Ep. 169’s Hannity vs. Stephens exposes the GOP’s fracturing over Trump, with Sean Hannity blaming establishment Republicans for Obama-era failures while Brett Stevens mocks him as Fox News’ "dumbest anchor." NBC’s Olympic coverage is skewered as a gendered "reality show," prioritizing a fencer’s religious attire drama over competition. Clavin frames the feud as a clash between populist Trump loyalists and elitist conservatives, both failing to counter Clinton’s corruption—like her lies about Comey’s email statements—while media ignores Iran’s nuclear scientist execution tied to her server scandal. The episode ties cultural decay to art history, arguing Western secularism still grapples with Christian themes of truth and sacrifice, from Renaissance altarpieces to The Matrix. [Automatically generated summary]
NBC is broadcasting the Rio Olympics on a tape delay with events packaged around the athletes' personal stories.
The network says, quote, and this is a real quote, more women watch the games than men, and for the women, they're less interested in the result and more interested in the journey.
It's sort of like the ultimate reality show and miniseries wrapped into one, unquote.
NBC's director of uterine programming, Thelma T. Battleaxe, added some detail to the network's policy, saying, quote, let's face it, girls don't really give a crap about sports.
So basically, if we're going to make some coin off this snooze fest, it's going to be with soft-focused pseudo-documentaries full of people tearing up about their sick mother or whatever.
Then a minute or so of running around a track.
Then it's like the bachelorette getting a rose and a trip to Costa Rica with a male model who has the IQ of an eggplant, except instead it's some lesbian broad with enormous thighs getting a gold medal for jumping over a stick, and then we forget about her and move on, unquote.
So far, for instance, women around the country have thrilled to the sentimental journey of American fencer Ib Tihaj Mohammed.
Ms. Mohammed couldn't play sports as a child because there was no way for her to wear the traditional Islamic headdress to signify her inferiority.
Finally, she discovered she could wear her hijab while fencing, and now the entire United States has the uplifting experience of watching a Muslim wielding a sword.
Then, of course, there was Ginny Thrasher, who won the first American gold medal in the field of rifle, causing Barack Obama to call for greater restrictions on gun ownership lest these weapons fall into the hands of other dangerous young athletes.
Ms. Thrasher disagreed with the president, saying guns could increase America's safety, and she would prove it by going out and shooting the first Muslim she saw carrying a sword.
What could possibly go wrong?
To further interest women, the Olympic Game Committee has included new events specifically created for romantic Rio de Janeiro.
For instance, there is the new triathlon that begins with a desperate race to get away from swarming Zika-infested mosquitoes, then continues with a slalom run to dodge the bullets of leftist guerrillas and ends with a dive into a pool of water filled with viruses and bacteria from human feces.
The gold medal will be laid on the grave of the last Olympian to vomit himself to death.
Girls love that sort of thing.
For those of us who identify as male, of course, a sport isn't really a sport unless it includes enormous black guys elbowing each other in the face while the referee isn't looking.
For us, the best Olympic event so far has been the one in which three young bicyclists race to find their missing companion in the shadow of a secret government facility that has accidentally unleashed an unimaginable horror.
Wait, maybe that's not the Olympics.
Maybe that's Stranger Things, which men are watching instead of the Olympics because the Olympics are so damn girly.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I cracked myself up.
I'm sorry.
I try.
I try to maintain a.
Conservative Missteps on Immigration00:14:00
Now I have to listen to all those tweets and emails.
Stop laughing at your own jokes.
So that Clavenless, I told you that Clavenless weekend, you were going to get kind of a pass because I had an article in the Wall Street Journal, so it wasn't an utterly Clavenless weekend.
And only 61 people were blown to pieces by a terrorist in Pakistan.
So that's not so bad.
I mean, that's just Obama world at this point.
That's not even my fault.
All right, so we're on Facebook Live for 15 minutes, and then some enormous horn will sound and you will be cast into the exterior darkness where there is great wailing and gnashing of teeth.
But you can wail and gnash your teeth over at the Daily Wire and listen to the rest of the show, where you can also subscribe.
And for a lousy eight bucks a month, you cheap SOB, you can then watch this show and not only watch the show, but also be in the mailbag.
You can send questions in the mailbag, which we will try our level best to answer come Wednesday.
All right.
So here's this story that I've sort of been writing about and covering because in a way it just represents exactly what is happening to the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
It is a little, it's like a cartoon.
