Andrew Clavin’s Hope and Fear and Hope satirizes the Nativity as a consumerist spectacle—wise men haggling over power tools at Best Buy—before pivoting to 2016’s political divide: Michelle Obama’s despair vs. Trump’s "hope" rallying working-class America against elite decadence, defined by regulatory excess and moral decay. He celebrates Trump’s victory as a quiet revolution but warns of judicial overreach post-Scalia, fearing progressive erosion of the Second Amendment. His 2017 hopes include deregulation, a conservative Supreme Court, and Middle East pragmatism, though he cautions against Trump’s potential authoritarianism. Culturally, he praises Secondhand Time’s spiritual void but mocks Hollywood’s leftist bias, hinting at a post-Trump shift toward conservative narratives, all framed by a Christmas message rejecting judgment in favor of divine joy. [Automatically generated summary]
It's Christmas time at last, and many people are returning to their Bibles to read once again the ancient story of God's love for his creation.
But what do they know?
Personally, I prefer to page through the flyers and catalogs I get in the mail and read the great gospel story there.
As I understand it, one day in ancient Galilee or some such place, an angel appeared to the Virgin Mary where she lay on her bed and the angel said to her, Behold, Mary, there's an amazing sale at JCPenney with sheets and bedding being offered at up to 50% off.
Also, you're pregnant.
And Mary arose and said, Wow, I better get to the mall right away.
Wait, what?
But by then, the angel had disappeared.
Now, a decree went out from Caesar saying that all men must be counted so they could pay their fair share of Caesar's mansions and dancing girls, lest there be like inequality or something.
And on hearing this decree, Joseph the carpenter brought his ass from the stable and put a padded saddle on it because he knew dealing with Caesar would give his ass a pain.
And when Joseph arrived in Bethlehem, Mary gave birth to a son and laid him in a manger.
And by some miracle, the animals began to speak and said to her, We hear there are some incredible bargains on cribs at Ethan Allen, which is great because frankly, we'd like our manger back so we can get something to eat.
Meanwhile, a choir of angels appeared to some shepherds singing, Glory in the highest.
Best Buy is offering Sony TVs for as much as 30% off, which is not even to mention the fact that the Savior of the world has been born in Bethlehem, so you might want to stop off there as well.
And the shepherds went forth rejoicing, shouting, hallelujah, 30% off a Sony.
Also, that other thing they said sounded good too, but I forget now what it was.
And wise men came from the east and visited the holy family, saying, our sacred books have told us that there are tremendous savings here in Bethlehem.
And Mary said to them, yes, truly, my son has come to save all mankind.
And the wise men said, actually, we were thinking more about a deal on power tools and maybe a workbench.
And they went home by another way.
And that's the story of why every year at this time, we celebrate the coming of a jolly fat man who brings toys to all the girls and boys.
Also, we remember the child born in Bethlehem for some reason.
But the important point is the toys.
Lots and lots of toys.
Cash makes a very nice gift as well.
And so as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us everyone, because otherwise we are in big, big trouble.
Different Experiences, Different Hope00:04:47
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boom.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-deep.
Ship-shaped hipsy-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.
That's it.
We're done.
There he is, the drummer drumming.
Austin's 12 days of clay.
It's putting the clavin back in Christmas, I think, is the important thing.
Wow, the year is, what a year.
What an amazing year 2016 has been.
And we have been here through every step of the way.
I mean, this is just, we're going to take a look back at the year, quick looks at the best and the worst, or my favorites and least favorites.
And we're going to have Christian Toto, one of the very few film critics out there with conservative values, will come on in the second half of the show.
And you know what?
We're going to stay on Facebook the whole time just as our Christmas present to you.
As you see, you can see we wrapped it and everything, the whole place.
But that doesn't mean you shouldn't subscribe.
You should.
All right, let's take a look.
We had come to the end of 2016 with a country having two entirely different experiences.
One is the experience of Michelle Obama.
Here she is.
Your husband's administration, everything, the election, was all about hope.
Do you think that this administration achieved that?
Yes.
I do, because we feel the difference now.
Yeah.
See, now we're feeling what not having hope feels like.
You know?
Hope is necessary.
It's a necessary concept.
And Barack didn't just talk about hope because he thought it was just a nice slogan to get votes.
I mean, he and I and so many believe that if you, what else do you have if you don't have hope?
Okay, so that's one half the country.
They have the country that is concentrated in California and New York.
They found, they figured out, I think if you took away California and New York, Trump won this election by something like 3 million votes.
