March 28, 2022 - Slightly Offensive - Elijah Schaffer
01:19:55
CONFRONTING Cowardly Men in The Last Days | Guest: Andrew Klavan | Ep 238
Tribulations are coming and the world is only going to get more violent, expensive, and evil. The hatred for “what is good” is growing and the men who are willing to fight for this country's tradition grows smaller every day. As the American empire steadily collapses, the time to fight back is here. Men and women must increase in strength to withstand the evil that lays ahead. Andrew Klavan, author of the upcoming book, "The Truth and Beauty," gets real about how we are going to make through these trying times successfully.
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ANDREW KLAVAN
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YOUTUBE: https://youtube.com/c/AndrewKlavan
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/andrewklavan?s=21&t=0FmBxbBO4FiADjVwYNEe5w
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The Idea Of A Free Society...For Kids!
Head to https://teachrealprinciples.com for a unique book series that introduces the important ideas that schools no longer teach. Show less
Slogan is usually be in the world, but not of the world.
And I think that that's right.
You know, we walk through the world understanding people are going to hate each other, people are going to kill each other, people are going to mistreat each other.
Men are going to say that they're women and then tell you that if you won't, you know, if you won't embrace the lie, it's your fault.
You're a bad person.
We're throwing you off our social media.
We're doing this.
And you guys just got to keep walking and doing what you do.
But you can't do that if you don't know what you believe.
You can't do that if you don't know who you are.
And so those are the things that you start with.
You start in your heart in this conversation with God.
Welcome back to Slightly Offensive, the best worst show on Blaze TV, where we usually have confetti of color that is, of course, diverse.
We always do confetti then of color because we like to respect political correctness.
It is my favorite topic of the year.
I have an amazing guest with me in the studio.
He's the author of the new book, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus, the infamous, the famous Andrew Clavin.
The area that you lived, I'm not outing where you used to live.
But number one, beautiful home.
So very, very sad.
Theoretically, a very beautiful scenery, too, right in the hills, right there.
I lived in Hollywood.
You're right, right around the corner.
And this is not a low-end, cheap neighborhood.
I mean, we're talking about LA has gotten to the point where I don't know if you saw just yesterday, there was a smash and grab in Beverly Hills by Rodeo.
Three to five million dollars of jewelry stolen.
So this is not like a Jared's discount store in the half-closed down mall in the seedy part of town.
I mean, LA, the depravity and the crime has gone not only up to the border of the upper end areas, but imagine paying $10, $15 million for a home, maybe even more now, and you're finding out that there's somebody who just broke and stole all your jewelry.
When I got a letter from my insurance company telling me that they were no longer going to cover damage from homeless encampment fires and meth lab tent explosions, which by the way, sounds rare, but is not uncommon.
I mean, you're still making something and it, I guess, it is cradle.
It is absolutely crazy.
And I think, I think, genuinely, I remember I was a, I laughed at people because my, my wife was a virgin.
We got married.
She was not like a hypersexual girl.
And so she was never to porn.
And I remember when we were in LA, she was like, she came to me and she goes, I saw a man masturbating on the side of the road and I cannot believe that I have in LA that I did not end up seeing my soon-to-be husband's penis first.
And I ended up, the first penis I saw was somebody masturbating on the side of the road.
So I'm loving this interview, but obviously we've got to give a huge shout out to iTarget Pro because I was going shooting the other weekend and man.
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Now back to the interview.
Yeah, I mean, I've had a car stolen.
Someone broke in while I was home one day and stole my camera.
But then also, too, I think, just in case you want to know, if you're trying to live a Christian life, I was unable to get to church because the freeway got shut down because a camp got set on fire and it spread and blocked the one-on-one freeway there.
So it was like, man, the homeless are keeping us from God.
They're not even homeless.
They're transients.
They're drug-addicted transients who refuse help.
And that's basically what is happening to the whole country.
The whole nation is sort of heading in this direction overall, especially in metropolitan areas to becoming like LA, where there's extreme wealth, extreme poverty, but extreme depravity, where it's like lawlessness abounds and there's no standards of ethics, of law, of order.
It's just one giant cluster F of people trying to fight for survival.
I guess if you ever want to prove evolution true, which I don't believe is, look at LA and see really truly where we're headed, which I think is the opposite direction.
Well, you have some really interesting themes in here.
I want to kind of jump onto something.
So one of the problems I'm seeing fundamentally in our country is that we are at war with the wrong things.
We are not only supporting the wrong things, right?
So we're supporting the trans identity, we're supporting the sexualization of children, but at the same time, we are actually fighting to destroy certain aspects of our culture.
And I wanted to explore this because one of the issues that has happened is this attack, not just on straightness, not just on men, not just on white people in general, this demonization, the sins of the world on the backs of white people, but specifically this interesting attack on straight white men.
And I want to look at a couple of these aspects.
I know you're familiar with the fact that you guys just came out with a razor at Daily Wire, right?
I mean, this new Jeremy's Razors, which, by the way, was an amazing commercial.
And why did you guys have to come out with your own company, your own brand to sponsor your show?
And Michael Knowles, my pal and my colleague, said, boys are boys and girls are girls.
And Harry's Razor said, oh my gosh, that is out of keeping with our values.
And they canceled their contract.
And so Jeremy Boring, we call him the God King small G of the Daily Wire.
He said, if that's what they're going to cancel us for, they're going to cancel us for stating a simple fact and tell us that somehow we've done something hateful by saying what is in fact the very nature of creation, boys are boys and girls are girls, we are going to compete with them and we're going to put out our own razors.
So he started Jeremy's Razors where you can find them at ihateharry's.com just to pay them back for the cancellation.
One of the things that we just find is that sponsors cancel people, Twitter censors people, and nobody strikes back.
And so this is our way of striking back and hopefully it'll work out.
It's gotten so bad that an acknowledgement of a biological fact has absolutely become an intolerable function.
And no wonder why people are like, well, why couldn't we tell the truth about COVID?
Why could nobody tell the truth?
Well, how are you going to tell the truth about an experimental jab when you can't even define the people that it's going into?
And it's this insane thing now where people, Charlie Kirk, even, okay, and I'm going to say this, and I'm fair to people on this show.
Somebody once wrote an article that was like, Elijah is some sort of like this gateway of bridging the further parts of the right and the mainstream.
And I'm like, oh, you mean being a normal person and talking to people?
No one writes an article when I talk to a radical communist or fifth wave feminist that hasn't even, you know, I don't know if we've developed that far into it or a black supremacist.
I'll talk to anybody.
I love talking to people.
But yet in the midst of all these conversations, I was waking up and I'm going, Charlie Kirk is being censored for extremism.
Like, I mean, that's, there's one criticism that the right-wing people have of him is that he doesn't go far enough.
And I'm like, what the hell did this guy get censored for?
What's going on here?
And I look at it, it's like, oh, he called a boy a boy.
Like, he just called a man a man, called a woman a woman.
And it is now illegal in 2022 to acknowledge the reality that men exist.
People talk about the war on man, men and the war on manhood.
But I think the underlying war is on women.
One of the chapters on this book is about the novel Frankenstein, which is really the beginning of the science fiction genre.
And what Frankenstein is about is about a man without a mother.
It's about a man creating a human being without a mother.
And that becomes a theme in all of science fiction.
And if you look at like some of the dystopian stories like Brave New World, anything, the giver, they're always about how you stop women from being mothers, how you stop them from being at the center of the family like that.
And so what feminists essentially said, they started out feminists wanting things that we all want.
We want everybody to be able to make his or her own choices and to have equal rights and all that.
But what feminists ultimately did is they adopted the values of men.
They said that women should be strong.
You ever notice this in movies?
The women are always strong and they're always standing like this.
And you think like, you know, if I wanted to marry somebody that strong, I'd have married a guy.
