Andrew Clavin argues cultural appropriation is a constitutional right, mocking leftist hypocrisy—condemning tacos but defending Muslim religious freedoms—while exposing CNN’s 9-hour delay in condemning Kathy Griffin’s Trump decapitation photo, contrasting it with their instant outrage over Trump’s misspelled tweet. He frames media bias as a "deep-state" threat, citing leftist policies like open borders as a "suicide pact," and praises Reagan’s missile defense strategy after a successful North Korea intercept test. Clavin dismisses Griffin’s career as irrelevant but warns the left’s violent rhetoric mirrors extremist ideologies, urging conservatives to treat them as an existential danger. [Automatically generated summary]
From time to time, in an effort to reach across the aisle and shake the hands or throats of our friends on the left, we here at the Andrew Clavin Show like to take some time to try to clear up areas of misunderstanding between those of us who see things from a conservative point of view and the bad guys.
In order to do this, we like to explain to conservatives the meanings of some of the terms the left uses to distract us from the fact that they have no idea what they're talking about.
And also that everything they do fails.
And that their women are sort of shrill and unattractive.
So, in order to build bridges of friendship between us and these nefarious clowns, let's attempt to explain what the left means when they say some of the ridiculous things they say.
Today we'll define the term cultural appropriation.
Cultural appropriation means borrowing practices or beliefs or foods from other cultures.
Cultural appropriation is great.
In fact, it's one of the very best things about living in America.
In America, we ask only that you obey the Constitution and live as you please while not impeding the liberty of others.
And as long as you do those things, you can wear your absurd little hat and eat whatever crap you're used to.
And if we like it, we'll wear it and eat it too.
Thus, through cultural appropriation, you can enjoy tacos without having Mexican drug cartels running your government.
You can do yoga without having flexible Indian people starving in your mind-boggling slums.
And you can enjoy a nice Wiener schnitzel without murdering all the Jews who come in handy when you need a doctor or want to go to the movies or something.
The left hates cultural appropriation because they think it's about the strong stealing stuff from the weak.
But really, when you think about it, it works both ways.
It allows minority people to adopt things invented by white people, like electricity and freedom.
And it even allows women to do things normally only done by men, like wear pants and use logic.
And the truth is, though leftists condemn cultural appropriation because they don't have jobs and have nothing better to do than go around bothering people, they actually support it at the same time.
For instance, let's say you came here from Saudi Arabia or some other godforsaken hellhole.
And let's say you're a Muslim or some fool thing like that.
And you want to have the full human and religious right to freely practice your religion.
That's cultural appropriation.
You didn't get the idea of human and religious rights from Saudi Arabia or Islam.
They don't have human and religious rights in Saudi Arabia or Islam.
You culturally appropriated those ideas from the West and Judeo-Christianity.
So a leftist who supports your rights is actually in favor of your cultural appropriation and can now move on to picketing a taco stand run by a white person.
Because leftists are gormless knuckleheads.
I hope this brings us all closer together.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I feel hunky-dunky.
Texture Trial Offer00:02:45
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Kafivi, it's Malbag Day.
Kafivi!
Hey!
Kafivi!
I think Kafivi is, I noticed Shapiro is gone again, right?
I think it's the Jewish holiday of Khafivi, right?
He's making these up now, I think.
The place is run by a lot of evangelical Christians, so Shapiro just comes in and he says things like, you know, yeah, it's the Jewish holiday of Khaivi, you know?
It's the day we, the Bible says we have to take our family to the beach, you know, except it's in Hebrew, we pronounce it bik.
But anyway, it is some holiday or other.
But anyway, we have a lot to talk about today, but first, you know, I feel really guilty whenever I do this ad for texture because I know it's going to destroy your life.
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Rhetoric And Reaction00:15:43
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Okay, I'm going to do something that I have never, ever done before, which is give a thought to Kathy Griffin.
And I, you know, and the reason I want to do it, it's not about Kathy Griffin.
And this is not going to be an outrage show.
I'm so outraged at Kathy Griffin.
Kathy Griffin is what she is.
She is an unattractive, untalented person who's desperate for attention.
And she did this thing where she took a picture of herself holding a mock-up of Donald Trump's severed head as if she were an ISIS killer murderer, but she had killed and beheaded the president.
And this caused all kinds of fuss yesterday.
And obviously in the Twitterverse and online, everybody was yelling about it.
