Ben Shapiro dissects Trump’s presidency as a conservative turning point, mocking media hysteria over obstruction claims while praising Saudi pressure on extremist madrasas and the EPA’s budget cuts. He frames Europe’s decline—from WWII scars to Merkel’s immigration policies—as a contrast to America’s creedal resilience, warning against conspiracy theories like Seth Rich’s murder. Theological debates on organ donation and resurrection pivot to political optimism: despite gridlock, healthcare reform may advance, but conservatives must fight eternal truths—liberty, truth—not fleeting victories. Memorial Day reflections critique leftist veteran narratives, recommending American Sniper for its moral depth over The Best Years of Our Lives. The episode ends with a preview of The Benedict Option, framing Trump’s era as both fragile and foundational. [Automatically generated summary]
According to a new study by a neuroscientist, the brains of journalists show a lower than average level of executive functioning with a low ability to regulate emotion, suppress biases, solve complex problems, and show creative and flexible thinking.
This is a real study.
On average, it found journalists were not as competent or intelligent as bankers, traders, salespeople, rodents, crackhors, coma patients, or that guy on the New York subway who pretends to strum a guitar that's actually a cardboard box.
The journalists were, however, about equal in intelligence to college professors and paving stones.
The scientists who performed the study were warned that the average IQ of the journalist may have been unfairly lowered by including Chris Cuomo, who is, of course, the idiot child of the Cuomo family and was thus sent to work at CNN in the hopes that no one would notice he's an idiot because he just blend in.
Unfortunately, even at CNN, that didn't work, and Cuomo just looks like an enormous idiot surrounded by other idiots.
The study analyzed the responses of 40 print and broadcast journalists under certain test conditions.
For instance, the journalists were gathered in a room and then shown a picture of Donald Trump.
They reacted by running around hysterically in different directions, phoning each other in fake Russian voices while pretending to be anonymous sources, and then confirming the legitimacy of their sources by calling in another fake voice to vouch for the first fake voice.
After this, they gave each other Pulitzer Prizes and dressed up as Robert Redford and all the president's men.
In another test, the journalists were shown old videos of Barack Obama and then asked a series of three questions.
Question number one, would you please stop doing what you're doing to yourself?
It's embarrassing the female researchers.
Question two, when you reflect on the fact that Obama's signature domestic program was based on lies and doomed to failure, and when you realize that his foreign policy resulted in an expansion of violence in the Middle East and a greater likelihood that Iran will acquire a nuclear weapon, would you then please stop doing what you're doing to yourself?
It's embarrassing the female researchers.
Question three, listen, I'm serious.
Would you stop or are you some kind of perverted idiot?
Oh, excuse me, Mr. Cuomo.
I didn't recognize you with your pants off.
Finally, in a series of multiple choice questions, the journalists were asked to assess various news stories.
One example, a Muslim man shoots 15 innocent bystanders while shouting Allah Huaq Bar.
He later tells the police he acted as a soldier for Islam, slaughtering it in the tradition of Muhammad and according to the commands of the Quran.
Who or what is responsible for the deaths of the bystanders?
A. Conservative Islamophobes.
B.
The gun.
C. Unemployment.
D. Please show me the video of Barack Obama again and then turn away for a few moments.
After the study was over, the journalists helped Chris Cuomo find his way out of the broom closet and went outside to play in traffic.
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-dunky.
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It's a wonderful day.
Hooray, hooray!
If you want to sing, hooray!
It's mailbag day.
Yay, yay!
Okay, but, you know, this is where I answer your questions, solve your problems, right?
The answers are guaranteed 100% correct.
Life Insurance Website Tips00:03:07
They are guaranteed to change your life.
Every now and again, they change your life for the better.
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That's why you subscribe.
And if that's not enough, if changing your miserable existence is not enough, if you subscribe for a year, allows you eight bucks a month, we will send you Ben Shapiro, his new book that he wrote with his dad David, called Say It So, Papa, Dad, Me, and the 2005 White Sox Champions Season.
It follows the White Sox through the entire season.
It was the first time they'd won a championship, I think, since 1732, I think it was, was the last time the White Sox had won a championship.
And it includes that adorable picture of Ben as a little boy, which most of us believe is actually made of wax because we don't believe that Ben actually ever was a little boy.
But anyway, it's a very touching story by Ben and his dad, David.
So, before we get started, let us talk about this.
You know, we keep talking, we always have this big talk about health insurance, health insurance, but you know that 30%, one-third of the people in the country, the families in the country, did not have any life insurance, which is nuts.
Because as you get older, of course, people come to be dependent on you.
And it may be your spouse, it may be your kids, or it may be your folks.
You know, as your folks get older and you start taking care of them, what happens if something happens to you?
Like suddenly you are backed over by a truck and there's nobody there to take care of the people that you take care of.
