Andrew Clavin demands investigations into administrations but slams partisan witch hunts, like Roy Moore’s assault allegations, where Darrell Nelson dismissed Beverly Young’s claims despite a signed yearbook. He mocks congressional overreach—Democrats pressuring Jeff Sessions, Republicans targeting Clinton—and blames Obama’s cult-like support on racial guilt. Shifting to art, he rejects sanitized Christian films and sola scriptura, advocating Spirit-led truth over dogma, while listeners grapple with trauma, grief, and faith. The episode ends with the collapse of "new atheism" and a defense of religion against its own hypocrisy, not atheist critiques. [Automatically generated summary]
We here at the Andrew Clavin Show are hereby calling for an investigation on every single member of Congress.
We would also like an investigation on this administration and on the last administration, and we would like further investigations into the investigators who are investigating the investigations into the other investigations.
We must investigate until the truth comes out, the conspiracy is unraveled, and we get to the bottom of the truth coming out of the conspiracy at the bottom of the truth that has come out during this conspiracy.
Without these investigations, it is our fear that government will devolve into a series of debates over ideas that lead to legislation.
And no one wants that.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Shippy, 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.
Does our government ever do anything but investigate other members of our government?
I mean, that is now basically what they're doing for a living.
It's Mailbag Day.
That's the important thing.
Yes.
And I will try, I'm going to try and get to it sooner today.
I feel like I've been putting it off to the last minute.
Well, also, you know, I love the mailbag because it's the only time I really get to communicate with you and hear from what about what you're thinking about instead of what I'm thinking about, which I'd much prefer.
I already know what I'm thinking about.
I'd like to hear from you.
But let me know.
You know, I have no way of knowing what you guys like, so let me know if you prefer the mailbag to be short or long or whatever.
I will try and get to it faster today.
And one of the reasons I'll be able to do that is because I won't be at the post office.
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Accusations and Evidence00:07:21
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Listen, I don't want to talk about Roy Moore and his magical dingus forever.
You know, I mean, I think like there's just a certain point at which Roy Moore's crotch begins to lose, you know, lose interest for me.
But I have to say, I got a lot of reaction to some of my reaction to what's going on.
And I want to respond to that.
I think it's important.
First, a bunch of people said that yesterday I kind of convicted him too quickly.
Basically, I'm believing his accuser, the girl who said when he was lady now, who said when she was 16, he attacked her, choked her, threatened her, said, no one will believe you if you tell anybody about this.
Today, Darrell Nelson, the stepson of that woman, Beverly Young Nelson, came out and said he doesn't believe her, so let's hear what he has to say.
Mr. Moore, I support you.
I don't believe the acts that she claims you've done.
I don't believe it.
I've known the woman.
She married my father many, many years ago.
I've known her for a while now.
And I truly do not believe that she's being honest about this.
You're a good judge.
I've grown up.
I've known your name since I was a kid.
You cared about the Ten Commandments.
You tried like hell to keep the Ten Commandments from being took out of the courthouse.
I remember.
So that's that.
Unfortunately, everybody else has now basically dumped him.
Mitch McConnell says his campaign is collapsing.
The RNC, the National Party, seems to have withdrawn funding and support.
Sean Hannity, who, you know, is a partisan and a very strong partisan, but he's always been really good about investigations.
He does not get caught up in witch hunts.
He's always, I thought he should have won a Pulitzer Prize, seriously, for his work during the La Crosse rape case.
I think if he had been a liberal and that had been a liberal case of some sort, I think Hannity would have a Pulitzer.
He'll obviously never get one because he's Hannity.
But I think that even he, this is what he said about Moore yesterday.
So Moore is losing even Sean's support.
Here's where I am tonight.
Between this interview that I did and the inconsistent answers, between him saying, I never knew this girl, and then that yearbook comes out.
For me, the judge has 24 hours.
You must immediately and fully come up with a satisfactory explanation for your inconsistencies that I just showed.
You must remove any doubt.
If you can't do this, then Judge Moore needs to get out of this race.
This country has way too many issues and problems.
The American people deserve 100% truth and honesty.
We need correct answers the first time on issues this serious.
Yeah, so, I mean, when you lose Sean and when Sean is telling you you got 24 hours to clear your name, you're in trouble.
So let me just respond to some of the people who wrote to me and tweeted me and did other things.
Someone said that I was being soft, making excuses for sexual harassment.
And that is utter garbage.
All I was pointing out is that we are in a witch hunt situation.
That does mean that we have to be careful and cautious of the accusations being made.
And I was also pointing out, and in this kind of feminist witch hunt, that people put clumsy or even offensive flirting on the same lists as actual rape and actual assault, that basically you're degrading these serious charges by mixing them in with things that just happen between men and women.
Things happen between men and women.
Men make mistakes.