And I have to say that even Keith Olberman denounced it and the Satanists.
So I think they've kind of covered.
And good for Keith Olbermann.
I mean, you know, I make a lot of fun of Keith Olberman because he's a buffoon, but I mean, at least he stood by and he actually came out and said, this is terrible.
But the important thing about this has nothing to do with Kathy Griffin.
She apologized.
She saw this.
The Secret Service said they were looking into it.
The important thing, though, well, let's play her apology.
Let's give her the chance to say what she said.
Hey, everybody, it's me, Kathy Griffin.
I sincerely apologize.
I am just now seeing the reaction of these images.
I'm a comic.
I cross the line.
I move the line.
Then I cross it.
I went way too far.
The image is too disturbing.
I understand how it offends people.
It wasn't funny.
I get it.
I've made a lot of mistakes in my career.
I will continue.
I asked your forgiveness, taking down the image, going to ask the photographer to take down the image, and I begged for your forgiveness.
I went too far.
I made a mistake, and I was wrong.
Now, I mean, that's a good apology.
It's not like a, you know, sorry you feel this way, or sorry, you know, some kind of mealy mouth thing.
That's a real apology.
Fine.
So, you know, it really is not about her.
What it is about is that she is employed by CNN.
She is employed by CNN on that, their New Year's Eve show, and they have her on as a commentator.
She's on the View a lot, and she's gone on The View and cursed at people who were nasty to Obama and all this stuff.
But I don't care about Kathy Griffin.
Like I said, she's a comedian.
She says dumb things.
But I want to play for you just a little bit of the way CNN has covered this stuff, because this is what is really important.
The first thing I want to play is how they covered a rodeo clown who made fun of Barack Obama.
That's the first thing we're going to talk about.
All right.
So let's play that.
Outraged today over this.
A Missouri rodeo clown mocking the president this past weekend.
Notice the broom in his backside and joking that he could be stomped by a bull.
Obama's going to have to just stay there, Obama.
Watch out for those bulls.
President Obama.
Hey, I know I'm a clown.
He just run around acting like one doesn't know he is one.
The Rodeo Association later apologized, and the state's Republican Lieutenant Governor Peter Kinder called the act disrespectful on Twitter, saying, we are better than this.
The state fair has banned the clown.
It's just the latest jab at the president.
Others have carried clearly racial undertones.
And this went on for a week at least until the clown was fired and had to take sensitivity training, okay?
This is a rodeo clown, you know, so he's like pulling down seven figures, right?
This guy who's not, you know, not like some billionaire.
This is a rodeo clown.
CNN forced him, basically, basically ran a campaign against him, all right?
Now, I want to go back and you remember Gabby Griffer's congresswoman, she was shot, and she was shot.
They tried to make it sound like she was being shot.
She had been shot by some right-winger because she was a Democrat.
She had, in fact, had been shot by a psychopath who was actually kind of a left-winger, but mostly what he was, was a psychopath, okay?
Candy Crowley, Creepy Crowley, the woman who stepped in to protect Barack Obama during a debate with Mitt Romney, right?
She has Democratic Senator Dick Durbin on.
And the whole thing is how the rhetoric, remember the rhetoric?
Do you remember this?
It was the rhetoric that caused this shooting.
It wasn't the fact that the guy was a psychopath.
It was conservative rhetoric.
And the one that kept coming up was Sarah Palin had run a campaign where she had targeted different congressional sites and she had put a rifle target over those congressional sites.
And this was what had caused this violence.
Listen to Candy Crowley and Dick Durbin.
When you talk about putting those that you want to defeat in crosshairs, sort of graphically on the internet, you're talking about Sarah Palin here.
And I guess that the undertow, and certainly it's not an undertow on the internet, but the undertow with politicians now speaking publicly is, well, the Republicans and the Tea Party and Sarah Palin have gone way too far in their rhetoric.
It's been violent rhetoric, and therefore this sort of thing happens.
Are you making that direct connection?
I don't think you could ever make that direct connection, but don't we have an obligation, those of us in public life and those who cover us, to say this is beyond the bounds.
It may be constitutionally permissible, but it shouldn't be acceptable rhetoric.
Okay, so now we have Kathy Griffin, employee of CNN, who has the president's head, and it was very realistic.
It was very ugly.
Apparently, the president's son was frightened by, thought it might actually be real for a minute.
