Andrew Clavin critiques leftist hypocrisy—mocking their rejection of Santa Claus for a "merit-based" Obama figure while pushing forced gay weddings and abortion funding—before pivoting to Pearl Harbor’s 75th anniversary, praising FDR’s "Day of Infamy" speech against Obama’s vague "war on terror" language. He contrasts Trump’s $50B SoftBank deal with Obama’s anti-business regulations, framing deregulation as a populist backlash to global trade’s post-WWII U.S. decline. Clavin defends Trump’s Twitter use as a counter to leftist cultural warfare, like SNL’s influence, while grappling with divine justice in suffering, citing Dostoevsky and his own spiritual turnaround from despair. The episode blends sharp political contrasts with existential musings on faith and free will. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, it's Christmas time, and you know what that means.
Or you're a leftist and you don't.
You see, this is the festive time of the year when leftists hear the sound of children laughing, carolers singing, and worshipers saying their prayers, and send their lawyers to hunt them down and silence them forever.
That's because leftists believe that religion is insulting and moralistic and should be destroyed because it's stupid and bad.
Leftists believe that it's exclusive to belong to an inclusive religion like Christianity because it excludes exclusive religions like Islam.
And thus the inclusive religion is exclusive for excluding the exclusive, which is inclusive because it murders everyone.
Leftists don't believe in Santa Claus because that's childish.
Instead, they believe in an all-powerful and beneficent figure who can be everywhere at once giving free gifts to those who deserve them.
And they're really sorry his presidency is coming to an end.
Leftists believe that conservative religious people should be forced to fund abortions and participate in gay weddings because when the founding fathers wrote in the First Amendment that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, they were really trying to say that Congress should make those laws, but they got it all confused because they were speaking in old English and all the S's looked like F's, plus they had nothing to write with but feathers, so the words got smeared.
But the point the founders were trying to make was that a man should be able to have sex with another man and then kill the baby if the second man becomes pregnant because he identifies as a woman.
And isn't that what Christmas is really all about?
Leftists believe that when you construct a tableau in a public place that shows a baby in a manger surrounded by wise men, shepherds, and farm animals, it's ridiculous to think that the baby is the son of the ever-living God.
Of course, the tableau must be taken down because it violates the separation of church and state because the baby is obviously the son of the ever-living God.
Leftists believe that you shouldn't judge people because Jesus said so, but they don't believe in Jesus, but you still shouldn't judge people because it makes them feel bad about the things they've done because they haven't been forgiven for them because they don't believe in Jesus who said you shouldn't judge them, but they don't believe in him.
Okay, it doesn't make any sense, but you're a hateful conservative, so shut up.
Leftists believe that we should abandon our irrational faith in the supernatural because now we have science which teaches us that evil black oil from ground poisoned Mother Gaia, the earth, bringing terrible fire from sky, unless give great white father in Washington much wampum.
But in keeping with the spirit of the season, leftists do believe that you should worship something greater than yourself.
Them.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Ship-shaped tipsy-topsy, the world is a bibby-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing!
Oh, hurrah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hoorah!
I love this Christmas song with the hat.
You can't see this if you're not watching.
You know, I've got the Christmas hat, I've got a beard, the snow is falling.
What is this, a chicken?
It's a partridge.
That partridge to the right.
What's to the left?
It's a French hen.
A French hen.
Oh, okay.
Sorry.
Oh, I get it.
It's in a French-made outfit.
You guys are sick.
Where did that idea come up?
All right, it's mailbag day.
Woohoo, woo, and also who, and we will be doing the mailbag after the break when we lose you if you're on Facebook or YouTube.
So you have to come on over to the Daily Wire, and you can listen to it, or you could subscribe.
If you subscribe, you can send in questions while I'm actually talking, and I will answer your questions in real time.
Answers guaranteed 100% correct, 97.5% guaranteed to change your life.
3% For the Better00:14:53
3% for the better, I would say.
But it will change your life.
Also, while we are talking about Christmas, you can buy my memoir, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.
It is an excellent Christmas present.
Only go on Amazon and read the reviews, and you will see people going nuts, really going nuts for it.
I have to say, it's very gratifying.
I didn't write it with the intention of changing people's lives, but they keep writing on Amazon.
You know, this changed my life, so it's great.
And also, while you're there, pick up for yourself a copy of Werewolf Cop, one of my best thrillers, is on sale on e-book for $195 or something, $199.
