Andrew Clavin critiques Gen Z’s fixation on fictional characters over socialism, framing it as a state-controlled system that stifles innovation and collapses under inefficiency. Comparing Trump’s presidency to past crises, he defends its conservative wins—Gorsuch’s SCOTUS nomination, Sessions’ sanctuary city crackdowns—and dismisses media bias, citing selective outrage over Nunes’ wiretapping probe while ignoring left-wing scandals. Hannity’s 1980s clash with Ted Koppel resurfaces, defending opinion journalism as a counter to media monopolies, while Paul Verhoeven’s Jesus Project is dissected for its flawed historical skepticism, blending existential themes in films like RoboCop with materialist contradictions. Ultimately, Clavin argues Trump’s presidency, despite flaws, has outpaced expectations, contrasting it with the left’s coercive authoritarianism. [Automatically generated summary]
Many young people today say they believe in socialism.
Many young people today also say they believe that if the yellow power ranger battled Ant-Man, it would be the coolest thing that ever happened in their entire life.
Many young people today are knuckleheads.
But the popularity of socialism among these charming and attractive nudniks may lead many of you to ask, what exactly is socialism?
And what the hell is a yellow power ranger?
Socialism is a system for making everything fair and everybody equal.
So you can pretty well guess how that crap storm of lunacy is going to turn out.
You see, under capitalism, each person is free to use his time and his money as he's able and as he sees fit.
He can use his time to learn a skill, which makes him valuable to others.
Or he might take university courses in social justice and become a completely useless pain in the buttocks.
If he does learn a skill, he can use it to earn money, which he can then spend in any way he wishes.
If another person has used his time to invent something cool, like say an iPhone app that can see through women's clothing, that'd be really cool.
Oh, sorry.
Then the people who earned money can spend the money on the app and then the app inventor gets to be rich.
Meanwhile, the pain in the buttocks who studied social justice and is therefore of no use to anyone doesn't make any money, which is when he starts to say, hey, let's have socialism.
See, under socialism, the money you earn and the time you spend earning that money do not belong to you.
They belong to the state.
Instead of you deciding what to do with the money you earned, the state takes the money away from you and gives it to people they think should have it, so those people can study social justice and be no use to anyone and then demand more money.
Now, you may say, I earn the money, what if I don't want to give it to the state?
Then the state sends policemen with guns to your house to arrest you and take your money.
That's why the people who believe in socialism are usually the same people who want to make sure you can't own a gun so they can rob your money at gunpoint without your fighting back.
You see, under socialism, wanting to keep your own money is called being greedy.
Taking other people's money is called being generous.
Noticed Something Yesterday00:10:43
Pretty funny, huh?
Under socialism, making yourself useful to others becomes much less worthwhile since you can't make money at it.
That's why in socialist states, the really clever people don't do useful things like farming or science.
They work for the state, where they have the power to take your money and even keep a little on the side for themselves.
Ultimately, under socialism, there's a great big state, but no farmers and no doctors, so everyone starves and dies.
Once everyone's dead, they're finally all equal.
So socialism works.
So, hooray.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Shipshape, dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
It makes me want to sing Hooray All right, we are one day away from the mailbag.
I know.
It's like, it's amazing.
You're sitting there today, you have problems, you have questions, you are puzzled, you're confused.
Tomorrow, clarity.
Like, it's like the clouds just parting.
Send in your questions.
We will answer them all.
Answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life, possibly for the better.
You have to subscribe.
So go on over to the dailywire.com and subscribe.
It's only allows you eight bucks a month.
If you subscribe for the entire year, you get still Michael Knowles' book.
You get Michael Knowles' completely blank book, Reasons to Vote for Democrats.
And if we run out of them, we'll just send you a paper.
It'll be fine.
And we have a new sponsor.
Hooray.
Yay.
And this is a good one, because I listened to this.
This is another podcast.
I'm advertising another podcast.
We should take ads on their podcast so people come back here after they listen.
But this is from Wondery.
It is a podcast called Found, and it is this really, really intriguing concept.
This guy, Davey Rothbart, who worked on This American Life at NPR, he has this kind of obsession with finding weird little things, just random things, and then tracing them back to their sources and unraveling the whole story behind them.
So it has this weird kind of random dreamlike quality.
At this point, of course, people are sending stuff into him, but it could be like just a love note he finds or a note.
One of them I heard was a note remonstrating with a class on a field trip, and he just traces it back to its source and finds out what's behind this thing.
