Andrew Clavin dissects Chuck Schumer’s performative leftist strategy—raising wages, demonizing capitalism, and mimicking Trump’s rhetoric—to win over working-class voters while his Empire of Lies critiques ideological suppression of dissent. He contrasts Trump’s unfiltered populism with McCain’s futile bipartisan plea in a gridlocked Congress, warning that Trump’s attacks on Sessions risk destabilizing his presidency despite Ohio rally fervor. The episode then pivots to Platonic theology: evil as fallen good, guilt as divine correction, and Hamlet’s moral chaos mirroring postmodernism’s collapse of objective truth, while quantum physics hints at a resurgence of spiritual realism—setting up Coffin’s debate on modern sin and authority. [Automatically generated summary]
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has now introduced a new Democrat program called A Better Deal.
Weeping hysterical tears, Schumer delivered a speech to the group of soggy stuffed animals he keeps hidden in his bedroom closet, saying, quote, We have called our new program a better deal, in the hope the word deal would make people think of Donald Trump so they might like us for being him instead of hating us for being who we really are.
Unquote the sobbing Schumer went on to say.
Quote, when you lose an election like the one we lost in 2016, you can't blame James Comey or the Russians or anyone else.
You have to look in the mirror unflinchingly and blame Hillary Clinton, whom you can see behind you in the mirror trying to sneak away before anyone blames her unquote.
In a position paper that the segment of the Democrat Party that is called the Democrat Party released to the segment of the Democrat Party that is called the news media, the Democrat Party Democrat Party told the news media Democrat Party how it would now attempt to appeal to working class Americans who voted for Donald Trump, rather than to the Democrat base, which is six guys who wear dresses and an 80 year old homeless man who agreed to vote 17 times in return for a bottle of JIM BEAM.
The position paper outlined a program whereby the Democrats would raise the minimum wage so businesses would hire fewer people, then raise taxes on the businesses so that there would be fewer businesses, then use the taxes from the businesses that are no longer there to give welfare to the people who aren't working, because Democrats raise the minimum wage and there are no more businesses.
Falling to his knees and pounding his chest as he wept, Schumer told his dripping security blanket quote, capitalism isn't working.
Sure, it's made much of the world richer than it's ever been, but it isn't working because it doesn't.
Let us steal middle-class people's money in order to buy votes from the poor with useless programs that foster dependency, illegitimacy and crime.
We need to have more government involvement in the economy so we can drive those cool 50s cars they have in Cuba and Venezuela and stage fun activities like food riots and show trials unquote.
Noting the success of Donald Trump's Make America Great Again campaign, Schumer said that Democrats would try to catch some of that magic by wearing orange wigs and pretending to love the country.
We want to make a better deal with working class Americans, Schumer said.
The deal is, we'll pretend not to hate you and you'll vote for us, and then we'll hate you again.
President Trump responded to the Democrats' new plan by humiliating all his friends, firing all his political allies and hiring the guy from the hot dog stand outside of Trump Tower to run the new Department OF Relish.
So on the Republican side, everything's pretty much the same as usual.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Showy BOO Birds are winging, also singing, hunky dunky, tipsy topsy.
The world is it easy.
It's a wonderful day hoorah, hooray.
It makes me want to sing oh hoorah hooray, oh hooray, hoorah.
All right Austin, you dozed off at the teleprompter.
What the hell's that about?
I thought, wait a minute, these words aren't moving.
Now I won't know what to say.
I was wondering, now I write these things.
Empire Lies Exposed00:03:16
Sometimes women wonder, can I remember it?
No, not all right, it's mailbag day.
Hooray!
Yay!
That was great.
Now, see, you've made up for it with an absolutely great woo.
If you want to get your questions in the mailbag, you have to subscribe to thedailywire.com.
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Hey, by the way, while I'm asking you for things, let me ask you for a favor.
If you like this show, if you enjoy the show, go on iTunes and give us some good reviews.
You know, people don't think about it.
I get a lot of really nice letters.
You send me nice letters, and it's embarrassing for me to write back in your letters and say, you know, put in a good review on iTunes.
So I'll just do it here and just embarrass myself here.
It's true.
It's true for my books as well.
The Great Good Thing.
If you liked it, go on Amazon and give it a good review.
They really help.
It really promotes the show.
So I have to, speaking of my books, I have to say, I was thinking about watching the incredible, it was just an incredible Shakespearean drama taking place in Washington, D.C.
And I was thinking about a book I wrote called Empire of Lies, which is one of my favorites of my books, and a book that I felt, it did well.
It sold okay, but it got kind of ignored.
It was an openly conservative book.
And the book I'd written before, when people didn't know I was a conservative, got something like 300 major reviews.
300 reviews in 300 major venues.
This book got one review in a major venue, and I was called a right-wing crackpot, okay?
