Ep. 302 dissects the left’s war on free speech, mocking media hypocrisy over Trump’s record while citing Oberlin’s progressive symbolism—four flags, including the UN’s, in its town square—as evidence of ideological overreach. Ann Coulter’s canceled Berkeley appearance and NYU professor Ulrich Baer’s postmodern dismissal of First Amendment protections frame a broader push to silence dissent under "hate speech" pretexts, despite Snyder v. Phelps affirming free speech for offensive speech. The episode ties this to generational relativism, quoting Curb Your Enthusiasm’s trivialization of Holocaust suffering, and contrasts it with Newt Gingrich’s claim the left silences opponents due to political weakness. Closing with The Grifters and a defiant sign-off from Oberlin, it leaves listeners questioning whether free speech is eroding under postmodernism’s rejection of objective truth—or if the fight for dissent is the last bastion against ideological tyranny. [Automatically generated summary]
The 100th day of the Trump administration is fast approaching, and that means it will have been 100 days since Donald Trump took office and that the first hundred days of his administration will be over and the word 100 will be said many times, maybe even 100.
President Trump made many promises about what he would accomplish in this period.
He promised to repeal Obamacare, lower taxes, wipe out ISIS, get in a couple of rounds of golf, draw a funny mustache on the White House portrait of Barack Obama, install cable service on Mars so he can continue to watch Fox and Friends even after the North Koreans make Earth uninhabitable, and of course, issue new uniforms for NATO leaders modeled on those in the final scene of The Music Man.
Now, some slimy elite newsworms in the mainstream media are complaining that, with the exception of the golf and drawing the funny mustache on Obama's portrait, Trump has not fulfilled his promises in his first 100 days, which are so very urgent because those 100 days have the word 100 in them, which is urgent because it's 100.
On the other side, true freedom-loving Americans point out that Donald Trump has elevated a constitutionalist to the Supreme Court and that the Obama mustache was kind of a hoot, just saying.
Now, to be fair to both sides, except for the mainstream media, because I mean, let's examine the true Trump accomplishments.
In his first 100 days, Donald Trump has succeeded in not appointing a Supreme Court justice who would destroy the First Amendment in order to get back at those nasty Citizens United people who had the unmitigated gall to make a mean video about Hillary Clinton, saying she wouldn't have been as great a president as she's been pretending to be in her bathroom mirror since she was 11 years old.
Trump has also managed against all odds not to appoint a Supreme Court justice who would erase the Second Amendment in the belief that guns are icky and who needs them when you've got perfectly good bodyguards who can carry guns for you.
Trump has also succeeded in not deposing a bunch of overseas tyrants and leaving utter chaos in their weight.
He hasn't opened our borders to every drug lord with an accent out of Treasurer of Sierra Madre who wants to set up shop in Phoenix, and he hasn't worn colorless pantsuits while making speeches in a screechy voice that sounds like a tomcat mating with a pterodactyl.
Now, sure, some might say that it's not enough just to point out that Donald Trump isn't Hillary Clinton.
And I'm sure they must mean something by that, but I can't imagine what it is.
In conclusion, I think we can safely say that this first 100 days of the Donald Trump presidency has been the single greatest 100 days that ever happened instead of the 100 days that would have happened if Donald Trump hadn't been president for the last 100 days.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Years are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is ippitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Exploring Skillshare Videos00:02:53
All right, so I'm here in Oberlin, Ohio, to speak at the college.
And very, very, it's a beautiful town, but I have to say, it's got a strange kind of vibe because it's obviously this is one of the liberal enclaves of the world and very politically correct.
So the town looks like a 1950s Ohio town.
It's all kind of very well preserved.
There's a five and dime.
There's a, you know, all kinds of church.
There's all the sorts of things you would expect to see in like, you know, a 1950s TV show about Ohio.
But everything has this patina of political correctness on it.
So in the town square, there are four flags flying together.
It's the American flag, the Ohio flag, and then the gay rainbow flag and the UN flag.
So you know that you've landed in Oberlin.
It's a very, very weird vibe.
Very pretty, but very weird.
I'm looking forward to seeing the students later and talking to them.
