Ep. 396 – One Hollywood Hero dissects Harvey Weinstein’s abuse as a symptom of Hollywood’s liberal hypocrisy, where institutions like The New York Times suppressed his crimes while Obama’s tepid response failed. Brad Pitt’s defiance contrasts with silent peers like Tarantino, exposing a culture where power trumps accountability—until conservative investors intervene, mirroring Trump’s NFL anthem strategy. The episode debates art vs. artist, arguing Polanski’s talent survives his crimes unless directly complicit, while critiquing revenge narratives as fantasies of justice. A ghostly anecdote and the host’s pro-life shift—rooted in post-conception ethics—bookend a broader attack on leftist universalism and right-wing nationalism, praising Crowder’s upcoming show as a Burkean bulwark against ideological decay. [Automatically generated summary]
I guess she realized the marriage was over when he stopped forcing her to watch him shower.
I think that was the end.
And then Harvey flies to Europe for treatment of sex addiction.
Sex addiction, that's the common name for it.
The medical, the full medical name for the disease is being a soulless piece of crap with too much power.
I think that's what doctors call it.
But you have to go to Europe to get treatment for that because it's harder for them to extradite you for to charge you with rape.
I think that's why.
That's why the European treatment is so much better than the American treatment.
But there is one person in Hollywood who did something I admire.
Maybe it wasn't a full Hollywood hero, but there's one person who did something I admire.
And nobody really is talking about it, even though he's a big star because of what it says about this situation.
Everybody's saying, oh, this situation is about feminism and it's about this.
I don't think so.
And this one guy did something that I admire, and I will talk about that.
Plus, we've got the mailbag.
I know, your problems are over.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boom.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dee-doo.
Ship-shaped tipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoora.
All right, we got a lot to talk about.
The mailbag is going to be in the second part of the show, so you will, if you're watching on Facebook and YouTube, you will have to come over to thedailywire.com and you can listen to it or you could subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month and you could watch the whole thing on the website without being cast out into the exterior darkness.
Subscribe for a lousy hundred bucks.
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Even as I'm sitting here, as I'm speaking, it will fill up with leftist tears, which I will then drink.
And you will hear my cries of satisfaction as they go down so smoothly.
Also, our second episode of The Conversation is coming up next, this coming Tuesday, Tuesday, October 17th.
It's at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific, and it features, this time it's the Daily Wire's own Andrew Cliff.
It's me.
It's me.
I know.
Who knew?
It's like I will be there with the beautiful Alicia Krauss, and I will explain all the mysteries of the universe, as I so often do.
You know, anybody who catches the show now knows there are fewer mysteries of the universe for me to explain.
But anybody can watch it.
You go on the Daily Wire Facebook page or YouTube channel and you can watch, but only subscribers can ask the questions.
So you either have to wait hoping someone will ask your question that will solve your problem, or you can come on and ask me right away, and I will, you know, answers like the mailbag, answers guaranteed 100% correct.
What else?
Another kingdom is coming, Friday the 13th.
Me and Michael Knowles doing a fictional podcast that will not be here.
That will be on the Ricochet site.
That's two days, I know, Friday the 13th.
It's happening.
It's all happening.
We hope.
I mean, like I said, Satan has been plotting against this thing.
Now, I would like to go on with the rest of the show, but I have to run to the post office.
And I should be, I'll be back, oh, you know, what, I don't know, three hours it takes to go to the post office in L.A.
It's like, first you got to drive there, then you got to wait online, then you have to hope the window is open, all that.
Or, or you could use stamps.com.
That's what I use.
Stamps.com brings all the services of the U.S. Postal Service right into your computer.
They jam it in there.
It's a little violent, but once it's in there, you can get any letter, any package, any class of mail using your own computer and printers.
Stamps.com makes it all incredibly easy.
They'll send you a digital scale, which will automatically calculate the exact postage, and they'll even help you decide the best class of mail based on your needs.
Really, I use it because it would just be crazy with life moving as quickly as it does to stop everything and run to the store.
And if you are listening to me, stamps.com will give you a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus postage and a digital scale without any long-term commitment.
So go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage, and type in Clavin.
Clavin.
K-L-A-V-A-N stamps.com and enter Clavinstamps.com.
You never have to pause and stop your day to go to the post office.
Again, I always like the post office.
People pick on the post office, but they do a good job.
It's just you've got to move into the present, right?
You can't just live.
You can't take the horse down, put the oil and the coal in your buggy and drive down to the post office.
Harvey Weinstein At The New Yorker00:10:01
All right, we got to, you know, the reason I want to keep talking about this Harvey Weinstein thing is not just because it's Hollywood.
I do think it's an important story.
I do think it has a lot of important things to say.
And I'm not going to just be picking on Hollywood because, first of all, I've worked out here quite a lot.
Hollywood is not a monolithic thing.
It is too overrun with liberals.
The left has too much of a stranglehold on it.
But it's not like everybody gets together in a room and plots things.
It's different businesses, different people, a lot of really nice people out here.
And not everybody is abusing women.
Plenty of religious people and good people and all this stuff.
But this story is amazing because this guy was king of the pack.
Harvey Weinstein was the king.
His movies are terrific.
His movies are excellent.
I think we have a question in the mailbag about that.
We have a lot of really good questions in the mailbag today, but that's one of them, I think.
So everybody's talking about the women coming forward, how wonderful it is, how heroic it is that these women are coming forward.
And of course, they're coming forward after 20 years.
