Andrew Clavin dissects The New York Times’ alleged "Journalism for Dummies" memo, exposing tactics like headline question marks and anonymous sources to smear Trump while ignoring Obama-era failures like Aleppo. He contrasts media hysteria—clips of Olbermann’s apocalyptic rhetoric—with Rush Limbaugh’s direct style, then skewers Pelosi’s Iraq War hypocrisy and CNN’s Russia panic. Shifting to foreign policy, Clavin praises Trump’s potential "realpolitik" pragmatism over Obama’s naivety, citing Peter Hitchens’ critique of Western interventionism, and wonders if Tillerson’s approach mirrors a clash-of-civilizations defense against Islamist threats. The episode closes with cultural optimism: Trump’s bypassing the media via figures like Kanye West signals a pro-growth shift, while Clavin argues societal revival demands internal moral renewal—not government censorship—citing To Kill a Mockingbird and O. Henry as timeless guides. [Automatically generated summary]
The New York Times, a former newspaper, is calling on reporters around the country to do more tough journalism on Donald Trump.
Times media columnist Lonesome Bubble sent a memo to his colleagues saying, quote, well, boys, the Republicans are back in office.
Time to start writing about homelessness and the Constitution again.
By the way, does anyone have a copy of the Constitution?
I put mine away in 2008 and haven't seen it since, unquote.
Fearing that many mainstream reporters may have allowed their skills to erode after they spent the last eight years staring at the president and sighing, oh look, he's so black, the Times has issued an instructional guide entitled, Journalism for Dummies who are ideologically corrupt and blinded by leftist race pathology.
And did I mention corrupt.
Here are some experts from this handy manual on how to make journalism journalism again.
One, learn how to use question marks to turn lies into headlines.
Question marks are a useful journalistic tool for taking scurrilous and unfounded assertions that would end the career of any honest journalist or even a New York Times journalist and transforming those dishonest assertions into morally unassailable questions.
For example, instead of writing, Donald Trump is going to shred our Constitution, try, will Donald Trump shred our Constitution?
This will not only prevent you from expressing an absurdly biased opinion based on no evidence whatsoever, it will keep you from having to find out what's actually in the Constitution, which let's face it, has really small print on crinkly brown paper, making it difficult to read.
Two, learn how to use anonymous attributions.
Anonymous attributions can help turn your hysterical anti-Trump rants into important news stories.
Instead of writing, Donald Trump hates black people, why not write instead, sources say officials are reporting that many people believe some think a highly placed observer feels that Donald Trump hates black people.
That way you can besmirch the man's character and stir up anger against him without violating New York Times standards for honesty.
Just imagining for a moment that the New York Times has standards for honesty.
Three, treat the poor with dignity and respect.
Although this will take more effort than you're used to, caring about the poor can be an effective way to smear those you dislike.
While during the Obama administration, it was perfectly natural to call the police to have a disgusting wino removed from the Times lobby, during the Trump administration, always remember the disgusting wino is now a poor, suffering homeless person.
Thus, instead of coming into work and saying, yuck, I had to have the police remove a disgusting wino from the lobby and then sitting down to make up a fantastic tale about how the Obama economy is really booming, now you can get right to work writing a story about the plague of homelessness sweeping the nation while an uncaring Republican sits in the White House.
By the way, when you're done with the story, please don't forget to call the police to have the wino removed from the lobby.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm for hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped tipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing!
Oh, hurrah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hurrah!
Hoorah, it's mailbag day!
Whoa, yay!
Is there a new thing up there?
Swana swimming!
He's just a swan, just swimming.
You couldn't think of anything, man.
I ran out of fire.
Bring in the new talent, all right.
All right, this week, I have been, I was thinking, I went home last night and I was thinking about what a crazy week this has been.
It's a crazy period.
What we're really watching is we are watching the collapse of the news media in real time.
We're watching, I mean, they've disgraced themselves for eight years.
They disgraced themselves during the Bush administration, but they disgraced themselves in the direction, in the right direction, in the sense that we actually want the press to attack the powerful and to make sure everything they do is right and to pick out scandals where they see them and all this stuff.
They were totally unfair to George W. Bush, but I'd rather have them being unfair than do what they did to Obama, which was just ignore scandal after scandal after scandal, malfeasance after malfeasance.
I mean, today, as we're sitting here, the biggest news story is the rape of Aleppo, the destruction of Aleppo.
