Ben Shapiro dissects the Democrats’ self-destructive toxicity, mocking their performative outrage over "Asian salad" names while ignoring systemic racism in Asia, then pivots to Trump’s Georgia win—blaming Pelosi’s far-left shift for alienating working-class voters. He frames healthcare reform as a GOP compromise, praises Trump’s media warfare, and contrasts his crowd’s patriotism with Democratic heckling. The episode ties Islam’s state-religion structure to inherent political violence, citing Michigan’s terror attack while debunking "Islamic Exceptionalism" myths, then pivots to Christianity’s violent history under Constantine and Saudi Arabia’s reform struggles. Using Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Shapiro argues transformative figures like the Beatles reshaped the 1960s—both liberating and destabilizing society—before critiquing modern progressives for rejecting the values that once fueled their movements, ending with a Beatles exception: "Here, There, and Everywhere." [Automatically generated summary]
In today's day and age, if there's one thing you don't want to be, it's racist.
I know I personally lie awake at night worrying that I'll somehow say something or do something that will make someone feel well, I'm not sure what, because that's when I usually drift off to sleep and dream about a scantily clad woman who lures me into a tremendous bowl of liquid marshmallow.
And when I wake up, it's already morning and I forgot what I was thinking about the night before.
But still, racism is bad.
So let's turn to our friends on the left to find out some things that are racist.
One thing the left finds racist is salad.
In a recent article in the New York Times, a former newspaper writer Bonnie Swee demanded to know why is Asian salad still on the menu.
Mrs. Swee wrote, quote, you might think Asian salad is culturally inclusive, and yet the Asian salad is often the one that comes with a winky, jokey name, Mr. Maus, or Secret Asian Man, or Oriental Chop Chop.
Oriental Chop Chop, that's a good one.
Oh, sorry.
Mrs. Swee says it's wrong to call something Asian as if it comes from an entire continent instead of a specific country.
And she goes on to say she is so glad she lives such a protected, privileged American life that she can write articles about salad instead of having to walk more than a mile to get fresh water as tens of millions of women have to do in Asia.
And maybe she didn't say that last part.
Maybe that was me.
Anyway, another thing leftists find racist is asking people for picture ID before they vote.
This is very racist, because whereas white people have picture ID that they use to buy a drink or apply for welfare or get on airplanes, black people's faces are too dark to appear in photographs and therefore they must always remain sober and work for a living and they can only fly places by flapping their arms.
It's just as well because if black people had to use picture ID to vote, many Democrat voters might cease to exist and many of those who continue to exist would only get to vote once.
It's simply not fair.
Yet another thing that's racist is owning a gun for home safety.
Fantasy filmmaker and unhappy fat man Michael Moore says wanting to own a gun to protect your home and family is racist because quote, and yes, this is a real quote, that imaginary person that's going to break into your home and kill you, who does that person look like?
You know it's not freckle-faced Jimmy down the street, is it?
Unquote.
So if you don't want Michael Moore to think you're racist, next time a black man breaks into your home, the best thing to do is shoot him and then say, oh, sorry, I thought you were Jimmy.
We should all be grateful to the left for explaining what racism is.
After all, leftists hate racism almost as much as they hate Jews.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Important News Update00:06:22
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped topsy, the world is a bibby-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, we have a lot to talk about before the clavinless weekend plunges us into the darkness, the exterior darkness, where there will be great wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Among the things we're going to talk about, we're going to finish our conversation about the Beatles in a discussion that will include the Beatles, Leo Tolstoy, and Edmund Burke.
Now, I bet you can go through every podcast on iTunes, and you will not find one other person discussing the Beatles, Leo Tolstoy and Edmund Burke, especially, who actually knows anything about the Beatles, Leo Tolstoy, and Edmund Burke.
So you won't get to hear that if you're on Facebook and YouTube.
You got to come over to the dailywire.com where you can hear it.
But if you subscribed, here's important news actually.
If you subscribe, you can watch the whole show right on the Daily Wire website, so you don't have to bounce around.
But here's some important news: we're going to raise our subscription rates.
Right now, it's a lousy $8 a month, but on July 1st, it's going up.
I don't know by how much.
I think it's going to be $1,000 a week after that.
But the thing is, we're not raising it on people who already have a subscription.
So if you have a subscription, you get to go on paying a lousy eight bucks a month.
So if you want to subscribe, if you think you might subscribe, this would be a good time to do it because as of July 1st, we come to your house and repossess your car.
You know, right now you can get everything you need for a lousy eight bucks a month, plus the mailbag.
