Andrew Clavin’s Death Struggle With the Deep State satirizes Susan Rice’s alleged unmasking of Trump associates, mocking media frenzy over Biden’s fictional "black cat burglar" antics and Obama’s absurd conspiracy theatrics. He pivots to Senate Republicans’ filibuster rule change for Gorsuch, Devin Nunes’ ethics-driven exit from the Russia probe, and media bias—contrasting Jonah Goldberg’s Trump critiques with Dennis Prager’s defenses of deregulation. Guest Max McLean’s C.S. Lewis adaptations lead Clavin to frame Jesus’ crucifixion as a systemic suppression of truth, mirroring modern media’s stifling of dissent (e.g., Islam debates) and Hollywood’s self-serving narratives, ending with Easter’s defiance of cultural "darkness" amid Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. [Automatically generated summary]
New revelations have come out about the Obama administration's possible misuse of classified intelligence information as a weapon against political opponents.
Here's CNN reporting.
The Russians are coming!
The Russians are coming!
Yes, that's right.
In the latest revelations, documents released by a whistleblower suggest that Obama's former national security advisor Susan Rice asked intelligence officers to unmask the names of Donald Trump's associates in surveillance documents.
President Obama then ensured that those documents would be spread far and wide and leaked to the press in an unprecedented abuse of surveillance in the political sphere.
Here's the report from NBC News.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
The Queen has spoken.
Further evidence from surveillance video cameras shows that Vice President Joe Biden personally crept into Trump Tower dressed in a black cat burglar outfit, broke into Mr. Trump's offices, installed a bug in Mr. Trump's telephone, and then leapt from the window, attached to a wire, and dressed as a dominatrix, recreating a scene from Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which the vice president said he'd always particularly enjoyed.
ABC News reported on the revelations by pointing out that Donald Trump lied when he said in a tweet that his, quote, wires were tapped since the phone that Mr. Biden tapped was in fact wireless.
Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff called for a full investigation, saying, quote, if this administration can't be trusted to know whether their phones have wires or not, then clearly there are communist agents at the highest level of government, and I have their names right here in this envelope, which I will open when the moment is right and the clock strikes 12 and the wolfbane blooms and hell freezes over, unquote.
New revelations continued to come and in as selfie videos recovered from the cell phone of President Obama himself showed the former president dressing up as a waiter so he could deliver breakfast to Donald Trump's room.
Then, when Mr. Trump was busy eating, then President Obama attempted to plant an 8x10 glossy photograph of Vladimir Putin signed by the Russian president with the words, to the Donald, who's your Vladdy?
Mr. Obama was in the process of slipping the photograph under Mr. Trump's pillow when he was discovered by a Trump security officer.
After a karate fight that left the room in a shambles, then President Obama got the officer in a chokehold and broke his neck with a deadly ninja twist.
President Obama then attempted to escape Trump Tower, engaging in a running gun battle with the police.
After a car chased through central Manhattan, ended with Obama running his souped-up trans am off a battery park pier into New York Harbor.
The then president was recovered from the water and taken by officers to one police plaza, where he was sweated by detectives until he broke down sobbing and confessed that it was actually he who had signed the Putin photo.
Scott Pelley of CBS News ran this report on the story.
Oh, I see nothing.
Paul's Critics Suddenly Accuse00:15:13
I was not here.
I did not even get up this morning.
This story will continue to develop, but not on network news.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
Hooray!
Oh, hooray!
Hoorah!
All right, this is it.
The last day before my vacation, and that world spins into the darkness of a clavinless week.
And so much news today, so many things happening.
The biggest news, I think, of all is that Lindsey Lohen seems to be converting to Islam, which should destroy two threats to world peace at once.
I think that's both Lindsay and Islam will be gone.
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So as we're sitting here, the Senate Republicans have triggered the so-called nuclear option.
In the Gorsuch hearings, the Democrats actually did filibuster Neil Gorsuch's nomination.
And Mitch McConnell, who a lot of conservatives said wouldn't do it, right?
He actually pulled the trigger.
In fact, he actually set off a nuclear device.
He actually went, he took it literally.
I don't know.
He just destroyed the Democrat Party, reduced them to radioactive ash.
Wishful thinking.
But they did get rid of the filibuster.
They've got, I think, 30 hours.
Tomorrow, there should be a vote on Neil Gorsuch, and he should be confirmed.