Remember those old political cartoons you sometimes see in Victoria, like Punch magazine, where like there would be the rich and he'd be some big fat guy and there'd be, you know, he'd be standing on the poor and it would be labeled the poor.
This is like a cartoon of this.
This is Brett Stevens, the Wall Street Journal foreign affairs columnist, and Sean Hannity, whom we all know from Fox News, having a Twitter fight that to call this a childish fight would be an insult to children.
I mean, children are much more capable of having a civilized argument than these two guys.
They went out at each other.
This started Hannity on his radio show.
You know, Hannity is in the tank for Trump.
I mean, he is just a Trumpian and has been from an early stage.
He has Trump on all the time.
He gives him a complete platform to speak in.
So he goes on the radio and he starts to shake his fist essentially at all the big-time Republicans who won't back Donald Trump.
And this is what he said.
I'm just going to say it because it needs to be said.
If in 96 days Trump loses this election, I am pointing the finger directly at people like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and John McCain and John Kasich and Ted Cruz if he won't endorse and any of the Jeb Bush and everybody else that made promises they're not keeping.
And because I have watched and witnessed to the point of incredible frustration, I have watched these Republicans be more harsh towards Donald Trump than they've ever been in standing up to Barack Obama and his radical agenda that has doubled the national debt,
that has resulted in a 51-year low in terms of home ownership in this country, the percentage of homes that are owned by Americans, that has led to the lowest labor participation rate since the 70s, and that has led to millions and millions and millions more Americans in poverty and on food stamps and out of the labor force.
Okay, so Stevens, Brett Stevens now goes on Twitter and links to this rant and says, here's what Fox News' dumbest anchor, he says, Fox News' dumbest anchor had a message for y'all, okay?
Y'all, this is the guy who's never used the phrase y'all in his life, but this is Fox News' dumbest anchor.
So Hannity goes nuts.
And he says, you know, it was Wall Street Journal geniuses like you, Brett Stevens, who let John Boehner and the House give up the power of the purse and finance all of Obama's programs with your stupid omnibus bills and you let this happen.
And he said it's arrogant, elitist enablers like you that never hold Republicans accountable and you created the opening for Trump.
And that's the cleanest thing, he said.
Sean was actually calling him some names that I won't repeat on the air until people accuse Hannity of being drunk.
So Stevens, Hannity says, no, I just had one beer at a Yankee game.
Yeah, one beer at a Yankee game.
Okay, so now Stevens strikes back on Twitter.
And this is after Hannity has now called him, you know, all kinds of unprintable things that he now prints on Twitter.
And Stevens responds by comparing Hannity to the Kevin Klein character in a fish called Wanda.
And he tweets this little clip from a fish called Wanda.
Don't call me stupid.
Oh, right.
To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people.
I've known sheep that could outwit you.
I've worn dresses with higher IQs, but you think you're an intellectual, don't you, Ape?
Apes don't read philosophy.
Yes, they do, Otto.
They just don't understand it.
Boys, boys, boys.
Okay, now the reason I'm talking about this, the reason I'm talking about this, is because it's almost like a perfect picture postcard of what is happening to not just the GOP, but the right.
Because Hannity is the man of the people, right?
Hannity, this is the persona.
He is the man of the people.
He has been so utterly in the tank for Trump.
I mean, it's really incredible.
And Brett Stevens is an elitist.
I mean, he's a boarding school guy.
He says, well, I succeeded on my own and all this stuff.
But his father, I think, was a vice president of a company or something like this.
And he's obviously a very, very well-educated, very elite.
You know, I've seen him speak, and he's quite brilliant.
And that's the other thing.
I like both these guys.
I mean, when there are internet feuds, I don't know if I'm the only, I'm not the only person who's noticed this, so obvious, that nobody has any, there's no gray areas.
It's all like one guy is the devil and one guy is a saint.
If one guy has done anything that you don't like, remember Reagan said if somebody is 80% your friend, he's not 20% your enemy.
The internet has thrown that away.
On the internet, you suck.
If I disagree with you, you stink.
But I actually like both these guys.
I mean, Hannity, look, Hannity is a man of the people.
He's a popular broadcaster.
The right conservative ideas do not get out enough.
We need popular broadcasters.
He's a talented radio guy.
I've been around radio all my life.
I know one when I see one.
He's a really good radio guy.
You know, you may disagree with him here.
