Andrew Klavan and Mona Charon dissect the Las Vegas shooting’s heroes—Jack Beaton, Charleston Hartfield, and Hannah Allers—while rejecting politicized grief, contrasting Trump’s praise for Thomas Gunderson with Democrats’ gun-control rhetoric. They critique the sexual revolution’s moral collapse, exposing leftist rape statistic inflation and conservative abandonment of moral accountability, then pivot to horror films like It Follows and Get Out as allegories for societal fears. Klavan’s Another Kingdom teases a divinely inspired counter-narrative against universal evil, framing heroism as an eternal revolution against darkness. [Automatically generated summary]
I saw a cartoon once, and I think it was in a newspaper.
It was an old couple walking out of a funeral, and the man says to the wife, I've got to start living a better life.
And the joke, of course, is kind of a subtle joke, but the joke is that when people die, you only say nice things about them, and you go to a funeral and you listen to the eulogy, and you think, God, this guy was great.
I stink, you know.
So, all week long, I've been reading about the people who've died so tragically in Las Vegas.
There was a construction worker, a guy named Jack Beaton, died.
He threw himself over, he threw his body over his wife's body.
An off-duty cop named Charleston Hartfield, he coached a youth football team, Hannah Allers, a full-time wife and mom, to three kids, and her brother called her Our Sunshine.
And I was thinking to myself, you know, you could also say about these people that they did bad things.
They lied, they were hypocritical, they woke up sometimes in the middle of the night and thought, gee, I said this thing that I wish I hadn't said, I did this thing that I wish I hadn't done.
And the way I know that about them is because that's true of every single person on earth.
You know, St. Paul said, what I want to do, I don't do, and what I hate, I do.
We are all in that battle.
St. Paul also said, we're not in a battle with flesh and blood, but we're dealing with rulers and authorities and cosmic powers over this present darkness.
We're fighting the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
And as you know, I don't like the word evil because sometimes we use it to obliterate our opponent.
We don't have to argue with somebody if he's evil.
But if you look at it from another way, it actually makes you more sympathetic with people when you realize we're all in the same battle with the same power of darkness that is very real and very true and that nobody actually wants to talk about it.
So we're going to talk about it today and we're going to talk about some of the ways that the heroes of Las Vegas dealt with it and what they have to say to us.
Mona Charon, the great Mona Charon, a terrific columnist, is going to be on to speak with us.
And we got a lot of other things to say as well.
Stuff I like.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
It is hard to believe that the Klavan-less weekend is back again.
And I got to say, just one piece of advice.
Run for your life.
Don't go out.
Don't stay under the bed.
Just keep there.
It's just getting worse and worse.
I think there's another hurricane headed for Florida.
I know, I know.
This is why Michael Knowles and I will be trying starting our new podcast on Friday the 13th, so the end of next week.
If the devil, I swear, I was just saying to Mathis, this is a true story.
When I wrote this story, this is a fic, it's called Another Kingdom.
It's a fictional story that we're releasing as a podcast in several parts, and we will be producing it as we go along.
When I wrote this story, I was struggling with another story that I couldn't make work, and suddenly, like a light coming over me, the entire kingdom just appeared to me, a totally different story.
I wasn't even thinking about it.
It was just there.
And when I sat down to work it out, it just came.
And I thought, wow, this is weird because it's not like my typical story.
It's different than the usual stuff I write.
And I started to say to my wife, you know, I think this is a story that comes from above.
I think I've been actually sent this story because it's almost like it's not mine.
And I thought, wow, I wonder if that's going to aggravate our common enemy, the devil.
And I finished this.
I swear this is true.
Every now and again, we get these really ugly little caterpillars that come out into our house.
And you'll just get one.
It'll come up through the bathtub or something like this.
They always just make me feel like, ugh, I hate this thing.
The day I finished Another Kingdom, I swear this is true.
They were all over the house.
I mean, usually I get one like every three months or something like this.
Suddenly they were everywhere.
And they were every place that I would go.
Like I would be on the floor doing sit-ups and I'd look around.
There'd be one right next to me.
And I was like a horror movie.
Knowles and I have been fighting the forces of darkness since this began because everything keeps going wrong.
But I think we're going to be ready on Friday the 13th.
I hope so.
We will be putting it out on the Ricochet Network.
We can't do it here because it's got some language in it and other things like that.
But anyway, Another Kingdom, wait for it on Friday.
Here, here, you got to start subscribing, folks, because we have to keep kicking you off.
No, we're going to stay on the air, right?
We're going to stay on so you can hear Mona.
Yeah, so you can hear Mona Charon.
She's terrific.
We will stay on.
But normally we got to say goodbye to you after about 15, 20 minutes.
If you're on YouTube or Facebook, then you've got to come over and listen to the rest of the show on thedailywire.com.
If you subscribe, a lousy $10 a month, you can watch the whole show on thedailywire.com.
We're going to do the conversation next Tuesday, I think it is.
Not next Tuesday, Tuesday the 17th.
Yeah, so it's a week from Tuesday.
