Ep. 307 dissects Trump’s "long game"—$21B defense boosts, $400K grad stipends mocked as performative activism, and 13 Obama-era rules reversed via Congressional Review Act—while critiquing leftist media and academia. Andrew Clavin rejects moral relativism, calling it a Pilate-esque cop-out, and contrasts The American President’s liberal ideals with today’s safe-space mobs, warning the right must dominate narratives or risk cultural surrender. [Automatically generated summary]
Yale graduate students are on a symbolic hunger strike in order to force the university to give them more stuff.
Now you may ask, what's a symbolic hunger strike?
And also, when did Yale start accepting idiot clowns at their university?
Is there some kind of new idiot clown department where they train idiot clowns so they can be in the stupid circus for stupid people?
Well, I'm not sure about the answer to all those other questions, but a symbolic hunger strike is a hunger strike where you don't eat unless you get hungry.
Then you eat.
So let's say after waking up like any normal graduate student at the crack of 10 a.m., you smoke a quick doobie and then motor skateboard down to Blue State Coffee, the socially conscious cafe where you enjoy a free-range egg and bacon sandwich on a sesame bagel in the self-righteous knowledge that some portion of the price will be donated to the New Haven Pride Center to make sure the gay people at Yale don't run out of pride because we wouldn't want that.
Then after completing your breakfast with a healthful yogurt parfait topped with gluten-free almond granola, you motorboard down to the strike line where you heroically don't eat a single thing until, oh, it gets to be around noon when you start in feeling just a tad peckish and then it's off for a quick pizza before you get down to the hard work of being a graduate student, which is grading papers and teaching a class if it happens to be Thursday.
And lest you think the symbolic suffering of this symbolic strike is not in a symbolically worthwhile cause, let me point out that for all this effort you're putting in, molding the minds of the young while simultaneously working on your thesis entitled Intersectional Trends of Transgender Oppression in last week's episode of The Walking Dead,
you only receive a stipend of over $30,000 a year, plus the full $40,000 a year for tuition, plus health care and other benefits amounting to nearly $400,000 a year for doing what you do, which is pretending to be on a hunger strike.
But all this is beside the point.
You see, a modern graduate student at Yale may be the single most privileged human being to have ever existed in the whole long course of history, including those ancient Roman guys who used to lie around on cushions and drink goblets of wine while pinching dancing girls.
So you have to stage a symbolic hunger strike to demonstrate that you are so symbolically courageous in the face of symbolic oppression that you're almost some kind of symbolic hero whose symbolic actions symbolize the highest symbols of symbolic human achievement.
In other words, you're a leftist, symbolically courageous in the symbolic fight against symbolic hardships that don't exist.
So, grad students of Yale, we here at the Andrew Clavin Show, support your symbolic hunger strike.
And if you're headed to lunch, pick up a pizza for me.
After all, it's not like you're busy doing anything else.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Money Talks00:13:52
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped dipsy-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.
It's mailbag day.
Yeah, yeah.
I wish they wouldn't drink before the show starts.
It's mailbag.
We have a couple of great questions in the mailbag.
I am tempted to just skip the politics and get right to them, but I'm not going to.
And that means that if you're on Facebook and YouTube, you will miss it because after about 15 minutes, you will be cast out into the exterior darkness where, as I'm sure you know, there is great wailing and gnashing of teeth.
But if you come over to thedailywire.com, you can not only hear the rest of the show, you could subscribe and watch the rest of the show.
And then next week, you could be in the mailbag where it's a little stuffy, but you get to ask some questions.
Let us talk for just a moment.
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So yesterday, I unloaded on the budget like just about every other right-winger in America, right?
You know, we all went a little bit nuts on this budget.
And I wanted to step back for a minute because this is one of the problems with right-wing politics is because right-wingers never think about the long game.
Everything is always a crisis.
Everything is always a disaster.
We've always been betrayed.
We never step back and look at whether we're winning or losing the long game.
And the long game is all important because the long game is what the left plays so brilliantly well.
The long game is the culture.
The long game is the academy.
The long game is the news media.
All the things that shape public opinion because as our founders knew, no law stands up.
Bless you.
No law stands up against, I hope you have life insurance, and I hope I'm the beneficiary.
No law stands up against public opinion.
If public opinion turns against free speech, the First Amendment isn't going to help you one little bit, okay?
So I just want to step back a little bit and look at this.