And I thought the problem with it is I think the book is really good, I think.
I think it's a really complex book.
It is not just blindly conservative.
It's about a conservative, but it talks about his problems.
But it's called Empire of Lies because there's an exchange in it where he goes and he talks to a college student, and the college student explains to him why people get destroyed when they stand up against the left-wing machine.
And the kid says to him, there are a lot of powerful people who believe things that aren't true.
Things like one culture is as good as another or there's no such thing as good and evil.
You only have to think about those statements for two minutes to see that they can't possibly be true.
But these powerful people think they should be true and they think they'll seem to be true if no one is allowed to say that they're not true.
So they attack anyone who says that they're not true.
They call him names.
They demand apologies from him.
They make his life a misery.
So it's like the emperor's new clothes, but instead of clothes, it's the emperor's lies.
And in an empire of lies, only a crazy man would speak the truth.
And crazy people do crazy things.
The powerful people don't destroy the crazy people for saying that their false ideas are false.
They destroy him for doing something crazy.
But you have to be crazy to say their false ideas are false, because if you do, they'll destroy you.
So that is what I couldn't help thinking this about Donald Trump.
You know, Donald Trump, the thing that people love about Donald Trump is that he just said the words that we were dying to hear, that we were being told we couldn't say.
Islam is associated with terror.
How hard is that?
Trump Attacking Sessions00:15:54
It was in front of everybody's eyes.
And they were telling us there was virtue in lying about it.
Not just that we should lie about it, but that it was virtue.
It was good to lie about it.
People, criminals, were coming in from Mexico.
We know that all Mexican people aren't criminals, that they're not criminals because they're Mexicans.
But we know that people who break the law tend to be criminals.
And when they broke into the country, some of these people were criminal people.
And if you go into a California prison, a lot of these people are Hispanic, you know, and that's what was happening.
And he said the thing that people didn't like.
They didn't like their laws being violated.
He just came out and said, he called Hillary a crook.
You know, that was it.
But in order to do that, in order to violate, and remember, you know, again and again and again, the people saying, this is the end of Trump's career.
Oh my gosh, this is the end.
And we kept saying, and people kept saying, no, this is what we like.
We like this.
I mean, it's the reason why he swept all those more stately statesmen who were running against him away is because we recognize, people recognize, and I shouldn't say we, because at that point I didn't, but people recognized that this guy was a bull in a China shop of lies, and all the China was lies.
And he was breaking out and people liked that.
But it entails a certain kind of wild hair in the guy that I think, you know, sometimes is great and sometimes threatens what he's trying to do.
And yesterday was just so dramatic.
We were talking about this a little yesterday.
It was part of what we were talking about: that Trump learns stuff and he's learning how to be president.
And part of being president is holding the Republican senators and congressmen's feet to the fire and saying to the people, using the bully pulpit of the presidency, to say to people, these guys promised you and promised you and promised you, and now they're not going to do it.
And all they were trying to get is a vote to continue debate on health care in the Senate, to open debate on health care in the Senate.
So John McCain, I mean, you can't make this stuff up.
John McCain, who is in Arizona because he's got a brain tumor, right?
And he's got this big, they have to take a blood clot out.
So he's got this big scar on his face.
He comes flying back to cast the vote for a bill he doesn't even like.
He says he will not vote for it as it is, but he comes flying back.
And essentially, he makes this speech.
And talk about Shakespeare, right?
The guy, the Senate, the institution of Congress was leveled by Barack Obama by polarizing the country the way Obama did.
The guy was supposed to bring the country together by putting the Republicans in a position where he would not negotiate with them and he would negotiate and then pull the rug out from under their feet.
The only thing they could do was oppose him.
And now the Democrats are fighting back.
You know, turnaround is fair play.
Now all the Democrats will do is obstruct and oppose.
There's no conversation between what used to be this collegial body.
The people, people, the partisans, the people on the far left and the far right, always would get furious at the Senate because they would negotiate.
They would say, you're reaching across the aisle, you're negotiating with the enemy, you know.
But that was the collegial Senate.
That's how they got things done.
That's gone.
So here is this 80-year-old McCain standing in the ruin of this institution that he loved.
And it's leveled.
And it's just, if you picture it, it's really just like, you know, pillars lying on their side and dust everywhere, light coming in through the broken ceiling.
And he makes this speech, this sad speech, where he calls on them to be the Senate that he knew again.
So here, let's play a couple of clips of this because it really was something.
Let's start with clip number six.
Our system doesn't depend on our nobility.
It accounts for our imperfections and gives us an order to our individual strivings that has helped make ours the most powerful and prosperous society on earth.
It is our responsibility to preserve that.
And even when it requires us to do something less satisfying than winning, even when we must give a little to get a little, even when our efforts manage just three yards in a cloud of dust while critics on both sides denounce us for timidity, for our failure to triumph.