So they wanted women to basically compete with men.
Women can't compete with men.
Men do what men do better than women do because men are men and women are women.
But now they've devalued the roles that women do better than men, namely motherhood, namely turning houses into homes, namely turning chores into acts of love.
I mean, who forgets his mother?
You know, you think mothers don't matter.
Go to a guy who's bigger than you and insult his mother and find out what happens.
I mean, the next thing you'll be seeing, like little stars floating around, little birdies tweeting, because the guy will knock you, you know, six ways from sideways because his mother matters to him more than anything else.
When you want to eliminate motherhood, you want to eliminate the consequences of sex.
You want to eliminate the family.
And the left does want to eliminate the family because it's a bastion of freedom.
People learn to be free in their families.
You can't be free without a family.
And you can't be free without a mother and a father teaching you how to discipline yourself.
And so women, I think, have always been the target.
But because women can't compete with men, men now have to be more feminine.
They have to be weaker.
They have to be incompetent.
And that's where the fight with men, manhood comes in.
Because if men remain men, they're going to be better than women.
As we see when so-called trans women play women's sports, we have that woman swimmer just blasting women away.
Women can't compete at being men.
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You know, they can compete at being women, but they can't compete at being men.
And so really the fight against men, I think, is a way of eliminating, making women basically obsolete.
I mean, everything that science does in some way is to make women obsolete.
Can we give them pills so they don't have babies when we sleep with them so we can just sleep with them for free?
If we make a mistake and they get pregnant, can we just kill the baby inside them and eliminate that part of their life?
It's all about like neutralizing the central function of womanhood, which is the creation of humankind.
And that is an anti-life, anti-human, I would say anti-God philosophy that ultimately is going to create a society that you're not going to like very much.
And if you will notice, you know, every time I give a speech at a college, one of the first things I say, at least before COVID shut down everything, one of the things I would say is young women seem to be miserable.
Now, I'm an old guy.
If I'm wrong, if I'm seeing something wrong, come up after the speech, stand up after the speech, and tell me.
Not one woman has ever stood up and said, oh, no, we're doing great.
They're miserable.
And if you read, it's really fascinating.
I talk about the importance of motherhood, of homemaking.
I mean, homemaking to me is just, you know, C.S. Lewis said this.
He said, it is the first career.
All other careers are there to support the homemaker.
So I support homemaking, and I get these letters from women all the time, all the time, saying, oh, you know what?
I listened to your show.
I decided to stay home.
I've never been happier.
Then turn to the New York Times and read the women there.
There's an outbed in the New York Times today.
Maybe this free sex thing is not such a good thing for women.
You know, maybe this is not working out this well.
The women in the New York Times are miserable.
They are miserable.
There's one editorial after another about how miserable they are, and it's always the fault of society.
Well, yeah, it's the fault of society because it has discounted their central function and the thing that they contribute to society that is more important than anything else.
You know, so much of this book, The Truth and Beauty, feeds into motherhood.
And I point out that even God, when he wanted to become a human being, the first thing he did was he picked out a mother.
He's God.
He didn't need a mother.
He could have just said, I am now going to be a human being.
But instead, he picked out a mother.
Mothers are not just the conduit of life into the world.
They are also the conduit of individuality in the world.
This is something that the poets learned a long time ago, but science is now finding out too.
In the first interchanges between a mother and her child, the child begins to become an individual.
They have what's called mirror neurons in their brain, and they look into the mother's eyes and they start to become a person that way.
Motherhood is the center of everything, I think.
And the fact that we have eliminated its essentiality, eliminated the honor of it and the respect we used to pay for it, is, I think, at the base of a lot of the sexual dysfunction we're experiencing.
Yeah, and it is interesting because some people do realize this from Blaze Media.
It says DeSantis names the Emma Wyant, the rightful winner of the NCAA 500-yard freestyle over trans swimmer Leah Thomas.
And that's important because he's saying we need to recognize women for when they are functioning well as a woman.
And we need to not put them in the same category as a man.
And for people that are listening that might even disagree with you, I want to go into this point that you were saying.
I believe that the attack on men does actually begin with the attack on women.
And here's why.
Because I believe that God said it's not good that man should be alone.
Yeah, Paul did say that it is better to be single, but also remember, it's possible that Paul was married at one point, considering his actual authority rule at a certain purpose of his life.
Maybe he was married.
And then also he ended up serving God.
And people go, well, then I shouldn't get married.
Also, remember that Paul, who was once Saul, was literally murdering Christians.
So his transformation on the road was an actual manifestation of God, of Christ.
He got to see the light and then he was blinded and then radically changed his life.
So unless you were killing Christians before, your life probably won't look like Paul.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't.
I'm not encouraging you to not be radical, but it's like some people are just radical.
And we just call that autism because that's really what it is.
It's not a not a not a not a light from God.
But when you look at this, I'm really scared, Andrew.
I really am scared because here's the deal.
There's a lot of this, this group of young men on the right specifically that very righteously have noticed some fundamental problems, not just in the world, but even in their own political class.
Meaning, they notice that there's been this massive liberalization of traditional values, where we have fundamentally lost what it means to be not only a God-fearing person, but even if you don't believe in God, to be a traditionalist, to follow Western archetypes and ideals.
And they look at this.
And like you said, the women are all, you know, on antidepressants, anti-anxiety, unhappy, overweight, which is a big thing for men, not attractive to them.
The men are all, and myself, I was included in this.
You know, we grow up in these cities.
We have no role models.
We have no understanding.
A lot of the young guys are molested, abused, or even just sexually confused, getting into pornography at a really young age, getting, you know, I mean, not just learning about sex, I mean, gangbangs and words that you shouldn't know as an adult or until later in life, they're finding this out at nine years old.
Their parents are divorced.
They are feeling the lost society.
They're told that they're racist, that they're misogynist.
And they look at this all and go, look, you can say what you want, but I reject this entirely, which is great.
You go, I reject this.
The problem is that they end up overcompensating in that rejection to rather than rejecting the women who are broken and looking to build women back up to be whole, they reject women entirely.
Instead of going out into realizing, yeah, you know what?
I don't want to be demonized for being white and I don't want to believe in this only Black Lives Matter, they become hateful of everyone else who is not like them, just highly discriminatory to where it's not even a joke anymore.
On top of that, they go, you know, with men, they go, you know what, I don't want to be a man like these people.
So then they become late, they're proud of it.
They go, I'm an incel.
Like, I'm not even going to have sex.
Like, it's not even like I'm trying to be, you know, respectful.
I'm trying to be, you know, chastity.
It's not like this idea of trying to save yourself for marriage.
It's like, I'm just rejecting the system entirely.
And now they end up living in almost a reactionary opposite of what they were fighting.
And I'm going to say this: they all claim to be Catholic and Christian and Protestant, et cetera.
But yet, when you look at their lives, they don't reflect the design that God said that a man should be.
They're just as depressed, they're angry, they're bitter, and they're alone.
And in that attempt to do what is right, they end up almost in just as bad of a place, except they, yeah, they're not having sex, and maybe they're not doing drugs, but they're not happy.
They're not content.
They're not having a good life.
They're lonely.
They're sad and they're depressed.
And that scares me because God calls us to be balanced.
He calls us, he said, you know, when man should not be alone, he said, don't reject women, reject women in the way that the world has designed them now.
Take my design for a woman, find a whole woman, pair up with them, become a union, et cetera.
But I feel like we're kind of heading in a bad direction on our own end.
And I don't know what you think about that because it's scaring me because this is very popular with Generation Z.
I talk about this all the time because one of the things that Jesus said is, I want the joy that is in me to be in you.
That doesn't sound like you're supposed to be sitting alone in your room, miserable and angry, right?
Anger, I like to tell people, anger is the devil's cocaine.
You know, once you start using anger, it feels like righteousness.
