Ep. 281’s The Great Double Standard exposes partisan media hypocrisy—Democrats scrutinized Sessions for Russian meetings while downplaying Schumer’s Putin ties, Obama’s missile defense promises, and Pelosi’s unproven healthcare claims. Trump’s debunked Trump Tower bugging claim was dismissed as "unsubstantiated," yet Democrats’ baseless accusations faced no equal scrutiny. Ben Carson’s slave-immigrant remark sparked outrage despite Obama’s 11 similar statements, while a gender-swapped debate study revealed audiences preferred a female Trump over male Clinton. The episode ties these inconsistencies to broader media bias, contrasting with theological reflections on faith, art, and personal morality—arguing double standards persist not just in politics but in cultural narratives too. [Automatically generated summary]
There seems to be a double standard in Washington when it comes to talking to Russians.
Democrats want to destroy Attorney General Jeff Sessions because he forgot he had had a couple of meetings with the Russian ambassador.
But many Democrats have forgotten their meetings with the Russian ambassador as well.
Attempts to reach the ambassador for comment were fielded by his wife, who said she had never met him.
So he may just be a forgettable sort of person.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer claimed there was something sinister about Republican meetings with Russian officials, but then photographs emerged showing Schumer sharing Krispy Kremds with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
When Schumer was asked about the photographs, he burst into tears and said that the Statue of Liberty was crying because she loved Krispy Kremes so very much.
Schumer is demanding that a special prosecutor be appointed to investigate any slanders against Krispy Kremes, and he says the entire Trump administration should resign to protect Krispy Kremes' reputation for deliciousness.
Democrat Senator Claire McCaskill scoffed at Jeff Sessions for saying he had met with the Russian ambassador because of his work on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
But tweets later revealed that she had met with the Russian ambassador because of her work on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
McCaskill later clarified that unlike Sessions, who said he had forgotten those meetings, she had forgotten those meetings, so it was completely different.
Barack Obama, whose Justice Department seems to have been investigating Trump's ties with the Russians, was also shown to have ties with the Russians.
But Obama's spokesman said these were just official meetings during which the president promised Vladimir Putin he would weaken America's missile defenses after his last election when he would no longer have to lie to the American public.
The spokesman said Obama later proved his dedication to defending America against the Russians by gutting our military and facilitating Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons.
Trump Accuses Obama of Bugging00:14:50
So that's okay then.
Other Democrats who said they hadn't met with the Russians include House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who said she couldn't remember any meetings with the Russians or where she'd parked her car or what her name was or how all these dead bodies had gotten into her apartment.
There was also Senator Dianne Feinstein who said she had never met with the Russians but now she admits she had had a few meetings with Russians but only to discuss cooking recipes and to exchange photographs of the grandchildren and American nuclear installations.
President Donald Trump meanwhile countered charges that his administration had colluded with the Russians during the last election by making the outlandish claim that the Democrats had bugged the phones at Trump Tower.
Trump's absurd claim was made during a private phone conversation with his wife Melania and later released by sources within the FBI.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
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All your questions answered.
If you're on Facebook or YouTube, you got to come over to thedailywire.com and listen to Mailbag Day.
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Ipso facto, whatever.
I don't know what that means, but I just said.
Michael Knowles' book.
Our cultural correspondent, Nobel Prize-winning cultural correspondent Michael Knowles, his reasons to vote for Democrats, a completely blank book, is now number six on the Amazon bestseller list.
Michael Knowles is now not just a Nobel Prize winner, not just a multi-Oscar winner and a Pulitzer Prize winner.
He is now a troll god.
I would say Knowles has changed.
Clearly, Shapiro and I are doing this whole book thing wrong by putting words in them.
I think Knowles has captured the spirit of the age inside the covers of this book.
Get your copy now while they're empty.
Otherwise, somebody might put words in them and then there'll be.
For those of you who like words, I have a short, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, the world's leading mystery magazine, which it is.
The new edition has a short story by me called All Our Yesterdays, and you can get that for, I think, three bucks on Amazon.
You can get that copy.
It is the March, April 2017 edition, but it does have words in it, so it's a little tougher than Knowles' book.
Unbelievable.
That is unbelievable that he did that.
Good on him.
The man is a troll.
And now do we have to respect him?
No.
Never mind.
Sorry.
That thought went fleeted through my head for a minute, but that's ridiculous.
All right, so what's going on?
I actually do want to talk about double standards.
I just have to mention this WikiLeaks thing that came out yesterday, this incredible blast of information.
So obviously we have a spy of some sort or traitor in our intelligence operations who released to Wikileaks all this material about the way our intelligence guys gather information.
