Andrew Clavin’s Liar’s Poker dissects whataboutism in Trump-Russia debates, contrasting it with Clinton-era ties to Moscow while defending Trump’s energy and Syria policies. He blames Rand Paul’s procedural obstruction for GOP healthcare failures, praises Trump’s adaptability but laments his legislative passivity compared to Obama. The episode pivots to the Mohammed Noor shooting, accusing media of omitting his Somali-Muslim background as bias, then critiques leftist urban policies while urging Republicans to reject compromise. Theological musings on Genesis frame humanity’s "fallen" nature, dismissing literalist dinosaur debates, and mocks liberal hypocrisy—like upper-class conservatives hiding traditional values. Clavin closes by endorsing Swept Away as feminist-criticized truth over leftist dogma, teasing Roger Kimball’s pro-Trump intellectual appearance. [Automatically generated summary]
As everyone knows, it's very bad to engage in whatabout-ism.
Whataboutism is when your enemy accuses you of doing something immoral and you respond by saying, Well, what about that time you did something even worse?
This is very wrong.
For instance, when the news media reports some scandal about Donald Trump and Russia, I don't want to resort to whataboutism and point out that there's a double standard in the press geared toward hobbling Republicans and empowering Democrats so that only leftist policies will be put in place and the country will be transformed into a socialist monstrosity.
I'm not sure why I don't want to do that.
People keep saying I don't want to, so I must not want to.
But who knows?
Maybe I do want to.
Let's try it and find out.
The Washington Post broke the story yesterday that Donald Trump had a second secret meeting with Vladimir Putin during the G20 summit.
The meeting was also attended by several sinister communists, including the sultry Russian spy Xenia Onatop from the James Bond movies, The Ghost of Joseph Stalin, and the editors of The Washington Post.
No, I'm joking.
Trump and Putin sat at the same dinner table in front of a lot of other people.
But according to our friends on the left, this proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Trump campaign colluded to help the Russians disturb our political process through a diabolical plot to make journalists hysterical over Russia stuff they never cared about before.
So, let's do some whataboutism.
What about while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, her pseudo-husband Bill, received half a million dollars for a speech he gave in Moscow and was paid by a company with ties to Russian intelligence?
What about the Clinton Foundation receiving something like a million and a half bucks from cronies of Vladimir Putin, and that some of those payments may have been connected to Hillary Clinton's decision to sign off on a deal that transferred some 20% of our uranium into Putin's hands?
What about Hillary's campaign manager, John Podesta, failing to disclose his interest in Jewel Unlimited, an energy company financed by the Kremlin?
And of course, what about President Obama getting caught on a hot mic, offering to weaken America's missile defense systems in places Putin wanted to intimidate and possibly conquer?
And what about the fact that Russia is financing many Democrat-supported environmental groups whose purpose is to weaken American energy production so to protect Russian petrodollars, Putin's main source of income?
And what about the fact that after eight years of Obama appeasing Russia on every front, President Trump has confronted Putin by freeing up our energy development and attacking Russia's allies in Syria?
Now, none of this is meant in any way to excuse any actions by Donald Trump or his associates, because that would be whataboutism, which is wrong.
Rand Paul's Budget Battle00:12:19
I forget why.
I'm sure there's a reason.
Maybe not.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
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So every time I talk about healthcare, I get slammed.
I mean, and it's always the same.
It's that same tone of voice.
You know, why do you compromise?
Why don't you fight?
Why are you giving in and all this stuff?
And to me, it's all about, it's all about realism and politics.
It's all about what's really happening and how and whether or not you're being played.
Because think about this for a minute.
If you listen to an anti-Trumper, he's going to tell you the Trump's to blame for the failure of the Republican health care bill.
If you listen to a conservative, he's going to tell you the moderates, they lied to you all that time that they said they were going to repeal it.
They weren't really going to repeal it.
And of course, if you listen to a moderate, they tell you that the conservatives are to blame for not compromising.
In order to win a fight, let me put it to you this way.
Let me put it to you in terms of my experience in life, all right?
I've written novels.
That's mostly what I've done most of my life.
But I've also written a lot of screenplays.
And for a period of time before my politics became known, I was actually quite a successful screenwriter in the sense that I sold a lot of my screenplays, although not a lot of them got made into films.
But that's how a lot of screenwriters make a living is just selling screenplays.
There are many differences between writing books and between writing screenplays, but that's not the point.
