Andrew Clavin critiques leftist cultural shifts—like Pirelli’s "unconventional" models and Obama’s climate focus—as fabricated crises ignoring real threats, comparing them to John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, which he calls morally ambiguous for defending pedophile priests. He praises Spotlight’s investigative truth over artistic relativism, arguing conservatism must seek greater accuracy while dismissing "fake stories" like Doubt as fraudulent. The episode pivots to Christmas media, recommending The Bishop’s Wife (1947) over its remake and framing Christian holiday repurposing of pagan traditions as a triumph of truth over cultural appropriation. [Automatically generated summary]
A Canadian university has banned the teaching of yoga because it represents cultural appropriation.
That's when a dominant culture steals something from a culture that is not dominant because it's been wasting its time doing yoga.
In response, dominant cultures are now demanding that lesser cultures stop using our stuff like science and freedom and banning stuff for stupid reasons because we're so rich, we have nothing important to do.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I have to tell you, my favorite tweet from yesterday.
I'm actually a Twitter fan, I've decided, you know, like, Twitter can waste your time.
It can be a time suck.
You can kind of go into Twitter, and suddenly 20 minutes have gone by, and you've done nothing but read these kind of little fragmentary thoughts.
But the thing I love about Twitter is that, you know, my father was a comedian, essentially.
He was a disc jockey, but he was really a professional comedian.
And he used to say that everybody is funny.
Comedians are people who can't do anything else.
And I think that that really is true.
You know, people are really funny when you sit and talk to people, just ordinary, and I say ordinary people, by which I mean non-celebrities, people who don't have a camera pointed in their face.
And you just go into the garage or into a restaurant and you talk to people, they say funny stuff.
And the thing I like about Twitter is that you really get this folk humor bubbling up and this kind of eye on the stuffed shirts.
It's like the little boy who said the emperor isn't wearing any clothes.
It's like all those little boys are on Twitter saying the emperor isn't wearing any clothes.
So there was this story yesterday, Shapiro wrote about it on the Daily Wire about this Pirelli calendar.
And I have to be honest, I never really knew what a Pirelli calendar was.
I mean, it was kind of somewhere floating around.
There was some place in my brain where probably the information was lodged.
But Pirelli is a tire company, right?
Isn't that what they do?
And every year they would put out a calendar with very beautiful models taken by very famous fashion photographers.
And a lot of times it was kind of soft core.
The girls were naked and they would put them in these weird, loosh positions, and it was all very, you know, exciting for the people who got it.
Because you couldn't buy it.
It just came to you if you were, I guess if you had Pirelli tires.
I don't know.
I don't know how you wound up with this calendar.
I never received one.
That's all I know.
All right, so this year they've changed the game and they've put women who are not very attractive but who have accomplished something on the calendar, like Amy Schumer and Serena Williams, and they put them in poses, some of them, like Amy Schumer's, not wearing any clothes, although you can't really see anything, and this is supposed to be amazingly mind-blowing that these accomplished but not altogether, you know, standardly beautiful.
I kind of actually find Amy Schumer a little cute, but these are apparently not.
You know, she's overweight and she's a little dumpy, so it's like she's not, it's not standard beauty.
So suddenly you've got this calendar with this thing.
This is the NEW YORK Times talking about this.
Okay, I have to read this along with Playboy, along with Playboy's decision in October to end nudity.
In its pages, the Pirelli pivot seems to give real substance, Substance to the theory that we are at a flexion point in the public objectification of female sexuality.
Now, a flex point, in case you're wondering, is a turning point.
The only difference is you have to look it up.
And that's the only difference between a flexion point and a turning point.
So it's a turning point in the public.
And then the ad lady from the McGarry Bowen advertising agency who put this calendar together, she says, what it is recording is a very macro trend.
She said, we call it the rise of the Shiro.
That is the female hero.
So someone on Twitter said, putting out pictures of dumpy women naked and expecting it to change the male perception of what is beautiful is the left-wing equivalent of praying the gay away.
And I just thought of that.
And I thought, that's perfect.
It's exactly right.
Because what the left believes is reality that they don't like is always malleable, can always be changed.
But reality that they do like is set in stone.
So, I mean, if you're heterosexual male and you find standardly beautiful women standardly beautiful, then that can be changed just by putting out a picture of Lena Dunhammer in her underwear.
