Ep. 10 mocks Indigenous Peoples Day as a hollow rebranding, dismissing pre-colonial life as brutal and framing colonization as a net gain despite its flaws, while mocking GOP lawmakers’ emotional fragility over McCarthy’s ouster. It ties leftist nostalgia for "noble savages" to climate activism’s RICO threats against skeptics, then pivots to original sin—arguing progress can’t fix human brokenness—before ending with a ghost story recommendation and a jab at rejecting modern medicine for Indigenous authenticity. [Automatically generated summary]
Instead of celebrating the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, we'll celebrate the history of America's native peoples who were colonized, enslaved, and sometimes even wiped out when the evil white man arrived.
Celebrating the history of native peoples instead of the history of Europeans has many advantages.
For one thing, native history is a lot easier to remember because the natives never actually accomplished anything.
With the Europeans, there are all those names and dates you have to memorize, like Isaac Newton and 1776 and Shakespeare and stuff.
Also, when you celebrate the Indigenous peoples, you get a warm, fuzzy feeling inside because it allows you to pretend you're exempt from the universal guilt of history, but you don't have to stop using things like air conditioning, birth control, and iPhones that you don't get without the universal guilt of history.
For instance, last year, Seattle City Council voted to rename Columbus Day Indigenous Peoples Day, and then celebrated by getting in their Priuses and driving to Starbucks, where they all enjoyed Grande Mocha, half-calf, latte frappuccinos, while texting their friends about how wonderful the indigenous people were and how wouldn't it be splendid if they'd never been colonized and we could all still live like they did.
Except, you know, with some things they never invented, like the wheel for our Priuses.
So we can still get to Starbucks.
This is not to minimize the tragic injustice that occurred when Europeans came over and destroyed the local culture's quaint superstitions and human sacrifice and replaced them with Christianity and its brutal potluck suppers and charity golf tournaments.
Believe me, I sympathize.
I've been to many potluck church suppers that would have been vastly enlivened by a couple of human sacrifices.
There the indigenous people were innocently living an idyllic pastoral existence almost exactly like the Navian avatar except with a life expectancy of about 35 years, constant filth and disease, unending tribal warfare, and treatment of women that made the NFL Wives Club seem like a feminist book group.
Suddenly, the white man swept down on them, interrupting the natives' wars, conquests, and enslavements with far more advanced wars, conquests, and enslavements, because if you have enough books and science on your side, you're just better at killing people, which gives you more free time in which to discover penicillin.
Now, let me be serious for just a second.
Okay, now back to what I was saying.
The point is not that it's good to kill and enslave indigenous peoples and replace their primitive, short, violent, and uncomfortable lives with blessings of civilization they themselves would have sold their souls for if they'd had half a chance.
The point is that there's no changing the past.
And sitting in your temperature-controlled car, condemning explorers, pioneers, and nation builders who lived lives, faced challenges, and made good and bad moral decisions you can't begin to appreciate or understand doesn't make you a better person.
Unless by a better person you mean sanctimonia schmuck.
Maybe we should rename Columbus Day Sanctimonia schmuck day, at least in Seattle.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clayton Show.
You know the best thing about doing this show every day is it forces me to shave.
I think this is like an important, you know, when you write for a living, you can go many, many days without shaving.
This weekend, my wife and I went out and saw friends on Friday, and that was pretty much it.
After that, we kind of went to the movies and just hung out together, and I stopped shaving.
My beard is thick, it comes in fast.
And this morning, I woke up and I looked in the mirror, and I thought, oh my God, I'm Bill Cosby, you know?
And it was like one of those Alfred Hitchcock, old Alfred Hitchcock television shows where you think you're investigating a murder, but it turns out you've escaped from an insane asylum and you are the murderer, you know.
It's like All those people who, all those people who, all those women accusing Bill Cosby were actually after me, you know?
And then I shaved and became myself again.