I hope we can again rely on humility, on our need to cooperate, on our dependence on each other, to learn how to trust each other again, and by so doing better, serve the people who elected us.
Stop listening to the bombastic loudmouths on the radio and television and the internet.
To hell with them.
They don't want anything done for the public good.
Our incapacity is their livelihood.
So the thing that I find so touching about this, and listen, I have plenty of problems with John McCain.
He has always genuinely annoyed me as a politician.
But I say this, it's rude to say it.
I know we're supposed to say he's fighting.
He's probably dying.
He's probably dying.
He's a tough guy.
He knows the score.
He knows that he's up against something where he's got something.
Like I said, the survival rates for this, the kind of brain cancer he has are in single digits.
He's in, you know, he's an old man.
He knows, he knows what he's looking at.
He's not like sitting there thinking, oh, this is, you know, this is the best time of my life.
The best is yet to come.
He knows what he's doing.
This is his valedictory.
He came to say goodbye to the Senate.
And it's really, really moving.
Now, part of what's moving about it is that he's speaking to an institution that no longer exists.
It's not that the Senate doesn't exist, but the Senate that he talked about, the news media that he talks about.
You know, people on the right, obviously he's striking out at Trump with the lines about winning.
And if you can't watch, if you're just listening, he makes little quote, you know, scare quotes in the air talking about winning.
We have to be beyond winning and all this stuff.
But when he talks about the idiots on the radio, of course, you immediately go to the right wing.
You immediately think of Rush and Mark Levin and, you know, all of us.
I mean, a whole family of right-wing commentators who Russia's children, as it were.
But what he doesn't understand is that the front page of the New York Times is exactly the same.
They're fighting back against the front page of the New York Times, which is just as biased.
Look, I do not pretend when you come here, you are getting an objective version of the news.
You're getting my version of the news.
Rush does not pretend that he is giving you all the news that's fit to print.
He is giving you the Rush Limbaugh version of the news.
Same with Sean Hannity.
The New York Times lies.
They pretend that their front page is all the news that's fit to print.
They say it right there, but it is just as biased as Rush, just as biased as Hannity, and worse, because those guys are honestly giving you their opinion.
And the Times is pretending it's the news.
So that's what's, you know, it's out of date to sit and strike out at Rush, to sit and strike out at Sean or any of these guys.
You know, that when you have a new, you know, McCain has always played to the New York Times.
He's always wanted the New York Times to like him.
So that landscape that he's talking about, he's standing in the ruin of it and making this farewell speech to an institution that's gone.
And when he calls out for civility, you know, it is just, it's so touching because I'm sure they're all moved to hear about this, but it's just not going to happen because Chuck Schumer is sitting on the other side and he's not going to do one damn thing to help, you know, to help Trump get his agenda moving.
So here's McCain's call for civility.
Let's trust each other.
Let's return to regular order.
We've been spinning our wheels on too many important issues because we keep trying to find a way to win without help from across the aisle.
That's an approach that's been employed by both sides, mandating legislation from the top down, without any support from the other side, with all the parliamentary maneuvers that requires.
We're getting nothing done, my friends.
We're getting nothing done.
And all we've really done this year is confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.
Our health care insurance system is a mess.
We all know it.
Those who support Obamacare and those who oppose it.
Something has to be done.
We Republicans have looked for a way to end it and replace it with something else without paying a terrible political price.
We haven't found it yet, and I'm not sure we will.
All we've managed to do is make more popular a policy that wasn't very popular when we started trying to get rid of it.
So he comes, this ailing, you know, probably dying senator, comes to make this valedictory speech, flies in, and through hook and by crook, they get together 50 votes and they get this thing out there.
And of course, Mike Pence casts the deciding vote.
I mean, you can't, like I said, you can't make this stuff up.
It's a tremendous, even though later on in the day they voted down, they lost a vote.
They never expected to win it on a repeal and replace.
But even so, this is a tremendous victory for Trump, a tremendous Confirmation of what I was saying, that he is learning how to do this president thing, that this is the important thing that he does.
It's not about tweeting.
It's not about anything like that, but this is the important stuff he does.
He wins.
Trump wins.
And then and then, like a character in Shakespeare, his character flaws threaten his own victory.
We'll talk about that in a minute, but I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, where you've been watching video for free.
You can come over to thedailywire.com and hear the rest of the show.
And for a lousy $10 a month, you can just watch the whole show and you don't have to be cast out like this into the exterior darkness where there is great weeping and gnashing of teeth.
over to the dailywire.com.
All right.
The mailbag is still to come.
I should have said that before we signed off, but I forgot.
The mailbag is still to come.
All your questions answered, answers guaranteed correct.
And oh, yeah, that's right.
