Ben Shapiro dissects Everyday Feminism’s Harry Zayad’s "queer" identity shift, mocking his introspection while tying it to the site’s financial struggles, then pivots to tech privacy—citing Facebook’s alleged eavesdropping on his kitchen conversations. He dismisses Trump Jr.’s Russia meeting as a "phony scandal," accusing Democrats of colluding with foreign actors (e.g., Fusion GPS’ Russian-funded dossier) while ignoring Clinton-era ties to Moscow, like uranium deals. Praising Sessions for ending affirmative action and blaming Venezuela’s collapse on socialism, he skewers feminist leaders Sarsour, Perez, and Mallory for Farrakhan links before fielding mailbag questions—from free will (God’s omniscience vs. human time) to marital values (2 Corinthians 6:14 as a practical guide). The episode ends with a plug for TheDailyWire.com and a tease of Christian Toto, framing leftist ideology as a materialist trap undermining tradition. [Automatically generated summary]
It's a new month, and that means it's time for a visit to our favorite website, Everyday Feminism.
Now, at this point, I usually make some cheap, stupid joke comparing our monthly visit to the website with a woman's minstrel cycle, implying that reading everyday feminism is sort of like experiencing cramps and discomfort, uncontrollable mood swings bordering on insanity that leave you feeling as if you're always angry at everyone all the time.
But today I'm going to refrain from degrading myself by stooping to that sort of low humor, because I trust my audience is able to do that on their own.
So let's just get right to a post on everyday feminism called the differences between the terms gay and queer and why it matters.
And folks, just to show you why I love this website so much, I'm going to read the beginning of this article word for word, so help me.
The author, Harry Zayad, writes, quote, For a while, I thought I was gay.
And maybe I was for some of that time.
There's nothing wrong with being gay, but I'm definitely not now.
I thought I was gay because I thought I was a man.
And I thought I was only and always attracted to other men.
I don't know what gender I am anymore, if any.
I knew before coming to that particular realization that I'm also not only and haven't always been attracted to men.
Additionally, I realized I don't know what exactly attraction means.
Word for word, I swear.
The author continues, quote, I know for certain I'm not heterosexual.
Without a stable gender, I'm not even sure I could be.
And when I first began to have these self-revelations, I also knew that I needed space to explore all of these complications.
As I spent time figuring out what they meant, I discovered that if I must have an identification that makes sense to others who need to see me with some sort of stability, it would be queer.
Unquote.
Now, I know what you're wondering.
Does this guy have a job?
Or does he just sit around with his head underpants trying to figure out what sex he is all day?
I mean, come on, this is not rocket science.
If you're watching baseball on TV and holding the remote, you're probably a man.
And if you're a woman, would you please bring me another beer and some chips?
How tough is this?
Hari Zayad concludes, quote, gayness and queerness are two different things.
But sometimes gayness is a part of queerness and vice versa.
So be queer, be gay, be both, be neither, but be you, unquote.
Actually, I'm not sure BU is such great advice for this guy.
Maybe he should try be someone who does something useful with your life or be someone who keeps your personal problems to yourself or just be quiet.
Oh, by the way, I noticed that everyday feminism is struggling financially and asking for contributions.
I almost feel I should send the money by way of thanks for all the comedy.
After all, I couldn't make this stuff up.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky, life is tickety boo.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky.
Ads in Private Jets00:07:06
Shipshaw, tipsy-topsy, no one is it easing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
That site makes me feel guilty at this point.
I'm just like reading this stuff off the website.
And the guy, I always, is it right to make fun of that guy?
It's like, yes, I guess it is.
I mean, it's like just reading it out loud.
All right, it's Mailbag Day.
Hooray!
It's Mailbag Day.
And if you want to contribute to the Mailbag live, go ahead, send them in, and we will try and get your questions in.
It's a little, we've juggled with the technology, but last time we actually got one in.
So take a crack at it.
You got to subscribe.
You got to be a subscriber to thedailywire.com.
It costs $10 a month.
And someone has complained for a year.
If you subscribe for a year, it's $99.99 for the year.
It's $100, a lousy $100 for the month.
Somebody complained that I said, for the year, I did it again.
Somebody complains that I keep saying it's $100 a month, which would be worth it because you get this leftist tears mug.
But in fact, we are just practically giving the thing away for a mere $100 for the year.
So it's lousy $10 a month if you subscribe by the month and $100 for the year if you subscribe for the year.
I should make that incredibly clear.
Oh, the other big thing is whether I should say inline or online.
So that's the other question.
Because New Yorkers, now I can't even remember what is normal to me.
I wait online, I think.
New Yorkers wait online and everybody else waits.
You know what?
I just want to unline.
I want to unline because that's why we go to stamps.com so you can unline.
I mean, seriously, I start working at 5.30 in the morning.
