Ep. 413 dissects the Left’s contradictions—Virginia and New Jersey’s Democratic wins framed as diversity triumphs, yet policies like LGBTQ+ mandates clash with religious liberty, as seen in Little Sisters of the Poor vs. HHS contraceptive rules. Monce Alvarado of the Beckett Fund warns of a "right to be offended" culture eroding public faith displays (e.g., military crosses) while courts grapple with cases like Masterpiece Cakes. Meanwhile, feminist hypocrisy peaks as Lindy West praises anger as empowerment, mirroring Victorian-era sex advice. The episode ties cultural tribalism—from Stoker’s Dracula misreadings to media obsession with Trump’s tweets—to a broader war over conscience vs. coercion in America’s public square. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, here again in New York, the heart of leftist darkness.
You know, yesterday was the anniversary of Donald Trump's upset election victory and Democrats actually, this is true, they gathered in Washington Square Park downtown to discuss their views and express their thoughts.
Here's a brief clip.
I wanted to play the entire 45 minutes of that, but they said that wasn't exactly a show.
But I thought they actually put out the logic of leftism quite cleverly.
The numbers from yesterday's election, this is really interesting because everybody was not saying what I was saying, but the numbers have come in and the people who know how to read the numbers from yesterday's election actually did say much more what I said.
The thing that was really interesting to me is they said there is now this coalition.
The Democrats are basically now rich white suburbanites and minorities.
Okay, so what's interesting to me about that is you have rich white suburbanites who are basically going to be married and have children, but they support the sexual libertinism that makes minorities' lives a living hell, right?
They're people who have jobs, but they support the kind of welfare that causes dependency.
The rich white suburbanites are the people who have bourgeois values, but if you tell them minorities ought to have bourgeois values too, they think that's terribly racist.
And the rich white suburbanites tend to rely on their skill to get ahead.
They feel dismayed if any mean Republican tells minorities that it's skill and hard work that will get you ahead.
So basically what you have now, the Democratic Party is now composed of rich white suburbanites and the people whose lives they destroy with their policy.
So it's going to be really interesting to watch that coalition unfold.
We have an excellent interview today with Monce Alvarado, who is the executive director of the Beckett Fund, which you've never heard of, but which is called God's ACLU, because basically what it goes out, what it does is they go out and they fight for religious freedom wherever they find it under the gun.
And it's really interesting what she had to say about the Obama administration in that regard.
Voting On Virginia00:15:15
And yesterday was Brahm Stoker's birthday.
So we'll talk about Dracula.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-donkey.
Life is tickety-boo Birds are winging, also singing Hunky-dunky-dee-doo Shitty-shitty, 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, hoorah.
Well, I'm so jet-lagged, and I hate to, I don't know exactly how to put this.
People here in New York drink a lot, and I, you know, am from New York, and so when I come back here, I tend to maybe overindulge.
And so my head is now about three blocks away, still trying to catch up, still trying to get up to my hotel room.
It may arrive somewhere during the course of the show.
But I've lost complete track of time, and I realize it is already, we are already on the edge of the Clavenless weekend, which makes it my civic responsibility to tell you that you can stave off the Clavenless weekend for one day by going and listening to Another Kingdom, the fantasy suspense podcast I'm doing with Knowles.
It's my story.
Knowles is doing the acting and performing quite brilliantly, I think.
And you go on iTunes, just look up Another Kingdom.
Please subscribe.
Please leave a high rating for it.
It really helps us out.
We have a sponsor now.
Actually, our sponsor, Tripping.com, is also now a sponsor of this show as well.
So it's a double sponsor.
But Another Kingdom, this is the episode when everything turns around.
So that's a very cool episode, episode number five.
And if you haven't been listening, you can binge from one through five.
And if you have, it'll be fun.
All right.
But first, we have to talk about another.
You know what?
I'm finally, I always forget to wear my, I forget to wear watches anyway, but I forget to wear my movement watch.
I actually have it on today.
You can see it is incredibly fancy, nice watch.
I don't know where to put it to get it in the camera.
There it is.
Really nice watch.
And, you know, the thing is, this is a company movement, which is MVMT, because we don't use vowels anymore because I don't know why.
But this was started by two college kids who really liked fancy timepieces but didn't want to shell out the fancy bucks.
He got to shell out to get a good watch.
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So this is a great way to get a really beautiful watch at a really nice price.
Movement watches start at just $95.
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And now is the time to step up your watch game.
Get it?
It's kind of a time, and you can look at the watch because it tells them, never mind.
Go to mvmt.com slash Andrew and join the movement.
So yesterday I was saying, you have to listen to the press.
There's only one guy I trust when it comes to reading the numbers of an election, and that's Henry Olson.
He's dispassionate.
He doesn't care who wins or loses.
He may care deep down, but he doesn't, the way he reads it, is really cool-headed.