Is that what it is?
It's like some really large number.
He won the election.
So in California and New York, which we I think can safely call the collection where the elites collect, these are the archipelago of the elites.
Hope is gone.
These people are hopeless.
On the other hand, here's Donald Trump talking about hope to his supporters.
Michelle Obama said yesterday that there's no hope but I assume she was talking about the past not the future because I'm telling you we have tremendous hope and we have tremendous promise and tremendous potential We are going to be so successful as a country again.
We are going to be amazing.
And I actually think she made that statement, not meaning it the way it came out.
I really do.
Because I met with President Obama and Michelle Obama in the White House.
My wife was there.
She could not have been nicer.
I honestly believe she meant that statement in a different way than it came out.
Because I believe, I believe there is tremendous hope.
And beyond hope, we have such potential.
That was actually kind of uncharacteristically generous of Trump right there.
He didn't go to his usual pugilistic mode because that's exactly what she meant.
She meant that with the election of Donald Trump, Donald Trump, all, yeah, whatever.
Donald Trump, all hope is gone.
Abandon all hope, ye who Trumpian enter here, you who enter into the Trumpian universe.
And that is the way that California and New York are feeling, and the rest of the country and many of us are feeling that actually, no, we are feeling a thrill of hope, as the Christmas Carol says.
So what's the difference?
And the difference has to do with exactly why I ended up voting for Donald Trump.
Even though I ended up voting for him reluctantly, it has to do with exactly why.
Let me tell you my least favorite and my most favorite moment of this year politically, speaking politically.
My least favorite moment came very early on in the year in February.
I'm sitting with my wife in a cafe in Santa Barbara and we just went up there for, you know, to have a pleasant day and we're sitting having having coffee and sandwich.
And I have different people react to bad news in different ways.
There's some people I've seen, like they hear someone has died or something and they just burst into tears.
My Least Favorite Moment00:10:53
They get it immediately.
Some people shut down.
I just go into this moment of deep, deep stillness.
When I hear something really that shakes me, I just go into this deep stillness and I start to assess.
And I know I'm going to have to feel the pain eventually, but I feel it like over sort of, I sort of let it leak into my system bit by bit instead of just feeling the blow right away.
I felt like that.
I went into that stillness when this man, the announcement came, that this man had died.
This is cut seven.
Much of the harm that has been done in recent years by activist constitutional interpretation is made possible by a theory which says That unlike an ordinary law, which doesn't change, it means what it meant when it was enacted and will always mean that.
Unlike that, the Constitution changes from decade to decade to comport with, and this is a phrase we use in our Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, we, the court does, to comport with, quote, the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.
In other words, we have a morphing constitution.
And of course, it's up to the court to decide when it morphs and how it morphs.
That's generally paraded as the, quote, living Constitution.
And unfortunately, that philosophy has made enormous headway, not only with lawyers and judges, but even with John Q. Public.
And that, of course, is, for those who weren't watching, is Antonin Scalia, Justice Antonin Scalia, talking to my good friend Peter Robinson, the best talk show host anywhere who should be on PBS if anything were fair.
But Scalia's death struck me so hard because it changed the entire nature of the election that was coming.
I am not, as anyone who listens knows, I am not a catastrophist.
I'm not somebody who gets hysterical, thinks the end of the country is coming.
I was not somebody who thought Barack Obama had destroyed America.
In fact, in fact, I thought one of the salient points about Barack Obama is that everything he's done has failed.
And when things fail, people fix them.
It's only when things are successful that, you know, it was the fact that Caesar Augustus was successful that ended the Roman Republic.
If he had failed, the Roman Republic would have been brought back.
It was only the fact that Hitler's invasions and his economic policies were successful at first that solidified his standing.
Barack Obama has failed at everything, and everything I think he has done will be erased.
So I didn't think that a disaster had come, but I realized that this, that the court was up for grabs, and the left can appoint justices who will erase the Second Amendment and the First Amendment in a heartbeat.
So it turned what would have been a change election into an oh-no election.
You know, it turned, it made the stakes very high.
And, you know, I really was looking at it, and I, you know, people were saying, oh, my God, Alex Jones, I remember, oh, my God, he was murdered and all this stuff, because they couldn't accept the fact that bad news is like this.
It's meaningless, you know.
It just, like, comes out of the blue.
He was an old man with heart trouble.
He knew he didn't have long to live.
And it was just one of those tragic things that really changed the entire face of the election.
Here was my favorite moment of the election.
This, it had to be, let me just see what cut this is.
