Andrew Clavin dissects Democrats’ shifting narratives after Virginia’s 2017 wins, mocking their pivot from "not significant" to "Trump referendum," while critiquing media bias in Pizzagate and Google’s suppression of conservative voices like Dennis Prager. He contrasts Trump’s policy successes with Obama’s executive overreach, praises his North Korea stance, and dismisses leftist claims of a "white lash." In the mailbag, he tackles cynicism via Ecclesiastes, defends tattoos (sort of), and advises a pro-life listener on confronting abortion-regret friends—all while plugging his Homelander series. The episode ends with a jab at liberal media manipulation and a tease for a religious rights interview. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, I'm coming to you from New York City where they just re-elected a communist for mayor.
So by the end of this podcast, I should be eating cats like they do in Venezuela.
I always like a good cat, actually.
But let's try a mind experiment here for a minute.
Let's pretend that reality can be anything you say it is, and that reality is simply what people believe.
And if you can get them to believe what you want them to believe, then that will become reality.
Congratulations, now you're a Democrat.
Yesterday, Democrats won two Democrat states.
The day before, they were worried about losing and telling everyone who would listen to them that it wasn't a referendum on anything.
And suddenly, now that they've won, it's a referendum on Donald Trump, and they're going to win everything in 2018, and Trump is finished, and everybody should run for their lives.
We'll be talking about how real their reality is.
Plus, it's the mailbag day.
It is mailbag day.
So go take a look at yourself in the mirror.
That sad sack of a person that you are right now is about to disappear because we're going to answer all your questions.
And the answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life on occasion for the better.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey here.
Life is to give.
Birds are ringing me, also singing hunky-dunky.
Shipshawsy Topsy, roll around the zippity zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoora, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoora.
I'm back.
Yes, and it's so, I have to tell you, it is so cold here.
I mean, I think I've just gotten soft from living in California.
I think I've lost, I love the cold, but it is cold.
Plus, we have this, I'm in this, you can see it's a very nice hotel room, really is.
But they have this fan system of heating, which was too loud for us to use during the show, so I had to turn it off.
So as you watch the show, you'll start to see like frost forming on my eyebrows, and by the end of it, I may just be sitting here staring through like a sheen of ice.
Plus, plus, have you ever been to a post office in New York?
I bring this up for a reason, because I'm segwaying with this beautiful grace and smoothness and skill into my ad for stamps.com.
Because if you've ever been to a post office in New York, it's a madhouse.
It is a madhouse.
You go in there, and I mean, everybody is in it.
Especially if it's anywhere near lunchtime or any time when people have to leave their offices to go and use the mailbox.
You don't want to have to do it.
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Stamps.com makes it easy.
They'll send you a digital scale, which automatically calculates the exact postage, and stamps.com will even help you decide the best class of mail based on your needs.
You got to use it.
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So my listeners, my listeners, can enjoy the stamps.com service with a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus trial plus postage and a digital scale without any long-term commitment.
What you do is you go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in Clavin very slowly, K-L-A-V-A-N, then learn to type.
So you can type it in quickly.
And that's stamps.com, Clavin, and you'll never have to go to the post office again, which is a good thing.
I actually like the post office.
They get a lot of flack, but I think they do a good job.
It's just, you know, you got to bring them into the modern world in your computer.
Elections And Narratives00:13:52
So, before we talk about the elections last night, and I'll talk about that and also Trump in South Korea, it's the anniversary.
It's November 8th.
It's the anniversary of the last election.
So, I think it would be a good thing to go back in time and remember, like revisit all the people who are telling you what the election means today and what's going to happen in 2018.
I think it's just an important thing that we remember who they all went.
So, let's first listen to everybody predicting what's going to happen in this election as cut number 11.
Which Republican candidate has the best chance of winning the general election of the declared ones right now, Donald Trump.
Now, President Obama weighing in, saying yet again that he does not believe that Donald Trump can end up winning this election.
Can you imagine Donald Trump standing up one day and delivering a State of the Union address?
Well, I can imagine it in a Saturday night skit.
Mr. Trump will not be present.
I don't see how he can win.
So, Donald Trump will lose, and he will then destroy the Republican Party.
Can Donald Trump win a general election?
My view is no.
You're never going to be president of the United States.
Oh, I insulted your way to the United States.
Let's see, I'm at 42 and you're at three, so it's far.
Doesn't matter.
Well, I can't find a single Republican.
I've talked to probably 12 Republican senators yesterday or their representatives.
I couldn't find a single one who now thinks they're going to win.
So, these are the same people, exact same people who are telling you today what's going to happen in 2018.
I mean, this was like the day before Trump was elected.