Meanwhile, I've been in my beautiful hotel room, which you can see behind me, and I've been puttering around with this Skillshare program that is now our new sponsor.
It is this really interesting set of videos that they're instructional videos about just about anything you want.
So like if you're looking to move up in your job at work, or you're looking to change your job, or you're just looking to adopt a new hobby, there are over 15,000 classes in design, business, and more, just about anything you can think of on this website that give you little short videos.
You can watch them for a few minutes and then go on to the next one or change your mind.
But you can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography, and you have unlimited access to the whole thing for a low monthly price.
You don't have to pay per class ever again.
Like, in other words, you don't have to be afraid you're going to click on a new class and say, oh, now I want to learn calligraphy and click on that class.
And oh, yes, that's an extra fee.
It's all for one fee.
So I've been kidding around with it because I wanted to test it out for the audience.
I didn't want to just sell it to you if I didn't think it was good.
So I went to all the writing classes because I remembered what it was like to be an aspiring writer and feel that it was just this kind of dark wall between you and success.
You didn't know how the business worked.
You didn't know where to go.
So I tried it out, just listened to all the writing advice, and it was good.
You know, it was really good.
Very short, you know, three-minute videos telling you how to prepare to be a writer, what kinds of mental discipline you need, how to set a time and space for your writing.
Really totally useful things.
I wish I had had the videos when I was starting out.
And even some stuff I may actually use myself, like how to market things.
So it's really a useful, useful site, and you can try it for free because you are listening to me.
If you are listening to me, Skillshare is giving my listeners a month of unlimited access to the site.
So you go to www.skillshare.com slash Andrew, and you can get over 15,000 classes on just about every subject you can imagine, and it's free for one month.
Skillshare.com.
Good stuff.
Why Free Speech Matters00:15:37
All right, so I'm giving this speech later on.
And my speech is going to be about this fight that we're in over the narrative.
Because even though I'm certainly hoping there's not going to be any trouble here, I'm not expecting any trouble here.
But, you know, you know, you're following what's happening to Ann Coulter in Berkeley.
She may pull out of the speech she was going to give.
She said she was going to give it in public, and the police basically just said, we're not going to protect you from these fascists who call themselves anti-fascists but are fascists who are shutting down the speech.
And it's really, I mean, it's gotten to be absurd because it's happening to all my friends.
I mean, Heather McDonald, Charles Murray is the one I don't know, and obviously it's happening to Ben Shapiro.
We at the Daily Wire could understand why anybody would chase Shapiro out of town.
But that's just personal.
You know, I think he should be allowed to say what he has to say.
But, you know, the thing that is really disturbing to me is not that a bunch of punk kids or even a bunch of outside agitators are going into these places and shutting down free speech.
What is really disturbing is that now the mainstream left is trying to legitimize this idea that you can censor speech, that the First Amendment doesn't cover speech that they happen to disagree with.
And of course, they call it hate speech because they live in this very convenient world where everything that they disagree with is hate.
They are the bastions of love.
You can always tell the bastion of love because he's wearing a balaclava mask and hitting you with a club.
That's how you can tell the real lovers of the world.
And they think that everything that they disagree with is hate.
So now they have this new meme they're sending out that hate speech is not free speech.
Hate speech is not covered by the First Amendment, which is totally untrue, but it's coming from very high-level sources.
So Howard Dean, the former DNC chair, former governor of Maine, tweets out hate speech is not free speech.
Hate speech can be hate speech like Ann Coulter.
That's who he's referring to, can be censored.
And here he is explaining his completely ridiculous reasoning.
So there's several things to think about.
One, the United States has the most far-reaching protections on speech of any country in the world.
Two, it's not absolute.
Three, there are three support case court cases, Supreme Court cases, that you need to know about.
One, the most recent is a John Roberts opinion that said the Phelps people, that church out in Kansas, had the right to picket horrible, offensive with signs, military funerals.
Two, in 2002, there was a Supreme Court that said that cross-bordering was illegal because it could incite violence.
And three, the Chaplinsky case in 1942 said that speech was not permitted if it included fighting words that were likely to incite violence.
So this is not a clear-cut carrying on the way the right does.
The right loves to be able to say anything they like, no matter how offensive it is.