And it turns out they can take over the Internet of Things, right?
They can take your iPad and watch you.
They can watch you through your Apple TV.
They can listen to you on your iPhone.
Hopefully they're only doing this to the bad guys, but they can do it to anybody.
And not only that, they can infiltrate your computer and make it seem as if the Russians had done it.
So now we don't know who hacked.
We don't know who phished.
Actually, nobody hacked the DNC.
You know, they phished the DNC.
They caught John Podesta on a phishing expedition.
He sent them his email address, I think, and that's how they got into him.
But now we don't even know if it's the Russians anymore.
So pretty soon they're going to be accusing Donald Trump of consorting with Americans.
You know, that's going to be the new thing on CNN.
CNN.
How many Americans did you talk to?
And did you talk to the American ambassador?
Well, I'm president of the United States.
That's no excuse.
Anyway, so this is everything is getting much, much more complicated.
But I want to talk about, I really do want to talk about this whole double standards thing, because this is, this week has just brought this to a fore.
When we talk about fake news, this is what it means.
It doesn't mean this story is untrue or that story is untrue.
It is the double standard by which things are treated.
So for instance, when the guy from Time, I think it was, said the Martin Luther King bust had been taken out of the Oval Office, oops, no, somebody was just standing in front of it.
You know, Chuck Todd and all these journals just shrugged that off as if that were an incredibly incendiary thing to say that you would never have said about a Democrat in office.
So now we have this thing.
Trump, you know, they hammer Trump with all this empty stuff about the Russians.
They have, it's all smoke, no fire.
And people keep saying it's a lot of smoke.
I'm not sure there's that much smoke.
You know, I mean, I don't know what they've got, but they don't have anything substantive.
And Trump shoots back this thing that I was bugged.
Obama bugged me in Trump Tower.
And listen to Scary Spicer, the president's spokesman, get hit by CNN and ABC News.
He's giving a press conference on the new health care bill, and they come out with this thing on the bugging.
The president made a very serious allegation over the weekend, and I think we would all be remiss if we went through this briefing and not try to get you on camera to at least offer us some evidence.
Where is the evidence?
Where is the proof that President Obama bugged President Trump?
Well, I answered this question yesterday on camera on your air.
So just so we're clear, I know this is now beat twice, but I think I made it clear yesterday.
Since yesterday.
Since yesterday, nothing is new proof.
No, it's not a question of it's not a question of new proof or less proof or whatever.
The answer is the same.
And I think that, which is that I think that there is a concern about what happened in the 2016 election.
The House and Senate Intelligence Committee have the staff and the capabilities and the processes in place to look at this in a way that's objective, and that's where it should be done.
And frankly, if you've seen the response from, especially on the House side, but as well as the Senate, they welcome this.
And so let's let the Senate do their job and the House, excuse me, intelligence committees, and then report back to the American people.
Will the president withdraw the accusation?
Does he have any?
That's what we're asking, is for them to look at this and see if there is no regulation about raising this action.
Absolutely not.
So he's getting the third degree, basically, over this thing.
But who is giving Schumer the third degree over his?
You know, Schumer can go on and accuse Trump, especially accused Jeff Sessions of essentially being a Russian spy, and nothing.
Nobody peppers him with questions like that.
Now, here, and some of this is coming from Andrew McCarthy at National Review, terrific.
He's obviously former federal prosecutor.
He's going to be on the show next week, and he's the guy who put the blind chic away.
But he's now become this absolutely terrific writer for National Review.
And he pointed this out.
Here's a New York Times story from January 18th: American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump, including his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, current and former senior American officials said.
So this was put out as a way of branding Trump.
This story was the New York Times, a former newspaper, branding Trump by saying, ooh, they're investigating him for communications with the Russians.
American law enforcement and intelligent agencies are examining intercepted communications.
So they're saying he was bugged.
They're saying he was bugged.
Now, if he wasn't bugged, you know, then there's no Russian story, right?
I mean, their idea is there's a Russian story because the feds were investigating him.
So if he wasn't bugged, there's no Russian stories.
If he was bugged, they haven't come up with anything.
So why was he bugged?
And listen to Josh Ernst.
Remember the last president in his name?
What was his name?
Oh, I can't remember.
He sounded like a terrorist.
I can't remember.
But Obama's former press guy, Josh Ernest, talking to Martha Rattis, right?
And listen, she actually, she, who is a partisan reporter on the left, she actually goes after him to try and get a denial out of him.
Listen to him weasel out of it.
President Obama's former speechwriter Jon Favreau, your former colleague, tweeted, I'd be careful about reporting that Obama said there was no wiretapping.