He's the guy who made me so I knew the day of last year's election, I knew that it was going to be much closer between Trump and Hillary Clinton than everybody said it was.
Henry Olson said it was going to be within the margin of error.
And so I was, you know, I always follow him because he's just always right and everybody else doesn't get it right.
So yesterday, just unbelievable kind of jubilation in our left-wing media about how wonderful it was that all this had happened.
And just I want to play a montage, first of all, just showing how everybody, everybody read this as a rebuke against Donald Trump because that's what they want so badly.
So let's play that montage.
That's number one.
Tough election night for President Trump and the GOP.
Democrats with key victories in Virginia and New Jersey.
On this first anniversary of President Trump's stunning election victory, it's the Democrats who are celebrating now.
Big victories last night in the Virginia and New Jersey races for governor with exit polls showing voters wanted to send a message to President Trump.
A big win for Democrats and a blow to Republicans, a loss the president will likely take personally.
One-third of Virginians in a CBS News exit poll said they voted to oppose the president.
Virginia Republicans suffered a good old-fashioned drubbing last night.
This was a referendum on guns and health care.
Republican Ed Gillespie dipped into the Trump playbook and it appears to have backfired.
So there's guns and health care, all the things they want.
This was a referendum on.
And it really is amazing that 34% of the people who came out in exit polls, which are notoriously unreliable, they came out and said they came out to vote against Donald Trump.
Well, Virginia hates Donald Trump, and one of the reasons they hate Donald Trump is they are the swamp.
That's where in Northern Virginia, all the people who work in Washington work.
And so they really are just absolutely livid at him.
And any Democrat who comes out and he says, were you sending a message to Donald Trump is going to say the same thing.
So that 34% number means absolutely nothing.
People are voting.
You're voting for governor.
You're voting for your state.
That is why people are voting.
But it does mean something, okay?
One other clip I've got to play from George Sukhalopagis, the guy, this Clinton Neester hack, who has been somehow theoretically transformed into a journalist.
And he's in Good Morning America.
And his version, his interpretation of what this election meant, and he's there with Matthew Dowd, another Democrat liberal commentator, and Megan McCain, who's kind of, I don't know where exactly to put her.
She's kind of in the middle.
But this is absurd.
I just want to play this just so you see the height of the absurdity of the commentary.
This is cut to.
Two to one in Virginia, three to one in New Jersey.
They wanted to send a message to Trump.
Yeah, they sent a message to Trump big time.
But I think the big takeaway that I had from it is the level of diversity and inclusion that happened on election night.
If you not only a first transgender person elected to office in Virginia, the first Sikh elected to office in a major city, the first gay mayor of Seattle, the first African-American woman elected the first woman mayor of Manchester.
I mean, it was a night of total diversity.
And I think that not only a rejection of Trump, it was basically a rejection of what he stood for.
That's appalling.
That is appalling.
Because you know how Donald Trump is plotting against the Sikhs.
I mean, this is the big part of the Trump administration.
I remember when he said, build a wall to keep out the Sikhs.
This narrative that they've got, that Trump is somehow a bigot, that he's against diversity of kinds of people, that he's divisive when he is divisive, but he's only as divisive as they are.
And this idea that by electing all these different people, they were sending a message to Donald Trump that, no, no, no, Donald Trump, we're not mean like you.
We're welcoming.
You're mean, but we're welcome.
It's just absurd.
And this is how the leftist media makes us stupid, because it poses in order to get us to keep, since the Democrats are now a coalition of rich white people and minorities, right?
Everybody in between is a Republican.
So the rich white people and minorities, and since the minorities are just being destroyed by their policies, I mean, the cities are terrible and all this stuff.
They've got to keep them in there.
And so they've got to pose every issue as if it's hurting minorities.
So instead of saying, oh, you know, how do we feel about the border?
Do we want to enforce the rule of law and enforce our borders and keep people safe?
Or do we want to be welcoming and Christian and open?
You know, there's a debate.
You can have a debate.
That's fine.
But instead of that, it's, oh, yeah, you don't like Mexicans or you have an open border.
And, you know, the same thing with gay marriage, everything.
Everything is basically, if you're not there, it's not their way.
It's about hatred, right?
If you want to keep the nation safe because Islamic immigration might be a problem, because maybe there's something about Islam that doesn't work in the West.
Maybe that too many Islamic people in the West is dangerous for the West, as we see in many parts of Europe and Scandinavia.
So you could have that debate.
It's dangerous or it's not dangerous.
It's dangerous, but freedom of religion trumps the danger, whatever debate you want to have.
But they won't have that debate.
They always pose everything as stupidity.
So in this stupid way to make you stupid.
So what they argue is it's either let everybody in or you hate Islamic people and you're a bigot.
So that's the way they're selling this.
Anytime Democrats win, it's a triumph for diversity, which of course is nonsense since they don't believe in diversity of thought.
So never mind, that's the bias, but it's also ill-informed.
I mean, it's just reading the numbers badly.
