Ep. 288 dissects Trump’s crumbling agenda: stock markets plunge over the GOP’s botched Obamacare repeal, with conservatives like Jordan and Scarborough demanding amendments while Trump’s credibility frays; meanwhile, mainstream media ignores a Rockville rape case tied to undocumented immigrants, exposing Democratic hypocrisy on immigration. Gorsuch’s confirmation sparks partisan outrage, yet Democrats’ past obstructionism (Schumer vs. Bush nominees) is conveniently forgotten. The episode pivots to suffering—rejecting Christian martyrdom tropes via Mother Teresa’s doubt and Macbeth’s nihilism—to argue faith offers joy over despair, before circling back to healthcare’s looming vote as Trump’s presidency hangs on legislative survival. [Automatically generated summary]
Hillary Clinton has announced she's ready to come out of the woods.
Mrs. Clinton's remarks at a recent St. Patrick's Day rally referred to the fact that she has spent a good deal of time walking in the forests near her ex-urban home in Chappaqua, New York, ever since her surprising and humiliating and crushing and well-deserved and humiliating and sort of hilarious and totally humiliating defeat by Donald Trump in her bid to become the first utterly corrupt female president of the United States.
In the wake of that election, disappointed Democrats have reportedly been taking pilgrimages to Chappaqua in hopes of catching sight of the recluse of Mrs. Clinton in the woods.
The Democrats, who had been absolutely certain Mrs. Clinton was going to win the election, hiked into the forests where they were absolutely certain they would see elves, fairies, and unicorns, as well as a socialist system that works.
Those who have seen Mrs. Clinton in the woods report that the defeated, humiliated, disgraced, and humiliated former candidate for dishonest president spent her time in the forests pulling thorns from the hooves of wounded deer, learning the art of song from the twittering birds, and teaching hawks how to make that loud, piercing, screeching noise when they descend from on high to shred and devour their prey.
The Woodland Democrats say they have returned from their Clinton pilgrimage inspired to build a wall around the forest to protect Mrs. Clinton's natural habitat and ensure she can't escape to re-enter politics.
But Mrs. Clinton says she has now healed the emotional wounds she suffered during her humiliating and crushing and humiliating humiliation and also defeat, which was very humiliating.
Mrs. Clinton says she now wants to return to a life of service to the country, though she's not yet certain whose life that will be and how she can get hold of it.
But Mrs. Clinton.
Mrs. Clinton's wounds from her unprecedented and humiliating defeat have not just been emotional and humiliating, they've also been financial, not to mention humiliating.
Shortly after Mrs. Clinton lost her bid to become the first soulless female communist president, donations to the Clinton Foundation reportedly dried up as donors realized the humiliated candidate would no longer be able to sell her political influence for cash since she had no political influence after her humiliating defeat.
However, word that Mrs. Clinton would be returning to public life.
Word that Mrs. Clinton would be returning to public life could change all that, as Democrats can be expected to rally around her, calling for her to once more enter the political fray and lead them to disaster.
That should fill the gap until her daughter Chelsea is ready to enter political life and lead Democrats to a whole new generation of humiliation and defeat.
Meanwhile, back in the woods, visitors have reported seeing squirrels, deer, and raccoons gathered in forest groves to drink champagne and smoke celebratory cigars.
As one chipmunk told reporters, quote, we thought she'd never leave.
That screeching hawk noise she made was absolutely hellish, unquote.
Hear Obama Discuss Gorsuch Nomination00:17:39
Democrats have formed a committee to see if the chipmunk should run for president.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is to give you boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-ducky.
Shipshaftsy-topsy, the world is a bibby-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
Well, that was totally Cynthia's fault, as Cynthia Ann Gulo, who does the illustrations to our openings.
The third time that Hillary Clinton came up, I just couldn't get through it.
But believe me, it would have been really funny if I all right, it's Mailbag Day.
Hooray!
All your problems will be solved and your life changed, possibly for the better.
But first, we have our wonderful sponsor, one of my favorites, Blue Apron.
And here is Cartoon Clavin to tell you all about it.
Basically, what this is, it's like having a restaurant in your home.
Not the kind of restaurants my listeners go to, you know, where the food is inedible, but the waitresses aren't wearing any clothes.
These are places like nice people go to, where the food is really good.
What they do is they send you, like, it's about 10 bucks a meal, and they send you all the ingredients you need in exactly the right proportions.
And it's easy after that.
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But every now and again, you have to get up and chase her around the room.
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Really was terrific.