Women are flirtatious.
All kinds of things happen.
It's very complicated.
And before you start accusing people, you want to know that you're accusing people and ruining their careers over something that is really, really bad.
And my personal approach, listen, I live outside the realm of feminism.
I'm not a feminist.
I don't live as a feminist.
I don't just come here and tell you I don't like it.
I don't live as a feminist.
I live as a gentleman.
I try to live as a gentleman.
But the problem is when feminists are telling you you don't have to be a lady, men are not going to be gentlemen.
And I think that that is a problem when I brought that out.
But I'm no way, you know, I think people who behave badly are bad.
You know, it's ridiculous.
That I just completely dismiss, but I thought I should bring it up.
Somebody said to me that when the accuser came out and accused Moore of rape, that she was crying and it was so long ago she wouldn't be crying anymore.
That is really bad thinking.
Like the whole thing about this stuff is it sticks with you for life.
It hurts you for life.
I have given speeches and talks about my conversion experience and have gone through some of the things that happened to me when I was a little kid and more than 30 years ago.
It still chokes me up.
It still affects me.
We live in time.
This is one of the reasons that I can't support abortion.
It's one of the reasons I'm pro-life is that I feel that you are the child you were.
You are the man or woman you will one day be.
Just as I feel a baby in the womb is the adult it will one day be.
And so I feel like we live in time and that person crying, I just think she was very credible.
I was watching that thing and I just thought that was very credible.
Look, she might be lying.
It's possible.
But I will say this.
If this is a hit job, it is one of the most elaborate conspiratorial hit jobs I have ever seen.
The evidence has really piled up.
Somebody said there was this thing where Moore said that he had never heard of the restaurant where he met the woman who accused him of assaulting her.
And then she produced a yearbook that he had signed and he had signed it that he was a DA.
Somebody said, a couple of people pointed out that he was, this is a kind of forgery theory, the idea that the yearbook was forged, that he was not a DA, he was a deputy DA.
But I've known a lot of DAs.
I've covered courts as a reporter.
You know, they're always ADAs because the DA is the elected, usually the elected official at the top.
But they sometimes say, I am a DA, meaning I am one of the DAs people.
So I don't buy that.
Somebody else, a couple of people said that there was no Old Hickory House restaurant.
This is something that's a meme that's going around.
Not true.
There's a listing for a restaurant called Old Hickory House Barbecue without the fake E that they put at the end of Old.
But that was established in 2001, which was after this event.
But a reporter for AL.com, which I guess is Alabama.com, a guy named William Thornton, dug up a city directory of Gadson from 1978, which lists a restaurant called Old Hickory House with the proper address.
And, you know, there's just a lot of people who are talking about the fact that he hung out at the mall as a 30-year-old guy picking up girls.
One mall said they had to ban him because he was bugging the little girls there or the young girls there.
There is a report from the Daily Beast, this is just their report, that even Steve Bannon is starting to think about dumping him.
Bannon's Alabama Investigation Claims00:09:24
You know, he has come forward a couple of times and talks about how he's going to support him.
But the Daily Beast says that over the past few days, Bannon has begun privately taking the temperature of those in his inner circle to see what they think of the Moore allegations and to get their sense of how to proceed.
And according to four knowledgeable sources, late last week, the Breitbart chairman Bannon said, I will put him in a grave myself, always with his, is always restrained, his restrained talk.
I will put him in a grave myself if he determines that Moore was lying to him about the numerous accusations a source close to Bannon relayed.
And again, tomorrow, we're going to have Sebastian.
Have we got Sebastian Gorka tomorrow?
Have we talked to him?
Okay, so we're supposed to have Sebastian Gorka.
And this is something I really want to ask him about because let's just go back to that press conference that Mitch McConnell held with Donald Trump.
And he was asked about the fact.
Remember, Trump and McConnell were supporting Luther Strange, not Roy Moore on this.
And Bannon was fighting, saying, I'm starting a civil war within the Republican Party to get rid of what he calls the UNA party.
It's war, it's civil war, blah, blah, blah.
And this is what Mitch McConnell said about that.
You know, the goal here is to win elections in November.
Back in 2010 and 2012, we nominated several candidates, Christine O'Donnell, Sharon Engel, Todd Agen, Richard Murdoch.
They're not in the Senate.
And the reason for that was that they were not able to appeal to a broader electorate in the general election.
My goal as the leader of the Republican Party and the Senate is to keep us in the majority.
The way you do that is not complicated.
You have to nominate people who can actually win because winners make policy and losers go home.
We changed the business model in 2014.
We nominated people who could win everywhere.
We took the majority in the Senate.
We had one skirmish in 2016.
We kept the majority in the Senate.
So our operating approach will be to support our incumbents and in open seats to seek to help nominate people who can actually win in November.
