Donald Trump’s 2016 poll surge—45% to Clinton’s 42%—stemmed from his "rape" accusation against Hillary, a calculated pivot that exploited voter fatigue with media hypocrisy, as seen in the Times’ botched women’s allegations story and ignored Juanita Broderick’s rape claims against Bill Clinton. Camille Paglia’s critique of the Times’ "priggish" framing and Maureen Dowd’s expose on Clinton’s feminist betrayal underscored the double standard, while Trump’s fake Supreme Court nominee list—featuring Judge Dredd and Wonder Woman—revealed his transactional judicial philosophy. His rise thrived on public disillusionment with political correctness, proving that outrage, not substance, now dictates power. [Automatically generated summary]
Donald Trump has released a list of judges he pretends he'll nominate to the Supreme Court if he's elected despicable president of the United States.
The list comes complete with Trump's personal assessment of the judges, so as a public service, we read the document to you now in full.
Quote, I, Donald J. Trump, would make the following nominations of judges to the Supreme Court.
Nomination number one, Judge Reinhold.
He was great in fast times at Ridgemont High, and then Sean Penn goes on to get all the stardom.
Very bad.
Sean Penn is practically some kind of communist, although he did tie Madonna to a chair and smack her around for nine hours, so he's got his positive side too.
Still, I think Judge Reinhold would be better on the Supreme Court than Sean Penn because he's more mild-mannered and judge-like.
Number two, Judge Dredd.
Very underrated judge, probably because the Sylvester Stallone movie didn't do so much business, but in real life, Dredd has been working as a street judge in Megacity One, a very tough environment, very tough, and frankly, I think it's time he got a promotion.
Some people might say he's not a real hero, just a hero in comic books, but by that logic, I'm not really presidential material.
I'm just a guy who plays at being a businessman on television.
It makes no sense, folks.
It makes no sense.
Number three, Samson.
Don't laugh.
The man was judge over Israel for 20 years.
And Israel, frankly, it's a mess.
We're going to have to get the very best people to figure out what's going on over there.
And starting with Samson on the Supreme Court, very good idea.
Number four, chocolate judge.
Who doesn't like chocolate?
I love chocolate.
I have many, many chocolate friends.
Although, wait, maybe it's not chocolate judge, it's chocolate fudge, so that wouldn't work because it's just a candy, so maybe it wouldn't be qualified for the Supreme Court.
We'll set that one aside for now.
It was just a suggestion.
I disavow.
Number five, Diana Prince, also known as Wonder Woman.
If you're looking for a justice, where better to look than the Justice League of America.
Also, we need a woman on the list to stop crooked Hillary from playing the woman card.
And Diana Prince is very smart.
And frankly, she has a body that just won't quit, which let's face it, doesn't hurt if you're trying to convince the other justices of something.
But this proves I love women, and I have many, many women friends who will tell you how much I respect women, and Diana Prince is as real as any of them.
Finally, number six, I would nominate myself because I'm very smart, I have a very good brain, and when I pass a law, I think I'm the best judge of whether it's a good law or a bad law.
This way, I can just pass the law and then make the decision, this is a good law, and that way we'll finally get something done instead of all this back and forth in Washington.
It's a disaster, folks, an absolute disaster.
Unquote.
In an interview later with Sean Hannity, Trump was asked if he would promise to nominate one of the names on this list if he became president.
Trump responded, what list?
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin show.
That one may have been a little too realistic.
That was actually verbatim, the document.
All right, all right, we're going to talk about rape.
Donald Trump cried rape, and the drudge reports stop dead still and this little siren goes off.
And oh my God, he used the R word.
Trump On The List00:15:47
We're going to get to that in a minute.
First, I don't want to manipulate anybody's emotions.
I want to be direct and everything, but yesterday, absolutely true story, absolutely true.
Yesterday, I'm taking a hike in one of the parks we have here in LA.
We have these wonderful parks that are built in canyons, so they go up and down.
Very beautiful views of the city and the canyons.
And of course, as I'm walking, I'm composing the opening to the show in my mind.
So I'm like a million miles away, and I'm kind of looking off into space.
