Ep. 296 slams feminism as a "neurotic" rejection of gender roles, then pivots to Syria, where Obama’s 2013 red-line failure (58 dead in Assad’s chemical attack) enabled Russia and Iran while Trump’s shift was falsely blamed by CBS’ Scott Pelley. Judeo-Christian values are framed as the only bulwark against moral collapse—from infant euthanasia debates to AI’s existential risks—while Hollywood’s "virtue signaling" and universities’ ideological bias erode classical foundations, leaving society vulnerable to radical redefinitions of truth. [Automatically generated summary]
Whenever someone points out that feminism is a toxic and destructive philosophy, some feminist always says, that's not real feminism.
Real feminism is something other than the toxic and destructive philosophy feminism actually is.
So what is feminism really?
Feminism is a sore point that emerges from time to time as a result of the relations between men and women.
Now wait, that's herpes.
No, it's feminism.
Now hold on, that's herpes, right?
Or feminism.
Now what's the difference?
Let's move on.
Ever since time began, human beings have found their chief consolation and joy in the love between a man and a woman, and their chief purpose and meaning in the indispensable care and tenderness of being a mother and homemaker and the responsibility and authority of being a father and provider.
Feminism is an attempt to put an end to all that so that unhappy neurotics can parade around in stupid pink hats screaming about something.
God knows what.
Feminists feel that for too long, men have gotten away with having sex with women and getting them pregnant and marrying them and then making sure they and their children have a roof over their head and food to eat, even if it means the man has to work until his fingers bleed and compromise his dreams and principles so that his children can have the all-important presence of a full-time mother in their lives.
And it's just not fair to women for some reason.
Feminists believe that men are grotesque, foul-mouthed, ill-mannered bullies who treat women as if they were nothing more than vaginas.
And they feel a feminist can do all that just as well as any man.
Feminists are angry that some men treat sex as a fleeting, meaningless physical pleasure.
And they feel that women should treat sex the same way and then wake up feeling disgusted with themselves and then blame men for their sense of shame, not to mention their incurable STD and the baby they have to abort so that now they'll spend the rest of their lives distorting their own sense of morality in order to avoid facing up to what they've done.
Then everything will be fair.
Feminists believe that women and men have exactly the same capabilities and it's only societal oppression that causes men to be better at math and science and women to be better at knowing that a 12-year-old has been doing something he wasn't supposed to be doing even before he comes through the freaking door for heaven's sake.
Feminists are sick and tired of being treated like children who need a man to take care of them and demand to be treated like children who need the government to take care of them.
Feminists believe that men have created a world of unfettered capitalism, unbridled aggression, and constant warfare.
And they want to fight that by making money, acting tough, and serving in combat.
In general, feminists believe that men are bad and women are good and women should be men and will then be bad, which will then be good.
So basically, feminism is completely irrational.
Women.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Why Stamps Matter00:02:28
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped, tipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, if there's anyone left I haven't offended, we're back and it's the mailbag day.
It's mailbag day today, and we will be answering all your questions, changing your life possibly for the better.
But that comes after the break.
You'll have to come over to thedailywire.com if you're listening on Facebook or on YouTube.
And while you're there, you could just subscribe for a lousy eight bucks a month and then you could ask questions and have all your problems solved.
We also have to talk about stamps.com.
I love stamps.com because otherwise you've got to go to the post office.
I always had this thing.
Post office is like the suburbs.
People are always saying, ah, the post office, ah, the suburbs.
And I grew up in the suburbs.
I always kind of liked them.
I thought the suburbs were really nice.
They were really pleasant.
And I like the post office.
They do a good job, but I don't want to go there.
I do not want to go there because I don't want to have to be anywhere in the middle of the day when I'm at home working.
I don't want to have to go out and go there.
I don't want to wait online.
That is the most important thing.
I do not want to wait online.
And people still, you know, I write books.
I write novels for young adults.
And I get these letters, you know, written on notebook paper from school, you know, and in a pen and all this stuff.
And you got to answer those, right?
You can't just leave them lying around.
So I got to get stamps.
Stamps.com.
It brings the post office right into your house, into your computer.
You can order the stamps online.
It's really simple.
You can print them right out, print them right onto the envelope, print them onto labels.
It's so much easier, and it's so much easier than that thing whose name I keep forgetting.
It's a postal meter, right?
A postal meter.
Yeah, it's so much easier than that because the whole thing is right there.
And right now, if you use stamps.com, 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.
Got to have that scale so you can figure out how much stamps to go.
You just do the whole thing at your desk.
I mean, that can't be any more convenient than that.