Statement just said that neither he nor the White House ordered it.
Can you categorically deny that the Obama Justice Department did not seek and obtain a FISA court-ordered term?
What I can categorically deny, Martha, is that the White House was at all involved in directing or interfering or influencing an FBI investigation.
That's not what I'm asking.
What I'm asking is can you deny that the Obama Justice Department did not seek and obtain a FISA court-ordered wiretap of the Trump campaign?
It was a cardinal rule.
Here's the simple answer to that question: Martha.
I don't know.
And it's not because I'm no longer in government.
The fact is, even when I was in government, I was not in a position of being regularly briefed on an FBI criminal or counterintelligence investigation.
The White House, no one at the White House, including the President of the United States, should be in a position in which they're trying to influence or dictate how that investigation is being conducted.
Do you know whether the President was ever given information about surveillance at Trump Tower?
What I can tell you, well, first of all, I'm not aware of all of the details of how the president was briefed by the FBI, but what I can tell you is the president was not giving marching orders to the FBI about how to conduct their investigations.
He was not asking for regular updates on FBI investigations.
And let me just stipulate one more time.
You have to ask the FBI whether there actually is an investigation into Mr. Trump.
Such weasel stuff, because again, as I said before, this is the meddlesome priest rule.
You know, the president doesn't have to call up the FBI and say, investigate Trump.
He just has to let it be known that that would be a good thing or have some of his people let it be known and off they go.
And he knows.
Look, you know, Loretta Lynch was one of the most blandly sinister public officials we ever had.
Nothing that went on in her Justice Department was unpolitical.
Eric Holder, same thing.
It was all political.
It was an absolute scandal the way the Obama Justice Department was run.
And if they were bugging Trump Tower, Obama knew.
If they were bugging, you know, that is almost guaranteed.
And I'm not saying he ordered it.
He didn't have to order it.
So all I'm talking about is the difference in the way these stories are covered.
CNN is basically putting up headlines that says Trump falsely claims Obama bugged him or Trump unsubstantiated claims, but never Schumer's unsubstantiated claims or Pelosi's unsubstantiated claims about Jeff Sessions or Obama or the contacts with the Russians.
Absolute trash.
I'm just talking about the double standard.
So now we've got this health bill come out.
And, you know, this health bill, I'm of two minds about it.
You know, it's obviously got a lot of problems.
It is a little bit of Obamacare light.
I'm not, I wonder if maybe, I think that Trump has to have a law.
They have to have passed something out that starts with this law.
And I'm hoping it'll be changed.
Both Paul Ryan and Tom Price, the health guy, are saying there's a three-pronged process by which we're going to get rid of Obamacare.
This is the first prong.
I think, you know, they're going to have to do something, and I hope they do.
But it's got problems, so off it goes to be debated and all this stuff.
But let's listen to the way Pelosi, Pelosi goes on, and she just says, this is the worst bill ever.
There's nothing good about it.
She said, what does she say?
Play number four.
You can hear what she says.
Just when you think you've seen it all, the Republicans go to a more extreme place.
This will make millions of people, it's a question of 10, 15, 20 million people off of having health insurance.
It will be the biggest transfer of wealth from low and middle income people to wealthy people in our country.
You don't think of it that way.
That's why we say to them, show us the numbers.
Show us the numbers about what the impact is personally on people.
Show us the numbers as to how many people will be thrown off.
It couldn't be worse.
If she doesn't know the numbers, how does she know it's going to be the biggest transfer of wealth?
If she doesn't know the number, I mean, this is what I mean.
This is like logic on the face of it.
If she doesn't know the numbers, how does she know it couldn't be worse or whether it's great?
She has no idea.
She doesn't know yet.
But she just goes out and says, but here's the thing that really gets me.
They ask her about Obamacare.
Okay?
And here's what she says.
This is number five.
Before, you have to take it back to before.
Before we had the Affordable Care Act, which is what I call it, and with all the respect and world to the president, before, premiums were soaring if you could even get insurance.
And if you had a pre-existing condition, you couldn't.
The Affordable Care Act, in some instances, there will be some increases, not across the board, but in some instances, there will be increases.
But nothing to compare what it would have been without the Affordable Care Act.
And the coverage is far superior.
All of the benefits.
So the goal of the Affordable Care Act was to do three things.
To improve benefits, to expand coverage as to who is included, and to lower cost.
It has succeeded in every one of those things.
Every word of that is untrue, and those guys, the reporters just sit there and listen to it.
The Affordable Care Act is collapsing.
And when the Republicans come out and say the Affordable Care Act is collapsing, they are only speaking the truth as if you said the sky were blue.