Let's go to Henry Olson.
And I have to say, this was on the right, too.
I mean, Karl Rove, and I don't want to pick on Karl Rove.
I like the guy, but like Karl Rove I got Donald Trump's election utterly wrong.
And you remember that night when Mitt Romney lost to Obama, I think it was, yeah, it was the second it was Obama's re-election when he was on Fox News insisting that they were wrong, that their count was wrong because he had the numbers figured out.
And he actually stormed down into their counting room and banged on the door and all this stuff, and they fired him.
And so, Karl Rove, at some point, you maybe start thinking, maybe I don't know how to read numbers.
Maybe I should leave this to somebody else.
Henry Olson does know how to read numbers, and he's working at City Journal, one of my favorite magazines.
And I'm going to get to him in just a minute.
But before I do that, I have to talk about policy genius because you don't have any life insurance and you need life insurance, especially if you have kids or if you have elderly parents, got to have life insurance because if something should happen to you, that's what they always say, something should happen to you.
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So let's talk about how Henry Olson reads these numbers, because he's just so good at this.
This is City Journal, one of my favorite magazines.
Last night's gubernatorial election in Virginia is being touted as a surprise Democrat landslide.
It shouldn't be.
The results simply reflect the changes that have occurred in national politics since Donald Trump's emergence.
That's not great news for Republicans, but neither is it a death knell.
Both parties still face the challenges their changing voter coalitions present.
Democrat governor-elect Ralph Northam, this is in Virginia, one largely because Virginia is a highly educated state with a sizable minority population, and both groups have been trending strongly toward Democrats for years, educated people and minorities.
Nor should one take the Democratic gains in the Virginia House of Delegates as proof of a Democratic surge.
And this is the one everybody was reading as a surge, but I knew it wasn't.
But if Henry Olson says so, you know, I'm just a barefoot teller of tales.
But if Henry Olson says so, you know it's true.
The surprise is not that Republicans lost most of the seats, but it was the surprise that they had held the vast majority of them for so long because the state is going blue.
Still, these losses are discouraging for Republicans because seats like these are the basis for much of their congressional and state legislative majorities.
Any Republican running for a Clinton-carried House seat is now on notice that he or she will have a hard time winning unless the political climate dramatically shifts.
So there's a lot of those Clinton-held House seats.
In other words, House seats that Republicans now hold in districts where Clinton won.
There's about 23 of them, I think.
And if the Democrats win 24, they'll take the House.
And so that's an important point, and that's an important thing for Republicans to be thinking about.
On the other side, however, and as Democrats learned to their dismay last year, America is not solely composed of well-educated, affluent suburbs.
The untold story, at least in the mainstream media from last night, is how well the Trump coalition held up under fire.
See, this is the important point.
Trump's people are not deserting him.
Trump's people love Trump, and they're sticking with him.
So he's got his base, and depending on what happens now, he can add to that base or possibly destroy it.
But Olson goes on.
Republicans who voted for Trump in 2016 largely came out and voted straight Republican tickets yesterday.
There are Republicans challenging Democratic incumbent senators in Montana, North Dakota, Indiana, Missouri, and Ohio next fall.
If last night's Virginia results were projected onto these seats, in other words, if the same kind of turnout happened in all those states, Republicans would have an excellent chance of picking up all five Senate seats.
I mean, that is really impressive stuff.
So I think that what Republicans are looking at is they're looking at a changing coalition and a changing series of ideas.
They're looking at people, working class people, who still are committed to the welfare state.
So they're not as interested in what Paul Ryan is doing with reforming entitlements, which I love.
They're not as interested in that.
They're much more interested in Donald Trump.
I'm going to take care of you.
I'm going to take care of you.
But we're going to do it in a more conservative way.
And the thing is, the other thing that's been going around is this idea that Donald Trump is just a kind of wildcard flying here and there.
And that's because of the way he talks.
And that's because of his tweets and all these things that he's doing that make him seem like a crazy man.
You know, I mean, Tom Friedman from Knucklehead Row, the guy, he's in the New York Times op-ed page, Knucklehead Row.
Tom Friedman talks about how these tweets make everybody so crazy that they don't pay attention to what's actually happening.
And he says it like it's a bad thing.
But for us, it's not so bad.
Here's Friedman discussing this.
I find from a journalism point of view, Donald Trump is a brain-eating disease.
That is, he does so many outrageous things on a daily basis.
You talked about Sam Clues, this guy appointing to head the Agriculture Department $3 billion research budget.
An Iowa talk show host shows such contempt for science and the department.
And as a journalist or columnist, you sit there and say, how could I not write about that?
That's so outrageous.
And yet if I write about it every week, I end up not going out and learning or writing about all these other things.
Outrageous Daily Shenanigans00:03:00
And I think it's a real danger that Trump is going to suck the brains out of so many reporters and columnists because you spend four years outraged at him and then you don't learn anything.
