Andrew Clavin mocks academic absurdity—like Rebecca Tuvell’s Hypatia essay defending "transracialism"—while praising capitalism’s efficiency, then pivots to Trump’s Middle East strategy and media bias, citing the NSA’s ignored FISA violations. Rod Dreyer’s Benedict Option interview warns of America’s post-Christian collapse, urging Christians to build resilient communities like Orthodox Jews or Amish, blending faith with modernity. Clavin contrasts this with Chelsea Clinton’s vacuous activism and Trump’s pragmatic terrorism response, ending on Elgar’s Torrance No. 11—a hymn to hidden renewal—as a darkly ironic anthem for a fractured nation. [Automatically generated summary]
Before we get to the news of the day, I thought it might be fun to take a little trip to academia and find out what our friends, the left-wing college professors, are up to.
After all, as the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but these people are idiots.
Actually, that saying may not be all that old.
Here's a story about college professors that, so help me, is completely true.
Assistant professor Rebecca Tuvell of Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, recently wrote an academic paper that was published in the feminist journal Hypatia.
The paper was entitled, In Defense of Transracialism.
Transracialism, of course, is when you pretend to be a different race in order to pretend to be a victim of pretend oppression.
Assistant Professor Tuvell wrote that it isn't fair that society is increasingly tolerant of transgenderism, but remains suspicious of transracialism.
After all, if we can pretend to believe people who pretend to be a different gender, why can't we pretend to believe people who pretend to be a different race?
Ms. Tuvell wrote, quote, and this is a real quote, we need an account of race that does not collapse into a position according to which all forms of self-identification are socially recognized, such as one's self-identification as a wolf.
Ms. Tuvell's article set off a firestorm of criticism, with hundreds of other academics signing a petition asserting that it was dangerous and an act of epistemic violence to suggest that, quote, white cis scholars may even engage in speculative discussion of these themes.
The journal Hypatia apologized for publishing the piece, but Susanna Walters, a professor of women's gender and sexuality studies at Northeastern University, apparently that's a thing, defended Ms. Tuvell, noting that Tuvell is a leftist feminist and therefore should be forgiven.
Professor Walters wrote, quote, academics should ask whether we are truly committed to a culture that is generous of spirit and open to debate.
Let's focus our hostility on the real enemies of feminist, queer, and marginalized lives, unquote.
So it's good to know Professor Walters wants academics to have a generous culture open to debate, as long as it's not generous or open to debate.
Anyway, the journal Hypatia ultimately apologized for their original apology in a letter from the editor which read, quote, as a white man who identifies as a black woman, who identifies as a gray wolf, who identifies as a white man in a gray wolf costume, I'm very sorry that I was sorry for being sorry about the thing I was sorry about before, and I'm now only sorry about the thing I'm currently sorry about, which is being sorry, unquote.
The editor then donned a furry costume and howled at the moon.
I hope you've enjoyed this little visit to the world of academics.
And if you happen to be a parent saving up for your child's education, you might want to consider spending your money on something more valuable, like string or one of those paintings of dogs playing poker.
After all, as the old saying goes, to air is human, but these people are idiots.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is to give you.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped, tipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, I'm identifying as Andrew Clavin.
We're back.
Movement Watches Born00:02:48
It's the last day before the long, long Clavinless weekend, right?
We've got a three-day Clavenless weekend.
We are actually closed for Memorial Day, I'm happy to say.
But today we have Rod Dreyer here from the American Conservative.
He is the author of a New York Times bestseller called The Benedict Option, a strategy for Christians in a post-Christian nation.
I've wanted to talk to him for a long time about this strategy, and we will do that.
Meanwhile, today I'm going to be talking about a lot of stupid.
I called this show Death by Stupid because there's just been a lot of stupid going on this week.
And so I want to start, before I get to the stupid, I want to start with something smart.
Because one of the things, one of the wonderful things about capitalism is capitalism still rewards you for being smart.
And if you have a smart idea, no matter who you are, you can still get it going and make some dough.
And, you know, it's good because it just means that you think, hey, here's something I would like.
Maybe somebody else would like this too.
And then you have this free exchange.
They give you money, you give the product.