Okay?
Why is she allowed?
She sits there without challenging it.
No Republican making outlandish statements like that would be unchallenged, would go unchallenged.
And they just sit there nodding.
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Okay, we're talking about double standards, right?
So this is, I'm just giving the examples of why the news is fake per se, okay?
It's not about each story, and it's not about whether this story is true or that story is true, but why the news is all fake because Democrats are covering Democrat news in a Democrat way for a Democrat audience.
That is what our mainstream media are.
Double Standards In Media00:10:15
That are what they are, as it were.
I always hate, we should just declare media a single noun.
I think we should get rid of the idea that it's a plural noun.
Okay.
So we've got this health bill.
Whatever, you know, Ryan said this himself.
He says we're putting it out of its misery.
This is an act of mercy.
And that is just true.
People, insurers are leaving the plan.
It's no longer sustainable.
Prices are going up.
Choices are going down.
The thing is falling apart.
It's going to vanish without a trace if the Republicans don't do something because of Barack Obama, because they created this.
Nancy Pelosi, who you just saw lying on TV, Nancy Pelosi created this bill, helped create this bill to make it so it would collapse.
And President Hillary Clinton would give us single-payer government health care.
And things somehow, you know, buying things didn't work out quite the way she planned.
All right.
So this is just the way people are covered.
I have to talk, in keeping with this subject, I have to talk about Ben Carson.
Ben Carson was giving a speech, right?
He's now the HUD director.
And he's giving a speech and he made this comment about slaves coming over to America.
There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less.
But they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandsons, great-granddaughters might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.
Okay, so he called slaves immigrants.
He said they came over unwillingly.
He called them immigrants, but he said they too had a dream that they might succeed in this land.
Twitter goes nuts.
Chelsea Clinton tweets, this can't be real.
Slaves were not and are not immigrants.
Okay, this is Chelsea Clinton.
Samuel Jackson, now spokesman for that credit card company, right?
Samuel Jackson says, okay, Ben Carson, I can't.
Immigrants in the bottom of slave ships, mother, please, and then has a hashtag that I won't repeat on the air, basically calling him an Uncle Tom, okay?
The New York Times has an op-ed today essentially calling Ben Carson a fool for saying this, what a clown he is.
Here's Barack Obama a couple years ago.
Life in America was not always easy.
It wasn't always easy for new immigrants.
Certainly it wasn't easy for those of African heritage who had not come here voluntarily and yet in their own way were immigrants themselves.
There was discrimination and hardship and poverty.
But like you, they no doubt found inspiration in all those who had come before them.
And they were able to muster faith that here in America they might build a better life.
This is one of 11 times he called slaves immigrants.
Barack Obama called slave immigrants.
His words are almost exactly the sentiments are almost exactly the same.
Next thing that's going to happen is they're going to accuse Ben Carson of plagiarism.
You know, it's like, wait, wait, you mother, you plagiarized our president.
I mean, it's absurd.
It is absurd.
And this happens again and again.
Here's one more, just double standards, right?
This happened at that White House press dinner.
Congressman, Democrat congressman from Louisiana, Cedric Richmond, talking about Kelly Ann Conway in that photograph that we've all been talking about, about her kneeling on the sofa in the Oval Office.
Here's the Joe.
This is a place where they go to make their jokes.
Here's the joke he made.
And you even mentioned Kelly Ann in the picture on the sofa.
But I really just want to know what was going on there.
Because, you know, I won't tell anybody.
And you can just explain to me that circumstance because she really looked kind of familiar in that position there.
But don't answer.
And I don't want you to refer back to the 90s.
Sexist?
Anybody?
No?
Yes.
Come on.
I mean, come on.
You know, it's like that.
She looked, it's unbelievable.
Can you imagine a Republican congressman saying this about a Democrat official?
I mean, just that's all you got to do.
You got to play Cheryl Atkinson's replacement game.
You know, replace the Democrat with a Republican, replace the Republican with a Democrat, and you will see the outrage.
Here is a place, here's an example where the double standard blew up in their faces, okay?
This is great.
I love this.
A professor of economics named Maria Guadalupe was watching the presidential debates last year and had a thought.
What if Trump were a woman and Hillary were a man?
How would that change people's perceptions of the exchanges in the debates?
With the help of Joe Salvatore, a professor who specializes in something called ethnodrama, Guadalupe set up a recreation of sections of the original debates, a recreation, I'm sorry, of sections of the original debates using actors to play the roles of Trump, Clinton, and the moderator, but switched the genders, right?
So Clinton, they studied, they studied Clinton's moves and her tone of voice, and they studied Trump's, and the woman played Trump, and the man played Clinton.