And you can find this and you can subscribe.
It's on www.wondery.com, iTunes SoundCloud.
And if you go on and listen to it and subscribe, it'll be downloaded just like I'm sure you're downloading this podcast directly to your phone.
It's just a really, it's really different.
It's really an odd thing, and it really carries you along with it.
You start listening to it, and then you think, like, I've got to find out this next part.
I've got to find out where this is going.
Really, really interesting.
Listen to a new episode of Found and subscribe to it.
There's a new episode every Wednesday, and you can subscribe to it wherever you listen to podcasts, including this one.
So I noticed something yesterday.
I was sitting around after the show, and I noticed that I'm not hysterical.
And this makes me almost unique among political commentators at this point, I think.
And I started to think, well, why?
I was listening to the language that people were using about the healthcare debacle.
There's a word, debacle.
It was a healthcare debacle, the fact that this law didn't pass, this bill didn't pass.
Even guys like I really respect, like Charles Krauthammer, who was very high up on my list of top commentators, said this is incalculable damage to Donald Trump.
And everybody kind of talking about, I was talking about yesterday how Trump is going to go left because he can't find any love from the Freedom Caucus on the right.
And I have to say, you know, I did complain about the Freedom Caucus.
They have not yet proved.
I mean, they chased out John Boehner.
They're looking like they might chase out Paul Ryan.
They have not yet proved that they can do anything but get in the way, but obstruct.
Somewhere along the line, we conservatives, people like me and the Freedom Caucus are not in the majority.
Some point along the line, you fight and fight and fight to get as much of what you want as you can, but somewhere along the line, you got to govern.
You got to let the government work, or else you just become the party of no.
But I was thinking, a lot of this is about Donald Trump.
I mean, ever since Trump was elected, the country seems to have been in this crisis mode.
And I just noticed that I'm not.
I'm not in a crisis mode.
I do not think we are an American crisis.
And part of this is because I've been around for a long time.
When I was a little kid, when I was a little kid, the president was murdered, okay?
When I was a little kid, or older than that, a major political candidate for president was murdered.
When I was a little kid, one of the great men of America, a civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, was murdered.
And even still in the first half of my life, Ronald Reagan, the greatest president of the 20th century, in my humble opinion, and in most Americans' humble opinion, I think, was shot.
He was shot.
That was kind of a crisis time.
When your guys are getting murdered, when American leaders are getting murdered, that's a crisis.
This is like politics.
And Trump is offbeat.
But I just thought, you know, it's time in the kind of aftermath as the dust settles from this healthcare thing.
Let me just take a look at Trump because I had all these fears about Trump.
And I listed them and I was very specific about them.
And I kind of went back and kind of looked at what they were.
And I thought, how's he doing compared to my fears?
And I'll have a spoiler.
I'll give you my end result, but then I'll show you what I mean.
Is that every one of my concerns about Trump turned out to be true, but it turned out to be true in a fairly mild, benign form.
So, in other words, if you see a friend and he's drinking too much, you might think, oh my God, this guy's spiraling into alcoholism.
But maybe he's not.
Maybe he just is having a few drinks too much at this time, whatever.
And so you can have these concerns, but just because you have concerns doesn't mean they're going to get to the worst possible point that they could.
So with Trump, I have found that everything I was concerned about remains a concern with me, but none of it has developed into its worst form and quite the opposite.
Plus, things that I never expected, good things I've never expected, have are really coming to pass or is still early, but are in the process of coming to pass.
So overall, I'm kind of happy with where we are.
So let me give you an example, all right?
The first one, and I want to talk about this first because it's the one that's kind of in the news and in my mind.
One of the things I worried about with Trump is that he's not a conservative.
I'm a conservative.
I want the government to be as small as possible.
I want each one of us to be as free as possible.
I want people to speak the truth and to value the truth and value facts, value traditions, even though I don't want anybody to be forced to follow traditions.
I think traditions are of deep value.
Trump's a Democrat.
He's a New Yorker.
You know, what Ted Cruz said about him in New York values, I'm a New Yorker.
It's true.
Our values stink.
Trump is like this.
And, you know, I was afraid, look, we're going to get a left-wing president.
And my real take after he was elected, or even before he was elected when I decided to vote for him, was that he would probably be a moderate, you know, for all the bluster and all the loud noise, he would probably be a moderate president.
So after this health care vote, as I predicted, I said if this goes south, he's going to start reaching out to Democrats.