And if you subscribe for a year, you get Say It's So by Ben Shapiro and David Shapiro, whoever they are.
But it is really, it's a really good book about the White Sox championship season in 2005.
So almost as we are speaking, they are unveiling the Senate version of Obamacare reform, repeal, replace, you know, something, whatever, whatever it is they're doing.
And, you know, I'm not going to discuss it too much because I can basically guess what's happening.
I mean, I saw a couple of headlines.
It was really happening as I was walking into the studio.
I could read it off the computer and kind of come up with a fast take opinion.
But why should I do that?
I mean, one of the reasons my opinions are always right is because I actually think about what I'm going to say and read into it a little more deeply and take some time over it.
But I can tell you what it is.
It doesn't repeal.
They're not going to repeal Obamacare.
It is the sauerkraut sandwich that we are going to have to eat, that conservatives are going to have to eat to get a lot of the good things we're getting with Donald Trump.
We're getting Gorsuch, we're getting repealing a lot of these regulations.
We're getting our foreign policy brought back into a sane place where we're the friends of Israel, where we're helping the Saudis in their battle against Iran, this monster in Iran that Obama helped to let loose.
We're getting a lot of good things so far with Donald Trump, many, many more than I thought we were going to get.
But I always knew we were going to not get full repeal of Obamacare because, first of all, it takes real leadership to pull back an entitlement.
And second of all, Trump is not in favor of that.
Trump has always been a government healthcare guy.
He's never really backed off of that.
He's always said we're going to repeal and replace Obamacare, but he didn't mean repeal and replace it as we conservatives mean it, which is basically take the law out, set it on fire, and just make the insurance market sane and free market.
So that's, it's just not going to happen.
But I think we are getting a lot of things so far, many more good things with Trump than I thought we were going to get.
Not least of which, by the way, is his driving the media insane.
He has undermined the media to the point where they have become less powerful than they were.
It really is a turning point, and it's an important turning point, and it's a conservative victory that I cannot believe more conservatives aren't celebrating.
I mean, I just think what Trump has done to the media has been a thing of beauty.
It has been a thing of beauty.
And he was doing some of it last night in Cedar Rapids.
Anyway, before we get to talk about that, we've got to talk about texture.com.
And I love texture.com because for a mere $9.99 a month, $10 a month, you can have no life whatsoever.
Because once you go on this thing, all you were going to do is read magazines.
And magazines matter.
They really do, especially now when it's so hard to get information.
You know, a lot of the stuff we do is opinion.
I know that Ben does this and I do it.
We just go and try and get as much information as we can.
But if you want to read deeply about stuff, you've got to go to the places where they send reporters out for weeks and weeks and bring back all this information.
And then when you have opinions, it's not just the feeling you have.
It's based on information.
So they have over for your 10 bucks, and we'll give you a break on it if you're a listener, but basically it's 10 bucks, and you get over 200 magazines, and these are magazines from all across the spectrum.
You can get Esquire, but you can also get Forbes, you can get, or you can just, if you want to know more about like showbiz and entertainment, you get People Entertainment Weekly, Sports Illustrated, National Geographic.
You know, it's a magazine that people make fun of, but it's got a lot of depth, a lot of information, Rolling Stone.
I know we'll all have some feelings about that.
Bloomberg Business Week, all these magazines for $10 a month, which is basically the cost of one subscription.
That is a good deal.
And once you start playing with this thing, I'm telling you, you just disappear.
It's the intellectual version of Angry Birds.
You know how you start playing Angry Birds and your life goes away.
That's texture is the intellectual version of this.
So what you want to do is you want to go to texture.com/slash Clavin, K-L-A-V-S-N-Victor A-N, texture.com/slash clavin, and you will get 14 days, two weeks, for free.
So you get to try it out.
Once you try it out, you'll see why it was selected one of Apple's top 2016 iPad apps.
Start your free trial now.
Here's what you do: you go to texture.com/slash clavin for a 14-day free trial.
14 days for free when you go to texture.com/slash clavin, texture.com/slash clavin.
You weren't doing anything with your life.
Now you won't have to because all you will do is play with this app.
I'm telling you, it is really terrific.
Election Insights: Pelosi's Perspective00:14:58
All right, so back to what we were talking about.
We were talking about the healthcare thing.
As I say, I'm going to read it in depth and we'll get back and we'll talk about it next week.
Right now, what I can tell you is that Chuck Schumer is going to stand up.
Well, I'll give you Chuck Schumer's reaction.
At least we'll let him have his say, well, his reaction to the new health care bill in the Senate.
Hey, hey, my wine, Mama's boy.