I look down in front of me, and there's a yard-long rattlesnake step under my foot, and I backpedal.
And I just want to say, you know, I don't want to manipulate you, but if I can risk my life to bring you this show, I think the least you could do is subscribe.
You know, if you subscribe, you get to.
Good men have died to bring you this commentary.
And if you subscribe, you get to watch and as well as listen and also contribute because we did the mailbox.
It was good, the mailbag.
Again, it was really fun.
And, you know, I have to say, in all seriousness, I really enjoy doing that mailbag because I like hearing from you.
So I'm not just talking to myself.
I actually want to know what you think and what you're wondering about.
So that's very helpful.
And as I say, if I'm going to go around getting bitten by rattlesnakes, just to bring this up.
Also, I have to show this.
I know I've mentioned this a few times this week.
But if you can see this, if you're subscribing, I got yesterday the first reading copies.
These are called ARCs, advanced reading copies of The Great Good Thing, A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.
And you can buy that pre-order.
You can pre-order it on Amazon now.
And it comes out in September, so just in time for you to sink into despair over the election.
You'll have something to read.
All right, we're going to talk about this rape thing, which is just really fascinating to me.
But first, we have to talk about, I mean, this has been an interesting week all around.
And we really haven't talked about Donald Trump all week because the chaos on the left, the chaos in the Democrat Party, and the scandals and the press and all this stuff have just been dominating the news.
And yesterday, there's a new Fox News poll.
Get this, okay?
Donald Trump tops Hillary Clinton in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup according to a new Fox News poll that also finds majorities of voters feel both frontrunners lack strong moral values and will say anything to get elected.
They like that, though.
They're not complaining, you know.
If they just have fewer moral values and say anything, they would vote for them more.
But Trump now has a 45 to 42 percent edge over Clinton if the presidential election were held today.
And we actually, I have an image, I think it's in there that you can put up.
It shows that he's overtaken her.
He was down in April.
You know, it was Clinton 48 to 41.
So this is a major change, okay?
So now last month, last month, Clinton was up by 48 to 41%.
So now he has really come abreast of her and passed her.
And the thing is, yesterday I'm watching the commentary on this and really smart commentators like Krauthammer and Jonah Goldberg, and they're saying, well, you know, Trump has won the nomination and everybody likes a winner as if people were like these sheep, which they're really not.
You know, people are actually seeing something.
I just totally disagree with that commentary.
I mean, people are seeing something in Donald Trump that they like.
That doesn't mean that it's good.
That doesn't mean that they're right, but it does mean that we should at least pay attention.
I mean, it's good information to have.
So listen, I've said a million times how I feel about Trump.
I am really upset by his violent tendencies and his fascistic tendencies.
Those are things that are not going to go away in a day because he says the right thing today and he didn't say the right thing yesterday.
I mean, those are character issues that I really, really give me a hard time.
I do respect the argument that he would be only the second worst thing that could happen in the country.
I can't sign on to that argument so far because of these things that I'm talking about.
But I'm just trying to say that I think I understand why people watched him this week in these last couple weeks and why they thought, yeah, that's not so bad.
You know, that's not so bad.
So let's take a look.
First of all, this Supreme Court thing before we get to the sex stuff, although that's really what we want to talk about.
But before we get to that, let's talk about the Supreme Court.
He puts out this list of judges.
Very big deal, as Trump himself might say.
Big deal, very big deal.
Big, big, big deal, deal, deal deal.
A lot of one-syllable words repeated over and over again.
So everybody understands.
He puts out a list of judges, and it is a big deal because the one thing that everybody is saying is we know we're going to get a left-wing judge from Hillary Clinton.
We know we're going to get a left-wing judge from Hillary Clinton.
And even if we had elected a conservative, we might not have gotten a conservative judge.
I mean, Reagan put in Sandra Day O'Connor.
He also put in Scalita, I think it was.
Bush, the first George Bush, put in Suter, an absolute disaster.
David Souter also put in a leado, but that's 50%.
That's one for two.
And so this guy, Trump, we don't know what he's going to do.
So he puts out a list, and everybody who should know about these things, the Cato Institute and John Yu, all these people said, great list, absolutely great.