And there is such a thing as righteous anger, but anger is not righteousness.
When you start to react to them, they've won.
It's over.
You're letting them set the standards that define your life.
When somebody says to you, I'm going to do this, and you say, well, I'm going to do the opposite, they define you.
So it's really important to not just know what you're against.
It's really important to know what you're for.
And that's why, you know, this is this book starts out with me trying to read the gospel to find out what Jesus was saying, not what Paul was saying, not what the church is saying, not what the religion says, what Jesus Himself was telling you to do with your life, which is really hard to figure out.
It's a lot more mysterious than people think.
We all think we absolutely know, but when you go back and look at it, it's really tough to know.
But once you start to learn that actually, you are part of create, not just part of creation, but part of the creation.
You are the continuation of creation.
You are made in God's image in order to create a life, children, a family, whatever it is that you were given to do.
You're creating a podcast right this minute.
This is something that you're doing that is an extension of yourself.
It's a use of the talents, like in the parable of the talents, that's where we get the word talent from that parable.
You are investing what was given to you and making it bear fruit as a branch of the vine of Jesus.
If you're not doing that, if you're sitting around just reacting to somebody else, they define you.
They are telling you what your life is about.
And I've seen this all my life, especially with men.
Men get very angry.
Men have access to their anger.
And when they are told, when they're sold this image of wimpy little men being beaten up by their wives and being dominated by their wives, when they're shown superheroines who are somehow stronger, better, faster, tougher than men, their reaction is to become brutes.
It's to say, oh, yeah, well, I'll show you.
I'll show you how tough I am and start to really push people around.
They get belligerent.
They team up in packs and rat packs.
It's all they're the victory of the people you despise the most.
It is giving the victory to the people you despise the most.
And I think you give the victory to God.
And the victory to God is becoming the person that He made you to be.
And the thing about this is we all know this.
Like even the people who hate God know this.
You know that you were made to be somebody and you're not that person.
I know it.
We all know it.
We all know that there is this image of us that was there at our creation.
It's bigger than what we are.
We're trying to grow into that image.
You can give up on that.
You can walk away from that.
But if you live into it, you suddenly find that your life becomes incredibly joyful.
And by joyful, I don't mean happy.
You know, I hate this thing in Christianity where everybody's supposed to be happy.
Yeah, it is interesting to me, though, because it's like where I deviate from these people, especially these young men and young women who are on here, is what I feel so heavy is I'm married to a beautiful woman.
She is a soul from God.
I don't know why she married me.
I don't deserve it.
And I don't mean that in like a weird way.
I mean like genuinely, she's a good girl.
She saved herself for marriage.
She wasn't a big drinker, didn't do drugs, just kind of followed God, was a missionary, et cetera.
And then if people know my life, then there's me.
And I don't think you'll ever meet a really holistic person that was born and raised in LA.
I don't think that those exist.
But if you are out there, let me know.
I'll put you in Rolls Guinness Book Records.
First one.
You know, I look at this and I realize how much benefit as a man and being a strong man there is to being with a woman who's living in her place and how much it helps you to live in your place as a man.
And I hate these dumb statements, just like Bjorn.
Every strong man is an even stronger woman.
That's not correct.
They're not stronger.
And every strong man is a woman who knows her value, knows her design, knows where she was made to be and lives in that in strength.
She's a strong in her way.
Because when you compare them, like, yeah, well, you're strong, your wife's stronger.
No, you are strong in different ways.
Yours is brute.
Yours is strength.
Yours is to go out into the battlefield to take the shots for your family.
But I'm telling you, like, I lived, I was born and raised in LA.
I didn't know, I didn't know anything about the way I came across to people because I was in an echo chamber.
I didn't know the way that I dressed looked bad.
I didn't know that the way that I talked was funny.
I didn't know I had a valley girl accent until I got into mainstream, you know, conservatism and realized, oh, shoot, this is genuinely real cowboys watching this stuff, and I'm not one of them.
But, you know, having a woman saying, hey, look, if you just change this about yourself, if you do this, et cetera.
Also on the back end, I haven't done a load of laundry in three years.
Everyone's different.
I don't have to worry about grocery shopping.
My time is freed up to build a brand, an empire, and I'm able to live freely.
And also on top of this, no one ever talks about the fact that women, married men, make more than unmarried men because a woman's never content and she's never satisfied.
And so she's always, you know, you always want to give her the bigger the bouquet, the better house, the better, you know, you always want to give it to her, not because she's needy or high maintenance, but because it's like you build this castle.
You're giving her something, the fruit of your labor.
You're giving her a place to be at home.
And so it's like, what I'm saying is people go, well, we're going to reject women.
I've learned, yeah, I didn't like any of those women either.
I get everyone's becoming gay and pansexual and deviants because, well, let's just face it, there's not a lot of good men or women out there.
But if you can find a woman, and more importantly, if you're a woman watching this, if you're a girl and you can be that woman, pairing up with a man, you can both build each other up where the man works, provides the home for you to stay at home, which I believe is the ultimate desire.
I think discounting staying at home as if that isn't a job, raising kids, building a house, I feel like that's the biggest disservice the West has ever done.
Like either you go to work as a woman or you stay home as if they're not both work.
Like as if it's just a, do you want to work in an office job under some man you don't know?
Or do you want to be under the authority of your husband and of God and your house?
It's just basically choosing where you want to be.
When we live in that design, where I've found that personally, your life grows in ways and there's so much joy, benefit, and value that God brings to your life that you go, ah, I see that God made marriage.
I see that marriage is holy.
I see that he made man, man, and woman, woman, that we will never understand each other and we will never fully get it.
But when we unite together, we just build each other up.
We strengthen one another.
And I find marriage to be quite enjoyable.
Like you said, it's not always happy.
It's not always, you know, but it's fulfilling and it is full of joy and greatness and it is what God wants.
And rejecting woman defeats what God created us to do.
You know, you're preaching to the choir here, but I have had an extraordinarily happy and romantic marriage.
I have to say, you know, I met my wife in the midst of my own personal troubles in my youth.
I was really quite insane.
I was really a troubled, troubled guy.
And yet I somehow, by the grace of God, I met this woman that I just absolutely fell in love with.
I picked her up hitchhiking and I absolutely fell in love with her.
We've been married over 40 years.
We've had one fight 35 years ago.
It lasted about 15 seconds.
We just, we just, something is magical about us.
One of the things that happens in a marriage like that is that at first when you talk to women, you can't understand anything they're saying.
You think like, you know, why is this creature incapable of reason?
And then slowly over time, you start to realize, oh, wait, they actually see a different half of the world.
And it's like wearing those red and blue glasses that make things three-dimensional.
The world becomes more three-dimensional when you live with a woman that you love.
And then once, of course, you have children, all kinds of dimensions of feeling come into your life.
And so it really is an amazing experience to be married and to love the woman that you're married to.
It's an incredible gift.
I know there's people who get into marriages that are very painful, that are abusive, that are terrible.
And I think those are things that we have to be honest about.
These things really do happen.
But if you find somebody who is going to be the kind of person that you need in your life, it's an incredible gift.
And I mean, one of the reasons, one of the many reasons, many things that led me to God was understanding that love was a real thing.
You know, love is not like, you know, they always say that love is kind of a, when I was growing up, at least, and this is probably still true in the general culture, they teach you that love is kind of an offshoot of sex, that you desire somebody and you can't have them.
So you get these feelings.
And it's not true.
There's a thing that is called love and it develops.
It starts off like an explosion, but it develops over time.
And in falling in love and in staying in love and in nurturing that love, you become a fuller human being and your life becomes fuller.
It is a great, great blessing.
There's no question about it.
And I agree with you.
I listen to people complain about marriage all the time in those kind of generic ways, like, oh, they all ball and chain, you know, oh, you know, you can't sleep with a lot of women and all this stuff.
