Ep. 388 – Too Much Winning frames Trump’s "culture war" victories—judicial appointments, ISIS defeats, and Alabama’s Roy Moore win—as proof his movement outmaneuvers establishment elites, while mocking Biden, Kerry, and Sanders as clueless. The host dismisses media attacks (e.g., Puerto Rico-Katrina comparisons) as desperate leftist smears, citing Peter Robinson’s praise for Trump’s deregulation despite personal flaws. Shifting to art, they defend "real" works like 1984 while condemning politicized films (Wonder Woman, Quantum of Solace) as ideological weapons, then pivot to biblical exegesis—arguing Jesus’ logic transcends literalism, rejecting Paul’s anti-homosexuality stance as flawed, and framing millennials’ shift toward homeownership as proof traditional values endure. Candace Owens teases the next episode. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, we have a really interesting show for you today.
You will not hear this anywhere else except for six months from now.
That's how it works.
We say it here first and then six months later everybody else is saying it.
For instance, yesterday the GOP failed to repeal and replace Obamacare again, and you can expect to hear a lot of people talking about Trump's legislative failures and he can't do anything, you know, can't get anything done in the Congress, even as he starts his new push for tax reform.
But if you've been listening to this show, I've been telling you that Trump is winning two of the most important conservative fights there are, and suddenly today, this week, at least, some other commentators, people who are not friendly to Trump, are catching on, which proves that the Andrew Clavin Show is where the future comes to rehearse.
Also, we have the mailbag.
Woohoo!
All your problems will be solved.
But first, many people think Donald Trump will be facing a real challenge in the next presidential election.
Trump's approval ratings are climbing, but they're still low.
And with the Republican Congress divided and incompetent and dishonest and cowardly and reneging on every promise they made for the last eight years and divided and incompetent, Trump hasn't managed to get much legislation passed.
So it's hard to see how he'll ever manage to win re-election, especially when you consider the powerhouse Democrat candidates waiting to run against him.
For instance, there's Joe Biden.
Biden, who would be 77 by the time he took office, recently told reporters, quote, you whipper snappers may not remember this, but I used to be pretty doggone important around these parts, and I'll be darned if I don't know a trick or two you youngsters haven't thought of.
Why, if I'm elected president, I'm going to appoint, what's his name, to be the, what do you call it?
And that other guy.
He's right on the tip of my tongue.
He'll do that other thing, you know, that one thing that everybody thinks is such a big deal, unquote.
Another hard-driving Dem who wants to get in the race is John Kerry.
Kerry would only be 76 when he took office and wouldn't turn 77 until the month after that.
Kerry recently told supporters, quote, if I'm elected, I'll tell everyone about that time back in 1967.
No, wait, it was 1968.
No, 67, that's right.
Oh, wait, maybe it was later, like 69 or so.
What were we talking about?
Dag Nabitt, never mind.
The whole point is that I was Secretary of State under Barack Obama when I finally brought peace to the Middle East.
Maybe that was a movie I saw once.
Or maybe I was just thinking about it back in 2012.
Or was it 2013?
It was 12.
Maybe 13, unquote.
And of course, you can't count out another run by Bernie Sanders.
The socialist Sanders would only be 79 when he took office.
Sanders recently addressed a crowd of Venezuelans who were either cheering wildly or begging for food.
And he said, quote, if I'm elected, I will put this country on track to follow the economic model of the Soviet Union, which is doing great.
Or was the last time I looked, which was on my honeymoon when me and my cutie pie tripped the light fantastic in Moscow, so everything there looked wonderful.
My socialist policies will revive the America of my youth in the sense that we'll all be driving 1950 Thunderbirds again, unquote.
So as we look ahead to 2020, all the Democrat candidates are raring to go, and each and every one of them is eager to do something, but they can't remember what it was.
Why Stamps.com Wins00:03:09
I'm sure it'll come back to them eventually.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety boom.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Shipshaw, tipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It does want to sing!
Oh, hoorah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hoorah!
All right, it's mailbag day.
Woohoo!
Yes!
Oh, you almost did it there.
You almost had that to it.
That Lindsay woo-hoo.
We had the official Lindsay here, but she said she might come back, but I don't see her.
I guess maybe she's out to breakfast.
All right, you know, it really is true.
I mean, this is something, this has annoyed my wife and children for years.
I am always right.
I am always right.
And it's so irritating.
It is.
It's so irritating that what people do is rather than admit that I'm always right, they tell me I'm wrong, they tell me I'm wrong, they tell me I'm ridiculous, and then about six months later, they just start saying what I was saying, and they don't give me the credit for it, which is fine.
It's fine.
So ultimately, you have a choice.
You can watch this show and be annoyed by the fact that I'm always right and I'm saying stuff you don't like, but it turns out to be true, or you can just watch other shows and find out the same thing six months later.
One thing I'm always right about is stamps.com, right?
Because just like anybody else, I do not want my day to suddenly come to a screeching halt, like one of those, ah, you know, do not want that to happen to suddenly have to jump in my car, drive to the post office, wait online, wait online some more, and finally get the stuff that I need.