This is a place where people are kicking down the doors of ordinary folks, just like you and me, and blowing them away, you know, just slaughtering people everywhere.
And much of it, I mean, I won't say it's Obama's fault, but I will say that he had his malfeasance, his ideologic, his ideological ignorance, his refusal to let go of his ideology, his fear to take any movement, to make any movement, his fear of being a colonialist and all this stuff.
All of this contributed to what's happening.
Our president contributed to what's happening.
That's the big story.
But instead, what we're hearing about is every sneeze that Donald Trump sneezes and how it's going to destroy our nation.
What a terrible.
You know, yesterday I played Keith Olbermann, which gave me the biggest laugh of the, it really was hilarious.
Let's play another.
I have another one for today.
I think I may bring on Keith every single day.
He is now the funniest thing happening on YouTube.
Let's play.
The people should know the truth.
They should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road.
They should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history when the whole equilibrium of representative government has been deranged and that the terrible words have for the time been pronounced against our democracy, thou are weighed in the balance and found wanting.
And do not suppose that this is the end.
This is only the beginning of the reckoning.
This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year, unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor we arise again and take our stand for freedom.
Huzzah!
Huzzah!
Let's charge over the hill and bang ourselves on the wall.
It kind of reminds me of the movie Scanners.
Remember the movie Scanners with people's heads exploded?
And also, what happened to contractions?
Do not suppose.
Why isn't it don't suppose?
Like, why is it more serious if we don't use control?
You know, the only reason I play this, aside from my own personal amusement, is because this is the voice of the media.
Keith Olperman is now the voice of the media.
You know, people always pick on Rush Limbaugh.
He's been the big target of the left.
And I'm a big fan of Rush Limbaugh.
And one of the reasons I'm a fan of Rush Limbaugh is Rush speaks in the language of ordinary people, but he actually elevates people.
He actually does educate them and introduce ideas that they might not have thought of and in ways that they can get and understand.
He actually is, unlike a lot of conservative media, a lot of conservative media plays down to people and lives down at the lowest common denominators, you know, spreading silly conspiracy theories and spreading anger and pumping up anger and self-righteousness, which is one of the flaws of the right, as well as the left.
But on the left, they have a whole different panoply of sins.
But on the right, we can tend to get, this tends to be a lot of anger, and people play into that.
But Rush doesn't do that.
He actually lifts people up.
But at least you know that when you listen to Rush, you are listening to a commentator.
When you listen to him, he's expressing his opinion.
What the left doesn't know is the New York Times is their rush, except that he doesn't elevate.
The Times doesn't elevate people.
It drags them down.
The news that they're getting is it's all Keith Olberman.
It is all Keith Olbermann.
He is the muse of the New York Times, of CBS, of ABC.
Listen to the, you know, obviously we're talking about is this whole thing about Russia.
Russia hacked in to the DNC, and now some anonymous sources have said, oh, it was all because they wanted Donald Trump to get elected.
But of course, that's ridiculous because they couldn't have known any more than anyone here knew that Donald Trump was going to get elected.
Nobody knew he was going to get elected.
If they were doing anything, it was probably trying to weaken what they thought was a Clinton, the upcoming Clinton presidency.
They probably didn't even bother with Donald Trump because they didn't think he could get elected.
Nobody did.
Nobody thought that.
So why would they think it?
They weren't even here, you know, like our guys were here and weren't saying that he could be elected.
So listen to this.
I think this is Dana Bash, who's just a Democrat hack.
And she's got Nancy Pelosi on, and Nancy Pelosi is saying, oh, we need an investigation.
We need a thousand investigations over all this stuff.
And listen to what she said.
Donald Trump responded when he said the intelligence community has said that Russia was responsible for the hacking.
He returned it with, well, they're the same people who told us that Saddam Hussein had Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Did not.
The intelligence community never said that.
The evidence, there is no intelligence to support that claim.
That threat was made by the Bush-Cheney administration.
As you see in Britain, they've just dispelled all of that.
It was a massive misrepresentation of the American people.
But there's nothing in the intelligence to support the threat that Bush Cheney was present.
So it was an acute response.
It was an acute response, and other people maybe have fallen for it.
But it's important to note that a president should pay attention to the intelligence that he's going to have, he has to have the knowledge to have the judgment to make the decisions a president makes.
I think I said that with CNN, it's MSNBC, where at least people know they're being lied to.
But let's hear what Nancy Pelosi was saying before the Iraq war.
Saddam Hussein certainly has chemical and biological weapons.