I bet you're going to cry.
Come on, Baba's boy.
Let's see you cry.
Come on.
So it's reliable.
Trump has taken to calling him crying Chuck, crying Chuck, he calls him.
So it's, you know, he's going to, they've been saying this all along.
They have been saying that they are doing nothing but obstructing this.
And Trump went to Cedar Rapids and he was trolling them about this.
You know, this is important because of this election that just took place.
Before the, I'm talking about obviously the Georgia, especially the Georgia election, where Karen Handel won despite them throwing $30 million into this kind of pajama boy, Osoff guy that they thought was going to go.
And you know why they thought they were going to win?
They thought they were going to win because this district is a highly intelligent district.
And of course, one thing the Democrats know is that highly intelligent people are Democrats and conservatives and Republicans are stupid.
That is what they know.
They know this for a fact.
That's why they thought they could pile 30 million bucks into this place and take it because they were smart people.
They weren't going to vote for somebody who might vote with Donald Trump and Donald Trump just barely won there.
And they thought, well, they're smart people, so we'll go in there.
And they lost.
Charles Krauthammer, before the election took place, had a prediction.
He made a prediction.
Let's play.
I love Charles Krauthammer and I love his name.
He sounds like a Viking chieftain, Charles Hammer of the Krauts.
But here was his prediction before the election.
If the Democrat wins, the headlines are going to be in referendum on Trump, Democrats win.
I can guarantee you.
If he loses, the headlines will be in a race that doesn't mean anything.
In a special election with special circumstances, would turn out problematic, et cetera.
They'll say that, of course, the Republicans won the seat with Tom Price by 23 points last time.
So what do you expect?
So this is how it's going to be played.
Everybody's waiting.
If there's a stumble by the Republicans, it'll be hiked from here to Sunday.
But I really think these special elections are very special.
Where else are you going to pour in $25 million into a House erase?
It's rather insane.
All right.
So in other words, if the Democrat won, it was going to be a presage of the 2018 tsunami for the Democrats.
If the Republicans won, it wasn't going to mean anything.
It wasn't quite true.
It wasn't quite true.
The way these things work is they don't work immediately.
You know, what happens is they just stop talking about the election a lot, a lot faster.
I mean, it's kind of like the shooting of Steve Scalese at the ball field.
And thank God, the guy's getting better, which was really, he looked like he was in trouble there.
Obviously, a tough guy, fought his way through, seems to be on the mend, which is great to hear.
But, you know, this long after Gabby Giffords, the Democrat congresswoman, was shot in Arizona, this was still the top headline on CNN.
Now, Scalise has been relegated to nowhere because he was shot by a Bernie bro.
So, you know, it's not as big a story.
And the same thing is happening with this.
The election was going to be important for a couple of days.
But there are some voices on the left that are beginning to get it.
It's just, it's like little notes.
You know, it's like the way scientific revolutions take place.
Little anomalies first appear, and then suddenly you realize, oh, the whole theory is wrong and the whole thing.
These are the little voices that are coming up.
So now we have Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio has been going around saying, you know, our brand, the Democrat brand, is more toxic than Donald Trump because they keep talking about these approval ratings.
You know, let me just stop for a minute about these approval ratings.
One of the things about this Karen Handel, Georgia election is the polls kept telling everybody that she was going to lose.
And they kept touting these because they hoped that they would swing the election.
They hoped they'd have an effect on the election.
But the thing about these polls is that they've been wrong a lot, and they've always been wrong on the same side.
They have not once have they overestimated the Republican victory.
Not once.
And that has got to tell you something, okay?
It has got to tell you something.
You know, there is no science for predicting the future.
This is the thing about climate change science.
There's not even science for predicting the future of a machine, which you should be able to predict.
The way predictions work, the way engineers make predictions, is you feed information in, and as you get closer and closer to the event that you're predicting, your prediction gets better and better.
That's the way weather reports work.
Two minutes before the rainstorm starts, you have a better chance of predicting the rainstorm than you do 10 days out when your prediction is probably going to be off.
So it's more information as you get closer and closer.
And that is why it was so hilarious on the night of the Trump Hillary election to watch the predictions of the New York Times as the lines crossed.
They started out that Hillary had a 95% chance of winning, and then just before Trump won, it was Trump who had the 95% chance of the lines crossed.
That is the way real predictions work, and that is why you don't have to take climate change predictions very seriously at all.
Okay, we're saying goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, but come on over to the Daily Wire to hear the rest.
And if you want to watch the rest on the Daily Wire, you can see the whole thing if you subscribe.