But if you're gay, you know, that's it.
And the answer is: if you work for the New York Times, if you work for the New York Times, all the praying in the world is not going to make you heterosexual.
I mean, that's just something you're going to have to face, all right?
But the thing is, but the thing is, what really underlies this is a complete confusion of reality and fantasy.
The thing is, what the Playboy's stopping putting out nudes doing in the Pirelli calendar, what it reflects, and the guy Playboy actually said this, what it reflects is you can now turn on your computer and get a picture of every woman on earth naked, including some poor dumb actress who sent a selfie to her boyfriend naked.
You can get that on it.
You can see any woman you want.
And so we're not turning to the media people to tell us what's beautiful.
We're finding a beautiful woman.
They're all there.
They're all right there.
So these guys have become completely unimportant, and that's what it reflects.
It reflects the fact that they no longer control the images that come to us that we find attractive.
And it's just, I mean, look, if you have a girl and she's nice to you and you love her and she's kind and does stuff for you, she's going to become beautiful to you, believe me.
And it doesn't matter.
She may be a little overweight.
You're not going to care.
That's actually not going to matter.
But a picture of a girl is not actually a girl.
See, this is the big secret the New York Times hasn't figured out.
A picture of a girl is just a picture.
And so all you're doing is reacting to stuff that hits your brain in a certain way.
So now we're talking about the difference between reality and art.
This brings us back to stuff we were talking about yesterday, is the fact that our leaders, the leaders of the free world, have gone into a complete world of their imagination and are off in Paris dealing with climate change while the rest of us are dealing with the economy and terrorism.
And Obama is giving speeches that, I mean, I almost can't believe I'm looking at him.
I keep expecting him to come out and sing that Willy Wonka song Lindsay and I were talking about before.
I keep expecting him to just stand up in front of a microphone and go, come with me and we'll be in a world of pure imagination.
Because he actually said at one point, oh, what a rebuke to the terrorists it's going to be when we all get together and deal with climate change.
And I thought I could just see the terrorists going, oh no, you know, Obama controls the sun.
We better stop killing people before he plunges us all into darkness and cold.
All right.
So Brett Stevens wrote a column.
I may read this column in its entirety.
I have always thought that Brett Stevens was just one of the most brilliant columnists out there.
He's the foreign policy guy for the Wall Street Journal.
But now I know he's the most brilliant columnist out there because his column today said exactly what I was saying yesterday about what the left is doing, this imaginary world that they're plunging.
Let me read you this column.
I'll try and cut it, but it's worth hearing if you haven't heard.
He says, little children have imaginary friends.
Modern liberalism has imaginary enemies.
Hunger in America is an imaginary enemy.
Liberal advocacy groups routinely claim that one in seven Americans is hungry in a country where the poorest counties have the highest rates of obesity.
The statistic is a preposterous extrapolation, but the line gives those advocacy groups a reason to exist while feeding the liberal narrative of America as a savage society of haves and have-nots.
The campus rape epidemic, in which one in five female college students is said to be the victim of sexual assault, is an imaginary enemy.
Never mind the debunked rape scandals at Duke and the University of Virginia or the soon-to-be-debunked case at the heart of the Hunting Ground documentary.
The real question is, if modern campuses were really zones of mass predation, Congo on the quad, why would intelligent young women even think of attending a co-educational school?
They do because there is no epidemic, but the campus rape narrative sustains liberal fictions of a never-ending war on women.
Institutionalized racism is an imaginary enemy, Brett Stevens goes on in the Wall Street Journal this morning.
Somehow, we're supposed to believe that the same college administrators who have made a religion of diversity are really the second coming of Strom Thurmond.
Somehow we're supposed to believe that twice electing a black president is evidence of our racial incorrigibility.
We're supposed to believe this anyway because the future of liberal racialism requires periodic sightings of the ghost of a racist past.
I mention these examples, Stevens says, by way of preface to the climate change summit that began this week in Paris, but first notice the pattern.
Dramatic crises, for which evidence tends to be anecdotal, subjective, invisible, tendentious, and sometimes fabricated, are trumpeted on the basis of incompetently designed studies, poorly understood statistics, or semantic ledger domain.
Yet bogus studies and statistics survive because the cottage industries of compassion need them to be believed, and because mindless repetition has a way of making things nearly true, and because dramatic crises require drastic and all-encompassing solutions.