And I'm not blaming them one bit.
You know, they are not to blame.
The women are not to blame here.
But, you know, it's not heroic to keep quiet for 20 years and then come out.
Hillary Clinton finally has come out and says something.
She says, I was shocked.
And Apollo, she sounds like the guy in Casablanca.
What's his name?
He says, I'm shocked to find gambling going on in this casino.
She's shocked to find sexual abuse going on in Hollywood.
I was shocked and appalled by the revelations about Harvey Weinstein.
The behavior described by women coming forward cannot be tolerated.
Their courage and the support of others is critical in helping to stop this kind of behavior.
And we're going to get to that.
Like, where is the courage here exactly?
And what's the problem?
What is the problem?
Because there's always been, there's always been powerful guys who abuse women.
Always, always, always.
There always will be, I guess.
I mean, I think as long as there are powerful men, you know, guys who get to the top without any kind of consideration of morality or decency or principle, there are always going to be people who then, when they get to the top, abuse the people around them, especially the people under them.
But this is, I mean, Ronan Farrow's piece, I didn't have time to read it all yesterday.
Ronan Farrow wrote this piece for The New Yorker, right?
He says three of the women he talked to said Weinstein raped them.
Okay?
Like, you know, as Whoopi Goldberg would say, that's rape rape, right?
She said of Roman Bolansky.
Well, it wasn't rape rape, you know?
It's like, yeah, no, that's rape.
Three women said he raped.
And by the way, I will say Weinstein has denied all of this.
He denies anything.
But he says the allegations include Weinstein forcibly performing or receiving oral sex and forcing vaginal sex.
Four women said that they experienced unwanted touching that could be classified as an assault.
One woman said that Weinstein brought her to a hotel room under a professional pretext, changed into a bathrobe, and forced himself on me sexually.
She said no repeatedly and clearly.
Afterward, she experienced horror, disbelief, and shame and considered going to the police.
I thought it would be a he said, she said, and I thought about how impressive his legal team is.
And I thought about how much I would lose.
And I decided to just move forward.
The woman continued to have professional contact with Weinstein after the alleged rape and acknowledged that subsequent communications between them might suggest a normal working relationship.
I was in a vulnerable position and I needed my job.
It just increases my shame and my guilt.
And, you know, I just want to be clear because I am going to talk about the fact that, you know, I don't think, I think when you've kept quiet, now you come forward, I think that's a good thing.
It's a positive thing.
And, you know, nothing but praise for the women who are coming forward and speaking out.
But I can't, it doesn't rank as heroism to me because, of course, all this time went by, but I just want to make it really clear that I totally understand what it means to need a job and not be able to speak out and to be up against.
This guy's a monolith.
He has got a legal team.
He's litigious.
He's happy to sue you.
He's happened to threaten to sue you.
But just for all the people, I think it was, who's the guy who plays Batman now?
Sorry, I've lost.
Ben Affleck.
It was Ben Affleck who said he didn't know about this.
And one of the women tweeted back, what do you mean?
You told me about it.
You know, you told me it was happening.
It was an open secret.
And Fox News just played this semi-montage of people making jokes about it on 30 Rock and at the Oscars.
This is cut number four.
Oh, please.
I'm not afraid of anyone in show business.
I turned down intercourse with Harvey Weinstein on no less than three occasions out of five.
Congratulations, you five ladies no longer have to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein.
I mean, that's a funny line from Tina Faye's show.
That was a really funny show.
Yeah, I turned him down three times out of five, but it does suggest that they knew what was going on.
You know, there's one on the Oscar that's a little more unclear because Harvey Weinstein was this gnome-like figure.
I mean, he's not an attractive man at all.
He's a horrible, burly, you know, ugly guy.
But, you know, so you might have made that joke about any powerful guy.
But the point is, this was covered up.
Ronan Farrell, the guy who writes the New Yorker piece, works for NBC.
He's a, you know, he's a, whatever they call him, a contributor to NBC.
He's on with Rachel Maddow, and he doesn't want to bite the hand that feeds him.
And he starts out by saying, well, I don't want to say why NBC.
She says to him, why didn't you bring this to NBC?
And he says, well, you know, I don't want to bite, you know, say anything bad about it.
But listen, as the interview goes on, Farrell will not back down and he won't, you know, cover up the fact NBC potted the story.
Listen to this.
Over many years, many news organizations have circled this story and faced a great deal of pressure in doing so.
And there are now reports emerging publicly about the kinds of pressure that news organizations face in this.
And that is real.
And in the course of this reporting, I was threatened with a lawsuit personally by Mr. Weinstein.
And, you know, we've already seen that the Times has been publicly threatened with the suit.
I don't want to describe any suits leveled at other organizations that I work with, but certainly this is a considerable amount of pressure that outlets get us.
And NBC says that the story wasn't publishable, that it wasn't ready to go by the time that you brought it to them.
But obviously, it's ready to go by the time you got it into the New Yorker.
I walked into the door at the New Yorker with an explosively reportable piece that should have been public earlier.
And immediately, obviously, the New Yorker recognized that, and it is not accurate to say that it was not reportable.
In fact, there were multiple determinations that was reportable at NBC.
Wow.
I mean, wow, that's like an explosively reportable piece.
And the New Yorker grabbed it, he says, but he had obviously gone to NBC with it first, who obviously want to go be on TV instead of in the New Yorker, which nobody reads.
And, you know, unless it has a piece like this in it, they turned him down.