And if you're going to subscribe, do it now, because the rates go up July 1st.
But if you subscribe now, your rates will stay the same.
Or if you're already subscribed, your rates will stay the same.
So come on over.
OK, so let's take a listen to Tim Ryan, Democrat from Ohio, Democrat congressman, telling Don Lemon.
And the best part of this is the look on Don Lemon's face.
Don Lemon, the dopiest person on TV, except for Chris Cuomo, who's the dopiest person on TV, except for Don Lemon.
So here's Tim Ryan explaining that the Democrat brand has gone bad.
This is cut six.
I don't think people in the Beltway are realizing just how toxic the Democratic Party brand is in so many of the countries.
This is a party that many of us grew up hearing.
This is the party for the working class.
And we've gotten away from that economic message about how do we help working class people, white, black, brown, gay, straight, people who work for a living, people who take a shower after work.
That used to be the bread and butter, the backbone of the Democratic Party.
And we're losing those people in droves.
And when you see us losing them in these special elections, how did you lose them?
Well, the brand's just bad.
I mean, you know, you look at a guy like Osoff, the kids, I thought he was a terrific candidate.
The energy on the ground in our party is amazing.
The resist movement, the indivisible groups, the swing left, all of these other groups, they're doing a terrific job, but they're not only fighting the Republican candidates, they're also fighting the Democratic brand, and that's a tough thing to overcome for a lot of candidates.
And in this election, the Democratic brand was represented by Nancy Pelosi, a left, far-left San Francisco Democrat who thinks San Francisco values should be imposed on the rest of the country.
They did ad after ad saying this guy, Asoff, is going to be in Nancy Pelosi's pocket.
And they watched the numbers and they felt those ads were really effective.
And again, the look on Lemon's face as Ryan explains to him that Pelosi is poisoned.
And people are beginning to wake up to this.
They haven't won an election since she came in, since she took over.
So here is just him explaining this to Lemon and Lemon in shock.
Pelosi hurting Democrats' chances, flat out, chances of winning house races.
Well, it's 18 months out, but I think it does inhibit our ability in certain seats.
I mean, you know, we've got to face that fact.
And I'm not here crying sour grapes because I ran and lost.
It's not about me.
It's not about Nancy Pelosi.
It's about that we have Donald Trump as president now.
We've done something terribly wrong to make that so.
And we've lost traditional Democratic voters that don't see us as connecting to them, don't see us as advocates for them.
And we've got to put ourselves in the best position possible to be able to win these races.
As I said, you opened it up.
Look, I don't think everybody should get a trophy in life.
You get trophies because you earn them.
I don't like second place.
I don't like moral victories.
That's not why I'm in politics.
I believe in the ideas of the Democratic Party.
I believe in a government that could be both nimble but yet active and support social justice issues that are critically important when you listen to what Trump talked about tonight.
But the economic message, Don, is something that we've got to get back to.
There's so many families that are struggling, and we're kind of not focused on that as much as we should be.
So he doesn't want to come out and just stick the knife into Nancy Pelosi, but he's sticking the knife into Nancy Pelosi.
She has not been a good leader in terms of victory.
She really hasn't.
She has done, she played some hardball during the Obama administration to get some of his stuff through, but she has not done a good job.
But also, it's so much more than this.
And this is the thing that the Democrats are going to have to wake up to.
And if they don't, they're really in trouble.
You know, yesterday, Donald Trump was in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and he gave a speech, and it was great.
I mean, it was a wonderful, wonderful speech.
It was Trump at his best.
But listen to just this one little cut when he started to talk about Steve Scalise in the hospital.
And they start, the liberals, Democrats in the crowd start heckling him.
This is cut two.
I'd like to also take this moment to send our thoughts and prayers to our courageous friend, somebody that I've gotten to know very well, Steve Scalise,
And everyone recovering from the assault never fails.
So you've got Democrats booing for a legislator who took a sniper bullet to the hip, and they're booing.
And you got Trump's crowd shouting, USA, USA.
Who do you think the voters are going to side with?
I mean, really, really.
You know, there is a large, large arm, and I wouldn't even have played this if it weren't representative of a large arm of the Democrat Party that is just ugly.
It is just ugly and hateful.
I mean, you know, you want to go and heckle Trump?
That's one thing.
But use some brains.
Use some timing.
Don't do it in the middle of a tribute to a wounded legislator.
He's an American legislator who got shot.
You know, if you're not, it's like when you're watching a movie, you know, if you're not rooting for the girl to get away from the madman, there's something wrong with you, right?
If you're rooting for the madman, you're in the wrong place.
