Andrew Clavin’s Best Weeks Ever! mocks political hysteria—leftist riots, right-wing bombast, and Trump’s satirical executive orders—before pivoting to conservative wins: McConnell silencing Warren, DeVos/Gorsuch appointments, and deregulation triumphs over media bias. He dismisses CNN as an "empire of lies," defends Sessions against racial slander, and ties modern debates to Romantic poets like Keats, who fused nature and imagination into eternal truth—only for his vision to shatter by age 26. The episode frames today’s ideological clashes as a revival of Enlightenment vs. Romanticism, where imagination now battles materialism’s collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
So many political observers are now predicting a catastrophe that I'm predicting a catastrophe will be caused by people predicting a catastrophe.
Catastrophe predicting from both the left and the right are stirring people up to so much hysteria that the catastrophe predicting is going to cause a catastrophe.
Or so I'm predicting.
In real life, a new president has been elected by the usual lawful means and has set to work changing the course of the country along the lines he promised during his campaign.
Donald Trump has so far appointed a team of accomplished individuals to staff his cabinet and agencies, moved to repeal a health care law that isn't working, chosen a talented and intelligent judge for the Supreme Court, and attempted to temporarily stop the influx of refugees until security procedures can be tightened.
But that's only in real life.
In the imagination of political observers, it is the onset of a catastrophe so catastrophic that only predicting catastrophe can cause enough panic to cause the catastrophe that those predicting a catastrophe are predicting.
On the left, activists are predicting catastrophe so often that leftists have taken to the streets in acts of such violence that many are predicting a catastrophe.
As one left-wing activist explained, quote, I predict we are heading into a catastrophe of widespread rioting and political assassinations unless we have widespread rioting and political assassinations to head off the catastrophe I'm predicting, unquote.
On the right, radio talk show hosts who predicted the Obama presidency would be a catastrophe are now predicting the end of the Obama presidency will be a catastrophe.
As radio host Ned Bombastic said on his show, quote, I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired of getting sick and tired of being sick and tired, unquote.
Mr. Bombastic went on to remark, quote, for years I have been screaming into this microphone in a loud, annoying voice that we were being flushed down the toilet of tyranny into the sewer of socialism.
Now it turns out some of these right-wing idiots got all hysterical and went out and elected Donald Trump because they thought we were being flushed down the toilet of tyranny into the sewer of socialism.
What the hell does that even mean?
I have no idea, and I'm the one who said it in a loud, annoying voice in the first place, unquote.
At a recent meeting at the Oval Office, President Donald Trump addressed his inner circle of store mannequins wearing MAGA hats, saying, quote, for years, I heard everyone predicting a catastrophe, and so I ran for office predicting there would be a catastrophe unless I was elected to prevent the catastrophe everyone was predicting.
If I had known my election was the catastrophe everyone was predicting, I would have tried to stop it by not running for president, which would have led to the catastrophe everyone was predicting, unquote.
The president then issued an executive order directing his agencies to prevent a catastrophe.
Observers say the order will be a catastrophe.
Jake Tapper's Central Role00:15:20
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dee-doo.
Ship-shaped dipsy-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.
All right, it's the full catastrophe.
The Andrew Clavin Show is back, and it's mailbag day.
Hey, hey, hey.
Lindsay is coming home to visit us, I think, tomorrow, so she's not here to give us our woohoo.
We'll have to use a recorded Lindsay woohoo when we get to the mailbag.
That's later on the show, so if you're on Facebook and YouTube, you will not be able to watch that.
You have to come over to thedailywire.com and you can listen.
Or if you subscribe, then you can watch it and be part of the mailbag.
So that's just a lousy eight bucks a month.
And I think we're giving away, are we giving away Jeremy's film, The Arroyo?
We are.
Come on.
Come on.
A lousy eight bucks a month.
You get the Arroyo.
This is great.
All right, we've got to start it with Blue Apron.
Much do I love BLUE Apron.
I mean, this is this thing where they deliver restaurant level quality food to your door and you make it.
You make the food so it's home cooking, but it tastes like you're going to a really nice restaurant and it's very easy.
It's like 10 bucks, so I like it so much.
When I talk about it I get very animated, so Austin decided he would animate me being animated, and we've actually got an animated commercial for BLUE Apron here.
It is basically what this is.
It's like having a restaurant in your home, not the kind of restaurants my listeners go to.
