Rachel in Wonderland dissects the media’s obsession with Trump’s nonexistent Russian ties, mocking Rachel Maddow’s failed hype over his 2005 tax returns and exposing outlets peddling "fantasy" narratives—from Clinton’s Podesta emails to Ferguson’s Michael Brown myth. She argues welfare breeds dependency, charity uplifts, and feminism fractures relationships, while Moonlight’s Oscar-winning leftist tale secretly exposes how broken families—regardless of race or sexuality—doom boys without fathers. Christianity, she insists, embraces earthly pessimism but trusts divine redemption, urging faith over dogma. The episode ends with a rapture-like anticipation for Monday’s return, framing modern chaos as proof that only localized responsibility—and divine hope—can restore order. [Automatically generated summary]
News stories about the ties between Russia and Donald Trump's presidential campaign are now so complex that it's become difficult to tell whether CNN and the New York Times are lying to try to sway public opinion toward Democrats or whether they're just making stuff up because they're bored and have nothing better to do.
Let's take a look at the developments so far.
Suspicions of Trump's Russian connections first arose when Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election.
All across this great land from West 42nd Street to West 59th, journalists began asking themselves, how could a corrupt, dishonest, socialist old bat who screeches like a pterodactyl fail to win the hearts and minds of the American people?
The answer must lie in Russia.
You see, the Russians had cleverly sent Clinton campaign manager John Podesta an email disguised as a message from Google.
The email read, quote, Prevy, Comrade John, someone has hacked your password ski.
Please send new password ski to Boris and Natasha, your friends at Google.
Das Vadania, Vlad, unquote.
Completely suckered in by this clever phishing expedition, Podesta sent the sly Russians his password, allowing them to steal and then leak his emails.
These emails shocked the nation by revealing that Hillary Clinton was a corrupt, dishonest, socialist old bat who screeches like a pterodactyl.
Up to that point, voters may have realized that Hillary was corrupt and probably dishonest.
And okay, they already understood she was a socialist.
And yes, they could see for themselves that she was an old bat who screeched like a pterodactyl, but they had never until this moment fully realized that John Podesta was stupid enough to send his password to the Russians.
This shocking news may have only swayed 0% of the electorate, but it was the crucial 0% that put Donald Trump over the top.
As one voter told reporters, quote, after eight years of being unemployed and watching Obama sell out American interests while he tried to force me to let boys into the girls' room at my daughter's school, I was just about to vote for four more years of the same until I read those doggone emails, unquote.
So, so far, journalists, so for journalists, the question naturally arises, what did Trump know and when did he become a Russian spy?
So far, reporters have found no evidence that Trump was involved in this completely meaningless mischief, but they have spent enough man hours covering the story that each and every one of them could have used his time more productively by whittling a bar of soap into a miniature replica of the battleship Missouri.
Working round the clock, journalists have exposed the fact that people who meet with ambassadors have met with ambassadors, people who speak to Vladimir Putin have spoken to Vladimir Putin, and that Donald Trump himself may have whistled the theme song to Firm Russia with Love while taking a shower in a hotel owned by a man who read the first hundred pages of War and Peace in college.
Trump's Tax Returns Mystery00:17:18
Stay tuned for more on this amazing story of cynicism, stupidity, and rank corruption, or as we call it, American journalism.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Shipshaw dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
It makes me want to sing Oh, hoorah, hooray Oh, hooray, hooray All right, it's mailbag day.
Hey!
And we'll be doing that after we break away from Facebook and YouTube.
So you got to come over to the dailywire.com.
And while you're there, you could subscribe.
Are we giving away something new?
We're giving away Knowles' book, aren't we?
We are giving away Michael Knowles' reasons to vote.
You got to subscribe for a year.
It's a lousy eight bucks a month, and we're giving away Michael Knowles' reason to vote for Democrats, a completely blank book.
And if we run out, we'll just send you a ream of papers.
It actually is a limited offer.
We only have so many of them, right?
Okay, so that is in the mailbag.
I do have some bad news, which is I'm going to Washington tomorrow to do the National Review Ideas Summit.
Why they asked me, I don't know, but it's really like heavy hitting intellectuals and big political Paul Ryan is going to be there all these people.
And me, you know, I think I'm cleaning the tables.
I think that's why I'm waiting tables after the thing.
But because of this, we were going to do a show on Friday, but our producer, Jonathan Hay, is doing his hair that day.
So, oh, that's the day you roll up your socks, isn't it?
I think, yeah, that's Friday.
So the Clavenless weekend begins after this show.