I stop usually around 8 o'clock at night.
I don't have time to get in my car if I have to mail something, drive to the post office, hope that it's open, wait online, stand there and deal with the whole thing, then drive home again.
And in LA, you know, a five-minute drive is three hours long.
So it's something I do not want to do.
That is why there's stamps.com.
You basically can just stuff the entire post office right into your computer.
Stamps.com brings all the services of the U.S. Postal Service right to your fingertips.
You can buy and print official U.S. postage for any letter, any package, any class of mail using your own computer and printer.
Stamps.com makes it easy.
They'll send you a digital scale so you can automatically calculate the exact postage you need.
And stamps.com will even help you decide the best class of mail based on your needs.
And right now, you too can enjoy the stamps.com service with a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus postage and a digital scale without any long-term commitments.
Just go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in Claven.
Please, please, you ask me these hard questions while I'm on the air.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N, stamps.com.
Enter Claven.
You'll get a four-week trial plus postage and a digital scale without long-term term commitments.
Stamps.com.
Online and never go to the post office again.
You want to hear a creepy story?
This is a genuinely creepy story, okay?
Maybe it's like a week and a half ago.
My wife is making dinner.
She's in the kitchen making dinner and I'm sitting at the kitchen table keeping her company, drinking a glass of wine, right?
And we're chatting and we get into one of those dopey, you know, meaningless conversations you have when you're just talking.
I think we started talking about some super rich guy like Bezos from Amazon or something.
And he was less rich than Gates for a minute and then Gates was richer.
And I said, you know, the only thing, there's nothing I want that I could get by being super rich.
There's nothing I really want to buy except one thing.
I would like to have a private jet because flying commercial airlines is now such a pain in the neck, you know?
And I said, you know, I wouldn't even have to be rich enough to get my own private jet.
I'd be happy to join one of those consortiums or one of those businesses where everybody chips in and has a jet and you schedule it at different times.
A day or two later, I go online and there's an ad for a company that has private jets.
Do you know about this?
So I'm like naive enough where I'm thinking this has got to be a coincidence because like I said, it was one of those dopey conversations.
It was not something I ever wrote to anybody about or mused about online or blogged about or talked about on the show.
It was just one of those things that kind of popped into my head as we're talking.
And I'm thinking, this has got to be a coincidence.
And it shows up on all my devices, ads for like, you know, private jet companies that you can.
So today I wake up and on Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds' great blog, it has an article that, in fact, if you have specifically Facebook Messenger app, the Facebook Messenger app.
which I don't use because I do all that on my computer, but if you have that on your phone, it's set to have a microphone on and they are listening.
I mean, I'm sitting in my kitchen with my wife talking, and it is listening to me and then deciding what ads to send.
So first, I deleted the thing, like as I'm reading the article, I'm deleting that app.
But then you can go on the settings, privacy settings, and press microphone and turn off the microphone on all your, because you don't need a microphone on most of these apps.
The only one I can think of that I would use is that when you sing to it and tells you what song it is, you know, that I guess needs a microphone.
But jeepers, that to me was a bridge too far because I didn't even like it when they were doing it in my email.
Like I remember sending an email to somebody and saying, oh, what am I doing?
I'm shopping for an elliptical machine.
Six months after I bought the machine, they're still sending me these ads for the elliptical machine.
Stop reading my email, you know?
But at least I feel like when I'm online, I just figure, there it is.
I know, I know, it's creepy.
I just figure when I'm online, you know, replaying the nude scenes from Game of Thrones or whatever the hell I'm doing, I figure people are watching that stuff.
The NSA, I just figure, I understand that I've sacrificed my privacy, but in my kitchen when I'm not online, just talking and then my phone is listening to me, enough, enough.
That was a privacy violation too far.
All right, so I thought I'd share that.
You can go on your settings, just hit the privacy button, go on microphone, and turn it off.
And the specific one they mentioned was Facebook.
But I found a bunch of them that had, like, Google Maps doesn't need a microphone from me.
I type things into it.
I don't talk to it.
Do you talk to your map program?
No.
Yeah, and so I turned that off.
I mean, it's like, oof.
Anyway, so they are listening to, I suppose there's just going to be a generation that just won't care, but I ain't it.
I am not the one.
So, you know, I've now begun to feel that the news is just making us stupid.
Now, part of that is the summer.
Not that much goes on.
It's been an interesting summer because of all the chaos at the White House, the firing people and all this stuff.
Why We Can't Abandon Conservatism00:15:23
But yesterday, they have this, quote, scandal, unquote, that Donald Trump Jr.'s first note about his meeting with the Russian babe who was telling him about the Magnissia Act and it never amounted to anything.
And this is now, oh, Trump said he had nothing to do with this, but maybe he dictated the note and all this.
And Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the spokeswoman for the White House, says, no, he just kind of chipped in as any dad would.