Yesterday, the Trump pyre struck back, basically.
They started to defend their budget, and they said that they got rolled kind of by the Democrats in the press, not in the budget negotiations.
So let's take a look at some of the things that they were talking about.
First, let's take a look at what Rush Limbaugh had Mike Pence on, and it was a fair deal.
Like, Rush really went out at him.
He said, why should we vote for Republicans if this is all we're going to get?
And here's one of their exchanges.
If I'm the Democrats, $21 billion, $15 billion for defense that was not originally authorized, that's a small price to pay for continuing to fund refugee resettlement, continuing to fund Planned Parenthood, continuing to fund sanctuary cities, continuing to fund the EPA and not build the wall.
The Democrats clearly think this is a big win, and they're confident they can block Trump's agenda after this spending bill for the rest of Trump's term.
There isn't anything of the president's agenda in this budget, and people are beginning to ask, when's that going to happen?
If you're going to shut it down in September, why not now?
If you complain about 60 votes today, why not go budget reconciliation for 51 votes and smoke them?
Yes.
Let me be real clear.
The number one priority of President Trump is to rebuild our military, to restore the arsenal of democracy.
And I got to tell you, to get Democrats in Washington, D.C. to agree to a $21 billion increase in a short-term budget bill.
And you know, the president's calling for the largest increase in military spending since the Reagan administration in the upcoming budget, I think is no small accomplishment.
Also, this bill includes the largest increase in border security funding in 10 years.
Okay, so this is the important thing here is that the deal on sequestration was that you couldn't, for every dime that you spent on the military, you had to spend money on social programs.
And that was part of Obama's plan, A, to overwhelm us with social programs, and B, to destroy our military, which he was doing an excellent, excellent job of.
So they broke that.
They broke the hold of that, and that's important.
Trump also points out that even though he didn't, he was talking for the Air Force Academy, and he points out that even though he didn't get money for the wall, he got a lot of money for increased border security.
So here's the second Trump cut, Trump on the board.
We achieved the single largest increase in border security funding in 10 years.
So we have more money now for the border than we've gotten in 10 years.
The Democrats didn't tell you that.
They forgot.
In their notes, they forgot to tell you that.
With enough money to make a down payment on the border wall, I think they'll go back and check their papers.
This includes swiftly replacing ineffective and failing fencing and walls with an unbreakable barrier.
So we're putting up a lot of new walls in certain areas.
We're putting up a tremendous amount of money to fix the existing structures that we have, some of which we can keep into the future.
They're in good shape, but we have to bring them back to the highest level.
We'll be doing that with this payment.
Okay, so that's, you know, this is his chance to make his plea.
Because, you know, what they're complaining about, what they're complaining about is they went down and they sat down and they had bipartisan negotiations.
They needed the extra votes to pass this thing.
And then the Democrats ran out and said, we win, we win, we win.
And of course, whatever the Democrats say gets echoed by the press.
So now they're all kind of feeling like they got a little bit stabbed in the back.
But that's politics.
I mean, that's the Democrats doing a good job at what they do.
But according to the Wall Street Journal, which has been very good about this stuff, despite their claims, Democrats did not preserve funding for Planned Parenthood.
Now, this is a big one because obviously I don't want my tax dollars going to these people.
But the bill contains no direct dollars for that group, but rather funds grants that will be issued by Health and Human Services, which is now unlikely to approve any for Planned Parenthood.
So that's a little bit different than we heard.
It all depends now on where those grants go and what they're used for.
Somebody asked me in the mailbag if they're not allowed to use the money for, even Planned Parenthood is not allowed to use the money for abortions, but that's ridiculous.
Money is fungible.
It doesn't matter whether you give it to Planned Parent, you give it to an abortion provider.
It doesn't matter what they use it for.
They're just shifting other money to the abortion, so it doesn't really matter.
Most of the domestic funding increases and decreases are GOP priorities.
The bill contains $45 million to fund three more years of Washington, D.C.'s popular school voucher program, as well as money for Western wildfire fighting and disaster-related repairs at NASA.
Conversely, the bill zeroes out dollars to the International Green Climate Fund set up as part of the Paris Climate Accord, and it rescinds, consolidates, or terminates more than 150 federal programs or initiatives, including such high priorities as the Crystal for Columbus Fellowship, on and on.
The important thing here, what the bill doesn't do.
So in other words, it was a negotiation, right?
