Ep. 330 dissects Trump’s White House chaos—from Sessions’ Russia recusal feud to Bannon’s "white supremacy" jokes and Priebus’ 16th firing—before pivoting to the 2017 congressional shooting, where left-wing media bias and partisan double standards exposed a "ratchet effect." The episode then ties childhood divorce trauma to modern grievance politics, arguing unresolved pain fuels societal division, while dismissing self-help as shallow compared to mentorship or faith. Rejecting transgender ideology as a denial of observable reality, the host frames it as part of a broader rejection of evolutionary randomness, praising classic storytellers like Greene over modernist pretension. [Automatically generated summary]
The media has become obsessed with reporting rumors about the tensions within the Trump administration, as opposed to being obsessed with reporting the news, telling the truth, or not being slimy knuckleheads damaging the country with their hysterical opposition to Republicans.
No, siree.
So here's a roundup of recent reporting about the inner workings of the administration as the reports came direct from our Nose for News journalists.
NBC has reported that anonymous sources told someone familiar with the situation who called the friend of a friend, who then told a girl in the NBC mailroom, whom he was sleeping with when it was supposed to be his weekend with the kids, that Donald Trump is angry at Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Sessions recused himself from the investigation into whether there was collusion between the cartoon Russian spies from the old Rocky and Bullwinkle shows and people Trump fired so long ago, no one can remember who they are.
The rumored reports of reported rumors that there are tensions between Trump and Sessions come hard on the heels of reported rumors that there are rumored reports of tensions between Trump and Steve Bannon.
Bannon, of course, is chief strategist in charge of destroying all that's good and true in the universe in order to establish the supremacy of the white race over his office, which has been moved next to the West Wing men's room.
According to the Washington Post, where democracy dies in darkness, but turning on the lights spikes the electricity bill, so to hell with it, Trump fell out with Bannon over Bannon's falling out with Sessions over his falling out with Trump.
The Post received word of the feud from an anonymous friend of an anonymous source, actually named Anonymous, who said that Trump and Bannon were seen in an argument in the Oval Office during which Trump hit Bannon's fist so hard that Bannon's arm swung around in a big circle, causing Bannon to punch himself on top of the head.
Bannon responded by trying to poke the president in the eyes with two fingers, but the president put his hand on his forehead, blocking the strike, and then laughed at Bannon, saying, quote, gnuck, gnuck, gnuck, whereupon Bannon surprised the president by twisting his nose in a 180-degree circle.
The Post report of the feud with Bannon over the NBC's report of the feud with Sessions may have been the result of a report on Axios that Bannon had arranged the firing of Chief of Staff Reines Priebus.
According to anonymous sources familiar with the situation of other anonymous sources, Priebus only continues to show up for work at the White House because he's embarrassed to tell his wife that he's been fired 16 times.
The reported Priebus firings are part of a reported administration shake-up that could affect every corner of journalists' imaginations.
The reported drama and feuding in the White House will continue until reporters in Washington, D.C. find something useful to do with their lives.
So don't expect it to end in the foreseeable future.
Tricker warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Restaurant-Level Meals Home-Delivered00:02:50
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity-ding.
Ship-shaped dipsy-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.
I'm still under battlefield conditions here.
I'm back from my home in our new studio, but our new studio is not set up yet.
So you see behind me is a beautiful studio, got a wonderful desk, got a fireplace.
But right now, all we've got is these two lamps that we stole from Motel 6, where I was staying last night to evade the law.
And also, I'm watching a screen on which I appear as I was two seconds ago.
And let me tell you, I look so much younger than.
I was really, really a good-looking guy in those days.
It's the mailbag today.
We do have the mailbag.
We had to use, because these are battlefield conditions, we have to use an actual mailbag with paper letters.
But we will answer all your questions with answers that are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life on occasion for the better.
Let us begin by giving you free food.
That would be at least, at least, no matter how the show goes, at least you're going to get free food because we're advertising the wonderful Blue Apron, Blue Apron, which brings restaurant-level meals to your house for you to cook.
They send you the ingredients, very simple instructions, and the ingredients are all measured out so there's not a lot of cutting and dicing and all that stuff.
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These are meals that you would go out to a restaurant for, but instead you make them yourself so everybody's very impressed with you and says, Hey, I didn't know you could do that, but you can.
You can have things like beef teriyaki stir-fry with sugar snap peas and lime rice.
Not something that I can make off the top of my head.
Baked spinach and egg flatbread with sauteed asparagus and lemon ioli, three cheese and baby broccoli stromboli with tomato and oregano dipping sauce.
But you know, you can choose your own stuff.
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And you just go on and you can pick this kind of stuff, arrange your own meals.
