Andrew Claven argues Texas secession mirrors Brexit’s defiance of centralized control, citing EU bureaucratic absurdities like banana regulations and comparing them to U.S. elite overreach—EPA policies, Clinton Foundation scandals (Saudi Arabia, China donations), and Trump’s self-funded populism as proof of democracy’s fragility. He champions "new federalism," mocking Hillary Clinton’s failures while framing moral judgment as futile, urging listeners to embrace love over condemnation. The episode pivots to House of Leaves, praising its love story beneath postmodern layers, and ends with a call for audience engagement amid Britain’s looming crises. [Automatically generated summary]
Today's opening monologue has been redacted by the Justice Department with blanks left where words were edited out.
Many Americans are beginning to feel that the Obama administration is not being honest about the threat to Americans posed by blank.
A perception has grown up that any link between terrorism and blank or violence and blank or the mistreatment of women and blank is being hidden from the public.
Possibly the administration feels that by not mentioning blank when there's an act of blank terrorism, it can keep the public from thinking about blank or connecting the dots between a rising tide of worldwide chaos and blank.
Whenever a terrorist shouts blank blank before setting off a suicide bomb or swears allegiance to blank or says that there is no God but blank and blank is his prophet before spraying a room of innocent people with bullets, the administration edits out the references to blank and immediately tries to reassure people that there's no more violence caused by blank than there is by Christianity.
After all, as President Obama and Hillary Clinton have repeatedly told us, it's guns that cause violence and just the fact that the guns are so often in the hands of a blank has no more reason to condemn blank than there is to point out that many hateful people are Christians are Republicans or Christian Republicans or conservative Christians or conservative Christian Republicans who go around spreading bigotry against blank like the hate-filled conservative Christian Republicans they are.
We here at the Andrew Clavin Show, however, feel that the administration's position doesn't make sense.
We can't help noticing that wherever a decisive number of blanks profess faith in blank and his prophet blank as taught in the blank, they always blank things up and turn everything to blanking blank.
In fact, some of these blanking blanks might ask themselves if blank and his blank in the blank are really the hot blank these blanking blanks with their blanking blanks think they are.
And another thing, why is it all right to link Republicans or Christians or conservatives to violence, which they almost never commit, but the blanks won't mention the blanks who blank up every blanking thing they touch?
Now, of course, we don't want to condemn all blanks, and we suppose we should blither the usual blah, blah, blah, blather about blank, blank, and blank, but these blank, blank, the blank every time a blank goes blank, and the blah, blah, blah, about the blank, blank, blank seems like a lot of blank.
In the end, we feel that the administration's dishonest misrepresentation of blank only serves to make people even more suspicious of blanks and may even stoke fears that Obama and his cronies are themselves a bunch of blanks, not to mention Muslims.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin show.
I'm sorry.
I just barely, just barely.
Brexit and European Union Dynamics00:12:37
We have a question.
It's Mailbag Day.
Yay, Mailbag Day.
We love Mailbag Day.
We really do.
And so you should subscribe so you can be in next week's Mailbag Day because you're already clinging to your lousy eight bucks a month.
You've already missed the chance to be in today's Mailbag Day.
But we do have a question about breaking up during the monologue, so I'll address that important issue when we get to the mailbag.
So we're going to talk about Brexit, not just not just Brexit from the British points of view, because who cares?
You know, I mean, we thought every time I see Milo Yiannopoulos and that other guy that Pierre, what's his name?
Yeah, Pierre Maya, I always think like, didn't we fight a war to keep you guys out of the country?
Why are you telling us?
Why are you telling us what we should be doing?
So I don't want to tell the British what they should be doing.
I want to talk about this as it relates to us.
Brexit, of course, is a portmanteau word.
We all know what a portmanteau word is, right?
Come on.
It's a portmanteau.
A portmanteau.
Well, let's just talk about portmanteau words.
And never mind, Brexit.
A portmanteau is a kind of suitcase that opens into two pieces.
So a portmanteau word is a word that's been smushed together from two words, like brunch is breakfast.
It's two.
