Andrew Clavin frames modern Western culture as besieged by a "Sharia miasma," dismissing geopolitical chaos as tangential while pivoting to gratitude—critiquing Pinker’s free-will denial and praising Judeo-Christian roots as the "bottom rung" of freedom. He argues Islam lacks moral foundations, contrasts leftist multiculturalism with Washington’s Christianity, and ends by plugging Frog Juice, a witchcraft card game, before signing off on the show’s final pre-Thanksgiving episode. [Automatically generated summary]
Today, a tale of horror, all the more frightening because it's true.
As a poisonous, miasmic fog of Sharia creeps like a poisonous miasmic fog of Sharia across the nations of the West, strange creatures are growing up among us.
They are haunting our halls of power, the sewers of our news media, and the circus tents of our universities.
They move in hordes as mindless and destructive as the zombies in the walking dead, or the Democrat voters in the last presidential election, or the walking dead Democrat voters in Chicago and Philadelphia.
If you listen carefully, in the watches of the night, you can hear these shambling monsters murmuring their eldritch refrain.
I believe in free speech, but I support the First Amendment, but I believe in free expression.
But that's right.
It's the attack of the buttheads.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
All right, life is a horror movie.
It's funny.
You know, it actually is like that.
You know, in a horror movie, the things you know are true suddenly become untrue because impossible things start happening.
That's what it's like now.
I mean, it's really.
So the latest is Russia shot down a Turkish plane, and Putin said he's going to have Turkey for Thanksgiving.
He didn't really say that, but he would have said it if he had thought.
What else?
There was an entry.
It's Thanksgiving.
It's almost Thanksgiving.
This month went by so fast.
It's just because I've been so entertaining.
I think that's it.
You know, it's like this show, really, this show is changing your life.
Why is that a good thing?
Have you ever noticed that if somebody says here's a book, it's going to change your life?
I mean, you could walk up to Leonardo DiCaprio.
Leonardo DiCaprio does nothing but make movies for millions and millions of dollars and sleep with like supermodels.
And you could walk up to him and say, you know, try this herb.
It'll change your life.
And DiCaprio would say, okay.
Like, what?
You know, he wants to be short and ugly, you know, poor.
Oh, yeah, that's good.
It changed my life.
You know, somehow that's always a good thing.
Anyway, what are we talking about?
There's a movie called, I think it's called Grand Canyon with Steve Martin, where Steve Martin says all of the wisdom of life you can find at the movies.
And today's wisdom phrase is the phrase from pulp fiction spoken by Ving Reims, a great actor, where he said, I'm going to go medieval on your ass.
And meaning, I'm going to torture you.
And it occurred to me that in that, he says to this guy, you know, we're going to get a blowtorch and a pair of pliers.
We're going to pull you apart.
I'm going to go medieval on your ass.
It occurred to me that in that phrase is embedded, if you know just a little bit of Western history, is embedded the entire reason why we're going through this period where the left is paying such tender, is giving such tender love and care to Islam while trying to destroy Christianity.
Why we have this, you know, they laugh at us for saying there's a war on Christmas, but there's a war on Christmas.
They're trying to expunge Christianity from the public square, but everything the Muslims do is tolerant and lovely, and it's just wonderful.
Why is it?
It's all explained if you think about Ving Rhames saying, I'm going to go medieval on your ass.
And we'll get to that in a minute.
But first, I just wanted to say that there was this really interesting article in the New York Times, everybody's favorite former newspaper.
This was by Arthur Brooks, an actual living, breathing conservative, not the phony conservatives who sometimes write for the New York Times.
I like Arthur Brooks.
He wrote this book, Conservative Heart, that I really like.
It's kind of a self-help book for Republican, public Republicans, for Republican candidates trying to sell conservatism, pointing out that conservatism is the more compassionate philosophy than liberalism, and why don't we sell it that way?
We always look so angry and we always look like we're shaking our fists.
And he talks, he has just, it's really the whole book, like all self-help books, is really just one chapter kind of padded out.
But it's telling us, you know, how to talk more about the good things that conservatism does.
And I thought it was a really wise, intelligent book written by Mark Thiessen under Brooks' name.
