Ep. 269 – The Swamp Strikes Back skewers media hysteria over Michael Flynn’s resignation, framing it as a "soft coup" by the deep state resisting Trump’s deregulation push, while mocking CNN’s hiring of disgraced journalist Mendacious Racehire. The host dismisses Russian collusion claims, contrasts Obama-era leaks with Flynn’s scrutiny, and speculates Trump used the fallout to favor Pence over Flynn’s extremism. Shifting to culture, he argues Hollywood’s sex-love distortion stems from a broader spiritual decline, praises Catholic theology (while rejecting rigid doctrine), and debates Christian unity—all while declining to sing due to vocal cord damage. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet closes the episode as a tragic parody of romantic idealism, with Zeffirelli’s 1968 film adaptation recommended for its raw depth. [Automatically generated summary]
According to the news media, the White House is in chaos.
The administration is falling apart, and Donald Trump will never be able to win the Republican nomination for president.
Oh, wait, scratch that last one.
He'll never win the election for president.
Oh, wait.
Well, anyway, let's move on.
All across this great land, from New York to Los Angeles and nowhere in between, the mainstream media is declaring that President Donald Trump's administration is in disarray.
The resignation of Michael Flynn reveals a White House that can never possibly match such landmark accomplishments of the last administration as wait, I'm thinking.
The guy was in office for eight years.
He must have accomplished something.
What was his name again?
Skinny, coffee-colored guy.
Had a name like a terrorist?
I forget.
But to return to the ineffectiveness of the Trump administration, the media, having scoured the opinions of the populace from 57th Street in Manhattan all the way to 43rd, have decided that this is an administration doomed to failure.
Mainstream journalist Mendacious Racehire says there's absolutely no indication that a man like Donald Trump can succeed.
Mr. Racehire was a reporter for the New York Times, a former newspaper, until he was fired in the latest round of cutbacks there and evicted from his apartment.
The former reporter for the former paper gave a press conference in his former apartment, standing in his underwear before an array of empty wine bottles and saying, quote, why on earth would anyone think Donald Trump could accomplish anything as president?
Sure, he was a successful real estate developer and a TV star, and he won his presidential campaign, but can he do this?
Mr. Racehire then held a cigarette lighter to his backside and caused the flame to explode clear across the room.
He was immediately hired to work at CNN.
It's apparently a talent they look for there.
Other journalists are now claiming that Trump is mentally ill.
Former blogger Andrew Sullivan, speaking from the former blogger's home for the consistently ridiculous, told CNN, quote, Trump is a pathological liar.
First, he said he'd removed the Martin Luther King bust from the Oval Office, and it turned out he hadn't.
Then he said he had threatened to invade Mexico when he hadn't.
Then he went on to say he was easing sanctions on Russia, which he wasn't, unquote.
When Sullivan was told these were all lies told by journalists rather than Trump, he responded, quote, oh.
Well, then maybe it's the journalists who are mentally ill.
That would explain why they never covered the fact that Sarah Palin hid someone else's baby in her womb for nine months, unquote.
All in all, journalists agree that the Trump White House is ineffective, dishonest, and in disarray.
As New York Times editor Blithering Prevarication III told a room full of former reporters who were packing up their bags after being fired, quote, I could tell you stories about the chaos at the White House.
Free Meals from Blue Apron00:02:20
But unfortunately, I don't have time right now because our building is on fire.
We needed the insurance money.
Run for your lives, unquote.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is ticket-by-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-kunky-kiking.
Shipshaw, tipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, it's mailbag day.
Hooray, yes, and we are going to explain everything that is happening in Washington in the wake of Michael Flynn's resignation and all the different theories about what's going on.
We're going to tell you the app.
Our theory is the only guaranteed true one because it's ours.
But the most important reason to listen to the show is free food.
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All right, so the swamp strikes back.
The Swamp Strikes Back00:15:57
Donald Trump said he was going to drain the swamp.
He didn't realize there were all these hideous creatures living in the swamp who are going to come crawling out and attack him back.