Well, Ann Coulter has used words that you cannot use on television to describe Jews, blacks, gays, Muslims, immigrants, and Hispanics.
I think there's a case to be made that that invokes the Chaplinsky decision, which is fighting words likely to incite violence.
And I think Berkeley is within its rights to make the decision that it puts their campus in danger if they have her there.
Completely untrue.
Every word out of his mouth, including the ands and buts, were completely untrue.
First of all, the most offensive thing about this is defining speech you disagree with as hate speech.
So the minute they started with hate speeches and free speech, that's ridiculous.
Secondly, even what he was saying made no sense.
The Supreme Court cases that he was citing, they did allow Westboro Baptist Church to picket a gay Marines funeral, which is about as hateful as you can get.
I mean, that's something that I would find genuinely hateful, but the Supreme Court said it was within the realm of free speech.
So that I don't see even why he was citing that.
In the crossburning case, what the Supreme Court did was they struck down a law banning all crossburning because they said you can't ban it altogether because it is speech.
What they said was you can prevent it if it's intimidation.
So it's not free speech for me to say, you know, if you walk into my, if you walk down the street, I'm going to kill you.
You know, that's a threat.
You can't do that.
And the fighting words case, again, that has been limited to essentially to threats or the kind of thing that I might shout directly into your face, which, you know, would be almost disturbing the peace or something like that.
It has nothing to do with the political opinions of people like Ann Coulter.
So every word that he said was completely untrue.
Now, there's some people on the left, Bernie Sanders has been standing up for free speech, which is good to hear.
Bill Maher, here's Bill Maher talking about the Berkeley thing.
But Berkeley, you know, used to be the cradle of free speech, and now it's just the cradle for babies.
And I feel like, you know, this goes on all over the country on campus, is they invite someone to speak who's not exactly what liberals want to hear, and they want to shut her down.
I feel like this is the liberals' version of book burning.
And it's got to stop.
Howard Dean tweeted today about this: hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment.
Yes, it is.
Threats are not protected by the First Amendment.
This is why the Supreme Court said the Nazis could march in Skokie.
They're a hateful bunch.
But that's what the First Amendment means.
It doesn't mean just shut up and agree with me.
Yeah, well, you know, I mean, Maher, I've always respected him for this.
He's always had Ann Coulter on his show.
He's always, we always used to have Andrew Breitbart on his show.
He's a guy who actually does appreciate free speech and stand up for it all the time.
And that's great.
If you listen to Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, she sort of defends, I mean, free speech is the cornerstone of everything we hold dear.
It is the American way.
It is the thing that makes America America.
Free speech.
There's a reason they put it in the First Amendment.
It is the most important right we have because without it, you don't have any freedoms at all, really.
So here's Elizabeth Warren kind of skirting the issue a little bit, talking to Jake Tapper.
Former Vermont governor and DNC chair Howard Dean tweeted last week: quote: Hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment.
Is that true?
You know, look, Anne Coulter has just gotten a much bigger platform because someone tried to deny her a chance to speak.
My view is: let her speak and just don't show up.
If you don't like it, don't show up.
Yeah, if you don't like it, don't show up, is absolutely true.
But on the other hand, I didn't hear a ringing endorsement of the First Amendment either.
But the thing that's really appalling, and John Molte has a good piece about this up on the Daily Wire, the thing that is really appalling is the New York Times and the National Review, I think it is, the famous left-wing journal.
That's not, that's National Review, it was the right-wing journal.
Who am I thinking of?
I can't remember now, but it doesn't matter.
It's their famous left-wing journal, have published articles explaining why universities have the right to censor speech.
The one in the New York Times, it's virtually illiterate, but it's by Ulrich Baer, who is the vice provost for faculty, arts, humanities, and diversity.
And he's a professor of comparative literature at NYU, all right?
And he writes, during the 1980s and 90s, a shift occurred in American culture.
Personal experience and testimony, especially of suffering and oppression, began to challenge the primacy of argument.
Now, think about that for a minute.
Personal experience and testimony began to challenge the primacy of argument.
So in other words, if you can say how much you've suffered, logic, objective truth, no longer matters.
