Ben Shapiro dissects Everyday Feminism’s performative allyship advice as hollow, then pivots to Iran’s ISIS bombing—dismissing media bias claims while warning Trump’s own missteps (like firing Sessions) could backfire amid Comey’s testimony. He mocks Democratic elites for alienating voters with condescending identity politics, arguing their midterm struggles stem from Trump’s flaws, not competence. In the mailbag, he rejects antidepressants for depression, praises Freud’s cultural grip despite flawed science, and ties God’s creation to love—not punishment—while slamming superhero films as shallow spectacle. The episode closes with Poe’s The Raven as a masterclass in perception’s power, bookending studio chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
Every 28 days or so, we find ourselves feeling a little bloated and cranky and homicidal, and we realize it's that time of month when we visit our favorite website, Everyday Feminism.
Everyday Feminism is the site where left-wingers give each other the kind of advice that would really improve the world if the world were the planet Zargon, where everything is different than it is here in reality.
This month on Everyday Feminism, there's a post entitled, Nine Phrases Allies Can Say When Called Out Instead of Getting Defensive by Sam Finch.
Allies is a leftist word meaning someone who pretends to sympathize with someone who pretends to be marginalized.
It might be a white who sympathizes with minorities in the hopes they won't mug him, or a man who sympathizes with feminists in the hopes of having sex.
You can usually recognize that sort of ally by the frustrated, disappointed look on his face.
Part of the fun of being an ally is that the people you sympathize with generally hate you.
They're always calling you out, which means they accuse you of secretly harboring hostile or politically incorrect thoughts about them.
This is great, because who wouldn't want to be in a relationship with someone who's always criticizing you?
I know that's what I love more than anything.
I also dig chicks who put their cigarettes out on my thigh.
It's just kind of a thing with me.
In his post, Sam Finch says, quote, and all these quotes are real.
Being called out can be a gift, as it calls on us to rise up and do better, to tap into our empathy and do the serious and critical work of interrogating our own beliefs and biases.
Now I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, you are a sad little man, Sam Finch.
A sad, sad, little, little man.
But let's read on.
Sam Finch has spent part of the brief and precious time he has on this earth compiling a list of things you can say when the minority or female you're sympathizing with calls you out.
One thing you can say when you're called out is, quote, wow, you're right.
I need to work on this.
This is a good response because it takes the minority or feminist by surprise, giving you a chance to sneak out for a beer with some white guys who'll leave you the hell alone.
Another response you can make is, I appreciate the work you put into criticizing me.
Sam Finch writes, quote, when marginalized people take the time to teach you something, it's essential to recognize their labor.
I agree, Sam Finch.
I myself usually say something like, thanks for taking the time to complain about me while I was trying to be nice to you.
I wonder what it would look like if you used that time to do something useful, like get a job or shut up.
Finally, according to Sam, you can say, I apologize.
I'm going to do better.
After which, you might want to add, please, mistress, put your cigarette out on my thigh again.
It works for me.
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-dunkity-dee-doo.
Ship-shaped itsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, it's mailbag day, and it's our last mailbag in the old studios.
You can't see this because we, through the magic of broadcasting, we hide it all from you, but I'm broadcasting basically from the ruins of our old studio.
Everything is gone.
The people are, you know, the mice out and they're running back and forth.
There's empty debris all over the place.
But next week, tomorrow I broadcast from home, right?
And then next week I will be in the new studios, which is amazing.
They're amazing.
I mean, the whole place is amazing.
I get my own studio.
You'll see.
There are dancing girls, fountains, chocolate fountains are spreading around all the time.
We've been promising you this since I came on.
By the way, I will try and talk a little bit about Wonder Woman later in the show, but we never get a chance to really talk enough about culture on the show.
I always feel like the politics kind of eats up everything, and it's a political site, so I know people want to hear about politics first.
But I had a conversation with my friend Tyler Smith over at his podcast, More Than One Lesson.
And if you just type Google More Than One Lesson, you can find it.
We were talking about fences, so you got to roll down a little bit to get to the show about fences.
And you can hear a very, very hour-long discussion about fathers and God and fences and all these things.
So it was kind of interesting.
Why Comey Matters00:15:21
What else?
Oh, the mailbag in which all your problems will be solved comes after the break.
So if you're on Facebook and YouTube, you will have to come over to the dailywire.com.
And while you're there, you will want to subscribe so you can be in next week's mailbag.
So you don't have to go another week.
You know, I got an email yesterday that said, I haven't subscribed yet, but here's my mailbag question.
And then it was like this real problem the guy had, and I was like, yeah, it's going to cost you a lousy eight bucks a month.
I'll solve that problem for you, but it's going to cost you a lousy eight bucks a month.
Also, if you subscribe for the year, you get a free copy of Say It So, Papa, Dad, Me, and the 2005 White Sox Champion season by young Mr. Ben Shapiro and slightly older Mr. David Shapiro, his father.