Go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage, and type in Clavin, K-L-A-V, as in Victor A-N, stamps.com and enter Clavin, and you will get a four-week free trial plus postage and a digital scale.
Stamps.com.
You never have to go to the post office again.
Kendall Jenner & Pepsi Commercial00:03:54
So, as we're coming in, there was this big headline on Drudge that Steve Bannon was out at the National Security Council.
I'm going to wait to comment about this because my spidey sense tells me this is a minor, minor story, that they didn't need him there anymore with Mike Flynn gone to balance the rush, the whole rush of it all.
We'll find out tomorrow what that's about.
I think they're going to play it.
It's going to be a big, big story today, a big shake-up and everything.
And then by tomorrow, they're going to realize it was just a minor shift.
I don't even think he went.
I think he went once.
He attended one meeting, and then Flynn was gone, and he didn't have to do that anymore.
So let's cover the important stuff.
Barry Manilow has come out as being gay.
I know you could have knocked me over with a feather, you know.
I mean, next, you're going to tell me it was like Richard Simmons.
You know, you're going to tell me, like, you're going to tell me like Oscar Wilde was gay.
He said he hadn't come out until now because he didn't want to disappoint his fans, you know, because they would have been like, you know, what?
He's gray.
What do you mean he's gray?
He's a young man still.
Why should he be gray?
Okay, I don't know.
Anyway, I think it would be much more exciting if he came out and admitted he was Taylor Swift.
That would account for both of their music, I think.
What was the other one?
Oh, Melania's arms are crossed.
They put out an official portrait of her and her arms are crossed on the plate.
So the Boston Globe actually ran an entire op-ed about what it means that her arms are crossed because like Trump, nothing that a Trump does can be possibly wrong.
They forgot that John F. Kennedy's arms are crossed.
That famous portrait of his, you know, looking down and all that stuff.
Anyway, but the big one, my favorite story, was this Pepsi commercial.
Have you seen this Pepsi commercial?
The Pepsi commercial.
I'll describe it because I know that some people are listening and not watching it.
The Pepsi commercial, it has this demonstration, and you can't tell what the demonstration is for.
It's for love and peace.
It's for love and peace.
It's a meaningless demonstration.
And Kendall Jenner, is that her name?
So is she formerly Bruce's daughter?
Is that what she is?
She still is.
Yeah, well, but she's, I didn't say he's formerly a daughter, but he's formerly Bruce, right?
That's like, all right, man.
So he's formerly, this is Kendall Jenner.
She's a model, and you know that she must have a lot of psychological problems because her father is now sort of her mother.
And she's in this thing, this big protest is going by, and Kendall Jenner is in a blonde wig, and she's doing a photo shoot, right?
And a kind of good-looking guy kind of says, kind of join the activism and all this stuff.
And Kendall Jenner heroically takes off her blonde wig and wipes off her lipstick and joins the march.
And there's a Muslim woman in there for some reason.
I have no idea what she's doing.
She's taking pictures.
And she picks up a Pepsi, because it's a Pepsi commercial, and she hands it to the kind of grim-faced cop, the riot cops who are out there protecting people, and she hands it to him, and he takes a sip of Pepsi and he smiles, and everybody cheers.
Okay.
So the right hated this because it romanticizes all these marches and protests.
And the left hated it because it trivializes all these marches and protests, because it actually was an accurate depiction of the marches and protests as being meaningless, confusing groups of people kind of parading their virtue and all this stuff.
And it makes it all about Kendall Jenner and Pepsi.
I love this commercial because it illustrates the genius of capitalism.
Capitalism, I've always noticed this.
Capitalism is like the blob.
Do you remember that old horror movie with Steve McQueen, you know, and the blob would come and eat people and then they would digest it and the blob would get bigger, right?
So that's what capitalism does.
If you're a communist and you're going like, power to the worker, we all workers are unite, let's just make a commercial.
Have a Coke, you know, have a Pepsi.
They don't care what you think, as long as you drink their cola.
It's like it's all about hot Kendall Jenner and the Pepsi.
Oh, you're protesting, have a cola.
We don't care if you're trying to bring down the government.
We need to just have a cola.
Pepsi And The Blob00:05:52
That's all that matters.
So I loved it.
It was like capitalism at its very best, trivializing all the things that people get angry about just as long as you buy the soda.
So anyway, so this is the news that people were talking about yesterday.
And it reminded me of a conversation I had once with Douglas Adams, the guy who wrote Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Just before Adams died, he moved to Santa Barbara and I became acquainted with him.
And when I first met him, I said, how do you like living in California?
Because he was here.