These guys are rooting for the sniper over an American congressman, and they're chanting.
And our guys, Trump's guys, are chanting USA.
Who do you think the voters are going to side with?
Really?
I mean, if they're decent voters, if they're not sociopaths.
But there is, and there's even more than this.
You've got to listen to, I mean, some of this stuff was just so much fun to watch.
Here is Trump touting his accomplishments.
This is cut four.
But it is interesting how they say Donald Trump is not producing health care, not producing.
So we've produced so much legislation.
I don't think any president, it could be somebody.
I have to be a little careful because they'll say he lied.
So few presidents, few, just have to be a little careful because they'll say, headline, Donald Trump lies to the people of Iowa.
I don't want.
But very few have done what we've done when you look at the regulations, when you look at all of, you know, they were saying, but he didn't pass legislative bills.
I think it's 38, and we're going to be talking about them.
38.
And if you listen to them, 38.
But, but, but.
And some of them are really big, having to do with regulation, having to do with lots of different things.
But we're working really hard on massive tax cuts.
It would be, if we get it the way I want it, the largest tax cut in the history of the United States of America.
That is a brilliant piece of politicking.
I mean, he's even making fun of himself for his tendency to talk in these big, you know, exaggerated terms that we all do.
The people on the street talk like that.
Oh, yeah, it was the greatest night ever.
Oh, yeah, I was drunker than I've ever been.
Oh, man, she was so most beautiful girl in the world.
You know, this is the way people talk, it's the way Trump talks, and they score him for lying because it's not the way politicians talk, and they don't get the fact that we like it.
We like him talking like a person, you know, and now he's making fun of both himself.
Oh, I don't want to say it's more legislation than anyone because then I'm exaggerating, it's a lie.
And he's also making fun of the fact that these guys are trapped in their hall of mirrors, trapped in their mirror maze, you know, banging into things, banging into the images of themselves because they can't see the rest of the people, what he sounds like to the rest of the people.
And I feel, look, this thing with healthcare, as I said before, I always knew that this was a sauerkraut sandwich we were going to have to eat.
We conservatives were going to have to eat.
I'd like to see Obamacare torched.
Religion and State Conflict00:08:48
I would like to see it torched.
But it's very hard to get rid of these entitlements once they're in there.
And it's even harder when the President of the United States is basically sympathetic to the idea of government health care.
So it's very tough.
If Trump had come in and said, repeal this thing, we've got to repeal it.
I want it gone.
It would be a different situation.
He was never going to do that.
You could tell by the way he was talking when he was talking quietly and not shouting to crowds.
You know, it's just, you know, I'm not happy about it.
This is why, this is, by the way, why I thought the House should have gone with the first version of the bill to give him a victory because we were going to lose this fight eventually.
It's just pure strategy on my part because I think we're getting a lot of good things with Trump, including the First Amendment and the Second Amendment, which is no small business.
You know, his appointment of conservative judges will protect our rights is a big, big deal.
And I know we keep going back to it because there's no big legislation yet.
But if the big legislation comes, it's going to be a successful presidency.
And then it's going to start to really, these Democrats with their guys who boo for wounded congressmen are going to have a really, really big problem.
Before I go on to the Beatles, I have to talk about something else that happened yesterday, which was that there was another, there was a terror attack on American soil.
There was in Michigan in an airport.
A guy shouted Allahu Akbar and started knifing a police officer, knifed him in the neck.
I think he's going to be all right, but he attacked him.
And of course, we got the usual statements from the FBI saying this attack is not connected to anything else except all the other attacks just like it.
And, you know, I've always been really, I've tried to be careful about the way I talk about Islam because obviously so many good people, you know, plenty of good people who are Islamic and you don't want to castigate them.
And of course, there is this divide between the way we feel in different situations, the way we react in different situations.
For instance, we know that black Americans commit more crimes, you know, per person, basically, than white Americans, a lot more.
I think that 50% of the homicides in America or something like that are committed by black Americans.
So you're walking down a dark street and you see a black guy in a hoodie behind you, you're going to be more nervous than if you see a white guy in a tie and jacket.
And everybody says, oh, that's racism.
That's racism.
It's not racism.
It is a natural survival mechanism based on the fact that to make a mistake in that situation is catastrophic, right?
To offend a nice guy who just happens to be walking in back of you is catastrophic.
Hey, I do this with women on the street.
If I'm walking on a dark street and there's a woman walking ahead of me and I see her start to look over her shoulder, I'll cross the street to make her feel better because I know that I know I would die.
I hope I would die defending her.
But she doesn't know that.
She is making a calculation based on the result of failure.