And, you know, the press is going to run this.
They're already, Bloomberg had a headline.
The GOP forces the destruction of the filibuster.
But we've talked about this before.
It's worth mentioning again.
This is totally, completely, utterly the Democrats' fault.
They, for the first time during the presidency of George W. Bush.
Remember, with all this Trump derangement syndrome, it's hard to remember that the left was deranged over George W. Bush.
Remember, George W. Bush was Hitler.
It was only when Trump got nominated that George W. Bush suddenly got elevated to left-wing sainthood.
Oh, he was a decent man.
You know, Mitt Romney, he was a decent man.
They were Hitler before Trump was Hitler.
I mean, Trump is just filling the Hitler slot for those guys.
And so this derangement stuff started with Bush.
They suddenly started to block all his judges' appointments and to filibuster every judge appointment.
And so when Obama took office, the Republicans said, well, we can do that too.
Two can play at this game.
And that was when Reed, Harry Reid, said, no, no, no, we're going to get rid of this filibuster for everything but the Supreme Court.
So it's all been Democrat aggression.
The whole thing has been Democrat aggression.
Very, very exciting times, really interesting time.
A lot of news.
There's this, Devin Nunes has temporarily stepped down from the investigation into Russia on the House Intelligence Committee.
He issued a statement.
Here's the statement.
He said, several left-wing activist groups have filed accusations against me with the Office of Congressional Ethics.
The charges are entirely false and politically motivated and are being leveled just as the American people are beginning to learn the truth about the improper unmasking of the identities of U.S. citizens and other abuses of power.
Despite the baselessness of the charges, I believe it is in the best interests of the House Intelligence Committee and the Congress for me to have Representative Mike Conaway with assistance from Representatives Trey Gowdy and Tom Rooney temporarily take charge of the committee's Russia investigation while the House Ethics Committee looks into this matter.
I hate, I hate to give them any leeway.
I hate to give the Democrats an inch.
They fight dirty.
They don't care what happens.
They don't care about the truth.
They have joined, you know, we've seen, we have watched the incredible cover-up in the media of this Susan Rice story.
And I'm not even saying the Susan Rice story, you know, is that she was breaking the law or anything like that.
Just the absolute lack of curiosity, the announcement, the announcement that this story was just a distraction.
Let's play a little bit.
We have some of the network news coverage.
Listen to this coverage.
It's amazing.
Let's try to unpack this whole unmasking controversy, if it is indeed a controversy.
As Cecilia said in the piece, unmasking legal, proper routine for national security officials, if that information were leaked, that would be a problem.
Yes, that's exactly right.
But there's not evidence at this point.
It also goes to the intent of any unmasking.
What's happening here is obviously it's the politicization of national security in an attempt to deflect from the focus of much of the energy point on Capitol Hill right now, which is the FBI investigation about possible Russian contact with the Trump transition and campaign.
But this is being pumped up by partisan media as something at least equivalent to validate the president's claims.
And so expect a lot more.
And I'm not going to do the president's claims about wiretapping.
Nothing.
Nothing to do with wiretapping at all.
But that distinction is not, is without a difference to most hardcore partisans right now who are desperately trying to either defend the president or deflect away from the main investigation.
White House and Republican lawmakers dragging former President Obama's national security advisor into the conversation.
Now she is firing back exclusively to NBC's Andrea Mitchell.
Andrea, good morning to you.
Good morning to you, Matt.
Well, former Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice is at the center of this new political firestorm, fanned by the Trump White House, denying to NBC that the Obama administration ever utilized intelligence for political purposes.
It's the latest in a series of charges by the Trump administration that critics say are designed to distract from the Russia investigation.
It's like critics say, critics, critics, some critics.
There's guys got out in the street, Mr. Critic, Fred Critic is out in the street.
You know, they don't even cover it until to have Susan Rice deny it.
There you have George Succalopagus, the guy, the Clinton operative, telling you, telling you it's a distraction.
It's just a distraction.
You know, it would be fine if all the rumors about Trump collusion with Russia were reported in the same way as just an attempt.
You know, if this snuffalopagus went on and said, you know, oh, well, this is just the Democrats' way of trying to delegitimize Donald Trump, and they have no evidence, there's no evidence.
But suddenly, only when the scandal is on the left, suddenly is the question, where's the smoking gun?