Anyway, speaking of insane asylums, I'm not going to talk for a long time about the House of Representatives and the leadership battle going on for the GOP because I have a life and I'm not going to pay that much attention to it.
But just looking at the reaction of our Republican congressmen to this leader, you know what's happening, that obviously John Boehner stepped down because there were challenges from the right and Kevin McCarthy, who was basically a Boehner clone except stupid, was going to step in, but then he retired and everybody went into this crisis mode.
It reminds me of this old Stanley Kubrick film called Paths of Glory, which not a lot of people have seen.
Probably 1957, Kirk Douglas, there's this big trial scene and Douglas makes this famous speech at the end where he says, you're tired as women.
I'm ashamed to be a member of the human race.
That's the way I felt about Republicans these last couple days.
I mean, listen to this reaction from Peter King to Kevin.
This is Kevin McCarthy.
He is not going to run for Speaker of the House.
He says, it is total confusion, a banana republic.
Any plan, anything you anticipate, who knows what will happen.
People are crying.
They don't have any idea how this will unfold at all.
A handful of House Republicans were weeping.
We're weeping, it says, I'm assuming, I mean, you know, the Democrats say we're not diverse, right?
But here we have grown men who identify as 13-year-old girls, you know?
I mean, this is, you know, this is really, it's got to be a category, right?
I mean, I mean, Bruce Jenner, what did he do?
You know, he went from being kind of a washed-up old guy to being a washed-up old broad.
You know, he had an operation, he had an operation that took him from being a Nick Nolte character to being Elaine Stritch.
You know, it's Elaine Stratton, you don't know who Elaine.
Elaine Stritch played Alec Baldwin's mom on 30 Rock.
But Elaine Stritch had this big career before that as a Broadway battle axe, who always sang these show-stopping battle axe numbers like, you know, I've seen it all.
She had a great whiskey voice.
I've seen it all and I'm still here.
It's here's the ladies who lunch.
So it's like Bruce Jenner, one night he was sitting in a bar, you know, drinking, going like, hey, you know, I used to be in the Olympics, you know, and the next day he had an operation, he's standing on the table going, I feel pretty, you know.
So that's not really a big change.
Whereas we actually have congressmen who are crying over Kevin McCarthy's decision not to run, which just seems to me not only transsexual but transgenerational because they like 13-year-old girls worrying about their favorite boy band collapse.
That's all I have.
That's all I'm going to say about that because that's all it deserves.
Let us go back.
Let us go back for a minute to the questions of Columbus Day, the questions brought up by Columbus Day and the Indigenous people.
Because it's been, I've kind of been thinking about it all weekend.
I've been thinking about the lie that's underneath that change from Columbus Day to Indigenous people.
The lie of racism, and racism is a lie, that racism is a superstition, and the lie is always the same.
The lie is not that the other guy's race is despicable, because the other guy's race is despicable.
The lie is that your race is any better, okay?
Because we're all pretty much the same.
We all are burdened with original sin.
And this idea, you know, I was looking up the treatment of women among Native Americans, and just the left has taken over this subject and just filled it with lies.
The guys who arrived, the Europeans who arrived and first saw the Native American women, described them as slaves.
They said, these women are treated like slaves.
They're treated like beasts of burden.
And now there are all these articles online, people saying, well, the white man didn't understand the division of labor between the women.
Listen, this is true.
This was true in the borderlands, you know, that wonderful movie, Braveheart and those people.
Any place where tribal warfare is the main profession, Afghanistan today, I saw this with my own eyes in the brief time I was in Afghanistan, I saw this.
Any place where tribal warfare is the main occupation, women are treated like beasts of burden.
The men do absolutely, you would think that that would make men kind of feel secure because men are good at fighting and killing.
You'd think they'd be kind of kings of the walk, but it's not true.
In areas where tribal warfare is the main occupation, men do nothing.
They do nothing but fight.
This was true in the borderlands of England where Braveheart takes place.
I'm sorry, I know we all love Braveheart, but sorry, just in real life, Braveheart.
