Ep. 287 dissects Trump’s judicial legacy—Neil Gorsuch’s originalist rulings as a bulwark against leftist authoritarianism—while mocking transgender ideology and abortion funding as threats to freedom, citing Billy Halliwell’s Fault Line on millennial relativism eroding truth. The episode contrasts Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure—where Angelo’s legalism clashes with Isabella’s plea for mercy—as a Christian subversion of Mosaic law, mirroring Jesus’ rejection of condemnation (John 8). It warns post-Christian Europe’s moral collapse weakens defenses against extremism, framing conservative engagement in media and academia as the only counter. Ends with Clavin’s mailbag tease: "100% correct" life advice. [Automatically generated summary]
Our friends on the left talk a lot about gender, but sometimes the things they say can be difficult to understand, as if they were speaking Swahili, or as if they were a possessed child, uttering obscure Latin phrases backwards, and then screaming a language no human ear has ever heard, while her head twists around backwards until she subsides into a series of unintelligible half-syllables and finally ends up staring glassily into the middle distance with a green slime dribbling down the side of her mouth.
So, many of you may ask, what does the left actually believe about gender?
Let me explain.
In the past, people believed there were two genders that evolved according to their purposes.
The purpose of men was to say things like vava vavum and then hit each other over the head with axes.
The purpose of women was to look amazing and then have babies, for some reason.
Thus, according to the rules of evolution, men slowly became better at making axes and other tools such as hydrogen bombs and those things that dispense soft ice cream to make swirly chocolate cones.
Women became better at worrying where you'd been till this time of night and waking you up whenever a baby turned over in his crib seven blocks away.
But according to the left, these gender differences were not caused by evolution.
According to the left, evolution only occurs when you don't want to believe in the Bible because it's stopping you from having sex with someone.
In fact, the left believes that all gender differences were imposed on us by society, which is a sinister organization that meets in secret to impose gender differences on unwitting individuals who are just minding their own business.
Without this sinister gender-imposing society, men and women are the same.
Men can do things we thought only women could do, like minstruate and wear high heels.
And women can do things we thought only men could do, like use reason and pretend they've slept with a lot of women when in fact they've only been watching Star Trek reruns.
Since men and women are the same, a man can stay home and take care of the babies until he's ready to die of oxycontin addiction.
And a woman can run a major corporation even while multitasking by simultaneously sobbing to her psychiatrist that she's wasted her life running some stupid corporation when she could have been home with the kids.
And since there is no difference between men and women, when a man says he's a woman in a man's body, it doesn't change anything because a woman in a man's body would be the same as a man in a woman's body unless the woman didn't want the man in her body.
Then the man goes to prison where he can be either a man or a woman depending on who's holding the makeshift knife.
So now you understand that according to the left, there is no difference between men and women.
And you also understand that there is a substantial difference between leftism and reality.
Billy Halliwell: The Hunky Candidate00:02:33
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped, dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, I just made it through that monologue without losing my stuff there.
We have Billy Halliwell coming on.
Are you guys aware that we have Billy Elliot?
Okay, he's got a new book coming called Fault Line, How a Seismic Shift in Culture is Threatening Free Speech and Shaping the Next Generation.
We'll be talking to him about that and about other things, about the dangers to our freedoms, which I think are extensive right now.
And it's the mailbag tomorrow.
Tomorrow is the mailbag.
If you are a subscriber, get your questions in because the answers will change your life, possibly for the better.
If you're not a subscriber, subscribe.
What's wrong with you?
You know, it's that lousy eight bucks a month.
And if you subscribe for the entire year, we will send you a free copy of Michael Knowles' completely empty book.
And if that's not worth eight bucks, I don't know what is.
You know, speaking of Knowles, last night, Knowles and I went to this very lovely, very small gathering.
It was maybe like eight or nine people with Dennis Prager, a little cigar and whiskey night with Dennis Prager.
And, you know, it was delightful on two counts.
One is that Dennis is a delightful guy.
He's, you know, friendly and profound and thoughtful, and he listens to people and also has so much to say.
He's just like he is on the radio, really a terrific guy.
Also, because Knowles drove me there, and he is the worst driver I have ever met.
So I was so delighted just to be there.
Like by the time I got there, I was like, Dennis, it's so nice to see you.
I'm so grateful to be here.
I was just grateful to be in it.
