Andrew Clavin critiques Islamic cultural practices and terrorism’s dark humor, framing the Manchester bombing as a symptom of postmodernism’s moral relativism. Dean Batali laments Hollywood’s lack of conservative voices, arguing for authentic faith-based storytelling over sanitized portrayals. They debate sin vs. compromise in media, praising Hacksaw Ridge’s moral realism while critiquing pacifist absolutism. The episode ties cultural decline to ideological erosion, ending with a call to reclaim truth through engagement—not retreat—while mocking societal pessimism. [Automatically generated summary]
As I always say, everything is funny in life except for other people's suffering.
Even evil itself would be hilarious if it weren't for the fact it caused other people to suffer.
For instance, a group of Islamic knuckleheads with stupid beards who can't even look at the female half of God's creation without becoming disgusted with themselves and their own natural yearnings would be the height of hilarious absurdity if they would simply solve the problem in the most rational way by decreeing that they themselves aren't allowed to go outside without wearing a blindfold, instead of annoying innocent women by forcing them to hide their beauty under black sacks.
What sense does that make?
Women whose lives are oppressed and constrained by a culture-wide sexual neurosis are not funny.
Stupid bearded guys wearing blindfolds and bumping into poles and tripping over curbstones, that's funny.
After all, if your eye offends you, pluck it out.
Or let me pluck it out.
That would also be funny.
Likewise, some dithering son of a nefarious Islamic dirtbag who feels his understanding of sin and apostasy confers on him the right to destroy the image of God and humanity could create a situation with amazing comic possibilities if he would simply do the sensible thing and blow himself to kingdom come in the privacy of his own moral cesspool without bothering the rest of us.
Nothing ruins a laugh more than blowing up other people just because you happen to be an Islamist knucklehead.
On the other hand, an Islamist knucklehead blowing himself to pieces in some out-of-the-way place would have a twofold benefit.
One, it would provide us with a top-notch chuckle fest, and two, it would blow up an Islamist knucklehead, which has to be a good thing in and of itself.
If it weren't for the suffering it caused, evil would be funny in the same way slapstick is funny, because it shows us the noble creature God made slipping on the banana peel of what he was never meant to be.
If it weren't for the suffering, evil would be funny because in our moments of loving forgiveness, we know exactly how wondrously we are made, while in our moments of brutality and stupidity and ugliness and Islamism, but I repeat myself, we see the ridiculous worst of what we sometimes become.
Evil would be good comic stuff except for the suffering.
All the same, there is evil somewhere every day and suffering somewhere every day, and yet every day we are tasked with a responsibility to rejoice.
We rejoice because we know who we are meant to be and we know that we will someday become that again.
And we know that in the end, we will have the last laugh.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Shipshape, tipsy-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, hoorah.
All right, we've got the mailbag tomorrow, so be there.
You know, we have gotten letters.
Seriously, we have, this is not no joke, we have gotten letters saying that we have solved people's personal relationships, that we have led people back to God and the mailbag.
New Sheets, Better Sleep00:04:01
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All right, we have got today, we have got a really guest, my friend Dean Batali.
He's a TV writer.
He worked on the 70s show.
He worked on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Remember, I don't know if people remember the half-hour news hour, which was Fox's attempt to put some comedy on conservative news.
He's now the showrunner, which is a big, big deal.
Now we have to call him Mr. Batali before we just called him Hey, Jay.
But now we have to call him Mr. Batali.
He's the showrunner on Hallmark's The Good Witch, and he is the author of Watching TV Religiously, Television and Theology and Dialogue with theologian Cutter Calloway.
And the reason I want to talk to Dean and the reason I want to talk a lot this week about the culture and where we are with the culture is because of things like what happened in Manchester, England yesterday.
Believing in Freedom00:15:27
This children, to me, their children killed watching Ariana Grande concert.
I think the death toll now is a 22, but it's whatever, you know, it only takes one for it to be more than you can bear.
You know, as a thriller writer, a lot of times, I don't do this as much as I used to, but I used to go to writing conferences and, you know, fans would show up and you would have panels, panel discussions about thriller writing, and you'd be asked questions.