It's delivered straight to your house, and it costs about 10 bucks a meal, which is really good for a restaurant-level meal.
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And I say free food because you can check out this week's menu and get your first three meals free with free shipping.
You do it by going to blueapron.com/slash Andrew.
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Years of Division00:16:19
All right, so we are in the midst of what seems to be a developing story.
I think we've got most of the pertinent facts.
There was a terrible, just nightmarish-sounding shooting in Washington.
The Congress was preparing for its charity baseball game, and the Republicans were preparing.
And a guy named James Hodgkinson is alleged.
He is the alleged shooter.
He's now dead.
He's 66.
He's from Illinois.
He is a guy, you know, when they go on his social media, he's a guy who spouts a lot of left-wing rhetoric, kind of very cliched left-wing rhetoric.
And he took us, he opened up with a rifle and shot Steve Scalise, who is the majority whip, the Republican whip.
And fortunately, because Scalise is apparently fine, well, let's hear Donald Trump talking about it.
He made a statement today.
Melania and I are grateful for the heroism and praying for the swift recovery of all victims.
Congressman Scalise is a friend and a very good friend.
He's a patriot and he's a fighter.
He will recover from this assault.
And Steve, I want you to know that you have the prayers not only of the entire city behind you, but of an entire nation and frankly, the entire world.
America is praying for you, and America is praying for all of the victims of this terrible shooting.
So, Scalise, the lucky thing was that because Scalise is in leadership, because he's the whip, he has a contingent of cops to protect him.
And of course, the cops and another guy with a gun, apparently, I haven't quite got this information yet, took the shooter down, and they were wounded as well.
And those are the heroes the president is talking about.
Rand Paul described this thing being in a shooting situation where you are unarmed, because of course, Washington, D.C. has such a stringent anti-gun laws that it's very, very hard even to get a carry permit for your home.
And they've had real problems with the Supreme Court saying, you know, they've gone too far.
So nobody was armed.
So Rand Paul describes, Congressman Rand Paul describes what a nightmare it is to be in this situation without firearms.
Our lives were saved by the Capitol Hill police.
Had they not been there, I think it would have been a massacre.
And you are completely helpless.
And, you know, having no self-defense and no way to get to somebody, the field was basically a killing field.
I mean, if you were to run out there while the shooter was still shooting, he would have shot anybody.
He was shooting people as far away as Wright Field.
So, I mean, he, I think that's probably, what, 75 yards or so, and that's about where we were.
I was lucky to be that far away, but he's still shooting people 75 yards away, and there's no stopping.
And it appeared as if after a while that he might have been advancing.
And had the Capitol Hill Police not been there, he could have walked around the field and just shot everybody.
Your only chance would have been to run.
And so at some point, we decided escape was really the only option, and we did have a route of escape.
The people in the dugout had no route, though, because they're in a dugout that goes down a foot or two.
Their only chance of survival is to get down below the surface of the ground.
And if they were to come and pop up, they're only 20 yards from the shooter.
And so they really had no choice.
Had the Capitol Hill Police not been there to prevent the advance of the gunman, I just, you know, as terrible as it is, it could have been a lot worse.
Really, I mean, it just sounds absolutely horrific.
Jeff Flake, Congressman Jeff Flake, apparently, after the shooter was taken down, rushed out of the dugout to get to the wounded Scalise and stop the bleeding, or at least put some pressure on the bleeding, use his belt for a tourniquet.
It was, it seems, a politically motivated crime.
Now, that doesn't mean that the guy is some great political philosopher.
It means he's probably, most of these guys are deeply mentally ill.
Most shooters are deeply mentally ill, but his mental illness was keyed off his politics.
Congressman Ron DeSantis seemed to have had a meeting, a confrontation, an encounter with the guy before the shooting took place.
So here's DeSantis describing that.
I actually left a little early, probably about a couple minutes before this all happened.
And as I was getting into the car with one of my colleagues, Jeff Duncan, there was a guy that walked up to us that was asking whether there was Republicans or Democrats out there.
And it was just a little odd.
And then he kind of walked towards the area where all this happened.
So we've told the police that.
Was he carrying anything?
He was not carrying anything at the time, but from where the shots were, I would think that that would have probably been staged because there was no one that was obviously walking around with a rifle at the time.
But it was just a little odd that he kind of really walked up to us to ask and then went ahead.
And probably it was probably like three minutes, five minutes after we pulled out of the parking lot.
What time did you leave, Congressman?
Because according to Brett Baer, the shooting started this morning at 7:15.
The gunman with a rifle.
We left it probably no later than 7:10.
So he just got out of there before the thing opened.
I mean, the whole thing just sounds like a nightmare.
Now, I know what you're wondering.