That's how Movement Watches was born.
And it's called Movement, but they cut out a lot of the letters.
It's MVMT.
MVMT.
That's how you find it.
Movement watches.
And this is just a couple of college kids who, like me, love expensive watches and, like me, are cheap.
And it's funny, you know, I'm not cheap about everything, but I do love a beautiful watch.
I love a watch that really looks good and works well, but something in me just will not, you know, there's stuff I will spend money on, you know, like a trip or something like that, but something about me won't let me spend like a whole pastel of money on a watch.
So that is why MVMT is a great, great system.
It's a, you know, it's a website.
They're selling beautiful, beautiful fashion watches that start at just 95 bucks.
At an apartment store, these at a department store, these things would cost you 400 to 500 bucks, but you're starting at $95.
Go on the website, just take a look at them.
They're just beautiful.
Classic designs, quality construction.
Styled minimalism is those very cool minimalist watches.
And they've already sold over a million watches in over 160 countries.
Today, if you go on there today, you can get 15% off with free shipping and free returns by going to mvmt.com/slash Andrew.
MVMT.
They dropped all those letters.
I don't know, maybe they'll start another company with the rest of the letters.
The watch has a beauty, take a look at them, really.
It's a beautiful, clean design.
Ever since I got one, I've been people always notice it, they always see it.
So you can step up your watch game at an affordable price at mvmt.com/slash Andrew.
Join the movement or join the anyway.
Really take a look.
They're terrific.
So I call this show Death by Stupid because I feel like the people who are supposed to be smart are idiots.
Resetting American Foreign Policy00:02:54
And the people who are supposed to be dumb, namely Trump and his team, are really doing very well.
I mean, if you asked me what the stories this week are, what are the big stories, right?
Because it's totally different what you're hearing in the news.
Like I opened the New York Times today, which I just do because it feeds me satire.
I opened the New York Times and I thought, like, there's no news.
There's no news.
It's just nonsense.
The big story this week, as far as I'm concerned, obviously there's the terrorist attack, and I'll go back, come back to that.
But the really big story this week is that Donald Trump has reset American foreign policy in the Middle East from stupid to smart.
That is the story.
Trump went to Saudi Arabia, and you know, it was very beautiful that he went to these three places that house the that are headquarters to the world's three great monotheistic religions.
He went to Rome and met the Pope.
And that way he said to the Pope, he was overheard saying to the Pope, I'll never forget what you said.
So I was wondering, like, did the Pope give him like a tip on a horse or something?
Because, you know, he's the Pope.
He probably knows this stuff, you know?
It's like the third in Hialeah.
But he went to the Pope, and that was great.
And he went to the Wailing Wall and his yarmulke and all this.
But it was really what happened in Saudi Arabia that changed the game because he went there.
And it took me a while to really kind of understand the whole depth of what he did.
And it's obviously him and his team.
But he assembled the Sunni nations like 50 Sunni nations and said, look, we will partner with you, but if this is an Islamic problem, you've got to start by dealing with you.
We will partner with you against Iran because Iran, because of Obama's stupidity, has become this huge monster power in the region.
We will partner with you against Iran.
We will sell you weapons and help you fight, but you got to start taking care of your own house.
You got to start going into these madrasas and stop teaching kids this radical stuff.
So I think that that was that, you know, it's an amazing thing because all this time we were told, remember how we were told that it was smart diplomacy.
Now we had Obama.
We had Obama.
It was going to be smart diplomacy.
I mean, here is Donald Trump and his team coming up with a genuine strategy.
We don't know yet, you know, obviously how it's going to work.
Will the Saudis step up?
All these things are open questions, but at least it's a smart strategy.
It's a smart idea.
Meanwhile, John Kerry, former Secretary of State under Obama, is giving a commencement speech where he's making fun of Trump because he's so smart.
And here's his answer to terrorism.
Just infusing more weapons into the Gulf states is not going to solve the problem of a region that needs to create more than 60 million new jobs in the next decade alone.
It is to provide these booming youth populations with a quality education, with skills for the modern world, with jobs that allow them to actually build a life.
So it's jobs.
It's not that they don't have a motive for killing you.