Anyway, he writes, Brooks, I like Brooks because he's kind of a little bit more of my mindset.
He used to be a musician, and he traveled around Europe with a jazz band and all this stuff.
So he has a little bit more of the artistic sensibility than most conservatives who are very fact-based and all this.
So he's a little bit more on my wavelength.
And he writes a lot about what makes people happy.
And he follows studies about what makes people happy.
And he goes to countries and he interviews people, why, you know, who's happy and why.
And he wrote this piece for the New York Times about being grateful since it's Thanksgiving and how we can be grateful, even if we don't feel grateful, that we don't have to rely on our feelings, that we don't have to be authentic.
We don't have to worry about being authentic.
We can just make ourselves feel grateful and it will cheer us up.
And he says this is not just self-improvement hookum.
For example, researchers in one 2003 study randomly assigned one group of study participants to keep a short weekly list of the things they were grateful for, while other groups listed hassles or neutral events.
Ten weeks later, the first group enjoyed significantly greater life satisfaction than the others.
Now, that it seems to me obvious.
That seems obviously true to me.
Anyone with any wisdom whatsoever remembers to be thankful, remembers to list the things that he's thankful for, to count your blessings.
I mean, isn't that what your mother always told you, count your blessings?
Not my mother, my mother just said, would you get out of here, please?
But other people's mothers would tell them to count their blessings.
And that's why.
But now he goes into this thing that I'm always very suspicious of.
He says, how does all this work?
One explanation is that acting happy, regardless of feelings, coaxes one's brains into processing positive emotions.
In one famous 1993 experiment, researchers asked human subjects to smile forcibly for 20 seconds while tensing facial muscles, notably the muscles around the eyes.
And they found that this action stimulated brain activity associated with positive emotions.
So walk around with a big smile on your face, keep smiling, as the old song goes, and you'll feel happier.
Now, I can't imagine that lasts for very long.
I mean, I can see why your brain would think for a moment if you were smiling that you were happy.
Like, it would just be an automatic reaction.
Your brain would go, like, hey, we're happy.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
I don't think that would work for very long.
I'm really, I'm very suspicious of materialist explanations for human things.
Humans have this really weird trait.
Once you notice it, you can't stop noticing it.
Is that we take the symbols of things for the things themselves.
We can't help but do this.
Yesterday we were talking about language and how the left thinks there's no reality and that therefore lying, political correctness, will change the nature of things.
If you say that Bruce Jenner is a woman, Presto, he'll be a woman.
And since there's no reality, since there's no internal reality, words can govern these things, which is just words are just symbols that we use to communicate things.
If I want to communicate something, I use a symbol, which is a word.
Money is the same way.
We invent money to symbolize value, and then we start to think we can't help it.
We start to think that money has value.
You have a stack of paper, and you say, oh, there it is, I'm really rich.
And all that has to happen is an inflationary cycle, and suddenly you've got nothing.
It's just paper.
It just represents stuff.
It's just a symbol for things.
And the body is just like that.
The story of your life is not about what happens to your body.
I mean, you could ask, you could ask the biggest materialist atheist in the world.
You could say to Richard Dawkins, tell me the story of your life.
And he wouldn't say to you, well, I was small, then I got a little bigger, and I started to walk around the room.
And after a while, I grew hair under my arms.
And finally, I started to walk with a stoop, and then I died.
And he wouldn't say that.
He would tell you about the development of his soul.
Even Richard Dawkins, who doesn't believe he has a soul, would tell you about that.
And scientists have this completely, scientists are just in some ways the worst victims of this little quirk.
It's just a little quirk in the human imagination.
They think that if they one day, Steven Pinker says this.
Steven Pinker is a science writer that I really like.
He's really an entertaining science writer.
And he says, one day, he says, there can't be free will.
I can't make sense of that, he says.
Those are his words.
We can't make sense of free will.
But the brain is so complicated, it's as if there were free will.
And he has said that once we chart all the reactions of the brain, we will know all the reasons why we do things.
And if you think about that for just 10 seconds in a row, you'll realize that that's completely illogical.
That can't be true.
I mean, let's say instead of billions and billions of sparks in your brain, you had 10, okay?