There's no question about that.
Oops.
Ruttro.
I mean, what the hell?
You know, of course, our intelligent people, all the intelligence said this.
All the Democrats thought it was true.
Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, everybody thought that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
That was not, you know, so she just sits there and lies, and nobody does a thing about it.
The New York Times had a piece, they had a piece that was called Mental Illness, the Crisis of Mental Illness in Trump's America.
Like, how did it get to be Trump's America?
He's not even president yet.
And what's really interesting, by the way, is a token of Obama's weakness that he kind of is the president already.
We're kind of more interested in what's happening in Trump Tower than we are what's happening in the White House.
I mean, Aleppo is going up in smoke.
Obama's doing nothing.
It's like it's not even happening.
Putin's Dangerous Philosophy00:13:25
He's taking pictures.
Oh, it's Christmas time.
And he's got, you know, doing all these little photo ops.
But what Trump is doing really matters.
I have to play this one clip because it's so interesting.
It's so amazing.
When we're talking about mental illness, here is the actress, Allie Wentworth.
And the most important thing about Allie Wentworth to this show is that she is the wife of George Sukalopagus, right?
So newsman extraordinaire, a guy running a network news station who is a Clinton hack, the guy who told Hillary Clinton, I love you, Hillary, it's in his memoir.
I love you, Hillary, and he's running a news department.
Here's what happened at their home on election night.
Now it's scary just because the world is so unpredictable and so different.
Yeah, and I have an 11-year-old daughter who doesn't really understand what ISIS is, but she knows that she's scared, and she's now sleeping in bed with us every night.
So what do you do, Ali?
What do you do?
You got little girls.
You see what's happening.
What can you say to other parents who are at their wits' end with their children who are scared, and they're also scared as adults?
This is what I say.
I say two things.
Say to my kids.
One is we help out everybody that is really going to need our help.
Whatever organization, you know, we give, we volunteer, we help out.
I mean, I'll tell you a story I wasn't planning on story, which might be the end of my marriage.
But we were watching the election.
She says no.
Well, then George.
There you go.
I'm sorry.
Happy holidays.
I want to talk about your new show.
And it's just so fantastic.
I'll tell you later.
It just involves my 14-year-old getting upset about the election and screaming no abortions really loudly.
14-year-old.
And I was like, you haven't kissed a boy yet.
Don't use that word so flippantly.
But she wants to women's rights.
It's women's rights.
Yeah, the women's right to have an abortion.
That's what everything depends on.
She's scared of ISIS now.
Why wasn't she scared during the Obama administration when ISIS was created by his crummy policies, by the fact that he gave up our victory in the Iraq war?
I mean, this is, you know, that calls into question, that quote, calls into question George Sukalopagus' ability to cover the news.
I'm sorry.
If he were surrounded by conservatives saying, George, you're getting out of hand.
You know, your craziness, this craziness that you've imposed on your family and your child is seeping into the news.
That would be one thing, but he's surrounded by people who agree with him.
So he thinks that's reality.
He thinks that world that he, where his child is so afraid of this election that she's sleeping in bed with him, he thinks that that world is the world.
This really calls this into question.
So all of this is to come back to Rex Tillerson.
Yesterday, I said that I was not worried about Rex Tillerson because of him.
I was worried about him because of Trump, because Trump has said a lot of things about Vladimir Putin that seemed to me naive.
And then I started to think about this.
I mean, by the way, I was gratified when I turned on Charles Krauthammer on Fox, and he said, I think he was listening to the show.
He almost gave our entire show yesterday.
He came out of Krauthammer's mouth.
I thought, God, I must be a smart guy.
If I'm as smart as Krauthammer, I must be as smart guy.
And he made this point that, well, let's go back to Rex Tillerson.
I want to stick with this.
I started to think, what is it that Rex Tillerson actually represents?
And what is it, if I'm worried about Trump, what is Trump saying?
Because the thing is, people have a philosophy.
Even if they don't know what their philosophy is, they have a philosophy.
Even a serial killer has a philosophy.
I mean, if you went to Satan and asked, what philosophy is the serial killer acting out?
Satan would know.
Okay, he'd be able to express it.
Maybe the serial killer couldn't, but he would be able to.
Trump is slowly evolving a philosophy.
We are seeing that philosophy becoming clearer as we go.
And we're going to talk about it in a few minutes.
But first, we have to say goodbye to our friends on Facebook and YouTube.
And let me say the mailbag is coming up.
You can only participate.