He goes on to say, freedom of expression became a flashpoint in this shift.
Then as now, both liberals and conservatives were wary of privileging personal experience with its powerful emotional impact over reason and argument, which some fear will bring an end to civilization or at least to freedom of speech.
My view, and this does not, he says, represent the views of NYU, is that we should resist the temptation to rehash these debates.
Doing so would overlook the fact that a thorough generational shift has occurred.
In other words, the free speech toothpaste is out of the tube and we can't put it back in.
Widespread caricatures of students as overly sensitive fail to acknowledge the philosophical work that was carried out, especially in the 80s and 90s, to legitimate experience over logical argument.
So he then quotes the philosopher Jean-François Léotard, Lyotard, Libtard, I guess he should be called, best known for his prescient analysis and the postmodern condition of how public discourse discards the categories of true, false, and just-unjust in favor of valuing the mere fact that something is being communicated.
Examine the tension between experience and argument in a different way.
You know what this reminds me of?
This reminds me of that wonderful show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, curb your enthusiasm, the terrible suffering of these college students.
Trump's argument.
And it reminds me of that show.
There was an episode, one of the funniest things I've ever seen on television.
There was an episode in which they invited over a bunch of survivors, Holocaust survivors, but one person misunderstood and invited a guy from the show, Survivor, a guy who had won the show Survivor.
And the kid who had been on Survivor started to argue with the Holocaust survivors about who had been through a worse experience.
Here's a short clip of this.
I think it's hilarious.
It was harrowing.
You come across a Taipan on the trail, you get bit, you're dead.
30 minutes flat.
I'll tell you, that's a very interesting story.
Let me tell you.
I was in a concentration camp.
You never even suffered one minute in your life compared to what I went through.
Look, I'm saying we spent 42 days trying to survive.
We had very little rations, no snacks.
Snacks?
What are you talking about snacks?
We didn't eat sometimes for a week, for a month.
We've ate nothing.
I went from 100%.
I mean, I couldn't even work out when I was over there.
They certainly didn't have a gym.
I wanted.
I mean, I wore my sneakers out.
And then the next thing you know, I've got a pair of flip-flops.
Flip-flops.
We slip on the ground on the dirt, okay?
118 degrees during the day, 98 at night with 98% humidity.
45 degrees below zero.
Did you guys have a bathroom?
A bedroom.
We didn't have a bathroom.
We had 12 people at a time with gold and shit.
Well, I'm sure you had toilet paper.
We had newspaper.
We had mosquitoes.
Absolutely.
You see this glass eye?
Have you even seen the show?
Did you ever see our show?
All right, listen, we have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, but over on thedailywire.com, where the show will continue, it's Mailbag Day.
I almost forgot to mention we're going to answer all your questions.
Our answers are 100% guaranteed correct and guaranteed also to change your life, possibly for the better.
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So all these people, right, they've suffered so much.
I mean, they've suffered just so much by being marginalized.
It's really painful when you get marginalized.
You know, that margin just kind of hits you right upside the head.
And it just really makes.
And so any speech that follows that really has to be censored because you're just suffering so much.
So Newt Gingrich comes out and he says that he believes this is because they are losing.
He believes the left is doing this, trying to silence voices because they're losing the political argument.
And he's talking to Sean Hannity, who, of course, has just been accused.
All these guys at Fox News, Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly, have lost their jobs because they're being accused of harassing women.
And so a woman accused Hannity of harassing her, and she immediately backed down when Hannity threatened to sue because Hannity does not, I don't know him well, but he does not strike me as a guy who goes around harassing anybody.
And she immediately backed down.
So Newt Gingrich is talking to Sean about why he feels the left is doing this.
They are so shocked that they lost in November and they can't believe it's because they are out of touch because they're dangerous because their ideas are fantasies.
Therefore, it's our fault.
We're cheating somehow.
And there's a war against Fox News for a practical reason.
Fox News is the one place where you get reasonably accurate coverage of Donald J. Trump.
If you're the New York Times or CBS News or the Washington Post, you would love to live in a world with no Fox News.
And so there's a war, literally a war going on with money being raised to hire lawyers, to set up fights, to do investigations.
So you're a piece of that action.
