Ben Shapiro dissects Al Gore’s failed climate prophecies—from 1970s ice-age warnings to 1996 doomsday claims—while mocking feminist orthodoxy, citing Anita Sarkeesian and Simone de Beauvoir’s rejection of women choosing homemaking. He accuses Planned Parenthood of weaponizing legal systems against anti-abortion activists while feminists like Katha Pollitt evade abortion’s moral weight, framing it as a manufactured crisis to silence dissent. The episode ties media bias—from Brexit hysteria to Michael Moore’s Trump extinction tweets—to a pattern of manufactured outrage, questioning whether leftist narratives thrive on suppressing debate rather than engaging with facts. [Automatically generated summary]
Former Vice President and lovable loon Al Gore has declared that global warming is the principal cause of the civil war in Syria and of the Brexit vote in the UK.
Oh really?
Weird Al made the comments during an interview in London.
Then he spun the propeller on his striped beanie and predicted that if he got it going fast enough, he'd be able to fly around the room and cool the atmosphere at the same time.
Gore's theory is that droughts in Syria forced people to move into cities where stupid Obama policies had caused the rise of ISIS, so British voters opted to leave the oppressive EU, and therefore everyone should give Al Gore even more money.
Something like that.
Wiping the drool from his chin, wiping the drool from his chin while handlers rebuttoned his shirt properly, the man who was once, so help me, very nearly president of the United States for crying out loud, went on to say, quote, I predicted all the way back in 1996 that if we did not take drastic measures, we would all die by 2006.
It's lucky I was able to bring everyone back to life using my magic powers and make them forget the entire incident with the memory ray hidden in my wristwatch.
But believe you me, it was a close call, unquote.
Gore's amazing ability to predict environmental disasters makes him only the latest in a long line of environmental disaster predictors whose uncanny accuracy and exactitude are matched only by the absurdity of their gibberish.
For instance, in 1970, environmental scientists predicted that by 1985, air pollution would reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth by one half.
I'm not making this up.
This led environmentalists to predict an ice age by the year 2000, which is why it got so dark and cold 17 years ago.
Though actually that may just be because I passed out in the bathtub and didn't regain consciousness until 2 in the morning.
Then of course, there was the prediction that the world would experience a population bomb.
In this scenario, advanced back in the 1960s, population was going to increase so fast that soon people would swarm through our cities like locusts, devouring everything in their path, including other human beings, unless Brad Pitt could make it to Wales and find the cure.
This prediction of the exact plot of World War Z more than 60 years in advance still stands as an awe-inspiring example of environmentalist accuracy in predicting ludicrous fantasies.
Environmentalists have also predicted that our oil would run out and that there would be widespread famine, which is amazing because my oil actually did run out just yesterday, and by the time I walked to the gas station, I was starving.
One thing is certain, though, as long as Al Gore is alive, the climate will continue to experience huge, intermittent gusts of hot air, followed by intense periods of side-splitting hilarity.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is ticky-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-diggy.
Ship shape, tipsy-topsy, the world is a bibby-zing.
Waiting Online Annoys Me00:02:24
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Here we go.
We got a lot to talk about today, but let us begin with our new sponsor, Stamps.com.
And the reason I love this new sponsor is because I have this thing about waiting online.
I don't even know.
We don't really wait online that much anymore.
It used to be like movies.
You had to wait online to get in the movies.
And I would wait until the line had gone in, even if it meant sitting in the back or whatever.
I wouldn't care.
I'd take the last seat because I just hate waiting online.
I never drive on the freeways.
I'd rather move quickly, even if it's longer, go back.
The one place where you still have to wait online is the post office.
I mean, I love the post office.
They do a great job, give them props.
But when you go there, you have to wait online.
And, of course, it's not always open.
But stamps.com, always open, and you don't have to wait anywhere.
You sit at your computer.
You can print out your stamps.
You basically buy the stamps online, print them out, put your envelope in the printer, and you can print them right onto the envelope.
You can print them onto stickers.
You can print labels, all kinds of things.
And you don't need one of those enormous, what are they called?
Those stamp machines that you get in businesses that if you drop it on your foot, basically you have to limp around forever.
You don't need anything like that.
They will send you, you don't know anything about it.
I'm just making this up.
No, no, it's true.
This is easy, reliable.
You get it, and they'll send you, they'll even send you a free stamp scale so you know exactly how much to put on.
It's amazing.