This is number nine, cut number nine.
It was Donald Trump versus almost all the experts, and as of right now, it looks like Donald Trump was right.
How do we explain those, that math?
I'm not sure you can.
I just think that we should have seen this coming.
America is crying tonight.
This is the time for real wisdom.
You want real wisdom?
I don't have that to offer at this hour.
The path here is getting to be very narrow.
It's hopeless with terrible values and incompetence galore.
This is a sadness.
It is a mourning moment.
And it's, you know, it's troubling.
How do we explain how this is possible?
We've overlooked rural America a bit too much.
No one counted the yard signs.
We're in a weird, weird situation right now.
And it is a moment filled with fear.
Do the brains that got this guy elected president tonight apply to being a good president?
I hope there's some connection.
Otherwise, we have a dingbat as president.
Tonight is hard to put into perspective.
It was the salty tears of the mainstream media.
I drank them like champagne.
It was so good.
It was better than the fact that Trump won.
It was not—it was maybe not better than the fact that Republicans won across the country in every aspect, in every place where they were up for grabs.
But the salty tears and bitterness and fear and anger of the mainstream media was a delight.
And this speaks to what—why—what the division in the country is, why one side of the country is hopeless and the other is filled with hope, and why I ultimately voted for Trump.
Leftism is decay.
Leftism is decadence.
Leftism is a gathering of the spoils that came from conservatism and distributing them and just, you know, just doling them out.
It's saying don't cut down that tree to build that city because that tree can never be replaced.
It's a—it's a—the death of energy.
It is regulations that stop people from inventing things.
It's, oh, please, don't do that.
Don't say that.
Don't go there.
Don't think that.
It's—it's all—it is all the things that stop a vibrant, living country from exploding with growth and getting greater and greater and greater.
And here's the thing.
This is an observation made by one of my favorite thinkers on Earth—he's no longer on Earth, but one of my favorite thinkers who visited Earth was Jacques Barzain.
And Jacques Barzain pointed out that decay, decadence, is good for elites.
Elites like decadence.
It's very pleasant.
There's lots of sex, and any mistakes can be paid for.
They have the money to pay for any mistakes they make and erase any mistakes and, you know, take care of their mistresses, take care of their abortions and all this stuff.
There's lots of inequality, and the elites are on the good side of that.
And when they're in decadence, people become very far apart, and elites are having a great time.
They're—they're doing fine.
The stock market—that's why Barack Obama the other day said, oh, the economy is growing, meaning the stock market was high.
That's not the same thing as there being jobs.
There's lots of—entertainment becomes very sick and full of, you know, nihilistic, sexual, twisted stuff.
And elites love that.
You know, yeah, that's getting down to the real reality of this.
You know, this is what I saw.
And what I saw in Hillary Clinton left—and when I say the elites, I'm including myself.
I am an elite.
Everybody here at The Daily Wire is an elite.
We are people who work in the chattering classes.
It is very comfortable for us.
When P.J. O'Rourke said he was voting for Hillary Clinton because she was awful, but she was awful within normal bounds, that's what he meant.
This decadence was very, very comfortable.
And that is the thing that Donald Trump blew up.
He blew it up.
The victory of Donald Trump blew it up.
He said, we are not going to go.
That's why—that's why his slogan, Make America Great Again, spoke directly into the concerns of the non-elites, the ordinary people, the people who suffer under decadence.
Now, that means—that makes this a quiet revolution.
It's not a real revolution.
There aren't people in the streets, thank God, because you wouldn't like it.
Believe me, that may sound good, but it ain't.
You know, it is a—this is an electoral democratic revolution.
Revolutions are dangerous.
I am not saying they're not.
I have hopes, and I have fears, and I have hopes, you know.
I mean, I'm not sure what's going to happen next.
But—but revolutions happen for a reason.
And this one happened because we were not quite ready to go gentle into that good night, and I am glad for that, and that is what I am hoping for.
My hopes for the new year, politically, smaller government by cutting—destroying regulation.
I have high hopes for that.
High hopes for that.
Great Supreme Court nomination.
Medium hopes.
I'm afraid that we'll have a good one, and then the Senate will shut it down, and Mitch McConnell won't have the guts to basically go in and ram it through as it needs to, and then Trump will back off.
That's my fear.
My hope is that somehow they will stand tall and get it through.
My third hope, Paul Ryan's reform agenda gets at least some traction, that Paul Ryan can maybe do some deals with the dealmaker Trump and get something going.
Moderate to low hopes.
I'm a little bit afraid of that.