Here's the thing.
I've said this before, but it's worth repeating.
Politicians are really good at being politicians.
If you ever go to a baseball game in the minor leagues, what is it?
Is it Triple-A that comes right before the major leagues?
I think it's triple.
Yeah, so if you ever go to a AAA game, these are guys one step down from the major leagues, and what you're watching is human beings play ball.
When you go to the major leagues, you're watching demigods play ball, and that's because there aren't that many major leaguers.
They are the best of the best of the best, right?
When you look at the people in the national government, in the federal government, you are looking at the best politicians there are.
They may not be nice people.
They may not be honest people.
They may not have your same values and your goals, but they're really good at being politicians or they wouldn't be where they are.
When you look at Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Senate, there's a reason he's in that position.
I'm not saying that you can only leave politicians to the professionals.
I'm just saying that before Bannon starts using that rhetoric about civil wars and the Uniparty and all this stuff, before he starts using that rhetoric, he ought to be sure that he's as good as they are at doing what they do.
Because I think that if you lose this Alabama seat, there's six Democrats in Alabama.
I mean, there's like 16 Democrats, and they could win a Senate seat at a time when we need every seat we have.
And it really is a disastrous political situation.
And it's also a disastrous situation to ask conservatives to support a guy who may have done truly, truly terrible things.
So I got to get back to this thing about investigations, because everything is investigations now.
And Jeff Sessions was at the, again, was pulled before Congress.
And it's supposed to be about his Russian statements.
And he made a statement that he never talked to anybody during the Trump campaign about Russia.
And he said, you know, it was a great campaign.
It was a terrific campaign, but it was chaotic.
Every day was chaos.
I think all of us who've watched Donald Trump can certainly believe Jeff Sessions on this.
And that he didn't remember everything he said.
And I, you know, I just, Sessions is a very straight shooting guy.
I just don't believe this thing.
But they bring him here and they're supposed to talk about Russia.
And they end up just the Democrats just hammering him about anything they can think of.
I'll just play one example of that.
Let's play Guiderez.
I really do not like Luis Guiderez.
I don't know if that's how you pronounce his first name, but he goes after Sessions.
And this is what these things have kind of degraded into, this cut 10.
Five minutes.
Mr. Chairman, before I begin, I think I have a solution that could allow the committee to move on to other important national matters like gun control and immigration.
Your side clearly wants an investigation of Hillary Clinton.
And our side has been begging for months to hold hearings and start an investigation of the Trump administration and campaigns, improper ties to Mr. Putin and the Russian government.
My solution would save the American taxpayers a lot of grief and a lot of money by eliminating the need for the investigations.
I propose we simply go to the President and the former Secretary of State and ask them both to resign.
I'll go to Hillary Clinton, and you can go to Donald Trump, and we'll say them both to resign.
Then we can move on as a nation from an election that just never seems to end.
Now, I did Google organizations that Hillary Clinton leads, and it came out zero.
So I'm not quite sure what you're going to get her to resign from, because he doesn't appear to be in charge of anything.
So this is what you call gas baggery, you know?
Like you bring this guy in and you just get these hot air balloons, you know, expel hot air all over the place, and that's supposed to be important.
And then people put it up on YouTube saying, oh, Guitar Rez destroys Jeff Sessions.
And that's nonsense.
I mean, Sessions should be at the Justice Department doing his job.
But the other thing from the right, from the right, where I think they're also making a kind of mistake, is Jim Jordan and who's the other one?
Jim Jordan and Louis Gohmert, who I love, I think is great.
And also, Mike Gates, I think his name is.
They're trying to get Sessions to appoint a special counsel to investigate Hillary Clinton.
So here is Jordan hammering him about the dossier, the steel dossier, which obviously is that fusion GPS thing that Hillary paid for to get dirt on Donald Trump from the Russians.
It's the closest thing we have to basically collusion with the Russians during the campaign.
So let's just play, well, actually, let's play cut number eight.
Here's Jim Jordan pressuring Sessions to try and get him to appoint a special prosecutor.
What's it going to take to get a special counsel?
We know that former FBI Director James Comey misled the American people in the summer of 2016 when he called the Clinton investigation a matter.
It's obviously an investigation.
We know FBI Director Comey was drafting an exoneration letter before the investigation was complete.
We know Loretta Lynch, one day before the Benghazi report came out, five days before Secretary Clinton was scheduled to be interviewed by the FBI, met with former President Bill Clinton on a tarmac in Phoenix.
We know after that meeting, when she was corresponding with public relations people, the Justice Department, she was using the name Elizabeth Carlisle.
You know, as I've said before, it seems to me if you're just talking golf and grandkids, you can probably use your real name.
We know that Mr. Comey publicized the investigation and we know he made the final decision on whether to prosecute or not.