The point is when you write a novel, you are basically in complete control of what goes into that book.
You may get, I've never had a really bad editor or just an editor who tried to insist that something go into the book.
When an editor makes a suggestion, you have the right to pull the book and take it somewhere else if you don't like it.
You have the right to just say, no, it's my name that goes on the book.
Basically, the editor is going to let you put into that book what you want.
So you can negotiate, you can talk, you can argue, you can do whatever you want.
And most editors, like I said, are really great.
Almost all my editors have been really helpful and good.
And I'm happy to take suggestions that make the book better.
But I have the power.
I have the power.
And so I deal with that situation in a certain way.
When you write a screenplay, you have zero power.
You have no power whatsoever.
So if you're trying to keep your screenplay that's going to have your name on it from becoming a piece of garbage, you really have to fight in a totally different way because they can fire you off your own project.
And a lot of people don't know this.
I write a screenplay, Batman's Revenge, and I send the screenplay in, and they love it, and they say it's great, and they hire a director, and the director says, I want to make Batman female.
And I go, that's ridiculous.
They can fire me and keep my name on the screenplay.
And I can pull it off the screenplay, but I lose all the money that I would get from making the movie.
So you're in this situation where you have zero power and can be fired at any minute, and anybody can change your script and any way they want, especially the director.
You have to fight in a different way.
You have to make friends.
You have to get us allies.
You have to compromise.
You have to know when you can't win and give in.
You have to be ready to quit.
You have to be ready to resign.
I've resigned from several films because I felt they were turning it into garbage, and I didn't want to be the guy who did that job.
I didn't want to be the guy who made the script worse.
You just have to fight in a different way.
And my point about entitlements is that those of us who feel that entitlements sap our freedom and we want there to be as few entitlements as are necessary to take care of only the poorest of the poor and everybody else should be given a hand up by their communities and by their churches and by the people and that's how you stay free.
We are in a tiny minority.
We are not the Republican Party.
We are the tail on the dog.
That is it.
And we can try as hard as we like to wag that dog, but we can't do it.
And you know, I was picking on Rand Paul yesterday.
I mean, let's go over Rand Paul for just a minute.
Okay.
Rand Paul has been the big voice of integrity.
You know, we promised repeal.
Why don't we repeal?
Let's go back into the Wayback Machine for a minute.
Six months ago, right?
Six months ago, six months, seven months, January.
In January, the Senate had to pass certain budget regulations, a budget resolution that would begin the repeal process, okay?
Every senator was for this because there was no political consequences at the time.
Every senator was for it except Rand Paul.
Okay, so this is the first, let me get my cut list.
This is the first Rand Paul cut, number three.
As a physician, probably nobody is offended by or is against Obamacare more than myself.
I've seen it up close.
I've seen it firsthand.
I'll do anything to get rid of it.
However, I don't want to have to vote for a budget that never balances and a budget that adds $9.7 trillion in debt in order to get to it.
What I've told my colleagues is, why don't we introduce a good budget, one that balances, and then repeal Obamacare.
The way the rules of the Senate and the Congress are, you cannot repeal it until you pass a budget.
But why does it have to be a bad budget?
Okay, so the one senator, he was not for it.
He wasn't going to do what needed to be done to pass repeal of Obamacare because the budget just wasn't good enough.
Okay, then three months ago, they started talking about just repealing it.
And Rand Paul, that was no good.
It had to be repeal and replace.
Here's the second cut.
This is three months ago.
Well, actually, I don't want to delay the repeal.
I'm all for the repeal as soon as we can get to it, but we should vote on replacement the same day.
And I'm putting together a bill that will be out this week that will be a consensus replacement bill.
Okay.
Now they bring in repeal and replace, and it's just not good enough for Rand Paul.
This is right before the vote collapsed.
Well, you know what I've suggested to the president, and I talked to the president again, you know, when he was in Paris just this last weekend, or I guess on Friday, and I've told him, I think we can still, you know, if this comes to an impasse, I think if the president jumps into the fray and says, look, guys, you promised to repeal it.
Let's just repeal what we can agree to, and then we can continue to try to fix, replace, or whatever afterwards.
So it's never any good.
And every time he speaks, it's always, I want repeal more than anybody else, but.
And you know the old expression, everything that comes before, but is nonsense, right?
I want repeal, but, but it's never good enough.
And all I get is, yes, no, you attack Rand Paul, but he's a man of principle.
He's a man of principle.