The bill was almost finished by the time it got, by the time Trump came in, it's a negotiation.
But the important thing here is they've got to stop with these omnibus spending bills because nobody can read them.
They used to be in 12 separate appropriation bills and then you would negotiate and you could really get into the weeds and lose on one appropriation bill and win on another.
They've got to get back to that.
And that is not up to Trump.
Obviously, that's up to Congress, but they really have to start talking about that.
But you know, so again, a compromise, not what we want from these guys.
We want them to drain the swamp.
It's not draining the swamp.
It's not changing the way Washington works.
It's just supplying the money to its business as usual.
And that's not why Trump was elected.
So it is a loss overall, but it's not a disaster.
It's just a loss overall.
And that is what, you know, like I said, Trump has shown himself to be very good at the part of government that is like business, but not so good so far at the part of government that's like government.
And hopefully he's going to pick that up, okay?
But let's talk about something else.
You know, a picture came out of Steve Bannon.
Everybody loves Steve Bannon.
I mean, is there a nicer, warmer personality than Steve Bannon?
Steve Bannon took a picture with the conservative rabbi Shmueli, what is his last name?
Gotich?
Let's see.
Anyway, so the rabbi, Shmuly Botich, that's his name, Shmuly Botich.
And so the rabbi tweeted this, and it showed them standing in Bannon's office.
And Drudge picked up the fact, and actually it was the Daily Telegraph that picked it up, and then Drudge repeated it, that Bannon's whiteboard is in back.
And on the whiteboard, it shows a list of all the promises, the pledges, he calls them, that the Trump people made on Obamacare and on immigration with little check marks to show which ones have been fulfilled and then others have not been fulfilled and they're more complicated and legislative.
And I just thought, you know, that speaks so well of the Trump administration and of Bannon that they're keeping track of what they've done and their promises.
And it means something to them.
It's not like Obama who would say one thing and then do something entirely different.
Their promises mean something and they have done a lot of stuff, the stuff that is good.
You know, the New York Times, I think this was about two days ago, they published a Cré de Corps, a cry from the heart.
It's just agony coming out of the New York Times.
It was like music to my ears, okay?
It was just about how Trump is dismantling the Obama legacy.
And you know, at the New York Times, to see the Obama legacy, it's like watching the pyramids fall.
You know, they think Obama had a big legacy.
I've always said that he had very, very little effect on our country.
But just days after the November election, top aides to Donald J. Trump, I'm reading from the New York Times, a former newspaper, huddled with congressional staff members and Speaker Paul Ryan's suite of offices in the Capitol with the objective not to get things done, but to undo them quickly.
For about three months after Inauguration Day, Mr. Trump would have the power to wipe away some of his predecessors' most significant regulations with simple majority votes from his allies in Congress, but the clock was ticking.
An obscure law known as the Congressional Review Act gives lawmakers 60 legislative days to overturn major new regulations issued by federal agencies.
After that window closes, sometime in early May, the process gets much more difficult.
Executive orders by the president can take years to unwind regulations well beyond the important 100-day yardstick for new administrations.
So, in weekly meetings leading up to January 20th, the Trump aides, and you can almost hear the anguish that they're writing this with, the Trump aides and lawmakers worked from a shared Excel spreadsheet to develop a list of possible targets, rules enacted late in Barack Obama's presidency that they viewed as a vast regulatory overreach that was stifling economic growth.
And you will remember at the end of Obama's presidency, he hit the gas on regulations because he knew nobody would stop him, and he just had his foot down on the gas.
He was not expecting this.
The result, and this is the New York Times direct from a former newspaper, the result was a historic reversal of government rules in record time.
Mr. Trump has used the Review Act as a regulatory wrecking ball, signing 13 bills that erased rules on the environment, labor, financial protections, internet privacy, abortion, education, and gun rights.
In the law's 21-year history, it had been used successfully only once before when President George W. Bush reversed a Clinton-era ergonomics rule.
The effort has surpassed its architects' most ambitious hopes.
And that just the rest is liberal tears.
So you know what I had for breakfast this morning.
The rest is just this sobbing.
And these regulations, this is no small thing.
This is the way.
This is the way that we are being controlled by the left.
Hey, I got to stop.
We got to turn off Facebook and YouTube.
So come on over to thedailywire.com because the mailbag is coming up.
So this is no small thing, you know, and some of this stuff is just going on kind of quietly behind the scenes.