So, use stamp.com.
It's just the easiest way to do this stuff.
I mean, it is, and it's never closed.
And you can enjoy the stamp service with a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus postage and a digital scale without long-term commitments.
Go to stamps.com and you click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in Clavin.
Find out how it's spelled and let me know.
No, it's K-L-A.
V-A-N.
That's stamp.com and enter Clavin, K-L-A-V-A-N.
Stamps.com, never have to go to the post office again.
Good stuff.
All right, and while I'm selling things, by the way, we're going to be talking a lot about feminism today.
And we had this, we sent Knowles to see Beauty and the Beast, our cultural, best-selling cultural correspondent and super troll Michael Knowles.
We sent him to see Beauty and the Beast.
My daughter, Faith Moore, has written a brilliant piece about Beauty and the Beast and why it is not, in fact, the new Beauty and the Beast and why it's not, in fact, feminism.
Why We Left Planned Parenthood00:09:13
She writes on parenting and things at PJ Media.
And she is a Disney princess addict.
And in fact, she has a website on Facebook, Disney Princess Addict.
So you can go on facebook.com/slash DisneyPrincessAddict, and you can see my daughter being a Disney princess addict.
And I know, you know, I know our producer Jonathan Hay loves those Disney princesses.
Yeah, I worry about you a little bit.
I'm not sure whether it's the long flowing blue gown or the fact that you talk to squirrels that makes you a little strange.
Anyway, go and see that.
Disney Princess Addict.
All right.
So yesterday, and this has been kind of the theme for the week, we were talking about hysteria and narrative, okay?
And why I think, see, I think because the left does not believe in truth, because at the base, they have this relativistic worldview.
They think that the truth is a story that you tell.
And whoever has the most power gets to tell the story.
That's what, remember that book, Roots, Alex Haley, it starts with history is written by the winners, which isn't actually true, but that was a very catchy phrase.
History is written by the winners.
And the left wants to make sure that they are telling the story because they think that gives them power over your mind, which to some extent it does because people are swept away in this narrative that they form.
And in order to get power, they have two very essential tools.
One is silence and one is crisis.
Okay?
And both those tools are in evidence in the news today.
And I want to start with silence because this story drove me a little nuts.
I mean, this is the story about Planned Parenthood.
Remember, yeah, California prosecutors on Tuesday charged two anti-abortion activists who made undercover videos of themselves trying to buy fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood.
They charged them with 15 felonies saying they invaded the privacy of medical providers by filming without consent.
So Planned Parenthood, killing babies, selling their body parts for cash, not a problem, but taking pictures of them and catching them doing this.
That's the problem.
Remember, that's Clavin's second rule of mainstream media news coverage is if the scandal is on the right, the story is the scandal.
If the scandal is on the left, the story is how did you get that information, right?
So this is a perfect example of that rule in operation.
Then the law, I mean, this is tyranny.
It's tyranny.
And all the, remember, all the press, oh, they were so shocked by Donald Trump saying the media, the news media is the enemy of the people.
This is horrible.
Where are they today?
These are journalists.
They're going in.
Now, when this happened, I mean, the actual meeting the actual video, which I'll show you in a minute, is so shocking.
It really is people just bartering away the limbs of murdered children, basically, for money, for cash.
So the press came out with this thing, and the way the press, these things are heavily edited.
They're heavily edited.
So they released the whole thing.
I mean, you can watch the entire thing.
Eventually, you could watch the entire thing.
No editing, you know.
I mean, it may have been edited for space, for time, but that didn't change the narrative one little bit.
So when I first came to the Daily Wire, I made a video making fun, and we're laughing because I made this.
This was the first, I think it was the first video I ever did, wasn't it?
I made this video because I was livid.
I mean, I saw these videos, and I was livid at the way the mainstream media was burying this story.
So we all worked so hard on this video.
It took us weeks, didn't it?
Oh, man.
So I was pretending to be the mainstream media news man, and we would release the videos of this thing and how they were being covered.
This thing shocked our bosses so much because we were just getting to know one another.
I shouldn't have led with it, but it was the story that set me off.
I shouldn't have led with it.
And they looked at this and they thought, we don't want our names on this.
And they made us cut the words Daily Wire off.
Now, if I did it today, I think now they kind of get it.
We all kind of know each other better and they understand where I was coming from.
Let me just play one.
I don't like to play my old videos because you can look them up, but I just got to play one minute of this.