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BlueApron.com slash Andrew.
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Good stuff.
I like that cartoon Clavin.
He should do the whole show.
He never cracks them.
So you may have noticed the stock market kind of plummeted yesterday.
And I think the reason that it kind of plummeted is because our president is having a little bit of trouble.
And what they're afraid of, I think, is that conservatives are going to tank Trump care.
They're going to tank the Ryan fix to Obamacare.
And that means that all the other stuff, the tax reform and the relief from certain kinds of regulations and stuff, all that stuff's going to get backed up.
And it's not all going to come together.
That's why the stock market has been climbing because of all the optimism.
So Trump has put his credibility on the line.
He met with conservatives who are not happy with this health care bill.
He apparently joked with some of them that he was going to crush them in primaries.
But he basically told the people, he had that rally in Kentucky a few days ago, and he told the people that this is going to happen.
Here's that cut.
Thursday is our chance to end Obamacare and the Obamacare catastrophe and begin delivering the reforms our people deserve.
Big thing that we get to tax cuts.
Big thing.
And remember, we're going to negotiate and it's going to go to the Senate and back and forth.
The end result is going to be wonderful and it's going to work great.
And it's going up.
It's supposed to go up for a vote Thursday.
Paul Ryan can always pull it.
But right now, the conservatives in the House are saying they have the votes to block this and they will.
And my concern about this is not, I don't think this is a great bill.
I think it's a mess.
I think my personal opinion is they should pass it, make some changes, pass it.
Then the Senate will pass their version, which will be totally different.
They'll sit down.
They'll iron it out.
They'll have a chance to build something that might be close to decent.
I think that that's important.
I think it's important because of Trump's credibility.
Let's just take a look.
Here's Joe Scarborough and Jim Jordan.
And Scarborough is saying, oh, well, they always threaten you that you'll lose your majority if you don't do what we say.
And Jordan responding to that.
The trick they always tried on us was, if you don't pass this bill that leadership crafted in the dead of night and jammed all of these things into, and if you don't pass it tomorrow, the Republican majority is at risk.
Do you want to do that argument?
Never worked then, and I find it hard to believe that it's going to work now, is it?
No, it's not going to work now because they rolled this bill out three weeks ago.
They didn't allow any witnesses to testify in the hearings.
No amendments were allowed to be offered except the manager's amendment, which is a leadership amendment.
It only makes technical changes.
And they said it's a binary choice, which is not how the legislative process is supposed to work.
So you're exactly right.
Our job is to do just what Mark Meadows said, to do what we told the American people we were going to do when they gave us the privilege to serve.
And this bill doesn't do that.
This bill does not repeal Obamacare.
And that fundamentally is why we're opposed to it.
And unless it changes, I do not see the votes there to pass this legislation.
And just to be fair to Paul Ryan, he said that when he said it was a binary choice, he meant when it came up for a vote, if you turn it down, then you're stuck with Obamacare, which is just pure, that's just the facts.
Now, Ryan can pull the bill.
He can pull it back, you know, and maybe avoid disgrace, come back relatively quickly with another replacement.
I think it is unwise.
And here's the thing.
Trump is under fire.
He is under unprecedented fire.
I've never seen a president denied any kind of honeymoon before at all.
And part of it is his own fault.
He's got a big mouth.
This stuff, you know, when he said that Obama wiretapped him, I think that's closer to the truth than people are granting.
Obviously, Comey says he's been under investigation.
Their campaign has been under investigation since July.
So clearly there's been surveillance from the New York Times reports and the Washington Post reports.
It all mentioned that stuff.
And it seems obvious to me, well, it's a fact that someone unmasked Michael Flynn's name, you know, illegally.
That's a felony from surveillance on the Russian ambassador when Flynn was caught up in that surveillance.
You're not supposed to reveal any American caught up in surveillance.
Clearly, Obama misused this information.
The Obama administration abused the information.
So there's more to what Trump says than people will grant him.
Doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
Guys, the President of the United States, when you accuse the last president of wiretapping, you've got to be exact.
You've got to be right.
He has hurt himself.
The Wall Street Journal has a devastating attack on him in there, and they've been fairly supportive.
On their editorial page, they said if President Trump announces that North Korea launched a missile that landed within 100 miles of Hawaii, would most Americans believe him?
Would the rest of the world?
We're not sure, which speaks to the damage that Mr. Trump is doing to his presidency with his seemingly endless stream of exaggerations, evidence-free accusations, implausible denials, and other falsehoods.