They were making his film into a movie, which unfortunately didn't turn out very well.
But they were making his film into a movie.
I said, how do you like being in California?
And he said, well, it's fine except for the news blackout.
Because for Europeans, when they come to America, they are stunned that we never cover anything but ourselves.
And this is true.
I mean, I remember when I was in Afghanistan, I got caught in some transport place, this gigantic hangar, and I was there for like hours and hours on end.
And I saw Fox.
There was two TVs, and one had Fox News and one had CNN.
And it was the election.
It was just the election.
Every minute, every minute, something else about the election, the election, the election.
And I thought, you know, there are other countries, but people in Europe don't understand that our country is so big.
You know, our country is so big that covering Kansas for people of these guys who never leave New York and LA, that's a big deal.
Covering Europe, forget about it.
I mean, how often do you even hear about what's going on?
Do we even know, like, you know, the French politics will hear about Maureen Le Pen, but we don't really know the issues over there.
They know because their countries are so small, so they know other, they know the news that's taking place.
So I have to bring this up, and I hate to bring it up because it's so unpleasant, but we have to talk about this thing in Syria that happened because everything that's happening here, I mean, this is what bothers me about this.
Everything that's happening here, this Russia conspiracy stuff and all the hysteria about that, all the refugee problems that people are having that are toppling governments, really Trump's election itself, which was so keyed in to illegal immigration, all of it goes back to Syria.
And it goes back to the fact that Obama messed this situation up.
Now, Obama is not to blame for Syria.
Bashar Assad is to blame for Syria.
The bad guys are the guys who pull the trigger are to blame.
But he sure messed this thing up big time.
So yesterday, evidence came out that they had used, again, poison gas, nerve gas, and they dropped it on this town and they killed at least 58 people, 11 of them children.
The pictures coming out look like they could be from the Holocaust.
I mean, just absolute, absolute atrocity and disaster.
And Trump and Sean Spicer came out and they said what is true.
They blamed it on Obama.
Here's Spicer.
It's just audio, but here's his statement.
Today's chemical attack in Syria against innocent people, including women and children, is reprehensible and cannot be ignored by the civilized world.
These heinous actions by the Basar al-Assad regime are a consequence of the past administration's weakness and irresolution.
President Obama said in 2012 that he would establish a quote-unquote red line against the use of chemical weapons and then did nothing.
The United States stands with our allies across the globe to condemn this intolerable act.
So this is, now, let's go back just quickly over this.
Everything Spicer said is true.
It really, Obama blew the, he blew the Middle East, really.
He really did, not just pulling out of Iraq like that.
But what happened, you'll remember, is that Hillary Clinton basically convinced Obama to go into Libya and overthrow Gaddafi, and it turned into an absolute disaster.
That was what Obama said was the biggest mistake of his presidency, the worst thing that happened in his presidency.
The protests in Syria started out as peaceful protests.
They weren't even trying to overthrow the regime.
They were just saying, give us some more civil rights.
And Obama was kind of like not going to do anything.
He didn't give them any support, really didn't stand up for them at all.
And then Assad responded to those protests with absolute brutality, you know, total killing, torturing, the whole thing.
And then there was this kind of weak Assad must go.
But we didn't do anything.
We didn't do anything, right?
And Obama said, well, famously, he said, well, we'll do something if they use poison gas.
I mean, that would be a red line.
So let's play that quote.
We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.
And then, of course, they continued to use chemical weapons, dumping chlorine gas on people.
I mean, this is the stuff that they poison people with from World War I.
This is why we have treaties.
And people said, well, what about, so now you've got to do something, right?
What about the red line?
Here was Obama's response.
First of all, I didn't set a red line.
The world set a red line.
Okay.
So the dog set a red line.
The dog ate my homework, and he said a red line.
And it's not my fault.
It's like that John Belushi thing.
It's not my fault.
Nothing's my fault.
Putin saw this.
The world saw it.
All these bad actors poured into Syria and started killing people, ISIS, all the terrorists, everybody's in there.
And basically, this gave Russia an excuse to go in and pretend that they were fighting ISIS.
Well, what they were really doing was just slaughtering Russia and Iran, Obama's good pal Iran, who he's helped on the path to getting nuclear weapons.
So now Russia is establishing Russia who was kicked out of, the Soviet Union was basically kicked out of the Middle East.
Now Russia has got a presence there again.
Scott Pelley On Assad00:11:52
They're helping Iran.
They're killing all these people on the scam that they're fighting ISIS.
What they're really fighting is anybody who is going to bring down Assad.
I'm going to pause here for a moment because we're going to have to say goodbye.