And one of the most common questions I was asked was, why do you think that bad guys are more interesting than good guys?
And I would always say they're not.
It's just that authors don't write good guys honestly and they write bad guys honestly.
And the problem, the problem is, and this is just true in fiction, and it's not true, I hope, in my fiction, and I'll tell you why in a sec, is that we write bad guys with all their human flaws intact, but we think that good guys are supposed to be good inside.
You know, we think if a guy is a faithful husband, for instance, he's not supposed to have pornographic thoughts about every other woman that he sees.
We think if a woman is a wonderful mom and a good wife, that she never has fantasies of locking her kids in the closet and setting the house on fire.
I mean, all these things that we take away, we strip the good guys of their natural, you know, their natural human brokenness and their natural human sin, and they cease to be interesting.
The hero ceases to be interesting because he's just this square-jawed Captain America type without any flaws.
And a long time ago, way back when I wrote my novel, True Crime, I realized that I wasn't interested in writing about bad guys.
They always say, if you're going to write a good thriller, you need a fascinating killer, you need a fascinating villain.
And I thought, well, what if I just have fascinating good guys?
What if my good guys are revealed in all their brokenness and all their trouble and all their problems?
And I concentrate on them.
And some of my books, True Crime is an example, some of my books don't even have bad guys in them.
They really are just about what the good guys are doing and how troubled they are and how difficult they are.
Because heroes aren't heroes because they're good, right?
They're good because they're heroes.
They're good because what they stand for.
The things they actually, the ideas they actually stand for.
And this is why I used to despise Barack Obama when he would talk about who we are, you know, who we are.
It's like, we're not anybody.
We're the same as the Islamic killers.
We're no better than them in our hearts.
We're better than them because of what we represent, what we believe, and how those beliefs guide us to behave.
And so the question, you know, the left, whenever there's a terrorist attack like this, I always hear them saying, why do they hate us?
Why do they hate us?
Like, who cares?
I could care less why they hate us.
I care less what their religion is.
I don't give a rat what they think.
I don't give a rats what they believe.
I don't care why they're doing what they do.
All I care about is who we are and what are we fighting for because you cannot fight back unless you know who you are and what you stand for.
If you think of it, think of it this way, just to use a metaphor, all right?
Think of yourself as a word, all right?
Your body, yourself, your life is a word that is meant, or a sentence maybe, to express an idea.
You know, ideas have absolutely no material existence, right?
They don't exist in reality.
You can't put your hand on an idea.
You can't feel it.
You can't touch it.
You can't eat it.
And yet, and yet the idea cannot exist in life.
You only experience that idea when certain physical things take place, when the brain works, when the mouth works, when words come out, when words are written down on the page.
All those things bring the idea into actuality, right?
This is kind of an Aristotelian idea, that things don't become real until they're embodied, even though they exist before they become what he would call real, okay?
So you are a sentence.
You are an idea.
And what is that idea that you're trying to express in all your brokenness, with all your lust and all your greed and all your dishonesty?
What is it that you are trying to express?
Because we live in a time, you know that Yeats poem, The Second Coming, where he says the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.
That is where we stand today, where these clowns or evil losers, as Donald Trump brilliantly called them, I feel like maybe we should play this cut for a minute, because Donald Trump, you don't usually think of Donald Trump and the phrase the maux juste, the French phrase meaning the perfect word, you know.
But this is like a typical classic Trump because it is this just meux, you know.
I mean, not just me saying it, this meu is sou juste, it is defining juste, okay?
This is his reaction to the attack yesterday.
We stand in absolute solidarity with the people of the United Kingdom.
So many young, beautiful, innocent people living and enjoying their lives murdered by evil losers in life.
I won't call them monsters because they would like that term.
They would think that's a great name.
I will call them from now on losers because that's what they are.
They're losers.
And we'll have more of them.
But they're losers.
Just remember that.
I love it.
I mean, Trump, you know, his opponents in the Republican primaries found out how, and Hillary Clinton as well found out how tough he is when he starts to plant names on you and how those names stick because they actually capture something true about you.