The latest example is Mr. Trump's refusal to back off his Saturday morning tweet of three weeks ago that he had found out that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower.
He has offered no evidence for his claim, and the president clings to his assertion like a drunk to an empty gin bottle, rolling out his press spokesman to make more dubious claims.
You know, so I understand, I understand that Obamacare repeal is important, but I just want to show you how damaged I think this president will be.
And this president, look, I've detailed my troubles with Trump endlessly, but this president's agenda right now is not just a conservative agenda.
It's almost a conservative dream agenda.
You know, even the stuff about infrastructure may bother some people, but some of this stuff about rolling back regulation, obviously Neil Gorsuch, his Supreme Court pick, this is great stuff.
I just want to show you, just for a few minutes, how the press is working so hard to damage this guy and stop him dead.
And of course the press, when I say the press, I mean the Democrats, because that's who the press is.
I want you to remember Clavin's first rule of mainstream media coverage.
I've said this again and again, but it's always worth repeating.
Whenever the prejudices and illusions of left-wingers are confirmed by an individual incident, the incident is treated as representative.
When left-wing prejudices and illusions are contradicted, the incident is considered an aberration and treating it as representative is deemed hateful.
And that brings us to this horrifying, horrifying rape in a Rockville, Maryland high school.
And I'm not going to go into the details, but a 14-year-old girl was forced into the boys' room by two illegals, right?
Two students who were here illegally.
They were 18, one of them's 18 and one 17, and all of them, the 14-year-old girl, the 18-year-old, and the 17-year-old, were all in the ninth grade because these illegals couldn't speak English, so they couldn't move up.
They forced her into the boys' room.
They raped her as brutally as, you know, you only have to use your imagination.
Sean Spicer, well, so this, as far as I know, and I may not be exactly right about that, but the networks have hardly touched this.
It just doesn't exist.
It doesn't exist because of the first rule of mainstream media coverage.
It can't be representative of the problem with letting people unvetted into the country because then you would have to stop letting people unvetted into the country.
And where would the Democrats get their voters from?
You know, so these kids got in.
One of them was busted by ICE and released under Barack Obama's catch and release program, right?
I mean, and even people on Univision, right, the please allow all illegals in station, even one of them said under Trump, this would not, under Trump's rules, this would not have happened.
So there's basically an embargo on this news.
At a press conference, we have to give props to the local Fox 5s, Veronica Cleary, who gets the going off the reservation award because she actually asked Sean Spicer about this.
And here's Spicer's response.
This is a tragic event, and it's horrendous and horrible and disgusting what this young woman in Rockville went through.
I can't possibly imagine.
So first of all, let's remember the human side of this, that this is a tragic event that no child, no person, no parent should ever have to deal with.
Schools should be a place where a parent puts their child on a bus or drops them off or sees them off and knows that they're safe.
I think it is troubling.
And I think further to your question, the president recognizes that education is a state-run and a local run issue.
But I think it is pause for concern what happened there.
So I hear you about it being a state issue.
Let's talk about something, though, that the president has implemented and introduced voice.
Is boys victims of immigration crime enforcement?
Is that enough to support?
No, no, no, it's one piece.
The president understands that victims need a voice, which is why he brought it in there to help them when they're specifically targeted or victims of a crime by people who hear illegally.
But I think part of the reason that the president has made a legal immigration and crackdown such a big deal is because of tragedies like this.
So again, Ronica Cleary gets the going off the reservation award.
But, you know, you say, well, why isn't the illegal dreamer who is an honor student, why isn't he representative of all illegal dreamers?
All I'm saying is it's just as fair.
It's just as fair to take one example as another example.
And the thing is, how many little girls have to get raped before it's a problem?
Because guess what?
If it doesn't happen in a public school, which is where it's going to happen, and it happens in a private school and it happens to somebody's daughter in power, if somebody's daughter in the media, if it's somebody's daughter in the media, then it only takes one.
That's all it takes is one.
But because this person is not a famous person, because she's not in government, because she's not working for CBS or NBC or ABC, they don't have to cover the story.
And this, look, it's on Obama.
This rape is on Obama.
I'm sorry, but it is.
And it is representative of the problem, one of the problems that Trump is trying to fix and is being thwarted at every turn.
All right, I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
But come on over to thedailywire.com.
You can hear the rest.
If you subscribe, you can be in next week's mailbag, but you can hear the mailbag today.
And, you know, because the press, because the press doesn't cover these things or buries them or, you know, makes excuses for them.
