Andrew Klavan dismisses emotional gun control appeals like Jimmy Kimmel’s, framing them as hypocritical while defending the Second Amendment as non-negotiable natural law—mocking statistical arguments and praising Stephen Paddock’s financial success despite his Las Vegas massacre. He ties armed resistance to biblical history, contrasting it with state overreach like Catalonia’s crackdowns, then pivots to faith-based politics, arguing shared moral premises (e.g., natural law) are essential for debate. In the mailbag, he rejects secularism’s separation of religion and morality, citing Jesus’ distinction between Caesar and God while warning against deterministic free-will denial. The episode culminates in a defense of NFL anthem protests as misguided patriotism, teasing a critique of campus rape narratives next. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello, I'm Andrew Clavin, and I'm here in Hollywood.
And I have a serious face today.
And when I have a serious face, it's very serious because I'm in Hollywood.
Usually I say funny things with a funny face, and then we all laugh, but today I'm serious.
And that means you have to take me seriously.
Sometimes I may even have emotions, and then it's very serious because my emotions aren't ordinary emotions, they're Hollywood emotions.
And Hollywood emotions make me an expert on things.
When I have Hollywood emotions, I become an expert on healthcare and gun control and anything else I want to talk about with my emotions.
And you have to take me seriously because I'm in Hollywood, and I have a serious face and emotions.
Now, some of you may say, wait, why do we have to take you seriously just because you have a serious face and emotions?
Shouldn't we calm down and get past our emotions so we can think clearly and make good decisions?
But I say no.
And when I say no, it's not an ordinary no.
It's a no from Hollywood.
So it's important.
I say if you care, now is the time to make decisions while you're emotional.
Because if you calm down, then you might think and gather facts.
And if you think and gather facts, you might stop taking me seriously.
And you have to take me seriously because I'm in Hollywood and I have a serious face.
There are others among you who probably say, well, we have a Constitution and we should probably follow the law set down in our Constitution.
But is the Constitution from Hollywood?
Does the Constitution have a serious Hollywood face with emotions?
How can we show we care if we're always obeying the Constitution instead of thinking about my emotions here in Hollywood?
So today, no matter what happens, remember three things.
I have a serious face, I have emotions, and I'm in Hollywood.
So what I say is important, even though it's complete crap.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
See, I can be Jimmy Kimmel.
And he's getting 10 million bucks for that, for doing that.
Mailbag Day: Blue Apron Deals00:02:15
It's the mailbag day.
That's more importantly, it is the mailbag day.
You know, and here's what we're going to talk about guns.
You know, I've been putting it off when this terrible thing happened in Vegas to begin with.
I said I didn't want to politicize it.
I wanted to find out what the police are doing.
Yesterday I talked about what the left was doing.
Today, they want to talk about guns.
Let's talk about guns.
I'm going to read you one of the best pieces that were written.
I think the best piece that was written yesterday about this.
But before we talk about that, oh, also, well, I mentioned the mailbag, and we have tickety boo news.
But first, we have to talk about Blue Apron, because Blue Apron are the people that I go to when I want to get a really restaurant-level meal that is cooked at home.
Now, I could pretend that I cook it at home, but what I do is I sit and drink a glass of wine and watch my wife cook it at home.
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So you know they know what they're doing, and what they do is they deliver the ingredients to you, all measured out so you have exactly what you need.
They give you this big card, which has very bright, clear-to-read, easy-to-read directions.
And the stuff they're sending you, it's just not the kind of thing you're normally going to cook.
Upcoming meals include cheesy chicken and black bean enchiladas with salsa verde.
Now, you know, you guys make this at your home every day, but we don't.
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Shrimp marinara with spaghetti, spinach, and parsley.
Maple gravy-smothered pork chops.
Ooh, that one sounds good.
Maple gravy-smothered pork chops with stewed collard greens and sweet potatoes.
Love collared greens.
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These things cost, I know that sounds like in a restaurant, that's the kind of meal that would cost you like 30 bucks, but this is 10 bucks per person per meal.
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Endowed With Rights00:15:44
So don't wait.
That's blueapron.com slash Andrew for 30 bucks off your first meal with free shipping.
BlueApron.com slash Andrew is a better way to cook.
And you know, I joke about the fact that my wife won't let me cook because I'd only hurt myself.
I mean, it really is true.
It really is true.
The times I've tried to cook, I've wound up with my hands entirely in bandages, like the invisible man or something like that.
But it's nice to be together.
You know, it's nice to sit around and cook and chat and all that stuff.
So, all right.
I want to read you what I just thought was the best piece, the best response to all this stuff.
I give you the latest on the shooting.
The killer, Stephen Paddock's girlfriend, Marilou Danley, arrived here in LA last night.
She was in the Philippines.
The police say she's a person of interest.
They're interviewing her as we speak, trying to find out the motive for this guy.
I cannot find out the motive for this guy, but she went to the Philippines before she went to the Philippines.
He wired $100,000 to the Philippines.
So we don't know what that's about.