But you're also a piece of this much broader action that all across America, the fascist left has decided that they have to shut us up because we're winning the argument and we're winning elections and things ain't going the way they thought they would.
So that's Newt saying it's basically a political problem they've got there.
We're winning the argument and so they have to silence speech.
But I really think it goes beyond that.
I mean, I think that really is ever since the Soviet Union fell and the great experiment of leftism collapsed and 9-11 also destroyed the philosophy of multiculturalism.
Ever since then, leftists have spread out through the universities teaching these kids that there's no such thing as objective truth.
You didn't really see the Soviet Union fall.
So, you know, as long as there's no such thing as objective truth, then socialism continues to work.
And this was really the philosophy.
And as the philosophy of these kids at colleges are echoing, you know, over Pomona, where they almost rioted to stop my friend Heather MacDonald from speaking, a bunch of kids wrote to the administration and said, no, you know, objective truth is just for white men.
You know, white males invented this to oppress us.
And this is the feminists have been saying the same thing.
So if there is no objective truth, only the narrative matters, if you want to control the narrative, then you have to use force because obviously reality is going to intrude.
You know, as Ben keeps saying, facts don't care about your feelings, so the facts are going to keep rising to the surface against your narrative.
You've got to silence them.
And that's really what's going on, I think.
And it really puts an onus on us to keep speaking no matter what and to not be not backed down.
You know, I just want to end talking about this and then we'll get to the mailbag, but I want to end talking about this with a little clip of Glenn Thrush, who is from the New York Times, and shocked me by giving credit to Donald Trump for being better about free speech than Barack Obama.
Here is Glenn Thrush from the New York Times.
Yeah, I do want to give Trump credit on things.
I think one of the things that I think he's doing better than Barack Obama are these press conferences and his outreach to individual reporters, even for organizations like my own that he criticizes.
I think, you know, people, we can't fall into this trap of harkening back to the Obama era as if it was this golden age.
When Obama had press conferences, he had a single piece of white paper and he had six or seven organizations that he had pre-selected to call upon.
And a lot of them were pretty favorable to him too, you know, generically.
And I think Trump's free-ranging press conferences, I think, are a lot more democratic than the way that Obama conducted them.
Reflections on Humor and Liberty00:12:20
What?
Donald Trump, good words for Donald Trump from a reporter at the New York Times.
But of course it's true.
Of course it's true.
You heard Howard Dean say it.
Those conservatives, they want to go around, have people go around saying anything they want.
That's exactly right, Howard.
That's exactly what we want.
We call it free speech.
We call it the First Amendment.
We call it America.
Don't like it?
Leave, brother.
All right, let's move to the mailbag.
I was going to say, where's Lindsay?
Just because I leave town, Lindsay disappears.
All right, we've got some really good questions from Michael, Dear the Enlightened One with Too Many Titles.
I can't have too many titles, Michael.
I mean, that's how enlightened I am.
He says, I shall call you dude.
All right.
Anyway, I have had discussions concerning the humanity of Jesus Christ, and I point out that Jesus in the Bible never laughs.
Is this due to the lack of laughter?
Did he not laugh?
Or did the scribes purposely leave it out?
I find it very interesting that they would leave this human trait out of the Bible.
This is a great question.
And I want to preface everything I say by reminding you that I'm not a theologian.
These are my reflections on this question which has come up.
G.K. Chesterton writes about it in Orthodoxy, I think.
He writes about the fact, he says, I think God hides something from us, and I wonder if it might be his mirth.
Does God hide his mirth from us?
Because it is interesting that in the New Testament, there really is no humor except one place where Paul in one of the letters says something, I wish you could be like me, except not in chains, because he's in prison.
And I guess that was kind of a snarky remark.
Here's what I think.
I think it's possible that they left it out.
You know, this is a very serious business they were dealing with, and so they didn't want to put in the moments when they were just hanging out and kidding around.
But I think it's also possible, also something else is possible.
Obviously, I love to joke around and I kid around a lot.
And one of the things I've often thought is that humor is an evidence of our fallen state.
What things are funny?
The thing that is essentially funny behind almost all humor is the high-low divide, going from its most basic, its most basic form of a guy who slips on a banana peel.