Okay?
And what they expected to find was that everybody would suddenly be outraged that a woman saying the things that Donald Trump said because everybody so hates women.
But instead, it blew up in their faces.
Let's just take a look.
This is the rehearsal.
It's really kind of funny.
This is the rehearsal.
We are going to enforce the trade deals that we have, and we're going to hold people accountable.
When I was Secretary of State, we actually increased American exports globally 30%.
We increased them to China 50%.
So I know how to really work to get new jobs and to get exports that help to create more new jobs.
But you haven't done it in 30 years, in 26 years.
You haven't done it.
I've been Secretary of State.
Your wife has NATA.
It's one of the worst trade deals to ever happen to.
You go to England, you go to Ohio, Pennsylvania, you go anywhere you want, Secretary Gordon, and you will see devastation where manufacturers are down 30, 40, sometimes 50%.
NAFTA is the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere, but certainly ever signed in this country.
And now you want to approve Trans-Pacific Partnership.
You were totally in favor of it.
Then you heard what I was saying, how bad it is, and you said, I can't win that today.
But you know that if you did win, you would approve that.
And that would be almost as bad as NAFTA.
Well, nothing will ever talk NAFTA.
That is just not accurate.
So these lefty professors and the lefty audience were all expecting to hate the woman because she was being aggressive and they thought that instead they really liked Donald Trump and there were people in the audience with their heads in their hands.
There were people like, you know, having trouble breathing because they found that she was speaking directly, simple, straightforward, in a straightforward manner.
They wanted to have a beer with her.
She reminded them of their Jewish aunt who comes and brings them chicken soup.
You know, it was like they suddenly found that they were exactly wrong.
The double standard was theirs.
It wasn't ours.
It was theirs.
Really, really interesting.
The final thing I want to say about this before we get to the mailbag is that this double standard, the big double standard here, is that there's some kind of chaos and destruction going on in the Oval Office.
Joe Scarborough said the other day, this White House is going down.
This is seven weeks in, seven weeks in of a non-politician, our first non-politician president, you know, trying to find his C-legs, basically.
And Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who's in tears half the time saying, Rome is burning, Rome is burning, everything, you know, this hysteria, where really the crisis is on the left.
The chaos is on the left.
I will give the last word to DNC Chair Tom Perez.
Listen to him talking about what has happened to the Democratic Party.
I understand that one of the basic pillars and adages of politics and of life is often, what have you done for me lately?
What do you stand for today?
I understand what you stood for yesterday, but what do you stand for today?
And what do you stand for tomorrow?
And I understand that not only did the Democratic Party not cross the finish line successfully in 2016, but when you look at the elections over the last eight years in states across this country, Democrats have lost over 900 seats.
We had far more governors eight years ago who were Democrats than we do today.
We had far more members of the United States Senate.
We had 59 Democrats in the Senate in 2009.
And now we have far less.
So I understand that it's an important time.
And I ran to be the chair of the Democratic National Committee because I understood that the Democratic Party has both a crisis of relevance and a crisis of confidence.
That we have work to do.
That the definition of insanity is to do the same old thing over and over again and think that this time you're going to be successful.
That's the DNC chair, a crisis of relevance, not just a crisis of confidence, but a crisis of relevance.
They definitely have it.
You know, the job numbers came in, or early job numbers, preliminary job numbers came in for February.
It seems like really good jobs have started to come back instead of the service sector, low-paying jobs that were buoying up the numbers for the Obama administration while people who had really good engineering jobs were maybe getting a small part-time job and they were saying, well, he's employed again and all this stuff.
It sounded like really good jobs.
We're coming back if that's true.
And we can't say yet that that is true.
But if this Trump economy starts to turn around and really come roaring back, I mean, he's going to win states that we don't even have.
It'll be like Obama talked about 57 states.
He's going to win 57 states next time out.
Why We Can't Judge00:11:08
All right, the mailbag.
We only play that trying to kill people on the road at this point.
All right.
From someone with my name, Drew Andrew, I'm a big fan of the show.
I've heard both you and Ben make several references to Game of Thrones, implying that you both watch it.
How do you justify the abundant nudity in sex scenes?
And how does this differ from pornography?
If they're not different, is pornography and thus Game of Thrones justifiable or okay for Christian viewing?
Thanks.
Hmm.
Okay, really good.
Excellent question because there's a big fight about this.
There's one guy I can't remember.
What's his name?
Matt, I can't remember.
He's a Christian guy who just says, and no Christian should be watching this.