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Okay, we've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, but the mailbag is coming up.
So come on over to thedailywire.com.
So I have to play you.
So, you know, here's this absolute atrocity taking place, right?
Children being gassed, people being gassed.
And a lot of it, Obama's not to blame for it.
He is responsible for bungling this thing.
And now we've got a situation where the Russians are in there and they're helping Iran.
And they're selling this idea.
Scott Pelley, who I just find one of the most ideologically corrupt newsmen in the country.
Scott Pelley, according to Cheryl Atkinson's book, she was the investigative reporter at CBS who had to leave CBS because she wanted to report honestly on the Obama administration.
They wouldn't let her.
And she wrote a book about it.
And she said that the actual reporters do not want their stories on Scott Pelley's show because he's so biased.
Listen to this incredible thing that he says.
He comes out and basically blames Trump for this atrocity in Syria.
He basically blames the statements of about five days ago.
Rex Tillerson and Nikki Haley both indicated that they were not going to prioritize getting rid of Assad.
They were going to prioritize fighting ISIS in the Middle East.
And Scott Pelley blames that for this atrocity.
Listen to this.
The attack came five days after the Trump administration signaled that the Syrian dictator would not be held accountable for the slaughter of his people.
The Trump administration said Bashar al-Assad could remain in power, a reversal of Obama-era policy that said Assad had to go.
Despite the appeasing change in his policy, Mr. Trump blamed today's attack on President Obama, calling it a consequence of the past administration's weakness.
What a dishonest putz.
I mean, really.
I mean, that is disgraceful.
That is an actual disgrace that that guy calls himself a newsman and goes on and blames Trump for appeasing.
By the way, what happened when they used poison gas and Obama didn't do anything about the red line is Obama went in there with Putin and negotiated that they would get rid of all their poison gas.
Okay, well, let you go this time, but we're going to get rid of all your poison gas.
And John Kerry was tweeting, oh, what a wonderful thing we've done.
They gave the Nobel Prize to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons for getting the poison gas out of Syria.
Meanwhile, they kept doing it.
They didn't get it out.
They kept doing it, and now it's there.
And Scott Pelley is here to tell you that it's all about something that Trump said five days ago.
Trump, who really has just arrived on the scene in a situation where now, if he goes in there, we're fighting with Russia.
Now, if he goes in there, we're fighting with a nuclear power and with Iran.
It's a really, really difficult situation that Obama left behind.
You know who Scott Pelley is?
Scott Pelley is Ted Baxter.
You remember Ted Baxter from the Mary Tyler Moore show?
He was that stupid guy with the big voice and the white hair.
You know, Scott Pelley is the same thing.
He's got the white hair and the big voice.
Here's a cut of Ted Baxter.
This is like who Scott Pelley reminds me of.
More weather heading our way.
And some especially good news for residents of our area.
Despite the tornado watch and severe hurricane warning, today's pollution index was only six.
Six.
That's six, of course.
Six is on a scale of one to seven, and that's the same scale we use at home at our Baxters at home when we're back on our Weight Watchers.
Speaking of the trouble in South America, here's a special report via satellite from special correspondent Muck Racker.
Muck?
Well, that's Scott Pelley, the silver era.
He's got the silver era, he's got the face, the newsman's face, he's got the big voice, and he's an idiot.
And that is genuinely corrupt.
It is genuinely corrupt.
That is not reporting the news to blame Trump for this.
But now, let us look.
I mean, once we have placed the blame.
See, the thing is, the blame is the blame, and the responsibility is the responsibility.
But no matter who's to blame, no matter who's to blame, here we are.
And gas children just isn't working for me.
You know, children getting gassed is not working for me.
And remember, this is all these people coming out of here, and Trump has been trying to arrange for them to have a safe place to go without bringing them into the country, without us being swamped by refugees.
So Rex Tillerson, who I really admire as Secretary of State, he did say something that I have to say was as dopey as a statement.
Now, he said it off the cuff.
Maybe he regrets it.
But when he said that we were not going to prioritize getting rid of Assad, this was his comment.
I think the status and the longer term, longer term status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people.
I mean, that's absurd.
The Syrian people have no choice.
They have no vote.
Being bombed into smithereens, that's an absurd thing to say.
John McCain, a guy I don't particularly like as a politician, he hit him and he hit him right.
Here's McCain's response.
We've seen this movie before.
It was when Barack Obama said that they would have a red line.
They crossed it and he did nothing.
And Bashra Assad and his friends, his friends, the Russians, take note of what Americans say.