Stamps.com brings all the services of the U.S. Postal Service and stuffs them violently into your computer so that they're right there at 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.
It automatically calculates the exact postage.
And stamps.com will even help you decide the best class of mail based on your needs.
I use stamp.com, I really do, because I just, you know, things just move too quickly, and there's still stuff you got to mail.
You got to put it in the mail.
The post office does a good job, but it's just slow.
You know, it's just far away.
It's not always open.
Lines are long.
So that's why stamps.com will solve that problem for you.
And right now, you can enjoy the stamps.com service with a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus postage and a digital scale without long-term commitments.
Go to stamps.com and click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and slowly, slowly type in Claven.
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No matter how slow you spell it, it's still quicker than going to the post office.
Stamps.com, enter Clavin, stamps.com, and you will never have to go to the post office again.
You know, here are two things.
All right.
So I'm right about stamps.com, but I've been right about Donald Trump.
Katrina and Moore's Message00:08:46
And Trump is a hard guy to get right because we haven't seen a politician like him before.
And everybody gets so swept up in his eccentricities.
And two things I told you about Trump.
One, that one of the most important things he's doing is the culture war.
He's winning the culture war, or at least he is winning it in a sense.
And I'll get to more of that later.
And people who say, oh, he's brash and he lies and he's this and that are missing the entire point.
And the other thing I've told you about Trump is you can't get too fascinated by him as a person if you want to see the political landscape clearly, right?
Because he kind of is like, you know, he just blinds you with all his stuff, all his drama and his craziness and all this stuff.
And he blinds you to what is actually going on.
And especially when you have the press, this constant noise in your ear, both on the right and the left, if you ask me, on the left, they're just dishonest and corrupt.
Because on the left, they're telling you they're giving you the news, but all they're really doing is selling Democrat propaganda.
But on the right, they think that every moment they have to win everything.
And if they're not winning everything at every moment, then they're being betrayed.
It's a betrayal.
And they don't even see, you know, there's an old joke about the Jews is the Jews are people who can't take yes for an answer.
And that's kind of what the conservatives have become like.
So let me just run through a little bit of what's going on, right?
I mean, first, the Trump administration today is proposing its new tax plan.
People are already screaming about it.
Is it raising taxes?
Is it lowering taxes?
I'm not going to talk about it today because it just came out.
And these things are very complicated.
And what Trump is proposing is not very detailed.
Like a lot of that is going to be written in Congress.
So I don't want to just go off half-cocked and talk about it beforehand.
But that's coming out.
But it was a defeat, another defeat for the GOP Congress.
John McCain, Rand Paul, and Susan Collins shot down the Graham Cassidy attempt to reform Obamacare.
And I know everybody wants Obamacare repealed, and I keep telling you it ain't going to happen that way.
But this was, I thought, a step in the right direction, moving the financing to the states, giving the states more federalist leeway, so eventually Obamacare, which is collapsing, would be allowed to collapse.
So here's Lindsey Graham announcing that this isn't going to happen, but it will happen eventually.
It's complicated.
It's difficult politics.
Instead of quitting, you allowed us to move forward.
And oh my God, how far we've come in such a short period of time.
To President Trump, thank you for engaging.
To Vice President Pence, you have moved mountains.
Governor Pence has shown us that with flexibility, governors with the right attitude can improve quality.
It's called healthy Indiana.
So the leadership team has done everything we've asked them.
We're coming back to this after taxes.
We're going to have time to explain our concept.
We'll have a better process.
And we're going to take this show on the road.
I've been up here 20 years.
I've never enjoyed anything more.
I believe this is the most important thing I can ever do for the country working with my colleagues is not to just repeal Obamacare, but to replace it with a system closer to where you live, controlled by people you can vote for.
And we're going to get there.
To my Republican colleagues, we're going to fulfill our promise to repeal and replace.
To the American people, we're going to improve health care for you, because at the end of the day, that's the only promise that matters.
Okay, so that's one thing that happened, and it feeds into this narrative.
Trump can't get anything done.
He doesn't know what he's doing.
He's not about legislation and all this.
The other thing that happened was that Roy Moore, the judge, the very, very conservative, God-fearing, pistol-waving judge, won the primary, the Republican primary, to replace Jeff Sessions as senator from Alabama.
And it was a very bizarre thing because Trump was backing Luther Strange, who was essentially Mitch McConnell's establishment candidate.
And Roy Moore is the wild man who's kind of thought to be more like Donald Trump.
Here's what you're going to hear about this.
You're going to hear one, that it's unimportant, it doesn't really mean anything, it doesn't really prove anything.
And the other thing you're going to hear about it is that, you know, it might be better for Republicans if Moore lost the general because they don't want to tarnish their brand with this wild man who opposes gay marriage and who puts the Ten Commandments on his, you know, won't take the Ten Commandments down even with a federal court order, lost judgeships twice because he wouldn't obey the feds.
Both these things are nonsense.
It is an important thing.