You can do that anywhere.
You're allowed to say woo-hoo anywhere.
But you can only participate in the mailbag if you subscribe to the Daily Wire.
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Answers guaranteed, 100% correct, 98.5% guaranteed to change your life, 2% guaranteed to change it for the better.
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So I started thinking about this because I really, as I said yesterday, I think Putin is a very dangerous, ugly guy, a guy who kills people, kills his enemies, you know, stages coups and, you know, annexed the Crimea and has been playing a double game in Syria while Obama looks on gobsmacked and helpless.
has been playing a double game where he is pretending to fight ISIS while really just propping up Assad and making inroads with Iran and taking advantage of Obama's innocence and naivete, I guess is the word I want.
He's taking advantage of naivete.
I thought, well, what does this express?
Because it's kind of repellent to me.
And it seems to me, as I watch our guys with Putin, that they get run around.
And then I remembered hearing Peter Hitchens talk about this.
Peter Hitchens is Christopher Hitchens, the late Christopher Hitchens brother, and a devout Christian, but like his brother, a contrarian, a guy who's always saying something a little different than everybody else.
And he lived in Russia during the fall of the Soviet Union, which I was just reading about in this wonderful book, Secondhand Time.
And Peter Hitchens has a real affection for Russia.
And he's a freedom-loving guy.
He's a liberty-loving guy and a Christian.
And here's what he says about foreign policy.
Basically, what he says about foreign policy is: let's not get silly and start thinking that we don't have to deal with bad actors as essentially as friends.
Here's that cut.
I believe that any sovereign country has the absolute freedom to be left alone by any other sovereign country, and that we have no business intervening in other people's countries, however much we dislike their regimes.
And the quality and character of somebody's regime is not the issue as to whether we go to war with them.
Indeed, if it were, this country and my country, if we were simply judging on whether to go to war with other nations on the basis of the revolting nature of their regimes, this country and my country would be at war with Saudi Arabia and the People's Republic of China, which seemed to me to outdistance all other states on the face of the earth in terms of despotism, repression, absence of the rule of law, and general menace to those who live under their rule.
And yet, funnily enough, both these nations are closely allied to us, and we are indeed deeply in debt to them and do not say a word about what's wrong with them, which makes to some extent a nonsense, it seems to me, of the self-righteous frenzy we might get into about the regime in Russia or in Syria or indeed in Slobodan Milosevic's Soviet.
I just mention this because it's a skimming of the surface, which is only the beginning of thought on this matter.
As soon as you begin to think about the nature of propaganda about foreign policy in the modern world, none of it makes any kind of logical sense.
Hitchens' point is that when the Soviet Union fell, we supported Yeltsin, who was kind of, we thought, the Democratic candidate.
Of course, we aren't in favor of democracy.
We're in favor of liberty, which as Hitchens has frequently pointed out, lots of people have pointed out, sometimes those two are opposed to one another.
Sometimes democracy is bad for liberty, and what we support is liberty, not the democracy.
After the Soviet Union fell, we supported Yelsin, who basically sold the country off to gangsters.
And this is why the people who live through the Soviet Union are appalled by capitalism.
They are not having free market capitalism.
They are having gangster capitalism, which capitalism is transformed into when you don't have God, which is why I'm always saying that freedom and capitalism and free markets are all great, but they are not sufficient.
They are not sufficient without a moral guide.
We don't even have to call it God.
Without a moral guide that takes care of the poor, where we take care of each other, where we believe in honest dealing and we enforce honest dealing.
Without those things, capitalism, free market, liberty itself don't mean a damn thing.
And so what Hitchens is saying is Putin is a thug.
He has come in and been a thug, but he's no worse than the thugs that we supported in Russia.
And Even his annexation of the Crimea, as he points out, is the annexation of a place that was being run by anti-Putin thugs who had thrown out the democratically elected pro-Putin thugs.
And so it's a mess, basically.
He's saying it's a mess.
And underlying this, underlying this, he is pointing out that the real problem with the Soviet Union, I think this is what he believes.
I can't entirely guarantee this.
I'm kind of drawing this out from what he's talked about.
is that when the Soviet Union fell, the atheist regime that had been such a problem, such a slave state that really reduces people to animals, was gone and Russia reverted to the fact that it's a Christian country.
And what Hitchens sees as the big problem is Islam and not Islam through terrorism, which he thinks is an overrated problem, but Islam through immigration and people coming in and determinedly trying to transform Western countries into Islamic countries.