And they've come after him and taken out Michael Flynn, or at least helped to take out Michael Flynn with weird leaks and all kinds of stuff that's going on that is now being picked up by the press.
Yesterday, I said that you got to choose a side because this is what, you know, they call it the deep state.
That's a little bit science fictiony or thriller novely to me, but this is the bureaucratic state that basically thinks it should be able to rule that your toilet is a waterway and therefore the EPA has the right to regulate how you use it.
I mean, this is what these guys think.
They think they should be regulating without legislation every aspect of your life.
And when Donald Trump starts to take that away, he's been gutting Obamacare.
He's just yesterday he helped started to gut Dodd-Frank, an absolutely appalling piece of legislation that puts the government in every business boardroom in America.
And he's doing this, and these guys are losing their power and they're coming back and they're coming after him.
And I said, you have to choose sides, whatever you think of Trump, you've got to choose sides between the state and Trump.
Yesterday, Bill Crystal, a never-Trumper, who I, well, he tweeted this: I obviously strongly prefer normal democratic and constitutional politics, but if it comes to it, I prefer the deep state to the Trump state.
Well, folks, that to me is making an idol out of your personal feelings.
You know, he doesn't like Trump.
He doesn't like the fact that he, you know, he did everything he could to try and stop him.
He made, in my opinion, a complete and utter fool of himself.
But that, he didn't do anything as bad as choosing this bureaucratic slavery.
And that's what it is.
It's completely un-American over Trump.
It's ridiculous.
It is ridiculous.
I don't care what Trump's flaws are.
So let's take a look at what happened because there's still a lot of questions.
It's still a little bit mysterious.
You remember, obviously, everyone knows at this point Michael Flynn, the national security advisor, had to resign after he lied to Pence, apparently, about conversations he had had with the Russian ambassador about sanctions that Obama had put on Russia after Russia hacked into our election system and tried to basically skew the election.
So the big question that the media, the media is spinning this is Russia's taken over our government.
And the big question they're asking is why it took so long.
So yesterday, Sean Spicer, my second favorite person in the administration, I really love Pence.
I think Pence is great.
But I think Spicer, I just think he ought to come out like dressed in leather with a whip at this point.
So he comes out and he explains what was going on.
So this is the first, yeah, number five.
We've been reviewing and evaluating this issue with respect to General Flynn on a daily basis for a few weeks, trying to ascertain the truth.
We got to a point not based on a legal issue, but based on a trust issue, where the level of trust between the president and General Flynn had eroded to the point where he felt he had to make a change.
The president was very concerned that General Flynn had misled the vice president and others.
He was also very concerned, in light of sensitive subjects dealt with by that position of national security advisors like China, North Korea, and the Middle East, that the president must have complete and unwavering trust for the person in that position.
The evolving and eroding level of trust as a result of this situation and a series of other questionable instances is what led the president to ask for General Flynn's resignation.
So, you know, the one thing they kept asking everybody, they kept asking Kellyanne Conway yesterday, why did it take so long?
They warned you that Flynn would be subject, vulnerable to Russian blackmail.
Well, the person who warned them was the acting attorney general Sally Yates, who you will remember, he had to fire when she refused to enforce his travel ban.
So Sally Yates was an Obama operative who never should have been there in the first place, that he didn't trust her, take her advice means nothing to me.
But the way they're trying to spend this now, the New York Times, their big headline is today that other members of Trump's campaign had contact with Russian intelligence.
Listen to this story.
This is from the New York Times, a former newspaper.
Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.
So Obama operatives feeding stuff to the New York Times.
American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said.
The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking.
The officials interviewed in recent weeks said that so far they had seen no evidence of such cooperation.
So they're talking to the Russians.
Trump had a lot of business dealings with Russia, and they especially singled out Paul Manafort, who has had contacts with Russia that I consider unsavory, but they were legal.
I mean, they were completely legal, right?
And so they said one of the guys was Paul Manafort, and they didn't name the other people.
So of course Manafort has dealings with Russia.
I mean, the guy was practically the publicity guy for the president of Ukraine.