First of all, it's a major, major victory for Steve Bannon.
Steve Bannon was down there with Sebastian Gorka.
He was campaigning for Moore on the basis that even though Trump was backing the other guy, Strange, that Moore was the more Trumpian candidate.
Remember, Bannon said when he left the White House, I'm going to be fighting for, and Sebastian Gorka said this too.
He said, we're going to be fighting for MAGA.
We're going to be fighting for the reason Trump was elected, what people are calling Trumpism rather than Trump.
And this is a big deal because Trump is watching this stuff.
Kushner told him to back Moore.
Kushner has been wrong about virtually everything that he's told him to do.
He's been, keeps telling him to go with the middle ground, the establishment, and keeps being wrong.
But this is also a message to Congress, which is messing up.
The GOP Congress is doing nothing.
If they fail on tax reform, they've already failed on Obamacare.
They say they'll come back to it.
I actually believe them.
I do believe they'll come back to it if they don't lose the majority.
But still, this is a message to them, and it matters.
So this is a victory for the Trump movement, the Trump attitude, the Trump culture.
And that's what I'm going to talk about in a couple of minutes.
Now, meanwhile, if you're watching the left, the left is desperate.
Okay?
They had this NFL thing.
It blew up in their face.
They think, they think, oh, we're showing everybody what a racist is continuing the racist narrative.
It's all about race.
They keep selling this thing that anything about the NFL is race, race, race.
Nobody cares.
Nobody cares about that.
I mean, it's just these people disrespecting the flag.
So now they start in.
They did nothing but cover the NFL.
And suddenly they say, why isn't anybody talking about the hurricane in Puerto Rico?
It's like, because you're talking about the NFL.
That's why.
So now they're selling, you know, Hurricane Katrina.
For those of you who don't remember, who don't remember what happened, they kept doing this to Bush, too.
Everything with Bush was a scandal.
Bush would say hello, good morning.
That was a scandal.
Bush would walk down the street.
That was a scandal.
Whatever Bush did, it was a scandal, and it didn't touch him.
And then they got Katrina and they got him.
They got him.
He made a mistake.
He didn't take care of the optics and they got him.
So they're praying.
They're just praying that's going to happen with Trump because so far nothing sticks.
So listen to this montage of them selling you the idea that the hurricane in Puerto Rico is Trump's Katrina.
It's not the presidential leadership we've come to suspect.
And part of the question we've got to confront is: is Maria Donald Trump's Katrina?
Sure, Michael, what do you see?
Do you see the president focused as much as he needs to be in Puerto Rico?
No, you know, I don't.
And originally being from New Orleans, I had a lot of family members that were actually impacted by Katrina.
And under the ordinary set of circumstances, I would probably say this would be the quote-unquote Katrina moment for Donald Trump.
But unfortunately, I'm not certain there's much of anything that would push his base against him.
And we should be hearing more about that than we're hearing.
Is this Katrina?
Is this Katrina?
It could turn into Katrina or something worse with Katrina.
To spend less time on putting out tweets and more time in addressing this humanitarian crisis, because this is going to turn to be Mr. Trump's Katrina.
So dream on, CNN.
Dream on.
This is they, oh, they hope it is, they hope it is.
It ain't.
I mean, Trump defended himself.
He pointed out, quite rightly, that it's, you know, it's harder to get supplies to Puerto Rico than it is to Texas and to Florida.
The administration has been doing a good job with these hurricanes, and they will stamp it up.
And he's going to go and visit them, I think, visit Puerto Rico next week.
And I just don't think this is going to make it.
So here's the thing.
Air Filters and Independence00:13:17
Well, you know what?
Before I do that, let me talk about, you know, before I do that, let me talk about air filters.
Because I know what you're thinking.
You know, I'm having a hard time paying attention to this because I'm worried about my air filters.
I have to tell you, I don't think about air filters either.
I never think about them, okay?
We had a heat wave here this summer that went on and on and on and on.
And we had the air conditioning on constantly.
And not only was it expensive, but the filters get messed up.
And people spend a lot of their time indoors where the concentrations of pollutants are like two to five times higher than they typically are outdoors.
So if you're not changing your filters, like I said, I don't think about it, but they keep dust level down.
You know, they keep all the germs from coming in.
Not the germs.
They keep the air from the soiled air from coming in.
And if you have asthma or allergies or anything like that, filters are all important.
I don't think about it either.
But Filter Easy thinks about it for you.
That's what they do.
Filter Easy thinks about it for you, and they solve the number one problem with home air filters, which is forgetting to change them.
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And by the way, that's another thing.
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It was the terror at looking at that bill.
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If you go on filteasy.com and you don't spell it K-L-A-V-A-N, you will not get this free deal.
So enter promo code Clavin on your, or you can enter promo code Clavin on the homepage at filtereasy.com and they will send you a standard one-inch air filter for free with free shipping.
And this way you just don't have to think about it.
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So we're going to begin by, you know, truth comes in funny places.
I want to pick two guys who do not like Donald Trump.
They don't like him at all.
One guy on the left, one guy on the right.