And that's bad news for, but some of you will survive.
Some of you will probably live through it and come back on Monday.
So that's, just have to set that up.
Meanwhile, is your underwear comfortable?
That's the real question.
That is the real question.
Is your underwear comfortable?
Because if you were wearing Mac Weldon, it would be.
And I am, this is testimony.
I am testifying to Mac Weldon.
I bought it online.
First, really easy website, easier than whatever website you use that you just love.
It's like one of those websites.
You click, you're there, you pick the stuff out you like, you can pick the color.
I got a hoodie at this place that is, it has become now one of my favorite pieces of clothing.
I wear this stuff so much that when my wife wants to wash it, she just picks me up by the heels and dumps me head first into the washing machine because I won't take this thing off.
It really is good stuff.
I don't know what they make it out of, but it's so really comfortable, really fits.
You can play in it.
You can do sports in it if you want.
Just wear it for comfort.
And if you go there now to macweldon.com, you can get 20% off by using the promo code Clavin.
That's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Use the promo code Clavin, K-L-A-V-A-N, and you will get 20% off really comfortable underwear and other stuff, sweatshirts and hoodies and the like.
And I actually got through that ad without cracking up like I did last time.
All right.
So we talked earlier.
It was earlier this week, I think, that I was talking about the fact that Trump has defeated, for now, the Democrat media, which is most of the mainstream media.
But it's even better than that.
He now has them on self-defeat.
They're now defeating themselves.
I mean, did you see that Rachel Maddow thing?
It was like she went down.
You know, here's the thing.
The mainstream media is so insulated, so inside this bubble, that it has created this entire fantasy world.
We were just joking about the Russian thing.
When you really study this Russian scandal, there is no there.
They keep saying, well, they hacked the election.
Hacked the election.
Nobody hacked the election.
They hacked some emails.
They sent some emails out.
I'm sure it had very, very little effect on who people were voted for.
People are much smarter than that.
So they didn't hack the election.
Didn't happen.
Total fantasy.
As far as we know, there's no insidious connection between the Trump campaign and the Russians.
So that's a fantasy.
So now they have this thing.
He didn't turn in his tax returns.
And my guess, to be honest with you, is that Trump didn't turn in his tax returns because he's not as wealthy as he says he is because he makes such a big deal about how wealthy he is.
And so maybe he only has a few billion dollars.
I mean, look, as far as I'm concerned, once you've got a billion dollars, once you go from the M to the B, you've kind of crossed that line.
So Rachel Maddow gets two pages of Trump's 2005 tax returns.
This is now 12 years ago, right?
And she, at 7:30 at night, she tweets out, breaking, we've got Trump tax returns tonight, 9 p.m., ETE, MSNBC, and then in parentheses, seriously, seriously.
Now, this is one of my favorite pieces of tape, I think, of the year so far.
She comes on, and I want to get the first one, number three.
She comes on and she builds this up and she is, when I say she's having hot flashes, she's waving her hand in front of her face as if she's having hot flashes.
Look at this.
A little bit of a hullabaloo around here this evening.
I apologize for being a little flustered.
People literally were tweeting at me, shut up, get to Rachel.
Well, you can't before 9 o'clock because I'm not sitting here until 8.59.58.
I'm going to watch.
Thank you, Chris.
Appreciate it.
And thanks, Stuart Home, for joining us for the next hour.
You may have heard we've got some significant breaking news tonight.
Donald Trump's tax returns have surfaced, at least a portion of Donald Trump's past tax returns.
What we have tonight has been turned over to a reporter.
These are returns for one year.
It's a federal return.
This is the first time we believe any federal tax returns for Donald Trump have been obtained by anyone, certainly by any news organization, since he became a presidential candidate, let alone president.
I want to tell you that the way we got this document, the way we got this Trump tax return, is through David K. Johnston.
David K. Johnston is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist.
He's a specialist on tax issues and on financial reporting.
David K. Johnston and his reporting shop, DCReport.org, that's who obtained this return.
And tonight, we have this exclusive first look at their reporting at what they have obtained.
In just a second, we are going to show you exactly what it is that we've got.
We're going to walk through it with David K. Johnston.
We're going to get context on it.
We're going to get some explanation of what it means.
Importantly, we're going to get some explanation and discussion about what further avenues for reporting this may open.
She goes and she goes on and on.
She goes the full Geraldo.
Remember Geraldo Rivera did Al Capone's vault and he built it up for an hour and then they opened the vault and there was a broken bottle inside or something like that.