Great gift for Father's Day.
You know, it occurred to me that Father's Day is on its way.
So that's a good thing to pick up now.
And you could even give your father the subscription.
That would be nice.
So this morning, as I always do, I do this so you don't have to.
I read the New York Times, a former newspaper, and there was this bombing in Iran.
ISIS bombed two places.
They bombed Parliament and the Ayatollah Khomeini's tomb, and like 12 people were killed.
Who do you think is at fault in the New York Times?
Who do you think caused this terrorist attack?
Take a guess.
Go ahead.
Yeah, hey, amazing.
That's amazing.
You must be psychic.
That is incredible.
Who is listening to this?
The attacks, the first in Tehran in more than a decade, came just after two weeks after Mr. Trump, with Saudi Arabia and its allies, vowed to isolate Iran.
In the view of many in Iran, the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, is inextricably linked to Saudi Arabia.
One hardline analyst with ties to Iran's supreme leader said ISIS ideologically, financially, and logistically is fully supported and sponsored by Saudi Arabia.
They are one and the same.
So, right after Trump goes to Saudi Arabia to isolate Iran, Iran is bombed, and Saudi Arabia and ISIS say this guy who's a total Iranian hardliner, which makes him virtually a terrorist.
So, this guy is interviewed.
He's blaming the New York Times is blaming Trump for this bombing.
I mean, you know, the thing is, one of the things we worried about, all of us, I think, worried about with Trump when he was running, is that it was wonderful that he was taking the media to task after eight years of this media just in the lap of Barack Obama.
I mean, just completely covering up his scandals, reporting on him with this dreamy look in his eyes, little bubble hearts floating around.
It was the perfect time to destroy the mainstream media.
And there is no question that Trump has made them beclown themselves.
They have become so obviously what they are: bias, the hatred, the hysteria, all of that, and the badly reported stories, all of that.
But I got to say, like, you know, one of the things we worried about was that Trump would justify their hysteria by being as bad as they say he is.
Now, he hasn't done that, but he is being kind of a knucklehead.
I mean, there's a report.
I have stopped paying attention to reports of tension in the Oval Office.
There are all these reports about, oh, you know, Steve Bannon is out this week, and Reynolds Priebus is being fired.
And Reince Priebus has been fired like 150 times.
I don't know why he's still showing up at work, but all this stuff is being reported.
So I'm a little wary when a story comes out saying Trump is on the outs with someone, but this one is about Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General.
There's a report out from NBC originally that Sessions threatened to quit because Trump is angry at him because Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation.
And Scary Spicer, the spokesman, was asked about this, and here was his response.
How would you describe the president's level of confidence in the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions?
I have not had a discussion with him about that.
The last time you said that, there was a development.
I'm answering a question, which is I have not had that discussion with him.
I said I have not had a discussion with him on the question.
I don't, if I haven't had a discussion with him about a subject, I tend not to speak about it.
So the last time he said this was about James Comey.
You know, it was like James Comey got the hook.
So everybody's now worried about Jeff Sessions.
I just want to say, if Donald Trump fires Jeff Sessions or forces Jeff Sessions out, his administration will die death by knucklehead.
I mean, that would be, and I'm not saying it's happening.
You know, at this point, the stories just fly so fast and furious.
You cannot tell.
They're all anonymously sourced.
This one came from a source familiar with the situation, whatever that means.
So you just can't tell whether it's true.
If, and I even hate talking about if these things are true, but because Spicer said that, if that's true, this administration will die death by knucklehead.
Sessions is not only a terrific person and a really good representative, he is on board with Donald Trump 100%.
And this is the thing with Trump.
Look, the list of good conservative things that he has done is mounting.
People keep saying, you know, people who still hate Trump on the right keep saying, well, what has he really done?
Well, you know, there's not just Justice Gorsuch.
There's realigning our allies, coming back to allying ourselves with Israel.
There is the cutback of regulations, especially the cutback of regulations that affect religious people, forcing them to pay for abortions, birth control, all this important stuff that he's dialing back.
There is the, oh, it goes on and on.
Now I've lost it for a minute.
Some of the stuff that, oh, and just the fact that he's beclowned the press, the fact that he's beclown the press, the fact that he's ended political correctness.
He has done many, many good conservative things.
He could be a terrific conservative president, but he could knuckle himself in the foot.
He could knucklehead himself to death.
And I'm afraid he will do that if he parts with Jeff Sessions.
Like he did with James Comey, who is now coming to town.
And this is the big show.
The left is, it is unbelievable the expectations.
See, they're expecting James Comey, who already said that he has never been pressured.
He's never got an untoward pressure.
And if he had been pressured, if Donald Trump had tried to obstruct justice, he would have been duty-bound, legally bound to report it and duty-bound to resign.
And he didn't do that.
So if he says that, he's going to indict himself.
So the left is over the moon, and the right is saying nothing's going to happen.
And probably these things tend to explode.
