James Comey’s firing by Trump in 2017 exposed deep political fractures: Democrats suddenly framed it as Watergate-level scandal despite earlier criticism of his Clinton email handling, while Rod Rosenstein’s role in pressuring his removal revealed institutional tensions. The host dismisses Watergate comparisons, arguing Trump’s impulsive firings differ from Nixon’s obstruction, yet warns special prosecutors could trigger endless investigations. Meanwhile, a listener’s question on Christianity’s appeal reveals its unique alignment with human experience—acknowledging selfhood, moral tension, and suffering—unlike Buddhism or secularism’s illusions. The episode ends by linking biblical betrayal themes to modern self-doubt, previewing a Trump-media critique with Molly Hemingway. [Automatically generated summary]
Democrats who called for the firing of FBI Director James Comey are shocked and appalled by the firing of FBI Director James Comey.
The Democrats say that Comey's firing will undermine the investigations for which they said he should have been fired.
In order to examine which Democrat claims are cynical political fabrications and which are hysterical conspiracy theories and which are cynical political hysterical theories about fabricated conspiracies, let's examine which investigations might be affected.
The FBI, as we know, is investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians to expose the Democrats' emails.
The Senate, meanwhile, is investigating whether the Obama administration investigated the Trump campaign for the collusion that the FBI is investigating.
The Judiciary Committee is investigating why the Attorney General failed to investigate Hillary Clinton's attempt to avoid the FBI investigation into the Attorney General's failure to investigate her emails to the Democrats, which the Russians hacked in an attempt to interfere with our election, which the Senate is investigating in an attempt to find out if the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians' hack of the Democrats emails, which the FBI is investigating to see whether the Obama administration was investigating the Trump campaign.
The House Intelligence Committee is investigating whether the House Intelligence Committee overstepped its bounds in investigating the Obama administration's attempts to use the intelligence community to investigate the Trump campaign's collusion with the Russian Hack into the Democrats' emails, which the FBI is investigating in order to find out whether the House Intelligence Committee overstepped its bounds in investigating the Obama administration.
The head of the House Committee, meanwhile, has stepped down, pending an investigation.
At the same time, many in the press are investigating why the press never investigated the Obama administration's investigation of the Trump campaign, but continues to investigate the Trump administration's investigation into whether the Obama administration investigated the Trump campaign, which is now under investigation in the Senate, causing several investigators to call for an independent investigation into the House investigation of the Senate investigation of the Trump administration, which is meanwhile investigating the Obama administration, which is on a yacht in the Bahamas at the time,
dancing to the musical stylings of Drake's hotline bling.
Mr. Drake is not currently under investigation.
Now, to be clear, an independent investigation into the Senate investigation of the House investigation of the Obama investigation into the Trump campaign could expand the investigation into an investigation of Russia's investigation of the emails that were under investigation by the FBI, which was in turn under investigation by the NSA, who have been investigating everybody in a surveillance program that's still under investigation.
If that were to happen, there would no doubt be calls for a full investigation into all the other investigations.
So it's easy to see that the firing of James Comey will have to be investigated to ensure it doesn't in any way curtail the important business of government, which is investigating.
Thank God the government's not actually governing, then we'd all be in real trouble.
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-dunky-donkey.
Ship-shaped itsy-topsy, the world is a bibby-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
Hunky-Dunky Exercise Promo00:02:33
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Trump's Typical Delay Tactics00:15:19
All right, so should we all be hysterical and run around with our hair on fire?
You know, I'd left my hair at home, but otherwise, I would set it on fire to react to the firing of James Comey.
I mean, I just, I have to say, it is ridiculous that the Democrats who have been just excoriating this guy are suddenly shocked and appalled.
You know, I'm shocked, shocked, Mr. Trump, to find that you have fired James Comey.
So he gets a letter, a classic Trump letter.
He gets this letter firing him, delivered by Trump's personal bodyguard while he's on at some job fair.
He apparently thought it was a joke when he first got it.
But I love this thing where he says, Trump says, while I greatly appreciate you informing me on three separate occasions that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.
So this is basically him saying this has nothing to do with FBI investigation into any kind of collusion between Trump's campaign and the Russians.
And the Democrats, who, like I said, they hated Comey because they blamed him for Hillary's loss, right?
Hillary blamed him for her loss.
The Democrats blamed him.