And when, you know, he didn't want to say it at first, but when Rachel Maddow says, you know, they're saying it wasn't reportable, the story wasn't any good.
He called them, he called BS on him.
So this obviously happened at the Times, at the rap the woman wrote that it happened at the New York Times.
It obviously was happening everywhere.
And remember, Weinstein assaulted a reporter in front of other reporters and it didn't make the news.
I mean, this stuff was happening all the time.
And the reason I'm bringing this up is because as far as the women go, as the victims go, this plays into it.
What do you do if they're not going to print the story?
If you're going to go up against this powerful guy who has a lot of power over you, power not just if you happen to be working for him, but power to ruin your life.
Power to make phone calls to your agent.
Power to tell people not to hire you.
I mean, you can be turned off in the town like that by a couple of phone calls if they just say, don't.
If Harvey Weinstein calls and says, look, this woman's trouble, don't hire her.
She's not going to get hired.
And if the press is protecting you and not just the press, you know, here's, Barack Obama finally came out and made a statement, typical mealy-mouthed, mushy statement from Barack Obama.
Michelle and I have been disgusted by the recent reports about Harvey Weinstein.
Any man who, and he put this statement out, he didn't come out and say it, any man who demeans and degrades women in such fashion needs to be condemned and held accountable regardless of wealth or status.
We should celebrate the courage of women who have come forward to tell these painful stories.
And we all need to build a culture included, a culture, including by empowering our girls and teaching our boys decency and respect so we can make such behavior less prevalent in the future.
As always with Obama, I think that's exactly not what we need.
But the point is, he says these people need to be held accountable.
But here is Gabe Sherman, a Vanity Fair special reporter in Vanity Fair covering all the celebs and all this stuff, pointing out that even while these rumors were spread and even while anybody who knew Harvey Weinstein knew about them, and like I said, even I, who was a screenwriter, which is like basically like the lowest position you can hold in Hollywood, even I knew that there was abuse.
I didn't actually know about sexual abuse.
It would not be something that would come my way, but I certainly knew that this was an abusive guy.
But listen to Gabe Sherman's.
This is his experience of covering a speech by Barack Obama at which Harvey Weinstein, a big Democrat donor, was present.
Surely people did know that there were allegations of Harvey's behavior with women.
It was an open secret in Hollywood and in media circles.
And, you know, I was at an event months back right after President Obama left office in which he gave a speech.
And the first person, I was really struck by this, the first person he went over to greet on the rope line was Harvey Weinstein.
And President Obama's daughter, Malia, interned for him.
And I, as a reporter, sort of knowing the rumors and the gossip, was shocked, you know, knowing what's out there that President Obama would legitimize Harvey Weinstein in that way.
And I think that is partly why women felt so scared to come forward, because the most powerful people in the country, from actors to journalists to politicians, were all surrounding themselves around Harvey.
Why Life Insurance Matters00:03:14
Well, bingo, right?
The president of the United States is moving to shake this guy's hand before anybody else, or maybe former president at this point, but still.
And you're a woman who maybe is not famous, maybe is just, or maybe even is famous, and knows that you can be cut down.
How are you supposed to overcome that?
I do not see, I'm not calling these women heroes because I feel like it all happened so late.
Heroic would have been blowing the whistle and gotten really taking the heat from him.
It was only when his power started to ebb that people came out with this stuff.
But they're certainly not, you know, they're not to blame.
They're not in any way to blame.
And it was what Obama said about what we need to, we need to empower our girls and teach our boys decency and respect.
I don't think that's what we need at all because the men are key here.
And that's why I wanted to point out one guy, one guy who at least did something.
He didn't do enough, but he at least did something.
Before we get to that, I have to talk about policy genius because nobody wants to talk about life insurance.
You don't want to talk about life insurance when you talk about life insurance.
You think about why you need life insurance, and nobody wants to think about why you need life insurance, but you do.
You need life insurance because you need to take care of the people around you if something happens, not just your kids and your spouse, but also your parents if they're getting old and if you're not around to take care of them, there's got to be some money.
But the problem is it's boring and it's hard to find and you just want to go and grab the first thing.
But you can save a lot of money if you compare prices, and that's what they do at PolicyGenius.
PolicyGenius.com is a place you can go to learn about life insurance and you can compare quotes from America's top providers and you can save up to 40% on your policy, which over time is a lot of money.
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Policy Genius has placed over $5 billion in life insurance.
They have a simple, user-friendly website that helps you work out exactly which policy is right for you and finds you the best place.
It takes five minutes to apply for a quote, which is nothing.
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Policygenius.com, it's life insurance for the 21st century.
Too many people, especially young people, go without life insurance because they think nothing's going to ever happen to them.
But eventually you're going to need it and it's a good thing to get early on.
All right, should we break?
I guess we should break from Facebook and YouTube.
The mailbag is coming up, but you've got to come over to thedailywire.com to hear it or you can subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month.
Then you can be in the mailbag, ask your questions, and all your problems will be solved.
Come on over to TheDailyWire.com.
So it's the men I want to talk about.
This is what I want to get to.
It's the men in this story.
Here's from The Guardian, all right, because this is happening now.
The Men Behind The Curtain00:15:48
Meryl Streep, Judy Dench, Kate Winslet, and dozens of other women in Hollywood, this is from the left-wing Guardian, right?
Have condemned the producer Harvey Weinstein amid a growing number of sexual harassment allegations.
Most high-profile men in the industry, however, have remained silent.