Holding the president of the United States' bloody head like she's an ISIS terrorist.
Nobody on CNN covers this, first of all, until Jake Tapper, who basically forced it onto the air and said that he thought it was disgusting.
And he was talking to Molly Ball of The Atlantic, and I'm not sure who the other panelist was.
This is their reaction.
I mean, I have a hard time bringing myself to care about something like this.
I think it just speaks to the need to see themselves as a victim that they have, that they're constantly being persecuted.
It's constantly...
The Trumps you're talking about.
The Trumps.
The Trump people are constantly having to point to the elites who are looking down on them.
Of course, like comedians and celebrities say dumb stuff and do dumb stuff and violence is not appropriate, but I just don't think that that's the source of President Trump's problems.
Dave, I think we've got much bigger issues to focus on than Kathy Griffin.
Jen, do you want to weigh in at all?
Agreed with David.
No big deal.
No big deal.
It took them till 9 o'clock Eastern Standard Time to denounce it, which they did in a tweet.
They send out a tweet denouncing the thing, and they're still, as of me going on the air, they're still discussing whether she's going to be on their CNN New Year show.
And of course, I don't have to say this, but just, you know, it needs, I guess it can't go without saying that if this had been a right-wing comedian, if this had been me or Ben holding up Barack Obama, severed head, you know, not only would we be fired, which we should be fired, it's a disgusting thing to do, but there would be no question about the endless, endless, endless coverage of how we cause the violence.
And the important thing about this, you know, I want to play just one more.
I want to play Morning Joe, too, because Morning Joe, they got married.
Joe and Mika got married, and Mika is this big Democrat.
And suddenly, the show has just become this festival of Trump hate.
Now, this Khafivi thing, if anybody wasn't following it, the Khafivi thing is a tweet that the president sent out where he talked about the lousy press Khafivi, obviously meaning coverage.
He just mistyped it, misspelled it.
How come he doesn't have his auto spell on?
Maybe that was his auto spell.
So, you know, the Twitter went nuts.
What's Khafivi?
And even Trump tweeted out, you know, I hope somebody figures out what Khafivi means.
So that's the story that they're talking about.
So now somebody brings up Kathy Griffin and listen to their reaction.
I missed the Kathy Griffin news last night.
Okay, you're not talking about it.
You missed nothing.
Michael, you're a good person.
Sorry.
He should eat.
He's not working.
Yeah, he probably should eat.
All right, coming up.
Michael eats some lunch.
Thanks for being on the show.
Thank you, Michael.
This was great.
I thought, Michael, this was a stellar performance.
Yeah, you were on your day.
I'm just happy I got very well.
Sort of.
All right, we'll ask award-winning linguist Nicholas Confessori to help us break down the word confe.
So they can't cover a comedian with a severed head of the president on Twitter, but they're going to have a whole segment with an expert on Khivi.
And what this means.
I'll tell you what Khafivi means.
Khafivi means we're pulling out of the Paris Accords.
That's what it means.
Apparently.
Now that's not solid yet, but everybody is saying that Trump looks like he's pulling out of the Paris Accords, which would be great, by the way.
But I want to stick with this for a minute, and just to say that what this means, what this means is CNN and the entire, entire infrastructure that we call the mainstream media is empty.
They are empty.
They're full of crap.
They have no moral sway.
They have no moral authority.
Nothing they do should resonate at all.
They're Russia coverage.
Everything, everything is called into question by this, that they haven't got the basic common decency to react on the instant to something this far over the top.
It's not about Kathy Griffin.
Kathy Griffin, she made a mistake.
She apologized.
She's looking for attention.
She got it.
Congratulations.
It's not about that.
It is about the networks.
It is about the mainstream media who have been ramming and hammering Trump all this time.
Oh, he's grotesque and he says these terrible things, and he pushed an ambassador out of his way.
They have no moral authority to speak.
They are utterly, utterly empty.
We got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
We're going to be doing the mailbag, which means if your life is as miserable as it must be, you should come over to thedailywire.com where we'll answer all your questions.
And if you subscribe, you could ask questions yourself.
And if you subscribe for a year for just a lousy eight bucks a month, you get a free copy of Ben Shapiro's new book, Say It's So, about the 2005 White Sox championship season.
This, you know, this is why I've stopped like picking up on every Russian story that comes out to debunk it, because I think it's all bunk.