They don't ask that question when the scandal is on the right.
You know, and it's just, it is, it's absolutely obstruction.
And now there's news, according to Fox News, there is news that legislators and investigators working with the House and Senate Intelligence Committee investigating allegations that the Obama administration spied on Trump associates.
They claim that the intelligence agencies are also stonewalling efforts to discover who leaked names and protected information to the media.
This is Hank Berrien, our own Hank Berrien, writing at the Daily Wire.
Fox News reported multiple lawmakers and investigators for the panel told Fox News the CIA, FBI, and National Security Agency, all agencies in position to aid the probe are not cooperating.
You know who has this right?
Rand Paul.
Rand Paul, I'm not the biggest Rand Paul fan.
I know some people are passionately love him.
I think he's too much of an isolationist for me.
He's too much of a, you know, he's constantly so worried about our intelligence agencies that I worry that he would hamper them from getting intelligence.
But a lot of his concerns are coming true, and you've got to give him his due.
When he's right, he's right.
What he is saying, do we have a cut from Paul?
Yeah, number eight.
Let's play this.
I think it's a mistake to downgrade this and say, oh, it was just incidental.
It's no big deal.
It is a huge deal that we are collecting millions of Americans' phone calls and that someone can go to a keyboard and put your name in and search it without a warrant.
This is an illegal, warrantless search.
This is the kind of stuff that is rife for abuse from either party.
And Joe had it exactly right when he said, if Dick Cheney did this to the Obama administration, Bill and every other leftist in the country would be on the other side of this issue.
It's not a partisan issue.
It's not a partisan issue.
And the way that Rand Paul sees it, and I think he's absolutely right, they keep going back to Donald Trump's tweet in early March where he said that Obama tapped my wires, I think was the word he used, and he put it in quotation marks.
And they keep saying, well, he wasn't surveilled.
Even if these names were caught up in legal surveillance, they weren't surveilling Trump.
But what Paul's point is, they're surveilling everybody.
They're now surveilling everybody.
The scooping up of information is so vast and the wiretapping is so extensive that of course people are going to get caught up in this.
And the minute they abuse that information, the minute you have people like Susan Wright, a political operative, remember Susan Rice was not, you know, she was the National Security Council.
She was not like a spy.
You know, she's basically an operative.
The minute you have them abusing that information, it is tacit surveillance.
It is tantamount to surveillance.
If you're surveilling everybody and you start to pick and choose who you're going to unmask and what you're going to leak to the press and who's going to, you know, who it's going to come out for.
And frankly, if you just string together the New York Times stories, the New York Times that said they had information taken from wiretaps, their phrase, taken from wiretaps, and the New York Times story that the Obama administration had made sure that this information could now spread to 17 agencies with names unmasked throughout the intelligence and political sphere.
It was basically the way Obama works.
It was basically guaranteeing that this information was going to get leaked to a willing press that turns a blind eye to Susan Rice, but it constantly sees a scandal everywhere that Trump is operating.
You know, what's really interesting about this is Trump is obviously a divisive character, and he has even divided the right.
And we're all sort of sitting on tenter hooks waiting to see if he can get his legislative agenda going.
Is he going to get something, some kind of repeal of Obamacare, or at least a rollback of Obamacare?
Is he going to get his tax plans going and all this stuff?
And because he is such a character, he's such a character, you know, he's so oversized and so unlike any president we've ever had before, it's really hard to know where everything is going.
And there are two articles I'm going to read, but first I have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
And we're going to have, I forgot to mention, we're going to have Max McLean come on, an actor who has been doing C.S. Lewis.
We're going to talk to him about changing the culture.
You know, this is one of the questions I get asked most often.
How do you change the culture?
Producer actor Max McLean has been trying to do that and doing quite well at it too.
So come on over to TheDailyWire.com, hear the rest of the show, and subscribe so you'll still be here when I get back from vacation.
So here are two articles, and I bring them up because they're both from writers I respect very deeply, all right?
They're guys that I go to, guys that I listen to for guidance to get another point of view in all this.
One of them is Jonah Goldberg, and I love Jonah because he's one of the best writers on the right.
And he writes a piece at National Review saying the problem with the Trump presidency is Trump, that everybody's complaining about this or that, but it really is the guy's character, character is fate.
And he says, and he was virtually a never-Trumper before this happened, and he's tried to be balanced since, but he really has a negative view of Trump.