And so what he's talking about is nationalism.
He's talking about that fighting for the West may involve an alliance with Russia.
And when I think about that, when I think about the fact that fighting for the West in the post-COVID, you know, he wrote a big article for First Things, the Christian magazine, Catholic really magazine, a big article saying the Cold War is over.
And that's what he's trying to say, that in the fight, the clash of civilizations, Russia may be more of an ally than we'd like, but a necessary ally.
And when I think about that, that sounds very much like Steve Bannon.
And I'm wondering if what Rex Tillerson is representing is a kind of real politic that says we are in a clash of civilizations.
In order to preserve the West as we love it, as we know it, to preserve liberty, we have to defend not ethno-nationalism, as Bannon keeps saying, but our Western borders, basically, and that Russia is going to be part of that.
And I'm wondering, I'm not endorsing that.
I'm not saying that's what they believe.
I'm just saying that what Peter Hitchens has been talking about for a long time sounds very much like Steve Bannon and gives some kind of sense to what Trump is talking about.
So I just wanted to get past a little bit of the noise and talk about that for a little while.
Meanwhile, at Trump Tower, things are really been interesting.
He's been talking to Kanye West, which I thought was, everybody got upset about Kanye West.
We have the picture of Obama.
Obama was with Kanye West.
So this is smart stuff Trump's doing.
This is not dumb stuff.
This is, you know, he was talking to the football players, Jim Brown and Lewis, Ray Lewis, not my favorite people on earth, but they came out and said, hey, he's reminding us that this is not about black and white.
It's about economic development.
Those are people that people listen to.
Trump is using the culture just like Obama did, and that's a smart thing to do.
Also talk to Bill Gates.
Today he's meeting with all these tech giants, and these are guys, you know, obviously Silicon Valley opposed him, but now they're talking about coming in.
Bill Gates gave an interview yesterday comparing Trump to Kennedy, saying he supported—well, let's play the Gates cut.
I had an opportunity to talk to him about innovation.
A lot of his message has been about things where he sees things not as good as he'd like.
But in the same way that President Kennedy talked about the space mission and got the country behind that, I think that whether it's education or stopping epidemics, other health breakthroughs, finishing polio,
and in this energy space, there can be a very upbeat message that his administration is going to organize things, get rid of regulatory barriers, and have American leadership through innovation be one of the things that he gets behind.
And of course, my whole career has been along those lines, and he was interested in listening to that.
And I'm sure there'll be further conversation.
So Trump just is rolling along while the entire media is doing the Keith Olbermann routine, the panic, oh my God, we're being invaded, the Russians have won the war, you know, this is the Manchurian candidate.
Trump just keeps rolling along, sending out a message to the ordinary people, getting right past the press by sending it through these icons, guys like Kanye West and Ray Lewis and people like that, sending out a message that he's going to be a pragmatic guy who cares about their jobs and who is going to look toward innovation, which would be an amazing thing.
It's a hopeful message.
Look, I'm not saying I don't know what the Trump presidency is going to be like.
I'm the only person who's saying this.
I'm the only person who will sit here and tell you, I don't know whether this guy's going to be a disaster or like the greatest president ever.
Why God Allows Evil00:04:53
I cannot tell you.
I know that he has caused great doubts in my mind by some of his behavior, but what he's doing right now, I really like.
A world, a pragmatic world that supports innovation and liberty is a world I'm going to be very, very happy with.
Guys who look like Bill Gates are going to be solving some of the big problems coming up down the road, problems of disease that have been regulated.
You know, our regulatory system strangles innovation when it comes to medicine.
You know, if those things go away, you know, I've been wondering what would it take, because my expectations of a Trump presidency have been so low, it wouldn't take that much for me to be happy about it, but certain things would make me delighted about it.
And this vision that is coming out of Trump Tower right this moment is making me very happy.
Mailbag.
It took us a while to get to it.
We're going to go a little long today, folks, I think.
All right, from Jay Witts, Supreme Commander Clavin, I am an atheist that is conservative, but I am conservative libertarian.
I've heard you discuss why you think you cannot be an intellectually honest atheist and a conservative, but I find my views to be consistent.
The reason I identify as both atheist and conservative is because I've always had a problem with authority, me too.
I don't like telling people what to do, and I certainly don't like people telling me what to do, whether it be Obama or a divine celestial being.
How do you reconcile the anti-authoritarian nature of conservatism with the fact that you willingly give authority to God?