And Manafort's response was, this is absurd.
I have no idea what this is referring to.
I've never knowingly spoken to Russian intelligence officers, and I've never been involved with anything to do with the Russian government or the Putin administration or any other issues under investigation today.
The point is that they talk to businessmen in Russia, the businessmen and the intelligence officers.
You cannot tell them apart.
This is a nothing burger story, okay?
It's a nothing burger story.
And by the way, you know, Spicer also dealt with this.
There was no illegality involved with what Flynn did.
There's no reason why this administration, even before they come into office, can't call up another government, even if you don't happen to like the government, and say, you know, we don't like the sanctions that were imposed on you or, you know, hold your fire until we get into office or whatever.
There's nothing illegal about this.
They can do that.
I mean, they could talk about the Logan Act, as I said.
No one's ever been prosecuted.
No one ever could be prosecuted on it, as far as I'm concerned, because it violates the First Amendment.
So, okay, let's just take a look.
You remember in 2012 when Obama famously left the mic open and he's talking to the outgoing president Medvedev.
He was going out, Putin was coming in, and Obama leaned over and was talking about our missile defense system, right?
was talking about our missile defense system and was caught on a hot mic saying, oh, I'll have a lot of flexibility after the next election because it's my last election.
Now, I want to play number three, cut number three, which is the way CBS News covered this story.
Okay, here it is.
President Obama was overheard giving Medvedev a very candid political assessment of his ability to deal with the major problems between the U.S. and Russia.
All of the issues can be solved, the president told Medvedev, but he stressed that it was particularly important for incoming Russian President Vladimir Putin to give him space on the missile defense system, which the U.S. and NATO want to install in Europe.
This is my last election, I believe.
Yeah, and after my election, I have more flexibility.
I just need this explanation.
Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney said the overheard remarks signaled that the president plans to cave to Russia on missile defense.
That is an alarming and troubling development.
This is no time for our president to be pulling his punches with the American people.
White House officials shrugged off Republican criticism as campaign rhetoric.
But Scott, they did acknowledge the president's remarks.
And in a statement, they said, since 2012 is an election year in both countries, it is clearly not a year in which we are going to achieve a breakthrough.
And you can't see it in this cut, but Scott Pelley, the anchorman in a Democrat hack, is smirking through the whole thing.
He said, oh, you know, like campaign rhetoric.
Now listen to Chuck Todd covering, remember these sanctions that we're talking about.
These sanctions were imposed by Obama as a political ploy to basically delegitimize the election of Donald Trump.
He was just making a big fuss over this hacking into the election.
You know, he was making a big show of it, which he would never have done it.
He would never have done it, I don't think, if Hillary was elected.
Here's Chuck Todd covering Flynn's resignation.
Good evening.
I'm Chuck Todd here in Washington.
Welcome to MTP Daily and welcome to day one of what is arguably the biggest presidential scandal involving a foreign government since Iran-Contra.
Take a breath.
Hyperbole aside, folks, hunker down, because this is a class five political hurricane.
So not putting in our missile defense system, you know, whispering to the Russians that we're don't worry about it.
I'm not going to put in the missile defense system.
That's just campaign rhetoric.
But having a perfectly legal conversation with the Russian ambassador about some silly sanctions, that's a class five hurricane, the worst thing since Iran-Contra.
The only scandal they covered because it was Reagan's scandal.
That's the only reason he knows it happened.
He doesn't know about any of the scandals that happened during Obama.
Hey, we're going to do the mailbag on the other side of the break, but you've got to come to thedailywire.com to hear it, or you can subscribe and you can watch the whole show on the site and put your questions in for next week.
Okay, so while we're at it, let's play Thomas Friedman's assessment of this situation.
This is the knucklehead from the New York Times.
I don't care what he told Pence.
We only care what happens because Pence went out and basically misled the public on face to nation.
The issue is what did he tell Trump?
Did he and Trump actually cook up this whole thing?
After the Russians did not respond harshly to the eviction of their spies and diplomats, Trump actually tweeted out some positive encouragement of this.