And he says, Trump brings the same glandular, impulsive style to meetings and interviews as he does to social media.
He blurts out ideas or claims that send staff scrambling to see them implemented or defended.
His management style is Hobbesian.
Rivalries are encouraged.
Senior aides panic at the thought of not being part of his movable entourage.
He cares more about saving face and counterpunching his critics than he does about getting policy victories.
In short, the problem is Trump's personality.
His presidency doesn't suffer from a failure of ideas, but a failure of character.
Now, in the same journal, in National Review, here's Dennis Prager.
Okay?
And Prager says that Donald Trump is a conservative hero.
I remember Never Trumpers calling my radio show and asking me how I could possibly believe that if elected president, Trump would really honor his commitment to nominate to the Supreme Court one of the conservatives on the list of judges he promised to choose from.
He has honored that promise.
And given the supreme importance of the Supreme Court, isn't that reason enough for conservatives to celebrate his presidency?
He has repealed many of the Obama energy regulations that would strangle the American economy.
He doesn't believe that carbon-induced warming of the planet will destroy the human race, the greatest of the innumerable hysterias the left manufactures and then believes.
Isn't that reason enough for conservatives to celebrate his presidency?
He is appointed as Secretary of Education, a woman who as a billionaire could easily have devoted her life to enjoying her wealth, but instead has fought for American students and their parents to be able to choose their schools just as the wealthy do.
And the president has taken on the teachers union, the only group that has ever given American teachers a bad name.
Isn't that reason enough for conservatives to celebrate his presidency?
He has appointed a woman to be ambassador to the United Nations who is calling the UN the naked emperor that it is, and now America is backing rather than subverting Israel in that benighted institution.
Isn't that reason enough for conservatives to celebrate his presidency?
And the funny thing about these two columns is I agree with both of them.
I mean, this has been one of the strangest experiences watching this presidency.
On the one hand, you have this kind of chaos, this palace intrigue.
Liberty's Defender00:02:08
Now Steve Bannon is out, but is he out?
Or that, you know, is there some kind of vengeance?
He's not on the National Security Council.
Did he threaten to quit?
We don't know.
All this kind of rumor coming out.
There's all this chaos, and Trump says things.
You know, Russia is going to help us fight ISIS, and then there's a bombing in Syria.
No, they're not going to help us fight ISIS.
This is all terrible.
It's hard to keep track.
But I have to say this.
My issue has never been Trump or anybody, anybody.
My issue is liberty, ordered liberty, you know, supported by tradition and moral wisdom.
That is what I want.
And Donald Trump has not done one thing in his first 100 days to threaten American liberty.
Not one thing.
I cannot think of one thing that he has done that has made me less free.
Obama, his extension of the regulatory agencies did that.
His misuse of the IRS did that.
His overuse of executive orders did that.
The Obamacare mandate limited liberty.
His secrecy and punishment of the press did that.
He jailed a video maker, remember, because he wanted to support his lies about Benghazi.
He jailed Dinesh D'Souza, essentially, for criticizing him.
He tried to jail James Rosen.
His pressure on local police forces made us less free.
His assault on Israel made us less free.
His estrangement of our allies, his encouragement of our enemies, Trump has done none of those things.
My client is always liberty.
Yours and mine.
The liberty of people I disagree with is my client.
That's the client I want to defend.
And all I will say about Donald Trump so far is his personality worries me.
It has worried me since the nomination.
It really does, and it still does.
And I'm not going to pretend that it doesn't.
But he has not, you know, my greatest fear of him is that he had authoritarian tendencies.
Only in the fantasies of the left has he done a single thing, a single thing to jeopardize our liberty.
And as long as that's true, I think those on the right, even those of us who have doubts, who have worries, I think he deserves our support for that alone.
It doesn't mean we have to support every policy, but it certainly means we have to stand up for him when he gets these constant assaults by the press.
Capturing Imagination Through Storytelling00:11:44
And the idea that he can make friends with the press if he does things differently is absurd.
They will never give him any credence.
All right.
One of the questions I'm asked most often is: what can we do about the culture?
How can we change?
A lot of times what they say is, how can we change the narrative?
When I was at the prayer breakfast in Washington, I met an actor and producer named Max McLean, and he has made a career out of adapting, producing, and starring in the works of C.S. Lewis, the great Christian apologist, and bringing them to the stage.