And we can't play that without remembering one year ago today the absolutely delicious moment when the press got the news that their world had turned upside down.
Next cut.
Because we're going to be and we're going to have to live with it.
You're awake, by the way.
You're not having a terrible, terrible dream.
Also, you're not dead and you haven't gone to hell.
This is your life now.
This is our election now.
This is us.
This is our country.
This is a different earth today than it was 24 hours ago.
It's a different place because it just is different.
The woman who President Obama called the most qualified person ever to run for the White House couldn't break through.
The question remains: who can?
Deeper concerns tonight that the world's shining light of democracy has gone dark.
Decency lost last night, and that's what's so hurtful about this.
This was a white lash.
This was a white lash against a changing country.
It was a white lash against a black president in part.
And that's the part where the pain comes.
I kind of push back against the advancement of African Americans, of Hispanics, of women, of Muslim Americans.
It is a mourning moment for those people, and it is a moment filled with fear.
You know, this is why you have to subscribe for a year to the Daily Wire.
It's a lousy hundred bucks.
And not only do you get to be asked your questions in the mailbag, you get the leftist tears tumbler, and you need it for moments like that because you have to fill it with those leftist tears.
And, you know, I don't like to drink leftist tears.
I just have to because they're so very good.
So I think it's just important as you go back.
I mean, this election, just yesterday, yesterday, I was listening to experts saying, well, this doesn't matter because they thought they were going to lose in Virginia.
They thought they were going to, the Democrats thought they were going to lose the Virginia race.
And the polls, this is what I love about politics.
I mean, this is the thing I love most about politics, is it's really just human nature writ large.
We all do this.
We all look at the world through the lens of our beliefs and our belief systems.
And so, and what we want, what we desire, we see the things we want to see.
We don't see the things we don't want to see.
And so the polls, yesterday, the average poll showed that Ed Gillespie, the Republican, was just two percentage points away.
And that was because the Democrats were worried.
They were worried they were going to lose this thing, and they were worried that it was going to be a victory for Trumpism.
Gillespie, you know, the thing is, with Trumpism, I'm not even sure what Trumpism is.
I don't even know what it means.
I mean, it kind of just means being belligerent in a lot of ways.
Although Donald Trump has been an amazingly conservative guy, far more conservative than I thought he was going to be.
A couple of things that he hasn't been conservative about, the health care thing.
I think if he had just stuck to repeal the Obamacare bill, it might be gone by now.
But he was, you know, he has that Democrat streak in him that wants everybody to have government health care.
But, you know, yesterday, the polls were 2%.
It turned out that Northam, the Republican, won a handy victory in Virginia, and they also got a lot of seats in the legislature.
Virginia is going blue.
Why is it going blue?
It's going blue for one reason, because the government has expanded so much under Obama, and all those people are moving into Virginia.
So you're getting all these people who are, they are the swamp.
They are the swamp.
They are the government.
And they're voting, you know, they're voting the blue state people in.
But now, now that it turns out that, you know, what was obviously going to happen happened.
Suddenly, it's a referendum on Trump.
It's a rebuke to Trump.
And, you know, I don't know.
The guy, Gillespie, never really brought Trump into it.
They said he was being Trumpian.
I don't know what that means.
I guess he was talking about immigration and things like that.
They were arguing over sanctuary cities, which don't exist in Virginia.
There are no sanctuary cities in Virginia.
So I guess there was some kind of sense of like, was this going to work?
When Northam won, he gave this speech.
Basically, now that he had won, now that he was safely won, he's flinging this back into what he thinks is the Trump coalition's face.
Here's his speech.
Virginia has told us to end the divisiveness, that we will not condone hatred and bigotry, and to end the politics that have torn this country apart.
I want to let you know that in Virginia, it's going to take a doctor to heal our differences to bring unity to our people.
And I'm here to let you know that the doctor is in.
Northam's a doctor, obviously.
You know, here's the thing.
With the left, everything is narrative.
Now, in politics, on both sides, everything is narrative.
But the left actually has a philosophy about this, that they teach in schools that basically narrative is the truth.
There is no moral world.
There is no moral universe.
There's no moral reality.
It's what you believe.
It's what Hamlet said when he was pretending to be mad and what leftists say when they're pretending to be sane.
Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so, of course.
So they then think that if they can control the narrative, they can control the truth.
And therefore, instead of speaking the truth, their actual moral duty becomes to speak what they think the narrative should be.
So he's talking about division.
And this is their narrative on Donald Trump that he somehow, you heard them saying, Van Jones saying, oh, it's a white lash that he won.
It's the victory over the people who hate black people, who don't want to turn back black people.
I mean, really?
Can they point to one thing?