And I'm going to start, shockingly enough, at the New York Times, a stopped clock and a former newspaper are both right every now and again, right?
So let's start by going over to the op-ed page, or as we call it, Knucklehead Row.
Okay, here is David Brooks, who hates Trump.
He calls Trump the Abby Hoffman of the right is Donald Trump.
Now, I don't know if you guys remember Abby Hoffman, 1960s.
He was what they called the yippies.
They were even beyond the hippies.
And he was the leader of the riots that took place at the 1968 Chicago Convention.
He was a radical.
So here's what David Brooks says.
It has to be admitted that Donald Trump is doing exactly what he was elected to do.
He was not elected to be a legislative president.
He never showed any real interest in policy during the campaign.
He was elected to be a cultural president.
He was elected to shred the dominant American culture and to give voice to those who felt voiceless in that culture.
He's doing that every day.
I mean, this is living proof that everything ultimately becomes the Andrew Clavin show.
You can be reading the New York Times.
They will try to resist.
They'll attack everything I say or anything, any idea that goes through my head.
Then suddenly, the New York Times is the Andrew Clavin show.
Except we've already moved on.
We're already giving you six months in the future.
David Brooks goes on.
What's troubling to me is that those who are the targets of his assaults seem to have no clue about what is going on.
That's absolutely right.
And also the people who are being helped by his assaults sometimes don't even know.
When they feel the most righteous, like this past weekend, over the NFL, they are actually losing and in the most peril.
And here he describes what's going on.
He says, after World War II, the Protestant establishment dominated the high ground of American culture and politics.
That establishment eventually failed.
It tolerated segregation and sexism, led the nation into war in Vietnam, and became stultifying.
So in the late 1960s, along came a group of provocateurs like Abby Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and the rest of the counterculture to upend the Protestant establishment.
They never attracted majority support for their antics, but they didn't have to.
All they had to do was provoke, offend the crew-cut crowd, generate outrage, and set off a cycle that ripped apart the cultural consensus.
Here's Abby Hoffman.
Here's a quick cut of Abby Hoffman at the 68 convention explaining what he's doing.
That's essentially what we're going to do: throw a lot of banana peels around Chicago and have the machine stumble.
And when it stumbles, and it gets into a policy of overkill, and it starts to devour itself.
So the cops are going to turn on themselves, or they'll at least fight other people in power.
You see, in Grand Central Station, they weren't just clubbing us longhairs.
You see, they started to take on commuters, you know, and people coming home from the opera and mayor's officials who are wandering around, and FBI agents who are there in secret, disguised as hippies.
They're all getting clubbed just like us.
Okay, so that is exactly what Donald Trump does.
He puts out banana peels and watches his enemies slip on it.
Remember, all during the primaries, he's doing it now.
All during the primaries, he would do things, and it was not that he destroyed people, it was people destroyed themselves because of what he was doing.
All right, Brooks goes on and says, The late 1960s were a time of intense cultural conflict, which left a lot of wreckage in its wake.
But eventually, a new establishment came into being, which we will call the meritocratic establishment, people like David Brooks, right?
This establishment, too, has had its failures.
It created an economy that benefits itself and leaves everybody else out.
It led America into, he's talking about the elites now, he's talking about himself.
It led America into war in Iraq and sent the working class off to fight it.
It has developed its own brand of cultural snobbery.
Its media, film, and music industries make members of the working class feel invisible and disrespected through David Brooks, through the medium of David Brooks.
People who read the New York Times are now hearing the Andrew Clayton show.
Okay, they don't know it, but they are.
So in 2016, Brooks says, members of the outraged working class elected their own Abby Hoffman as president.
Trump is not good at much, but he is wickedly good at sticking his thumb in the eye of the educated elites.
He doesn't have to build a new culture or even attract a majority.
He just has to tear down the old one.
And that's another thing I keep telling you: that we're in a place where things are falling apart.
The gravity has left the room.
All the furniture is floating around, and we don't know where it's going to come down.
But think about it for a minute.
Sure, it can get worse.
Things can get worse.
But it's so bad for Republicans.
We were in this place where the GOP was doing what they call in baseball losing comfortably.
Our democracy was slipping away.
Our independence was slipping away.
Our federalist structure was all slipping away.
And the right and the left were both sitting there.
The Republicans were putting up John McCain for president.
John McCain, they were putting up Nitt Romney.
I mean, they were not putting up the people who represented anybody, not the right, not the intellectual right, and not the base right, nothing.
And so it was just all slipping away.
It's all so easy, and destroying that culture, shaking up that culture, is a win for us.
I'm going to continue this on the other side, but I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
The mailbag is coming up.
The mailbag.
All your questions are going to be answered.
Your miserable life will be turned around, changed, maybe for the better.
It's a lousy $10 a month to get your questions in.
With that $10, you can watch the entire show at the DailyWire.com and not be cast out into the exterior darkness.
If you subscribe for a year, it's a lousy hundred bucks, and you get the leftist tears tumbler, which will continue to fill up with what I'm going to say next.