Two is not that much matter.
So brunch is a portmanteau word, right?
Because it's breakfast and lunch.
Motel, a motor hotel is a portmanteau.
My favorite, my personal favorite portmanteau word is gerrymander, which comes from a guy named Jerry who divided up the congressional districts in such a twisty way to keep all his people in it that it looked like a salamander.
So it was a gerrymander.
That's where the gerrymander goes.
Okay.
So this is Britain an exit.
They want to exit the EU.
And the reason this comes up is because in a desperate re-election campaign in 2015, the Prime Minister David Cameron promised his disaffected conservative base who wanted to get out of the European Union.
He promised them an up-and-down vote on whether they could stay.
And this is pretty shocking because it really is like a Texas.
It's like if Texas had a vote on whether to leave this union, you know, so it's very, although obviously this union has only been something that's come up after the war and it's much more modern, but still, there's a very, there's a lot of similarity.
The EU, Britain has some certain outs, certain ways that they're not part of the EU.
They kept the pound.
They still have some control over their borders.
But the EU is this massive bureaucratic institution.
They elect their parliament, but the parliament is really the tools of the bureaucracy.
And this bureaucracy is churning out laws that the British are supposed to follow, that everybody's supposed to follow.
The laws come out of Brussels, but everybody's supposed to follow them.
And one of the big complaints that the British have is that the British are people who follow rules.
So when Brussels sends laws to Italy, that's like to laugh.
The Italians haven't had a government since Caesar got murdered.
They're like, oh, laws are from Italy.
You're not good.
Throw it away.
Throw it on the fire.
It's a little cold tonight.
But the British, you tell them that your potato chips have to have this much salt in it.
And so help me.
Those are the kinds of laws that come down from the EU.
One of them was about the curve and a banana.
And the British will melt down their bananas to get to the curve because the British follow the rules.
And so this is one of the things.
It's very, you know, it's a burden on the British that it's not on other people.
It's also economically, it doesn't make a lot of sense in a lot of ways because when you make everybody's currency the same, that means the Germans who work like dogs, you know, and they work and they're businessmen and they're, you know, have a lot of, you know, they have a lot of industry and all this stuff.
Their money is worth the same as the Greeks, who again, you know, since Odysseus came home from Troy, they haven't worked a full eight-hour day, you know, and they're going, and they're striking because they're not getting charity, they're not getting entitlements.
So it's really a so it's a really weird union because they are even more different from one another than we are.
I mean, the Italians and the British are a lot more different even than Texans and New Yorkers who are very different also.
So it's very much like some of the stuff that's going on here.
So let's listen.
Here's Cameron.
He's trying to keep people in the union.
Let's hear his argument.
Brits don't quit.
We get involved.
We take a lead.
We make a difference.
We get things done.
If we left, if we left, our neighbors would go on meeting and making decisions that profoundly affect us, affect our country, affect our jobs, but we wouldn't be there.
They would be making decisions about us, but without us.
I know Europe isn't perfect.
Believe me, I understand and I see those frustrations.
I feel them myself.
That's why we negotiated and enhanced our special status.
Out of the Euro, keeping our borders, not involved in ever closer union.
We have the best of both worlds.
So as you take this decision, whether to remain or leave, do think about the hopes and dreams of your children and grandchildren.
They know their chances to work, to travel, to build the sort of open and successful society they want to live in rests on this outcome.
If I felt that remaining in the European Union diminished us, I would recommend that we voted to leave.
But it doesn't.
It amplifies our power.
When we're in these organizations, we become an even bigger force in the world, with a bigger influence in the world.
So two things that you noticed, he said that they had opted out of the European Union's move to become ever closer.
This is a move within Brussels that is very unpopular in Britain, but it's really unpopular in a lot of places throughout Europe to essentially become one country, to essentially become the United States of Europe.
But Britain is kind of holding back from that and has been holding back.
And the other thing you heard him do is appeal to people about their children and their grandchildren.
And the reason for that is because young people in Britain think of themselves as European.