And I would like to see our Middle East policy become pragmatic but vigorous.
That's what I want.
I do not want to go to war with every country in the Middle East.
I do not want to be killing people for no reason that I can understand.
I do want to protect Israel.
It's the knife edge of freedom, and they're also God's people, and so we ought to be on their side.
Just saying, just saying.
But, you know, they are the knife edge of freedom.
We need to protect them.
I want to punish not only terrorists but terrorist regimes, and I want to make sure we are safe at home.
I do have pretty high hopes for that.
Trump looks like right now that he's doing the right thing on that.
My fear, my major fear, one day Donald Trump and Paul Ryan are going to clash, and Paul Ryan and the Senate and the Congress are going to clash.
And they're not going to want to give President Trump what he wants.
And President Trump, when he is thwarted, becomes a bully.
And he says terrible things, and he does terrible things.
He calls people names.
He lies about them.
We've seen this with him.
It is a personality flaw.
You know, he has many things that I really like about him, his pragmatism, his go-get-em attitude, all that stuff, you know, his political incorrectness.
Love it.
Love it all.
The bullying stuff is a personality defect.
And I'm afraid, what I'm afraid of is that when that happens, McConnell and Ryan will not have the support of the people.
And the problem there is not who wins the fight.
It is keeping our separation of powers intact.
And so I really hope, I'm a little bit afraid that Ryan and McConnell will not have the backbone to stand up against that onslaught.
My hope is, however, my hope is that in that moment, the people will remember Antonin Scalia.
And will remember that the Constitution, as Antonin Scalia said, is not living, it's dead, meaning it means what it says.
And in that sense, it is the living dead.
I hope that the Constitution and its eternal values and its brilliant, brilliant defense of those eternal values will come to our rescue.
I actually believe that's going to happen.
I actually do believe that.
I think we're going to be okay.
There's going to be some wacky moments coming ahead.
This guy is a wacky president, but he's doing great so far.
I really like what he's doing so far.
And, yeah, I have hope.
I'm going to take a quick, before we bring on Christian, I'm just going to ask him to hang on, be a little patient.
I'm going to go through my quick rundown of my favorites in culture.
Hollywood's Post-Trump Shift00:13:42
I really, my favorite book that I read this year, and I had it on Stuff I Like, was Secondhand Time by the Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Aleksevich.
It is a series of interviews with people who lived through the fall of the Soviet Union.
And to me, as a religious guy, it was a testimony to what happens to people when you force them to live outside the truth, not just the truth of how politics work, not just the truth of how human beings work, but the ultimate truth of living without God.
And it is a terrible, tragic, and yet beautiful portrait of people whose souls, whose souls have been twisted by being denied the simple truth that God is there and God loves them and God supports their individuality and their individualism.
And it is just, it's a beautiful, beautiful piece of work.
It's all interviews.
It's oral history.
Best movies?
Movies, I think, I think, it was a lousy year for movies, basically.
But yeah, a lousy year for movies.
But I really liked Hail Caesar, the Coen brothers' takeoff on the old movies.
Great, very funny, very affectionate for the old movies, and yet also had a true conservative message about work and faith.
That was great.
Hell or High Water was one of the best.
The shoot-em-up story, the, it really was, Chris Pine and, what's his name, Ben Foster, yeah, both great in it.
But the real star for that was Taylor Sheridan, the writer who also wrote Sicario, just a great crime writer, and he did a great job.
I also had a personal favorite, was one of mine was 10 Cloverfield Lane, which I just thought was such a good thriller.
So neat and tight and right, and had the discovery of Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who put into, who brought alive my theory that the greatest actresses, the ones who become the big stars, are the ones who show the most vulnerability.
And she just walked on stage, and you wanted to take care of her from the split second she was on stage, and every moment she was in danger.
It was terrible.
Best TV?
Two easy picks.
Obviously, Game of Thrones.
Best show ever made.
The Battle of the Bastards was, one of the great war scenes in all of cinematic history on screen, just great.
Not because of the way it was directed, but because of the way it was, well, partly because of the way it was directed, because you understood every single thing that was happening, you understood everything that was at stake, you understood every strategic move, and it was so exciting, so beautiful, so brilliant.
The other was the last season of Rectify.
I really recommend this.
Nobody's watching it, because it's a little tough about a man who, it's created by Ray McKinnon, an actor.
Aidan Young stars as a man who has been on death row for 20 years and then is released, and it is just a beautiful, intelligent, touching, moving show.
I think it's got some tough stuff.