You know, that's where you get to ask questions.
You can watch it if you don't subscribe, but if you subscribe, you can ask questions.
If you subscribe for a year for a lousy hundred bucks, you get the leftist tears tumbler.
I mean, what is not the like?
So before we begin, go over, because we're going to be talking about, you know, deep things.
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Cut Numbers Honest Dialogue00:15:25
Now you can stop looking in the mirror and sobbing quietly to yourself.
So, as those of you who listen regularly or watch regularly know, I'm a sexist.
No, I think that's a fair thing to say.
Well, what do I mean by that?
I believe that not only do I believe that men and women are essentially different, I believe that they're the only two kinds of people there are.
You know, I mean, I really don't believe very much in race.
Race doesn't matter to me.
I'm anti-racist philosophically, but also just my observations tell me that a man of one color is pretty much like a man of another color, and a woman of one color is pretty much like a woman of another color.
But men and women are really different.
And because of this, it's one of the reasons I always listen to what women are saying to me because I know they're telling me something that comes from another place.
And a lot of times, look, men and women do good things and bad things like all of us.
And when men do bad things, they tend to be bad men things.
And when women do bad things, they tend to be bad women things, and vice versa.
When they do good things, they tend to be typical of their sex.
And obviously, each individual is different and all that, but I'm just saying, speaking generally, I always listen to what women say because I feel like they see things that I don't see.
They see things from a position that I don't see.
And I think if I add that to what I'm seeing, maybe I can get a fuller picture.
This is especially true of moms.
And people, you know, we're not allowed to say these things anymore, but it is true.
When I am listening to commentators on the news, and I know that I'm listening to a mom, I sometimes hear them say things, and I think like nobody else is talking about this.
And the reason I'm saying this is last night I'm watching Special Report, the Brett Baer Show, which is my favorite, the only TV news show I think is any good, really.
It's really the one thing where they give you a pretty fair, as Fox would say, fair and balanced report.
And they have this panel at the end where they have different people come on and commentate.
And Molly Hemingway is on.
And Molly Hemingway has been on this show a couple of times, and I love her to death.
But she is also, she just says things where I just sit and think, not only does nobody else say those things, but they're so mom, and nobody else listens to them.
Now, so all week long, and we're not going to talk about this much because I'm just sick of it.
I'm sick of the politicizing of this tragedy.
You know, the Democrats have just been, the left in general, have just been, they just politicize these things.
They want to get rid of your guns.
They don't want you to be free people.
They don't want the government from the bottom down.
They want it from the top up.
So they immediately go after the guns with which you would have to defend yourself if you needed it.
And they just keep saying stupid things because they don't know anything about guns, most of them.
They're in this bubble.
What did Patricia Arquette say today?
She's an actress, good actress, actually.
She said, you may have the right to have a gun, but you don't have the right to shoot somebody because you're mad.
Well, you know, I agree.
I think I was, we're on the same page.
You know, that is absolutely right.
But Tim Kaine, that's not a stupid thing to say.
That's actually true.
But Tim Kaine, who, as you remember, was running for the vice presidency, right?
This guy wanted to be your vice president.
Here is what he said about, remember Hillary Clinton was saying, oh, now they're pushing silencers because there was a bill to make silencers easier to get because they protect your ears.
They don't really, they're not really silencers, they're suppressors.
They bring the sound down a little.
But you can hear, I mean, a machine gun's like a jackhammer.
You will hear it.
So here's Tim Kaine talking like an absolute idiot.
I hate when I go to places around the world, and this is what they think of our country.
They think of our country as the place where these massive tragedies occur and we do nothing, absolutely nothing.
And for the Congress to do nothing when the population overwhelmingly supports reasonable steps, and we're scheduled to have a vote this week on whether it should be easier to get silencers.
This guy killed 60 people, maybe more by now, and injured more than 500 people.
And he only was stopped finally because he didn't have a silencer on his weapon.
And the sound drew people to the place where he was ultimately stopped.
Can you imagine what this would have been if he'd had silencers on all these weapons?
But Congress is poised to vote this week to make it easier to get silencers.
It's like we've lost our minds on this issue.
See, it's like, how do you know when a Democrat's saying something stupid?
It's because his mouth is moving, right?
And it's like, so he's talking absolute nonsense.
And they're all talking absolute nonsense.
We have guns because we want to be free people, governed from the bottom up, not from the top down.
So they have this panel, and the news is essentially a male enterprise, if you think about it.
Here are the facts, here's what happened.
Even when they discuss it, they discuss it in terms of policy and all this stuff.
And Molly said something, and I kind of sat up and I thought, that's the one truly wise thing, one of the few truly wise things anybody has said this week.
So just listen to Molly when she was asked about the debate over gun control.
And nobody heard what she said except me.
I think I just said, I just really sat, listen to this.
At least in this case, we're talking about something that was involved in this actual deadly incident, which is not usually the case when we go through this ritual of talking about gun control after any deadly event.
And that is something we kind of do to make ourselves feel better about the fact that no amount of gun regulation is going to prevent people who are hell-bent on murdering people from doing so.