And he's done so many outrageous things, you can't even keep track of them anymore.
Trump is a brain-eating disease, meaning his brain has been eaten.
I could have told them that.
That was true before Trump came along.
But what they're saying is they're being distracted from what is really happening.
And I think that's not only true on the left.
I think it's true on the right as well, where there's still these people who have a class objection to Donald Trump at some level.
He's just not quite the thing.
And the people on the right who really are exulting in any loss that Trump faces and trying to say that he's destroying the party and all this.
He's not destroying the party.
The party is changing, and he has manifested that.
I will talk about that more in a minute.
I had a really interesting dinner last night.
I'll tell you about that.
But first, first, we have to welcome Tripping.com.
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Conscience and Ceremony00:15:35
We cast you out now into the exterior darkness where there is, nah, it's not such a great.
Well, you got to listen to the show instead of watching it.
But if you subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month, you could be watching it right on the website.
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Right now, come on over to thedailywire.com and listen to the rest of the show.
So last night I had dinner with my pal, Brian Anderson.
I mean, Brian, I consider him a good friend, and he is, I think he is one of the smartest conservatives I know.
I think he's one of the smartest guys I know.
And what really got me about this is we were sitting there and basically we were looking at one another saying, is nobody actually paying attention to the actual stuff that's happening in the Trump administration?
Is it just you and me?
Because I feel that there's this anger, this absolute volcano of anger exploding over everything.
And nobody's really looking at what is really happening.
People talk about Trump being a fascist.
What has he done to violate the rules of American governance?
People talk about him being anti-black.
What has he done to harm black people, anti-gay?
What has he done to harm gay people?
All these things.
That's from the left, but on the right, too, there's this idea he's destroying the party.
He's doing all this.
And Brian said, and what got me about this is that Brian was agreeing with me.
And like I said, he's a smart guy.
He's not just a barefoot teller of tales.
He's an actual intelligent human being.
He's the guy.
He's the editor of City Journal, this magazine that I write for sometimes.
And he is a really brilliant guy.
And he said to me, there are three headlines that tell it all.
Three headlines that really tell people what they should be paying attention to.
And the first is from The Guardian.
Now, before I read this from The Guardian, I just want to play something that Jim Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, said in May.
This is what he said in, I think it was April or May, after Trump gave him his marching orders against ISIS.
Two significant changes resulted from President Trump's review of our findings.
First, he delegated authority to the right level to aggressively and in a timely manner move against enemy vulnerabilities.
Secondly, he directed a tactical shift from shoving ISIS out of seized locations in an attrition fight to surrounding the enemy and their strongholds so we can annihilate ISIS.
Okay, so that's back in the spring.
Here's a headline from the left-wing British newspaper, The Guardian.
Rise and fall of ISIS.
Its dream of a caliphate is over, so what now?
And the fact of the caliphate, the idea that they had property, they had an Islamic state, as they called themselves, that was their big selling point.
Trump, by delegating the authority to the generals, the places where the authority should be in these matters, annihilated him.
That is an achievement of the Trump administration.
And you can't say, oh, it wasn't him.
Of course it wasn't him.
It was the guy he gave the orders to.
Second headline: Kim Strossel, and I read this on the air when it came out, but Brian was just pointing this out.
Scalia's all the way down.
Mr. Trump, this is Kim Strossel in the Wall Street Journal.
Mr. Trump has now nominated nearly 60 judges, filling more vacancies than Barack Obama did in his entire first year.
There are another 160 court openings allowing Mr. Trump to flip or further consolidate conservative majorities on the circuit courts that have the final say on 99% of federal legal disputes.
And unlike the Bush administration, where they tried to come up with compromises that wouldn't get shot down, this president is stocking the court with a class of brilliant young textualists bearing little relation to even their Reagan or Bush predecessors.
That is, Scalias, guys like Scalia, who read the Constitution to mean what it means.
Finally, the third headline, and this one is a big one, even though I know it's boring to a lot of people, is Time magazine cover the wrecking crew.
Trump's cabinet is dismantling government as we know it.
I mean, and this is really an important point.
And I think that the fact that the EPA can no longer come into your home and declare your toilet a major waterway so you can't go to the bathroom without the government's permission, that is a big deal in this administration.
All of that could go away if Trump loses himself loses the office or if he loses enough majorities in Congress.
So we're looking at, you know, the right wing who is celebrating Trump's discomfiture at the election results last night is making a big mistake because this is the most conservative administration that has been in place since Ronald Reagan.
It just is.
It may be more conservative than Ronald Reagan in some ways, and that's something that I think the right should think about a little bit, especially the intellectual right that's picking on him so much.
All right, we've got to go to this interview, terrific interview with Monci Alvarado.
She is currently the executive director of the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty, the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty called God's ACLU, because they go out and fight those fights that we all read about, the wars on Christmas and all that stuff.
