Ep. 295’s Media Cover-Up pits Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation battle—where Republicans defend originalist rulings and Democrats weaponize the filibuster—against Susan Rice’s alleged unmasking of Trump associates, a story buried by CNN and NYT to protect Obama’s legacy. The host frames it as proof of media bias, contrasting Trump’s anti-Russia hawkishness with Democratic conspiracy theories like Schiff’s baseless collusion claims. Meanwhile, Silence—Scorsese’s brutal 17th-century Japan martyrdom epic—exposes modern Christian cinema’s shallowness by forcing viewers to confront faith’s limits under torture, leaving even believers questioning their resolve. The episode ends with a jab at "Clavenless Week" humor before the host’s Easter break. [Automatically generated summary]
It's time to examine the arguments for and against confirming Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.
Republicans are saying that Gorsuch is a universally respected judge whose views almost always concur with the majority and whose decisions are almost always upheld by higher courts.
Democrats are saying that Gorsuch is a stinky doo-doo head whose mother wears funny shoes and who probably kisses girls and gets cooties.
Republicans point out that Gorsuch is an originalist who tries to find the meaning of the law as it was written rather than twisting the Constitution into the image of his own personal or political opinions.
Democrats say, holy crap, if he does that, we'll never get to do any of the things we want.
Also, the Constitution is a stinky doo-doo head.
Republicans say elections have consequences, and Donald Trump has selected a justice from a list he made public long before he won the presidency so the voters had a full chance to vet and approve of his choice.
Democrats say Donald Trump wouldn't have won the presidency if it weren't for the Russians and the Electoral College.
And he cheated and it rained that day and it was so dark no one could see who they were voting for and the dog ate all the good people's votes and shut up, shut up, shut up, you stink.
Republicans point out that no one has ever used the filibuster to block a Supreme Court nomination and to do so on what are purely partisan political grounds would be both dangerous and un-American.
Democrats say we can't hear you because we have our fingers in our ears and we're singing I've been working on the railroad very loudly.
Republicans say we understand Democrats are incensed that we didn't allow the nomination of a lame duck president to reach a vote, but there is a difference between playing hardball politics and shutting down the entire country by having a childish tantrum because you didn't get what you wanted.
Democrats say we're going to dig a hole and cover it over with newspaper, then cover the newspaper with dirt so the Republicans will walk on it and fall in the hole and break their legs and then will laugh.
Republicans say accepting Supreme Court justices appointed by your political opponents is a difficult but necessary part of a two-party Democratic system.
And you have to, Democrats say, we don't want to accept them.
We don't want to and we won't, we won't, we won't.
Republicans say, look, you can't just Democrats say we're going to hold our breaths until our faces turn blue and kick our heels on the floor and scream until everyone does what we want.
Republicans say actually you can't hold your breath and scream at the same time.
Democrats say that's not fair.
You're never fair.
You always cheat.
You stink.
We hate you.
We're running away from home.
The debate will continue until the vote later this week or until Democrats are sent to their rooms without supper.
Whichever comes first.
ProFlowers Guarantee Fresh Flowers00:02:52
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
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Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
You know, my brother and I actually did that when we were kids.
We dug a hole in our backyard and we covered it over with newspaper and we sprinkled dirt in it.
So help me, this is true.
And our neighbor from across the way came, I swear, came across and fell right into it.
Oh, my father was very, very unhappy about that.
We were just doing it as a joke.
We didn't think anyone was going to walk on it.
But there it was.
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So the mailbag is tomorrow.
Yeah.
And it's the last mailbag because I am gone the week after that.
Cernovich's Unreported Story00:16:13
I'm gone for holy week into Easter, and I'll be in England, so I can't answer your questions.
So if you have problems, you can have them solved now or you're stuck with them until I come back, which, you know, who knows what could happen by then.
You have to go on and subscribe to the daily.
Can they be in the mailbag even if they don't subscribe for the year?
Nobody knows anything.
Who are you?
How did you get in our room?
But yes, you don't have to subscribe for the year, but you subscribe for a month.
It's a lousy eight bucks.
You can ask any question you want.
The answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life possibly for the better.
So that's tomorrow and the last one for a while.
An amazing, amazing cover-up is underway.
John Nolte, you know, we had him on a couple of days ago to talk about the press.
He's a great media observer and his Twitter handle is CNN is Hitler.
But CNN isn't Hitler.
CNN is Nixon.