But it doesn't matter.
Comey will say something.
We can be sure that the left will spin for three days into Trump Trump obstructed justice.
You have to hear how.
I mean, the thing is, there's plenty of scandal on the left to go around.
The only law we know that's been broken is the unmasking of Michael Flynn.
There have been subpoenas sent out to old Obama people about unmasking.
We know that Obama was playing fast and loose with intelligence, and there is reason to suspect he was doing it to get at Donald Trump.
We know he played with the IRS for political reasons, so why wouldn't he play with intelligence for political reasons?
There's plenty of questions Comey could be asked that will be the headline after the anti-Trump hysteria dies down.
So there's a lot for the right to be looking forward to.
But you have got to listen.
This is Chris Matthews.
I usually don't go to MSNBC for media stuff, but it's so representative and so hilarious, it's worth listening.
This is him anticipating the Comey hearing.
I'm thinking back to the Army McCarthy hearings.
I'm thinking about John Dean testifying that really broke open the Watergate story because he had a photographic memory.
I think Comey may have that ability.
He is a very, I think he has a Jimmy Stewart quality, so the good guy quality, and he's going to stand there, he's going to stand, he's going to sit there and look up to the hearing senators, the big shot senators, and I think people are going to give him all the time he needs.
This is scary for Trump.
When I pick up the newspaper Friday morning, the major newspapers of this country, top of the fold, I will see a big picture, and it will not be Donald Trump for the first time in a long time.
It will be James Comey testifying.
It is going to be a powerful moment that Trump won't like.
He's going to be pushed out of the spotlight for this guy, unless he pulls one of these weird Jokers things out of the Batman comics and shows up on TV shows that night, which I think he might do, and try to bump him from the news.
I think Trump may try that, say, 7 o'clock.
Come on, hardball, Mr. President.
We'd like to have you on because I think he's going to try to find some way to displace this powerful witness and powerful testimony we're all going to get.
It's Jimmy Stewart versus the Joker in Chris Matthews' mind.
Jimmy Stewart versus the Joker, and he's worried.
He's anxious, you know, like you know how when you're anticipating something good happens, you get anxious that maybe it'll go wrong.
He's worried that Donald Trump will steal James Comey's thunder by being the president, by showing up on a TV show.
But I love it.
It's Jimmy Stewart versus the Joker in the minds of the mainstream media.
And I only played that because it's representative.
I mean, they're having happy hours and all this stuff.
So Joe Scarborough, who has also just lost his mind, I mean, he got married to his co-host and he just lost his mind.
And he is now under the impression that Trump is paying attention to him and he can work in Trump's head, that he gets in Trump's head.
Recently, after Trump left the Paris deal, he said, oh, well, this proves Steve Bannon is president.
And you just know, I mean, you know, he's trolling Trump, hoping Trump will say, What?
You said Bennon is president?
Why, by golly, I'll fire Steve Bennon on the spot.
Like, you know, Trump cares what Joe Scarborough said.
So now he has this Republican Steve Schmidt on, Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, and listen to them trying to intimidate.
Comey's going to testify before the Senate Intel Committee, and he's trying to intimidate the Republican senators on the committee into being tough on Trump, on being tough on Trump, asking Comey the tough questions.
Listen to this exchange.
And there are some young rising stories.
You have someone like Tom Cotton, combat veteran, Harvard-educated lawyer, someone in his early 40s who could have a real national profile.
Is he going to get to the truth tomorrow?
Is he going to be a shill for the administration?
Marco Rubio, another person with a long career ahead of him, how is he going to handle this?
So I think we're looking for a generation now of younger Republican leaders.
Are they going to put the country first?
Are we going to get to the bottom of what happened?
Or are we going to see nonsense tomorrow?
Right.
And of course, those are the two people you named actually went to the White House and had dinner last night.
They did.
Donald Trump, again, being a schmuck, thinking that he can buy people's integrity by inviting them over to the White House and wowing them.
I'm sorry, that's how he thinks.
I know that firsthand.
He thinks if he invites you to the White House and gives you food, that you are going to cut him a break, cut him slack.
The president is a schmuck?
And then Trump is hit for being uncouth.
This is what I like.
There's a guy, Riesla Aslan, is that his name, on CNN, who keeps calling Trump a POS, and then he apologizes saying it's not like me.
And then you go back and see that he's done it any number of times.
It's exactly like him.
And then they call Trump uncouth.
So here is, and the whole point of this is to intimidate Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton and say, are you going to put your country first or not?
Are you going to ask home me?
Because what they should really ask him is like, how much unmasking did the Obama administration do and who'd they share the intelligence with?
They should be asking those questions as well.
So here's Eric Trump on Hannity.
And I love this.
He was asked about, well, you can listen.
Don't you wish you went to Washington so you could be dealing with this every second of every day?
You know what?
I've never seen hatred like this.
I mean, to me, they're not even people.
It's so, so sad.
