Andrew Clavin and Michael Knowles dissect the left’s hostility toward English-speaking nations, mocking New York Times hyperbole on Republican healthcare while critiquing Macron’s France as a "globalization vs. nationalism" false dichotomy. They reject Adam Gopnik’s revisionist take on the American Revolution, framing universal healthcare and equality as elite power grabs akin to the French Revolution’s bloodshed. Knowles laments leftist comedy’s loss of proportion, praising South Park’s satire over preachy specials like Amy Schumer’s. Clavin pivots to Genesis, arguing sin stems from distorted perception—shame arises only after Adam and Eve "see" evil, contrasting Milton’s paradise with modern alienation, before teasing Mona Charon on Never Trumpism. The episode ties leftist grievances to a rejection of Western freedom’s messy, flawed legacy. [Automatically generated summary]
Democrats and the media are reacting to the health care bill passed by the House last week with the sort of thoughtful, measured commentary one usually sees only at an eight-year-old girl's birthday party after a mouse gets in, and the shrieking children knock over the cake, and the candles set the house on fire, and the fire trucks rushing to the scene crash into one another, and one engine explodes over an undetected gas leak, causing the entire street to go up in billowing flames that engulf the surrounding buildings,
causing them to collapse on both the inhabitants and innocent passersby.
In an editorial in the New York Times, a former newspaper, Times editor Blithering Prevarication III said, quote, Because of this disastrous Republican bill, everyone will die.
Old people sitting all unsuspecting in their wheelchairs will suddenly keel over, expiring with pitiable gasps.
Women forced to go into labor, just like in The Handmaid's Tale, will end their lives shrieking for mercy.
Men in the prime of life will be hit by cars and crushed under construction equipment.
And innocent children will slowly grow to adulthood, then become old and finally waste away.
Unquote.
When told that everyone would die, whether the Republicans passed a bill or not, the Times editor curled up in a corner of his office and began to weep quietly at the meaningless tragedy of life.
Make-believe American Indian Senator Elizabeth Warren also reacted negatively to the bill.
Warren had recently returned from a vision quest, the Native American right of manhood in which young boys become warriors, and was already disappointed to find she remained a querulous old white woman.
But when she heard about the health care bill, she really got upset.
Warren issued a statement saying, quote, under Obamacare, every American could receive unaffordable health insurance, allowing them access to doctors they hated until the market collapsed and everything was in chaos.
But this bill ruins all that.
This is what happens when a bunch of white men are allowed to change our laws, break our treaties, and steal the lands of our fathers until we weep no more forever in the happy hunting ground, unquote.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer burst into tears when the bill passed, telling reporters, quote, the statue of Liberty is crying because she has a statue of cancer and can't afford to go see a gigantic copper doctor for treatment, unquote.
Democrat news agencies, including ABC, CBS, and NBC, all denounced the bill, saying, We hope stinky rotten Republicans will be torn limb from limb by armies of half-dead women with pre-existing conditions and unwanted pregnancies caused by incestuous rapes, and then we'll laugh at those mean Republicans who just wait and see if we don't.
Ha ha ha, nyanyanya, unquote.
The bill hasn't passed the Senate yet and has no final form, making it impossible to know what effect it will have.
But if media reports bear any relation to reality, it will be a disaster.
Fortunately, there's little chance that media reports will bear any relation to reality.
Macron's Revolution Debate00:13:19
They never have before.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped hip-sy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Hurrah, the Clavenless weekend is over.
The pall of unknowing lifts, and suddenly we can see clearly again Troll King Michael Knowles is here, our cultural correspondent, chairman of the troll board, and author of, what is the name of that book?
That would be reasons to vote for Democrats.
Yeah, a comprehensive guy, a completely blank book that has been on the top of the bestseller list for, I think, now six years, I believe.
So what I did on Friday is I went down to our local Indochino showroom, which I didn't even know existed.
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So over the Clavenless weekend, Maureen Le Pen lost the French election to Macron.
Macron, Emmanuel Macron, who is being described as the centrist.