There was an empty whiskey bottle.
She goes, never go the full Geraldo Geraldo, Rachel.
She goes the full Geraldo and she just builds it up and builds it up.
And Twitter is hilarious.
I mean, Twitter is going nuts.
They're putting up these, you know, these little videos of people banging themselves in the head with rakes and they're saying, kill us, Rachel.
Just tell us what he paid in taxes.
All right.
But she's in full fantasy mode.
She's telling all the things that might be in this thing.
And this is a fantasy that the left has been having for a long time.
You remember Hillary?
We have a clip of Hillary during the debates.
Remember, she wonders why doesn't Trump release his returns.
So you've got to ask yourself, why won't he release his tax returns?
And I think there may be a couple of reasons.
First, maybe he's not as rich as he says he is.
Second, maybe he's not as charitable as he claims to be.
Third, we don't know all of his business dealings, but we have been told through investigative reporting that he owes about $650 million to Wall Street and foreign banks.
Or maybe he doesn't want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he's paid nothing in federal taxes because the only years that anybody's ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license and they showed he didn't pay any federal income tax.
So he's paid zero.
That means zero for troops, zero for vets, zero for schools or health.
And you know, every American, every American is sitting at home going like, wow, you know, I really want to pay as much income tax as I want.
So when Trump says that makes me smart if I didn't pay any income taxes, people are thinking like, well, yeah, you know.
So now, finally, after going on, I don't know how long she went on, but it seemed forever, Rachel takes out, you'd think she hadn't read it.
It looked like she hadn't read it.
You know, she takes out these two pages of a 12-year-old tax return, and here's the big reveal.
What I have here is a copy of Donald Trump's tax returns.
We have his federal tax return for one year for 2005.
I believe this is the only set of the president's federal taxes that reporters have ever gotten a hold of.
What we have are these two pages, front and back, from the same 1040 form that you might have filled out when you file your taxes.
And in terms of what's on here, let me give you the basics.
Aside from the numbers being large, these pages are straightforward.
He paid $38 million, looks like $38 million in taxes.
He took a big write-down of $103 million.
More on that later.
If you add up the lines for income, he made more than $150 million in that year, Mazeltoff.
We got these pages.
We got this document today from a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who's better on financial matters than almost anybody else in the business.
His name is David K. Johnston.
These pages turned up the other day in his mailbox.
He paid $38 million in taxes on $100.
That is more tax.
First of all, it's more taxes than Comcast pays.
It is.
It's a higher tax rate than Obama paid.
So that's like close to a quarter of his income.
Which raises the question in my mind: how did the government get to own one-fourth of anybody's time?
How do you get to own one-fourth of anybody's time?
It makes you one-fourth a slave.
I mean, it's like, how did that happen?
How are we getting into that debate?
So even CNN, and this is a wild cut.
This is not the yeah, here it is, number one.
Here's CNN panel, right?
All liberals, and listen to the assumptions in here.
Even they are going, like, oh boy, this was a big, big bust.
Listen to this.
Here's reality.
If all we get tonight is that Donald Trump paid $38 million to America's government, that's a good night for Donald Trump.
I'm sorry.
There's just really no way.
Like, I was hoping and praying that it would show not only did he pay no taxes, he actually charged the government and got money back.
I wanted something I could get excited about.
What you wanted is that he was paid in rubles.
That's what you were hoping for.
You know, what would be amazing about that is when the New York Times got the 1995 taxes, the big headline was $960 million deduction that allows Donald Trump to not pay any taxes potentially for 18 years.
So if 10 years later, he's paying $38 million, and Trump at the debate essentially said that that story was right.
He said, that makes me smart.
That makes me smart.
So he was actually bragging about it.
So Matt Romney shows that maybe that actually he paid more tax than he's previously admitted to.
It's great.
And what I love about this, what I love is even they're actually, they don't know it, but they're actually making fun of themselves.
I mean, Anderson Cooper said, we were hoping he was paid in rubles.
And Van Jones is saying, I was hoping and praying.
Why are you hoping and praying that the president is a tax cheat?
Because you stink.
Because you're living in a fantasy world of fantasy scandals, hoping and hoping and hoping that the crap you throw against the wall is eventually going to stick.
Because that's what they did to George W. Bush.
We've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, but the mailbag is coming, and you will be able to send questions live.
It does raise the chances that I'll be right.
It lowers the chances that I'll be right from 100% to 99.7%, I think.
You can't send them in line.
So this is what they did to George W. Bush until Hurricane Katrina hit, right?
They kept throwing these fake scandals.