I mean, morality's just gone.
Morals have flown out the window.
We deserve so much better than this as a country.
And, you know, it's so sad.
You see the Democratic Party, they're imploding.
They're imploding.
They have no message.
You see the head of the DNC who is a total whack job.
There's no leadership there.
And so what do they do?
They become obstructionists because they have no message of their own.
They have no solid candidates of their own.
They lost the election that they should have won because they spent seven times the amount of money that my father spent.
They have no message.
So what do they try and do?
They try and obstruct a great man.
They try and obstruct his family.
They come after us viciously.
Eric, I gotta.
And it's truly, truly horrible.
So are Democrats people?
We will answer that question, but first we have to cut away from Facebook and YouTube.
You got to come over to thedailywire.com to hear the mailbag.
All answers to questions are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life, possibly for the better.
And you can subscribe over there so you can be in next week's mailbag.
And if you subscribe for the year, you get Ben's new book, Say It So, Papa, Dad, Me, and the 2005 White Sox champion season, a great father to stay present.
Funny thing is that this question of whether Democrats are actually people is a debate that's actually going on among the Democrats.
This is true.
I'm not making this up.
Whether they're real people, regular people, actual Americans, whether they can actually talk to most Americans.
Now, there's a big debate going on on our side.
It was kind of torched a little bit by Dennis Prager this week.
I mentioned his piece about never Trumpers, and there's now this debate going on.
Really, the question is whether Trump is worse for the conservative movement than leftism is dangerous to the country.
And I personally think that's a silly question because I don't think the conservative movement is as important as the country.
So I think if there's a danger to the country, You know, that's the first thing.
And I think the left presents a clear, I think Prager is absolutely right about this.
The left presents a clear and present danger to our democratic norms, to our electoral process.
They have tried to mess with everything.
They don't even pass laws anymore, as Obama himself said.
I just use the pen and the phone.
But the debate on the left side is: can we talk to people?
Can we talk to actual human beings?
Bill McGurrin, terrific writer at the Wall Street Journal, wrote a piece yesterday, I think it was, called Why Elites Hate.
Okay, and he says, nine years after Barack Obama accused small towners of clinging to guns or religion, nearly three years after Jonathan Gruber was shown to have attributed Obamacare's passage to the stupidity of the American voter, and eight months after Hillary Clinton pronounced half of Donald Trump's voters irredeemable, Democrats are now getting some sophisticated advice.
You don't win votes by showing contempt for voters.
No small part of the attraction of identity politics is its usefulness in silencing those who do not hew to progressive orthodoxy.
This dynamic is most visible on campus where identity politics is also most virulent.
In much the same way, identity politics has led Democrats to regard themselves as the resistance rather than the loyal opposition.
The great irony here is that this has left Democrats increasingly choosing undemocratic means to get what they want.
From President Obama's boast that he would use his pen and phone to bypass Congress to the progressive use of the Supreme Court as its preferred legislature to the Iran and climate deals that made end runs around the Constitution.
It all underscores one thing.
The modern American progressive has no faith in the democratic process because he has no trust in the American people.
Middle Americans Speak Up00:03:44
You've heard me say this number of times.
He cites, Bill McGurn cites Michael Tomoski writing The New Republic among the articles he cites.
And this is Tomoski trying to tell people how, Chinese should tell his fellow Democrats, right, how to talk to ordinary human beings.
You have to hear this.
He says, before I go further, let me announce that I myself am an elite liberal.
I tick all the major boxes.
I'm not religious.
I have few Republican friends.
I have deeply conflicted feelings about patriotism.
I would never consider living anywhere other than a major city or at the very least a liberal university town where the odds are slim that I would end up next door to an actual racist.
Ha ha ha.
So if I'm hectoring anyone here, I'm hectoring a group that includes me.
Here's his advice.
First of all, middle Americans go to church, not temple, church.
God and Jesus Christ play important roles in their lives.
Elite liberals are fine with expressions of faith among African Americans and Latinos, but we often seem to assume that white people who are religious are conservative.
It's not remotely the case.
So check that for a minute.
He's not going to be living next to any racists, but it's okay for African Americans and Latinos to believe in God because, let's face it, they're dumb.
That's what he's really saying.
They're too stupid to know there's no God or to know that Barack Obama is God.
And so it's, you know, it's when white people believe in this Jesus Christ stuff, then something has gone terribly wrong because white people, you know, I mean, it's the most racist thing you could say.
But he goes on to give the advice.
Second, politics simply doesn't consume middle Americans the way it does elites on the coasts.
Many of these people have lots of friends and sometimes even spouses who are Republicans.
They don't sit around and watch MSNBC and talk politics.
They talk kids and local gossip and pop culture and sports.
They don't have a position on every issue and they think Democrats and Republicans are equally to blame for partisan rancor and congressional gridlock.
In other words, they know the truth and they have lives.
They have real lives.
They're busy.
They're doing stuff.