And then when he gets fired, he leaks a government document through a friend to the New York Times.
And what was his goal?
To create momentum for a special counsel.
And of course, it can't just be any special counsel.
It's got to be Bob Knoller, his best friend, his predecessor, his mentor.
The same Bob Muller, who was involved, we've now learned in this whole investigation with the informant regarding Russian businesses wanting to do business in the uranium business here in the United States regarding the uranium one deal.
So I guess my main question is what's it going to take, if all that, not to mention the dossier information, what's it going to take to actually get a special counsel?
It would take a factual basis that meets the standards of the appointment of a special counsel counsel.
And is that analysis going on right now?
Well, that's in the manual of the Department of Justice about what's required.
We've only had two.
The first one was the WACO, Janet Reno, Senator Danforth, who took over that investigation, as special counsel, and Mr. Mueller.
Each of those are pretty special, factual situations.
Let me ask it this way.
And we will use the proper standards, and that's what I only think I can tell you, Mr. Jordan.
What's the problem with this, okay?
Because a lot of Jordan's points are absolutely true.
There's a lot of stuff that needs to be looked into and investigated and all this stuff.
You don't need a special counsel for this.
And in fact, it's a bad idea.
The reason he wants this is because we now have this battle of investigations going on, which is what they do instead of arguing ideas, instead of debating, instead of legislating, instead of doing the work that we sent them there to do, this investigation has become the kind of go-to action of our Congress.
And it is ridiculous.
So when they appointed this special prose counselor Mueller to look into the Russian collusion thing, I went nuts.
Why Investigations Became Politics00:03:38
If anybody was listening, if you remember, I just thought that was the stupidest thing they had ever done.
Because once you appoint these guys, they just run rampant.
They just go anywhere in order to get the kind of convictions that will make it look like it was worthwhile appointing them.
And there's reason to think that Robert Mueller has got too many Democrat donors and all this stuff.
And there's also reason to think a lot of people trust him.
You know, I'm not impugning his integrity.
I'm just saying once you do this, these guys go wild.
So Jordan wants our own wild, rampant investigator.
But the only thing is you don't need a special investigator for this.
Sessions has not recused himself.
Sessions had recused himself from the Russian investigation.
That's why they needed a special counsel.
He hasn't recused himself from any of this.
So it doesn't mean he's not investigating it if he doesn't have some crazed special counsel running all over the place.
Jordan just wants to continue that battle.
And I think it's a waste of our money and our time.
And I think a lot of this is a waste if you, you know, the guys, like I said, Sessions should be basically doing his job, investigating Hillary Clinton.
But I think that this is just, it's a waste and it's the wrong way to run a government.
It's like a tinpot, you know, it's like a tinpot dictatorship where you just investigate everybody.
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Crossing Grief's Desert00:15:46
We've got a break from Facebook and YouTube, but the mailbag is coming up.
So here's what you do: you go over to thedailywire.com and you can listen to the rest of the show there.
And while you're there, you subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month, and you can watch the entire show right there on the site and put questions in the mailbag so your problems will be solved right here because all the answers to your questions are guaranteed correct and will change your life on occasion for the better.
Plus, if you subscribe for a year, it's only 100 lousy bucks.
And come on, you get the leftist tears tumbler, which fills up every time I speak a word.
All right, come on over to thedailywire.com.
All right, you know what?
I'm going to just go to the mailbag.
I have more to say, but I think that's the problem.
Let's do the mailbag.
Woo!
Yeah!
I said I would get to it a little earlier.
I'll get to it a little earlier.
All right, I got a lot of good questions.
That's why.
All right, from Dominic, master of the single-nostril breath claim.
I understand the stance that large-scale conspiracies undertaken by the government seem unlikely due to the next level incompetence of the people who run the show.
Right.
You know, a conspiracy is just two people making a plan.
So there are conspiracies, but they usually come out cropper because people are incompetent.
That being said, how on earth does, what's his name, Barack Obama, and it is hard to remember his name now that his legacy is a smoking pile of ash in the Trump administration, but how does, how on earth does Barack Obama still have such a rich and fervent following despite the serious corruption of his administration that is so glaringly obvious to the rest of us?
It's his race.
That is why.
There is, on the left, especially, but I think throughout the country, there is a racial pathology that we have fallen into.
Black people in this country were treated abominably, not just by the slavery that Democrats held them in, but the Jim Crow laws that Democrats passed that just brutalized people's lives.
I mean, when the Democrats became Ku Klux Klansmen, that brutalized their lives.
And a steady prejudice, you know, once people are so abused, once people are so abused, you know, it does create all these pathologies in their community, and then people hate them for things that they're actually doing, like committing crimes and so forth like this.
So once America lost its sense of itself as a virtuous country, which it did have after, especially after World War II, lost its sense of itself as a virtuous country and reckoned with this, they felt a lot of shame.