This was defended, it was created to defend the free exercise of all faiths in the United States.
She's also the former editor of Alt Femme magazine, a platform for women of faith.
Here is a pre-recorded interview with Monci Alvarado.
Let us start with the Beckett Fund.
The Beckett Fund is called God's ACLU.
What does that mean?
What does the Beckett Fund do?
We are a nonprofit law firm.
We've been around since 1994.
We're celebrating 25 years of defending religious freedom for all.
And what does that mean?
We're a litigation shock, a boutique law firm that does appellate work, and we're trying to change the law to promote the true understanding of religious liberty in our country.
And that is religious freedom for everyone, not for one specific group, but what the founders really intended, which is our right to seek the truth and to believe in things that even if people believe they're wrong, we have the right to believe.
Now, there's an intense feeling, especially on the conservative side of the aisle in this country, that religious rights are under attack.
Is that intense feeling actually relate to anything real, or is it just paranoia?
I definitely think it relates to something real.
Otherwise, we wouldn't be so busy.
Right.
I've been with Beckett for eight years and a couple of months, so I'll be able to say nine years soon, and we have not stopped.
So you can see that the attacks on religious liberty, although it seems like it's conservatives that are complaining about this, they come from both sides.
It's this misunderstanding of what our Constitution actually says.
Well, give me an example of a case, please, where like where you feel religious liberty is under attack.
A recent case.
A recent case.
I can give you a couple of Supreme Court cases that are exciting.
Some that have a lot of press coverage and some that don't.
I'll start with the one that doesn't.
Hosanna Tabor is one of our wonderful 9-0 Supreme Court victories.
I say wonderful just because 9-0 is something hard to come by, and it just truly means that these are issues that the Supreme Court is not only willing to take to discuss, but they're willing to defend.
This case, Hosanna Tabor, is about the ministerial exception.
So the right of religious institutions and churches to choose their own leadership and to hire or fire them when they are not holding up the tenets of their religion and practice.
This was a school that had a leader or a minister that was violating the tenets of their beliefs and they didn't want to renew her contract.
And it went all the way up to the Supreme Court.
And Justice Kagan was the one who wrote in the opinion that religion serves as the critical buffer between the individual and the state.
The moment that you allow the government to meddle in these very important institutional decisions, you're losing that buffer.
So we like to say that we want this autonomy.
You know, government is good for certain things and it's not so great for other things.
And in religion, how is the government going to know who is best suited to run your church and to teach your children?
That's a tough call.
You know, it's funny.
I try to explain this to my non-religious friends: that if the church loses its power, that they will lose their only power they have to defend their own conscience.
It's a hard argument for people to get.
Is there a conflict when you have issues like, for instance, gay rights and religious people, some religious people feel that gay shouldn't be allowed to marry and they don't want to participate in that ceremony?
It always seems to me very, it seems to me very oppressive when you go to a small business like a cake shop or a flower shop and say you have to do this thing that offends your religious.
Is that the kind of thing you would defend?
Definitely.
And I can give you some stories of ways that we would defend it on both sides.
The government shouldn't be allowed to tell you how to express your religion.
These are freedom of expression issues where a cake baker or a photographer is participating in a ceremony.
And it's an important ceremony for them, a religious ceremony.
And they should be able to participate in those that they believe in and not participate in those that they don't believe in.
And that's that live and let live principle that has allowed us to maintain this republic and what it was based on.
When we lose that ability to say, well, I don't necessarily agree with what you're doing, but it's good for you to have that freedom because someday you're going to disagree with me and I'm going to want that freedom as well.
We've lost that.
And it's this tribalism of yes for me and no for you that is really putting us down a very precarious path.
You know, recently this fellow, Roy Moore, was nominated to run for the Senate.
He's been a very strong advocate of things like keeping the Ten Commandments up in outside a courthouse.
Recently there was a case where a cross at a military memorial was deemed to be unconstitutional.
This does seem to me like an assault on the idea that religion has a place in the public sphere.
Is that something that the Beckett Fund worries about?
That there's this attack on any outward expression of religion?
Well, I mean, we work on this all the time.
So we have expression cases for crosses.
We have one in Pensacola right now that's similar, where it's a memorial.
Someone drove by and said, oh, no, this offends me.
It's this right to be offended that everyone is so excited about.
The facts are a little bit interesting.
I'm not so sure that they're residents of this country at the moment when they filed that case.
And there are a couple of things that make it complicated.
But that right to be offended and to have these trigger warnings and all the things we're seeing on campus now actually manifested in our society and in our everyday lives, that is that big red flag that tells you that there's something else happening here.
I mean, Beckett, we love our Constitution and the Establishment Clause is a really strong piece that allows us to defend both the right to have freedom of expression and true religious liberty and at the same time to have those limits that are necessary to avoid government entanglement.
And we don't have to worry about that.
The law is there.
It's robust.
It's strong and Beckett's here to defend it.
Well, that, you know, that's the question.