I mean, this, you know, when these sexual stories come out, everybody likes to make them political and say, ah, you know, Bill Clinton, he's on the left, Roger Ailes, he's on the right, and all that stuff.
And I'm trying not to do that because I don't think that that, I mean, look, the left is a little bit more sanctimonious about sexual relations and they're the feminists and they're the women's friends and all that stuff.
So it is a little bit, what's the word, ironic, you know, that when it happens on the left, it's a little, you know, just like they accuse us of hypocrisy when some religious guy, you know, is found in a Motel 6 with his male masseur.
You know, I think that that's, we feel a little bit about this.
But my problem here, the leftism that I have a problem here with, is feminism, because I think feminism, like every other leftist policy, accomplishes the exact opposite of what it says it's going to do.
And what bothers me about the right is we're so busy being gleeful about the failures of the left that we actually adopt their values when we do it.
So what we say is like, ha, you call yourself a feminist, but now these women are being abused.
That's not what I'm saying at all.
Feminism to me is a contributing factor to the crime.
And I will explain how in just a minute.
But let me finish this.
The Guardian contacted more than 20 male actors and directors who have worked with the movie Mogul over the years, some of whom have projects with Weinstein.
All of them declined to comment or did not respond to inquiries about the accusations that the producer sexually harassed women over a period of nearly three decades.
Listen to this.
The list of industry figures thus far remaining silent includes a number of male directors, such as the Oscar-nominated Quentin Tarantino and David Russell, Silverlining's Playbook, who have both made numerous movies with Weinstein.
The liberal filmmaker Michael Moore, currently working with Weinstein, on a documentary about Donald Trump.
This is more pro-Donald Trump documentary.
Yeah, I made that up.
All right.
He also did not respond.
Moore did not respond to a request for comment.
To some, the glaring silence from the men of Hollywood reflects a broader culture of misogyny in the entertainment business, boosted by enablers who looked the other way or ignored the rumors allowing the Weinstein accusations to remain an open secret for years.
But it's not misogyny.
It's feminism.
Now, let me be clear that before feminism, plenty of powerful men abused women.
After feminism, and in the future, plenty of powerful men will abuse women.
But what does feminism condemn in men?
It condemns our superior strength being used as a protective guard for women.
And that is why my one hero in this story, the one person I like in the story, is Brad freaking Pitt.
Brad Pitt, okay?
Here's the story from the New York Times.
When Gwyneth Paltrow was 22 years old, she got a role that would take her from actress to star.
The film producer Harvey Weinstein hired her for the lead in Jane Austen's adaptation, the Jane Austen adaptation, Emma.
Great movie, and she is absolutely, I mean, I always thought that Gwyneth Paltrow, she's kind of my type.
I've always loved Grace Kelly, Peggy Lipton.
Gwyneth Paltrow, I always thought, was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen.
I think my wife is kind of this long, lean blonde, you know, and I think I just like long, lean blondes.
Before shooting began, Harvey summoned Gwyneth Paltrow to his suite at the peninsula, Beverly Hills Hotel, where I've been many times, for a work meeting that began uneventfully.
It ended with Mr. Weinstein placing his hands on her and suggesting they head to the bedroom for massages.
She says, I was a kid, I was signed up, I was petrified, she said in an interview, publicly disclosing that she was sexually harassed by the man who ignited her career and later helped her win an Academy Award in Shakespeare and Love.
And by the way, she says, just CAA, you know, her agency, they just sent over your schedule for today.
Here are your business meetings.
And one of them was this meeting.
So like she had no reason to be suspicious or anything like this.
When Mr. Weinstein tried to massage her and invited her into the bedroom, she immediately left.
And she remembers feeling stunned as she drove away.
I thought you were my uncle Harvey, she recalled thinking, explaining that she had seen Harvey Weinstein as a mentor, as you would.
She told Brad Pitt about the episode.
And Pitt, God love him.
Thankfully, we can say something good about somebody in Hollywood.
Brad Pitt approached Mr. Weinstein at a theater premiere.
And we have an actual video of what he said to him.
I won't give you a sum you can't take off.
Yeah!
Okay, that was my daydream.
That was my daydream.
But Brad Pitt went up to him and told him to keep his lousy hands to himself.
And Mr. Pitt, it says, confirmed the account to the Times through a representative.
He gave it to him, apparently, because then Weinstein calls up Paltrow, because he's too much of a wuss to take on Pitt, right?
He calls up Paltrow and berates her for discussing the episode.
Hey, when I'm trying to rape you, you don't go on telling people, I'm not sure exactly what he said, but don't interrupt me while I'm raping you.
She said she also told a few friends, family members, and her agent, he screamed at me for a long time, Paltrow said, and she once again feared she could lose the role in Emma.
It was brutal, but she stood her ground, she said, and insisted that he put the relationship back on a professional footing.
And Paltrow went on to become, she became known as the First Lady of Miramax because she was in all these independent films and she was in Shakespeare and Love, one of my favorite movies, just an absolutely beautiful movie in which she is beautiful beyond words, as far as I'm concerned.
But good for Brad Pitt.
He acted like a man.
I mean, what we need is more guys who feel that when this happens, it's their job to stop it.
And the people, and they don't want to talk about it because it's unfeminist.
And I am so anti-feminist and I'm so anti-right wingers who start to accuse the left, oh, you know, you've betrayed feminism.
Screw feminism.
You betrayed decency.
You betrayed humanity.
I hate feminism because it does this to men.
It makes, it takes away from men.