And they even said somebody in the press, I think it was in the New York Times, a former newspaper, said, you know, we haven't been able to lay a glove on him.
And you think, like, why are you trying to lay a glove on him?
You know, why aren't you just reporting the news?
But they are living in this fantasy world.
I've got to keep covering this a little bit longer because it gets funnier and funnier.
The next morning, David K. Johnston, the guy who says he got these financial reports in his mail, he goes on Chris Cuomo's show.
Chris Cuomo is, I think, a professional embarrassment.
His show is so dopey.
But guess who's to blame for this bust?
Guess who's to blame?
Cut number seven.
Do you think it's possible that it was sent to you by the president?
Yes.
Donald has a long history of leaking things about himself and doing it directly and indirectly.
So it's a possibility.
The anger with which the White House responded suggests to me not likely, however, it's when something gets leaked he's happy about he doesn't complain.
Although they did have their game together in uncharacteristic fashion here.
When they found out that this was coming out, they put out a response that nailed exactly how to play this, and they don't always do that.
Actually, they behave pretty unethically for people in the White House press office because I sent them the document and proceeded them to give out the information to competing news organizations.
Professional PR people don't do things like that.
I've never had a White House, and my experience goes back 50 years, do something like that.
That's wonderful.
He's accusing Trump of acting unethically for revealing his own tax forms, right?
Because what happened was when they heard Rachel Maddow was promoing this thing, the White House sent out a notice saying, these are the numbers.
We paid $38 million, you know, Trump paid $38 million.
So they completely undercut her and wrong-footed her.
He's complaining.
He says he has no right to release his tax returns before I release his tax returns.
But by the way, it's a federal crime to reveal somebody's tax returns.
It is a federal crime to send somebody.
It's not this guy's fault.
Obviously, the press gets its information however it gets its information.
And it's possible.
I'm not sure if it's still, I think it is still a federal crime if you did it if a preparer does it.
You cannot do this.
You cannot release people's tax returns.
So, I mean, the whole thing is so scurvy.
And now he's accusing Trump of being the bad guy.
And now listen to this.
This is the exact same spin the New York Times put on this.
Listen to this as Cuomo, and Cuomo is no mental giant.
I mean, the guy, really, really, the guy, if he bumped into a corner of the room, somebody would have to come and turn him around.
And even Cuomo starts to get, as this interview is going on, that, uh-oh, this is not a story, right?
So listen to this.
In Trump's case, he shouldn't have the negative income.
He didn't pay back banks about $918 million.
The banks took that loss.
But the president bought a tax shelter that allowed him to take it as well.
Double taking the loss.
Legal.
Congress, the Republicans in Congress shut that off the minute they learned about it.
But you know what they do?
They let the people who already bought the tax shelter keep their ill-got tax savings.
So legal, but they changed the law subsidy.
That's correct.
So those rotten Republicans, they let you, you know, they don't pass laws retroactively, which you're not allowed to do.
Only the IRS is allowed to pass laws retroactively.
But it's like the guy is still sinking.
You know, it's like he's going, well, I'm going underwater here, but I'm trying to keep this alive.
Even if when even Chris Cuomo figures out that this is no story, I mean, you are really.
But this the thing that gets me about this is it is part of this fantasy world that they are all living in, that they are hoping that they will bump into the real life scandal.
Today, the New York Times runs a headline.
Listen to this, Neil Gorsuch, right?
He's the president's pick for the Supreme Court.
Neil Gorsuch has web of ties to secretive billionaire.
You know who this is?
This is Philip Anschutz.
This is the guy who makes the Narnia movies.
You know, he's a billionaire.
He hired Gorsuch when he was a lawyer.
Gorsuch worked for him for pay as a private lawyer.
Gorsuch occasionally was invited to speak and he spoke.
It's a web of ties to a secretive billionaire.
It's like a lawyer working for a living, you know?
It's like people hire you.
It's just unbelievable.
The other one, I mean, this is all over.
All these stories are coming out, and because of the internet and because they do not monopoly, they don't have the monopoly on the information flow that they used to have.
They still have a pretty strong grip on the information flow, but they don't have the monopoly they used to have.
They keep getting caught.
Charity vs. Welfare State00:15:36
So they have this guy, Jason Pollack, and he's making a film about Michael Brown, the guy who was shot in Ferguson, right?
And Michael Brown robbed the convenience store, but he's got video from the day before showing Brown bringing in a bag.
And it's got he says it's got marijuana in it.
And he says he wasn't robbing it.
He was trading marijuana.