And I think in doing this, this was really one of the best moments of his presidency so far because he actually did capture this thing that they're not monsters.
They're not demons.
They're just losers.
They're evil losers in life because the world is going to go on without them and they are going to be destroyed.
And it is something that's happening.
It kind of shows that ISIS is on the run.
And one of the reasons that ISIS is becoming dangerous in Western countries is because they are on the run.
They're losing their place in the Middle East.
But here's the thing.
If we don't know who we are, we don't know what to fight for.
We don't know what to stand for.
And when a culture dies, I recently read a book about the death of the Soviet Union.
And it was called, Nothing is True, Everything is Possible.
And that is where the left wants us to be right now.
Nothing is true.
Everything is possible.
Your gender is not your gender.
Your religion is not your religion.
Your traditions are wrong.
Your creed is wrong.
Everything is wrong.
We've been reading, we've been hearing this stuff over the last couple of weeks.
Maybe the American Revolution was a mistake and all this stuff.
And you're a man, no, but you can be a woman.
You can just wish it.
Everything's possible.
Nothing is true.
Everything's possible.
You're white and you want to be black so you can play the victim card.
Okay, you're black.
The only thing that's holding you back is society.
There's no actual limits to reality.
And of course, that's the opposite of the truth.
Reality has a nature.
Reality has its limits.
And there is such a thing.
There's such a thing as absolute truth.
Now, maybe we never get to it absolutely, but we know that that truth exists and we can move toward it.
And every time I say this, I get letters.
I must have gotten now somewhere between five and ten letters telling me that I don't understand the postmodernists.
And I have read the postmodernists and I do understand them and I really truly believe they are wrong.
And people keep saying, well, Derry die.
You know, he doesn't say, he says that, you know, there are concepts that work.
There are conventions.
You know, it's just this mealy mouth way of getting around the fact that the world has a reality, the world has an author, the author has a nature, that nature is our morality.
And if you don't believe in something, if you don't believe in something, you end up believing in nothing and you are easy to destroy.
You become an easy target.
Let me tell you what I believe in, okay?
What I believe in is your freedom, okay?
I believe in your freedom because my freedom is dependent on me.
My freedom is dependent on my willingness to die to do what I want and say what I believe.
Now, if I don't have that courage, then that's on me.
But your freedom depends on me and everybody around you.
I believe in your freedom to be hateful and nasty, and I believe in your freedom to love your neighbor as you love yourself.
I believe in your freedom to be gay, and I believe in your freedom to think that being gay is immoral, and you don't want to cater a gay wedding.
I believe in your freedom to do what you want to do as long as you don't physically impede the freedom of the guy next to you.
And then, and then when we have that freedom, right, then the argument begins.
And I believe in the argument.
The argument used to be called the great conversation.
That is all the thoughts of Western, great Western thinkers put together.
I believe in this great conversation.
And the reason this comes up is because of Ariana Grandi, okay?
Now, I only know Arianna Grandi.
Obviously, I'm not the audience for Ariana Granti.
And the only reason I know her is because I've worked on these hotlines for people who are suicidal.
A lot of those people are teens.
A lot of times you're talking to teenage girls and you sort of try and make some connection.
You ask them what they're interested in.
And a lot of them were interested in Ariana Grandi.
So I went on and watched her stuff, okay?
And I found that, what's the word?
I found it.
I find it kind of trashy.
I found it selling this version of little girls, sexualizing little girls, dressing in this very garbagey way, kind of putting forward an idea to little girls that their sexuality is meant to be kind of this raw, almost, you know, I don't want to use the word submissive, but just kind of like, you know, come and get me, here I am, kind of sexuality that actually, it does have a kind of raw appeal, but also puts people off as well,
and it may not be the best way to live your life.
Now, Ariana Granti is not an evil person, right?
She may be doing something that I disapprove of, but you only have to compare her to the people who blew up her concert to know the difference, right?
If Ariana Granti could fill a theater singing Irving Berlin songs, that's what she'd be singing.
It is the culture that creates her.