You may hate the fact that he picked up Trump, but he's good at what he does.
Brett Stevens is also very good at what he does.
He's a foreign affair correspondent, so I have great respect for both of these guys, but I think they represent, each one of them represents a side of the party.
One represents the Wall Street Journal establishment, and the other represents this man of the people guy who's going for Trump.
Now, I just think they're both in the wrong.
They've both made these mistakes.
And Hannity, let's start with Hannity.
Hannity tweeted, back in 2012, he tweeted this message.
The Republican Party was floundering, and he sent out a tweet.
It's time to start nominating disciplined, principled conservatives, men and women who will defeat their opponents, not themselves.
And then he backed Trump.
Okay, so that's like disobeying his own advice, like including the commas.
That's like every possible aspect.
He's not disciplined.
Trump is not disciplined.
Trump is not principled.
Trump is not conservative.
If conservative is about limiting government so that individuals can be free, Trump is not a conservative.
He supports eminent domain.
He supports universal health care.
He supports strongman government.
I alone can solve.
I alone can solve.
You know, that's not a conservative point of view.
I alone can solve.
The conservative point of view is you alone, each of you, the populist, the individual, can solve.
Okay, so when Sean backed him, and you know, it's really painful to see when Sean interviews, when Hannity interviews Trump, the way he puts words in his mouth.
Do we have that cut of Hannity with Trump after Trump announced the judges?
Did I include that cut?
Yeah.
Just watch this.
It's just Hannity telling Trump what he believes.
One of the top things I would ask you often is your judicial philosophy.
And you mentioned, as I said, Sculliette and Thomas.
They are what we call originalists, constitutionalists.
Correct.
You are a constitutionalist.
Correct.
Correct.
Correct, correct.
I don't know what that means, constitutionalist, traditionalist, whatever.
That's what I am.
If you tell me, Sean, that's what I am.
I mean, he might as well be sitting on his lap while Sean pulls the string in back.
And you know, he has abandoned his own advice.
He's abandoned the principles that he was supposed to represent.
He is now on the Trump train, and that train has taken a lot of turns that have been very embarrassing for everybody.
And so when he yells, when he says, goes into that rant and says, I'm going to blame the people who don't stand with Trump, look, these are people following their consciences.
You can disagree with them.
You can disagree with them, but they find Trump unacceptable.
And Brett Stevens finds Trump unacceptable.
And this is what Stevens said when he was asked by Farid Zakaria, I think, will you vote for Donald Trump?
This is the yes, this is cut six.
Yeah.
Well, I most certainly will not vote for Donald Trump.
I will vote least left-wing opponent to Donald Trump, and I want to make a vote to make sure that he has he is the biggest loser in presidential history since, I don't know, Alf Landon or going back further.
It's important that Donald Trump and what he represents, this kind of ethnic, quote, conservatism or populism, be so decisively rebuked that the Republican Party and Republican voters will forever learn their lesson that they cannot nominate a man so manifestly unqualified to be president in any way, shape, or form.
So they have to learn a lesson in the way perhaps Democrats learned a lesson from McGovern in 72.
George Will has said let's have him lose in 50 states.
Why not Guam, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia, too?
See, that's the voice of an arrogant elitist.
I'm sorry.
You know, I have nothing.
He's never Trump.
That's his prerogative.
That's his conscience.
But I'm going to teach the Conservative Party a lesson.
These people need to be taught a lesson.
What do they mean voting for someone that I didn't approve of?
He has this tone all the time.
I mean, for instance, he's very laissez-faire about gay marriage, and he's very laissez-faire about illegal immigration from Mexico.
It's not a question of whether you agree with those policies or not.
I'm laissez-faire about gay marriage.
I think I don't want the government to tell anybody who they can sleep with.
I don't want the government to tell anybody anything except which side of the road to drive on, basically.
But listen to his tone of voice.
Here he is writing about Mexico and people feeling that maybe illegals shouldn't be pouring across our borders.
And he writes, Mexico is a functioning democracy whose voters tend to favor pro-business conservatives, not a North American version of Libya, exporting jihad and boat people to its neighbors.
Somebody ought to explain this to Republican voters whose brains, like pickles and brine, have marinated too long in anti-Mexican nonsense.
You know, here's the thing.
I mean, I can understand you're thinking we need more Mexicans pouring across our borders illegally.
But, you know, it's offensive to people to have the laws of their country disobeyed.