I mean, we were driving around those Hollywood hills, and I would say to Knowles, you know, slow down here because you really can't see around the corner.
Oh, yeah, nothing.
You know, just 60 miles.
So anyway, it's just a blessing to be with you today.
Knowles clearly has an angel on his shoulder because his empty book is a huge bestseller and I'm still alive.
So, you know, while I was at the, over the weekend when I was at the National Review gathering last week, at the end of last week, you know, the thing about National Review is famously kind of never Trump.
James Scalia's Legacy00:14:38
Like everybody there just hated Trump.
They're the ones who tried to run David French.
When I saw I saw David there and I said, there he is, the man who missed being president by just this much.
It's almost the president of the United States.
But, you know, they were never trying.
And they're kind of watching all this, watching things unfold, kind of like Ben is, I think, to a certain extent, with a kind of wonder.
They keep waiting for things to collapse, and things don't collapse.
And there is this disparity between the stuff that Trump tweets and says and what he does.
It really is this weird show happening at the same time.
Like some of the stuff Trump says, you just wish he wouldn't.
You wish he wouldn't say things.
You wish he'd get control over his tweets and all this stuff.
But so far, the stuff he's done, I mean, his appointments, his judicial appointments, certainly as Neil Gorsuch is just rocking in his hearings.
You know, he seems incredibly competent.
He seems to be doing a good job.
And I walked away and I thought the one thing I have to say about Donald Trump, and I think I can safely say that I was wrong about this because I suspected that he was an authoritarian.
But the one thing I have to say, judging him by his actions, the guy is not an enemy of freedom.
And I think, you know, given that we dodged a bullet by not electing Hillary Clinton, given what the left is doing right now on Capitol Hill, there's just no question that they are enemies of freedom.
Your freedom, your freedom to do, to wake up in the morning, do what you want, say what you want, have the life that you want, take responsibility for yourself, because that's part of freedom too.
Obviously, the thing about freedom is, you know, it's like a kid borrowing your car.
You know, he says, I'm old enough to drive the car.
Sure, but when he puts a dent in it, he's got to pay for it.
He can't then come to you and say, you know, oh, but I did this, which is kind of what people say when they say, like, oh, you should pay for my abortion.
You know, it's like, why?
You know, like, why?
It's like that was a decision you made and responsibilities for your decision.
That's taking responsibility for the outcome of your decision is part of what freedom is.
So I'm watching this thing.
I mean, the big headline yesterday was Comey, James Comey.
James Comey has now become an expert in making headlines.
He's always saying the same thing.
He's always saying, normally, I wouldn't be talking about this because it's behind this, but now I've got to make an exception.
He's always saying this.
And everybody, you know, the left isn't sure.
They love him when he clears Hillary Clinton.
They hate him when he writes a letter saying, oh, I have to reopen this case.
Then he's a terrible, terrible guy.
What did Nancy Pelosi call that?
A foul deed or something like that.
So they love him.
And then I hate him.
Now they love him again because for some, I'm not sure why this is a headline because we all knew this already.
We knew they were investigating whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.
And we keep hearing that there is no evidence of collusion.
But here's what he said yesterday that made the headline.
As you know, our practice is not to confirm the existence of ongoing investigations, especially those investigations that involve classified matters.
But in unusual circumstances where it is in the public interest, it may be appropriate to do so, as Justice Department policies recognize.
This is one of those circumstances.
I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
And that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia's efforts.
As with any counterintelligence investigation, this will also include an assessment of whether any crimes were committed.
Because it is an open, ongoing investigation and is classified, I cannot say more about what we are doing and whose conduct we are examining.
So the thing that got me about this, this is the big headline, is give Democrats something to talk about while they're not governing and while their party is falling apart.
So now they'll have something to talk about.
Oh, Russia, Russia, Russia.
We'll be hearing about this until Comey makes his big announcement when he comes out and says, you know, nothing happened.
And then they get, you know, then Comey will be a bad guy again.
But what got me about this is the other part of the headline was, of course, Comey saying there was no evidence that when Trump tweeted that Obama, the Obama administration basically surveilled him.
He said Obama wiretapped me, but he meant, obviously, the Obama administration surveilled me.
There was no evidence of that.
Now Comey says they were investigating him since July.
So Trump was obviously right.
I mean, the Obama administration, I mean, of course, you can make the argument that no one ever touched the FBI or told them what to do and all this.