So that's not it.
So don't let it go south.
So he won't do that.
But this is what he said.
And Trump said he was going to reach out to Democrats.
And Scary Spicer at a press conference was asked by Jonathan Carl, I think, of ABC: was Trump serious?
And Spicer said yeah.
Is the president serious about working with Democrats forward after with Apple with healthcare?
Absolutely.
In fact, starting Friday afternoon through late yesterday, he's received a number of calls as well as other members of the senior staff that had been working on health care from members of both sides saying that they would like to work together, offer up ideas, and had suggestions about how to come to resolution on this and get to a House vote on this.
But wouldn't this require a...
I'm sorry, this isn't a free-for-all.
Jonathan's asking a question.
But wouldn't this require a correction for the White House?
I mean, the president's branded Chuck Schumer a clown, you know, worked entirely with Republicans on this bill.
Wouldn't this require a serious change of course from the president?
To some degree, sure.
So that was one of my fears.
Obviously, it's true.
You know, Trump is a flexible guy who has a lot of left-leaning feelings.
And so that fear is still in operation.
But the stuff that he's done on the right already, that is developing on the right already, has been very, very impressive.
The Neil Gorsuch appointment, even though it hasn't gone through yet, has been very good and may result in them killing the filibuster.
I mean, Schumer says he's going to filibuster this incredible appointment.
And they may just, you know, Mitch McConnell just may kill the filibuster altogether, which would be a really amazing thing.
And then they'll just have an up and down vote on this guy.
Rex Tillerson is out there talking to North Korea and saying we're done being patient with this.
He's dealing with China.
I mean, there's a lot of good options.
Not a lot of good options.
There are some really good options for basically getting rid of this regime in North Korea, which is just tormenting these people and keeping them in poverty because this fat, crazy guy, this fat, crazy family of fat, crazy people is running this country, you know.
And so Tillerson is really taking a good hard line with them and a strategic line.
And Jeff Sessions yesterday, he came out and said, you know, we're going to start penalizing sanctuary cities who are breaking the law.
He talked about the fact that they're going to deny them some of these legal grants that they get.
So this is, well, let's hear Sessions talking about this.
Failure to deport aliens who are convicted of criminal offenses puts whole communities at risk, especially immigrant communities in the very sanctuary jurisdictions that seek to protect the perpetrators.
DUIs, assaults, burglaries, drug crimes, gang rapes, crimes against children, and murderers.
Obama's Criticism of Trump's Lies00:15:17
Countless Americans would be alive today, and countless loved ones would not be grieving today if these policies of sanctuary cities were ended.
Not only do these policies endanger lives of every American, just last May, the Department of Justice Inspector General found that these policies also violate federal law.
The president has rightly said disregard for law must end.
In his executive order, he stated that it is the policy of the executive branch to ensure that states and cities comply with all federal laws, including all immigration laws.
So one of the things I like about this, LA is threatening to fight back Chicago, New York.
One of the things I love about Trump when he is conservative is that he forces Democrats into the position of defending federalism, of defending the fact that in their localities people have the right to make their own laws.
So when I have one side, the federal government, you know, pushing conservatism and I have the left pushing federalism, I'm a happy camper because I get a win in any direction, you know.
And I think, so this is one of the things, like I said, yes, Trump has left leanings.
Yes, he's going to do left-wing things.
I didn't win the election.
My guy didn't win the election.
My guy didn't win the primaries.
Another guy did.
I don't think any other person could have beat Hillary Clinton besides Donald Trump.
So I think that that is a plus.
We're going to have to take some leftism with our meal.
That's too bad.
I'm sorry about that.
But it hasn't been malignant.
It doesn't look like it's going to turn malignant because of all the good right-wing things that are doing that he's doing that may actually last longer than any left-wing thing he does.
So in other words, if he actually does get good appointments on the Supreme Court, that's going to have a much longer lasting effect.
The next thing, boy, I'm sorry.
You know, I'm going to stop here and say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Also, to have a glass of water.
Come on over to thedailywire.com and subscribe so you can be in the mailbag.
It's a little warm in there, but you get to ask questions and they'll change your life.
So I had to do an interview at like five o'clock this morning.
I still haven't got my voice back.
All right.
Now, the second one that really bothered me is this whole thing about words meaning things, lies and truth.
And I mean, Trump does go off and he says things that are, strictly speaking, not true.