ABC, CBS, NBC, they're Nixon.
They cover up everything and they just, they are lying.
We had this story on.
We started yesterday.
It was just breaking as we came on the air yesterday that Susan Rice, we now know, was asking for stuff to be unmasked, for names to be unmasked, American names on surveillance, and was looking into specifically conversations with the Donald Trump transition team and the Trump team that had nothing to do with the investigation into Russia.
This had nothing to do with the investigation into Russia.
The Daily Caller is now reporting that Susan Rice, this is former President Barack Obama's National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, ordered U.S. spy agencies to produce detailed spreadsheets of legal phone calls involving Trump and his aides when he was running for president, according to former U.S. Attorney Joseph de Genova.
What was produced, this is talking, what was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals.
Now, look, I'm not saying that what she did was illegal.
It's not illegal for somebody, a national security advisor, to have names unmasked.
But the way it was done and the fact that it all started in July when Trump started to become a threat, it's very, very, very suspicious.
It's a big, big story.
And the fact that she lied about it, we played the cut yesterday.
I knew nothing.
She was on TV today and MSNBC.
This was just happening as I was coming to work.
Not Cut Five, but the later cut.
Number 15.
This is not anything political has been alleged.
The allegation is that somehow Obama administration officials utilized intelligence for political purposes.
That's absolutely false.
Let me explain how this works.
I was a national security advisor.
My job is to protect the American people and the security of our country.
That's the same as the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the CIA director.
And every morning, to enable us to do that, we receive from the intelligence community a compilation of intelligence reports that the IC, the intelligence community, has selected for us on a daily basis to give us the best information as to what's going on around the world.
She goes on to say that she says, I didn't, I leaked nothing to no one, she says.
Now, remember, this is the woman who went on five morning Sunday shows and lied about Benghazi, right?
This is a woman whose credibility is already in the crapper.
So we don't have to, we have no obligation to believe a word that she says.
So let's just play this out because this is genuinely amazing, okay?
Mike Cernovich is, I think he's kind of a kook.
He's an alt-right guy.
He's the guy who spread a lot of that Pizzagate thing where Hillary Clinton was secretly running child's child sex ring out of a pizza parlor.
People yelled at me when I said the story was garbage.
The story was garbage.
I researched it down to its back, down to its sources.
It was absolute nonsense.
And people were literally writing me saying, Are you telling me that anchovies isn't code for child porn?
Yes, it's code for anchovies.
People put anchovies on their pizza.
So Cernovich is a little bit of a kook.
Cernovich broke the Susan Rice story before Maggie Haberman of the Times or before Eli Lake, I think his name was at Bloomberg, right?
Cernovich broke it.
How did he break it?
You have to listen.
This is an amazing piece of video.
Here's Cernovich talking about how he broke the story and where his sources were.
Maggie Haberman had it.
Maggie Haberman had it.
She will not run any articles that are critical of the Obama administration.
Eli Lake had it.
He didn't want to run it and Bloomberg didn't want to run it because it vindicates Trump's claim that he had been spied upon.
And Eli Lake is a never-Trumper.
So Bloomberg was a never-Trump publication.
So I'm showing you the politics of real journalism, okay?
Real journalism is that Bloomberg had it, the New York Times had it.
They wouldn't run it because they don't want to run any stories that will make Obama look bad or that will vindicate Trump.
They only want to run stories that make Trump look bad.
So that's why they sat on it.
And so where did I get the story?
I didn't get it from the intelligence community.
That's the big joke about this.
Everybody's trying to figure out where I got it from.
I got it from somebody who works in one of those media companies.
I have spies in every media organization.
So people think now, oh, I must have got it from Deep State.
I must have got it from who are my sources in the administration.
I got people in newsrooms.
I got it from a source within the newsroom who said, Cernovich, they're sitting on this story.
They're not going to run it.
You can run it.
So kooky conspiracy blogger Cernovich gets the story because he has sources in the newsroom.
And now the story has been confirmed all over.
So he was right.
He scooped them because they wouldn't run it.
That guy, I mean, just like, just like the, you know, Woodward and Bernstein had sources in the government, now bloggers have sources in newsrooms to get the story, to pry stories out if they happen to make the Obama administration look as bad as it was.
That's an amazing turnaround.
It is amazing.
Don Lemon is on CNN declaring defiantly that he's not going to tell you the truth, declaring defiantly that he will not report the story.