And I want to be really careful because when I have talked about sex and Christianity on the show, there's always the problem is not with what I say, the problem is what I know people hear, and so I want to be very careful, okay?
So let me set up, I'm going to get to the answer of this question, but I'm going to go the long way route.
First of all, I want to make it clear that there is a difference between what might be good for you or bad for you, what might be right and wrong, and what I feel I have the right to judge, okay?
So for instance, I would happily engage with somebody in a conversation about whether gay marriage is good for society or not.
I would happily engage in that conversation.
But what the guy next to me does at home with a willing adult partner is absolutely none of my business.
I may have opinions about it, but I am not here to judge that.
And by not judging it, I not only follow what I think is scripture, I also have a happier life, which I think following scripture generally provides.
I think that the judge not lest you be judged, I do not know.
I do not know, A, what the person next to me does in the privacy of his own home, and I do not know how it affects his relationship with God.
That is what I do not know.
He may be living at so much higher a level than his internal desires.
He may be doing so much better than the machine that he's inhabiting, this car that he's driving, that he may actually be doing great when I think, oh my, how can he do such things?
It's none of my business.
So that is one question.
The other question is, how does the gospel affect our relationship with sex?
And not only do a lot of mainstream churches, but a lot of people desire to find rules for sex that apply to everyone, right?
The rules for sex that apply to everyone.
One of the things that this does is it gives you the power to judge other people as the Bible tells you not to do, okay?
The new covenant that Christ begins is a covenant in which the law of God is written on your heart and in your brain.
And that means that it may look entirely different in some instances for you than it looks for me.
That is not telling you to go wild because you think it's great.
It is telling you that when you come to God through Christ, this is my own experience.
It's not that sex becomes less important.
It's that something else becomes more important.
If there's no God, if you are just a piece of meat, sex is about as important as it gets.
That's about as important as it gets.
But there is something I think that is more important.
And that's something, this is from a guy named Drew.
So I will say, there is a Drew that you were meant to be that you know that you are not.
You know this to be true.
Every single person knows this to be true.
We know there is someone we were made to be that we are not.
And Christ through his actions and through his life and death and resurrection opens a door back to that person.
And because you now have a purpose in life, which is getting back to that person that you were made to be, your life becomes joyful.
When you are going in the right direction, when you know what your life is about, that makes your life joyful.
Okay, so what does that have to do with sex?
All right.
Let's say two people are on the road, traveling salesmen, whatever, man and a woman.
They're completely unattached, have no wife, no husband.
They meet on the road, they like each other, in a friendly way, decide to go to bed together and have sex.
None of your business, right?
None of my business, nobody's business but theirs.
They can do anything they want.
Is that moving them back on the road to that person they're supposed to be?
I don't know the answer.
You don't know the answer, but they know the answer, okay?
They know the answer.
Now, let's get back to Game of Thrones.
I have a friend who is a Christian who has a pornography problem.
He's very open about it.
He says, I've become addicted to it.
I had to break the addiction.
Blah, blah, blah.
He can't watch Game of Thrones.
He cannot watch Game of Thrones because there's a lot of sex and nudity in it.
And I'll get to the question of whether it's pornography because I don't think it is, but there's a lot of sex and nudity in it.
And in the opening seasons of the show, when HBO was trying to draw you in, it was exploitative.
There's no question.
They threw it in.
I think personally, I think most sex scenes and nude scenes in movies are exploitative.
I mean, you can almost always do it better some other way, but it brings in the people, it puts butts in the seats, as they say, and so they did it, and there it is.
Okay, so that guy is doing the right thing.
He is moving toward that self that he is supposed to be, and he knows it, and he does that in consultation with God and with the gospels, I hope, and that helps him to know what he should do.
My life is One of the great consolations of life for me is the arts, especially the storytelling arts.
The arts are a way that I get closer to myself, get closer to God.
The storytelling arts are a central joy in my life, and I believe joy brings me closer to God.
And the effect of watching a nude scene on me is not the same as it is on my friend.
I mean, I, first of all, I find beautiful women one of the great joys of life.
You know, if you're going to cut the nudes out of the art, you're going to have to close down the Louvre because it's full of nudes, you know.
Beautiful women are one of the great joys of life.
Oftentimes, I enjoy that, I have that joy in a fairly innocent fashion.
Sometimes not so innocent.
But I have learned over the years that I'm not going to do the things that are really bad, like get addicted to pornography or cheat on my wife or any of those things.
So I am taking the joy of this great story, Game of Thrones, which I do believe is a terrific story, one of the great stories of our age.
And it is giving me the joy and wisdom and bliss that I get from storytelling, which is part of my nature, part of who I'm supposed to be.