I really do.
I think until the moment when they have something, it's not even a story, it's not even a news story.
It is just a blithering kind of sidebar that should be on the inside pages about the fact that the Russians are, you know, as always, have been tampering with our elections.
And there's an investigation that, you know, they have pushed it with their hysteria.
They managed to push it to the front page.
They managed to get their special counsel.
But they are so empty now, that they are so empty that anything they say, anything that they say is absolutely dismissible.
You know, here, there is a moment.
Let me show you, just before I show you this, let me show you a scene, a pretty famous scene, from all the president's men, because this is who they all think they are.
This is their heroism that they all look back to when they toppled a Republican president and they hated Nixon.
If you think that, you know, the hatred comes with them.
It doesn't come with Trump.
It's not Trump inspiring the hatred.
The hatred is there.
They hated Nixon.
They hated Bush.
They hated Reagan.
They did it to all these guys.
With Trump, it is amped up because Trump is such a big figure and he stole it out from under their noses.
He stole the election in the White House out from under their noses.
But they have been filled with this hate forever.
So here's a scene, though, just showing you what it was like at the Washington Post.
And Woodward has talked about the scene and said, you know, obviously there's Hollywood stuff involved, but it basically got the attitude pretty right.
And leave my mic on because I have to describe some of it, because some of it, if you're not watching, you won't be able to see.
But this is Jason Robards playing the editor of the Washington Post as he goes over a story based on anonymous sources from Woodward and Bernstein.
It's Jason Robards playing.
You haven't got it.
Librarian and Secretary say Hunt looked at a book.
That's not good, man.
White House aide told me that Hunt was investigating Kennedy.
Who was it?
Who was it?
You want the name, you mean?
No, no, how senior, how high up?
I don't know, titles.
So now he starts, he takes out his red pen and he starts crossing out the stuff that they haven't got.
Anything that is backed out, that isn't backed up.
Anonymous sources with no names because the audience can't judge.
The reader can't judge.
No special interest.
No, we said the White House was investigating Kennedy.
No special interest.
Jesus' story's stronger than that.
We got a White House librarian who says Hunt checked out a whole lot of books.
We got a Secretary in Colton's office and Huntington's.
All right, that's five.
Ben, that's a page one story.
Take it inside someplace.
This is a damn important story, but get some harder information next time.
Get some harder information next time because they don't have the story.
They have anonymous sources.
And the problem with anonymous sources is not that they can't have good information, it's that you, the reader, can't judge.
You're just trusting them.
And now we know, if Kathy Griffin taught us nothing, we now know for sure that you can't trust them.
They are absolutely empty of moral decency, of moral authority.
They're just done.
They're absolutely done.
I mean, I saw that.
I saw that yesterday and I thought, I don't care about Kathy Griffin.
I don't care what she does.
But I do care that this, the CNN, that the New York Times, that all these people are not going to report it and it's just not important when all anything anybody said to Barack Obama was a problem.
Now, compare that scene from all the president's men.
Compare this to this interview between Allison Camarotta on CNN and John Sununu, the former governor who is a pro-Trump guy, and she's talking about she's going after this Russia story and the Jared Kushner story.
Listen to what Sununu says.
Well, I'm trying to actually take your time.
You have to engage your comfort level with all of this.
My comfort level, the only discomfort I have is with folks in the media trying to create a veniality without having the courage to specifically tell me what the veniality that I should be concerned about is.
I don't have.
I have not identified a veniality.
Have you?
Well, you should be concerned if there was collusion.
And that's what I'm saying.
I don't see any evidence of collusion.
Do you?
No.
That's what I'm saying.
That should end your reporting right there.
I should put an exclamation point after you know.
Understood.
So now John Zununu has to go to CNN and play the role of Ben Bradley, the editor of the Washington Post, and do what the newsmen don't do anymore.
He's telling her, you don't have the story, so don't run the story.
But they are so empty.
You know, Dennis Prager wrote a column.
I'm not sure whether he wrote it yesterday or just kind of made the rounds yesterday.
Dennis Prager And The Press00:05:42
About thinking about the fact Dennis Prager did not support, like me, didn't support Trump, but now has become a Trump supporter.
And he was trying to, he's wondering why the people who refuse, the conservatives who refuse to support Trump, why they won't come around.
And he said a lot of stuff that you've heard me say on the show.