So the young people, the polls on this are completely, the vote is tomorrow, and the polls have them divided 47% to 47%.
And the polls in Britain are classically unreliable.
They had Cameron losing the last election, and there he is.
And, you know, I personally feel there's always a lot more power to inertia, to stay in Put, and they're trying to panic people and tell them that the economy is going to tank.
But what he is, he's talking to people about their children and grandchildren, because the young people, basically, this is all they've ever known.
All they've known is themselves as part of Europe.
It's the older people who are saying, gee, England isn't England anymore.
And if you go to London now, you don't hear a British accent.
If you're in the center of London, you do not hear a British accent.
You have to start getting out to the outskirts, and then you start to get into where the English are.
And so people are just disturbed by that.
They feel they're losing the nature of their country, which they love.
And the younger people are much more cosmopolitan, much more worldly.
So that's why he's appealing.
So here's Dan Hannan.
Now, we love Dan Hannan.
He's our conservative guy over there.
You hear him on Hannity a lot and all this.
I met him on the NRO cruise.
Very, very intelligent fellow.
I like him because he quotes Shakespeare all the time.
But Hannan is a European MP who is against the EU.
So he made this ad.
Hello, I'm Daniel Hannan, Conservative member of the European Parliament.
And I'm inviting you to fire me on the 23rd of June.
For five reasons.
First, because leaving is the modern choice.
The European Union is a relic of the 1950s, a leftover from an era when regional blocs looked like the future.
But that world has been overtaken by technological change.
Second, because it's the cheaper choice.
Instead of handing Brussels £20 billion a year gross 10 billion net, we'll have our money to spend on our priorities.
Third, it's the democratic choice.
We will take back the sublime right to hire and fire our own lawmakers.
Fourth, it's the safer choice.
In a necessarily uncertain world, we will have taken back control to mitigate any risks ourselves instead of passing power to people who may not have our interests at heart.
And fifth, because it's the confident choice.
We are a merchant maritime global nation.
The fifth largest economy on the planet, the fourth military power, one of five permanent seat holders on the UN Security Council.
We have the world's most widely studied language, the world's greatest city.
How much bigger do we have to be before we're able to run our own affairs in our own interests?
Trading and cooperating with friends and allies on every continent, including Europe, but living under our own laws.
Now, you'll notice that looks a little different than an American commercial, like, you know, which is like, you know, Hillary Clinton's going to kill everybody.
Donald Trump is the worst president.
You know, they actually come out and reason with people, and they really do.
Their politics is a lot more civilized and a lot more articulate than ours.
So you hear the arguments, he's making the obvious arguments, we want control of our own country, we can still be great.
That's very important to the British.
The British lost their empire within living memory, you know, so they actually don't, it's not like when you go to Amsterdam and they had an empire once, they could care less.
They just think that they are still the moral center of the universe.
But the British miss that kind of importance.
They're all linked to us.
Everything is linked to us.
They're very sensitive about our president coming in and bullying their PM and all this.
So he's saying we can still be a powerful nation without linking ourselves to Europe and control ourselves.
Now, every now and again, I want to come in and say something, and just before I'm about to, somebody writes a column that says exactly what I was going to say, and it's always Jonah Goldberg.
And I've yelled at him about this.
I've told him to stop.
But somehow he just doesn't need like – but he makes the point that I was going to make that they are having – you know, I'm always very slow to tell other countries, to express opinions about what other countries should do.
And the reason for that is I've lived in Britain, I've lived overseas, and until you live someplace, you do not know that place at all.
When you hear Bernie Sanders talking about Scandinavia, he doesn't know jack about those countries.
He doesn't know how they work.
He doesn't know what's failed there.
He doesn't know what they're arguing about.
He just sees like, oh, something looks like universal health care, so we should have that here, and it all works because they're all nice white people with yellow hair, so everything is great.
And that's really the way people are thinking about other countries.
But personally, I have an instinctive feeling that Britain should get out.
Britain has exempted itself from the foibles of Europe throughout its history.
They didn't have the Inquisition while the rest of Europe had the Inquisition.