You know where the food is inedible but the waitresses aren't wearing any clothes, but these are places like nice people go to the where the food is really good.
What they do is they send you like it's about 10 bucks a meal and they send you all the ingredients you need in exactly the right proportions, and it's easy.
After that you just sit back and watch your wife make the meal, but every, every now and again you have to get up and chase her around the room.
Maybe that's just in my house, i'm not sure.
You just go on Blueapron.com, slash Andrew, and they will give you the first meals for free, no delivery charge nothing, so you can taste them yourself really was terrific.
I mean, i'm not, not joking, that was great, great food.
Blueapron.com slash Andrew, it's a better way to cook.
I'm sure my wife's gonna love that picture of her knocking me out as I chase, which actually happened as a real life thing.
But excellent job, Austin.
I think that was.
That was a great commercial.
I think that's that's good.
We should put that out there.
All right, Blueapron.com slash andrew, you get the first three for free, at which I I don't even understand why I have to do these commercials.
It's free food, I mean, all right.
So here's the, here's the state of play.
All right, Elizabeth Warren got Mitch slapped and Uh, told her to shut up.
The media is whine is now, has now been reduced to whining on air.
Betsy Devos is the new education secretary.
I i'm sorry, but I think it's time for the Trump happiness montage.
It is, let's do it.
We're gonna win so much.
We're gonna win at every level.
We're going to win economically, we're going to win with the economy, we're going to win with military, we're going to win with healthcare and for our veterans, we're going to win with every single facet.
Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay, my oh my, what a wonderful day.
We're going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning.
you say please please it's too much winning we can't take it anymore i feel pretty oh so pretty i feel pretty and witty and gay we have to keep winning we have to win more we're gonna win more I love it.
I love it.
You know, I went out to dinner with a friend.
I won't mention him because I didn't ask him if I could.
But this is a guy from New York in a position where he is in position to really observe politics in a deep way, you know.
And I always like to see guys from New York because they know Trump better.
He's always, this guy has always been in a position to observe Trump and all this stuff.
And I needed a reality check because the left is so hysterical and the right is hysterical too.
And everybody is talking about, oh, the effect and what's going to happen.
Thank you.
Not about what's happening now, but what's going to happen.
I mean, these are all the people who are wrong about Trump getting elected are now sitting around talking about what's going to happen next.
And I said, you know, is it me or are these the best two and a half weeks that conservatives have ever had in my lifetime?
And I lived through Reagan.
I mean, these have been two of the most incredible weeks.
And I know we can't compare Trump to what would have happened with Hillary forever, but we have to say, as my friend said, if Hillary had gotten elected, it could well have been the end of the American experiment.
And what Trump is doing is shaking things up so much.
And this is, look, I've been really honest about Trump, and some of you yell at me because you want me to only say the good things and all this stuff, but I can't do that.
However, however, when you just look at the results, this team that he has assembled, I think Rex Tillerson is going to be a very, very pleasant surprise to people who doubted him.
Betsy DeVos, you know, that was an amazing thing.
I mean, that the vice president, Mike Pence, had to go in and break the tie to get Betsy DeVos in this little, it's a tiny department, the education department, because most money for schools comes from local property taxes and other local taxes.
But they're so, the Democrats are so in bed with the teachers' unions, they had to show that they would not let this proponent of school choice get through, and she did get through.
Mike Pence, another example.
I mean, come on, what a great pick.
And you know, another thing that my friend pointed out, and of course, Gorsuch, we can't go out without that.
I mean, look, I mean, that was the court.
If we had lost the court under Hillary, your gun rights probably would have been gone.
Free speech rights, I wasn't so secure about.
And we can see now as Trump goes forward arguing about his refugee pause that went before the Ninth Circuit, the most letter, they call it the Ninth Circus because it's the leftiest left-wing court in the country.
It's the most overturned court in the country.
But right now, there are only eight people on the Supreme Court, four and four.
So we can see how important this ninth guy is just to let the president do what is obviously legal for him to do.
That's a great pick.
This attack, this assault on the bureaucratic state, the regulations, I mean, we do not, as my friend said yesterday, because I was pointing out an idea I cadged from Brett Stevens that because we're protected by the First Amendment, they can't regulate us the way they regulate everybody else.