This is me as the mainstream media news anchor introducing these secret videos.
Good evening.
This is the MSM News Desk, bringing you all the news that fits.
A group of conservative, right-wing conservatives have been releasing a series of hidden camera videos taken at Planned Parenthood facilities around the country.
These far-right, icky, conservative videos are heavily edited to make it look like Planned Parenthood kills babies and sells their body parts for medical experiments.
Well, all right, Planned Parenthood does do that, but these videos try to make it seem like that's not okay.
This video, for instance, entraps one of Planned Parenthood's most respected doctors in an admittedly awkward moment.
I love sitting at the children's table.
It's another boy.
I say you love planned parenthood.
Something about the devil eating babies didn't sit well with our new bosses.
You know, it never, they didn't know me.
But I mean, this is essentially really what this story.
Take a look.
This is Dr. Mary Gatter, the president of Planned Parenthood's Medical Director Council, being caught.
She's negotiating.
They call it tissue, but it's body parts.
What would you expect for intact tissue?
What sort of compensation, what sort of...
Well, why don't you start by telling me where you're used to paying.
Okay.
I don't think so.
I'd like to, I would like to know what would make you happy.
What would work for you?
Well, you know, in negotiations, a person who stroves up to figure first is got a loss, right?
So.
No, I don't look at it that way.
I know.
You want to play that game?
I get it.
I'm going to lowball because I'm used to low things from.
You know what?
If you lowball, I'll act pleasantly surprised, and you'll know it's a low ball.
What I want to know is what would work for you.
Don't lowball it.
Tell me what you'll discuss it.
Oh, that's way too low.
And that's, really, that's way too low.
I don't want to exit.
I've been a place that did 52.
See, we're not in it for the money.
We're not in it for the money.
It's like, yeah, but we'll take the money, but we're not in it for the money.
You know, so the thing is, remember the formula.
The formula is to acquire power so that you control the narrative because the narrative is the truth.
And one of the tools, they're really two, it's like a pincer movement.
On one hand, there is silence, and on the other hand, there is crisis.
And this is silence.
They are silencing these people.
They're not going to get away with this.
The Supreme Court has already ruled that a news organization can do this kind of secret video stuff if it's in public.
California has a law that I can't tape you on the phone in a private conversation, but this is not going to cover that.
They don't care.
They're just intimidating journalists.
They want to make sure you know Planned Parenthood, the abortion mill of Planned Parenthood, is off limits.
And by the way, they call their movement pro-choice, right?
They call it pro-choice.
There is no choice involved.
They do not want, remember when they had that woman's march, the women's march, I guess it was in January.
They banned women who were pro-life from sponsoring the march.
And Katha Pollett, who is a, well, never mind, Katha Pollitt, who writes for the Liberal Journal of the Nation, then wrote an article, Can Feminists Be Pro-Choice?
are feminists.
And she ends, she says, well, she can be anti-abortion for herself and many pro-choice women are, but rights and personal ethics are not the same.
I don't see how restricting and criminalizing abortion, bullying women on their way into the clinic and pushing lies that abortion will give you breast cancer, make you infertile or lead to a life's worth of misery are compatible with respecting other women's rights to make their own moral decisions in an area where people, she left out one thing.
All that stuff may be untrue, but she left out the true one, the one where it's killing babies.
That's the problem.
The problem is not, it's always about, they're always telling you about women's, what do they call it?
Birth, you know, reproduction rights.
Women's, you notice they never use the words.
They never use the words.
It's like they never say, they don't even say abortion really anymore, you know?
And this is feminism in a nutshell, by the way.
Feminism, you know, there's that woman, Anita Sarkeesian, who is always yelling about, oh, girls and video games or, you know, sexist objects and all that stuff.
And they better be because otherwise I'm not playing.
But, you know, she basically tweeted out, feminism is about the collective liberation of women as a social class.
It's not about personal choice.
You don't have a personal choice to stay home.
There was a woman in Australia, New Zealand, I can't remember, a feminist in Australia, I think it was, who said women should not be allowed to stay home and be homemakers.
The Point Of Feminism00:12:34
And this, by the way, this was from the very beginning, from the very beginning.
Simone de Beauvoir, who wrote one of the most famous initial original feminist tracts, I think it was called The Second Sex, she said the same thing.
Women should not be allowed to be homemakers because too many of them will choose that.
That's why.
None of this is about choice.
It's all about silence.