Yeah, I just checked it this morning, so it's still on sale for like two bucks.
All right, lest we forget, today is Pearl Harbor Day.
This is 75 years ago today, the Japanese launched a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, bombed our ships, damaged eight of them, sank four of them, killed over 2,000 Americans, wounded over 1,000 Americans.
Thought that they were devastating our naval capability and in many ways should have been.
But Winston Churchill is said to have heard about the attack and said, ah, then we've won.
And he later said that he knew that the moment he heard about Pearl Harbor that Hitler's fate was sealed and that the war was essentially over, that we were going to decimate him.
Within four months, we launched a bombing raid, a suicide mission, the Doolittle raid on Tokyo, which really was a suicide mission, but they just wanted, they didn't want the attack to go unanswered.
So they just flew over there and these guys got captured, had to make their way out of China.
There's a really good movie about it called 30 Seconds Over Tokyo.
Excellent movie with, I think, is William Holden.
I'm talking from memory, but I'm pretty sure it's William Holden, and I think Spencer Tracy, too.
And really good film.
And then within six months, we fought the Japanese, the U.S. fought the Japanese at Midway and destroyed their Navy.
So it was much, you know, I was talking before about how important the Navy is, and we forget that now that we're flying around all over the place, but the Navy still controls access to the seas, and that is one of the reasons that Obama has been so negligent and so irresponsible in letter Navy language.
Just to remind you, here's what a U.S. president sounded like after Pearl Harbor was bombed.
This is what a U.S. president used to sound like.
Yesterday, December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy.
The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
Hostilities.
Yesterday.
No blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.
With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph.
So help us God.
The line I love, it kind of got jammed up in there, but the line he says is hostilities are taking place.
There's no avoiding it.
There's no looking away and saying it's not happening and it's happening.
And compare that to today when we have these people telling us that we don't have to, we can't say the word Islam and connect it to terrorism.
And every time there's a terrorist attack, people race to tell us that it's our fault that we are Islamophobic, which is insane.
I mean, it's insane.
There is, you know, Islamic, every Islamic-majority country is a slave state.
Virtually everyone is a slave state.
Virtually everyone oppresses women and all this, you know, but immediately they go to us.
It's our fault.
Can you imagine if FDR had come out and said, said, you know, yesterday, a day that does will live and infamy.
We were bombed by the Japanese.
Why do they hate us so much?
What have we done to make them?
It must be Asian phobia.
I think this is a terrible, terrible thing.
Here's what a president sounds like today.
Here's Obama talking about victory, so help us God, in the war on terror.
I'm always worried about using the word victory because it evokes this notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur.
We're not dealing with nation states at this point.
We're concerned with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
He's so smart.
He's so smart.
First of all, it wasn't Emperor, as we know, who signed the surrender.
It was, I don't know, the foreign secretary in the name of Hirohito.
Just putting that aside from it, I worry about the word victory.
We don't want to have victory.
We're fighting a war.
We don't want victory.
I mean, eight years of this stuff, and they elected Donald Trump.
I'm surprised they didn't elect just some wild Godzilla with a big American flag stuck out of his ear.
I was like, I didn't want to be talking about victory.
So here's what a president is going to sound like in dealing with the Japanese.
This is kind of funny.
Here's what a president is going to sound like in dealing with the Japanese as of January.
Here is President-elect Trump in Trump Tower talking to the Japanese, Korean Japanese, Masayoshi-san of SoftBank.
Here he is.
This is Masa of SoftBank from Japan, and he's just agreed to invest $50 billion in the United States and 50,000 jobs.
And he's one of the great men of industry.
So I just want to thank you for that.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
And if you'd like to speak to him, you can.
But one of the truly great men.
Thank you.
Thank you, Michelle.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
You may want to say hello.
Yes, yes, thank you.
I'll see you soon.
I just came to celebrate his new job.
And we were talking about it.
And then I said, I would like to celebrate his presidential job and commit, you know, because he would do a lot of deregulation.
I said, this is great.
United States, U.S. will become great again.
That will become great again.
So what a difference 75 years make.
I mean, that's, and of course, I think we would all rather have this sort of victory with Japan than victory over Japan.
I'm glad that victory over Japan is no longer required and we can now have victory together.
If this comes off, if this is a real thing, I don't know about the 50,000 jobs because he was talking about investing in startups and startups usually have like two employees.