So for me, watching Game of Thrones is a good thing.
It is a positive thing.
And so that's why I don't believe in the rules.
Now, is it pornography?
I don't think it actually is pornography because it is a story about characters.
To me, I'll tell you something funny.
Pornography is inherently, it's inherently anti-art because it dehumanizes sex.
That is the thing about pornography.
When you see pornography, as one Supreme Court justice once said, you know it when you see it, and that's because it's anti-art.
Art is about humanizing the world, imposing God's values essentially on the world, telling the story of the world through the human heart.
And pornography does exactly the opposite.
It turns everybody into a piece of meat, into a peg fitting into a hole, and it really just plays to your flesh, basically.
I think the most corrupting thing about Game of Thrones is that the author doesn't believe in God, and he ties himself in knots, excluding God from the story when God has a natural place in the story.
Because there's all this religion that has power, but it keeps getting debunked, you know.
And the one time that somebody speaks true religion, he's immediately wiped off the face of the earth in this very humiliating way, you know.
And so I think that that is the most corrupting thing about it, that the logic of the story is being perverted by the author's opinion.
And that is something as an author, you try never to do.
You try never to say, oh, I want this to have a happy ending, so I'm going to give it a happy ending, even though the story demands that the hero dies.
You just don't do that.
That is bad authoring, as bad writing.
And that is the one thing about Game of Thrones.
That's my biggest criticism of it.
So I hope that's an answer.
I mean, the thing is, you know who you're supposed to be.
I hope you're reading the Bible.
I hope you're talking to God every day and consulting with him and consulting with other books about that.
And you know, you know what you should be doing, whether you're taking a step toward that person you're supposed to be or away.
You know.
It's written in your heart and in your brain.
That is the new covenant.
And so I can't give you rules for what you should watch.
I can't give you rules for what you should do except for those things.
Do those things.
All right.
Did that make sense?
I'm not going to send anybody off a cliff.
All right.
All right.
Here's.
Let's see.
I've used up so much time here.
Oh, great and wise supreme leader Clavin, I am puzzled by a certain aspect of Christian theology.
Christians believe that anyone who accepts Christ as his Lord and Savior goes to heaven.
How does this make sense philosophically?
If someone like Hitler would accept Christ, would he go to heaven sincerely, George?
You know, we had this hilarious conversation backstage once about whether Hitler committed suicide, so could he go to heaven because he killed Hitler?
Which actually is kind of a profound question, but it was very funny.
You know, first of all, that's a very simplistic notion of heaven and how you go and all this.
You know, it's a very mysterious thing.
We know that we are saved by faith in Christ.
We don't necessarily know how that works.
We don't know who is saved and how he's saved.
We have faith and trust that if we have faith, we will be saved.
And the question of Hitler's inner life, we actually cannot judge.
We cannot.
The thing that we cannot judge is a person's relationship with God.
Now, Hitler, yeah, can we make a safe guess?
I'm not expecting to see him, I'll be honest with you.
But in all truth, getting to the most profound level, we cannot judge his relationship with God.
And that is the only thing, the only thing we know about it.
What it is, you know, the thing about Jesus is so fascinating is that he wrongfoots everybody.
You know, when he comes into Jerusalem at the end and he's raised Lazarus from the dead and the people are cheering, it seems like they're kind of thinking, oh, you know, he can raise the dead, therefore he's going to get rid of the Romans and he's going to rebuild the temple and bring back the kingdom of David and all that stuff.
He doesn't do any of those things.
He doesn't do any of those things.
He completely wrongfoots everybody.
And so it really seems that he's saying, I'm not changing the way the world works.
I'm trying to tell you that it can be seen in a different way.
Because Jesus says all these stuff, this stuff, and because it's Jesus, everybody kind of nods and looks holy and looks pious about it.
He says, don't worry about money.
And everybody, ah, Jesus, don't worry.
Yes, don't worry about money.
And I always think, like, really?
If I got two kids and they're in private school and I'm a novelist, it's like I shouldn't worry.
I mean, because that's a kind of complicated thing.
He heals people and you think, well, what?
Because that doesn't happen when he's not around.
So he's obviously seeing a different world than we are.
He's coming from a different place than we are.
And he's trying to get us to that place.
And that is the salvation I think that he's bringing.
But you've got to think it through.
You've got to think, what does he see that we don't see?
How does a guy walk on water?
Why does he think if you can't walk on water, you don't have enough faith?
It's really, it really are important questions.
One more, and then I'll stop.
Dear great one and love guru Claven, this is from Spencer.
Looking for Revolution00:05:42
I have noticed in the mailbag, woo-hoo, you have answered some romance questions, so here is mine.