I mean, I just, you know, it's funny.
I turned on the TV to see what the updates were.
It's just people speculating.
Really, it's kind of awful.
I guess they have to fill the airtime, but we just don't know.
We don't know.
The sheriff, somebody made some remark about maybe he was radicalized and on InfoWars or something, they're playing that out to say he was killing conservatives.
But there's also a story that he was planning attacks on other kinds, not just country music concerts, but other kinds of concerts.
Multiple witnesses do say he was unkind to his girlfriend, that he treated her brusquely and badly, and people witnessed this.
His brother, Eric Paddock, I shouldn't laugh, but he's just slowly falling apart.
He keeps giving these interviews, and each interview gets more and more emotional.
They've got a third brother who apparently, like their father, was also also had a criminal history.
So maybe Eric Paddock is like the one guy, maybe he's the white sheep of the family or something, and he's just trying to deal with this.
Here's a cut of him talking, cut number six, of him talking about the fact that this guy was a gambler, but he was a successful gambler.
And the records show he was paid up at these casinos.
He was not in debt, as an earlier report said.
Steve was a highly intelligent, highly successful person.
He could have done anything he wanted to do.
And he did.
He made himself wealthy.
He made us wealthy.
He was a very successful person.
He gambled for 20 plus years successfully.
It's like a job to him.
He did it mathematically.
He did it because it was a way to have a fun life and he didn't go poor doing it.
So he goes on and talks about his terrible feelings that maybe he could have done something differently.
Maybe if the guy had called him, he could have talked him out of it.
But all that is just the emotional side of this.
And there's been a lot of emotions.
Jimmy Kimmel, I don't want to constantly talk about Jimmy Kimmel, but he really has become, CNN said, how did Jimmy Kimmel become our conscience?
It's like CNN, Jimmy Kimmel is your conscience, you know?
I mean, if your conscience is Jimmy Kimmel, like mine's Jerry Lewis, okay?
It's like my conscience is just making funny faces and funny voices.
But, you know, Jimmy Kimmel has really sunk.
He's really become kind of weasely at this point.
You know, he has that thing that the left has where they think the First Amendment not only protects their freedom of speech, which it does.
I don't want Jimmy Kimmel to have to shut up or anything like that.
But they think it also protects them from criticism and the consequences of the things they say.
So people are picking on him.
And Kimmel's response is to accuse all of us who disagree with him of essentially being accessories before the fact.
Here's Kimmel with his usual emotionalism.
You know, they say Kimmel is getting his talking points from Chuck Schumer.
I guess they're right.
That sounds just like him.
All right, but here's what Kimmel really said.
I'm not going to get deep into it again tonight.
I said what I had to say last night, but I do want to say something to these nuts who spent most of the day today on television online attacking those of us who think we need to do something about the fact that 59 innocent people were killed.
They say it's inappropriate to be talking about it because it's too soon.
Well, maybe it's too soon for you because deep down inside, you know, in your heart, you know you bear some responsibility for the fact that almost anyone can get any weapon they want.
Now you want to cover yourself until the storm of outrage passes.
You can go back to your dirty business as usual.
But it's not too soon for us because we're Americans.
And last time I checked, the First Amendment is at least as important as the Second Amendment.
Oh, yeah.
Well, so we're going back to our dirty business here.
Go back to our dirty business defending the Second Amendment and disagreeing with Jimmy Kimmel.
I mean, that's what he's complaining about.
Nobody said, you know, shut Jimmy Kimmel down.
Nobody said, you know, he can't have his stupid show where he abuses the publicly owned airways instead of delivering the comedy that he's being paid for.
He delivers this kind of garbage where he now has just told all the people in this country who believe in the Second Amendment that they are, you know, complicit in the slaughter in Vegas.
Just to have one more voice in there, Steve Scalise, again, the congressman who was shot and nearly killed by the Bernie Bro shooter at the softball game in D.C., he says this has fortified his pro-Second Amendment opinions.
First of all, you've got to recognize that, you know, when there is a, when there's a tragedy like this, the first thing we should be thinking about is praying for the people who were injured and doing whatever we can to help them, to help law enforcement.
We shouldn't first be thinking of promoting our political agenda.
And I think we see too much of that where people say, okay, now you have to have gun control.
Well, first of all, look at some of those bills.
Those bills wouldn't have done anything to stop this.
I mean, the gunmen actually cleared background checks.
So to promote some kind of gun control, I think, is the wrong way to approach this.
And frankly, what I experienced was when there was a shooter, we had, luckily, we had Capitol Police there with their own guns.
Every single day in America, regular citizens that just have a passionate belief in the Second Amendment, that have their own guns, use guns every single day to protect themselves against criminals.
And those stories never get told or hardly ever get told.
But that's a different side of the story that I think is important, that people use guns way more to defend themselves from criminals than criminals using guns to hurt people.
You know, to bring Scalise's point home, Kimmel says that he's gotten all this blowback from Trump supporters, so he's had to increase security.