I mean, you'd have to invest in a whole lot of startups before you got to 50,000 jobs.
But if he is serious about that much money, $50 billion, he said, that's a lot of money to inject into our economy.
Really amazing, and no trace of any of the carrier problems.
People who thought, oh, well, it's a banana republic because he forced Carrier to keep the jobs here.
By the way, I just want to bring up about Carrier, that no one knows for a fact that he threatened them.
There was this kind of idea going around that Trump threatened Carrier with withdrawing government contracts from their parent company.
But nobody knows that.
Really, what the carrier people said is exactly what this guy said: he knows that all these regulations, and this is not covered in the news.
Obama is spewing out regulations.
He is breaking records for regulations, and every single one of those regulations costs some company money, which means it costs you money when you go to buy their product.
So, what Trump is saying is that's going to stop.
All those regulations are going away.
As he said in his speech at the Carrier Plant, he suddenly realized while he was campaigning, something that he could have found out by just listening to the show: that regulations are even worse than high corporate taxes, which we also have.
Get rid of high corporate taxes, get rid of regulations.
You're not going to need all these tariffs he's talking about to keep companies in the U.S. Companies will want to stay in the U.S. because who doesn't want to be in the U.S.?
I mean, that's where you want to be.
That's where your workers want to be.
So, why not be here if you can do it more cheaply and not have to pay the Obama tax on everything?
Obama has been running a war on business.
So, now, you know, these things are kind of related because after World War II, when I would say these things, I mean, Pearl Harbor and this new business attitude is related.
Because after World War II, we started to set up this global trading world in which the U.S. was kind of at a disadvantage.
And it was okay that the U.S. was at a disadvantage because everybody else was dead.
You know, this is the thing.
You know, the entire West, you know, you forget about this, but Berlin was rubble.
You know, Britain, rubble.
All these countries were rubble.
And people say, well, we had such a great economy.
Yeah, because there was nobody else there.
It's very, very hard to do that now that we have all this competition and much, much less reason for us to give up any advantage, for us to act as if we are the granddaddy and we're taking care of everybody else.
Now is the time for us to compete as a nation and to be a nation state.
That's why things are changing.
That's why suddenly, you know, this is the post, we are still living in the post-war world, and all these guys have failed us.
All these guys who are moaning and groaning, and Obama is moaning and groaning, they have failed us by regulating us into the ground.
And not just businesses, it's us too.
If your kid goes out and starts a lemonade stand, the police come up and give her a ticket because she doesn't have a license.
That's the stuff where people have to be tarred and feathered, thrown into the river, and pelted with rotten vegetables as they float out to sea.
And that's what the election of Donald Trump is, and so is Brexit, and so is all this stuff that is sweet.
You know, it's not, heaven help us, heaven forfend, it is not fascism.
It's simply the people taking back the world from these bureaucrats.
That's all that's happening.
And let's hope it doesn't go any further than that, because the people, when roused, can do some pretty ugly stuff.
So the response to this from the mainstream media, which is after all, just a corporate arm, it's just the Democrat talk, it's just the Democrat pravda.
You know, it's the, these are massive corporations, and massive corporations love regulations.
Massive corporations love regulations because they can pay for them and you can't.
So if you invent a better product in your garage or in your kitchen, you can't compete with the hostess company or whatever corporation is already there because you can't pay for the regulation.
So the plot to stop this rising populism begins, and we're going to talk about that in a second.
But first, we have to say goodbye to Facebook and to YouTube.
Come on over to the Daily Wire if you want to be in the mailbag and you subscribe for a lousy eight bucks a month.
Come on.
You cheap people.
Come on.
Yeah, lousy eight bucks a month.
You can subscribe.
You can ask questions while I am talking on the mailbag.
on over.
So what we're seeing is this hysteria.
I mean, the left are such pansies.
The leftists are, you know, I want to say this.
When I think Obama is the worst president of my lifetime, and I lived through Carter.
So Obama is the worst president.
He has made everything worse.
The only thing that's not worse under Obama is the economy is not worse than it was when it crashed in 2008.
That is true, but it's much, much worse than it would have been had he not weighted it down with all this Dodd-Frank regulation and Obamacare, which is just like an anvil sitting on top of the economy.
So the economy is worse.
Obviously, the wars in the Middle East, much, much worse than when he took office.
Our state in the world, our estate, the respect we have in the world, much lower, much worse.