It seemed to me under the Obama administration that religious rights came under attack as never before.
I mean, I thought of the think of the little sisters of the poor being asked or to forced really to pay for kinds of birth control that they disapproved of.
It almost seemed to me like the administration was trying to push the boundary of government power against the power of faith.
That was me looking from the outside, just as a guy reading the newspaper.
Was that something that you were experiencing too?
It was an unprecedented attack on religious conscience.
So going back to that first point that you made about trying to get people to understand what conscience actually is, what it means, how it manifests itself in your life, why the same year that we were really intensely fighting for the little sisters of the poor, we had their older argument, we gave our annual award to Armando Valladares.
He's a survivor of solitary confinement in Castro's Gulag.
And he was placed there because he wouldn't put a sign on his desk that said, I'm with Fidel.
He said, that goes against my conscience.
And that story is really telling because it shows us how, in real life, when you allow government to grow and to really oppress you in these expressive ways, you're limiting yourself in situations where religion really would have been that buffer.
And he lost beyond religious liberty, he lost that deep forum internum, right?
That ability to be free in what you feel, what you believe, and what you think, what's in your heart and what's in your mind.
Am I right in feeling that the last eight years under the Obama administration, that those attacks increased?
Oh, yes.
They did.
Very definitely.
Okay.
Definitely.
I hadn't seen anything like that.
I don't think anyone else has.
The lawsuits that we saw under the Obama administration, not just the HHS mandate lawsuit, but the last six months of the administration with the transgender mandate, forcing doctors to provide surgeries and hormonal therapy to young kids and violating the Hippocratic Oath.
It's saying just because you believe that this might not be the best treatment, if you provide it for other reasons that aren't transition reasons, you must provide this.
And forcing doctors to violate their conscience is a very dangerous thing.
It doesn't just manifest itself in the realm of transgender transitions.
There are many other things that doctors don't want to do and don't want to participate in that they definitely shouldn't be forced to.
And has it gotten better now that that administration is over?
I wish I could read tea leaves and say that I know where this administration is going.
We are still fighting over our little sisters' cases to settle them.
It's heartening to see that some other cases that are on the same principles, Jones Day just got rid of their cases and settled them, which is wonderful.
I hope that we're next.
And I would say that with the transgender mandate, we're hoping that it won't be defended by the administration.
So I wish that I could say where it's going, but I'm happy to update you as soon as I know.
Okay.
All right.
Do you feel that people are not educated enough about religion?
They don't understand how it protects them, why it matters that the people have the right to worship.
I mean, I think that Americans, in general, if you said, do people have the right to pray in any way they want, they would say, of course, go into your church, your temple, your mosque, do whatever you want.
But when you come out, then you have to stop, essentially.
And they don't understand that that's not what the Constitution says, right?
I mean, the Constitution protects the practice of religion.
That difference between freedom of worship and freedom of religion.
Even in, so I would going back to the past eight years, if you look at the difference in vocabulary, you stopped hearing freedom of religion and you started being hearing this replacing freedom of religion with freedom of worship, confining it to within the walls of your church and your home.
Again, that's very dangerous.
And it's not what the founders intended for us to have in this country.
And that's actually why we came here, why we founded this great country.
Constitutional Shifts00:12:23
And what about the Supreme Court?
Now, as you look at the Supreme Court over the last, let's go back like 10.
I know you've only been there eight years or so, but like if you go back over the last 10 or 15 years.
Yeah.
Yeah.
How has the Supreme Court been on these cases overall, do you feel?
Most of the time the Supreme Court is great.
I would say the past couple of years.
Oh, definitely.
These are not issues that are controversial for the Supreme Court to defend.
Freedom of expression, free speech in the last decade and a half has really been a popular right and one that is no questions asked, definitely supported, defended, advocated for,
which is probably one of the reasons why it's such a crucial moment right now to see what is going to happen with the Masterpiece Cakes case and what's going to happen with this collision between freedom of expression and the new rights that were created with the Obergefell decision.
So same-sex marriage and religious liberty should not be in conflict, but the way that we have allowed it to manifest in our country, they are.
And now the Supreme Court has to make this decision of how we are going to maneuver ourselves so that we can live and let live.
That's the ideal, the ideal outcome.
I mean, it does seem to me that, and it seems to me it started with Roe v. Wade.
It seems to me that when you demand that states provide, that when you start to claim that something is a right, that most of the rights in the Constitution are negative rights.
It's like the government should not do this and it should not do that.
But when you start to say that you have a right to have an abortion, that you have a right to get married in a certain way, that you are actually stripping the states of power.
And in stripping the state of power, you kind of strip the church of power too, because the state has no way to relate to its local, whatever its local customs and religions.
And I'd go one step further and say you're stripping the state, but you're also stripping the individual, right?
The federal government is so far removed from an individual's ability to govern themselves and to really be represented.
Why would you want them making those decisions for you?