It's hard to be a man.
It's hard to get it right.
It's hard to be required to stand up for women.
It's hard to be required to stand up for yourself and do the right thing on principle.
It's hard.
And so if women don't help men be men, men don't have to be men and they won't do it.
They won't do it because why should men take the risks?
Why should men stand up?
Why should Brad Pitt go and risk having his career damaged by Harvey Weinstein?
He did it because he was the guy, because she was his girlfriend, and he was the guy and he did it.
And that, to me, is what this story is really about.
All these guys who are silent now, all these guys who won't answer the Guardian's questions, all these guys are not acting like guys.
They're not acting like men and standing up.
And that's why guys like Harvey Weinstein get around because get away with this.
Because if there are no men, Harvey Weinstein is all there is.
All right.
Now, I just want to finish talking about, before I go on to the mailbag, I just want to say that this, this is a moment when Hollywood as an industry is being exposed.
And Roger Simon, my pal Roger Simon, writes over at PJ Media.
He's an Oscar nominated.
I don't think he won, but he was definitely nominated for his screenwriting.
Really good writer.
And he wrote a piece today saying this is the moment for right-wing investors to start to get into the popular culture, to start to buy into the popular culture.
When the people can see that the left-wing structure that lectures and hectors them every day from their TV screen at night, that is rotten.
It's rotten to the core.
This is the time for the right to get in.
And Donald Trump, again, God love the guy.
I have all these problems with Donald Trump, but he does some really good things.
He has proved that if you stand up, like he stood up to the NFL, you can win.
The National Football League is now saying it will consider requiring all of its personnel to stand for the national anthem.
Trump is winning.
It's a move that could diffuse the dispute with President Donald Trump, but create a showdown with players over their right to protest.
But the thing is, you know, a woman at ESPN, Jamal Hill, she got suspended because she said she told people to boycott advertisers if they left the NFL.
Michael Wilbon, also an ESPN commentator, accused the owner of the Dallas Cowboys who said he would fire people.
He would take people off the field if they didn't salute the flag, if they didn't stand up for the flag.
And so he went on, Wilbon went on radio and he called it a plantation mentality.
It's a plant, they're pulling the race card.
But listen to what he says.
I use the phrase plantation mentality.
Let me repeat it.
Because that's what it comes off as.
I don't care if Jerry Jones comes back and criticizes me or Fox News or anybody else.
You know, there needs to be open discussion.
And sometimes it's harsh.
And I don't have my bosses tell me what to say, meaning my producers at PTI.
I don't have anybody at Bristol tell me what to say.
And I'm not waiting for it.
I'm not sitting by the phone, waiting for area code 860.
It's just feeling cock.
See, this is the typical leftist thing.
We need to have a discussion, an open discussion.
As if we have talked about anything else in this country for the last 50 years, but certainly for the last three months, we've had an open discussion.
You are losing the discussion.
That's the problem.
It's not that we're not having an open discussion.
This discussion couldn't be any more open.
The president is tweeting about it.
How open the discussion do you want?
You're losing the discussion.
They are losing the culture.
And it's time for us to make a move.
This is the time.
And Trump, you know, he's a guy.
I got a lot of problems with him.
A lot of his politics, you know, sometimes the things he does make me crazy, but he is leading the way.
He's showing all these people, you know, all these intellectuals who just want to talk about ideas and all this stuff.
He's showing them there's something more important.
There's a passion and a love of country and a kind of visceral attachment to our traditions and our way of life that you have to have to make this stuff work.
And part of that comes through the culture.
And I think with Hollywood being exposed as being as hypocritical as it is, with the NFL being exposed as being completely vulnerable to the audience because they were so big no one could touch them.
I think this is the moment when we have to start to strike back.
Guys with money, guys with talent, all those people have to start speaking out fearlessly, fearlessly, because that's what it's going to take because you're going to be called racist at every turn.
You're going to be called sexist at every turn.
You're going to be called a million things.
You have to never back down.
We have to push forward because this is the moment when we could win.
The mailbag.
I love her.
Lindsay's a Halloween freak and she posted a beautiful picture she made of illustrating a song of hers called, I think it's called The Digger or something like this.
But the picture of this woman in the woods that she drew.
I didn't even know she was that talented artist.
Really nice.
You can see it on her Twitter feed.
All right, from Daniel.
Mr. Clavin, to what extent, here is the question about Weinstein.
To what extent should one separate the artist from the art?
Roman Polanski has directed some amazing films and Harvey Weinstein has produced some of the greatest films I've ever seen.
I agree.
I don't expect artists or anyone to be a saint, but is there a limit where one must cut off the artist and their work no matter how good the art is?
I have no limits for Emperor Clavin, though.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate that.
Of course.
And of course, you should completely separate the artist and the art in the sense of there's no reason, the only reason I would boycott a Harvey Weinstein film or film that Harvey Weinstein produced was to stop him from doing something that I felt needed to be stopped.
Like in other words, if they were going to ignore these charges against him and not force him out now that we know about them, then I would say like, yeah, I'm not going to your movies until you get rid of this guy.
I mean, that would be a political action and a political moment to get at the person who was committing the crimes in the moment.
But his films, in some sense, have nothing to do with him.
I mean, there are plenty of artists I love.
I'm reading all about Shelley now, the poet, the romantic poet Shelley, who's a terrible person.
He did terrible things.
Byron was awful.
I mean, awful, but they wrote great poetry, and the poetry is a gift.
You know, talent is blind.