I knew you were trying to tell me something.
I never listened to you.
That's why.
I just try to ignore him and hope that he'll just stop saying things.
But in fact, we're going to try and take questions live.
If you're there and you want to send in some questions live, we will do our best to see if our new technology can handle this without exploding.
If you just see a large flash of light, you've killed us all.
But we'll try.
We do have questions that were sent in already, but we'll also take extra questions.
So what is Trump doing?
Well, he scores this victory.
He shows, yes, I can be president.
I can move this forward.
It's a long shot that this healthcare thing will actually get passed, but at least it's still in there.
Look, two days ago, everybody was saying it's dead.
It's gone.
It's finished.
Trump pushed it through.
And I think you have to just, the credit lies very largely with him.
Obviously, all the gut Mitch McConnell and all that, they had a lot to do with it, but it was Trump pushing them through.
That's how you be president.
And what is he doing?
He is doing this thing with Jeff Sessions that is just embarrassing.
I mean, he obviously has lost his temper over the fact that his family, Jared Kushner, has been pulled into this nonsense Russian probe.
And again, I don't blame him, but we all lose our temper.
You know, we have to be a big boy.
He's president of the United States.
It's not the same as when he was a candidate.
You know, these people, if he fires Jeff Sessions or forces Jeff Sessions to resign, and everybody's saying he's going to resign.
I'm not sure I believe that.
But if that happens, what do you think is going to happen?
What do you think is going to happen if he fires Jeff Sessions?
Nobody worth his salt is going to want to be in that position.
Rudy Giuliani, maybe.
Giuliani's 70 years old.
He's making a lot of money.
He's done the stuff that's going to make him a great man.
He doesn't really want to be involved in this anymore.
Maybe he'd do it, maybe.
But is he going to get confirmed?
I don't know.
Rex Tillerson has been kind of making noises.
There have been rumors that he was going to quit.
He says, no, he's just taking a break.
But obviously, working for Trump is not a picnic.
It's not a picnic.
He's got a great staff, a great cabinet that he appointed.
If they start to abandon ship, this presidency will go down.
And they will.
These are big guys.
These are not guys who are going to be pushed around by Donald Trump or anybody else.
Rex Tillerson doesn't give a rats what Donald Trump does.
If he's having a bad time, if he feels he can't get work done, he's going to leave.
So here is Trump attacking, he's been attacking and attacking Sessions on the fact that he recused himself from the Russian investigation.
And Sessions did that because he forgot that he had, in fact, had a meeting with the Russian ambassador.
You know, obviously had nothing to do with any of this, but he forgot it.
And then he said, okay, well, now that I've made a mistake under oath, I'm going to have to recuse myself.
So here is Trump attacking him for that in a press conference.
But I am disappointed in the Attorney General.
He should not have recused himself almost immediately after he took office.
And if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me prior to taking office.
And I would have quite simply picked somebody else.
So I think that's a bad thing, not for the president, but for the presidency.
I think it's unfair to be.
And that's the way I feel.
You know, he said this thing in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
I mean, everybody points out that Jeff Sessions was an early Trump signed on to the campaign early.
He was faithful to Trump when Trump got in trouble with that, you know, entertainment tie tape, whatever it was, where he talked about grabbing women.
You know, Sessions stood up for him, stayed in there, formed a lot of his policy.
Trump said this in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
He said, you know, he said, Sessions was senator from Alabama.
I had 40,000 people at a rally in Alabama.
Sessions looks at 40,000 people and he probably says, what do I have to lose?
And he endorsed me.
So it's not like a great loyal thing about the endorsement.
I'm very disappointed in Jeff Sessions.
That's a crappy thing to say.
I mean, it's typical of Trump.
It is typical of nasty Trump when Trump is being nasty.
But this is a guy who did support him.
This is not the opposition.
This is not going after Hillary.
And this is the other thing he, you know, he says he, after saying he didn't want to go after Hillary, which would not be a good idea.
I know a lot of people want to see Hillary in prison.
Not a happy thing for a democracy to have its candidates go to prison, whether you think she deserves it or not.
I think she does deserve it.
I think she does deserve it.
I don't want to see her go to prison.
And now he's attacking Sessions for not cracking down on the leaks, which, by the way, Sessions says he's doing.
You know, Sessions is doing a lot of this stuff.
He just, you know, the AG doesn't always announce what he's doing, but now he has to announce it so that Trump can hear it.
It's being done.
But here he is attacking the leaks.
I want the Attorney General to be much tougher on the leaks from intelligence agencies, which are leaking like rarely have they ever leaked before at a very important level.
These are intelligence agencies.
We cannot have that happen.
You know many of my views in addition to that, but I think that's one of the very important things that they have to get on with.
I told you before I'm very disappointed, Attorney General, but we will see what happens.