So that's silence on the one side, and the other side is crisis, okay?
Everything has to be a crisis.
I'm going to talk about this.
Come on over.
We've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
I forgot to say it's the mailbag today.
I totally forgot to talk about the mailbag.
If you don't come over to thedailywire.com to hear the rest of the show, you cannot hear the mailbag in which all your problems will be solved.
How could you miss that?
If you subscribe, you can ask your own personal questions for a lousy eight bucks a month.
So the other thing is crisis.
Yesterday, Theresa May, the Prime Minister of England, finally put into place the Brexit order.
They basically told the EU they're out.
So what does this mean?
Well, let her say it.
Here she is in Parliament.
A few minutes ago in Brussels, the United Kingdom's permanent representative to the EU handed a letter to the President of the European Council on my behalf, confirming the government's decision to invoke Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union.
The Article 50 process is now underway, and in accordance with the wishes of the British people, the United Kingdom is leaving the European Union.
This is an historic moment from which there can be no turning back.
Britain is leaving the European Union.
We are going to make our own decisions and our own laws.
We are going to take control of the things that matter most to us.
And we are going to take this opportunity to build a stronger, fairer Britain, a country that our children and grandchildren are proud to call home.
That is our ambition and our opportunity.
And that is what this government is determined to do.
So Britain wants to be a country in and of itself.
Now, it's never happened to Britain before, except for like a thousand years, right?
This is all they want.
They thought, hey, you know, we tried the EU, it didn't work.
They opened our borders.
We got, you know, we got creamed with immigration.
We don't like their regulations coming out of Brussels, basically telling us what to do all the time.
The people decided they want out.
They want out.
Here is the people, the experts and the authorities reacting to this decision when it was made.
Brexit of Britain is a complete economic disaster.
It's terrible.
What a disaster.
Out of Brexit would be a disaster.
We are heading towards a disaster.
I believe disaster, quite frankly.
It would be a complete disaster.
It is a disaster.
It would be an economic disaster.
Because this is a disaster.
It will be a disaster.
A bloody disaster.
A bloody disaster.
Who put that together?
Was it Rebecca?
Rebecca Shapiro, the nice Shapiro, as we call her here, the nice attractive Shapiro.
Put that together, thank you.
And, you know, the thing is, it's a crisis.
It's got to be a crisis.
You know, instead of just saying, hey, you know, we'll negotiate, we'll have trade deals, it's going to be fine.
Britain was a country a long time before the EU came along.
It is going to be fine.
Let's see what happens.
Let's see how it goes.
You know, it's like nothing.
It's got to be a disaster because otherwise you start thinking for yourself, you know, and it's only in disaster.
Remember the great Democrat slogan, right?
Never let a crisis go to waste.
But you need the crisis.
You need the crisis.
So everything has to be a crisis.
Yesterday, was it yesterday?
Yeah.
The president got rid of all these Obama, ridiculous Obama environmental laws, meant to kill the coal industry, meant to put limits on American production of energy, which I think was supposedly going to be more fair to all the people we've colonized and oppressed and imperialized over the world.
So Trump rolls that stuff back.
So here, did I send the network coverage of this?
Play the network coverage.
This is hilarious.
His order would allow coal mining on federal lands, permit the oil industry to release more methane, and would allow more carbon pollution from power plants that burn coal.
Methane and carbon are the leading contributors to climate warming.
Mr. Trump said all of this is intended to put American miners back to work.
But the White House doesn't know exactly how many new mining jobs will come out of this executive order.
Environmentalists say the president is overselling the revival of jobs in a declining industry.
Fewer than 75,000 coal mining jobs remain in the U.S. By comparison, there are more than 650,000 renewable energy jobs.
Today, the Sierra Club called the President's executive order the single biggest attack on climate action in U.S. history, period.
And tonight, environmentalists decrying the executive order, saying combating climate change is key to protecting the planet, the economy, and even national security.
So that's fair.
It's a disaster.
It's a crisis.
It's terrible.
And they're going to tell you, I mean, who cares what environmentalists say?
They lie.
They always lie.
They always overdo things.
And it's always going to be a disaster.
We started with that with Al Gore.
You know, it causes every problem on Earth.
My favorite, and this is funny, is Michael Moore, the pseudo-documentarian, tweeted out, now listen carefully, okay?
Historians in the near future will mark today, March 28th, 2017, as the day the extinction of human life on Earth began, thanks to Donald Trump.