You got to have life insurance.
You've got to get it.
And you're probably saying to yourself, hey, I'm just starting out in life.
I can't afford life insurance.
And that is why there is policygenius.com.
It is a very simple website that allows you to compare the prices of all the best insurance sellers, life insurance sellers, which means that you can sometimes get as much as 40% off other life insurance prices because, first of all, you don't have to go from place to place.
You don't have to get on the phone.
It's a really simple website.
They don't push you.
They don't give you any sales talks.
They do have people to help you out and to use the website.
It's a very friendly website, very welcoming, and it's spelled Policy Genius.
It's P-O-L-I-C-Y-G-E-N-I-U-S dot com.
There's no jargon, there's no sales pressure, there's no hassle.
It is life insurance made easy.
You've got to have it, and this is a good way to get it if you're starting out or if you just want to save money, right?
It also has other things, like it actually has stuff like pet insurance in case you're dependent on your pet.
I don't know how that works, but maybe it's to take care of your pet.
But you can check it out.
Over $5 billion in life insurance has been placed at Policy Genius because that's where you go to save money.
Wait, there's another page here.
Do they offer you some fantastic deal?
No, but it's a fantastic deal anyway.
All right.
So there it is.
You don't need it because there's a free website.
All right.
Budget Cuts in Europe00:15:11
So watching, we're watching the aftermath of the terrorist attack with Britain, it's just on high alert.
They've got the soldiers out there.
You know, Britain, one of the things about Britain, by the way, is you can't always be fooled by some of their politically correct talk.
The British police are, and the British military are very, very tough ombres.
And like, you do not want to fall into their clutches if you're a bad guy.
So like I always have a lot of, they're actually better than most of Europe in hunting down these guys.
They have a better conviction rate, a better arrest rate.
And so they really are on the scene.
The reason is, is this clown who grew, or we'll just call him evil loser, this evil loser who just blew up the Ariana Grande concert was using weapons that were kind of sophisticated.
It was a sophisticated attack.
So they think this is not just some clown who put this stuff together.
This really is a terrorist attack and they've already arrested more people that they think were involved.
So they've really, the place is really under arms and under high security, which is sad to see.
But it's part of what's happening because Donald Trump is also continuing his trip.
He was meeting with the Pope this morning.
And the thing is, you reach a certain age in life.
I have to tell you this, as you get to be the ancient of days that I have now become, it's like when you're in a plane and it gets high enough where you start to see the curve of the earth, you start to see that things really do change and nothing is permanent and things go away.
You can't see over the curve.
It's not like being in space where you get that whole big picture of what history is going to be like.
But you do see that things are really different.
The America we live in now is not the America I grew up in.
Europe is gone.
I mean, England is still here because it's kind of a client.
It's kind of the 51st state of the United States.
And as long as we're linked together, we still have these bonds, mystic bonds of memory.
So England is still out there.
But the rest of Europe, I really do believe, it's died.
You know, obviously the Europe that was the great Europe, the Europe that began with the Reformation, that produced all of the greatest art and culture that has ever existed in human history that wasn't made by ancient Greeks.
You know, the Europe of Mozart, the Europe of Shakespeare, the Europe of Da Vinci and Michelangelo.
That Europe died, I think, in the two world wars.
I think that it's really interesting when you watch, when you study World War I, it seems to have started for no reason whatsoever.
It was almost like a disease.
It was like Europe had run its course, it was done, and it just died.
And it died by wiping out a generation of men.
It never really came back from that.
And World War II, with its Holocaust, was just a true death throw.
And I think that what we're seeing now is that playing out.
Obviously, there's still a Europe in the same way there's still a Rome, there's still a Greece, and they'll continue to be a Europe.
But I really think that the will to live seems to be gone from the people, that they allow these Islamists to come in, that Angela Merkel has opened the gates of Europe to let them come sweeping in, and nobody, you know, and nobody even wants to come out and just say, you know, there's a problem with this philosophy.
There is a way to express this without attacking people, without attacking individuals, saying there's something wrong with this philosophy.
Which is what I think Donald Trump did in his speech in Saudi Arabia that I thought was the one, was a really important thing that he did.
But I'll get back to that in a minute.
It's that, you know, they keep tweeting these things and saying these things like in order to win against the terrorists, what we have to do is carry on just as always.
But think about that for a minute.
Think about you're like in Berlin in 1945 and the Soviets are closing in from one side and the Americans and British are closing in from the other side.
Think of what it would be as like, if we don't keep doing what we're doing, the Allies win.
The Allies have won.
They're about to march through your city.
And these guys are going to keep blowing people up.
And so what does that mean?
Go on doing what you do.
Don't be afraid for your children.
I mean, this was like blowing up a middle school.
You blow up an Ariana Grandi concert.
One of the people who died was eight years old.