Besides, the thinking goes, falsehood and exaggeration could serve a purpose if it induces virtuous behavior.
The more afraid we are of the shadow of racism, the more conscious we might become of our own suspected biases, and so to Paris.
He says, I'm not the first to notice the incongruity of this huge gathering of world leaders meeting to combat a notional enemy in the same place where a real enemy just inflicted so much mortal damage.
It's also appropriate since reality substitution is how modern liberalism conducts political business.
This is a great column.
He says, what is the central liberal project of the 21st century if not to persuade people that climate change represents an infinitely greater threat to human civilization than the barbarians, sorry, violent extremists of Missoula and Molinbique?
Why overreact to a few hundred deaths today when hundreds of thousands will be dead in a century or two if we fail to act now?
The same dishonest pattern is at work, the semantic trick in the phrase climate change, allowing every climate anomaly to serve as further proof of the overall theory.
The hysteria generated by an imperceptible temperature rise of 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, as if the trend is bound to continue forever or is not a product of natural variation or cannot be mitigated except by drastic policy interventions.
The hyping of flimsy studies to press the political point, the job security, so on and so on.
And of course, the chance to switch the subject.
If your enemy is global jihad, then to defeat it, you need military wherewithal, martial talents, and political will.
If your enemy is the structure of an energy-intensive global economy, then you need a compelling justification to change it.
Climate dystopia can work wonders, provided the jihadists don't interrupt too often.
And he ended almost with the same words I almost ended yesterday.
Here's a climate prediction for the year 2115.
Liberals will still be organizing campaigns against yet another mooted social or environmental crisis.
Temperatures will be about the same.
Okay.
So this brings me to something that happened to me over the Thanksgiving holiday, where sometimes, I mean, I'm sure you've noticed this, that you're thinking about a problem and you go to church and suddenly the guy starts preaching on your problem.
Or you pick up the newspaper and suddenly there's a story that relates to what you were thinking about.
Or you learn a word for the first time, like flexion, and then suddenly, and suddenly everywhere you go, you know, you're doing a crossword puzzle and there's the word flexion, you know, so that things have this very strange way of coming together.
I have this experience that kind of explained this issue that I've been talking about that I was talking about yesterday and plan to continue talking about for a while, about the fact that leftists use these lies to create a sense of mission.
And I showed yesterday John F. Kennedy talking about how we were going to the moon because Kennedy understood that when you're free and rich and successful as we were in that moment in 1962, it's not enough.
It's not enough.
Freedom and wealth are empty pleasures.
You know, they are important.
They are urgent.
They're essential, but they're also empty.
They do not give you a purpose in life.
And that's what we're talking about.
We're talking about our purposes, not just as individuals, but our purposes as a society, things that take us outside of ourselves.
Kennedy wanted us to go to the moon.
Barack Obama wants us to stop doing stuff.
Don't use that.
Don't do that.
Don't go there.
Don't use that water.
Oh my goodness, you're using too much oil.
You're building too much.
You're triumphing too much.
You're too rich.
You're too happy.
You know, there comes a time when you have too much money, too much, too much.
Don't do it.
Okay, that's the difference between a guy like John F. Kennedy, who today would be obviously a Republican, who said, we are going to the moon because it's hard, because it's the highest mountain, because it's something we've never done before.
That's why, that's why we're going to do it.
And Obama, who says, ooh, everything's going bad.
We must stop.
Stop, please.
Put a fence around it.
Don't touch anything.
And it reminded me of this tweet as we're talking about global jihad that Joyce Carol Oates sent out.
Joyce Carol Oates, of course, is a very famous, prolific author.
She writes about a book a minute.
I mean, and I know, I met her once at a party, and we had a very long talk, and she was just an absolutely delightful, kind of dreamy, you know, off-in-space lady.
And I know a lot of people who know her and she writes so often that if you send her an email, how you doing, Joyce, you'll get like five pages back.
She's just like, the stuff pours out of her, you know.
And she sent out this tweet that everybody was making fun of.
And she said, all we hear of ISIS is puritanical and punitive.
Is there nothing celebratory and joyous?
Or is that query naive?
And everybody made fun of it.
Oh, we're not looking about the joy of ISIS.
But it's not naive.