You know, this is the funny thing about the left.
They always think Midwesterners or the rest of us, basically, they always think everybody else, that we're stupid, but because we don't know like every little thing that they might talk about.
But it's because we're busy.
We have lives.
We do things.
We have children.
We actually take care of our children.
We actually stay with our wives.
That takes up a lot of time when you actually don't leave your wife.
Third, he goes on, this is his last piece of advice, their daily lives are pretty different from the lives of elite liberals.
Few of them buy fair trade coffee or organic almond milk.
Some of them served in the armed forces.
Some of them own guns and like to shoot them and teach their kids how to shoot them.
Some of them hold jobs in the service of global capital and feel proud of their work.
I mean, this is the way.
So when Eric Trump says these people aren't even people, even they don't think they're people.
Even they don't believe they're people.
You know, I have to say, you know, we had Henry Olson on and he was saying that the elections, the upcoming half-term elections don't look good.
If Trump is defeated, it's going to be by his own knuckleheadedness because his opposition is in disarray.
And if he just dials down the knucklehead factor, I don't mind him tweeting.
I mind some of the things he tweets, right?
I don't mind him taking the press to pieces.
I mind it when he makes himself the story when he doesn't have to be.
When, you know, like sometimes when your enemies are shooting at each other, don't interrupt, you know, don't get the other way.
But if he is defeated, it will be by himself.
If he loses these midterm elections, it'll be by his own behavior because the left, the Democrats are in complete disarray and they are total clowns.
All right, time for the mailbag.
Woohoo!
Kafifi!
I love Khafifi.
Freud's Chemical View of Life00:10:16
This is just to say goodbye to our old studio.
We have the new Lindsay.
She visited us before, before, as we were dismantling the place.
All right, from Richard, you described your struggle with depression in The Great Good Thing.
That's my memoir, The Great Good Thing A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.
For those of us who feel at the bottom of a well and can't find the first rung, have you discovered an affirmative first step to finding your way out?
Or do you just have to wait for a moment of clarity at rock bottom?
Excellent question.
I will be happy to answer it.
I write about In The Great Good Thing, I write about the fact that I've lived two lives.
I lived a life till the age of 28 when there was really something wrong with me.
I became suicidal.
I was depressed by a miraculous relationship with a psychiatrist, basically.
The second half of my life has been the irritatingly jolly person I am today.
If you wonder why Shapiro runs out of the room at the end of his show, it's to keep from being around me because I am generally a very joyful person.
But I remember.
I remember what it is like to be depressed.
I remember what it is like to sleep 17 hours and to have a cold that lasts for three weeks and to not even be able to open your mouth to say, please, I'd like to buy a pack of gum or something, not even to get the words out.
So I do know what it's like.
And one of the things that I'm really grateful for was that this was before they started medicating depressive people.
Now, I'm not a doctor and I don't want to talk anybody to get off the meds, but I think that I do think that antidepressants are over-prescribed.
I think there are certain people who have an imbalance that is born, that is inborn, and they get depressed for no reason, and drugs may help them very much.
I think there are some people who may take the drugs and then use some form of therapy.
The drugs help them with their therapy, and then they can get off the drugs.
But too many people, I see this again and again and again, get on the drugs and then spend the rest of their lives adjusting the dosage because they think, ah, you know, there's some magic place where the chemistry set in my head is going to fix all the problems I have.
People get depressed for a reason, and sometimes that reason goes back to their childhood, and sometimes that's something they have to face and get through.
In the meantime, before you get therapy, and I really recommend that you go and talk to somebody, especially not a psychiatrist, because psychiatrists now are basically drug dealers.
I would go to a psychotherapist, someone who will talk to you and explore your life and explore what is causing your depression.
But before you do this, here is what I did.
I will tell you something.
I am, you know, I've learned to overcome it at this point in my life, but I am a naturally, painfully shy person.
And when I say that, I mean I am a wallflower, especially with people I don't know.
Once I get used to people, I'm fine.
But when I don't know people, it's very, very hard for me to start a conversation or talk to them or anything like that.
I stopped being as depressed as I was by going out and joining stuff.
And I never joined anything.
I was in college, and I went out and joined.
I joined the campus radio station.
I went to meetings.
I went to play cards with people.
I forced myself to go on dates because I didn't want to see anybody.
I just did anything I could that would get me out with people and force me to talk.
And sometimes it was embarrassing because I had a hard time even speaking.
That's how depressed I was.
I had a hard time even speaking.
But after a while, it broke through because when you are busy, when you're doing stuff, and when you're with other people, it cures the depression.
And I think if you can do it that way, rather than taking drugs, rather than getting on that treadmill of dosages and, you know, I'm going to prescribe this, I'm going to prescribe that, that is a great beginning to break out of that.
But once you break out of it, I really do believe that you need to go talk to somebody because you are depressed for a reason.
You don't just get depressed.
And if you do, if you do just get depressed and there is no reason, then sometimes drugs are helpful.