But I liked a response, not the first cut of Sarah Sanders, but the second cut, where she just basically said, like, please, enough is enough.
Here it is.
Everybody wants to try to make this some story about misleading.
The only thing I see misleading is a year's worth of stories that have been fueling a false narrative about this Russia collusion and based on a phony scandal based on anonymous sources.
And I think that is, if we're going to talk about misleading, that's the only thing misleading I see in this entire process.
You guys are focused on a meeting that Don Jr. had no consequence when the Democrats actually colluded with a foreign government like Ukraine.
The Democrat-linked firm Fusion GPS actually took money from the Russian government while it created the phony dossier that's been the basis for all of the Russia scandal fake news.
And if you want to talk further about a relationship with Russia, look no further than the Clintons, as we've said time and time again.
Bill Clinton was paid half a million dollars to give a speech to a Russian bank and was personally thanked by Putin for it.
Hillary Clinton allowed one-fifth of America's uranium to reserve to be sold to a Russian firm whose investors were Clinton Foundation donors.
And the Clinton campaign chairman's brother lobbied against sanctions on Russia's largest bank and failed to report it.
So the reason this is okay with me, because it's whataboutism, you know, well, I did this, but what about, is because there's still no story.
And I know I talked about when Robert Mueller was made the special counsel and investigating this stuff.
I talked about what a big mistake I thought that was, how ridiculous I thought it was.
I've been sort of proved right already in that he's hiring all these Democrats.
He's obviously going to go off the reservation.
Maybe he looks at something like this and says, ah, it's evidence of a guilty conscience that they lied about it.
But the story itself isn't there.
I mean, all these things, if you think of every, look, during a campaign, people do all kinds of nefarious stuff.
All of them.
They all do nefarious stuff.
I'm sure the Trump camp was meeting with people they shouldn't have met with.
I'm sure the Hillary camp was meeting with people.
It ain't being bagged.
It's politics.
So they're always doing this nefarious stuff.
But think of each thing as kind of a dot.
The line that is connecting the dots here is the narrative.
And the narrative is that Russia hacked our elections and Donald Trump hept.
He helped them.
Donald Trump helped them mess up our elections.
But we know that they had no effect on our elections.
We know that they do this all the time and we do it back to them.
We know this is always happening.
And we know that Trump was not, I mean, we're fairly reasonably certain that Trump was not sitting around going, yes, yes, help me, you know, mess up the voting booths or whatever.
I mean, the word collusion isn't even a legal word that they keep using.
And we know that the Clinton camp was so deep with the Russians through Fusion GPS, that freelance investigatory firm.
We know all this.
So the narrative itself doesn't exist.
So they're getting narrative points on the storyline for a story that isn't there.
And it is just, it's wearying at this point.
And 6% of the country say this is an important story.
75% of the coverage or something like that goes to this story.
6% of the people care about it.
Why should they care about it?
Why should they care if Anthony Scaramucci has a job or not?
You know, it's a, what is it?
It's staff change.
You know, it's dramatic.
I get that it's news.
I get that it's like fun to watch and all this stuff and that Trump's weird, outlandish style is fun and all this stuff.
But who cares?
I mean, look, you know, you have a life.
I have a life.
These are the things that matter.
I care when Dinesh D'Souza gets sent to jail for making a movie about Barack Obama.
That makes me scared because, you know, he did commit some minor, you know, malfeasance with campaign funding laws, which are already stupid laws to begin with.
Some minor thing.
Nobody else would have, anybody else would have been fined, slapped on the wrist.
They would have wagged the finger at him.
You know, he was facing serious jail time because Barack Obama doesn't like people making movies about him that insult him.
You know, Hillary Clinton was trying to shut down Citizens United, trying to reverse that, that just says you have the right to make movies about her because they made them, Citizens United made a movie attacking her.
She didn't like the fact that we had the First Amendment.
That stuff bothers me.
The Scaramucci's, you know, I get that it's a minor flash in the pen news story and it's funny and all that.
But really, they're making us stupid and they're doing it on purpose.
All right, we've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, which means you will be cast from the free video into the exterior darkness where there is great weeping and gnashing of teeth.
But if you come over to thedailywire.com, you can listen to the rest of the show or subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month or 100 bucks for an entire year, right?
Okay, 100 bucks.
And for 100 bucks for the entire year, you get the leftist tears mug.
Plus, you can be in the mailbag and you know you can ask anything.
We've got some very poignant questions in the mailbag and you can ask anything you want.
Our answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life, possibly for the better.
And if you want to send them in live, you can send them in live and we will catch them.
Come on over to TheDailyWire.com.
So the thing about this, all the panic and the, you know, oh, it's chaos and everybody is it does affect Washington, D.C.
And you'll notice that there are more and more stories about the Republicans going off the reservation.