It's not she who creates the culture.
And only in freedom, in liberty, can we argue about these things and win.
Because, you know, the thing is, if you force a woman to put on a bag over her head, I believe that womanly modesty is a good thing.
If you force a woman to put a bag over her head, that's not modesty.
It's not modesty unless you choose it.
I believe that men should exhibit honor and chivalry, but it's not honor and chivalry if you force them to do it or kill them if they don't.
You have to choose it.
Love is not love unless you choose it.
And faith is not faith unless you choose it.
And that's why I don't believe in blasphemy laws.
That's why I don't believe in apostasy.
I believe in the great conversation of Western thought, okay?
And that is what we are trying to defend.
And that is what the left, you know, people always wonder, why does the left give quarter to these Islamists?
It's because they both have the same enemy.
You know, your enemy's enemy is your friend.
That is what the left wants to destroy.
That is why your professors will not teach you.
Your college professors will not teach you about Plato, about Aristotle.
All they'll teach you is their theory about these things, their feminism, their race theory.
They will not let you read Shakespeare without imposing their ideas on him because both the Islamists and the leftists are trying to destroy the same thing, this freedom that we have to have this great conversation and find our way and work our will.
Do we have Dean on the line?
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, let's bring Dean Batali on.
He is, as I said, a TV writer.
He worked on that 70s show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the half-hour news hour, which I have to mention because I really enjoyed it.
And he's currently the showrunner on Hallmark's Good Witch, which, as I said, means we sometimes have to call him Mr. Batali.
And he is the author, the co-author of Watching TV Religiously, Television and Theology in Dialogue with the theologian Cutter Calloway.
You there, Dean?
There he is.
I am here.
How you doing?
It's kind of, you know, it seems like two days ago I was talking to you in a bar and now I'm talking to you on this weird TV thing.
It's kind of a strange experience.
That's correct.
You know, they say in show business, you should never follow children or animals.
I'd like to add to that postmodernism discussions by Andrew Clavin.
Yeah, because, well, you're in good shape because now everyone's asleep, right?
It was like, when I got to Derry Die, I lost half the audience.
So the reason I brought you on is because you are a culture warrior and you are a guy who have worked.
I mean, these are big shows, Buffy and the 70s show and now doing The Good Witch, which is essential.
You know, I drive to work every day.
I see this enormous billboard for The Good Witch, and I'm envious, and it makes me enraged.
But what is it?
Let's start with how bad do you think the culture is?
I mean, how far along do you think we are on the road to falling down?
Well, first of all, I have to say what a lifelong dream this is to be on the Andrew Clavin show, which makes me think I need to get a different life of some kind.
Yeah, the different dreams.
Yeah.
You know, there's a friend of mine, Mako Fujimara, who's a, who's an artist, and he talks more about culture care rather than being culture warriors and cultivating the culture in a way, participating more, making it, being smart as we consume it.
Look, I think that our culture is generally damaging.
I actually think I've worked on shows that are damaging to our culture, not because of the occult of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but because of the meanness of the characters on that 70s show.
You know, I had no problem with the show being about sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
I'm very much in favor of two of those three things within their proper use.
But I just think I'm more concerned about how mean people are to each other and also the lack of diversity in our culture, in television and film, especially.
Not racial or gender diversity, but worldview diversity, diversity of thought, characters who express my, our worldview.
I mean, I won't say that yours and my worldview are exactly the same because I can't get that far to the right.
But, you know, there's a part of me that wants to see people like us discussions like we have in bars and at our homes on television, in fiction, in film.
You were talking about Blue Bloods the other day and how they were doing something about gay marriage, I think, and you never had the actual argument that would have been on the other side, which is what makes great drama.
Right.
Great television, great film.
So that's what I miss is seeing people represented like us.
I mean, I came to Hollywood.
I'm Christian.
I came to Hollywood because I wanted to see Christian characters represented.
And that's my frustration with the culture is we don't see that diversity.
So I think, and it's getting, I'm not sure it's getting better or worse in terms of, I feel like it's actually getting farther away.