But I really do believe that turning people into bags of chemicals and thinking you can adjust those chemicals and give them a good life, I think it is causing more depression.
I think there's a reason, if you had a cure, when you had a cure for polio, polio vanished.
Now that they have drugs for depression, depression is on the rise.
And the reason for that, I believe, is because when you treat people like hunks of meat that are chemical with chemistry sets inside that can be adjusted, that in and of itself is a depressing way to look at life and it takes the purpose out of life.
And it's not true either.
From Tanner, Supreme Leader Clavin.
And I do appreciate people using my title, by the way.
Some of these people put in these kind of snarky things.
I just cut them all out, you know.
Supreme Leader Clavin, in your opinion, who was the most influential mind of the 20th century, and why do you think so?
Well, using terms like most influential is tough, but I think beyond a shadow of a doubt, one of the key influential minds of the 20th century was Sigmund Freud.
And we forget now, people haven't lived through it.
Sigmund Freud affected every avenue of thought in the Western world.
And I believe he was wrong about so many things.
The poet Yeats said that he's no longer a person.
He was no longer a person.
He became a climate of opinion.
And that is true.
He has lost a lot of his power, but only because his ideas have so spread into the world that they're now absolutely accepted.
And or they're part of the way we think of things.
And by the way, I don't think he was the best.
I think he was far and away not the best thinker.
I think a lot of the stuff he said was nuts.
I think the basis of his thought was nuts.
I was wrapped up in it myself for a long time, and it kept me from seeing very important things.
I think that C.S. Lewis was far, far more brilliant.
And much of what C.S. Lewis said was in answer to Freud, was an Aristotelian attack on Freud.
And that was kind of the argument that going on.
Because what Freud was trying to do was he was trying to materialize human life.
He was trying to make material human life.
So everything was related to the sex drive or the erotic drive, because not just sex, but the eros drive.
And it was a way of making everything material.
So it didn't have to do with your relationship with God.
It didn't have to do with sin.
It always had to do with your pleasure and pain, your desires and the things that thwarted your desires.
And a lot of the things, the bad stuff that came out of Freud, the Freudianism, weren't Freud's fault.
Like Karl Marx is said to have remarked, I don't know what I am, but I'm not a Marxist.
Well, Freud wasn't a Freudian.
And so a lot of the silly stuff he said, but I went back and read when I was writing my memoir.
I went back and reread Freud because he had such a powerful effect on me.
And I was amazed at how unscientific, how little evidence he had for what he said, the elaborate structure that he built on empty air.
There is no question that we have an unconscious.
There's no question, obviously, that our sexuality plays into our lives and is a great driving factor in our lives.
I believe that Freud was wrong.
But, but, when you ask who is influential, you know, and that's a different question than whether he was right.
I think he was massively, massively influential.
And I think if C.S. Lewis had been recognized at the level of Freud, I think we'd be living in a much, much better world because I think C.S. Lewis came much, much closer to the truth.
All right.
Mark, why do you think God created humans in the first place?
There are many theories, but why did God create beings to worship him seems very conceited?
I don't want to call you shallow, Mark.
Sorry, that's a terrible thing to say.
It's not conceited.
I believe that he created us out of love.
I think when you, love is an abundant emotion that wants to make more of itself.
I think that that is basically the same reason people have children, basically.
I think that there is, sure, there's an instinct to have children, but there's just an instinct to, when you are, when you love someone, there is an instinct to create more of that love.
And I think that the worship and the glory that we give to God is simply a question of living in reality.
You know, people always talk about God as if he punishes you.
You know, God is trying to tell you what reality is.
It's like saying you're being punished, you know, like if you don't exercise, you get fat.
If you eat too much, you get fat.
That's the way it is.
It's not a punishment, it is a result.
And the thing is, if you don't act in reality, bad things happen to you.
If you're not in tune with reality, and worshiping God is just the realistic thing to do with your all-loving, all-knowing Creator.
That is the way to react to him.
And so he didn't create us to have us dance around his throne.
He created us to love him and says in the Bible that now we are, through Christ, we are his friends.
And that's an amazing thing.
That is an amazing thing that he was trying to do.
And it's purely an act of love.
I mean, clearly, it is an act.
Because, you know, I've said this before, but Dennis Prager and I were talking about this.
And Dennis Prager says his faith is completely based on rationality.
And he doesn't believe it's rational to believe in a loving God.
And I said, well, then how do you explain creation?
And he said, I can't.
And I do believe in a loving God, and I can explain creation.
That is, for me, the explanation.
From Noah, in your opinion, can one be both a conservative and an atheist?
We've had that question before, but I get asked it so often that I think it's worth answering.
Again, I think, of course, you can be a conservative and an atheist, but I think you're not making sense.
I think that that's what it comes down to.
You know, really, once you follow atheist thought to its conclusion, you will come to the conclusion.