This means that like Mayor de Blasio, he just announced that the city is ordering schools.
This is New York City, right?
The city is ordering schools and staffers not to allow immigration agents to enter school buildings.
Here's the Blasio statement.
We want to be very clear to parents that we're not allowing ICE agents in the building because I think parents are so afraid right now.
It's like, I mean, you know, he can only live in that fantasy world, endangering children, endangering the children in his care, endangering the children that he's responsible for.
He can only do that because the press allows that fantasy to exist the way it does.
Now, this thing goes, you know, I pick on that obviously because it's one that obviously gets under my skin a little bit because of what was done to this child, but it's true of just about everything.
I mean, remember, you know, remember this whole thing about Russia and Trump that Comey has allowed the Democrats to keep alive, even though they've been investigating it since July.
They've got no evidence of collusion between Trump and the Russians during the campaign.
It's utterly ridiculous.
There's no evidence that the Russians had any effect on the outcome of the election.
But don't forget that back in 1996, and I'm thankful to newsbusters because they're always picking up this stuff.
Back in 1996, China helped then President Bill Clinton get re-elected by funneling money to the Clinton campaign.
During Clinton's re-election campaign against Republican Bob Dole, the Chinese Red Army via fundraiser Johnny Chung donated $300,000 to the Clinton campaign.
So Red China was helping.
And, by the way, after Clinton won, his administration quietly approved the export of key technology that aided China's ballistic missile program.
Now, the papers did cover this, and they did get scoops on it, and they came out and got it.
But the networks dumped it.
And when they covered it, like the late ABC World News Tonight anchor Peter Jennings covered it, and he said, when we come back, we'll look at the investigations because Congress was investigating this fundraising.
We'll look into these investigations into fundraising abuse.
Are these investigations a waste of time and money?
That's the question they were asking, okay?
And Katie Couric asked Bob Woodward, are members of the media too scandal-obsessed looking at something for every corner?
I don't hear him saying that now.
I don't hear him saying that at all now.
This thing with Gorsuch, Neil Gorsuch, you know, they put him through a marathon.
I think it was nine hours or something like this.
They questioned the guy for nine hours.
You've got to hear.
So the thing is, they can't get anything on this guy.
He's a choir boy.
He's obviously a brilliant judge.
Everybody loves him.
So what they're bringing up is the fact that Merrick Garland didn't get a hearing, right?
Because it was an election year, and so the Democrats refused, the Republicans refused to bring him up for a hearing.
So Obama didn't get to replace Antonin Scalia with a liberal judge, and they're really angry about this.
And here's Al Franken, a constitutional scholar, Al Franken, explaining to former SNL comedian Neil Gorsuch, oh wait, I've got that backwards.
It's comedian Al Franken explaining to Neil Gorsuch that he's allowed to talk about this.
When Gorsuch says, I'm not going to comment on that.
Here it is.
How do you think Merrick Garland was treated by the Republicans?
I'm the center since I became a judge 10 years ago.
I have a canon of ethics that precludes me from getting involved in any way, shape, or form in politics.
There's a reason why judges don't clap at the State of the Union and why I can't even attend a political caucus in my home state to register a vote in the equivalent of a primary.
Okay, but I don't think that this is you have to state your political views.
That's not what this is about how a Supreme Court justice who is nominated by the President of the United States, this is like in the Constitution.
I think you're allowed to talk about what happened to the last guy who was nominated in your position.
You're allowed to say something without being about getting involved in politics.
You can express an opinion on this.
Senator, I appreciate the invitation, but I know the other side has their views of this, and your side has your views of it.
That, by definition, is politics.
Okay.
And senator judges have to stay outside of politics.
I think the world of Merrick Carlin, I think he's an outstanding judge.
Okay, I understand.
I told you what I think.
I understand.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I don't mean to cut you off, but you know, we have time.
I love it.
I love it.
And thank you for explaining the Constitution to the guy going to the Supreme Court.
Thank you very much.
So here's Chris Matthews basically speaking for all the Democrats.
He's so ticked off.
He's so angry.
Listen to the logic of this as he explains why they shouldn't confirm this obviously eminently qualified judge.
Donald Trump wants the United States Senate to confirm his pick, Donald Trump's pick, for the U.S. Supreme Court.
He wants Democrats to join Republicans in giving his pick the 60 votes to override the expected filibuster.
Let me suggest a very good reason not to let this happen.
President Bush's Consideration00:04:08
It's not about Trump's pick.