Time will tell.
Time will tell.
So I just find this heartbreaking, you know, that as he is getting better at his job, he is also, you know, like a Shakespeare character.
He is also, you know, cannot, there's things that he can't change about himself, and that he doesn't really realize that this is not the way the president should treat the Attorney General.
And again, forget about whether you think he's right or not.
Forget about whether you think Sessions is doing a good job or not.
This is not what he should be focusing.
He shouldn't be distracting the Senate.
He shouldn't be giving the Senate an excuse not to vote on the health care bill.
The Senate says, oh, there's so much drama in the White House.
We can't focus.
You know, these guys, it's natural for them not to want to take political chances.
Trump's Ohio Rally00:02:38
He's got to be hurting them every minute, not talking about this stuff.
What really touches me about this also is that Trump was in Ohio and did this rally in Ohio.
And, you know, it was the usual Trump stuff.
I'm not going to play cuts from that, but I have to read this piece from Selena Zito at the New York Post, who did something that none of these reporters ever do.
She went to Ohio.
She says, is there a place between New York and LA?
I thought it was just a black hole.
She is reporting on the people turning out for this event.
She says the town was on fire.
By one in the afternoon on Tuesday, every main thoroughfare downtown was filled with happy people heading toward the Cofelli Center.
Folks dressed in red, white, and blue crisscrossed the main grids as vendors sold Make America Great Again ball caps, American flags, and bottles of water.
Thousands had filled the gravel parking lot to wait until the doors opened at four.
License plates revealing they had traveled from as far as Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.
She starts to interview some of these people.
I am very happy.
He talks to Donald Scowron, a retired Youngstown police officer, who drove his green pickup truck up and down Champion Street with a wooden Trump pence sign straddling the bed of the truck.
He says, I am very happy with the president's performance so far.
He has set the exact tone I was looking for, although I'll be honest, I wish he didn't tweet all of the time, but that is hardly anything to complain about.
Scowron said he is encouraged by reading about Trump's constant meetings with industry leaders as well as union and trade members.
We have a president, this is Scowron talking again, we have a president invested in trying to navigate between the people who create jobs and the men and women doing the jobs and how repealing regulations help both.
Six months after Donald Trump was inaugurated as 45th president, he received a hero's welcome in this town.
The advanced ticket requests of over 20,000 had exceeded the 6,000 seat capacity.
I mean, this is amazing.
Okay, this is after eight years of listening to, you know, I'm going to tell you which mentally ill child should use which bathroom in your little neighborhood.
Okay.
So here is Dave Torrance, another interview.
He's black.
He says he gets his fair share of criticism from folks when they find out whom he supports.
He got more when he told them he was driving to see Trump in person at a rally.
The man says, they don't understand why I think he is doing okay.
They don't think because I am black that I should support him.
I am polite about it, but I tell them that politics isn't about color.
It's about accomplishments.
And I think Trump is doing the right things.
He finds them refreshing.
He says, I don't care for the hatred directed towards him or the people who supported him.
Shakespeare's Monopoly On Truth00:15:50
There have been plenty of presidents I did not vote for, but I always want them to be successful so that our country is successful.
It's the voice of America you're listening to, and they're waiting for this.
They are sick and tired of the Russian garbage.
They're sick and tired of the hatred that he's getting from the press.
And they love that this guy is their voice.
He is speaking for them.
You know, he went to this Boy Scout jamboree thing and gave this speech.
And the place was rocking.
The place was rocking.
So the left-wing press is going, oh, it's like a Nazi youth rally.
So now you have the left-wing calling the Boy Scouts the Nazi youth.
I mean, he's got these guys trolled into insanity.
He's got them trolled into insanity.
If he can keep doing stuff like that, he'll win every state in the Union except for New York and California.
You know, I mean, he has it in his hands, and he may just blow it by alienating the people who are his allies.
The guys like Sessions, the guy like Tillerson, you know, the people who he's appointed who were such great appointments.
If he alienates them, if he humiliates them, if he treats them like underlings who he can slap around, he will blow this presidency up right on the border of success.
It's an incredible drama.
It's incredibly entertaining to watch.
I hope he succeeds.
I hope he pulls himself together.
But it is something, it is something else.
I cannot remember the last time just governing in a free country was this dramatic.
The mailbag.
There she is.
All right.
Let's see.
From Rafe Adler, Big King Clavin, I see the, should be old King Clavin.
I see the world as containing absolute good and evil, but I don't understand the view that good is in charge.
Why isn't the universe a battle between good and evil, truth being a neutral absolute power instead of an all-powerful and good God?
Wow, that is, I think, Manicheism, I think that's called, and it is a heresy.
And so I'm sorry, Rafe, we have to burn you at the stake.
That's part of the mailbag I didn't include, you know, that we do solve your problems, but if you commit heresy, we have to kill you.