Now, here's Jonah Goldberg, one of the smartest political observers out there, in my opinion, from National Review.
And he is no anti-Rand Paul guy, and he's always very reasonable about Paul's positions.
And he says, I found many, he asks the question, is Paul really operating on principle?
Here's what Jonah says.
I found many of Paul's arguments and complaints entirely persuasive on the merits.
But there have been times when I had to wonder if the merits were all that was driving him.
Was it just a coincidence that the bill was terribly unpopular in his home state of Kentucky, where more than one in five Kentuckians are on Medicaid?
Now, that's the big cut.
That's the big reform that everybody kept saying.
Everybody who's for the bill kept saying this is the biggest reform basically in a quarter century, if not more, and the reform was on Medicaid.
So one in five of his constituents are on Medicaid.
And Goldberg goes on, this is the problem.
When touting your principles is a politically expedient way of avoiding accountability, it's hard to tell whether principles or expedients is in the driver's seat.
But it's not impossible to tell.
Paul learned politics on the knee of his father, Ron Paul, a longtime Texas congressman and irrepressible presidential candidate.
In the House, the elder Paul earned the nickname Dr. No because he voted against nearly everything on the grounds that it wasn't constitutional or libertarian enough.
But Ron Paul loved earmarks.
This is where you pick, you put in stuff in a budget that's going to go right to your constituents so that you can brag about all you got for them.
He'd cram, Ron Paul would cram pork for his district into must-pass spending bills like an overstuffed burrito.
And then he would vote against the bill in the name of purity, often boasting that he never approved an earmark or a spending bill.
So in other words, he knew the bill had to pass.
He'd stuff it full of earmarks.
Then he'd vote against it because it had earmarks in it, knowing it would still pass.
In 2006, Republicans proposed legislation to slow the growth of entitlements by $40 billion over five years.
Democrats, as usual, screamed bloody murder about Republican heartlessness and voted against it.
So did Ron Paul on the grounds the reform didn't go far enough.
$40 billion cuts.
He votes against it because it didn't go far enough.
And Jonah adds, man, that sounds familiar.
Now, I can't say for sure, this is Jonah again, that Rand Paul is carrying on the family tradition.
He is different from his dad in many ways.
And yet, every time health care proceedings moved one step in Paul's direction, he seemed to move one step back.
Senator Ted Cruz offered an amendment that would open up the market for more flexible and affordable plans like Paul wanted.
No good, Paul told Fox's Chris Wallace.
Those plans would still be in the context of the Obamacare mandates.
My idea always was to replace it with freedom, legalize choice, legalize inexpensive insurance, allow people to join associations to buy their insurance, Paul said, which sounds good, except a provision for exempting associations from Obamacare mandates was already in the bill.
You Want to Feel Good00:02:40
What are you trying to get?
What can you get?
Those are the questions you've got to know.
You've got to know what you can get and what you want to get and what the path is to getting what you can.
And if Ron Paul is always against everything, he can bang his chest and say he's for principles, but essentially he is doing nothing.
Now, I know what you're thinking at this point.
You're thinking, man, this guy looks great.
I can barely concentrate on what he's saying because he's just so fit.
And the reason is I work out constantly.
How was that?
How was that for a segue, you know?
People doing the show.
I work out constantly.
And here's the thing about working out, okay?
When you're young, you have this, the reason you work out is you want to look great.
You want the opposite sex to like you and all that stuff.
And that may be nature's way of telling you to work out.
But over time, working out, the important thing about working out, look, a brick could drop out of an airplane and kill you tomorrow.
But the question is, what is your life like every day?
You want your life to be good.
You want to wake up feeling good.
You want to be in shape.
You want to be in shape for as long as you possibly can.
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Beach Body on Demand is the total package.
And these are not, you know, these are not like just some guys making up workouts.
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P90X, which is absolutely crazy.
Insanity also have tried that very crazy 21-day fix, T25, and a three-week yoga retreat all online.
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It's a brand new service, but it already has over a million members, and you can tell why.
My listeners and my watchers can claim a free trial membership.
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Just text Andrew to 303030.
Text Andrew to 303030, and you will get full access to this entire platform for free for a trial period.
Use it.
Text Andrew for Access00:15:26
It's cool.
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cannot live without it so all I'm all I'm basically saying is know what's going on don't Don't be a pawn of other people because everybody wants to sell you something.
Everybody wants to sell you it's the other guy's fault.