Now, I think we all know that those security guys are carrying guns, right?
I used to live, I really do live in Hollywood.
My next-door neighbor used to be one of the biggest stars out here.
And I won't expose who he was because I think just because you happen to live next to me doesn't give me the right.
Your home should be like a castle.
I don't want to dox the guy.
So it doesn't matter who it was, but it was a very liberal, big star, very nice in all our dealings with him, but a very avid anti-gun campaigner.
Every single day, every single day, men with guns came into that house to protect that house and to protect that person who was a major, major celebrity.
The gunmen even called up my wife and told her that they would be watching our house as well because their house is obviously because much bigger star.
They had this huge mansion kind of looking down on us.
But they said, you know, if there's any trouble there, we'll be happy to come over.
I thought that was great.
I thought that was really good.
But, you know, the point is, I can't afford to have bodyguards.
I get threatened.
I get people who wish I was dead and all that stuff.
And ordinary people, obviously, the people in Vegas, they're not movie stars.
We can't all afford the security that Jimmy Kimmel has.
We carry guns for protection.
We hold guns for protection.
It's the same thing, you know.
And maybe it's just that we like guns.
Maybe some people just have guns because they like them, but most people are trying to be safer.
So there's a lot, a lot of hypocrisy and all that crying and all that blaming people and all that cursing people out and calling them nuts and saying that they are part of this dirty business and somehow complicit in this massacre.
It's a weasel thing to do.
It is a really nasty, low, despicable thing to do.
So let me read you what I just thought was an unbelievably great piece from Charles Cook.
Charlie Cook is, what I like about Charlie Cook is he's British-born.
I don't know if he's become an American citizen, but he knows more.
I've been on cruises with him and panels with him, and he just knows a lot about the First Amendment and all this stuff.
But he wrote a piece yesterday called The Right to Bear Arms Isn't Up for Debate.
Okay?
And let me just read, I want to read as much of this piece as I can, and I'll interrupt myself to talk about some other things.
But he begins by saying, when debating the wisdom of the Constitution's Second Amendment, the media tends to start from the presumption that the question is purely scientific and that the answers can and should be derived from statistical analyses and relentless experimentation.
And let me stop right there because there was another article out yesterday from a statistician who said, after researching gun violence, I no longer believe in gun control.
This is a woman named Leia Labresco, who is a liberal, formerly of Nate Silver's 538 site where they gather all the information, a lot of the electoral statistics.
She crunched the numbers in a study of all 33,000 gun homicides in the United States annually.
She went in thinking that the usual liberal menu of anti-gun policies would reduce that number dramatically.
She came out concluding that the only selling point of anti-gun policies is that gun owners hate them.
You know how we on the right with Trump are being accused of only doing things to make liberals cry?
She says this is the only reason to do this.
Here's what she said.
I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn't prove much about what America's policy should be.
Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun-related crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans.
Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress.
And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths.
When I looked at the other off-praised policies, I found that no gun owner walks into the store to buy an assault weapon.
Finally, someone on the left figures this out.
It's an invented classification that includes any semi-automatic that has two or more features, such as a bayonet mount, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher mount, a folding stock, or a pistol grip.
But guns are modular, and any hobbyist can easily add these features at home, just as if they were snapping together Legos.
That's one of the things that this guy did.
He had, what do they call bump stocks?
And you don't even need a bump stock to turn a semi-automatic into an automatic.
It's really a question of handling the recoil.
So she goes on to say: as my co-workers and I kept looking at the data, it seemed less and less clear that one broad gun control restriction could make a big difference.
Two-thirds of gun deaths in the United States every year are suicides.
This is what happens when a liberal looks at facts.
Suddenly, they become us.
What is a conservative?
A conservative is a liberal who looks at facts.
All right, let me get back to this Charlie Cook piece because I think it's just excellent.
The Second Amendment is not up for debate.
He says the statistical approach is mistaken.
The right of the people to keep and bear arms is not the product of the latest research fads or exquisitely tortured data journalism, but a natural extension of the Lockean principles on which this country was founded.
It must be protected as such.
The Declaration of Independence presumes that all men enjoy certain inalienable rights, and among them are life and liberty.
Practically speaking, at both the state level as a bulwark against tyranny and at the individual level as a means by which to protect oneself, this necessitates the auxiliary right to the private ownership of arms, which in the common law that preceded the Second Amendment was understood to include personal weapons.
In other words, because of the theories and the ideas that were built up over centuries that ended with the Lockean point of view about natural law, we have a right, a God-given right.
Remember, these rights were endowed by our Creator to life and liberty.
And part of those rights, to defend your liberty and to defend your life, you need to be able to be armed, okay?
And I'm going to pause here again.
Here is a brief clip of Chuck Todd saying what everybody on the left is saying is: we need to act now because we're emotional, and now is the time to act on our emotions.
So here's Chuck Todd saying this.
I'll tell you why I play it in just a sec.
This is exactly the time to start talking about any issue, gun violence included.
If we wait until cooler heads prevail on any of these, we never talk about it.