You know, this is really interesting to me.
This whole idea of God as this, you know, people get a little confused about this because they have this idea of God as this authoritarian bossing people around, but they also can't understand why he allows evil, why he permits evil.
And of course, he permits evil because he's not bossing you around.
He's not telling you what to do.
Let me put it to you this way.
If I said to you, if I said to you, if you go to the gym and exercise, you will have a trim, attractive body and be healthier.
If you don't go to the gym and exercise and you just sit around all day, you're going to be fat and you're going to risk dying young and you're going to risk being in bad health.
Would you turn to me and say, don't tell me what to do?
I'm not telling you what to do.
I'm simply telling you how the world works.
I can't make you go to the gym and exercise.
I can only tell you that that's going to be better for your health than if you don't do it.
I mean, that's all I can tell you.
That's all God is telling you.
That's all he's telling you.
He's telling you this kind of behavior is going to have one result and that kind of behavior is going to have a different kind of result.
But there's an added thing in this because we look at the world and we see that it's not true that the good thrive and the evil fail.
It's not true.
You can become president of the United States.
You can become president of Russia while being a terrible, terrible, terrible person.
You can do good things while being a terrible, terrible person.
What Christianity, at least, is telling you is that the logic of life extends past life and it's telling you what you are turning your soul into in the long term.
That's all it's doing.
It's not saying do this, do that.
If it were, if it were, you would have to be good.
You would have to do the right thing, but you don't.
Nobody, there is no authoritarianism in Christianity.
Now, a lot of times, and this is why I never thought Christopher Hitchens' arguments were very good.
A lot of times, the church does that.
Churches do it.
Priests do it.
Pastors do it.
But so what?
Jesus spent most of his ministry telling those people to get stuffed.
I mean, he used more polite language because he was Jesus, but that's what he was basically saying to the religious people of his time.
And he could say it.
He could come back tomorrow and he would be saying it to the religious people of our time.
Don't argue with religions.
Argue with the point of religion, what religion is supposed to be and what Jesus is telling you and God is telling you within.
So there's no authoritarianism involved at all.
All right.
Having read The Great Good Thing, this is my memoir, The Great Good Thing, A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.
Having read The Great Good Thing through twice, now I have only one question for you.
Did you ever find the recipe for Minna's cookies?
And if so, can you post it absently great?
That's great.
You know what?
I am the helpless in a kitchen.
Somebody once, a guy once came over when I was living alone, like in college, and he said, you can't live like this.
You live like you go out to restaurants, you never clean up after yourself.
I'm going to teach you how to cook something.
So he taught me how to cook things, and within a week, my hands were all in bandages because I'm very absent-minded.
And I'm not there.
Seriously, my hands were just bandaged up because I kept burning myself in the kitchen.
My wife won't let me near food preparation.
So, no, I don't know men's cookies.
They are gone with the wind.
They were one of the best things that ever happened to me in my entire life.
Dear Supreme Leader Claven, I need to get a Christmas present for my sister.
She likes to read.
This is from Matt Lewis.
She likes to read, but I'm not well versed in the genre.
She likes Sarah Desson and her genre of stories as her kind of romance YA novels, I guess they would call it.
As an author, I feel there is no one better to ask.
Emotional Revival00:08:32
Are there any good novels that you would remake?
Yeah, you know, I mean, like, this is obviously not my wheelhouse.
I don't read a lot of 15-year-old girl fiction, but The Fault in Our Stars I did read is very good.
If I Stay is a good book, a really entertaining book.
And, you know, I'm kind of sneaky about this.
What I would give her at 15, I'd give her The Kill a Mockingbird.
I think The Killing Mockingbird is a terrific novel.
It's not my favorite novel.
I'm not as enamored of it as other people, but it's a good, solid literary novel.
And I think a 15-year-old could definitely handle it.
From Alex Wickett, do you feel the film industry as a whole is better or worse off for its present freedom from restrictions in regard to content?
In general, are we as a society better off having accepted the entertainment industry's freedom from past standards in exchange for freedom of artistic vision?
This question, this is a deep question because it applies not just to the movie industry, it applies to life itself.
The golden age of film was about 1939, you know, right in that era.
When you look at the films that were turned out in 1939, it's one classic after another.
I can't even think of them all now, but I think it was, you know, Wizard of Oz and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, one after another.
And under the Hayes office, there were very strict restrictions on what you could show, and yet the movies were great.
And now the movies kind of suck, and you can show anything.