They just want jobs.
It's just their little ways, like those big, sad eyes.
They're just, when they blow up children in Manchester, it's just their little way of saying, we need a job.
You know, it's just their way of saying.
Why Lemon Challenges Opinions00:05:29
So people, you know, anybody with any sense, this is the guy, remember, we were told how smart, how nuanced he was, and what an idiot Donald Trump is.
And meanwhile, Trump has come up with an actual strategy in the Middle East, or at least his team has.
And John Kerry is still peddling this nonsense.
And when people buried their face in their hands at John Kerry, he defended, this is him defending himself.
I can handle things.
I'm smart.
Not like everybody says.
Like, dumb, I'm smart, and I want the sticks.
You know, it's funny because his voice goes up when he gets upset.
You know, I'm smart.
Anyway, I mean, it really is an amazing thing.
And then we have, of course, we have the story in Montana.
We have to talk about this because apparently a reporter for they're having a congressional race, a U.S. Congress race, and the reporter for the socialist newspaper The Guardian in the UK went in to ask Greg Gianforte, the Republican candidate, something about the healthcare, the CBO's new thing on the health care bill.
And apparently it got violent.
We have some video of the actual confrontation.
When I want to know anything from you, I'll tell you, you long-legged son of a.
You want to call me that mile.
Things are tough in Montana.
This is a manly state.
They don't get around.
So here's Ben Jacobs describing, this is the Guardian reporter describing what happened.
I've been pressing the campaign for two days to paradigm forte 101, and they told me that they decided in the past they weren't.
And I just wanted to figure he was standing around there just to reach out and get his response to the CBO score.
That he'd been talking about that he'd been holding off his opinion on healthcare, at least on the sun, until he saw the CBO score.
And I went up and asked him about it.
And he sort of said, you know, I've tried to talk to my communications person.
I just followed up and said, you know, you've been talking about this.
Just wanted to get your response.
And he sort of said, no, I've had enough.
And next thing I know, I'm being body slammed.
And he, you know, he's on top of me for a second.
My glasses are broken.
It's the strangest, it's the strangest moment in my entire life reporting.
So, you know, in Montana, it's like when you asked me about the CBO smile.
So he was charged.
All the newspapers withdrew their support from the candidate, and he was charged with a not a felony, I think a misdemeanor assault charge.
Apparently, hitting a reporter is now against the law.
I didn't realize that.
No, obviously, I'm joking.
We did grown-ups, grown-ups, we use our words, we don't use our fists.
I don't know what was going through this guy's mind at all.
Really, I don't.
And apparently, it's a real story.
The Fox News team was there, so we actually know it's real.
If it were just the Guardian, we wouldn't know, but Fox was there.
But let me just show you, though.
I mean, obviously, bad thing.
Don't hit people, really.
You know, I mean, I understand the frustration with the press.
Here is Don Lemon, and I'm only playing Don Lemon because he is representative.
Joe Scarborough said the same thing.
Here's Don Lemon telling one of his guests.
One of his guests says, This has nothing to do with Donald Trump.
I mean, what does it have to do with Donald Trump?
It has nothing.
Lemon can't believe that anyone would even believe that.
He can't believe anyone, the words would come out of his mouth.
Listen to Lemon cutting off his guest.
But my point is this, Don.
We have an issue going on right now where people think they can do anything with their fists and with their hands, like this candidate did.
And we have people who think they can say anything that they want to as well.
They are both wrong.
Come on, Paris.
You don't think it has anything to do with someone saying.
Don, if you're trying to make a connection or a quarrel, I'm not trying, I'm telling you.
I'm telling you, I am.
I'm not trying to do that.
But I can't believe that you believe the words that are coming out of your mouth.
I do.
And you can't be coming out of my mind.
I do understand.
I don't think that you don't believe that.
I do not believe that.
You're obviously on television just saying that because you feel that you have to defend everything about this particular person in office.
You actually sit there.
Does Donald Trump have anything to do with what this candidate did?
Let's hold this candidate.
They're the fake people back there.
They're horrible people.
They're the enemy of the American people.
If you think that that doesn't have anything to do with it, then you are sadly, sadly mistaken, my friend.