Listen again and see if you can see what's wrong with Michael Moore's thinking.
Historians in the near future will mark today as the day the extinction of human life on Earth began, thanks to Donald Trump.
If human life is extinct, where do the historians come from?
They're going to be like cockroach historians who just survived?
I mean, these guys are so, first of all, they're stupid.
But, you know, it's the same thing with Donald Trump.
It is the same thing with Donald Trump.
That's what I was trying to talk about yesterday.
Why I'm not hysterical, why it's not a crisis, why I think that we on the right have to be steely-eyed missile men and tell the people who will listen to us that things are fine.
You know, things are fine.
There is such a thing as a crisis.
There will be crises during this presidency.
There are crises during every presidency.
But right now, this stuff with this, where everything is a scandal, is fake news.
And here's Neil Cavuto.
He went off the other day on the way this coverage.
And Neil Cavuto is no Trumpster.
He's like, you know, Trump won't even go on his show.
And the same media that's all but ignored the stock run-up since his election is now calling the sell-off post-the healthcare debacle the Trump slump.
Clever.
Or this blaring New York Daily News front page the day after it all went down, Trump care fiasco.
Or this front page headline in today's Washington Post, president takes a right turn in the blame game.
Then a major news network posts an online opinion piece from a daily beast columnist.
Is Trump already a lame duck?
Who comes up with this quack?
It's like it's the constant, constant barrage.
This thing with Devin Nunes, you know, that they're trying to sell that Trump is a Russian spy.
So that's, it doesn't matter where that information comes from.
If it's taped by secret video, it doesn't matter.
If it's Michael Flynn's name being released on, on, illegally released on, you know, intelligence wiretaps, doesn't matter.
But, but if Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, if he goes off and gets a piece of information that might confirm that Obama acted wrongly in gathering this information and basically ensuring that Flynn's name would be released, Michael Duran wrote this piece on the Hill in The Hill saying the leaking of Flynn's name was part of what can only be described as a White House campaign to hype the Obama White House campaign, to hype the Russian threat,
and at the same time to depict Trump as Vladimir Putin's Manchurian candidate.
So if it gets in the way of the narrative, the problem is Devin Nunez.
They actually shut down the intelligence, the intelligence committee investigation into the whole Russian thing because, oh my gosh, this is a crisis.
He's got to step down.
He's got to quit.
He should plant his feet in cement as far as I'm concerned.
This is all baloney, but it is all the thing.
Here is what it's meant to produce.
Well, first let me show you this and I'll tell you what the idea behind this is, right?
Here is, this made a lot of news yesterday.
April Ryan, I think her name is, of the Urban News Network, asks a question of scary Spicer and Spicer went off on her in his scary way, okay?
So listen to, but listen carefully to the question before Spicer comes back with what I thought was kind of a funny remark.
With all of these investigations, questions of what is is, how does this administration try to revamp its image?
Two and a half months in, you've got this Yay story today.
You've got other things going on.
You've got Russia, you've got, you've got wiretapping, you've got, you know, we don't have that.
I know.
On Capitol Hill.
No, no, I get it, but you keep at it.
I've said it from the day that I got here until whatever, that there is no connection.
You've got Russia.
If the president puts Russian salad dressing on his salad tonight, somehow that's a Russian connection.
But every single person, no, I, well, no, that's, I appreciate your agenda here, but the reality is, oh, no, no, hold on, no, No, at some point, report the facts.
The facts are that every single person who has been briefed on this subject has come away with the same conclusion.
Republican, Democrat.
So I'm sorry that that disgusts you.
You're shaking your head.
I appreciate it.
But listen, okay, but understand this.
That at some point, the facts are what they are.
See, Spicer is entirely right.
He is entirely right.
This is not a news story.
Nothing has happened.
It is a news story that could be going on in the background.
There's an investigation.
Let them investigate.
Okay, that's fine.
But this is not a news story until something breaks.
And nothing, nothing has broken except the release of Michael Flynn's name, the only felony we knew took place.
So Spicer is absolutely right.
But the question is the point.
The question is the point.
And how is Trump going to rise above this constant barrage of scandal that we are making up, that we are making up?
How are you going to rise above the fact that we attack you all the time?
The question should really be, how is the press going to rise above the shame of what they're doing?
But the point is to seed the ground.
Now, here's what I'm trying to get to.
The point is to seed the ground.
They did this to George W. Bush.