Everybody wants to sell you.
Look, we know the left sells virtue.
That's what they sell.
They sell, you're a caring guy.
You're a nice guy.
Just give me a little bit more power.
Just give me, just have a little less freedom.
And then you can go around and tell your friends, yes, I voted for that tax hike.
Yes, I voted for that plan.
It doesn't matter.
You know, we on the right keep saying, look, your cities are on fire.
You know, black people are being murdered in Chicago and in Baltimore.
In Baltimore, they're trying to have a non-a murder-free weekend.
And their slogan is, don't anybody kill anybody.
It's like, why didn't we think of this before?
Are we going to do?
Just say no to blowing somebody else away.
And of course, you know, if a cop kills somebody, I'm going to talk about that Minneapolis story a little bit later.
But, you know, if a cop kills somebody, then suddenly he's crucified.
So the cops don't want to police and they wonder why Democrat cities go up in flames.
But we know they sell you virtue.
On the right, I keep telling you this, they sell you outrage and anger.
Why, you betrayed this country.
It was treason.
You promised this and promised.
All I want is to get stuff done that makes me more free.
That is what I want.
I am playing the game of thrones, and the throne to me is freedom.
I can't get all the freedom I want because I know freedom is a minority position.
Even a lot of people who sit around and talk about freedom and wear the MAGA hats and wave the flags, they want those entitlements.
They want that help when things go wrong.
They want their government program.
That's what Bill Maher is saying.
We heard him yesterday saying it's already a socialist country.
That's nonsense, but there are socialist programs that people like, and it's hard to take them away, and that is true with healthcare.
Trump, I think as we speak, Trump is meeting with the Republicans.
He's meeting with the entire Republican Senate.
I don't know what they expect to come out.
The latest thing Trump has been saying is that he just is going to let Obamacare die, and then the Democrats will come and help negotiate.
Here he is talking about that.
We've had a lot of victories, but we haven't had a victory in health care.
We're disappointed.
I am very disappointed because, again, even as a civilian, for seven years I've been hearing about health care, and I've been hearing about repeal and replace.
And Obamacare is a total disaster.
Some states had over a 200% increase, a 200% increase in their premiums, and their deductibles are through the roof.
It's an absolute disaster.
And I think you'll also agree that I've been saying for a long time, let Obamacare fail, and then everybody's going to have to come together and fix it and come up with a new plan and a plan that's really good for the people with much lower premiums, much lower costs, and much better protection.
I've been saying that, Mike, I think you'll agree for a long time.
Let Obamacare fail.
It'll be a lot easier.
And I think we're probably in that position where we'll just let Obamacare fail.
We're not going to own it.
I'm not going to own it.
I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it.
We'll let Obamacare fail, and then the Democrats are going to come to us and they're going to say, how do we fix it?
How do we fix it?
Or how do we come up with a new plan?
So, you know, I don't think the Democrats are going to give anybody help.
I think they're just going to do everything they can to obstruct.
And by the way, I don't actually blame Democrats for obstruction.
Obstruction is what the opposition does, the minority does in America.
It's what you have to do.
It's a shame that we have lost, largely through Obama, largely through the work of Obama, we have lost the ability to reach across the aisle at all.
It's so frozen that we need these big majorities to get anything done.
I definitely think Mitch McConnell should throw out the filibuster because guess who will throw out the filibuster the minute they have a majority?
So it might as well be us if it's going to be them.
Does Trump bear some blame?
Yeah, he does bear some blame.
And I don't say that just to point the finger at him.
I say it because of this.
Trump has really impressed me with his ability to learn stuff.
I know he still goes off on Twitter sometimes.
He loses it and goes off, but he does it less.
He does it less than he did, and he's a little bit more circumspect.
I think the way he has treated foreign leaders has gotten better.
I think he is a guy who pays attention and learns what he's doing.
His weakest point, obviously, is herding the congressional cats toward legislation.
In order to do that, I mean, Barack Obama had this vision, as I said yesterday, he had a vision of a socialist America.
He went out there to push it.
He made over 30, close to 40 speeches about Obamacare, explaining to people how great it was.
If you want to keep your doctor, you can keep your doctor.
He was lying through his teeth, but he went out and he did it, and Trump didn't.
And Trump is a guy who just kind of wants, put it, he says, basically, I'm sitting here with a pen, put something in front of me, I'll sign it.
You know, somebody ought to just give him a check and see if that'll sign that.