You know, not many people know this, but Don Lemon actually invented Chris Cuomo in a lab because he was tired of being the stupidest person at CNN.
I think that that's the only reason this guy, I mean, first of all, it's such a rude thing to do to your guest.
You have the guy on to get his opinion, and then you tell him his opinion is not his opinion.
His opinion must be your opinion, or else, you know, it's not even an opinion.
You can't say it.
But, you know, these are the same guys when in Berkeley, these guys in balaclavas beat up people because they didn't want to hear their speech.
I didn't hear anybody saying, oh, this is Nancy Pelosi's fault.
This is Chuck Schumer's fault.
This is Barack Obama's fault.
When five cops were killed in Dallas after Obama had just spent day after day after day berating the police, did Don Lemon ever come on and say the blood of those cops is on Barack Obama's hands?
And yet somehow, because Trump fights back against these bullies in the press, because suddenly the bullies met a bully who is as good a bully as they are, suddenly it's his fault whenever some nutcase goes off on a reporter.
Electric Toothbrush Review00:03:01
Come on.
I mean, come on.
These are the guys who are supposed to be our experts.
They just want this narrative.
They're going to push it down your throat no matter what they can do.
And I'll tell you, there's another story.
We're going to stay on Facebook.
Yeah, so you can hear Rod Dreyer, who will be on in a little while.
But first, I want to talk about, I got to talk about something else.
This is a true story.
I tell you a true personal story.
I have many foibles like everybody, but one of them is not personal vanity.
I'm an artist.
I almost never pay attention to how I look.
You know, when people get angry at me, they always are like, you know, my political opponents, they always say, you're bald.
You know, like, wow, no cat.
What?
You know, when did that happen?
But I did notice about two years ago, I noticed my teeth had started to turn gray, and this had never happened before.
And I was like, what on earth?
You know, and it just, it bugged me.
I have to be honest.
Like, people, I get my picture taken a lot, and people want to take their picture with me.
And I stopped smiling, you know.
So I went to the dentist and I talked to the lady who cleans your teeth and I said to her, because I had all that stuff in my mouth.
And she said, you have got to get an electric toothbrush, because I was not using an electric toothbrush.
And boy, oh boy, look, you can see, it had changed everything because these electric toothbrushes now are so sophisticated.
They come with timers.
They tell you that they help you to brush your teeth longer.
You use them at the right time.
You use them quickly after you have a cup of coffee or something like that.
And they really work well, so much better than all that stuff you want to put on the bleach and all that.
You can use that sometimes, but you just can't keep using it all the time.
But the one thing about these electric toothbrushes is that they are so huge and so clunky that you can't travel with them.
They have to constantly recharge them.
And that's why they came up with Quip, because Quip has all the stuff you want in an electric toothbrush, but it is so sleek and so beautifully designed.
If you see it, it just looks like something that Steve Jobs would have invented to clean his teeth with.
It works on a AAA battery, so you don't have to recharge it.
You don't need all that stuff.
And it's just as really good looking, and it comes with all the stuff that you need with the timer and all that.
And it starts at just $25, which for one of these sophisticated toothbrushes is a really, really good price.
This thing won the Time magazine Best Inventions of 2016.
It won the 2016 GQ Grooming Award, and it was on Oprah's 2017 New Year's O-list.
So, I mean, all these people are approving of it because it really works.
And, you know, one of the other things you have to do with these toothbrushes, you've got to change the head, the brush head, every three months.
And who wants to remember that?
But with these guys, you can subscribe and receive new brushheads on a dentist-recommended three-month plan for just five bucks, including free shipping.
So it's the whole package is really good.
Right now, go to getquip.com slash clavin, K-L-A-V-A-N, always have to spell it, getquip.com slash Claven to get your first refill pack free with a Quip electric toothbrush.
That's your first refill pack free at getquip.com slash Clavin.
Christian Resilience in Chaos00:14:36
G-E-T-Q-U-I-P.com slash Claven.
These things are really good, and they're good-looking, too.
And so will you be.
All right, so back to this thing about this, just the incredible stupidity that is being heaped on top of us.