And so Martha McCallum has him on and she starts asking him, saying, you know, there's been three investigations.
The entire left-wing Justice Department of Barack Obama descended on this case and went through this case with a fine toothcomb, all these investigations.
And you have this video that doesn't show anything except maybe he committed another crime.
I mean, if he was doing drugs, trading drugs, then he committed yet another crime.
And they still were trying to stop him from taking stuff out of the store when he turned on the shopkeeper in that threatening way.
He was a gigantic guy.
Listen to this guy when he steps out of his fantasy world.
Listen to him go nuts.
You're saying all of that doesn't matter.
Their investigation is absolutely not true.
Michael Brown did not reach into that guy.
Excuse me, Miss.
Can I speak now?
When the facts of this case come out in my film, Stranger Fruit, the real facts of this case, the facts of this case that Bob McCullough doesn't want us talking about, like the fact that Michael Brown was shot in the head and a bullet came out of his eye.
Do you know how that would happen?
When your head is down and there's a bullet in the ground in their report, there's a bullet in the ground by Michael Brown's head.
Now, how would a bullet go through here out of his eye?
What I know is that there was three different forensic investigations that were done that showed that he was shot in the face.
They failed him.
Everyone in the country was told this narrative that he was shot in the back.
They all failed to fight.
You know how many black men said, you know how many black men are in jail right now?
You know how many black men are in jail right now for nothing, for nothing?
Because the Department of Justice failed them?
You know how many black men are in jail right now?
Don't take it.
Tell me if you have closed the book on it.
We're okay.
My film will show the public the truth, ma'am.
And if you want to know the truth, you should watch it.
Yeah, okay.
I don't know why you got so hung up on what happened, whether he was trading pot or trading or stealing something is completely irrelevant to the outcome of this case.
You know what this reminds me is like when mommy catches you in a lie and you go, you know, you're calling me a liar.
Well, you did lie.
Yeah, man, you can't come in.
You know, his face turns all right.
I mean, Martha is sitting there.
She does.
She reminds me like mom, you know, like now just admit that what you're saying doesn't make any sense.
You know, Nate Silver, I will wind up with this before we get to the mailbag.
Nate Silver, who is, he's kind of the numbers guy or one of the numbers guys, I guess, at the Times.
He has his own site, right?
He has that 38 or whatever it is.
Anyway, he talks about elections and all this.
He did a report recently saying there is, in fact, a left-wing bubble in the press, okay?
And he talks about the fact that diversity of opinion is what gets people to the truth.
That even if you have a group of people who are all high IQ, it's not as good as having a group of people who are different IQs so that you get different points of view.
And that's the wisdom of crowds.
When you have diversity, when you have diversity, you get wisdom.
When you have all people with the same opinion, you get confirmed in your opinion and it starts to make you radical and it starts to make you deluded, as we see the media and so many people on the left clearly are.
I mean, this is what Rachel Maddow was proving.
The thing that got me about this article, nobody quoted this, everybody was talking about Nate Silver's article, but he says the best term for a short-term fix might come from an attitudinal adjustment.
Journalists should recalibrate themselves to be more skeptical of the consensus of their peers.
Well, I call BS the best fix is to hire some conservatives to put conservatives on the editorial desk.
50% of them should be conservatives, just like in the country.
50% can be liberals and 50% can be conservatives of different stripes.
As long as you are talking to yourself, you will only hear what you have to say, and it will become magnified over and over and over again.
That's what we're seeing.
We are seeing them descend into complete fantasy, and all Trump has to do is sit there and laugh up his sleeve.
He doesn't even tweet.
He wasn't even tweeting about when he sent out one tweet.
You know, it's like fake news or something like this.
But he doesn't even have to.
They are on self-destruct.
It's beautiful.
All right.
The mailbag.
You know, somebody wrote in and told us that every time when that happens, he gets so unnerved that he almost drives off the road.
I like to think about that when I hear that.
Do you hear Supreme?
I just like, and not only hear Lindsay scream, I like, I like to think, dear Supreme Grand Moff Clavin, my girlfriend and I are big fans of your show.
Well, thank you.
She especially loves your insight on Hollywood, being a conservative, but also an aspiring actress and filmmaker.
His girlfriend, my girlfriend's biggest fear is being blacklisted for her opinion and political beliefs, so she tends not to voice her opinion often and even tries to act liberal on social media to mask her views.
What advice would you give to her about her career prospects and being a conservative in Hollywood?
Thanks, Josh.
Listen, it's real.