And let's say you could trace those 10 sparks from this one to that one to that one.
When you were done tracing those sparks, you still wouldn't know what set them off.
And so he can't make sense of free will.
And you're right, you can make sense of free will.
But you also can't make sense of what was there before the Big Bang.
Scientists talk about this and they say, well, there was nothing.
Well, what was there before?
Well, there was no time because time is just a relationship between objects.
You're like, yeah, I'm not making sense of that either.
But we know it's all here.
And they just keep thinking that they can put the final explanation off.
So there's this Big Bang explosion.
And everything, I mean, just a complete random chaotic explosion.
And yet everything works perfectly so that you're here.
And so that the universe can develop a life that understands it.
The odds of that happening are amazingly bizarre.
And so scientists, just to keep away from the final explanation, from saying it was free will.
Somebody had will and will the world into creation.
Will is the only thing we know that acts without a predecessor.
Instead of saying that, they say, well, there are billions and billions of universes.
And this just happens to be the one where there's life that can understand the universe.
And you think about that for a minute.
Think about, you know, those old Westerns where they were playing cards in the bar?
So think about you're in an old Western, you're playing cards with Black Bart, right?
And you get five royal flushes in a row, and Black Bart pushes his chair back and draws his guns and says, you varmint, you're cheating.
And you say, no, no, there are infinite number of card games.
This just happens to be the one where I draw five royal flushes in a row.
You'd be perforated.
I'd be like, blam!
Go to explanation, boy, boom.
You're a dead man.
But scientists love this sort of thing because they mistake the material.
Flesh is the language of life.
Just like words express things, flesh expresses our life.
It is not our life itself.
We know that.
We know our life is inside.
Anyway, so gratitude, what does it do?
Gratitude makes the stuff we don't think about, the invisible stuff, visible.
You know, if just what we were talking about just now, think about the fact that you're here.
You're here.
Every single ancestor, whether it was a paramecium or a monkey or whatever it was, whether it was Adam and Eve, every single ancestor for thousands and thousands and thousands of years had to survive and reproduce in order for there to be you.
I mean, that's it, you know.
You don't think about that.
You don't think about all those people who had to like kill sabertooth tigers or whatever they did or just hide.
I mean, my ancestors, I know, were under a rock.
Oh, hey, somebody kill that saber-toothed tiger over there because Clavin needs to be born.
And yeah, once you start to be grateful for that, and once you start to see it, it is really remarkable because life is entropy.
Life is stuff falling apart.
That's what it is.
Life is dying.
Life is things coming to pieces.
And yet for a moment, for a moment, you're here.
And that's amazing.
So, I mean, when, you know, everything is like this.
We stand on the shoulders of giants and we think that we're flying.
I mean, that is, to me, the great flaw in our culture and our society.
We have everything.
We have everything.
We're rich, peaceful, all this stuff.
So if you're a peacenick, go thank a guy with a gun because that's why there's peace.
There's never peace.
There's never peace.
If you are sitting in an opera watching the opera, that's an act of war.
The act of war is the three guys outside the opera with rifles keeping people from coming in and killing you so you can watch the opera.
If you're raising your child, that's an act of war because somebody is defending you.
And just because you don't see them, that doesn't make you a peaceful person.
There's no such thing as peace.
So you like peace, you love peace, go out and thank the guy with a gun.
If you're a feminist, if you're a feminist, go shake a man's hand today.
Go say, you know, I'm sure glad there are men to invent every machine that exists, every labor-saving device that exists, every piece, every pill, every piece of medicine that ever existed, which was invented by a male.
So thank you as a male representative.
Thank you for inventing all that stuff that allows me to be a loudmouth, nasty witch and tell everybody how free and equal I am, because you wouldn't be free and equal if there weren't things like birth control pills invented by men and guns invented by men, which take away from the need to have upper body strength, which before that was how you had peace.
Before you had guns, you had peace with upper body strength.
People lifting swords, all of them guys.
You know, maybe six Amazons and the rest were guys.
So thank a man.
And by the way, if you're a man, thank a woman.
I mean, you know, I hear guys, I hear guys, they listen to women on TV and they get angry at women.