I feel like we're getting kind of even more pushed off off the airway.
Well, how bad is it on the inside?
You know, people on the right are always just feel that Hollywood is the enemy, that they hate them, that they're out to get them and all this stuff.
True or false?
Maybe.
I don't know if they're out to get us so much as they have no idea who we are and are very suspicious of us.
You know, I hate to praise Ben Shapiro on your show.
Yeah, really?
But his book, Primetime Propaganda, was really great investigative journalism that really, you know, when you have the showrunner of friends saying, I don't know why a conservative would want to write on this show.
Faith In Hollywood00:12:39
And I'm thinking, well, for the hundreds of thousands of dollars that I could then donate to conservative causes.
But there's just a lack of understanding of who we are, why we would want to be engaged.
There are assumptions about people of faith and conservatives.
You know, the Basketball Horrible's comment is what most people in Hollywood that I've met feel about conservatives.
And again, it's not because they're evil, horrible people.
They might be, according to you, but it's because they don't really know many of us and don't have conversations with us.
So I've been in the writers' rooms and I get, you know, I get told things like, I'm so glad I know you because now I know that all Christians aren't freaks.
And I'll be defending, you know, a conservative point of view or a religious point of view that just isn't offended if I'm not there.
I mean, I think I do believe that most of the people in Hollywood that I meet are really lovely people, but they have never met anybody like either one of us.
But I mean, you know, you have something like this, The Last Man Standing got canceled, and people on the right went nuts.
And I thought, like, how much of that, how much of that is an economic decision?
Because the show was a hit, and how much of it is political?
Look, it might be 10% political.
It's really more economic.
There's a weird phrase in the, it's a 20th Century Fox produced show on a Disney-owned network.
And by the time it got to season six or seven seven, the contract clicked in so that Disney would be paying the entire production fee for the show.
So basically, Disney is printing money for 20th Century Fox.
That's what happened.
Look, the thing that's more, you know, whether Hollywood is run by economics or worldview, and I do think that it's run a little more by worldview.
The problem is that nobody in Hollywood ever goes to a party and hears these words.
Oh, I love Last Man Standing.
My family and I watch it all the time.
They're talking about Modern Family or other shows, and they want affirmation.
This is just high school for rich, angry, smart people.
We just want affirmation for who we are because our mothers didn't love us enough and we didn't get kissed enough in high school.
I always try to explain this to conservatives that artists work for love, and they think like love, is there a dollar bill with that?
Because most people don't.
Yeah, the other side of that story is that the Real O'Neills got canceled at the same time that Last Man Standing did.
And the Real Neals was one of the most anti-Christian, anti-conservative value shows on the air.
And now that's gone.
So I celebrate that more than I'm upset that Last Man Standing after.
So now here, this is the part where we're getting a little bit into the high weeds, because one of the things that always bothers me in talking to my fellow Christians about the culture is I think, well, what would you like to see?
I sometimes get the feeling they want to see a world of G-rated films where nobody really has sex and where everybody who has sex gets punished, where the Christian is happy and the non-Christian is unhappy.
And they want to see a world that in no way reflects the world that I see in front of me, which simply is not art.
I mean, I say this because of all these movies that Christians love, like, you know, God is Not Dead and The War Room and all these films that make a fortune no matter how badly they're made.
And so I guess what I want to ask you is, what does your end game look like?
If tomorrow you could wake up and think, oh, Dean, you won the culture.
What would that culture look like?
Well, I've already won the culture because I'm on the Andrew Clayman show for that sort of thing.
No, well, you've won life.
That's certainly winning life.
Yeah, right.
No, it's seeing characters.
Look, I've said it this before.
I'd like to see as many Christian characters on television as there are gay characters.
And actually, we're starting to catch up.
But what we don't have is actual lead characters.
So I want to see characters.
Look, I think Hacksaw Ridge and Silence are really interesting.
And that's the kind of movies that I'd like to see made.
Christians who actually utilize their faith, not are arguing about things and standing the grounds, but actually living out their faith as happens in Silence and Hacksaw Ridge.
It's happening on TV shows like The Americans, where the daughter is Christian.