I mean, the blacklist, it's a gray list, but it's real.
Before you get big, before you get famous, before you get out of their reach, you know, you will pay for expressing your opinions.
John Voigt, a big star with Oscar under his belt, still got hit when he came out in favor of George W. Bush and still was isolated and all this stuff.
So look, you have to decide what you want your life to be like.
This, for me, was a big deal.
I'm a writer.
I'm not an actor.
I don't pretend to be somebody else.
Even if I write fiction, it's my fiction.
And I decided that it's not worth, I love waking up and doing what I do.
I love waking up and doing what I do.
It depends on my telling the truth as best I can.
Every word that I write has to be as close to the truth as I can make it.
Even if it's fiction, it has to be truth.
So it doesn't serve me, and it doesn't serve my joy, and it doesn't serve my God for me to lie, for me to pretend to be anything other than what I am.
When I go into a meeting and somebody challenges my politics, and they do this often, they don't challenge me directly.
What they do is they throw their opinions in my face, because a lot of times they're just assuming that I am on their side, because everybody in Hollywood is a liberal.
I always mention that I'm on the other side, and it costs me the job, almost continually cost me the job.
But the way I feel about it is to render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar is to do the work so that the work will be commercial.
If somebody says to me, you know, you have to change this scene because the audience won't like it and the picture will bomb, it's my job to do that.
That is rendering unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar.
But to change who I am, to lie to them about my opinions, to hide my opinions from them, that to me is rendering unto Caesar what belongs to God because that's who I am.
That is my truth.
So what I would say is you have to make choices here.
It will hurt your career to come out as a conservative in Hollywood.
It will hurt your career.
There is no question about it.
So either decide that you're just going to try and keep a low profile and say nothing, or that you're going to try and work on the outskirts of Hollywood and hope that the situation changes.
Hope that by voicing your opinion, you can get that situation to change.
But the one thing I have to say, like I can't tell you what to do, but I wouldn't pretend to be anything.
I would not pretend to be anything.
You can keep your mouth shut.
You can smile.
You can say, you know, when somebody says, oh, wasn't Obama the greatest president ever?
You can smile and sort of look at them glassy-eyed.
You don't have to agree.
But, you know, going on social media and pretending you're a liberal, I don't know.
I think that that does damage to you as an artist, let alone as a person.
I do not think that one should live a lie.
I just don't think that that's a good thing, you know, especially for an artist.
An artist lives in the truth.
Even actors live in the truth, and I don't think it's a good thing to live a lie.
A lot of people would give you other advice.
I'm telling you the way it is.
It will hurt you to come out as a conservative.
But pretending you're a liberal, I'm not sure you have to go that far, and I'm not sure it's good for you.
Hail, Imperator Andrivus Klaisers Maximus.
That is in Latin.
That is amazing.
They got my Latin title.
Thanks for all you do in your discussion about freedom, the poor, and the role of the state.
I noticed one critical absence, charity.
Well, we weren't talking about that, but that's a perfectly valid point.
Charity is also missing from the perspectives of most modern Americans, but I've been thinking about the witness of early Christians as part of Lent.
This perhaps mirrors shifts in focus and values, particularly the loss of extended family structures and localized communities.
But what is the place of charities in helping to balance these relationships?
Many thanks, El Genia D. Listen, charity, the whole thing about charity, there is nothing in the Gospels, there's nothing in the Gospels that says take money away from other people and give it to the poor.
Nothing in the Gospels says anything about that.
At times, Jesus advises certain people to give away money and give their money to the poor, and that always is an ennobling thing.
The whole thing about charity is charity ennobles the giver and it creates responsibility in the person who receives it, right?
It ennobles you because you're letting go of something for a good purpose, and it means the receiver then is kind of responsible to you.
You know, if he's a drunk, if he's doing something wrong, if he's doing something that is making his life go bad, then he now becomes responsible to a church or to a person, and it gives him at least a shot of elevating himself.
If you get welfare, you have what's called welfare psychosis.
This is a word I learned from a welfare, a person who worked in the welfare department.
It's called welfare psychosis, where you begin to think that you deserve what is essentially other people's money.
Other people earned, worked to earn the welfare you are receiving.
And yet, when you receive it from the government, you begin to think it's an entitlement.
That's what they call it, entitlement.
You are entitled to it.
And people come into the welfare office and frequently are very demanding.
Where's my check?
Where's the money that I, it's my money.
It's my money.
And they forget the fact that somebody earned it because you've lost that charitable connection, that connection with charity.
So charity is always better than welfare.