They didn't get involved in the 30 Years' War, this bloody war that just completely, it was mostly fought in Germany, but every country in Europe was killing everybody else in Germany, and the British just stayed out of that.
You know, they didn't have the French Revolution.
They stayed non-revolutionary and developed toward freedom in a much more majestic and quiet and slowly paced way.
And they, of course, didn't have Hitler.
They alone, while the French were going like, oh, it's not the killing jews.
What a good idea.
I like it.
You know, the British were like, yeah, you know, come and get us.
So they have stood up in many, many ways.
And my instinct is they should do that again now.
But of course, it's something for them to decide.
But the thing is, they're having the exact same problem with Brussels that we are having with Washington.
And here is the way that Jonah Goldberg puts it.
He says, for generations, American elites, particularly on the left side of the aisle, have insisted that democracy gets in the way of optimal decision-making.
What they like is they like experts.
Jonah goes on to quote Democrats since FDR who basically say our problems are now too complex for the people to solve.
We need experts.
And you remember Obama once said, if I could just sit down for a few hours with the experts, we could solve all the problems.
Experts Over Democracy00:04:33
But unfortunately, we have to go through the Constitution.
So he says this attitude, this love of expertise, virtually defines the Obama administration's approach to everything from climate change.
It was the Environmental Protection Agency, not Congress, that destroyed the coal agency, to immigration.
Even President Obama admitted his executive orders would be unconstitutional, then went through with them anyway.
Hillary Clinton's disdain for the rules regarding her server and email, whether criminal or not, have the distinct stench of aloof aristocratic arrogance, as does her family's foundation.
The thing about the rule of unaccountable rulers is that people will defer to them so long as they feel things are moving in the right direction, economically and otherwise, but when their incompetence and self-dealing seems to come at the expense of the public, the deference ends.
See, the problem with rule by experts is that experts don't know anything.
This is really the problem.
An expert telling you how you should make your bananas, how you should run your garage, doesn't know what you know.
There's a wonderful movie.
Have you ever seen Back to School with Rodney Dangerfield?
And Back to School, Rodney Dangerfield is a businessman, a rich businessman, who goes back to school because his son is having problems or he goes back to college.
And here's a scene where the expert in college who's never started a business, never done anything, is explaining to the class how you start a business, and Dangerfield interrupts him.
You will see the final bottom line requires the factoring in of not just the material and construction costs, but also the architects' fees and the costs of land servicing.
Oh, you're left out of a bunch of stuff.
Oh, really?
Like what, for instance?
Well, first of all, you're going to have to grease local politicians for the sudden zoning problems that always come up.
Then there's the kickbacks to the carpenters.
And if you plan on using any cement in this building, I'm sure the teams would like to have a little chat with you.
And that'll cost you.
Oh, and I'll get something for the building inspectors.
Then there's a long-term course, such as waste disposal.
I don't know if you're familiar with who runs that business, but I assure you it's not the Boy Scouts.
That'll be quite enough, Mr. Mellon.
Maybe bribes and kickbacks and mafia payoffs are how you do business.
But they are not part of the legitimate business world.
And they're certainly not part of anything I'm teaching in this class.
Do I make myself clear?
Sorry, just trying to help.
You got to pay off the mob if you want the construction stuff.
So, you know, yesterday, Hillary Clinton launched her big attack on Trump for his business failures.
And one of her funny lines, play Hillary 2, the second Hillary Clip.
I think Donald Trump has said he's qualified to be president because of his business record.
A few days ago, he said, and I quote, I'm going to do for the country what I did for my business.
So let's take a look at what he did for his business.
He's written a lot of books about business.
They all seem to end at chapter 11.
Hey, you know, good line, I guess, for a politician.
But the thing is, you know, in business, you fail.
In business, failing is part of your success.
You fail because you try things out on the public and the public doesn't like them and you change.
True in show business.
You make a movie, the public doesn't show up, you make a different movie.
You change the things that you do.
In government, you never are held accountable.
You know, you can turn Libya into a flaming mess and you're still Secretary of State.