Yesterday, I was talking about the Julius Caesar in Central Park, where Julius Caesar is dressed up as Donald Trump.
And every night, courtesy of the funding from the New York Times and courtesy of funding from Time Warner, the owners of CNN, every night the audience stands up and cheers to the sight of Donald Trump being knifed to death.
And you're wondering if I'm going to blame this shooting on them.
And am I going to blame it on Kathy Griffin for holding up the severed head of Donald Trump and all the people who have been talking about Donald Trump at the level of rhetoric that they've been talking about?
And I'm not.
And there's one very specific reason that I'm not going to do that.
The reason is, I don't work for CNN, and I don't work for the New York Times, and I don't work for the ABC, and I don't work for the left-wing media that does this all the time.
That, I mean, we only have to go back.
I mean, you could go back to John F. Kennedy and the whole fact that they covered up.
They spent 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, covering up the fact that Kennedy was a Cold Warrior killed by a communist.
But let's not go back that far.
Let's just go back to 2011 when Gabby Giffords, a congresswoman, was shot in a terrible incident in Arizona.
I want to start just reminding you, because it's not enough for me to talk about it.
I want to play some of this stuff from that time.
But first, I want to start by playing a friend.
The shooter's name was Jared Lofner, and he was, like all these guys, a crackpot.
And I hesitate to call him a schizophrenic, though that's technically what he has.
And the only reason I hesitate to do that is most schizophrenics, it's a tormenting, terrible disease.
Most schizophrenics are incredibly peaceful and never cause harm.
So I don't want to demonize them.
But it's some kind of people do this stuff almost always because they are mentally ill.
Almost always.
It's because they're mentally ill, especially in America where we're really not dealing, thank God, with the kinds of things that need to be stopped with a gun.
But let's just play: here is Jared Lofner's buddy who is talking about his motivation.
This is cut to.
He did not watch TV.
He disliked the news.
He didn't listen to political radio.
He didn't take sides.
He wasn't on the left.
He wasn't on the right.
Okay.
And here is a montage from Reason TV of the incredible, incredible barrage of rhetoric against Sarah Palin and other right-wing commentators, other people who made comments that could be construed as violent.
Sarah Palin had put a rifle site over, among other others, Gabby Gifford's area, her area that she was the congresswoman over, saying we've got to target these areas and take them over.
And this was blamed.
The sheriff in Arizona blamed Sarah Palin, blamed other Republican candidates, and the news just ran with it.
Here is a montage, a selection.
Party has treated this tragedy in a reprehensible way.
They claim their rhetoric has nothing to do with the shooting.
A lot of his political philosophy was anti-government.
He had picked up some of the extreme right positions.
It's sprinkled with things.
Anti-government.
Seeing the government as an enemy.
What's been the role of talk radio and fueling the heated language?
Wouldn't you be smiling too if you had the entire Democrat Party running interference for you?
A trial to inflame the public on a daily basis 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
It does impact people who may have a mental problem.
A. Line Beck, Sharon Engel, and the Red got their first target.
Glenn Beck himself has been responsible for three thwarted assassination attempts this year.
Glenn Beck, who obsesses nearly as strangely as this Mr. Woffner did about gold and debts.
The books you mentioned, there's a theme that runs through all of them, in particular the Ayn Rand book, the idea of the individual against the state.
They refuse to stop calling it a jobs-killing health care repeal.
The right-wing loves the go-to rhetoric for them is: wouldn't it be fun to kill the people we dis Yeah, so that was the left reacting to the shooting, the non-political shooting by a madman of Gabby Giffords.
And we are not going to do that because we're not them.
But that in itself creates a problem.
I just want to end this part before we say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
I just want to end by talking about Ross Duthot's column this morning, which I bet he wishes he had back talking about Julius Caesar in the park.
And Duthot is one of the House conservatives at the New York Times.
And he wrote a column called The Trumpiest Roman of them all.
And it begins, the problem with staging a Julius Caesar in which Caesar clearly resembles Donald Trump, the culture war controversy du jour, thanks to Shakespeare in the park, isn't that doing so encourages the president's assassination.
So that's, we know that right there.
No, the problem with a Trumpified Caesar is that the conceit fails to illuminate our moment the way a good classical illusion should.
That's the problem with putting that in the park, just so you know.
So we're going to continue talking about this because it really is, it really does create a very specific moral dilemma for us.
But first I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, but that means, horrors, you're going to miss the mailbag.
But if you come over to the, I know, I know, it's like that, your life is going to continue just the way it is.
Look in the mirror.
Is that what you want?
No.
DailyWire.com, come on over.
You can hear the rest of the show.
you subscribe, you can watch the show on the site and be in next week's mailbag.