The opposition, of course, is playing this for all that's worth.
I love, I love the reaction from Chuck Schumer.
We have the usual Chuck Schumer reaction here.
Chuck, Chuck, calm down.
Here's Chuck Schumer in the Senate explaining this in careful single-syllable words so his constituency can understand it.
What's wrong with letting Obamacare die?
In fact, passing repeal and having it go into effect two years later is in many ways worse than the Republican health care bill that was just rejected by my Republican colleagues.
It's like if our health care system was a patient who came in and needed some medicine.
The Republicans proposed surgery.
The operation was a failure.
Now Republicans are proposing a second surgery that will surely kill the patient.
Medicine is needed, bipartisan medicine, not a second surgery.
We urge our Republican colleagues to change their tune.
Passing repeal now is not a door to bipartisan solutions, as the majority leader suggested this morning.
Rather, it is a disaster.
The door to bipartisanship is open right now, not with repeal, but with an effort to improve the existing system.
I love the logic of this.
They screw.
You know, healthcare before Obamacare had problems, but it was basically working pretty well.
I mean, it was working pretty well.
They made a crisis of it because they want to get that socialized health care in there so they can control your choices, just like they're doing in Britain with Baby Guard.
They want to be able to decide who lives, who dies, who gets the health care, who gets what, you know, what you have to do, whether you can smoke, all that stuff.
They want to be in your face.
They would like you to get up in the morning, open the kitchen cabinet, and a Democrat pops out and tells you how to live.
That is the whole point of doing this.
So they put this crap thing together, this absolute piece of garbage together, is causing people suffering, and they say, and now, and now the evil Republicans want to kill it.
Killing it would be a mercy.
It would be a mercy to human beings.
Corey Booker was even worse.
And this is just, I play this only because it illustrates the perfidy of the press, why we need a better news media.
I mean, that's not just cynical.
It's actually sinister.
Here is a guy that promised consistently that he was, hey, only I can fix this, that I'm taking, I'm the guy, that I'm going to make health care for everybody.
I'm going to make it affordable.
Oh, it's going to be, I think the word he used was terrific.
Well, he's completely abdicated that responsibility, completely broken that promise.
He outsourced this health care process to people like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan and didn't even try to reach out to one Democrat in the Senate.
Didn't call one Democrat, didn't call us up to the White House to try to work with us.
The great deal maker failed to make a deal.
And so now he's just saying that I'm going to imperil 30 million Americans.
If Obamacare fails, it's not just people going to say, hey, policy doesn't just fail.
That means Americans will get hurt badly.
And you'll see very devastating things happen.
So that's not just a cynical way that's violating his promises.
That's sinister.
And it's evil to plot against Americans like that.
It's evil to let their crummy program die.
They did this.
And only, only on CNN, which is all the news media, which is just representative of all the news media, could a guy get away with that without somebody saying to him, wait, you did this.
It's your program.
They're just trying to fix it.
You know, I just want to mention this briefly.
I always hate to talk about developing stories because it seems to me on a podcast, there's no point.
You know, you want to find out what the story is before you can talk about it.
But I do have to mention the story in Minneapolis, really briefly, and then we'll get to the mailbag.
where a Somali Muslim cop, one of the few, remember they had this influx of Somali Muslims where Obama was throwing them down anywhere he could get them going and he was tossing them into Minneapolis where there's already a big, where there's a big Muslim community.
No, no, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
He was just putting them into Minneapolis, St. Paul.
So now Mohammed Noor became a cop two years ago.
He's called by this absolutely lovely Australian woman who was like a yoga teacher.
She was about to get married.
There's a video online of her rescuing little ducklings.
I mean, she was just this absolutely nice person.
She called saying she was being harassed.
She came up to the car and Noor shot her through the car window across his partner.
She came up to his partner and shot and Noor will not talk to investigators so we don't even know what his side of the story is.
I have to mention this because I want to see how it's played.
The Washington Post ran a huge story about this without mentioning the guy's name or that he was a Somali or that he was a Muslim.
So you can tell the bigotry of the left is completely inflamed.
I mean leftism is bigotry.
They regard everything as racial.
We have no idea whether any of that played into this.
We have no idea what this story is about.
Do not listen to people saying, you know, this story doesn't hold together because we don't have enough of the story for it to hold together or not.
But it's going to be interesting.
I want to cover the way that it's covered as the truth comes out, which the truth, I believe, ultimately will.