And we've learned that through so many terrorist incidents involving planes, trucks, fertilizer, and any number of other things.
So we're pretending we're having a debate about gun control, but we're really having a debate about the nature of evil and whether a big enough government can contain it.
And nobody even responded to it.
But that is, of course, what we're doing.
That is, of course, what we're doing.
And I just thought, that is so mom, because the thing that moms here is they hear the thing that you need, not what you say.
Like my kids come to me and they say, I need this, and I give it to them.
You know, I find a way to get it for them.
And sometimes my wife will say, why'd you give them that?
That's not what they wanted.
And I'll go, you know, that's above my pay grade.
That's at mom pay grade.
That's not a dad pay grade.
Dad is like, you want it, here it is.
You know, that's, and that is, of course, what we're talking about.
We are, of course, talking about, not about guns, because now they have immediately on this panel, and I love the panel, but they immediately on this panel went to talking about bump stocks, those things that the guy used to apparently, you know, make them shoot faster.
Completely meaningless conversation.
Whether they ban them, whether they don't ban them, people will be able to modify guns to shoot faster.
They have absolutely nothing.
But what Molly was talking about was actually important.
That actually mattered because we are talking about evil, and there is a difference between the left and the right.
And here I'm not talking, by the way, about ordinary people who might vote Democratic for any number of reasons and people who vote Republican.
I'm talking about the leaders, the people who go on TV.
When I talk about the left, I'm mostly talking about the media who tell the senators what to do and the senators and these leaders who are talking about nonsense.
They're talking about whether or not a government, if we just keep making government bigger, we can do something about evil.
And of course, the left believes the answer is yes, because they don't really believe in evil.
They don't really believe in the forces, the principalities and powers that St. Paul talked about.
And we do.
And so it makes, they think we sound weak when we say life is tragic, people can do evil things.
But of course, that's the answer.
You know, there's still, this is a very strange story, this entire story about the Las Vegas shooting, because they still haven't figured out the guy's motive.
And the reason that's so strange is because you think if you do something like this, you want everybody to know your motive.
Why would you do it?
You know, why are you doing it, if not to sort of advertise yourself and go down in history, even in evil history, and make yourself known and get attention paid?
But this guy must have been planning this for over a year.
The police have started to say he must have had help.
They're just, they don't know.
They're just suggesting it.
I mean, there are all these rumors.
One of the reasons I'd like them to find the motive pretty soon is because I think all these rumors come out.
People are saying, oh, there was another shooter.
And, you know, I just don't buy any of it until I hear this from some official or it's proved to me.
But it's really human to look for motives.
And now, you know, they've been interviewing the guy's girlfriend.
She put out a statement that her lawyer, what was her lawyer's name, Mark Lombard, put out a statement.
Read a little bit of this.
What she said, she said the guy gave her no clue.
This is cut number two.
I knew Stephen Paddock as a kind, caring, quiet man.
I loved him and hoped for a quiet future together with him.
He never said anything to me or took any action that I was aware of that I understood in any way to be a warning that something horrible like this was going to happen.
A little more than two weeks ago, Stephen told me he'd found a cheap ticket for me to the Philippines and that he wanted me to take a trip home to see my family.
Like all Filipinos abroad, I was excited to go home and see family and friends.
While there, he wired me money.
What she said was for me to buy a house for me and my family.
I was grateful, but honestly, I was worried that first the unexpected trip home and then the money was a way of breaking up with me.
It never occurred to me in any way whatsoever that he was planning violence against anyone.
So no clue from that.
You know, we don't know how much of that is true.
We've heard people, witnesses saying that he mistreated her or at least treated her brusquely.
There's, like I said, the sheriff says that there might have been another person helping him and that there's indications that he was hoping had an escape plan and all this stuff.
But it's just all rumor at this point.
The FBI, an FBI spokesman, said, we're talking to people overseas, so we don't even know about the political aspect of it yet.
With all the garbage noise going down, Donald Trump, of all people, not always the most tactful or restrained person, he struck just the right note.
He went to Vegas yesterday, made a speech, and he really said some great stuff.
This is cut number nine.
We struggle for the words to explain to our children how such evil can exist, how there can be such cruelty and such suffering.
But we cannot be defined by the evil that threatens us or the violence that incites such terror.
We're defined by our love, our caring, and our courage.
In the darkest moments, what shines most brightly is the goodness that thrives in the hearts of our people.
That goodness is our lighthouse and our solace is knowledge that the souls of those who passed are now at peace in heaven.
Here on earth, we're blessed to be surrounded by heroes.
As one eyewitness recounted this week, while everyone else was crouching, police officers were standing up as targets, just trying to direct people and tell them where to go.
The officers were standing up in the line of fire to help those in danger and to find out where those horrible shots were coming from.
Words cannot describe the bravery that the whole world witnessed on Sunday night.
See, when Tim Kaine says he goes over to foreign countries and he's embarrassed because they think this is what America is, Tim Kaine ought to be a little less embarrassed and be saying that this is what America is.
Let me show you what America is.