What are you going to say to those parents?
Like, just keep on doing what you do.
Their life is gone.
The thing that made their life, their life has changed forever.
And that child who has been wiped out, I mean, that's imprinted on everybody's mind.
You can't go on doing what you do.
So they've lost this will to say, this is who we are.
And by the way, again, I have to say this, without being racist or white supremacist or any of those things, who they are is different than who we are.
France is named France because of the Franks.
They are a racially founded country.
Countries, the only non-racially founded country in the world is this one.
We are a creedal country.
We are based on a creed.
We can take in people of a million different races and turn them into Americans.
I'm not so sure you can do that in England or France or Germany.
And it may be that their idea of diversity is just an idea that they're not going to be who they were anymore.
And things, look, things change, and these are some of the things that change.
Nations rise and fall, empires rise and fall, continents rise and fall.
And that may be what we're seeing, but it is why.
It is why Trump is an important figure and the figure that he's cutting overseas means so much.
You know, I am not trying to be, as some of the recovering never-Trumpers are.
I'm not trying to be a fair umpire with Trump calling balls and strikes.
I don't believe in it.
I'm all-American all the time.
I am always going to call strikes against the enemies of America, who I now think is this complex of the deep state, the media, and the Democrats, which has just been hurling itself at Trump again and again.
Does that mean everything that Trump does is right?
It doesn't even mean that anything Trump does is right.
It simply means that he is not the danger to the state.
And he is, in general, I think, you know, a more or less, so far, has been a more or less positive force.
And the things that he's doing overseas have been, I think, really positive.
So much of what a guy does, what a president does when he's overseas is symbolic.
So just his flying from Saudi Arabia to Israel was an important thing.
This speech that he made in Saudi Arabia, where he said basically what he said, this is translated into my words, he said, this terrorism thing is an Islamic problem.
It's an Islamic problem.
It is a problem in the house of Islam.
He didn't say, I know a lot of you would have liked to hear him say, I think somewhere deep down I might have liked to hear him say, it is a product of Islam.
He didn't say Islam necessarily leads to terror, but he said this is a problem in the house of Islam, which means you have to fix it.
And I think implied in there is if you don't fix it, we will and you won't like it.
You know, that is not going to be a happy thing.
And when he talked in religious terms and said, your souls are damned if you're a terrorist.
You are not worshiping God.
You're worshiping hate.
He was telling the Saudis who have been funding these stupid madrasas where they teach this radical Wahhabi philosophy.
He was telling them, you got to stop.
You've got to stop.
Will they?
I don't know.
Maybe not.
But I think there's a lot of indications, a lot of things that are pushing them toward that.
Mainly, Obama's crazy, stupid, ignorant, and disastrous alliance with Iran, that he gave Iran so much power in his deal with them and in his negotiating with them and in his turning his back on our old allies that now the Saudis are thinking, okay, well, if we've got to tone it down in the madrasa to make sure that the U.S. is on our side against Iran, we may have to do that.
So we may get more results than you think we will, you know, than we would if it were not in their interest to do it.
And also, I have to say, it was a delight to me to see the statement by Netanyahu that, I mean, Bailey, our new, what is your role?
What do we call you?
Our new engineer, Bailey?
Sure, sure.
Okay, we'll call you our new engineer.
Was saying that there should have been little bubble hearts passing between them because they looked, they really did.
They looked like we're in love.
We're quoting each other.
We're finishing each other's sentences.
We're holding hands.
We're dancing in the field.
This was the statement that Netanyahu made.
I mean, that's a happy guy, you know?
That's a guy.
All right, that may have just been what was going on in his mind.
So Trump is sending a message overseas, and I think it's an important message.
It is a new version of American conservatism.
He sounds a little bit more, not a little bit more, he sounds a lot more isolationist, certainly than George W. Bush.
Think that the George W. Bush thing didn't work out too well.
It might have worked out.
It might have worked out.
It was badly handled.
Hey, I got to say goodbye to the people on Facebook and YouTube, which means you are going to miss the mailbag unless you come to thedailywire.com and listen to the rest.
And while you're there, subscribe.
You will get to ask your own questions in the mailbag.
Plus, we'll send you Ben's new book, Say It's So.
Plus, Trump is sending a message here at home with his new budget that he brought out.
And there are things about this budget I didn't like.
It doesn't really attack the two major entitlement programs.
He promised he wouldn't, so he's not going to do it.
Fair enough, Social Security, Medicare, but somebody's going to have to.
I mean, Paul Ryan is right about this.
This is the thing that's driving the debt.
But I like the fact, I mean, I just like the fact that it went after these sacred cows.
Like, it cuts the EPA by like 30%, which is a good start.
You know, I mean, I think we do that for three years running.