I mean, this is the thing with Trump.
Trump is a character, and a lot of things he does, I don't like.
And a lot of ways he behaves, I don't like.
And I think when they talk about how unpopular he is, in the same way when they would talk about the popularity of Obama, they were really talking about the fact that people liked him.
He was civilized.
He was nice.
You know, he spoke well.
He had a funny, he had a good sense of humor.
They weren't talking about his policies.
It was clear they didn't like his policies.
And I think with Trump, the same thing is happening.
They don't like Trump because he's brash and he's bullying and he's loud and all that stuff.
But at the same time, the same people who will sit and tell you they don't like Donald Trump will sit and tell you, how's your business doing?
Great.
How's the economy?
Great.
How's the optimism of the consumer?
Absolutely terrific.
How do you feel about Donald Trump?
Hate the guy.
I just hate the guy.
So it's very, pardon me, it's very unclear as we go forward whether Trump is going to win victories for his policies and his behavior, or he's going to lose over his behavior.
And this is the thing I really dislike about the left's politics is everything becomes this personal narrative.
Everything becomes swaying your emotions.
You know, there was one person who won for the legislature, the Virginia legislature, Danica Rome.
And Danica Rome is a former journalist and also a former man who now identifies as a woman.
And I could make many jokes about this, but I'm not going to because I'm just that classy a guy that I'm going to leave those jokes on the table for you to make in your imagination.
In fact, I'll wait while you make those jokes.
Aren't you ashamed of yourself?
Of course you are.
That's a terrible thing to say.
But here is Danica Rome.
This is such a local election that she's running over things like the traffic.
You know, how bad was the traffic in your neighborhood?
Seriously, that was what the issues were.
And now he or she or whatever wins, and this is Danica Rome's speech.
To every person.
Bring it out.
To every person who's ever been singled out, who's ever been stigmatized, who's ever been the misfit, who's ever been the kid in the corner, who's ever needed someone to stand up for when they didn't have a voice of their own because there's no one else who is with them.
This one's for you.
And this one is for, most importantly, the people of Haymarket.
I mean, really?
Who cares?
Like, fix the traffic.
Fix the traffic.
Nobody cares about your sex life.
Nobody cares.
You know, it's just like, just try not to chase anybody around.
You know, the biggest problem we have in politics is these guys chasing the pages around.
You know, just try not to do that and fix the traffic.
Who cares?
It is just that everything is a civil rights issue, that every weirdo or oddball getting elected is some new breakthrough in civil rights.
It's just this, it's this narrative that the world is filled with oppression.
And I really don't think in America people are very oppressed.
I just don't think they are.
I think they feel bad about themselves.
And I think there are people who dislike them and it's hard to live in that society.
But this is not a victory for anybody except unless, unless they fix the traffic.
Now, I have to say that it was a good narrative because he was running or she was running against a guy who was a big, he had put forward a bathroom bill, keep transgenders out of bathrooms.
He called himself the chief homophobe in Virginia.
So it was a very, you know, there was a very black and white narrative there.
But still, still, all of this stuff is about narrative.
Speaking of which, speaking of narrative, and how the left is always desperate to control it because they actually think they're controlling reality, not just electoral reality, because it is true if they can get you to believe certain things, they can get you to vote in certain ways.
But those policies, as they found out in Detroit and every other city Democrats run, those policies still won't work.
They can't change that reality no matter what they get you to believe.
So, you know, the other day, Dona Brazil, I mean, I just want to remind you, as we go forward, Trump is unpopular.
Like I said, I'm not sure whether he's unpopular personally or because of his policies and which people will vote for.
So I just don't know because I don't know the future.
And the people who tell you they do, we saw a lot of them before, they don't know the future either, okay?
So the other thing is, is the Democrat Party is equally unpopular.
They are at their lowest popularity since the 90s.
People hate them.
They're corrupt.
Everybody sees they're corrupt.
They're going far to the left.
Everybody sees them going far to the left.
Another thing about the guy who won in Northam, who won in Virginia, is he was a moderate.
A lot of the left-wing base did not like him because he was a moderate.
So Donna Brazil, we talked about this before.
She came out and she talked about the corruption in the DNC.
She talked about the fact that Obama cared so little about anybody but himself that he bankrupted the DNC.
Hillary Clinton, like a shark, saw the blood in the water, swam in there, got them to agree, paid off their debts, but got them to agree to funnel money, launder money through her, and thereby took over the campaign and basically gave the shaft to Bernie.
So we showed, I showed a couple of days ago, I showed some of the newsmen at CNN just dissing Donna Brazil because she slipped Hillary a question while she was working as a commentator for CNN.
So they had to fire her.