But since all that stuff was being leaked, all that stuff, I have to assume that these are the wiretaps that the New York Times was reporting on that were being leaked.
It just seems to me that Trump was a lot closer to being right than he was to being wrong.
I don't know.
I guess we'll have to see as this goes forward.
So that was the headline.
But to me, what's going on in the health care bill and with Gorsuch are really much more interesting.
And the reason they're interesting is because they tell you what's at stake.
You know, it really does occur to me a lot of the times in the mailbag, and remember the mailbag is tomorrow, a lot of the times in the mailbag, people say, you know, what do I do about the fact that my teacher will fail me if I come out as a conservative?
What do I do about the fact that my friends will desert me?
What do I do about the fact that everybody on Facebook is telling me that conservatives are terrible and I am a conservative?
And I realize, like, we're kind of asking you to stand up a little bit.
You know, I never believe, I never believe that you should be obstreperous or shout at people and be unkind to people or pick fights that don't have to be fought.
You know, it's not your job to stand up every time your professor mouths off and tell him he's wrong.
But it is kind of your job to be who you are.
I mean, it is kind of your job to not let them force you to lie.
And I realize that comes with risks, that integrity always comes with risks.
I mean, this is what we know.
This is our religion, the Christian religion is that, like, you know, say what you have to say and then they kill you.
So we know that integrity comes with risk.
But every little meeting between people is a kind of battlefield.
You know, I hate war metaphors because only war is war.
But there's a little fight going on every time somebody, and every time they make you turn you into a fake, every time they turn you into a liar, they win that little battle.
They make it a little harder for the next person to say, I believe in the Constitution.
And just watch the difference now when you see what's at stake here.
Watch the difference between Gorsuch on the Hill during his hearings and what the Democrats are actually saying in response.
I noticed we only have one Gorsuch cut.
I thought I sent you two.
We have two.
Give me the first one, not the one about being a judge, the other one.
Mr. Chairman, these days we sometimes hear judges cynically described as politicians in robes, seeking to enforce their own politics rather than striving to apply the law impartially.
If I thought that were true, I'd hang up the robe.
The truth is, I just don't think that's what a life in the law is about.
As a lawyer for many years working in the trial court trenches, I saw judges and juries, while human and perfect, striving hard every day to fairly decide the cases I put to them.
As a judge now for more than a decade, I've watched my colleagues spend long days worrying over cases.
Sometimes the answers we reach aren't the ones we personally prefer.
Sometimes the answers follow us home at night and keep us up.
But the answers we reach are always the ones we believe the law requires.
And for all its imperfections, I believe that the rule of law in this nation truly is a wonder, and that it's no wonder that it's the envy of the world.
So that's Gorsuch.
And this is a guy who was confirmed by voice vote unanimously when he was appointed to the federal bench.
And now the Democrats are just looking for ways.
He's apparently a Boy Scout.
He doesn't stray.
He doesn't do anything bad.
He's beloved by the people who know him.
So he's like a good guy, and he's an originalist like Scalia.
So this is a guy going up there, and the Democrats have to say something to attack him.
I want you to listen to a little bit of what—first, let's start with Al Franken.
And then we're going to get to Billy Halliwell and talk to him about his book, Faultline, and we'll stay on Facebook so you get to watch so you won't miss the interview.
So here's Al Franken.
And first he talks about Citizens United, which basically says that if you form a corporation, you don't lose your right to free speech.
And this drives the Democrats crazy.
It was originally a way they were trying to keep an anti-Hillary documentary off the air that was made by Citizens United.
And under the old McCain-Feingold rules, you could do that.
And the Supreme Court said, no, you can't do that.
You can't stop somebody from speaking just because they formed a corporation to make their film.
That's ridiculous.
So first Franken defends that.
And then he comes up with this stuff about the administrative state, meaning these agencies that can come and tell you to basically do whatever they want you to do because it's their interpretation of the law.
And he's talking about this Chevron ruling, which essentially says if the EPA decides that your sink is a waterway, right, the court, and then comes and tells you that you can't shave in the morning.
The court is basically supposed to say, well, it's the EPA.
They should know what a waterway is, right?
You know, that's kind of what the Chevron ruling is.
So now this is Franken telling Gorsuch that Scalia would have supported this.