You know, if we take the original and just each year cut out 30% of what we've got now, and eventually it's just a little house with a guy in it with a pool testing kit, that would work really well for me.
And I thought Mulvaney, the budget director, did an excellent job of talking about this.
Here are just a few cuts, the first Mulvaney cut.
We looked at this budget through the eyes of the people who are actually paying the bills.
Compassion needs to be on both sides of that equation.
Yes, you have to have compassion for folks who are receiving the federal funds, but also you have to have compassion for the folks who are paying it.
We're not going to measure compassion by the amount of money that we spend, but by the number of people that we help.
That's an important message, right?
Because you cut it from the point of view of the people who are paying the bills, because the Democrats say, those are the rich.
They're doing fine.
Why care about them?
That's ridiculous.
That is ridiculous.
The people paying taxes.
First of all, the people paying taxes are not the super rich.
The people paying taxes are essentially the middle class.
The middle class, depending on where you live, goes up to people who are making, you know, a quarter of a million dollars a year.
And you think, oh my God, that's an amazing amount of money.
But if you have two kids and you live in Los Angeles or New York or any of these places that are really expensive, that really is kind of the middle class.
And if those people disappear, the jobs disappear, all the good things that they bring disappear, believe me, guys like the billionaires know how to protect their money.
This is where the thing always gets me about George Soros, who's trying to bring about socialism while he hides out on the islands with all his money protected.
But Mulvaney also made this incredibly important point, and he made it to the press corps, which I just thought was really important about how they report on the budget.
And this is something to remember when you're reading about the budget.
In Washington, D.C., if you spent $100 last year on something, and we spent $100 on it this year on that same thing, in Washington, people call that a cut.
$100 last year, $100 this year.
Y'all call it a cut.
In fact, I've seen several occasions where we spent $100 last year and $102 this year, and many people will still call that a cut because the budget is hardwired by the Congressional Budget Office to go up every single year.
And if the Congressional Budget Office says we spent $100 last year and we're supposed to spend $106 this year, for a lot of people, anything less than $107 is a cut.
In fact, I've actually heard 106 referred to as a freeze because it simply stays in line with the Congressional Budget Office.
A classic example of how Washington speaks differently than the world back home.
So a couple things about Medicaid, okay?
There are no Medicaid cuts in the terms of what ordinary human beings would refer to as a cut.
We are not spending less money one year than we spent before.
What we are doing is growing Medicaid more slowly over the 10-year budget window than the Congressional Budget Office says that we should or says that we will under current law.
Why do we change it?
We change it, and we change those growth rates in Medicaid spending because of the American Health Care Act, which this president does support.
So this is good Republican stuff.
Explain it, talk factually, go around the message of the press.
That is what Republicans are supposed to do, as opposed to the ever overly emotional, crazy Chuck Schumer, who immediately came out with this.
The irony of the Trump budget is that it hurts many of the people who supported him most in the campaign.
That's the great irony of the budget.
When you add it all up, the Trump budget is a comic book villain-bad budget.
And just like comic books, it relies on fantasy to make the numbers work.
My name is not Oswald!
It's penguin!
I am not a human being!
I am an animal!
Wow, did Schumer mean to do that?
That was a big, I think he kind of gave himself away there that who the comic book villains actually are.
So anyway, Trump is actually selling, and some of this may be instinctive, I don't know.
He is selling a new vision.
So one of the reasons I think a lot of the Never Trumpers hate him, this is not classic conservatism, it's not old-fashioned conservatism.
They thought that they were going to invent this at the Heritage Foundation, and it's not going to be invented there.
It's going to be invented by some kind of Trumpian figure or the guy who follows Trump.
And this is this vision that, yes, we can cut these things back.
Now, is this budget going to make it through?
Of course not, because the big state, including the Republicans, aren't going to let things get cut in their neighborhoods.
And it also needs to requires them, ultimately, they're going to have to go after these entitlements.
And whether or not they have the guts to do that is an open question.
But here's the thing.
Here's the thing.
The other side of this is Trump, Trump is getting, as I keep saying, Trump learns stuff.
He's a smart guy and he learns stuff.
And he is learning how to be president overseas.
What he hasn't learned to do is how to be president here.
Trump's Learning Curve00:03:53
And that is the reason the media has been so effective in this campaign that they are waging against him.
It's not his fault that they're waging the campaign, but he's going to have to learn how to do it.
Because what the media is doing now is they're manufacturing a new scandal.
If you listen to them closely, the idea now is, okay, maybe Trump didn't collude with the Russians, but he tried to obstruct justice.
Listen to them carefully and you will see.
Actually, here's a cut from the Morning Joe show where Mika and Joe got married and Mika is this big Democrat and now the show has just become this like hate fest.
It's just become a hate fest against Donald Trump.
It used to be kind of an interesting journalistic experience.
Now it is just absurd.