They start railing about women.
And I always say to them, is your wife like that?
No, my wife's really nice.
Well, then shut up and go home and say thank you to your wife.
Because I know, I mean, listen, I'm a lucky dude.
I have an extraordinary marriage, but I know my wife does stuff for me I'd never do for her.
I mean, I know, you know, as we go into Thanksgiving and the Christmas holidays and she gets all stressed out putting all this stuff together, I said to her, you know, the one thing you don't have to worry about is me helping you because that's never going to happen because I'm going to be working around the clock.
But she is also, I have to say, we had an absolutely true story.
We had a couple in our house.
The woman was a feminist.
But like many, many, many feminists I know, her husband supported her and she just did these little art projects and things.
And, you know, she lived off his money, which is fine.
That's the way it should be done.
But whether she ever cooked him a meal or not, I don't know.
She's sitting at my dinner table, eating my food under my roof.
And she says to my wife, she says, you treat this man like a king.
You cook him food, you serve him dinner, you raise his, what does he do?
And my wife, in one of the great wordless answers of all time, just raises her hands to the roof over our heads and to the table and the food on the table and to the children who were sitting there being well-behaved because they were terrified of their father.
And, you know, and that was just, that's all she said.
You know, she just raised, and that's true.
That is really true of all of us.
Mormon Influence on Civilization00:15:58
Anyone who is alive and is breathing, if you raised your hands, you would look around and say, oh, you know, really, this is a piece of dumb luck.
And it's not about happiness, by the way.
It's about joy.
I mean, the difference between happiness is you're happy, you're having sex, you won some money, you're happy, whatever.
You know, you see a good movie, you're happy.
Joy is the awareness of the vitality of life.
It's what Jesus called life in abundance, which is kind of like watching a movie.
And the movie is sad or the movie's happy and you're crying and you're laughing, whatever you're doing, you're liking the movie.
You're enjoying the movie.
The movie is giving you joy.
You can live life like that to some degree if you grow wise.
You realize you're having happy times, sad times, struggles, and all that.
But you're alive, and it's a moment of abundance.
And And that's why I think being grateful just reminds you of the truth.
I mean, the truth sets you free.
It reminds you of the truth.
All right.
That was Arthur Brooks.
I just thought that part about the brain thing was silly.
So anyway, gratitude is sanity.
So what I wanted to talk about has to do with this in a roundabout way, because we were talking yesterday about this whole political correctness thing and words governing reality.
Why is it that the big lie that we're being told at this moment when radical Islam is killing people all around the world, when it's oppressing people all around the world, other Muslims, yes, but really a threat to the West.
It's a threat to the West.
It is an existential threat.
You know, of course, not as bad as make-believe global warming, which is a threat to our imaginary friends.
I don't know.
It's all imaginary.
I don't know who it's going to harm, like Batman or somebody, like some imaginary character.
But in real life, in real life, it's radical Islamic terrorism that is a threat to the world.
Why are we listening to this constant, constant refrain of how wonderful Islam is?
People think, you know, people tell me, oh, you know, Barack Obama is a Muslim because he keeps saying this stuff about Islam.
To me, that's comforting yourself.
It would be comforting if that was the explanation.
If the explanation was Barack Obama was a Muslim super spy who had been implanted in our civilization to rise to the White House and destroy us, at least that would make sense.
But in fact, Barack Obama doesn't believe anything that 85% of the college kids, the college students teaching your kids, don't believe.
They believe the same thing.
They're not Muslims.
This is what the left believes.
The left believes that Islam is great.
Listen for just a minute.
Hillary Clinton, this was back when Hillary was lying, although maybe that's not specific enough.
A little more specific.
This is after Benghazi, Hillary Clinton gave this news conference where she was still lying about this stupid video that had nothing to do with the Benghazi attacks, but she's claiming it did.
So listen for just a minute to her talking about this.
And this is this speech, this was in 2012, September 2012, I think.
This little segment that I'm going to show you was later put into an ad that was shown, I think, in Pakistan to ensure the Muslims of the world that we were wonderful people and we cared terribly about their goodwill.
So this stupid video was made.
This poor Shnook who made the video was put in prison because of this.