Now suddenly they're selling the idea that this is a constitutional crisis on the order of Nixon's Saturday night massacre.
So listen to, of course, the Nets, the networks, they just serve as an echo chamber for the Democrats.
That's all they are.
They're the Democrat echo chamber.
And here are the Nets selling the Democrats' message.
Calls for a special prosecutor to take over the Russia investigation.
Democrats compare this to Watergate.
Some congressional Democrats compared President Trump to Richard Nixon, who ordered the firing of the Watergate scandal's independent prosecutor.
And put this into context for us because some are comparing this to Watergate.
Well, that's understandable that people are comparing it to Watergate because, of course, what happened there is that President Nixon fired the special prosecutor because he was getting too close.
And here we have the president firing the head of the FBI.
Columnist in the New York Post said, if all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
And if all you are is a Democrat, everything looks like Watergate.
This is a reference to 1973, the special prosecutor investigating Watergate tried to subpoena Richard Nixon's tapes, the tapes of his conversations with private people, private conversations in the Oval Office.
Nixon didn't want to give him over, so he demanded that the AG fire Cox.
The AG refused, so he fired the AG.
Then the deputy AG refused, so he fired.
And then finally, it was Robert Bork, I think.
It was.
It was Robert Bork who fired him, who fired Archibald Cox.
So three people went down, and it was just a blatant attempt to cover up this, you know, the Watergate investigation to stop the Watergate investigation.
So here are the Democrats.
I mean, these are the Democrats who just a little while ago were telling us that, you know, here's Pelosi.
Pelosi's version of this was, this was back in November when Comey said he was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton.
This is how Pelosi reacted to it at the time.
I think he made a mistake on this.
And he clearly has a double standard when it comes to Donald Trump and or the, or just keep him out of it, just when it came to the hacking by the Russians that the highest confidence of our intelligence community says the Russians did this.
I know it privately because of being hacked by the Russians.
And he says, well, it's too close to the election to talk about that.
And yet it's not too close to the election to talk about the emails that he says may not be significant.
So I think he made a mistake.
And these jobs, if you're not in it for a while, you can't take the heat.
And I think he just couldn't take the heat from the Republicans.
It's really unfortunate because I do believe he is a good person.
Maybe he's not in the right job.
He's not in the right job.
So you know what was coming.
You know, John Nolte tweeted yesterday that he's lucky that Hillary didn't get elected.
Comey is lucky Hillary didn't get elected because not only would he be fired, he'd be dead.
But, you know, it was obvious.
It was obvious that Comey's head was on the block if the Democrats got elected.
And the only difference was that Trump didn't do it right away.
But we're going to talk about this more, obviously, when you try and get at what went on.
But before I do, I have to play Keith Olbermann's reaction back in October.
Keith Olbermann, this is his reaction back in October to Comey reopening the investigation into Hillary's emails.
The director of the FBI must resign.
First, he must retract his statement, then resign.
There are only two alternatives here.
James B. Comey either knowingly tried to tamper with a presidential election 11 days out on a hint of a possibility of a rumor, of an inference, of a chance of Clinton emails that reportedly aren't from Clinton and aren't to Clinton, which his bureau had not bothered to tell him about nor gotten a warrant for until last night, or James B. Comey had no idea that his statement would impact a presidential election in such a way that there would not be a chance to disprove the negative he threw against the wall like the shit by all accounts it is.
In the former case, Comey, once that rarest of individuals, the nonpartisan legal hero from the Bush administration, is a criminal who has desperately and personally and at the last minute tried to deliver this country and its 240 years of democracy into the hands of a self-obsessed,
compulsively lying fascist with no respect nor interest in anyone or anything besides himself and no understanding of the real world and the billions of people he could kill in a fit of peak over something somebody would say about him on TV.
That was his reaction.
That was his reaction back in October.
Yesterday, he tweets, Trump declares war on the U.S. Fires Comey.
Trump declares war on the U.S. by firing Comey.
You know, and here is, well, you know what?
I'm not even going to play them all.
They're just like talking.
They're basically saying, oh, it's a constitutional crisis.
It's a constitutional crisis.
Here's the problem, okay?
When you fire the independent investigator, the special investigator, into Watergate, you're trying to put a kibosh on an investigation.
The FBI is not going to stop investigating the Russian collusion if there is an investigation.
It's not Comey who was investigating.