Today it's a claim that President Obama's former national security advisor, Susan Rice, unmasked the names of Trump associates.
We will talk about that in detail in just a moment on this very program.
And last week, it was a debunked talking point that former Obama administration official Evelyn Farkas admitted spying on the Trump team.
She did no such thing.
The week before that, it was Representative Devin Nunes' clumsy effort to give the president cover for wiretapping claims.
The president said he was vindicated by Nunes.
He was not.
The Washington Post today calls the latest claims about Susan Rice anatomy of a fake scandal ginned up by right-wing media and Trump.
So let us be very clear about this.
There is no evidence whatsoever that the Trump team surveilled or spied on, was spied on illegally.
There is no evidence that backs up the president's original claim.
And on this program tonight, we will not insult your intelligence by pretending otherwise, nor will we aid and abet the people who are trying to misinform you, the American people, by creating a diversion.
Not going to do it.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
The cleaning house has spoken.
That's the latest CNN reporter.
Pay no attention to the scandal.
Now, let's stop for just a second.
Let's stop.
You know, Susan Rice hasn't been caught doing anything illegal.
We don't know that she's the one who leaked Mike Flynn's name, which is a felony.
We do not know who did this, but a lot of stuff is piling up.
So just think about this for a minute, right?
Let's pretend you're an actual real-life reporter, not somebody who works for ABC or CBS or NBC or CNN or the New York Times, but an actual journalist, somebody who wants to get the truth.
And now you've got what looks like the thread, the tail end of a thread of a story that maybe the president of the United States, maybe some of his highest people were spying on the political opposition.
have got the story of the decade this is a bigger look this is a bigger scandal than watergate before the cover-up this you know That was just a break-in to spy on other, you know, that was an actual break-in to spy on another candidate.
This is using the intelligence services to spy on other candidates.
This is a big story.
You've got it.
Suddenly, nobody cares.
Don Lemon is just going to tell you, there's no proof.
There's no evidence.
Don, that's your job.
That's your job, is to find the evidence, to be so on fire for the truth that no matter where it leads, you follow it.
Not to tell you, we're not going to do it.
We're not going to do it.
Not happening.
Forget it.
It's not.
We know.
This is insane.
The press has become.
And so you make.
You know, I was worried.
I talked last week about the things that I was worried about Trump and how they all came true, but they didn't come true as badly as I thought they would.
And one of the things I was worried about Donald Trump is that his bad behavior would give credibility back to the media that had sold its credibility to cover up for Obama.
You know, I was afraid that Trump's behavior would be so bad that they would make the mainstream media look good again.
Instead, instead, the mainstream media has acted so badly that they're giving credence to guys like Cernovich, that they're making conspiracy theorists look good compared to them.
I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, but come on over to TheDailyWire.com, hear the rest of the show, and subscribe for a lousy eight bucks a month, and you can be in the mailbag tomorrow.
You know, just to give you some perspective on this, Roger Kimball is writing for a blog called American Greatness.
Roger Kimball, brilliant writer, runs the New Criterion, I believe it is, and the publishing house that's connected to it.
Anyway, he writes in American Greatness, and he plays what Cheryl Atkins, the former CBS reporter, calls the substitution game.
He asks questions like, what if a Republican had presided over Benghazi instead of Miss At This Point, what difference does it make Clinton?
In other words, what if a Republican had been president when the Benghazi disaster happened?
What if a Republican administration had intervened to prevent Arizona from enforcing federal immigration laws?
What if a Republican had decided to enforce provisions of the Affordable Care Act selectively, omitting for the time being those that were politically inexpedient?
What if a Republican had made a deal with Iran that all but guaranteed their acquisition of nuclear weapons?
And what if a Republican administration had spied on a rival presidential candidate who then, to the surprise of wise men everywhere, became the disfavored president-elect?
What if a Republican administration had illegally leaked from classified intelligence reports the name of private citizens to the media?
You think Don Lemon would be on there now saying, there's no proof, there's no smoking gun.
They would be parachuting reporters into the White House lawn to get information.
I mean, this is, it's not, oh my gosh, we have a smoking gun.
It's the lack, utter lack of intellectual curiosity, right?
The utter lack, no curiosity whatsoever.
It is amazing.
But Russia, oh, the Russia hacked the election.
There's absolutely no evidence of this.
You know, first, let's just flash back just for a minute to what Obama thought of the threat of Russia when he was running against Mitt Romney.