If you follow it all the way, you will come to the conclusion that you essentially don't exist, that you're essentially an illusion, that everything that happens, you have no free will, everything that happens has been worked into the machine from the beginning.
Nothing is, you can't change anything.
Your prayers don't change anything, your decisions don't change anything.
You will have to come to that conclusion if you follow atheism down to the ground.
But if you believe that you were endowed by your Creator with certain inalienable rights, you should have to believe in a Creator just to be making sense.
So yeah, of course, can you vote Republican if you're an atheist?
Yeah.
Can you believe in individual liberty if you're an atheist?
Yes.
But, but when you get into your late-night argument with your liberal friend and it gets to be 2 o'clock in the morning, he's going to win that argument because you have not got a foundational belief that supports your conservatism.
Beautiful Poe's Raven00:09:45
And so that's why I think that it's an interesting thing to sort of follow your thoughts.
I mean, this is another thing that's in my memoirs, the fact that by nature, even as a little boy, I always wanted to follow my thoughts to their conclusion.
I always wanted everything to make sense down to the ground.
And I think it's important to do because otherwise, when the con men come, and the con men are going to look like your college professors, they're going to look like you're the guy who hires you, they're going to look like your friends on Facebook.
When those con men come and they start to pitch you their dumb ideas, you won't know why you believe what you believe.
So I believe you can be a conservative and an atheist, but it's not such a good idea.
All right, because it doesn't make sense.
All right, I want to talk briefly about Wonder Woman.
I have to talk about this because, you know, I don't like to talk about superhero movies anymore because I'm just done with them.
And I'm done with them because they're world that they exist.
And everybody in this room disagrees with me.
And everybody in this room is like holding stuff ready to throw it at me.
But I have to say, it is a 12-year-old world.
And the better the movies get, and this movie is so beautiful.
It really is so well made and so engrossing.
And the visuals are just spectacular.
The more you are sucked into this 12-year-old world, this world of big questions but not important questions.
It's elemental, but it's not profound.
It's all this stuff happening that just doesn't affect your life.
And it doesn't cause, you know, the thing that's interesting about art, and I'll talk about this a little bit more in Stuff I Like, the thing that's interesting about art is you.
You know, you are the thing that art is working on.
It is the way that it calls up certain things in you that make you question yourself, that make you look deeper into life, that make you question life and some of the assumptions of the society around you.
And these comic books never, ever, ever do that.
And so they're just kind of, I don't know, they're just kind of, you know, these basic principles of good and evil sort of, you know, celebrated, which never causes you to be any better than you were when you went into the movie or any more smarter or anything like that.
That said, it's incredibly well done.
It's incredibly beautiful.
The girl, Gal Godot, is that how you pronounce her name?
I actually have no idea.
You have no idea.
Nobody knows how to pronounce her name.
But she's absolutely beautiful.
They made her a girl, which was nice.
They made her a woman, which I thought was really pleasant.
And of course, the left is going crazy.
Anytime anybody says the movie is about how pretty she is, the movie, you know, it reminds me back in the 80s.
Now, this is a long time ago.
Back in the 80s, there was a movie called Flash Dance.
And it had this very beautiful actress in it.
And she was a construction worker, and then she was a dancer.
And they got the same thing.
Oh, it's about female empowerment.
Now the feminists, finally, we have a movie.
And it was a really big hit.
And they asked Jack Nicholson about it.
And Jack Nicholson is very coarse.
And he says things that I can't say on this show.
But basically, he said, it's a movie about watching this babe.
You know, he said it in this very grotesque, obscene way that I won't repeat.
But basically, he said, the movie is about watching this beautiful babe.
You know, Wonder Woman was created by a guy with a bondage problem.
He was into bondage.
And she has this rope, the magic rope that she ties people up with.
That's the movie.
You know, the movie is she's incredibly beautiful.
She wears nice gowns.
She wears that outfit and all this stuff.
And so some guy at New York magazine wrote about it that way.
He wrote, I actually, do I have it here?
I think I may actually have the article.
Yes, I do.
He wrote, the only grace note in this generally clunky Wonder Woman is its star, the 5 foot, 10 inch Israeli actress and model Gal Godot, who is somehow the perfect blend of super babe in the woods, innocence, and mouthiness.
All this is true, by the way, except for that it's clunky.
It's actually a good superhero movie.
While this Wonder Woman is still into ropes, there's no trace of the comic's well-documented S ⁇ M kinkiness with a female director at the helm.
Diana isn't even photographed to elicit slobbers.
She looks fabulous in her suffragette outfit and little specks, but it's not until she strips down to her superheroine bodice and shorts.
This is what the movie's about.
And so, of course, everybody's screaming at him.
But that is the film, basically.
I mean, it wouldn't be as popular as it was if 12-year-old boys couldn't go to it and say, like, ooh, yeah, something about this that I like, but I can't think of what it is.
So we're all, everybody's gonna grow up.