So she got it from a non-CNN source and she slipped Hillary a debate question and they fired her.
So suddenly they were dissing her for that.
Tucker Carlson says that he has a source who tells him that this was a setup job, that this was a talking point at CNN that they were told to go after her.
Here's Tucker.
And then we added on a couple of examples of the CNN anchor men going after Donna Brazil.
She's the one who, through somebody who doesn't work at CNN, got access to one town hall question and sent an email, which we know from WikiLeaks, to someone in the Clinton campaign to give them a town hall question, which is completely unethical.
She wasn't doing that for Bernie Sanders.
Do you take her at her word, Sam, given the fact that she lied about that CNN debate and giving those questions to Hillary Clinton ahead of time?
I just cannot believe the bombshell that Donna Brazil has launched, where she says that she was dealing with three, quote, titanic egos.
President Obama, you know, I stopped taking Donna Brazil seriously when she lied and when it was revealed that CNN fired her for giving debate questions to Hillary Clinton.
Wow.
So this is, I mean, this is what you're, this is basically what you're facing when you're watching political commentary.
Reality Is A Certain Way00:03:11
And I enjoy it because as a novelist, I like watching human nature unfold.
And what it is, is these people trying to convince you and convince themselves that reality is a certain way.
Nobody knows the future.
Right now, you know, I do think Trump is unpopular.
I think that could genuinely change.
I don't think it's going to change about his personality.
I think people don't like his personality.
It's, you know, even the fact that in many ways, I do not think that a softer person could have broken through the bars that the media and the professor has surrounded us with, the lies.
I don't think a softer personality could have broken through.
It makes me uncomfortable, I'm sure it makes a lot of people uncomfortable that our country has reached the level where we might need someone as bullying and borish as Donald Trump to break through.
And that's an uncomfortable fact.
There's a moral hazard there that I think we kind of sense, even if we support what Trump is doing, as I basically do so far.
Which brings me to the fact of my beautiful body.
I mean, that's the first thing that just pops into my mind when I'm talking about that.
I don't know why.
Because I have to talk about Beach Body on Demand.
Now, normally, if I wanted to sell you Beach Body on Demand, I would tell you that I'm using it and then I would just strip my shirt off.
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I haven't done this one yet.
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They have over a million members already, and you can get a free listener, free membership if you just text Andrew on your phone to 313131.
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It's really a helpful, helpful service, and you can try it for free if you just text Andrew to 31.
Let me just make sure I have as many 3-1s.
Text Andrew to 313131 and try it out for free.
All right, we've got to say goodbye, don't we, to YouTube?
Narrative Power and Regime Fear00:07:38
Where am I?
I'm in another city.
I don't know where I am.
To YouTube and Facebook, but you can come over to the DailyWire.com and listen to the rest of the show.
You can listen to the rest of the show on YouTube if you want.
But if you want to watch the show, if you want to watch the show, you subscribe, right, for a lousy 10 bucks a month, and then you can watch the whole show on thedailywire.com.
If you subscribe for a lousy $100, you get an entire year.
You get the leftist tears tumbler.
And you can ask your questions in the mailbag, which is coming up right soon.
One of the dangers about narrative is that it skews everything, and it skews everything in favor of the president, because the president has this kind of monarchical appearance in the American system.
He kind of fills in for the king as well as being the executive.
We focus all our energy on him.
But the problem with that is it gives a false impression of what our president is supposed to be.
Trump was on with my friend Larry O'Connor the other day.
He was being interviewed by Larry O'Connor, who I think is with Mediight and WMAL.
And he said this thing that the left has been making fun of, kind of justifiably, but it's interesting.
Pay attention to what Trump says here to Larry O'Connor.
It's just audio.
The saddest thing is that because of the President of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department.
I'm not supposed to be involved with the FBI.
I'm not supposed to be doing the kind of things that I would love to be doing.
And I'm very frustrated by it.
He's very frustrated that he can't, he wants Hillary Clinton investigated, that he can't skew the investigation.
So the left was making fun of him.
Speaking of this, by the way, just to go off on a tangent for a minute, there was a really interesting story on Fox the other day.
Remember that Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, who met with Donald Trump Jr. and they were saying, oh, it's treason, it's treason, it's treason, before we found out that Hillary Clinton had paid Fusion GPS to get intelligence from the Russians.
Before we found that out, that wasn't treason, but this was treason, treason, treason.
Fox had a report from some of their better reporters, some of their best reporters, saying that Natalia, I can't pronounce her last name, the lawyer, met with Fusion GPS right before that meeting and right after that meeting.
Now, people are making a conspiracy of this.
I'm not sure what it is, but put a pin in it because we'll come back to it.