This principle, outlined by the Supreme Court, recognizes that our agencies employ individuals with great expertise in the laws that they are charged with enforcing, like biologists at the FBA, and that where those experts have issued rules in highly technical areas, judges should defer to their expertise.
Now, administrative law can be an obscure and sometimes complicated area of the law, but for anyone who cares about clean air or clean water or about the safety of our food and of our medicines, it's incredibly important.
And Chevron simply ensures that judges don't discard an agency's expertise without good reason.
Justice Scalia recognized this to be true.
But to those who subscribe to President Trump's extreme view, Chevron is the only thing standing between them and what the president chief strategist Steve Bannon called the quote-unquote deconstruction of the administrative state.
Well, if that's extremist, I'm an extremist because I really, I mean, you know, you have the FDA keeping people from using drugs when they are fatally ill, when they are dying.
And they say, well, yeah, but the drug isn't tested to be safe.
Safe, you're dying.
You know, take the drug, test the drug.
You know, it's ridiculous.
The experts, this absolute dependency on experts because they know the experts are really them.
They know, the elites know the experts are them.
And they are them exercising their power over us without elected officials.
It's just an agency interpreting the rule to be further.
That's how they started this whole thing about who uses the bathroom in your school.
Washington, D.C., telling you in Kentucky who uses the bathroom in your school because they took Title IX, which says, no, you can't have sexual discrimination, and said, yes.
And if a man says he's a woman, he's a woman, so you're sexually discriminating against him by keeping him out of the woman's room.
I mean, it's insane, you know.
You saw that transgender woman who's a man basically winning a weightlifting competition against women.
You know, so you have your daughter and she goes out for athletics and then she gets blown away by some guy who just declares himself a woman.
I mean, it's madness, and it's madness that comes out of these wonderful experts that Al Franken is talking about.
They are enemies of freedom.
They want more and more power to go to the state, less and less power to go to you and your state.
So that was Franken.
Here's Diane Feinstein.
You know, the thing is, Scalia was what's called a soft originalist.
That means that he, Clarence Thomas is a hard originalist.
That means that he wants the Constitution to be interpreted as the public understood it to mean.
He doesn't care if they find under James Madison's bed a note saying, no, what I really meant was this.
It's what the people thought it meant when the laws were passed.
That's what the laws are supposed to mean.
Okay?
But he does, but Scalia did admit that there were ways in which things could change.
So for instance, if it says no cruel and unusual punishment, and what they mean by that is they can cut your ears off, you know, which they did.
They would knock your ears or something like this, or they flog you, or they put you in the pillory.
We understand cruel and unusual punishment to be much less than that, right?
So Scalia would change.
Clarence Thomas, I'm not sure.
I don't know.
Clarence like he's a real originalist.
So here's Dianne Feinstein saying absolutely not.
To read the Constitution as if it meant what it said is just the height of tyranny.
He believes judges should look to the original public meaning of the Constitution when they decide what a provision of the Constitution means.
This is personal, but I find this originalist judicial philosophy to be really troubling.
In essence, it means that judges and courts should evaluate our constitutional rights and privileges as they were understood in 1789.
However, to do so would not only ignore the intent of the framers, that the Constitution would be a framework on which to build, but it severely limits the genius of what our Constitution upholds.
I firmly believe the American Constitution living document intended to evolve as our country evolves.
In 1789, it's a living document.
A living document is the same as a blank document.
Then they don't have any meaning.
Can have any meaning.
These people, you know, the Constitution is the only thing that stands between people like Dianne Feinstein.
Dianne Feinstein, you know, she's from California.
Media Eroding Faith00:15:31
She tyrannizes Hollywood.
When a movie comes out she doesn't like, she threatens an investigation.
Remember, Zero Dark 30?
She didn't like the fact that it kind of said that torture kind of worked on some of these, you know, enhanced interrogation, worked on some of these jihadists.
So she threatened, just to make sure it didn't win the Oscar, she threatened an investigation of how the information was acquired.
And then the minute the Oscars were over, investigation disappeared.
She's a tyrant.
The only thing that stands between her and you is the Constitution, meaning what it means.
You want to change the Constitution?
Change it.
But as long as the words are there.
All right, let's bring on Billy because he's going to talk about some more threats to the freedom.
And the reason that we kind of do ask people, and especially young people, to stand up a little bit, not to throw yourself in front of a train, but to take some of the hits that come with integrity.