It's offensive to people to have their traditions, their thousand-year-old traditions about marriage cast aside as if they were evil, as if suddenly the left has, our betters, our superiors, have suddenly discovered something, a moral vision so much higher than ours that law and tradition no longer mean anything and can be just cast aside in any way they want.
Because guess what?
They haven't discovered that vision.
There's something about this guy's tone of voice, and here's a guy, I love to read him on Israel, I love to read him on the Middle East, he's brilliant on foreign affairs, but Republican voters who object to illegal immigration, not legal immigration, but people pouring across their borders illegally, making hash of their laws, disrespecting their laws, disrespecting the country that they're coming into and then waving La Raza flags and saying, oh, make America Mexico again and all this stuff.
You know, there's something about that you have to respect.
I respect the anger that they feel.
I even respect, no matter what I think about gay marriage, I totally respect someone saying, hey, you know, this has been a tradition and what I was taught in church.
Five people on the Supreme Court have no right, have no right to just invent this right in the Constitution, which they did.
I respect their anger.
There's nothing wrong with what they're saying.
And People like Brett Stevens and the entire Wall Street Journal editorial staff, if you ask me, ignoring that rage is a problem.
It's the problem that creates an opening for Donald Trump.
I have to pause here to say farewell to our friends at Facebook.
Come to the Daily Wire and hear the rest.
Every time I hear that, I want to draw a sword and just charge.
All right.
But Stevens is never Trump.
And my problem with Never Trump is not what they say about Donald Trump, because I think they're right in what they say about Donald Trump.
He is unacceptable.
My problem is that they don't really appreciate how bad Hillary Clinton is.
And Stevens has said he would vote for Hillary Clinton if it mattered which way his state would go, which I guess if he's in New York, it won't matter much.
But my problem with the Never Trump people is definitely not what they say about Trump.
I agree with everything the Never Trump people say about Trump, but I don't think, you know, the press, as we know, and as I've been complaining about, the press is unfair.
Why Never Trump Misses Clinton00:05:58
They treat one side differently than the other, utterly differently.
I mean, something like 97% of mainstream reporters are Democrats.
They're just reporting the Democrat side of the issue.
It creates an atmosphere where even if you know that journalists lie, even if you know they're biased, it creates an atmosphere where you become acclimated to people like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and you don't realize how genuinely, genuinely terrible they are.
You know, Hillary Clinton made a she lied again on screen with the tape playing, with, you know, Comey of the FBI saying everything she said about her emails was untrue.
She sat there and said, no, Comey said I told the truth.
And she was asked at a journalists meeting where they were applauding for her, by the way, to talk about bias.
She was asked, well, you know, didn't you lie when you said Comey said you were true?
Listen to this answer for a second.
I was pointing out in both of those instances that Director Comey had said that my answers in my FBI interview were truthful.
That's really the bottom line here.
And I have said during the interview and in many other occasions over the past months that what I told the FBI, which he said was truthful, is consistent with what I have said publicly.
So I may have short-circuited it, and for that, I will try to clarify because I think Chris Wallace and I were probably talking past each other because of course he could only talk to what I had told the FBI and I appreciated that.
Now I have acknowledged repeatedly that using two email accounts was a mistake and I take responsibility for that.
But I do think having him say that my answers to the FBI were truthful and then I should quickly add what I said was consistent with what I had said publicly and that's really sort of in my view trying to tie both ends together.
What?
I mean essentially, you know, she's still lying.
And when she says we were talking at cross purposes, you know, Tapper was asking a question.
She was lying.
That was their cross purposes.
You know, she lied.
And, you know, she keeps doing it.
And by the way, the New York Times, I mean, this is a big deal because it does say in the same way that Trump's going off on Mrs. Kahn when he didn't have to and it was just an unforced error.
It does say something about his character.
It says something about his compulsions, his inability to keep his mouth shut when he needs to, even when it's the politically smart thing to do.
This says something about her.
The New York Times did not cover this story, okay?
Their own public editor, you know, the one who sort of is supposed to be their public watchdog, her name is Spade.
Liz Spade, the public editor of the New York Times, she wrote a blog post entitled The Clinton Story You Didn't Read Here at the New York Times.
And it says, This is their, the New York Times, a former newspaper, this is their public editor.
She says, if you're getting all your political news from the New York Times, this may be the first time you're hearing this about Hillary Clinton lying.