So that, you know, it's risky.
All right.
The answer to that question is, of course, complicated.
And I'm probably not the best person.
I mean, I'm a thriller recorder.
I'm not a theologian.
I'm not a philosopher.
I'm just a barefoot teller of tales, but I will try and answer this question.
You know, first let me say this.
When we talk about religion nowadays, it's very offensive when they say, oh, you know, to the left, politics is a religion.
Global warming, climate change is a religion.
What we mean by that is it's irrational.
Our religion, the Christian religion, and I would say this is true of the Jewish religion, is not irrational at all.
Our faith is faith that our logic will be true, that our logic, that human logic can describe the world.
So much of this stuff has been reasoned out by people over centuries, and our faith is that just because we can't see it doesn't mean that our logic doesn't hold.
So it's reasonable.
The world can't be divided.
The Manichean, if I'm right, if that's what it's called, heresy cannot be true.
The world cannot be divided equally between good and evil because of what good is, because of the nature of the definition of the word good and the definition of the word evil.
Good is, in everything, is the highest attainment of the essence of something.
So the highest attainment of the essence of what it means to be a man is to unite with God.
That would be his purpose, his cause, his good.
That would be his good.
Take morality out of it for just a minute.
Just take a circle.
Let's say everybody in this room draws a circle.
Jess draws her probably excellent and attractive circle.
Austin draws, you know, something we can barely recognize as a circle.
I draw a circle.
They're different colors and all this stuff.
None of them is the perfect circle.
Even if my computer draws a circle, it will not be a perfect circle.
There'll be something wrong with it.
But we all know there is a perfect circle.
We have it in our heads.
We all know these, no matter how badly we draw those circles, we all know they're supposed to be circles, and we all know that they are part of what Plato would call this form of a perfect circle.
That is the good.
It is trying to attain the good.
There is a good circle.
Circles get good as they attain that perfection.
There is no worst circle.
There only is a circle that doesn't exist, right?
I mean, if it has some form close to a circle, it has some good in it, okay?
That is the way you have to think about these things.
Okay, so being itself, existence itself, is like that.
The ultimate existence, the ultimate existence is the good, right?
That is what it is, the fulfillment of the good.
There is no, the highest being, the highest being, is the good being.
Not just because he's the highest, but because it is the nature of goodness to be the absolute fulfillment of being, okay?
I hope I'm making, am I making sense?
Okay, good.
There is no absolute evil person.
Even Satan, even Satan is a fallen angel.
He is a broken good thing.
Even Satan, like if you read Paradise Lost, he suffers in his evil because there's still something in him that knows the good.
There is nothing, and then there is bad, and then going up the level to good.
And that's why the Manichean heresy is wrong.
That's why we're not in a, you know, truth is not just empty.
It is, there is a good, an ultimate good, and that ultimate good is the ultimate being, and the ultimate being is the ultimate intelligence, and that is God.
That's my answer.
I hope that made sense.
I feel like, you know, I feel like what we have, I'll bring a philosopher on in a few weeks, and we'll talk to him about it.
But that's as good as I can do.
All right.
Supreme Overlord Clavin, as a Christian, I often think of Ephesians 4.1, where Paul urges followers of Christ to live a life worthy of the calling you have received.
Though I accept my salvation through Christ, I often struggle with what it means to be a good person and live a worthy life.
What are your thoughts on this?
Thanks for all you do, Luke.
We all do, of course.
We all struggle with not only knowing the good, but doing the good once we know it.
Paul himself struggled with it and said the good that he wanted to do, he didn't do, and the bad that he didn't want to do, he did do.
That's the nature of being a sinful creature.
Just try and remember this.
The name Satan, if I'm getting this right, means accuser.
It is the accuser.
He is the accuser.
Satan is the one who is in your head when you are tormenting yourself with guilt.
Guilt is like pain.
It's there for a purpose.
It's there to let you know that something is wrong, so fix it.
You cut yourself, right, and you say, oh, that hurt.
What's wrong?
Oh, I've cut my finger.
You don't then sit there and say, ooh, the pain.
Ah, the pain.
I think I'll just sit here and think about the pain.
I'll live with the pain.
You fix your finger, right?
You don't like hold yourself accountable to the pain.
You don't live with the pain forever.
Guilt is the same way.
You do something wrong, you fix it.
You try and do your best to not do it again.
That's what you do.
That voice that torments you over this, that torments you about your flaws, the things that you can't fix in yourself, that voice is not God's voice.
That is not God's voice.
That is the voice of your accuser.
He does that to keep you from turning toward the love and forgiveness that God is offering you.
So that is what I would say.
We all struggle to do right.
We all struggle to know the right.
But, you know, that voice that tangles you up in guilt, it keeps you from proceeding past your guilt toward love and forgiveness.