Eventually, Trump is going to make a mistake.
Eventually, Trump is going to do something dishonest or that can be interpreted as dishonest.
Eventually, somebody in the White House is going to cover up something someone always does.
There is always a cover-up during an administration.
And when that happens, when they have him dead to rights, okay, this is what they did to Bush with Hurricane Katrina.
They went after him and after him and after him with fake scandal after fake scandal after fake scandal.
And when finally they had those horrifying pictures from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and they hit him with that and maybe he acted a little slowly.
I don't actually think he did anything wrong, but it could be interpreted as being wrong.
They creamed him because there was this sense that everything had been going wrong and now, oh my God, here's the last possible thing.
And the point is simply to win the narrative.
The point is simply to win power to tell the story which they believe is the truth.
Silence and crisis.
That's what they want.
And that is why, that is why we have to answer with honesty, with telling the truth.
That's the answer to silence.
And the other thing is with some kind of calm.
This is not, the country is not in crisis.
It may be, it may be in crisis tomorrow.
You know, North Korea may release a nuke.
Then you'll know what a crisis looks like.
Donald Trump is not a crisis.
He's doing a moderately good job.
He's doing some things that I disagree with.
He's appointing some people I love.
You know, that's called the presidency.
That's how the presidency works.
That's it.
That's what's going on.
It is they want the crisis because it's in the crisis that they seize power, and it is in power that they seize the narrative, which they believe is the truth.
Someone Poor's Perspective00:05:34
Mailbag.
Woo!
You know, every time I hear that, I just think of somebody being scared off the road.
Somebody wrote in.
So yesterday, somebody tweeted to me that I had said something on the air, and they quoted it to their wife, and their wife thought it was sexy, so she was going to sleep, have sex with him tonight, and so he loved the show.
So I thought that was funny, so I retweeted it, and he said she saw that and now she wouldn't do it, you know?
And I think stick to the show, but you got to get an adjustment on the wife because if that's the way your wife is making decisions, I think you ought to talk to her about that.
All right.
From Emily.
From Emily, dear knower of all things good.
Oh, that's me.
Since it is Shakespeare week on your show, that was last week.
Yes, I wonder what your thoughts on Shakespeare's true identity is.
There are many theories that Shakespeare himself did not write his plays, but that someone else did.
There was an interesting movie with that premise called Anonymous.
What do you think?
I agree with Woody Allen.
Woody Allen once made the joke, I think it was Shakespeare didn't write his plays, it was someone else named Shakespeare.
Here's the thing: these theories began, and if you go back and trace them, these theories began with the premise that no one who is not upper class could have written Shakespeare's plays.
And since Shakespeare was not an upper class guy, I can't remember what his father was, a stabler, or is that Keats?
Anyway, he was not an upper class guy.
He couldn't have done it.
Remember, Ben Johnson said of him in his famous elegy, he had little Latin and less Greek.
The idea was in England that no one of his class could have done it, and that is why they started to come up with these theories, that it was someone more noble, someone from the upper classes.
It's completely ridiculous.
This guy was obviously just a genius.
I mean, he was a genius the likes of which we have never seen before or since.
No one has ever been as great a genius in literature as William Shakespeare.
I always tell people when they say to me, like, you know, how could you believe in the resurrection?
I say, you know what, the resurrection is easier to believe than the fact that a human being wrote the Shakespeare plays.
But he did.
And I think that that is, I just think when you go back and trace the ultimate source of these things, they're not based in anything factual.
They're based like most conspiracy theories on wanting to get to a preconceived idea of what reality is, right?
If Muslims knock down the World Trade Center and you are a multiculturalist, there's got to be a conspiracy theory where it turns out to be George W. Bush because you want to get back to your preconceived notion that multiculturalism makes sense.
And the same thing is true of Shakespeare.
The preconceived notion is that only a nobleman could have written those plays.
From Dylan, dear Supreme Overlord Clavin, I'm someone who is very poor and not religious at all.
I am conservative, but I'm beginning to feel like I'm in the wrong crowd.
Should I feel like I'm in the wrong crowd?
Now, I interpret this to mean should I feel that I should not be a conservative anymore.
What is fascinating to me about this letter, because I can't, I'll tell you why I can't give you a direct answer to this letter, is this first word, I am someone who is very poor.
So, you know, I am someone who is five foot ten and a half, right?
I can't do anything about that.