It's about the President Obama's pick, the one Mitch McConnell and his bunch decided did not even deserve a vote, did not even deserve a hearing, did not even deserve the respect of someone nominated to this high position.
Just like McConnell decided in 2008 he was going to destroy the Obama presidency at the get-go, decided that he wanted to wait for the next president to do business with.
He decided eight years later that he would bump Obama's court pick from the line and wait for a pick by the next president.
Well, this brand of bad politics has to stop.
Since the Republicans aren't going to stop it, the Democrats have to.
It's not about being a sap or a chump or any other word you call a person who gets taken and lets himself or herself get taken again.
It's about starting to fix the system.
A president nominates a Supreme Court justice.
The Senate deliberates on the nomination.
We will not get back to such respect if we let Trump exploit the vacancy Mitch McConnell created.
You can cut it off.
I mean, this is basically the Democrats talking through Chris Matthews.
Let's go back for just a minute just because we're talking about how the press covers these things.
Let's go back to Chuck Schumer in 2007 under Bush.
Here he is saying how he thinks Supreme Court nominees should be treated.
The Supreme Court is dangerously out of balance.
We cannot afford to see Justice Stevens replaced by another Roberts or Justice Ginsburg by another Alito.
Given the track record of this president and the experience of obfuscation at hearings, with respect to the Supreme Court at least, I will recommend to my colleagues that we should not confirm any Bush nominee to the Supreme Court except in extraordinary circumstances.
They must prove.
They must prove by actions, not words, that they are in the mainstream, rather than we have to prove that they are not.
Okay, that's 2007.
Here's Joe Biden during the 1992 election year with the first President Bush.
It is my view that if a Supreme Court justice resigns tomorrow or within the next several weeks or resigns at the end of the summer, President Bush should consider following the practice of a majority of his predecessors and not and not name a nominee until after the November election is completed.
The Senate, too, Mr. President, must consider how it would respond to a Supreme Court vacancy that would occur in the full throes of an election year.
It is my view that if the president goes the way of presidents Fillmore and Johnson and presses an election year nomination, the Senate Judiciary Committee should seriously consider not scheduling confirmation hearings on the nomination until ever, until after the political campaign season is over.
Okay, so if we had honest reporters, honest journalists anywhere in this country, anywhere on the mainstream media, they would be telling us that this is what happened to Merrick Garland.
It was politics as usual.
You know, it's obviously frustrating.
I get it, but it's politics as usual, and that's, you know, that's all this is.
This pretend scandal over Russia is a pretend scandal.
Even the tweeting thing where I do blame President Trump for going off or opening his big mouth, which he does too often, you know, even that is really a minor, minor point.
Here's my point.
Here's my point.
I get, I do get that this health care bill is not optimal.
I do get it, and I hope it gets better as it goes forward, but I hope it does go forward, because remember, the Trump agenda is immigration, taxes, regulation reform, future judges, all these things that Trump is committed to, and he does seem to be committed to keeping his promises on these things, right?
He is under unprecedented attack.
He has been given no honeymoon, not just by the press, but by the right, the Republican Party, who didn't want him in the first place.
Remember, he took over their party.
Why Pacifists Fight00:04:24
They don't love him that much.
And I think he will be so weakened by this bill getting shot down.
I think he will be weakened.
Not only might he lose his majority in Congress, the Republican majority in Congress, but his own power and respect and political clout will be weakened by shooting down this bill.
And that's why I think they ought to pass the bill, get it through the Senate, start to modify it, change it, hopefully make it better, and go forward and let Tom Price and HHS regulate and open up the market a little bit.
It's politics.
It's just politics.
That's all it is.
It's not a hill to die on.
It's politics.
And if Trump loses his credibility and his respect, more than he does by shooting himself in the foot, if the Republicans essentially strip him of the power, the bully pulpit of the presidency, I don't think those conservatives are going to be happy down the line.
And I think with all the thumping on the table done on talk radio, they're not going to be happy with the results.
All right.
The mailbag.
Let me get it out first before she starts screaming.
All right, the mailbag.
I'm going to have to do this fairly quickly.
I'll try not to talk too fast, though.
To a brother in Christ, what is your take on a just war in Christian teaching?
Many seem to adopt a pacifist position because of Christ's teaching on humility and turning the other cheek.
This is from Brandon in England.
I do not believe that Jesus Christ was a pacifist.
I do not believe actually that Jesus Christ spoke in any way to governments, to people acting as governments.