Men and Women Revisited00:15:13
And I know, I know we're all watching the healthcare thing, we're all watching the budget deal, and these are big deals, but I'm just saying that conservatives tend to panic and go nuts over every little thing.
You know, we have to take, just step back just a little bit.
You know, after Obama was re-elected, and we were all so depressed that a guy who really would have been a decent middle-of-the-road president, Mitt Romney, had lost to a guy who really was a bad, bad president, I wrote a piece for City Journal called The Long Game, Playing the Long Game.
And you can just put Claven the Long Game in Google and you can read the whole thing.
But basically, I was attacking my fellow conservatives for always talking about the latest disaster and never playing the long game, which is culture.
And I thought I said there are three things that we have to pay attention to.
One is the mainstream media, the news media, that they've just become basically an outlet for Democrat propaganda.
The entertainment industry, and we saw this yesterday with Stephen Colbert, how the entertainment industry basically nails down the biased reporting of the left and the news media.
And my last one was, I thought, was I said religion for intellectuals.
And I wrote, normally I would have said that number three was reforming the academy.
But I believe that this is where the fight for the academy lies.
It is in bringing back the intellectual idea of God, the idea that God, I believe that there was a period after Newton when it made a certain amount of sense to expect that everything was going to become material, that science was going to expose everything.
I think the exact opposite has happened.
I think science has opened onto many, many mysteries.
And I'm not talking about a God of the gaps.
I'm talking about a rational reliance on the moral order that we all know is there.
And I'll be talking about that more in the mailbag.
So I think that what we need is religion for intellectuals.
That's something that I think is happening behind the scenes.
Nobody believes me on this, but I'm telling you, I think there are more and more intellectuals who are gathering together and saying, huh, you know, maybe we have to go back to this, if only as a tradition, maybe we have to go back to the Gospels, if only as a tradition, and see what's there.
I think, you know, it is not right to say that Trump's trolling of the media is a minor deal.
That is not true.
Trump's trolling of the media is a guy who recognized a rotten structure and drove a truck into it.
He has disabled them, and whatever comes in their wake, we hope, is going to be better.
We have to respond, obviously.
And the other thing is with the entertainment media.
We saw this with Colbert.
They are going mad.
They are losing their stuff.
And it is good for us, for them to be exposed.
The Onion had a wonderful, wonderful video joke, a piece of video satire, of a Trump voter who says he has changed his mind because he has been convinced by the Academy.
Let's just play a piece of that.
I voted for Donald Trump.
I voted for Trump because I thought he'd create a better America for everyone.
But after reading 800 or so pages on queer feminist theory, I realize now just how much I've been duped.
You got to understand.
I come from a small steel town in Pennsylvania.
If I had known the foundational texts on intersectional theory, I would have never chanted, lock her up, lock her up, lock her up, lock her up.
We were told Hillary Clinton was the enemy, but it's clear now that the true enemy is a patriarchal capitalistic society that maintains its ascendance by making powerful and ambitious women appear threatening.
Only to protect my status in a system purposefully designed to benefit cassette white men like myself.
Jesus.
When Donald Trump said he would make America great again, it's obvious to me now that he was only trying to play off my own complicity and comfort in an unequal social structure that disproportionately strips women and minorities, particularly trans and gender queer people of color, of their autonomy and seeks to subjugate them to an inverterate and intentionally antagonistic andocratic order.
I get that now after I attended a gender-fluid non-binary poetry slam at Swarthmore.
A couple of other guys from work attended it too.
And now it's all we talk about on the line.
Yeah, just bet it is.
It's all they talk about on the line.
I mean, that is brilliant, brilliant satire because it not only, I mean, it does sort of say that this guy is out of it because I'm sure the people of the Onion agree with the people at Swarthmore, you know, but it also is telling you how out of touch the Democrats are.
They are completely out of touch with most people.
And, you know, one of the things that struck me yesterday when we were talking to the wonderful Christina Hoffsommers is she said that the women, when she speaks, get triggered by the idea that they're not victims, you know?
I'm telling you, the left, I think, is collapsing.
I believe it is collapsing, and I believe that Donald Trump is part of the reason.
You have to remember, I don't care about Donald Trump as a human being.
I only care about him as a force for liberty.
And all I know is I am not, I'm sleeping well right now in terms of my liberty because I do not feel my liberty is under threat.
Yes, I understand he needs some policy victories.