It's a strange story so far, but we know so little about it that it's hard to know what it's all about.
The mailbag.
There's just a beat there.
All right.
Hi, Andrew.
I often hear that people on the left view human nature as being inherently good, while people on the right view human nature as being inherently not good, meaning capable of evil on their own.
In Genesis, we read that God saw all that he had made, including humanity, and it was very good.
How then can Christian conservatives reconcile these two seemingly opposite understandings of humanity, which seem to be true?
Thank you for all your hard work, Levi.
I think you may have stopped reading Genesis before you got to the good part.
You know, Christians believe that man is fallen, that he disobeyed God and went his own way in the garden, and therefore he is a broken piece of godliness.
He is not evil.
He is not good.
He is flawed and fallen.
He is steeped in sin, but still retains the mark of God on him.
So he still retains this mark of eternal goodness on him, and he is capable of salvation through our old friend Jesus Christ.
You know, it's a fascinating, I've said this before, but Genesis, the story of the fall in Genesis, is one of the most profound pieces of literature anywhere, anywhere.
It is such an incredible, and you know, people are always arguing about whether it's literally true or a myth.
For me, as a myth, it is actually more profound than if it had been literally true.
If there were a guy named, necessarily named Adam, who necessarily talked to a serpent, and his wife Eve talked to a serpent and ate an apple.
That is less interesting to me than what this story is saying, because it's really, really strange.
I mean, the sin that they commit is that they eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and God says then he will be like us.
And it's obvious that he is somehow, that they're somehow usurping God, but why would God not want us to know what's good or what's evil?
The theory that I work on at the moment is that, you know, the great revelation of almost any religious revelation, anytime you have a religious revelation, one of the things you realize is that everything is good.
Everything is exactly as it is supposed to be.
That is one of the things that happens when people have mystic revelations.
That's the feeling they almost always describe.
And what I suspect is that if you can see the world from an eternal standpoint, from God's standpoint, it is very good.
If you live as we do in time where you can't imagine, for instance, how the suffering of a child can ever be redeemed.
We can't imagine how anything good could ever come from the suffering we see in the world because we have limited imaginations.
We don't have eternal imaginations.
We see everything in time.
And there is no way that the suffering of a child or the Holocaust can be redeemed in time.
It can only be redeemed in eternity.
And we trust that in eternity, all of the evil of the earth will be redeemed.
And it seems to me that what one of my theories is that man had at some point the capacity or was made with the capacity to see the world in that way and then lost it because he decided to take on the power of judgment for himself.
And when Jesus comes, one of the things he does is he keeps saying, I'm the light of the world.
You can see things while I'm here that you won't be able to see later.
And what can you see?
You can see that disease goes away basically at a word.
He wills it and it goes away.
You can see that the storms can be calmed.
You can see that the world is good.
It is actually a working good thing, but only as we see it does it have good and evil in it.
And so I really do believe that there is a form of vision that we lost, and that is the nature of sin.
Anyway, that's the answer to why Christians can believe that people are not inherently bad or inherently good.
They are inherently broken.
There's something wrong.
They have fallen.
And I think that that is literally true.
That is absolutely true.
Arguing With Arguments00:04:11
Sean, why do some people vote liberal but act conservative in their personal lives?
Almost all of them, almost all upper-class liberals are conservatives in their personal lives.
And this is what makes me feel, you know, you don't like to impugn, I don't like to impugn the motives of the opposition.
I just want to argue with their arguments.
But I do know so many liberals who just live there, faithful to their wives, but they talk, you know, knowingly.
They make jokes about, you know, how wild sexually they are in their minds, basically.
You know, it is a very strange thing.
Charles Murray calls it, the sociologist calls it a failure to preach what you practice.
And I think that it feels judgmental and pompous and unhip to say, hey, you know what?
We do go to church and we do stay faithful and we do have children in wedlock instead of out of wedlock and that helps us advance in life and it gives us a better life.
You know, to say that is to put yourself up as, you know, post yourself as a moral example, which is uncomfortable.
It makes you feel like maybe you're not a hip cool dude who's doing all the crazy things that the millennials are supposedly doing and probably not doing, but they're doing in the newspapers.
And so I think that that's it.
I think there's a sense of virtue that you get from not from not displaying your good choices to other people.
And you've got to find a way around that because I think you're doing a disservice to the people who are destroying their lives because they haven't learned some of the stuff you have learned.