So the problem is, we call it the problem of the ratchet.
And for those of you who don't use tools, a ratchet is a device that they frequently put in wrenches that causes the wrench to turn in only one direction.
You've probably seen guys with cars, you know, fixing cars, using it.
It goes click, click, click, click, because when you push it in one way, it doesn't do anything, but when you push it in the other, it does something else, right?
It does turn.
And that is the problem we have had with, I was talking about this at the beginning of the week, with the fact that, for instance, for eight years, Barack Obama corrupted the Justice Department, corrupted the IRS, openly, openly did it, openly used the IRS to silence the opposition, openly had an attorney general who said, I am the president's wingman, openly had Loretta Lynch, well, now we know Loretta Lynch was lying,
was telling the head of the FBI, James Comey, to lie about the Clinton investigation, openly doing all this, and absolutely not a word, not a word.
And now Donald Trump says anything untoward, and it is a full-fledged investigation complete with special counsel, complete with hearing after hearing after hearing.
This creates this situation in which we start to say, and it is right for us to say, hey, wait a minute, wait a minute.
If our guy gets in trouble for doing it and your guy never gets in trouble, then the ratchet is only going to turn to the left.
And our government, our freedoms, our Constitution are all going to disappear because we know that you don't care about those things.
You don't care.
So why shouldn't we turn into you and start doing what you do?
And of course, the problem we have is they already, the left already does this.
Their feminists have already turned into masculinists.
They're telling their women to be men.
So that's why their women turn into second-rate men instead of free women.
They tell their blacks basically to use the racism that was used against them.
And now you have blacks segregated in schools.
If you take the goals and the values of your enemy, you turn into your enemy and you will achieve what your enemy achieved.
I mean, we can, you know, the right can take down the Constitution just like the left does.
But, you know, it is a painful problem.
And, you know, these guys, Bill Maher, one of the things he said during the Gabby Giffords thing was he said, you know, the chalkboard in the shooter's basement probably looks just like the chalkboard in Glenn Beck's basement.
And you heard them attacking Beck.
They're always attacking Rush.
Let me tell you something.
Let me tell you something.
Rush is an amazing radio talent.
Rush is the greatest radio talent I've heard since my old man, who was also a great radio talent.
He would be a star no matter what was going on in the country.
But having said that, the lies of the mainstream media are his jet fuel.
He flies as high and as fast as he does on that fuel.
I'm not saying he wouldn't create another show that was just as successful and a different show, but he'd have to think about it.
He'd have to figure out what he was going to talk about because all he has to talk about is the fact that they lie and they show the world in one way.
And this is, I mean, this is everything.
You know, yesterday, the other story, of course, was Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, being forced.
He wasn't forced to testify in the sense that they dragged him in.
He wanted to testify in public to clear his name because they've been implicating him in this make-believe Russian collusion story, which is now very clearly a complete fantasy.
And Sessions just didn't want to be hit again and again by this whispering campaign.
And here's the thing, all right?
They kept saying, oh, he had three meetings with the Russians and all this because, and they accuse him of lying because they asked him if he had meetings with the Russians.
And he understood that to mean, did I have meetings with the Russians to collude over the campaign?
And he said, no.
But of course, as a senator, of course, he had meetings with the Russian ambassador.
He bumped into people, shake hands with them, and now they said, oh, there was another one.
And he said, none of this happens.
So he wanted to go out there and blast them.
And he did.
Let's hear cut number five.
Let me state this clearly, colleagues.
I have never met with or had any conversation with any Russians or any foreign officials concerning any type of interference with any campaign or election in the United States.
Further, I have no knowledge of any such conversations by anyone connected to the Trump campaign.
I was your colleague in this body for 20 years, at least some of you, and I participated, and the suggestion that I participated in any collusion, that I was aware of any collusion with the Russian government to hurt this country, which I have served with honor for 35 years, or to undermine the integrity of our democratic process,
is an appalling and detestable lie.
Understanding Masculinity Through Role Models00:14:39
Now, what was important about what he just said, which was all true, okay, was that I was your colleague.
You know who I am, see?
And the reason that's important is because it is absolutely true.
They know Jeff Sessions.
The idea that Jeff Sessions is colluding with the Russians, I'm not saying that Jeff is a saint or anything, that he does everything right.
I'm just saying that the idea that he was colluding with the Russians to mess around with the campaign is complete nonsense.
But it's not just complete nonsense.
Every senator in the room knew it was nonsense.
So when you watch them questioning him and hammering at him, every one of them knows he's putting on a show.
And here is Ron Wyden, you know, questioning him about Comey's comment that Sessions recused himself from the Russian investigation.
He did that because he was part of the campaign.