I'm sure they took note of what our Secretary of State said just the other day that the Syrian people would be determining their own future themselves.
One of the more incredible statements I've ever heard, given the involvement of Hezbollah, of the Iranians, of the Russians, and of course, the barrel bombing and precision strikes by Russian aircraft into hospitals in Aleppo.
So I'm sure they're encouraged to know that the United States is withdrawing and seeking some kind of new arrangement with the Russians, and it is another disgraceful chapter in American history, and it was predictable.
See, and this is a genuine problem.
Anytime John McCain is right about something, it's a genuine problem.
For yeah, that's not a good sign.
Nikki Haley, she also came out and said, obviously speaking for the administration, that we're not going to prioritize getting rid of Assad.
But she was in the UN slapping the Russians around, which I was glad to see, and holding them to account for what's going on.
Here's Haley.
Watch some of the videos online from the regime's chemical weapons attacks in Syria.
Watch the rows of parents and children lying on the ground, suffocated to death.
Watch Syrians gasping for breath in makeshift hospitals, desperate for oxygen to stop from gagging on chlorine.
The suffering is inhumane.
It's grotesque.
It should shake every one of us to our core.
None of us should hesitate to impose consequences for these attacks.
So for my friends in Russia, this resolution is very appropriate.
It is a sad day on the Security Council.
When members start making excuses for other member states killing their own people, the world is definitely a more dangerous place.
So we're getting kind of, let's call them mixed signals.
If Trump is pulling back on getting rid of Assad, and you know, this is the other thing Scott Pelley said, he's changing Obama's policy that Assad must go.
It's easy for to say Assad must go and sit around and do nothing.
That's what Obama did.
You know, I can say, yeah, Assad must go.
You know, I can pound my hand on my, you know, my fist in my palm and say Assad must go.
It doesn't matter if you don't do anything.
And Obama did absolutely nothing.
He bungled this start to finish.
But if the Trump administration is backing off on getting rid of Assad on regime change, because they think they can strike some cooperative deal with Russia to fight ISIS, then they're fools.
And Rex Tillerson knows better.
He knows better.
The point of the Russians being there is to get rid of us.
It's to replace us.
It's not to fight ISIS.
It's not to do anything good.
I mean, these are bad, bad guys.
And this whole routine that Trump used to do is it would be a good thing if we and Russia could get together and work together.
Well, sure it would.
It would if we could, and we can't.
And so the question is, if that's what he's thinking, that's a fool's errand.
But if what he's thinking is he's going to be realistic, that we can't get rid of Assad right now without going to war with Russia, without really having a problem, that's different.
If he has got some kind of long-term strategy for stopping this, because this has got to stop.
It doesn't, you know, it's all well and good.
It's all well and good to blame Obama.
It's all well and good to take Scott Pelle to task for being a dishonest, corrupt Ted Baxter of a newsman, which is what he is.
But all that stuff doesn't keep the kids from dying.
You know, that's the problem.
And we've got to get around to some policy that brings this atrocity to an end.
Over half a million people have been killed.
It has taken this region, set this region on fire.
This is what Trump has inherited.
And I cannot be too harsh on him for not coming up with a solution right away.
But somehow we've got to come to some sort of action that we and our allies can take.
I mean, it was embarrassing when Obama was president.
The British were coming over and begging us to take action.
I mean, this is the way Europe works.
If we take action, they get to be peaceful.
Zen And Faith00:14:58
They get to say, oh, it's terrible.
The Americans are so aggressive.
And if we don't, it's like, please do something.
You know, you've got to get over there.
Well, we're going to have to do something because this cannot stand.
All right.
The mailbag.
Bad!
I always forget about the screaming Lindsay on the mailbag.
All right.
Let us see.
From Ricardo.
Screenwriter Clavin.
That's me.
What are your thoughts, master screenwriter, Claven?
What are your thoughts on Hollywood casting a black actor in a traditionally white part?
Is it just virtue signaling or that the actor auditions so well?
It depends.
A lot of it is, you know, this always used to happen.
Othello always used to be played by a white guy in black face, right?
Now, if you did that, everybody would be up in arms.
And so they have women playing Hamlet, and they have, you know, blacks playing parts that normally go to whites and all this stuff.
And a lot of it is virtue signaling.
A lot of it is cheap creativity.
Sometimes, I mean, in Much Ado About Nothing, Kenneth Brannig's brilliant, brilliant Shakespeare comedy, Much Ado About Nothing, Denzel Washington plays the part of a white guy's brother, you know, so it was actually a little confusing as you were trying to get everybody in place.
But Denzel's such a great actor, he was terrific in it, and it was great to have him there.