But if we were like regular small businesses, I would write a sentence and three lawyers from the government would show up and say, oh, you know, that sentence hasn't been checked for environmental damage that it's done, and you have to pay health care to one of the words in that sentence, and you have to, you know, all this stuff that the government does that makes everyone's life a misery.
And this Trump is making, you know, this is one of the reasons why there are so many leaks coming out of the White House is because this is the entire administrative state is going to mobilize to try and stop him.
And of course, the press has gone insane.
And if there is one thing, you know, I gave it to Trump pretty hard about this Russia comment that he made because I just thought he was utterly, utterly wrong and it was wrong to make the comment.
However, however, Trump is getting picked on all the time for his overblown statements.
And Trump himself says that he makes overblown statements because that's the way to make a deal.
You start out with this extreme point of view and then you can dial it back a little bit.
It's kind of a strategy.
However, that he has challenged the press.
The press is an empire of lies.
Our media, if 7% of them are Republicans, that's like most of them are Democrats.
They're almost all Democrats.
It would be against human nature for them not to become more and more radicalized, more and more confirmed in their bias, and more and more biased.
But you don't even have to.
You just have to look at it.
So, I mean, listen to Trump as he was talking in that Bill O'Reilly interview.
Listen to him talk about the press.
I mean, it's about time a president said this stuff.
I read the papers, I see what's going on in television, I take a look, I see the lies, you know, the lies of, that's another thing.
I always got sort of good press.
You know, I was a business guy, I got good press, I did good news.
I know.
I have never, I call it, you know, fake news.
Some of the networks and some of the papers, it's so the level of dishonesty where they'll take a story that I know good from bad.
Sure.
They'll take something that should be a good story.
In fact, sometimes I say, oh, this is going to be nice to read.
I'll say, whoa.
And they will purposely totally change in a way.
It's fake news.
This is absolutely true.
It is absolutely true.
And, you know, on Trump himself, because I keep hearing people say Trump is stupid or all this stuff, there's a lot of stuff.
I wish that I'm worried about where Trump gets some of his information from.
You know, I think he doesn't necessarily parse which are real news sites and which are fake news sites, which is getting harder to do, by the way.
I myself am having about, I would say, about a 30% harder time making sure that I don't come on the air and say something that's entirely untrue because I got it from some source like the New York Times, which is now a fake news site.
But, you know, another thing my friend was pointing out is he said, and he was a guy who, just like me, had doubts about Trump, but ended up voting for him.
And he said, you know, this is a guy.
He succeeded in real estate, which is in New York real estate, very tough business.
He succeeded in show business.
He had a big show.
And he won the presidency of the United States.
After a while, it's not an accident.
You know, I mean, it's not, you don't just stumble into that stuff.
So, look, I don't think the guy is playing 16-dimensional chess.
I don't think everything he does is a strategy.
But I think that he has found a successful way to relate to the world.
And he does not, he wants to win.
He does not want to be a failed president.
And he's not going to be.
You can just see by how hard they are working.
So here now he goes after the press on terrorism.
And he's talking, I guess, to military people in Florida.
And all across Europe, you've seen what happened in Paris and Nice.
All over Europe, it's happening.
It's gotten to a point where it's not even being reported.
And in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn't want to report it.
They have their reasons, and you understand that.
So today we deliver a message in one very unified voice to these forces of death and destruction.
America and its allies will defeat you.
We will defeat them.
So this made Jake Tapper sad.
And Jake Tapper brought Kelly Ann Conway and basically just, and Kelly Ann Conway was trying to be nice to him too.
She was trying to hold out an olive branch.
He basically berated her for 25 minutes about Trump attacking him.
And this is what he said.
He said she was accusing them of not covering the right stories.
And listen to Tapper.
What we're talking about is the fact that the White House is waging war on people who are providing information, sometimes risking their lives to do so, saying that nothing we say is true.
All of it is fake.
I would much rather be talking to you about veterans issues.
In fact, when it comes to the Trump administration, I would be much rather covering immigration.
I would much rather be covering trade.
And I would much rather be covering draining the swamp and counterterrorism.
But instead, every day, there are these sprays of attack and sprays of falsehoods coming from the White House.
It would be better if they were not covering from the White House for me and for you.
This has moved me to give Jake Tapper the first Andrew Clavin Award.
Here it is.
Oh, boo-hoo!
Let me play a sad song for you on the world's smallest violin.
That's the world's smallest violin for Jake Tapper.