He even called, and this actually speaks well of him, I have to say.
He called National Review.
He had his people call National Review, according to Jonah Goldberg, and ask for their advice.
And National Review has just hammered him relentlessly.
They put out an entire issue against Trump.
They're still kind of brooding about the idea of a third-party candidate, an absolutely disastrous idea on every level, but they're still doing it.
And yet he called them and asked for their advice.
So he puts out this list, and it's apparently a really good list.
You know, I mean, I'm just saying that the experts on these things say these are all very conservative judgments.
So why should we have any reservations?
Why should that not convince us that maybe all will be well?
Well, here he is yesterday.
He's on Sean Trumpetty, as we now can call him.
Is that a little unkind?
So Sean Hannity has him on, and he's talking about this list.
Listen to this.
One of the top things I would ask you often is your judicial philosophy.
And you mentioned, as I said, Scolia and Thomas.
They are what we call originalists.
Right.
Constitutionalists.
Correct.
You are a constitutionalist.
Correct.
Correct.
And I'm also, I want high intellect.
I want great intellect.
These people are all of very high, high intellect.
They're pro-life.
And so that's my list.
And we are going to choose from, most likely from this list, but at a minimum, we will keep people within this general realm.
So Hannity at this point might just as well have Trump sit on his lap and like pull a string in back and he moves his mouth and Hannity just does this venture.
I'm a constitutionalist.
That's what I believe in the original constitution.
I was like, wow, Hannity's hardly moving his lips.
That's amazing.
Anyway, but you heard at the end him hedging his bets.
And we all know, we know that Trump's word is not good.
We know his word is not good.
And sometimes I have some sympathy with the things he says, like when he said, you know, my Muslim ban was just a suggestion and everybody went up in arms.
And he said, well, anything that the president says is just a suggestion.
You have to pass laws and all this stuff.
There's some truth to that, but we just know that he can change his mind at any minute.
He was going to cut taxes, then he was going to raise taxes.
Now I don't know what he's going to do.
And this, too, he left himself a lot of wiggle room to just sort of say, well, it's going to be the general realm.
You know, it's like whatever, the general.
But the other thing about this, and this is a genuine objection.
That thing that Hannity was doing where he's saying, you know, you're a constitutionalist, originalist, right?
Yeah, I'm an original.
You know, let's go back.
This is just a couple months ago.
Good morning, America.
After he talked about the Muslim ban, Hillary Clinton said, oh my gosh, you know, what kind of Supreme Court justice would this monster nominate?
And so here he is.
He's asked about this on Good Morning America.
I do want to get your reaction, Mr. Trump, to something Hillary Clinton said just this week.
She said, quote, ask yourself, what kind of justice would President Trump appoint, or for that matter, Attorney General, citing your belief that Muslims should be banned from entering this country because of their faith?
She said, as scary as it might seem, you have to ask yourself, who would he appoint?
How do you react?
Well, I'd probably appoint people that would look very seriously at her email disaster because it's a criminal activity, and I would appoint people that would look very seriously at that to start off with.
What she's getting away with is absolutely murder.
You talk about a case.
Now, that's a real case.
Now, nothing seems to be happening.
But you can also poll people on that, and you see what happens to that, because that is a real case.
And if she's able to get away with that, you can get away with anything.
So the guy has no clue what a Supreme Court justice does for a living.
He has no idea.
They've got to appoint people to the Supreme Court who are going to hunt down Hillary for her email.
You know, they're not going to decide on the constitutionality of laws or anything like that.
They're going to hunt down Hillary.
He has no clue.
And he did it again on one of the debates with Ted Cruz.
You know, Trump's sister, I can't, what's her name, Marianne Trump Barry, I think it is, Marian Trump.
She's a U.S. circuit.
She's a federal judge.
She's a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judge.
It's like they never sit down at Thanksgiving and ask and say, so sis, what do you do for a living?
No, when Cruz attacked a decision that she made, here's his response.
Here's Trump's response.
He's been criticizing my sister for signing a certain bill.
You know who else signed that bill?
Justice Samuel Alito, a very conservative member of the Supreme Court with my sister, signed that bill.
So he has no idea.