If she fails, if she makes a mistake, then it's catastrophic.
So she's going to say, oh, it's a guy, therefore it's a threat.
So we all make these assessments.
Islam has been connected to most terror attacks, all the violence around the world.
So much of the violence around the world involves Islam.
It is completely sensible to make that calculation because if you make a mistake, it's catastrophic.
But when you're out of that situation, if I go to a meeting, right, and I'm at a conference and there's a black guy there and he's in a talion jacket and he's one of the speakers and I say, oh, I want to stay away from him because black people commit a lot of crime, then I'm a racist.
That's insane.
That is insane.
That is taking the logic of a survival moment and appending it or attaching it to a normal moment.
And this is the reason why I think it's unfair to hit the police.
Okay, it's unfair to hit the police for racial profiling because we hire them, we pay them to act in our survival moments, to act in that survival mode.
So they're always fighting in survival mode so that we can deal in meeting conference mode so that we can deal with each other in a civilized way.
So there's nothing wrong with talking about Islam and terror, and there's nothing wrong in understanding that Islamic people, if I'm on an airplane and a guy jumps up in the middle of the aisle and starts shouting Allahu Akbar, that's a lot different than a guy who stands up and says, praise Jesus.
You know, it's different.
It's a different situation, and I'm within my rights.
But to universally condemn Islam as inherently violent without actually thinking it through is a mistake.
And so my question has always been: is the violence coming out of Islam inherent to Islam, or is it a cancer on Islam?
And this is something for the experts to debate, but there is one thing I would like to contribute to this conversation.
The first book I read this year, my son-in-law gave it to me for Christmas, was called Islamic Exceptionalism by a guy named Shadi Hamid.
And I believe him to be a liberal guy.
He's from one of the liberal think tanks.
I can't remember which one.
Islamic exceptionalism.
But he makes two points, two important points in this book.
One is that Islam has built into it a political element.
This is not true of Christianity.
Christianity, Jesus said, give the things of Caesar to Caesar, give the things of God to God.
I don't believe, in my reading of the Old Testament, I don't believe it's true of Judaism either.
When the Jews came to the prophet Samuel, I believe, and they said to him, We want a king, he and God were both disappointed in the people.
They wanted the people to be free and have God as their king.
God wanted the Jews to have God as their only king, and when they appointed a king, it was really a second fall, the way I read the Old Testament.
It was a second fall of man where they lost their faith in God to rule and they gave power over to politics.
But Islam has an inherently political message in the Quran.
And the second part of this that Hamid makes in the book, Islamic Exceptionalism, is their relationship to the Quran, to the words in the Quran, is different than Christian relationship in that those words are not inspired by God, they are written by God.
Okay, so every single one of them, even the sound of them, even the sound of the words, even the way the words are written, you can only understand the Quran and its original Arabic, which I don't speak, because those are the words that God spoke.
And so there's not a lot of room for movement.
Why does this matter?
Okay.
People, you know, the left especially, they love to say, well, there's as much violence in Christianity as there is in Islam.
Look at the Crusades and all this.
When you look at the history of Christianity, Christianity spread for 200 plus years through peaceful means, through people preaching, by people arguing, and by people suffering violence, not committing violence, by the martyrs who were killed by the Romans and by others and by Jews and arrested by Jews.
And they were, that's what spread Christianity until it became so powerful that the state in the form of Constantine, the emperor of Rome, had to adopt it, that he had to adopt it simply to appease the people.
There's great reason to think it was a political move.
Maybe it wasn't.
Maybe it wasn't.
But at that point, it became the state religion of Rome.
It was when Christianity became part of the state and connected with the state that became connected to violence, because the state is an inherently violent entity.
The state has to defend its people.
The state wants to secure its borders.
The state has to do a lot of things.
And in those days, conquest was an acceptable enterprise.
So the state does those things.
The state commits violence.
Even the Catholic Church, you know, Catholics always get angry about Martin Luther, you know, they think he ruined everything, but I don't think he did.
I think he stripped the Catholic Church of some of its state powers ultimately that corrupted it.
The Catholic Church was corrupt and violent when it was acting like a state.
The kingdom of Christ is not of this world.
We know this because Jesus said, my kingdom is not of this world.
That is how we know that his kingdom is not of this world, right?
It is when a religion gets tied up in the state that it becomes violent.
The problem, I think, with Islam, set aside anything else in the Quran, set aside orders, set aside the interpretations, what the Imams say, set all that aside, is that it is a state religion and a state religion, and it can't be changed because the words are written by God.
And I think this is a real problem.