Hey, before I go, before I say goodbye to folks on Facebook and YouTube, I want to give myself a plug because speaking of awards, my memoir, The Great Good Thing, has been now a finalist in the Audi Award, which is the big awards for audible books in the category of inspirational, faith-based non-fiction.
The Great Good Thing.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
There's a finalist in the audio award.
It's very nice.
It's a real honor.
Got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, but we're going into the mailbag.
So you've got to come over to thedailywire.com, and we will change your life, possibly, for the better.
You know, the thing that Jake Tapper was saying, everything they say is untrue.
It's not that everything they say is unfactual.
It's that they create an atmosphere of untruth by the stories they play down, the stories they don't report, and the stories they do report.
You know, is it true that they cover most terrorist attacks?
Yes.
But it's the way that, you know, there was a CBS poll that came out that said one in seven Democrats, only one in seven Democrats believe that Islam is more violent than Christianity.
Only one in seven Democrats believe.
I mean, think about, just think about the fact that Islam is at war around the world, that almost every war that is now being fought involves Islam.
You know, what is there?
Like one crazy loon who goes off every now and again at an abortion center and every Christian on earth condemns him.
You know, but these guys, I mean, the thing is, if you do that, if you blow up an abortion center, you're a bad Christian.
But the question is, if you blow up people yourself and take people with you, are you a bad Muslim?
I don't know.
It's an open question right now because it's happening everywhere.
That is the press.
That misperception could not exist.
You know, I was watching CNN during the Boston Marathon bombing.
A guy's on the street, and when he gets the name of who he gets the ID from the police of who caused the bombing, and he said, you know, I don't know why I have to add this, but I just, it's one of the facts, it's my job, I'm embarrassed, but I have to mention that he's a Muslim.
I thought, like, you know what?
Fake, you know, it's not just fake news, it's a fake universe.
They're living in a fake universe.
And it's true in Hollywood.
It's true of the professoriate.
It's all this stuff.
And for Jake Tapper to whine, when he gets attacked at this point, he should look around the room and see if he can find a Republican in a position of power at CNN.
See if he can find a conservative on an editorial desk at CNN.
And if he can't, he should shut up.
Because that's ridiculous.
The way CNN reports the news, the level of hysteria at Trump, the level of playing down the role of Islam and terrorism, the attacks on George W. Bush, which suddenly vanished when Obama was president for eight years.
Nobody asked the man a tough question.
And if somebody did ask the man a tough question, they had to debate whether it was right to ask him a tough question.
This is an empire of lies.
Jake Tapper is right in the center of it.
And I like Tapper.
Jake Tapper's Dilemma00:03:55
I actually think he does some good stuff.
But that whining is completely absurd.
It is completely absurd.
I just have to add before we get to the mailbag that this thing with Elizabeth Warren was hilarious.
We're calling her chief spreading bull now.
But she gets up.
They have now confirmed five of Trump's picks, which is absurd.
I mean, they did 10 in 10 days with Obama, I think it was.
Now they went after Betsy DeVos because they're chained.
Here's a woman who just is in support of school choice.
And because Corey Booker, I mean, this was absurd.
Corey Booker, who used to work for DeVos's organization with DeVos's organization, would say, oh, this is the greatest organization.
I had school choice.
It saved my life.
What a wonderful thing.
He gets up and gives this teary speech about how she's going to change.
They are so manacle to these corrupt unions who have kept, who keep poor.
This is one of the reasons I switched over from the left to the right, is because they keep these children chained in poverty and ignorance to serve these teachers.
And whenever anybody opposes them, as Schwarzenegger tried to do here, and they destroyed him, they destroyed his entire governorship.
They bring on Miss Smith.
Here's Miss Smith.
You don't want to hurt Miss Smith.
She's a teacher.
You love your teachers.
And all these white folks in nice middle-class schools go, no, I love Miss Smith.
I don't want to hurt Miss Smith.
And they go out and they vote against everybody because the teachers union has all that money.
But Miss Smith ain't working in these schools.
And if she is, she's not being allowed to do her job.
If they're, you know, those hero teachers who go in there and try and educate poor kids, they get attacked by the administrations in those schools because they don't want to shake, you know, shake up the boat.
So, you know, this is ridiculous.
So now they're going after Jeff Sessions.
And this is also absurd.
To accuse Jeff Sessions of being a racist is just right out of the Democrat playbook.
It's disgusting.