A Play's Moral Question00:15:15
Women are leaving the West to join ISIS and finding themselves flogged for putting on a lipstick and finding themselves killed, murdered for just being women, for just wanting to be beautiful and adorn themselves.
Why are they going?
Why are they leaving?
You know, they're leaving because it is offering something.
It is offering this mission.
It is offering this sense of purpose compared to our religion.
So here's what happened to me over the weekend, right?
I went and saw one play and one movie.
And the movie I saw was by, the play I saw was by John Patrick Shanley.
This is a good example of how the culture just speaks into the world as you're living it, in real time, as you're living it.
I went to see this play by John Patrick Shanley called Outside Mullingar.
It takes place in Ireland.
It's gotten fantastic reviews, and I hated it.
And, you know, I hate to attack fellow writers.
I've liked stuff Shanley did.
He wrote that movie Moonstruck with Cher.
I thought it was very original, very sweet, romantic comedy.
I hated Outside Mullingar.
I thought it was Twee.
I don't know if you know the word Twee.
Twee is a British word that means just too cute.
Little cottage, you know, you know that painter Thomas Kincaid?
I'm not saying his paintings are bad, but they're twee, and I hate twee, okay?
And this was like, you know, I'm me, darling, I'll be loving you until the sun, the cows come walking back.
It was a kind of Irish, crap, you know, fake Irish.
You know, ah, the love I feel for you, John McDulligan, will never stop.
And I just thought, oh, God, I hate this stuff, you know.
And it made me reflect back on Shanley's most famous play, which is Doubt, okay?
And Doubt was about the priest, you know, pedophile, the pedophile priest scandal in the Catholic Church.
And Doubt was, it was really called Doubt a Parable, and Doubt won the Pulitzer Prize, and Doubt won the Detoni, I'm pretty sure.
I saw Doubt and I thought, God, I hate this play.
You know, he's a talented writer.
It was a well-written, entertaining play, but I thought, I hate what this is about.
The real title of Doubt, the full title, was Doubt a Parable.
And I believe the parable was supposed to be about the Iraq War and George W. Bush.
And it was supposed to be about the self-certainty of these neoconservatives thinking that they knew right from wrong and they were going to go find the weapons of mass destruction.
And they had a good reason to go to war because we were right and they were wrong.
The Muslims were wrong.
And the play concerns a very pinched, self-certain nun who accuses a priest of pedophilia of attacking a young black boy in his care.
And she's just a kind of pinched nun.
And the whole point of the play is she doesn't have any proof.
She's just sure of herself.
She just knows.
And she kind of represents the George W. Bush of it all, even though the play never tells you, you kind of suspect that she's right.
You know, the play never tells you about it.
And they made a movie of this with just a spectacular cast.
It was Philip Seymour Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Amy Adams.
I mean, I would watch those guys read the phone book.
It was the acting in this thing was great.
So the play has all these things where you kind of doubt her.
It's all about doubt.
You kind of doubt her, but you sort of think she's right.
And then you find out she's been toying with the facts, and yet you still think she might be right.
But the flexion point, the turning point in the play comes when the nun played by Meryl Streep goes to confront the mother of this boy who she thinks has been abused.
This is the second clip, the second doubt clip.
And the mother is played by Viola Davis, another spectacular actress.
And she may have even won some critics' award for this.
I can't remember.
But she turns in a great performance.
And the mother says to her, I don't mind it so much because my son is actually gay.
And his father beats him because he's gay.
So listen to this clip for a minute as the mother tells the nun why she doesn't want to do anything to stop this priest.
My boy came to your school because they were going to kill him in a public school.
His father doesn't like him.
You come to your school, kids don't like them.
One man is good to him, this priest.
Then does a man have his reasons?
Yes.
Everybody does.
You have your reasons, but do I ask the man why he's good to my son?
No.
I don't care why.
My son needs some man to care about him and to see him through the way he wants to go.
And thank God this educated man with some kindness in him wants to do just that.
Okay.
So at this point in the play, you're supposed to think, not only do we not know whether this uptight, conservative George W. Bush nun, Sister W, is right, we don't even know if she's morally right because she's shot, but here is this woman saying, well, this is the best thing that ever happened to him.
When I saw the play, I saw the play in Santa Barbara.
It was a pretty good production.