Well, it's funny to see a guy slip on a banana peel, especially if he's dressed in a tuxedo, you know, and wearing a derby and carrying an umbrella and he slips on a banana peel.
That's very funny.
When the Monty Python guys would do the funny walks, it was because they were British and stiff and they would do these funny walks, and that was really funny.
There's that low-high divide.
And that continues to be true, even for the kind of humor that I specialize in, which is pointing out the absurdity of people.
It's the high-low divide between rationality.
We know we're supposed to be rational, but we know we're often not rational.
And as I've commented even recently, evil itself would be funny if there weren't so much human suffering involved.
So that humor comes about by the fact that we know we're supposed to be something better than we are.
And I think that it's entirely possible if you are not in a fallen state, as Jesus Christ was not in a fallen state, you may have something higher than humor, a kind of bliss maybe, a kind of joy that doesn't require humor to express itself.
Humor may be something that you only have in your fallen state.
In the same way that marriage, you know, Christ says there's no marrying in heaven.
I don't think that that means there's no loving in heaven.
I don't think that that means there's no conjoining in heaven.
I think it simply means that marriage is the fallen version of something that's far, far better in heaven.
And I think humor may be the fallen version of something that's far, far better in heaven.
That strikes me as a possibility.
And that's just my speculation, but there it is.
All right.
Yo, a.k.
Since you respect facts and science and the truth, uh-oh, I hate facts and science and the truth.
All right, since I respect facts and science and the truth, I am sure you understand that love, as it is referred to, is fundamentally a chemical reaction in our brains to a stimulus such as an attractive woman that causes humans to want to breed.
Can you connect that science and Christianity to the idea of love and marriage and the seemingly negative situation it could place the members of Christianity?
In other words, does that not debunk Christianity?
I really hope that made sense.
Keep it real, G, from Blake in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Well, Blake, there's a famous proposition in logic that if your premise is false, everything you say after it will be true.
If you say if the grass is red, therefore pigs can fly, that will be true, because if the grass is red, pigs can fly, but the grass isn't red.
And I challenge the premise that love is fundamentally a chemical reaction.
I challenge the entire premise that the chemical reactions and electrical reactions that take place in our body are the causes of the things we feel.
So this is this materialist view of humankind, that we're just a bag of chemicals, we're just a series of electric sparks.
This materialist view has seeped into our language where we accept it without thinking.
So we say, I have an adrenaline rush instead of I got excited.
But think about that for a minute.
When you have an adrenaline rush, is that because the computer in your mind is registering certain things that set off a liquid explosion of adrenaline and that's why that's what causes you to feel the excitement?
Or is it because you feel excitement and your body expresses that excitement by ejecting adrenaline?
Either one of those explanations makes perfect sense, but let me ask you which one of them feels more like the life you're living.
There are really only two ways to think about this.
Either your body, I've talked about this Monday, I guess, either your body is expressing something spiritual.
It's a language for expressing something spiritual.
And everything that happens is material.
Everything that happens in the world is material, but is it expressing something spiritual?
If it's not, then your entire personality, your entire self, is an illusion.
There's no you there.
And when scientists say this, and many scientists do say it, that the you of you is an hallucination.
My question is, well, who is experiencing the hallucination?
Who is having the hallucination?
I think it's more like life.
It is more like reality to think of ourselves as an idea.
So you have an idea.
Let's say the idea is liberty, okay?
Liberty is not the word liberty.
We can use other words.
Freedom, we can use words in other language.
We can express the thought in a sentence.
So it's not the word.
It's not the spark in our brains that caused the idea to be there.
It's not the fact that whether or not we're free, whether we're here, whether we're thinking it or not, the idea of liberty continues to exist.
But when a man is free, then he embodies liberty, and liberty becomes a real thing.
Just like two plus two equals four has no practical meaning until you have two pennies and two pennies and then you get four pennies.
So ideas, ideas have no material reality, but we can only experience them in physical form.
And I believe the same thing is true of you, Blake, from Charlotte, North Carolina.
You, the you of Blake, are your body is an expression of an idea in the mind of God, and that is your soul.
That is who you are.