They did it back in the 80s and it worked.
They did it back in the 80s and they worked.
And they can't believe that now they've been exposed.
We've seen this game so many times.
They can't believe it's not working.
Wait, we call him a racist.
He's supposed to disappear.
It's like throwing water on a witch.
He's supposed to melt away and Jeff Sessions isn't going away and Trump isn't abandoning him and neither are the Republican Party.
So Chief Spreading Bull gets up and she starts reading the letter that Coretta Scott King wrote the last time they tried to slander this guy.
And Mitch McConnell stops her on Rule 19, which says you cannot slander, you cannot impugn the motives of a fellow senator, because Sessions is a senator and he shuts her down.
You've got to watch the tape.
It's great.
They are mothers, daughters, sisters, fathers, sons, and brothers.
Mr. President.
They are the majority leader.
Senators impugn the motives and conduct of our colleague from Alabama as warned by the chair.
Senator Warren, quote, said Senator Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens.
I call the senator to order under the provisions of Rule 19.
Mr. President.
Senator from Massachusetts.
Mr. President, I am surprised that the words of Coretta Scott King are not suitable for debate in the United States Senate.
I ask leave of the Senate to continue my remarks.
Is there objection?
Object.
I appeal the ruling.
Objection is hurt.
Mitch!
Mitch Slap!
The hashtag let Liz speak is they're trying to fight back.
I think the hashtag should be Mitch Slap.
Even Mitch is reborn.
This is the guy.
This is the guy we were sure was going to stand up and do the right thing.
He is getting, he is on the Trump train, you know, and he himself came out and said, we're pleased.
Why We Left The Senate00:06:22
You know, the press is trying to spread this idea of chaos, that everything is chaos and all this.
And Mitch said, no, I think Trump is doing a good job.
And he shut her down.
And they're screaming, oh, the men are making the woman be quiet.
You know, it's like the woman has to follow the rules just like the men.
Listen, good two and a half weeks, right?
We won't, you know, we don't have time to play the Trump happiness montage, but you can sing it yourself at home.
I think he's doing, he's doing great.
We got to say it.
All right, the mailbag.
It's almost like having her here.
All right.
From Larry.
Hi, Andrew.
Is there a story to how you broke your nose?
There are three stories, actually.
I've broken my nose three times.
Once in a fist fight, as I tell in my book, The Great Good Thing.
I got in a lot of fist fights when I was a kid.
I once dove into the shallow end of a pool, which is how Charles Krauthammer became crippled, so I got off really easy.
But that was truly, truly painful.
I mean, I got to say, I dove into the shallow end, went right to the bottom, smack, busted my nose.
And one time, the most absurd time, I changed rooms.
I was sleeping in a different room because as each of my brothers would go to college, we would move into his room because the older brother would have the best room.
And so I was sleeping with the wall on a different side, and the alarm went off, and I turned into the wall and just flattened my nose.
So I've earned this look, and I'm, you know, I've got a deviated septum which sometimes makes it hard to breathe.
And I've thought sometimes of getting it fixed, and then I thought, nah, I earned this nose, man.
I want to keep it.
All right, from Marielle.
Hi, Andrew, since Valentine's Day approaches.
What's the best marriage advice you have received?
More importantly, what's your favorite scotch?
Well, that is more important.
That is actually my marriage advice.
Keep drinking, Scott.
My favorite scotch is McAllen 12, the 12-year McAllen.
Everybody always says, oh, the older it gets, the better, but the older it gets, the smokier it gets.
And I like that smooth, fudge taste you get with McAllen.
It's a great, it's a single malt, Scott.
Valentine's Day.
You know, I have to say that Valentine's Day, I'm not a big holiday guy, except for Christmas and Thanksgiving and like that, but Valentine's Day has become disgusting.
I turn on the TV and they have all these things like, you know, every kiss begins with K, K is a jeweler, every kiss, you know, and I think, yeah, every prostitute begins with P, you know, like, I don't have to give, you don't want to give your wife like jewelry in return for a kiss.
This whole thing, oh, you give her a teddy bear and, you know, the big wink, you'll get lucky, you know.
I mean, this is, it's like disgusting, you know, it's like you're in a marriage.
You're supposed to love one another.
It's nice to give your wife presents.
It's nice to give each other presents, but that's not what this is about.
I mean, look, the best advice, the best advice I have given or gotten on marriage is be polite.