Welfare is destructive.
Welfare creates dependency.
Charity can, can ennoble both the giver and the receiver.
The argument of the left has been, since really the Industrial Revolution, that there's simply the problems are too big in the industrial world for independent charities to handle them.
That has been the argument.
And what I would say to that is, you know, there's no way to prove it because we'll never get rid of the welfare state.
But what I would say is cut the welfare state as far back as you possibly can and then see, then see if people are dealt with by charity.
I have not noticed, I have not seen the, it seems to me the effects of welfare are to mire people in generational poverty.
It does seem sensible to me to have a bottom line, a kind of safety net so nobody falls through the cracks, nobody can lose his job or lose his portfolio and just disappear off the face of the earth.
But it does seem to me that the more, the less the government does, the more communities will do.
And I think it would be really wonderful if we could test that thesis, but you don't want to test it on the lives of the poor.
So I think what I would say is keep cutting back welfare as far as you can until the problem surfaces and make sure the churches and synagogues and people understand that now it becomes their responsibility.
It's just like in tennis, you know, when you play tennis at a club, you have to make calls.
You have to say that's in or that's out.
And so you tend to be very honest and try because there's no game if you're lying.
But if there's a judge, if there's a line judge, then you don't have to make the call.
And when the judge calls it out, even if you know it's in, you're not responsible.
So when the government takes things over, it takes responsibility away from you.
Dear Mr. Clavin, master of word and form, except book titles, yours are not always the best.
That is true, I must confess.
The truth is true, and there it is.
I am curious, do you think it is possible to be a Christian and a pessimist, or is it a contradiction in terms, TMS?
No, it's entirely possible to be a Christian and a pessimist about this world.
I mean, Christianity is, in fact, pessimistic about this world.
What Christ says is, you know, there will be tribulations in the world, but I have overcome the world.
But the world can be a painful, mournful, terrible place.
Civilizations rise and fall.
Everything humans make die.
Every human dies.
You can be a pessimist about that.
What you can't be a pessimist about is the overall story.
We know the overall story has a happy ending.
We know that there is more to life than the world.
That is our faith.
Our faith is that there is more to life than the world.
So your pessimism has to be localized.
It has to be localized in the flesh.
And then you can be a pessimist.
The only thing I would ask is, say, is that pessimism is not always useful.
It just sometimes makes people feel good about themselves.
It makes them feel smart.
But pessimism is not always useful.
And you should ask yourself, is being a pessimist in this particular situation, does that help the situation or just make me feel good about myself?
That's the only thing I would say about it.
But certainly not a contradiction in terms with Christianity.
Dear Supreme Leader Clavin, how would you approach dating with the insanity of feminism infecting women, Spencer?
First of all, I would never date a feminist.
I wouldn't.
I mean, I think that it is a, I think it's a foul, toxic philosophy that makes women unhappy, makes men unhappy.
I'm an individualist, so I would date a CEO.
I would date a woman who wanted to be, you know, who was ambitious.
That may not be what I want.
What I would say, though, any man especially, any man, but I would say this to women too, but I think women have a better sense of this stuff than men do.
Know what you want.
Know what you want your life to look like before you decide you're in love.
Because falling in love can happen and disappear again, you know.
But you've got to know what you want your life to look like.
If you want somebody to make a home for you and take care of your children, then you don't marry a woman who wants to be a CEO.
If you want a person who's going to be a hard-driving businesswoman, great.
Make sure that the woman you're with is a hard-driving businesswoman.
But these things matter.
It's a long life.
A marriage lasts for a long time.
And you want to make those decisions beforehand.
When you date somebody, it's really a trial balloon.
You don't want to get caught up with somebody who you're not going to be with over the long term.
So if somebody, to me, feminism is a lie, it's toxic, and you have to have the courage to say that politely and kindly to people.
And then, believe me, the feminists won't want to go out with you either.
It will solve your problem.
Let's see.
One more, right?
Yes, one more.
Clavin, Clavin, that's it?
Clavin?
I mean, come on.
A little respect for my titles here.
As a Jew converted to Christianity, what are your thoughts on messianic Judaism, which is kind of where you remain a Jew but also believe in Christ?
Why not just keep the mitzvah's obligations and hold a personal belief in Jesus from Josiah?
Mitchell, you know, I have no objections to that whatsoever.
I have no objections to any way that people form their relationships with Jesus Christ.
My personal theology, which I hope is well-founded in Scripture, is that Christianity is not a religion per se.
It is a relationship with a person.