Yes, I understand he can't keep capitulating to the left, and this has to do with Congress as much, if not more, than Trump.
But I just think he is a force that is destroying, I mean, that is helping to destroy the rotten structures of the left.
And the rest is up to us because we have to fill in the culture.
You know, if their culture is going to fall apart, if you think that we are going to replace their culture of Stephen Colbert cursing out the president with anger and with racism and with reactionary, you know, thumping our fists, what we have to sell, what conservatives have to sell, is freedom and joy.
In fact, it's the joy of freedom.
It's the joy of taking care of yourself.
It's the joy of being sexually responsible and living a good life.
So when you get to the end of it, you can say, my children rise up and call me blessed.
My wife hasn't been abandoned.
My husband hasn't been left in the lurch.
You know, it's the joy of living the kind of life that conservatives want you to live where you're responsible for yourself, but you're also free and the joy of God, the joy of worship.
I mean, these are things that we can sell because they are good.
We can sell good stuff.
And these guys have got nothing but their anger and their Balaclava masks and their craziness.
And we can replace them.
I think we are, in fact, beginning, beginning to win the long game.
And I think, you know, Trump has had a hand in it.
I think all in all, he has been, despite my own misgivings about him, I think all in all, he has been a force for good, maybe even in spite of himself.
The mailbag.
Woo!
Yeah!
God, I miss her so much.
All right.
From Jackson, oh, great Clavan intellectual mastermind and drinker of leftist tears.
My mother believes that you are a misogynist because of your attack, your attack on feminism.
Not just one attack, many, many attacks on feminism.
Tell your mom, I have not stopped attacking them.
She says that if women do not play the role that you expect them to, that of caretaker and not that of worker or provider, then you do not like them.
Is her criticism correct?
If so, why is your viewpoint a good viewpoint?
And if not, where does my mother go wrong?
Yeah, your mother is wrong, actually.
She's still your mother, so you've got to be nice to her, but she's completely wrong.
I am an anti-feminist.
I think feminism is a wicked, toxic philosophy that makes women, turns women into victims when they're not.
American women are not victims.
They are some of the most privileged people walking the face of the planet.
And it is hateful toward men, and it is destructive of masculinity, which I think can be a force, which I think the thing about masculinity is I think it is a powerful, powerful force.
It can be a force for evil, as it is right now in the Middle East, or it can be a force for good.
Here is the way I deal with life, okay?
While I'm not a feminist, I am an individualist, right?
I believe each person has the right to make the choices that they want in life, and I respect them insofar as those choices are good, and insofar as they are good.
Here's the thing.
There are two kinds of people, basically.
There's only one really major division in the human race, and that is men and women.
And men and women operate on a complete spectrum.
There are feminine men, there are masculine women, but we would not have the concepts of femininity and masculinity if we had not observed them in men and women, those concepts.
We didn't make those concepts up as instruments of intersectional oppression.
We learned them from watching men and women, because most men are more on the masculine scale, and most women are more on the feminine scale.
All of them are people, and I respect all of them as people.
And I don't respect them by philosophy, although it is my philosophy.
I respect them naturally.
It is the way I feel about people.
I have worked for women.
I have worked with women.
I've loved all different kinds of people.
I mean, I frequently think of the lady who taught me how to fly a plane.
I had many flight instructors because I moved around a lot, but the woman who really taught me how to fly a plane was a five-foot-nothing, scrappy gay girl who I always remember, and I loved her to death.
I mean, I love, seriously, I loved her like a sister.
And I remember once the sun visor on our plane fell apart, and she took a needle-nose pliers out of her back pocket, and she said, ah, when a girl takes pliers out of her pocket, you know you're dealing with a lesbian.
She fixed the thing there.
And one of the reasons I loved her so much, by the way, was as we were flying in one day, I made a mistake and went to pull the choke instead of the throttle, which would have killed us.
I mean, Jay, you're a pilot.
You know, that would have just crashed us nose first into the ground.
And where any male pilot would have screamed, what are you doing, you stupid?
Anyone, you know.
She just put her hand on mine and she said, no, no, sweetheart, not that one.
That's why I like a woman to teach me.
No, so anyway, all of these people are people.
Now, now, I not only react to people as people, I react to them as men and women.
If we believe, as we must believe, that men and women are different, then there must be traits that make them different.
If there are traits that make them different, some of those traits must be good and some of them must be bad.
