Andrew Clavin skewers Slate’s left-leaning panel—Brian Stelter’s biased Trump coverage, Carlotta Hysterix’s admitted failures, and Jorge Killall Gringos’ anti-American hypocrisy—while contrasting Obama’s Chelsea Manning pardon with Democratic media outrage over WikiLeaks. He mocks Davos elites like John Kerry dismissing Trump as fleeting and highlights The New York Times’ budget cuts amid "diversity" hiring shifts, praising Trump’s disruption over establishment inertia. The episode blends media critique with theology—Christ fulfilling Mosaic law yet transcending rigid legalism—and ends with a detour into tattoos, gun safety books, and Clavin’s Vermont appearance, all framed as defiance against cultural gatekeepers. [Automatically generated summary]
The website Slate is hosting a panel next week on how the news media should cover Donald Trump.
Slate, named for the fact that their writers have the intelligence of a roof shingle, has stocked the panel with journalists of diverse political positions ranging from the left to the left.
Moderating the panel, for instance, will be CNN's fair-minded anchorman, Brian Stelter, who has had the fare on his mind ever since he won a stuffed giraffe there by throwing baseballs at a milk bottle.
Stelter issued a statement saying, quote, in covering Donald Trump, we want to make sure that we are as objective about this hate-filled racist scumball as we were about the good and saintly president who preceded him, who was also handsome, to the point of being arousing, and I'm totally straight, I swear, unquote.
Stelter went on to say, while reporting on Trump, at no time do we want our personal opinions to get in the way of our destroying him and salting the earth where once he trod.
Slate's editor-in-chief, Carlotta Hysterix, will also be on the panel and will discuss Trump's effects on women in a loud, shrieky voice before swooning away.
Ms. Hysterics told reporters, quote, during the campaign, we went berserk every time Trump opened his mouth while covering up the failures and corruption of the Democrats.
And that didn't work, so now what?
Personally, after going berserk and lying, I feel I've used up all the techniques I learned in journalism school and I'm looking for some fresh ideas, unquote.
Another panelist will be Dusty Remnant IV, the chief editor of The New Yorker and author of the book, If Not Park Slope, then where?
No really, where?
Remnant wrote a brief 73,000-word essay about the upcoming panel, which said in part, quote, the whiplash-like flabbergastion of disorienting from our frabious Obama-lissimist to this suicidal fathomish of Donaldian melancholia, his cormorant suka-dil boracante massacha-cha-cha-hoopla.
I guess he got tired of looking up words in the thesaurus about halfway through that.
The final panelist will be Univision anchorman Jorge Killall Gringos.
Although to be fair, I'm not sure whether that's his name or just his tattoo.
Mr. Gringos told reporters, quote, Trump is different from other presidents because when we ruthlessly attack him, he ruthlessly attacks us back.
That's anti-American, which I usually consider a good thing, but not in this case.
After all, there's a First Amendment in our country.
Well, not in our country, but in your country, which would be our country if you hadn't stolen it, you yunky dogs, unquote.
Among the topics the panel will discuss, fake news and how to report it, narrative and truth, what's the diff, and burn in hell Donald Trump will get you if it's the last thing we do.
Actually, that last one may just be a piece of graffiti on the wall of Slate's newsroom.
Participating journalists say they look forward to holding the discussion and then vanishing into complete irrelevance.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Blue Apron Arrival00:02:33
I'm for hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dee-dee.
Shipsha-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, hoorah.
All right, it's Mailbag Day.
Yay, hooray!
It's Mailbag.
And it's also, I am so excited, my blue apron stuff is coming today.
We got this email.
This is very cool.
This is this, it's our new sponsor, and they send you a meal that you prepare it yourself with these fresh top-notch ingredients.
And it's instead of, it's like $10 a meal, but instead of just sending out for some stuff that's going to leave you feeling bad about yourself, this is a really, really good meal that comes to your door.
They deliver it to your door, and it's easy to prepare, takes about, I don't know, like they say 30 to 40 minutes.
And this is like every single human being in LA is doing this.
This is what they do now.