It is a relationship with Jesus Christ, what he has done and what he will do and what he is right now.
That is the relationship.
That human beings need some kind of rites and rituals and metaphors to reach the inexpressible seems to me really sound.
Rites and Rituals of Fatherhood00:04:39
That's a really sound truth about people.
And if you find those rites and rituals and metaphors in the rites and rituals of Judaism, great.
If you find them in the rites and rituals of Catholicism, great.
If you find them in other places, great.
But the goal is to establish that relationship with Jesus Christ, what he did, who he is now, and what he's going to do.
And it makes perfect sense to me that different people have different rites and rituals that get them to that place.
And so I am not, this annoys people because a lot of times people think their religion is the truth.
The truth is that Jesus Christ died for your sins and will come again to judge the living of the dead.
That's the truth.
If you've got that truth down, I think you're in good shape and I don't care how you get there or what rituals you do to remind yourself of it.
All right, let me end the claven week, the short claven week, with a last stuff I like.
And this, you know, I'm calling this stuff I like because it's part of the theme of what I've been talking about this week, which is movies that are supposed to be left-wing and are made by left-wing people, mostly about blacks, that really have conservative messages when you look at them.
And this is Moonlight, which is the Oscar winning film, right?
I won the Oscar.
And by the way, when I kept saying it was going to win the Oscar, and there are comments on the site and on SoundCloud, and I got comments I got on email saying, you are crazy.
Not like I disagree.
You're crazy.
It's going to be la-la-land.
Oddly, none of those people have written to say like, wow, you know, you were right, you know, because you'd be writing to me all the time.
So Moonlight, you know, listen, this is not a great movie because it's vanishingly small.
It is vanishingly small.
But it is, you know, I mean, it could have been an episode.
I thought it could have been one-third of a television show.
That's what I thought.
That's how small I thought it was.
I thought it was one plot line in maybe a season of a series.
Like if this had been, you know, if on The Wire, every two, you know, every week they had two minutes of this story, it would have made a lot more sense.
To make a movie of it seemed ridiculous.
And I'm going to violate, I'll warn you here, I'm going to violate my rule about spoilers.
I'm actually going to give you a spoiler for the reason that it's not really a plot-based movie.
I don't think it ruins the movie to know.
And secondly, I doubt anybody's going to see it.
No one has seen this movie, and I doubt anyone's ever going to look at it.
Very well written, brilliantly acted.
The acting is almost supernatural.
So turn me off if you don't want to spoiler to Moonlight.
But basically, this is a story about a gay kid in the ghetto.
So of course, you've got this intersectional sectionality thing coming out of your nose, right?
You're going like, oh, my God, how left-wing can you get?
But in fact, it's the story of a kid without a father.
And it is a story about the way that fathers define a young boy's life.
Because in the course of this movie, he finds a father figure in this drug dealer who's a little bit more decent than other people.
But he is a drug dealer.
And he ends up, because he has no other father figure, no one else who will accept him for the gay kid he is and for the kind of offbeat kid he is.
No one else will accept him except this drug dealer.
He becomes a drug dealer.
And he becomes, and he takes on all the accoutrements of this guy, like the gold teeth and the Cadillac with the stuff inside and all this.
He takes in all that stuff.
He becomes the father figure, the one guy who acted as a father figure.
And that is a message that I think in this community and in all communities, we need to hear that this is how young boys learn to be men.
And I say that whether they are gay or straight.
Young boys learn to be men by having fathers.
And if you're not there, and if you are there and you're a dirtbag, that is how they're going to learn to be men.
You know, that is how they're going to learn to be men.
And I think that this story really does speak to that.
So as they're going through their intersectionality and celebrating, you know, their tolerance and their gayness and their blackness and all this, they're really telling you that without fathers, boys are lost.
And that is a message that they have screamed at us for saying again and again.
They have told us that marriage was bad for women, which is a lie.
They have told us that fathers didn't matter, which is a lie.
They told us their welfare programs wouldn't destroy the black family by making the father obsolete by replacing the father.
That was a lie.
They were warned about it.
They did it anyway.
That was a lie.
And in moonlight, you see, as they're telling their intersectional story, you actually see that the left in all these policies, their feminist policies, their welfare policies, and their anti-male policies, have really destroyed the lives of kids in the ghetto.
That's it.
Crawling Across the Desert00:00:16
A long, clavinless weekend.
It's kind of like crawling across the desert, right?
You know, it's like it's going to be tough.
There are going to be earthquakes, wars, rumors of war.
But some of you, some of you will survive for the rapture of Monday.