And I was fortunate enough, I didn't see Max in these screw tape letters, but I saw his production of the screw tape letters up in Santa Barbara, and it was wonderful.
I mean, it just brought the whole thing to life.
It had kind of a dance, I won't call it dance, but a sort of movement element in it, and it brought this whole story to life with a one-person performance.
Have we got Max on the line?
There he is.
Max.
How you doing?
It's good to see you.
Good to see you.
I mean, usually I don't associate with actors when they're too far away to pick up the check for the drinks.
That's right.
Well, we had a great time.
We did.
It was a delight to hang out.
You know, I want to talk to you about this because this is a question I get asked all the time about how we get our voices into the culture, the voice of something other than the nihilistic, you know, vision that comes out of Hollywood so much.
First of all, how did you get into this?
How did you get into doing C.S. Lewis performances?
Well, my background was as an actor and an adult convert to Christianity.
And so there was a desire to integrate my faith with my work.
And that easily, quickly led to C.S. Lewis because he captured my imagination.
And so, and because he captured my imagination, I thought, well, you know, that this work could be adapted to the stage, particularly if we stayed close to Lewis's words.
Because that's what's, you know, he is the constellation of ideas that come from his mind are once in a generation, perhaps once in a century.
And so if I could stay true to that and move that from the page to the stage, I think I'd have something that an audience would want to hear and see.
Do you ever find, I mean, C.S. Lewis, I agree with you.
C.S. Lewis is one of the, if not the great thinker of the last century, he's certainly one of the great thinkers of the last century.
Do you find that audiences react to this positively?
I mean, do they, when I was there, the place was full.
People were really enthusiastic.
Is that typical?
Or do you have an uphill climb getting people to see this?
Yeah, it is.
I think, first of all, Lewis has a huge following.
I mean, more people read his books now.
He sells more books this year than he sold last year and will sell more next year than he did this year.
His embers are blazing.
His star continues to rise.
And it's primarily because he's a very generous personality and he has this extraordinary ability to make very complex ideas live in the imagination.
That's his key.
He captures the imagination.
You mentioned about somehow changing the culture.
That's a big deal.
And I think someone said, and I can't remember who, but the quote is stuck, that culture is upstream from politics.
Right.
And so you, or is it downstream?
It's politics is downstream from culture.
That's what they are.
That's right.
So, I mean, it starts with in terms of capturing people's imagination.
Lewis said the imagination is the organ of meaning.
Reason is the organ of truth.
And what he meant by that, if something doesn't capture your imagination, and I do think that's perhaps one of the issues with art and the right is we just don't put our best people in arts and media.
We don't trust the imagination, it's true.
Right.
So we go into business.
And so that means we've left a pretty big area for the left to a big playground.
And they've used it really, really well.
They do use it well, yeah.
Yeah, so that's, you know, in fact, I remember seeing what was it, Bill Maher was commenting about the transgender law, and his comment was to the politicians.
He said, leave that to us.
He says, you know, if you try to use that as a political plank, it's going to be very upsetting.
Just leave that to us.
We'll get there.
We'll get there.
That was a very, very interesting, a very interesting thought.
So I think the importance is telling good stories and telling them well.
Our mission is to produce theater from a Christian worldview, meant to engage a diverse audience.
We do that by being very selective in the kind of material that we use, and that, of course, leads us to Lewis.
We execute it to the highest levels that our budgets will allow so that we can play the great performing arts venues around the country, such as the theater in Santa Barbara that you saw at LA, where you're from.
We've played many of the major venues and we'll continue to go back there.
And we think that's an opportunity to at least state a case, an imaginative case, and we're going to continue doing that.
Well, what about the fact that, I mean, there's so much hostility toward Christianity in this country now.
And I mean, just the other day, this thing with Mike Pence saying that he didn't want to, you know, he wanted to stay out of situations where he might be tempted to cheat on his wife.
And if he had been a Muslim or even a Jew, I think that nobody would have said a word.
But the fact that he was a Christian made him some kind of jihadi for not wanting to dine with women who weren't his wife.
Do you get pushback?
I mean, do you feel like you're not?
You know, it's a different kind of pushback.
For instance, here in New York, the New York Times won't review us.
They won't review you.
So that's a challenge.
And we've had good conversations with them.
So they hold the gatekeeping mechanisms.