That's why judges sign bills now.
They persecute Hillary.
They prosecute Hillary Clinton, and then they sign bills.
So he just, like, I just, I mean, are there no like Trump family dinners where they sit around really and say, like, you know, so, sis, what exactly do you do for a living?
And about these Supreme Court justices, what do they do?
Doesn't happen.
Okay, so this is why, you know, it's kind of laughable.
I mean, look, I respect the fact that Trump had the intelligence, the political intelligence, to address this problem.
This gives cover to Paul Ryan.
It gives cover to all the Republicans who are holding back but have nowhere else to go.
And this third party thing is a really bad idea for any number of reasons, but most of all, because it won't work.
It won't do anything.
We have these two choices, these two bad choices.
And we either have to decide to sit it out and vote through third party or write something in, or we have to decide that one is worse than the other.
That's all there is to it.
You know, I mean, it's like, this is the way it is.
And it's not finished yet because we don't know what's going to happen with Hillary.
There's still some surprises coming down the pike.
But okay, so he made a smart move, and I think this is going to help the Republican Party to come together.
So now let's go back and talk about this thing about women, because this has been a big, I mean, the Times basically blew itself up.
The New York Times basically blew itself up, pardon me, with this story about how Trump treats women.
I mean, they just bannered it with a headline, crossing the line.
And then when you read the story, by the way, it, you know, it was just a billionaire, you know, messing around with girls who want to be with billionaires, with pretty girls who want to put on bathing suits for billionaires, because it's fun.
You know, that's the thing they do.
So now today, they published the letters of reaction.
And by the way, the New York Times doesn't have much readership, but it's much more powerful than it ought to be.
You know, the New York Times sets the budgets for newspapers and television news throughout the country.
Every day, every day, it's called a budget in the newspaper business.
A budget comes over and it says what we're going to cover and how much space it's going to get.
That's why it's called a budget.
You know, how much space it's going to get and what we're going to do.
And I have been in newspaper offices when the New York Times budget comes over, and if their lead story is Trump did this, that's what that little newspaper who's kind of taking guidance from this big newspaper is going to do.
And a lot of the Times, these guys are liberals, but they don't really know they're liberals.
You know, when I was researching my novel, Empire of Lies, I went to the local newspaper, the Santa Barbara News Press, and I was talking to a really nice guy who was the editor there.
And he said to me, you know, why do you think we're biased?
Because I mentioned that I thought the paper had a left-wing bias, which it did.
Why do you think we're biased?
And while he's talking, the New York Times budget comes over, and he hands it to his sub-editor, and the editor goes out to set the budget of their newspaper.
And I said, that's why that's a left-wing newspaper setting your budget.
And his face fell.
I mean, it hadn't even occurred to him that the New York Times was not somehow the voice of God.
So the New York Times has power.
And they put out this article and it just made them look ridiculous.
The women that they interviewed came out and said, no, Trump was a gentleman.
He was nice.
At one point, one of them said that, you know, he changed over the years as he got divorced.
And this happened to Clarence Thomas, too.
You know, when guys get divorced, they get angry.
They get angry at the women and they talk, listen, talk to their ex-wives, and you don't think they're angry at men and saying things about men.
Yes, they are.
So that's like a personal thing that bleeds into your public life.
So now today, the New York Times publishes letters.
And you got to hear some of this.
And some of it is like, you know, Trump would call somebody Hun or baby or comment on her looks and all this stuff.
So here's a letter.
A significant amount of Trump's behavior would be actionable under the sexual harassment policies of almost any for-profit or non-profit organization in America.
If he worked in my institution, he would be fired for cause.
Well, that just shows you what a, you know, uptight, like, little guy you are.
Here's another one from a woman named Patricia Sears in Ottawa, Canada.
I need a shower after reading this.
But there is nothing here to surprise any woman who was in the workplace in the 1970s to 90s.
So here's a woman who needs a shower.
No, I mean, it was exciting.
You know, she has to wash this normal behavior off herself.
It would be hard to find a man in the world, says Tony from New York, that hadn't slipped and called a woman hun or sweetie.
And I love that word slipped.
Like to call a woman hun or sweetie is like the worst thing you could possibly do in the world.