They're going to ignore Trump.
You know, they ignored, for instance, that transgender ban that he tweeted about.
The military was like, yeah, and make that an order and you're the commander-in-chief.
But if it's a tweet, in my book, it doesn't say tweet, we have to do, you know, it's kind of just disappeared.
They're still studying the issue.
I'm sure they'll come up with a result in like six months and do whatever they do about it.
And now the Times, the New York Times, which used to be a newspaper, I think, they have a story.
Congressional Republicans moved on Tuesday to defuse President Trump's threat to cut off critical payments to health insurance companies maneuvering around the president toward bipartisan legislation to shore up insurance markets under the Affordable Care Act.
So in other words, Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the influential chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, announced that his panel would begin work in early September on legislation to stabilize and strengthen the individual health insurance market for 2018.
So in other words, they're going to prop Obamacare up, which is, I mean, if you want to lose the Republican majority, that's it.
That would happen like the next day.
They think they would hold like an election.
Those elections that they have with like torches and pitchforks where they just come and toss you out.
You know, and have you seen, have you seen this guy, Jeff Flake, Senator Jeff Flake?
He wrote this book called The Conscience of a Conservative.
Obviously, a very, very famous book by Senator Barry Goldwater, has become, and it's become a sort of conservative guidebook, basically.
So he writes, Jeff Flake, I'll tell you why this is funny in a minute.
He writes this book basically reaming Trump and saying we've got to get back to it.
And now here he is on Face the Nation and suddenly his tone changes because the book, I haven't read the book, but I've just read a couple of excerpts.
It really goes after Trump, calling him a demagogue and all this stuff.
And now he goes on Face the Nation, suddenly butter wouldn't melt in his mouth.
Well, I felt that just like Goldwater had felt in his time 56 years ago when he wrote the original Conscience of Conservative, that the party had lost its way.
And I think similarly today, the party has lost its way.
We've given in to nativism and protectionism.
And I think that if we're going to be a governing party in the future and a majority party, we've got to go back to traditional conservatism.
Limited government, economic freedom, individual responsibility, respect for free trade.
Those are the principles that made us who we are.
So he's looking, he's got this kind of sincere look and all this stuff.
And he goes on, Chris Matthews on MSNBC, and Matthews is saying, wait a minute, where's the Trump attacks?
So, you know, in your book, it's all Trump attacks.
Where is it?
Listen to this.
What's getting this book a lot of publicity and a lot of attention, the reason I'm fascinated with is how tough you are on Donald Trump, not this sort of generalized critique you're offering about the world conditions you're giving me here.
You have a different tone right now in this room.
You have in this book.
This book is very hard-hitting, very hard-hitting on Trump.
Demagoguy is the word you use.
Populism, protectionism.
You used all the tough words, and you don't like them.
You don't think this president's good for the country, do you?
Well, let me say.
Well, no, in this book, it says he's not doing it.
I'll talk about what I talk about in the book.
Okay, good.
I say in the book that I've agreed with him on many things.
Supreme Court Justice, great one.
Great cabinet picks.
I've worked with him on regulatory reform.
But where I think that he's profoundly unconservative is on things like free trade.
I mean, that's something that we can't abandon as Republicans.
We are decidedly less conservative if we do so.
I think it's a tough, well-written book, and I just want to keep you to it.
Where's the hate?
You want to deliver with the hate.
Here's the thing about this guy, okay, about Jeff Flake.
Brent Bezell, who is a chum and who runs the fantastic Media Research Center website that I'm quoting all the time.
And we take some of their videos.
I don't always remember to credit them, but they are terrific.
One of my favorite websites, truly, because they just go after bias in the press.
And they just, every time they catch them out lying, it's really, it's a funny website, but it's also just a really useful, useful website.
Brent Bezell's father ghost-wrote Goldwater's book.
So he ghost-wrote it.
Buzzell puts out a statement.
He says, on behalf of my late father and my family, I am denouncing Senator Jeff Flake and his new book, dishonestly titled, Conscience of a Conservative.
Since entering the Senate in 2013, Jeff Flake has time and again proven he is part of the indulgent hypocrisy in Washington.
While he waxes poetically about conservative principles, his conservative review liberty score is an abysmal 53%, also known as F. In 2013, I watched firsthand as Flake refused to sign a letter pledging to defund Obamacare among his many betrayals to conservatism.
Jeff Flake is neither a conservative nor does he have a conscience.
I mean, ouch.
And listen, you know, a 53% rating from the conservative liberty score, that stinks.
That stinks.
And he goes out there and he talks about Mike Pence, who's a genuine conservative.
I came in the same time as Mike Pence, and we thought, you know, it's so phony, but this is the thing the left loves.
They'd love to take these guys and say, oh, look, it's bipartisan.
It's bipartisan.
Everybody hates Trump.