I think, I don't know, I'm having a pretty good time, you know, and I've been having a pretty good time for over 40 years.
And when you create that bond, because I want to get some of this about the discussion about the women and the harm that, you know, not defining women and also not defining men and creating trans women genuinely.
causes confusion in society and moves our direction to a place of confusion overall.
You know, I have found that you said, since we speak different languages, it is so fascinating that I was having a problem in my marriage, not an actual marriage problem, but it's more of those problems where you're going, this could become a problem if we don't figure this out.
There's some disconnect going on.
And I was feeling like, man, my wife, which a lot of guys would like, is just obsessed with me.
And she just will not let me off the hook.
And I'm a very independent man.
I've travel.
I'm a journalist, et cetera.
I don't need her around all the time.
And I was going, why don't you just let me just do my life?
And then I realized I never asked my wife, what do you need?
What do you need to feel like you have my attention?
Kind of like a fat, homeless person.
You're like, how's that guy fat?
And it's because he's got the mindset of, I don't know what I'm going to eat next.
So let me try to eat as much as I can.
And now we have obese, fat, you know, fat, obese, homeless.
I realized women can be the same way.
If you're not intentional, if you're not upfront, specifically with my wife, hey, if I don't tell you, hey, these are the times I'll take on a date this night.
We'll have this lunch together.
I'll be around.
She's going to be like, I don't know when I'm going to get the next time with him.
So I got to try to take every moment of him feeling like I'm never getting enough.
And by just communicating and having that aspect, our marriage increased, I don't want to say a thousand percent better.
Because now, you know, I felt like my wife was sort of like nagging at me, being like taking all my time trying to suffocate me.
And in reality, all she was asking for is, hey, just communicate with me and just tell me when we're going to see each other.
So I know when I'm going to see you next.
And that idea of like, I didn't know that she was trying to tell me something as women do without telling it to me.
Like, and by having that communication opening up, that union and even those issues help you to grow so much as a person, which is so interesting that when we don't have models, my wife has a good mom and a good father.
Which, which are, which love each other and are incredible.
And we don't have a lot of role models anymore.
And so when we're talking about this, this idea of now that men can become women, where we're at, what do you think the long-term damage is going to be to young girls, to women in society who grow up, seeing that trans women are not only destroying them in sports, but as we're moving towards even transhumanism where they might be able to give birth, we'll get there, I think.
You know, what does this do to young girls and what kind of society is this building?
Well, I think it is sending the message to girls that they are irrelevant, that they're obsolete, that they're non-existent, that they can be replaced.
And I think that that is the message the left means to send to all of us so that our families are insecure, so that our relationships are insecure.
I have a certain sense of the future that I think is the Christian sense of the future, which is not, there's not one future.
There's two.
There's one for the saved and there's one for the salvation impaired.
And I think that when you look at what is going to happen to society, that's what's going to happen to society.
Some of us are going to live one way and other people are going to live another way.
And so that's why I say when you're reacting to someone, you're not building anything.
When I'm reacting to the way the world is going, the Bible tells us the world is going to hell in a handbasket.
It's literally going to hell in a handbasket.
There's one thing that bothers me about churches.
Churches have made themselves irrelevant by trying to make the world a better place.
Nowhere in the gospels does Jesus say the world is going to become a better place.
He says, give your money to the poor, but the poor you'll always have with you.
Follow me and people will hate you.
You know, pick up your cross and follow me because they're going to come for you.
They're going to crucify you in some way.
Either they're going to cancel you or they're going to fire you or they're going to hate you.
They're going to revile you.
Whatever's going to happen is going to happen to you.
He never says the world is going to become a better place.
What he says is that you are going to become closer to God and the joy that is in God will be in you.
That's a different thing.
That is a different thing.
And so when you start to live, you know, they say the slogan is usually be in the world, but not of the world.
And I think that that's right.
You know, we walk through the world understanding.
People are going to hate each other.
People are going to kill each other.
People are going to mistreat each other.
Men are going to say that they're women and then tell you that if you won't, you know, if you won't embrace the lie, it's your fault.
You're a bad person.
We're throwing you off our social media.
We're doing this.
And you guys just got to keep walking and doing what you do.
But you can't do that if you don't know what you believe.
You can't do that if you don't know who you are.
And so those are the things that you start with.
You start in your heart in this conversation with God.
Who'd you make me to be?
What do you want from me?
What am I supposed to be doing here?
Once you see that, it's a straight line.
It's a straight line.
Bombs are going to be going.
It's like a joke.
You know, bombs are going off.
People are throwing things at you.
You just keep walking.
You know, I found a statue of Mary in a Yale chapel, and there was Latin on it.
And the Latin basically translated is as do fear, do right, fear nothing.
Do right, fear nothing.
And you think about that and it's like, how can I fear nothing?
But in fact, if you know what the right is for you and for your life and for the people that you love, you do stop fearing things.
You stop fearing a lot.
You stop thinking, well, this guy's going to hurt me.
This guy's going to hate me.
This guy's going to cancel me.
You just think, you know what?
I'm sorry.
I'm not going to hate you.
I'm not going to hurt you, but I'm going to keep walking.
I'm just going to keep walking.
If you have the power to, and this is, I think, the definition of a man, by the way.
I don't think a man is necessarily, I know guys who couldn't lift 10 pounds.
I know guys who are weak and guys who are small and intellectual and all this stuff.
I don't think that that's the measure of a man.
I think the measure of a man is the integrity to be who he was made to be.
And I think that that entails the way you treat people and the way you walk through life and the words that come out of your mouth.
It entails everything that you do.
Once you get that, once you get that, you don't have to become it.
You just have to be walking in that direction.
I mean, anytime you're turned around to walk in the right direction, your life gets better.
And so once you start to do that, you don't have to be afraid of anybody because they can't take that away from you.
If you are not, if you are fearless, they cannot touch you.
And that's, you know, that's the whole answer right there.
So there's, you say, what's it going to do to society?
I don't know.
Society is going to go bad.
You know, this empire, every empire has fallen.
This empire will fall.
You know, maybe I got lucky.
I got to live my life in one of the best periods in history.
And you guys have gotten a lot harder time to deal with, but it doesn't matter because you're going to have to do the same thing.
You know, I mean, we all have our sorrows and our tragedies and our enemies.
You're going to have to do the same thing.
And to sit there really and worry about, you know, I mean, look, I'll speak out about it.
I will say to anybody that this guy who stole that girl's victory in that swimming contest did the wrong thing.
And the people who defend him are doing the wrong thing.
And the people who say that that's a woman are lying.
I will say that to anybody, but I'm not going to cross the street to punch that guy or anything like that.
I'm just going to keep walking, saying what I'm saying, and living in the truth.
And, you know, I do feel, especially with young men, especially with young men, that they have lost that plot.
And I think for the reason that a lot of them have lost their dads, a lot of divorce has deprived them of that role model.
You know, I didn't have really good male role models when I was a kid, and I found them in literature.
One of the reasons I became a writer is because I found the guys in literature who I thought, like, that's the guy I want to be like.
There was a detective in a famous group of detective stories, the Philip Marlowe story, and his author said, down these mean streets.
This is where we get the saying, mean streets.
He said, down these mean streets, a man must go who is not himself mean.
And I read that sentence and I thought, that's what I want to be.
I want to walk through the world of corruption.
I want to walk through the world of evil.
I want to walk through the world of brutality and not be corrupt and not be evil and not be brutal.
And that, you know, again, once you start to see that, that that's who you are and that's what you have to give and what you have to create, what your role in creation is, because you do have a role in creation.
Creation is not over.
It is repeated every time a child is born.
It is repeated every time that child finds himself and finds what he or she is supposed to do.
Once you have that, you know, it's like they really can't touch you.
They can kill you, but they can't touch you.