Look, we got this mail.
Your blue apron is on the way.
These are the meals.
Pibli-style pork with spinach and citrus rice.
I mean, this is like gourmet eating.
Seared chicken and mashed potatoes with kale, mushrooms, and ve juice.
Indonesian spiced salmon.
This is what they sent me with freak and marinated rash.
This shows up at my door tonight, and then I would like to pretend that I'm going to cook it, but in fact, my wife is going to cook it because otherwise it's dangerous.
So listen, this is, I'm telling you, every single human being, J.H. You've done this.
You loved it, right?
Okay, so it's like you can customize it any way you want.
They send you new recipes.
You can try this for free.
We are going to let you try this for free.
You can check out this week's menu and get your first three meals free with free shipping by going to blueapron.com/slash Andrew.
Please put that in so they know I sent you, blueapron.com/slash Andrew.
You will love how good it feels and tastes to create incredible home-cooked meals with Blue Apron.
So don't wait.
That's blueapron.com/slash Andrew.
Blue Apron, a better way to cook.
Three meals for free.
That's cool.
So they arrived today, and you will hear all about it next week.
I will let you know.
But you can try it out yourself for free.
So we can compare notes.
All right, before we get to the mailbag, which we will get to, I have to talk about the events of yesterday incredibly focused, the narrative of what's going on, because this is a historic moment.
There's no question that we're living through history.
Iran's Right to Represent00:15:42
And, you know, when you're in the midst of history, it's hard to see what's going on.
You're in the midst of this maelstrom, and people are, everybody has an opinion.
And also, everybody has interest.
They have skin in the game.
So they're telling you what they think it means.
But it's really what they think the best interpretation for them is.
Come to the show, we have no skin in the game.
We're going to be dead soon.
So we're just telling you what we see.
And so yesterday, we're going to get to this Chelsea Manning, Obama pardoning Chelsea Manning.
That is an amazing, amazing story.
But before we do that, I want to put it in context of everything that's happening because as we talked about yesterday, they're having this meeting in Davos, Switzerland, that they have every January where the most powerful rich people on earth sit down and decide how they're going to rule our lives.
And these are people from all over the world.
And this is kind of, it's kind of the, they call it Davos man.
You know, it's kind of like this is the globalization gang.
Okay, this is the gang that basically thinks, what do they call it?
The world is flat.
The world is flat.
And yesterday I was joking that it's like Versailles.
And I'm going to show you how like Versailles it is.
Versailles right before the French Revolution, right?
Where everybody's a king and they're discussing things and suddenly they look out the window and it's over.
That's the end of that.
So all these rich people are sitting there and they're discussing globalization in light of Brexit, in light of Donald Trump and all this stuff.
But they don't really understand that the people are rising up and challenging their vision.
Their vision is that the world is just a marketplace.
It's a marketplace and everybody's happier when the markets are free and there's no such culture, ideas.
It's just really How to run the marketplace.
So, you know, yeah, and listen, a lot of this has worked.
Like I said, it has brought poverty down around the world.
So if you don't mind if you're a German girl and you don't mind being raped by Syrian immigrants, you know, it's great.
It's great for them.
They're doing great.
You know, if like you're a French lady and you don't mind the fact that there are neighborhoods in Paris where you can't go anymore, hey, it's fine.
You know, if you live in the Midwest and you have no job and you're killing yourself with prescription opiates, you know, it's like, but think of the poverty rate going down around the world.
And, you know, and if and if you happen to have a religion and believe that you are in a relationship with God that is guiding your life and guiding your children's life and you want to do live out that religion, forget about the Constitution's right to do that because if it gets in the way of their vision of how this is being done, they don't want any part of it.
So part of this, one of the biggest proponents of this is Thomas Friedman.
He wrote a book, I think, was called The World is Flat, and he is just a cheerleader for globalization.
And so he's talking to John Kerry, who is Davos man, you know, like incarnate, basically.
And he asks him about the election of Donald Trump.
And here's what Kerry said.
But the whole thing sounds so darn democratic.
I'm sorry.
I couldn't resist.