Governor Romney, I'm glad that you recognize that Al-Qaeda is a threat.
Because a few months ago, when you were asked what's the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia.
Not Al-Qaeda.
You said Russia.
In the 1980s, they're calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War has been over for 20 years.
But, Governor, when it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policies of the 1950s and the economic policies of the 1920s.
So Russia was nothing to Obama.
Russia, forget Russia.
We're going to have a reset.
Everything's going to be great.
We're going to be lovey-dovey with Vladimir Putin.
Everything's terrific.
Now, suddenly, suddenly, after 60 years of practical communism, suddenly the Democratic Party cares about Russia.
So let's take a look at Russia.
Now, Adam Schiff, remember, he's the Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, the chief Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
He has been throwing out these McCarthyite slanders.
You know, oh, we have more than circumstantial evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia.
Yes, it's very, oh, I have the kind of stuff that I would take to a grand jury.
These are the things he said.
Now listen to him.
The Russia's not coming!
The Russia's not coming!
Okay, maybe that wasn't him.
Let's try that again.
Issue, of course, is whether or not there was collusion among members of the Trump campaign or surrounding the Trump campaign, Trump advisors.
Can you say definitively that there was collusion?
There were people affiliated with the Trump campaign who were working with Russians to time the release of damaging information about Hillary Clinton that had been hacked either from John Podesta or the DNC?
I don't think we can say anything definitively at this point.
We are still at the very early stage of the investigation.
The only thing I can say is that it would be irresponsible for us not to get to the bottom of this.
We really need to find out exactly what the Russians did, because one of the most important conclusions that the intelligence community reached is that they are going to do this again to the United States.
They're doing it already in Europe.
So we can say conclusively, this is something that needs to be thoroughly investigated.
But it's way premature to be reaching conclusions.
So they've been investigating this for eight months.
They've been investigating this since July.
Last time it was they had circumstantial evidence.
Then it was they had more than circumstantial evidence.
Then it was we're taking this to a grand jury.
Suddenly we got nothing.
We got nothing.
This thing is blowing up in their faces.
You know, I'm not even saying, I'm not even jumping to conclusions.
I'm not even saying that there wasn't something wrong between the Trump team, somebody on the Trump team didn't talk to the Russians in a bad way.
I'm not even saying that.
But at this point, the Russians are always messing with us.
They're always messing with our elections.
We probably do the same stuff back.
At this point, you have a big, big story.
I mean, if I'm a reporter and I get this thread, this loose thread, I am pulling on that thread until it unravels.
I cannot believe these guys will turn their backs on the biggest story of the decade to protect their ideology.
They're not reporters.
They're not even Nixon.
I mean, even Nixon at least was trying to accomplish something.
They are just liars.
They are liars.
It is all fake news.
And when it comes to Russia, they haven't even noticed yet that Trump isn't being very nice to Russia.
You know, I mean, there was a guy, Adrian Karatniki in the Wall Street Journal wrote a piece today.
He's the co-director of the UK in Europe initiative at the Atlantic Council.
So he's a pro-Ukraine guy.
He doesn't want to see Russia propped up.
And he says the expert consensus about Mr. Putin is so negative that Mr. Trump couldn't have put together a Kremlin-friendly national security team, even if he had tried.
As a result, serious-minded Russia hawks are emerging in key posts.
When Michael Flynn was forced to resign as national security advisor, H.R. McMaster took his place.
The appointment of Putin critic Fiona Hill to be the National Security Council's Russia expert is pending.
Mr. Trump's most senior appointees, including the vice president and defense secretary, began criticizing Russian actions almost immediately after taking office.
And, you know, the Russians now are writing nasty stuff.
The official Russian press is writing nasty stuff about Trump.
They're not happy with him at all.
Judges Force Filibuster Dumping00:05:18
Here is Nikki Haley, the wonderful, the lovely Nikki, actually, our lovely ambassador to the U.N. Is that sexist to call him the ambassador to the UN?
Probably.
The lovely ambassador to the UN, talking about the fact that she hasn't been pulled off Russia at all.
President Trump has said he respects Putin, but you say you don't trust him.
You've said the U.S. needs to take hacking seriously.
President Trump has been dismissive of it.
Which one of you should our allies and adversaries believe?
I think we're both saying the same thing.
It's just being reported differently.
If you look at what Russia about Russia and us calling them out, President Trump has agreed, and this administration agrees that Russia's involvement in Ukraine is wrong.