You can leave people to die in Benghazi and then come back and lie about it.
And as long as you can keep lying, as long as you can keep convincing people to vote for you, you never are held to account.
So a businessman is held to account.
Yesterday, not yesterday, it was Monday, that hacker, Gussifer 2.0, released some documents that he had gotten from the DNC where they were assessing what they called Clinton Foundation vulnerabilities, things that Clinton may be hit on.
And these are not new things.
These have all been put out in that book, Clinton Cash and Otherwise.
Just let me read.
I'm just going to read a list that was in Breitbart.
The Clinton Foundation received donations from individuals tied to Saudi Arabia while Clinton served as Secretary of State.
Indian politician Amar Singh, who had donated at least $1 million to the Clinton Foundation, met with Hillary Clinton in September 2008 to discuss an India-U.S. civil nuclear agreement.
billionaire steel executive and members of the Foreign Investment Council in Kazakhstan, Lakshmi Mittal gave $1 million to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation before Clinton became Secretary of State.
Soon after Secretary Clinton left the State Department, the Clinton Foundation received a large donation from a conglomerate run by a member of China's National People's Congress.
Clinton Cash Controversies00:04:03
On and on and on and on.
So, you know, this is like an unaccountable woman.
This is a woman who does not hold herself to account.
And of course, we just saw from the Federal Election Commission, Trump is basically paying himself to run for president.
So his, you know, his record is not that good either.
Our ruling class, for lack of a better phrase, our ruling class, has failed us.
They have failed us utterly.
And we, in our desperation to bring in outsiders, have, according to the irony of God, brought in the two dirtiest insiders we could have thought of, Trump versus Hillary.
And that's the thing.
So we should be thinking too, the way the British are thinking, maybe it's time for a new federalism, which is really what I would like to talk more and more about as the show goes on.
We need a rebirth of federalism at every level, political, economic, and moral.
We need to refashion our localities, our churches, our towns, our states in defiance of Washington and recreate the America we want in our hometowns.
All right, we'll talk more about that as the time goes on.
It's time for the mailbag.
Hey, mailbag, mailbag.
All right, first question from David.
My wife and I loved your episode 140 intro monologue.
That's the one about good and evil and men and women.
That was pretty funny.
Did you do it in one take?
If not, are there any outtakes that you could share with your viewers?
We don't have outtakes, but let me tell you that for about a week, I could not get through a monologue in one take.
And we're still taping.
We haven't gone live yet.
And so it's important that I get it down.
And the problem was, this really was the problem.
They shifted the lights.
So suddenly where before everybody was back there in the dark, I couldn't see them, but now I can see them.
So I've kind of adjusted until today when I blew it.
So I'm just going to have to fight my way through because we will be going live eventually, pretty soon, I think, within the next couple of weeks.
And so there's nothing I can do.
That one I did get through in one because I just adjusted my mind to the fact that I could see everybody before they were all in darkness.
So if they didn't laugh out loud, they didn't crack me up.
But when I could see them, I could see them kind of trying not to laugh and it broke me up.
All right, from Alicia.
I'm sorry, from Dane.
I'll get to Alicia.
From Dane, I'm currently reading your book, Werewolf Cop.
I love it.
Oh, thanks.
Although I was curious, did you base any of the characters on people from reality?
I couldn't help but notice that at the beginning of the book, your description of the police chief seemed to resemble Hillary Clinton.
Was that on purpose or am I nuts?
Well, hopefully you're not nuts.
I can't answer that part of the question.
But no, it wasn't based on Hillary Clinton.
The way I build characters is I've seen a lot of characters.
I know the kinds of people that they are.
I create them.
And then I take a little bit from somebody I know or maybe a couple of people I know and use it as leaven, the same way you put yeast into bread, and that brings them to life.
But sometimes the person I'm using is totally different than the person you see.
And if you write a character who looks like somebody, they think it's them.
But a lot of times it just looks like them, but it's actually got somebody else in their heart.
So I use a little bit of real people, but not so much from TV.
I use people that I've met and experienced in life, and certainly it wasn't Hillary Clinton.