Anyway, you know, somebody says, don't go after the fact we have pageants, because Trump ran those beauty pageants.
Don't go after the fact that we have pageants with women paraded in swimsuits.
Go after the guy who owns the pageant.
Well, why go after anybody?
People like pageants.
Women like being in pageants.
Men like watching the pageant.
What is the problem?
It's like ordinary life.
Camille Paglia comes out in Salon, and Camille Paglia must be a thorn in the side of the left.
She's a lesbian feminist who thinks the feminists are awful.
And she comes out and she says, blame for this fiasco falls squarely upon the New York Times editors who delegated to two far too young journalists, Michael Barbaro and Megan Tuhe, the complex task of probing the glitzy, exhibitionistic world of late 20th century beauty pageants, gambling casinos, strip clubs, and luxury resorts.
Neither Barbaro, a 2002 graduate of Yale, nor Tuhe, a 1998 graduate of Georgetown University, had any frame of reference for sexual analysis aside from the rote political correctness that has saturated elite American campuses for nearly 40 years.
Their prim, priggish formulations in this awkwardly disconnected article demonstrate the embarrassing lack of sophistication that passes for theoretical expertise among their overpaid and undereducated professors.
Okay?
I mean, she goes on to say it's a supreme irony that the Times put a picture to illustrate this article of Trump with a young woman, and she said, it's the sexiest picture that's been in the mainstream media for years.
There's all the sizzling glory of hormonal sex differentiation, which the grim commissars of campus gender studies will never wipe out.
So what she's saying is this illustrates how far from ordinary human life our betters and superiors are.
The Inherent Lie00:07:20
And it matters because our politicians are locked in this echo chamber with the press.
And it especially hurts the GOP.
You know, you wonder why the GOP, once it won majorities in the House and Senate, didn't do anything to stop Obama.
It's because they can't hear your voice.
They can't hear the voice of the people over the voice of the press.
And the press is left-wing.
That doesn't hurt the left.
That hurts the left in different ways.
It kind of makes them, when they get attacked, they're so shocked because they're never getting attacked.
But it hurts the GOP because it cuts them off from the true opinions of people.
I can't help but think they too, Paul Ryan too, is getting the budget of the New York Times and it's setting the budget of Congress.
So now Trump responds to the article on, again, with Sean Hannity.
Trump responds and he uses the R word and the world stops still.
So listen to this.
This is Trump and Hannity.
It's been a disaster for the New York Times because the New York Times is a whole big conjugate.
But this is going to be the campaign.
The Clintons are known for being very good.
But the good thing about this, this sets the table.
You know, this sort of sets the stage.
People have seen this.
People have seen Kerry.
They've seen Rowan.
They've seen others now that are coming forward that were mentioned in that story, which frankly wasn't even that bad.
If you want to know the truth, it's not like I hope that people that haven't read it.
It was 20 pages printed.
Oh, no, but I mean, in one case, I don't know, it's like minor stuff.
I said to one of the women, I said, don't eat, you shouldn't have a piece of candy.
Okay, that was, I told my kids.
How do you compare that against Clinton?
What Clinton's done?
What about what Clinton's done?
How big an issue should that be in the campaign?
For example, I looked at the New York Times.
Are they going to interview Juanita Broderick?
Are they going to interview Paula Jones?
Are they going to interview Kathleen Willey?
In one case, it's about exposure.
In another case, it's about groping and fondling and touching against a woman's will.
And rape.
And rape.
And big settlements, massive settlements.
$850,000 for Paula Jones.
Lots of other things.
And impeachment for lying, smearing, for smirk money.
For losing your law license.
You know, he lost his law license.
Okay.
Couldn't practice law.
And you don't read about this on Clinton.
So he says the word rape, and, you know, it's Drudge, of course, and Drudge is very supportive of Trump, obviously, and also very canny in the way it releases the news.
But Drudge puts up his famous police siren going off, and he says, oh, Trump said the R. Why should anybody be shocked by this?
Why should anybody be shocked?
Clinton was accused of rape by women who, when you listen to them, don't sound crazy.
They don't sound like crazy, vengeful women.