That love that you feel is not the result of chemicals being released in your brain.
That love, if it is love, is expressed, is caused by your love, and the chemicals are caused by your feeling the love.
It's the other way around.
Otherwise, you couldn't think you were in love with someone and not be in love with someone.
Sometimes when those chemicals get released, you feel a lot of love, but it turns out it's not to be, it's not love.
It's only when your body gets it right and expresses the idea correctly that you wind up with a great wife like mine.
All right, I'll do one more and then I've got to stop.
Well, here's a quick one from Amadeo.
Dear philosopher King Clavin, I was raised Catholic, but became an atheist after 12 years of Catholic school.
I've been wanting to read your book, The Great Good Thing, A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ, but I'm afraid of some of the questions it may make me ask.
Any advice on convincing myself to pick it up?
Yeah, cowboy up, dude.
Read the book.
Read the book.
Go online, buy the book, and read the book.
Your name is Amadeo.
It means loving God.
So just read the book and you will live up to your name.
All right.
From David, Dear Andrew, regarding your thoughts on the movie Silence, why should persecuted Christians choose to die instead of publicly renouncing their faith?
Wouldn't they be better off if they just pretended to renounce the faith?
You know, I've had some more thoughts.
It's really not my thoughts.
My son Spencer made a really good point about silence in which he pointed out that the priest had no right to save the Japanese from the torture that they themselves had signed on for.
That was a very patriarchal and condescending thing to do, that if they wanted to die and suffer for their Christianity, that he should have let them do it.
He had no right to pronounce on the goodness or the realness of their Japanese Christianity.
I thought that actually undermines the entire thought processes of the movie, or at least of the priest in the movie.
Why should you die?
Well, I mean, this is Christianity spread because people were willing to die, because they were willing to live as if their bodies were expressions of their souls, even unto death.
It's a very powerful statement.
It is refusing to allow your freedom to be taken away.
People die for freedom.
People die for faith, which is also dying for freedom.
So, you know, he pays your money and you takes your choice.
It's a hard choice to make, but that's why, if you're asking why.
All right, that's the mailbag.
Good questions.
Finally, finally, before I sign off from Oberlin, Stuff I Like.
And, you know, I can't remember if I've ever done this film before, but we were talking about the Grifter.
We were talking about The Vanishing, so I thought I'd stick with some slightly obscure but excellent crime films.
The Grifters, 1990, by Stephen Frears.
Have I ever done this before?
It's based on a Jim Thompson novel, the guy who wrote The Killer Inside Me.
Yeah, I don't think I have done this before.
It's just terrific.
If you have never seen The Grifters, it's John Cusack, Angelica Houston, and Annette Benning.
Annette Benning, I should add, doing one of the great nude scenes in movies in The Grifters.
It's about John Cusack plays a Grifter con man who has a Grifter mom and a Grifter girlfriend, and he gets kind of caught between them.
The script is written by Donald E. Westlake, one of the great American crime writers, died a few years back.
And it really is a terrific piece of work.
Here is one.
Let's take one look at one scene.
Angelica Houston plays the tough mother of John Cusack.
She's willing to do anything to get what she wants, which is usually money.
Here she is dealing with a guy in a diner who tries to pick her up.
A beautiful woman like you, you shouldn't eat alone.
Go away.
What do you want to eat alone for?
Can I have some more coffee, please?
Going up.
We could have coffee together.
My name's Kenny.
Your pal wants you.
Let him find his own pretty woman.
This fella bothering you, miss.
Yes.
Why don't you go back there and just go sit down.
I'll sit here.
Oh!
Oh!
Oh, God.
You do it.
You all right?
You didn't need to do that.
I thought I did.
You should take better care of your friends.
Get out of here.
Okay.
I'm sorry a lady can't eat in here without being bothered.
Sorry.
She elbows him in the throat for those of you who couldn't see it.
All right, that's it for me.
I'm going to get back on a plane early tomorrow morning and be back.
We'll do the show a little later tomorrow, but we will do it as soon as I return from Ohio, assuming that I myself am not carried away by antifa fascists in their balaclavas.
But if I am so long, it's been nice knowing you.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Claven Show and we will see you again tomorrow.