I mean, here's the thing.
There's a lot of, I've known a lot of artists in my life, and a lot of them were bad people.
And the bad people always say, well, this one was bad, and that one was bad, so I can be bad too.
But the fact is, talent is blind.
It lands where it will.
You know, Eminem, I'm not going to play it, but Eminem put out this really stupid video of him attacking Donald Trump.
Eminem, who has some of the most hateful lyrics about women, the violence, and all this stuff.
Eminem is an immensely talented guy.
I hate rap music, but he is an immensely talented guy.
But that doesn't mean his art doesn't stink.
His art stinks.
It's violent and vicious.
It's soulless.
It's nasty.
But he has talent.
He has talent.
If he had used it for something a little better, if he had used it to express something better in himself, he would have written better stuff.
I don't really think his stuff is good enough to overcome its cruelty.
But if it were, I would listen to it.
If it were, I would listen to it, no matter what he was doing.
So, yeah, you definitely separate it.
You have no, there's nothing, nothing sticks to you because you enjoy art, assuming the art is saying something that, in fact, is lifting, uplifting your life.
That's my problem with Eminem: he actually uses his art for bad purposes.
That's the way I feel about it, but I'm not a rap fan, so maybe I don't know.
All right, from Benjamin.
Andrew, as Christians, we are typically taught that revenge for its own sake is a bad thing.
Still, I think people tend to view the protagonists of revenge tales as the good guys.
Why do you think this is?
What, in your opinion, as a writer, makes a revenge story so compelling?
Well, revenge, it's justice.
I mean, we believe in mercy, Christians believe in mercy, but we also believe in God's perfect justice.
And revenge stories give us the justice we crave in our imaginations.
They usually start, one of the reasons I have a hard time with revenge stories is that they usually start with a crime so horrible as to justify the revenge.
And I hate watching the opening scene where they kill the kid or they rape the wife or something like this.
And I know it's coming and I don't want to watch it.
But it represents justice, and there's nothing wrong with, you know, Stephen King once said that his books take the monsters out of your brain and take them for a walk.
And I think that that is one of the things that art does.
I mean, I have my own theories about art.
You can read about them in my book, The Great Good Thing.
I have my own theories about what art does, but still, one of the things it certainly does is it brings out these things and it illustrates them.
Watching, you know, an example that I always use is Thelma Louise, not my favorite movie in the world, but in Thelman Louise, the girls shoot a rapist after he has his hands up and he is unarmed.
And people go, Yeah, yeah.
Whereas, of course, if you did that in real life, you'd be charged with murder and you'd probably, you know, at least get hit for manslaughter.
But in the movie, you get it.
You get that this guy has done something irredeemable and gets what he deserves, and it gets that fantasy out.
There's an element of fantasy to it.
And I think what you are fantasizing about is justice.
Painful Fantasies00:08:30
And in this context of the story, they are removing the mercy, they're removing the legal applications that slow things down.
But I think that you have the right to fantasize about it.
And I think you can actually learn something and expand something about your own mind by exploring that part of yourself.
Just don't go out and kill anybody.
From Laurie, I think.
Hail, Clavin, hail, yes.
A quick question in honor of the upcoming All Halloweds Eve.
As a believer in the super or preternatural, do you believe ghosts exist?
If so, what are they?
If not, what are people experiencing?
Cheers for all those leftist tears.
I love ghosts.
I love ghost stories.
I love ghost stories.
And I always have to distinguish between ghost stories, which are kind of eerie and creepy, and horror stories, which have a lot of gore and dissecting people, which I really can't stand.
But I love ghost stories.
Because I love ghost stories, I kind of collect them in the sense that whenever I'm in a room with 10 or more people, I always say, Has anybody ever seen a ghost?
And I've never been shut out.
I have never had 10 people or more in a room and no one had seen a ghost.
And I have heard some really, really convincing stories.
Now, when I lived in England where they're obsessed with ghosts, my daughter and I used to go around and we'd choose hotels.
If we had to stay in a hotel, we'd choose the most haunted hotel.
And then we'd meet in the hallways at midnight and creep around looking for ghosts.
Never saw anything.
The only experience I have ever had like this at all was a couple years ago, my dog died.
She died on Christmas, Christmas Day.
Loved this dog.
She was exactly 15 years old.
I was like connected to this dog, like she was my second soul.
And I just absolutely love the dog.
And we put the dog to sleep.
She was in terrible pain, and there was nothing we could do for her.
And we all came home.
It was me and my wife and my son, and we were looking at each other.
I just said, let's not just look at each other morose.
I'm going to go and work out.
So I have out in a porch, I have an elliptical machine.
And the porch is connected to the little patch of grass that my dog used as a bathroom, right?
So it's a screened in, it's a glassed in porch.
So I got on the elliptical machine and I am going, and the dog has been dead for like an hour maybe.
And I'm going on the elliptical machine and suddenly the door to this little porch from the place that my dog used to use as her bathroom comes slowly swinging in.
Slowly, I mean like somebody is pushing it in.
And I turned and I thought, that's my dog.
And the door stayed open for about a minute and then it slowly swung closed again.
And that's never happened before.
It's never happened since.
I have no idea what it was.
I have sensed her presence once.
We used to have a joke about my dog, but she was very spiritual.
One of those family jokes where you always say the same thing over and over again.
We'd say, you know, dog is God spelled backwards.
So I was surprised.
But so you asked me the question, do I believe ghosts exist?
And you know, I kind of do.