And sometimes he says things, these conspiracy things that he gets out of the paper, you know, like the one I always go back to is that Ted Cruz thing about, you know, Ted Cruz's father killed Kennedy or whatever the crazy thing was.
You know, and that really bothers me because as the president, you want your president to at least be trying to speak the truth.
Now, on the one hand, but so far, so far, Trump's lies have been, Trump's untruths have been the kind of untruths that you can actually interpret.
You can actually, I think, and I think people who love Trump say this.
We know what he means.
He's not a politician.
He doesn't say everything right, but we know what he means, and what he means tends to be true.
Now, is that optimal?
No, not to me, it's not.
But still, it's better than our last president who openly lied.
Now, I have two feelings about this.
I mean, just to go over it.
I mean, Obama lied about his relationship with the terrorist Bill Ayers.
He lied about what he knew about Jeremiah Wright's philosophy.
He lied about Benghazi.
He lied about health care.
He lied about the line.
You know, he lied a lot.
President Obama lied a lot.
Now, that doesn't, on the one hand, you can say, well, that doesn't justify Trump lying.
Absolutely true.
On the other hand, if you look at it as a trajectory, we're moving up.
The president is that we actually have a more honest president than we had before.
So if you look at it in terms of American history, we're on the right path.
But I think the point is that the lies, somebody said this to me, a commentator on CNN actually said this to me, that Trump's lies are the lies of like a Carney Barker.
He overdoes things, he overstates things, he's inexact, he puffs himself up.
But so far, he has not developed the kind of lies that really worry me, that I was worried about.
So again, my fears were justified, but they haven't been justified at the level that I was afraid they would get to.
And the other side, of course, is so, you know, there's this scandal playing out on the House Intelligence Committee.
And Andrew Clavin's second rule of mainstream journalism.
I'm going to do one of those Prager videos.
I am about three rules of mainstream journalism, so I'm holding my third one in reserve to reveal it there.
But my second rule is that when there's a scandal on the left, the news is the scandal.
When there's a scandal on the right, I'm sorry, I got that wrong.
When there's a scandal on the right, when there's a scandal on the right, the news is the scandal.
When there's a scandal on the left, the news is, how did you get that information?
That's wrong that you've got that.
So we're seeing this play out in real time at the House Intelligence Committee.
All we've heard all this time is Trump works for Smirsch.
Trump is a Russian spy.
And we know this because we're getting leaks, illegally leaked intelligence information that was illegally taken and illegally unmasked.
And we're publishing it with, oh, it's great.
We're publishing, oh, we got all this intelligence.
We got all these sources.
It's great.
It's great.
Now, the head of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, goes out and he gets some documents that seem to confirm that there was abusive wiretapping of Donald Trump and his campaign people during the campaign by the Obama administration.
Now the scandal is: how did he get those documents?
Why did he go and talk to Donald Trump before he went and talked to the House Intelligence Committee?
What is wrong with it?
He went on.
Why did he go on to the White House to find these documents?
And what he says is that he had to go on there because they couldn't take the documents out of the area.
So he had to go to the area where the documents were.
Here he is.
Here's, no, let me show you first, Senator Mark Warner trying to make the story with the help, of course, his willing executioners on Meet the Press.
He's trying to make the story into how did you get these documents?
Typical rule of mainstream media.
I am totally mystified by what Mr. Nunes has said.
And I've talked to my chairman, Richard Burr.
He doesn't know.
I've talked to Democrats, Republicans on the committee.
I think it's fairly mystifying, if not outrageous, that he makes these claims.
Then goes down and briefs the White House.
And I know Adam Schiff, the lead Democrat, still wants to keep the investigation bipartisan.
I don't think Mr. Schiff even knows today what those documents are.
Remember, what they're edging for all the time is they're edging for independent counsel.
They want an independent counsel because once an independent investigation, because once they have an independent investigation, no one can stop it.
It can go anywhere they want.
They can keep it going for four years, eight years, as long as they want.
And they are not held responsible for the results.
So that's what they're always going for, and I don't think they should let him have it because I don't think there's any scandal here.
Meanwhile, Nunes explains why he did what he did.
Here he is.
Oh, I want the I WEXPING number two.
This is where he says basically that he went looking for one thing at these documents and then he found something else and that's why he went and told the president.
I was expecting to see what had been described to me.
I was not expecting to see what I saw.
And that's why there was nothing clandestine about it.
It was simply just going through there, saying hi to people, going in, looking at what I needed to look at, figuring out it had nothing to do with Russia at all, and had everything to do about American citizens being caught up in surveillance of some kind.