All the thinking in the world isn't going to add a cubit to my stature, right?
But to say I am someone who is very poor leaves out all this information.
Why are you very poor?
Are you ill?
Are you sick?
Are you addicted to something?
Or do you behave badly?
Do you not work hard enough?
All these reasons why someone might be very poor.
And the question I would be asking is: can you become not very poor?
Can you become less poor?
Can you become middle class?
Can you become wealthy?
And if not, why not?
If the reason is because you are handicapped in some terrible way that there's no way around, then I think, you know, whether you're conservative or liberal, I think people believe there should be provision for you.
But if, in fact, your poverty is a result of your behaviors, then I think what you want to do is not only befriend conservatives, I thought you think maybe you want to start listening to conservatives.
I mean, are you poor because you drink too much?
Maybe that's something you should stop doing.
You know, are you making choices that are keeping you poor?
Why, when you say I'm someone who is very poor, you are identifying that as a state about which you can do nothing.
And I don't know.
It's possible that it is, in which case, I do believe you need help, and I think conservatives and leftists would probably agree on that.
But if not, if not, why not?
And then, if there's a reason, if there is a reason that doesn't have to do with something catastrophic, then the question is, you know, who is going to give you the best advice?
Who is going to kick you in the pants and make you get on the ball and get out of that state of poverty?
And my answer would be conservatives.
What liberals will do is they will addict you and make you dependent on them.
They're pushers.
They're pushers.
And they sell you this stuff and they say, oh, this is going to help you.
This is going to help you.
It's going to feel great.
It's going to feel great.
And ultimately, you have to come crawling to them to get your supply of welfare or whatever it is they're giving you.
So that's my answer because I don't know enough about why you're poor.
From Miko, what do you think about flat earthers?
And what would you say to a friend who completely believes the earth is flat?
I would tell him that he is paying for the drinks because he's an idiot.
Look, they're pictures of the earth taken from outside the earth.
It's not flat.
So I think this began as a joke, actually.
It began as a joke, and then people kind of started to get into it.
You know, it is indicative of what I was saying before.
People will believe what they want to believe.
And they want to get to some kind of certain, they want to feel knowledgeable and they want to get to some kind of certain secret knowledge and they want to preserve their view of the world.
Great Authors Should Be Read00:07:44
But they're wrong.
I mean, it's just wrong.
There it is.
From Dylan.
Did we have a Dylan already?
Yes, we did.
This is a different Dylan.
Dear Baba Clavin Das.
I'm taking a 20th century British literature course.
So far, all of our readings have been by obscure female authors.
Oh, this drives me crazy.
Which I've never heard of.
It seems like my professor's choice of literature is merely a means to promote her feminist ideas.
And she had no problem wasting class time on her political rants.
I'd like to know some recommendations for the real authors who I think you should be reading.
You know, what's so, this is, this is like criminal.
I mean, it's criminal to do this.
Authors are people who basically, great authors, great authors are people who travel through time to tell you what it was like, the experience of being human, was like in their time.
It is like not sharing with you mathematical knowledge because the person who had it was a white male.
To take away from a great author and simply declare, and this is another thing, of course, they just think greatness is just who says, who has the power to declare the greatness.
They think the canon, as they call it, the canon of greatness, but that's wrong because literature does something.
Literature communicates the inner experience of being a human being.
Some people do this well.
Some people don't do it so well.
The great authors should be read.
And of course, the people who are acknowledged great in their time should be read because they were acknowledged great in their time.
But great authors remain great.
Who are the 20th century great British authors?
Kipling, late Conrad, Joseph Conrad, if you've never read his stuff, he is great, and his late stuff was written in the 20th century.
James Joyce, I guess we'll have to include him as a British, he's an Irish writer, but a great writer.
C.S. Lewis's The Weight of Glory, you should not miss.
Auden, the great poet.
T.S. Eliot was an American, but wrote ultimately as a British subject.
A great poet, Agatha Christie, John LeCore, P.G. Woodhouse, some easy reading, but great authors.
Who else?
Oh, Virginia Woolfe.
You want a female great writer?
You know, I'm not a fan of Virginia Woolfe.
Somebody once said he was saving Virginia Woolf till he was dead.
And I who was it who said that?
Julian Barnes said that.
But she's a good writer.
She's a very, very good writer and indicative of women coming out of a certain state into the new state of freedom.
And her To the Lighthouse is not a bad book at all.
So there's some recommendations.