Americans felt a lot of shame.
And they changed, and this country is no longer an institutionally racist country.
It is no longer a country where you can pass laws hurting people because of the color of their skin.
And thank God for that.
That is a good, good thing.
But this shame has made white people especially pathological in their guilt and in their attempt to display virtue.
And they display virtue even when it hurts black people.
The Barack Obama administration was lousy for blacks.
It was lousy economically.
It was lousy in terms of crime.
It was lousy in terms of turning communities against the police who need, desperately need the police.
Obama played the race card every time he failed, which was every time he tried to do anything.
And the left just could not let the first black president be a failure.
They could not let it happen.
It would mean that they themselves were part of the shame of the past.
And that is a pathology because none of us is, we're not responsible for the past.
We're only responsible for today and tomorrow and changing things so that the stuff that happened to black people in this country doesn't happen again.
And they cannot let go of their virtue long enough to judge Obama rightly because it would just mean that their entire philosophy is wrong.
And that's why every time anybody criticized him, it's like you're a racist, as if you can't criticize the president.
I mean, if Trump, if they had held Obama to the standard they held Trump, which is that every word out of his mouth is taken in the wrong way, Obama wouldn't have lasted a month.
All right, from that, that's my answer.
That's why.
It's racial pathology on the left.
From Katie, why are you and Ben so hard on Knowles?
He seems pretty likable and talented to me.
Reminds me of a young Al Pacino.
Katie, you're wrong.
He's a total knucklehead.
No, I'm hard on Knowles because I'm a New Yorker and I'm hard on my friends.
Ben is hard on Knowles because he's a sadist, basically.
He just likes torturing Knowles, and it is so much fun to torture.
From Danny, dear highest incarnation of physical beauty and mental badassery Clavin, I'm a Christian and a freelance DP.
That's a director of photography.
He's the guy who basically makes movies look great.
They always give the credit to the director, but it's usually the DP.
I've been in the film industry for 10 years now, and I'm clearly outnumbered as a Christian.
I'm only 31, and dude, have I aged because of these people?
Yes, it's obvious they have no interest in making anything of Christian value, and the people who do make Christian media suck at it.
Would you consider writing screenplays again to save us from God's Not Dead 3?
Danny, let me tell you something.
This is absolutely true.
Christians in this town get together and meet all the time, and sometimes I am there.
And the problem we have is that God's Not Dead 3 costs 25 cents to make and makes a million dollars.
The business model is just so strong, it's hard to get around to making realistic things.
And when, look, I'm getting this, we have this thing that I keep touting, Another Kingdom, on iTunes that me and Knowles did.
I wrote it and Knowles performed it.
And it is a fantasy suspense story, but it is written by a Christian, and it is imbued with my values.
And people are complaining because it has the F word in it.
Because when I wrote it, I left the F word out, and then I looked at it and I thought, this is not real life.
This is not a work of art because it doesn't represent real life.
And people are hammering me for it and attacking me.
The thing is doing great.
It's got over 600 five-star reviews.
I'm really grateful for how well it's doing.
But it does get to me every time I hear, you're not a Christian.
You call yourself a Christian, but you use the F word.
You know, I don't often use the F word.
But the fact is, people do, and you can't represent people realistically in a work of art.
So I will tell you, this is an absolute true story.
I was called to a meeting of several film Christians to sit together and talk.
I brought these points up.
I said, I do not want to make candy.
God is the God of the real world.
He's not the God of Candyland.
I don't want to make movies about Camden.
They called me up and in the nicest, most Christian, most polite way, asked me not to come back.
They said, you know, you don't fit in here.
And it's not like I was screaming and yelling.
I just made the point that you're making here.
It's a problem because their business model works and Christians do not want to hear what I have to say.
Anyone who wants to hear me say more about this, there is a pamphlet available on Amazon called The Crisis in the Arts.
It's by me.
I think it costs a buck.
I don't get any money for it.
It was put out by the David Horowitz people and it supports them.
But it's a very short pamphlet and it talks about how the arts work and what Christians misunderstand.
The most important thing that Christians and conservatives misunderstand is that Christian and conservative work does not look like Christian conservative world.
Those are two different things.
The things that our founding fathers read to build this country were filled with bloodshed and sex.
They read the Greek tragedies.
They read Shakespeare.
They knew all the great classic work that deals with sex and violence.
And a Bible, by the way, which also deals with these things.
It's very frustrating, Danny.
I completely hear what you're saying.
And I don't have an answer because these candy, I don't have a better word to use for these.
These candy-covered Christian films make a lot of money.
So I don't really have an answer for how to break through that business model.
Cassidy, love your podcast.
I listen to it every day.
As a Catholic, I want to charitably ask about your belief in theological truths and how you come to them on your own.