So it is this double standard.
Now, the problem is that this is a serious story.
I mean, it's just like Benghazi was a serious story, just like the IRS was a serious story.
All these things, these terrible things that are happening in our country, these assaults, especially on the First Amendment.
You know, there was this nuclear scientist in Iran, Sharon Shahram Amiri, who was hanged the other day.
They announced that they had hanged him because they say he was a U.S. spy.
Now, there's no proof that it was an email to Hillary Clinton on her private server that gave him away, where this guy was referred to as our friend in an open email on her server.
But here is John Dickerson, who I basically think is a Democrat hack, asking Tom Cotton, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, about Donald Trump.
But first he mentions the Amiri hanging and listen to what Cotton says and then listen to how Dickerson responds.
And Iran announced today that they executed a scientist who they believe helped the United States reveal news about its nuclear program.
Let me ask you about Donald Trump as president.
Have you gotten more or less confident in his job and ability to handle the commander-in-chief position since you endorsed him?
Well, John, I know the media is obsessed with Donald Trump.
I'm not going to respond to every single thing that Donald Trump has to say or that Hillary Clinton says.
I'm not going to follow the back and forth in the campaign trail.
What's ultimately going to matter in the long term is not who won or lost a week in the campaign, but whether the American people are safe.
You mentioned the Iranian scientist that was recently executed.
Now, of course, I'm not going to comment on what he may or may not have done for the United States government.
But in the emails that were on Hillary Clinton's private server, there were conversations among her senior advisors about this gentleman.
That goes to show just how reckless and careless her decisions was to put that kind of highly classified information on a private server.
I think her judgment is not suited to keep this country safe.
Okay, that's on her judgment.
But since Donald Trump is the nominee of your party and you spoke at the convention about him, you said help is on the way.
When in the future, if Donald Trump is in the office of the presidency, do you think he has the temperament to handle those lonely decisions that a president makes?
So never mind, she got a guy killed, maybe, but never mind that.
What about Donald Trump threw out a baby?
You know, Donald Trump said something nasty, which turns out not to have the story turns out to have been entirely untrue, by the way.
Changes in Art and Culture00:09:22
But that's the thing that we're seeing.
I think we have all, even though we all know it's happening, we have all gotten acclimated to the horribleness of the Obama administration with its shut you down through the IRS and the horribleness of Hillary Clinton with her open attacks on the First Amendment.
And people like Hannity and Stevens, these two sides of our party, this elite side and this rank and file side, are going to have to start talking to each other and stop calling each other names if we're going to rebuild some kind of coalition that can stop these people.
It's not going to happen with Donald Trump, it doesn't look like.
But next time, there's going to be more elections, one can hope.
And, you know, we want to get together.
We've got to stop calling each other names.
It's absurd.
And start to think about how we rebuild a somewhat right-wing coalition.
All right, let's talk about stuff I like.
I went to the Getty Museum and I was walking, I took a kind of quick tour through the painting galleries.
And the painting galleries start with, you know, just before the Renaissance, basically, and they go through the moderns.
I guess they end with the Impressionists about.
And I was looking at it, and you could just see the entire history of Western culture in the arts.
It starts out with one picture after another of the Virgin and Child and the crucifixion.
And these are good paintings, but they're not great paintings.
They are a little bit primitive, but they are made as objects of reverence.
They're made as things to put in churches that people can go and pray before, and they will remind you of the mother and child and all this.
And then you go into the next room as you get into the next century, moving into the 16th century, you start to get this incredible explosion of talent and perspective and technique.
And the subject matter branches out.
All the biblical stories are being beautifully rendered, and also some classical stories because they had rediscovered the classic myths and all this.
And this goes on until you start to now see more classical stuff and some average ordinary paintings of ordinary life brilliantly rendered so that they're no longer objects of reverence.
They're actually objects of art.
It's the artist saying, look what I can do.
Look at this.
Look how brilliantly I've made this.
And of course, there gets to be a lot of sex.
A lot less Virgin Mary, a lot more naked women, you know, bathing by the pool and all this stuff.
And it gets very, very sexy until the point where you're almost looking at these things as erotic objects.
And yet the talent and the skill becomes greater and greater and greater.
And then it starts to dissolve with the Impressionists who are essentially painting paintings about light, paintings about painting.
That's what happens at the end of a cycle of the arts.
The arts become about themselves.