You know, there was a story yesterday that I didn't talk about because I wanted to confirm it.
I got it kind of late.
And it's this story about the FISA court and how they slammed Barack Obama's NSA for misusing their intelligence, basically, for routinely violating American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts, okay?
And this means that any time they caught on with Americans, they were unmasking people, and the FISA courts had rebuked the NSA about this before, and the NSA said, oh, yeah, well, we've already changed all that.
And they hadn't changed anything.
And now the FISA court came back and said, this is a serious Fourth Amendment violation.
So here is the montage.
This came out a couple of days ago.
It's from Circa, a website called Circa.
And here is a montage of the networks covering this story.
All right, move on.
Nothing to see here.
Please, it's personal.
Nothing to see here, please.
But that was the way they just didn't cover it.
They just did not cover it.
New York Times didn't cover it.
And the reason it's important, of course, is because this is one of the things that the Trump administration has charged Obama with, is misusing this intelligence.
Now we know they were doing it.
Rand Paul says, this is, listen to how bad Rand Paul says this is.
I've been concerned about this for a long time and realize this is not just a few people.
You think it's only people that are calling a foreign leader or a foreign person that are being picked up.
If you mention a foreign person in your conversation or in your email, so if anybody mentions the name Assad in an email, it's being gathered up.
And so it isn't just communications with Assad, it's communications about Assad.
So we're talking about millions and millions of phone calls and emails that are being gathered up and then being searched with no sort of control over the privacy of the Americans.
We call this a backdoor way to sort of get at Americans' privacy without using a warrant.
And I think it's a terrible program.
So what's the story?
I mean, this is a bombshell story.
It's a big story.
I know the story has been out before, but the fact that FISA came back and wrapped their knuckles saying they hadn't done anything about it is a big story.
And the New York Times headline is, top Russian officials discussed how to influence Trump AIDS last summer.
Who cares?
I mean, that's a story.
That is a news story.
But they don't have any evidence that they actually did it, that anybody actually colluded with them, anything like that.
It is just to keep this story going while Trump is having such a success overseas.
And it is this kind of overwhelming stupid.
And, you know, I'll get back to this again in regards to Manchester.
But I want to bring on Rod Dreher first because it's something I really want to talk to him about.
He's a senior editor at the American Conservative.
He's written and edited for just about everybody.
New York Post, National Review, Washington Times.
He's been published in the Wall Street Journal, where I read him all the time.
He's appeared everywhere, and now he's appearing here and has been profiled in the New Yorker.
He wrote the New York Times bestseller, The Benedict Option, a strategy for Christians in a post-Christian nation.
And you can find him on Twitter at R-O-D-D-R-E-H-E-R.
Rod Dreyer.
Rod, you there?
I'm here.
Hey, it's nice to meet you.
How are you?
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me on.
It's a pleasure.
You know, I've wanted to talk to you for a long time because we talk a lot on this show about a sort of cultural federalism, about the fact that if all our values are collapsing everywhere, maybe the only way we can fight back is by kind of establishing our own communities and defending our own communities from the onslaught of the federal government.
And you've kind of put this in a Christian context to some degree.
But I want to start at the very beginning with this, because it's called the Benedict Option, A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation.
Is this a post-Christian nation?
It absolutely is.
And by post-Christian, I don't mean that there are no Christians anywhere.
Clearly, there are plenty of Christians all over.
What I mean by post-Christian is that the nation doesn't understand biblical Christianity as the foundation for how we understand our politics, our morals, and so on and so forth.
If you look at the statistics that sociologists have been bringing forth about the millennial generation, there's been a tremendous falloff in religious identification, even religious understanding among that generation.
And I think that we are headed straight to the secularism that is already prevalent in Europe and Canada.
It's not just me saying that, Andrew.
It's two top sociologists of religion said that America is no longer, can no longer be thought of as a counterexample to the secularization thesis.
So what I propose is that we Christians, and I am a Christian myself, not panic about this, but wake up and realize the seriousness of the situation we're in and take what I hope will be effective measures to preserving the faith in a hostile secular country.
Okay, and I'm going to get back to that in just a second.
But before I do, why do you think this happened?