When I saw the play, there was a discussion afterwards, and a guy in the audience, who I'm fairly certain was gay, raised his hand and said, isn't it wonderful that we don't even know whether he did this thing and no one can ever get at the truth?
And isn't it wonderful that maybe this was the best thing that ever happened to this boy being molested by this priest?
Maybe this really helped him because he had a father figure.
And I refrained from saying anything because all I could say was, first of all, was crap.
That's crap.
I mean, this is, you know, for an adult to use a child for personal gratification is rape.
That's rape.
Okay, it's the same as knocking somebody down and using them by force.
It is exactly the same.
Rape is taking somebody, using somebody for your pleasure without their consent, and a child cannot possibly give informed consent.
Abusing a child is rape.
And for a guy to do that and then use that kind of justification that, oh, I was doing him a favor.
I was bringing out his true feelings.
Because these guys, these predators are smart, you know, and they know they can see a kid who might be gay and who might be developing in that direction.
There is no way that is good for you.
That is no way that is a helpful thing to have happened to you.
It may be helpful to find a mentor who understands you're gay.
Maybe that'll help you.
But to have him put his hands on you is a crime.
It's rape.
That's all it is, okay?
So to bring that into moral question and to bring into question whether we can ever know the truth is garbage.
And this is what I want to get back to this book.
Before I get back to it, let me just talk about another version of the story.
And by the way, I don't mean to pick on the Catholic Church.
I know this was a great, great pain for people who are Catholic.
I have a lot of respect to the Catholic Church, not only for its effects on our culture over the centuries, but for the good that it does in our society.
But, but, you know, there are a lot of Catholics who don't want to talk about this, and the Catholic Church itself has said, well, you know, a lot of organizations have problems with this, and there are, in fact, no more pedophile priests than there are pedophiles in any other organization.
That argument is no good, because if what the Catholics are saying is true, if even part of it is true, all right, if even Jesus is Lord is true, as I believe it is true, and if the Catholics have a special relationship in telling us about that and teaching us about that, which you believe if you're a Catholic, then what these priests did was worse.
It was worse.
It was not just an offense against people.
It was an offense against God.
It was taking people's link to God away.
If what the Catholics say is true, if the Catholic Church has legitimacy, any legitimacy, then to abuse the position of priest is worse than abusing the position even of teacher, which is as bad as it could be.
I know we're parsing, you know, which room in hell these people are going to be in, but still, still, the Catholic Church has no argument.
This is a major scandal.
I don't think it's entirely been cleaned up yet, although they have done a lot to do it.
So it's not, it is something worth revisiting.
Okay, I went and saw the movie Spotlight.
I had screening tickets to this film Spotlight.
And this is a minor film that's been getting fantastic reviews.
It's about the Boston Globe team called Spotlight.
They had a section called Spotlight that did investigative reporting that exposed this scandal, that lit the torch that exposed the pedophile priest scandal in Boston, a very Catholic town.
And I expected to hate this movie because it's gotten these fabulous reviews.
And I thought, sure, it's gotten fabulous reviews because it loves the media.
It romanticizes the media just like all the president's men did.
And it attacks priests, people of God.
So, of course, the media loves it, just like they loved all the president men.
But All the President's Men is a good movie, even though it glorifies the media and attacks Republicans.
It is a good movie, and this is a very good movie.
This movie made me, I have to say, so angry.
When I was a little kid, I used to have a babysitter who was from a foreign country, and she used to yell at the TV to warn the good guys that if a bad guy was creeping up in back of them, she would say, look out behind you.
We would laugh at her and say, you know, they can't actually hear you.
I almost did this in this theater.
I almost stood up and started screaming.
All right.
So now you have these reporters in a Catholic town, and they start to expose this scandal.
And they start to put the pieces together, and they are looking, trying to get at this guy named Law, a cardinal named Law.
And they get some evidence on him, but they don't have enough.
And one of the reporters, this is again the second clip on, let's play both clips.
Go to the first clip.
The first thing that happens is they start to uncover the story, and Michael Keaton plays the head of Spotlight.
He's the editor.
And this guy from Catholic Charities approaches him in a bar.
And the guy's a good guy.
He's not a pedophile.
He just approaches him, but he points out all the stuff that Catholics do that's great stuff, you know, all the charities they do.
And he comes up to Michael Keaton in a bar and tries to quash the story.