If some of them are good, I am within my rights as a person, just as a single individual human being, to like those traits that are good more than I like those traits that are bad.
So, recently, I made the point that When a professor forces a student to mouth back leftist things he does not agree with in order to get a good grade, he is compromising his integrity.
And I pointed out that that is a worse, it's always a bad thing to do, but it is a worse thing to do to men because if I had to pick the trait which I thought was most essential for a man to be a man, it would be courageous integrity.
I used to say courage and integrity, but then I realized what I mean is courageous integrity, by which I mean the courage to be what you say you are and to say what you think, no matter what the consequences.
That is to me the measure of a man, and I would say that to a gay man.
I would say it to any kind of man.
I would say, if you do that, you are well on your way to true manhood.
When I am with people who are men, I may respect them for their baseball ability.
I may respect them for their sense of humor.
I may respect them for the job they do.
But I admire them as men if they have courageous integrity.
And those are, in fact, the kinds of men I like to hang out with and smoke cigars with and drink with.
I mean, that is what makes a man a man.
To me, and I think, I actually think that is what makes a man a man.
What makes a woman a woman is different.
Is courageous integrity admirable in a woman?
Yes, it is.
But is it essential to her femininity?
I would say not so much, not as much.
What makes women women to me, I would say, is a kind of tenderness and generosity that men can't even imitate.
I don't know any men that can imitate it.
Now, I will tell you something.
The poet Yeats said that artists, and I am an artist, if there were no women, artists would have no one to talk to.
This is absolutely true.
There are certain things, there are certain places where the circle of being an artist and the circle of being a woman meet, namely in a deep interest in the internal life of human beings.
Okay, this is what women are really good at.
It's also what artists are really good at observing, especially narrative artists like myself.
So I really like the company of women.
I enjoy the company of women, and what I admire in them is tenderness and generosity.
Women have made my life.
Without women, I would not have the life I have.
And that's what I admire in women.
And so, when I see a woman who is a mom and a homemaker, that is the kind of woman that I most admire.
That is the kind of woman who, when she speaks, I suddenly pay even more attention than I pay to others.
Just like I like being with certain kinds of men, those are the kinds of women that I actually like, the kinds who I think will become homemakers and moms, or the kinds who are, or just people who are, for some reason, are not going to become that, but have that feminine trait.
I am allowed my personal take.
This is the thing about feminists, if you listen to them, they don't want you to be able to have your personal take.
I would sit down to lunch with a female CEO, and like I said, I've worked for women and had good experiences.
I wouldn't marry her.
If I were dating again, I would think like, hey, you know, that's not the kind of woman I want to live with.
That is not the woman I want to live with.
You know, like, I don't need to have two, you know, drivingly ambitious, hard-nosed, nasty people.
If I wanted that, I'd marry a dude, you know?
A woman is a woman.
So, what I'm saying is, I respect people's choices.
I respect the jobs they do.
I respect good traits and bad traits in them.
But when I react to men as men and when I react to women as women, I would respect most those traits that I think are most feminine and those traits that I think are most masculine, which has nothing to do, you don't have to care who I respect.
This is America.
You can just say, who cares who I respect?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
It just has to do with me.
So that is my response to your mom.
Tell her, I love her, she's great.
But she's got me wrong.
All right.
From Ross.
Oh, great, General McClavin.
Yes, and I have been promoted to general.
I didn't make that announcement, but that is true.
Would you please share your thoughts on the argument called evolution of morality?
I am a Christian college student and often argue with my atheist friends about morality.
When I say that morality has to come from God, they counter by saying that murder is wrong because our species just evolved to think that.
I seem to have trouble countering this argument.
Well, it is, I love this question because it is the great question in front of us, all right?
When people say that morals evolve, they are talking about relativism.
And I'll explain why I say that.
If, as we discover more about nutrition over time, our science gets better, we discover more about nutrition, people have evolved to be taller and stronger and healthier over time because we've discovered more about nutrition.
When I was growing up, I was tall.
Now I'm not tall anymore because the next generations have come and they're much taller because nutrition has gotten better.
So we've discovered nutrition.
The truths about nutrition were always there.
Inventing Planet Nazi00:06:03
They were always true.
The truths about nutrition were always there.
But we have evolved because of our discoveries into being taller, okay?
So evolution is something that happens to us, right?
It's not something that we discover.
It's not a truth that we discover.