And here's, let me just give you like sort of the money graph here.
He says, I have concluded that there are a few reasons that explain conservatives who were never Trumpers during the election and who remain anti-Trump today.
The first and by far the greatest reason is this.
They do not believe that America is engaged in a civil war with the survival of America as we know it at stake.
While they strongly differ with the left, they do not regard the left-right battle as an existential battle for preserving our nation.
On the other hand, I and other conservative Trump supporters do.
And that's what you've heard me saying, was that the real enemy is this deep state that is leaking to the press, that is using the Democrats as an echo chamber, giving the Democrats an echo chamber, and is protecting.
I mean, it's just not on for our intelligence services to be undermining the president with leaks and for the press to take that up and then use and the Democrats to use it as an echo chamber.
Now, Jonah Goldberg, who is one of the guys that Prager is talking about, and Prager, by the way, and Goldberg both talk about the respect and affection they have for one another and the fact that they're fans of one another.
I am a huge fan of Jonah Goldberg.
I think he's one of the best writers on the right, an excellent thinker.
But he comes back and his response to Prager is typical of the response of people who did not support, who do not support Trump.
And he says, Dennis runs through a bunch of other motivations for why conservative Trump critics don't recognize that Trump is our general in a civil war and report for duty.
In none of them does he account for the fact that he is using the term civil war at best figuratively and at worst wholly inaccurately, nor does he wrestle with the myriad problems with his analogy and the assumptions that support it.
Donald Trump is literally no one's general because the president isn't a general.
Even figuratively, the idea that conservatives should operate like loyal troops to a political leader is fraught with intellectual, philosophical, and historical problems.
That's not an argument.
That's copy editing.
You know, I mean, you can talk about the way Dennis wrote the piece and you can say he wasn't clear, but you know what he's talking about.
You know what he's talking about.
And it doesn't mean supporting Trump does not mean supporting everything he does.
It does not mean tolerating everything he does.
It doesn't mean lowering your own standards.
What it means is understanding that one side is wholly in the right here, even when the leader is wrong.
One set of principles is wholly in the right, and the other is dangerous.
It is a dangerous anti-Western philosophy that is trying to destroy what is unique about America.
And it's not just the West.
It is what is unique about America.
You know, Heather McDonald, one of our favorite reporters, has a piece in City Journal talking about the reaction to the Manchester bombing.
I'm not going to read it, but it calls it a unilateral suicide pact of the left, a suicide pact that they will not consider in the face of this attack on children, right?
They will not consider immigration changes.
They won't consider better law enforcement.
They won't consider changing deportation.
We have judges who are undermining the separation of powers by throwing out Trump's travel restrictions, which is wholly, obviously unconstitutional.
They are obviously overstepping their bounds.
And this, it's suicidal.
It is suicidal.
They mean to destroy the left.
The West, they do not want the West to maintain itself as it is and bringing in these guys, these wave after wave of immigrants who do not have our values and who disguise and hide not just terrorists in their generation, but terrorists in the next generation who are produced out of their association with the West.
They won't change.
And this is not new.
This has been going on forever.
Yesterday, the Pentagon shot down an intercontinental ballistic missile with its own interceptor missile.
This is a big deal because obviously North Korea, which is outside my door, I mean, like, you know, you remember Sarah Pale and the joke about Sarah Pale and I can see Russia from my house.
Well, we can see North Korea in terms of an intercontinental ballistic missile.
That could end up in our laps right here.
Okay, so this is a big deal.
It's the Pentagon showing North Korea that we can blow their missiles out of the sky.
This was a Reagan-inspired idea, okay?
They laughed at him and they called it Star Wars.
But he had this vision that we would be able to create a missile shield that would make Russia's nuclear arsenal useless and that we would then share it with them and that would make that end the nuclear threat, the threat of nuclear war.
And of course that vision was too big, but it did result in what we have.
And the left pounded Reagan on this.
Reagan, remember, there was this thing with Gorbachev.
They always tell you that Gorbachev had something to do with the end of the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev did everything he could to keep the Soviet Union alive.
It is a total lie.
He did 0% to destroy the Soviet Union.
And Reagan, in 1987, Reagan and Gorbachev met in Reykjavik, Iceland, and they were negotiating for a missile treaty.
And at the last minute, Gorbachev said, oh, yes, and you have to get rid of Star Wars, you know, this intercontinent.