Okay.
Okay, that's on the left, right?
So now the left is doing my show on the page of the New York Times.
And then there's Peter Robinson, a pal of mine, great guy, who was a big speechwriter for Donald Trump.
He wrote, or he claims that with Reagan he wrote the tear down that wall speech.
He now runs the terrific website Ricochet, my friends over there.
And he's at the Hoover Institute and does one of the greatest interview shows ever, which is called Uncommon Knowledge, Peter Robinson.
So he writes a piece called Trump Through a Pinhole.
And this is the other thing I've been saying for months and months, which is that Trump himself is a distraction from the reality of the Trump administration.
Peter says this, During the recent eclipse, NASA urged us all to protect our eyes by turning our backs on the sun itself, observing the eclipse only through pinhole cameras.
A similar technique proves remarkably useful in observing the Trump administration.
If you ignore the strangely dazzling figure of the president himself, examining him instead, the second-order effects he's producing, you'll find that a certain reassuring clarity emerges.
To wit, Congress may have thwarted the administration's effort to replace Obamacare, but wherever the administration has been able to take action on its own, it has done just that, demonstrating not incompetence, but considerable effectiveness.
And again, Peter is not a Trump fan.
He says at the end of this, let me see if I can find it, he says Donald Trump is impulsive, vain, profane, shallow, loudmouthed, inconsistent, and overbearing.
But he then goes on to list all the things I've been listing all this time.
He appointed Neil Gorsuch, but not just Neil Gorsuch, to the Supreme Court, more than 30 other excellent originalist judges to federal courts.
He took away half of ISIS's territory in the Middle East, changing the strategy there.
He's been enforcing immigration laws so that illegal entries are down by some 70 percent.
He's cutting back business-killing EPA overregulation, cutting back oppressive sexual harassment rules at universities, right, when he rescinded that Dear Colleague letter, eliminating two federal regulations for every new one passed, approving important energy pipelines, pulling out of a useless climate accord, and exposing our corrupt all-Democrat-all-the-time news media as a corrupt all-Democrat-all-the-time news media.
I added that one at the end.
The rest is Peter Robinson.
And now, yesterday, too, Jeff Sessions came out in support of free speech, and if we have time after the mailbag, we'll talk about that, too.
I'm telling you, there's going to be all kinds of stuff that makes conservatives like me upset, because Trump is not a conservative in his legislative heart.
There's going to be all kinds of things, but there are all kinds of reasons to celebrate, and the right, some of the people on the right are acting like people who cannot take yes for an answer.
After all this, I think I'm going to have to give a quick Trump happiness montage.
We're going to win so much.
We're going to win at every level.
Economically, we're going to win with the economy.
We're going to win with military.
We're going to win with health care and for our veterans.
We're going to win with every single facet.
Zip-a-dee-doo-dah.
Zip-a-dee-ay.
My, oh, my.
What a wonderful day.
We're going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning.
Yay!
You say, please, please, it's too much winning.
We can't take it anymore.
I feel pretty.
Oh, so pretty.
I feel pretty and witty and gay.
We have to keep winning.
We have to win more.
We're going to win more.
Still makes me laugh, that thing.
We'll have to make a new one.
Again, I've been attacked as an anti-Trumper.
I've been attacked as a pro-Trumper.
I'm just trying to take a realistic assessment of where we are in the midst of all that noise.
Anyways, you can listen to it now, or you can listen to it six months later someplace else.
This is why my wife is so annoyed.
This is why my wife is so annoyed with me.
But it is true.
You can listen to it here, or you can listen to it elsewhere six months later.
The mailbag.
Oh, yeah!
Well, we don't have the real Lindsay, but it'll just have to do.
From Nicholas.
Hey, Andrew, I love your show and your baldness.
Who could not love my baldness?
I mean, come on.
Only Jess.
It makes Jess work very hard.
Jess powder a lot of stuff.
Why Jesus Matters00:13:23
My question is, why won't Hillary leave the political stage?
She can't.
She can't, because when she leaves the political stage, it's over.
When she leaves the political stage, there's nothing left but the mirror and who she is.
Instead, she can go around, and people are still praising her and trying to rehabilitate her.
You should have seen Charlie Rose talking to her the other day, just reading her good reviews into her face, you know?
It's just like, you know, so she can't, because then the dream is over.
The dream that she's important, the dream that she is the president who never was, it's all over.
This is who she is.
She doesn't have a personal life.
I mean, her husband is not really her husband, you know?
I mean, it's like a fake marriage.
So, you know, she can't do it.
And also, as long as she's saying, making excuses, there's some chance that her excuses are true.
If she stops, then she just has to accept that she lost because she was a bad candidate.
From Jackson, at what point should conservatives stop supporting good art that they disagree with?
Can art that disagrees with the conservative movement in every way still be considered good art, or is there a limit to how good art can be if it is not conservative?
Well, first of all, we should never stop supporting good art.
We should never stop supporting good art for political reasons.