I am a 20-year-old Christian male who has never had a date of any kind.
I am not someone you typically characterize like this because I'm not 400 pounds or a nerd who plays video games.
Hey, hey, leave the video games alone.
I would say I am a fairly decent looking, but have devoted all my time to baseball as a college athlete.
I would like to get into the dating scene, but I am not really sure where to start.
What would your advice be to me who would really like to enter dating?
You know, I got to say, I mean, obviously I've been out of the dating game a long time, but I would have to say, if I were dating today, I would go on a Christian dating site.
I would go on eHarmony or something like that.
Is that a bad answer?
I mean, yeah, you don't know it because you guys haven't had a date in six months, right?
Oh, you're married, so you're not allowed there.
But yeah, no, I think I would.
I think if you do it right and it's a reputable site, eHarmony or something like that is a good place.
It's people who are looking for permanent relationships, not looking for a hit and run.
And I think that would be the safest way to do it.
In the old days, in my day, people went to bars and it was awful.
It was just dreadful.
I mean, they would call it a meat rack, and it was.
And I think this is a way to get to know somebody and get to know somebody well.
And the other thing, of course, is go to places where people are and socialize.
I mean, churches, you go to church and you can socialize and all that stuff.
So, those would be my suggestions, but I've been out of the game a long time.
All right, stuff I like.
We're talking about political movies and books and their reaction to them.
And the way, you know, it's really interesting.
The first one we talked about was 1984, because all these lefties are buying 1984 because they think Donald Trump has brought 1984, but they don't realize they are 1984.
1984 is a takedown of the left.
It's a takedown of the left by a left-winger, but it is still a takedown of the left.
And when you read it and you see the way language is treated, you see the way history is treated, you see the way people are treated who don't agree, the way they were treated, for instance, at Middlebury College, where there was a riot to stop a man from speaking and speaking his opinion.
You know, you see that 1984 is the left.
There's more of 1984 on college campuses than there is in the Trump White House.
The one we did yesterday was Not Without My Daughter, which I really like.
And I think you guys, if you've never seen it, you'll really enjoy it.
It's just a really enjoyable film about the tyranny of Iranian Islamism.
And that was just attacked as if it were racist to speak about how a philosophy affects people.
This is one of, I think, the major movies of all time, Dr. Shivago.
I just think it is a wonderful, wonderful film by David Lean, the great director, and by the great writer Robert Bolt, who wrote A Man for All Seasons.
So a really terrific team.
It's got Omar Sharif, when he was still Omar Sharif before he took care of that.
There's all these actors, you know, they come in, they're absolutely good-looking, and then they start drinking.
And they lose it.
Julie Christie, a story of a man, a sweeping, epic story based on the novel by Boris Pasternak that had to be smuggled out of the Soviet Union about the Russian Revolution.
And it's a wonderful story for a lot of reasons.
Mostly it's a love story, but it's a wonderful story because it shows you that revolutions, you know, no matter how bad a revolution is, it doesn't pop up out of nothing.
You know, I mean, it's not like, oh, the Tsars were great, you know, love those Tsars, and here come the evil communists.
That's not the way it worked.
I mean, the thing is, and this is what I always remind conservatives: if you don't want to have a revolution, you know, you've got to treat people fairly and make sure people are being served by the government.
So here is a wonderful scene where Dr. Shivago, who is a famous poet, actually, and he writes poets to his love, Lara, and he is brought in before a guy that he used to know who used to just be a kind of Shmo and now is the leader of the communists, one of the leaders of the communist revolution.
And here is a wonderful scene where he, the leader of the communists, interviews Shivago.
Are you the poet?
Yes.
I used to admire your poetry.
Thank you.
I shouldn't admire it now.
I should find it absurdly personal.
Don't you agree?
Feelings, insights, affections.
It's suddenly trivial now.
You don't agree.
You're wrong.
The personal life is dead in Russia.
History has killed it.
I can see how you might hate me.
I hate everything you say, but not enough to kill you for it.
You have a brother, Yevgrav?
Yevgrav, yes, the policeman.
I didn't know that.
Perhaps not.
A secret policeman.
Did he send you here?
Yevgrov?
Oh, Yevgrav's a Bolshevik.
I don't know anything about these things.
Oh, you know a great deal.
The critics have never given this picture its due.
It is a beautiful movie, a great love story, a great historical epic.
They have never given it its due because it takes their heroes, the commies, and shows them for what they are.
And it's a tragic story.
It's not a blanket condemnation.
It shows you that this world had to go, this world of the czars had to go, but it just shows you what it was that replaced it.