And I thought that it was important for the president to know, and that's why the following day I went and briefed him.
So again, Trump, you know, this is about the Trump tweeting that Obama wiretapped him.
And again, you know, obviously that's not exactly what happened, but close enough for jazz, you know?
I mean, it's getting to look like it was close.
You know, the old joke used to be it's close enough for government work, you know, because the government workers don't work very hard and they don't get things very right, so it's close enough for government work.
You know, again, Trump, you know, he has a problem stating things clearly and accurately and exactly.
And he does have a problem where he takes news stories off TV without really vetting them himself.
It's all still a problem.
I get it.
But it just hasn't reached the level of bad that I was afraid it was going to reach.
Whereas the other side, namely the Democrats and the media, but I repeat myself, are just heaping, heaping lies on him over and over and over again.
And after all, you know, we had a binary choice.
The choice was Trump versus Hillary.
I'm not going to pretend that that choice was a high watermark in electoral politics in the United States.
It wasn't my favorite election.
But still, we had a choice.
We made the choice.
I think so far, Trump has been much, much, much better than I feared and much better than, obviously, the opposition.
The final one, and the one that really did bother me, this was the one that bothered me the most, is that Trump has a tendency to bully.
And he has a tendency not to play fight.
Politics in some ways is a play fight.
It's not a real fight where you actually hit people with bricks.
It's a fight where you yell at people and call them names and then you go out and have a beer with them.
It's a lot harder to do that when somebody says your dad killed Kennedy or when somebody says, you know, you're ugly or you're a woman and you're ugly or whatever.
You know, it's very, your wife is ugly.
All these things that Trump said.
And what I worried about that most of all was that it revealed an authoritarian personality.
I don't like the bullying, but my real fear was that it underlied an authoritarian personality, somebody who was not going to be constrained by the United States government and our checks and balances system.
And so far, I have to say that is the fear that has not come true the most.
That is the fear Trump has been anything but authoritarian.
Is he governing a little bit too much by executive orders?
Yeah, but he's got to.
You know, the last president did.
He's got to erase some of these things that Obama did.
It's too bad.
It's too bad that we've reached that point.
But still, he has not been, you know, this whole thing, he was Hitler, he was Mussolini.
The House just rejected a bill that he wanted, the big health care bill that he wanted.
Judges have shot down his executive orders.
Nobody's being hanged in the streets.
No press, this whole thing, oh, he hates the press.
Nobody in the press has been bugged that we know about like Obama did.
You know, nobody has been silenced.
You know, he actually, for all the noise and all the sound and fury, he seems to be completely willing to work within the structure of the American government.
And the American government seems to be plenty strong.
You know, our checks and balances system.
Look, it wasn't strong under Obama because the media didn't do its job.
The media didn't hold Obama to account.
Our system began to weaken.
This is why you should only elect white male Republicans, right?
Because the media will go after them.
And they should go.
You know, we want a tough media.
We want a media that's tough on authority figures.
They have a lot of power.
You know, we should go after them.
But all of the authoritarianism is on the left, all of it.
You know, I have to tell you this story.
This is an amazing story.
Senator Chuck Schumer, who you may have heard of, right?
He's the leader of the Senate Democrats.
He caused a scene at a Manhattan restaurant.
I think this is from the New York Post.
He caused a scene at a Manhattan restaurant when he began yelling at a wealthy and well-connected Donald Trump supporter and screaming that POTUS is a liar.
Schumer lost his cool on Sunday night at an Upper Eastside restaurant, Sete Mezzo, according to witnesses.
He was dying.
This is the leader of the house, he's in a nice restaurant in New York, right?
He was dining with friends when he encountered Joseph Califano Jr., the former U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under Jimmy Carter and domestic policy advisor to President Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife, Hillary, who are having a quiet dinner.
So this couple, you know, this Democrat couple is sitting having a quiet dinner.
Onlookers said Schumer was incensed that Hillary, who's the daughter of William Paley, the founder and chairman of CBS, had voted for Trump, even though her husband Joseph is a well-known Democrat.
One witness said of the restaurant rant: Schumer made a scene yelling, she voted for Trump.
The Califanos left the restaurant, but Schumer followed them outside.
On the sidewalk, Schumer carried on, How could you vote for Trump?
He's a liar.
He kept repeating, he's a liar.
Hillary, the wife, confirmed the confrontation, telling page six, Senator Schumer was really rude.