And, you know, it sounds so dopey, but you do it with everybody in your life except the people you're closest to, you know?
And it's like you get annoyed with a waitress in a diner or with the guy who takes your ticket at the movie theater.
You don't just start go off on him unless you're a jerk.
You know, you still try to remain polite and get where you have to go.
You know, if you're living with somebody for 40 or 50 years, there are going to be moments when you're in a less good mood than, you know, than other moments.
But if you're polite and kind, you know, you can get through a lot of stuff.
You can get through a lot of stuff.
And I say this as someone who's been married 40 years, to my delight.
I'm not sure what my wife would say about it, but it's been delightful for me.
So I think that that little stuff is really, really important.
The other thing is you have to marry my wife.
Otherwise, you're just coming in second place.
What can I tell you?
All right, from Kurt, oh Lord Claverness, I am a newly converted conservative and reinvigorated Catholic at the ripe age of 18.
But I'm also a homosexual leading a very strong monogamous life with my partner of a year.
But I still find it difficult to reconcile how I can be both homosexual and either Christian or conservative.
How best would I rationalize these facets of my identity?
Well, it's not for me to tell you how to live at all.
It is for God to tell you how to live.
But I can tell you one thing.
Those aren't facets of your identity.
Your identity is not that you're homosexual and your identity is not that you're Catholic.
Your identity is that you are a child of God.
That is your only identity.
It's your only identity.
I mean, if, you know, if you, there are things about you that I don't know what they are, but you know what they are, that you stifle because they're awful, because they would be criminal, because they disgust you, whatever it is.
We all have these things in our heads, and we say, that's not part of me.
That's not who I am.
I'm not going to do those things.
I'm not going to follow those things.
So you and God are to choose who you are going forward, and you do that in a relationship with God.
You have a relationship with God by reading the Bible, by reading theology, and by praying.
You should pray.
I think you should pray every day.
And I think you should pray by yourself.
I think you should pray out loud.
I think you should pray in complete sentences so that you can hear what you're saying.
And so God, God knows what you're saying, but I think it's important to do it in complete sentences.
And then you find out.
You go forward.
It's not for me to tell you.
It's not for me to tell you what God wants for your life at all.
And I'm not telling you what He wants for your life.
I'm simply telling you that your identity is none of those things.
Your identity is that you are a child of God and you should be what He wants you to be.
All right.
Oh, great Overlord Clavin.
This is from Patrick.
Has cultural correspondent Michael Knowles legitimately won any of his notable awards?
Are you kidding?
Look at him.
Of course not.
That guy is like, he's lucky we let him in here.
We don't pay him, do we?
God, I hope not.
That's a silly question.
Pay attention.
Pay attention.
All right.
Do we have time for one more?
Let's see.
Salute, Monsieur Clavant.
While you are dining, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
This is from Laurie.
I'd love to hear your thoughts about why so few women become involved in political leadership.
Because they're smarter than men, probably.
I mean, like, women, you know, women have better things to do, I think, than political leadership.
And political leaders, I think that political leadership is more natural to men.
Why Few Women Lead Politically00:02:48
I think they like the fight.
They like the power.
They like to, you know, parade themselves around.
You know, C.S. Lewis, one of my favorite religious writers, said that homemaking is the central profession, and all other professions are there to make homemaking possible.
And I actually believe that to be completely true.
I don't think that feminism has stopped that from being true.
I think that continues to be true.
I think there are probably enough women who believe that is true and know it to be true that it takes, it bleeds them out of other kinds of professions.
And I mean, I think, you know, if you want to be in political leadership, you have to be ready to fight every day, to tangle with people who are going to lie about you, who are going to tear you down, to be incessantly aggressive, incessantly aggressive.
I wouldn't do it.
And I think a lot of women wouldn't do it.
All right.
Can I see this live question?
I enjoyed the debate last night on healthcare between Cruz and the Crypt Keeper.
Do you think this could be a catalyst to more televised debates on policy outside of campaign trails?
I'm afraid it may be.
That's all I can say.
You know, I think what I noticed today was the debate, they promoed the debate every minute it was going to be on.
Like, you know, nine hours left of the debate.
Here it comes.
And they promoted it like a boxing match.
After it was over, and Cruz just kind of like diced him and sliced them.
He's going, like, you know, everybody should have health care.
And, you know, small business owners are going, I can't afford it.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
You have to have health care because I think it's a right.