The investigation was into the Trump campaign, and he was part of the Trump campaign.
So he said, I can't be fair, and he recused himself.
Ask yourself, when was the last time Eric Holder, the attorney general under Obama, recused himself?
When did Loretta Lynch, a friend of the Clintons, recuse herself during that investigation?
Never, never, never.
When was there a special counsel during the corrupt Obama administration?
Never, never, never.
But Comey apparently suggested that there was something fishy, something problematic, I think was the word he used, about Jeff Sessions' recusal.
So here is Wyden, knowing this is a show, knowing this is all false, questioning Jeff Sessions about this.
Mr. Comey said that there were matters with respect to the recusal that were problematic and he couldn't talk about them.
What are they?
Why don't you tell me?
They are none, Senator Wyden.
There are none.
I can tell you that for absolute certainty.
This is a secret innuendo being leaked out there about me, and I don't appreciate it.
And I've tried to give my best and truthful answers to any committee I've appeared before.
And it's really people are suggesting through innuendo that I have been not honest about matters, and I've tried to be honest.
I mean, it's amazing stuff.
And here's the New York Times editorial board in the morning after the testimony.
The last time Mr. Sessions appeared before a Senate committee during his confirmation hearing in January, he gave false testimony, period.
Quote, I did not have communications with the Russians, Mr. Sessions said in response to a question no one asked.
And despite the fact that he had, in fact, met with the Russian ambassador, Sergei Kislyak, at least twice during the 2016 presidential campaign when he was a senator.
And it was like meetings in the open, out in front.
You know, what did they think he was doing?
Standing in the well of the Capitol discussing how to sell the country to the Russians, Jeff Seshinsky, you know, I mean, it's like, it's nuts.
It is nuts.
And so, and they know it's nuts.
And I just want to play one more thing before I finish commenting about this and how it relates back to the shooting in D.C. Here's Tom Cotton, who brilliantly caught the entire tone of this entire Russian collusion investigation.
Mr. Sessions, are you familiar with what spies called tradecraft?
A little bit.
That involves things like covert communications and dead drops and brush passes, right?
That is part of it.
Do you like spy fiction?
John Lecoray?
Daniel Silva?
Jason Matthews?
Yeah, Alan First.
David Ignatius.
This figure is book.
Do you like Jason Bourne or James Bond movies?
No.
Yes.
I do.
Have you ever, in any of these fantastical situations, heard of a plot line so ridiculous that a sitting United States senator and an ambassador of a foreign government colluded at an open setting with hundreds of other people to pull off the greatest caper in the history of SCP.
I mean, it is amazing.
It's amazing.
And on CNN, this is 24-7 at the New York Times.
This is what fills up their pages.
You know, I think it's disgusting to have an assassination.
I'm a free speech purist.
I'm a free speech purist.
You have the right to have a Julius Caesar where Julius Caesar is Donald Trump.
You have the right to hold up the severed head of Donald Trump.
I think your employers should react to that.
I think you should be boycotted.
I think you should be, I think the companies that fund that have a responsibility.
But that's not what makes everybody so angry.
It's the lies.
It's the constant, constant lies.
It's the constant ratchet in one direction in the press so that our guys never get a fair break and their guys are always walking on water.
I mean, it is infuriating to be lied to.
And the problem with these things about the assassination porn that the left indulges in is it creates a mindset in which there can be no communication between us.
Because the truth is, the truth is that those of us who are arguing with each other are separate from the people who are shooting people, right?
We're different.
No matter which side we're on, we are different.
And we should state that difference very, very clearly.
Listen, during the Obama administration, I remember having conversations with friends, some of them influential people, and sometimes they would get so angry that their dialogue would get violent, their language would get violent.
And I would always say to them, don't even think about it.
Don't even think about it.
You do not want to live in that country.
I have lived in a country, this country, where a president was shot.
I have lived through that.
You do not want to be there.
It never goes away.
It is a trauma that never ends for the country itself.
And what makes people angry is the lies.
You, the mainstream media, when you tell us one thing all the time and when you take one side all the time, you make the opposite people, you make the opposite side furious, furious.
You divide the country.
You create the anger.
You don't create the shooting.
You just make it so that we cannot have a dialogue.
And so you create a sort of continuum between the shooters and the fighters where there shouldn't be.
The continuum is really between right and left.
It's us arguing over the country like good Americans, openly, honestly, and having all our voices heard.
When every actor, when every comedian, when every award show is hammering one side, you're going to get anger and division.
That is on you.
That is on you.
The madmen, well, look, there are always going to be madmen.
There are always going to be violent people.
But if one side is blaming, if one side is always blamed for the violence, that just increases the anger between the good people.