Did the two of them cook this up all along?
And it gets Joe to two other issues.
The first is we have never taken seriously from the very beginning Russia hacked our election.
That was a 9-11 scale event.
They attacked the core of our very democracy.
That was a Pearl Harbor scale event.
Can you imagine if Hillary Clinton were where Trump was, what the right would be doing on this issue?
This goes to the very core of our democracy.
It's a Pearl Harbor-level event that they stole some emails from the DNC and embarrassed people.
I mean, really, that's a Pearl Harbor 9-11 event to Thomas Friedman of the New York Times.
I mean, are you kidding me?
It's a ran-contra.
It's 9-11.
It's Pearl Harbor.
Good, you know.
And here's the other thing.
Here on substance, Sean Spicer talking about the way, in fact, remember, the whole thing that the Democrats are selling now, and the deep state is selling now, is that Trump's entire administration is in hockey to Russia.
They're just Russian agents, basically.
You know, this is Boris Badenoff from the Rocky cartoons, okay?
Here's Spicer on the way they've been treating Russia.
In fact.
The irony of this entire situation is that the president has been incredibly tough on Russia.
He continues to raise the issue of Crimea, which the previous administration had allowed to be seized by Russia.
His ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, stood before the U.N. Security Council on her first day and strongly denounced the Russian occupation of Crimea.
As Ambassador Haley said at the time, the, quote, dire situation in eastern Ukraine is one that demands clear and strong condemnation of Russian actions.
President Trump has made it very clear that he expects the Russian government to de-escalate violence in the Ukraine and return Crimea.
At the same time, he fully expects to and wants to be able to get along with Russia, unlike previous administrations, so that we can solve many problems together facing the world, such as the threat of ISIS and terrorism.
Damon Linker, so in other words, they've been tougher on, you know, remember when the Russians annexed Crimea, Obama basically sucked his thumb.
So they're being a lot tougher about this than the Obama administration.
So that's the reality of what's going on.
Damon Linker, who is no friend to the Trump administration, writes in the magazine The Week, the United States is much better off without Michael Flynn serving as national security advisor, but no one should be cheering the way he was brought down.
The whole episode is evidence of the precipitous and ongoing collapse of America's democratic institutions, not a sign of their resiliency.
Flynn's ouster was a soft coup or political assassination engineered by anonymous intelligence community bureaucrats.
The results may be salutary.
It may be good that Flynn is gone, according to this guy, but this isn't the way a liberal democracy is supposed to function.
You know, these are leaks.
This is a private citizen.
When Flynn's phone was bugged, he was a private citizen.
We don't even know if they had a, is it FICA, I think it's called, a FICA warrant.
We don't know if they had that.
A private citizen, they then sent the transcripts to the press, to the Washington Post.
This is an attack on Donald Trump for attacking the bureaucracy.
You have to side with Trump on this.
You have to.
This is Mordor Pal.
You know, I mean, you may not like Donald Trump.
It doesn't matter.
But this is the state that we are trying to bring down.
And if Donald Trump is going to do it, you have got to cheer him on.
Let me tell you why I think, what I think happened.
Because the question then becomes, Trump's no dummy.
He knows what he's up against.
Why did he then fire Flynn?
Why did he let them take Flynn out?
And this is my theory, okay?
And it's just a theory, but so is everybody else's theory about why this happened.
So this is mine.
You know, two things that people say about presidents they don't like.
They say someone else is really running the show.
That's the first thing.
So they remember with Obama, the right said it was Valerie Jarrett.
With George W. Bush, it was either Karl Rove or Dick Cheney, okay?
Always untrue.
It's always a fantasy that people have.
It just makes them feel powerful to say it.
These guys have very powerful advisors.
The advisors have a lot of sway.
Steve Bannon is not running a damn thing.
He's not running anything.
He's a guy who was brought in late in the game.
He did a good job at the election.
Trump trusts him.
He'll talk to him.
He'll consult with him.
But Bannon is not running anything.
That's just something people say.
The other thing they do, they say about presidents they don't like, and this is right and left.