He's our senator, and I don't really like him.
Yes, I voted for Trump.
Schumer joined us outside and he told me Trump was a liar.
I should have told him that Hillary Clinton was a liar, but I was so surprised I didn't say anything.
I don't blame her.
You know, this crazy senator is fine.
So this is the thing I have to say about the left.
And, you know, other people have made this observation.
Ann Coulter, I know, has made it, but many people have made it.
The left is always accusing the right of things that the left does.
And one of the things they accuse us of all the time is being fascist, authoritarian.
They are fascist authoritarians.
The left is fascist and authoritarian.
You know, it's because they don't believe in truth, right?
They don't believe in facts and truth in objectivity.
They believe that the truth is a story that people tell.
It's a narrative told by the strongest person.
A philosopher, a philosophy professor, Crispin Sartwell.
I'm using this, I'm going to use this for my opening speech, my opening monologue tomorrow.
Crispin Sartwell wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal talking about the history of this idea, the history that there is no objective truth.
He quotes this philosopher, Richard Rorty, who wrote, Objectivity is a matter of intersubjective consensus among human beings.
In other words, we agree to what the truth is.
The truth is a story that we tell.
Well, if the truth is a story that we tell, right, then you have to stop people from telling the story that you don't want told.
See, I don't have to shut people up because the facts will bear me out or not, and I will live and die by the facts.
But if you just think there is no truth, that there's only a story, you have to shut people up.
You know, we had Jordan Peterson on the show a while back, this college professor, a psychology professor in Canada, and he is fighting against this law in Canada that means that mandates that individuals use the preferred pronouns of gender non-binary people or be faced with prosecution.
If you don't call someone she, if he thinks she's a she, you can be prosecuted.
So he went to give a speech at McMasters University, and the people just tried to shout him down and were screaming at him.
Let's just play this clip of Peterson fighting back after they screamed.
He had to take the crowd outside, and we've seen this happen to Ben.
You know, we've seen this happen to a lot of speakers on the universe.
They have to shout him down because truth is just a story, so they can't let the opposite story get told.
And here's his response.
All right, so I can tell you a little bit about why I was opposed to Bill C-16.
And there's a variety of reasons.
Shouting Down Speakers00:03:18
I think the most important one is that it's the first piece of Canadian legislation that's ever been put forward that actually requires people to use a particular set of words.
Now, there is other legislation that does govern to some degree what you can't say.
So, for example, you can't incite a crime, and that's perfectly logical.
It's a reasonable restriction on free speech.
But we've never had a piece of legislation ever that would require you to use a certain kind of vocabulary.
And regardless of what the vocabulary is, and the fact that it happens to be about transgender terminology, hypothetically, is almost beside the point, as far as I'm concerned.
You know, this all focused on this particular issue.
And it had to focus on some issue.
But this isn't the issue that's at the bottom of it.
It's just that complex things manifest themselves in very particular locations, and this just happens to be the location that this is manifesting itself in.
In other words, it's not really about transgender people.
You can have your opinion about transgender people.
I can have my opinion about transgender people.
When you force, they're forcing people to use the words they want them to use because they think words define reality.
But they don't.
The ability to speak words defines freedom, but the words themselves do not define reality.
And if you don't think this, well, we know this is happening here.
We know it's happening on universities.
But listen to this, because I'll end with this and then I'll get to stuff I like.
Ted Koppel interviewed.
Younger people may not remember Ted Koppel.
He had this really, really important news show called Nightline.
And it became a big deal during the hostage crisis during the Reagan administration.
And Koppel interviewed Sean Hannity, and Hannity was complaining because he did a long interview, and this is the only part he put on the air.
But Koppel basically told Sean that Sean was a bad thing in general.
Now listen to this exchange.
Think we're bad for America?
You think I'm bad for America?
Yeah, you do.
In the long haul, I think you and all these opinions.
No, you know why?
Sad.
Because you're very good at what you do and because you have attracted a significantly more intelligent.
Let me finish the sentence.
I'm not sure you do that.
With all due.
Yes.
You have attracted people who are determined that ideology is more important than facts.
See, what Ted Koppel doesn't realize is that this is that all he's complaining about is that he's lost his monopoly on the news.
He has lost his monopoly.
The left has lost its monopoly on the flow of information.
Sean Hannity is an opinion journalist.
He says it over and over and over again.
He is entitled to his opinion.