And in fact, if we applied the same logic to every other debate and every other crisis that this country faces that we do to the gun debate, we never would have focused on any of those issues either.
We can't wait till cooler heads prevail.
If cooler heads prevail, we'll look at facts and numbers.
Now, the reason I wanted to play this is because I also wanted to play something I've been meaning to play since last week.
Remember the guy in Alabama, Roy Moore, who is a very religious, very openly religious guy, is always talking about God when he gives speeches, quoting the Bible when he gives speeches.
He talked about how our rights come from God, and that is what it says in the Declaration of Independence.
We are endowed by our Creator, our Creator.
This is going to surprise you, but our Creator is actually not Barack Obama, our creator, is God.
He endowed us with these rights.
He made us, they are self-evident rights, among them life and liberty.
Here is Chuck Todd reacting, the same Chuck Todd who just told you not to wait till cooler heads prevail, reacting to Roy Moore's winning the primary in Alabama.
Roy Moore, where the phrase Christian conservative doesn't even begin to describe him, could very well be your next U.S. Senator.
And you don't understand just how freaked out some folks in the GOP and the White House are about what that means, then you don't know Roy Moore.
First off, he doesn't appear to believe in the Constitution as it's written.
Our rights don't come from government.
They don't come from a Bill of Rights.
They come from Almighty God.
Now, that's just a taste of what are very fundamentalist views that have gotten him removed from office twice as Alabama's Chief Justice.
I'm sorry, I'm speechless.
I haven't listened to that cut for a week, but when I first played it, I was speechless.
There is Chuck Todd, who thinks that when, you know, like Jimmy Kimmel, he thinks that if his face is facing a camera, he must know something, or why would they be pointing a camera at him?
And Roy Moore says, what is foundational, it is foundational, it is the bottom block in the Jenga Tower of America that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, and the argument that Charles Cook is making is that that endowment necessitates that we have guns, necessitates that we can protect ourselves.
And there is Chuck Todd when he hears somebody say what is in our founding documents that that's unconstitutional.
That guy, he doesn't believe in the Constitution.
You know, Chuck Todd thinks our rights emanate from the Constitution.
Why Guns Are Fundamental00:06:42
Our Constitution is there to protect, including the Second Amendment, is there to protect our God-given rights.
All right, we have the mailbag coming up, but we've got to break away from Facebook and YouTube.
Let me explain what this means.
You know, you get to watch about, I don't know, what do we give them, like 15, 20 minutes, right, on Facebook and YouTube.
And then if you want to hear the rest of the show, you can come over to the dailywire.com.
But if you subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month, you can watch the whole show on thedailywire.com so you don't have to be cast out like this into the exterior darkness where there is great wailing and gnashing of teeth.
If you know your Bible, you would know that.
But for a lousy 10 bucks a month, also, that way you can get questions in the mailbag.
We have some really, really good questions.
My answers are guaranteed 100% correct.
We guarantee that our answers are as 100% correct, and they will change your life on occasion for the better.
If you subscribe for a year, it's only 100 lousy bucks and you get the leftist tears tumbler, which is filling up automatically, even as I speak with leftist tears, because of the things I'm saying.
It's amazing.
It is amazing, and it keeps them cool or hot as you like them.
All right, come on over to thedailywire.com.
Hear the rest of the show.
All right, let's get back to Charlie Cook's piece.
This is the Second Amendment is not up for debate, even if Jimmy Kimmel himself, the conscience of America, says it is.
Cook writes, at the time of the American founding, it was widely understood that there was a real danger in a government's attempting to deprive the people of what Alexander Hamilton called their original right of self-defense.
This is why, when it came to writing the Constitution, the anti-federalists who feared the government's potential to become corrupt refused to sign on to a more powerful national government until they had been promised certain explicit protections.
You remember, right, they had a first Constitution that wasn't strong enough, didn't have a strong enough central government, so they went back to the Constitutional Congress, and that's when they started writing the federal papers to argue we needed a stronger central government.
But a lot of people were saying if we have a stronger central government, they're going to take over everything.
Why would they say something like that?
What on earth made them think that?
Okay, but then is now, says Cook, their logic was clear.
It makes no sense to allow the representatives of a free people to disarm their masters.
This is what they've forgotten.
We are their masters.
It makes no sense to allow the people who merely represent us to disarm us, their masters.
This is why this piece is so good.
I mean, maybe it took an Englishman to figure this out.
Reacting to this argument, we often hear advocates of gun control propose that the founders' observations are irrelevant because they could not have imagined the modern world.
Isn't that the one they always say?
Well, they didn't see automatic weapons.
As if the government doesn't have automatic weapons, too.
The weapons have gone up on both sides.
Cook says, I agree with the latter assertion.
The founders could not have imagined the modern world.
As well-read in world history as they were, there is no way that they could have foreseen just how prescient they were in insisting on harsh limitations of government power, just how far-seeing they were.
In their time, tyranny was comparatively soft.
