Ben Shapiro compares Trump’s presidency to Reagan’s, citing DeVos’ confirmation and trade policies as evidence of populist conservatism despite media hysteria over Russia remarks. He mocks left-wing outrage—like protests at Schumer’s home—and dismisses moral equivalence debates as overblown, framing them as media-driven. The episode ties Trump’s era to a broader crisis of truth, tracing skepticism from Luther’s Reformation to Hamlet’s despair and Romanticism’s rejection of objective reality, questioning whether subjective perception undermines natural rights. Ultimately, it suggests modern political battles reflect centuries-old struggles over how to define truth itself. [Automatically generated summary]
The Donald Trump organization has announced it is opening up a new Trump Tower inside the head of the editor of the New York Times.
A spokesman for the Trump organization said Donald Trump already owned the real estate in the editor's head, and while the space was narrow there, there was still plenty of room in it since there seemed to be nothing else in there besides thoughts of Donald Trump.
Early blueprints of the tower show that the foundation will be laid in the seething froth of hysterical bias located at the base of the editor's brainstem, and the tower should rise unimpeded through the top of the editor's head since the top of his head exploded directly after Trump won the election.
Times editor Blithering Prevarication III said he welcomed the construction of the new Trump Tower inside his head since it would give him a place to neatly store all the blithering prevarication Trump headlines that are now littering the front page of the former newspaper itself.
These headlines include, some say many feel sources report experts pick Donald Trump as worst president ever.
Celebrity stylists say Trump's hair reveals ties to fascism.
Observers wonder why they never see Donald Trump and Steve Bannon at the same time.
And why stupid Americans stupidly voted for stupid Donald Trump because they're so stupid.
At a joint press conference Mr. Prevarication held with his psychiatrist, the editor of the former newspaper addressed an empty room full of imaginary reporters saying, quote, many people say I have become obsessed with Donald Trump and that I think every news story should be about Trump and that I even think Trump is hacking my dreams and broadcasting Trump thoughts directly into my Trump head through the Trump fillings in my Trump teeth.
Trump, Unquote.
Mr. Prevarication went on to assure the reporters, these accusations are entirely untrump.
A spokesman for the Trump organization said the new Trump Tower inside the editor's head would include some never-before-seen innovations, like a gigantic photograph of Donald Trump's face on every wall, a recording of Trump's inaugural address playing at full volume on a loop in every room, and of course, large gold letters spelling Trump to be used instead of furniture and fixtures.
The spokesman said this decor was meant to blend in with the decor that was already in the Times editor's head, so they would not cause much of a change.
To commemorate the construction of the new tower, the New York Times issued a special edition with the headline, Trump to build new Trump Tower, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.
The entire article consisted of Trump's name written again and again.
After writing the article, the Times editor chased his wife through the house with an axe, shouting, here's Johnny, before returning to live in the Trump Tower inside his head, where he will continue to edit new editions of the New York Trump.
Trump Trump.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Shipshaw, tipsy-topsy, the world is a bibby-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Hooray, hurrah.
It's Tuesday, and you know what that means?
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All right, some news coming down the pike.
Even as we go on the air, Betsy DeVos was just confirmed as education secretary.
This is excellent, excellent news.
A couple of silly Republicans ducking out because I guess they were afraid of the teachers' unions, but Mike Pence broke the tie.
That is a first in history that a cabinet member needed the vice president to break the tie.
Someone on TV last night called it very unique, which you will never hear anyone in this room ever say and survive because unique means one of a kind, so you can't be very one of a kind.
You can only be unique or not unique.
But anyway, Betsy DeVos, these are important.
These are the things we talk about here.
Betsy DeVos is in.
There was a piece, I think it was in the Washington Post, commemorating Ronald Reagan's 106th birthday, which was yesterday, comparing Donald Trump to Ronald Reagan, which normally would not be even interesting except for the brilliant guy who was writing the article and for the fact that he has been right about everything.
So we're going to get to that later on in the show.
First, let's just cover some of the news.
Of course, Trump's order to temporarily ban refugees and to ban people coming in from seven countries that the Obama administration deemed as dangerous so they can check on their vetting procedures.
That has been suspended by a Seattle judge, James Robart, because he said, kind of ridiculously, he said that it was bound to be overturned, so I'm suspending it, which is he's actually allowed to do that, like if he thinks it's a likely case that it will be suspended.