I do not see, I do not see how Sean Hannity's opinion can be bad for America or really any opinion, even hateful opinions, can be bad for America.
If you don't believe that there are facts, if you don't believe that there is truth, if you don't believe that there is something to defend here, you know, that will support you, common sense and logic and truth and facts, then it's just about who says what.
And I think that that is why these guys have become authoritarian.
And Trump, again, Trump, for all my fears of Trump, he has not been like that at all.
Why These Guys Became Authoritarian00:03:46
He has not, all he has done is he's fought back.
And that's what they hate.
He fights back against the press.
And yes, should he be more specific?
Absolutely.
But, you know, so far, Trump, I don't know.
He's like a relatively competent.
So far he's been pretty competent in terms of his, he's been very competent in terms of his appointments.
And I like what he's doing insofar as he's in control in foreign policy and in what he was doing with what Jeff Sessions is doing and all this.
You know, he's going to have to learn this legislative system.
He can't just complain that he's a businessman and doesn't understand that.
He ran for president.
He ran for the job of president.
He's got to be the president.
But so far, you know, it just has been pretty good.
You know, I mean, I would say it's a pretty good presidency so far.
I'd like to see it get a lot better, but we'll see.
Anyway, that was my assessment and the reason that I'm not hysterical in any way, shape, or form.
I'll try and get hysterical because I know it's good for ratings.
All right, so I want to go back to stuff I like to Paul Verhoven, who did the picture L.
And he's just had this, he has had this fascinating film career.
And one of the things that I didn't talk about in Ell is its attitude toward religion.
You know, it has a very dur attitude toward, especially Catholicism, the key, there's a key crime that takes place that is based on, that kind of swirls around Catholicism, swirls around Christ.
And Christ figures in a lot of his movies, in a lot of Verhoven's movies.
And Verhoeven was part of something called the Jesus Project.
He was almost unique, I think, in not being a religious scholar and being part of this project.
The Jesus Project, as I understand it, was basically a search for the historical Jesus.
Now, I know a lot about this because I've written whole novels about Jesus and I really read a lot about the historical Jesus.
And Verhoeven has said that what he feels is that the humanity of Christ, the humanity of Jesus, has been destroyed by all the magic stuff like healings and resurrections and all the stuff that is part of faith.
And one of the reasons that I got off the historical Jesus train, I remember one day that I was reading this immense, immense volume.
It was like a four or five volume set on the historical Jesus.
And I got about halfway through the second volume.
Each volume was like a thousand pages.
I got halfway through the second volume.
I thought, this is ridiculous.
And I'll tell you why I think the search for historical Jesus is ridiculous.
When I was in college, I took a class on the beginning of Christianity, and the historian, excellent historian named Bausma, I think his name was, got to the resurrection.
And he said, at this point, something happened because people were transformed from despair to hope.
So we don't know what it was, but something happened.
And somebody, a Christian, raised her hand and said, why can't we just say it was the resurrection?
And he said, because that's not history.
And he's absolutely right.
That's not history.
That is faith.
That is spirituality and religion.
Things like that don't happen in history.
That's why we're excited about it.
That's why we made it into a religion.
If things like that happened all the time, it would have been like, oh, it's a resurrection.
It's Thursday already.
Nobody would care, right?
So he's absolutely right.
History can only deal with what history can deal with.
So the logic of historical Jesus people, and I'm telling you, I've read so much of this, I can almost recite it.
The logic is always to leave out.
You start with leaving out all the faith-based stuff.
The healings, the miracles, all that stuff has to go if you're going to get to the historical Jesus.
So immediately you've removed any reason for studying the historical Jesus because who cares?
He's just a guy who, you know, so what?
There's lots of guys.
So you've removed any of that.
And then by the logic of history, you have to start asking yourself questions like, you have to start saying things like, well, if they were ashamed to say it, it must be true.
So for instance, they'll say, well, they must have been ashamed that John the Baptist attracted such a big crowd.
Memory Man00:06:25
So that must be true.
And all this stuff about Jesus kind of supplanting him or John saying, now, you know, Jesus is going to go further than I could have gone.
All that stuff must have been made up to explain the fact that John was so popular.
So in other words, the logic of historicity determines, predetermines what you're going to find.
And you can only find this guy.
That's all you can find.
And you can only find the things, if you only believe the things that they would have been ashamed to say, then you'll only find the things that somehow you find shameful.
It's all predetermined, and that's why I don't believe in it.
So Verhoeven is stuck with this question.