That's Thurston Owl from Gilligan's Island, who sounds exactly like John Kerry.
There's absolutely no difference.
All right, so that's not what they're talking about.
Kerry's making this presentation, being interviewed by Thomas Friedman, who, you know, he's on the op-ed page of the Times, which I call Knucklehead Row, and he's one of the chief knuckleheads on Knucklehead Row.
And he's, and Kerry is touting this Iran deal because, oh, how global it is that we just, you know, let Iran have its nukes.
And Thomas Friedman is just sick at what's happening in the world.
And listen carefully to what John Kerry says.
People here, Mr. Secretary, myself included, who are walking around with a pit in their stomach, a fear that so many of the things you just articulated and achieved could be reversed in a week.
I don't believe there will be.
I just don't believe that.
I mean, take Iran, for instance.
If the United States were to decide suddenly and say, hey, we're not going to pursue this and so forth, I'll bet you, I haven't talked to all of them, but I'll bet you that our friends and allies who negotiated this with us will get together and that Russia, China, Germany, France, and Britain will say, you know what, this is a good deal.
We're going to keep it.
And Iran and the rest of it, and they will keep it.
And we'll have made ourselves the odd personnel.
We'll have injured our own credibility in conceivably a reparable way.
Not irreparable.
Things, time, and that's just too dramatic, but we will have done great injury to ourselves.
And it will hurt for the endurance of a year, two years, whatever, while the administration is there.
But it's unnecessary because these people.
A year or two years while the administration is there, right?
So that Donald Trump is not going to last more than a year or two years.
And John Kerry's there to represent the world.
He's not there to represent American interests.
He's there to represent the world.
And if we pull out, the world is going to take care of this without.
That's what those guys are talking about over there.
It's only a year.
It's only a year, two years.
We'll get rid of Donald.
This Donald Trump thing isn't going to last.
It's not going to be like a presidency or anything like that.
Is it?
Is it Dotty?
No, no.
It's not going to be.
I mean, this is, that's what these guys are talking.
They are not listening at all.
They do not see the pitchforks.
They don't see the torches.
They are like Frankenstein in the castle just before the mob arrives.
And listen, the thing is, the newspaper that Thomas Friedman works for, the New York Times, is cutting its budget again.
It's firing.
Just released this 8,700-word report that our friends at Newsbusters got a hold of.
And it's saying what, you know, it's one of those things.
If you've ever worked for a corporation, I have, you know, they have this corporate speak where they say, good news, everyone's fired.
You know, they make it sound like it's a good thing.
And so this is how the New York Times is going to change.
First, they're going to fire people.
They say they're going to have budget cuts, they're going to be firing, and we're going to change the way we cover the news.
Stories written in a dense institutional language that fails to clarify important subjects and feels alien to younger readers.
This is one of the problems.
They have a long string of text when a photograph, video, or chart would be more eloquent.
How about just a cartoon?
You know, not just like a Donald Duck cartoon or something.
This is like they're going to dumb the paper down because they can't read, because they think nobody's listening to them because of the way they're presented instead of the fact that they lie all the time.
They just take at this point of view.
And what they really need to do is increase the diversity of our newsroom.
So they're going to hire some conservatives.
Ha ha ha.
More people of color, more women, more people from outside.
As long as they all agree, they can look like anything they want.
So this is, and this is Hollywood, too, by the way.
You know, one of the reasons you ask yourself, you know, Hollywood, which once spread American values to the world, Hollywood, the Hollywood that was invented by the Jews, basically, and back in the 30s and 40s, spread American values all over the world.
Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, these are people, faces that were recognized all over the world and represented who we are.
Why are they so anti-American?
Because of the global market.
They know they can bring out their stinky little anti-Afghanistan, anti-George W. Bush picture, and somewhere in France, someone will buy some popcorn and say, I knew it.
I knew there's Americans.
I never liked them.
I busted popcorn.
And they're going to make their money back because those movies bomb and bomb and bomb, but they're fine in France.
So these guys are, this thing is falling apart around them and they are not letting go.
They have got their fingers in.