Not today, but we'll see.
Keep an eye on that just to see what that was all about.
But anyway, the media itself has become so focused on the presidency that the president thinks he's supposed to have more power than he's supposed to have.
So Trump is surprised.
Someone else was surprised was Obama.
I just want to take you back in time for just a minute when leftist reporter Jonathan Carl asked Obama this question, basically begging him to become king.
And this is part of the narrative, part of the way the narrative skews our idea of what the president is.
When you were running for president, you said, quote, the biggest problems we're facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all, and that's what I intend to reverse.
So my question to you: has Congress's inability to do anything significant given you a green light to push the limits of executive power, even a duty to do so, or put another way, does it bother you more to be accused of being an imperial president, pushing those limits, or to be accused of being a do-nothing president who couldn't get anything done because he faced dysfunctional Congress?
That's the press begging Obama to take over to become king.
I mean, that's basically, and Obama basically obliged them.
He said, I have a pen and a phone, and I'm not going to wait for legislation.
I think that this is part of this narrative because the press, it's easy to cover one person, it's easy to cover, and it's easy for the people to think about one person as representing the country.
I think they give the president too much power.
Trump, however, like I said, people dislike him, but he is doing many good things.
He did one of them yesterday.
He's in South Korea.
You know, he's got a real problem over there because the South Korean president, Moon, is basically appeasing the North Koreans, basically appeasing the Chinese.
And Trump went in there really in his now signature fashion and really gave it to the North Koreans on their own turf, basically telling them, you know, knock it off.
Play the cut, I'm not sure which cut it is, the cut where he tells them not to mess with us.
Today, I hope I speak not only for our countries, but for all civilized nations.
When I say to the North, do not underestimate us and do not try us.
We will defend our common security, our shared prosperity, and our sacred liberty.
we did not choose to draw here on this peninsula this magnificent peninsula the thin line of civilization that runs around the world and down through time
But here it was drawn, and here it remains to this day.
It is the line between peace and war, between decency and depravity, between law and tyranny, between hope and total despair.
It's a really good speech, as his overseas speeches tend to be.
And the big question with him is: what can he back up his words?
Because what's he going to do?
Is he willing to really go to the military option when he faces down this guy?
And just so you remember what it was like under Obama, just so you do not forget what this guy is replacing.
John Kerry, listen to John Kerry, former Secretary of State, Obama's Secretary of State, on this speech.
I think what the president needs to do is make sure that he's not feeding into North Korea's fear of regime change or of a unilateral attack or otherwise.
And I think the rhetoric to date has, frankly, stepped over the line with respect to the messages that are being sent.
It's given North Korea reason to say, hey, we need a bomb, because if we don't have a bomb, we're going to not be able to protect ourselves and they'll come after us.
So we've got to get into the dialogue.
It's not going to be easy.
It's not going to happen overnight.
Lots of negotiations have taken a long time.
What a clown.
What a clown.
I mean, we're giving him a reason.
It's our fault.
Classic, classic Kerry, by the way, classic of the left.
It's always the United States' fault.
Nobody else has, you know, Muslims don't have a philosophy that drives them to kill us.
It's our fault.
North Koreans don't have a lunatic in office.
It's our fault.
Just insane that they live inside.
That is the difference between the right and the left.
The left, every politician lies, but the left actually believes their own lies.
I really do think that.
It's just incredible that this is the guy who's replacing.
So the question really is: how much of the Trump narrative is real?
I mean, that's what we're going to see.
Can he really face down this guy in North Korea?
Can he do anything with the legislature here?
If he can, I don't think the fact that he's personally unpleasant to a lot of people is going to matter that much.
All right, we've got to go to the mailbag.
I always say, there's always that lag.
Left's Lying Legacy00:11:43
I'm always afraid she's not going to show up.
But Lindsay always shows up.
From Matthew, if you, Ben Shapiro, and Michael Knowles were stranded on an island and you had no food, who do you think you guys would eat first and why?
Obviously, Knowles, because he's useless.
I mean, what's the point of him?
And after that, I think we just have to fight it out.
From Nick, dear Claven the all-knowing, all-wise, and all-bald being, I'm a young man looking for a mate and have been trying to reconcile the fact that I find some women more physically attractive than others with the advice that everyone gives about not marrying someone just for their looks.
My question is simply this: what role, if any, should beauty play in my choice of whom to date and ultimately marry?
Well, I actually think you're confusing two things.
Of course, you shouldn't marry someone just for their looks.
Beauty, like courage, is an amoral virtue.
Bad people have courage and good people have courage.
Bad people have beauty and good people have beauty.
So that's really not to say that you shouldn't be attracted to your wife.