Their complaints focused on underrepresentation and the capricious restriction of ancient rights.
In the past century, by contrast, tyranny involved the systematic execution of entire groups of people and the enslavement of whole countries.
The notion that if James Madison had foreseen the 20th century, he would have concluded that the Bill of Rights was too generous is laughable.
Conservatives who are scared of tyrants often ask, could it happen here?
Well, it did happen here.
Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, lynching, legal segregation.
For a period, the South was everything a free man should fear.
When Ida B. Wells, Ida B. Wells was a black journalist and suffragette, I guess.
You'd call her, she was like an early feminist.
And she was like a newspaper writer early part of the 20th century, late part of the 19th century.
When Ida B. Wells noted that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give, she was confirming an age-old truth.
The gun is a great equalizer, and the state is a capricious beast.
It is from this understanding that all conversations must proceed.
The Second Amendment is not old.
It is timeless.
It is not unclear.
It is obvious.
It is not embarrassing.
It is fundamental.
And as much as anything else, it is a vital indicator of the correct relationship between the citizen and the state and a reminder of the unbreakable sovereignty of the individual.
Unless those calling for greater restrictions learn to acknowledge this at the outset of any public discussion, they will continue to get nowhere in their deliberations.
That is a brilliant piece.
And the reason that is a brilliant piece is because it shifts the conversation back to where it should be, an understanding that we want to be armed to protect us against the state.
Listen, I love the cops.
The cops do a great job.
The cops have been shaped as we all have been shaped by this wonderful, liberal, free society that they live in.
They respect people's rights.
They really do.
I mean, if you ever see cops on the beat, they really do.
They play by the rules.
When the new rules come down, they may not like them, but they usually play by them.
Sometimes they skirt the rules if they have to, but they usually play by the rules.
You don't see what you see in Catalonia.
In Catalonia, they're trying to have this vote.
They had this vote to become a separate state, right, to break away from Spain.
And the Spanish said, well, that's illegal because our Constitution says the whole country has to vote on this.
Well, that's a rigged system, right?
I mean, I'm not saying Catalonia should break away.
I'm not making any comment on the right of their cause, but certainly you can't have a vote to break away in which four, what is it, I think four-fifths of the country says, gets a vote to keep you there.
That's not fair, right?
That's not fair.
If you want independence, there should be some way that you can address that.
Okay, so they sent in the cops, and the cops were beating people up when they tried to vote.
And now they're moving toward what looks like it could become like an armed conflict.
It could become a civil war.
I hope not, but that's the kind of thing it's moving toward.
When you look at that, how can you think that the people shouldn't have guns?
When the cops can come in, soldiers, I wasn't cops, soldiers come in and take you out of the voting booth by force.
How can you think that the people shouldn't be able to fight back?
And people say, well, the American military is so tough that we could never beat them.
You know, they haven't done so well in Afghanistan.
It's not that easy to fight a people, a local populace in arms.
God forbid that should ever happen.
But God forbid twice that it should happen and the people not be armed, okay?
Knowing God's Voice00:15:26
Listen, when Charlie says this is timeless, go back to the Bible.
You know, when the people, when the Hebrews first came into the land of Israel, they had no government.
They just had prophets who would tell them what God was saying through the prophets.
When things got bad and they were oppressed by the Philistines, or as we call them now, the Palestinians, when things got bad and they were oppressed by, you know, surrounding armies, they would have a guy they would call one of the judges who would rise up, sometimes a girl who would rise up and help them fight back and fight back against the surrounding people.
Then they'd go back to their places and govern themselves through the word of God.
You know, when the prophet Samuel got old, he appointed his sons and his sons were corrupt.
And so the people came to him and said, why can't we have kings like everybody else?
And Samuel thought, well, that's not a good idea.
You don't want to do that.
And he went to God and God said to Samuel, He said, Don't worry.
He said, Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.
So Samuel went back to the people and said, Okay, you know, you want to have kings?
These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you.
He will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots.
And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties and some to plow his ground and reap his harvest and make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariot.
He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers.
He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants.
He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants.
He will take your male servants and female servants and put them to work.
He will take the tenth of your flocks and you shall be his slaves.
Government has always been a problem.
We have the right to liberty.
We have the God-given right to liberty.
We have the God-given right to life.
You cannot protect liberty or life unless you're armed.
That's it.
That's the answer.
And I don't give a rat's what Jimmy Kimmel thinks because the guy is a weasel and he's a fool.
And I don't care how he cries.
I don't care what he says.
That's why we have the right to bear arms.
Mailback.
There she is.
A little slow, a little slow.
I took her by surprise there, I think.
But she's still there.
All right.
From Joe.
Hey, Andrew, it seems to me that national political debate must be rooted in a similar view of morality.
You can't have a debate unless you have a similar view of morality.
The problem is that our friends on the left think that we conservative Christians need to separate our religion from our politics.
Somehow they don't realize that the two are inexorably linked.
How do you think we can overcome this divide?