That is not God's voice, and it's not your voice either.
All right, you got an actual live question?
I do have a live question.
All right, let's hear it.
From Jeremiah.
All right.
Oh, Claven, live forever.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
We know that you're a gamer.
Yep.
Have you ever tried an escape room?
Ah, you know, first of all, I've only recently, about a month or maybe two months ago, I heard about escape rooms.
Now, I'm a little bit torn about this, okay?
I will tell you why.
I love games, and I love escape, right?
I think escape movies are some of my favorite movies, like The Great Escape, one of my favorite movies.
I love anything where I write these stories.
I mean, they write these stories where these guys get in impossible situations.
Can they get out?
And I always love that Hitchcock scene where the guy is surrounded in a theater and then he shouts fire and everybody panics and that's how he gets past every door and all this stuff.
Love that stuff.
I don't, when I'm playing games, I don't like intense pressure.
I mean, I live with a lot of pressure, which I accept and I'm pretty good under pressure, actually.
But I don't like it when I'm playing, you know, and sometimes even when we play party games and things get too competitive, I think like, do I need this?
You know, I mean, I have a lot of competition and pressure in my life.
So I'm a little bit torn about it.
I'm not actually sure I want to do it.
I'm not sure I'd have as much fun, but I kind of love the idea of it.
And I've played the iPad games that have those escape things, and I have enjoyed them.
So I may do it yet.
It does sound kind of fun, I got to admit.
All right, let's do one more and then we'll move on to stuff I like.
From Max, Dear Mr. Claven, I am an aspiring novelist who is also a religious conservative.
I want to give up.
No, I want to, and inevitably do, incorporate themes which correspond with my beliefs into my writing.
My question is, since popular art has become a vehicle for the delivery of leftist ideology, can novels with more right-wing ideas and messages still sell?
Thanks, Max.
First of all, yes.
There's a huge market for Christian novels.
I mean, the Christian literature is a big deal, and there are Christian publishers.
They're fewer because they're all now owned by HarperCollins.
I mean, when I started with Thomas Nelson writing novels for them, they were like this wonderful little company.
There's still many, many wonderful people there, but now they're part of this big HarperCollins corporation.
But, you know, the novel business is a tough business.
I love it.
I love doing it.
I love being in it.
But it is a tough business.
And obviously, if you are in keeping with the left-wing, the left-wing prejudices of the mainstream publishing industry, you will have a way forward.
But there's still, it is better than TV and much better than the movies.
There's still many different voices there that you can get into.
So yeah, I would not give up on that account.
I mean, obviously, you don't want to be preachy.
You don't want to be like selling this stuff.
You want to tell a story and let the story tell its, tell, have your values in it.
But that is not a reason not to do it.
I mean, it's just, it's a tough business.
It is a tough business.
And that will maybe add to the toughness.
But like, it still can be done.
All right, let's move on to stuff I like.
And, you know, I want to do, instead of just recommending stuff this week, I really did get off in this thought yesterday.
We were talking about Borges and talking about this idea that we're in a crisis of ideas and conservatism has to, even if we come back in the future with a new conservatism, it is going to be different simply because of the time that it's in.
It's not going to be 1950s.
The 1950s are not coming back.
Nothing comes back.
Everything changes.
The change continues all the time.
Edmund Burke talked about this, that you want to change in keeping with your traditions.
You want to change in keeping with the things that are essentially and always true.
But we have deviated from the path.
There's no question about it.
And what I want to just point out is this deviation has been going on for centuries.
And one of two ways this can go.
The reason I'm returning to something I used to talk about when the show began.
I guess it's almost two years now since the show began in Jeremy Boring, the God King of the Daily Wire.
We started in his pool house, broadcasting out of his pool house.
Now we have these fabulous studios and all this, but we started just doing it with a mic in his pool house.
And at that time, I talked a lot about Hamlet.
And Hamlet is really interesting.
I believe that Hamlet is Shakespeare's reaction to the Reformation.
People always say that Shakespeare was not a religious writer.
I don't believe that at all.
I've done whole shows about how I think he was a religious writer.
But it doesn't make any sense that a writer of Shakespeare's genius was living during the time of this Reformation where people were being burned at the stake for their beliefs and people were being killed and arrested for reading the Bible in their native language and stuff like that.
It doesn't make sense that he wouldn't write about that, that that wouldn't inform the way he thinks.
And one of the things, Hamlet is the story of a man, it's based on another play, play called Hamlet, in which a guy is told that his father's ghost comes and says, I was murdered, you have to avenge my murder, and Hamlet goes and avenges his murder.
We don't have that play, but we know that's what it was about.
Shakespeare writes a play in which the ghost comes to Hamlet and says, you have to avenge my murder.