It would happen on a show called Rectify, where a guy actually got baptized, was trying to be a better person.
That's what I want to see.
It's a little easier to talk from a faith perspective because I want to see characters of faith.
From a conservative perspective, it's a little more difficult to say, well, what would that look like?
You can look at the Lord of the Rings and look at that as kind of a pro-war movie.
There are things worth fighting for.
But from a faith perspective, it's just I want to see as many characters of faith as there are in our culture, church-going people, 40, 50%, whatever it is, on television, living their lives.
It frustrates me that I've never seen a show about a hospital chaplain or a police chaplain, you know, and all these shows with death and destruction, and there's never going to be walking up and saying we'd like to talk about God.
That's what's missing, I think.
That is amazing.
I mean, I noticed many, many years ago, even before I became a Christian, I noticed that nobody ever said grace in the movies.
And I felt like how many people, most people, I think, say something, you know, at night or something, you know, before dinner.
And like, no, it's funny is that, yeah, they do this on Fast and the Furious.
Almost every episode, almost every Fast and the Furious movie ends with them sitting around a table and joining hands to say a prayer.
And they do it on blue blood.
And I just think it's more present.
It doesn't have to be front and center.
It's just if you have a character of seven people, shouldn't one or two of them be a Christian on this show?
This is us.
Where's faith?
I mean, it's kind of way in the background.
Aren't people actually living out their faith?
Again, mixing it up the way it happens in culture.
One of the things that I hear from, well, I deal with with Christians all the time.
I mean, I get this letter from my books.
You call yourself a Christian, you call yourself a Christian letter.
I should keep a file of them, you know, because my character.
Well, I've sent a couple of those.
I know it's you.
It's all you, I think.
But I mean, you know, they don't like my characters curse.
So my bad guys are bad, that my good guys are bad.
They don't like any of this stuff.
And one of the things they say is, well, if we become, if we speak in the culture such that we reach the people who need to hear us, don't we also degrade ourselves at the same time?
They feel like they're in a dilemma that they become the culture.
If we have a Christian singer who dances around scantily clad like Ariana Grandi, you know, aren't we essentially debasing ourselves even while we're reaching more people?
I mean, do you have an answer to that?
Is there something, is there a way you feel about that?
I don't know.
That's probably a longer conversation.
There's a difference between degradation, compromise, and sin.
So I get accused of compromising because I've worked on that 70s show.
I've taken Hollywood's manna.
Okay, well, Daniel had to work for the Diviners and the Witches when he was running King Nebuchadnezzar's court.
Maybe he compromised in taking that job.
He would have been killed if he didn't take that job.
But the challenge is, did he sin?
I mean, look, we got to mix it up.
Paul knew the culture.
If you read what Paul knew about the culture, he went into places where not a lot of religious people went to, like libraries and other things, and was up on the culture completely.
And I think we have to be, and look, in order to talk, if you're going to talk to certain people, you got to talk to a certain way.
I don't know.
I think God's a little more concerned with our behavior than our language.
And I think there are limits.
I've turned down jobs.
There are certain things I won't write.
But, you know, I always say that I think the most pro-abstinence movie ever made in Hollywood is the 40-year-old virgin.
It should be shown in churches to say to people, if you wait long enough, it's worth it.
But it's a movie that's full of bestiality jokes and all sorts of profanity, but it makes more of a point than any Christian-made film I've ever seen.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, there are things I won't write in jobs I've actually turned down, but it's always about where the heart of the movie lies for me.
I mean, I've seen slasher movies.
As long as the guy, the heart of the movie is with the victim, I'm all right.
But I've seen slasher movies where the heart of the movie is actually with the slasher and with the cheap thrill of that.
And that really does put me off.
So looking for, are you hopeful?
I mean, you're probably one of the least hopeful people I've ever met.
And so I think I asked this.
Compared to you, Laban, it's a sliding scale.
I mean, you're just wow.
He's all.
Do you feel, I mean, like I was just talking, I don't know if you heard this part.