Everybody does it, is that their former successes didn't mean anything.
So Obama was just a community organizer.
George W. Bush was just his daddy's boy and got everything from his daddy.
Also, always untrue.
You cannot win an election without being a very tough, smart dude.
Obama was a great politician.
Obama was a great politician.
And even the fact that he left no paper trail was part of the greatness of his politicking.
George W. Bush, a dynamic leader, a very decisive, dynamic guy.
You know, Donald Trump is a guy, as we said earlier in the opening.
This is a guy who succeeded in three fields right now.
He succeeded in New York real estate, very tough field, television star, very tough field.
And in his campaign, people who succeed at things tend to be realists in that sphere, okay?
So if you talk to Sean Penn about how to become a Hollywood actor, he would give you great advice if he could form an English sentence.
He would say, you know, you should do this, Hollywood works this way.
He'd be very realistic.
Talk to him about Venezuelan economics, and suddenly you think, this guy's an idiot.
You know, he's a total idiot because he's a realist in his sphere, but not outside of the sphere.
And that's why all these billionaires make mistakes.
They think, I made a billion dollars.
I must be able to move into movie business.
And then all their movies bomb because they're realists in their field.
But the one thing that Trump has not been given enough credit for is that he learns as he enters each new field.
Choosing Risk in Relationships00:07:26
His campaign when he started out was chaotic.
It was crazy.
It was a mess.
He brought in Bannon.
He brought in Kellyanne Conway and he straightened it out.
And the last third of his campaign was brilliantly, beautifully run with a lot of discipline.
Now he's moved into a new sphere.
And he's a realist and he wants to win.
And winning to him means being a good president, a president who does what he said he was going to do.
I suspect that Michael Flynn wasn't doing a very good job.
I suspect that Michael Flynn's very over-the-top conspiracy ideas, he calls people commies, he has all these ideas about the conspiracies on the left.
I think that played really well at Trump Tower and not so well in Washington, D.C.
And I think that Trump saw a chance.
On the other hand, I think Mike Pence, he is seeing, oh, here's a guy who is solid as a rock, can deal with Congress, knows how the Washington works, who is really giving me good advice.
And I think Pence disliked Flynn, and I think that Trump used this as an opportunity to choose between them.
And that's as far as it goes.
I do not think, I don't think they're in hock to Russia.
I don't think, you know, I think that's ridiculous.
It is ridiculous.
Trump wants to be a good president.
Whether he can be or not is still open to question.
But so far, I think he's doing a pretty good job.
This is not a, you know, not a Class V hurricane.
It's not a Ren-Contre.
It's not a 911.
It's a little bit of startup problems that he's going to have for a couple more weeks, I believe, until he starts to get the lay of the land.
And he will, because that's what he does.
I mean, that's his personality.
And we may not like what he does then.
We'll say it at the time.
But in this fight between the deep state and Donald Trump, I am with Trump 100%.
I think we have to be, I seriously believe he is battling Mordor.
He is battling the problem, the thing that has kept government expanding and expanding through Republican and Democratic administrations for all these years.
So before we start the mailbag, I have to report that I got a letter from a guy who complained that every time we do the mailbag, we have Lindsay, our lovely Lindsay, whom we love so much, shrieking and yelling.
I announced the mailbag and we have her shrieking.
He says he was driving on the inside lane of a highway next to an 18-wheeler full of gasoline and suddenly Lindsay shrieked and he was so startled he almost ran into the truck.
And so he has demanded, he says he is a subscriber, and he has demanded that we stop playing Lindsay screaming.
And now it's time for the mailbag.
Well, we lost another subscriber, boy.
Oh my God, the bloodshed.
Oh, that's terrible.
Oh, the road.
He's all over the road.
That's awful.
Oh, and stole my another one.
We're not going to have any subscribers left.
They're all scattered over the highway.
All right.
I hope that guy wasn't serious.
That's all.
All right.
Dear Supreme Leader Clavin, I am a Canadian woman in her 20s.