Thomas Gunderson was there.
He's a young guy, got shot in the leg, and the president came to visit him.
I think this thing has gotten like 12 million hits on YouTube.
And he put out on Facebook, he said, I will never lie down when the president of this great country comes to shake my hand.
Here's the video.
If you can see, if you're watching, you can see him.
He gets out of bed.
And Melania is saying, get back in bed.
Play the video.
Are you feeling good, Penny?
Penny, get up.
Where's this thing at?
Take a time.
Hey, this guy looks tough to me.
Thank you so much for being here.
I love the Trump line.
This guy looks tough to me.
And, you know, what he said was when the president of this great country, I'd like to think he would have done that for Obama, too.
You know, it's really, this, see, this is the thing.
Again, I started out this week by saying, you know, that the divisions in this country aren't going to be healed on the news.
They are making the divisions fester.
They mean to do it.
It serves their political term.
The politicians mean to divide us.
Jimmy Kimmel means to divide us.
They mean to divide us because they think they can win in that division.
But the answers are going to come at this level, the level of guys like Gunderson.
That's one of the reasons I love this one guy.
He's a copy machine repairman.
He said he got his family out of the kill zone and then went back in and was credited with rescuing up to 30 people.
The thing I love best about him as a novelist is that his name is Jonathan Smith.
His name is John Smith.
It's like the kind of name, you know, if you're signing into a motel and you don't want anybody to name it.
So he could be anybody.
That's the point.
I mean, that's the great thing.
He says himself, I'm just an ordinary guy.
I'm just a human being.
But listen to what, you know, when he was talking, he was on CNN and he was talking about why he went back.
This is cut number three.
Honestly, I don't know what I was thinking, honestly.
From the moment that I got my brother and my three nieces across the street from Guiles, I don't know what made me turn back around.
Maybe it was the screams.
I don't know.
But there were a lot of people still running out.
A few of them fell down.
I still remember it vivid.
I try not to, honestly.
But I really can't explain why or what made me turn around.
I just felt, you know what, if I could help one person or multiple people, at least that's someone life that was fair.
So he's going to live, they say maybe for the rest of his life, he's going to have a bullet in his neck, right?
And as he's coming out, so this guy goes in, this copy machine repairman named John Smith, like you really, you can't make that stuff up, you know.
He goes in and he's back, he runs back into the kill zone and pulls out 30 people, helps 30 people out.
Now he's shot in the neck and he's bleeding.
He goes down and an off-duty cop, it's unbelievable, an off-duty cop from San Diego staunches the blood.
Rape, Live, June Devils00:15:28
This is cut number four.
Honestly, I mean, I owe that man my life because from the moment I got hit, he was the first one to actually help me stop the bleeding.
He never left my side at all.
And I remember getting him helping me get in the back of a pickup truck, a red pickup truck with another young lady that had a gunshot wound.
And I kept telling him, I don't want to die.
I don't want to die.
And he kept saying, you're not going to die.
I got you.
Look at me.
You're not going to die.
I mean, so this is like a chain of heroism going on.
One more clip.
I got a play.
We have Mona Charon who's going to come on and talk to us.
One more clip I got a play from Hannity.
He had a young lady on named Cassidy Huff who is suffering from cancer.
She's beating cancer, I hope.
Her prognosis seems to be good, but she's been under chemo.
You know what chemo does to you, just like absolutely lays you out.
She's frail, she's weak.
And she talks about her escape and how she, too, was finally rescued by a cop.
And this is Cassidy Huff talking to Hannity with her mom.
We started running, trying to beat the crowd.
And it was very scary because I didn't want to get trampled because I was so weak.
And my mom lifted me up through like some type of pretzel stand or something.
And then we ran from there, but it was like a bad dream where you can't, you want to run so fast, but you can't because my legs just wouldn't let me.
So it's frustrating.
You're still recovering.
I mean, you've been through a very tough treatment.
And I know people at home will want to know you do have a pretty good prognosis right now.
Yes.
And so far, scans are clean.
Yes.
Mom, a bunch of people came over to your daughter.
I'm calling you, Mom.
Kelly, I'm sorry.
It's a nice title.
Off-duty police officers, it's tough to carry a kid.
Tell us what they did for your daughter.
Well, as soon as we had crossed the street initially, she basically collapsed behind a car and just couldn't go.
And before I could think about what to do, an LAP PD officer just scooped her up and said, keep running.
And his girlfriend grabbed my hand and we continued to run and take cover behind another dumpster.
So Hannity starts crying too.
My point here, by the way, is that when things like this happen, evil seems big because one guy can cause so much destruction.
A few guys at 9 and 11 can cause so much suffering and pain.
And evil is big.
Evil is the emperor of this world.
This is the empire of evil.
And we're kind of like the American revolutionaries fighting back with taking these little pot shots from behind the wall and from behind a tree.
Every time you tell the truth, when you want to tell a lie, every time you speak a word of kindness, when you want to say something angry and hurtful, every time you stay true to your word.