All right, I got to move on to stuff I like.
I'm running out of time.
And we've been talking about Paul Verhoeven.
And one of the things about Paul Verhoeven, great Dutch filmmaker who had a big Hollywood career and now has made a very successful French film called Elle.
And I've always noticed that I won't say he doesn't like women.
I think he finds women a little frightening because he constantly has femmes fatales.
It was femmes fatal, but he, you know, he has dangerous, dangerous women.
And dangerous women are an old crime fiction staple.
And of course, the great writer of femme fatales is James M. Kane, who wrote both The Postman Always Rings Twice, a great movie, the old one with John Garfield and Lana Turner, is a great movie.
The Postman Always Rings Twice, but it is an even greater book.
The novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, is a great American novel.
It is a great American crime novel.
It's much better than the movie.
Double Indemnity, which was written by Raymond Chandler, the script was written by Raymond Chandler.
The book is not as good.
And James M. Kaine knew it, too.
The movie is great.
Double Indemnity with Fred McMurray and Barbara Stanwick, great things.
But the thing about great femme fatale stories is they're not about really the evil of women.
They're about the weakness of mankind, okay?
The great question that Verhoeven really struggles with.
We talked about this yesterday, that he struggled in total recall and in RoboCop.
What is a human being?
Is he just a body?
If a human being is just a body, sex is really the be-all and end-all, both of pleasure and creation.
You know, I mean, it's more important to have a child and have sex for the pleasure and for the creation than it is to make art or, you know, to do, or to love somebody, to love somebody instead of having sex.
And so, you know, Verhoeven is thinking about this a lot.
And his most famous femme fatale, of course, is in what's the picture?
Basic Instinct with Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone.
And this is a picture I don't like.
It is a very famous movie.
It has a very famous scene.
We'll play a little bit of it.
It is, my biggest problem with it is I feel it was stolen from a better film, which was called Sea of Love with Al Pacino.
And Al Pacino plays a cop looking for a serial killer, and he falls in love with one of the suspects, basically.
And is she the serial killer or not?
It has a great plot.
It's written by Richard Price, a very good writer, very good crime writer.
And it's a little dated.
It's a little slow and meditative now.
And they let Pacino ad-lib a lot and all this stuff.
But it's still a much, much better crime film than Basic Instinct, which turns everything into sex.
And it's just, I think it's badly written.
I think the dialogue is clunky.
And here's the famous scene where Sharon Stone is brought in, she's a suspect, and she is being interviewed by a group of male cops.
And she just totally turns the power dynamic around.
And it is a good scene.
And of course, it ends with her famously, we're not going to play this, but it ends with her famously crossing her legs, and she's not wearing any underwear so the men can see right up her skirt.
And it just completely turns the power dynamic around.
Here's a brief scene.
Would you tell us the nature of your relationship with Mr. Boz?
I had sex with him for about a year and a half.
I liked having sex with him.
He wasn't afraid of experimenting.
I like men like that.
Men who give me pleasure.
He gave me a lot of pleasure.
You ever engage in any sadomasochistic activity?
Exactly what did you have in mind, Mr. Corelli?
You ever tie him up?
No.
You never tied him up.
No.
Johnny liked to use his hands too much.
I like hands and feet.
So she's taking the power away from by being openly sexual, openly enjoying sex, which at that time, you know, had a little bit of, still had a little bit of shock value to it.
You know, like the women liked it, as we used to say in the locker rooms.
Women like it too.
You know, that was a big discovery for every 12-year-old kid for a while.
Now, you know, and so he's showing Verhoven and showing how she is taking power back by her open sexuality.
And then she crosses her legs.
And the whole, you know, it's kind of funny because they're cops.
They've seen everything.
So I don't think they would really be taking it.
But Sharon Stone is at the height of her beauty and it does work.
But I just dislike this film.
I just thought it was cheap.
I thought it was blunt.
I thought it had no subtlety whatsoever.
Sea of Love is a much better picture.
But if you want to see Paul Fairhoven do a really startling, deep, intelligent take on the femme fatale, watch his Dutch movie, The Fourth Man.
I mean, this first of all, it's really violent, it's really bloody.
But this is a story about femme fatales, about the Virgin Mary is in it.
The Virgin Mary does an appearance.
It is a real meditation on body and soul and how sex plays into that and how women play into it.
And it really is a thoughtful, deep, and scary film, but very, very violent, very, very bloody.