Beckett put out a book in 2008 on these conflicts and how ideally they would be resolved.
And state-level action is preferred, if any at all, is necessary to make sure that you have the right mix of representation, like you were saying.
It's an important thing to consider when you start ruling by DICA from the government, from the federal government.
How do you guys, I have to ask, how do you guys raise money?
Do you just go out and ask for it?
Yes.
Okay.
It seems important because you provide the legal for free.
We're a nonprofit law firm.
Charitable contributions are more than welcome.
All right.
Well, Monci Alvarado, thank you very much to the Beckett Fund.
I have to wrap it up, but it's been a pleasure talking to you.
I hope you'll come back.
Definitely.
Thank you so much.
Really interesting woman.
And I didn't even know.
I read about that in the Wall Street Journal, but before that, I didn't even know the Beckett Fund existed.
All right, we have to take a quick trip.
I just have to read this.
a quick trip to knucklehead row the New York Times op-ed page has actually just beat itself I mean, you wouldn't believe that they could outdo themselves, but they did.
Uma Thurman, right, the actress, wonderful actress, she was on a red carpet somewhere and she was asked about all these sex scandals that are going on in Hollywood.
And here was her response.
I don't have a tidy soundbite for you because I have learned, I am not a child, and I have learned that when I've spoken in anger, I usually regret the way I express myself.
So I've been waiting to feel less angry.
And when I'm ready, I'll say what I have to say.
So I was really impressed when I saw that.
She's a woman saying, I'm too angry to say something sensible, so I won't say anything at all.
So they have this feminist writer named Lindy West at Knucklehead Row, and she is the author of a book called Shrill, Notes from a Loud Woman.
And she opens up her op-ed praising Uma Thurman for being wise enough to hold her tongue when angry, and then says, but I'm angry, so I'm going to say stuff.
And she goes on and says, it is so stupid.
I can only read a little bit of it, but it's worth reading.
Not only are, this is her view of life, not only are women expected to weather sexual violence, intimate partner violence, workplace discrimination, institutional subordination, the expectation of free domestic labor, by which she means homemaking and motherhood.
That's the expectation.
All these things.
I don't know anybody who expects women to weather sexual violence or intimate partner violence unless he's a thug, right?
We take the blame for our own victimization and all the subtler invisible cuts that undermine us daily.
We are not even allowed to be angry about it.
Close your eyes and think of America.
That was advice to a woman in the Victorian era when she was having sex.
You're not going to enjoy it, but close your eyes and think of England.
So she's being told that nobody, nobody, if women don't have a voice, because this is what feminists are always saying, women don't have a voice, how come they never stop talking?
I mean, how come you can't shut these women up?
So he says, we are expected to keep quiet about the men who prey upon us as though their predation was our choice, not theirs.
We're expected to sit quietly as men debate whether or not the state should be allowed to forcibly use our bodies as incubators.
In other words, whether the state forces them to have babies.
In order to do that, the state would have to force them to have sex, which it doesn't do.
They chose to have sex, and then they had a baby.
And all the state is saying is, don't kill the baby.
And the state can't even say that anymore.
The thing goes on and on.
It is worth reading yourself.
What's her name?
Lindy West, Shrill Notes from a Loud Woman.
My entire response to it was, shut up and make me a sandwich.
All right, stuff I like.
So it was Brom Stoker's birthday yesterday.
He's 170 years old.
Looks great.
And he wrote only one thing.
He wrote only one thing that's worthwhile.
Well, he wrote Dracula in 1897.
And of course, everybody knows Dracula.
They don't have to introduce it.
But it is worth knowing that he kind of invented the vampire.
I mean, he took certain parts of legends and he invented all these things that have become standard issue that you kind of have to do if you tell a vampire story.
And they were really his invention.
And what makes the book, I've talked about this before, but it's worth repeating just because it's such a good book and such an exciting book and such a frightening book.
It's very rare that you read a book that is actually scary.
And this book is scary.
What makes it so scary is that I think it's pretty clear that Brom Stoker was a closet gay guy.
And from reading the book, and you don't have to be Freudian to think this, and I'm not a Freudian, but I do think it, he was really horrified by female sexuality.
And the book is not about the horror of female sexuality at all.
It's simply powered by his horror of it.
If you read the scene where Lucy, who becomes a vampire, they have to stake her through the heart.
If you read it, it is a scene of sex.
It's a scene of sex being turned into death.
And that's the mechanism, the way the book works.
It's not what the book is about, but it's the mechanism of the way it works.
Everything is turned into physical material.
So instead of the blood and wine of the mass, he's drinking blood.
Instead of a body with a soul that's living, he's lost his soul, and he's just a living body that just goes on and on and on, preying on other people.
And that really is, to some degree, what the story is about.
It's about materialism versus faith.
And one of the things that's really fascinating about it, a lot of Victorian stories have this theme, especially ghost stories, the question of faith and spirituality, usually portrayed as a ghost or some horrifying supernatural thing that's happening.