Let me put it to you this way.
The evidence that I have collected favors ghosts existing.
I do believe if they exist, that they are the spirits of the dead.
And I think that, you know, why they get caught here, I have no idea whether they come and go or actually are trapped in some kind of limbo.
I have no idea.
I just have heard so many, the stories I've heard have been from rational people, and they have been incredibly vivid.
I mean, some of them, some of them are like, oh, I heard a voice.
Like that story I just told you.
You could say, oh, the wind blew the door in or whatever.
Some could be explained, but some of them have been out of like a Christmas carol with like invisible people and things like that.
And just like, I've just heard enough to make me think that there's something there.
That's all I would say.
There was one here I wanted to, there are a couple of ones.
I'm running out of time, but there are a couple I still want to answer.
I've heard you mention in interviews.
This is from George.
I've heard you mention in interviews, most recently the Rubin report, that you used to be pro-choice.
Then you say you lost an argument with someone and changed your opinion to pro-life.
What was the person's argument that so influenced you?
I engage with pro-choicers frequently, but I doubt that my arguments have changed anyone's mind.
I realize that whatever caused you to rethink your position will not necessarily persuade someone else.
But I'm wondering if there is a case I have not made.
Well, first of all, it had to do with the guy I was arguing with, one of my oldest friends, but at the time he was not one of my oldest friends because I wasn't old enough to have oldest friends.
And he was a guy I really, as today, like and trust and admire.
I admire his intelligence.
He's always had very honest, open arguments with me.
He is a devout Catholic, and he didn't jump on me.
He didn't scream at me.
You know, it was a very civilized argument that went into the long hours.
And I'm a good arguer when I'm allowed to speak and debate, you know, but I felt I lost the argument, fair and square.
I mean, I felt I lost the argument.
And the thing that I think most impressed me was when I made the argument that it's just a, you know, patch of cells, a bunch of cells.
He very quietly laid out that this is a unique blueprint, at least, for an individual, you know, and if left alone, it will develop into a full human being.
And that's not true before, because he could, you know, he doesn't, he's a devout Catholic.
doesn't believe in birth control, which I do believe in very deeply.
But he didn't even make that argument.
He didn't say, he said, this is different.
This is different.
Once the child is there and is growing, if you don't get in the way, this will become a full human being.
And what occurred to me as he was speaking, and I don't remember whether he said this or not, because I was making my arguments and he was making, it occurred to me that we live in time.
We don't just live in space, right?
If you go to sleep, I can't come in and kill you because you're unconscious because you will eventually wake up.
We live in time.
The things that happened to me in the past affect me now.
I have things that bother me from the past that have changed my behavior because they happened to me.
We don't just live in the dimension of space.
It took me 20 years to admit to myself that I had lost the argument because it is such, I was on the left and it was such a, what's the word, a bugbear of the left.
You know, it was kind of like one of their idols.
But that argument that even though at that moment the person couldn't make a decision, at that moment the person might not feel desire, at that moment the person might not feel pain, though we're not sure of that, but even so, that the person was living in time and would become a human being if left alone.
And that is not true before you have sex.
It's not true before conception, but it is true afterwards.
It's a complete plan for a human being that will develop over time.
And I just, you know, it's painful for me because I want women to be happy and have whatever they want and have the freedoms that they want.
But I just, you can't kill people to get your freedom.
One more I got to do, because it was a really good question, if I can find it.
From Leland.
Dear Sir Clayfield of Los Angeles, I've had a crush on this girl for quite some time.
I only call it that because she's the first person I thought of on a non-physical basis.
We men often think about assets of the body before anything else, but she was different.
The only issue is that my best friend got to her first.
So now while I'm still close to both of them, whenever I see them both, I feel something bitter boiling inside.
I don't believe this is envy, because I have no desire to interfere with them.
Any thoughts?
Yes, I do have thoughts on this.
First of all, I question your description that your best friend got to her first.
What sounds to me is like your best friend and the girl that you have a crush on or are in love with fell in love.
They started a relationship.
Whether he got there first or not, this seems to be the relationship that she wants to have.
So you are in a situation where your best friend and the girl you love are together.
That is a painful situation.
So what you are feeling is pain.
You're feeling pain at a painful situation.
You will have painful situations in your life.
This is one of them.
And it's a painful one.
I mean, I know something about this.
And this is a painful, painful situation.
Your best friend and a girl that you really love are in love with each other, and you're in pain.
So now, you have the same problem that you have every day when you're not in pain or when you are in pain, which is to act with integrity and decency and for the best of all involved.
Edmund Burke's Legacy00:07:37
That's all there is to it.
And to live in pain.
I mean, I can only give you the advice of Dalton from Roadhouse, which is pain don't hurt.
And what that means is basically that you have to tough it out.
You are in pain.
And that just happens.
And you've got to be a man about it.
That is really the answer.
You have got to be a man about the pain and act with decency.
And if you can't, if you can act with decency, you've got to walk away.
You've got to walk away from them and not come near them.
If you cannot get past the pain, if it just reopens the wound every time, then you have to walk away.
Tickety-boo news.
You know, when we play the other one from the Sexual Follies, I don't get to see me dancing, but it is now me dancing.
Yeah, you got to put that up there so I can see it.
It's not fair that the audience gets entertained and I'm not, I'm here to be entertained.
I want to be undertaken.
So, Tickety Wu News is not happy news.
It's news about how to read the newspaper.
And there was this, how to read the news, basically, and how to not get swept up in their craziness.