Trump needs to do exactly one thing.
He needs to do one thing.
He needs to get rid of the rule that allows Congress not to be part of Obamacare.
People don't know this.
In Congress, you don't have to be in Obamacare.
And the reason is Chuck Grassley, a Republican, good Republican, passed an amendment to the Affordable Care Act that made it so that they did have to do it.
And Obama passed a rule.
He didn't go through.
He went to the Office of Personnel Management and they made a rule that says basically the House and the Senate are small businesses, right?
Because you have fewer than 50 full-time employees.
And it's small business.
And so that way they can get out of, they use that to get out of being on Obamacare.
I mean, people don't know this stuff.
All Trump has to do is pull that rule.
That's not a law.
It's not part of the law because Obama knew if he tried to amend the law, he'd have to give stuff to the Republicans, and he never wanted to do stuff to the Republicans.
All he has to do is put them on Obamacare, and like the next day, it'll be repealed.
I mean, they do not want to do this.
And this is, you know, this is in the Federalist Papers.
One of the Federalist papers says, you want to know when tyranny is coming.
It's when the people who make the laws don't obey the laws.
And, you know, Trump, there's also, I just want to say, just want to remind you that Trump is doing good things.
The New York Times today, I think Knowles is going to be talking about this on his show.
They had a report that Jeff Sessions may go after affirmative action.
Of course, in the New York Times, they're horrified.
Oh, my God.
You know, they're going to go after people for discriminating against white people.
But affirmative action is really bad.
It's bad for black people.
It's bad for everybody.
It takes away your dignity.
It takes away your accomplishments.
You know, because people don't think, oh, yeah, you have a medical degree, but did you get it through affirmative action?
It also puts people in colleges where they can't succeed.
I mean, even Malcolm Gladwell talks about this, that, you know, you put guys in a college where you can't succeed.
It's actually worse for them than putting them somewhere where they can excel.
So that's a good thing.
One of the top Environmental Protection Agency officials resigned because she doesn't like that the EPA is going.
And she says, this is all lies.
You know, it's lies.
Truth is, there is no war on coal.
There is no economic crisis caused by environmental protection.
Climate change is caused by man's activities.
I mean, there is a war on coal.
Hillary Clinton said they were going to, and Barack Obama said they were going to drive coal out of business.
And yeah, does mankind's activities contribute to the change of the climate?
Almost certainly.
Do we know how much?
No.
And while the press, by the way, and I'm going to get to the mailbag in a minute, but while the press is navel-gazing on all this inside Washington stuff, Venezuela is going up in flames through as the end game of socialism.
It is the end game of socialism.
And do not forget, Sean Penn, Noam Chomsky, Oliver Stone, you know, big names on the left supported this guy.
Michael Moore, a congressman, Jose Serrano from New York.
These guys really supported Hugo Chavez, and this is on them.
And it's not only that, it's leftist policy.
I mean, the thing that he was doing, that Hugo Chavez was doing, was leftist policy.
I mean, I don't want to stick it even to Obama too much.
I mean, I love to give it to Obama when I can, but he congratulated the Venezuelan people when they re-elected Hugo Chavez.
He did say a couple of times that this was not a good thing, but he also supported, you know, Obama supported socialism.
When he was praising Bernie Sanders, he said, Bernie Sanders may be going too fast, but this is basically a good thing.
And this is who the left is.
You know, there was a piece by Barry Weiss in the New York Times talking about the fact that the leader, finally in the New York Times, and this Barry Weiss used to work for the Wall Street Journal, so maybe that's why he's paying attention, finally talking about the fact that the leaders of the feminist movement, Linda Sarcer and Carmen Perez and Tamika Mallory, these people are terrible, terrible people.
Marriage Challenges00:11:00
I mean, Linda Sarcer, you know, is for Sharia law.
She's a big Sharia law supporter.
They all support this cop killer, what's her name?
Asada Shakur, who's a cop killer who's escaped into Cuba.
They support, his name has just gone out of my head, Farrakhan, the anti-Semite black Muslim leader, Farrakhan.
There it is, Farrakhan.
You know, these are terrible, terrible people on the left.
So while the press is bobbling around about who wrote Donald Trump Jr.'s note, you know, while they're talking about this and what's happening to Anthony Scaramucci, the left, they stink they are assaulting, you know, the stuff that makes the world work, that makes the world better.
They are really doing a terrible thing.
Well, Trump is actually doing good stuff.
And I really like that Roger Kimball came on and talked about that yesterday, because now you know that smart people are saying it too, not just me.
It's actual people with an education.
All right, the mailbag.
That's always just a second of dead air before we get there.
From Eric, this is a very poignant question.
Dear Mr. Clavin, is there an appropriate time to not honor your father?
I have recently moved back home with my parents now that I'm done with college and waiting to ship out to the Navy.