Well, I think this is a difficult problem, but I think we have to go back to our old friend, Uncle Jesus, because he always had a lot of stuff to say.
And remember when he was asked whether it was right to pay taxes to Caesar, he said, show me a coin, held it up, and said, whose face is on this coin?
It's Caesar's face.
Give Caesar what's Caesar and give to God what is God, meaning your soul, the things of the soul.
We have to be able to make arguments that are not simply scriptural arguments.
Jesus specifically recognized a division between church and state, between our allegiance to God and our allegiance to the state.
We have the right to say that you have hit a point where the state can have no control.
So for instance, I, who am very libertarian about people's sexual lives, think it's appalling when they go to someone and say, you must be forced to cater a gay wedding, even though it's against your religious belief, because that's violating the things of God.
That is the state intruding on the things of God, which is exactly what the left wants.
But I do think we have to be able to argue with people about laws in secular terms.
I think we have to be able to argue with people about government in secular terms.
What I think you're talking about, though, which is also important, is when you don't have shared common premises, it's very hard to have an argument at all.
The other day I was talking about the discussion I had with Edward Fazer, the philosopher, and one of the moments that I really liked in this conversation was I disagreed with him about the application of natural law to human sexuality.
And I put forward my ideas, and he put forward his ideas, and I just basically then backed off and let the audience decide which of us made a better case.
It was me, but of course, I didn't want to say that at the time.
But the point is, we share a premise.
Phaser and I share a premise that people have a purpose, that there is a natural law, that you can logically reach, move toward that natural law.
And so we could have that argument.
When you're dealing with leftists, I really believe that the good thing to do is to start with premises.
And I do this when I go and speak, which I don't do all that often.
I probably should do it more, but when I go and speak, I always begin by saying, this is what I believe.
And I talk for a minute to two minutes on what freedom means to me and why I think it restricts certain things.
Why I think that believing in freedom means, for instance, we can't be equal.
We can't be equal because the only way for me to stop somebody from being better than me is to make him worse, is to force him to be worse, and that's taking away his freedom.
So when you're talking to leftists, I think it's a really, really good idea to A, not talk about personalities, not talk about Trump did this and Obama did this, and to stop them every time they do it because they will continually revert to it, but to talk about your premises because you might not agree on those premises, and then that's what you have to be debating.
How can you debate about guns, for instance?
This is what I love so much about Cook's piece is that he got back to the basics.
He got back to the premises of the debate without letting guys like Kimmel and Chuck Todd sway the debate to the emotional needs of the moment, but to keep the eternal ideas, the premises in line.
So talk about premises first.
Talk about premises.
Don't talk about people.
That is the way to hold debates with the left.
From Ricardo, Grand Syr Clavin, how do we know we have free will?
Well, you know, no is a weird word, but let's do it this way.
Play out the logic of your philosophy.
You always have to do this.
You have to do this with people who say there's no God.
You have to do it with people who say there's no free will.
If you play out the logic of your philosophy and you say there is no free will, then everything is a machine, right?
We're just machines.
And not only is our life predetermined, every step of it, but the entire universe is predetermined from the beginning, right?
Because there's no free will.
There's no place for accident.
There's no place for chaos.
There's no place for choice to change anything.
So everything that's going to happen has to happen.
Try living your life that way.
Try living your life that way for 15 minutes and see how far you get.
You will know that you have free will.
You will be back to knowing that you have free will.
Now, if what you're saying is, do you have free will in the mind of God?
That, like in other words, can God see what you're going to do before you do it?
I would say that that is a question about time and the mind of God.
God sees things.
I believe God sees things so differently from us that we can't even make that comparison.
And your business is not to live God's life.
God's business is to live God's life.
Yours is to live your life.
You can't live it without acting as if you have free will.
So what would be the point of denying it?
All right.
From Jake.
Dear His Majesty Supreme Grand Moff Claven, knower of the best words, master of hilarity.
I am a Christian, and I am always moved by the way you talk about your faith.
My question is, how do you know God's voice from your own thoughts?
What a great question.
Thank you for considering my question, despite the lack of the best words.
This is a long subject to go into, so I won't be able to say everything I want to say.
First of all, knowing the word of God, which what do Christians call that?
Discernment.
They always have these Christianese words for things that I never know, but it's discernment.
Knowing, being able to discern the voice of God from your own emotions and your own thought is something that you should be working on all the time.
The rewards are so tremendous and the rewards in your life and the way you live your life are so huge that if you're not putting some time into it every day, I would say, you're actually missing out.
You're missing out on one of the great rewards of knowing God and being in a relationship with God.
So, how do you do it?
Let's talk for a minute about the difference between emotion and sensation.
One of the things that's confusing to people is when you say, Well, I just know that's wrong, and people think that that's emotional.
It's not always emotional.
There is a difference between emotion and sensation.
Let me give you an example from sports.
In sports, there are things you have to do that require an intense zen-like concentration.
Hitting a golf ball, hitting a baseball.
I was a tennis player for a while.
Doing a serve requires you to let go of all your emotions and just do something with your body thoughtlessly.