They sound like women who have a grudge.
You know, obviously it's he said, she said, I wasn't there.
I can't prove anything.
But it's worth, I mean, when you're talking about the fact that this billionaire had a model, a swimsuit model over his house and had her put on a bathing suit, which sounds like lots of fun to me.
Look, is that the way I want my daughter to live?
Is that the way I live?
No, but I don't sit around telling people how to live.
This is the way these people lived, and they weren't hurting each other.
They were doing consensual stuff consensually, you know?
This is what the entire feminist left said when Clinton was caught with Lewinsky, with Monica Lewinsky.
Well, it was consensual.
I would sleep with the president.
They actually wrote articles saying this.
You know, this is all consensual stuff.
Trump wasn't doing anything.
He has been accused of rape.
Here's Juanita Broderick, who has, you know, she had a terrible story to tell.
It made your throat clutch when she told it.
Here she is talking to Aaron Klein, I think his name is, on his show, Aaron Klein Show, about how she feels about this New York Times article.
Did they, Juanita, the New York Times, contact you to investigate your accusations against Bill Clinton?
No, they haven't, Aaron.
And I've not read the entire article about Mr. Trump, but I've been listening to the news and all of the fallout in connection with it.
And I wish that they would use the same amount of energy to interview the hundreds of women that Bill Clinton has probably spoken bad words about and the many women that he has assaulted.
I think a person's own actions and what they do to women speaks much louder than a person's hearsay and words.
You know, Maureen Dowd, who has, she's this left-wing columnist on the New York Times, far-left-wing columnist, but she went after the Clintons for this because she's a feminist, and she has been excoriated.
I mean, I think she said she got death threats.
I'm saying that from memory, but I know she was just constantly attacked.
And she recently wrote a column called When Hillary Clinton Killed Feminism, When She Killed Feminism.
And she says, when it was politically beneficial, the feminists went after Justice Clarence Thomas for bad behavior and painted Anita Hill as a victim.
And later, when it was politically beneficial, they defended Bill's bad behavior and stayed mute as Clinton allies mauled his dalliances as trailer trash and stalkers.
The same feminists who were outraged at the portrayal of Anita Hill by David Brock as a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty hypocritically went along when Hillary and other defenders of Bill Clinton used that same aspersion against Lewinsky.
Hillary knew that she could count on the complicity of feminist leaders and Democratic women in Congress who liked Bill's progressive policies on women, and that's always the ugly Faustian bargain with the Clintons, not only on the sex cover-ups, but the money grabs.
You can have our bright public service side as long as you accept our dark, sketchy side.
Here's the thing.
The thing that really bothers me about this is the inherent lie.
The idea, I got a tweet, I think it was yesterday.
Didn't Trump objectify women?
I don't even accept the category of objectifying women.
I mean, to make a woman an object, you know, yeah, if you put a glass on her head, you know, like I said, said, hold my glass, but to appreciate a woman's beauty is not object.
It is what men do.
Women's beauty has an essential value in human life.
It's not fair.
It doesn't make a person good.
It doesn't make her deep.
It doesn't make her smart.
It may not be right to judge her entirely on that.
Of course, it's not right to judge her entirely on that.
But it's built into the human system.
It's evolutionary, like a man's courage.
A man's courage has an essential value to human survival that a woman's courage doesn't have.
You know, a woman's courage may be admirable, but it doesn't have that same essential value.
And a man can be courageous and evil, or he can be courageous and good.
A woman can be beautiful and evil.
She can be beautiful and good.
But you can't deny that essential value.
And if you deny it, if you lie about it, if you tell people they're bad for noticing it, if Megan Kelly, which she does all the time, Megan Kelly has people on and she excoriates them for mentioning a woman's beauty as if Megan Kelly would be sitting there if she looked like me.
She wouldn't be.
She's there because she's not just a good journalist and she is a pretty good journalist, but she's also spectacularly beautiful.
The thing is, if you lie, if you lie, you give people who break through the lies power.
Lies are jet fuel to Donald Trump.
When he says the word rape, this is what people see.
This is why his poll numbers are going up.