In my time away at school, my dad's casual drinking has turned into a nightly routine of getting so drunk he can't talk.
Despite the fact I have asked him to cut down his drinking on numerous occasions, he continues his habits to the point that he is no longer his old self.
Is there a point where he no longer deserves my respect?
Well, first of all, Eric, thank you for your service joining the Navy, and I'm really sorry this is happening.
Alcohol is obviously all these addictions.
They call them a disease.
They're not a disease.
You know, you can't give up cancer.
You know, when you have a disease, it's not the same thing.
But they are instruments of the enemy of mankind.
There's just no question about it.
When you see the end result, as I have seen too many times, too many times, because I'm a writer and an artist, and a lot of people I've known throughout my life have abused drugs and alcohol.
When you see the end result of this, you know that basically this stuff takes your soul away if you follow it down the road.
Let me answer your question about honoring your father, because this is something I know about.
I didn't get along with my dad.
He could be a toxic personality with his kids.
I always felt, certainly he was with me.
I shouldn't speak for anybody else in my family, but certainly he was a toxic influence on me.
So I do know about this.
First, theologically, I am someone who believes that Jesus takes us beyond the laws of the Old Testament.
He himself refused to see his mother and his brothers when they came to take him away because they thought he might be out of his mind since he was going around making all these claims about himself and performing miracles and the like.
When his mother and brothers and sisters came to get him, he said, My mother and my brothers and my sisters and my family are those who obey God, who are those who love God, and basically rejected them there.
So he goes beyond the law, but the law to honor your father and your mother is written on the heart as well.
I mean, that is something that is not just written on the stone of the Ten Commandments, it's also written on the heart.
Here's the thing: when you honor your father, you're not honoring the man, you're honoring his fatherhood.
You're honoring the fact, like I said, I didn't get along with my father, but my father did feed me.
He did put a roof over my head, he did create me.
And I always tried to be civil to him when I could.
I stayed away from him.
I never told him what I was going on in my life because his advice was always toxic and destructive.
When he was sick, I went and visited him.
I was at his deathbed when he died.
I did not turn my back on him and walk away forever.
But even that sometimes is necessary.
I mean, I know women who have been abused by their fathers, more than one.
And I really do feel that at that point, this guy has done such a bad thing that he has forfeited his role as father.
And to honor his creation, which is you, to honor his creation as a father, you have to walk away.
You have to walk away from him just because the thing that he did as a father is you.
And to preserve that you, you have to walk away.
So I would say in this situation where the guy is drinking too much and he won't listen, and maybe he's depressed, maybe he's got the empty nest depression or something like this.
But whatever he's doing, it's a bad thing.
You have to protect yourself first.
You are the creation of your father.
You are the prime, his prime achievement as a father.
And to honor him, you must protect yourself first and not let him destroy you.
I would not punch him out.
I would not cut him out of your life if you can, possibly keep him there.
I would honor his fatherhood to that degree, but protect yourself because you are his great, you are his great creation as a father, and to honor him, you have to honor yourself.
So that is my answer to that.
From Jacob, hello, incomparable, matchless, unequal, unsurpassed, and top shelf clavin.
That's what's on my actual desk.
My question to you is whether the denial of Peter destroys the concept of free will, for Peter was told what he would do and when and still could not change the outcome.
I've spoken about this before.
I don't believe that God sees time the same way we do.
I think he sees it all at once.
And so we who live in time and cannot live outside of time do have free will, but he sees everything that's going to happen.
I don't actually believe that Jesus, while he was on earth, I think he was living in time, but he partook of the knowledge of the fathers or knew some things that were going to happen.
But yes, Peter did have free will.
It's just that God's view of time and our view of time is different.
So you just can't compare.
You can't think in terms of God.
Dear Andrew, if the Daily Wire had a staff boxing tournament, who would win?
Jeremy, he's the boss, right?
Yeah, Jeremy.
You let the boss win.
That's an easy question.
Supreme Galactic Ruler Darth Clavinus.
I've been a Christian for pretty much my whole life, and I've been living under the assumption that 2 Corinthians 6:14 is marital advice.
That says, Don't yoke yourself to an unbeliever, I think, which it's not actually about marriage, but it's but he says, Having studied the Bible, I've only just realized that this verse was not written for the context of marriage.
Do you think it is still good advice to not marry outside the faith, or have I been wrongly limiting my marriage prospects this whole time?
Thanks, your humble servant Sawyer.
Okay, so this is not a theological question.
There is nothing that I have ever seen in what Jesus says that would prevent you that says God doesn't want you to marry outside the faith.
There is nothing that I can find that Jesus says that does that.
So it's not a theological question, it's a values question.
It is a question of, you know, you're going to be living with someone for a very long time, you're going to be producing children, you're going to want to agree about the education of the children and what the children's values are going to be.