I'm always very, very wary of these descriptions of foreign candidates because their political spectrum is so different from ours.
But basically, the American left is in ecstasy over this outcome.
Le Pen is from the National Front, which used to be a fascistic, anti-Semitic party.
She has tried to lighten that, soften it, but it's still a very nationalistic party.
It is a socialist party.
I mean, she's a national socialist, which is where we get the term Nazi.
She is a nationalist, but she's not what we would call a right-winger.
So it's not exactly like Donald Trump or Brexit or anything like that.
But it does mean that France is still committed to the European Union.
And that is the big thing.
So here's the New York Times, a former newspaper.
They are just ecstatic.
This is their news story, right?
The French presidential runoff transcended national politics.
It was globalization against nationalization.
It was the future versus the past, open versus closed.
I love the way the New York Times knows what the future looks like versus the past.
The future looks like globalization.
The past looks like France, you know?
And the problem with this is that, first of all, let's say this.
Le Pen suffered a very bad defeat.
Emmanuel Macron, who's, like I said, he's being described as a centrist.
He is a businessman.
And remember, France is virtually a socialist country where they riot when you try to get them to work more than 35 hours a week.
No one has explained to them that they can't have all the social programs they want funded by people who only work 35 hours a week because you don't create enough wealth.
And that is the problem they're having.
But the big thing, the big thing, the big difference between Macron and Le Pen is her address of this Islamic immigration problem that is a genuine problem throughout the West.
And Macron was quoted as saying things like, there is no such thing as French culture.
Terrorism is an imponderable problem.
It's imponderable.
You can't even ponder it.
Don't even ponder the problem.
And, you know, the thing is, Le Pen's party, Le Pen's voted better than the National Front has ever done before.
There's going to be in a month there's going to be a parliamentary election, and so who knows how many seats they will win.
We don't really see this yet.
So we don't really know what's happening, but the thing is, how long, how long can this be put off?
How long can it be put off?
The Europeans deal with putting off the question of Islam.
I mean, cities like Rotterdam cities are being taken over by Islamists.
And the thing about Islam, as we always have to say this, this is not about Muslim people.
It is not about Muslim people.
It is about a philosophy.
Islam is different than both Christianity and Judaism in that its political role is interlinked with its religious role.
Its politics and religion are baked into the system, and it's oppressive.
So why does that not condemn Muslim people?
Because people choose what they want out of religion.
People say they look at their books and they interpret it away.
They say, look, I'm just a religious guy.
Jihad to me means fighting the devil within and all this stuff.
And you say, great, who cares?
That's fine.
But Islam for all of its existence has had a political arm.
It's been imperialistic.
And it has been in favor of conquest.
And what we're seeing is when the left wants globalization, what they are against is they are against the West.
They are against the English-speaking peoples, the version of the West.
You know, they keep saying that globalization has been stopped because Le Pen lost in France and Geert Wilders lost in the Dutch elections, even though he also gained seats.
And they keep saying this is a renunciation of what's happening here.
But the thing is, the English-speaking peoples have always been unique.
We have always been, when you look at England, the things that didn't come to England, I've said it before, but it's worth saying again, Nazism, the Inquisition, the French Revolution, these are the things that stopped at the cliffs of Dover and the things that we have inherited.
And this is the stuff that the left hates.
What the left hates is the legacy of the English-speaking people, which is more freedom, more independence, and rule from the bottom up.
You know, all of the people in Europe understand, all of them understand that the Islamic migration is a problem, but they're so used to being told from above what they're supposed to think that even when they vote, they don't think for themselves.
And if you want to know where all this is going, Adam Gopnik, a New Yorker writer, has a piece in The New Yorker today.
And I tell you, believe me, this is the wave of the leftist future.
It's called, We Could Have Been Canada.
And that's supposed to be a good thing.
Gopnik, I think, is originally from Canada.
We could have been Canada.
The revolution is the last bulwark of national myth, our American Revolution.
But in sanctifying it, we forget that it was more horrific than heroic.
Okay, this is in the New Yorker, right?
Here it is.
This is the first line.
And what if it was a mistake from the start?
The Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, the creation of the United States of America.
What if all this was a terrible idea?
And what if the injustices and madness of American life since then have occurred not in spite of the virtues of the Founding Fathers, but because of them?
The revolution, this argument might run.
Not that I'm making this argument, but this argument might run.
The revolution was a needless and brutal bit of slaveholders' panic mixed with enlightenment argil bargle producing a country that was always marked for violence and disruption and demagogue.
Look north to Canada or south to Australia and you will see different possibilities of peaceful evolution away from Britain towards sane and whole, more equitable and less sanguinary countries.
No revolution and slavery might have ended as it did elsewhere in the British Empire more peacefully and sooner.
No peculiar institution, no hideous civil war, an appalling aftermath.
Instead, an orderly development of the interior, less violent and less inclined to celebrate the desperado over the peaceful peasant.
We could have ended with a social democratic commonwealth that stretched from north to south, a near continent-wide Canada.
The only question is who would have defended it?
All those happy people in Canada would now be speaking Russia.
You know, you don't like Putin?
Putin would be running Canada.
So he goes on to say the thought is taboo, the revolution being still sacred in its self-directed propaganda.
One can grasp the scale and strangeness of the sanctity only by leaving America for a country with a different attitude toward its past and its founding.
This is what I heard recently on my trip to England.
They kept saying to me, my friends kept saying to me, you know, your problem is, your trouble is, this written constitution of yours.
And this is the future of the left.
If you don't believe me, just wait and see.
This is the future of the left.
The American experiment was a mistake.
And what they're looking for, what is the difference?
What is the difference?
The difference is that we haven't opted in for equality.
You know, I've been thinking about this all weekend because all weekend people have been yelling at me on Twitter and other places that healthcare, free health care is a right.
And they keep saying free health care doesn't exist.
There's no such thing as free health care.
What you're saying is you have the right to other people's labor.
You have the right to other people's work.
You don't, whether it's the doctor's work or the guy whose money you steal to pay for your health care, you're taking other people's work.
You don't have that right.
But this idea of equality, which poisoned the French Revolution, which turned it into a bloodfest, right?
You know, this is one of the things Emmanuel Macron said.
You know, Trump should take it easy because you owe us, because of the help of Lafayette, you owe us for your freedom.
Well, thanks.
You know, it's the last military thing you guys ever did that worked.
You know, we appreciate it.
But it's been a long time.
This dream of equality, this dream of secularism, this dream that the English-speaking people have never quite embraced is what they are selling.
And in order to sell it, they are going to have to start convincing you, and this is going to be the new argument, that it's all been in error.
And you see this too in the hysteria, the absolute hysteria over this health care bill, which we'll talk about another time.
I mean, you know, there is a real question.
You know, the right is very upset that the House hasn't managed to actually repeal Obamacare.
And so many people are saying, you know, they have now accepted.
Obamacare has failed on every level.
It failed politically.
It got the Democrats swept out of power.
It's failed practically.
But no one can say, no one, even among the Republicans, is willing to say health care is not a right because you don't have the right to other people's work.
And you know, the thing is, a free market system, it works for TVs, it works for everything else.
A TV comes out, it costs 10 grand, and then, you know, two years later, it costs $600.
If they said to doctors, you have to charge the same thing to a guy with insurance as without insurance, and compete openly, and you have to post your prices, and they have to be the same for everybody, whether he needs the health care or not, things would be a lot different.
And just when you decree that things are a right, that they become expensive.
That's when they become expensive.
Anyway, this whole hysteria over power bleeding away from the top is this love of equality, this European love of equality that they think works, but it only leads to death.
It leads to slow death.
And that's what's happening in Europe is the slow, we're watching the slow death of Europe.
There's just no question about it.
It really is almost the afterdeath.
Europe died in the two world wars, and we're just watching the body rot in some sense.
But I think, you know, the fact that the English-speaking peoples have always opted for freedom, they've always opted for, it evolved slowly in England, but it did evolve, this bottom-up government that then was finally expressed in the Constitution.
That is what the left hates because they want that power.