And I think that that's basically one of the key messages of the gospel, one of the things you will hear Jesus say if you really listen to him.
Yeah, it's the loss to me of redemption that has really struck me because I have personally noticed rather than, you know, if I, let's say if I have something that I'm wrong on, a bad take, we've all had bad takes.
We've all been objectively wrong on certain things and looked back and went, what the hell was I thinking when I said that or did that?
And that goes to our personal lives.
And if you're listening to this, you know that, where you just look back and you have no excuse.
You just, you were wrong.
Maybe even did it intentionally.
And I find it so weird today because of the internet and the instant likes and gratification that people rather than trying to help or love other people or have a heart, especially on the right wings, which is what I'm kind of focusing on, tend to just like to point out that somebody's wrong and not only not correct them, but it also never comes across to me like it's in love.
And, you know, I'm not going to get into it right now because I'm having him on my show later, but a good example would have been the Dave Rubin thing, where a lot of people that were telling him about what he did was wrong.
I agree with what they were saying, but I always asked myself the question was just, are you telling him he's wrong because you care that he's wrong?
Or do you love him enough to pray that he could see what's right?
Or do you care enough to talk to him in his mind about, you know, he's not even a Christian.
So you're coming at him with Christian values and morals to a guy that's a gay Jew and you're not even putting into your mind about who he is.
And why aren't you talking to him like he's a human?
Why are you talking like he's a child?
Why don't you come to him as somebody who cares?
And it doesn't look like you care about him.
You care about yourself.
You want to be right rather than saying, hey, if I feel like you're wrong and I want you to do what's right, then I should start number one through prayer.
I should start through, you know, looking out for you, trying to understand who I'm speaking to, kind of like on Mars Hill, you know, who am I speaking to?
This is the unknown God.
How do I present truth in a way that the people will understand it rather than just yelling at them?
But in the modern world, I feel like a lot of people don't change and people aren't changing for the better.
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And so it just kind of breaks my mind and breaks my heart that when I read this verse here, like Matthew 18, 6, it says, but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.
That the young, the youth, young people growing up have been really manipulated, have been targeted, have been brought into a terrible place morally in a world that's depraved.
And rather than, you know, the Bible says he wants to punish the person who corrupted them, not the child.
who got corrupted, that we are putting our focus on all of these people that are the victims of a corrupt world rather than focusing our fight against those who have tried to take them down and have created the system they're growing up in.
And instead of giving them a life preserver and a life raft and saying, hey, there's a better way to live.
God can heal you.
God can redeem you.
He can pull you out of feminism.
We just hate women.
Hey, you know what?
God can make you masculine if you've been emasculated and you go, nope, you're just a gay, you're a fag, you're this, get out of here.
You're not a true person, you know, or even if you're an atheist, like there's truth.
Nope, you're just a cringe atheist.
Get out.
We don't want you in our movement.
And we've lost the Christ-like mentality to bring that salvation into the world, to be that conduit.
And instead, we've almost become like the Pharisees with the adulterous woman, where we're like, God's like, throw the first stone.
And I feel like if Twitter, if Twitter users were there, that woman would be dead.
You know, it is an amazing thing that people always think of Jesus as kind of meek and mild and all this, you know, little Jesus meek and mild.
I don't think Jesus ever says anything nice to anybody in the entire gospel.
I can't find one place where he actually says, you know, good for you.
Well done, you know.
But the only people he really goes after are the priests.
The only people he actually like rips into are the priests where he says, you know, you have shut the door of heaven in these people's faces.
And that's a pretty, you know, terrible indictment.
That's a pretty terrible thing to say.
And again, it goes back to what are you doing with your life that is a sermon?
You know, I mean, I always ask people, people, especially in the evangelical, you know, community, they're always preaching to people.
I always ask them, does that work?
You know, because I've never seen that work on anybody where you get in their face and you tell them about Jesus and suddenly they go, oh, now I get it.
You know, they understand.
But when people see joy, when people see gusto, when they see love in a marriage, people start to say, you know, like, I want that.
Listen, I worked in Hollywood.
A lot of people in Hollywood are getting a lot of women.
They're sleeping with a lot of women and they're miserable.
And I was in a meeting once where this guy actually was telling me about all the women he was sleeping with, two women this night.
And I got a model this night.
And on his desk is a picture of his child.
And I said, are you divorced?
He said, yeah, my wife caught me with another woman.
And I said, well, let me ask you something.
You're having all this fun.
Was it worth it?
And he went, oh, no.
I just thought, I thought, well, that is really the story because we're making these movies where it's just so much fun to sleep with one woman after another.
And it's so much, you know, and the wife is dragging you down or is telling you that you don't know how to fix a car.
You know, those are stories that people are telling.
And the people who are telling those stories have an agenda.
I know them.
I know who they are.
You know, if you don't tell those stories, they kick you out.
So it's like it is a certain message that they're trying to send.
You have to send another message.
You have to have another message inside you that you can send through your life.
And I think that that is the greatest sermon you can give, the greatest sermon you can give is the way you live.
And just, you know, I don't really have to tell anybody about my religion.
I do.
I mean, I talk about it.
I'm not, I don't hide it.
But I don't have to preach to people for people to say, what are you doing that makes you like that?
What are you doing that has made you, you know, at the age of 152 as happy as anybody I've ever seen?
You know, then you can start to talk about it.
If what you're doing is you're yelling at them, you're calling them names, you're miserable yourself, you're sitting around at home.
Where's the sermon in that?
What have you got to sell?
The key thing about politics is you have to understand there's no more virtue on the right than on the left.
The only difference right now is that the left has all the power.
Power corrupts.
Power turns people into what the left is.
The left. is basically in charge of every institution in America and the right feels left out and they feel silenced and they're angry and all that stuff.
But if the right had all the power, if the right owned every institution in America, the right would be the people bullying people and pushing people around.
We are all broken, sinful people.
Power makes us nuts.
You know, money makes us nuts.
All the things that life gives you can make you nuts.
The only thing that is not going to do that is if you are focused on the one who made you who you are.
And this is the interesting thing.
You know, my life was saved as a young man by a psychiatrist.
And he was, I'm sure he was an atheist.
I mean, the only time I ever shocked him was when I told him I had converted to Christianity.
But he saved my life through psychiatry.
And I used to think like everything that I learned in psychiatry was false.
All the Freudian stuff, it was all false.
I don't believe any of it.
But somehow the relationship between him and me changed my life.
And it was because he was a father to me.
He was a mentor.
And I loved him.
And that readjusted a life that had been bent as a kid, right?
And I straightened out a life that had been bent as a kid.
And the thing is, our psychology is not just inside our head.
Our psychology is a relationship.
And when you have a father who abandons you, that father was meant to represent God to you.
You know, he was meant to represent the male part of God, as your mother is meant to represent the female part of God, because God made us in his image, male and female.
And so when one of them fails you, he's closing the door, you know, to God.
And you have to find a way to open that door.
If what you do is you make God in the image of your father, you're going to turn away from him because your father was a flawed person.
Even the great father is a flawed person, right?
But if he loved you in the right way and if he gave you the right role model, then he opens that door and you can see beyond him into something bigger than him.
And the whole world is like that.
Everything you love is just a symbol of God.
Everything you want and hunger for is really just a symbol of God.
And you have to learn, you know, it says in the Bible, do everything to the glory of God.
And to me, what that means is do everything, understanding that it's a metaphor.
It's a symbol for God, right?
I can't just, you know, put my arms around God and said, love your buddy.
You know, I can't do that.
But what I can do is use my gift in such a way that it glorifies him.
I can love the people I love in such a way that it glorifies him.
All of that stuff, all of that stuff is available to everybody.
It's just there on the table.
I say, you know, it's fruit lying on the ground.
But the world hates it.
And we were told the world is going to hate it.
And the world is doing everything it can to teach you not to be that way.