But why he thinks that, nobody knows, and whether he actually, whether a Seattle judge actually has the right to do that, I'm not sure.
Donald Trump, of course, responded with a tweet calling him a so-called judge, and the hearts of the media broke in twain for the feelings of this judge.
You've got to watch this.
This is incredible.
George Snuffalupagus, former Democrat hack, currently a Democrat hack portraying a journalist on TV, says to Mike Pence, aren't you concerned?
Listen to the lovelorn voice of this guy.
Is it right for the president to say so-called judge?
Doesn't that undermine the separation of powers in the Constitution written right next door?
Well, I don't think it does.
I think the American people are very accustomed to this president speaking his mind and speaking very straight with him.
And it's very frustrating when scholars on the left and the right, people as distinguished as Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, have said while he doesn't agree with the executive order, he recognizes the president has the full authority to put the security of the homeland first in determining who comes in.
But to see a judge actually suspend that order across the country.
This is a judge who was nominated by President Bush, 99 to nothing, confirmed.
How is he a so-called judge?
Well, again, there's simply no question under the Constitution, and frankly under federal law, that the President of the United States has the authority, in the interest of national security, to determine who has the right to come into this country.
I love reading really like Mike Pence and Sean Spencer have the hardest jobs in the country right now.
It's like the Trump whisperers, The guys who tell you what Trump really meant when he said something.
But I just love, I love the bleeding sadness of George Snuffalopagus as he says, oh, like, you know, isn't it, what about the separation of powers?
I mean, it does my heart good to see left-wing hacks suddenly worried about the separation of powers.
Where were they for eight years?
But it's great.
I mean, it's terrific.
We should have had Trump in there a long time ago.
Here's Andrew Napolitano, the legal authority at Fox News, good guy, talking about just the fact that Trump does absolutely have the right to do what he did.
Whether you think this is wise or not, whether you think it's disruptive or not, whether you think it's fair to stop everybody, including people with hardship cases, in order to keep a few bad people out, that is a decision for the President of the United States and the President of the United States only.
The statute is correct.
The statute couldn't be clearer.
It's a 1952 statute that expressly says the president of the United States on his own may suspend the immigration of any person, class, or group of people for public health, public safety, or national security.
End of the story.
So, you know, I just want to remind people, you know, the thing is, we have to find our way here because it's so frustrating and so frustrating, the level of hysteria.
And I'm going to get back to that in a minute, the level of hysteria with which Trump is being covered, that there is this tendency to say, well, you never did this with Obama, you never did this with Obama, without judging Trump what he says on its own merits.
I mean, just to remind you, here is Obama at the State of the Union hurling what is an absolute untruth into the faces of the Supreme Court.
They had just done this, you know, the case that, oh my gosh, I forgot the one that Hillary Clinton was always yelling about, where they said that a corporation retains its rights to free speech.
And this drove the left crazy, and they've been trying to destroy it ever since.
And he hurls it back.
They're sitting there and he hurls it back in their face.
Now listen to this.
With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections.
So you can see Alito sitting there shaking his head, going, what the hell is he talking about?
I just reverse any law.
I mean, they basically just said, as I've explained this to left-wingers again and again, all they said was that if you form a corporation, you don't lose your rights to free speech.
So, you know, that clear, clear attempt to intimidate the Supreme Court from the bully pulpit of the presidency went virtually without notice in the mainstream media.
You didn't see Snuffalopagus crying then.
I mean, that's only now that the guy is suddenly, oh my goodness, oh my goodness, he called him a so-called judge.
I mean, if you think that Trump has not made the left hysterical, I've got a couple of cuts to play here that are just hilarious.
I mean, what is happening now is that demonstrators have gathered outside Chuck Schumer's house, right, top Democrat in the Senate.
They've gathered outside his house and they're screaming, you know, resistance, resistance, again, and they have these four-letter words and all this stuff.
So these guys are waking up every day and looking out their window and seeing these people who are telling them, you know, you have to resist everything Donald Trump does.
And meanwhile, there are Republicans who now have to go out in the next midterm election and have to go out to these Republican states that voted for Trump by well over 55% and run for office.
So if there's nothing but hysterical, hysterical resistance, they're going to lose their seats.
If you don't think that Donald Trump has built his latest Trump tower inside the Democrats' head, listen to Nancy Pelosi talk about the fact that she can't support anything he does.
Listen carefully to what she says.