The only reference he ever makes to war is in a parable where he says a king, if he's going to war, wants to make sure he has enough troops.
He obviously speaks toward patience, restraint, forgiveness, forgiveness of one's enemies, and also, and he's talking, remember, into an honor culture.
He's talking into one of these cultures, these Middle Eastern cultures where people feud for hundreds of years over everything and a culture that is being dominated by Romans, by foreigners.
And he is basically saying, you know, play it cool, you know, play it cool and forgive.
If you open up your heart to other people and forgive and play it cool and don't, you know, turn the other cheek.
That's an honor thing.
If somebody slaps you in the cheek, do you challenge them to a duel?
No, turn the other cheek.
If somebody robs from you, go a little bit further.
Give him something.
Maybe he needs that something.
But at no point does he ever say, if your wife is attacked, stand by and let her get raped.
He doesn't say anything like that.
He doesn't say, if your neighbor is being shot, you know, don't go or being attacked.
Don't go and defend him.
He doesn't say that there's no just cause for fighting.
And most churches have agreed there are just causes for fighting.
C.S. Lewis is very good on how soldiers should behave, warriors should behave, once the cause for fighting is established and once they're there.
And he says that he actually believes that the moment after two enemy soldiers kill each other, they might find themselves together in heaven laughing about what happened.
And that's hard to imagine.
But still, I simply don't believe there's an argument for pacifism, which all pacifism ever does is shunt off the responsibility for fighting onto the guy next to you.
Because if you're a pacifist, then somebody's going to take you out.
And unless you're defended by a cop or a soldier or somebody who's willing to do the fighting for you, you're not really a pacifist anyway.
From Rob, what cigars do you like?
Cubans.
Conquer Claven, why are modern films so devoid of romance?
Great question.
I've seen lots of movies in the past few years where the young and possibly attractive leading man and lady never show any interest in each other beyond being swell pals and makes them feel like aliens or robots.
To me, it's feminism.
The reason is feminism.
They do not know they cannot show the way that real relationships are because real relationships are where girls are their girliest and men are their manyest and they don't want to talk about it.
They do not want to talk about what the purpose of relationships is.
They don't want to talk about family.
They don't want to talk about the choices that women make over the choices that men make.
They don't want to show men as being aggressive and women enjoying that aggression.
And they don't want to show any of the things that are true.
And so they've simply eliminated it and they show people at work.
I mean, that picture, what was the alien picture, guys?
Macbeth's Moral Suffering00:13:55
Arrival.
Yeah, arrival.
One of the reasons I found it so dull is that the romance in it.
I thought it was a good movie.
I definitely thought it was a good movie, but it was awfully slow.
And one of the reasons was the romance was absolutely devoid of any passion whatsoever.
It was two people working together who barely had any kind of communications at all.
To show true romance is anti-feminist, should be anti-feminist if you do it honestly, and people don't want to do it.
It's one of the things, you know, it's one of the things I'm now pouring into every piece of fiction I write is femininity celebrated and masculinity celebrated and just not as a propaganda thing, but just as a reality thing, because that's the way I think people are.
Darth Clavenus, this is from our friend Jerin.
What do you believe is going to happen in the end times?
I don't care.
I do not care.
I have to tell you how the end times are going.
You know, what I know is that Christ will return to judge the quick and the dead.
I'm hoping to be quick, and I'm hoping that I get on the good side of that judgment.
I have no role in it.
I have no role in it.
There is nothing in the Bible assigned to me except to have faith.
And so what's the, you know, it's like, am I going to have to pull the chain that flushes the world down the toilet?
You know, no.
So like, why am I worried about this?
It says no one knows.
No one knows when it's going to happen.
Not even Jesus knew.
Only the Father in heaven knew.
Let him take care of it.
That's my answer.
All right.
I'm going to do one more because I want to get on to William Shakespeare.
Boy, there's so many good ones.
Why in Christianity is every saint depicted as suffering?
This is from Victor.
Does this imply that the highest moral position is to sacrifice yourself for others?
You know, we were just talking about this with Dennis Prager, and he was saying that Jews hate suffering and Christians kind of celebrate suffering.
I think the Christian celebration of suffering is a mistake.
Let me see if I can get through this right.
Jesus doesn't want to suffer.
Jesus realizes that he has to suffer.
He weeps tears.
That's how frightened and troubled he is.
He begs God to get him off the hook.
He says, your will be done.
I'm willing.
I'm here.
I'm doing what you want me to do.
But if you can get me out of this, get me out of this.