Racial tensions in our country, much worse.
The state of corruption in our Justice Department, in the IRS, much worse.
Everything, much worse under Obama.
He's an incompetent ideologue who would not change his mind, would not change his ideas, even when the facts refuted them.
I knew this.
Most of us conservatives knew this in 2012.
And when I saw him re-elected that night against Mitt Romney, not my favorite candidate, but a good man, a sane man, an adult, a guy who knew how to roll with the tide, knew how to do business.
When I saw him beat Mitt Romney, it was a downer.
I'm not going to kid you.
I was down.
I was like, I think up until the day before the election, I convinced myself that Romney had a chance.
The day I woke up, I could smell it.
It was like I opened the window, took a whiff, and thought, ooh, this is bad, you know, and it was over so fast.
I was depressed.
I didn't cry about it.
I didn't protest about it.
I didn't try to get the electors to change their votes.
I didn't demand a recount.
I didn't put out a hashtag, Obama's not my president.
I knew he was my president, and I even respected the will of the people, though I had a difficult time respecting the people whose will it was.
But these guys are such wusses.
I mentioned that Washington Post article the other day where the woman says, I'm no longer looking for a partner anymore because I have no hope because Donald Trump, you know, I mean, these guys are such wusses.
And by the way, when I say pansies, don't think that I'm insulting gay people.
I've known gay people who could like pick up a pool table and beat you to death with it.
I'm insulting leftists.
I'm insulting these people who are weeping and moaning and crying.
And it's all couldn't happen.
Madonna, I'm ashamed to be an American.
You know, she's an American because it's the only place a woman with no talent can make a zillion dollars by taking your shirt off.
That's why she's an American, so I don't think she should be too ashamed of it.
All this moaning and whining.
Why is it, why is it that they cannot, I'm not telling them to accept defeat, I'm not telling them not to fight back, but it's the crying.
It's like being stuck on an airplane with a crying baby.
You know, it's like that little, wow, wow, wow.
And here's my theory.
My theory is this.
A conservative like me wakes up every morning, turns on the news, and sees newsmen lying about him.
Sees newsmen telling him he's a bad guy and the Democrats are great because these journalists are just Democrat operatives with press cards, as Glenn Reynolds at Instapundent likes to say.
I go to the movies, I see movie stars insulting me.
I turn on the TV, I see TV stars insulting me, telling me my ideas are bad, my politicians are evil, all this stuff.
We played that thing from Lucifer where he said Trump was going to hell.
Lauer's Critique of Media Dishonesty00:05:40
I get this all day long.
If I'm in school, my professor tells me everything I believe is untrue.
If I'm in Hollywood and I let people know what I think, I'm out of work, which happens to me a lot, by the way.
And a lot of people, if they admit, you know, that they voted for Trump, remember the Kellogg's company won't advertise on Breitbart anymore.
Breitbart is staging a retaliatory boycott, and good for them.
Kellogg's deserves it for doing that.
Every day you get hit with this, it makes you tough.
It makes you strong.
It makes you start to think about, well, how can I argue back?
Your argument is this.
What's my argument?
I'm surrounded by people who disagree with me.
Why am I right?
Why am I right?
Do they have a point?
Let me think about it.
Leftists, on the other hand, are engulfed in this candy cane cloud, this candy cloud of pink agreement.
And they turn on the TV, and there's their favorite singer telling them how wise, how smart, how good they are.
They go to the movies, there they are telling you your values are true, everything you believe is good.
Oh, look at the evil concern.
Anyone who disagrees with you is evil.
Of course, Trump is going to lose the election.
How could an evil, terrible person like that win the election?
All day long.
This is all they get.
All they get.
And then when it turns out that it's a lie, that they paid these people to lie, they insisted they lie.
They stopped reading their papers if they heard anything else.
If Fox News told them anything else, they demonized them.
How could they not be surrounded in these lies?
Then suddenly, when it all turns out to be untrue, it's like, oh, baby, you know, the pain, the suffering, and they're children.
They have been reduced.
They've reduced themselves to children by surrounding themselves with this false information.
And one of the things that is bothering them the most about Donald Trump, tomorrow we're going to have the great and mighty noltenator, John Nolte, is going to come on, and we're going to discuss the media a little bit more.
But one of the things that is bothering them about Donald Trump is that he goes right to them.
He talks to them through Twitter.