In order to do that, you have to get rid of your emotions, but you have to be in touch with your sensation.
You have to be able to feel that it's right, that you're doing it right, okay?
If you're worried about, oh my gosh, I'm going to miss, oh my goodness, I'm going to lose, or I'm ahead, now I'm going to lose, I'm going to get nervous, right?
Your tennis serve or your golf swing falls apart.
You have to just let your emotions go away, but allow your sensations to take over.
Allow yourself to feel.
And when you do it right, it becomes incredibly easy.
If you want to hear the voice of God, if you want to hear my voice, if you want to hear anybody's voice, you've got to talk to them, right?
You want to hear me, you got to listen to the show.
You want to hear, you know, talk to Austin, you got to talk to Austin.
If you want to hear God's voice, you got to talk to God.
As you talk to God, and you should be doing it every day, and talk to God shouldn't, well, I'm not going to tell you how to pray.
You pray your own way, but it should be your own way.
You know, it's one thing to pray by rote.
It's another thing to say every day, oh, please give me this, please give me that, help me, help me, help me.
It's another to actually converse with your Maker who wants to hear from you and wants to respond to you.
As you talk to God, you're going to find that there are obstacles in communicating with God.
One that I have had is sometimes confusing God with my father, like expecting reactions from God, which really were reactions that I would have expected from my father, who wasn't that good at being a father.
So that I would say, oh, wait, oh, wait, you know, that's actually not God.
Now, how do I know that it's actually not God?
Well, I read God's book.
I read the New Testament.
I read both Testaments, but I read the Bible.
And I see what Jesus is telling me about God, about his love for me, about his concern for me, about the way the things he wants me to do, the love that he puts at the center of all his commandments.
And I know that when I'm hearing something that isn't in keeping with that, I know it.
And I don't know it emotionally.
I know it by sensation, right?
I have the sensation of peace and completion and natural, you talk about natural law, of a natural relationship coming about.
So as I talk to God, I get a clearer sense of who God is, just as I get that sense from reading about him, and sometimes from reading other people.
I mean, you can read somebody, I read Joel Osteen and got a bad sense of God.
You know, I would read that and think, no, that can't be right.
That doesn't make any sense.
I was using my rational mind to get past that.
But as you talk to God, you know, it becomes clearer to you who God is.
And you struggle with your own emotions.
You know deep down, and God knows always, what your emotions want.
So if you're sitting there saying, boy, I'm married, but I really like this other girl.
Should I cheat on her?
You know that something in your heart is saying, yeah, sure.
And you have to start to distinguish whether that's the voice of God or not.
And so there is a quality of sensation, which means that thing that you know just because you know it, you know, like the Supreme Court judge who said, I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it.
You will learn to know the voice of God if you work at knowing the voice of God.
Will know it as a sensation, a sensation of calm, and I get a sense of joy and connection.
And I know, ah, yes, that's how I have hit the jackpot.
I question it.
I question when God essentially told me, almost with a voice, that I should be baptized, I tortured myself for five months.
That's what I wrote my book about, The Great Good Thing, is about my struggle.
Is that the voice of God, or is it me?
It took me five months to figure that out.
But in the end, I went through all the rational processes.
I went through all my emotions.
I analyzed all my emotions, analyzed all my logic.
And in the end, I reached that point where my sensation was, ah, yes, this is something that is being said to me.
I have never regretted it.
It has been a great source.
So that's, is that, I mean, I could go on, but that is the thing.
The thing is, to learn the voice of God, you got to be talking to God.
You got to be reading God's Word.
You got to be thinking it through.
Don't expect to know it like on that day.
I mean, learn it, and you will learn to recognize the voice just as you recognize my voice.
I call my wife, I don't say, hi, it's Andrew Clavin.
I say, hi, it's me.
And she says, oh, it's him, because she knows my voice.
You will learn to know the sound of God's voice.
One more.
Okay, from John, what did you read that gave you the inspiration to be a writer?
Or was that an innate desire of yours?
Well, it was a combination.
Also, The Great Good Thing.
You know, people really, it's got almost 400 reviews on Amazon and it's five stars.
It's still at five stars, and it's got even more on Audible.
It's called The Great Good Thing, A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ, but it's also about my journey as a novelist and a writer.
And I talk about this a lot.
First of all, I was, because I was a very unhappy kid, hard to believe now, but it's like I've lived two, I really have lived two lives.
But like, because I was an unhappy kid, I became a chronic daydreamer.
I escaped into daydreams, and because I'm a very rational person, my daydreams always had to make sense.
And so I couldn't just say, I'll have a daydream about having superpowers.
I'd always have to say, well, how did you get superpowers?
Like, did I come from another planet or did I drink some serum or something?
So I started to build stories in my head, and I got to be very good.
It wasn't a very healthy way to live, but it was a good way to start to develop my sense of storytelling.
And then as I got older and I started to read, because I was not in a good relationship with my father, I had no male role models.
And I began to look for male role models in fiction.