You know, and Cruz is just taking him to pieces.
You didn't hear another word about it.
I mean, all of a sudden it vanished, it vanished from the, so I think that, I think it would be, I actually think it would be a good thing to have more debates.
I think it would be a wonderful thing to have a monthly debate or a weekly debate.
I think once they see how badly they do and they're not just screaming racist, the proper way to defend leftism is to scream at people for being racist and set buildings on fire and break things, because if you have to explain it logically, you're going to be destroyed.
So that's why I'm not sure these debates will take off.
But I don't think it would be a bad thing.
I like debates.
Stuff I like.
Now, I've been talking all week about the English Romantics.
And I don't know.
You know, a lot of people have said they really like this.
I hope I'm not going too deep.
But I thought for a while the stuff I like was getting kind of shallow.
I was just saying stuff that was passing through.
And this is stuff that's really important because it had a huge effect on the thinking of the world.
And we're having almost the exact kinds of debates today.
I was talking about the fact that the French Revolution seemed like it was going to change everything.
Instead, it led to the terror, people being guillotined, and then it led to World War as Napoleon essentially conquered Europe, except for the British.
An entire generation of poets grew up thinking, ah, you know, now we've entered the reign of reason.
Everything was going to be reason.
And then reason led to this terror.
It led to madness.
It led to war.
Reason Led to Terror00:08:38
That's all it did.
And suddenly these guys were going, like, well, wait, what is it?
And they started to think, well, if reason is not going to give us truth, we have to turn to nature.
But if we turn to nature, which was this whole idea that was part of the French Revolution, part of the American Revolution too, that we have natural rights, that nature gives us our rights.
What about the fact that nature is only what we say it is, what human beings say it is?
And they began to try and parse this idea.
How do we find the truth?
Where does the truth lie?
Because they could not go back to the church, and they could not go back to a world in which priests told everybody what was morally true.
That was the first generation.
That was Wordsworth and Coleridge who lived through the French Revolution.
Blake was part of that as well.
Then came the second generation.
And one of the things that was interesting is, you know, these guys went back to medieval ideas and to legends.
Coleridge wrote the famous rhyme of the ancient mariner, kind of horror stories, to go back into the imagination, to capture what it was about the imagination and where the imagination could find the truth and impose the truth on nature.
The next generation started to write this stuff and they were bestsellers, like guys like Sir Walter Scott would write Ivanhoe and these would become bestsellers.
In the second generation, probably the second most talented English language poet who ever lived next to Shakespeare was born, John Keats, who was just enamored of Wordsworth.
He just thought Wordsworth was the greatest poet ever.
Keats is one of the famous good guys of literature.
You know, talent is blind.
It lands on bad people and good people.
It lands on annoying people and drunk people and sane people and wonderful people.
And Keats was one of the best people on which talent landed.
He was just about as brilliant a poet as ever lived.
And he lived to be 26 maybe, 25.
I mean, he died tremendously young, which is just a tragedy.
I mean, it is a true tragedy.
Two years before he died in 1819, he went into this magical period where he produced six odes, kind of a celebratory poem, three of which are three of the greatest poems in the English language.
And he would, you know, he'd send letters to friends and say, oh, I wrote this poem the other day on the letter.
And you can see some of these in the British Library written in his hand.
On the letter, it's like one of the greatest poems in the English language.
Yes, I dashed this off.
Three of these poems, the Ode on a Grecian Urn, you've probably heard about, Ode to a Nightingale, and The Ode to Autumn, are just like three of these great poems.
And in each one of them, in two of them, something, I'm going to look one of them up so I can quote it a little bit.
In two of them, there is a kind of movement in the poem.
Let's see.
A kind of movement in the poem where he's looking at, for instance, at this urn, and urn has a sculpture of it, of a sacrifice.
A cow is being led to the sacrifice.
And his imagination enters the picture, and it comes to life, and he is carried off into the eternal world of art.
You know, this is a world in which nothing ever changes.
He's saying, ah, happy, happy boughs that cannot shed your leaves nor ever bid the spring adieu, and happy melodists, a guy playing a pipe unwearied, forever piping songs forever new.
And this is one of my favorite lines.
More happy love, more happy, happy love, forever warm and still to be enjoyed, forever panting and forever young, all-breathing human passion far above.
It's just beautiful stuff.
I mean, I'm not going to read it.