I recently rediscovered my faith and began seeing a fellow Christian.
I'm wondering what you think about premarital sex.
I'm married.
Oh, that's not what you mean.
I'm wondering what you think about premarital sex.
Since to me, it feels almost impossible to wait that long.
Do you think it's important to wait?
Thank you, Jenna.
Wow.
First of all, nothing that I say should be taken as advice on what you should do.
You have to judge your own life and your own risk.
I'm going to tell you, give you two answers.
One is my answer, and one is the answer I know my wife would give if she was here.
All right.
Because I actually believe that people who are going to be married should sleep together first.
It's a very important part of marriage.
It's not the center of marriage, but it's a very important part of marriage.
And if you're somehow sexually incompatible and you find out later, it could be a problem.
The other way to deal with this, though, the other way to deal with it is if you find out that you're sexually incompatible, become sexually compatible.
You can learn how to deal with each other in the sack.
My wife would say that the woman is taking a big, big risk.
Marriage is not that good a deal for men in the modern world.
They have to stop sleeping around.
The children just cost money.
And a lot of times the woman isn't willing to make a home for them.
And so they don't really get anything very much out of it.
And if you hang out a long time, women, when they are young, are at their peak beauty and value.
It's just the way it is.
It's not fair, but that's the way it is.
So you are giving up something.
You are giving up a bargaining chip.
Me, I feel like I don't use sex as a bargaining chip.
I wouldn't want my wife.
I wouldn't want to have a wife who did either.
So I guess what I'm saying is, you know, you have to choose where you are at in this relationship and whether or not that's going to destroy it.
I do not think God is going to condemn you if you sleep with the man that you're going to marry and then marry him.
I don't think that's.
I think God has more important things to do.
A lot of theologians would disagree with me, but that is what I believe.
I believe that to marry somebody you haven't had sex with, you are taking a big risk.
I know a lot of people who've done it very happily.
I will add that.
So that's a kind of a wishy-washy answer because I would say one thing, I would say, go for it.
My wife would say, don't do it.
So you're going to have to decide which one of us is right.
Usually, by the way, just on the record, she's always right.
Dear Master Chief Supreme Claven, what are your views on capital punishment?
Love from Scotland.
Mark, I am for capital punishment.
In principle, I am against the way we practice it.
You know, I think that there are some crimes so terrible that the web of social justice can only be put back together by making the guy pay the ultimate penalty.
But putting him in prison for 20 years and walking him down the last mile 10 times, and then maybe he gets pardoned on some kind of technicality and all that.
That is cruel and unusual punishment both to him and to the suffering families of the victim.
I would say that what I would like to see is if we're going to have capital punishment, there should be a separate bureau, basically, of three people who investigate for 365 days.
After the guy's convicted and he is sentenced to death, they investigate for 365 days trying to find any evidence that he's not guilty, any evidence that something's gone wrong.
At the end of a year, you put him to death.
That would be my system for doing it.
I do not think we can keep up the way we're doing it now.
It's incredibly expensive, and it's just wrong.
It's just wrong to do it to people.
After 20 years, the guy you execute is not the guy who committed the crime anyway.
You know, it's like, all right.
Let's see here.
Hi, Andrew.
In your podcast today, this is yesterday, you mentioned that Hollywood is portraying a kind of love that is not real or attainable.
How much of an influence has this facade played in the ever-rising divorce rate in our society, thanks, Luke?
Well, that's not, just to be clear, that's not exactly what I said.
What I said is that an art form that is basically a visual art form that comes to use sex as a code for love is essentially selling you the wrong message.
It's selling you the message that sex is love rather than the message that love should lead to sex, right?
You're getting it backwards because you're seeing what they're showing you is this woman, naked woman, falling backwards in slow motion on a bed.
Don't try that at home, by the way.
I've tried it, it doesn't work.
They don't slow down when they're falling backwards.
The Flesh as Spiritual Language00:03:27
I don't know.
I thought that's the way they went.
I watched the movies.
I thought, well, when you push them back on the bed, they go into slow motion, but apparently not.