What leads an individual Christian to the fullness to truth?
In other words, without the church, I guess.
How do you know that you're always being guided by the Holy Spirit?
Well, you know, this is the great divide between Protestants and Catholics.
Both sides are looking for an absolute bedrock authority.
Catholics use the church and the Pope, and the Protestants use sola scriptura.
You know, they use the scripture.
I reject both of those because I don't think there is anything on earth that is absolutely bedrock.
We are meant to use the Holy Spirit to find the truth and stumble toward the truth.
I do believe the Bible is inspired.
I do believe people I read, you know, I'm very Catholic friendly.
I read a lot of Catholic theology, but I don't look for it alone.
I look for it in the great works of Catholic theology and Christian and Protestant theology.
I look for truth in, you know, the great traditions and all these things.
The problem for me is that the Catholics are really good at not falling into the mistake of worshiping the Bible instead of worshiping God.
I think that is a problem among Protestants.
The Protestants are very good at not building a vast mountain of precedent like the Supreme Court that has nothing to do with the actual scriptures.
And I think that is a problem with Catholicism, the things that some of the things the Catholics believe have built up over the centuries that just are not connected to what Jesus had to say and what Jesus did.
So I think that both sides looking for absolute certainty, both sides go astray in some way.
And what I do is I stumble forward through the dark with my Bible in one hand and great theologians in the other and prayer and try and find my way always with a kind of humility that I might be mistaken.
It might not be me.
I might not be being guided by the Holy Spirit.
And that's why I'm slow to, I try to be slow to judge and I try to go forward carefully and in prayer.
From Annette, hi, Andrew.
I have been a practicing Christian for as long as I've been breathing, but in the last six months I have caved into fear and have not been attending church.
I watch services online, but I cannot bring myself to take my family to church despite the fact that my husband is a concealed carry holder.
I recall as a child hearing about Christians butchered in their churches in the Middle East and hiding their services as a means of survival and thinking, I hope that I can have that faith and courage for God if it ever comes down to it.
Turns out I'm a total wimp.
I think what she's saying here is she's worried about the church shootings.
Do you have any insight on how I can get past my fear and be present without having to run out of service halfway through because some guy brought a backpack and it gave me a panic attack?
Yeah, listen, first of all, obviously you're having a trauma reaction to the news of shooting because your odds of being shot in church are really, really low.
I mean, that's, so this is not a, it's not rational, but it is understandable.
Okay, so in other words, you're not reacting to reality, very low chance that you'll be shot in church, but you are reacting to events that are traumatic and difficult to do.
And what I would suggest is that you gather together with other people in your church and the pastor and discuss this with them.
I mean, I don't think you're being neurotic or crazy.
I think you're actually having a reaction to something, but it's not a reaction to the actual odds that you're facing.
So I think the things that a church can do, that you can do together with your church and with the people in your church to make sure you feel safe, to make sure people are behaving well and that they're not threatening and they don't look threatening.
You know, this thought has come into my mind because sometimes I'll run down and take communion in the middle of the week and sometimes there'll be like homeless people who wander in and I think about this too.
But I think you have to join together.
You have to do this with other people.
You have to join together with other people in your church and have a communal reaction that helps you to deal with this.
It would be a good idea if you could overcome it, because I think it's very low odds that anything bad is going to happen to you.
Let's see.
If it pleases His Shininess, Lord Clavin from Luke, I request an audience with thee.
I was baptized and raised Roman Catholic, and like every other curious know-it-all kid who goes through biology class, I rapidly turned away from Jesus, thinking that I, in all my 15 years of infinite wisdom, knew better.
I became an atheist, believing that science and religion are irreconcilable, but after coming out of a seven-year haze of materialism, I've begun to delve into my spirituality and have begun back down the path towards God.
My question is about prayer.
I find it hard to pray when I don't know who I'm praying to.
Is prayer something that will guide me down the path and become more powerful to me as my faith strengthens, or is it futile until I sort myself and my faith out?
No, I don't think it's futile at all.
It's like saying, I don't know who you are, Clavin, and I can't talk to you until I find out.
It's only by talking to me that you can find out.
You know, that's the thing.
And obviously, what I said before about not just prayer, but also scripture, also the great traditions, also your church, and all those things that help guide you.
God will teach you who he is.
When I started praying, I write about this in the great good thing.
I was like, it was complete no man's land for me.
I didn't have a church.
I wasn't a Jew anymore, a believing Jew anymore.
So I was just praying in an absolute vacuum.
And I was thinking, well, you know, can I pray for a Cadillac?
Can I pray that I can have an affair without getting caught?
Can I pray?
What can you pray for?
Can you pray for anything?
How does it work?
And slowly, and not actually all that slowly, God taught me who He was.