That is not, like yesterday when I was talking to Christian Toto of Hollywood and Toto, when I was talking to him about whether to boycott certain things, we weren't really talking about works of art.
We were talking about all the ancillary infrastructure that comes with works of art.
We don't have to watch the Emmys if it's just going to be one spoiled brat of a multimillionaire after another telling us we're stupid and our president is a bad guy.
We don't have to watch that show.
We don't have to watch football games where they diss our flag.
We don't have to watch award shows.
We don't have to watch, you know, movies that are not actually works of art that are hijacked by the left.
You know, right now they're saying, for instance, that Wonder Woman should be bisexual in the next movie.
You know, if you don't approve of that, you don't have to go see Wonder Woman.
That's not a work of art.
You know, it's just a movie.
It's like it's an entertainment.
You know, you don't have to see that.
But the thing about works of art is that they rise above politics like religion.
You can do a work of art that intends to be left wing or right wing, but it will rise above that.
I always give the example of 1984.
It is an anti-communist work of art.
But communists have sometimes used it against right wingers because Big Brother is a symbol of oppression on both the right and the left.
Anybody can be oppressive.
Right wingers, left wingers can be oppressive.
And Big Brother is a good symbol.
So good art always informs you, just like good religion always informs your conservatism.
You know, the left is not without its points.
The left is good at pointing out places where people have been left out, where things have been done wrong.
It's always their solutions I disagree with.
You know, their solution is always what, as Newt Gingrich said, they wake up in the morning, they know the answer is more government.
They just don't know what the question is.
And I think that's the problem.
But it's not, you know, it's certainly true that minorities have suffered in this country.
It's certainly true that, you know, women have new roles that they want to play.
And there's, you know, difficulty in doing that and all kinds of things that they face.
You know, art, real art, it just brings people to life.
It just brings life to life.
And I don't think we should ever boycott it for political reasons.
I do think we should watch for what John Nolte calls the sucker punch, when a movie like James Bond has no reason to make a political statement.
And suddenly they have James Bond, like in The Quantum of Solace, praising socialism.
And you think, really, this is the guy who single-handedly brought down the Soviet Union, and now he's praising socialism?
I mean, that is just fake, and we should point it out all the time.
All right.
From Patrick, Almighty Klavan, KLVN, I was curious about your thoughts as they relate to biblical exegesis.
You've made your view on the Gospels clear, but it seems to me that Paul and plenty of the church fathers and Christian thinkers who followed him touched on subjects that Jesus never spoke about.
Absolutely.
My take on the Bible is this.
You know, I take my faith very seriously.
I believe, after long thought, I believe that Jesus Christ was the incarnation of the logos, the logic of God, the word of God, the third person in the Trinity.
I believe that he performed miracles that showed that reality is not what it sometimes appears to be.
I believe that he triumphed over death by being resurrected from the grave.
My reasons for believing this are several.
One is, if you read, as I'm a very well-read person, I know about storytelling, I know what story, I can recognize different kinds of stories.
If you read the Gospels, what you see are people telling what they saw, witnessed, or heard about.
And I think, and I believe them, they're people of probity, they're not, you know, con men, they were preaching this stuff in a situation where they could be killed for preaching it.
Many of them were killed.
Many people died because they saw this happen and they believed what they saw with their own eyes, and that is one reason to believe it.
The other reason I believe it is, as C.S. Lewis said, he not only sees, what did he say, he not only sees the truth of it, but he sees, it's like the sun.
He sees everything else by the light of it.
But Christianity is the only religion that makes perfect sense of my lived experience, my experience that things are good and bad, good and evil morally, my experience that I am an I, a person, and not an illusion thrown up by my brain, my experience that death is somehow unnatural to the human condition.
That is not what we were intended for, is not what the godly part of us was intended for, and that's why I believe it.
The argument against Christianity, because we have more documented proof of Christianity than we do of Hannibal, you know, than we do of, like, Julius Caesar.
We have more documents about Christ from the time than we do of a lot of other, Alexander the Great, for instance.
The only reason not to believe it, the reason to believe it is stuff like that don't happen.
That's the reason not to believe it, okay?
And my argument with, I agree, stuff like that don't happen.
If it did happen, it wouldn't be a religion.
I would just say, ah, it was just another guy walking through town.
All right.
I believe in the miraculous.
I've experienced the miraculous.
I don't believe in magic.
I don't believe that people suddenly were able to write down words, every one of which was absolutely true.
I believe that they were describing things, but I believe, like every other author, they got things wrong, they made mistakes, some of the evidence.
Mostly in the Gospels, they're parallel stories, but there are some contradictions.
That doesn't bother me.
People make mistakes, especially when things are getting, you know, panicky and desperate.
They see things differently.
They see things from different angles.
So I don't believe the Bible is a magical book.
I do believe it is the book that God means us to have about himself.
So when I look at the aftermath of the Gospels, and I look at Paul, and I look at the letters of Paul, and all this, I believe it is inspired.
I believe God means us to have it.
But I don't necessarily believe that every single word they say is literally true.
I think there are places where people are wrong.