But this is true of life, too, right?
You know, under restrictions, you probably will live a better life, and under non-restrictions, there's the chance that you'll go off the rails, right?
You know, this is true of life.
The problem is, the problem is this.
If the restrictions do not exist within you, anybody who imposes them is essentially committing an act of tyranny.
When the country believed to some extent in the values of the Hayes office, the movies were representing something that was interior.
They weren't really being oppressed as much as all that.
So I don't believe, I don't believe that any office. any form of restriction can be imposed on people who do not have those restrictions already in their hearts.
And when you look forward to an American renaissance, to an America that incorporates the freedoms we've earned and the freedoms we've acquired, but becomes less of a mess and less of a place where children are abandoned because some father wanted to leave his wife for a secretary and less of a place where children, poor children, are turned out into single-parent homes and condemned to multi-generational poverty and people destroying themselves with drugs and pornography, if you're looking for that, is going to have to start within people,
which is why I look to a religious revival and I look to that revival coming not from the tents of the people.
I look coming from above because I believe the logic of atheism has played itself out.
Last night, just before I went to bed, I went on Twitter and I gave this interview on the Dave Rubin show and the Rubin Report where I said that as much as I love the writing of Christopher Hitchens, deal with the other Hitchens brothers, much as I love the writing of Christopher Hitchens, his arguments against his arguments for atheism were absurd.
And this has driven people crazy.
I've been getting tweets and emails and all kinds of communications about this.
And somebody put up a video, a 12-minute video of Christopher Hitchens' various debates on atheism saying, and Andrew Clavin calls these arguments absurd.
So it was 12 minutes long, and I thought, all right, I'll listen to it.
So I listened to all 12 minutes.
There was not one argument on it.
Hitchens was a witty, witty guy, and he was just so much fun to watch.
And there were lots of witty insults and lots of moments of him wrong-footing religious people, but he did not make one argument against religion.
And I thought, so why are you tweeting this to me?
I'm perfectly willing to admit Hitchens was a wit, and he was.
Anyway, my point is that, my point is only that if we are going to have a revival of the arts and a revival of our lives, it's going to have to come from within.
We do not want a government telling us what to do.
It doesn't fix anything.
You cannot legislate morality.
And I just think we have lost our way to some degree within.
And that's got to start with us.
And it's got to start with us.
And it's got to start with us figuring this out logically without, it's got to start with us figuring this out without being stupid about it, without throwing the Bible at each other and wagging our fingers in our faces, in each other's faces, and condemning people, because that's never been what Christianity was about.
One last question, and we will take one last Christianity question from Walker Harmon, Dear Supreme Andrew Clavicus the Fearless.
I used to be a practicing Christian.
How did he know that?
How did they know these things?
I used to be a practicing Christian and planned on entering the ministry.
However, after going through a rough period where I felt God was absent in my life, I'm left questioning whether or not he was really ever there.
My question is, how do you remain close to God throughout trials, and how do you assure yourself that your experiences with God aren't just subjective?
Let me start with this last question first.
This is a misunderstanding of the word subjective.
There are some things that are experienced within, and so are subjective.
My love for my wife is experienced within.
There is no place where there is love for my wife where they can extract it.
Maybe there's some chemical that flows through my mind.
I don't know.
But the fact is it is an experience that I have that is borne out by 40 years of marriage.
But it wasn't borne out when I married her.
I had to trust that subjective experience.
It was kind of like Nancy Pelosi would say, I had to pass the law before I knew what was in it.
I had to basically follow that objective, that subjective experience before I found out that it was true.
And the same is true of the subjective experience of God.
Just because you experience him within does not mean he's not really there any more than my love for my wife is not really there.
That would be an absurd statement.
So when people say, as they always do say, if they follow the logic of materialism, they ultimately have to say to you that your very self is an illusion.
And I always ask, an illusion to whom?
To whom is it an illusion?
Your self is something that you experience subjectively, but it is real.
God is something that you experience subjectively, but he too is real.
As to the way that suffering can sometimes make us feel distanced from God, I have total sympathy for this.
This is an emotional fact, this is not a factual or logical problem.
It's an emotional problem.
When you hear somebody say, oh, I lost my wife in a tragic accident and I lost my faith, the logical question that arises is, why didn't you lose your faith when somebody else lost their wife in a tragic accident?
The world was sad before it was sad for you, but now when it's sad for you, it comes home.
And that's being human.
That's being a human being.