Supreme Overlord Clavin, did God know that Adam and Eve, another fall question, did God know that Adam and Eve were going to eat from the tree of life, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?
Stay sexy, Jeff.
Okay, Jeff, I will.
You know, that's one of those questions I think that actually misunderstands how vastly different God's perspective is from ours.
You know, I don't think God lives in time.
I think all things are simultaneous to God.
And even that, I think, is a metaphor that tries, a way of trying for my limited mind to understand a mind that is so far beyond mine that I really can understand it.
So the point of whether he knows something is going to happen.
You know, for instance, I think that when I read the book of the Gospel of John, I think that Jesus learns how distant he is from humans during the course of that gospel.
But if God always knows, God the Father always knows because he has already lived through that time.
That time doesn't come to him.
It is always there.
So I think that does he know?
He knows everything.
He knows the whole deal.
But he possibly doesn't see it in time the way we do.
So it's not a question.
It's all one great design to him.
That would be my guess.
But of course, you're talking about something that you can't possibly imagine.
From Warren, dear Overlord Clavin of the high universe, whose head shines like a thousand suns.
That's just the lightning, I think.
I am a Christian and believe in the Bible.
If the Bible is truth, what exactly happened to the dinosaurs?
What do all those fossils mean, and why would God destroy a species he created?
I wonder sometimes if these are from real Bible reading people.
You know, the question of the fossils is a question that was devised because somebody took all the generations in the Bible and strung them together and added the numbers together and decided that the world was like 6,000 years old.
The world is millions of years old.
There's been, things have evolved, species have come and gone.
And the dinosaurs seem to have been one of them.
You know, they seem to, they were, remember, the dinosaurs were before the development of the larger mammals, probably because the mammals were hiding under rocks going, they're dinosaurs out there, you know?
And it was only when the dinosaurs died, possibly one theory is because of a meteor strike, that when the dinosaurs died, that was when the mammals came out and we could develop.
There's nothing, to me, there's nothing in the Bible that says there can't be dinosaurs.
I mean, I think that adding up the generations that happen to be listed in the Bible is just not a very secure way of dating the earth.
I think there are better ways of dating the earth than that.
All right.
Dear Mr. Clavin, I've been in denial for years, but I can deny it no longer.
I'm going bald.
Please help me.
Losing Hair and Wines00:06:48
I get them all, don't I?
I need you to tell me how you overcame the inner struggle with self and body image so I can be as strong as you and all my hair is gone.
Sincerely, Ben.
Is that Shapiro writing to me?
No.
Gee, you know, that's an interesting question.
The thing that bothered me when I was going bald was that it was really hard.
It was before people really started shaving their heads.
So I would go to the barber and I would say, whatever you do, don't give me a comon.
Comb over.
Because I didn't want to be fake.
I thought I'm losing my hair.
I can live with that.
And they would do it anyway.
And you couldn't get them not to do it.
I mean, that is why I started clipping my own hair.
And I finally took a buzzer and buzzed it down so low.
And then I would just go to the barber every week or so and just ask him to buzz it over again.
And finally, I worked up the courage to just do it all myself.
You know, my brother always told me that every man gets a certain amount of testosterone and some wasted growing hair.
So I mean, look at it.
Look at this as a power thing.
You know, look, all I can tell you is the only reason, you know, I always remember that when Rogain came out, you know, Rogaine was supposed to make your hair grow back.
And they said one of the side effects was that it made you impotent.
And I thought, if you're impotent, why do you need hair?
I mean, the only reason that you really care about the way you look is because you want women to like you.
Try liking them.
You know, that'll really go, that'll really go far because women actually don't care so much about whether you have hair or not.
They just care whether you're nice and actually like them as who they actually are as opposed to who they're supposed to be.
You know, live with it, dude.
I mean, these are the vagaries of life.
One day, one day, hopefully long, long, long in the future, you're going to look in the mirror and think, oh, there's a gigantic lump in my neck.
I'm dying.
I mean, things, really bad things happen.
Losing your hair is not really one of them.
It really isn't.
I mean, it's not something you want to worry about too much.
I don't know if I can help you with that.
I mean, that's something you're going to have to learn from yourself.
Today is a big day for me, I have to say.
Today is a big day for me because I ordered some wine from Wink, and it hasn't arrived yet, so I'm not going to plug the wine, say how good it is.
But the thing about Wink is Wink is not only an online wine club, they are actually wine manufacturers.