Billy Halliwell, terrific journalist.
I met you on the Blaze.
We were on the Glenn Becks thing together, but you've written for just everywhere from HuffPo to WAPO.
Your new book called Fault Line: How a Seismic Shift in Culture is Threatening Free Speech and Shaping the Next Generation.
Let's hear it, Billy.
How bad is it?
It's bad.
It's bad.
I think, you know, we're in a tough spot right now.
I think culturally, what we're seeing happen, and you know this, the last five years, especially, we've sort of gone into a chaotic spiral, I think, of relativism.
That's the real problem.
We've got a lot of people culturally, more than half the country, who say, oh, you know, you can decide what you believe truth is, or whatever culture can decide what they believe is true for them.
We've got 51% of millennials saying truth is relative.
I mean, that is terrifying.
These are people who are 18 to 35, right?
This is the future of this country.
So I think Josh McDowell actually said it best.
He was one of the people I interviewed for the book.
He said, we have experienced a profound lostness of truth.
And I thought, what a simple way of saying, you know, where we are right now culturally.
So that's where we are, I think, at this point.
So how did we get there?
I mean, I keep hearing this phrase: the girl who was just suspended from the blaze for supporting abortion said, I had to speak my truth.
And you think, like, yeah, you know, what?
What?
My truth?
Your truth.
So, so how'd we get here?
How did they sell this?
I mean, relativism doesn't make any sense.
You know, so how did they sell it?
I think it's been a very slow churning process, right?
I think it's the media, it's Hollywood, it's universities.
It's the three, you know, areas of society that we've all talked about the most.
We tend to look at each of them individually.
We complain about things when we see anecdotal examples happen.
But collectively, when you look at all three, the left, secularists, they have dominated all three of those.
And we've gotten to a place culturally with technology that, look, if you're not going to church on Sunday, if you're not taking your kids to church on Sunday, they are literally only learning from Hollywood, the media, and universities.
And so that's why I think we've seen this really kick up into high gear.
And the problem's metastasized since maybe 2000 because technology has increased.
And so you're up against a really hard battle trying to keep certain information, certain images out of your home with the increase of technology.
So I would say that's where the focus is.
That's where the real problem has been incubated and created.
So you're essentially saying, though, just to not pass over this, you're saying this is a religious problem.
You're saying this is an assault.
You know, last night I was talking to Dennis Prager and Prager said, if there is no God, then murder is okay, which I believe.
I believe that's right.
I do not believe you can get to the place where you say murder is an absolute wrong without belief in God.
So what you're saying is these three things, the media, news media, basically, entertainment, and universities, have been eroding faith.
Is that a fair?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And look, we can look at all the statistics in the world.
I think a lot of us as conservatives and or Christians, you want to jump in.
You want to have a discussion about these issues, right?
but you don't have the information.
You don't have the statistics.
That was one of the things with Faultline that I wanted to do.
I wanted to give people, here are the stats.
Here's what journalists believe.
I mean, how many people know that Pew did a study in 2007 and asked reporters how often they go to church?
We know that only 8% of national reporters, and that question hasn't been asked again, go to church weekly or synagogue weekly.
80%.
I did not know that.
That's an amazing stat.
Okay.
So there's a lot of stats like that in the book.
60% of professors self-identify as liberals.
There's a study that's done every year that nobody talks about.
Well, while 60% of them are liberals, 13% are conservative.
So you start to piece this all together and it becomes very clear.
I think for me, there are two kinds of bias.
I think all of us could agree on this.
Overt bias, where people go after the media goes after somebody.
They go after an institution.
And then there's the covert bias that even the people responsible for it don't realize is happening.
And I think that is a lot of what happens in media, the ignorance, not understanding Christianity, not understanding culture, and not really getting what conservatives believe.
That contributes to the biggest, I think, areas of bias and problems that we see.
Now, the problem is they don't necessarily believe they have that bias.
So I wanted to try to shine a light on that.
So, you know, one of the things that I find a big problem out here, and there are a lot of Christians in Hollywood, and we kind of gather in these secret meetings, you know, like in the catacombs of Hollywood and talk about this a lot, is that what is considered to be Christian entertainment is pretty bad.
You know, yesterday, my friend Michael Moles, we were talking about the shack.
You know, all these pictures, God is not dead.