If Jesus is just a man, then what is a man?
What constitutes a man?
Now, the really fascinating thing about Paul Verhoeven is he started out, made a lot of Dutch films that were, you know, art house films, basically art foreign films.
And then he came to Hollywood and he had a bang-up Hollywood career.
And each one of his films, if you watch them carefully, are still gigantic films, gigantic American films that have the heart of a small foreign film.
And one of his best is a film called RoboCop with Peter Weller, and they've remade it.
I haven't seen the remake.
I hear it's not very good.
But RoboCop is about a cop.
It's like the $6 million man, right?
It's about a cop who gets killed and they give him a fake body.
And here's a scene where Robo is seen.
It's really brilliant.
It's seen from RoboCop's point of view as they're operating on him.
He's seeing it as he's becoming a robot.
He's on.
What's the story?
We were able to save the left arm.
What?
I thought we agreed on total body prosthesis.
Now lose the arm, okay?
Jesus Morton.
Can you understand what I'm saying?
It doesn't matter.
We're going to blank his memory anyway.
Well, I think we should lose the arm.
What do you think, Johnson?
Well, he signed release forms when he joined the force.
He's legally dead.
We can do pretty much what we want to lose the arm.
Shut him down.
Prep him for surgery.
So the point is they remove anything from this guy that is human.
They remove his flesh.
They wipe his memory.
So is he still a human being?
Isn't he just a robot?
And of course, the whole story of RoboCop is this guy who starts to find his humanity.
They can't take it.
There's something in him they can't take away.
And Verhoeven can't explain this, but he knows it.
He knows it's true.
And he keeps asking himself, what is a man?
And the other one he does like this is Total Recall.
Now, Total Recall is an unfortunate film because I'm a big Arnold Schwarzenegger fan.
I love the Terminator movies, and I love a couple of the films he was the one where he's a hunter and the alien predator.
Love that film.
Everybody in that film got elected governor of someplace.
It's true.
But he just doesn't play a human being very well.
He's just too immense, too German, too Germanic, too heavy.
He doesn't play a human.
And this is a part for an everyman.
Total recall.
It's about a working-class guy who suddenly realizes that his entire life is an implanted memory.
And that's the problem.
I'm not giving it away.
It's the premise of the first 10 minutes of the film.
His entire life is an implanted memory.
So who the hell is he?
So who the hell is he?
And the film has one of the terrific science fiction scripts ever.
It just works.
Every beat of it works.
And it's just ruined a little bit by Arnud, you know.
But he asks the question, what is a man?
And in one point, this guy with no memory of who he is, who started to realize that some of the things he did in his life may not have been all that good, right, finds this mutant wise man.
And it's really disgusting.
The mutant wise man lives in the belly of another man and all this stuff.
And here's what the wise man says to him.
What do you want, Mr. Quay?
The same as you, to remember.
But I to be myself again.
You are what you do.
A man is defined by his action, not his memory.
Please, take my hand.
Open your mind to me.
Open your mind.
Open your mind.
That's a great 1990 special effects there.
Open your mind.
Anyway, what he's saying, you know, to unpack this, what you see is this little baby, basically, this little malformed baby coming out of another man's body.
And it really does take us back to this idea that if you're going to enter the kingdom of heaven, you have to become as a child again.
It is this original man inside this other man, which is a very Christian concept.
The original man inside this other man telling him that a man is not what he remembers, he is what he does, right?
Because an original man doesn't really have a memory.
The original man is just the things that he does, which indicates free will.
You know, it indicates a soul.
All these things that Verhoeven was trying to work out.
One of the things about L that I found rather disturbing is it doesn't really have a soul.
It really is a series of Freudian reactions.
He's got a lot of, he's very obsessed with sex, as all materialists ultimately are.
You know, that in L, there are a lot of things that are built like a steam engine.
If pressure comes here, then pressure goes out there.
And there is a lot of that in life, and it's very realistic to that extent.
But in these pictures, he was looking for something more.
He was looking to define what is a man, what is a person.
And that makes these pictures really interesting because they're big, you know, 1990s, 19 late 80s, 90s science fiction stories.
But they have the ideas of a guy who is part of the Jesus Project who is looking for what it is that is inside people that makes them more than just flesh and blood.
Really interesting filmmaker, Paul Verhoven.
We'll talk about one more tomorrow.
But tomorrow is the mailbag.
I mean, come on.
All your problems are on the verge of being solved.