You know, this is the thing, in the same way that free health care doesn't mean anything, it just means other people's labor, equality means power.
Equality means power for the elite.
That's all it really means.
Why Equality Means Power00:12:23
We got Michael Knowles coming up, but you got to come over to thedailywire.com to hear it or watch it.
You can watch it if you subscribe.
And if you subscribe for a year for just a lousy eight bucks a month, not only can you be in the mailbag and ask questions that will, the answers to which will change your life, you also get a free copy of the Arroyo.
We're still giving away the Arroyo.
Yeah, excellent.
All right.
Come on over to thedailywire.com and hear Knowles.
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All right, King of Trolls, Michael Knowles is with us today.
I'm glad you made it.
Is the Yankees game over now?
I was up very late last night.
I was doing some work last night, and it got to be about midnight.
I said, okay, it's time to go to bed.
I chose not to watch the Yankee game because I was getting work done.
So I check in to see what the score was, and it was the bottom of the 16th inning.
It was Yankees Cubs.
So, of course, then I just stayed up for the rest of the game.
How long was it?
It ended up going to 18.
It ended at the bottom of the 18th.
And just to let everybody know, the Yankees did win.
Yeah, they're on fire, right?
They are killing.
Yeah, 20 out of 25 games or something like that.
Yeah, it's really good.
So I know our producer Austin really is a big Cubs fan.
So there you have it.
The pain.
We can drink his tears.
All right.
So what I wanted to talk about today, and I think this is really interesting.
I mean, I was watching Colbert go on his ugly rant against Trump and all this stuff.
And, you know, free speech for everybody, great.
But the left just isn't funny anymore, are they?
They're not funny at all.
And this is sort of a new phenomenon because there always were workable, decent comedians on the left.
And more importantly, the media would promote those people to the hilt.
So guys like Jon Stewart, who were pretty funny, were all of a sudden the kings of comedy.
Right, right.
Stephen Colbert, people like that.
But I took a look at the Netflix comedy specials that have come out recently and have come out this year.
And the most striking thing about all of them is they're not hysterical left-wingers.
Really?
Especially the biggest ones, the most popular ones.
I'm not saying they're conservatives or they hang out at the Heritage Foundation or anything, but they are not hysterical left-wingers.
Give you, but Louis C.K. might be the most popular comedian right now.
He can be really funny.
And he can be really funny.
He's no Norm McDonald's, but he can be really funny.
No one is Norman.
Do we have this clip from his comedy special?
I think abortion is exactly like taking a s.
I think it is 100% the exact same thing as taking a s or it isn't or it is or it isn't.
It's either taking a s or it's killing a baby.
It's only one of those two things.
It's no other things.
You can cut it there.
That's tough.
Wow.
That is some pretty hard line and really funny comedy.
And we'll go into why it's funny and why these guys are having success.
But even like Dave Chappelle, everyone would think of him as a real left-winger.
He has an excellent special on Netflix right now.
And he was quoted.
He was speaking to The Observer and he said regarding Trump and Hillary back when the campaign was on, what I heard on that tape was gross, referring to the Access Hollywood tape.
But the way I got to hear it was even more gross.
You know, that came directly from Hillary.
There's something wrong with her.
Sexual assault?
It wasn't.
He said, when you're a star, they let you do it.
That phrase implies consent.
I just don't like the way the media twisted that whole thing.
Nobody questioned it.
Wow.
My jaw hits the floor when I read something like that.
Dave Chappelle defending Donald Trump.
Then there's a young comedian, Jared Carmichael.
Very funny.
He jokes about animal rights.
He jokes about global warming, hysteria.
And there's a clip of him on Colbert's show.
Do we have that?
People all the time.
And truthfully, as someone who recently moved to a new tax bracket, I think he has some interesting ideas sometimes.
He's making a thing that I may agree with Trump on.
What's that?
The wall.
Okay.
I like the wall.
I saw him here.
He was talking about the wall, a big fat door.
I don't know what that means.
I don't like hearing him talk about the wall, but I like the idea of a wall.