But listen to the way they're talking about him on Morning Joe.
I personally think it's over.
I don't think there's anything that can be done that can stop this at this point.
Cacophony, this gushing of lies, problems, questions, chaos that will stop this presidency in its tracks because they won't be able to get anything else done.
And tomorrow there will be something new.
And tomorrow there will be something new.
There is always more chaos on the horizon.
There's a cover-up going on.
There is a cover-up going on.
And that has to be the premise of all our reporting going forward.
Well, yes.
At this moment, we don't know what is being covered up.
That is still a huge question.
How big it is, who it goes to.
Is it financial?
Is it personal?
Does it involve the president himself or just his associates?
We don't know.
But related to this administration and this campaign in Russia, everything that they are doing gives the clear appearance of people who are trying to cover stuff up, lie about things, and they are doing it with extraordinary ineptitude.
This is insane.
I mean, this is insane.
There's a cover-up going on, but we don't know what they're covering up.
I mean, why would you even be looking for a cover-up if you don't know what they're covering up?
This is like when people attack you and then they say you're behaving, you're being very defensive.
It's like, well, you're attacking me, so I have to defend myself.
But Trump has, there's the clumsiness of Trump, the big-mouthedness of Trump, the fact that he can't shut his mouth, all of this has hurt him, and it hurts his agenda.
It hurts taking his vision, which is developing.
He is developing a new American vision, a restorative American vision, but he cannot bring that into being unless he controls, unless he's popular, unless he has power to convince, and unless he does the hard work of convincing people, of going into the room with the senators, with the congressmen, saying, what are we talking about?
How are we going to do it?
And he hasn't been doing that, and he really has to.
And on our side, on our side, we have got to be careful with the conspiracy, conspiracy stuff.
Because, you know, Fox News is dead right now.
It is dead.
I mean, there is no interest in the younger Murdochs in restoring the combative, conservative voice that Fox News was under Roger Ailes and with O'Reilly.
And Sean Hannity, and I'm not going to pile on Sean.
Everybody's piling on him about this Seth Rich thing.
Sean Hannity deserved a Pulitzer Prize for the way he handled the rape case at the Duke University rape case when everybody else was kind of piling on these kids, convicting them.
They were convicted on the front of magazines and saying that they had committed this rape.
He very quietly, very slowly said, I'm not convinced.
I'm following this down.
I'm going to follow it down.
And he actually did help expose the fact that it was a complete fraud, that the whole thing was a fraud.
He was a lone voice on that.
So I'm very, very reluctant to jump on him.
I've followed this.
I have no sources on the Seth Rich case.
I have only followed it from him and all this stuff.
And I don't see any there there yet.
If I did, I would be talking about it.
I got nothing to lose.
You know, I would happily talk about it.
I just don't see it there.
It doesn't make any sense to me.
The people who keep saying, well, they say it was a botched robbery, but they didn't steal anything.
It was a botched robbery because they shot him and then panicked and ran.
The Resurrection Debate00:03:56
That makes perfect sense.
The idea that he leaked to WikiLeaks, that's another question.
It's possible.
It's possible.
If you've got that, you should bring it out.
But the idea that that was why they would murder him, I don't know, that's a pretty crummy motive.
Look, if you've got the goods, go for the goods.
But you don't go on and hit that thing every day with the family telling you to stop.
So yesterday on the show, after tweeting all day that he was going to stand up and keep not retract anything, he kind of pulled out of it.
I think it's not that we shouldn't report the things that have to be reported.
It's not that we shouldn't undermine the message of the mainstream media.
Just a little bit of care.
You know, don't jump on every bandwagon, every conspiracy theory that comes out.
It's crazy.
When a guy like Anton Scalia dies and people start saying he was murdered and he was 80 with a heart problem, dude, I mean, use some brains.
So all I'm saying about this Seth Rich is I've been reading and reading and reading about it.
I cannot find any there there.
If they've got it, they should get it and then bring it forward.
Let's go to the mailbag.
You know, we're learning.
This is a learning curve.
All right.
From Mark.
Oh, sovereign of the clavinium, bearer of wisdom unassailable, and sayer of sooths impeccable, which is true one of my titles.
It's not a one I bring up very much because it's a mouthful.
I have heard you describe our physical bodies as a temporal expression of our eternal spiritual selves.
How does this concept influence your understanding of the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the dead?
And what, if any, are the implications for an ethical approach to the modern practice of organ and tissue recovery for transplantation?
I ask, as a father of an organ and tissue donor who, while embracing the recipient, has felt his son's heart beating in another man's chest.
That's very moving, and I can answer that question.
First of all, it is precisely because of the resurrection of the body.
I think that I believe what I believe.
And what I believe is not, you know, it's pretty much Aristotle as he was reinterpreted by the German Romanticists and guys like Samuel Coleridge.