It wasn't Comey like in a trench coat and a snap-brim hat going out and investigating.
There are dozens of agents on this case who, by the way, the FBI is a really good organization.
It really is.
And by the way, if they try to put the kibosh, the FBI is going to leak like a colander.
It's going to be suddenly, you know, suddenly everything they've got is going to be in the newspaper.
Trump knows that.
Trump's not a dummy.
It's utterly ridiculous to think, it's just implausible to think that Trump is trying to stop this investigation this way.
It just doesn't make sense that that's what he's doing.
What is also implausible, of course, is what Trump said.
Trump basically said, I'm doing this because you mishandled the Hillary Clinton investigation.
That's also implausible.
Nobody can believe that.
I just have to stop for just a minute, though, and talk on a sidebar here about how often the Democrats depend on your ignorance to say what they say.
And the reason they can do that and the reason the Republicans don't do it as much, it's not because the Republicans are saints and the Democrats are devils.
It's because the Democrats know the press will back them up.
The Democrats know if they depend on your ignorance.
You know, you talk to Democrats.
Whenever I go to New York, I talk to a lot of Democrats.
They believe this stuff.
They believe this stuff.
Oh, you know, they will, I can tell you within the next week, several Democrats will say to me, oh, it's just like Watergate.
It's just, it's exactly like, you know, you'll just keep hearing it.
The same way with global warming, you know, people just absolutely buy into this stuff because they buy into it because the press echoes everything that the Democrats say.
But, you know, it's interesting that Chuck Schumer basically gave the game away because Chuck Schumer was one of the people who said he had lost confidence in, he said, I've lost confidence in Comey.
Now, when you say that, that is essentially saying that the guy should lose his job.
When you say, I have lost confidence in your ability to run the department, you are saying this guy is out.
So Chuck Schumer said that when the email investigation was reopened, and he was asked about it as he was saying what a cover-up, it's all a cover-up, blah, And he got off, and he actually described the situation that we're in now.
I never called on the president to fire Director Comey.
I had a lot of questions about how he handled himself.
But the overwhelming question is this.
If the administration had those same questions, the events occurred months ago, and they should have fired Comey on the day they came into office.
All of them occurred before he came into office.
So that does not seem to me to be a very logical or persuasive explanation.
So he's absolutely right.
The question is not why he fired Comey.
It's why he fired him now.
That is the question.
And we're going to try and answer it, or at least look at some theories.
But first we have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, which means if you don't come over to thedailywire.com and hear the rest of the show, you will miss the mailbag, which in turn means that all your problems will continue.
So, why now?
That's really the question.
I mean, Comey has been an absolute, he has fumbled every ball that's been tossed to him.
He has really done a lot of wrong stuff, and we'll talk about that.
But here are three things just to think about.
One is, this is absolutely typical of Donald Trump.
This is the way he behaves.
He doesn't fire people right away, and then he fires them suddenly too late.
You know, this is what he did with Corey Lewandowski over the thing where Michelle Field was thrown down, grabbed like this.
It was like, no, no, no, I stand by Corey Lewandowski.
I stand by Corey Lewandowski.
I stand by.
You're out.
Whereas if he had said, hey, guys on my staff can't manhandle women, I'm sorry, you got to step down.
Or if he had said, you know, he did the wrong thing.
We're going to forgive him.
Come on over, Michelle, and let's have a drink and we'll talk about it.
He could have done either of those things, but it is just typical of Trump that he holds off, he holds off, he holds off, and then he fires him.
Paul Manafort, same thing.
Michael Flynn, same thing.
Why did he wait?
He waited because he's Donald Trump.
He waits.
There are two obvious reasons.
One is that he waits until he just can't help but fire him anymore because the heat is getting too bad.
Or the other is he waits until he gets so angry that he just does it on impulse.
With Donald Trump, I would suspect that both of those things are true.
But it is absolutely what he did today is absolutely typical of him.
He should have fired Comey coming in.
He thought like, no, you know, I can work with Comey.
He's been all over the place with this.
When Comey cleared Hillary, you know, it was like, oh, the system is rigged.
And then he cast doubt on Comey's honesty.
Then when Comey reopened it, he said Comey had saved his reputation.
And then when he said there was nothing in the new emails, Trump said, how do you read all those emails in such a short period of time?
And then after the election, he said Comey is just trying to be fair to everybody.