And He's still teaching me, but He taught me, you know, what it is, what kind of prayers are important and which ones will bring me closer to Him.
And coming closer to Him just makes your life so much more joyful that it's just worth doing every day.
I really do believe that people should be alone for at least 10 minutes every day, 15 if you can do it, and pray out loud.
So people don't hear you, but if you pray out loud, you finish your sentences and you finish your thoughts, and it's really helpful.
So that's, you know, I think you have to pray to find out who God is, just like you have to talk to people to find out who they are.
All right.
I'm running out of time, and there's one here that I must get into.
Dear Lord Clavinus Maximus the Wise, I was in a relationship for two years with a woman I absolutely adored and truly believed that I was going to spend the rest of my life with.
We were deeply in love and making arrangements to move in together when she decided out of nowhere, at least from my perspective, that she didn't think we had a future together.
It's been six months and I'm still not over her.
What advice can you give me for trying to move on and finding a woman to start a life with?
That's from Jacob.
So this is grief.
You're experiencing grief.
And I've said this a couple of times, but it is worth saying.
Grief is a desert that has to be crossed on foot.
And the reason I say that is because grief is not something, you know, people want you to get over grief.
They're very impatient with it.
It usually takes about a year.
That is the average time it takes to get through grieving.
But the thing is, grief is, when I say it's a desert that has to be crossed on foot, what I mean is that you actually are on a journey through something.
You're not just in a pool unless you just languish in it.
You're actually journeying through something.
And it's important when you journey across a wasteland, which is what grief is like.
It's important where you come out on the other side.
Are you going to come out in a slum or are you going to come out in the spiritual Vegas, you know, where everything is good?
You know, and that's why I think it's, if you can, if you believe and you can pray, I think that's very important that you're following God through that desert.
So you get on the other side when you come out on the other side, that you are actually richer and deeper for the journey.
That's what you're trying to do.
You're trying to use the grief to make you a better person.
Listen, I've grieved over numerous things, including a broken heart.
Finding Blessing in Grief00:07:32
And one of the things that happens is it becomes part of who you are.
You know, as I said before, we live in time.
We continue to be the person that we were before.
And that melancholy that you've been through, that sadness becomes a kind of sweeter melancholy that helps you to appreciate the beautiful things that are happening in your life at this moment, because all things, good and bad, pass away.
When you come to the other side, and you will, if you keep journeying, the reason people get stuck in grief is they become proud of their grief, they become fascinated by it and addicted by it.
And so that you don't want to do that.
You want to keep moving, keep walking forward.
And when you do, just open your, you know, your heart will open up again.
You open your heart up to love, and you don't have to go and find the girl you marry to, you know, the sloppy seconds to replace this girl.
You want to start to meet women and hopefully find one that you can love again.
And I know you will.
I know you will.
You just have to make that journey and be patient with it.
Because not only do we ourselves get impatient with our grief, the people around us get impatient with our grief, even if they love us.
They just get so tired of hearing us bring up the same subjects again.
And, you know, when are you going to stop?
And what you have to realize is this is part of the process.
It's a journey.
You just cannot hurry.
You just have to make the journey.
And you will get to the other side, but it's important.
And if you can pray and believe, that will help you to get to a good place when you get to the other side because grief is part of life.
Can I do one more?
I think I'd do one more, right?
From Kevin.
Dear Andrew, my wife and I have an adult daughter with significant special needs caused by brain trauma when she was born 10 weeks early.
I recently saw a tweet stating that having an abortion can increase a woman's odds of preterm birth in later pregnancies.
Before my wife became a Christian and before we met, she had two abortions.
The news that her abortions may have contributed to our daughter's problems is painful to me.
My inclination is to keep this news to myself to protect my wife.
However, I'm a little worried that carrying this information alone could create a wedge in our happy marriage.
Okay.
First of all, there is some science behind this that abortion can lead to preterm births.
There is some science behind that.
But like all these things, that could change and you don't know and you don't know in your particular case.
And you certainly should follow your inclinations and keep this to yourself.
And if you need to talk to somebody, a therapist or something, talk to it.
What I think you are really dealing with, and I'm going to be blunt about this, you know, the heart is filled with all kinds of irrational feelings.
And you're not to blame for that.
That's true of everybody's heart.
That's true of everyone.
But I think you are harboring beneath the surface of your consciousness.
I think you're harboring the idea that somehow this is a punishment on your wife.
And you're angry, I think, somewhere in a subterranean level.
You're angry at your wife for having done something that was brought back as a punishment on your daughter.
That's not true.
That's not how God works.
God is not punishing your wife.
He's not punishing your daughter.
This is a tragic thing.
Tragic things happen in life.
And yes, we make bad choices and that sometimes leads to tragedy, but this is not your wife's fault and it is not your daughter's fault.