What went wrong?
I mean, it's so obvious.
It's so obvious that our values, our laws, our ideas are informed by Christianity.
I mean, one of the things that led me to Christ was kind of understanding how central it was to everything that I believed was true and how it underpined that.
How do we lose that argument?
Well, that's whole books have been written about that.
But I think the key thing was the Enlightenment, which was a deliberate attempt to sever the roots of Western culture from Christianity for the sake of liberating the individual.
Now, a lot of the men who founded the Enlightenment, the philosophers and so on, also men who founded our country, were, if not Christians necessarily, at least deist.
And they recognized that there had to be, that the social order, the political order had to be rooted in something transcendent.
For us, this was the Christian faith.
Well, 200, 250 years on, we have depleted that understanding.
And now we have come to the point in our culture, and even in a lot of churches, I hate to say, where our religion and our public ethos worships the autonomous self.
And I saw this really interesting thing the other day.
Someone had one of those Google engrams where they go back and search books to see over the past 300 years to see how often certain words appear in those books.
The word rights appears four or five times as often as the word duties appears in books written since the 1960s.
What does that tell you?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, and I know I'm taking you through this slowly, but I actually want to get your whole vision here.
When you look at the country, when you look at your daily life, what do you think the worst effect is of having lost the underpinning of Christianity?
What do you think the worst effects?
What are the things that are the things that bug you?
Just real life, everyday things.
Yeah, well, you know, I've lived most of my life online because I write for a living.
And that right there is a sign of modernity, too.
Even though I try to be a traditionalist, I'm as modern as anybody else in that regard.
But my wife is a teacher, and she teaches in a Christian school.
And I talk to a lot of different teachers, both in Christian schools and public schools.
And the lack of a moral center among kids today, the idea that they believe that their purpose in life is to be happy and that they are owed certain things.
This is not the country we started out in.
This is not the country that my father, who was born in the 30s and who lived through the Depression, this isn't the country he helped to build.
But I think that there's so many things, not just the education system, but our entire consumer economy and the consumerist ethos teaches us to think that the purpose in life is to freely choose the things that make us happy, not necessarily the things that are right.
And this plays out in so many different ways.
I'll tell you, too, this might sound crotchety, but I see it as a real problem for us going forward.
Every time I go to colleges to speak at Christian colleges too, the number one thing that the professors tell me that they see the kids struggling with, addiction to pornography.
It comes through the smartphones that I'm seeing even in conservative Christian communities, parents handing their kids.
And they come to think that this is part of the moral ecology, having access to smartphones.
I see a lot of parents undermining the sort of things that they want their churches and the schools to teach their kids, but they're undermining it themselves by this uncritical acceptance of technology.
Yeah, and I mean, it really isn't crotchety because it's not just a question of saying, you know, oh, that's naughty.
It really is so destructive to people and it's an addiction and it destroys people's sex lives, which is ironic, but there it is.
So what's the Benedict option?
What does it mean?
Well, this philosopher, Aleister McIntyre, contemporary philosopher, said back in the 1980s that we in the West have lost our moral center and this is why we are going further and further apart.
He said that we are living a lot like the late Roman times, the time when the Roman Empire fell.
Interestingly enough, Cardinal Ratzinger, just before he became Pope Benedict, said the same thing.
Anyway, McIntyre said that we await a new and doubtless very different St. Benedict.
Well, who was Saint Benedict?
He was a Roman Christian, a layman, born around the year 500, who went down to the city of Rome to get his education.
The empire had collapsed.
The barbarians were ruling Rome.
He saw it was so decadent and chaotic that he withdrew from the city, moved out to the woods, and founded some monasteries.
He didn't try to make Rome great again or save Roman civilization.
He just wanted to serve God in community as best he could in very difficult times.
Two or three hundred years after he died, the spread of Benedict's monasteries had helped preach the gospel to the barbarian tribes to re-civilize Western Europe and to lay the foundations for the refounding of Western civilization.
What I say today is we have to look, we Christians, we traditionalist Christians have to look around at the chaos and the collapse around us and start doing what St. Benedict did.
We're not called to head for the hills or build monasteries.