So just watch this for a sec.
You know, you get a lot of people here respect you, Robbie.
The work you do.
That's good to know.
You know, it's because you care about this place.
It's why you do what you do.
It's who you are.
You know, people need the church more than ever right now.
You know, you can feel it.
And the cardinal, you know, the Cardinal, he might not be perfect.
But we can't throw out all the good he's doing over a few bad apples.
Now, you know, I'm bringing this up to you because I know this is Baron's idea, his agenda.
I gotta tell you, I mean, honest to God, I mean, he doesn't care about the city the way we do.
I mean, how could he?
This is how it happens, isn't it, Pete?
What's that?
Guy leans on a guy, and suddenly the whole town just looks the other way.
That's right.
That's exactly how it happens.
That's happened to me.
I've been a reporter.
That's exactly how it happens.
A friend comes to you, puts his arm around you, says, hey, you know, this guy, not one of us, you know, we're together in this.
Let's quash this story.
Nobody watching that scene, nobody watching that scene has the same concerns as in doubt.
Nobody watching that scene says, how can Michael Keaton know the truth?
Maybe this was the best thing that ever.
There's even a scene, there's even a scene, by the way, with a gay guy.
It breaks your heart with a gay guy who was molested who says, this guy used that rationale on me to get me to let him touch me, right?
And it breaks his heart.
It breaks his life.
A lot of these guys killed themselves.
It breaks their heart, whether they're gay or straight, to have these adults use them in that way.
So the whole premise of doubt is doubtful.
That whole premise of that Viola Davis scene is wrong.
It's wrong.
It doesn't change the moral equation, and it doesn't change whether you can know the truth.
Okay, so here's the key, a linchpin, my favorite scene in this movie, Spotlight, where finally somebody says, we have got this story.
We've got this cardinal law.
We've got to run it.
And Michael Keaton says, no, we don't want just cardinal law.
We want the whole system.
So just run this.
This is finally a guy expressing, as Mark Ruffalo as the reporter, expressing what everybody in the audience at this point is thinking.
We got law.
This is it.
No, this is law covering for one priest.
There's another 90 out there.
Yeah, and we'll print that story when we get it, but we got to go with this now.
No, I'm not going to rush the story, Mike.
We don't have a choice, Robbie.
If we don't rush to print, somebody else is going to find these letters and butcher this story.
Joe Quimby from the Herald was at the freaking courthouse.
Mike, what?
Why are we hesitating?
Barron told us to get law.
This is law.
Barron told us to get the system.
We need the full scope.
That's the only thing that will put an end to this.
So let's take it up to Ben and let him decide.
We'll take it to Ben when I say it's time.
It's time, Robbie.
It's time.
They knew and they let it happen to kids.
Okay?
It could have been you.
It could have been me.
It could have been any of us.
We got to nail these scumbags.
We got to show people that nobody can get away with this.
Not a priest or a cardinal or a freaking pope.
Okay.
So let's go back to the stuff we were talking about before, the naked women on the calendar and how the left can't tell the difference between reality, a picture of a woman and a woman, and the relationship you have with a picture of a woman and a woman.
In the imaginary story about the pedophile priests, the woman who is certain is a pinched, hyper-conservative George W. Bush parable.
You know, you just can't know.
You can't know what happened.
You can't know.
You can't even know if your morality is right in this play, okay?
Because this play comes from this, let's face it, the theater in America is completely dominated by leftists.
The only David Mammet, and when they bring over a Tom Stoppard play, the two best playwrights alive, when the two best playwrights alive are working, they're conservatives, of course.
But all the rest, the rank and file, even as a good writer as Shanley, they're all on one side.
In a play, when you're sure, it's wrong.
In a play, when you've got morality, it's wrong.
But in a movie about reality, okay, this is virtually, it's not a documentary, but it's a very close, it's very close.
They stuck very close to the truth.
When you're talking about the truth, we all know.
We know something happened and something didn't happen.
We know we can get close enough to prove it.
We know that our moral guide is basically right.
Yes, there are gray edges, but that guy, when Ruffalo says they did this to kids and they knew and they covered it up, we all know he's right.
We know, we know, and this is the difference between the arts and reality.
This is the difference between the imaginary, the imaginary world of the left, of Barack Obama, you know, saving us from sunlight in Paris, and the real world of people concerned about what we're going to do.