And it's not that I'm like anti-you know, Mexican, but I'm pro-wall.
You just enjoy walls.
Pauls are amazing.
Like, we have them in our homes for a reason, wouldn't like, tear down a wall so one of your neighbors could wander in if they're feeling oppressed.
You know, the wall makes sense.
That's a good line.
Wow.
That's a great line.
And you're waiting for him to have a kind of ironic punchline about why.
No, he doesn't.
He just says, you know, the wall is a good idea and it makes perfect sense.
And this goes on and on.
You know, one of the highest-rated specials, which I watched last night on Netflix, is Jim Gaff again.
Oh, yeah.
He can be really funny.
He can be really funny.
He doesn't make any political jokes.
He makes jokes mostly about food and how he's a little chunky.
But he, you know, he's a total family guy.
He does totally clean comedy.
The very fact that he doesn't make left-wing comedy jokes kind of tells you all you need to know.
He also, I love he refers to his family as Shiite Catholic.
Shiite Catholic guys.
He has like a million children.
Now, and by the way, Brian Regan, who is certainly no rabid left-winger, is getting a comedy special shooting in June.
So all of these comedy specials that are on.
Oh, and by the way, Norm McDonald's, I think, premieres tomorrow.
Oh, it does?
It does.
And I was lucky enough.
I got to see some of his routine that he's doing on it.
I got to see him working it out in Pasadena a couple months ago.
It is so, so funny.
I won't spoil anything, but Norm McDonald is not an hysterical right-winger, I promise you.
He's not a left-winger.
I mean, he's kind of suffered in his career, I think, for being politically incorrect.
I think that's right.
He's so funny.
And so as a result, he is not politically incorrect.
And probably it has hurt his career.
He got fired from SNL for saying, basically, for saying that OJ was guilty, right?
That's right.
That's right.
He made a joke about Hillary Clinton.
He was tossed around on the view because he made a joke about Bill Clinton.
So you can read all about that in his very funny literary memoir.
But there's only one comedy special that's been really promoted on Netflix that is extremely left-wing, and nobody likes it.
What is that?
This is Amy Schumann's writer special.
I watched maybe 15, 20 minutes of that, which then I assigned it to you, I think.
That's right, that is right.
That was the worst Clavenless weekend maybe ever.
That was pretty bad.
This movie's almost sadistic now, I think.
It has about a 7% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
That's right.
Seven, you know, one digit.
And I hope this was not in the 15 minutes you saw because it's the least funny thing I've ever seen.
But do we have that clip of her ranting?
Two girls, named Macy Burrow and Jillian Johnson, were shot and killed at the movie theater when they went to see my movie.
And the feeling of putting something out and being excited and then finding out that these two beautiful, amazing, smart women who just wanted to have a good time went and got murdered was crushing.
And yeah, and I just wanted to do something about it.
I knew nothing about gun violence, and I found out that she still knows nothing about gun violence.
I mean, it's a really, obviously, that's a sad event that happened in one of her shows.
She then rants about gun control for several minutes.
This is right in the middle of what's supposed to be a comedy routine.
And I mean, tragedy pervades the world, but because the left has no sense of proportion or reality anymore, they don't understand comedy.
Their comedy has just fallen absolutely flat.
Samantha Bee's show, Full Frontal with Samantha B, is a darling of the left.
It has a 100% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes.
It has a 57% audience score.
It's completely unfunny.
And it's just like all these late night shows are just people throwing F-bombs at Trump.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
And they're easy jokes.
They really aren't funny.
And the issue is that fanatics aren't funny.
People who have a wild view of the world and are extraordinarily impassioned can't be funny because they have no sense of proportion.
Comedy requires, even comedy that plays on the grotesque and the absurd requires a standard against which it's incongruous.
And that's what's funny about it.
And there was basically the inventor of the Gothic novel, Horace Walpole, the fourth Earl of Orford, had a great insight into this, which is: life is a comedy to him who thinks, but it's a tragedy to him who feels.
That's one of my favorite quotes.
That is.
That was a precursor to Ben's line about how facts don't care about your feelings.