He made this video that basically just showed girls, naked girls with Muhammad or something like that.
I can't remember what it was, but it was just a kind of a childish thing insulting Muhammad.
And so here's Hillary Clinton talking about this.
I also want to take a moment to address the video circulating on the internet that has led to these protests in a number of countries.
Let me state very clearly, and I hope it is obvious, that the United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this video.
We absolutely reject its content and message.
America's commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation.
And as you know, we are home to people of all religions, many of whom came to this country seeking the right to exercise their own religion, including, of course, millions of Muslims.
And we have the greatest respect for people of faith.
To us, to me personally, this video is disgusting and reprehensible.
Okay, disgusting, reprehensible.
This guy must be punished.
promised standing in front of the bodies of the dead Americans who were killed for nothing for no reason having to do with this video.
And by the way, we now know this, right?
Because all those emails that she hid and tried to erase and tried to keep away from Congress finally came out and showed that she knew that what she was saying right there was a lie and yet as we talked about before she thinks there was virtue in telling this lie.
About a year before she makes that speech, she goes to the Book of Mormon on Broadway.
Big Broadway hit by the wonderful South Park gang, Matt Stone and Trey Parker.
And this is about two Mormon kids or a bunch of Mormon kids.
I haven't seen it, but it's about Mormon kids who go to proselytize.
They go on mission trips and they go on a mission trip to some savage tribe in Africa.
And there's one scene, I'll show you the scene, this is from the Tony Awards, I think.
Andrew Reynolds is the star, and he's playing this Mormon kid who has gone to Africa and is now having doubts because he's afraid.
And so he goes back and he tells himself what he reminds himself what a Mormon believes.
Let's just listen to this song.
Hillary Clinton went to this show about a year before she made that speech.
This was the time for me to step up.
So then why was I so scared?
A warlord who shoots people in the face.
What's so scary about that?
I must trust that my Lord is mightier and always has my back.
Now I must be completely devout.
I can't have even one trend of doubt.
I believe that the Lord God created the universe.
I believe that he sent his only son to die for my sins.
And I believe that ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America.
I am a Mormon.
And the Mormon trust me.
Now that, by the way, I mean, if you know South Park, you'll know that that was a very, very mild part of that show.
The show includes, you know, songs about, you know, that say F God and all kinds of insane language about God and attacks and mocking the Mormon religion, which of course is fine with me.
You can mock the Mormon religion, you can mock the Jewish religion, you can mock my religion.
I don't care because part of my religion is a God who laughs and who loves us and is part of us and is among us.
And laughter is one of our good traits.
Hillary Clinton gave this a standing ovation.
So it was fine with her to say F God.
It was fine with her to say a Mormon just believes in all these silly things and that his belief in Jesus and his belief in ships sailing to America is of a peace.
That was fine to give that a stand.
She loved it.
She cheered for it, according to the New York Post, I think it was.
But Islam, it's blasphemy.
Islam must be the sensitive souls of Islam in their peaceful, loving way, must be protected from blasphemy lest they kill us all.
So where does this come from?
And what is it?
You know, first of all, let's go back to something I was talking about yesterday about Christianity without Christ.
There's no getting away from our Christian beginnings.
There's no getting away from the things that formed us.
There's always this debate where the founding fathers, Christians, it doesn't matter.
They were shaped by 1,700 years of Christian society.
Their minds were set in Christianity.
What we're seeing when we see Obama come out and say, well, remember, Christians did bad things in the Crusades 500 years ago.
So that's the same as a Muslim wiping out a bunch of kids at a rock concert today.
That comes from this Christian idea of don't criticize the moat in the other guy's eye before you remove the plank in our eye.
So the idea that he's living in, the reason it resonates with us is because we are all formed by Christianity.
But when you take the Christianity out of it, it becomes nonsense.
Or does it?
This is the big argument.
This is why we go back to this phrase, I'm going to go medieval on your ass.
Medieval is just a word that means Middle Ages.
That's all it means, the Middle Ages.
Think about that for a minute.
Think about the phrase Middle Ages and where this comes from.
If you're living in the Middle Ages, if you're living in 1100, what's it in the middle of?