And I think that if you listen to what he said about the elections, of course we don't want any country involved in our elections.
And so that's going to happen.
I think that Russia is very aware that they're on notice when it comes to certain issues.
They're very aware that we do want to try and defeat ISIS together, if that's at all possible, along with our allies.
But there's no love or anything going on with Russia right now.
They get that we're getting our strength back, that we're getting our voice back, and that we're starting to lead again.
What a woman.
What a woman.
I just have a thing for pretty girls who slap around Russians.
That actually is my fetish, pretty girls who slap around Russians.
I go on prettywomenwho Slaprussians.com just in my spare time.
See, the Democrats depend, they depend on this wall of lies to protect them.
They depend, they know all their actions.
You ever wonder why, you know, conservatives are always saying, why don't Republicans have the courage to shut down the government?
They don't have the courage to shut down the government because they know they know that same wall of lies and blames will fall on them and protect the Democrats.
And the Democrats have been depending for years, for years on this wall of protection.
And the wall of protection has sprung a leak, namely us, namely the internet, namely the podcast, namely guys like crazy guys like Mike Sarnovich who report the story and force the mainstream media to bring it out in the same way that Drudge forced the mainstream media to report that Bill Clinton was having an affair.
You know, that story got spiked by the mainstream media too, and Drudge ran it, and that's how that came out.
Dan Rather was exposed by the internet.
These guys have not caught on that no one, they are bleeding, bleeding audience, and it's coming to, you know, people are getting their news from the internet, and we're doing a better job.
We are doing a better job of prioritizing what's there.
You know, the Democrats are counting on this Democrat, this news media wall of lies.
They're counting on it again with the Gorsuch Supreme Court nomination.
You know, they're going to force, they say they've got the votes to force a filibuster.
It's never happened before that a Supreme Court nominee has been filibustered, certainly not for purely political reasons.
Now they're going to force the Republicans to dump the filibuster.
And then, of course, the press is going to be, oh my gosh, this unprecedented, this unprecedented breach of the rules.
But let me just give you, well, you know what?
Let's Mitch McConnell, the head of the Republicans in the Senate, let him give the first part of this history of the history of the way the filibuster has been misused by one party and one party only.
Yeah, what I can tell you is that Neil Gorsuch will be confirmed this week.
How that happens really depends on our Democratic friends.
How many of them are willing to oppose closure on a partisan basis to kill a Supreme Court nominee?
Never happened before in history, in the whole history of the country.
In fact, filibustering judges at all is a rather recent phenomenon started by your next guest, Senator Schumer, after George Bush, 43, got elected president.
We didn't used to do this.
Clarence Thomas was confirmed 52 to 48, the most controversial Supreme Court nominee in history, and not a single senator said he has to get 60 votes.
So what happened was, this is absolutely true.
Nobody used to, you know, the idea was elections had consequences.
You've got to appoint your judges.
Then, under Schumer, when George W. Bush came into office, they started to filibuster all these judges.
So then Obama won the next election.
So the Republicans said, okay, well, you filibustered our judges.
We're going to filibuster your judges right back.
And that's when Harry Reid changed the rules.
That's when he had the nuclear option and he got rid of the filibuster for every level of judge except the Supreme Court.
So it's all been Democrat aggression.
It has all been Democrats pushing the envelope of how to abuse power because they cannot believe, they cannot believe that they don't have power all the time.
They just think they should, you know, it's the same thing on TV.
It's the same thing on TV.
You go on late night TV and you watch comedians and they're all making Trump jokes, Trump, Trump, Trump jokes, anti-Trump jokes, no Obama jokes never, ever, never happens.
They're all the same.
And it's like they cannot believe that anybody, anybody has a different opinion.
They just think this is the way.
This is the way the truth.
The Democrats, they just think they're the way, the truth, and the life.
And anytime they lose power, it's got to be illegitimate.
Must be the Russians.
Faith and Freedom00:10:55
It's got to be.
They do it through the media.
These lies, the media have become the willing executioners of truth.
And it really is pitiful.
I mean, it cannot stand.
It cannot stand.
People will not live in a fantasy world.
They tried it in the Soviet Union.
It didn't work.
It never works.
Reality comes back and bites you on the leg.
And I really do believe it's about to bite the Democrats big time.
You know, this has nothing to do with Donald Trump.
I want to say that.