You know, it's true in Afghanistan today.
The women in Afghanistan, they take care of the animals, they raise the children, they take care of the house.
The men sit around and stare with these kind of lupine, wolfish stares and chew, I think it's called cot.
It's like a drug.
And that's all they do.
And that's all the Indians would do, and the women would do all this stuff.
And the men said, gee, these women are like slaves.
That's the way women are treated.
Women are not, women become equal through technology.
And the big lie that the left is selling us is this lie of what they used to call the noble savage.
The lie that if we just go back in time, we're going to get to that pre-lapsarian state in Eden where we've beaten original sin.
And this is what is powering this absolute hysteria about global warming and oil.
Because of course it's oil, it's energy that takes us into the future.
It's energy that makes us civilized.
Listen to this from the Wall Street Journal, I think it was this morning or maybe it was over the weekend, where they are trying to get, they're trying to get professors and scientists who don't believe in global warming.
They have written a letter, several professors have written a letter to the Justice Department and President Obama asking that these scientists be investigated under the RICO Act.
And if you don't remember the RICO Act, the RICO Act was what was given to prosecutors so they could bust the mafia.
It was a racketeering.
R in RICO stands for racketeering, and the RICO is because it was supposed to refer to the mafia.
That is how Rudy Giuliani basically broke up the mafia using the RICO Act.
And now they want to investigate people who don't believe in climate hysteria with using the RICO Act to shut them down.
There is a video online that is, it's 10 minutes long, and so I can only play a little bit of it, but it's Senator Ted Cruz questioning the head of the Sierra Club about global warming.
Just listen to this one little exchange from this, so you know exactly what we're talking about.
That the satellite data over the last 18 years demonstrate no significant warming whatsoever.
Global warming alarmists call that the pause because the computer models say there should be dramatic warming.
And yet the actual satellites taking the measurement don't show any significant warming.
But, Senator, 97 percent of the scientists can clear and agree that there is global warming and anthropogenic impact with regards to the problem with that statistic that gets cited a lot is it's based on one bogus study.
And indeed, your response, I would point that your response is quite striking.
I asked about the science and the evidence, the actual data.
We have satellites.
They're measuring temperature.
That should be relevant.
And your answer was pay no attention to your lying eyes and the numbers that the satellites show.
Instead, listen to the scientists who are receiving massive grants who tell us, do not debate the science.
Here's a lesson.
So we're not going to debate the science.
The science, anybody who mentions the science is going to be shut down.
One of Cruz's colleagues then tries to shut him down as this questioning continues.
And we're going to investigate you using the RICO, the Racketeering Act, if you disagree.
This is this desperate urge to get back to this avatar paradise that never took place.
The Secret of Original Sin00:02:00
There is an article from The Village Voice.
It's frequently cited by Timothy Keller, the great preacher from Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York.
And he frequently uses this sort of to highlight original sin.
It's an article by a woman named Cynthia Heimel, and she wrote it in 1990 in The Village Voice after having lived in, you know, the Greenwich Village where all the artists, the up-and-coming artists are in New York.
And she lived among all these up-and-coming artists, many of whom became enormously famous.
And this is what she wrote about them.
She said, I pity celebrities.
I really do.
Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, and Barbara Streisand were once perfectly pleasant human beings.
And now their wrath is awful.
I think when God wants to play a really rotten practical joke on you, he grants you your deepest wish and then laughs merrily when you realize you want to kill yourself.
You see, Sly, Bruce, and Barbara wanted fame.
They worked, they pushed.
The morning after each of them became famous, they wanted to take an overdose because that giant thing they were striving for, that fame thing that was going to make everything okay, that was going to provide them with personal fulfillment and happiness, had happened and they were still then.
And this is what the left's problem with America is.
We have everything.
We have everything.
And all the stuff they told us was going to make us happy, the free sex that was going to make us happy, has women so depressed they don't know what to do with themselves.