And then the scientist who doesn't believe in it and whose beliefs are shattered by this advent.
But in Dracula, the scientist, Dr. Van Helsing, is a man of faith.
He's a man who believes.
And there's a wonderful scene in the movie, the original, the wonderful movie with Bella Lugosi, where the two are fighting one another.
Their wills are in conflict.
And Dracula leaps at Van Helsing, and Van Helsing pulls out the cross, and Dracula is flung back away from him.
And it really is this beautiful moment of the man of intelligence, the man of science, is the man of faith.
And that really gives it a very different feeling.
There's a strain of thought that Dracula represents the evil Jews, that it's an anti-Semitic book.
And in the movie, Dracula, the Bella Lugosi movie, Dracula wears a pendant that actually is a Star of David, though whether it's meant to be or not, whether they did that by accident or not, I don't know.
But the idea was, you know, the Jews are called bloodsuckers and they hate the crucifix and they have that strange accent and they have gold.
There's one scene in the book where they cut his, they try to cut him with a knife and they cut open his clothes and gold pieces fall out.
And so it was meant, it was thought to mean a sort of hatred of the Jewish immigration that was taking place from Eastern Europe since the exile of the Jews had been withdrawn.
Jews were no longer forbidden in England and so they were coming back.
But it's not.
It's really not an anti-Semitic work.
Stoker was not an anti-Semite.
He was a liberal guy.
He didn't feel that way at all.
I think what is happening is that anti-Semites look at Jews wrongly, of course, as non-spiritual people.
Anti-Semites look at Jews as being vampiric, materialistic people who destroy all the great faith, you know, all the great faith emblems and structures that Christians create.
And Dracula really does that.
So Dracula fulfills what anti-Semites think Jews fulfill but don't.
And Stoker was no way, I think, trying to create an anti-Semitic character at all.
But it's a beautiful book, and it also is built perfectly.
I always talk about every horror story has the same three acts.
The first act is, what is it?
That's usually my favorite act because this eerie stuff is going on, but you don't know what it is.
And the second act is, oh, there it is, where the reveal comes and you see that it's a monster of some kind.
And the third act is, let's kill it.
And that's the suspenseful act where they chase the alien through the spaceship or whatever.
Dracula is built on that model and sort of perfects that model.
The final third of it is as exciting as anything you'll ever read.
The first third of it is really creepy and scary.
And the middle of it is just a really fascinating reveal.
This really is not like anything else.
It's better than all the movies.
The book is better than all the movies.
It really was great.
The Clavenless Weekend is here unless you go to iTunes and subscribe to Another Kingdom.
Michael Knowles will thank you, and it will help us keep him off the street.
You'll really enjoy it.
It's a really good story.
Please go and do that.
I'm going to end.
I like to end with music.
I think it was last night at the Country Music Awards.
I got to remember who it was.
It was Paisley and Underwood.
That's right.
Carrie Underwood and Brad Paisley.
They always do this political numbers.
And what I really liked about this, people were saying, oh, they attacked Donald Trump.
Well, it's pretty good-natured and unlike, unlike all the late-night shows, they actually made jokes about everybody, which made it much more palatable.
And the jokes they made about Trump were kind of funny and good-natured.
And I really thought it was political humor the way it should be done.
So let's go out with that.
I'm Andrew Claven.
This is the Andrew Claven Show.
Subscribe to Another Kingdom, and I will see you if you survive the Clavenless weekend.
I'll see you on Monday.
This year's show is a politics-free zone.
Are you kidding me?
That's not fair.
Hold on, so we can't even do like, well, way down yonder on the scaramucci.
Does it work?
No.
No scaramucci, Brad.
No.
What about like, well, she's gone, gone, gone.
No.
Gone, gone, gone.
She's Gone, Gone, Gone00:01:28
Uh-uh.
Oh, no, she wrote a memoir.
Hillary's back.
Can't do it.
Creative, but no.
So that means, like, no more hold me closer, Bernie Sanders.
No, can't do it.
No Harper Valley DNC.
Nope.
Not even stand by your manaphor?
Definitely not.
What are we going to do then?
Well, I mean, clearly, we can't say or play anything.
So I guess to present our first award of the night.
The stars of the new movie.
What are you doing, Fred?
Oh, I'm definitely not doing this one.
Right now, he's probably in his PJs watching cable news, reaching for his cell phone.
Really?
Right now, he's probably asking Siri, how in the hell do you spell Pocahontas?
Well, here we go.
In the middle of the night, from the privacy of a gold-plated White House toilet seat, he writes, Little Bob Corker, NFL, and Kofi.
Kofi!
Oh, Feffy!
Feffy!
Feffy!
Peepy!
Feffy!
Thank you.
And it's fun to watch, yeah, that's for sure to little.
Rocketman starts a nuclear war, and then they find nothing.