I think you very much should have a physical attraction to your wife as well.
I mean, I think that that's an important, you know, that's an important part of erotic love.
Being married is partly erotic love, and you want to have somebody you're attracted to.
The only thing I would add to that, by the way, is women frequently grow more attractive as you get to know them, when you find out that they are nice, when you find out that they have a lot of traits that you love, when you find out that they're gentle, kind, all those things.
They literally become more beautiful as you are talking to them.
And so you shouldn't keep your idea of beauty.
Here's a place, you're going to hear me agree with the feminists.
Your head can explode.
Here's a place where I do believe that the kind of sale of a certain narrow idea of beauty that is largely created by Photoshop and sometimes by spending so much time in the gym that you have no life, that narrow idea of beauty really does need to be expanded because when you talk to women and they are beautiful and their personalities are beautiful, they actually do become beautiful.
I've had this happen.
I've had this experience.
I've fallen in love with a woman that I didn't think was that attractive.
And as I got to know her, she got more and more attractive.
I think that's the only thing.
You shouldn't limit your idea of what beautiful is, but you should be attracted to your wife.
It's like that's going to be your romantic life after marriage and you want it to work.
From Lucinda, do you have any suggestions for getting out of the Ecclesiastes mindset?
All things are full of weariness.
A man cannot utter it.
The eye is not satisfied with seeing or the ear with hearing.
What has been is what will be and what has been done is what will be done and there is nothing new under the sun.
Lucinda says life is exhausting and very painful.
Life can be extremely painful and it can be exhausting, but it's also very beautiful.
And I think that that is something you can train yourself to understand and to see that there is so much in life that is spoken into the world directly by God.
love, kindness, the little joys of existence, the harmless pleasures of food and having sex with someone that you love and are committed to and all those things.
There's just tremendous, tremendous beauty in the world and that beauty will lead you right into the infinite.
So while it is fashionable, while there is truth to the kind of Ecclesiastes cynicism, Ecclesiastes is a very deep, rich book.
I think that Ecclesiastes is meant to guide you away from the hurly-burley of life, from the things that people tell you are important.
Oh my gosh, Donald Trump said this.
Oh my gosh, Barack Obama said this.
And to make you refocus on the things that really matter.
You know, if you're eaten up by a desire for money, a desire for success, a desire for fame, all those things that don't mean anything if they're unattached from God, that's when that cynicism starts to come over you.
You know, if you ever see or read the play Macbeth, it is a beautiful description of how living outside the moral universe brings you to this kind of cynicism and despair.
But if you live toward God, if you live for God, you start to find that all these things become beautiful again, even though the cynicism is justified.
Ecclesiastes is not meant to make you turn away from life.
It's meant to make you turn away from life as people tell you it's supposed to be lived.
It's meant to make you turn away from the things that are unimportant in life and remember what's important.
That's the way I've always read that book.
It's one of my favorite books in the Bible, and I think that its cynicism and weariness are an attitude that come upon you when you have followed the wrong things, when you've gone after the wrong things.
From James, good day to you.
I'm writing to ask your permission to use your cartoon drawing, the most handsome cartoon character ever drawn on paper, in my huge tattoo piece.
You have absolute permission.
Go ahead.
Tattoo that sucker all over yourself.
All over everyone.
You know, I want my face to be on everybody's chest.
And having said that to this guy, let me say to the rest of you, don't get tattoos.
They're uncivilized.
All right, from Peter.
Just the idea that someone might walk around with my face tattooed on his body is just there.
That'll take you to the Ecclesiastes mindset right there.
All right, from Peter.
Andrew, I am vehemently pro-life.
So am I. My best buddy growing up and his girlfriend got pregnant with twins and had them aborted.
Given the climate of opinion on abortion, I'm sure that neither of them thought of it as murdering their own children, but I can't see it as anything less.
I'm having a hard time hanging out or even speaking to my friend.
What should I do?
All right, really good question.
Really tough question.
Pardon me, I'm getting a little choked up here being indoors all the time.
Really good question.
All right.
First of all, if this person is really your best friend or your good friend, you can't live in a dishonest relationship with him.
You have to talk to him.
So the question is, what are you going to say?
And obviously, going up to him and shouting murderer and hitting him over the head with your Bible or whatever you plan to do or whatever you might feel like doing is obviously not the way forward.
You want to communicate with this guy.
He's your friend.
The love between you is important, as are the lives that were lost in this abortion are also important.
And if it were me, if it were I, I would sit him down, especially if he was my best buddy growing up and tell him, look, I have a problem.
This is what I'm feeling, and I have to tell you about it.
I know that you don't see it this way.
I see it this way.