While it's only a couple of weeks since the inauguration, there's complete evidence.
We've seen nothing that we can work, but I can work with President Bush on, and I'm disappointed because I thought that there might be some interest because of what he said in the campaign, which turns out to be not true, a hoax, and really dangerous to the economic stability of America's working families.
President Bush?
President Bush?
Hello?
Hey, Granny, you know, I think you forgot what administration we're in.
They are so hysterical.
She can't even remember the name of the president.
You can see Maxing Waters standing in back of her, give this look to the guy.
I think that's not this president anymore.
Is that still the president?
I'm not sure.
Just completely hysterical.
And it is fun.
This is my favorite.
This is my favorite.
Here is Katie Tour.
Now, we're going to get back to this idea of the Russians and all this stuff.
But Katie Tour reacts to on, she's on MSNBC, and this is her reaction to Trump's statement that, you know, O'Reilly asked him if he respected Putin.
Putin's a killer.
Trump says, oh, well, we have plenty of killers too.
And here is Katie Tour interviewing a senator.
And listen to the question she asks.
Senator, the junior senator in your state, Senator Ben Sass, came up pretty strongly over the weekend condemning Donald Trump's assertion that we are just as bad as Russia when he said that, you know, America does bad and terrible things too.
When Bill O'Reilly asked him if Vladimir Putin was a killer.
What is your sense of why this president is going above and beyond, bending over backwards, if you will, to stay away from criticizing the Russian president and to almost give him an excuse?
As we know, there's, since 2000, been a couple dozen suspicious deaths of journalists in Russia who came out against the government there.
Donald Trump has made no secret about going after journalists and his distaste for any news that doesn't agree with him here.
Do you find that this is a dangerous path he is heading down?
Trump is now assassinating journalists.
They're asking.
I mean, the journalists, they're running covers in Europe of Trump with a target on his head and running actual articles saying, should we, what do you think?
Let's discuss, should we assassinate him?
But she's afraid that Trump is going to assassinate them.
He doesn't have to assassinate him.
They're shooting themselves in the foot every single day.
And not only are they shooting themselves in the foot, their foot is in their mouth.
So it's really dangerous.
It is just absolutely amazing the level of hysteria they have reached.
And I just want to play, before we, we're going to have to cut away from Facebook, but before we do, I just want to play this very funny imitation of Sean Spicer, the spokesman Melissa McCarthy did on Saturday Night Live.
And the reason I want to play it is this is what the media are seeing.
This is what they see is happening to them.
Here is Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer.
Before we begin, I know that myself and the press have gone wrong to Rocky Starr.
In the sense, when I say Rocky Start, I mean it in the sense of Rocky the movie because I came out here to punch you in the face and also I don't talk so good.
Now I want you to begin today by apologizing on behalf of you to me For how you have treated me these last two weeks.
And that apology is not accepted.
Because I'm not here to be your buddy.
I'm here to swallow gum and I'm here to take NAIDE.
Worries About Trump's Depth00:12:15
So this is what they hear.
You know, they're like, we were just sitting here trying to destroy your administration and now everybody's picking on us.
What's going on?
You know, 7%, the last number I heard, 7% of American journalists are Republicans.
7%.
And still, when you ask them if they're biased, they're like, biased?
What biased?
They're tweeting, how do we bring this man down?
How do we destroy this administration?
And then they go on the air and go, you know, our objective report, here we are.
And they're thinking they're not biased.
All right, we've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
But come on over to the dailywire.com.
You can hear the rest if you subscribe.
You can watch the rest.
And you can get your question in the mailbag and turn your miserable existence around to come on over.
All right.
So the left is, they are absolutely hysterical.
They've lost their minds.
But the right, there's a lot of hysteria on the right, too.
And the hysteria is a little different, obviously.
What people on the right are hysterical about is: is Donald Trump going to destroy the Republican Party?
And of course, the people who love Donald Trump beyond all measure, who have no qualms about Donald Trump, are thinking, I hope so.
They hate the Republican Party because the Republican Party hasn't done anything for eight years.
They haven't managed to do anything except they kind of hogtied Obama in certain respects.
But the thing that you're hearing on the right, or at least I'm hearing on the right, isn't Trump with his loose talk and his weird left-right leanings, isn't he destroying this party that was supposed to be the party of conservatism, that was supposed to take conservatism into the new century?
And to give you an example of why, some of you left me comments attacking my attack on Donald Trump for his comments about Russia.