But then just before he had the testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee the other day, he tweeted out FBI Director Comey was the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton and that he gave her a free pass for many bad deeds.
That's probably, that is probably a reflection of our president's mind in some way, that when things go against him, he gets angry at the people.
He takes it personally.
He gets angry at the people.
When things go for him, the guy is a saint and everything like this.
I think he just reached that point and he goes zinging back and forth until finally he erupts and you're fired.
It is his signature move, is firing people.
So this is not atypical of Donald Trump.
This is something that he does, waits too long, gets ticked off, fires you.
Very typical.
But there are two new things that have happened since recently.
One is the appointment of Rod Rosenstein as the Assistant Attorney General, who is the guy who is basically Comey's boss.
And the other thing, of course, is Comey's latest testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
So Rod Rosenstein, and some people say that he was brought in basically to take out Comey.
I don't know if that's true or not.
He's a very trusted guy.
He's a guy with a good reputation who knows what that means.
I don't know him.
But he wrote this letter and he really wrote a letter.
He didn't say you must fire Comey, but he wrote a letter that really cut the ground out from underneath Comey.
It says, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, this is a letter to Trump, has long been regarded as our nation's premier federal investigative agency.
Over the past year, however, the FBI's reputation and credibility have suffered substantial damage and it has affected the entire Department of Justice.
That is deeply troubling to many Department employees and veterans, legislators, and citizens.
I cannot defend the director's handling of the conclusion of the investigation of Secretary Clinton's emails.
And I do not understand his refusal to accept the nearly universal judgment that he was mistaken.
The director was wrong to usurp the Attorney General's authority on July 5th, 2016, and announce his conclusion that the case should be closed without prosecution.
It's not the function of the director to make such an announcement.
Now, do you remember after his Comey's latest testimony, I said that the news media had bungled the lead story.
The news media was all about did it cost Hillary the election?
Did Comey cost Hillary the election?
Because they're Democrats, and that was what Hillary was talking about, so that's what they were thinking about.
And I said it was all about Comey's virtual declaration that the Obama Justice Department was so corrupt that he had to act on his own by exposing all the bad, I mean, it was really bad behavior for an FBI.
The FBI isn't supposed to tell you that they're investigating.
They're not supposed to tell you what their conclusions are.
They're just supposed to say we are passing the information on to the Justice Department.
He came out, you will remember, in July, and he basically lambasted her.
It was a closing.
I mean, this is what Rosenstein says.
It was a closing argument without the trial.
And then he said, oh, and I clear her.
I'm not going to indict her, as if he made that decision.
Now, here's what he said.
And this was what I said should have been the headline that day, and it wasn't, except here.
And this is what he said.
Play the Comey cut again.
I've lived my whole life caring about the credibility and the integrity of the criminal justice process, that the American people believe it to be and that it be in fact fair, independent, and honest.
And so what I struggled with in the spring of last year was how do we credibly complete the investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails if we conclude there's no case there?
The normal way to do it would be to have the Department of Justice announce it.
Credibly Ending The Investigation00:04:06
And I struggled as we got closer to the end of it.
A number of things had gone on, some of which I can't talk about yet, that made me worry that the department leadership could not credibly complete the investigation and decline prosecution without grievous damage to the American people's confidence in the justice system.
And then the capper was, and I'm not picking on the Attorney General, Luda Lynch, who I like very much, but her meeting with President Clinton on that airplane was the capper for me.
And I then said, you know what?
The department cannot by itself credibly end this.
The best chance we have as a justice system is if I do something I never imagined before, step away from them and tell the American people, look, here's what the FBI did, here's what we found, here's what we think.
And that that offered us the best chance of the American people believing in the system, that it was done in a credible way.
That was a hard call for me to make to call the Attorney General that morning and say, I'm about to do a press conference and I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to say.
And I said to her, I hope someday you'll understand why I think I have to do this.
But look, I wasn't loving this.
I knew this would be disastrous for me personally, but I thought this is the best way to protect these institutions that we care so much about.
And having done that, and then having testified repeatedly under oath, we're done, this was done in a credible way, there's no there, that when the Anthony Weiner thing landed on me on October 27th and there was a huge, this is what people forget, new step to be taken, we may be finding the golden missing emails that would change this case.
If I were not to speak about that, it would be a disastrous, catastrophic concealment.