All the energy, all the science, all the things that the liberals touted, gave, wanted us to have in the 60s and 70s, we have them all, and we're still unhappy because of what human beings are.
The human system doesn't work.
Men want one thing and women want another.
Freedom makes us prosperous.
Prosperity makes us lazy.
Laziness destroys freedom and prosperity.
The human and civilization's fault.
The human system doesn't work.
There is no way out but through.
There's no way back but forward.
And that's the secret.
You know, the secret is original sin.
The Haunting of Original Sin00:03:59
And I'm not one of these, I'm not a biblical literalist.
I believe every single word in the Bible is true, but I believe there are different genres, different ways of telling stories.
And what the story of Genesis tells us is that we're broken.
Something is terribly, terribly broken that needs to be fixed.
And if you don't believe in that, if you think you're going to go back and grab that thing again, you're just heading in the wrong direction.
It's really sad.
This indigenous people, I don't mean to pick on the indigenous peoples.
I really don't.
I understand that atrocities happen and people have to make decisions and people are out there on the frontier.
But celebrating the Indigenous peoples is such a pompous, sanctimonious thing to do.
And it's so untrue of who we are, what we are, the blessings that we have.
We got because of the sins of history.
And what original sin means, what I was going to say about original sin is you don't have to believe in the literal story of Genesis to understand that once a bad thing happens, it's written into the fabric of history and there's no getting out.
We live on the land that was stolen from the Indians.
That's the way it is.
Do we have white privilege?
Maybe.
It's not going away.
It's not going away.
The only thing we can do is start today to behave as we are supposed to behave and then make our own mistakes that our children will blame us for and will eventually become the bad guys.
Anyway, that's my thoughts on Columbus Day.
I'm not going to obsess about this.
I'm going to let it go as the holiday passes.
It is time for Halloween stuff I like, the all-important Halloween stuff I like.
Lindsay's nodding because this is about the ghost stuff, which we love.
And I talked before about how ghost stories, the best ghost stories, are short stories.
Very few good ghost novels.
But there is, well, there are one or two of them.
The Shining is a great one by Stephen King, but one that's probably the most famous ghost novel is called The Haunting of Hill House.
And it's by Shirley Jackson, and it was made into an excellent film in 1963 called The Haunting, and then remade into an absolutely crap film in the 1990s with Liam Neeson.
There's a play by Lanford Wilson called Burn This, in which a screenwriter comes on stage and says, Hollywood ruins everything, and if by some chance they don't ruin it, they remake it and ruin it.
So The Haunting was a perfect example of that.
But I'm not going to recommend The Haunting of Hill House.
Shirley Jackson was this really interesting writer.
She was actually in her time, she was most famous for being a domestic comedian.
She was like an Irma Baumbeck.
If anybody remembers Irma Bombeck, she would write, you know, about raising her kids and how funny being a housewife was and all this stuff.
But she had this darker side, and she wrote probably her most famous story was The Lottery, which I think everybody still reads in high school.
And then she wrote The Haunting of Hill House, which was made into this movie.
The book she wrote that I think is her best book by far and has never been made into a film.
I frequently, when I do meetings in Hollywood, I've gone into several different producers' offices where they have the book and lookbooks and attempts to put it into, I think Michael Douglas' company has been trying to produce it.
No one has ever been able to make this into a film because it's such a delicate little spook story that it's really hard to put on screen.
It's called We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
And it basically is about two sisters and an old crippled man living in a gothic house all alone in a village that hates them.
And it's about what Shirley Jackson was always writing about was the outsider, the people being intolerant.
It is a genuinely creepy little tale and perfect for Halloween.
And it takes maybe an hour, two hours to read.
We have always lived in the castle.
If you've never read this, it holds up brilliantly.
It's great stuff.
That's it for Indigenous Peoples Day.
I'm so excited.
I'm going to go out and run through the mud and hope I don't get ill because we have no medicine among we Indigenous peoples and I would have to come back to the present.
This is Andrew Clavin with the Andrew Clavin Show.