And so, again, this idea that we have to worry about what the world is going to become, the world is going to become crap.
Yeah, I mean, if anybody's been sleeping, the last two years should have woken you up.
How quickly, I mean, this is rapid.
I'm sure even it shocked you how quickly things in the last two years with COVID just switched from the new world order was agenda 2030 and then it's now agenda 2021.
Yeah, and you know, and it is crazy, though, because despite there being madness in the world, I mean, there's this article from the Washington Examiner, how they tried to make Leah Thomas, the trans swimmer, look more feminine.
They actually photoshopped the picture.
So it's like viewers are quick to take note of an NBC show today's attempt to feminize photos of controversial transgender college swimmer Leah Thomas that appeared during a discussion of the ongoing NCAA championship races, meaning they don't even buy their own bullshit, but they don't.
I mean, they know that's a dude.
That's the dude.
And like, I've always said this, like, I congratulate Leah Thomas for effectively being more masculine than I am.
Like, genuinely, I mean, I'm taking notes.
But I mean, and it's not just to mock people who are in confusion, right?
But, but with all this, right?
Most people's issues is that they're not trans.
But you talk about this idea of knowing your place.
Like, so my wife would be different because she's, she's, there's a, do you know who Yako Billions is?
He's, you know, he's just really, he's really been out there doing a lot of God's work.
And you see people like Yako or like my wife, and you go, wow, that is like such a good Christian, right?
And you go, well, that is such a good example.
Like, even Yako never drank in his life.
You know, he's his wife was his first as well.
And there's this like true conservative core value.
But I feel like a lot of men are in my road where we really haven't had such a smooth upbringing.
You know, bad things happen to us when we were kids that we can't undo.
Things have happened.
And I'm not going to get into the woke, you know, blame my trauma for my current victimhood, but we've chosen not to be victims, basically.
And we've said, you know what?
This stuff has happened.
I don't know what to do with it.
I've been involved in certain things.
I have memories.
I have these issues.
And I hate even calling it trauma.
I just have an experience of life where it has not, it is a miracle that I'm even as sane as I am.
So when people mock you for like not being as conservative as them or not being as good of an example as a Christian, you go, oh, holy hell, you should see my life if the Bible didn't exist because you would be so shocked at how I'd be living.
But yet at the same time, you know, I went ahead and people know this.
You know, a lot of young men reject the world.
And I did this.
I became a Christian in my young adult years and I rejected the world.
I actually moved to the desert, didn't watch movies or listen to music, studied the Bible for years, ended up getting going to seminary and everything.
And I didn't drink.
I didn't do, I didn't do any of these outward things.
I didn't gamble.
I wasn't having sex.
I totally cleansed my life of worldly actions.
But to be honest, I was weak.
Like I was told that living and being effective in the world was sort of like what you're not doing rather than what you're doing.
And that's the image I got from the church: you're a good Christian, and we're going to elevate you to where I end up becoming a youth pastor because you were looking for someone to run a ministry that doesn't smoke, that doesn't drink, that doesn't gamble, that isn't having sex.
And I found myself on, and I'm going to be careful because I don't, some of these people watch the show, being around a lot of people who were lazy, good people morally, but lazy and very ineffective.
And I started noticing that the church was doing a lot less to really see that the people in the church were transformed and more live this life that was like the greatest thing that you could do was wear skinny jeans and be a worship leader.
Like that was the, you know, the greatest thing you could do was to be a pastor, forgetting that the pastor is helping to equip the saints who are the hands, you know, the eyes, the ears, you know, and the feet of Christ to go out into the world.
It was seen like church was the center and was the bastion.
And to be the best Christian was to be the best at church.
And I'm telling you, Andrew, I was in an existential crisis because I was like going crazy where I'm like, dude, I literally am doing the Christ thing.
Like I'm, I'm, I was even dating a virgin.
I'm like, I'm dating a virgin.
I haven't even touched her boobs yet.
Like, I'm like, this is crazy.
Like, I, I don't, it's very hard for a guy not to touch your girlfriend's boobs.
It really is.
You're like, you just sit in there, like, and I was going, but like, what am I doing?
Well, and I'm not discounting, you know, the David being in the field and the times with God before you kill Goliath.
And I think that was a good time God used, but I was like, I want to be effective.
I went out in the world, realized I was so unprepared for the reality of the way the world was, that the church equipped me so little and it was so misunderstanding of how it was that I fell back into a lot of old habits, not as extreme, not as crazy, not as addictive, or et cetera.
You know, I started drinking again.
I started cursing, et cetera.
But it wasn't like intentional.
It was just like, dude, there's not a lot of Christians out in the world, really, like in these industries and stuff trying to pioneer.
That I realized, man, like I'm in a position now where, yeah, I left the, I left and moved out, not just left the church, I'm still a part of it.
Went to fight in the world, got really shocked at how really intense, nasty, and negative it is.
And I've taken some hits.
Like, I mean, I'm going to be honest.
I think my bulletproof S is about as effective as the vaccines.
You know, I mean, there's a little bit of hole that things get through.
And now I'm here.
And I've seen this with a lot of the messages I've been getting, the comments, where there's so many men out there that are going, look, I'm needing to work for God's kingdom.
I'm wanting to work for him, but I'm like too sinful that the church rejects me because I've got some rough spots in my life, but I'm not woken.
I'm not a worldly guy where I want to go live for my flesh.
I want to fight for God's kingdom, but nobody wants me.
Nobody wants to pair up with me.
And even I feel the shame of myself that I've got so many, you know, weak moral spots or vices or things that I don't know if I really can be an effective example.
I don't know if I can really be a witness out in the world because, like I said, the Christians won't support me because I cuss and the woke people don't want to hear my stuff about Christ.
I would say 90% of the male viewers of the show are in that position.
The swimmer, you know, feminizing his look so that because they know they're lying, they have to lie.
And you talk about your trauma and dealing with your trauma and about sin.
All of this has to do with the truth.
It has to do with telling the truth.
It's an amazingly powerful thing.
When, you know, Christ said, the truth will set you free.
He knew what he was talking about.
The truth is, life makes sense.
This is one of the funny things.
We don't pay attention to this that often, but if you walk north, you will get to Canada.
If you walk south, you will get to Mexico.
Not every single time, not sometimes, every single time, the same thing will happen.
Life actually fits together and it makes sense.
And when people say things that don't make sense, like, you know, a man can have a period or a man can give birth, it means something.
They're just playing with language.
They're telling you that words will mean whatever they say they mean, like Humpty Dumpty and Alice in Wonderland.
When you deal with the truth, when you deal with the truth, you're going to come up against some things in yourself that you don't like.
You are definitely going to come up with some things that are sinful, cowardly, small, weak, all of those things.
Everyone does.
Everyone does, whether you're Mickey Mouse or John Wayne, you are going to come up against those things in yourself that you don't like.
Now, if you get mired in that, if you get mired in that, then you've kind of surrendered to the enemy of mankind who is constantly accusing you, right?
But if you understand that God sees this already, he saw it before you did.
He knows it's there.
He already forgave you for it.
You're on your way.
And you can just walk in truth.
If you can walk in truth with your wife, if you can walk in truth with your employer, if you can walk in truth with the people you talk to through a microphone or wherever you talk to people, you have a power that no one else has.
And yes, of course they're going to silence you.
This is the world.
The world is a corrupt place.
You know, when you speak the truth in the world, they try to kill you.
And one of the great messages of the resurrection is you can kill the truth, but the truth ain't going to die.
I mean, you can kill the truth as many times as you want, but it's going to come back.
And if you participate in the truth, you're going to come back and you're going to be okay.
It's an amazing power.
And it is the power of men.
It is the power of men to say, I will tell the truth no matter what.
And that doesn't mean you can't keep your mouth shut when your mouth should be shut.
