyrants and madmen run the asylum, and now they want everyone to sign on.

Of course in England, something like 40,000 people have already signed a petition against this. The EU Migration Commissioner said he doesn’t understand why anybody would oppose the pact, because it’s not binding, so why wouldn’t you sign it? That is absurd, if you don’t agree with it why would you sign it? Once you sign it you accept the terms of the pact, which is that basically migration is a human right, and anybody should be able to do it.

I’m not sure what this E.U. MP’s name is, but he was protesting this pact, and he described this idea that they’re going to simply shut down the voice of the people: “Participating countries are set to sign this agreement, and although this current agreement isn’t binding, it’s still meant to be the legal framework on which the participating countries commit themselves to build new legislation. One basic element of this new agreement is the extension of the definition of hate speech. The agreement wants to criminalize migration speech, criticism of migration will become a criminal offense.”

All around the world anti-immigration groups are rising up, all around the world nationalist leaders are getting more and more votes. Trump wins in America by promising to build a wall on the border. Angela Merkel is finished in Germany because she let all those people come sweeping in. The people want to protect their nations, they want a right to say who comes into their nations, even welcoming nations like ours can be taxed beyond our ability to take people in. The elite hear these voices, and they want them to shut up. They are telling you, “don’t tell us what to do, we’re the elites.” The way they do it is by defining speech they don’t like as hate speech.

READ MORE: CONSERVATISM DONALD TRUMP EUROPE EUROPEAN UNION IMMIGRANTS IMMIGRATIONTRUMP ADMINISTRATION UNITED NATIONS

Was The Steele Dossier The FBI’s “Insurance Policy?”

ANDREW MCCARTHY:

Was The Steele Dossier The FBI’s “Insurance Policy?”

 “There were layers of insulation between the Clinton campaign and Steele — the campaign and the Democratic party retained a law firm, which contracted with Fusion GPS, which in turn hired the former spy. At some point, though, perhaps early on, the FBI and DOJ learned that the dossier was actually a partisan opposition-research product. By then, they were dug in. No one, after all, would be any the wiser: Hillary would coast to victory, so Democrats would continue running the government; FISA materials are highly classified, so they’d be kept under wraps. Just as it had been with the Obama-era’s Fast and Furious and IRS scandals, any malfeasance would remain hidden. The best laid schemes . . . gang aft agley.”

14Posted at 10:37 am by Glenn Reynolds   

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The Trouble With Maggie Haberman

KLAVAN ON THE CULTURE

The Trouble With Maggie Haberman

 

BY ANDREW KLAVAN OCTOBER 29, 2017

CHAT 189 COMMENTS

Maggie Haberman is shocked — shocked — to find that Hillary Clinton's people are dishonest. Some of you may remember Hillary Clinton. This is the woman who liedabout her husband's infidelity, her trip to Bosnia, the cause of the Benghazi massacre, her illegal emails and just about everything else she's ever talked about. But when the Clinton people told Haberman that they had nothing to do with the now-infamous Steele dossier filled with dubious Russian dirt on Donald Trump, Maggie apparently bought it hook, line and sinker. "Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year," she complained on Twitter. Shocked.

It now turns out that Clinton and the Democrats paid for the dossier, thus colluding with the Russians to help skew the outcome of an American presidential election. Reports that the Republicans also had something to do with the dossier are a smokescreen: they didn't. And drawing a moral equivalence between this and Donald Trump Jr.'s meaningless meeting with a Russian lawyer is nonsense. Clinton and the Democrats did what they have been accusing Donald Trump of doing all this time. That's the story.

So how'd the Democrats get away with peddling the phony version of the Russia scandal for so long? Let's take a closer look at Haberman and her gullibility in context.

Haberman is a White House correspondent for the New York Times, a former newspaper. Haberman's father was a long-time Times journalist and Maggie herself got to know Donald Trump while covering him for the New York Post, giving her a useful relationship with the president.

The job she holds now was once held by Jeff Zeleny, who famously used his first chance to ask Barack Obama some tough questions by asking him what "enchanted" him most about being president. In doing so, Dreamy Jeff kicked off eight years of embarrassing non-coverage of one of the most corrupt administrations in American history. At the end of Obama's IRS scandal, the Fast and Furious scandal, the Benghazi scandal, the Lynch-Clinton scandal and — as we're now finding out — a possible spying on Donald Trump scandal, the American press corps almost universally declared Obama "scandal free." Like Admiral Nelsonputting his telescope to his blind eye, they really did not see the corruption! They thus sacrificed their credibility on the altar of their politics, leaving themselves open to Trump's Godzilla-like destruction of whatever moral authority they had left.

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And what was Maggie Haberman, then a reporter for Politico, doing during that time? Let's turn for answers to actual journalist Sharyl Attkisson. Attkisson had to leave CBS News because they repeatedly quashed her exposes about Obama administration corruption. During her reporting on Fast and Furious, she claims Obama's corrupt Justice Department broke into her computer, planted classified documents and riffled through her files. She says the DOJ not only tried to smear her but also her whistle-blowing source as well.

In her excellent new book Smear, Attkisson describes how political operatives use friendly journalists to skew coverage.