And I don't mean to run them down because they're kind of like they're kind of like romantic comedies.
They have their audience, and I think that audience should be served.
But you're never, ever, ever going to reach a non-believer with a film like God is not dead.
I mean, they're just not going to watch it, and it's not going to mean anything to them.
You almost have to be there.
And the problem that I have frequently talking to religious people about these problems is that they want religious entertainment to be squeaky clean.
They want it to get to the Jesus of it all.
We've been talking this week about Shakespeare, how he almost never mentions the gospels, and yet he's filled with gospel wisdom.
You know, is there a way to convince Christians to talk to the culture in the voice of the culture, the way St. Paul said?
That's what we have to do, right?
So I think my solution is not the same as some other people out there.
I know there's another book that has sort of a different solution to this problem.
We have to engage.
I think we've been retreating for far too long, right?
We're not, you were talking before about being who you are and not being nasty or mean to people, but jumping in, being who you are, having a presence.
It might be harder to get into the media, Hollywood, or universities.
It might be a tougher battle, but we have to do it.
And we have to do, I mean, look, look at Hacksaw Ridge, right?
It's a film that has a message.
There's a lot of violence in it because it's war.
It's telling an accurate account of what went on.
And so you're seeing those things, but it's telling a deeper story that will resonate with people who might not be Christians, people who might not be conservative.
But it's a film that is sort of in there.
Christians have to get in.
They have to become producers, directors, professors, journalists.
They have to get behind the scenes.
This is essential.
If we don't do it, this problem is only going to get worse because it's so easy to dismiss somebody sitting next to you or who isn't sitting next to you, right?
There's no Christian in the room.
There's no conservative in the room.
It's easy to create a caricature, but it's a little harder for them to do that when we have a presence.
And so that is my, you know, that's the 30,000-foot view solution that I have in Faultline for this problem.
How do you feel in terms of optimism, pessimism?
And I don't mean how do you feel.
I mean, as you look at it, what's your assessment?
Look, it's bad, right?
It's bad.
And it might get worse.
But we know as Christians in particular, right?
Christians believe that the gospel cannot be stopped.
This has been 2,000 years and counting.
And so I always go back to that because it's not going to be stopped.
But I do think people's, you know, and this sounds corny, but their souls are on the line.
That's the reality, right?
People, truth is on the line.
And so if we're not there to speak that truth, fewer people are hearing it.
And so while I'm optimistic that in the end it's all going to be okay, we do have a battle for people's minds and their hearts.
And I think by not being there, we're sort of relinquishing that responsibility.
And I think we have that responsibility as conservatives and or Christians to get that truth out there.
So I am optimistic, but I think it'll be tough.
It's going to be a hard road.
You're not going to get involved in culture and solve it in five minutes.
It could be a 30, 40 year road because the problem has just gotten so bad so fast.
You know, I'm going to have to let you go in a minute, but I want to ask a last question.
What do you say to somebody who says to you, hey, dude, you know, chill, you know, if you have a truth and I have a truth, what's the problem?
What could possibly go wrong?
You know, this way I don't have to judge my neighbor.
You know, that's what the gospel says.
Don't judge not.
What could go wrong with the idea of my having a truth and your having a truth?
Well, at the end of the day, right, there is a truth.
There is a solid truth.
This notion of, well, that's your truth.
This is my truth.
That doesn't play out into reality.
That goes down a rabbit hole, and it's not a very pretty rabbit hole.
The end of that hole could end somewhere very, very, very dangerous.
And I think we've seen this happen in cultures and in society where we abandon morals and values.
And where do we end up?
So look, I believe the Bible is the basis of it as a Christian.
That's what I believe.
Not everybody has to believe that.
But for me, there is a truth.
And it's not just my truth.
It is the truth.
And I think our culture has been built on that.
What we're seeing is an erosion of that, which some people see as positive, but I'm seeing chaos.
Yeah.
Okay.
Billy Halloway of Hallowell, Faultline, How a Seismic Shift in Culture is Threatening Free Speech and Shaping the Next Generation.
Really interesting stuff, Billy.
It's great talking to you.
Thanks for having me.
Excellent.
You know, it really is.
I mean, look, I think part of this, too, is when you, you know, when these Islamists sweep into Europe and they have, it is a relativist, not post-Christian culture.
They have no argument.
They have no argument against the people saying, how can you, you know, how can you bar these people?