All right.
I hope everybody who was shot gets better and is all right and good for the cops for standing up and taking this guy out.
The mailbag.
Woohoo!
Kafifi!
Kafi!
The mailbag.
I'm never letting that go.
That Kafifi, I'm going on.
That may be my last word when I die.
It's going to be farewell and Kafifi.
All right.
This one comes with no name.
Mr. Clavin, I heard you on Tyler Smith's podcast, and I loved listening to you two talk about the father quality of God.
I mentioned this before.
This is on Tyler's podcast, more than one lesson.
We were talking about fences and other movies about fathers and what to do, how you can connect to God as a father if your own father was a bad guy.
So here's the question: I was wondering as a young millennial growing up in a household with a single mother and in a time with this corrosive feminism, how does a male find his masculinity?
I have lacked father figures most of my life, and it seems like I have two settings: a full-on Tony Soprano, aggressive and mean, or a complete beta male that gets walked on.
Is there a middle ground of masculinity with a sincere heroic quality to it?
What are some good books on masculinity?
Is there a middle ground of masculinity with a sincere heroic quality to it?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And of course, that is why fathers are so important, because men learn from watching.
You know, one of the things about being a woman, one of the few things about being a woman that is actually easier is you kind of know what a woman is because she has babies.
You know, that creates a sort of immediate thing, and you have babies and you take care of babies.
And I know the feminists get all angry saying that that's what womanhood is, that kind of nurturing, loving, emotionally connected stuff.
Tough.
They're wrong.
The feminists are wrong.
They can be as angry as they like.
That is what femininity is.
But what is masculinity?
And what is it in each situation?
Is it the ability to punch somebody in the face?
Is it an ability to be a tough guy?
You have to learn by watching.
And I believe, and I said this, I believe I said this, I went on a rant on Tyler's show, more than one lesson.
I truly believe that a lot of the stuff we're seeing on college campuses has to do with divorce.
You know, people get divorced.
When you get divorced, and look, there are some legitimate reasons for divorce abuse and addiction among them.
I understand that.
But when you get divorced, you blow up a child's planet.
You are blowing up that child's planet.
When you then say to the child, you're fine, you're going to be fine.
Oh, the kids are fine.
The kids are all right.
Oh, he's doing fine.
Little Tommy's doing fine.
He's gotten over it.
He's gotten over it.
When you say that, you strip them of their ability to get through the trauma of their planet blowing up.
You, mom and dad, are the planet.
When you get a divorce, you blow up the planet.
They're not fine.
They're not fine.
They are traumatized, okay?
Then these kids who have never really dealt with the trauma because they feel bad about it because they feel guilty about blaming mom and dad or blaming mom or blaming dad for this divorce and this terrible, terrible suffering and pain they went through.
They get to college and the guys, the professor says to them, oh, you know what your problem is?
Your problem is you're oppressed.
Your problem is that nobody likes black people.
The problem is that nobody likes gay people.
The problem is that you live in a country that's unfair and capitalism that's unfair.
They have a place to take that anger and put it and attach it to something.
And I just believe that divorce accounts for so much of this.
And so in answer to your question, and I had this, you know, I did not go through a divorce, thank God.
It was one of the best things my parents gave me was their marriage, which was a very good marriage.
But I didn't have a role model in my father.
He and I were at daggers drawn a lot of the time.
And I didn't have a role model in my father.
And I turned to fiction.
And I turned to the heroes of fiction.
And I would go through and kind of think to myself, almost unconsciously, but also sometimes consciously, who are the heroes who represent the kind of man I want to be.
And I talk about this in my memoir, The Great Good Thing.
I talk about settling on Philip Marlowe because he was a man who kind of stood up for ideas of chivalry even while knowing that he was living in a corrupt world.
And what I would say about this is when you say, are there any good books on masculinity?
I don't know any books called How to Be a Man.
You know, I don't know any, I wouldn't know if they existed.
I really do think that turning to other role models, finding other mentors, other role models, other people who can help you, is the way to go.
And I continued to do that into my 20s when I found a great psychiatrist who saved my life and he sort of became my mentor, really the only mentor I ever had.
And I think that you really have to find people, even if they're fictional, that you can admire and base yourself on.
Because I understand, you know, when you have a father that you can admire, when you have a father who is against you, who is mean or who's absent, you have to find other role models and you have to do it in any way that you can do it.
And fiction is one of the ways.
I mean, there are great heroes.
I always talk about the book Shane, a great example where a boy has to choose between the kind of action man father and the at-home domestic father.
Both of them good images of manhood.
And I think that, you know, you have to do something because, of course, of course, being a man gives you a lot of, you have usually more physical strength than the women in your lives.