So I just thought that was false.
I also think that certain kinds of tales, fairy tales, give the impression that everybody is going, every woman is going to get her handsome prince, and every handsome prince is going to get his Cinderella.
And I think that that is also false.
That, in fact, love is for heroes.
You have to be worthy of love before you have love.
I mean, or you and your partner have to become worthy of love together.
And I think that people feel disappointed that they don't get the love they see in the movies, but they're not heroes like the people in the movies.
I mean, that's the thing.
You have to get the whole story, not just the love part of the story.
Does this is part of what has led to all the confusion between men and women?
And it's obvious that men and women are in a very, very confused state in their relationships.
It's part of that, but it's only indicative of it.
It's not the cause.
The cause is the slow building up of the idea that we are physical creatures, not spirits.
You know, if you look at yourself, we used to understand that we are spirits represented by the flesh.
The flesh is the language in which our spirit speaks.
When you understand that, you approach love in a very different way than if you think you're just a body.
And if you think you're a body, I think that it just becomes, you know, love and sex become confused in your mind, and I think that's going to lead you down the garden path.
So I don't think the movies cause these things.
I think they're indicative of the fact that they're happening in society.
All right, I'm running out of time because I have to do an interview right after the show.
So I'm just trying to find.
I have noticed you speak about Catholics often.
I am Catholic, and for me personally, I don't have doubts.
My question is: do you think that someday Christians will unite to be one again?
Mere Christianity, the great C.S. Lewis book that I just finished reading again this morning, always comes to mind.
The things that all Christian faiths have in common, Jeff Devil.
Yeah, the reason I talk about Catholics often is because, of course, the modern West, meaning the European West, was cradled in Catholicism.
We are all Catholics shaped by Catholicism in some way.
If we are Westerners, we are shaped by Catholicism in some way.
And Catholicism holds a place in the Western imagination, sometimes an angry place, like in Gothic fiction, the villains are always priests and nuns and all this stuff, because Catholicism is our mother.
It's like the mother faith that we want to break away from, and so sometimes we demonize her and all this stuff.
I have a great, very deep respect for Catholic theology.
One of my favorite living theologians is the former Pope Benedict XVI.
And I just think some of his theology is brilliant.
There's a lot about Catholicism I just can't subscribe to.
So that's the way I use it.
And do I think that Christians will ultimately come together?
Yes, I do.
I mean, I think that all these things are systems for building a relationship with Jesus Christ.
That's what I think these things are.
They are ways, symbols, visual aids, rituals, ideas that we use to build this relationship.
Christianity is not a religion.
It's a relationship.
And anything else that you're doing is extraneous, in my opinion, is extraneous to that relationship.
So if Catholicism floats your boat and helps you get into that relationship, good for you.
If it's something else, fine.
But I think what you're really trying to build is a relationship with your Lord and Savior.
Building Relationships00:06:23
Let me do one more, and then I'll...
David Wall, we've heard Ben sing.
Any chance we get to hear you sing in the near future?
No.
No.
You know, I used to be a good singer.
I actually sang in cafes and played the guitar, and then one day I decided to get a, I wasn't a very good guitarist, so I decided to get a friend who was a really good guitarist, and we started rehearsing to do an act together, and I did that thing where I ripped out my vocal cords, basically.
I lost my voice.
And I could still sing for many, many years, but about 10 years ago, I just lost my voice basically to age.
It just got gruff, and I can't really sing that much anyway.
For about 15 seconds in a row, I can carry, still carry a tune well, and I can carry a tune.
That's not fair, but I lost the good voice I had.
I regret it.
I loved singing, although I only did it in the car.
Anything else?
One more.
What's your advice on getting through Supreme Overlord of the Universe?
Finally, somebody got my title problem.
What's your advice for getting through long books?
I want to read The Brothers Karamaslov, great book, and War and Peace, absolutely great book.
But I'm not the fastest reader out there.
I fear I'll take many months to finish these books.
How do you stay focused and not get distracted with other books you want to read?
What I do is, you know, I'm a very slow reader.