There's no way he says, oh, suffering.
Oh, it's so wonderful.
One of my favorite lines in the Bible, it's really a piece of poetry.
Jesus says, now is my soul troubled, but what shall I say?
Father, save me from this hour.
It's for this hour that I came.
Okay, so he knows he can't get out of it.
He still begs to get out of it.
He falls on the ground.
He weeps tears.
So this whole idea that suffering should be like, whoopee, you know, I get to suffer.
No.
What you do understand is that this is the way, and I'm going to be talking about this more as we get to Shakespeare, that this is the way the world works.
The world includes suffering, and so you go to suffering in conjunction with God, in conjunction with Christ.
And Christ knows what your suffering is, and he goes there with you.
And this is the thing that if you simply stand on your integrity, you will suffer.
And the saints are people who stood on their integrity up even unto death.
That's what makes them saints.
So they're shown suffering because they took their commitment and faith to the extreme, but not because they went like, oh boy, someone's going to cut my legs and arms off.
Someone's going to fill me full of arrows.
That's not, I think, what a saint.
I don't think that's what a saint is.
Mother Teresa spoke about this wonderfully when she said, you know, she lost her faith for years and she realized finally that that was connecting her to Christ.
And so she celebrated that, but she didn't look forward to it and she didn't want it.
All right, I got to move on because I'm not going to have time to do the stuff I like, and this is a complicated stuff I like.
We're going to talk about Macbeth, one of my favorite works of art in all of literature, in all of anything.
Dark Play, a play so dark they sometimes think that you're not even allowed to mention the name of it in a theater because it causes bad luck.
They just call it the Scottish play.
But it is a play that deals with a question that it was a question both to the Jewish rabbis and to the Christians from earliest times.
Basically, how can you have an omniscient God and have free will?
If God knows what you're going to do before you do it, how can your will be free?
And this is posed in a kind of fairy tale setting.
Macbeth is a thane in Scotland and he bumps into some witches and the witches say, you're going to be king.
And Macbeth thinks the only way I could be king is if these people die and he starts to kill them.
So he makes a choice even though he's been told this prophecy and he basically thinks if this prophecy is going to happen, I have to make it happen.
I'm going to have to make it happen.
So he chooses to start to kill his way to the throne.
I call this process silhouetting.
I made this up, but I use it myself.
It's the system where you show the moral world by showing people acting against the moral world.
If you want to see it really well done, you watch the show The Sopranos.
The Sopranos is a deeply moral show, but nobody ever does anything good in it.
It's all people who are very ugly.
I'm not going to play this now, but there's this wonderful episode called From Where to Eternity, in which the gangsters in this show start to realize that there is a God, there is a hell, there is judgment, and they become briefly afraid, and then they forget about it.
They just forget about it and go back to killing people.
So he's showing you that this is the world.
This is what the world is like.
The world is filled with people like the Sopranos who act badly, but that doesn't mean the moral world doesn't exist.
Now, this is a deeply—one of the things I've been trying to talk about is that Shakespeare is frequently called, often called by academics, a completely secular writer.
And this is because he never talks in what we think of as religious terms.
My argument about Shakespeare is everything he does takes place in a Christian world, including the supernatural things that happen.
It takes place in a Christian world.
His worldview is a Christian worldview.
I believe he was a Catholic who couldn't write about Catholicism because of all the Reformation controversies.
They could have gotten him fined or burned at the stake or all kinds of things.
And so he just imbued his work with this Christian worldview.
It was in a deeply, deeply Christian world in which his characters exist.
And since Shakespeare actually invented our sense of ourselves as human beings, I don't know if he invented it, maybe he predicted it, maybe he sketched it and invented it.
Our ideas of ourselves are Christian ideas.
Even the people who think they are atheists and who oppose Christianity actually think in very Christian terms.
Jesus enters Jerusalem toward the end of his life, and the people cheer and they celebrate his coming.
And it's widely thought that they cheer because they think he's coming to overturn the Romans and establish the kingdom of David.
He is the armed Messiah.
They think this is it.
There's even a theory, some of the assassins, the revolutionaries who are trying to overthrow the government were called sycori.
It was a kind of dagger, the sycariat, I think, was a kind of dagger, so they're called dagger men.
And there's even a theory that Judas Iscariot was really Judas Sicariot.
In the words, the letters got transposed, that Judas betrayed Jesus in the hope that he would then bring the revolution that Judas has been trying to do.
Instead, Jesus, knowing full well this is going to happen, marches into Jerusalem like a king.