We're lay people, but we have to start strengthening our local communities and churches and schools and other institutions to give ourselves the strength to carry the faith and to carry the Western tradition through this dark age of chaos that's coming upon us.
What does that look like in real life?
I mean, what would you like to see Christians doing exactly?
Well, in my book, The Benedict Option, I profiled several different various Christian communities, Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Christian, who are doing forms of this.
My favorite one, the one that I think realizes it most completely, is an Italian community in a city on the Adriatic.
They're all Catholics, very faithful Catholics, but they're not angry about it.
They can read the signs of the times and see how things are falling apart, but they also realize that they have to come together, as they've done, to build a school, a classical school to educate their kids.
They also come together as a community for Bible study, and also for events like sporting events, community gardening, things like that.
They are building the thick community that they're going to need to hold on to the faith amid all these different currents that's separating us from each other and families from each other and people from their churches.
I think some form of that, you can't franchise this, but some form of that where we make the community, the church in most people's cases, but also schools, classical Christian schools and neighborhoods the focus of our lives in much the same way that modern Orthodox Jews do, that will give us the strength to go out into the world as we are called to do without losing our moral grounding and our faith.
At least that's the hope.
But when you bring up Orthodox Jews and the Amish and people like that who live in communities that essentially reject, they sort of reject modernity itself, which I think is a hard sell because modernity has so many wonders in it.
It really is, but part of it, I actually believe, is the inheritance of Christianity, that our science and our cures and our things that we basically Christ showed us we could do if we went forward.
So we don't want to lose, I personally don't want to lose modernity in making sure that I preserve what's worth preserving.
Right.
You're right.
We can't lose modernity because this is the air we breathe.
It's the water we swim in.
And I'm not attracted myself to the life of the Hasidim or the Amish.
I mentioned the modern Orthodox Jews who are active in the world and present in the world, but they live their lives in such a way through fasting, through prayer, and through communal identification that make them resilient out in the world.
They can present themselves as faithful Jews in the world because the things they do in their private lives and communally within the Jewish community strengthen their identification as Jews.
I think we Christians have a lot to learn from them.
Really interesting.
I'm out of time, but I want to ask you just one last question.
Do you think we are at the end of the American empire?
I mean, or do you think this is, do you think this is the fall of Rome?
Yeah, I do.
I don't know how long it'll take, Andrew, and it doesn't make me happy to say that, but I don't see how we hold it together.
The forces pulling us apart, pulling us away from our faith and our traditions and each other are immensely strong.
And I, as a Christian, I hope to encourage my fellow Christians to do what it takes to hold on and to survive this, and not only to survive this, but to thrive in the chaos that's to come and to help others outside our communities to come in and to find peace and light and order and love and healing within the churches.
End Of An Era00:04:50
That's really interesting.
Rod Dreyer of the American Conservative, the author of The Benedict Option, a strategy for Christians in a post-Christian nation.
Find him on Twitter at R-O-D-D-R-E-H-E-R.
Anywhere else people should look for you?
At my blog at theamericanconservative.com at theamericanconservative.com/slash Dreer.
Great.
Rod, it's really nice talking to you.
I hope to do it again.
It's great to be here.
Thanks, Andrew.
Thanks a lot, Mike.
Really, really interesting.
You know, just I think that this kind of, as I say, this kind of cultural federalism is stuff we're going to have to be looking at as this federal government continues to grow, if indeed it does continue to grow, if it continues to grow and intrude in our lives.
I just want to end with one last thing before the long clavenless weekend begins, going back to this horrible, this horrible attack in Manchester.
I don't want to end on a low note, but I have to just talk about this for a minute.
The British security forces have acted with amazing speed and intelligence and efficiency in rounding up some of these guys, and they say they're looking at a network, and they obviously had a lot of ins to this network for them to act so quickly.
But it is amazing.
I mean, I could do an entire show on the stupid things that people say.
You know, just the incredible things that come out.
You know, I don't care about the guy on Twitter or the minor this or the minor that, but I'm talking about real people who have influence with other people.
I mean, there was this thing that Chelsea Clinton was talking about the other day.
This is number seven.
It's like it's all this vague thing.