When you feel sad, it's hard to know somebody else's sadness.
I can sit here.
I mean, that's why when you say to somebody who's lost his wife, well, God wanted her in heaven or something like that, that's why you're talking crap, because you're not addressing the experience they're having, this terrible experience of loneliness and grief.
This experience of loneliness and grief is at the heart of being a human being.
God is a God of the sad world.
He is not a God of Christian movies where everything is happy and everything works out.
It is this world.
It is this world that he is God of.
And you have to understand him that way in order to get through these periods of lonesomeness, of terror.
This is why, you know, the last thing that Christ, one of the last things Christ said on the cross was he cried out to God, why have you forsaken me?
Why have you forsaken me?
And then after he said that, he said, it is accomplished.
And I've always taken that to mean that that was the moment when God understood what it was like to be us.
Because God is all-knowing, so he can't, he couldn't know before Christ entered the world what it's like to not be all-knowing, to suffer in despair.
So in that moment of Christ's despair, he opened up a pathway back between, a pathway of communication, so that God knows what it is is happening here.
When you go through a rough period, all I can tell you is God knows.
That's all I can tell you, is God understands.
He's been there, he's seen it, he's done it, he knows.
That may not help you with your emotional problem, but just remember, your emotional problem is not a logical problem.
The logical problem of God, the logical existence of God, remains just as logical as it was before, and just as almost, I would say, unavoidable.
Someone in the other question said that I accused conservatives of being intellectually dishonest when they reject God.
That's not quite what I've said.
What I've said is they can't quite explain their conservatism.
They can't explain their conservatism down to the ground without the presence of God, because you can't explain your morality down to the ground without the presence of God.
All right.
A lot of, you know, I love Mail Day.
Mail Day is like one of my favorite days.
It's like, you know, not that I mind talking about Donald Trump all the time, but it's like occasionally.
There is, you know, like as Mel Brooks might have said, there is somebody over Donald Trump.
There's somebody more important than Donald Trump.
Damon Runyon Dialogue00:02:35
Stuff I like.
Yesterday, I mentioned O'Henry's great story, The Gift of the Magi, great Christmas story, The Gift of the Magi.
I was surprised, not just here, but also, you know, in the public, how few people have read what is one of the classic Christmas stories of all time, O'Henry's Gift of the Magi.
So I thought of another one that I really like.
Damon Runyon, one of my favorite writers.
Damon Runyon is a great writer and wrote short stories, so you can read him all the time.
You may know Damon Runyon if you know the musical Guys and Dolls.
It was based on Damon Runyon.
Just here's a short clip from Guys and Dolls that kind of imitates the dialogue of a Damon Runyon story.
Do you know what is at stake here?
Nathan Detroit's crap game.
Because of a doc.
I cannot believe that a number one businessman like you could let himself go and fall in love with his own fiancé.
All right, so Adelaide is my weakness.
Can you not be tolerant that I have got a weakness?
Especially since this weakness is a sad condition that guys are in all over the world?
Look, what's playing at the Roxy?
I'll tell you what's playing at the Roxy.
It's a picture about a Minnesota man so in love with a Mississippi girl that he sacrifices everything and moves all the way to Biloxi.
That's what's playing at the Roxy.
What's in the daily news?
I'll tell you what's in the daily news.
Story about a guy who bought his wife a small ruby with what otherwise would have been his union dues.
That's what's in the daily news.
You can cut it.
What's happening all over?
All right, so that goes on.
I mean, it's a brilliant musical, Frank Lessman musical, and it captures that the way that these guys, it's all about these thugs who hang out around Broadway and they commit crimes.
They're criminals.
They're hitmen.
They're robbers.
They're all these terrible things.
But they all have the same problems that we do.
So they're always talking about the dolls and they have these problems with the dolls and the guys and the dolls and all this stuff.
So he wrote a Christmas story called Dancing Dan's Christmas Gift, which is about a bunch of guys who've just, about a bunch of criminals drinking in a bar until it occurs to one of them that there's an old drunk Santa Claus, a guy who plays Santa Claus and he's passed out of the bar.
And it just occurs to one of them to put on his Santa Claus suit.
And it's what happens after that.
It is a great, great Christmas story about gangsters.
Damon Runyon's Dancing Dan's Christmas gift.
Stuff I like.
We only have one more day.
That's the, I know, one more day before the Clavenless weekend is upon us.
This has been a fascinating week, and I'm sure we will have one more fascinating day to go before we are plunged into the darkness.