I just say that not to show off that I've read him, just to say that it's not stuff I'm just making up out of my mind.
It's the idea that just as Jesus is the word of God, his body is the logos of God, you are the logos of you, of God's creation of you.
You are the logos of a soul.
You are the word that speaks the idea of you.
That's, you know, because it gets rid of this idea that you're like a ghost in a machine, that you're this machine walking around inside this little Casper figure who represents your soul and then you die and the soul goes to heaven.
That is not the Christian idea.
The Christian idea is that you will be issued a perfected body in another world that will express you without the whole sin business, without the flaws that the body that you have now in this fallen world has.
And, you know, when you read one of the things, this is Pope Benedict XVI in his beautiful, beautiful trilogy about the life of Jesus.
It was one of the last things he wrote before he retired.
He talks about how weird the stories of the resurrection of Jesus are.
People who knew him really well don't recognize him.
And I've heard preachers say the dumbest things about that, like Mary Magdalene, you know, didn't recognize him.
They say, well, she was crying, so her eyes, you know, come on, you know, it's ridiculous.
I mean, guys, the guys on the road to a mouse, they walked with him all that way, and he explained things to them that, you know, they didn't know, and they didn't recognize him.
And so, like, there was something about this.
And yet, at the same time, he had the scars in his body and his hands and feet.
He walks through walls.
He does a lot of weird stuff.
All of which is to say, we don't really know that much about what the perfected body we will be issued will look like.
But here is one thing I can guarantee you: you can't mess it up.
You can't wrongfoot God.
It's not like God wants to issue you a new body and goes, ah, darn it, I wanted to issue him his new body, but he's an organ donor.
Reflections on PTSD00:15:23
Now I'm screwed.
He's God.
You're a Shmo.
It's not going to happen.
It's going to be fine.
You know, like you can be cremated.
You can do anything you want.
That God is not going to be foiled in his plans.
His love is like Terminator in the first movie.
It's just going to keep coming at you.
So those are the things.
If I could tell Christians what to stop worrying about, it would be the afterlife because you should be busy with this life.
It's what you've been given.
And secondly, it's the end of the world.
It's like I never understand.
There's nothing that you have to do for the end of the world.
That is on God completely.
It's not like you have to flush the world down the drain or anything like that.
It'll all be taken care of.
And this will be taken care of.
You should never, ever worry about organ doning or anything like this.
God will not be foiled.
Another question from Andrew.
Oh, no, I'm sorry, from Jeff.
Masterful, beautiful overlord of all that is claiming.
GOP has the House, the Senate, and the executive branch, yet they still can't get anything significant done.
Both parties seem so bought out that it seems virtually impossible to pass any significant legislation.
How can we fix Congress or are they unrepairable?
You know, first of all, don't give up hope.
They are working quietly.
They have used the chaos of the Trump administration to go off on their own and continue working on the health care thing.
It's not going to be the full repeal that we want, but it's going to be something and followed by taxing.
They may get stuff done.
But is there a log jam in Washington?
Yes, there is.
And how can it be solved?
Well, first of all, you have to understand that it's a reflection of us.
There's a log jam in America.
There is a tremendous division in America.
And there's a lot of things, a lot of ways in which the things that would bring us together are being thwarted.
For instance, for instance, when you have a media that constantly emphasizes for ratings the extraordinary and the radical and the odd and the disgusting, so that if somebody says something on Twitter, makes evil remarks on Twitter, that becomes the news.
Instead of the maybe, on a guess, 70% of people who really would be able to sit down and say, okay, I'll give you this, if you'll give me that, I'll compromise here, if you'll compromise there, this will be a law, but this will be our culture.
These things are really being exacerbated, and I think that that is reflected in the Congress.
But still, still, don't give up hope.
Trump has not learned how to work Congress yet, and we'll have to see if he does.
But Mitch McConnell is not, you know, he's not a coward.
He's done some stuff.
He's working behind the scenes.
Ryan, you know, maybe he's, I'm hoping he'll grow into his job.
I think he is a talented and intelligent guy.
I just wouldn't give up yet.
You know, you'll get some stuff.
It's always tough.
It always is tough.
And this has been a very, very slow, a very slow process.
I agree.
It's been really frustrating.
But they are still talking about healthcare reform and tax cuts this year.
So, you know, I have my fingers crossed.
And like I said, don't get distracted by the hysteria of the press.
Dear Supreme, this one is from Andrew.
Dear Supreme Mind Master Clavin, I think that in the last election we dodged a bullet, but instead moved into a smaller caliber bullet, that well may be.
This is an area where it seems that for conservatives there are no major victories, only minor victories and major defeats.
What made you enter such an arena?
What is your driving force that pushes you forward in this uphill battle?
Excellent question, actually.
Here's the thing, and I've said this before, but it's worth repeating.