How can you bar them?
Because they don't say, well, because we believe X, Y, and Z, and they don't, and they believe the opposite, bringing down X, Y, and Z. When they take away the underlying logic of what you think, you know, then you're unprotected.
You're unprotected in argument.
I have to just tell this one quick story.
I was reading a novel by the great German poet, novelist, thinker Goethe, right?
And at the end of the novel, the last line was about two people were dead, and the last line of the novel was, and won't it be wonderful when they awake and see each other again?
That was the last line.
And then I was reading the afterword by this college professor, and he said, well, that's just a fantasy.
That'll never happen.
And he was telling me that that's what Goethe meant, when Goethe clearly meant, you know, one day they will awaken.
And this guy just wanted to erase that.
He wanted to erase it.
And I see this from everywhere from academic stuff to Sports Illustrated.
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So we're talking about Shakespeare, and we're talking about the way that Shakespeare, brilliantly, I think, took the gospel and showed you the world that the gospel says is there without preaching the gospel.
He basically, I personally think it was to avoid persecution and to avoid controversy.
It was an entertainment.
He was an entertainer, and he just wanted to entertain, and he didn't want to preach to anybody, but he wanted to show, he showed you the world, the world that he saw, which was the world that he had learned from the gospels.
And it's there in a lot of different ways.
And one of my favorites of his plays, and a much underrated play, is a comedy called Measure for Measure.
Well, I want to correct yesterday, I said Titus Andronicus was his oldest play.
I meant his oldest tragedy, obviously.
I misspoke.
And somebody was jumping on me about it, so I just want to say that that is true.
It is the oldest tragedy.
So Measure for Measure is a comedy, but it's a very dark comedy.
And I believe that it is, let's put it this way.
I believe it would not exist without what is called the adultery story in the Gospels.
The adultery story, a woman taken in adultery is brought before Christ.
They say the law says we stone her.
Christ says, yes, that is the law.
And he who is without sin can throw the first stone.
Everybody puts their rocks down and disappears.
I believe it says, you know, from memory, I believe it says that the oldest people leave first.
Yeah, you don't have to convince the old people.
They know who they are, you know.
But everybody leaves eventually.
Christ says to the woman, Where are they who are going to condemn you?
Is there anyone left to condemn you?
She says, No, Lord, no one is left.
And Jesus says, Then I will not condemn you either.
Go and sin no more.
Okay?
Now, this is a controversial passage in the very, very oldest copies of the gospel.
It's not there, and it is there later on, but I'm talking about very early.
But it is mentioned by people very, very early on.
It's mentioned by some of the earliest Christian writers.
So it's clearly, you know, some people say, well, it was added later, you know, and people just like it because it's liberal.
There was actually a move.
Phyllis Schlafly's son was part of a move to have it removed from the Gospels.
I believe that it was clearly something that happened, clearly something that was recorded, and I think they kept it out because it was liberating, because it stopped people from exercising the law in the most intolerable way.
So this is something I talk about all the time.
If I had to pick one thing that I got yelled at for most of all, it's not my opinions about Islam or my questions about Islam.
It's not my attacks on the alt-right and their fascist, racist garbage.
It's not any of those things.
It is my true belief that we should not judge people.
We should not judge people, yeah, their relationship with God.
And, you know, someone I like very much who corresponds with me quite a lot quoted the story of Jesus at the well with the woman at the well where he says, go fetch your husband.
And she says, I don't have a husband.
He says, I know you've been married five times and now you're living with a man who's not a husband.
And the woman says, wow, you know, he told me everything I've ever done.
And this correspondent interpreted that as to mean, wow, he condemned me.
But that's not in the book.
He doesn't say, and you're a bad girl.
And she doesn't say, and I'm a bad girl.
He just tells her what she's done.
Now, I suspect that she maybe didn't feel so good about the way her life had gone.
And that was, you know, part of what he was talking about.
But that's my suspicion.
It's not what's in the book.
So this is a very, very controversial thing.
Every time Jesus is confronted with the law, he humanizes it.
Every time.
Every time they say, well, it's the Sabbath.
You shouldn't have healed anybody.
He's like, are you kidding me?
I just healed somebody.
Is it right to do good on the Sabbath or bad on the Sabbath?
So Shakespeare writes this incredibly, incredibly complex play about this.