There's an article by Yoni Applebaum in the Atlantic Monthly: Is the American Idea Doomed?
And he comes out with a lot of bad news.
He says, America no longer serves as a model for the world as it once did.
Its influence is receding.
At home, critics on the left reject the notion that the U.S. has a special role to play.
On the right, nationalists push to define American identity around culture, not principles.
Is the American idea obsolete?
And he goes on to say, to some extent, America is a victim of its own success.
It's spread to other nations.
The American ideas spread to other nations.
It has left America less distinctive than it once was.
It's also failed to live up to its own ideals.
Recent reports rank the U.S. 28th out of 35 developed countries in the percentage of adults who vote and 32nd in income equality.
Its rates of intergenerational economic mobility are among the lowest in the developed world.
On Opportunity 2, the United States now falls short.
It's no surprise that younger Americans have lost faith in a system that no longer seems to deliver on its promises.
Around the globe, those who dislike the American ideas about democracy now outnumber those who favor them.
All of this has left many Americans feeling disoriented.
Their faith that their nation has something distinctive to offer the world has been shaken.
On the left, many have gravitated toward a strange sort of universalism, focusing on America's flaws while admiring other nations' virtues.
They decry nationalism and covet open borders, imagining a world in which ideas can prevail without nations to champion them.
Many on the right now doubt that America is a land defined by a distinctive idea at all.
President Donald Trump's rhetoric is curiously devoid of references to a common civic creed.
He promotes instead a more generic nationalism, one defined like any nations, by culture and borders and narrow interests and enemies.
Both of these visions are corrosive, although not equally.
And then he goes on to bash Trump.
Here's what I want to say about this.
I agree with him that the left's idea that ideas just somehow float in the idea, you know, that common sense is going to make us all decent and free, and that it just kind of lands on us like the gentle rain from heaven.
This idea that it's not America, it's not the people who fought and died, it's not our history that goes into it is absurd.
And I also agree that Donald Trump does not fully understand the American idea, that he doesn't talk enough about the Constitution, he doesn't quite understand what it is, and that the people who do talk about those things hate Donald Trump and will not connect him to the ideas.
They won't help connect him to the ideas.
And this, I think, those people are wrong.
The intellectual right that has abandoned Donald Trump.
And here's why.
It has to do with Edmund Burke.
Edmund Burke was like kind of the founder of conservatism.
And Edmund Burke was a parliamentarian in England.
And he recognized the American Revolution and he supported it, but he attacked the French Revolution.
I just now reread, just a couple of months ago, I reread his remarks about the revolution, his whole book about the revolution in France and why he thinks it's wrong.
And why he understood that the American Revolution was good and the French Revolution was bad has to do with the idea of tradition.
Burke's ideas about tradition are too often talked about as if they were some emotional thing, that he just liked tradition.
But what he said was that if you are free, if your country is free and prosperous, there's every reason to believe that your traditions had something to do with that.
And so you should be slow to throw them away.
You should be slow to throw your traditions away.
You know, one of those letters talked about the Rubin report, Dave Rubin, and Dave Rubin is gay.
And he said to me, I don't understand why small government conservatives are against gay marriage.
And I said, well, I totally, you know, I'm on the liberal side of this question, but I totally understand it because marriage is one of the founding traditions of founding principles of our democracy, of our culture.
And you don't just redefine it because you think it would be nice.
You know, I understand that.
I mean, in this case, I think I side with freedom.
I always side with freedom and work out the problems later.
But still, still, you don't throw traditions away.
And that's what Burke was talking about.
And when Donald Trump hits the NFL because they're not standing up for the flag, it's important.
It's not right for us to turn away when people in Hollywood start to stand up and say, well, maybe men should protect women a little bit.
Maybe men have a job to stand up for women a little bit.
You know, that's a good thing.
These are traditions.
And when feminists sweep this stuff away, when feminists say, don't open the door for me, when feminists say, don't stand up when I come to the table, they're throwing away the traditions that communicate this friendliness and this helpfulness between the sexes, without which there's not going to be equality, without which there's only going to be brutality and weakness.
That's all there's going to be.
And so Donald Trump is doing something in a flawed way.
I acknowledge that, but he's doing something important.
He is standing up for our traditions, our visceral love of country, our organic, emotional love of country and our love of our traditions.
And they have been under attack for so long that just doing that makes him popular, that just doing that makes him right.
And so I would say to my friends, and I love these guys, you know, my friends on the intellectual right who I admire so much and read and look up to, you know, I would just say to them, you know, you can't live fully in ideas.
These ideas live inside a temple.
And that temple is built on respect for the flag.
That temple is built for respect for our armed forces.
A temple is built on respect for manliness and femininity.
That is the temple that is built.
These ideas live inside.
It's not just the earth we live in.
It's not just the continent we live in, but it's also these traditions.
And Donald Trump, I acknowledge he does it in a flawed way, but he does it, and he does it with strength and vigor, and people are responding to that.
And I think that even if we, that we should be supplying some of the ideas that go behind what he does, because it's important he's winning these battles that we have been complaining about for years.
And again, I will always come out and say when I think Trump does something wrong, and I'll always come out and hit him for some of his ego and narcissism.
But this is so important.
This fight for the culture is so important because it protects the traditions that protect our ideas.
Tomorrow, who's, oh, I think Crowder's coming tomorrow.
I always love it when Crowder comes by because the only time they let him out of the cage, I think, is when he comes to do the show.