If the New York Times has to reduce itself to cartooning to keep selling their crappy little leftist global vision, they're going to keep doing it.
So now let's talk about the pardon of Bradley, nay Bradley, now Chelsea Manning.
Okay, this is Obama pardons this guy, commuted his sentence.
He was sentenced, I think, to 35 years.
He's going to let him out after seven years.
This is the guy, just to remind you, he was Private Bradley Manning.
He was in Iraq, I think.
He was a low-level, you know, as a private.
He was a low-level intelligence guy.
And he released 750,000 emails, just kind of a dump, to WikiLeaks, which then spread them around.
Now, remember, two days ago, one day ago, WikiLeaks was the greatest villain on earth because they had released John Podesta's email showing that the Democratic Party just cares about power and is a cynical bunch of political hacks.
Okay, and that was evil.
That was, oh, that was Russia.
WikiLeaks is in with Russia.
This is terrible.
This guy released stuff that showed our operational strategy in Afghanistan, showed who we were talking to in Afghanistan, who was cooperating with us.
You know, Catherine Harridge, the great State Department reporter for Fox News, I don't have this clip, but she came on on Brett Baer's show yesterday and said, look, my people are telling me that after this happened, the Taliban went on a kill spree.
I mean, these papers were found in Osama bin Laden's computer when they took him out.
So, you know, she said they went on a kill spree.
If there was an indication that we were working with a guy, you know, named Fred, they just went out and killed everybody named Fred.
They didn't care whether they got the real guy or not.
They were just spreading terror.
Here's Obama explaining his decision to let this guy go.
I don't understand.
Oh, because he's a lame duck.
I get it.
But he is going to do as much damage as he can.
Now remember, when this happened, when this happened, this was the worst thing ever.
The Secretary of State, I can't remember what her name was, but she condemned it in the harshest possible terms.
The United States strongly condemns the illegal disclosure of classified information.
It puts people's lives in danger, threatens our national security, and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems.
So I'm going to tell, what was her name?
Who knows?
She's nobody now, so it doesn't matter.
But we've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
We're going to continue this discussion.
I'm going to tell you how this narrative fits together.
If you come to thedailywire.com, if you subscribe to thedailywire.com for a lousy crummy $8 a month, come on.
You can be in the mailbag, ask questions.
You can ask questions while I speak.
I will change your life on the spot like that.
See you over at The Daily Wire.
OK, so Senator Tom Cotton is asked, I think it's by Jake Tapper.
Yeah, Jake Tapper says, do we know that this cost anybody's life?
And Cotton is not, he's now the senator from Arkansas, but of course he was a, he's a battle veteran, a U.S. Army veteran, led troops.
Do you know of anybody actually through these WikiLeaks found somebody and caused them harm because of the Wikileaks?
Is there any evidence that that happened?
Jake, I don't want to speak about specific cases in part because of the classification levels involved, but I do want to say that it caused serious national security harm.
And what President Obama has done today is going to cause harm as well.
All around the world, in virtually every country, there are people trying to decide whether they want to help America, whether they want to help our military, our intelligence agencies, and our diplomats.
And when they see someone like Chelsea Manning leak highly classified information that reveals those sources, and then they see our president not take seriously the criminal penalties that our military justice system has imposed on Private Manning, it'll cause them pause in whether or not they can cooperate with America and remain safe in the future.
So this is not just past harm, this is ongoing future harm as well.
Our president is sending a message to our enemies that, you know, not so bad to attack America.
You know, he also pardoned an FALN bomber who was a pal with the Castros.
This law he got rid of, you know, they had this wet foot, dryfoot thing where if you escape from Cuba because it's an oppressive communist regime, right, it's not just like, you know, coming over from Mexico, you're an actual refugee.
If you swim through the sharks, if somehow you get your inner tube through the shark-infested waters and come to America, they had this rule that if you got a foot on dry land, you were in.
And by the way, people have described to me how people will come down from the fancy hotels in Miami, come down from all the out-of-the-houses and give money, take dollar bills out of their pockets and give it to the guy as he comes on and pull him out of the ocean to welcome him to America.