I think it, I'm probably wrong about this because I'm talking completely off the top of my head, but I think it's in Timothy's, right, something like you shouldn't associate with non-Christians.
Well, I don't think Jesus would have approved of that.
I think Jesus wanted you to walk into the lion's den of non-Christianity and speak the truth.
I think that's what he wanted.
That's what he did.
I think it's what he wanted you to do.
There's a major, major clash between James, the brother of Jesus, and Paul.
If you read Galatians, and then you read the book of James, I mean, Martin Luther, the great Protestant reformer, believed James should be taken out of the Bible.
He thought it was such a bad gospel.
Paul believed you are saved simply by having faith and not by works.
James said famously, faith without works is dead.
Well, you know, can those both be true?
Yes, I believe those can both be true, but neither one of those people was in possession of the full truth at the time.
God is like an umbrella that covers them both.
Why do I think they're both true?
I think that it's true that Jesus replaces the law, and you are saved by your faith in him, but faith in him looks like something.
Faith in gravity looks like not walking off a cliff, right?
There are things I don't do because I believe in gravity, things I do do because I believe in gravity.
I put my leftist tears tumbler on the desk, and I don't expect it to fly up in the air because I believe.
There are things, and when James says, what good is it if a person comes to you and he's hungry, and you say, yes, I believe in feeding the poor, but you don't give them any bread.
You know, that's James' argument, so I believe that the post-gospel writings have to be read as a history, as ideas that are developing, and I don't always believe that every single word they say exists through all time.
So, for instance, Paul will unleash a group of things that he finds sinful, and I think, well, maybe, you know, that's just his perspective.
You know, I can understand not everything that we think is sinful in our time is sinful.
I mean, after all, people used to marry many women.
You know, was that sinful then?
It doesn't say anywhere in the Bible that it's sinful to marry many women.
I mean, you know, the people in the Bible knew that that was going to happen.
People get angry at me when I say this, but you cannot send me a quote from the Bible that demands that marriage is between a man, one man, and one woman.
You have to interpret that.
You can interpret it out of the Bible, but you can't find me a quote that says that.
There's only one quote in the New Testament that says a bishop of the church should only have one wife, and that's it.
You know, so I'm just saying, you know, that standards change.
Not everything that everybody says is for all time.
And so, Paul, again, Paul says in Christ there are no men and women.
But then later on, Paul, or some scholars think a pseudo-Paul, a guy writing under the name of Paul, has all these rules for women that he doesn't have for men.
You know, I think that we can look at the Bible as the book God wants us to have without looking for a foolish consistency.
So I hope that answers the question.
I'd be willing to talk about it more.
What everybody gets angry at me about, I live a conservative life.
I've been married to the same woman faithfully and devotedly for, I think it's now 172 years, I think, actually.
It was weird because she's still, like, 32.
I don't know how that happened, but I've grown old.
But, you know, I live that conservative life.
But what people get angry about with me is that I will not condemn people who live other lives because it says, Jesus said, don't do that.
Do not judge what I took him to mean when he said, judge not.
I took him to mean don't judge where another person stands in relationship to God.
And when I hear a lot of conservative churches thundering, for instance, about homosexuality from the pulpit, I wonder how many people in that congregation are gay.
Probably not that many, probably none.
And so why are they talking about other people's sins when Jesus said, take the plank out of your own eye before you remove the remote, the mote from someone else's eye?
And I believe he was being sarcastic because I don't believe you ever get that plank out of your own eye.
So people get angry at me because I won't condemn other people or judge other people in relationship to God.
But I do believe that that's what the Gospels demand.
All right.
And again, I'm happy to talk about this more, write in more questions.
From Seth, Mr. This will be the last one.
Mr. Sir Cleven.
I like that.
How has truth seemingly become subjective versus objective to some people?
What can we do to fight this kind of belief?
OK, this is you're talking about moral relativism.
You know, there is a fascinating, there's a magazine called Philosophy Now, which is, I believe, a dead tree magazine, but you can get it online.
In it, this issue, there is an article by a fellow named Spencer Cleven.
I don't know.
He has the same last name.
I know.
He has the same last name as me.
He had no relation, or at least he says there's no relation.
I claim he's my son.
But Spencer wrote a piece about relativism and about Socrates fighting relativism.
Like, in other words, what he says is that people who are relativists think they're being all newfangled, but in fact, it's been around forever.
And his argument is that relativism is the norm in human thought.
It is people like Socrates and Jesus who come along and say, no, there is such a thing as objective moral truth.
And Jesus said, I am the truth.
And I always say that Socrates and Jesus are the twin telamons of Western civilization.
A telamon, you've probably seen them, are guys who hold up statues that hold up buildings, but they look like men, right?
So they're the twin pillars, Socrates and Jesus, of our society.
And that is the reason why, is because they believed in truth.
The idea of relativism is the norm in human thinking.
Okay, when Jesus said, I am the truth, you know, I speak the truth, Pontius Pilate said, what is truth?
That was, he was a sophisticated Roman guy.
That's what the Romans were thinking.