And Reagan said no, and he walked out.
And the New York Times and the whole mainstream media, they went nuts.
They went nuts because they said, oh, he's a warmonger and he's, you know, he's not contributing.
He's not helping out this wonderful Gorbachev.
Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing.
Reagan never won the Nobel Peace Prize for freeing a huge segment of the world.
Marriage as Soul Stuff Made Visible00:14:53
So let me say this.
Let me end with this before we get to the mailbag.
Congratulations, Kathy Griffin, because you know what?
You created a work of art.
You showed us exactly who you and the left are.
This is who you are.
You and the ISIS terrorists who hold up people's heads, there is like hardly a breath between you.
The only difference is they actualize their violence and you turn it into a thought.
It's into a meme.
But if the meme is with you as it is with them, and of course that makes them worse than you, but in principle, in principle, you guys are on the same page.
And I just think, Kathy Griffin, you know, your whole life has been a waste.
You haven't done anything.
Yesterday, you created a work of art.
Congratulations.
And CNN and the rest of the media, you have at last no decency.
Have you at last no decency?
No, you haven't.
All right, the mailbag.
Woo!
Yeah!
We need to get Lindsay back and have her go, kafi fee!
All right.
Dear all-knowing dispenser of world moral judgment, that's me.
I'm currently dating a man I've known since I was a child, and I've been trying to figure out as quickly as possible if he is the kind of man I'm looking for as a husband.
He knows I have a firm stance of not having sex until I'm married and my reasons why.
I think sometimes the best way to determine if he has husband material is to put him to a test, tell him I'm willing to sleep with him and seeing if he tries to remind me of the reasons I say I don't want to or if he will take me up on that offer.
Do you think that would be a cruel thing to do?
Sometimes I think it would be in other times.
I don't ambivalently, Kim.
Well, Kim, first of all, let me say I respect the seriousness with which you take this decision, this decision of getting married, and I respect your sexual morality.
And with that respect, let me tell you, this is one of the worst ideas I have ever heard, okay?
And interestingly, you know, and I don't say this to be mean or anything at all.
It indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of what a relationship and what a marriage is.
Like you're not there to test one another, to pull, run games on one another.
I mean, I hear a lot, a lot of stories these days of people who discover that their spouses are having an affair because they go through their cell phones and they find text messages or they go through their computers and they spy on them.
And of course, the one who has had an affair has committed the greater wrong, but the fact that you would do that to your partner, the fact that you would spy on your partner like that indicates that there was a fundamental problem in the relationship to begin with.
A marriage relationship is a genuine spiritual life partnership.
When the Bible says you become one flesh, they are not kidding.
That's not about you become one flesh because you have sex.
That's not what that means.
It is actually the creation of a third thing.
And I'll talk about that a little bit later in Stuff I Like, but still, still, I mean, if you're going to put this guy to the test instead of sitting down and talking with him and being open about your doubts and your fears and communicating with him as one human being to another, what are you going to do later on when in a married relationship you actually face the tests of life and they will come?
So, you know, I think you have to rethink a little bit, really, I really do.
I think you have to rethink a little bit what you think a relationship is before you can know whether you're in the relationship that you want to move into, that you want to move toward marriage.
From Ryan, as a believer, I grew up believing the Christian creation story quite literally lately.
I'm not sure it is to be taken literally or as an analogy.
What is your take on it?
Well, I do not take it literally.
Many of the people who work here do, and so I'm speaking in the minority.
But I don't take it as an analogy either.
The Bible is a collection of books.
I believe it is a collection curated by God.
I believe that it is the story that God wants us to have about himself.
And it contains vast, vast, vast amounts of truth.
I believe that every word in it is true, but that doesn't mean every word in it is literal or historical.
I don't think that that is the way truth gets told all the time.
Nobody was there at the creation.
The people writing it weren't there.
And I don't actually believe they meant it to be taken as a literal event.
They meant creation stories are stories about who we are and what we're like.
And the creation story in Genesis is, I believe, one of the most profound stories ever written.
It is so profound, you could study it your entire life and never get to the bottom of what it tells you, the truths it tells you about our human state and what it is to be a human being.
And so I think that that's more important about whether or not there was a guy named Adam and a girl named Eve.
You know, I think that's just a more important thing than that.
So, what I believe about the Bible is I believe there are different genres in the Bible.