And then at these great moments, these big moments when evil really unleashes, you have these moments of heroism when you see that these little acts are actually big acts.
And it's a long, maybe even eternal battle.
No government can stop evil, but I do believe we can hold out and that the cavalry is on the way.
And Mona Sharon is here.
Mona Sharon is a syndicated columnist and a political analyst, really one of the smartest observers of politics around.
She lives in the Washington, D.C. area, is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Institute, and has a podcast called Need to Know.
You have a new book, don't you, Mona?
Is it coming out?
Yes, I. Hi, Drew.
First of all, it's so great to see you.
It's great to see you, too.
You look terrific.
Thank you likewise.
So yeah, I have this book, but the frustrating part is that whereas we live in an era when things happen instantaneously, book publishing is still on the 19th century skew.
It's hilarious.
It doesn't come out until June.
Okay.
Well, good.
We'll get to see you again in June.
But it is hilarious that you could press a button and publish your book pretty nicely, actually.
I mean, we have a guy here, Michael Knowles, who published a blank book and made a quarter of a million dollars.
So Ben Shapiro, I said to Ben Shapiro, now we know what we're doing wrong.
We're putting words in our books.
But anyway, we'll have you back in June to talk about your book.
So all week long I've been talking about this.
I have to ask you a little bit about this.
I've been so struck by the comparison between the meanness of the press and the pettiness of our political debate and the immensity of the heroism and decency of the people out there.
We don't know what politics they had.
We don't know the guys that when they went in and rescued people.
We don't know who was a Democrat, who was a Republican.
It seems like the country is operating at a higher level than our spokespeople.
Well, that is a very, very valid observation on your part.
Let me say something a little bit about masculinity, because Whenever we have one of these horrific situations, whether it's the shooting in the Aurora movie theater or in Newtown or on that French train, again and again, what you see, well, and here in Las Vegas,
but there were men who leaped forward to throw their bodies on their wives, their girlfriends, even sometimes total strangers.
Women jumped in front of their children.
People did these things.
In a split second, you have no time to think, hmm, is this the best move for me?
You know, it's like it comes from the deepest part of who they are, that they're going to be self-sacrificing for another.
And the reason I mention about the men is that we're living in an era when masculinity is being called toxic, when we're constantly told about how bad men are.
And men can be bad.
Nobody needs to tell you that that's, of course, the nature of the human beast.
But there's also something unbelievably noble and self-sacrificing about men in particular.
They rush to defend women.
They rush to sacrifice themselves this way.
It's very moving.
And it's the best of what it means to be a human.
And we shouldn't lose sight of that.
I know that we're going to talk about the college campus situation and the rape and so forth.
And there's definitely men who are behaving badly, and there always will be.
But I worry that this tendency in our society to pathologize masculinity in general is very, you know, it's unfair and it's very destructive.
You know, that is such a great point.
And it really, I opened the show by talking about the fact that I really, I'm always particularly attentive when I hear commentators on politics who are moms.
And I know you are a mom, and I was talking about Molly Hemingway earlier, the way they say things that come out of, for me, come out of the blue.
It really is as if, though, it goes back to my point that normal people, everyday people who live with members of the opposite sex, learn this great respect and love for the differences between us, while at the top level, in the level of public talk, there's all this battle going on that really is, it's different than our ordinary lives.
It's different than the lives we live.
Right.
Although it does have a corroding effect.
It filters down.
And there's a lot of unhappiness out there between men and women.
And it's sad because a certain minimum amount, I suppose, is inevitable.
But I think we have way more than we really need to.
And that's partly because so many of our young people are being fed an ideology that says that men are oppressors and women are oppressed and vice versa.
I mean, there's a certain amount of misogyny that is now very fashionable in public discourse.
And I've never been a feminist, but I am an anti-misogynist.
Yes, well, so am I. I'm an anti-feminist and an anti-misogynist.
Well, you wrote this really interesting piece.
I mean, recently, the Secretary of Education, whose name I'm, it's DeVos, Betsy DeVos, Betty DeVos, Betty DeVos.
Betsy, she withdrew the Obama-era dear colleague letter that essentially demanded that colleges give a higher rate of belief, you know, give more belief based.
It basically stripped guys who were charged with rape on college campuses.
It stripped them of their rights to a fair trial and basically put all of the credibility on the accuser and none on the guy who's charged.
But you wrote a piece saying earlier, saying both the right and the left do not get this issue, the issue of campus rape.
Now, why did you say that?
This kind of feeds into what you were just talking about.
Right.
So there's on the left, what you have is kind of the hair on fire anti-rape activists, you know, who say that there is an epidemic of rape, that it's either one in four or one in five women are being raped on college campuses, which if it were true, would be a rate higher than, you know, in Chad or, you know, like really dangerous parts of the globe, okay?
It's exaggerated.
On the other hand, there is a tendency, and this is what I find so frustrating about the right, is that whereas they used to recognize that when you drop all sexual standards and when you say anything goes, women are going to get hurt and men are going to be encouraged to behave like louts.
Most conservatives used to think that and used to say it and used to say that it's, you know, that men have to be taught to be gentlemen.