And he makes this comment about Russia basically putting a moral equivalence between us and a country that routinely murders opposition, murders reporters, as if that were somehow happening here.
And, you know, you cited CIA operations that may have been questionable and bad things that America has done, and there's no doubt all countries have done bad things, especially superpowers, have to do questionable things.
And sometimes those questionable things go over the line, no question about it.
But the question is: you go back and you take a look at Ronald Reagan.
Here's the thing: in language, there's such a thing called as a speech act, right?
A speech act is an act you commit simply by speaking.
A promise is a speech act.
I promise you something, that's all it takes.
Now, there is a bond between us.
If I am a man of honor, if I am a person, I bet, I bet you is a speech act.
If I say, I bet you $100 the Yankees are going to win the World Series, they don't win the World Series, got to pay the bet because I said it.
It is now a done deal.
Virtually everything the president says is a speech act or interpreted as a speech act.
If he says, you know, Russia and America are morally equivalent, that can make you think, well, does that mean we're going to behave like Russia or Russia is not going to be held to account?
I mean, everything he says because he is in that bully pulpit has the power of an action.
So let's just go back for a minute, since it was Reagan's 106th birthday, and let's just go back for a minute and remember Ronald Reagan.
I have two cuts here.
The one I want is number two.
Yeah, Reagan number two.
I just want you to remember: here's a speech that Reagan gives, and he starts out with a long, long quote.
He's talking to ministers, and he starts out with a long, long quote of C.S. Lewis talking about how evil has become a bureaucratic function.
It's no longer a function of stormtroopers or anything like that.
It's happening in small offices.
He's talking about the screw tape letters in which a demon tries to destroy the soul of a man.
And here is how he concludes in this very famous portion of this speech.
But if history teaches anything, it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly.
It means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom.
So I urge you to speak out against those who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority.
You know, I've always believed that old screw tape reserved his best efforts for those of you in the church.
So in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.
I mean, that's powerful stuff, and it is speaking with a moral voice.
And remember the fact that he defined the evil empire.
There are stories that came out of the Soviet Union after the fall that when they heard that, they were like, evil?
Us?
We thought we were the good guy.
We thought we were bringing the future.
It really undermined their confidence in themselves.
So it was an action.
Whereas the stuff that Donald Trump is saying is stuff that, you know, Putin is going to use in speeches where he says, don't let America lecture us about human rights.
Your own president says you're just as evil as we are, right?
So that's a problem.
Henry Olson is the guy, people like, he's a wonk, he's an election watcher.
He is the guy who said many, many years before the rise of Donald Trump that the Republicans have got to start paying attention to the white working class in the middle of the country.
He said they have a, he repeatedly said, we had him on the show, he said, we have repeatedly made the mistake of thinking that Ronald Reagan was a small government conservative who wouldn't do anything for those people, whereas he would quote Reagan's speeches again and again, saying, no, Reagan reached out to the white working class saying, we are not going to let you fall off the bottom of the ladder.
We're not going to get rid of the safety net of the New Deal.
What Reagan would say is, I just want to repeal, he didn't want to repeal the New Deal.
He wanted to repeal the Great Society, Lyndon Johnson's flood of programs that really has been very destructive.
So now, Henry Olson, and Henry Olson is the guy that I was reading when the election came about, and I said I thought it was going to be closer than people were saying it was going to be.
You know, that was because I was reading Henry Olson because his observations have been so dead accurate.
And while he didn't quite predict Trump's victory, he came as close as you could come without being just a guy making predictions off the top of your head.
I mean, as a guy really studying the numbers.
So it's startling to me.
It is startling to me that he would write the following article to celebrate Reagan's 106th birthday.
President Trump's election has caused many observers to bemoan Reagan's supposedly waning influence on today's Republican Party.
But these people start from the same flawed assumption that Trump's election means the United States and Republicans have rejected Reagan's legacy.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, and this guy is not like a Trump train, you know, I love Trump no matter what he does.
He is not that guy at all.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, Trump's election does not represent the deregonization of the Republican Party.
It presents Republicans with their last best hope to re-regenize it.
This flawed common wisdom flows from a flawed understanding of Reagan's philosophy that accepts the myth that Reagan was an anti-government ideologue.
But from the moment Reagan started speaking out as a conservative in the late 1950s, he endorsed an active role for government.