From Alicia, why is America a two-party system?
Wouldn't Americans benefit from having more candidates to choose from?
Not in my opinion.
The two-party system, for all, is a tremendous pain in the neck.
It keeps radicalism at bay.
You know, basically, the country is divided into two halves, people who want to leave other people alone and people who don't.
And those are our two parties.
We have the Democrats who want to tell everybody what to do.
And we have the Republicans who pretty much want more federalism and more freedom.
And insofar as those parties represent that, I think that's the right way to go.
Because a lot of this, When you have more and more parties, they tend to represent smaller and smaller niches, smaller and smaller segments of the population, more and more radical ideas.
And while, yes, every now and again a revolutionary idea comes along that is salvific, that saves you, most revolutionary ideas are very, very bad, and most revolutions go very, very wrong.
John, we love your podcast.
Keep up the good work.
My friend and I are dying to know what your wife thinks about your podcast remarks on feminism.
Judge Not00:07:59
I'm not going to answer that question because my wife is a tremendously private person.
We all know my wife here.
She is a lovely, elegant person.
Listen, we have had, I hope you'll get my memoir.
My memoir is called The Great Good Thing, A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.
You can pre-order it now.
It won't come until September.
But it is virtually a love letter to my wife.
It describes our marriage in detail and what it is about our marriage that is really spectacular, almost miraculous.
It really is an amazing marriage.
And you can imagine just from listening to the show that anybody who is in an amazing marriage with me must be an incredibly patient person.
So that's as much as I can say because she really likes to be left out of my public life.
And I don't blame her, and I don't want to drag her into it if I can help it.
All right.
From Rebecca, how far should Christians take the command of judge not?
Oh, man, I love this question.
I could talk for hours on this question.
It seems to me that Christians these days have abandoned all discernment in favor of accepting all sin for fear of being called unloving.
The Bible states that darkness will hate the light, but we want to appear dark so as not to offend the dark.
Where is the correct balance between loving and discerning?
That is a great question and a deep question, and I obviously can't answer it deeply right this minute.
But let me tell you this.
Jesus meant it when he said, judge not lest you be judged.
And the way you can tell Jesus meant it, it is the one thing he said that everybody tries to get out of.
Every Christian tries to get out of.
Jesus never said a word about homosexuality.
I'm not arguing that he approved of homosexuality.
All I'm saying is that he never said a word about it, yet everybody seems to know exactly what he thought and exactly what he meant on that issue.
But he said, judge not lest he be judged half a dozen times.
He said, let he who's without sin throw the first stone, meaning nobody.
He said, don't look at the speck in somebody else's eye.
Look at the plank in your own eye.
And yet everybody, when they hear that, suddenly turns into a lawyer.
You know, everybody's looking for a loophole on the judge not.
And all I can tell you is this, that, first of all, you know, to understand what Jesus means, you have to know him.
You have to get to know him.
Same thing with me.
When I talk about feminism and I make jokes about women, I never get attacked by feminists, oddly enough.
And the reason is it's very obvious that my respect for women runs deep and that I consider them half the world and their viewpoint half the world.
They have taken care of me since I've been an adult.
Women have taken care of me and run my life since I've been an adult.
So everybody who knows me knows that I'm not saying anything anti-women.
And the same thing is true with Jesus.
You have to know him to understand what he's saying.
He's obviously not saying that you should forgive crime, that you should look at a society that oppresses women or commits acts of violence and say, oh, well, it's just as good as our society.
Judge not.
Obviously, we judge crime because it's something that happens between man and man.
The things that happen between man and man, we are perfectly capable of judging.
The things that happen between man and God, we have no capability of judging.
We have no capability of looking at a person.
And I'm talking in the extreme, even if he's evil, we have no capability of knowing the state of his soul with God.
We just don't know it.
And so we should just keep our opinion to ourselves and turn to the state of our own soul.
If you are in a church and you look around you, what you will see, every single face that you see, every single person that you see, is full of anxiety, is full of guilt, is full of sin.