They have to learn that there are certain things you cannot do.
And one of them is if a woman is drunk, you don't take advantage of her, right?
And there is a lot of that.
There's a ton of it.
I've talked to a lot of kids in the research for my book.
And I've talked to kids who are religious, serious Christians and Catholics.
And they all report that they know somebody who was raped.
They were raped themselves.
They are highly aware of this problem.
And it's a mistake, I think, for the right to say, oh, it's really, it's just a bunch of hysterical feminists complaining.
Because what really happened was the sexual revolution left women so vulnerable.
The feminists don't want to recognize that, but the right doesn't really grapple with it anymore either.
The right's just saying, oh, shut up and enjoy yourself.
No, wait.
Do you feel that?
Because I mean, the thing that always got me about the feminists is they basically said women are the same as men and they should be able to enjoy sexuality the same way men do.
And I thought, like, why?
I mean, why, if there's anything different between us, and I think there's a lot that's different between us spiritually as well as physically, but if there's anything different between us, it's the way we have sex.
So why shouldn't women's experience be different than men's?
But go back to this thing about the right.
What are you now hearing from the right that makes you feel that this is a lost battle?
I mean, yeah.
Okay, so there is this understandable, okay, there's an understandable focus on the men who've been mistreated and railroaded in these kangaroo courts.
That's fair enough, okay?
But then there's a tone that creeps into the commentary of, you know, a failure to draw some moral lines and say, look, they're not all cases of just regretted sex.
I mean, there are really horrible cases out there of guys who have committed real rapes or who have committed at least something that should be called sexual assault.
And you don't see conservatives writing articles about those cases.
They let the left handle that.
And this one young woman that I was reading who had written to Brett Stevens, fellow columnist, New York Times, I'm not the New York Times, he's at the New York Times, she wrote, you know, why have conservatives ceded the issue of rape to the left?
Why do conservatives never seem concerned about this?
And that's a fair point.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, you mentioned this thing about drinking, and whenever you bring this up, people accuse you of blaming the victim.
Obviously, it is unwise for a woman to let herself get drunk around a bunch of strange men.
But the other side of this that you mentioned is also true.
I grew up very, that was a very, very strict rule that if the girl you were with was drunk, you didn't take advantage of that.
You took her home, and many of us did it with our throats closed because we wanted to take advantage of her so much.
But that has gone completely by the boards in a world where people are told that we're all the same, basically.
That we're all the same and that it's just a fun thing and it's not any more serious for a woman than it is for a man.
And it's led to terrible, terrible consequences.
So what my book is about is trying to clear away the mess and sort of get back to the basics.
I mean, you were saying earlier about sexual behavior between men and women experiencing sex differently.
And why is it that women don't get credit for how for their own experience?
The feminists would argue with us, but I say it took thousands of years of civilizational progress to get to the point where women said to men, you have to subordinate your natural sexuality to our natural sexuality.
You have to do it our way, which is be faithful to one person, stick with me, be a good father to your children, don't cat around.
And eventually, civilization got to the point where that became the standard.
And we threw that away.
Yeah, I know.
It is amazing to me how often progressivism is regressive into the past, into the things we knew already are wrong.
We've done them already.
We've been there.
So let's talk a little bit.
I don't have much more time, but I want to talk just a little bit about Donald Trump because you were very opposed to Donald Trump.
And you've remained, as I read your stuff, very opposed to him.
I have kind of made a separate piece.
I mean, I have this problem with his manners.
I have a problem with the way he talks sometimes and the way he treats people around him.
But I can't help but notice that he is a voice for people who have no voice.
You know, he is a voice for all these people, all these comedians on late night.
Every single one of them has the exact same political point of view.
Every actor and actress who stands up and accepts an award, same political point of view.
The news people, all same political point of view.
They're all giving comfort, aid and comfort to the Democrats.
And of course, the Democrats all have the same political point of view.
Donald Trump, in being kind of a bully and a loudmouth, has kind of given a voice to all these people who've been cut out.
Am I just being a Pollyanna here?
That's you, Drew Claydon, Pollyanna.
Pollyanna's Sympathy00:02:35
That's what everyone says.
Okay, maybe that was not the right term.
But I mean, have you no sympathy for him at all?
Yeah.
No.
He lives down to every rotten stereotype about closed-minded, stupid conservatives.
And he puts his foot in his mouth every day and he's cruel to people, including his attorney general, as I think you were kind of alluding to.
Or it doesn't matter how long you're in loyalty, you've served him.
He'll kick you in the teeth if he's in a bad mood.
So, no, I don't have any sympathy for him.
I, of course, have sympathy for people who voted for him because they were faced with a terrible choice.
But that is in the general election.
I don't have sympathy for those who voted for him in the primary.
We had lots of qualified candidates.
That was not a good thing, Republicans.
So we'll just have to say he's president.
I mean, I hope that he gets the hang of it and changes or at least inhibits his most destructive tendencies.
But I don't think this is going well.
I know I'm in a minority.
Most Republicans are happy with him.