He's on an ass, which is a sign that he's the king from the prophecies in the Bible, and he dies and he gets killed.
He gets killed by the authorities, he gets carted off.
And not to reduce such a profound thing to a message, but just to say that the world remains the same.
Christians believe that the world as we are in it, nothing has changed.
Nothing has changed.
In fact, I remember a critic watching Game of Thrones and saying, How can it all be about power and killing and murder?
As if Jesus was never born.
The world is still about power and killing and murder.
And this is what Jesus said to his disciples before he died.
He told them what was going to happen.
He explained everything as best he could.
And he says, I tell you these things so that in me you may have peace.
In this world you will have trouble, but take heart.
I have overcome the world.
Okay.
Now let's jump ahead to one of my favorite works of art, one of the wisest works of art, I think, is a Christmas Carol, sometimes called the fifth gospel.
And in this, we see a man making choices about his life, Ebenezer Scrooge, becoming greedy.
You know, he becomes greedy over time.
He's afraid of being poor and he's afraid of not having power.
And ultimately, he loses the loving, charitable Christian girl who he's engaged to.
And he says to her, You know, you condemn me for wanting wealth, but there's nothing on which the world is so hard as poverty.
And she says to him, You fear the world too much.
Okay?
My point being that the choices you make are not always about what you do.
The choices you make are not always about what is going to happen and whether you get things right.
The choices you make are whether you, the choice, the big choice you make is whether you are going to have faith that the world has been overcome, whether you're going to have faith that the world is not what it seems to be, but is more, much more, and that God's world is working as it should to its proper conclusion.
If you don't do that, if you don't do that, your internal world becomes hell.
And that is the hell that you walk into, I believe, after this world.
It is simply the world you made, in a way.
If you go back to Milton, Milton's Satan is cast out of heaven and he says, Which way shall I fly?
Infinite wrath, infinite despair.
Any way I fly is hell, myself am hell.
Okay?
So he has transformed himself by the choices that he made, the free choices that he made.
And this is what happens to Macbeth.
Would Macbeth have been king?
Would the prophecies have come true if Macbeth hadn't killed his way to the throne?
We don't know.
We have no way of knowing, right?
Macbeth only has one life.
He killed his way to the throne.
And what happens in one of the greatest nihilistic speeches ever written, if not the greatest, one of the greatest, it's one of the greatest pieces of writing in all of literature.
Macbeth at the end, as he faces his death, as he realizes that all the prophecies of his destruction, which seemed impossible, are now coming true as well.
These prophecies too are coming true because now he's helplessly being carried along in prophecy.
Word is brought to him that his beloved wife has died, has basically gone mad from evil and has died.
And he makes this speech.
Here is the unparalleled Ian McKellen delivering the great speech.
Tomorrow.
And tomorrow.
And tomorrow creeps in this petty place from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief candle.
Life is but a walking shadow.
A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.
It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Life has become meaningless to him.
Myself and hell, because of the choices that he made.
And this is silhouetting because it suggests the other choice, the opposite choice that you might make and what it might do for your life now, not for your life afterwards, for your life now.
This is why saints were willing to die.
This is why saints were willing to walk into the fire and into the you know the into their martyrdom, why they were willing to suffer, because of the opposite choices that you make with your free will of a way of living, not what necessarily what you do, but a way that you approach life will give you the joy of heaven in this life, in this life, before you get to the full joy.
Obviously, when I talk about joy, I'm not talking about happiness.
I'm not talking about whoopee, everything's great.
I'm talking about a fullness and abundance of life that you are promised if you accept if you live this way in faith.
And Macbeth doesn't.
He doesn't live that way in faith.
He takes on destiny on himself.
He decides that he is going to do what only God can do.
He kills his way to the throne, and he is left with this emptiness that is recorded in this speech.
All right, that's Shakespeare for this week.
Next, yeah.
So, next is a complicated thought, but I think it's actually worthwhile because so often when Christians talk, they talk about sin and redemption and things that are kind of esoteric.
We think like, what does that mean?
Should I be nicer?
You don't need Jesus to tell you to be nicer.
I'll tell you to be nicer.
It's like, really, really, you do not need Jesus Christ to tell you to be a nice guy.
Be a nice guy.
It's going to be a better life for you.
Or a nice girl, it's going to be a better life for you.
What you need is a way of seeing the world every day, every hour of every day, that will bring you a life of joy, not just now, but hereafter.
And I think that that is the promise that Christ is giving.