Trump had that tweet, that kind of controversial tweet where he said they wiretapped my thing and everybody keeps saying, oh, he lied, he lied, he lied.
Hey, you know, Trump has a big mouth, and he really does.
He really should stop with those tweets.
He really should shut up.
I get it.
I get it.
But if I'm a reporter, just put yourself in the position of a reporter.
You've got one thing where Trump has this kind of wild tweet.
And the other hand, you have the first thread that maybe the Obama administration was using the intelligence agencies to spy on his political opposition.
I mean, you've got a Pulitzer Prize winning story, and you're still talking about this stupid tweet.
It is amazing.
It is amazing.
It's all fake news.
All right.
Easter stuff I like.
I got to do this because I'll be gone for a holy week, so I'm doing Easter.
So I watched Silence.
And this is this Martin Scorsese film.
He's been trying to get this made for 25 years, I think.
It's a novel written in 1966, a Japanese novel by Shuzako Endo.
And it is a brutally difficult movie to watch.
Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, and Liam Neeson, who turned in, I just thought, a spectacular performance.
I mean, really, you forgot he could act because he's been shooting people for the last 10 years, but he really is a great actor.
The story is two priests go to Japan during a persecution of Christians.
And these two priests go looking for a mentor priest, Liam Neeson, who has, they feel, apostatized.
They've been told that he has given up the faith and become a Buddhist.
And they just then witness the martyrdom of the Japanese Christians.
And they're peasants.
They're just little people, you know, who just have found this faith, and it's giving them joy and it's giving them hope.
And this Grand Inquisitor comes through.
I should have gotten his name.
I forgot his name because he's fantastic also.
The Grand Inquisitor comes through and just tortures them, tortures these people to death, not just trying to get them to deny Christ, but trying to get the priests to deny Christ to stop the slaughter.
In other words, they say to the priests, you have to deny Christ or we're going to kill all these people.
You know, we're going to kill all these people, and there are various reactions to it.
It's a difficult picture to review because it's not a picture that I can tell you you're going to love watching.
It's very, very tough.
It's very beautiful.
It looks beautiful.
It goes on and on, and there's a lot of just very rough stuff to watch.
And as a movie, I found it kind of very literary.
I sort of wanted to read the book.
It's very thick, very rich with ideas.
Some of those ideas don't fully come across in the movie, but it asks some incredibly difficult, difficult questions.
And let's just talk about a couple of them for a minute.
One of the questions it really asks is it poses to you, if you're a believer, could you do it?
Could you do it?
I mean, we were talking backstage yesterday, and one of us was saying, oh, yeah, you know, I'd be a martyr.
I thought like, I don't know, man, I lost my faith watching the movie.
I was ready to give up just watching the movie.
You know, Christianity leads you to a place where you start to realize that either you believe that this flesh, this hand, this arm, is all there is, that you're just a piece of meat, you know, with sparks and with chemicals and electricity inside, or this piece of meat is expressing something.
It's not like you have a little ghost, a little Casper the ghost inside.
It's that you are a langu, your body is a language for expressing the spiritual you.
And that is a different way of life, right?
Then you start to do things.
You don't necessarily serve your body at every moment.
You serve that spiritual creature that your body represents, that your body is a language for representing.
But that means, in theoretically, that you should be willing to die in order to say to believe what you want to believe.
And one of the things that's so powerful about Liam Neeson's performance is that you can see in his eyes that his soul has been wrenched out, essentially, by facing these tortures.
And that, if you sit there and watch the movie and think like, oh yeah, I could do that.
You're not being very realistic.
I mean, seriously, these are people, these people are peasants.
They'll never be famous.
They'll never be made saints by the Catholic Church.
They're never going to be glorified.
They're just going to suffer and die.
And their faith has to be so powerful that they can survive that.
And it's a really interesting question.
And the other question that the picture asks, which is even more difficult, is, is there a moment when you have to renounce your faith in the name of your faith?
Which is just a very complicated theological question.
And the thing that this just brought home to me is how bad Christian cinema is.
You know, how bad Christian movies are.
It's not that I'm against movies like God Is Not Dead or whatever, the prayer room, what was it called, the war room, the war room.
You know, those are like situation, like romantic comedies.
It's like the difference between watching a romantic comedy and watching a serious film about marriage.
Those are two different things, a serious film about love.
Those are two different things.
This is a serious film about faith.
It's very powerful.
It's very painful.