You know, think about this for a minute from the Justice Department's point of view, from Jeff Sessions and Ron Rosenstein, especially Rosenstein.
He's new.
He's been in for about two weeks.
Think of it from this point of view.
Here is an FBI director telling Congress that he feels that in the event that the Attorney General and the Justice Department are not doing their job, it's his job to take over their department, to essentially usurp their function.
That's what he said.
That's what he's saying there.
Now, obviously, there is a way, a means that you can act with integrity in that situation, which is that you resign and you blow the whistle.
That is what he should have done if he felt Loretta Lynch was so compromised that he couldn't end this investigation in a credible way.
You resign and say something is wrong.
I cannot continue to do my job.
You either decide to blow the whistle altogether, or you decide that you're just going to resign and let the reporters figure it out for themselves or leak it or whatever you're going to do.
But you do not, obviously, usurp the role of the Justice Department.
So, Sessions and Rosenstein are looking at this thing and they're saying, Holy, you know, we can't have this guy in there.
Trump, meanwhile, is probably ticked off.
There are reports that he's ticked off that Comey will just not say that he did not collude with Russia, which Trump claims he told him three separate times, right?
That he told him three separate times, but he won't go in front of the Senate.
So, you've got a volatile Trump who tends to wait and wait until he's just too angry and then fires people suddenly.
And you've got a Justice Department that suddenly realizes they've got a rogue guy running the FBI, that this emotional, over-emotional guy who's willing to take control if they don't act the way he does.
So, it's clumsy, but it seems to me totally justified.
He seems to me have screwed up.
The Democrats were right.
Everybody wanted him fired.
That's part of Rosenstein's letter.
You can read just all the testimonies that he puts in there of everybody on every side of the political spectrum saying that he was doing the wrong thing.
The one thing that I hope the Trump administration is smart enough not to do is appoint a special prosecutor.
That is all you're going to be hearing from the media and the Democrats for the next, oh, let's say eight years.
You know, that's all you're going to be hearing.
The minute you do this, this thing spirals out of control.
Endless headlines, endless leaks, endless investigations, because you can't limit what the investigator, a special prosecutor, investigates.
He can just start investigating every little thing.
It would be a major, major mistake.
The long knives are out for this guy to begin with.
He should just go about his business and appoint a new FBI.
Why Christianity Appeals00:14:42
This is the other thing.
He's got to appoint a guy that gets approved by Congress.
So, like, it's not like he's going to appoint Ivanka.
You know, he's going to appoint, although he may try, but he's not going to do that.
So, he's going to have to appoint somebody that everybody trusts and that looks good.
This is not, I do not believe it's a cover-up.
I really don't believe that at all, but I do believe it's clumsily handled.
The mailbag.
All right.
All right.
I've got a bunch of good questions here.
I'll just read, I'll read them off.
And you can send in live ones if you want while I'm reading.
From Nathan.
Hi, Andrew, longtime fan of yours.
I ask this question as a religious conservative male.
In today's world, it is not easy to find a partner who is willing to agree with no premarital sex and other values.
What is your opinion of the old saying that God has a plan for you when it comes to finding a spouse?
Do you think that holds true?
And should you just go through, or should you just go through life and should you just go through life expecting to find someone?
Or do you think you should go out of your way to find that person?
Thanks and love the show.
You know, there are a lot of great expressions.
I'm not a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, but I have attended them in training for hotlines, yeah, for hotlines.
So I've been in training.
They have an expression: God can't drive a parked car.
And I think that that's a really good expression because I do believe that God has a plan for your life.
I do believe that part of that plan may well be the partner you're supposed to have.
It may not be.
But God can't drive a parked car.
And there are places, after all, to find women who share your values.
One of them would be church.
A good place.
You know, there's the kind of place where you find people who, at least, you know, share your baseline values, which really is important when you marry somebody.
I mean, you don't have to share all values.
You don't have to share all opinions.
But I just think, like, yeah, should you say God has a plan for me, so I'm going to put my feet up on the table and do nothing?
Absolutely not.
Absolutely not.
I do believe that God has plans for people's lives, and I think you have to search for that plan.
You have to pray to understand that plan, and then you have to act in accordance with that plan.
I always think that there have been times when God has all but spoken to me and said something like, stop smoking, but I have to stop smoking.
It has to be me who does it.
All right.
From Jared, Dear Intellectual Savior of the Unwashed Masses.