You have to really look ahead, really think ahead, no matter how much attracted you might be to someone or how much it feels like love's sweet song.
You really have to look ahead and be practical about this at some level and say, look, you know, if this is a woman who believes in abortion, say, that's going to be a problem.
Then, when we're teaching our children right from wrong, if this is a person who is hostile toward God, if this is a person who will never ever find faith and will always mock faith and make fun of faith, that's going to be a problem when you have kids too.
If you bring your kid to church and he wants to know why, you know, mommy doesn't come and mommy is not going to be pleasant about that or kind and is going to destroy your child's chance of faith.
Those are all real serious problems.
So all I would say is marriage can be tough.
Marriage is a long haul.
It's a marathon.
And you want to be as close and connected and in sync with your partner as you possibly can.
So it's just something you want to think about.
It is one of the things you want to think about.
But there's nothing that I have ever seen in the Gospels that forbids it.
That's not a theological question.
It's a values question and a wisdom question.
So like, be careful.
Oh, somebody actually did send in a live one.
How did you learn Greek?
I learned it from a book.
And, you know, what was it?
William Mounts.
William Mounts has a workbook.
Gee, I'm so proud of myself for remembering that.
I did it assiduously.
I only don't have a lot of time, so I did it 20 minutes every day.
I still, now every day I read four lines of the Gospels in Greek and translate them, and then I do a little vocabulary memorization, so I do that every day.
Probably going to push it to five lines, but I won't push it past that because it's still very hard.
I could study more and get better, but right now I think this is as far as I want to go.
I can read the Gospels, and that's what I set out to do.
So William Mounts did it totally out of a book, and he has a website where he lets you go on, and there were all kinds of tests you could take.
And occasionally, you could look at a video.
If you pay more, you can look at his videos and he'll just do the class and you can do an online class.
That worked for me, so I was really happy.
Andrew Clavin, no grandiose title necessary.
I take issue with that, but I'll let it pass in this case.
I am currently enlisted in the Army, and I volunteered for special forces selection, which I will be attending in about a year.
If I make it through the training and become a Green Beret, I will abandon having a family and getting married for the fear of being an emotional burden on my potential wife and kids in the case of death, great injuries, psychological damage, and being away on deployments for seven months every year.
Especially so if I make a career out of it for 20 years, people around me think this is a bad idea.
What's your take on it?
Thanks.
This is from Eric.
Eric, thanks so much for volunteering to serve your country.
I hope you make it.
It's a tough road to get that Green Beret, I know.
And I have known people who do it, and it is, it's really tough on families.
Here's what I would say about this.
You are a hero.
Heroes, not everybody is a hero.
You are a hero just for trying to do this.
Even if you don't make it, I think you will.
But if you don't, you're still a hero for trying to do this.
The wives of people who do this are also heroes.
And heroes are not everyday people.
I mean, this is the thing.
In the arch kind of everybody gets a trophy culture, there's this idea that we're all heroes.
We're all special.
We're not.
I mean, if everybody's special, then nobody's special.
Special people are special.
Green berets are special people.
The wives of Green Berets are special people.
Everything you bring up here is legit.
You know, the long deployments, the possibility of injury, the possibility of psychological damage.
Your wife is going to have to be a hero.
I know Green Berets.
I know SEALs.
That's a very tough road to hoe for marriage, and you are right to be careful.
Value In Marriage00:03:19
You can't marry just any woman.
You're going to have to marry somebody who is as big a hero as you.
And that's something you're going to have to look at when you're, you know, because I know, believe me, I know you get wrapped up in attraction, you get wrapped up in love, you get wrapped up in romance, and it's easy not to think about these things as marriage.
But a long-term commitment, if you're a Green Beret, you are going to have to marry a hero.
That's my answer.
I think if you find a hero, marry her, because you'll be well suited to one another.
Dear Andrew from Francis, this is not a life-altering question, but I hope you will address it.
What is your analysis of why, while the feminism that arose in the 60s is outraged at the assumption that there might be differences between men and women, at the same time our culture has hypersexualized women?
Okay, I think I understand that question.
Both feminism did not cause the hypersexualization of women, but both feminism and the hypersexualization.
And by hypersexualization, I'm taking you to mean the fact that women are used to advertise everything from beer to cars, and basically it's like if you like how sexy this girl is, you buy the beer, that women are basically, you know, you walk around LA and you see women dressed, basically, it's like a, how do I put this exactly?
They're not dressed modestly.
They're dressed to display themselves sexually.
Have you seen the billboards for Work Group Warehouse?
Yes.
Yes, I have.
Work booths.
Yes.
I see that all the time.
It's over one of the gas stations I stop at.
I mean, it's insane.
You know, it is insane.
Both feminism and this trend derive from a materialist view of life.
One of the things that feminism has done is it has embraced the materialism of workaday culture.