He believed the government should care for those who could not care for themselves, build public housing for the poor, and expand public universities.
Reagan's conservatism even supported the idea of universal health coverage.
That, to me, I'm not convinced of that.
Reagan made several speeches in which we even have a cut.
Play is cut.
He warned that universal health care, socialized health care, was the beginning of socialism.
Here's Reagan.
One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine.
It's very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project.
Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can't afford it.
Okay, so there's that.
He really was cautious about this stuff, and he understood the issues, which I'm not sure Trump does.
But he did, Reagan did also say any person in the United States who requires medical attention and cannot provide for himself should have it provided for him, which is essentially what Trump has said.
Nobody's going to die in the streets.
The article goes on.
Reagan did not shrink from endorsing government action when needed as governor or as president.
He raised the gas tax in 1983 to fund road construction and repair, and he imposed sanctions on Japanese industries and companies for what he believed were unfair trade practices.
Reagan's support for immigration was limited by a belief in protecting U.S. workers, and he goes on and on.
He says, each of these positions has a clear analog in Trump's early acts or statements.
Trump's position that everyone should have some sort of health insurance finds its counterpart in Reagan's long-expressed beliefs.
Trump's belief in building more public infrastructure could be funded by a gas tax hike, just like Reagan's was.
His belief that free trade should be fair trade was Reagan's.
And his belief that immigration controls to protect U.S. workers are just also was Reagan's.
That's not to say Reagan would have agreed with everything Trump does, but the overlap in their views on these issues stems from a broader overlap in philosophy.
Trump seems to believe the federal government should act forcefully to protect the interest of the U.S. worker.
Reagan's philosophy was broader and deeper, but it stemmed from the same source, the enhancement of the life, dignity, and freedom of the ordinary American was the proper role for the government.
A very, very startling look from Henry Olson, a guy who does not panic, who stays very calm.
We will see, of course, if it's true.
I mean, the thing, you know, look, I've said this from the start.
The thing that worries me about Trump is that he doesn't seem to be grounded in deep knowledge the way Reagan obviously was.
Reagan had done a lot of reading.
He had prepared.
He had been governor.
Trump does not seem to have done a lot of reading.
He sometimes seems to believe sources that are absurd, like Alex Jones and, you know, The Enquirer and stuff like this.
However, he is making the case.
He is making the case that people like Stephen Moore, people who have interpreted the Reagan legacy as pure supply-side economics and small government and basically no government, cutting back government, are making a mistake and that some of Trump's instincts, at least, are like Reagan's philosophy.
You know, I also have to add, whatever Trump is doing so far, it has been amazingly good, amazingly good.
This Betsy DeVos thing, this is good news.
It's good news for the poor.
It's good news for blacks in the inner city.
It means that this stranglehold that our corrupt teachers unions who own the Democrat Party, that they have had on education for poor kids, might, might just be broken.
She is going to have a fight on her hands that is going to make the last scene of Lord of the Rings look like a musical, okay?
She is going to have the fight of her life on her hands, but that she's there, it's important.
Tillerson, I think, a good pick.
Obviously, Gorsuch, the judge, fantastic pick.
Trump is doing a great job.
He is doing a great job.
It would be insane not to worry a little bit and be concerned when he says things like comparing Russia, morally comparing Russia and America.
You know, we don't have to like follow Trump off a cliff every time he walks off a cliff.
You know, we just have to praise him when the praise is good and praise him when he's walking in the right direction.
And he is certainly walking in the right direction.
And Henry Olson says he's going even closer to that direction than maybe we can imagine.
All right, before I talk about stuff I like, I just wanted to give a quick review to this film, Deepwater Horizon, which I watched on DVD.
Really enjoyable.
I mean, I would give it like three of five stars at least.
Mark Wahlberg has now gotten a little niche for himself in making straightforward, patriotic, old-fashioned movie movies.
Deepwater Horizon Indictment00:02:00
And this is about the BP spill, you know, the well that exploded in the Louisiana Gulf.
First of all, it's an indictment of BP.
I mean, it's just a rough indictment of BP, but it is a tribute to the American working man, a tribute to his courage, a tribute to his common sense, and a good old-fashioned American takedown of rich fat cats.
It's Kurt Russell who's great, Mark Wahlberg, and John Malkovich playing a mustache-twirling role as the BP executive.