There's poetry, there's history, there is what this is kind of mythology.
And you have to know, I mean, you have to kind of learn how to read to see which one is which.
And different kinds of writing, I know from having studied it all my life, different kinds of writing are done in different ways and sound different.
And so, that's, you know, like I believe the Job story is a legend based on a true story.
That's what I believe that is.
But it is a legend, but it is a legend based on a true story, kind of like the Faust myth.
I believe the same thing about that.
So, anyway, you have to read these things as different.
I do believe the Gospels are history.
That doesn't mean that, you know, they're not history seen through a human being.
But anyway, I don't believe, and neither did St. Augustus, one of the founding fathers of Christianity, he did not believe that it should be taken literally either.
And I don't see why we should be afraid of that.
I think as long as we know that it is true, that's more important.
All right, let's see.
From Rochelle to the culture warrior of the West, Sir Andrew Clavin the Great, in your book, Werewolf Cop, which was awesome, you describe death as being black and nothingness.
Is that how you perceive death to be?
And if not, how?
Actually, no, it's a work of art, and I had to create a moment of death, a conscious moment of death, and that was, I thought, as horrible as I could create, and it explained some of the plot points about it, and it is a fair imagination of death.
I actually have no idea what the afterlife is like, and I can only sort of speak through.
I was speaking spiritually, which is what art does.
And people have asked me this before about other scenes.
There's a scene in Hunting Down Amanda where somebody pictures everybody sort of at this dinner table, even the sinners and the saints all together and all this.
And people say, Well, is that what you believe?
And it's like, no, it's a vision.
It's a work of art.
Let's see.
From Adam, who did more to spread Americanism in the world?
Elvis or Kennedy?
How about Reagan or Sinatra?
Also, what would you say the roles of musicians could be in spreading American values and culture around the world?
Listen, I think culture is huge.
I don't know if I would, how to quantify it, but I think that culture is huge in spreading American values.
And if anything, really spread American values, it was American movies.
I think that American movies, Westerns, gangster films, all those films gave a picture of American life as free and big and expansive.
And I think that really, really affected people.
You know, there's a scene in a book.
I haven't quite got the name of it.
It was a book about World War I.
And I'm sorry, I can't remember the name of it right offhand.
It'll come back to me.
But the scene of the Americans arriving on the scene in World War I, and they're like giants.
Suddenly, like this British woman looks up and she sees these giants marching.
She realizes the Americans have arrived and the war is effectively over.
And I think that presence, our gigantic presence, the presence of gigantic freedom, has completely redefined what freedom means.
I always point out that there were no republics, constitutional republics existing when America was formed.
And now, even those who, even those countries that are not actual constitutional republics, have to call themselves that.
Remember, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
They had to say that, even though they had no freedom, because we had changed the rules of the game, and that remains true today.
So when you hear, for instance, Angela Merkel lecturing us about how we should behave, we don't have to listen to that.
We can just completely, completely ignore.
All right.
From JJ, great prophet Andrew, peace be upon him.
You often discuss the subject of what to do with art that may have values that are less than ideal.
I am a big fan of heavy metal music.
Call it a juvenile guilty pleasure.
As anyone vaguely familiar with the genre knows metal music more often than not deals with darker themes such as the occult graphic violence or extreme nihilism.
To me, listening to heavy metal is no different than watching a horror film as I view it as escapism and enjoy the theatricality and ridiculousness of it all.
Do you advise against consuming art that tends to deal with darker subjects?
This is a great question.
Was my mother correct in telling me that liking such stuff so much is indicative of a personal moral feeling?
First of all, only you can answer this question for yourself.
Like, there are things, you know, I know people, if they look at a work with overt sex in it, that leads them to addiction to pornography.
You know, I think you can only decide how this is affecting you.
Is it story?
You know, look, art puts stuff into you.
Art puts stuff into you.
There is a difference between driving around in your car and listening to heavy metal music and listening to Mozart.
You are going to get out of that car a different person according to what you listen to.
But let me, I will tell you an absolute personal story because I do believe this is a personal decision that each person has to make for himself because you can tell what it's doing to you.
I don't sleep a lot.
So at night when all my work is done and my wife's in bed and all this stuff, I will go upstairs and I will channel surf.
And a lot of times I'll find myself thinking, I'd like to find a horror movie.