As far as you're concerned, you're on the cutting edge of modernity, you know?
New plows and all kinds of new stuff in the Middle Ages.
The Middle Ages are the ages that come in the middle between classic civilization in Rome and Greece and the Renaissance, when classic civilization was found again.
The Renaissance was touched off by discoveries of classical writings.
The legend, I mean, it's not a legend, it's a true story, but whether it's the complete story, I doubt, is that the poet, the Italian poet Petrarch, a wonderful poet, wrote beautiful, beautiful love poetry to a woman, a girl, I think she was 13, that he saw once, and he just fell in love with her and wrote this beautiful series of sonnets to Laura, and Petrarch is one of the founding minds of Western civilization.
He stumbled on some of Cicero's letters, the great defender of the Republic in ancient Rome.
And he said, ah, you know, this is what, he was a humanist.
He believed in paying attention to human things, not heavenly things.
And he says, ah, here was the great civilization.
We have to rediscover this civilization.
Everything that came after this was just the Dark Ages.
They're just the Middle Ages.
It just came in the middle.
It was propaganda.
Even this idea that the Middle Ages should be associated with torture, a lot of the torture devices that we see on TV, they're in Edgar Allan Poe, the Iron Maiden and all that stuff.
There's a band called Iron Maiden, which just has that maiden, it's a box with spikes and stuff, all made up in the 19th century.
It was all invented for museums so you could come and be horrified by these things.
The Middle Ages weren't the Middle Ages to the people living in them.
They were just the ages that as this civilization of Europe developed.
And yes, they had lost a lot of the classical knowledge.
If you look at the sculpture of classical sculpture, it's so much more beautiful than medieval sculpture.
And when that stuff was discovered, it did reinvigorate the society.
And so the idea became that the church, Christianity, was this prison that they had broken out of.
So that would be the metaphor.
The metaphor would be, you're living your life, you're in Rome, you're a Roman, you're in Greece, you've got the Parthenon, you're in Rome, you've got the aqueducts, everything's great, and then you're put in the prison of the church, and not until Petrarch and his friends discover all the great writing of the classical age, do you break free, and now you have a new life.
And that philosophy fed into what is now leftism.
It really took hold in the French Revolution.
One of the thinkers who led into the French Revolution said, man will never be free until the last king is strangled to death with the intestines of the last priest.
So the idea was that everything that had gone before was a prison and now we were breaking out.
And it is impossible now, maybe if you live through the 60s, because it was kind of like the 60s, it's impossible now to understand the joy that swept through intellectual Europe at the onset of the French Revolution.
I mean, William Wordsworth was one of the great poets of the age, and he wrote this famous autobiographical poem called The Prelude.
And he said, let me make sure I'm quoting it exactly so I don't just throw it away.
He said, bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.
Oh, times in which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways of custom, law, and statute took at once the attraction of a country in romance.
They disappeared.
All that law and statue and all that stuff that went before, that Christianity that had held us prisoner, we were suddenly free from it and we could go into the future.
Now Wordsworth, and by the way, if you want to read more about this, I wrote an article about this for City Journal called Romanticon.
And if you just Google Romanticon Claven, you can read an entire article about Wordsworth's progress.
Wordsworth was one of the only Romantic poets who lived a long time.
He became a Victorian.
He lived into his 80s where all the other Romantic poets died in their 20s.
And he watched what happened to the French Revolution.
He was in France.
He went to France just to see the revolution.
He was so excited by it.
He had an affair with a French woman.
They had an illegitimate child, and then he was forced back because of the Napoleonic Wars.
He had to go back to England, and he left her there and married another woman.
One of the great marriages in literary history was Wordsworth's marriage to his wife.
But he left this woman behind, and he saw what happened.
He saw the terror.
He was there when the terror began, when they started to slaughter priests in the street, and he was there to experience that.
And after that, World War.
Napoleon came and conquered most of Europe.
And he was in England, the one place that held out, just like in the later World War.
And Wordsworth saw, and he changed his mind.
He started to understand that to leave everything behind is to kick out the bottom block of the tower, that we stand on the shoulders of giants and we think we're flying, and when we throw the giant away, we collapse.