And I, look, I'm a big wine drinker.
I mean, I love wine.
Obviously, you know, at the end of the day, I like to have a scotch, I like to have a whiskey, but with food, wine just makes everything taste better.
It's lighter than whiskey.
You can't drink a lot of whiskey.
You shouldn't drink a lot of wine either, but you can drink a little bit more because it has less alcohol, it's less poisonous.
It really makes everything better.
It makes life itself better.
I mean, it's in the Bible.
Remember, Jesus drinks wine in the Bible.
He turns water to wine.
And this club, what they do is they give you a questionnaire so they know what kind of taste you have and what you like.
And then they start sending you wine and making suggestions, and they even have suggestions for recipes to go with the wine.
One of my favorite scenes in all movies is James Bond and from Russia with Love.
He, I think it's Robert Shaw.
He realizes he's a Russian spy because he orders red wine with fish.
So like he beats him up.
He says, I ordered wine with red wine with fish.
People get very nervous about not knowing which wine to drink with what.
And you can learn that from belonging to Wink, because they will send you meals to go with the wine.
And you can taste and see why these wines go together.
So you're not only getting good wine, you're actually learning stuff.
And they make the wine themselves, so they have all kinds of, they go all over the world, get the grapes, make the wines themselves, so you're going to taste wine you've probably never tried before, really expand your knowledge while drinking wine, which is the best way to expand your knowledge.
Right now, Wink is offering listeners 20 bucks off your first order when you go to trywink.com slash Andrew.
Let me repeat that.
It's T-R-Y, W-I-N-C.com.
It's not W, I call it Wink, but it's W-I-N-C.
So it's T-R-Y-W-I-N-C.com slash Andrew.
You get $20 off your first order now, plus complimentary shipping, trywink.com, trywink.com slash Andrew.
And by the next time we have that ad on, I will have tried the wine and will be able to tell you if it's good or not.
And I will.
Stuff I like.
Politically incorrect masterpieces we've been doing.
And this is one you may not know because it's so old.
Or if you do know it, you know it from a terrible, terrible remake with Madonna.
In 1974, Lena Wirtmuller, a radical filmmaker, she was a feminist, I think she was an anarchist, she was probably a communist, she was all this stuff.
She made a film called Swept Away.
It was called Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August.
And they brought it out in America, Swept Away, because they didn't think that Americans would pay attention.
With Giancarlo Giannini, one of the great comic actors, and Mariangela Mulatto.
And the story is basically this.
A rich woman on a yacht trip who is kind of snobby and abusive to the hands on the ship gets shipwrecked with one of the hands on the ship.
And they are lost on this island, and so they are from going from a rich lady to a working class guy, they suddenly just become man and woman in the most basic sense.
Well, the feminists flipped out.
But the thing about it is, I wanted to point this out.
It reminds me of Germanal.
Germanal is a novel by Emil Zola about a coal strike.
And Emil Zola claimed to be a socialist, but he also was a great, great novelist.
So he told the truth.
And if you read Germanal, which is a terrific book, by the way, really just an entertaining read, you will see this is the most anti-socialist.
It really shows you exactly what socialism does to people.
And in this, it's not, you know, the feminists went nuts because as they're reduced to just a man and a woman, of course, the man becomes the more powerful over the woman and all this.
And the woman shows a desire to have a powerful man in her life in very, very graphic and entertaining and sometimes shocking ways.
But the movie is much more complicated than that.
And the ending is genuinely, genuinely moving and kind of shocking and says a lot about men and women.
It is politically correct.
It's in Italian.
I'm not going to play.
I brought in a dubbed version, but it's too silly.
The dubbing makes it just seem silly.
It's in the original Italian.
It is really fun.
It's funny.
And you will learn more about men and women watching this movie than you ever will from listening to a leftist because you'll learn nothing that way except about leftism.
Genuinely Moving Ending00:00:33
All right, one more day in the Clavin week.
Oh, and tomorrow we have Roger Kimball.
You know, we canceled Roger Kimball last time because of all the technical glitches we're having, but we will have him on.
One of the most brilliant men in the country, runs magazines and publishing houses.
And yet, and yet, a very highly educated guy.
So highly educated, he sometimes wears a bow tie.
That's how educated he is.
I know.
You've got to be educated.
But a big, big Trump supporter.
So we're going to talk to him about that and where he thinks the culture is going.
Be there.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show, and we'll see you again tomorrow.