You know, look, it's not because in TV, in TV, TV works so fast.
You're working week by week.
If somebody comes in and auditions for the part and he's not the color you thought he was, you rewrite the part because you just got to get the thing going.
You say, okay, he's a black guy, whatever.
But in theater, in movies, it's usually done with a lot more consideration.
Yeah, you know, is it virtue signaling?
Yes, it is.
On the other hand, if it doesn't affect the picture, it's never bothered me.
I can't remember a time when it bothered me when I was watching a movie and thought the closest I ever came was that Denzel Washington thing because it just confused, I was trying to remember who was whose brother and a white guy and a black guy being a brother didn't make any sense.
But normally it is some kind of virtue signaling, especially in the theater where they do it as a kind of ritual of how wonderfully unracist they are.
From Ben, as the importance of faith declines in our society, the concept of an absolute good seems to have been discarded by many of our cultural elites.
That is true.
Is it fair to say that nihilism is the inevitable consequence of atheism and the cause of the moral malaise our culture is experiencing?
Yeah, it is.
It's a big, big problem.
I mean, the problem is, if you don't know where your thoughts come from, where your morality comes from, where your customs come from, how do you defend them when somebody comes?
Somebody is always, there's always a percentage.
There's always fame to be had and notoriety to be had in saying something radical.
There's always notoriety to be had in saying, you know, killing a baby up to the age of one, there's nothing wrong with that.
He has no way of making a choice.
You know, they've got Peter Singer who actually believes in some kinds of euthanasia for babies and things like this.
You know, the guy from Princeton, I think it is.
You know, when you say these atrocious things, people are so shocked that the only thing that they can say is, that's shocking.
That's shocking.
That's not a good argument.
That is not a good argument.
And that argument will eventually fail because what happens is when people make these arguments, they are actually shifting the goalpost just by making the argument.
Okay, so when somebody says, oh, you know, a guy should be let into the girl's bathroom if he's wearing a dress and identifies as a female, everybody is outraged, but they've actually managed to shift the goalpost by making that a serious conversation, a conversation that has to be had.
You would never have that conversation before they shifted the goalpost.
So now that becomes something that might be argued.
So if you don't have an anchor, if you do not have an idea of not only what you think, but why you think what you think, then you don't have any defense against that constant shifting of the goalpost toward, as you say, toward nihilism.
And this is the important thing.
And this is why I am resistant to arguments from religious authority about religion.
It's not that I believe very deeply in my religion, but I don't say, well, this is proved by the fact that it's in the Bible.
I show you why.
I try to show myself and others why it is the rational thought and why it is the thing that we know and why everything that we have and everything that we love about what we have is built on that tower.
It is built, we are standing on top of the tower of our Christianity, essentially, our Judeo-Christianity, if you like.
We're standing on the top of that tower.
And if you pull that tower away and you think your freedoms are going to remain there just because they're good, just because they're common sense, it's not going to be long before someone comes along and says, you know, why is freedom good?
Who said freedom is good?
And you're not going to know.
You're not going to know the answer.
Whenever you hear somebody say it's just common sense, it ain't common sense.
If it were common sense, everybody would do it.
If it were common sense, it wouldn't have taken thousands of years to think about it.
If it were common sense, we wouldn't have had to fight.
We wouldn't have to send our children to die face down in the mud to defend it.
It's not common sense.
It is built on a long thousand-year evolution, thousands of years evolution, from our basic principles, which are contained in our religion and in our culture and our traditions.
So it is very, very dangerous to let your religion go, and it's very, very dangerous not to know why you think what you think.
And that is why, that is why the left has invaded our universities and why they teach ignorance.
They teach ignorance.
If you show somebody Shakespeare and teach it from the point of view that Shakespeare wasn't a good feminist, all you're doing is you're shouting Shakespeare down.
You're not letting Shakespeare speak.
The only way to teach Shakespeare is what was he saying and what did he understand himself to be saying.
In the same way, the only way to understand the Constitution is what did they mean and what did people understand them to mean.
That is why when they teach you English classes and they teach you obscure literature because the guy who wrote it happened to be some color, but the literature had no effect on the people around them and no effect on the culture at large, they're cheating you.
They're cheating you of the basis, the foundation of your understanding of yourself.
And when somebody comes along and makes that radical argument, you will have no defense.
From Vlad.
Hi, Andrew, the Clavinator.
I like, that's pretty good.
The Clavinator?
Yeah, I'll go with that.
How do you square your belief in God with your belief in human ability to create artificial human beings or any other form of AI?