Trump, as I was driving, and he was on, what was he on?
Good Morning America or Today?
Yeah.
He was talking to Matt Lauer, right?
Matt Lauer.
And Matt Lauer says, you know, when are you going to stop tweeting?
Stop tweeting.
Listen to this.
There's Trump's reply.
I think I am very restrained, and I talk about important things.
I talk about, you know, as you know, recently, China and the fact we talked about their devaluation.
We talked about their building this massive military fortress in the middle of the South China Sea, which they're not supposed to be doing, and other things.
And frankly, it's a modern-day form of communication.
Even when you're picking fights for that.
Between Facebook and Twitter, I have, I guess, more than 40 million people.
And that's a modern-day form of communication.
I get it out much faster than a press release.
I get it out much more honestly than dealing with dishonest reporters.
So many reporters are dishonest.
It's like he's just going right over this guy's head, you know, and they can't stand it.
And beautifully, brilliantly, all this news, all these appointments that Lauer could be asking him about, and instead he's asking him about the fact that he's insulting SNL.
And by the way, he's doing that for a reason.
He's not talking about Boeing.
You know, Trump sent out this tweet about Boeing.
He was going to cancel their Air Force One contract or whatever.
He's not asking about anything important.
He's not asking him about Ben Carson.
He's not asking him about Steve Bennett.
Nothing.
He's asking him about Twitter and why are you attacking SNL?
Why don't you just stop watching Saturday Night Live?
Here's Trump's response.
Can we agree, President-elect Trump, that at this stage it would be better for you to simply stop watching SNL as opposed to watching it and then complaining about it?
Well, I hosted SNL when it was a good show, but it's not a good show anymore.
First of all, nothing to do with me.
There's nothing funny about it.
This gets it terrible.
So why do you keep watching?
I like Alec, but his imitation of me is really mean-spirited and not very good.
I don't think it's good.
And I do like him, and I like him as an actor, but I don't think that his imitation of me gets me at all.
And it's meant to be very mean-spirited, which is very biased.
And I don't like it.
But you can't bring yourself to stop watching it.
No, look, frankly, the way the show is going now, and you look at the kind of work they're doing, who knows how long that show is going to be on.
It's a terrible show.
Wow.
Wow.
Now, the reason that's important is that is Matt Lauer defending what's important.
They know, they know that it's the culture that's important.
You know, all you guys who listen to me making jokes at the opening of the show, I see them on Facebook.
They say, I'm not listening to this.
These are jokes.
Guess what?
Guess what?
The next time the Democrats win, you go, why did we lose the culture?
That's why.
That's why.
And Trump understands that.
Trump understands that SNL is poisoning the minds of a generation, and he's fighting back against them.
And he's right.
He is right to do it.
Obviously, it would be wrong to censor them.
It would be wrong to violate their rights to make the jokes.
But why shouldn't he fight back?
Why shouldn't he be part of the culture too?
He is realizing, he realizes, because he is part of the culture, because he's a TV star, basically.
He realizes that this is the weapon the left wields, and so does Lauer, and Lauer is fighting for it.
That's what is going on, and that it's going to continue to go on.
And like I said, we'll talk more about the media tomorrow because we have John Nolte here, who is, for my money, one of the best observers of the media ever.
And you know he is because his Twitter handle is CNN is Hitler.
That's his Twitter handle.
All right, the mailbag.
Our weekly visit.
Our weekly visit from Lindsay.
All right, from Frank Turk.
Morality And Justice00:08:32
Dear, merciful, benevolent, and powerful.
And I like this.
It's K-L-V-N.
He leaves out the vowels like in the Bible.
On the Dave Rubin podcast, I did the Rubin report.
I did an interview on the Rubin report, and this has been really interesting.
Dave and I, we had a really friendly, really nice conversation.
Dave's a smart guy, and we talked about God versus atheism in keeping with my book, The Great Good Thing.
And I obviously must have stumbled, accidentally said something profound and insightful because the atheists have been going nuts.
The atheists have been tweeting me things like, you know, you're not convincing me.
They don't realize that they're so much more worried about being convinced than I'm worried about convincing them.
I'm not trying to convince them.
I was just talking to Dave.
So here's a question about this.
On the Dave Rubin podcast, you were really clear about the moral imperative against abortion.
Yes, I was.
But generally, you're less clear about what sort of sexual morality people should follow.
Fair point.