In other words, it has said that your value is measured in money, your value is measured in promotion.
It used to be that a woman's value as a homemaker, as a mother, was incalculable.
You couldn't say what money went into that.
There's no way, you know, the chores that a woman does.
Somebody once said, oh, if you paid a mother, you'd be paying millions of dollars.
You probably wouldn't.
You probably wouldn't.
But it's incalculable.
How can you calculate the value of having your mom at home when you come home?
I mean, how can you calculate the value of someone who makes a home for you?
I mean, I wouldn't want to calculate the value of what my wife has done in my life and in my children's life.
You know, it's priceless.
But both feminism and this culture have embraced a materialist view of what people are.
And so that view ultimately leads to erotomania.
It ultimately means that sex and not even reproduction, just pleasure, physical pleasure, becomes the purpose of a human being.
We've been talking a lot about purpose.
There's an article I wanted to talk about today, but I can't get to it.
We've been talking a lot about this lost idea that people have purpose.
And I'll try and get to this article tomorrow because it says the universe has no purpose, and that is basically what they've been selling us.
And both of these things, feminism and hypersex, come from the same well.
You know, I will say this, though, that the transgenderism is all materialism makes no sense, and so materialism always ends up in people saying things that don't make sense.
But transgenderism is ridiculous because first they say to you, you're just a body.
Agatha Christie's Mysteries00:03:58
Then they say, well, men and women are exactly the same.
It's just a difference in body.
They can do all the same things.
And then they say, well, I'm a man, I'm a woman inside a man's body.
And you think, well, how would you know?
If men and women are exactly the same, how would you know if you're a woman inside a man's body?
It'd just be exactly the same.
You know, so are you just wearing a dress on the inside?
I mean, what does that mean?
So it makes no sense, the materialism, but it leads to both of these things.
All right, I'm going to end it there.
Is there another one that came in live?
No.
Okay.
Stuff I like.
We're going to rejigger this show.
We're going to go beyond stuff I like, but we'll do a couple more to end the week.
And I just noticed, I was at the movies watching I can't remember what, and they are remaking Murder on the Orient Express, which was a wonderful movie based on an Agatha Christie novel, a really interesting Agatha Christie mystery.
The thing about Agatha Christie is she wrote so many books that you can't possibly guess the killer in any of them because every one of them has, she used every possible trick there could be.
The only clue that's ever in her books is she didn't believe that people killed each other over love.
She only believed they killed each other over money, which isn't true, but she believed it, and that sometimes governs who the killer is.
Really interesting, really fun movie, the old film, which had Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot, and it was basically a cast of stars.
And this one has Ken Browning.
Actually, we have a little bit of the trailer.
Let's play the trailer.
I see Evian on this train.
A passenger has died, so they got him after all.
You assume he was killed?
No, no.
No.
No, not.
Well, he was in perfectly good health.
He had his enemies.
Indeed, he was murdered.
God, a murder here.
Albert Isol.
Someone was rummaging around my cabin in the middle of the night.
No one would listen to me.
If there was a murder.
What is going on?
And there was a murderer.
The murderer is with us.
And every one of you is a suspect.
And who are you?
My name is Hercule Poirot, and I'm probably the greatest detective in the world.
It's Ken Browning eating the scenery a little bit.
It's a good part for that.
Johnny Depp is in a Penelope Cruz.
I thought I saw Judy Denshin there in the trailer.
I'm not a big Agatha Christie fan.
She's a little girly and domestic for me, I got to admit, but I have read a couple of them that I just loved.
This is one of them.
Murder on the Orient Express, excellent novel.
It's a toss-up.
Do you want to see the movie and get the ending there, or do you want to read the book first?
If you haven't read this one, if you haven't read Then There Were None, sometimes called Ten Little Indians, they had to change the title because it wasn't politically correct, and they call it And Then There Were None.
Then There Were None is a classic.
Then There Were None, I have to say, is a classic piece of mystery writing that is so good.
It kind of overwhelms my problems with Agatha Christie.
She was a good writer, and she was an excellent observer of the years between the wars in England.
Then There Were None is a terrific one.
The Secret of Chimneys, which is absolutely absurd, although I did guess the ending of that one.
I was proud of myself.
I guessed the end of Secret of Chimneys, but it's really fun.
The Secret of Chimneys is really fun.
And some of these, if you ever belong to Audible, they make a really good listen.
They're actually excellent listening.
But they do make good beach reads.
Agatha Christie, Then There Were None, Murder on the Orient Express, Murder on the Orient Express, and Secret of Chimneys.
Tomorrow, we have a guest.
I think it's Christian Toto to talk about movies.
Excellent.
I love talking to Christian Toto.
That will be the final show of the week already.
That's unbelievable.
And then, who knows who's going to get fired at the Trump White House?
People just don't last long during the Clavenless weekend.