It doesn't mean you don't tell, you don't, you know, keep your keep your opinions to yourself sometimes.
It simply means that when you speak, people know you mean what you say.
People know you will do what you say you're going to do.
People know that you are who you seem to be.
And, you know, it's one of the most important things.
Listen, if you're married for a long time, you know that you're going to come upon a woman sometime in a bar or meet somebody and think like, gee, this would be great.
You know, who would ever find out?
What would happen.
But if you don't do that, if you don't do that, you suddenly begin to see that, oh, to be a faithful man means that when my wife looks at me, she is seeing me.
It means when my kids look at me, they're seeing me.
They're not seeing me hiding some nasty stuff away.
They're seeing me, you know, and that, and that's tremendous power.
Everything you've said in this conversation has led back to that idea, that idea of the truth.
And I think the truth is at the heart of being a man.
I think loving the truth, knowing the truth, admitting the truth to yourself and to other people.
I think that's at the heart of manhood.
And I think that that is a way to find out who you are, which is also what a man is here to do.
Yeah, I want to talk about your book here because, you know, my family's Australian.
My wife's Australian.
I don't know if you know, but they're back to a prison colony.
We've gotten full circle, full arc here.
And I'm just, it's crazy.
I mean, to put it in perspective, if you're new to the show, I mean, my mom, as we call her with a U, she got kicked off a public table outside because she, you know, because of her status.
And it breaks my heart.
I mean, it's such a heavy thing.
And obviously, like churches there, you know, even because of the vax passport thing have, you know, at some points, she told me that there was, you know, pastors who were outing members who were coming to their church who were not vaccinated.
And then also too, like they weren't allowing certain, if you weren't vaccinated, you weren't allowed to sing.
You weren't allowed to praise God through music.
And also at the point where there's different services sometimes for the unvaccinated and the vaccinated.
We've seen this before.
But the church has really gotten to a point where it's become very worldly.
It's become very asinine and just sort of, this is why people are abandoning it.
It's not because they're abandoning God.
In fact, I feel the hunger for God has never been greater in the world today, especially with young people.
I see them just on fire to want to know, but not finding God in the church.
And so it's like, as you get into this, you start getting books like this.
And I cannot help but notice on the front, amongst the choices of the artwork, which I'm imagining you signed off on, you do have the Holy Bible as one of these books that is up there.
And so in your book, The Truth and the Beauty, and which by the way, I want to remind people is endorsed by, I wonder how you got a Michael Knowles endorsing.
Well, I hope the book is an easy read because it's really stories about these fantastic human beings who are alive at a time that's very similar to this one in many ways, when gender was under question, when radical politics and conservative politics were fighting for dominance and when people were finding out, stopping, they ceased to believe in God because science was advancing so quickly.
They lost their connection to the church.
So it's about people in a time that's very much like this.
I was having a conversation with my son, who's a brilliant guy and a very deep thinker.
And we were sitting around talking about religion.
And I said, one of the things that bothers me is whenever I understand what Christ is saying, my happiness, my joy meter goes up and it stays up.
Every time I understand a little bit more about what he's saying, and I said, I can't understand a lot of what he's saying.
A lot of what he's saying doesn't make sense to me.
Just to give you an example, Peter walks on water.
He sees Christ walking on water and he says, let me walk on water.
And then he loses his faith after a couple of steps and he starts to sink.
And Jesus says to him, oh, ye of little faith.
And I thought, well, wait a minute.
How many steps on water do you have to take before you get a big faith badge?
I mean, I've never taken one step on water.
And I thought, like, what is he talking about?
What does he mean?
What does he mean, you know, turn the other cheek?
Because if somebody attacks me, am I going to turn the other cheek?
If somebody attacks somebody I love, am I going to turn the other cheek?
So I thought, he is the word made flesh.
His words must mean something.
And I don't understand what he's saying.
And my son said to me, you know, I think the problem is you're trying to understand a philosophy instead of trying to get to know a man.
And the minute he said that, I thought, that's the smartest thing anybody's ever said to me.
And so I decided I was going to reread the Gospels without any theology, without the church, without St. Paul, without anybody, anybody telling me what Jesus was saying, and just get to know this man, like a character in a novel or a memoir.
You're reading a memoir about a guy or a biography about a guy and you get to know Harry Truman or George Washington, whoever it is.
But I went back and read it just to get to know who he is.
And as I was reading it, I started to think, you know, this reminds me, what he's saying reminds me of some of the greatest poetry I've ever read, which are the Romantic poets.
And I thought, why should that be?
And the reason I came to feel was that the Romantic poets had lost God, a lot, most of them.
They had lost God.
They had come into this world of confusion, of gender identity, confusion.
And they had to try and reconstruct it.
They had to build it back.
Now, I'm not the only person who's ever said that.
Some of the great critics of this literature have said it.
But I started to want to think, well, maybe this is a way that I can understand Jesus better.
Jesus doesn't change.
He is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
But we change.
You know, our world changes.
I mean, St. Paul wasn't dealing with the internet.
You know, we're dealing with all kinds of things that are different.
Sometimes we need a different doorway into understanding it.
And when I went back to these poets and went back, not just to their poetry, because this is not a book about poetry.
It's a book about the poets who are these young Christians.
These are about these geniuses who were living in a time of complete confusion, just like us.
And they were mostly young men, mostly rebels.
I deal with, as I said, Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein, because that's a book about women that I think is really interesting.
And I started to find that they built a road back to Christ.
Wordsworth, who was a big inspiration to C.S. Lewis, was not a believer when he started out.
He ended up as a believer.
The smartest of them and the most messed up one, he was a drug addict and everything was Coleridge.
He was a believer.
He understood that Jesus was at the center of meaning.
And he affected, he was like the holy, a kind of broken version of the Holy Spirit.
He went from poet to poet to poet, including Mary Shelley, inspiring each one of them so that each one of them, Mary Shelley, also kind of became much more religious as she got older.
And Keats, unfortunately, died when he was in his 20s.
So we never found out what he would have been like.
They built a way of understanding the gospels in a world in which the gospels have ceased to speak.
Okay, so in other words, if you begin with them, and this is what C.S. Lewis said, if you begin with Wordsworth and stick with it, you will come to believe.
And so they opened a door to those of us who were kind of blocked out of the meaning of these words.
And sometimes you're blocked out because you weren't raised in it.
Sometimes you're blocked out because you haven't heard it.
Sometimes you're blocked out because the church. as you say, has not prepared you to deal with the objections.
This is what I find in cradle Christians is that a lot of times they've never heard an honest argument against Christianity.
So when they meet one, they're suddenly convinced, you know, because they were kind of told all those atheists don't know what they're talking about.
They're all fools.
They have no idea.
And that's not true.
You know, they actually have a way of looking at the world that also makes sense.
It just happens to be incorrect, you know.
And so you have to be prepared to meet that with the truth.
Again, you can't just say like, oh, you're a sinner.
I'm not going to listen to you.
You have to say, no, I understand why I believe what I believe.
And I think these poets really helped me to do that.
They increased my joy in the reading of the Gospels.
I've since found other writers who kind of saw what they saw.
And it's just been really liberating and has increased, as I say, it's increased my joy in Christ.
And I think that that's to me the whole purpose.
The whole purpose is for God's joy to be in you and for you to see the world the way he sees it.
I mean, this is what Jesus says when he says, love your enemies.
You think, why should I love my enemies?
You know, I don't even like my enemies.
Why should I love my enemies?
He says, because it will make you a son of your father who treats all people with love.
And you think like, oh, okay.
So in other words, I will see what God sees and I will have the joy that God has in creation.
That actually works.
That's an amazing thing.
You know, Jesus was not, you know, a lot of religion silences Jesus.
I talk about this at the beginning of the book, that the Nicene Creed, which is the basic statement of Christianity, says Christ was born of the Virgin Mary and he died under Pontius Pilate.