So you have to work around that.
One of the great things about social media is it's making things much more egalitarian that way.
So yeah, so there is that kind of challenge.
I mean, we are the minority report and have been for a while.
But I don't try to, I certainly don't complain about it.
It just encourages me to do better work.
And have you ever approached the New York Times and said what's going on?
In fact, there was an article, there was an interview on Fresh Air, the NPR program, where Dean Baquette, the executive editor of the New York Times, simply said in the interview, we don't get religion.
We don't get it.
He said it, you know.
Wow.
You know, I mean, and so I and he and he said we have to do a better job.
And this, of course, is, you know, after the election, there was all this soul searching about what we missed.
You know, so and that was a big part of what they missed.
So the so I went to the editor of the arts page, the theater page, and wrote a very, very nice letter, you know, commending him on his work and sent him that quote.
And he wrote back the very next day, says, Thank you for your very thoughtful letter.
I will consider it.
And then he considered it for like 30 seconds.
Well, that brings up the question.
You know, people like me are always being accused of, oh, we don't reach outside.
You know, we're preaching to the choir all the time.
And I actually don't mind that because, first of all, I think the choir needs entertaining.
And second of all, I think that a lot of times, you know, husbands say to their wives, wives to their husbands, come on over and look at this.
This guy's funny.
He's not the usual conservative or whatever.
And that does spread the word.
But do you feel that you ever get beyond a Christian audience?
Yeah, I do.
And I think Lewis is the reason why.
I mean, things are more and more polarized.
There's no doubt about that.
And of course, with art and culture, people know what they like and they self-select very, very quickly.
So the issue is that you're looking for people that are willing to use their relational capital to invite friends that are willing to go along.
But I do find the way we market the play in New York, and I do a QA after each show, and so I can tell by the kinds of questions where the audiences are coming from.
Like, for instance, yesterday at the QA, this very sort of Upper East Side-type lady simply said, you know, when I hear about Christianity, I hear either the Pope or evangelicals and fundamentals on TV.
And that's my picture of Christianity.
So, you know, that's my imaginative thought.
And essentially, I can't see myself in that world.
And so what happens is, she said, this is after seeing the play, enjoying the play, staying for the QA, and having the courage to ask a question in public.
She says, I never hear Christianity expressed like you just expressed it.
Which is thoughtful, which is measured.
So because obviously people have to see themselves in that world.
And I see myself in that world.
I don't see myself in this other world.
So what we try to do is make it so that the world says, hmm, begin there.
And you really have to take small steps.
One of the things that Lewis was really big on, he talked about you have to be mindful of your embarrassing supporters.
Yes, that is good advice.
Where can people find you?
How do they know where you're going?
Yeah, the best way is to, I think, go to our website, cslewisonstage.com, cslewisonstage.com.
We're at Theater Row on 42nd Street in New York.
We've extended till May 21st.
So we're going to be around for a little bit longer.
Excellent.
CSLewisonStage.com.
Yeah.
Max, it's great to see you.
I hope to see you again next time in New York.
Thanks, Andrew.
Delighted.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
You know, I don't know if you've ever been on Theater Row.
It's so great, so many great restaurants, and you can just go to one of the great restaurants and go over and catch the show.
The one I saw was just terrific.
I mean, it really was.
You know, I'm going to end with this because here we're going into Holy Week, and it also is the Clavenless weekend.
So, not only is there a sort of darkness that comes over Christianity, but over all of us because I'm gone.
And, you know, I want to just talk a little bit about what this week means to me and what I frequently see in it, because it's different a little bit than what some Christians see in it.
The World's Minor Corruption00:06:10
The crucifixion of Jesus Christ, which was obviously a tremendous miscarriage of earthly justice, but not heavenly justice.
One of the things that has always fascinated me about the Passion story, which is what plays out over Holy Week, the story of Christ entering Jerusalem, the people cheering for him, he makes a final appearance, and then basically Judas turns him into the authorities who are trying to arrest him without disturbing the mob.
He's taken off to a series of kangaroo courts and finally crucified at the behest of the mob and the behest of the Sanhedrin, which are the temple, the temple priests, basically.
And one of the things that has always struck me about this story is there's not really any evil in it.
There's nobody who is really evil.
You could say Judas, who betrays Jesus, comes as close to being evil, but it's such a minor evil.