It's really giving me a problem.
I think that, you know, in my worldview, you've done a wrong thing, and these children had a life, and they'll never get to live.
And I'm, you know, it's not for you.
It's not for you to pass judgment on him.
You know, you have a judgment of what he did, which is, you know, I agree with, but it's not for you.
But, you know, his judgment comes elsewhere.
It is not for you to pass judgment on him.
And especially because that doesn't help.
See, that doesn't help.
That isn't going to lead him to change his mind.
But I think that maybe just explaining to him that exactly what you told me, that you have a problem with him, a problem being around him, a problem talking to him.
You know, look, it might end the friendship.
That could be really painful.
But I think being honest, being honest with compassion, being honest with kindness, is the only way to save the friendship.
Because what good is a friendship if it's based around a lie?
If it's based around an atmosphere in lies, a tough conversation.
I don't envy you having to have it, but I think that it is worth having to have it because the reason it's worth having to have it is because the guy is your friend, just walking away from him because you feel uncomfortable with him leaves no opportunity, no opportunity for him to change or for him to see things differently.
It's very hard for people who've had an abortion to change because they have to accept that they may have done something that really was not right.
And that's a hard thing for all of us to do.
I mean, I think that it's the beginning of wisdom.
I think that our old pal the devil depends on us rationalizing our bad actions so that we continue going down that road.
The more you rationalize, the further down the road you have to go.
So don't expect anything.
Don't expect anything.
But go to him and with compassion and with love, speak the, you know, speak how you're feeling.
Don't speak about what he did.
Speak about how you're feeling about what he did.
And, you know, who knows what can come of it.
Honesty and love go a lot, do a lot of crazy things in the world.
And it's worth doing because you don't really have a choice.
You don't really have a choice.
You can't live in dishonesty with your friend, not that level of dishonesty.
All right.
I'm running out of time here.
But last one.
All right.
I kind of just read one just like that.
Here is, Mr. Clavin, I make my son read.
He has to give a book report or explain the story's moral subject matter.
He doesn't like to read very much at all.
So I thought a book of poems might be a good change from straight stories.
Could you recommend a good book of American poets or a book of good poets in general?
Let me address this.
This is from Sarah.
You know, boys don't like to read a lot of times because I've talked to all these teachers who say I can't get boys to read.
And you say, what are they reading?
What are you giving them to read?
And it'll be like, you know, Rainbow Princess Goes to the Ball or something.
It'll be something that no boy wants to read.
And so I highly recommend.
First of all, let me sell you one of my books.
I'm going to do this because I know from the letters that I get that this book has an extraordinary effect on young boys who don't read.
Try reading my Homelander series.
The first one is called The Last Thing I Remember.
That's a four-book series.
And if that, and I would like to hear from you, I would like to hear if that has any effect.
But to answer your question more directly, poetry, if you're going to go to poetry, I would go to story poems.
He might, I don't know what your son likes, what kind of subjects he likes, but he might like Edgar Allan Poe, he might like the creepy stuff in the raven.
I mean, that's a story poem.
He might like The Highwayman.
That's an adventure poem.
There are a lot of really good poems, The Death of Dan, the shooting of Dan McGrew, poems that tell stories frequently reach people.
But I would say, though, you know, look at books like Shane by Jack Schaefer, books that really have a cool narrative with fighting and gunplay and manhood and things like that.
And again, try my Homelander series.
It's written for a Christian publisher.
It's squeaky clean, but it's very exciting and very adventurous.
And I'm not just seizing this opportunity to sell a book.
I'm really not.
But the last thing I remember is the first one.
And I just, the things that people tell me about it make me feel that it could solve this problem.
And I want to hear from you if it does.
And if it doesn't.
All right.
We have to stop there.
Let's move on to tickety-boo news.
Watching this little, you know, because I'm doing this on my laptop, watching this little image of myself dance across my laptop is a little surreal.
You know, I'm just, I can't wait.
I hope this guy does this tattoo thing and then just sends me pictures.
Not too many.
It depends where the tattoos are and on whom.
So tickety boo news.
Fake News Fallout00:06:26
This is what I like to talk about is how we read the news and what we see in the news and how the news tries to fool us.
And that's kind of what I've been talking about all day today, about the narrative and selling the narrative.
I've talked about this before, but I just, I'm getting a phone call on my hotel phone.
There's nothing I can do about that.
All right, I'll pick it up and hang it out.
That's the instruction I'm getting.
Oh, well, this is the hotel phone.
I didn't think about that.
So anyway, you know, I just finished this book, Cheryl Atkinson's book, The Smear, and I'm a big fan of Cheryl Atkinson's, an excellent reporter, investigative reporter who had to leave CBS because they wouldn't run her Obama stories.