No more, no more.
Now, you know, you can sneak in here from Mexico, especially if you're a Muslim bomber, but if you escape from Cuba, you're going back.
You do not have that right anymore.
See, we keep saying Obama's anti-American, but that may be unfair.
He's pro-global.
That's what he is for.
He is for globalism.
He is for, and because America is powerful, because our ideas are better than other people's ideas, because the idea of freedom has changed the entire world, we have become the engine of democracy.
We have become the engine of progress, the defender of democracy.
He hates that.
He said it.
He said it at the UN.
One country shouldn't have the right to set the tone.
So in other words, what he wants is he wants imperialism, but he wants imperialism for the elites.
He doesn't want imperialism for America.
He doesn't want the American empire.
He wants the empire of people like himself.
And they've blown it.
They have blown it.
They have left too many people behind.
They have made too many rules.
They've brought in immigrants who can't adapt, at least can adapt quickly enough.
And they've made—so meanwhile, all this is happening.
And meanwhile, the Democrats are ditching the inaugural, right?
These are all the Democrats.
I don't know the numbers.
Is it close to 60 congresspeople who are not going to the Trump inaugural because Trump is the opposite?
Trump is make America great again, right?
He is the blunt.
Look, he's a blunt instrument.
There's no question about it, but he is a blunt instrument meant to get these clowns' attention because they are not listening.
This is like, you know, what do you do when somebody's not listening?
You know, you clap them, like, hey, I'm talking to you.
That's Donald Trump, okay?
So these are people.
Here's Maxine Waters.
I mean, she's a reliable leftist hack, and she comes in, Congresswoman, she comes in and says she was never going to this.
This is not about the feud that Trump is having with John Lewis.
This is just, she's just not going.
Let me just tell you, after I discovered who Trump is in the way that he conducted himself, I was never going to go to the inauguration.
I never planned.
I never contemplated even going near any of those activities or those events.
I don't like the way he has, you know, misled people, the way he has lied.
I don't like the way he has disparaged folks.
I don't like the way he mimicked and mocked a disabled man.
I don't like the way he talked about women and grabbing their private parts.
And so there's nothing about him that I would want to be involved with.
And certainly the inauguration is a way of welcoming in someone to the presidency and honoring them and respecting them.
I don't honor him.
I don't respect him.
And I don't want to be involved with him.
Okay.
So, you know, remember, respect the office of the presidency.
I mean, John Lewis is the guy who really got this ball rolling.
He's not the guy who started, but he got this ball rolling.
This is civil rights icon.
That's like part of his name now, civil rights icon, John Lewis.
He said that he's always gone to the inaugural, but now he's not going to go.
This is what John Lewis said about Obama.
He says, I think Obama's been treated differently because of his race.
Disparaging Comments00:13:16
I really believe that.
You wouldn't hear with a white Democrat or white Republican speaking someone holler out, you lie.
He said, I've always said, if you don't respect the man, respect the position.
That's what John Lewis said.
He said he has never boycotted an inaugural before.
That was untrue.
It turned out he boycotted W. Bush's inaugural.
So here, let us give Donald Trump the last word here.
Here is Donald Trump being asked about this.
His response, as far as I'm concerned, is hilarious and spot on.
Congressman Lewis is saying he didn't remember that he skipped that inauguration.
He conveniently doesn't remember.
How do you forget if you go to an inauguration?
I can tell you when I was at the inauguration, you don't forget something like that.
So he got caught, and it's pretty bad.
And it's making him look bad, frankly.
It's a very important time.
This is a transition and a very important transition.
And especially because things will be done beautifully, but they'll be done differently than they have been over the past eight years.
And I can say over the past 16 years, I mean, they'll be different.
And, you know, we have to have a smooth transition.
And President Obama understands that very well, and that's why he's been so gracious.
But he understands that.
And I think for him to have grandstanded, because I think he just grandstanded John Lewis, and then he got caught in a very bad lie.
So let's see what happens.
As far as other people not going, that's okay because we need seats so badly.
I hope they give me their tickets.