And you think like, that's it?
You know, there's not what happened between those two times, what happened between the time he was born and he was killed.
In fact, there was a time when he was speaking and he was saying something.
And those things are really important to finding him and finding out who he was and establishing that relationship that helps you become, and this has become, to me, one of the central quotes of the Bible is it helps you become a branch of his vine.
In other words, you want to do stuff with your life.
You want to bear fruit.
But you can't bear fruit if you've fallen off the tree, right?
If you're just a stick lying on the ground, you're not going to bear it.
You have to be part of the tree.
You have to let the blood of the tree flow through you and make you who you are.
And that's what you're trying to do in getting to know a man.
And to me, these people and their lives, these poems, really help me understand.
The way the book works, it tells stories about these poets.
And then the last third of the book is rereading the Gospels in the light of what these poets say.
So the last large section of the book is all about the Gospels referring back to what these poets were talking about and showing how it illuminates what Christ was saying.
Yeah, I mean, if you look at this too, if you're not a big reader, this is only about 233 pages each.
To some people, this is a year-long book to read.
But for the most part, I mean, you can, you know, you casually read this in a week, you know, and there's no need, by the way, I want to remind people to be in a competition for reading.
So a lot of people are afraid to buy books and to read books because there's always that same person when you say it's cold in your state, it's colder in my state.
You go, I got a good book.
They've had a better book.
If it took you a month to read, they read it in a day.
It's not a competition.
My wife has dyslexia and she reads all the time.
She reads slowly, but she likes to read.
I can read a book in just like a day and it doesn't matter.
Yeah, I do everything but move my lips when I read.
You know, you don't have to like poetry to read the book, but I hope when you're done, you'll kind of think like, oh, there's something here that's worth finding out a little bit.
And in the modern day, we hear a lot from young people, you know, and from musicians and beauty talent contest winners and whatever Joe Biden's bumbling, you know, but very rarely do wise people or people who have experience really get to speak.
And this audience is definitely on the younger side.
And, you know, you're listening to this and you probably have never heard of Andrew Clavin if you're under 20, because you probably are new to this whole world.
You might not even know this is kind of a political show.
You might just think we just laugh and look at crazy things.
And but I'd say the majority of you guys, if you're older than 20, know who he is.
You've at least heard him, watched a speech, a clip.
What you don't know is that he's incredibly gifted in his understanding of the world and giving great advice specifically to young people, which I follow your podcast.
Very, very good.
So looking at young people and knowing who's listening, and as someone who's been through that, what are your concerns right now for the next generation in this country?
And how can this book and how can what's in here help young men and young women to battle and to get through what you believe is coming?
If I could change one thing in the history of this country, it would be the Supreme Court decision that said you can't pray in schools.
Because not only should you pray in school, but you should be taught about God in school.
And you don't have to be taught about the Christian God.
You just have to be taught that there is a God and He wants you to be free.
If you follow that logic, you'll probably end up worshiping the Christian God, but never mind that for the moment.
Everything we believe, everything we know is right.
This is why I came to Christ.
I came to Christ at 49.
I was baptized at 49, so it took me a long time to find this road because I grew up in a secular world with secular people.
I grew up in New York and Los Angeles and London and places where people just didn't talk about God.
And so not believing is kind of the default system.
And anytime you talk about God, it's kind of icky and kind of like, you know, why, you know, I described it in my memoirs.
Like every time somebody said Jesus, it was like dropping a squid down the back of my neck.
You know, it just didn't make sense.
But everything, everything that makes sense about your life has to do with God.
We're told that we have are endowed by our creator with rights.
That doesn't make sense unless you believe in God.
We're told that all men are created equal.
We're told that all men are created equal.
Well, we know they're not.
We know men aren't equal, but they're equal in the sight of God.
That only makes sense if you have a creator.
And so what I would say is begin with this.
Begin with this.
Don't be afraid.
I always tell people don't believe what you don't believe.
Like, don't say a guy's a woman because you don't believe it.
Just don't say it because you don't believe it.
Don't pretend to believe it.
Just don't do it.
But the other thing is, believe what you do believe.
You know, you know, you know that there is a person that you're supposed to be.
Start with that.
You know that there's a person that you're supposed to be.
You know you were made to be something better than what you are.
Start with that and start moving toward that.
And again, I want to go back to that slogan that I found on that statue: do right, fear nothing.
When I look at young people today, what I see mostly is fear, fear to speak, fear to be, fear to believe.
That's what I see in young people.
And, you know, it's like you don't have to.
You just don't have to.
Once you understand, once you are committed to the truth, once you are committed to believing what in fact makes sense, you will not be afraid.
You will get braver all the time, every day you will.
And so, you know, that's the thing that I always, when I talk to people, I get letters on my podcast and I answer these letters.
And the one thing I see again and again is that I don't feel people are taking the time in their day to make themselves better.
I feel that they are, you know, watching TV, they're playing video games.
And by the way, I like all that.
You want to talk?
Nothing against it, but they don't take even 20 minutes to stop and to say, what am I supposed to do?
How do I do it?
What's the method of doing it?
Should I meditate?
Should I pray?
You know, I would start by praying.
I would start with 15 minutes of outspoken prayer.
But that's the thing.
You have to get past that fear.
That is what I see mostly in young people is I see women miserable and they're miserable because they don't have men who are unafraid.
And I think that, you know, that's what I want to see.
I worked in Hollywood.
When I started to speak my mind, they threw me out.
I had to sell my house.
I mean, my income went from here to here.
I never lost a night's sleep about it because I knew I was doing the right thing.
I know all the guys who did the opposite.
I know every single one of them.
You look in their eyes and they're afraid and they're small and they're running away.
There's a price you pay for everything.
The price you pay for fear is you become smaller.
The price you pay for courage is people will dislike you, but you become bigger and you become healthier and you become smarter and things start to go better.
So that would be what I would say is do right, fear nothing.
That is the best advice I could give any young person, especially young men.
Yeah, and I think we can end on that in the fact of being strong and courageous.
You know, the Bible has a lot to talk about, about being strong and courageous both together and being unashamed, realizing that I, and I want to tell the young men, young women, you know, part of what's being strong and courageous and being out there and having your flaws being called out can be good because it can be convicting.
And, you know, don't wait to be fixed to try to go out and to do what God calls you to do.
Because sometimes God might work on some of those areas while you're out in the world.
Sometimes you go, well, I don't want to get married till I'm perfect.
It's like, well, maybe God's going to use your spouse to help to put a spotlight on some of those flaws and make you have to work them out.
And they're going to keep you accountable.
And be careful.
Don't isolate yourself.
Don't sit in the room.
Don't be proud that you're an incel.
Don't sit around, you know, saying I'm religious, but then denying the power within, which was a warning in the last days from 2 Timothy, that you have an appearance of godliness, but you deny the power.
Don't be religious, be godly, which is a very different thing.
And if this gives any predication or help, I am not the conduit as the best example of any of the things that I'm learning and fighting for, of whether it's masculinity or whether it's being a husband or being a Christian, but I'm learning too.
And you can just learn.
And sometimes you realize that nobody in the world is harder on you than yourself.
And the accuser of the brethren is the devil.
And he's going to keep reminding you of where you're weak so that you stay weak rather than learning that God makes you strong, that where you are weak, you are strong, right?
That's what he says.
So where you acknowledge that, you let God supersede and his power comes through.
So just remember that acknowledging that and relying on God can give you the strength to do mighty things that you will never do.
Anyway, thank you so much again for watching another episode of Slightly Offensive, the best worst show on Blaze TV since we are in Washington, D.C. in a bunker.
I think where is we're in a bunker of the White House at the Dementia Conference.
A lot of ice cream present and vodka because Nancy's around.
We hope you enjoyed the show.
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