Here is a great scene where Kurt Russell, who's running the ship, he's running the oil, Derek, tells Malkovich that there are all these problems, and Malkovich doesn't want to believe it because it costs money.
You're a $180 billion company, and you're cheap.
That's why we're $186 billion company.
We worry about those bills.
I worry about my rig.
My crew lives on it.
You just rent it.
Don, you and I both know we need some downtime for maintenance.
Mike, how many of our machines need repair?
$390, Mr. Jimmy.
$390.
Yes, sir.
Almost 10% of all the machinery aboard.
Name a few, Farmi.
A few?
I would love to hear exactly what piece of mission-critical equipment are down.
Where do I start?
A driller chair, process station 18, BOP control pods, telephone system, pipe racket system, GPS antenna, direct TV system, wireless internet, iron rough neck, top drive rack bag system, auxiliary drawwares, control, saltwater service phone, smoke alarms in the galley.
The reason why you're sweating so hard is because the compressor with the AC on this deck are down, too.
Everything but the toilets, huh?
Oh, no, you got problems there, too, but I don't do shit.
That's engineering.
Who are you?
Mike Williams, Chief E.T.
It's just a classic American guy film who ends, you know, with this, obviously, the spectacular disaster.
It really, really was entertaining.
It had me riveted the whole time I watched it.
And kind of, I don't know if it made any money, kind of came and went, it seemed like.
Age of Natural Rights00:03:02
All right, stuff I like.
We are having a conversation, or I am having a conversation with you, about the English romantics.
And the reason I'm talking about it is because I really feel it is relevant to what's going on in the present day.
And we were talking yesterday about the fact that the French Revolution came and people thought, just like in the 60s, they thought the age of Aquarius had arrived, right?
They thought now liberty and reason for all are going to be everywhere and it's going to spread.
And the millennium had come.
They really thought just the way people did in the 60s when they were singing, This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius.
And then it all went bad.
The revolution turned into the terror with nobles being beheaded, with everybody being beheaded.
They were guillotining everybody in sight.
The terror then gave way to the Napoleonic Wars, which engulfed really most of the world.
I mean, Napoleon was in Egypt.
He was all throughout Europe.
Only Little England, just as in another world war we've heard of, only Little England stood against Napoleon with the wonderful line, because what happened was Napoleon parked his ships in the Bay of Abukir off Egypt, and Nelson went in and just destroyed them.
And so a parliamentarian said, I'm not saying they won't come, but they won't come by sea.
Of course, England was an island, that meant they weren't coming.
So for intellectuals and poets and thinkers, this was an amazing thing because they had been told that the age of reason had dawned, the age of natural rights.
The age of natural rights was where we get our Constitution.
Remember, it's like nature, and nature's God, and it's self-evident.
These are truths that we hold self-evident.
They were embedded in nature.
That was the theory.
And suddenly, here were these people touting reason, touting natural rights, just not only slaughtering each other en masse, but they were also trying to conquer the entire world through Napoleon.
This conversation, this conversation goes back, as far as I'm concerned, it is the conversation of Western history.
The oldest piece of the gospel we have is Jesus confronting Pilate and Jesus saying, I speak the truth and those who want love the truth hear what I say.
And Pilate says, what is truth?
How can you tell what truth is?
Because our version of Western history, European Western history, was shaped by the Catholic Church.
That question was decided for hundreds of years in Jesus' favor, that the truth was the truth, was the truth.
But when Martin Luther came around and started the Reformation, the Protestant Reformation, he came out and he said, every man is responsible for his own faith and he must see it for himself that he believes rightly.
As little as another can go to hell or heaven for me, so little can he believe or disbelieve from me.
And as little as he can open or shut heaven or hell for me, so little can he drive me to faith or unbelief.
So each person had to find the truth on his own.
And this reopened this issue of what is truth and how do you know, okay?
Each Person Finds Truth Alone00:06:52
And Shakespeare saw it immediately.
Shakespeare wrote the play Hamlet, which I believe is a commentary on the Reformation.
And he basically gave Hamlet this problem.
Hamlet went to school where Martin Luther lived.
That is the key.
And even though the play takes place before the Reformation takes place in the Dark Ages, that doesn't matter.
Shakespeare never cared about anachronisms.
He never cared about anything like that.
I think this was his commentary.
And what he said was, okay, if there's no truth, then how does Hamlet know who killed his father?
Hamlet was assigned the revenge of his father.
In the old days, a hero would just do that.