I'm in a minority.
Well, you know that.
I have to say, yeah, no, I have to say that I am happy.
I'm happy with the rollback in regulations.
I'm happy with the judges' appointments.
I'm happy with the fact that this CNN, who I just consider a bunch of liars and clowns, I'm happy that they're on their back heels, Even though I understand that Trump is no great lover of truth and beauty, but it is nice to have somebody slap these guys around because they so deserve it.
I mean, the news media so deserve it.
But I gotta say, you're taking an ethical stance, and I have to approve that.
Where can people hear your need to know podcast?
Oh, it's on the Ricochet website.
So if you just go to Ricochet and look up podcasts, we're there once a week, Jay Nordlinger and I, and we have guests, and we'll have to have you as a guest.
Please, I would be happy to come on.
Mona Charon, syndicated columnist, a really terrific political observer.
It's great to see you, and come back on when your book comes out.
Likewise, it's great to see you too.
Thank you so much.
I'll talk to you guys.
Bye.
Bye.
She's great.
I just love her.
Yeah, she's really, really, really smart.
All right, let's, I think we're coming to the end.
We're coming to that.
Cleveland, it's like a train, isn't it?
When It Takes Place00:10:00
It's like just a train barreling toward us, like a disaster.
Stuff I like.
We've got to go into stuff I like.
Oh, you, oh, I can't see the stuff I like thing.
Oh, okay, sorry.
Usually, that's my favorite part of the show.
My favorite part of the show is a little figure of me with a flag running doing a can can or whatever.
All right.
So I want to talk a little bit about, it's October, so we're coming into Halloween.
I want to talk about a little bit about this new horror that has been coming up.
It's really been coming up for a couple of years now.
Small indie horror without big special effects, sometimes a little mysterious, sometimes a little, you know, raises doubts about what you're seeing, but that is being used to address social issues in a way that goes above politics, which is what art should do.
Art should, you know, I think a Democrat and a Republican should both be able to sit and watch a good work of art and turn to each other and say, you know, I saw this and I, you know, that you saw different things, but you both acknowledge that you're talking about the same subject.
So I think this really started.
It's always hard to say where these things begin, but the best, the first one that made me really sit up and take notice was It Follows in 2014.
And It Follows was a really simple story about STDs, basically, right?
It's about a monster who, if you sleep with somebody, it follows you and comes after you and destroys you.
And so here is a guy, and you've got to pass it on to get rid of it.
But even if you get rid of it, it can come back and get you after the other person, the person you gave it to, is destroyed.
So it starts out with this guy who basically drugs, date rapes this girl and then tries to tell her, he ties her up so he can explain to her what is going to happen next.
And here's that scene.
This thing, it's going to follow you.
Somebody gave it to me.
And I passed it to you.
Back in the car.
It could look like someone you know.
Or it could be a stranger in a crowd.
Whatever helps to get close to you.
It can look like anyone.
But there's only one of it.
That's a really creepy movie.
And it's written and directed by David Robert Mitchell.
One of the really interesting things about it is you can't tell when it takes place.
It takes place in Detroit, but the dresses are kind of 1950s.
All the technology looks like 1950s.
All the movies that they watch are in black and white and all the stuff.
They're always watching old movies.
But at the same time, there's a girl in it who has a, you know, a, it's a cell phone or some kind of wireless device.
There are all kinds of references, the way the sex takes place, the casual sex of it really is not from the 1950s.
It's really from today.
And so it takes place kind of at all time.
And Detroit is just a sort of setting of decay that's around it all.
And so if you're a conservative, you're sitting there and looking and say, yeah, you know, if we'd only not abandon the, you know, if we'd not have the sexual revolution, but if you're, you know, in Detroit, that's the problem of Democrats and all this.
But leftists could look at it another way.
The point is, he's kind of isolating this thing, this absolute plague of STDs that we're living through.
I hope you're not living through it because you're living such a chaste and honest life, but that the country is living through.
And he isolates it and elevates it to the level of an anxiety and of art.
That was also true of the film Get Out, which came out last year.
It actually came out earlier this year, which was by Jordan Peale of Key and Peel, two of the funniest people around.
I was really sorry when they broke up.
But this is about a black guy with a white girlfriend who's invited back to her parents' house to meet the rents, basically, and it turns into a nightmare because every black person he meets there is weirdly zombie-like and then on occasion sort of breaks through.
So here is this guy.
He's acting like the waspiest guy imaginable.
He's wearing the straw hat.
He looks like a 60-year-old silver-haired wasp gangster, except he's a black guy.
And he starts talking about the black experience.
And then if you can't see it, the hero takes a picture of him and the flash kind of wakes him up for a minute.
I find that the African-American experience for me has been, for the most part, very good.
Although I find it difficult to go into detail as I haven't had much desire to leave the house in a while.
We've become such homebodies.
Yes, yes, yes.
But even when you go into the city, I've just had no interest.
The chores have become my sanctuary.
Get out.
Sorry, man.
Get out!
Go!
Get out!
Yo!
She's killed!
She's out!