As a Christian, do you believe there is actually a sexual morality people ought to follow?
Or is that decision merely an aesthetic decision?
If there is such a thing as sexual morality, why does it seem less important than the morality which governs murder or theft or lying?
From Frank.
Excellent question.
I seem to have a hard time explaining this to people, that I'm not talking about the absolute morality of what you do sexually.
Most sexual crimes are actually other kinds of crimes.
There are crimes of lying, there are crimes of cheating, they're crimes of betrayal, they're crimes of abuse, of abusing people.
Most sexual crimes are not about who puts what where.
They're about the fact that you made a promise to do one thing, but you did another because you had a desire and you wanted pleasure and things like this.
When you talk about abortion, you're talking about taking somebody's life, and that's a crime.
My point is not about, for instance, whether being gay is sinful per se.
I have no idea whether being gay is sinful per se because I'm not gay.
And I think that that's the important point I'm trying to make.
The only point I'm trying to make is what's useful for me to know.
You know, Jesus said, Jesus said to the religious authorities, he said, you judge according to the flesh.
I judge no one.
That's what he said.
You judge according to the flesh.
I judge no one or nothing.
It's hard to translate from the Greek.
And what I'm trying to say is I need to know what is important to me as a spiritual being.
So, for instance, I've talked about this before.
When somebody says the last days are coming, I always think, so what?
My last days are definitely coming.
I know for sure, I know for sure that within, let's be generous, within the next 40 years, my last day is coming.
Maybe 40 minutes.
I don't know.
But I know that's coming.
I have to prepare in the same way I would prepare for the last trump, for the last trumpet to sound.
The same thing is true.
So my question is this.
If my job is to love God and love my neighbor, Why am I concerned with his internal sexuality, with his desires, if he's not hurting anybody?
If he's committing a crime, a crime of adultery, abandoning his children, doing things to people that I know or love or care about, which is virtually everybody, you know, that I can judge, and I can pass judgment on that.
But what he's doing to his internal self is between him and God, and I have no role in judging that.
If he comes to me, I would tell, if a gay guy comes to me, I've said this before, I would tell him the exact same thing.
I would tell a straight guy, get on your knees, talk to God about it.
God will talk back, he will tell you what to do.
It is not for me to judge.
I'm talking about my role and your role.
That's why I do not understand.
I do not understand why a preacher stands up in a church where there are zero gay people, and this happens all the time, and preaches against gay people when he's standing in a church full of fat guys cheating on their wives.
I mean, that's the problem in his church.
That's what he should be talking about, because that's what his people should be thinking about.
People cheating, people doing the wrong thing to their kids, all this stuff.
Why is he even talking about that?
That's what I have a hard time understanding.
So I'm not pronouncing theologically on anybody's sexuality.
Of course, there's sexual morality.
There's not only sexual immorality outside what you do to people, there's sexual morality inside what you make of yourself, what you do to yourself.
I can't judge that second one.
I can only judge that in myself.
I'm instructed not to judge it in other people.
So that's all I'm trying to say.
I'm not making a theological point.
I'm making a practical theological point.
From Stephen Peng, Supreme God-King Claven, I loved watching you on Rubin Report.
Another Dave Rubin thing, I'm telling you.
One issue I have trouble understanding is how why God interferes with the physical world.
When we pray for him to help a cancer patient, for instance, I don't see how God actually does that or why.
It seems inconsistent to say that God allows suffering and the world to play out because of free will, yet he will help us when we are in need, but if he doesn't help, it's okay.
Great question.
Really difficult question.
We're talking about justice and how basically it comes down to, this question comes down to the old question of how we can understand a just God in an unjust world.
There's a great scene in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, one of the greatest Christian novels ever written, in which one of the brothers tells a horrifying story about a child being abused.
And at the end of this story, which really it's difficult to read the story, it's so well written and so well described, of this child being abused.
And at the end of the story, he says, What could God ever do?
This is his basic question translated into my poor American.
What could God ever do to make up for that suffering?
And the answer to that question, as far as I'm concerned, is I don't know.
I can't imagine what God could ever do to make up for the suffering of a child, but I can imagine a morality so great and so big that he can see that I can't, in which when I get a glimpse of it, I'll say, ah, now I get it.
I can imagine that.
I can imagine that my mind, my brain is so limited that I cannot picture what justice looks like on an eternal, everlasting scale where he can.
Okay?
So the same thing is true of this.