You killed my dad, I kill you.
Hamlet was like, how do I know it's truth?
And Hamlet began to realize that even nature, even nature, was subject to his own perceptions.
Here is Mel Gibson delivering the famous speech.
And I'll break it down after he finishes, but this is a great version of Hamlet.
He's cut a four-hour play to an hour and a half, and it really moves fast, and he gives a great performance.
But here he's giving a speech where what he says is, I have become sad, and therefore all the beauty of nature looks awful to me.
I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises.
And indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory.
This most excellent canopy, the air.
Look you.
This brave, o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire.
Why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.
What a piece of work is a man.
How noble in reason.
How infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable.
In action, how like an angel.
In apprehension, how like a god.
The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.
And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
Man delights not me.
No.
No woman neither, though, by your smiling.
You seem to say so.
Shakespeare.
Shakespeare could never resist a dirty joke.
He cannot stop from making a dirty joke.
So he says, man delights not me.
And Rosencrantz and Guildenson crack up because they think, well, that's because you're not gay.
And he says, no, I don't want women delight, not me either.
He's talking about man in the general sense.
Shakespeare just loved the dirty joke.
He does.
Anyway, so Shakespeare saw this problem coming.
He saw it coming.
But all the great thinkers, the intellectuals, didn't see it coming at all.
Of course not because they weren't reading Shakespeare and understanding what he was trying to tell them.
They thought, ah, it's reason.
Reason is everything.
Reason is going to take us forward.
We no longer need religion.
Voltaire, I think it was, said, I want to strangle the last king with the entrails of the last priest, or vice versa.
I can't remember what he wanted to do.
It was, they thought that reason was going to save everything, and we could reason our way.
Nature gave us certain rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of property, was the original idea.
But these we could deduce from nature.
But what if nature was just us?
And this was the problem the Romantics suddenly rediscovered in the wake of the terror and the world Napoleonic Wars.
Coleridge, sitting up alone at night, lamenting the fact that he had married badly, Samuel Teller Coleridge, one of the greatest of the Romantic poets and possibly the greatest of the Romantic thinkers, Coleridge is probably the last man who ever knew anything, everything there was to know.
Coleridge is probably the last man who knew everything there was to know.
After that era, science advanced so quickly that there was too much for one person to know.
And now a man with a mind as great as Coleridge has to study one thing deeply.
But in those days, there was still little enough information that he just knew everything.
I mean, Coleridge knew everything there was to know.
And sitting up one night lamenting the fact that he had fallen in love with a woman who was not his wife, who would therefore, because they were English, not French, would therefore not have sex with him, and his wife was giving him misery, suddenly realized that he had lost the joy inside himself, and it was from this feeling, this passion of life, that nature took its nature.
So he says in a poem called Dejection an Ode, he says, we receive from nature but what we give.
And in our life alone does nature live.
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud.
In other words, she looks like a bride or like a corpse according to how we feel.
And would we ought behold of higher worth than that inanimate, cold world allowed to the poor, loveless, ever-anxious crowd?
Ah, from the soul itself must issue forth a light, a glory, a fair, luminous cloud enveloping the earth.
In other words, if we are going to see anything in nature aside from nature, aside from grass, trees, animals, if we're going to see anything, it's going to come from us.
Well, where does that leave natural rights?
Where does that leave the rights of man?
If we have natural rights and yet nature all comes from within us, the nature of nature comes from our observation, where does that leave natural rights?
And that's why some people blame the Romantics, although not the English Romantics.
They blame the German Romantics for the rise of Hitler, because Hitler had this irrational love of the past and of medievalism going back to the days of the Catholic Church.
Before the monopoly of truth had shattered, this is not a knock on the Catholic Church, just going back to those days when there was certainty of what truth was.
They blame the romantics for this, but these guys were trying to think forward to refine, to find again a foundation of the things that they knew were true, the things that they knew were true.
Coleridge, by the way, never lost his faith.
He was a Christian his whole life.
He preached from the pulpit.
Wordsworth became a, started out as what Coleridge called a semi-atheist, but became a Christian later in life.
But we will continue to talk about this tomorrow, about how they started to try to refine the ground of truth that had given way, that had created things like the Constitution and the French Revolution.
All right, that's enough.
Let's talk.
We'll talk again tomorrow.
Tomorrow is the mailbag.
It is the mailbag.
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Don't despair.
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