Are they going to give us the atticky?
I love that.
We need the seats.
Don't show up.
We need the seats.
This is the voice of America.
Like I said, Trump is a blunt instrument.
Whether he'll do a good job or not, we don't know.
Like I also have said, he has been doing great so far.
The people that he has appointed have been terrific.
Watching them being questioned by these clowns in Congress has been inspiring to see adults coming back into the room, to see people who look like they may be honest coming back into the room.
This globalization thing, you know, I'm for free trade, but it's free trade between nations.
Our culture is different from other people's culture.
It is worth defending.
Our culture, I believe, our culture is very close to the right one.
Obviously, we're not perfect, but this idea of freedom, this idea that a man or a woman can do what he or she likes, say what he or she thinks, that there's no such thing as censorable speech.
I mean, this is not the way the rest of the world lives.
And we're not willing to give this away for trade.
We're not willing to give it away even to help people in distant lands.
It starts with America.
It starts with America.
And so this is the people speaking with a blunt instrument, hitting these clowns, these John Kerry, Thurston Powell III clowns over the head with a blunt instrument.
And they're going to feel it eventually.
They're going to know it's not going to be just a year or two years.
It's going to be a while before they can get their claws on power again.
Write the mailbag.
Lindsay, we miss you.
All right.
I'm sorry, this is a hard name to pronounce from Sangeetha Rama Murthy.
Dear Supreme Commander Clavin, have you ever watched The Bachelor or any sort of reality TV dating show like it?
What are your thoughts about shows like this and why do you think they are so popular?
I have watched them because I watched them for research, actually, when I was writing my novel Empire of Lies, which is kind of about a man watching television and realizing that he is seeing a conspiracy unfold in front of him on the TV screens.
And so I watched a couple of reality shows and I found them kind of compelling and interesting.
As the meaning goes out of institutions, the drama and show of those institutions becomes more important.
So as marriage became something that might last forever or if you got tired of each other, nah, not so much.
Suddenly, you know, it wasn't enough to propose to a girl, even get on your knees and ask her to marry her.
Suddenly you had to hire a plane to ride across the sky during a Mets game, you know, like, will you marry me?
You know, and then the wedding had to be your special day.
It's the most special day.
It's like these people spending hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I mean, it's obscene what people spend on weddings.
You know, a wedding can be nice.
You can do a nice wedding for relatively cheap.
If the important thing is the marriage, you can elope if the important thing is the marriage.
As the meaning goes out of these things, we try to hold it there by keeping the drama.
And so what you have is you have this fake, prostituted idea of romance where people are doing things on screen that should be done privately.
They are pretending to have emotions they don't have.
It's like being in high school.
It's like watching high school.
You know, they're pretending they're hyper-dramatizing the emotions.
And it truly is sad.
It truly is sad.
Two people who love one another are not going to find one another on a television show.
They're not going to worry so much about renting a plane as they are about building a life together and how they treat one another and what the purpose of a life together and children is.
So I just think it is as the meaning, the less meaning and the less truth is inside an institution, the more that institution becomes an idol.
And that's why that's what you're watching on TV.
You're watching the idol of love.
You're watching the idol of marriage and courting and things like that.
From Peter Millionus, are there no Smiths?
Are there no Jones?
Dear Pontifex Maximus II Clavin, who was the first, oh, maybe it was Peter.
Okay.
Throughout history, when we look at culture, usually we can get a good idea of ideological landscape of the time.
For instance, thoughts about British imperialism during the Victoria era and how they changed.
When people look back on our time in history, how do you think it'll be interpreted since our culture is so dominated by the left?
Are there historical precedents for such a situation?
Oh, absolutely.
You know, I'm a big fan of the Romantic poets in the Romantic era, and it was an era very much like ours.
If you want to look up my article about Wordsworth in City Journal, I talk about this.
But, you know, like we had the 60s when there was this revolution in culture, and we thought the age of Aquarius was coming.
They had the French Revolution when they thought, oh my God, they thought this was the millennium.
They thought that, you know, everything was going to be great now.