Chariots of Fire's Jerusalem00:06:13
Everybody stops and goes, ha, finally, somebody just said the simple thing.
Some guy, he said, oh, she's beautiful.
She's got a nice backside.
Whatever he said, you know, people said, yes, I'm thinking that too.
We're all thinking it.
So say it.
What's the difference?
Like, don't lie.
It has nothing to do with the moral value of those lies.
It has to do with the hunger people have to just hear what we all know is true spoken out loud.
And that's why Donald Trump is climbing in the polls.
It has nothing to do with people just getting on the bandwagon.
The week has come to an end.
And as we plunge into the darkness of the Clavenless weekend, which even I despair at, and it's not really Clavenless for me, but even I despair at going into the Clavenless weekend.
I want to leave you with something, stuff I like, a little bit uplifting.
One of the things when I lived in Britain that I loved was British hymns, church hymns, are so much nicer than ours.
There's so many beautiful ones.
They have one, I vow to thee, my country, just absolutely a rocking great hymn, seek thee first the kingdom of God.
And the most famous of them is called Jerusalem.
And some of you, if you remember the film Chariots of Fire, the word, the title Chariots of Fire, comes from the hymn Jerusalem.
It was written by William Blake, a poet that I love very dearly.
He's a very, very, very difficult poet.
When I read him in college, I couldn't understand a word he was saying.
And yet I read lots and lots and lots of him.
And then one day, many years later, when I was living in New York, it suddenly went on.
And I got him.
I understood what he was saying, because he wrote these mythologies where he made up the characters.
And so you have to sort of figure out what each character represents and who he is.
And he was a forerunner of Sigmund Freud and that kind of psychological thing where you talk about characters like the ego and the id.
And so he write these mythologies.
And one of his poems, it's really just the prelude to one of his massive, his poems are just massive.
But he wrote this poem that provides the words for the hymn Jerusalem.
And it's based on an old myth that Joseph of Arimathea brought Jesus to England during his lost years as a child.
And that's where the lyrics did those feet in ancient time walk upon England's mountains green.
But then he goes on to talk about the coming of the new Jerusalem.
And Jerusalem, this is one of the things when the Jews were expelled from Jerusalem, Jerusalem became sort of a dream of restoring the Jewish fortunes.
And I think to this day at Passover, they say, they raise a toast, next year we'll be in Jerusalem.
And that doesn't mean next year the family's going on a trip to Israel.
What it means is that next year, the Jewish fortunes will be restored.
And that was where a lot of the theology, the Jewish theology of the Messiah came from, that a descendant of King David, who was their most powerful king, the king who established their empire, the line of King David would produce another king and restore them to Jerusalem.
And that got translated in Christianity into a sort of more, it became in Judaism actually translated into a more spiritual level.
And I realize this is the classics illustrated version of this, but I'm in a hurry, so you cut me a little slack.
But in Christianity, they developed this idea of the new Jerusalem, the Jerusalem, a spiritual Jerusalem, a new heaven and a new earth, which is in Revelations.
And so William Blake, who was a visionary, a guy who saw angels and trees, he actually saw angels and heard them whispering.
There's a very moving story about his death when he was on his deathbed.
He had a long-standing marriage to a woman he loved very much, who was an illiterate, but helped him with all his stuff.
And he started singing on his deathbed.
And she said, whose, his wife said to him, whose songs are those, my love?
And he said, they are not mine.
And he was hearing this music from the other sphere as he passed very peacefully into the next world.
And so at the end of this, he has this incredibly beautiful, uplifting verse where he calls out to the heavens and he says, bring me my bow of burning gold.
Bring me my arrows of desire.
Bring me my spear.
O clouds unfold.
Bring me my chariot of fire.
I will not cease from mental fight, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand till we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land.
So think about that through the Clavenless weekend, that the mental fight never ends.
We will fight this spiritual battle together and we'll go on no matter what happens in the physical world.
We'll continue to fight this.
Here is Charlotte Church with the voice of an angel singing this live in Jerusalem.
Bring me my bow of burning, God.
Bring me my arrows of desire.
Bring me my spear and fall.
Bring me my chariots on fire.
I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my soul sing in my heart to live for me and praise and land.