My wife didn't want to watch it because of some of the sexual stuff in it, but it's really just a soap opera, but it's a soap opera with deep intelligence.
That stuff was really good.
Let's bring on Christian Toto, one of my favorite critics.
He is, I just want to make sure I, he is the editor of Hollywood in Toto, HollywoodinToto.com, and he now has a new podcast.
Are you there?
Oh, there he is.
Oh, I can't hear you.
Give me sound, give me sound.
Wait.
We're, we're, can you hear him?
Uh-oh.
All right, we're going to call you back, Christian.
We'll go right back to you.
You know, this wasn't, this wasn't a great year for, for film, but I think a lot of what's happening in film is moving over to television.
And for some of us, that's difficult to watch because we like the movies and we like going to the big screen and seeing all these things.
But if you're looking for human drama, it is all on television.
And another one of my favorites has been the new series of Black Mirror.
Is that what it's called, Black Mirror?
Yeah.
Really good, really spooky, really scary.
And, uh, and that, and that really has been, that, that's kind of been it.
Is there anything I'm missing?
Is it, did I miss any movies that you loved that, uh, I can't think of any.
You guys love the Star Wars and the superheroes and Doctor Strange.
Doctor Strange was.
Doctor Strange, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's not, it's not that I don't like those things.
Uh, I'll go back since we have to, we have to vamp a little bit because Christian isn't with us.
Uh, two more of my favorite books, uh, Ron Cherno's Washington biography, which I had actually read before, but I read again.
And one of the things I loved about this book, especially in an election year, was it reminded me that, uh, politics in America has always been insane.
I mean, here was the guy, here was George Washington, who had an army, he had the love of the people, he had a government that hadn't been formed.
Virtually anyone else on Earth would have become king.
I, I really do believe that.
I don't believe there are ten men in history who would not have become king.
And instead, he went to Congress, laid down his sword, turned his sword over to the civilian population.
And, and ultimately, he became president.
And when he became president, he was accused continually of wanting to be king.
It was just, like, constant.
And, like, that, that was the, the level, you know, oh my God, this, you know, we fought this whole revolution and now George Washington is going to be king.
The one guy, the one guy on Earth who didn't want to be king when he could have been king, and he was constantly accused of it.
And that's one of the reasons why I try to keep the rhetoric down, you know, I try to keep the rhetoric about tyranny down.
I try to keep the rhetoric about the end of the country down, because it's been the end of the country since the country began.
And so, I'm not, not always that worried.
The other thing, you know, I didn't read a lot of good novels this year.
One of the things about this year was, you know, normally I'm writing a novel.
And this, because of my memoir came out, and because I was starting the show and trying to get the show up and running, I was actually reading a lot of policy stuff, a lot of wonky stuff to bring myself so I could be informed and all this stuff.
I didn't read, usually I'm steeped in, like, classic novels, and I didn't read any.
The one novel that I just actually loved was The Girl on the Train, the thriller by Paula Hawkins.
The movie was, I didn't like the movie.
I thought the movie was, like, really muddy and didn't have any emotions in it.
Just, have we got them?
No.
Yeah, okay.
Didn't have any, you know, that was one of the things that was really interesting.
This is part of one of these thrillers, one of these new girl thrillers, you know, Gone Girl, and a couple of, there have been a couple of them, Girls Who Lose Their Memory.
It's basically, it's really interesting.
I came up as a thriller writer in the 90s, and I was part of the invention of what they were calling the yuppie thriller, which was ordinary, it's kind of neo-Hitchcockian stuff, ordinary people getting into these incredible moments of danger.
And now they are doing those again, but they're doing them with women.
And so Gone Girl is one of them, and Girl on the Train was another one.
So, the culture this year, not great, but really interesting.
And there was an article in Hollywood Reporter.
You know, this is what we've been fighting for, and a lot of times conservatives don't understand the culture, and they think it's all propaganda.
It's just a way of, you know, transmitting their messages, and that's not true.
But when you silence every conservative voice, when you blacklist every conservative voice, the culture does begin to erode the values that we care about.
And it does begin to, like, slow dripping on sand, begin to cut from under your feet the values that you hold dear.
And that's why a guy like Barack Obama, who has absolutely no experience, no skill, but looks like, looks like what we've been told the great black American president was going to look like, that is why he gets elected, because they control the culture.
There was an article in Hollywood Reporter last week, I think, that pointed out, you know, Hollywood Reporter is a trade magazine, so they know all the people in town, that pointed out that the election of Trump was such a shock to the system of the elites that people have started, in Hollywood, have started to question themselves.