Man was going to be free.
Everything was going to be terrific.
And then it all collapsed, and it became beheading.
It became a world war.
The Napoleonic Wars were a world war.
And so the poets, of course, and the artists were all left-wing.
They were all supporting this revolution, even though the British were cracking down on what they could say.
So many of the poets, Byron, Shelley, they left the country.
Byron left for other reasons as well, but they left the country so they could say what they wanted to say without being arrested.
Wordsworth, who is a guy I like a lot for obvious reasons, Wordsworth, over time, started to say, I made a mistake.
Wordsworth was a guy who went and visited the French Revolution.
He went like a year after the Bastille and visited France and saw some of the things that were going on and was brought into revolutionary ideas, almost wrote something that would get him arrested.
And suddenly he said no.
And he became a Burkean conservative.
And he got more and more conservative and he was assaulted.
Wordsworth, for a great poet, got the worst reviews of anyone who ever lived.
He was one of the few Romantics who lived to be a Victorian, and he was ultimately appointed poet laureate, even though he didn't want it.
I think he turned it down three times.
He said, I'm too old.
I can't write the poetry.
He's the only poet laureate who never wrote an official poem.
Robert Browning slammed them.
Oh, you took the poet laureate, you sold your soul.
He wrote this famous poem, you know, you sold your soul for a blue ribbon or something like this.
He was, I mean, and he was excoriated, Wordsworth, for what he did.
But think about it.
Think about it.
When we look back, who do we read?
We read Wordsworth, you know.
I mean, this was a time when atheism was rising up.
The greatest, the smartest of the poet, poets, I want to say the greatest, the smartest was Coleridge, the one who kept his religion.
Wordsworth came back to Christianity.
And people still, you know, when professors teach him, they stop teaching Wordsworth after his youth because they don't want to talk about the fact that he became a conservative and he became a Christian.
Coleridge never stopped being a Christian, though I think he was a Unitarian for most of, at least in his youth.
Anyway, the point is, the point is, time telescopes things.
There can be a million leftist artists, a million leftist movies, but if some movie like American Sniper tells the truth, when all those other Iraq war and Afghanistan war movies are utterly, utterly forgotten, professors from another era will still be saying, ah, but American Sniper, that was the movie, that was the movie that everyone went to see.
And it doesn't matter whether they're popular, some of the Romantic poets were not popular.
Wordsworth really never had an audience until the end of his life.
The thing is, time telescopes these things, and you really don't have to worry about the lies.
The truth does survive.
I mean, the true poets, the true geniuses do survive.
And there are points about the left that are going to contain the truth.
And so, you know, this situation is in no way unprecedented.
People were just absolutely excoriated and blacklisted for siding with the conservative viewpoint, siding with the conservative viewpoint during the times of the French Revolution.
From Nick, Clavin the Destroyer, what do you think of how the old Mosaic law applies to the U.S. and modern society in general today?
You're going to get me fired because there are different attitudes, different theologies about this.
There are some people, many of whom pay our salaries, who believe that the Mosaic law continues to be enforced.
There are other people like myself who believe that Christ in the crucifixion completed the Mosaic law and despite the wisdom of the Mosaic law, replaced it with faith in himself.
And I'm not one of these people who believes that faith is inactive.
I believe that if you have faith in something, you behave in a certain way.
So if you have faith in gravity, you don't step off a building.
If you have faith in Christ, you don't stab a beggar in the back.
I mean, that's part of the way that you show your faith in Christ.
But the law as the law is completed and done in my theology.
And so I think that obviously the great Jewish thinkers have interpreted these laws such that they remain relevant today.
Thou shalt not murder, still a good one for that.
No, seriously, the Ten Commandments, still brilliant, brilliant condensation of human interaction and all this.
But I do believe that there is a moving humanity in Christ such that you could bring a woman taken in adultery before him and say, the law says she should be stoned.
And Jesus said, well, let him who is without sin throw the first stone.
And no one touched her.
That's something a book can't say.
Only a human can say that.
Only a human being using his connection with God, his conscience, his heart, can make that kind of humane decision in the moment.