And that's why it's going to be really interesting to see what happens in Saudi Arabia now that this kind of reformist kid, Muhammad bin Salman, has been made the crown prince and he's going to become the king because he is trying to reform Saudi Arabia, privatize the oil business, diversify because petrodollars naturally lead to tyranny because they concentrate all this money in one place.
Reforming Saudi Arabia00:10:03
You know, get people off welfare, get them working again.
That's going to mean giving some rights to women because they're going to need women for help with their economy.
But he's going to have to do it within the confines of the Quran.
That is what he said.
We're going to be governed by the Quran, but we're going to also be governed by moderation.
Let's see if he does it.
Let's see how it works.
And if he does pull it off, it's going to be a good thing because it's going to mean that more Muslims can stay in their countries without being oppressed and murdered.
And the problem is, the problem is we, who do not believe in theocracy, because Jesus told us not to believe in theocracy, that's why, and we've seen what it can do, Islam may not fit in here.
It may not fit in here.
It may be something that just we can take in certain amounts, but not more because of its inherently political nature.
This brings me back to stuff I like.
It actually does bring me back to stuff I like because we're talking about, we're going to be talking about reform and tradition.
I've been picking on the Beatles, but I picked on the Beatles using this phrase all week long.
I talked about great Beatle songs and why I hate them.
And I said it that way because I recognized that the Beatles were a very talented group of guys, that they had a huge effect on music.
Now, and they came at this important moment.
You know, Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace puts forward this theory.
And the theory is that it's not men who make history, it's history who makes men.
So it's history that makes men.
So he essentially says that Napoleon got all this press for being the change agent of the world after the French Revolution, spreading French values through the world by conquest.
But according to War and Peace, basically, Tolstoy puts forward the idea that history needed a Napoleon.
If it hadn't been Napoleon, it would have been somebody else.
Now, I always took this to be a little bit of sour grapes because if it hadn't been for the weather, Napoleon would have taken over Russia.
He just kind of wiped out their troops.
But in War and Peace, Tolstoy creates this real-life general, Kutuzov, who basically just nods and shrugs all the time.
He doesn't ever really give orders.
He just lets history flow.
And he defeats Napoleon simply because it starts to get cold in the same way it started to get cold for the Nazis.
And Napoleon obviously eventually had to fall back.
But Napoleon remained this big figure.
And Tolstoy was basically saying, this big figure of transition, and Tolstoy was basically saying history created him, he didn't create history.
It's impossible to know.
I fall right smack in the middle of this question because I think history does call up certain people, but I think those people have to take the reins and do what they do.
The Beatles are, as I said at the very beginning of the week, they are one of those collections of artists, one of those artists who come along at a moment of transition.
Picasso, who took art from one way of being into a new way of being.
Wordsworth, who took poetry from one way of being into a new way of being.
Marlon Brando, who took acting into one way.
If they hadn't come along, would acting have changed?
Would poetry have changed?
Would painting have changed?
I have to think it would have.
I have to think that that was built into the march of the art form itself.
The art form follows a certain logic.
And yet these were the people who come along.
So the Beatles represent this moment in time when everything changed.
This is the 60s.
The Beatles were certainly the key representative of that moment in time.
And how you feel about the Beatles has a lot to do with how you feel about the 60s if you're paying attention.
And I went through the 60s.
It was shocking.
I mean, it was a shocking thing.
Looking back on it, of course, I was a little kid.
I was living it.
It didn't really, I didn't really realize it.
But really, especially in the terms of your sex life, what your sex life was like on one side of the 60s and what it was like after the 60s, what your values were like, what your dress was like, the fact that you didn't wear a tie anymore.
You go back and look at baseball games and see all the men in ties and jackets wearing hats and all this stuff.
I mean, you know, I can sit back and say, oh, the world was better in the 50s, but you don't see me wearing a tie.
You know, I can say all this.
So the question is, are things better or worse?
Because obviously conservatives look askance at the 60s because of all the terrible things that happened.
But if I had to go back and live in the 50s, would I do it?
Absolutely not.
Absolutely not.
I mean, healthcare is better.
I am happy that I feel that black people have more freedom.
I feel women have more freedom of choice.
I feel that gays are not being arrested.
I mean, the fact, you know, people don't remember that a cop could go into a bar and solicit a guy, a gay guy, hope a gay guy would come up to him and solicit him and then arrest him just for doing that.
I mean, young people don't realize that, and they see the gay people making fools of themselves at the gay pride parade and say, what are they doing?
Well, you know, they remember and some of them and they've been told and they pass that down.
