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KLAVAN: What The Never-Trump Crowd Gets Wrong About Trump

   DailyWire.com

On Tuesday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan discusses where the Never-Trump movement has gone wrong in its criticism of President Donald Trump and why Trump is winning in the culture. Video and partial transcript below:

Sometimes I look at Never-Trumpers. The guys who were Never-Trumpers. You know, I understand this is their conscience. But sometimes I think that a lot of them were that kid in school who would get punched or something and they’d say, “Well just because you punched me doesn’t make you right.” You know, because sometimes when kids are kind of like, little weedy intellectuals they’d like to tell themselves, “Well yeah, you’re bigger than me and you get all the girls and you’re on the football team and maybe you beat me up. But you know I’m a smarter, better person than you.”

A lot of times that’s true. They are smarter, better people than the bullies and all that. I think they look at Donald Trump and they think here is that guy, that bully in the office doing more than I could ever do.

I’m not, you know, mentioning Bill Kristol or anything like that but I just say, I look at that guy and I think he’s the guy who thought like, “Oh yeah, well I’m a lot smarter than you are.” And there’s Donald Trump doing all the stuff that Bill Kristol couldn’t get done and doing it better and he hates him for it. The reason that Donald … somebody wrote in the Claremont Review the other day. … Oh, it was Nathan Podhoretz. He was giving an interview and he said “Donald Trump may not be a man for all seasons. He may not be a man for every hundred years. He is the man for this season.” The reason he is the man for this season is because all of our institutions have been eaten away inside by leftism. Our most important institutions have been eaten away by this censorious small minded pinch-hearted philosophy of leftism, this anti-freedom philosophy of leftism and they’re walking around like the guy in “Men In Black.”

They still look like the New York Times. You know, kind of misshapen version of The New York Times. Still looks like this misshapen version of Harvard, still looks like this misshapen version of Yale. But inside it is just this small, mean, anti-freedom philosophy that does nothing for anybody, that destroys our cities and would destroy our country. It has destroyed the culture of Europe. Utterly gutted Europe. I mean Europe is just a shell of its former self walking around. Europe is a good example. Europe is walking around, and people go, “Oh, it’s Europe.”

But it’s not Europe anymore. It’s not the Europe of Michelangelo or Shakespeare or Mozart. It’s the Europe of nothing. It’s the Europe of “Oh you know I don’t want to work — I’m going to riot because you made me work more than 38 hours a week.” That is the Europe that’s left. Walking around looking like the Europe of its great culture. Let’s see if they can rebuild Notre Dame and then I’ll tell you if there’s anything left of Europe.

George Will made this comment recently. I have time for George Will. He’s just like kind of an old fashion guy. Andrew Breitbart always used to say “yeah George Will is great. He’s from the time when the Republicans were in the minority and they figured they always would be, and they didn’t want to win”. But he made this comment the other day about all this anti-elite nationalism populism that’s rising up throughout the West.

George Will: What Mr. Trump represents is a pandemic, indiscriminate revolt against elites ignoring the following fact. The question is never, “will elites’ rule?” Of course, they will, by definition. The question is which elites. The problem of democracy is to get public consent to worthy elites. And the kind of constant harping about elites, again the crybaby conservatism, people are picking on us, people are manipulating us. We don’t have real moral agency, we’re just passive. It’s victimology, now embraced by conservatives.

Nonsense. That’s nonsense. It doesn’t even make any sense, right? He just said that people are throwing out the elites. That’s not victimology. These elites deserved it. They lost this fight. They lost it on the Right by ceding the ground to these leftists by being afraid to speak out. By being afraid to be called racist. By being silenced like the people in A Quiet Place. You know, they walk around not saying anything because they’re afraid that the leftist, racist monster is going to come and eat them up. You know, you’re a racist!

“No, no please, please don’t call me racist I’ll do anything.” That’s why they’ve been rejected. They gave away the country. They gave away the culture and now they’re saying, “Why did you kick us out?” We kicked you out because you failed. Donald Trump may be a bully. He may be obstreperous. He may be a loud mouth and a bore. But at least he stands up for the country and for what it should be and what it is and what it has been all these years.

Watch more of The Andrew Klavan Show here.

Listen to more of The Andrew Klavan Show on iTunes here.

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