But that is right.
The comedy plays on the intellect rather than the passions and the emotions.
And as you just said, it plays on us knowing what makes sense, what's common sense, and all this.
And the left is, you know, we shouldn't leave out, by the way, South Park, which is like 20 years old at this point, and has quietly revolutionized comedy on the comedy central station and has almost always been in the libertarian camp.
I mean, the guys who made it, what are their names?
Trey?
Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
Yeah, and they said, you know, we hate conservatives, but we effing hate liberals.
That's right.
And I think that that's, you know, that thing has just basically picked political correctness and the entire humorless left as its target and has just completely undermined them.
That's right.
You know, they're equal opportunity offenders.
They are, especially for the 20 years or more, maybe even that they've been on, they have been the most relentless and insightful social satire that's in regular programs.
Yeah, no, that's right.
They also, you know, speaking of their joke about conservatives, they also said, we think religions are really funny.
They've mocked religions in Book of Mormon or what have you on their show.
They say, but the craziest explanation we've ever heard for all of this and life and why I breathe and the love I feel and all the passions is just because.
That's all.
Just because.
And that insight, I think, allows them to make really, really true and insightful comedy.
But the bottom line of that is that things are funny when they're true.
Things are funny when they relate.
That is the common line, right?
It's so funny because it's true.
And when they were censored after they make relentless fun of Jesus, they make relentless fun of Jews.
And then when they wanted to make relentless fun of Islam, they were censored.
And that sends a message.
I mean, it's kind of like what we were talking about in what I was talking about in France, is that ultimately, you know, if you don't deal with these problems as they come up, ultimately you have this overreaction.
I mean, that's the kind of thing.
You know, we've seen that before in Europe.
Things Are Funny When They Relate00:12:27
This doesn't turn out well.
Yeah, it doesn't turn out well when you stifle a natural reaction to your culture being assaulted.
And I think that that is, you know, that is what they have done.
They've done it with Islam here.
They've tried to.
But ultimately, to silence South Park when they make fun of Islam is to make fun of Islam.
That's right.
Humorlessness is a sign that you just don't have it quite right.
You don't have events of the world quite right.
And that's why America, in spite of what the New Yorker believes, has always been one of the funniest countries, next to Britain, I think, has always been one of the funniest countries.
President of the Council of Trolls, Michael Knowles, we appreciate it.
You're always great.
You did a good job.
I hear you're going on a trip that I want to hear about.
You will report on Monday.
We will report in.
I don't want to give away any details, but the entire trip will consist of smoking a lot of cigars and drinking rum around communists.
So that's the teaser, but we'll talk about it next Monday.
All right, good.
We will look forward to it.
Stay safe in the meantime.
All right, stuff I like.
This week on Stuff I Like, I have something I think is kind of interesting, which is I want to take a look at some of my favorite Bible verses, but this is not going to be religious.
Well, it will be religious, but it's going to be take a look at some of my favorite Bible verses and talk about how they relate to certain pieces of pop art that comment on them, sometimes in a negative way.
And the first one I want to talk about is the creation story.
And not the creation story, the fall of man, what Christians call the fall of man, Adam and Eve being tempted to eat the apple, the knowledge of the tree, the knowledge of good and evil, right?
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
And this always gets swept away in this kind of evolution debate and literal interpretations.
And I am an evolution guy, I have to say, which I get hammered for occasionally around here.
But the important thing for me is whether there's evolution or not makes absolutely no difference to my theology.
I mean, that is not the way I read the creation story.
Creation stories throughout history and throughout mythology have always been about who we are, not where we came from.
They're about what we're like.
And that's what gives them their power.
If they didn't have a power to talk about what we're like, then they wouldn't be interesting.
They'd have historical interest, I guess, but they wouldn't really be all that interesting.
Even evolution is interesting because it talks about what we're like.
And the creation story in Genesis is the wisest, deepest, richest, and weirdest story that you will ever hear.
And here is one of the things that I personally find very weird about it, is that God says you cannot eat the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
And you would think like that's kind of a strange restriction.