And Hamlet goes, well, how do I know that this is really a ghost?
How do I know that this is really murder?
How do I know that this is what I'm supposed to say?
He can't make up his mind.
Well, why?
What happened?
And one of the things about Hamlet is he goes to school in Wittenberg in Germany.
Even though the play takes place before the Reformation, it takes place in some dark, you know, backward time.
Shakespeare never cared about that.
He never cared about anachronism.
And he goes to school in Wittenberg, which is where the Reformation began.
It's where Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses up on the cathedral door.
So I believe that this is Shakespeare saying this play is about what happens when the monopoly on truth that is owned by the church, when the authority of absolute truth that we had in the church disappears.
What happens?
How do you make up your mind?
How do you know it's true?
Now you're just living out of your own head.
How can you know where the truth lies?
And in this famous speech, this is Mel Gibson, in a great movie.
He cut a four-hour play down to an hour and a half, and it really works.
And it's one of the best Hamlet's performances I've ever seen.
Mel Gibson talks about the fact that his mood changes everything.
The very nature of the world seems to change with his mood.
So here's this speech.
I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises.
And indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory.
This most excellent canopy, the air.
Look you.
This brave, o'erhanging firmament.
This majestical roof fretted with golden fire.
Why it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.
What a piece of work is a man.
How noble in reason.
How infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable.
In action, how like an angel.
In apprehension, how like a god.
The beauty of the world.
The paragon of animals.
And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
Man delights not me.
No.
No woman neither, though by your smiling, you seem to say so.
Shakespeare always throws in a dirty joke if he can get in a dirty joke.
So he says, man delights not me.
And the guy laughs saying, yes, but you like women, don't you?
So Hamlet is saying that the entire world, the sky, the world, mankind himself, seems to be at the mercy, the very nature of him seems to be at the mercy of his moods.
And when he's depressed, suddenly man, who seems to be an angel, looks like nothing but dust.
That's not quite what that statement means, but for now, that's fine.
The Nature of Reality00:02:54
You know, the sky is no longer beautiful.
The earth is no longer beautiful.
How then do you know the truth?
How then do you know what's right and wrong?
How then do you know that what you think is right is not just your anger?
If we don't have a church that is going to tell us these things, how do you know?
And this idea that Shakespeare saw coming from so far away, in Hamlet, there are hints of postmodernism, there's hints of deconstructionism, all kinds of things.
He just saw into the future, really all the future.
He saw everything that was going to happen.
He reasoned it out.
And that's what I believe the play is about, and that's why I think it's so great.
And at the same time this was happening, a scientific revolution started to take place.
And in that scientific revolution, man and his man's perceptions began to be disproved.
It seemed like the earth stood still or that the earth was at the center of things.
It seemed like the sun moved around the earth.
Turned out, nope, you know, it was the earth moving around the sun.
That was the Copernican revolution.
You know, that was why, well, Galileo and the church got into it over this.
That's not actually entirely why, but it doesn't matter.
The thing is, it was changing where man was.
The only truth that you could count on was the truth that you could measure, was science's truth.
And the idea was basically that man's perceptions now were unreliable, and the only real truth was physical truth, measurable truth, the distances between things.
And the soul got relegated to this kind of ghostly place.
You know, this was Descartes.
It was Descartes who said, who talked about basically the soul.
He turned the soul into a ghost in the machine.
Those are not Descartes' words, but what somebody said.
And that's what we've been fighting about.
We fight about whether there's a ghost in the machine.
Of course there's not a ghost in the machine.
People before the scientific revolution did not think that's what the soul was.
They thought the soul was the nature of being alive.
It was the very fact of what you were when you were alive.
And so you could have a soul, but it didn't have to be some ghostly thing.
Anyway, the scientific revolution was so successful that this idea took hold even though it makes no sense.
And what I have been arguing is that the sense that it doesn't make is now coming to an end.
The fact that we are now saying things, people are sitting there going, well, we don't really exist.
We have no self.
We have no free will.
Soon we're going to learn every piece of machinery that makes every decision for us.
All these things are untrue and they are going to be disproved, but they are being disproved as we speak.
The very nature of reality, the very nature of reality, has suddenly become connected to the observer in quantum physics and things.
The logic of the scientific revolution that took place back in Shakespeare's time is falling apart.
And the logic of there not being a moral reality, a spiritual reality, is also, I believe, falling apart.
But as we rediscover that reality, I do not believe we're going to go back to 13th, 14th, 15th century theology.
I don't believe that's going to happen.
Reality's Observer Effect00:00:41
And what we have to be talking about is what is, just what we were talking about earlier on, what is the good of man in the modern world?
What does sin look like in the modern world?
What is right and wrong?
And what is, and who is going to decide, and how can we decide?
And how does the reason of guys like Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, how does it apply to the new world?