I'll believe it when I see it, but the interviews went like this.
You know, we have a character who's a conservative in this TV show, but maybe we should make him less of a cartoon.
You know, they had actual stories of actual producers calling actual writers and saying, take this conservative character and make him more real, because they felt that they had ignored the audience who was represented by Donald Trump.
Now, if that's true, if that is true, then Trump will have done an amazing thing.
I mean, if I had two big dreams for the Donald Trump presidency, here's what they would be.
One would be that, that the elites start to realize that they have it good because of decadence, and maybe that's not so good for the rest of the country.
And if the elites start to realize that and start to, you know, do what Hollywood used to do, because, you know, Hollywood was always filled with elites and weirdos and eccentrics and artists and people who didn't share the life of the people, but because it was run by mostly Jewish businessmen who loved the country, they would say, let's serve the country.
Let's show the people what they want.
Let's show them themselves at their best.
Let's show them their priests as heroes.
Let's show them their institutions as sound.
Let's show them their values as heroic.
Let's do that.
And that not only sold America to America, it sold America to the world.
It was the greatest single cultural invention.
The movie business has been the greatest single cultural invention of America.
And to have that come back a little bit, to have those people, these elites, these guys in their bubble who are what John Nolte calls bubble bum, to have that bubble burst by the election of Donald Trump and have them start to think like, hey, you know, maybe we should call in a guy who thinks that Jesus is not a bad guy, you know, who thinks that, you know, that Christianity is not a bad thing.
That would be an amazing thing.
And the other thing would be this.
If Trump is successful enough to reduce the mainstream media to the pure irrelevance, which they deserve, that that's only part one.
And the other part is that a new news media is created that is dedicated to telling the truth for everybody, for telling both sides, for telling the truth in incidents and telling both sides and balancing their staff.
You know, guys, I'm going to have to cancel Christian.
I'm sorry.
I would have loved to have had him here.
Those are my hopes and dreams for the future of the country.
I'm feeling pretty good about it.
Let me leave off just with one quick talk about Christmas.
I get it.
Every time I talk about religion, somebody lambastes me, you know, every time.
And a lot of them think that when two people over the last couple of days have left notes calling me a universalist, meaning I think that all religions are the same, they're not obviously listening to me.
I only think one religion is true, although I do think that people can come closer to that religion sometimes when they're not mouthing the words of that religion than they do otherwise.
You know, what's that?
We did just get it.
Okay.
All right.
Yeah.
No, I think we have to wrap it up.
But, you know, for me in America anyway, too often Christianity and Christ's arrival are just seen as a license for me to condemn your sex life or somehow a team that I'm on that is better than the other team.
Or it's a blessing on conservatives and a curse on all liberals.
And those things are the concerns of men, not of God.
You know, obviously your individual moral life and our moral life as a people is a concern of God.
But you're judging other people's moral lives, not what really God is interested in and not what this is about.
The birth of Christ, the birth of Christ is good news because it means that God acted in history to open up a path from your heart to joy.
And that, if anything, if there is something that I've wanted to communicate in this show, it is that.
That God has done a specific thing at a specific time to open up a path between your heart and joy.
And the thing is, when I say your heart, I don't mean the heart you pretend to have, the heart you show to other people, or the heart even you only pretend to have to yourself, or the heart that other people are showing on Facebook, or the heart that other Christians are telling you that they have that's so much better than yours.
I'm talking about your heart with all its anger and its perversions and its craziness and its sin and its envy and its bitterness, all those things.
The pathway from that heart to joy is opened, and it is opened on the original Christmas Day, and it is opened now and forever.
That path, obviously, is like all good things.
It is an upward path through dark places.
But every step of the way, I promise you, is a step of joy.
And when I say joy, what I mean is vitality in life, what Christ called life in abundance.
It is open to you, and that is the real Christmas, is that path between your heart, as it is right now, as it is right now.
And believe me, I know how black it is because mine is too.
And from that heart to the joy of God is a real thing.
So don't be afraid.
Don't be afraid.
Don't let any Christians, loudmouthed, judgmental, nasty Christians make you afraid to walk that path.
In fact, don't be afraid at all.
Do not be afraid.
Do right.
Fear nothing.
The Lord has plans for you, not for evil, but for good.
Plans to give you a future and a hope, and the Lord has come.
I'm Andrew Klavan.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
Have a merry, merry Christmas and a very happy new year.
And we will be back in 2017.
God only knows what it has in store, but we will see you then.