This is from Ian.
I'm a very slow reader.
In fact, somebody, on my last trip, I also have no sense of direction.
And people laugh when you say that, but it's a genuine deficit.
And because I am a woodsman, I hike in the woods a lot.
It has come close to being a fatal deficit.
I have no, literally no sense of direction.
I can walk out of the same elevator five times in a row and turn in the wrong direction, even though I've been in that building a thousand times.
Just I have no sense.
And somebody pointed out that that is kind of, it sounds like I'm on the low end of the dyslexic scale, that she had dyslexic children.
She said they have no sense of direction, and they read, they can have a hard time reading.
And I have a really, I am a very slow reader.
What I do is I set myself a number of pages every day.
I never fail to do it.
It can be as few as 25 pages.
You know, that's 25 pages, even for me, is only half an hour of reading.
And you'll get through the book.
And then if you want, you can read another book at the same time.
I'm usually reading three books at once.
So I don't have this problem where I go through a long, like I'm reading this two-volume biography of Samuel Coleridge.
That's a thousand pages.
It's taken me two months to get through it.
But in that time, I've read a bunch of thrillers.
I've read a bunch of other books that I really enjoy too.
Audiobooks are great too.
Audiobooks are excellent.
And in LA, they save your life.
All right.
Stuff I like, the last Valentine's Day stuff I like.
We are going to do Romeo and Juliet.
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
The thing about Shakespeare that's really interesting is that he was not a big fan of romantic love.
You know, I can't remember what play it's in.
Somebody says, men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love.
And my wife, one Valentine's Day, got me a mug with Shakespeare quotes about love on it.
And they're all very like, you know, they're not very romantic, you know?
But this is Romeo and Juliet, of course, is one of the great romances of all time.
And yet, and yet, if you pay attention to it, it's a very strange play.
It starts out with Romeo brokenhearted because he has lost the love of his life, Rosalind, I think her name is.
And then he sees Juliet and he's in love with her.
And the question becomes, the question in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is, is love specific to the person that you are loving, or is it something that is inside you, an ideal that is inside you that attaches to a person?
And the nature of what makes a person a person is very much part of the play.
And in one of the famous scenes, Juliet on the balcony kind of reflects on this.
Because remember, they are having a feud.
They're two people who are parts of families that are feuding with each other.
So they're falling in love is politically incorrect.
And this is the wonderful Franco Zephyri version with Olivia Hussey.
She must have been, I don't know, 18.
She was one of the most beautiful women on earth.
And she is playing Juliet, and she makes this speech on the balcony.
Oh, Romeo, Romeo.
Wherefore art thou, Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name.
Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn, my love, and I'll no longer be a capulet.
Shall I hear more or shall I speak?
Tis but thy name that is my enemy.
Thou art thyself, though, not a Montague.
What is Montague?
It is not hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face, nor any other part belonging to a man.
Oh, be some other name.
What's in a name?
That which you call a rose.
By any other name would smell as sweet.
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called, retain that dear perfection which he owes without that title.
Romeo, doth thy name.
And for that name which is no part of thee, take all myself.
I take thee at thy word.
Call me but love and I'll be new baptized.
That's a great scene.
You know, what she says, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore, which means why?
Why art thou Romeo?
Why are you Romeo?
A rose by any other name would be as sweet.
So why do we have to get involved in this family feud?
But she's also asking this question: what constitutes his being?
What constitutes the person that she is in love with?
And he says to her, you know, call me love and I'll be new baptized.
In other words, I will become the thing that you love.
And it's a very, very complex look at love and also a tragedy.
It's the first of his, up until this time, he's mostly, Shakespeare's mostly written comedies.
And there's one coincidence in this play that turns it into the famous tragedy that it is.
And if that didn't happen, it would just be a comedy.
You know, it's really a fascinating look at love, really deep.
I don't have time to go into it now extensively, but it's worth watching.
And that movie is one of the most beautiful versions of it there is.
All right, I gotta go, but we will be back tomorrow.
And the mailbag will be back next week with more screaming from Lindsay.