"In a January 2015 strategic memo about 'Shaping a Public Narrative,'Clinton officials describe Politico reporter Maggie Haberman as an ideal, friendly journalist willing to generate positive press for the campaign. Under the title 'Placing a Story,' the memo states, 'We feel that it's important to go with what is safe and what has worked in the past. We've had a very good relationship with Maggie Haberman of Politico over the last year. We have had her tee up stories for us before and have never been disappointed. While we should have a larger conversation in the near future about a broader strategy for re-engaging the beat press that covers HRC, for this we think we can achieve our objective and do the most shaping by going to Maggie.' It almost makes it sound as if Haberman is on the payroll of the Clinton campaign."

It does, doesn't it?

Since we now know that Robert Mueller's FBI covered up Russian malfeasance during Vladimir Putin's successful attempts to acquire some of our uranium supplies — malfeasance that seems to have included millions of dollars in payoffs to the Clintons — Haberman's friendliness with the Clinton people brings much of her other reporting into question. For instance, who are Haberman's sources and what are they using her for when they anonymously feed her stories about Muller's current investigation into Trump's dealing with Russia?

Can Trump Bring Breitbart's Dream to Life?

KLAVAN ON THE CULTURE

Can Trump Bring Breitbart's Dream to Life?

 

BY ANDREW KLAVAN MARCH 5, 2017

CHAT 15 COMMENTS

March first marked the fifth anniversary of the death of my friend Andrew Breitbart. A Triple-A personality, he jump-started a media revolution then burned out at the absurdly young age of 43.

I think of him often. I suspect we all do — all of us mostly west coast conservative communicators who had nowhere to communicate our politics until he created the space. Ben Shapiro, Bill Whittle, Dana Loesch, Steve Crowder, Alfonzo Rachel, John Nolte, Jeremy Boreing (who directed The Arroyo and created and runs the Daily Wire) — just about every right winger with an entertainment bent: it's not that he gave all of us our starts, it's that he brought us together, introduced us to one another, gave us a sense of ourselves as a movement.

The point of that movement was to build — to begin to build — a grassroots communication industry that could counter the relentless left-wing bias of what Andrew called the Democrat-Media complex. The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC News: all Democrats, all for Democrats, all one-sided all the time. It isn't that every story they write is false, it's that every story is shaped by the same left-wing assumptions: capitalism is bad, government control is good, feminism is good, white men are bad, America is racist... on and on and on. Fake News, as we've learned to call it now.

What did Andrew want instead? He told Peter Robinson (whose brilliant interview show Uncommon Knowledge would surely be on PBS if the media's left wing bias weren't so egregious):

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"I want a center right nation to fight for its soul — and its soul is represented in the arts, its soul is represented in a world in which media is everything... I want the right to enter the world of media to the extent, and invest in media in the way, the left has."

"You want an NPR," said Peter.

"I want everything."

Andrew — an internet visionary who helped build both the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post — began to assemble his everything from the ground up, starting with the site Big Hollywood, then adding Big Government and Big Journalism, slowly building an online newspaper that ultimately would become the Breitbart News Network.

During the last election, I watched with misgiving as Steve Bannon transformed that site into a vehicle for supporting Donald Trump and, in his own words, "a platform for the alt-right." To be fair to Steve, the phrase alt-right has become so vague as to be nearly meaningless and he has openly rejected its worst manifestations. But in its common usage, the definition of alt-right certainly covers a collection of white supremacist anti-semitic low-lifes whom I know with certainty Andrew would have despised.

What though would Breitbart have made of Donald Trump? And how would he have felt about his site supporting Trump's candidacy the way it did? I'm neither a mind reader nor a medium, so obviously I can't say. The Andrew of my imagination would have enjoyed Trump's outrageous pugilism — it's so much like his own — but would have recoiled when it soured into bullying or dishonesty, especially when turned against such conservative heroes as Ted Cruz.

But maybe, in the long run, Bannon's Breitbart site expressed Andrew's spirit more than I thought it did. Because if there is one thing I feel sure Andrew would have loved it is watching President Donald Trump wage such expert and relentless war against the fake news of the Democrat-Media Complex. Trump's use of blunt language that the press has deemed unseemly, the brilliantly aggressive press conference at which he scattered the media's corrupt and dishonest forces to the wind, this week's terrific address before Congress in which he wrong-footed press expectations so that their cameras caught the Democrats in all their unpatriotic bitterness: I think Andrew would have enjoyed it all.

 Does Trump know that the media won't stop? The fake news won't stop nor the fake scandals nor the fake outrage and cries for investigations. Does he know the media will continue to bury his accomplishments and magnify his gaffes no matter what he does, no matter how he tries to appease them, now matter how strong or free or rich the country becomes while he's in office?

If he does know — if he keeps fighting them — if, always respectful of the First Amendment, he challenges their lies at every turn — than he might just begin the good work of clearing the way for a new, honest American journalism that tells both sides of every story.

And if he does that, then Bannon and the Breitbart site will have been right: the election of Donald Trump will have served Andrew's spirit and been a major step in making his vision a reality.