Kill me!
Get out!
So this is another creepy picture with a really exciting ending.
But again, you know, here's a story where I looked at it, and all the evil white people in it are Democrats.
So I thought, yeah, this is a movie about Democrats.
But of course, I don't think when I actually was at Blumhouse where they made it, and I was talking to some of the story people there, and one of the women was talking about how, you know, what a liberal movie it was.
It was this kind of left-wing movie.
And I thought, I said to her, there are no Republicans in the movie.
There are not one.
Everybody in it voted for Obama, including the bad guys.
And I thought, like, that, you know, so you can see it.
But the point is, it elevates the question of, it's a question of assimilation.
It's a question of whether or not we can all sort of become one people, even when we have different cultural experiences, different skin colors, and all this stuff.
Which brings me to the latest one, which is It Comes at Night, which just came out.
It's just came out on DVD.
It's been out for a while.
You can now get it on Netflix and everything like this.
And this is by a guy named Trey Edward Schultz.
Did you see Creta?
I haven't seen it.
He wrote, this is his first movie.
It's supposed to be terrific.
And I haven't seen it, but I will watch it.
But this is a really mysterious story.
I didn't like the title because there's nothing in it that comes at night.
And I thought, if you call your movie It Comes at Night, something ought to come at night.
But that's not actually what it's about.
It's very hard to say what it's about.
First of all, this movie could have been made except for the fact it's got Joel Edgerton in it, who's a minor, he's an indie star and a really good actor at times.
And aside from that, it could have been made for, I don't know, $100,000, which is nothing for a movie.
It's just basically four or five people in a house in the woods.
We don't know what's happened.
We know there's been some kind of apocalypse.
We know that there is a plague going around that they all are defending themselves against.
And basically, it also has a mixed-race couple, which I only mention because it's just not mentioned in the movie.
Joel Edgerson's wife is black and their son is black.
And they're living alone in this house.
And some strangers come.
Some strangers who seem like decent people, another, a man, a woman, and a child.
And they need water and they need food and they need shelter.
And so they take them in.
And the problems that arise are not problems of good versus evil.
They're problems of self-interest.
So this is the scene where they're just getting to know the guy of this family, and he seems like a really good guy.
And Joel Edgerson talks to his son about him.
He just gives him a warning.
All right.
Yeah.
I think it's piled on.
That's cool.
Yeah, sure.
Thanks, Will.
No problem.
Good people, huh?
Yes.
I like the man.
Why don't you just keep it in perspective, okay?
I don't need to tell you, but you can't trust anybody but family.
As good as they seem.
Just don't forget that, okay?
Yeah.
So, you know, this is, and it's wonderful that the problems that come up are so basic.
They're not horror movie problems.
The boy is 17 and the wife who comes is young and beautiful and he's attracted to her.
You know, it's not a big deal.
It's just an aspect of the story, as he would be, of course, attracted to her.
There's no other woman for him to have.
Their child is small and the child is irresponsible and they have to follow certain rules to keep the bad guys out and to keep the diseases going on.
It's very mysterious.
If you go on Rotten Tomatoes, it got high marks from critics, but low marks from people, ordinary people kind of watched it and said, you know, what's going on here?
Where's the monster?
What's going on?
But this is part of this new horror thing.
And what I think it's talking about is it's talking about this kind of global world we're in where we feel a certain amount of xenophobia, a fear of foreigners, but some of that fear is legitimate.
You know, some of the people who just openly welcomed some of the large influx of Muslims into Europe are now saying, oh, wow, this is really bad.
Our women are being attacked.
We can't train these people out of their cultural habits that are bad for the West.
You know, nobody wants to be like this.
You know, this is one of the things I always object to when the left charges people with Islamophobia.
Global Horror, Grounded Fear00:02:22
Nobody just woke up one morning and said, you know what I'm going to do?
I'm going to hate Islamic people.
That's not the way it works.
You know, we see things.
There are problems.
We have to address them.
And what I really liked about this movie is it really addressed in a very, very hard, realistic way the fact that you have to protect the people you love first.
You have to protect your town first.
You have to protect your family, your friends, and then your country first.
And that creates all kinds of difficulties.
It's a very, very powerful, very quiet film.
If you're looking for real slash and burn horror, obviously that's not it.
But that's not what I like.
I really like this new spade of horror films.
I hope there are a lot more before the movement, as all movements do, dies out, but I hope there are more.
I'm sorry, folks.
I can't help you anymore.
Clavenless Weekend is here.
You know, batten down the hatches, store up some fresh water.
You know, get your guns together.
We'll end with Tom Petty.
Tom Petty died this week.
That's sad.
All this Las Vegas news.
It was kind of hard to take notice, but his song, one of his most famous songs, certainly speaks into the heart of this country and to the heart of these people who are resisting not just the evil that comes on a sudden and looks so big, but the everyday evil and also the people who are trying to divide us.
Here is Tom Petty and the heartbreakers in Stand My Ground.
Well, I won't back down.
No, I won't back down.
You can stand me up at the gates of hell, but I won't back down.