And he started to change his mind.
And he took, you can imagine, it was just like today.
Just like today, he took all kinds of flack.
Poets were writing poems about him, about what a rotten, Robert Browning wrote a poem about what a rotten guy he was for becoming poet laureate of England.
But Wordsworth began to ask himself, what was it that supported freedom in England while it fell apart all around Europe after the French Revolution?
And he came up with, he started to write these sonnets to the Church of England.
And not his best poetry, but they're some of his best philosophy.
And in one of them, he says, he says, ungrateful country, speaking to England, if thou e'er forget the sons who for thy civil rights have bled.
And he says, he talks about some of the martyrs who died for their faith and for their beliefs.
And he says, these had fallen for profitless regret had not thy holy church her champions bred.
And claims, I want you to, you have to listen carefully to this because it's in this poetic language.
Claims from other worlds inspirited the star of liberty to rise.
Religion was where the power of liberty came from.
He says, if spiritual things be lost through apathy or scorn or fear, shalt thou thy humbler franchises support, however hardly won or justly dear.
What came from heaven to heaven by nature clings, and if dissevered thence, its course is short.
Knock out the bottom rung of the tower and freedom collapses.
Knock out the religion and freedom collapses.
It's the difference between thinking of the Middle Ages as a prison and thinking of it as a mother.
The Bottom Rung Matters00:03:24
If you have a mother who raises you and teaches you and forms your mind and does it well and teaches you who to be and what to think and how to feel and what your principles should be, ultimately you're going to want to leave your mother.
Ultimately, a man grows up, a woman grows up, and goes away from his mother.
But he's not leaving her behind.
He is extending her into the world, essentially.
And that's the way that we conservatives look at the world.
It doesn't matter if George Washington was a Christian, he was, but it doesn't matter exactly whether he was because he was bringing the things that his mother, the church, had taught our civilization for thousands of years, you know, for 1,700 years into the modern world.
The left hates freedom because it empowers little people, you know, the people that they don't like, those people with their guns and their Bibles.
And they know that they don't have to attack Islam.
Our freedoms don't rest on Islam.
No matter how many speeches they give about all the wonderful things Islam have done for us, Islam has done nothing for us.
Zero zip, except for in some point in the Middle Ages, preserve some of the documents that we later found and that inspirited the Renaissance.
Freedom rests on that bottom rung of our religious beliefs.
And that's why it's fine to get rid of that.
It's fine to get rid of that and why we are preserving Islam, which has nothing to do with it.
Islam, it's a show of, it's a show of tolerance.
For the left to accept that the precepts of Islam may not be reconcilable with our values, that would be for them to accept that multiculturalism is wrong, that we are better than other people, that the moral relativism that underpins multiculturalism is wrong, and that the values of the West, which they hate, are not in fact values at all, but morals.
They are human reflections of a moral order.
That's all I'm going to say.
My time is up.
But as long as I can quote Wordsworth, I'm happy.
Stuff I like, family stuff I like.
This is the time when your family descends on you.
I love games and puzzles.
I am a game and puzzle fanatic.
And I can't get any, my wife won't play with me because I always win strategy games, and those are the games I like, you know.
And luck games get kind of boring.
And it's really hard for adults to find games that they can play with kids that they're not just kind of humoring the kid that are fun.
Here's a card game.
It's from a company called Game Right.
You can get it on Amazon.
It's called Frog Juice.
I say this as a sophisticated player of games.
This game is so much.
Has anybody ever played this?
It's so much fun.
And the way it's set up, it's kind of, most card games for kids are either old made or rummy, or go fish.
Those are the three games they just keep, put different pictures on them.
This is a genuinely original, different game about witchcraft and casting spells and all this, and you have to collect the cards for your spells.
And somehow they've worked it out so that the way it's scored, a kid can beat you.
Can't beat me because then I won't feed him.
But he could beat, in an ordinary game, you play it well, but you can still lose to a kid, and the kid can still play well.
It's really exciting.
Frog Juice, excellent, excellent game.
That's all I have to say.
We'll be back with one more show.
We will be back, right?
Okay, they're still working on the studio, but we will be back tomorrow with one more show before Thanksgiving.