A week or so ago, you were discussing sci-fi movies dealing with this kind of stuff, and you said you believed artificial human beings are a fact of our future life.
Actually, I didn't say that, but that's, isn't human intellect supposed to be part of a human soul provided by God, not by Google or IBM?
Wait, Google's not God?
Oh, no.
Actually, I feel there is no conflict here.
I think there may be a time.
I didn't say that.
What I said was that babies would be created without human beings, but they'd still be babies.
We are made in the image of God, and part of that image is that we are infinitely creative, and it would not shock me at all if I were to come back 100 years from now and find that babies could be created out of what before was thought to be artificial material.
It would shock me if they could create human life out of nothing, like God did, out of zero, out of no material.
That would shock me.
I mean, that I don't think will ever happen.
We will never be able to call life into being out of nothing by speaking.
That's not going to happen.
But it is possible that in our role as the image of God, that we may become creative to the point where we can create babies who become full human beings, and then they will be full human beings with souls that are reflective of something in eternity.
And that doesn't bother me.
I mean, it's going to create all kinds of interesting issues and problems and all that stuff, but it doesn't bother me in terms of my belief in God whatsoever.
You know, this is the mistake.
You know, a lot of people are still yelling at me about the fact that I said that historians can't have the tools with which to prove a miracle.
They got very belligerent about it.
And just as a pro tip, if you disagree with me, you shouldn't be belligerent about it because it makes it more painful when you have to admit you're wrong.
So just letting you know in advance.
But what I was talking about was the fact that historians can say, well, 600 people claim to have witnessed a miracle.
They can say that.
But a miracle is by nature something that can't possibly have happened.
It can't possibly have happened.
So no historian whose worth is salt would say something that can't possibly have happened happened.
No scientist would do it also.
They don't have the tools.
Before a miracle happens, a scientist would say that can't happen.
And after it happens, he'd say, oh, well, I was wrong, but let me explain to you how it happened naturally without any miraculous intervention.
Science does not have the vision.
It's like glasses that see very clearly a certain kind of thing, material things, but doesn't have the vision to see into the immaterial world.
And so again, you can't confuse the material world with the immaterial world.
They are zones that actually don't cross.
The tools of one do not work in the world of the other, which is why faith always starts with faith, and then you can test it against reality.
You can test whether your faith explains reality or doesn't.
It's kind of strange, actually, to have faith and expect the tools of non-faith to support you.
That's essentially saying that history and science are more important than your faith.
It's kind of a category error.
All right.
From Joshua, Andrew, I was wondering what, if any, views you hold toward Eastern traditions such as meditation, specifically in an attempt to pursue some sort of enlightenment.
I am a Christian, but see some value potential in these teachings and do not personally see how it interferes with my faith, seeing it as a much more worldly pursuit.
Also, I think it would be great if you had a recommended reading list somewhere, many would benefit.
I practiced Zen for many years.
I was a Zen practitioner.
I write about this in my book, The Great Good Thing, A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.
Zen meditation was very much a part of my journey, and I loved it.
And I write in my book about how it made me an excellent trash can basketball player.
I had such great focus when I was practicing Zen that I would go to work in the newsroom where I was working with him.
We would play trash can basketball.
And I'd come home with my, this is true, with my pockets stuffed with quarters because I couldn't miss.
My focus was so good.
What I found with Zen, you know, there's a Zen story.
Zen is impossible to explain.
Zen is not a belief system.
It's simply a practice of sitting and focusing in a certain way and breathing in a certain way.
So there are all these Zen stories to sort of bring it to life.
And one of them is a story about a guy who comes to a Zen meditation place and he sits down and he meditates and then he leaves and he never comes back.
And one day he's walking down the street and he bumps into the Zen master who runs the meditation place and the Zen master says, you only came for a day and then you didn't come back.
And the guy says, well, you know, after I came there, I was walking around and everything looked so clear and beautiful.
I thought, like, you know, I don't really want to meditate.
I want to look at the clouds going by overhead.
I want to feel the breeze.
And the Zen master says, ah, well, then you achieved enlightenment.
You know, that's the point.
And what I did find, I actually had, and again, I write about this in The Great Good Thing, I had an experience where Zen led to the experience that they call satori, you know, the kick in the eye, the sudden revelation.
And after that, I found that meditation died for me a little bit.
It became a sort of death.
I thought, like, why do I want to sit and do nothing when I can live, when I can see, when I can experience?
And I felt that that was, that was the result of that meditation.
So I think it's a wonderful thing.
I think it is incredibly good for focus.
I think it will bring you, it can bring you closer to your Christian faith.