You have sometimes a more domineering personality than the women in your lives.
Eventually, if you have children and become a father, you have to show them what a man is.
You have to show your son so he can be a man.
You have to show your daughter so she can find a man, so she can understand what kind of man she's looking for.
You have to show your wife so she can have a good life.
You know, those are things that you have to do as a man, and you have to understand what that is.
But of course, it's not Tony Soprano and it's not being a pushover.
Of course, it's not.
There is a method of having strength and carrying strength with nobility and courage and integrity.
And integrity, I think, is possibly, you know, people, feminists especially, get really angry at me, but integrity, which is admirable in anybody, is essential to manhood in a way it may not be to womanhood.
To be, to say, act, and be who you seem to be, I think, is essential to being a man.
Anyway, I think that it is a task.
It can be a lifelong task, but it's something you have to take on.
From Larry, hi, Andrew, you're the greatest.
Fact check true, right?
What is your opinion of self-help books?
Are there any good self-help books?
Have you ever read a self-help book?
Is there anything we should look out for in this self-help field?
You know, I've only read, I think, one self-help book, which was about eating, you know, how to lose weight.
But I read a bunch of them for research when I was doing a book that involved a self-help book.
I cannot remember which book it was.
But the one thing I found about self-help books is almost all of them could be written in three pages.
They have some good advice.
Some of them have great advice, and they have really good advice, and you could easily condense it to three pages, and to make money, they turned it into a book.
And after you finish reading the book, you think, like, yeah, I could have said that in about 500 words.
So, my feeling about it is there's lots of good advice in self-help books.
Many self-help books have good advice.
I don't know what you're looking for self-help in, so I don't know what to recommend.
I'm not sure I would be the right guy to do it.
But almost all of them can be condensed into a short article, and that might be the way to go to look at articles instead.
I do think that for deep change, you might need other things like religion is a good one, and therapy can be good, but self-help can help you with things like dieting and exercise and things like that.
Well, let's see, we've had that question before.
Here's a weird one.
I'm not sure what to make of this from Marcus Hello, Supreme Overlord Clavin.
Purpose Beyond Randomness00:03:49
At least they got the title right.
Could you explain your thoughts about hermaphrodites?
Hermaphrodites, obviously, people with two sexual organs.
My mother likes to cite hermaphrodites when debating sexuality, and it does raise some good questions.
What would you say the proper Christian view on this subject would be?
Thank you.
You know, I don't understand what the argument is there, because the point about a hermaphrodite is it is abnormal.
It's not wrong, it's just abnormal.
But we know it's abnormal.
How do we know it's abnormal?
Because we know what normal looks like.
So a hermaphrodite, just like if a hermaphrodite had been born with a sixth finger or one leg, has to deal with these things.
But we know that is not the way human beings are made.
So I'm not sure what the argument your mother is making is.
You know, the fact that somebody could be born.
You know, listen, you know, I tease the transgender movement all the time, but I believe transgender people probably have a problem.
It may be a mental problem.
It could be a genetic problem.
It could be a hormonal problem.
I believe they have a problem.
It might make them a transgender person.
That might be a fair thing to do.
But it doesn't make them is a member of the opposite sex.
All I care about, I don't want to oppress people for their problems.
That's ridiculous.
I don't want to make fun of people for their problems.
I only make fun of people who tell me that I have to lie in order for them to live.
That I have to change what I see with my own eyes in order for them to live.
People are born with problems.
People have physical problems.
People acquire problems as they go, psychiatric problems.
It's not about beating these people up.
It's about not being forced to lie about the state of the world.
And the reason is, goes back to what we've been talking about a lot this week, and I would like to talk about a lot more, is that things have a purpose.
And what we have been taught, you know, I have to keep going back to this because it's really interesting.
A lot of people here in this office don't believe in evolution, and I believe very strongly in evolution and the evolutionary process.
And it always used to bother me.
Why fight about this?
Because the science is pretty clear.
I think the science on evolution is pretty clear.
You know, there's stuff that's open for question, and fine, you know, ask the questions.
But what does this have to do with God?
And what does it have to do with religion?
And sometimes they put it in terms of, oh, the book of Genesis being absolutely true.
But I don't think that that's the real issue.
The real issue is that if you are religious, you come to realize that you have a purpose, that you were made with a purpose, that your intellect has a purpose, that your hands and your sexual organs and your nose and your eyes, they have a purpose.
You were made for a reason.
You are not just a piece of nature in this natural world that is all kind of accidental and random.
You are the reason there is nature.
The reason there is nature is to make you.
You know, it may be to make other creatures with souls and consciousness, which fine, but it is here on earth who make you.
You are the reason.