They have done things in their lives and think things every day that they are so ashamed of, so ashamed of, that they can't even face their shame.
They've actually reconstructed their entire moral universe to hide their shame from themselves.
When you realize that it's all those people, what you suddenly realize is it's you too.
And the question you should be asking is, how are you doing that?
How are you modifying your moral world to keep from facing your own shame?
And that's what Jesus is talking about.
Look, you can have all the opinions you want.
I've worked on a lot of hotlines, suicide hotlines, and people call in and they say they've done terrible things.
And they say they are terrible things.
I mean, things like people call in and say they're Satanists.
Do you think it helps them?
Do you think it saves them?
Do you think it keeps them alive to say, like, ooh, Satanism, that's wrong.
I know, look, we both know, we all know what Satanism is.
We know it's terrible, but that's not what they're looking for.
What they're looking for is love.
And if you're going to help them, it's going to be by loving them and taking them in and accepting them and listening to them.
And if that's not going to work, nothing's going to work.
If that's not going to save them, nothing's going to save them.
I will end with this.
I will end with this.
When Jesus tells you something hard, like judge not, because it's really hard.
All I can tell you is if you try to, the more you do it, the more joyous you become.
The more you leave people to their lives, the more joyous you become.
The less you worry about what other people are doing in their bedrooms, how other people are eating, how they're drinking, what they're thinking, the happier you will become.
And you only have to look at the left and how miserable they've made themselves, trying to tell everybody what they should eat, what they should think, who they should love, what their opinion should be, who they should serve in their restaurants, to look how miserable they make themselves, to know that if you let go, if you let go of other people's lives and stop trying to coerce them to be good, you will become more joyous and more wise as well.
So anyway, it's not to tell you not to have opinions.
It's not to tell you not to judge the actions of one person to another.
It is to tell you that you are not the judge of people.
God has got that, and you've got to trust him to have it.
Gee, I'm out of time.
There were a couple of really great questions.
Maybe we'll come back to them next week.
Don't lose them.
Stuff I like.
You know, I've been talking, I'm kind of out of time, but stuff I like.
I wanted to talk about this book, House of Leaves, and I'm not recommending House of Leaves.
It's by a guy named Mark Deniluski.
It's a ghost story.
It's really big, and it's really, really difficult to read.
It's a very difficult read.
It's a postmodern book.
It's about a guy who finds an academic study of a movie that may or may not exist.
And the movie is about a family in a haunted house.
And so it's all these college professors speaking in this college speak, this academic speak, about this haunted house, about this movie about this haunted house.
And the reason I love this book, I found it really entertaining, but it is a very, it's an intellectual exercise.
It's not like a big emotional book.
But the thing I loved about it is that the heart of this story is just a love story between a brave man and a loving woman.
It is a man who has the courage to walk into the darkness and a woman who has the love to follow him and help him out.
And what the book sort of says is that everything we talk about, everything we talk about, all the academics, all the nonsense, all the politics, everything, at the center of it is that.
At the center of that is at the center of our lives is whether a man is brave enough to do what has to be done and whether a woman loves him enough to do what she has to do as well.
And when I talk about the logic of stories, one of the questions that came in that I didn't get a chance to answer was, why don't I do stuff I hate?
Like the question comes from Ben, so maybe it's from Shapiro, but it says, why don't you do a things I hate segment?
And the reason is there are no things I hate.
I don't hate works of art.
Some of them I think are bad.
I think they don't do what they're supposed to do, but they don't bother me.
They don't even bother me if they're selling leftism.
Because I realize that just as God will speak to the sinner in his sin, stories will speak to the heart in truth, even if people try to lie.
If people try to lie, the story will fall apart.
If the story reaches people, it will reach them in truth, even if the artist was trying to sell propaganda and lie.
So I don't, you know, I forget stories that don't work, and I love the stories that do work, and I just have no great list of things that I don't like.
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We will end the week.
My gosh, this week just flew by.
It's already time for the Clavenless weekend.
So that sounds bad for Britain, I think.
As Britain goes into the Clavenless weekend, we'll hope they survive.