Don't you want people to know the difference between good and evil?
And then a very strange thing happens when Eve is tempted by the serpent.
He says, you know, God says if you eat of it, you will die.
And the serpent says, no, no, no, don't, you know, you won't surely die.
You shall not surely die.
And she eats of it, and she gives it to Adam, and he eats of it.
And the line is, and their eyes, both their eyes, were opened.
And that, to me, is a strange thing.
And when they find out, I'll read it.
So it says, she ate and she gave it to Adam and he ate, then the eyes of both were opened.
And they knew that they were naked.
And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.
And when God comes into the garden, they hide from him because they're ashamed of their nakedness.
And God says, who told you that you were naked?
And that's how God knows that they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
This idea of sin as a kind of sight or a kind of blindness has been really haunting me lately.
An idea that the world is not what we see.
That sin is not so much, oh, I did this or I did that, but it is a whole way of seeing the world.
And we know, of course, that Jesus says, I'm the light of the world, and when I'm with you, you will have the light.
When I'm gone, you'll be stumbling in darkness.
And this idea that somehow we are not seeing the world aright.
And of course, the funny thing in this story is that God knows they have done the wrong thing because they're now ashamed, because they're now ashamed.
They were naked before, but they weren't ashamed.
And now their eyes being opened means that they see themselves as being inherently shameful.
They see their nakedness as being inherently shameful.
The suggestion is that if we were not sinful, if we were not sinful, there would be nothing shameful about being naked.
We would not feel shame for being naked, and all these things.
And that's why, that's why you have poets throughout Christian history.
You have poets imagining a world in which sexuality is free of shame.
So you have Milton, who talks in the fourth book of Paradise Lost.
He has this famous sex scene, and it's very sexy, but it's completely innocent.
It's completely, you know, it's just married love, and everything is fine.
He says, this is before there was shame.
This is before there was false shame.
And in Blake, especially, Blake just feels he's kind of like the worst of the Freudians, not like Freud, but like the worst of the Freudians.
Blake just feels if we could just remove the guilt, if we could just remove the shame, then all of a sudden it would all be great.
We'd all be sleeping with one another.
And he has a vision in one of his poems of women gathering other women for you to sleep with and all this.
And there's no jealousy and there's no envy.
And this has been the picture of paradise that goes into minds that don't accept the fall.
If you accept the fall, then you know that it's not curable.
Our blindness, our weird sight, our sinful sight is not curable.
Even with Christ's sacrifice, it's only through faith that we know that we could see the world another way.
But we live in the fallen world.
So if you don't believe in the fall, and if you don't believe in the tragedy of the fall, you get nonsense like this piece of garbage that was on, is it Bill Nye?
Is that his name?
The science guy, the so-called science guy, a man who opens his mouth and reduces the IQ of the world with every word he speaks.
It's like every word is like a point taken off the IQ of the world.
And he now has a show called Bill Nye Saves the World.
And since we know that everything left to say is actually the opposite, we can reinterpret the title of that show.
But he showed this completely unfunny and stupid show, little YouTube video about sexuality, in which a vanilla ice cream cone tries to convert all the wonderful, flavorful cones because the big vanilla cone in the sky wants everybody to be vanilla.
Here's just a moment of it.
And of course, at the end, it is the vanilla cone who is converted to libertinism.
I just think if you want to get right with the big ice cream in the sky, change your flavor by wishing to be vanilla.
What if the big ice cream in the sky is chocolate?
Blasphemy.
Everyone should pretend to be vanilla until they no longer have the urge not to be vanilla.
I did not urge to be pistachio.
I am pistachio.
Hey, mid chocolate chip.
Sorry I'm late.
I was busy being two awesome things at once.
Cool.
Not cool.
Hickelaine Butstain.
Vanilla's trying to convert us all again.
That's nuts.
No offense, nuts.
Come on, vanilla.
Nobody wants just one flavor of ice cream.
I do.
Haven't you ever wanted to be in a Neapolitan?
I can't.
I can't.
Come on.
It's natural.
All natural cocoa.
And strawberry fresh from the field.