You know, he's a thief, basically.
They say he's a thief and he gets 30 pieces of silver.
He commits a tremendously evil act, but it's not the act of an evil person like a serial killer or a torturer or something like that or a Hitler or something.
It's the kind of minor corruption that people commit all the time.
It just happens to be that his victim is the Son of God, elevating what would have been a sort of horrible minor act.
And for the rest, it's really just systematic.
The Sanhedrin isn't being evil.
The Jewish priests aren't being evil.
They're protecting what they think is the true religion.
They're protecting what they think is not just their position, but also the faith of their people.
And they're afraid that they will lose their country to the Romans.
Pontius Pilate, who was famously kind of mishandled the Jewish question in Palestine, was probably just trying to keep things from getting out of hand.
He didn't want to have to go back to Caesar and say, I blew this situation and caused riots.
It really was just the world.
It was just the world.
Jesus was the truth, as he said.
He said, I am the truth.
I am the truth.
And the world is built to destroy the truth.
The world is built to crucify the truth.
And we see it, you know, not to compare great things to small, but we see it in this absolute dedication on CNN, on CBS, NBC, ABC, the absolute dedication to hiding what might be the truth.
We don't know all the information, but they just want one thing to be said.
They want to hide anything that goes against their point of view.
And that ultimately ends in destroying the truth.
We see it in whenever we try to discuss issues intelligently.
I mean, there are so many things that we should be discussing about Islam in the world.
There are so many intelligent debates that should be going on about whether Islam can be reconciled to the West, about whether Islam is inherently violent or violence is a cancer on Islam.
These are debates that can be had at a very high and intelligent level, educating the public, but instead people are shouted down the minute they start talking.
It becomes the two most extreme sides are brought on to yell at each other and nobody hears anything.
The world is built to destroy the truth.
It is built to crucify the truth.
And when people ask me, how do we change the narrative?
How do we change the culture?
I think sometimes what they're really asking me is how do we be who we are but still become successful in the standard mainstream culture in Hollywood, on TV, and on whatever the mainstream venues are, on radio and all this stuff.
And the thing is, the culture is what Jesus called the world.
It is the thing that is meant to destroy the truth.
The culture is meant to sell you itself.
It is meant to sell you its products.
It is meant to sell you a worldview that makes you need, that makes you needy, that makes you dependent.
It is meant to destroy the truth.
The idea isn't really not to change, to enter the narrative and change it.
The idea is to become the narrative yourself.
The idea is to speak the truth yourself, to become dedicated to the truth yourself in whatever way you can.
And, you know, Max McLean, he doesn't, you know, he's not acting in Hollywood.
He's not going to Hollywood and saying make a movie out of C.S. Lewis.
He's doing it himself.
He's becoming the narrative.
And if he finds one person, if he finds two people, if he reaches all the audiences that he reaches, that becomes a thing, you know.
And so you can't be, you have to be in the world without being of the world, as the Christians say, because the world is meant, it is designed.
It doesn't have to be evil.
The world doesn't have to be evil to destroy the truth.
It does it naturally.
And it is what the world does.
The message of Easter is that the truth doesn't die.
You can kill it as often as you like.
It's going to keep coming back.
It comes back.
I've said it repeatedly that even if the Gospels weren't a true story, they would be a true story anyway, which is one of the evidences that they are a true, historically true story.
But the truth simply cannot be killed.
And so when you see all these guys, and I know it drives me crazy, I'll be honest with you.
When I see these newsmen whose job it is to come to work and tell you the truth, when I see them essentially lying, when I see them essentially covering up, when I see people who receive a paycheck to expose the powerful, when I see them protecting men like Barack Obama, people like Susan Rice, you know, yes, does it hurt my heart?
Yes, it does.
But the truth doesn't die.
It never dies.
That is the message of Easter.
That is the message of Christ.
That is the message of Christianity at its heart, that the truth lives forever.
And if you can embrace the truth, then so will you.
I will be back right after Easter.
I think we may be closed the day after Easter, but I will be back whenever we reopen, so figure a week and a couple of days.
And in that time, I think that you'll probably have a new Supreme Court justice, which would be nice.
So that will alleviate the clavenless darkness.
Also, the resurrection might do that.
You know, who knows?
All right, we're going to end with Bach, St. Matthew's Passion.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Enjoy my vacation, and the survivors will gather here when I return.