I'd like to watch a horror movie.
And I'll look around and if I find a horror movie, I'll watch it for about 30 seconds and I'll think, why did I want to, I hate this stuff.
Why would I watch a horror movie?
I like ghost movies.
I love ghost movies, but I hate like butcher, you know, like Friday the 13th and stuff like that.
I just hate it.
So I finally stopped and I asked myself, why do I do this?
And I believe it is what they call in psychology re-traumatizing experience.
I believe something happened to me in my youth that I re-traumatized myself by turning to these horror movies, but then my conscious self takes over and I realize I don't want to watch this.
I don't want to see this stuff and I don't want it coming into me because I don't believe, you know, like I don't mind violence.
I don't mind even graphic violence in movies as long as I know where the heart of the artist is.
You know, as long as I know that the heart of the artist is not with the thrill of destruction.
So really, you have to decide this for yourself.
Like I said, I love ghost stories.
I read a ghost novel where I got to the end of it and I realized it was like a work of actual evil.
Like the guy writing it was actually like kind of caught up in the evil part of it, not in the spookiness or the kind of uncanniness of it.
I remember I threw the book away.
I got to the last page.
I just tossed it in the garbage.
And then I thought, you know what?
I don't want that in my house.
I actually took it outside and put it in the garbage in the garage.
You've got to decide for yourself.
But you're absolutely right, though.
Your mom is right about this.
You shouldn't just assume that it's harmless.
You shouldn't assume that it's harmless.
You have to look into your heart and see what it's doing to you and make that decision for yourself because different things affect different people differently.
All right.
You know, I said I was going to do some narrative poems this week, but I'm not because I have something else I have to do, and I will get back to that next week.
But for stuff I like, I would like to talk about my marriage.
One of the things I like is my marriage.
Today is my 37th anniversary.
And my wife and I, thank you, thank you.
My wife and I have been together for 41 years.
We have lived together, and it has been exceptional.
And I want to read a very brief passage.
I won't go on and on, but I want to read a very brief passage about our marriage from my memoir, The Great Good Thing, A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ, which if you haven't read it, you should.
And I will just read a brief passage about the story of how I met my wife is very funny, and it's in the book, and I'm not going to read that now.
I picked her up hitchhiking, basically, when I didn't have a car with me.
But I won't talk about that, but I just want to read this passage that I wrote in the book about my marriage.
My marriage to Ellen has not been an ordinary one, not by a long shot.
It has been a lifelong romance.
I love her, by which I mean her good is my good and her misfortune mine.
And I love her passionately, by which I mean I hunger for her company as well as her touch.
This has not changed even a little in our nearly 40 years together.
In nearly 40 years, we have had exactly one quarrel.
It was a meaningless flare of temper more than 30 years ago.
For the rest, we have been poor and rich together, crazy and sane, happy and miserable, but never wholly out of harmony.
I find I can no longer even dream a woman who is not in some sense she.
But more than that, our marriage has taken on a life of its own.
It has become a third creation, greater than anything we are individually or together.
I like to think we're perfectly decent people, Ellen and I, but I have all the usual flaws of men and she of women.
We're clearly, neither one of us, as special as this vessel that contains us.
Our marriage shines around us and between us with an otherly light, a sacred habitation for our shambolic humanity.
It is soul stuff made visible.
Living within such a spiritual sanctuary has an effect on you over the years.
Just knowing such a marriage can exist refashions the way you look at life.
Our marriage gave undeniable substance to the inner experience of true love, and true love in turn shone a light on the redemptive possibilities even of tragedy.
Even the kingdom of evil came to seem to me like only the empty space where true love might have been.
And when, over time, I had reasoned my way to God, it was our marriage in part that made me trust my reasoning.
I trusted myself because I had recognized love when I saw it.
And it was the fact of our long love that had slowly revealed to me a greater love than ours, the love that was our love's source and inspiration.
It was as if our marriage had guided me through my days from a realm beyond the ordinary, the way a lodestar shines from deepest space, yet nonetheless leads you home.
So happy anniversary.
37 years.
Boy, it seems like, to me, it went right by to her.
Probably each day was like, terrible, terrible story.
All right, tomorrow we have Floyd Abrams, the author of a terrific book called Soul of the First Amendment.
It has changed the way I think it's only like 70 or 80 pages.
You should read it, and we will talk to Mr. Abrams tomorrow.