When people say save the earth, there are people who say we should get rid of all the people and save the earth.
The only reason the Earth is even interesting is just a rock, just a piece of rock spiraling into a nuclear explosion.
The only reason it's interesting is because of you.
It's because of you.
And you are here with a purpose.
And once you see that, it changes your attitude towards sexuality.
It changes your attitude to all these things.
It doesn't mean that abnormal sexuality is bad necessarily.
It just means that everything comes with a price that is based on how far you are straying from that purpose.
That's all it means.
It means that you have to take stock of your life.
It's not about how other people feel toward you or act toward you.
You want them to be nice to you.
You want them to be polite.
You want to be free to do the things that you want to do.
But at the same time, in dealing with yourself, you have to understand yourself as a creation made for a reason.
And the reason people get so angry at the evolutionists is because they keep insisting that it's random selection.
Yeah, it's random from our point of view, but that doesn't make it random in the big sense.
Graham Greene's Gripping Stories00:03:08
You can't see in a system if the system is random.
Gee, I've talked so much that I have to move on, and I've got a lot of other mailbag questions that I wanted to deal with, but I started to blather there.
Hopefully it was interesting.
Stuff I like.
We'll move on to stuff I like.
All week long I've been talking about a group of writers who are very dear to my heart because they are the writers who, in the midst of the onslaught of modernism as fiction was reaching that part that art forms reach as they grow old, where they become very intellectualized, very self-referential, very much the stuff of critics and intellectuals and college professors and not so much the stuff of entertainment.
These are the guys who kept great storytelling alive.
We talked about Daphne Des Maurier, terrific storytelling writer.
Yesterday I was talking about Somerset Maugham, also wonderful if you've never read him.
And the thing about both Maugham and Des Morier is they were great short story writers.
So if you want to sample them, you can just get their short stories and take a look.
Here is one more, who is Graham Greene.
And Graham Green, Graham Greene may be the most filmed author who ever lived.
I'm not sure, you know, maybe Dickens, I don't know.
Graham Green, his movies were not only filmed, but they are brilliant.
He is what I think may be the greatest movie ever made.
It is certainly one of my favorite, very favorite movies.
He is the author of The Third Man, and he wrote the book of The Third Man really just to prepare for writing the screenplay.
So it's really the screenplay.
It's really the movie that is spectacular.
He also wrote another book, another short story, which was made by the same director.
He wrote a short story called The Basement Room, which became The Fallen Idol, which also has made Stuff I Like, a wonderful, wonderful movie, The Fallen Idol, and a good short story, The Basement Room.
He wrote Brighton Rock, an excellent thriller story that was, you know, Brighton Rock started the career of David Attenborough, who later went on to direct Jurassic Park and all that.
He started out as a young actor, and he played the gangster in Brighton Rock.
I'm not sure if it was his first movie, but it was certainly a very early movie.
Another actor who got his career off Graham Green was Alan Ladd, who played Shane.
He started out in This Gun for Hire, which was a Graham Green book called This Gun for Sale.
And a lot of these books he wrote to be entertainments, and he would divide his books between entertainments and what he thought was more serious novels like The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, which is a very funny spy story.
He wrote a lot of spy stories.
Really, just a really gripping writer.
The End of the Affair is one of his series.
That's also been filmed.
These have all been filmed.
I mean, virtually, Our Man in Havana was filmed, The Quiet American was filmed with Marlon Brando.
Our Man in Havana was Alec Guinness.
You know, just everything he wrote just went right to the movies because he was a terrific storyteller.
But he was also a terrific writer, and it's worth reading The End of the Affair.
It is worth reading.
Not so much worth reading, The Third Man.
I've read it, but the movie is better.
Worth reading, The Quiet, really worth reading, The Quiet American.
Our Man in Havana is still a very funny book.
Graham Greene, terrific writer, died in 1991.
Worth Reading, The Quiet American00:00:41
All right.
Well, we're back in our studio, but our studio isn't here yet.
So we're still under battlefield conditions.
We still, are we going to have a, we can't have a guest tomorrow, can we?
Yeah.
Skype?
Yeah.
Maybe, well, maybe we will have a guest tomorrow.
We'll find out.
I think we've canceled them for this week.
I suspect we have.
But we will be back.
I will be here with my.
I'll take these back to the Motel 5 tonight, these lamps behind me, back to the Motel 5 tonight, but I will bring them back with me.
I have this great, you wait till you see this place.
It looks like it's going to be beautiful.
It really does.
I mean, I've been joking about the champagne fountains, but there really is.
Is it a working fireplace?
Yeah.
We have a working fireplace so we can have human sacrifices.
It's great.
All right.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
We will be back under these battlefield conditions tomorrow.