It's so dense and complex that it doesn't really make sense to read it.
You can go obviously and look it up online.
But he gets carried away into this, and then it breaks.
He loses that connection.
It carries him away into this flow of eternity, and then that connection breaks, and he goes back into himself.
And what he comes back from, and he says that the message of the urn, the thing that the urn is telling him, is that beauty is truth, and truth is beauty.
Okay, so that's suddenly what he's getting at, that there is something in the human imagination that perceives the truth and finds it beautiful, and that art can drag us into this, can pull us into this.
And the nightingale, who represents nature, also pulls him into it.
He starts, he's listening, you know, his brother had died, and he nursed him through this terrible bout of tuberculosis, a terrible wasting disease.
And he's sitting there morose, listening to the nightingale, and the nightingale pulls him into this world of eternity.
And he's taken out of time.
And finally, in September, he is walking along and he writes the ode to autumn, which I think is the greatest poem, short, the greatest short poem in the English language.
And in this poem, he disappears completely.
He disappears completely.
There is no narrator of the poem.
And it is just autumn, the season, humanized.
In other words, the imagination and the world have become one thing.
And autumn becomes a figure.
He says, who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find thee sitting careless on a granary floor, thy hair soft lifted by the winnowing wind.
So she becomes, autumn becomes, this woman becomes a figure, and he says, he ends by saying, where are the songs of spring?
Ay, where are they?
Think not of them.
Thou hast thy music too.
In other words, all these things, when this happens, he's carried away into what the poets often call the one life, the one life, which was kind of a German idea, came from Schopenhauer, this one idea of the will and the life that lives beyond people.
And when that happens, he is connected with beauty and with truth, and the imagination becomes capable of perceiving what is true.
Two years after this incredible period of creativity, he dies in misery and sorrow and in pain in Rome.
You can go see his house right above the Spanish steppes.
It's now a museum.
If he had lived, remember the Victorian age was coming, if he had lived, the entire history of poetry and probably of thought would be different.
I mean, he was that brilliant.
He was that great a genius.
He was Shakespearean in his level of talent.
I don't say that easily.
But he didn't live to solve this problem of what is truth.
I mean, he started instinctively to see that it was the imagination entering into the world, humanizing the world, that brought us to the truth of morality, of beauty, of all the things that, of love, of all the things that really matter.
But he was 26.
He couldn't think it through.
He couldn't figure it out and make it into a philosophy.
That would come, I believe that came later with a group of writers called the Inklings, who you know because they wrote The Lord of the Rings.
J.R.L. Tolkien was one of them.
C.S. Lewis was one of them.
Owen Barfield, kind of a more obscure one.
Chesterton was not one of the Inklings, but he inspired them, who had a new Christian idea of the imagination and talked about the fact that Chesterton said, it's not the imagination that makes people mad, it's reason.
It's when you have only reason, that's when you go insane.
But that was not to come for many years, and it was to become the minority viewpoint.
I think the majority viewpoint, if you asked most thinkers, would be that all morality is relative, it's subjective, it doesn't count, and all this.
But this was the idea that the Romantics were trying to work through.
Some people say they failed.
I think that they succeeded but weren't listened to, weren't heeded.
The things that they found weren't heeded.
And I think the fact that Keats died was such a tragedy because I think he would have changed that.
I think he would have made Romanticism in its true form, its truest form.
I think he would have made it the way, helped to make it maybe the way we think today.
But because of this, a kind of materialist, scientistic view has taken over.
People like me who don't believe in scientism, I believe in science, but I don't believe in scientism, we, I think, are the minority.
Certainly the minority among people who think and read and discuss ideas.
I think we are right now the minority.
I do believe that is changing.
I believe that a revolution in thought is coming because the idea that morality is relative simply can't stand.
It makes no sense.
It's internally illogical.
But anyway, this was the moment that these genius poets were struggling with.
Worth Considering00:00:33
They are so worth reading.
It's so worth getting a collection of Romantic poetry.
There's a wonderful old collection that Auden, the poet Auden, edited.
But it really is worth looking at.
All right.
The week is over.
No, the week is not over.
What am I talking about?
There's one more day.
Woof, woof.
For a minute there, I thought it was the Clavenless weekend and we're all going down now.
This week is going by so quickly that it felt like that.
But we will be back here tomorrow with more celebration, hopefully, and with more hilarity.