That is one of my lesser-known titles, but it is in fact my title.
Werewolf Cop was an amazingly awesome book of pure awesomeness.
Title is a little eh, though.
I completely agree.
One of my best novels, I'm absolutely convinced, Werewolf Cop.
I wish, I cannot believe that nobody stopped me from using that title.
If you could get anyone to direct a film adaptation of that masterclass of a novel, who would you pick and why?
Thank you for your time.
You know, just picking famous directors, I think it would be this guy, I don't know how to even pronounce his name, Denis Veleneuve.
You know, he's the guy who did, he recently did Arrival, which was not my favorite of his movies, very slow, and I just didn't think it was dramatic enough.
But he did a picture called Prisoners, which is slow and meditative, but so tense and so cool.
And he did Sicario, which is very violent and had a couple of flaws in it.
But just really, he does these really smart thrillers that are very, very tense.
And obviously with Arrival, he showed he could handle the special effects and make it realistic, which would be important in Werewolf Cop.
So he would be the guy.
Dear Clavin the Conqueror, only the conquered peoples call me that, but it's fair enough.
As a lapsed Catholic agnostic of 30 plus years, you are maybe, I find you maybe the most effective advocate for faith I've ever heard.
I'm glad to hear that.
I loved your book, The Great Good Thing.
I have to mention the name of the book, The Great Good Thing, A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.
I love your book, and you've almost won me back.
I've always wanted to believe, but I always stumble on the precipice of the leap of faith.
My question, what makes the story of Christ more compelling to you than the faith of your birth or for that matter, Buddhism?
They can't all be true, so why is Christianity true?
I have never gotten past this question.
Cheers, Bob, from New Jersey.
First of all, I want to say that I really respect people who want to believe but don't pretend to believe.
I've always respected that.
Follow your search, follow your journey.
Make sure that you believe what you believe before going forward.
To me, the answer to this question is very easy, but I want to make sure I say it in the right way, because what I don't want to do, I believe that Christianity is uniquely true, which means I believe that all other religions are in some sense false.
But I don't want to pick on other religions.
You can only caricature another religion from the outside, especially speaking in a few minutes.
From within, religions provide all kinds of comfort and open the eyes to all kinds of truths, but I believe that doesn't make the religion itself true.
The one I always pick on is the Mormons when I've read their book.
The book seems to me almost absurd, and yet the Mormons are lovely people and they seem to regulate their lives very well.
It's none of my business whether their beliefs, whether I believe in their beliefs or not.
And I don't mean to pick on them particularly, but it's just I've read the Book of Mormon and I couldn't believe it.
But I see how well they live.
So here's the thing about Christianity that seems to me so appealing.
Everybody has sayings, little maxims in their mind that they live by.
One of mine is don't believe what you don't believe.
And by that I mean I meet people all the time who say this stuff that I know they do not live by.
So they'll say there's no such thing as morality.
And you say like, well, why don't you cheat on your wife?
And then they go into this long, you know, crazy thing.
It just thinks like, hey, you know what's wrong.
You don't do it.
You don't do stuff because you know it's wrong.
Christianity presents my life as I know it to be.
I know I am a self.
I know I am a soul.
I know I also have a body, okay?
And this is the way Christianity presents my life.
I know that the desires of my soul and the desires of my body are out of whack but not unrelated.
That is also the way that Christianity presents my life.
I know that I'm not what I'm supposed to be, that I was supposed to be something and I am not that.
And that is also a depiction of Christianity.
I know that the world is not an illusion, you know, which is a lot of the Eastern religions, and I have practiced Zen for I practice Zen for many years.
You know, one of the things that the Eastern religions are always saying is the world is an illusion, and this is like scientism, not science, but scientism always is saying this.
Oh, you're not really a self.
It's just an illusion that the brain throws up to somebody who's not there.
I don't even understand exactly what it means.
But all those things I don't believe.
It's the same reason I'm not that interested in certain philosophy like Descartes.
I think, therefore, I am.
I already know I am.
It's interesting to think about it.
Philosophy is fascinating.
But I don't need to prove that I am.
I know it.
I know it to be true.
Christianity, again and again, in most of its central doctrines, describes life as I live it.
You know, again, I don't want to pick on other religions, but when some Buddhists say, for instance, all suffering comes from desire, that doesn't represent my life.
You know, suffering comes from desire.
Also, joy comes from desire.