The problem with change is that change always makes things better and it makes things worse because as we change, we leave behind good things as well as bad.
And this is something that Edmund Burke wrote about.
I'm a real fan of Edmund Burke.
Edmund Burke was a politician during the revolutionary times of the 1800s, the 18th century.
And it was really interesting was that he supported the American Revolution, but he opposed the French Revolution.
So basically, he got everything exactly right because the French Revolution devolved into terror.
The American Revolution led to greater freedom.
How did he know?
How did he know?
And he knew because he believed in tradition.
He made a logical assumption that the good things that people had came from their traditions.
And so when you needed change, when you needed more freedom, when you needed to liberalize and all this stuff, you should liberalize in keeping with your tradition.
So the American Revolution was a revolution, but it was a revolution in keeping with British traditions.
It was saying we want our British rights in America, basically.
This is what it was saying.
Whereas the French threw out everything.
They threw out their king.
They killed their queen.
They said, no God, there's not going to be a God.
There's not going to be, we're going to rewrite the calendar.
Everything is gone.
And Burke immediately knew that this was going to end in blood and tears.
He knew immediately.
And the problem that we have with the 60s is so much good things, so many good things came, but they came along with people claiming that it was our traditions that caused the bad thing.
And a good example of this is the greater extension of rights for black people.
The idea was that black people had been excluded from the logic of America.
They had been excluded from the things that we hold dear, the all men are created equal, the equal rights, being treated equally under the law.
And that wasn't happening.
That wasn't happening.
And so it had to be changed.
But the left hooks themselves into these movements.
They hooks themselves into these movements and says the problem was America itself.
The problem was the sins of America.
Therefore, we have to get rid of the things that were the things that the black people wanted.
The freedom, the self-reliance, the acting on, the acting on yourself and for yourself and taking responsibility for yourself.
Those black people who got with that program got out of the slums.
Those black people who attached themselves to the Democrat Party and the left are living in hellholes like Baltimore, Chicago, and Detroit, entire products of Democrat governance and of Democrat philosophy because they threw away the thing that they were trying to get, the very tradition that they wanted to be a part of and had been unfairly barred from.
Same thing is true of the feminists.
Of course, I want every woman, every little girl, to grow up and know she can be whatever it is she wants to be.
But the feminists hooked themselves to that movement, which, by the way, I was there, and the minute women said, you know, we want a bigger role, of course, there was pushback, of course, there were clowns who said things, but basically they got a bigger role.
The economy loved having all those workers in so they didn't have to pay workers as much.
The corporations loved that stuff.
You know, it's the feminists who come along and say that womanhood itself is a construct that we reject.
You know, they call motherhood being in favor of motherhood now.
They actually, the left has a name for it.
They call it pro-natalist.
Why are you being pro-natalist?
You know, they're against it.
They're again it.
To think that your life, I mean, motherhood is the purpose of human life.
Motherhood is what everything men do, everything men do is to support and defend motherhood.
All the things they do are to imitate motherhood.
Because men can't be mothers.
That's why they create art.
That's why they build buildings.
And that is also why they tout those things and celebrate those things so heavily is because they can't do the basic thing that women can do.
And so it's not the idea of greater freedom.
It's the idea of getting rid of the traditions that led you to the conclusion that people should have freedom.
Edmund Burke was right.
So the Beatles for me represent this change that took place that brought along some very good things but also brought along some very bad things including rock music and which I just don't happen to like.
But again, their music is incredibly talented.
They were incredibly talented.
They just mark this change that anybody would feel ambiguous about because it's set free this monster of the left which has gutted our institutions, taken over our communications, caused, it's the left, not the right, that has caused the tremendous anger and division and it has caused it by shutting down one half of the country, by demonizing, shutting down, and censoring and penalizing one half of the country so that they became furious and then that justified the left's anger against them.
It's a bad, bad system, and it needs to be reformed.
So as we go into the Clavenless weekend, where there will be great wailing and gnashing of teeth, let us at least end with a Beatles song that I just love.
It is really one of their most beautiful songs and it also has good lyrics, which is one of my big complaints about the Beatles.
It has lyrics that make sense and fit together and are really nice, including the line, Watching Your Eyes and Hoping I'm Always There, which is an inspired piece of lyric writing.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show, and here are the Beatles with Here, There, and Everywhere.
Beautiful Beatles Lyrics00:01:08
To lead a better life, I need my love to be here, Making each day of the year Changing my life with a wave of her hand.
Nobody can deny that there's something there, how good it can be.
Someone is speaking, But she doesn't know he's there.
I want her everywhere, And if she's beside me I know I need never care.