Knowing the Truth00:04:25
You know, there's a meme that went around that there's no objectivity and therefore newsmen shouldn't be objective.
They don't have to be objective because there is no objectivity.
So why can't they just be leftist and rightist?
The Fox can cover the right.
New York Times, CBS, and all the rest of them can cover the left, and that's fine.
It isn't so.
What there is truth, objectivity is not a place.
It's a journey towards something.
If you fill a newsroom with conservatives and leftists, they will come closer to the truth than if you do what they do now, which is fill the newsroom only with leftists.
People discussing things can get closer to objectivity.
All of us, by facing our corruption and our fears and our prejudice, can get closer to the truth.
And that begins, I think, when we see this, when we see the difference.
This is the difference between a real story where we know something is true and we know what's right and wrong, and a fake story like doubt, which to me was a fraud, in which we don't know, we'll never know the truth, and we can't really know what's right and wrong.
That's in your imagination.
That's the world of your imagination.
In real life, you know, and you can get close to the truth.
And that begins to suggest a purpose.
That begins to suggest the purpose of freedom, okay?
That there is a movement that we should be making, both as individuals and as a society, toward greater truth, toward greater understanding, and toward greater righteousness.
And how to make that, how to incorporate that in the message of freedom, and how to incorporate that journey is one of the problems facing conservatism.
We're going to talk about it more, not just tomorrow, but a lot.
We're going to talk about how to incorporate that journey, because it changes everything.
It changes the nature of imperialism.
It changes the nature of cultural appropriation.
It's why we should be teaching yoga in classes if you want to do yoga.
It changes the entire equation when you see it that way.
All right.
It's December 1st.
It's Advent.
It's time talking about cultural appropriation.
This is one of the things I love about Christmas is we stole the pagans holiday and made it beautiful and made it truthful.
It's terrific.
And now it's time for Christmas stuff I like.
And this is a real challenge, okay?
Because the whole point of stuff I like is not to tell you all the classic stuff, not to say like, oh, you should read Hamlet.
If you haven't read Hamlet, you're probably not going to read Hamlet.
Or if you are, it's not going to be because I said it's good.
You already know it's good.
So what I've tried to find is I try to find stuff that's good that maybe you never heard of.
And also that if you're not a culture vulture like me, it won't take you, you know, eight years to read the book, okay?
I don't recommend Crime and Punishment.
I think it is a monumental work of art, but it's hard.
It's a hard book, and you really have to believe in reading works of art like that in order to do it.
And the problem with Christmas stuff is that there's not very much of it that's good, except the music.
There's plenty of great Christmas music.
But all the stuff that's good, we've all seen a million times.
You know, we've seen the Christmas Carol.
We've seen It's a Wonderful Life.
We've heard White Christmas a million times.
So find stuff that maybe you haven't seen that I really think is overlooked and is good.
Really a challenge, and we'll see how well I do.
This first one, Borderline.
It's borderline, because a lot of people have seen this, I know, but there's still some people who haven't, and it is really good.
A really good Christmas movie called The Bishop's Wife, 1947, Carrie Grant, David Niven, and Loretta Young.
Anybody seen it?
Everybody seen it?
No.
Okay.
Excellent.
So maybe you haven't seen it.
Now, don't watch the remake, The Pastor's Wife, I think it's called, with Whitney Houston.
It's terrible.
But The Bishop's Wife, 1947, it's about this priest who's become a bishop in the Episcopal Church so he can get married.
And he's become a bishop, and he's become focused on building this cathedral, and he's kind of lost his way.
All he's doing is raising money, and he's lost his purpose.
And his wife, he's neglecting his beautiful wife.
And an angel, he prays, and an angel comes down from heaven in the person of Carrie Grant, which is all, you know, all angels, if they're men, should look like Carrie Grant, right?
And so this very sophisticated, very, you know, gallant angel comes down and starts to try and bring the husband and wife back together.
But she's a very pretty wife, and this angel is starting to look at this wife, and it's really good.
It's a comedy, and it's a romance, and it's a very, very beautiful movie that it's really entertaining, and it holds up.
I've seen it recently.
It's worth seeing.
The Bishop's Wife, Christmas stuff I like.
That's it for me.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm Andrew Claven.
We'll be back again tomorrow, which is Wednesday, right?