So I began to really like the tough guy writers, American Tough Guy writers, Ernest Hemingway, the detective writers, Dashel Hammett, James M. Kaine.
But my favorite of all was Raymond Chandler.
And I think it may have been Chandler above all who made me think, this is what I want to do.
This kind of writing is what I want to do.
And what I loved about Chandler is that his detective, Philip Marlowe, one of the first of the great tough guy detectives, had in his mind a sense of chivalry.
And he carried with him into this corrupt LA in which he worked this sense of old-fashioned chivalry.
And he knew he was out of place, and he knew he was always going to take it on the chin because he was trying to be a knight.
And as he says in The Big Sleep, the first novel, he says, this is not a game for knights.
You know, he's playing chess with himself, and he says, it's not a game for knights.
Premises Shifted00:05:05
But I really admired that.
And it was by following the logic of knights and armor that I found King Arthur.
And by finding King Arthur, I started to wonder about Christianity because there's a lot of Christian myths in King Arthur.
So that was another way that I started to come to God, not only to God, but also to become a writer.
The Great Good Thing, you should buy it.
It's really good.
The Great Good Thing is a secular Jew comes to faith in Christ.
tickety-boo news.
I'm not that guy in my house.
When I come home, I say to my wife, I'm home.
You know, we talked a lot about the NFL, and I'm not going to go into this forever, but on Monday Night Football was the Kansas City Chiefs, I think, over the Washington Redskins.
Their ratings are tanking.
Their ratings are tanking because they are disrespecting the flag, which I think is wrong to do.
Again, I think they have the right to do it, but I think they are doing the wrong thing.
And I've laid this out both on the show and on my blog at the PJ Media, that I think it is wrong because it is the flag that protects their right to disrespect it.
It's the flag that links us all together and makes us care about them.
And it's the flag that represents the justice that they are looking for, the players are looking for.
John King at CNN says he has information that the owners so far are supporting the players in their protests, but they ain't happy.
Can you play the John King cut?
Have we got that?
NFL owners so far siding with their players for their right to free speech, but they're also keeping close tabs on the financial impact and the public relations impact of this confrontation.
I'm told the owners have research clearly showing the president is right when he says the anthem protests are one factor in a TV ratings drop.
And since the president weighed in, the owners are now dealing with a surge in ticket holder requests for refunds.
Other sports leagues are watching this quite closely.
The NBA season, for example, kicks off in a little more than two weeks.
And the NBA headquarters this week reminded teams and the players of the league's long-standing policy requiring players to stand during the national anthem.
There are, however, some ongoing conversations about alternative ways for the players to show their displeasure.
The reason I think this is a good thing is not because I'm gleeful at the NFL being punished for what I think are their bad acts.
I think they are doing the wrong thing and disrespecting the flag.
But the reason I think this is a good thing is because it is evidence that something that Trump is doing is really working well.
I have problems with Trump.
I think I talked about this on Monday.
I have problems with Trump's bad manners.
I have troubles with his bullying attitude.
I don't like the fact that in order to fight back against the bullying of the left, we have had to become bullies like them through Trump.
I don't like that fact because if we keep stooping to each other's level, we're eventually going to end up underneath the floor.
But it has been effective.
When you see the bullying, and that was emotional bullying you saw at the opening of the show, Jimmy Kimmel, when you know that every single comedian is on the same side, every single, you know, I keep going through this routine, but it's true.
Every single newsman, every single academic, every single researcher, all the scientists, you know, when they're all run by these left-wingers, you need a voice to speak back.
Trump has become that voice, and he is the only one powerful enough to be that voice.
What you're seeing is you're seeing the premises.
Remember, we're just talking about premises.
You're seeing the premise of the conversation shifting back from the Obama years.
In the Obama years, it was us defending the country, saying the country is a good place.
But the premise of the conversation was that the country was wrong.
America had something to apologize for.
America was the reason black people were having trouble.
America had never done anything but kill Indians and enslave blacks.
Now, suddenly, through Trump mainly, the conversation is shifting back.
Suddenly we're saying, no, no, no, no, wait a minute.
You can protest, but the reason you can protest is because you're an American.
We care about you, black NFL players, but we care about you because you're our fellow Americans, so don't disrespect the flag.
The premises are shifting back to what I think is reality.
The reality is this country has been a force for good since its inception.
It has changed the nature of the entire governance of the world.
Remember, there were no republics on earth when America was first founded.
Now, even the Soviet Union had to call its satellites republics.
Remember, it was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
They had to lie about being republics because we have made republic the standard for governance.
We have made the freedom of the people the standard for governance.
And when they say, why aren't we more like Europe?
The question really should be, why isn't Europe more like us?
Why isn't everybody more like us?
Trump has actually, through his belligerence, through his bullying, some of which I don't like, he has actually shifted the premise of the conversation back to the right.
And he will continue, I hope, to do that.
We have Mona Charon tomorrow, one of my favorites.
We're going to talk about campus rape and the sexual revolution and other fun topics.