I was talking before you came on about a book I read about the fall of the Soviet Union, and it was called, I can't remember if it was everything is possible and nothing is true or nothing is true and everything is possible.
But the point was that, you know, as things unraveled, the truth vanished, you know, the limits of reality sort of seemed to disappear and everything just fell apart.
Do you think that's where we're headed?
Or do you think there will be a reclamation?
Do you think we will have a revival in this country, at least, of the idea of truth and God, possibly?
Boy, I don't see a lot of evidence for it, but I guess that shows me to be the pessimist that I am.
You know, Tolkien said, by birth, I'm a pessimist, but by conviction, an optimist.
And now do I win a prize for quoting Tolkien on the anti-slavery show?
Yes, you do.
I'm much optimistic about that.
I also see where humanity, you know, if I look at where I think the Bible says we're heading, you know, I'm not so optimistic on that level.
I am optimistic that more people of faith and more people of more conservative libertarian worldview are looking at Hollywood as a mission field or a culture place to be, you know, to cultivate, to care for culture.
We need more people there.
And I think if we start, you know, making these kind of movies, putting these, getting these characters on the air, then Hollywood might see there's a marketplace out there and put aside the worldview because there might be money to make.
But I am, you know, look, I'm in the middle on this.
I'm not quite as pessimistic as you might think I am.
I'm not very near as optimistic as you are.
But I think that the solution is to care for the culture, cultivate it, be a part of it, not complain so much about it, find the good and praise it, and make even better good stuff.
Well, I will let you leave it there.
Dean Batali, the author of Watching TV Religiously, Television and Theology and Dialogue.
I expect a free copy to win a free copy of this.
Unlike most Daily Wire guests, my book has words in it.
Oh, we disapprove.
We disapprove of that.
It's good to see you, Dean.
I'll talk to you again.
Thank you.
All right.
That's really interesting.
You know, he was starting to break up.
I actually wanted to ask him about his book, but I'll bring him back on and talk to him about it later.
I do think this is an interesting moment because, you know, the thing is, on the one side, you have the idea of our identity falling apart, that we're supposed to be in love with diversity, but not supposed to have an identity that unites us, which is nonsense.
And on the other side, you have these guys, these white supremacists and Western supremacists, who basically become jingoistic and violent and stodgy.
You know, they become stuck in their idea of what the West is.
And that's why I plunk always for liberty over everything, because I think that through liberty, through ordered liberty, you can get to righteousness where it's harder to get, it's harder to get to liberty from righteousness than it is to get to righteousness from liberty, I think.
But maybe, but look, you know, I would go any way I could get there to get to that freedom.
I have to just say, before we turn to stuff I like, I have to give Trump props for the hilarity of watching him come to Israel and the joy that the Israelis had in not having Barack Obama anymore.
I thought that Benjamin Netanyahu is going to have to change his name to Benjamin Netanyahu because I just think he was so happy.
This is what he said.
Play cut four.
I just love this cut.
We had a terrific discussion today, and when I say terrific, it encompasses everything.
We could talk about deregulation, we could talk about economics.
I think we quote each other.
We understand each other and so much of the things that we wish to accomplish for both our countries.
But I want to thank you especially today for your deep commitment to Israel's security, its well-being, and its future.
I have no doubt that as we work together, you and I, the alliance between our countries will grow ever stronger.
I want you to know how much we appreciate the change in American policy on Iran, which you enunciated so clearly just an hour ago.
I want you to know how much we appreciate your bold decision to act against the use of chemical weapons in Syria.
And I want to tell you also how much we appreciate the reassertion of American leadership in the Middle East.
Reassertion Of American Leadership00:04:43
Ouch, the reassertion, the reassertion of what was missing there, B.B.
Oh, yeah, it was eight years of being stabbed in the back.
I mean, just the glee, the glee in his voice.
He said when he said, oh, we quote each other.
You know, it's like this love affair.
I mean, this is, if you could have listened to Netanyahu's mind, it would have sounded like this.
It's really, I've just never seen the guy that's like, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Anyway, stuff I like.
All right.