So when you say that morals have evolved, what you were saying is morals are not like nutrition.
They're not facts that we find.
There's not an objective morality that we discover over time.
You are saying it is something that happens to us.
It is what we agree on as being true.
That is what they're saying.
This has been around.
And now, you know, I have to give credit to my son Spencer, okay?
And I don't just quote him because he's my son.
I quote him because he is a brilliant classical scholar who points out that relativism, he points out that relativism is the natural state of thinking man.
It is the natural way.
It has been around Protagoras.
Remember, the Greek philosopher, he said, man is the measure of all things.
And he was the guy that Socrates and Plato were arguing with.
Pontius Pilate said, what is truth?
Meaning the same thing, that is, truth is what we agree on.
Man is the measure of truth.
And it was Jesus who said, eh, not so much, you know?
And it's Jesus and Socrates who have built Western, who built, who are the founding stones of Western civilization because they stood up against relativism.
But what did we do to them?
We killed them, okay?
We killed them.
And we will always want to kill the guy who stands against relativism.
Now, we killed them for a couple of reasons.
I mean, why is relativism important?
Why is relativism something that we like?
Well, two reasons.
One is relativism flatters intellectuals.
Because if things are relative, then intellectuals, you can analyze things into dust.
You can keep breaking them down.
You never hit bottom.
So you can always analyze things into the next little phase.
And that's what intellectuals are good at.
That was kind of Nietzsche, the genealogy of morals.
We don't want to, there is no morality.
There's just a genealogy of morals.
We just take them apart.
That's what intellectuals are good at.
So it flatters the intellect.
But more importantly, I think, is it promises to kill our shame?
Our shame, our guilt is universal.
Freud had to deal with this problem.
Why is everybody guilty?
Why is there this baseline of guilt?
And he invented a story, Freud, that there was some kind of tribe that killed its father and that primal murder has filtered into all of us, okay?
Now, of course, some of us have a different idea.
We believe in the fall of mankind.
And whether you believe that it was literally Adam and Eve or whether you believe that that is a symbolic story of something that happened to all of mankind, we believe that man is in a fallen state.
He is not what he is meant to be.
So there is a ground level of shame.
And relativism promises to get rid of that shame.
It says, no, no, no, you didn't do anything wrong, Mr. Frenchman, when you collaborated with the Nazis.
All you have to do is invent the theory that there's no truth.
The old theory, the old Pontius Pilate, Protagoras theory, invent that theory, and then you won't mind so much that you collaborated with the Nazis.
And that's where some of the postmodern theory that came out of France came from.
It doesn't work.
And that's what we're seeing in the left right now.
The left is now saying, well, I'm not ashamed because I'm such and such.
I'm ashamed because you, society, make me feel ashamed.
Relativism always promises this.
So let's test relativism.
Let's test the relativist theory, okay?
Here is a thought experiment.
Let's take a Nazi torturing an innocent child as our baseline, something that I'm hoping that everybody listening to the show would think like, yeah, that's not so good.
That's not such a good thing.
A Nazi torturing an innocent child.
Let us invent planet Nazi, where everybody's a Nazi, including the innocent child, so that a Nazi torturing an innocent child is thoroughly agreed to by everybody to be the right thing to do, including the child.
He thinks, you know, it's horrible.
He hates it, but he thinks this is as it should be.
Is a Nazi on that planet Nazi, especially if there are no other planets on planet Nazi, is a Nazi torturing an innocent child therefore correct?
Is it morally right?
Now, people like me say no.
No, I don't care how many people say it.
It is always, always wrong.
That is an act of faith.
In fact, I would say that's the only leap of faith.
After you make that leap of faith, everything in the Gospels follows logically.
You have to make that leap of faith.
There is no way around it.
There's no way to say, you know, to prove it.
You cannot prove it.
It is what you believe.
But once you see it, it does make sense of everything else.
Let's say you're a relativist, though.
Let's say you say, no, on that planet, on the planet Nazi, a Nazi torturing a child is right.
I mean, who is there to say it's wrong?
You know, it has evolved to be the right thing, so it says it's wrong.
So that makes, that's who you are now, right?
You are the person who now on planet Nazi thinks, well, this is what's right, right?
Because, you know, I can't be the only person who's right.
It must be that everybody agrees, and so therefore, this is what's right.
Now take that back to planet Earth, okay?
And that's the person you are with your relativism.
And now you're in a mob.