And it's not a punishment from God.
Your daughter is a blessing from God.
You just have to find that blessing.
I know it's difficult and I know she's suffering and all this, but I think you have to find where that blessing is.
That's why.
That's why we don't abort our children because we know they're going to be a blessing.
So when you want to tell her about this, what I think you really want to do is I think you really want to bring out your anger.
And I know you may not feel that anger, but I think it's there.
And I think you want to accuse her and tell her that God is punishing her.
Keep it to yourself.
And if you have to deal with it in some other way, go to a therapist, go to a friend, and talk it through.
Because this is not a punishment.
You know, you are blessed with a wife who has found her way.
She, in becoming a Christian, she has been forgiven.
Now you have to forgive her too.
God has forgiven her.
Now you have to forgive her too and move on and try to find the blessing in a difficult situation.
All right.
I guess I have to get to the end, to tickety-boo news.
So I have to bring this up.
Global atheist convention called Reason to Hope is canceled because no one wants to go.
And I don't mean to be triumphal about it, but here's the story.
I think this is from us.
This is the Daily Wire.
The third annual global atheist convention, ironically dubbed Reason to Hope, has been canceled due to dismal ticket sales.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports.
Turns out offering nihilism packages hope doesn't sell too well to the masses.
The conference, which was scheduled for February of this year, was set to be headlined by atheist novelist Sir Salman Rushdie, who was a huge get for the convention organizers.
You would think so.
This is the guy, the Ayatollah Khomeini.
This is when Islamism first really rose to the surface.
The Ayatollah Tollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Rushdie for his novel, The Satanic Verses, in 1989.
And fellow atheist Richard Dawkins was also in the anti-God roster.
That was a star.
You know, this is something that people are noticing: that the, remember the new atheist Dawkins and all these other people?
They were supposed to be such a big deal, and they've kind of fizzled.
It's kind of fizzled out.
And I will tell you why I think this has happened.
I believe that the popularity of the new atheists was an attempt to salvage multiculturalism in the face of Islamism, of radical Islam.
Nobody wanted to say, nobody on the left wanted to say, maybe Islam is a bad religion.
Maybe there is a God, and God has certain features and qualities, and you can be wrong about God, who God is.
I think a person who is serving a mean, nasty, judgmental little Allah who wants him to blow people up because he doesn't believe in him is not serving God at all.
I don't believe that Allah is Allah.
I don't believe that Allah is God.
And I think that people were afraid to say that.
They were afraid to say, hey, you know, there's a problem in the house of Islam.
There's a problem with the God they're worshiping.
So instead, they said, well, it's all religion, all religion, a big problem.
Now, Sam Harris has been very good about this.
He is an atheist, and he does say Islam is really the big problem, and he gets hammered for that a lot.
So Sam Harris is off the hook on this, but I think the popularity of these people was based on this idea that somehow this was going to save us from getting rid of our multiculturalism.
I was writing books for Thomas Nelson, some of my young adult thrillers for Thomas Nelson, and I said to him, you don't have to be afraid of atheists because when you argue with them, you win.
Their arguments are lousy.
And look, some of these people, Dawkins is a smart guy.
His arguments are lousy.
You know, I mean, Sam Harris, smart guy, his arguments are bad.
You can beat these guys in argument.
I love to have atheists come out and say what they have to say because I think we can win that argument.
The things that really hurt God are corruption in the church.
I mean, Catholics get angry at me because I'm always, because I keep going back to the priest molesters, not because I don't like the Catholic Church, because I like the Catholic Church.
And that's what hurts God.
What hurts God is small-mindedness and meanness and hammering people with your Bible for their lives instead of forgiving them, which is what God keeps telling you to do on every page of the New Testament.
Being judgmental and small-minded in the name of God, which is not God.
Those are the things that hurt God.
But atheism, intellectual atheism is great.
We can always challenge that.
And I'm not so sure Richard Dawkins is going to make it to the grave without changing his mind.
Because I've heard him say things like, I'm a, what does he say?
I'm a secular Christian and all that.
Because that doesn't make any sense.
And Dawkins is smart enough.
Attack On Relativism00:00:44
He might figure that out.
So anyway, I just wanted to say that I think when you read news about the new atheists, that's what you're reading.
You're not reading an attack on God.
You are reading an attack on God, but you're also reading a desperate attempt to defend a philosophy, relativism, which has failed utterly and fails per se because it makes no sense.
Tomorrow, hopefully, Sebastian Gorka will be here, and we will put his feet to the fire and question him about this Civil War and the GOP and what Roy Moore means for it.
Please be there.
And next week, are we going to run that Scott Adams interview?
I interviewed Dilbert's creator Scott Adams.
What a great interview that was.
And that's going to be next week, I think on Tuesday, probably, since Thursday's Thanksgiving.