And it's deeply interesting.
I have not been able to stop thinking about it.
And it seems to me that the questions that it asks, the silence refers to the silence of God.
And it seems to me that that question that it asks about the silence of God and the fact that we have to make our decisions in the midst of that silence, I don't know, that just is much more realistic than scenes I've seen in Christian movies where somebody dies and everybody's happy because he found Christ and now he's gone to heaven.
I mean, I don't think that that's the experience you have of death in this life, you know?
I've been to funerals where the priest has said, why aren't we mourning?
The guy has gone to heaven.
I think I'm mourning because he's dead.
That's my problem.
I mean, Christianity asks a lot of you.
And, you know, I remember long ago, John Irving, the novelist who wrote The World According to GARP, and he was the biggest thing since sliced bread back in the 90s.
Everybody thought he was the great novelist and all this.
And he said he envied writers in the Soviet Union because they mattered, because people persecuted them.
And I thought, hey, I'd be happy to come over and attach electrodes to your private parts and then you can feel like a big dude, you know.
But it was a stupid thing to say.
But he had, I get the point.
The point is, in a free society, in a free society, art and religion become trivialized because, look, who's the first guy they lock up when they take over?
Who are the first guys the Soviets lock up?
They lock up the artists because the artists touch people's hearts.
They touch people's souls, and they don't want that happening in the name of freedom.
Who do they lock up?
They lock up the priests.
Who was it?
You remember those scenes, if you're old enough to remember John Paul II visiting Poland, and the people came out, it was like heartbreaking.
The people came out after years and years of Soviet oppression, of enforced atheism, screaming, we want God, we want God.
I mean, it was unbelievably heartbreaking how their souls hungered, hungered for God.
And so in a world of oppression, the priest, the artist, these guys become incredibly important, incredibly vivid.
But in a world of freedom, they start to be less important, less obviously important.
Because one of the reasons for this is that freedom is the first goal of religion.
Freedom is the first goal of both Christ, Christian religion, and of art.
It's to make men free.
Christ, it's for freedom that God made men free.
Isn't that, have I got that right?
For freedom, God made men free.
So freedom is the first goal of religion and of art.
And once you've achieved that freedom, its next goal is wisdom.
So in other words, now it's on you.
It's on you to look into the faith and find the wisdom in the faith because you're not going to be tested by martyrdom.
You're not going to be tested by being imprisoned.
You're not going to be tested by somebody saying you have to attend a gay wedding or we're going to run you out of business.
Oh, wait, maybe you are.
And then suddenly, you know, suddenly it all comes back that the idea here is to be free.
And the only way to be free is not to fear death.
The only way to be free is to believe that you are something more than what they can kill.
And you become out of practice.
I mean, the first Christians, they were always in practice because they were always getting killed.
You know, here in America, we think like if somebody passes a law that means we're going to have to pay a fine, we're martyrs because we're out of practice.
And listen, I'm not making fun of that.
I'm the same way.
Like I said, I watched this picture like hiding under the bed, basically, thinking this is awful.
I do not know if I could stand up to this.
But it just shows you, it is reflected in our Christian art, that our Christian art has become tedious and shallow because freedom tends to make art and religion tedious and shallow.
And now, once you are free, it is up to you to plumb the depths of your faith.
It's up to you to find the depths of wisdom and up to you to find the courage that faith is supposed to give you.
No one can tell you whether you could stand up to this kind of martyrdom.
No one could tell you, but the movie is worth watching to imaginatively move yourself into that world and ask yourself the questions that it asks.
I mean, I just think, you know, religion always makes for the best conversation.
We always talk about this, that people who don't have religion, they don't have as interesting conversations.
And I've been both an atheist and an agnostic and a believer.
And I can tell you that after a while, conversations without religion become very repetitive.
People talking about the same things over and over and over again because truth bottoms out.
And a movie like this really does bring home the depth that created the music of Bach, the Sistine Chapel, the poetry of Milton.
You know, this is why Christianity created some of the greatest art that ever was.
So, look, do I recommend Silence?
Is it like a fun family movie?
No, it's not.
It's very, very difficult.
But when you're up for it and when you're willing to face some of the difficult questions that Christianity poses, I think it's a very beautiful movie to watch and a very deep movie and a very interesting one.
All right, tomorrow is the mailbag.
The last mailbag before the Clavenless Week.
That's what they call Holy Week now, Clavenless Week.