You're in a mob, and so that, you know, we all live in our little world, so your little world is now the mob, and the mob is filled with your friends, and it's filled with your neighbors, and so that's your world, and that's what everybody agrees with.
And what the mob is shouting is, send out that black man so we can hang him from a tree.
Send out that Jew so we can turn him over to the authorities.
Send out that conservative, that Ann Coulter, so we can silence her.
That's what the mob is saying.
And that's your little world, okay?
So that's who you're going to be.
Do you know in your heart, in your heart, do you know that you would rather be the man who stands up and says no?
Do you know?
That's my question.
Because as I say, this is an act of faith.
This is a question of faith.
Your relativism is just as much faith as my objective morality.
But do you want to be the man who goes with the mob?
And if not, why not?
If not, why not?
There is no evolution of morality.
There is a discovery, a slow discovery of morality.
Discovery Of Morality00:04:02
And yes, it happens over time, and yes, it happens by nature.
And yes, sometimes you can look back on morality and say that it makes logical sense, but very often when you're heading off to the cross, when you're heading off to the stake to be burned, when you're heading off to prison for protecting the Jewish guy in your house in the Nazi regime, it doesn't look like such a good thing to do.
It doesn't look like such a good thing to do, and yet people do it because they know deep down that relativism is a lie.
That's why.
And that is why people like Socrates and Jesus, this energy comes off them that creates whole civilizations, whereas people like Pilate and Protagoras sink into the backgrounds, even though they win the day.
They win the day, but they lose the ages.
All right, that's it.
I'm going to stop there and get back to stuff I like, talking about honesty and dishonesty.
We've been talking about good leftist films that are good because they lie, because they change reality.
And probably one of the best is The American President, a 1995 romantic comedy directed by Rob Reiner and written by Aaron Sorkin, who of course went on to write The West Wing.
And this was made, as Rob Reiner said, to help Bill Clinton get past his reputation as a womanizer, get past his reputation for having affairs.
And he was hoping to, you know, this would secure his image in the minds of the people.
And so he changed a few things, right?
Instead of a guy who sleeps with women, not his wife, who commits adultery, who commits adultery with younger women, who forces sometimes women to do what they wouldn't do, who bothers them, suddenly Bill Clinton is rewritten as Michael Douglas, a widower who falls in love with a woman his own age, right?
And the Republicans, the evil Republicans, go nuts calling him, you know, calling her a whore and calling him immoral.
Why?
Why do they do it?
It makes absolutely no sense.
But in the movie, it makes perfect sense because once you see that this is what's happening, you accept, you suspend disbelief.
And once you suspend disbelief, you step into this wonderful story, and it's a wonderful love story.
Sorkin is a very talented writer.
And you follow along and you think like, yeah, you know, why are they picking on poor Bill Clinton?
Why are they picking on this poor Bill Clinton as played by Michael Douglas?
And they did this, by the way, throughout the Clinton administration.
They rewrote him.
Remember Independence Day?
The young president was an Air Force pilot, you know, and you think like, yeah, he's a Clintonian president, but he was an Air Force pilot, a little bit different than a draft Dodger.
You know, it's kind of just a draft Dodger Air Force pilot, kind of the same, but not quite.
So they just change the values.
But most importantly, looking back, because this is a 1995 film, listen to who Aaron Sorkin thinks he is.
This is Aaron Sorkin writing for the American president, putting in the voice of the American president who he thinks a liberal is.
Let's listen.
America isn't easy.
America is advanced citizenship.
You've got to want it bad, because it's going to put up a fight.
It's going to say, you want free speech?
Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.
You want to claim this land is the land of the free?
Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag.
The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest.
Now show me that.
Defend that.
Celebrate that in your classrooms.
Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.
And ask yourself, is that the left you know today?
The guys in the balaclavas with the sticks attacking anybody who disagrees with them, the little girls going into their fainting couches into their safe spaces because the evil Christina Hoff Summers comes and tells them they're not oppressed.
Is that the left?
Is that who the left is?
Of course not.
The left is not just lying to you.
It is lying to themselves.
Involved Every Minute00:00:33
And they do it very well because they know how to tell stories.
And it's something the right has to pay attention to and stop getting so involved every minute in every crisis, everything that comes along that they think is a crisis or a catastrophe.
All right, that's it.
We got one more day.
Good mailbag.
I like those questions.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Please subscribe so you can be in the mailbag next week as well.