We're doing Memorial Day stuff I like because I think, I feel there are so many great war movies and so many war movies that they make nowadays that reflect back on the past in a false way.
And I want to just, if you've never seen Sergeant York, it is considered one of the classic films.
The American Film Institute makes it one of its 100 most inspirational American movies.
And they call Alvin York one of its top 50 heroes in American cinema.
Alvin York was a real guy.
He was a pacifist.
He had lived a kind of rowdy life and then he found God and he didn't want to go to World War I.
This was, but he went to World War I and became one of the most decorated American soldiers of the war.
And this was directed by Howard Hawkes and Gary Cooper plays Sergeant York and he won the Oscar for it.
It's a little clunky.
It's an old, old movie, it's 1941, but it feels a little older than that, maybe because of its setting.
But here's just a scene where Sergeant York explains why he changed his mind, why he stopped being a pacifist.
There's something that I'd like to know.
Yes, sir.
That night that you reported back to me at Camp Gordon, you as much as told me that you were quite prepared to die for your country, but not to kill.
What made you decide to change your mind?
Well, sir, of course, if you'd rather not tell me, why?
It's quite all right.
Well, I'm as much again killing as ever, sir.
But it was this way, Colonel.
When I started out, I felt just like you said.
But when I hear them machine guns are going and all them fellas are dropping around me, I figured that them guns was killing hundreds, maybe thousands.
And there weren't nothing anybody could do but to stop them guns.
And that's what I done.
You mean to tell me that you did it to save lives?
Yes, sir.
That was why.
Well, York, what you've just told me is the most extraordinary thing of all.
So I want to compare that to Hacksaw Ridge.
And I don't want to knock Hacksaw Ridge.
I think it's a good movie, but not a great movie.
And I think it didn't do as well as everybody who made it expected it to make.
Mel Gibson's a terrific director.
Its war scenes are really powerful.
Its acting is terrific.
And it's about World War II.
Desmond Das was a guy who didn't want to carry a gun.
A Seventh-day Adventist, he didn't want to carry a gun.
He was a pacifist.
But he ended up saving so many lives through his sheer raw, unbelievable courage, unbelievable courage.
And I think the problem, the thing that undermined the film more than anything else was that his position didn't make sense.
That his position was, I'm not going to carry, I will go into war, into battle, but I won't carry a rifle.
And the problem is, is Sergeant York is right.
Sometimes a rifle saves lives.
Sometimes killing saves lives.
And what I think is, I think, kind of got people in the back of their minds was that all you're doing when you don't carry a rifle into war is you're preserving your own righteousness.
You're not doing the righteous thing.
And I think one of the things that God calls upon us to do sometimes is set aside our own righteousness for His righteousness.
And that's why I feel that Sergeant York is a terrific film, and Hacksaw Ridge is a good, watchable film, but not a great film.
And I think that it, once again, it brings us back to the fact that reality has parameters.
It has limits.
When you are in a battle, the way you save lives is by killing the people who are taking lives.
The way you save lives is by winning the war.
Presumably, you're fighting the war in the first place to save the lives of the people around you and the values of the country that you love.
And so I just think that we've lost this sense that, like we saw in Saving Private Ryan, a little bit in Hacksaw Ridge, we've lost this sense that reality has parameters and morality has parameters.
These parameters are absolutely real.
They are absolutely real.
They are not relative.
They're not, you know, fuzzy.
They're absolutely real.
We may not see them clearly.
We may never be able to reach the wall of reality.
Of course we can't.
Half Steps Forward00:00:56
We're only these little worms, you know, crawl these ants crawling around on the anthill.
We don't have the mind of God.
But to know that it's there, to know that the great conversation is the way we approach the edges of reality by half steps, to know that freedom is the way that people can blossom and become fully who they are and therefore help us in our disagreements and in our tolerance of one another to get to make those half steps toward the wall.
That is the whole thing that we're fighting for, that we're standing up for, and it is the whole reason these people who kill in the name of what they think is God, but we know as the ancient enemy of humankind, why they are indeed evil losers, because in the long run, in the very long run, they will indeed lose as evil itself will lose.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
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