I have a tragic view of life, which is that everything that lives must die.
Everything man makes must fall.
Everything passes away, okay?
So I've never seen conservatism or anything else as the salvation of the world.
Jesus Christ is the salvation of the world.
The rest is politics.
You're like a doctor.
You fight every day for every little thing that you can get.
You know, if you can keep the patient to free, the patient is freedom.
Freedom is a living thing.
And it dies.
It goes away.
Every free society has fallen.
They all collapse.
This one will not be any different.
This free society will also collapse.
It is in danger of collapsing, you know, probably not as fast as we think, but it's in trouble.
You know, it's weakened.
Every day you win, you win.
Just like a doctor, just like a doctor with a patient.
I sometimes tease pessimists and tell them, you know, if a patient comes into you and he's 40 years old and you say, look, I have bad news for you.
You're dying.
And he says, how long have you got?
You say, well, about 45 years.
You know, that's actually not a good diagnosis because it's not a tragic view of life.
The thing is, how long, how long can we keep this freedom alive?
And when that's no longer possible, when that's no longer possible, what do we do then?
My son Spencer wrote a beautiful, beautiful piece in the LA Times about Cicero.
And Cicero, of course, was there at the fall of the Roman Republic.
And before they murdered him, or did they kill him or did he commit suicide?
I can't remember, but if he committed suicide, it was because they were about to kill him.
After the fall of the Roman Republic, he retired and wrote about free societies and how a republic should be formed.
1,700 years later, that inspired our founders in the building of America.
And they were frequently quoting Cicero.
So when the battle was lost in his time, he fought the battle for eternity.
He fought the battle for the rest of us in time.
And that's what all of us have to do every day.
And that powers me because I believe that freedom is an absolute good.
I believe that liberty is an absolute good.
Every way I can save it today, I will fight to save it today.
I'm only a guy.
I don't have any overblown ideas of who I am or what I can accomplish.
But for what I can do with my voice, with my vote, I will do it to preserve freedom today.
When that is no longer possible, and even now, even now in the troubles that we're in, I write about what I think these ideas are and what ideas should be retained.
I read about them so I know what I'm talking about.
And that's what powers me.
I think that liberty is an absolute good.
I think we were made by God to be free.
I think when they say that we were endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights, they mean it.
I mean it.
I think it is absolutely true.
And so you're not, you know, if politics makes you crazy, if it makes you depressed, if it makes you anxious, ignore it.
Don't pay any attention to it, really, because your life is not supposed to be that way.
That is not what your life is supposed to be.
Your life is supposed to be joyful, creative, as much as possible as you can make it, courageous, all those things.
If politics saps that out of you, if it makes you bitter, if it makes you angry, if you're just constantly yelling at the TV, turn the TV off.
I don't feel that way at all because I know, I know the things that I'm fighting for never die.
The things that I'm fighting for never die.
They kill them, they bury them, they put them in the tomb, they roll the stone over them, you come in the morning, the stone is rolled back, the tomb is empty.
The things, the truth, the truth of liberty, the truth of what's good, the truth of good and evil, they just don't die.
And so they're worth fighting for and they're worth standing for because you're hooking yourself to something that's eternal.
And that is what powers me.
And I am not in any way depressed about what's going on.
I really am not.
I think that, you know, I think that good things are coming, good things will happen in the culture, in the world, and bad things, all those things.
But it'll always be worth it.
It'll always be worth standing up for the things that make life worth living.
All right, I've got to pass on into Memorial Day stuff I like, our last Memorial Day stuff I like.
We've been talking about war movies and the ways, the different ways things have been portrayed.
And each time I've been kind of touting an old movie that got it right and sort of then showing some modern movies that I feel kind of didn't get it quite as right.
But today I want to talk about an old movie and a modern movie that talk about something just from different angles, that talk about basically PTSD, the thing that when soldiers sometimes come back, they have a hard time adjusting.
And one of the many, many things I despise about the left is that they treat our military like victims.
And I just remember, I remember, it was Alec Baldwin who did this ad, we've got your back, we know you're in trouble, we know that you've got, and I thought, yeah, why didn't you have their back when they were in the fight?
You know, why didn't you support what they were doing when they were in the fight?
But it's always this kind of boo-hoo, you're a soldier, isn't that sad?
And I don't feel that way about our warriors at all.
I mean, everything we do is because of our warriors.
You go to the opera, it's because they're guys with guns, you know, overseas, on the street, your police, your soldiers who are protecting you.
You read a book, you put your kid to bed, all of that depends on these people who defend us.
But it is a super stressful job.
I don't think that that is hard to guess at it.
I mean, when you are under fire, I think that coming back is tough.
But there are two ways to look at PTSD.
And here are two different movies that are both great movies, in my opinion.
One is called The Best Years of Our Lives.