Sophisticated people always think that they, that truth is relative.
It's not.
There is a moral truth.
It's hard to know.
We approach it by half steps, but it's there.
Ultimately, the thing is, their ideas collapse, and their ideas are self-contradictory.
Because you'll hear them say, you know, there's no, all cultures are the same, so it's wrong, you know, to condemn other cultures.
Well, if truth is relative, why is it wrong?
Why can't it just be my culture that condemns your culture?
You know, why is it wrong that people held slaves in the South?
That was Southern culture.
And, of course, they have no answer because morality is not actually relative.
So, what I would say is hold your ground, speak your, speak the truth, and ultimately, their ideas collapse.
Millennials And Moral Truth00:04:58
They always have in the past.
They will in the future.
All right.
Good mailbag.
I wish I could go on some, but I think my time is running up.
Tickety-boo news.
I just, I just wanted to do a whole show of 45 minutes of just, like, things running past.
All right.
Here's just a, I'll do this quickly.
Just a point I want to make about people speaking about young people, okay?
There's a new NBC poll on President Donald Trump in there.
Oh, they're so excited about it because it shows that Trump's approval rating amongst millennials is terrible, okay?
Overall, Trump has a 64 percent disapproval rating among millennials and 21 percent approval amongst all, 21 percent approval amongst all millennials.
And, of course, it's even worse with African Americans and Asian Americans and Latinos.
But let me just give you another fact that has come out recently about millennials, all right?
Millennials, millennials kind of came of age in the, during the financial crisis.
And a lot of them were the people we were laughing about who went home to live with their moms or went home and lived in the basements and all this stuff.
Now, things are picking up under Trump and they're coming out and they have to get, and they want to get jobs and they want to get married and they want to have lives, right?
Millennials, this is from Bloomberg, millennials are finally starting their own baby boom and heading for the suburbs in big sport utility vehicles, much like their parents did.
Americans aged about 18 to 34 have become the largest group of homebuyers and almost half live in the suburbs, according to Zillow Group data.
As they shop for bigger homes to accommodate growing families, they're upsizing their vehicles to match.
U.S. industry sales of large SUVs have jumped 11 percent in the first half of the year.
Ford Motor Company estimates are compared with increases of 9 percent for midsize and 4 percent of small SUVs.
All right.
My point is this.
We played Abby Hoffman later on.
And Abby Hoffman got a law degree.
And I remember personally, I remember him being interviewed and somebody said to him, you know, you told everybody to drop out, to get stoned and drop out.
But then you went and got a law degree.
And and Hoffman said, don't hock me, which is Yiddish.
Don't leave me alone.
Don't bother me.
Don't bother me.
And of course, things ended badly for for Hoffman.
He ended up hunted by the FBI, went underground, died on the road.
As I again, speaking from memory, but that's what I remember how he ended.
But my point is this.
The generation of Wall Street, remember Wall Street with Michael Douglas, where everybody was, you know, dishonest and rising and making millions of dollars.
The generation of the bonfire of the vanities is the same generation as the generation of radicals.
Same people.
Not always the same people, but some of the same people.
In other words, people don't stay the same as they were when they were kids.
Ignorance and youth are synonyms.
You know, when you're young, you're ignorant.
You have to be.
You can't.
Nobody knows anything when they're young.
You know, you what you know is you have this vitality and you have this life and you sort of have a sense of what's right and what's wrong.
Maybe your parents taught you some stuff.
Maybe your teachers taught you some stuff.
But you but you haven't lived.
You just haven't lived.
But as you live, you begin to realize that certain things have value, things that your parents thought had value, you thought had no value.
Oh, they were right.
You know, Mark Twain said that I thought my father was a dumb guy when I was young.
Then I grew up.
My father became a lot smarter.
You know, I think that this is what happens.
So all this stuff about where millennials are going and where and it's true about races, too.
All this stuff about the demographics are going to destroy the Democrat Party.
You know, they're not going to be majority white.
You're not going to be majority Christian is going to destroy the Republican Party.
The Republican Party is going to be destroyed because people are going to be Latino and people are going to be black.
The truth has a way of catching up to people.
Life has a way of catching up to people.
People do not want to live the life that leftism offers.
They do not want to live that life.
They want to live a life of prosperity, of independence, of responsibility.
And we can't we could lose the country.
Countries die.
But you shouldn't like take these polls.
My only point about this is when you hear these polls, you should remember that time in this sense is on your side.
Time creates wisdom in people.
And when you hear what young people are talking about, what they're thinking about, what they're doing, you know, wait four years.
Wait five years.
See what happens.
Tomorrow we have the beautiful Candace Owens in the studio.
Right.
Funnily enough, I always invite the really beautiful guests to come into the studio.
Everybody else can be on Skype.
Skype, Candace Owens is doing those great YouTube videos called Red Pill Black, The Myth of the Coon.
And she is just she was really talented.
And I have to say, for a codger who kind of was among the first people to do these kind of YouTube commentaries for the right, it's great to see people that lovely, that talented, that smart coming up.