All right, and I want to make sure I always forget the names on these things, but there's a Duke of Vienna, okay, named Vincencio.
I'm reading this off the page.
A Duke of Vienna, and he goes away or pretends to go away, and he leaves the government in the hands of the strict judge, Angelo.
Let's Hear Her Speech00:04:29
And Angelo decides that there is a law against fornication that is network, you have to be killed for having sex out of wedlock.
The punishment is death, it hasn't been enforced, so now he's going to enforce it.
And he starts to chase off, close all the houses of prostitution.
There's some very high Shakespearean comedy where the lady, the woman who runs the madam who runs the houses of prostitution, is, oh no, what's going to happen?
And everybody says, don't worry, there are always going to be houses of prostitution.
But the guy who gets caught up in it, worst of all, is, I think his name is Claudio.
Is that his name?
Let us say, I'm talking.
Yes, it's Claudio.
Claudio has slept with the woman that he has begun to marry, but he hasn't finished.
You know, there's a long process of getting married.
They had to publish the bans and all this stuff.
But he has broken, technically broken this law, and we know because his girlfriend or soon-to-be-wife is pregnant.
Okay.
So Claudio, who's basically guilty of sleeping with his wife, gets caught up in this law and he's sentenced to death.
And Claudio goes to his sister, who is a nun, and says, You have to go and plead for me with Angelo.
And Isabella, the sister who is, you know, she's a novice nun, and also obviously a virgin, goes before this judge and pleads for the life.
And what Angelo says is, I am being merciful by killing him because I am keeping other people from doing it.
The typical legalistic argument is: if we show mercy, then the law falls apart and then everybody's going to do it, and ultimately it's all that.
And she makes this incredible speech.
We'll play just a little bit of it and I'll read some of it too, in case you can't hear it.
Let's just hear the speech she makes to him, where she says it is a wonderful thing to have the power of a giant, but to use it as a giant is a terrible thing.
Let's hear the speech.
Oh, it is excellent to have a giant strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.
Could great men thunder as Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet.
For every pelting petty officer would use his heaven for thunder, nothing but thunder.
Merciful heaven, thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt splits the unwedgible and gnarled oak than the soft myrtle.
But man, proud man, dressed in a little brief authority, most ignorant of what he's most assured, his glassy essence, like an angry ape, plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as makes the angels weep.
Who with our spleens would all themselves laugh, mortal.
We cannot weigh our brother with ourself.
Great men may jest with saints, tis wit in them.
But in the less foul profanation, that in the captain's but a choleric word, which in the soldier is flat blasphemy.
Oh, it is excellent.
I love it.
It is excellent to have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.
Man, proud man, she says, heaven uses lightning to hit the to split an oak, not the little myrtle.
But man, proud man, dressed in a little brief authority, most ignorant of what he's most assured, his glassy essence, like an angry ape, plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make the angels weep.
So what happens?
Angelo looks at this babe, and she's a babe, right?
She's a virgin, she's obviously eloquent, she's merciful, and he wants her.
And so he makes it, he tries to make a deal with her.
He says, I'll save your brother's life if you sleep with me.
So the guy who is going to kill this guy for committing fornic, and she says, no, she can't break her virgin vows to save.
So she is now in the position that she can't break the law, her law, even to save a life.
And I won't tell you how it ends.
The ending is, I would say, mysterious and difficult.
But the point I'm making is that Shakespeare understood the difficulty that Christ had presented us with when you say the law is written on your heart.
When you say the law is written on your heart, that means that human mercy, human mercy has to take the place of strict law.
Guaranteed Answer Mysterious00:01:08
And when people say to me, you know, like, yes, but it says this, and there's this in the Bible, and I say, judge not lest you be judged, and they get so angry.
That's what I'm talking about.
That is what I'm talking about.
They bring the law to Jesus, and he says, okay, that's the law.
Let he who's without sin throw the first stone.
And Shakespeare works out the ramifications.
And I'm sure he was thinking of it, but I can't say that for sure because nobody knows anything about Shakespeare.
But I'm sure at least he was affected by this because this doesn't exist in pre-Christian culture.
This kind of idea does not exist in pre-Christian culture.
The closest they get to it is the play Electra, in which a woman sacrifices herself for family over personal gods over the state, which is a really fascinating play.
But this is clearly, clearly formed by Christianity and formed by the gospel look at the needs of the law and the needs of mercy.
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