What you should know going in is if you focus on anything, that thing will come to seem real.
So in Zen, you kind of focus on nothingness.
So nothingness will come to seem real.
If you focus on Christ, Christ will come to seem real.
It doesn't matter.
You know, focus on like dog biscuits, dog biscuits will come to seem real.
So don't confuse Zen with philosophy and with truth.
It is just a method for focusing your mind, which is great.
I have other objections to Buddhist beliefs.
I believe that they engender passivity.
to some degree and I believe that the idea that you should get rid of your desires in order to get rid of suffering is misguided.
I don't think that's the way you should live and I think that Christianity has a much different way of being.
It wants you to immerse yourself in life completely and accept the suffering of life as part of part of what life is.
All right, more about that another time.
Stuff I like.
We've been talking about Easter, stuff I like.
And I wanted to talk, go back.
I was talking about Silence yesterday, and I wanted to just say, you know, it's such a difficult film to watch that I was thinking about the fact that some of the old movies about religion managed to bring up some really interesting things while being incredibly pleasant to watch, while being really fun.
And I thought of two films that are religious films but are incredibly fun films.
And one of them, of course, is Ben-Hur, which is an Oscar-winning film and one of the greatest movies ever made.
William Wyler directed Charlton Heston.
I believe he won the, that's what he won the Oscar for, or was it for Moses?
I can't remember.
I think he won it from Ben-Hur.
Anyway, he, you know, it's a, and it really does deal with the question of forgiveness.
And the wonderful thing about it is it's this epic adventure story with swords and, you know, slavery and ship battles and every chariot, the famous chariot race and all this stuff.
But every now and again, Jesus wanders past.
And you never see him.
He just wanders by, you know?
And it really is amazing.
And it keeps like sort of showing you that in the midst, in the midst of this world of action and danger and hatred and revenge and war, there's this other story being told.
And you think you're watching Ben-Hur, so you think this is history, what Ben-Hur is in history.
And really the history is being made in the background all the time.
And it really is a wonderful vision of the way religion works.
And the other film I have to recommend is Going My Way, 1944 film with Bing Crosby.
And a lot of people make fun of this film because it's so, what's the word I want?
It's so clean.
It's so clean and happy and jolly, but it really contains, first of all, it's incredibly entertaining, very watchable.
And it contains a couple of scenes that really speak in a very subtle, quiet way about some of the mysteries of religion.
And one of my favorite scenes, there's a woman in it named Rees Stevens, who is an opera singer.
And she plays Bing Crosby's old girlfriend before he became a priest.
And she bumps into him on the street and he's wearing an overcoat.
It's winter and he's wearing an overcoat and she doesn't see his collar.
And she goes into change.
She's an opera singer.
She goes into change for her performance and she's behind the curtain and she's talking, she's flirting with him.
Opera Singer's Flirtation00:01:59
You know, she's talking about why did you stop writing to me?
Well, you were sending me all these letters and then suddenly you stopped writing to me and all this stuff.
And Crosby is taking off his coat and he realizes she doesn't know.
She didn't get his last letter, basically.
She didn't get his last letter.
And she walks out and he's standing there in his priest collar and she just deflates, you know, and she tries to pick it up and she invites him to watch her show.
And her show is Carmen.
And Carmen begins with this famous aria, sometimes called the love aria, some other word they use, mercado, I can't remember.
But you've all heard it.
It's bum, bum, bar, bum, And Carmen comes in, and she's usually wearing this incredibly low-cut outfit, and she just looks hot, and she's covered in sweat, and all the men are grabbing at her, and she sings this song about love.
Love is a bird, you know, that nobody can control and all this stuff.
And so Bing Crosby in his priest outfit is standing backstage listening to this woman sing one of the most sensual songs in all of the opera canon.
And as he's listening, it's really wonderful.
As he's listening, he just raises his hand to her and waves goodbye and walks out.
And it's this beautiful, beautiful representation of what this guy has given up to do what he's doing.
And you suddenly see this kind of benign, white as milk, you know, absolutely vanilla guy.
You suddenly see that he's made this tremendous sacrifice by saying goodbye, not just to this one woman, but to the entire world realm of sensuality and love.
And it's a very beautiful scene in the midst of this picture that is usually dismissed as, you know, a kind of dawdle, as nothing.
Really good stuff.
Ben Hur and Going My Way, good religious stuff, good family stuff to watch over Easter while you're having a good time.
That was the last mailbag.
Until I come back from vacation, I am gone next week, Holy Week.
I will be in England, but I will be back tomorrow to end the week.
So cling desperately to these last clavin-filled moments before the clavinless week begins.