It was written in 1946.
It was about the soldiers coming home from World War II.
And remember, a lot of these were citizen soldiers.
These were not guys who were career soldiers.
These were guys who signed up to be in the war or were drafted to be in the war.
This won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, directed by William Wyler, one of the greatest of great directors.
Best actor was Frederick March.
Best supporting actor was Harold Russell, who is an actual veteran who had lost his hands.
And he has some very touching scenes in the movie about what it's like to have been maimed in the war.
But here is a scene: Dana Andrews, Dana Andrews, good tough guy actor, and Teresa Wright, a woman that I am deeply, deeply in love with.
If I could reconstruct her, I would.
She was just a beautiful all-American girl.
And here is them showing, they show many ways how difficult it is to readjust.
But here is the scene where Dana Andrews kind of relives some of the horrors of being in the air war.
Hey, you guys, jump.
Get out of there.
Bail out.
Gdosky.
Gdoshi, get out of that plane.
Two self-worth.
Come on, the rest of you guys.
Fred, come on, get out.
Fred, wake up.
Gdosky.
Wake up.
Gonoski.
She's worthy of it.
Fred, wake up.
Wake up.
Take word.
You're going to hit the goat.
It's all right, Fred.
Go back to sleep.
Go back to sleep.
There's nothing to be afraid of.
All you have to do is go to sleep.
Go to sleep.
Go to sleep.
If you haven't seen this movie and you have some time over Memorial Day weekend, it will make you weep.
It is a beautiful, beautiful movie, really one of the best of the golden age of Hollywood.
And that is one form of PTSD.
But here's the thing that people don't talk about enough, okay?
And that is that PTSD sometimes is our flashbacks to the horrors of war.
But the other form of PTSD is the loss of the meaning that you get in war.
The loss of the mission, the loss of the camaraderie, the loss of the fact that you know what you're doing, why you're doing it, and what you have to do, and that you're living at a very, very high level.
You're living where your adrenaline is pumping all the time, and that has an effect on you.
And you come back and suddenly, you know, life is ordinary.
The things you were fighting for, the things that you were fighting for, are the ordinary things.
You're fighting so that guys like me don't have to fight.
You're fighting so that mom can take her kid to the park.
You're fighting so that dad can play catch with his son.
That's what you're fighting for.
And you come back and try and live that life.
And suddenly it's hard to restore the meaning.
And the picture that got that so brilliantly was American Sniper.
And American Sniper is one of the best pictures of the last 20 years.
It is a classic American picture, obviously, by Clint Eastwood, directed by Clint Eastwood.
It's a brave movie because they had been writing all the anti-war films they made, bombed, and they kept telling themselves, well, people didn't want to hear about this war on terror thing.
They don't like the war on terror.
But what they didn't want is they didn't want to see the war on terror in which we were depicted as the bad guys, which was what Hollywood was doing.
And Eastwood told the story of the great American sniper, played by Bradley Cooper, and he showed that we were the heroes, but that didn't mean it wasn't complex.
It didn't mean there weren't moral complexities, and it didn't mean that war wasn't hell.
And it has this brilliant, brilliant scene that I'm not going to show because it's so visual that if you're not watching, you won't be able to see it.
Where he's sitting in front of the TV, he's come home, he's sitting in front of the TV, and you hear the war on TV, and then Eastwood pans around in back of him, and the TV is off, and you realize the war is just still in his mind.
But here is the scene where the psychiatrist who thinks he has one kind of PTSD finally figures it out and gets it right and begins to help him come back.
Would you be surprised if I told you that the Navy has credited you with over 160 kills?
Do you ever think that you might have seen things or done some things over there that you wish you hadn't?
Oh, that's not me, no.
Well, it's not you.
I was just protecting my guys.
They were trying to kill our soldiers, and I'm willing to meet my creator and answer for every shot that I took.
The thing that haunts me are all the guys that I couldn't save.
I'm willing and able to be there, but I'm not.
I'm here.
I quit.
You can walk down any poll in this hospital.
We got plenty of soldiers need saving.
Mm-hmm.
Want to take a walk?
Sure.
That is a great understated scene because he's turning, you know, the psychiatrist gets it.
You think he's kind of a fatuous idiot, and Cooper is telling him the way it is, but the psychiatrist gets it.
Ah, you know, he needs the meaning back.
He needs to be doing something.
He's not ashamed.
He's not haunted by the kills.
He's haunted by having left the men behind.
It's a brilliant, brilliant scene, a brilliant, brilliant movie.
Either one of them, if you want to watch from Memorial Day weekend, best years of our lives, American Sniper, stuff I like very, very much.
Hey, tomorrow we got Rod Dreer, the author of The Benedict Option Strategy for Christians in a Non-Christian Nation.
So we'll be talking more about the culture with him.