It's so creamy and delicious.
Big ice cream in the sky, help me.
It's good.
It's good.
And then they all get into a bowl together and it's all like a big ice cream orgy.
Aside from the fact that this is like utterly unfunny and sanctimonious and self-congratulatory, aside from all those things, it's also utterly absurd.
I mean, the rules that people create over time to deal with the unruly sexual urge may sometimes be small-minded and may sometimes be actually overly restrictive.
Those things happen.
But they're created there because of an understanding of our tragic state.
You know, this is the thing.
The fall alienates Adam and Eve from nature.
That's what happens.
Before that, this beautiful, beautiful passage in the same chapter of Paradise Lost, describing the animals just kind of playing together as Adam and Eve are kind of, you know, making out together.
And it's just this wonderful paradise of peace.
We don't live in that world.
We are alienated from nature because of the fact that we can no longer see what we saw in paradise.
There's nothing that makes us, that make, that changes that.
Nothing changes that.
That's the world we live in.
So the choices between these sometimes restrictive rules, and sometimes people can be oppressive with those rules and can be overly restrictive and overly small-minded.
But the choices between regulating our sex lives and the utter tragedy that forever ensues when all the ice cream flavors get into the bowl at once and just go at it.
You know, it just never ceases to lead to disease.
You know, even if it didn't lead to disease, even if it didn't lead to plagues like AIDS, it would lead to complete oppression.
You know, you think that free sex is going to be free, but in fact, it winds up with the weak being oppressed by the strong.
Just one, the movie that I want to suggest for stuff I like, because it's actually a really good movie, is a film called Grizzly Man.
It is a documentary about a guy who decides to go in and live with the grizzlies, and he's obviously a little bit out of his mind.
It was made in 2005 by the German director Werner Erzog.
Have you ever seen it?
Oh, it's a great, great movie.
This is not giving anything away because this is what it starts with.
He's ultimately eaten by a grizzly bear.
Of course he is, you know.
But here's just a quick scene of this guy who thinks he can go out and become one with nature.
I'm out in the prime cut of the big green.
Behind me is Ed and Rowdy, members of an up-and-coming sub-adult gang.
They're challenging everything, including me.
Goes with the territory.
If I show weakness, if I retreat, I may be hurt.
I may be killed.
I must hold my own if I'm going to stay within this land.
For once there is weakness, they will explode it.
They will take me out.
They will decapitate me.
They will chop me into bits and pieces.
I'm dead.
But so far, I persevere.
I persevere.
Most times I'm a kind warrior out here.
Most times I am gentle.
I am like a flower.
I am like a fly on the wall, observing, non-committal, non-invasive in any way.
Occasionally I am challenged.
And in that case, the kind warrior must, must, must become a samurai.
Must become so, so formidable, so fearless of death.
So strong that you will win.
You will win.
See, the thing is, at the end, what happens is the drought basically forces the bears down out of the wood.
They get hungry.
They eat him.
You know, up until then, he thinks he's one of them.
He thinks that he's a there and he's a samurai and he's the kind warrior.
But they eat him because the alienation from nature, whether it's our own sexual nature, the true freedom of our own sexual nature, or from nature itself, is a tragic fact.
You know, there's nothing makes it go away.
And this guy tries to live.
You know, Herzog in the movie says that when he looks at a bear, he just sees this soulless, you know, eating machine.
But that also may be a sinful view of life.
I mean, maybe both of these things are two extremes.
There is a kind of in-between comfort with nature, understanding that you are in a dangerous environment of eating machines in the same way you understand of your sexuality that there's a great deal of fun and joy to be had, but without restrictions, you destroy yourself and everybody around you.
Tragic Fact of Life00:00:28
The tragic fact of life, which is in, the tragic fact of life, which is described beautifully in the book of Genesis, does not go away simply because we recognize its tragedies or its injustices.
More of this to come in Stuff I Like tomorrow.
Tomorrow we have, who do we have tomorrow?
Mona Charon.
Mona Charon, one of the great, great conservative writers, and we're going to talk to her about Never Trumpism.