There's all this stuff.
And finally, the fact that the world, two things.
The fact that the world is a place of suffering, which is part of Christianity, but also that if you live in the truth, if you live outside the truth, you will do well in the world.
And if you live in the truth, you won't do well in the world.
And if you live absolutely in the truth, you'll get crucified, seems to me a very accurate description of the world that we know, the tragic world that we know, the messed up, fallen world that we know.
Christianity is the only religion that represents both the life that I live and the God that I believe is there, because I do not believe that God is sitting there saying, if you do this, everything will be great.
If you do that, everything will be bad.
It just doesn't do that.
And so it explains so much about the life that I live.
You know, when I actually became a Christian, which was a big step for me, and that's why I wrote the book, when I became a Christian, one of the things I really did say to myself, the kind of escape hatch, I said, is that if I became less of a realist, I would reconsider.
I would think maybe I had made a mistake.
If I started to live in this kind of fantasy, happy land, you know, cotton candy world that I see certain Christians do live in, I would say, oh, you know, this is a mistake.
But instead, I find that I have become far more realistic about life.
I have become far more able to deal with life and predict what's going to happen in life, insofar as that's possible.
My insights into other human beings, which is half of living life, half of the trick of living life, have become much clearer, much sharper, and much more borne out by their subsequent actions.
So, you know, that's my argument.
I mean, Christianity presents my life as it's lived.
And if you say, well, this miracle and that miracle and all that stuff, you know, you can argue that stuff forever.
That's not the question.
The question is, does the vision of Christianity represent life as it's really lived?
And that is why I think it is uniquely true.
I think it does that uniquely.
I have to move on.
I wish I could just keep answering mailbag questions, but I can't because I have to go into stuff I like.
We need some sound for stuff I like.
We have the great woo for woo-hoo, Lindsay's great woo-hoo for the mailbag.
But stuff I like needs to be like, you know, maybe like stuff I like, you know, some sort of dopey thing.
All right.
So, yeah, yeah, something like that.
Not quite that, but something like that.
All right.
So I've been talking about scenes from the Bible that are really powerful scenes in themselves and how they are represented in pop art and how they affect pop art or how pop art reacts to them or discusses them, you know, is in a conversation with them.
I want to talk about the Last Supper, just one thing from the Last Supper, and I have to give credit to the God-king of the Daily Wire, Jeremy Boring, because he is a very, very insightful gospel interpreter, and he said this about the Last Supper, and I had never thought of it before.
Here's the passage that I'm thinking of.
When it was evening, Jesus reclined at table with the 12 disciples, and as they were eating, he said, truly I say to you, one of you will betray me.
And they were very sorrowful and began to say to him one after another, is it I, Lord?
Am I the one who will betray you?
And what Jeremy pointed out, which I just thought was a brilliant insight, is how pitiful that is.
How pitiful that you're following this guy you obviously love, you obviously hold him in the highest esteem.
He says that you're going to betray him, and you don't even know if you're the person who's going to do it.
You can't even trust yourself not to be that guy.
And it had never occurred to me to think of it that way, because you sort of just think of it as, oh, he's making a prediction, is it going to be me?
But how could it be you unless you were capable of doing it?
Unless you knew in your heart somehow that you were capable of betraying this guy.
And we know that the guy that Jesus has chosen to be the leader of his pack, when he's gone, Peter, does betray him in the sense that he says, I'm not with this guy.
Don't accuse me of it.
He denies him.
He doesn't betray him, I guess.
He denies him.
And says, I will never deny you.
I will stand with you unto death.
And then when it comes down to it, he punks out.
And so that is a powerful thing about who we are, because all of us walk around with daydreams of heroism, all of us.
We walk around thinking, I'm the guy who would run into the fire to save the lady.
I'm the person who would stand up before the dictator and tell him, no, I am the guy who would tell the truth.
And when you hear people rant politically, and part of our business here is to rant politically, you hear them saying, well, why didn't Comey quit?
Well, you know, that's what I'm saying.
Why didn't Comey do this?
Why didn't he do the right thing?
Sometimes it's hard to give up your job.
It's hard to lose your salary.
It's hard to tell your boss he's full of it.
It's hard to tell your professor you're a conservative when you know you're going to get a bad mark.
It's hard to do these things, okay?
And so, and we know in our hearts that we are all capable of failure.