They were protecting Obama from scandal because they wanted his administration to be scandal-free, and they achieved that by not covering the scandals.
She has a take on fake news that I had never quite considered before.
Do you remember Pizzagate?
Pizzagate was obviously this kind of weird conspiracy story that there was a pizza parlor in Washington called Comet Ping Pong, I think it was called, and Hillary Clinton was somehow running child sex slavery ring out of this pizza parlor, and finally, finally somebody went in there with a gun and I think even fired a shot, and this began this kind of panic about fake news.
And obviously Donald Trump took hold of that and he turned it around and he shot it back at the left.
It was the left who was putting forward this fake news, this whole thing about fake news.
But the left started with fake news and tried to use it and to some extent has used it to censor people.
And what Cheryl Atkinson points out, and she doesn't make this accusation, but she points out that David Brock, Brock is the guy who created Media Matters.
He is a left-wing smear merchant.
He started out as a right-wing smear merchant, I think, smearing Anita Hill, and then became a left-wing smear merchant.
And he started Media Matters and American Bridge and all these citizens for responsibility.
He was just an attack dog for Hillary Clinton.
And he would go around spreading these stories, making sure the press covered things the way he wanted them to.
He's attacked Cheryl Atkinson.
He smears anybody who comes up against him.
And the guy who owned the pizza parlor was his former boyfriend.
It was his ex-boyfriend.
And she points out that he is a master, that Brock's a master of controlling the narrative.
And there is reason to think, or at least it is possible, that he invented Pizzagate, this absurd conspiracy that in order to make sure that right-wingers would pick up this fake news, and then he could say, we need to do something about fake news and go in, as he did go in to Facebook and Google.
And Google is a very big Democrat supporter.
They're big Clintonistas and everything like that.
Go in and say, you know, we need to curate this.
And remember, Barack Obama gave this his support.
People forget this, but he was in favor of, you know, he'd say it's not censorship, but it's curating the news.
And Obama was a master at giving these speeches so his minions would go off and do it without his having his fingerprints on it.
But let's just remember this one piece of video of Obama calling for a curating, curating the news.
We're going to have to rebuild within this wild, wild west of information flow, some sort of curating function that people agree to.
I use the analogy in politics.
It used to be there were three television stations and Walter Cronkite's on there.
Not everybody agreed, and there were always outliers who thought that it was all propaganda and we didn't really land on the moon and Elvis is still alive and so forth.
But generally that was in the papers that you bought at the supermarket as you were checking out.
And generally people trusted a basic body of information.
It wasn't always as democratic as it should have been.
And it's always exactly right that, for example, on something like climate change, we've actually been doing some interesting initiatives where we're essentially deputizing citizens with handheld technologies to start recording information that then gets pooled.
They're becoming scientists without getting the PhD.
So there is Obama saying, you know, we're going to curate the news.
Facebook and Google, they met with Brock's people and they said we're going to let them have, Facebook said we're going to let them have some say over identifying fake news.
All the people they allowed to have say were liberals.
They were all left-wingers.
They all were.
And now Dennis Prager, of course, is suing YouTube for, you know, making his stuff restricted.
I mean, Dennis Prager, who's one of the most rational, you know, kind of middle-of-the-road conservatives there is.
They're giving him a hard time.
And so this was something that may have been, starting with Pizzagate, may have been organized by this guy, Brock, basically to make it harder for us to get our words out.
And I have to say, that quote you just saw, that piece of video, it took me forever to find it.
It's hard for me to find Chuck Schumer saying stupid things I know he said.
It's hard for me to find all the things.
If you feed in, you know, give me that point where Obama lied about it, you will not get that information.
Google is making it harder and harder.
YouTube is making it harder.
Stephen Crowder's getting hit by YouTube.
It is an actual attempt to silence conservatives without you even seeing they're being silenced.
And I think it's really interesting that this Pizzagate thing, which I debunked at the time, I debunked it because I knew it was untrue, but it never occurred to me, as Cheryl Atkinson puts forward, that it might have been.
It might have been planted not by the right, but by the left.
It might have been fake news put in there to deputize them, to censor information.
So that's a really, it's a really interesting point of view.
I'd love to hear more about it.
I'd love to see if Atkinson can get some goods on it.
She has a timeline that's very, very suggestive in her book.
All right, we got a really fascinating interview tomorrow with Monce Alvarado, who is part of the Beckett Fund, which is God's ACLU.
She goes around defending religious rights.
It was a really interesting interview.
I will be here in New York.
I may have frozen by then.
I may be eating cats.
But by golly, I will get back to you.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show, and I'll see you tomorrow.