I mean, when I was in New York just this weekend, I went to St. Thomas's Cathedral because it turned out I wasn't welcome anymore in the church where I was baptized, which is downtown.
So I went to this Midtown Church of St. Thomas, which is a beautiful, beautiful church.
At the nadir of my life, at the lowest point in my life, which I describe in painful detail in The Great Good Thing, I would sometimes just stop in that church and just sit there.
I was close to suicide.
I was close to just misery.
We were talking 30 years ago.
And I would just think like, I would pray to a God I didn't even believe in to help me out.
I went back there and sitting, it was very moving after 30 years of incredible joy and love and pleasure, the life that I have led since then, which is a life that happened in my mind.
You know, it's a life that happened because of a spiritual change, not because everything always went well for 30 years, which would be absurd.
It wouldn't be life.
I don't know why God did that for me, because I've seen over those years, I've seen friends and fellow, you know, and colleagues fall apart, go down the drain.
I don't know why I got that stick, you know?
I really don't know.
And at the same time, I don't know why.
I do believe God intervenes in history.
I believe he intervened in history at the founding of this country.
I don't know why.
All I can say is that I can imagine a justice so much bigger and more complex than the justice we see where it all makes sense.
That's all I can tell you.
And we shouldn't be afraid to say we don't know.
There's so much in Christianity that you're allowed not to know.
We know that the death of Jesus Christ saves us.
We don't know exactly how.
A lot of people think they do, but if you go back to the Gospels, we don't know exactly how that works.
You know, there are different ways of looking at it.
There's so much we don't know.
And especially when it comes to these questions of justice, we are putting the faith in a good and loving God, that the way he sees things, and remember, he doesn't live in time the way we do.
He sees everything at once in the way we see it minute by minute.
It all looks very different to him.
All I can say is that I can imagine that there is such a justice that makes the injustice of this world make sense.
That's the best I can do, and I think it's the best anybody can do.
And it takes a certain release of control.
You have to let go of what you are.
You have to let go of the idea that you're in control and that you're going to make it all work out.
Cannot Remember00:02:22
One more from Austin.
How did you and Ben meet?
I don't remember.
I can't remember.
You know, we will all, I mean, Andrew Breitbart was kind of the hub of the wheel of all of us.
He sort of would all introduce all of us together.
And of course, Ben worked for Breitbart and I wrote occasionally for Breitbart.
Breitbart was the only person on earth I ever wrote for free for.
And I did it very rarely.
It used to drive me crazy.
He would say, why don't you write for me?
And I would say, read my lips, Andrew.
You don't pay anything.
I'm a professional writer.
This is what I do for a living.
I do know this, however.
I do know this.
Ben and I didn't really know each other very well.
We were always, you know, always greet each other pleasantly.
But I do remember this, that I didn't pay much attention to him, you know, because he was kind of a kid.
You know, I wasn't really paying attention to him.
And one day I was recording an audio book.
I was recording one of my books, and it was one of the rare times when I wasn't working in the morning.
So I was in my car driving to record my audio book, and I turned on the radio, and I'm listening to this guy, and I thought, wow, this guy's a really talented broadcaster.
And it was Ben.
And I wrote to him, and I said, gee, I never knew you had any talent, you know.
But that was the first moment I actually noticed him, that I noticed that he was actually quite good on the air, and I've been around radio all my life.
My father was in radio, so I know a good radio talent when I see one.
And that was really when I started to realize he was quite good.
All right, stuff I like.
I'm going to repeat a stuff I like from last Christmastime because there's not that much to go around, but also I think this is just a really good Christmas present.
And while there's still time to buy Christmas presents, and I know you'll be on Amazon buying the great good thing, so while you're there, there is also the big book of Christmas Mysteries, one of the great anthologies ever.
It has every good Christmas mystery story in it, including the Sherlock Holmes one, the famous Sherlock Holmes one, famous Father Brown, one which is called The Goose or something.
I can't remember what it's called, but it's a really, really wonderful Christmas story.
It's a wonderful Agatha Christie Christmas story.
And there's one by me.
There's one by me, The Killer Christian, is in there as well, which is a story that's been anthologized so many times that I've almost made $10 off it, you know.
Writing prose is not the best thing in the world.
All right, that's the mailbag for this week.
We will do it again next week.
So, you want to subscribe?
Tomorrow we have the Noltenator John Nolte with us.