You know, you see that in movies when movies, like Quentin Tarantino movies are movies about movies.
They're not really movies about life.
And that's what happens as an art dies.
And so I was looking at this and I was thinking, boy, you can really see this culture explode out of a few objects of veneration into all life, you know, just painting all of life.
And you can either look at that, you can look at that in one of two ways.
You can look at it as the church basically containing the human impulse and it suddenly explodes like a volcano and you can see this explosion like some Freudian thing where the steam has been pent up and now it explodes.
And that's kind of the story we've been told.
That's the story we've been told, that there were the Middle Ages when nothing was happening and then there was the Renaissance when things came to life again.
I don't really believe that's the true story.
I believe that what you had is a thousand years, 1,500 years.
No, it's about 1,000 years of the church training savages to become human beings.
And that's a long, long job.
And what you're seeing is not an explosion.
You're seeing a growth.
You're seeing a seed of the church.
This church kind of acts like a reliquary, those things that they used to contain the bones of saints.
It holds the classical tradition within it.
It changes the classical tradition into the image of Christ.
And that seed now grows up into this enormous plant which gets further and further away from its roots until finally it's really so far away that nobody really even remembers where it came from.
So I started to think about, and I've thought about this a lot, and I've talked about it somewhat, about the ways in which our culture is constantly asking the questions that are asked by the gospels in new ways, that we can only really think in terms of Christianity.
We don't know we're doing it anymore, but we're still doing it.
It's not to say that other cultures don't ask the same questions.
They don't always ask the same questions.
But we have to look at those questions in a certain way.
That is who we are.
That is the tree that we grew up in.
We are shaped by the Christian church.
And so I'm just going to look at three things, each one a day, of three subject matters and how the arts deal with them in the West.
The first is the subject matter of truth.
And truth becomes a huge issue when Jesus is brought before Pontius Pilate and he says, Are you a king?
Pontius Paulo says, Are you a king?
And he says, I came to speak the truth, and all who know the truth recognize my voice.
And elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus says, I am the truth.
I am the truth, he says.
And Pilate responds, because Pilate is a sophisticated Roman, he says, what is truth?
And that, of course, is the argument that then continues throughout Western culture.
What is truth?
Is there objective truth?
This is what Hamlet is about.
It's what Hamlet, what Shakespeare is writing about.
And Hamlet, I always maintain that Hamlet is a Catholic writer's take on the Reformation, that Hamlet comes from Wittgenberg, which is where he's studying there, which is where the Reformation begins.
And he comes, and now he can't decide what's the truth.
What's the truth?
He makes this one speech, this famous speech about what a piece of work is man.
Let's take a look at that speech.
And this is Hamlet talking about the fact that because he's depressed, everything has changed.
I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises.
And indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory.
This most excellent canopy, the air.
Look you.
This brave, o'erhanging firmament.
This majestical roof fretted with golden fire.
Why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.
What a piece of work is a man.
How noble in reason.
How infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable.
In action, how like an angel.
In apprehension, how like a god.
The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.
And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
Man delights not me.
So what Hamlet is saying is because he's depressed, the whole world has changed.
Everything is changed.
So how can you know what the truth is?
My brilliant son, Spencer Clavin, wrote an excellent article about this in which he points out that what Hamlet is talking about is he's essentially repeating Psalm 8, which praises the wondrous work of God, but he's leaving God out of it.
Without God, how can you find the truth?
Without God, you become the arbiter of truth, and nothing is real.
And so the stuff I like today is the film The Matrix, in which literally the question is asked, how can you ever know what is real?
Here's Lawrence Fishbourne as Morpheus explaining to Neo, how can you know that anything is real?
The Matrix is everywhere.
It is all around us.
Even now in this very room.
You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television.
You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes.
It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
What truth?
That you are a slave, Neo.
Like everyone else, you were born into bondage.
Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch.
A prison for your mind.
Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is.
You have to see it for yourself.
And how does Neo break out of the Matrix?
He has to die and be resurrected.
And if you remember the last, the third movie, he's basically up there with his arms out and stretched like he's on the cross and sacrificing himself.
And so that's another, so either the truth is a man who brings the truth, who speaks the truth, and who dies and sacrifices himself for our freedom, or there is no truth, or you're living. as a slave.
And so we're constantly asking these same questions over and over again.
And tomorrow I'll look at another subject that we deal with in Christian terms without even knowing that we're talking about Christianity.