And that is the law that I think applies today.
We call it love God, love your neighbor, but that is, you know, that is the law that I think Christ established and the law that is in effect today.
That's my personal theology.
And it's an official theology.
I mean, I'm not making it up.
I'm just saying that other people do feel other ways.
One more.
What is this one?
What is your view on the idea of predestination and the seemingly eternal battle?
You know what?
That's such a complex question.
I'm not going to answer it off the top of my head.
We'll bring it back.
Hold it till next week and we'll come back to it.
What do you think about tattoos from Kyle Boulding?
I know Shapiro's opinion on them as being silly and skin deep.
I have to say, and we have many lovely makeup ladies, especially.
We have many lovely girls here with tattoos.
I hate them.
I just, to me, you know, I think Shapiro and I are as one on this.
I think we walk the same walk on this.
I think you, listen, like all men, I love that women make themselves beautiful.
I love the fact that they make themselves beautiful.
Girls do girl things, men like that, because we like girls.
So we like when girls do girl things.
There's something about this that seems self-destructive and self-what's the word I'm looking for?
Mutilating, thank you.
Yeah, self-mutilating.
Obviously, you know, you get a small tattoo, you're not really doing anything big, but I think when I see people with these big tattoos and really tattoos cover over their body, I think something's wrong.
I think that I want them to like themselves a little more than that.
I don't like piercing either.
I'm not, listen, I'm not passing, making a moral judgment.
I'm telling you my own aesthetic feeling when I see them.
And Jess, if you want to come over and smack me after the show, you can.
But I just, I do not like that stuff.
I think, you know, stick with makeup.
It makes you, it's nice, it's fun, we like it, you know, but stop.
And by the way, it goes, it goes for men too.
When I see the, I see even more men just completely decorated, like something out of Ray Bradbury, with these tattoos, and I really just want to smack them.
I just think like, you know, dude, you know, one day you're going to be an old wrinkled guy with these tattoos on you, you know, and it's like, well, I can take them off.
Yeah, you know, don't put them on.
Why We Avoid Body Modification00:02:23
That's a lot easier.
All right.
Stuff I like.
You know, I never use stuff I like to, I made a vow that I would never use stuff I like to plug my friends' books and my friends' movies and all that stuff.
But this, I'm making this exception because, and this guy isn't really, he's a pal.
He's a guy I know, but he's not really a friend of mine.
A guy named Yehuda Reimer.
Many years ago, he came to me with this idea.
He had an idea to write a book about how to, a book about gun safety for children, a children's book about gun safety.
When he told me this, I laughed out loud because children's books, children's books are part of the industry unto themselves.
They are very, very strictly governed by the gatekeepers and the editors and all this stuff.
And the idea of a book about gun safety passing through these leftist publishers never happened.
But of course, the publishing industry, like everything else, like the guys in Davos, have lost their grip on power.
And now people can self-publish and they can bring it out through small publishers and all this.
And Yehuda somehow managed to get this book called Safety On.
Safety On.
It's a father explaining to his child how to behave around guns, how to stay safe around guns.
And if I were the NRA, I would be selling this thing like, you know, like crazy.
I think it is a great idea.
It's a great idea if you have a gun in the home to get it for your kids.
So you make sure, you know, never go near it, never touch it, go to an adult, all that stuff that you need to know.
I am telling you, five years ago, you could never have gotten this stuff in print in a respectable way.
And Yehuda has done it.
Good for him.
If you have guns in your home, if you have kids in your home, and you prefer to keep them, some people don't, but if you prefer to keep your kids around, safety on.
It really is a great idea.
And it's a good book.
I went through it early on and I saw the manuscript along the way and it really is good.
All right, one more day before the Clavenless weekend.
And then I'm flying off.
It's not a totally clavenless weekend because I'm flying off to do Mark Stein's new show.
So Mark has graciously invited me to fly to Vermont in the middle of winter.
Thanks, Mark.
I really appreciate it.
But I will, so it won't be a totally clavenless weekend.
But we have one more day.
And each day, as I always say, every day is a day.