Everybody's gonna grow up and ask their girlfriends to tie them up.
Anyway, if you like superhero movies, it's a good one.
I'm done with them.
I'm sorry.
Like, you know, Logan was a great one.
That was the one that kind of made me think that maybe I could watch them again.
But I should stay away from them because I'm getting to sound kind of cranky about it.
All right, stuff I like.
We've been doing narrative poetry, and every time I do one, people start sending me stuff.
Somebody tweeted me.
Yesterday I did the shooting of Dan McGrew, which is this great poem in idiomatic English, you know.
And somebody sent me, the reason I want to play just a minute of this, Margaret Rutherford was one of the great dames of British acting.
And I had forgotten this.
She did four Miss Marple Agatha Christie novels as movies, and they just totally revamped them to make Miss Marble kind of this eccentric kook.
And there was one scene in one of these where she wanders into an audition, and the director says, All right, you know, give us your audition.
And she starts to recite the shooting of Dan McGrew.
And of course, she's got this very plummy upper-class English accent.
There's a bunch of the boys while having a drink in the Melimut saloon, you know.
And finally, he stops her and says, Just jump, cut to the chase.
So here's just a brief part of that scene.
Well, out of the night that was fifty below, and into the den and the glare, there stumbled a miner, fresh from the creeks, dog dirty and loaded for bear.
Just give me the gist and get to the climax.
Oh, dear me, that's very difficult.
It's a long poem, and there's a great deal behind it.
However, as you wish.
Well, now, soon after the stranger has entered this lurid scene, it becomes increasingly evident that there is a growing antagonism between him and Mr. McGrew, an antagonism which is to end in stock travel.
These movies, the only reason I played this is because actually these Miss Marble movies with Margaret Rutherford, if you have kids, they're just absolutely delightful murder mysteries, and she was a great actress and absolutely hilarious.
I had totally forgotten about them.
I had totally forgotten they existed.
But this reminded me.
Anyway, today I want to talk about what I think is one of the truly great poems.
Narrative poems are frequently not as good at poetry as shorter poems, I think.
But this is one of the great poems of all time.
And it's interesting.
This is The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe, one of my favorite poems, 1845.
This is a poem that gets dissed by critics a lot, and partly because of the kind of lurid language that he uses, which I think is great.
I mean, he was a Gothic writer, so he wrote Gothic language.
But it is a work of genius.
Almost everybody knows the story of about the raven who perches on the door and says nevermore to this guy who is grieving his lost girlfriend Lenore.
And what the poem is about is about the way that the human heart and nature combine to create meaning.
And this is what the Romantics, Poe was a very, very late Romantic writer.
And this was what the Romantics were wrestling with.
And now we know this in science now, in quantum mechanics, that we know that observers actually change what they observe, that light acts differently when you see it do one thing than when you see it do another.
And it doesn't actually exist in a form until somebody observes it.
And this is what the poets, the Romantic poets, started to understand about meaning.
And people have turned this into relativism, but it's not relativism at all because there is such a thing as human nature and there is such a thing as reality.
This poem is a perfect description.
It is a brilliant, brilliant description of how the mind creates part of the meaning of reality.
And we've talked about this a lot in Hamlet.
Hamlet talks about how, because he's depressed, the world has become an ugly place.
Because he's depressed, mankind, who is close to the angels, is no longer beautiful.
And because this guy is in grief, this word that is repeated by this bird, nevermore, becomes a deep, deeply meaningful expression when obviously the bird is just a bird repeating something.
It's just brilliant.
And the language, I love the language.
I'll just read a little bit of it, but you should really read it.
It's a great, great poem.
The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe opens famously.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, while I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
'Tis some visitor, I muttered, tapping at my chamber door, only this and nothing more.
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December, and each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly, I wished the morrow, vainly I had sought to borrow from my books surcease of sorrow, sorrow for the lost Lenore, for the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore, nameless here forevermore.
And of course, that evermore gets picked up by the raven who comes in and starts saying nevermore.
It is a wonderful poem, and I think that it's funny.
The French discovered Poe.
You know, Poe died in absolutely this poem made him famous.
He became famous because of the raven, but he didn't make a dime off it for some reason and ended his life literally strangling on his own puke in the gutter, just a totally messed up guy and always impoverished, and never had the respect here from the critics that he had in France.
It was the French who finally said, This is great stuff.
And that kind of came back and brought him back into fashion here.
Poe's Raven Echoes00:00:35
All right, tomorrow, this is it.
They say goodbye to our old studio.
I mean, you can't see it, but the studio is basically gone.
If you turn the camera around, you just see the street.
Not the street, but it is in rubble around us.
And tomorrow I will be broadcasting from my house.
What did you call it, Bailey Clavin in the crib?
Is that what we're going to call it?
Clavin in my crib.
And then the new studios on Monday.
Will the studios even be set up?
Will they be?
No, they won't.
It'll still be in the midst of rubble and all that stuff.