And what we don't know, we don't know is whether we're capable of courage unto death.
We don't know if we're capable of courage even unto getting a bad mark on a paper, even unto losing our jobs.
We do not know how bad we are, you know.
And this is always reflected in some of my fate, one of my favorite kinds of thrillers.
I have written them myself.
I guess you would call them amnesia-based thrillers.
I wrote one called The Animal Hour, which has some, it's one of my earliest thrillers.
It has some things I wish I could change in it, but it also has a very, very cool plot and a very cool resolution.
And the question that the woman in it asks is, she doesn't know who she is, is, am I the good guy or am I the bad guy?
And we see this in one of the truly great thriller films, The Born Identity, where this guy comes back with complete, and this is based on the Robert Ludlam novel, and he comes back with complete memory loss and suddenly starts to find that he has skills that make him suspect to himself.
Who has a safety deposit box full of money and six passports and a gun?
Who has a bank account number in their hip?
I come in here, and the first thing I'm doing is I'm catching the sight lines and looking for an exit.
I see the exit sign too.
I'm not worried.
I mean, you were shot.
People do all kinds of weird and amazing stuff when they're scared.
I can tell you the license plate numbers of all six cars outside.
I can tell you that our waitress is left-handed, and the guy sitting up at the counter weighs 215 pounds and knows how to handle himself.
I know the best place to look for a gun is the cab with a gray truck outside.
And at this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
Now, why would I know that?
You know, this idea that you cannot trust yourself, that you know that something's wrong with you.
The film that I want to recommend, because I'm sure that everybody has seen The Born Identity, and if you haven't, you should watch it.
I mean, The Born Identity, as a professional thriller writer, I actually took that film and broke it down, which I do only very occasionally with things that I think are really, really cooking with gas.
And I broke it down scene by scene just to see how it was constructed.
I mean, part of it's just part of my job, but I wouldn't do it unless I thought the film was really well constructed.
Robert De Niro's Mysterious Role00:02:44
It really is.
But the film that I want to talk about, or just recommend, is a film you probably haven't seen.
In 1987, they call it in Wikipedia, they call it a neo-noir supernatural horror film called Angel Heart.
It's with Mickey Rourke and Robert De Niro and Lisa Bonet, who was one of the daughters on the Bill Cosby show.
And this famously, she does her first nude sex scene, which is very nude, very sexy.
And it is a story of Robert De Niro plays a very mysterious, wealthy guy who hires a private eye to find a missing person who owes him something.
And it is just such a well-constructed film.
It is horrific.
It is bloody.
It is violent.
So don't watch it if you don't enjoy that stuff.
But it is a powerful film based on the not I novel by William Hortzberg.
I don't want to run it down, but I didn't think it was as good as the movie.
The movie is really something, and it's Robert De Niro at his best.
Do we have time to play that one cut?
Here's one cut.
Okay, here's one cut between De Niro, the guy who hires the private eye, and Mickey Rourke, who plays Harry Angel, the private eye.
This Dr. Fowler guy ended up dead with his brains blown out all over the place, all right?
Fowler?
Yeah, Fowler.
Did you kill him?
No, I didn't kill him.
But the cops might think I did.
Hey, look, I took on $125 a day missing persons job with you, all right?
Now I'm a murder suspect.
That's it.
I'm out.
Such are the hazards of your profession, Mr. Angel.
If the fee bothers you, we can have it adjusted.
No, Saifu, you bother me.
Listen, the closest I ever come to death is standing on the corner on 2nd Avenue watching the stiffs go by in the hearse.
All right?
That's the way I like it.
Are you afraid?
Yeah, I'm afraid.
It's really, first of all, De Niro is just, he eats the scenery and he really hands it up, but he's great in it.
And it's just a very, very dark, scary, exciting film.
But it does tap into that last supper thing.
Is it I, Lord?
Am I the one who will betray you?
Who am I?
And what am I?
And am I the good guy or the bad guy?
All right, tomorrow, the last show of the week.
This happened fast.
Oh, Molly Hemingway is going to be here.
Isn't Molly Hemingway?
Oh, Molly Hemingway has written this incredible broadside about Trump and the media.
It is so good.
I'm sure you've seen her on Fox recently.
If you ever watch the Brett Baer News show, she's on the panel sometimes.
Incredibly articulate, incredibly smart.
And this broadside, which I've been reading, is really great about Trump and the media.