Now, here's a woman who is almost certainly going to end up running for something.
Who knows which Republican will beat her?
We know it'll be somebody.
And just listen to the words coming out of her mouth.
I mean, listen to the vapidity.
When I say death by stupid, this is what I'm talking about.
This is cut number seven.
To be able to kind of carry multiple concerns in both our head and our heart.
And just listening kind of to the concerns around education and climate change, kind of women's health, you know, child marriage, access to technology.
All of those are, of course, interconnected.
We have to focus on each of them kind of in their interconnectedness and also as kind of individual outrages that do demand our attention.
Wow, makes you think, doesn't it?
It's like it's amazing stuff that is coming out of people's mouth.
You know, a lot of people made fun of Katy Perry, who came on and said, oh, we got to coexist and no borders and everything.
And your fan base is my fan base.
And, you know, Katie Perry is a pop star.
You know, so she has influence, but like, what do you expect?
You know, what do you expect?
So she's a pop star, so she's saying this nonsense.
But what really got me was she was on the show with the host of the show she was talking on was this guy named Elvis Duran.
And what got me about what he said is I have heard this kind of talk from people who are putative intellectuals, people who are supposed to be our elites and our leaders.
I just want you to hear Elvis Duran's response to Katy Perry, because it really is amazing.
So once again, something as devastating as this actually has so many wonderful things that come out of it.
That's like, I mean, I will retire to Bedlam.
You know, there's so wonderful things.
I wonder what wonderful thing is coming out of for the eight-year-old girl whose life was ended.
You know, what that is, is a failure to understand.
It's a failure to understand that the people who die in these atrocities are just as real as you are, that their inner lives are just as precious, that the love, the network of love around them is just as precious as everything you have.
And how would it, what would you think?
What would you think if you were blown to Kingdom Come and somebody said, old Elvis is gone, but something really beautiful has come out of it.
You know, like, what?
A potted plant?
You know, I mean, come on.
You know, this is a genuine threat.
This is genuine evil.
It needs serious people doing serious stuff.
Donald Trump, and you have heard me go off on Trump, and you've heard me criticize him even yesterday.
Donald Trump is actually coming up with a strategy to fight this.
We don't know if it will work yet, but at least it's a strategy.
At least it is putting aside what we had for eight years, which was stupid.
It was stupid.
I don't care how nice his suits were.
I don't care how well Obama spoke.
I don't care what words you know.
I don't care what colleges he went to.
Same is true of the knucklehead row that is the op-ed page of the New York Times.
We will die by this stupidity.
We will die by the stupidity.
We need SMART.
And SMART does not look like a good suit and a good college education.
It looks like SMART.
It looks like using common sense and logic to go forward.
Serious People Doing Serious Stuff00:03:09
Let me end with stuff I like.
I always like to end with music, but this is something my son Spencer sent me.
And I just, I love the words.
First of all, this is a piece of music by Edward Elgar, who you know because he wrote Pomp and Circumstance.
So he's getting played.
He's collecting a lot of ASCAP fees right now.
But he is a famous British composer for those kinds of things.
But his smaller pieces, it's his smaller pieces that really, this is Torrance's number 11.
Yeah, it's the smaller pieces that are really very beautiful.
And this is a very beautiful setting to music of a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, one of the great American poets, wrote Hiawatha and all these things.
But let me read you the lyrics to this because you won't be able to hear them as they sing necessarily.
Here are the lyrics from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
As torrents in summer, half-dried in their channels, suddenly rise through the sky, though the sky is still cloudless, for rain has been falling far off at their fountains.
So hearts that are fainting grow full to o'erflowing, and they that behold it marvel and know not that God at their fountains, far off, has been raining.
So to translate that into non-poetry, what it means is suddenly in the summer, the rivers rise, even though it hasn't been raining, because the snow, it's been raining up in the mountains, it's been snowing, and now the snow is melting and coming down into the torrents.
And the same way, when you feel that your heart is at its end, when your courage is down, when your strength is down, when your endurance seems to be down, God is doing the same thing.
He is snowing at the fountains that you don't see, and that strength and that faith and that renewal will come rushing down when the summer comes.