Ep. 425 contrasts Trump’s economic and military achievements—tax cuts, ISIS defeats, judicial picks—with leftist media attacks, dismissing hyperbolic claims like Eichenwald’s warnings as baseless while defending Flynn’s plea deal against FBI controversies. Michael Knowles reveals Hollywood’s reluctant embrace of Another Kingdom, exposing its political double standards. The episode pivots to Advent theology, critiquing the "war on Christmas" and tracing Jesus’ genealogy as a universal divine mission, before slamming progressive tactics like Minnesota mayor Val Johnson’s "Social Justice Warrior playbook." It ends with a call for unapologetic conservatism, framing Trump’s presidency as a bulwark against cultural indoctrination. [Automatically generated summary]
So one of my biggest problems with the fact that the left owns the culture is that even when we win the arguments, we sometimes tend to adopt the values that we should be fighting against.
And the most obvious example is feminism, where I'll hear right-wingers say, oh, you know, the feminists say, well, women should be strong, strength.
She's a strong woman, she's strong.
And then right-wingers will say, well, feminism doesn't make women strong.
It makes them weak without ever questioning whether we actually care whether women are strong.
I mean, maybe women would prefer that men be strong so that they can concentrate on the far more important and culturally healing attributes of femininity.
You know, that's maybe why men are strong, so that femininity can exist.
And we let the SJWs accuse people of racism, and then we'll say, no, you're the racist.
We're not the racist.
Instead of saying, hey, you know what?
Institutional racism has been eradicated in this country.
There is no legal racism in this country.
Personal racism, it may not be a problem.
Individuals are always going to be racist as a bad thing, but there's always going to be bad things in life.
And maybe that's not something that politics has to deal with.
When I met, the first time I ever met as a liberal, a conservative, the first conservative I've ever met who was a great guy and a friend, and I was shocked to find out he was a conservative, we would get into friendly debates over these things.
And like all liberals, I didn't really know very much.
I thought I knew a lot.
I thought I knew that the Republicans were evil, but I didn't really know anything about policy or the economy or anything like this.
And I would constantly get battered in these arguments, even though he was being kind of kind to me because he realized I was a typical liberal and had no idea what was going on.
And one day he said to me, I remember, I said to him, you know, I'm embarrassed to tell you this, but it was a long, long time ago.
But I said, you know, the Republicans just don't seem to care.
And he said, who cares if they care?
And I was shocked.
I was scandalized that anybody would not care.
But of course, he was right.
Who cares if politicians care?
And what I see now is I see that some people on the right, every day I wake up and they're talking about this tweet and this emotional sense of this and emotional this.
And who cares?
I mean, look at what is happening.
Look at what is happening.
Tax reform.
If this tax reform thing goes through, it is going to be huge.
If it includes the dial back of the Obamacare mandate, it is going to be generationally huge.
ISIS has been destroyed in Syria and Iraq nine months after Mattis said that Trump said, go destroy ISIS.
Trump is transforming the federal judiciary into a constitutional, a pro-Constitution judiciary from the Obama judiciary that only wanted to push progressive values.
Illegal immigration is way down to the point of almost having stopped.
Political correctness is dead.
The MSM, the mainstream media is in a shambles.
And the left has actually been reduced to now this kind of banana republic politics where they're just going to try and convict Republicans of crimes that are just typically typical politics day by day.
Trump Happiness Montage00:15:32
And, you know, I'm sitting here and I actually, like in the distance, I can start to hear, I hear something.
Yes, it's getting louder.
I think it's the Trump happiness montage.
We're going to win economically.
We're going to win with the economy.
We're going to win with military.
We're going to win with health care and for our veterans.
We're going to win with every single facet.
My, oh my, what a wonderful day.
We're going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning.
Yay!
You say, please, please, it's too much winning.
We can't take it anymore.
I feel pretty.
Oh, so pretty.
I feel pretty and witty and gay.
We have to keep winning.
We have to win more.
I'm gonna wait for a trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunkity.
Shipshape, tipsy-topsy, the world is it bitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing!
Oh, hurrah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hurrah!
All right, Michael Knowles is with us, Father Michael O'Knowles.
He's going to be talking.
Father Michael O'Knowles is here today.
He's going to be talking to us about the theology of Christmas.
This is after his starring role in Another Kingdom, which is doing spectacularly.
Well, we'll talk about what happened on this pitch.
I promised that I would report back this pitch I did on Thursday.
I had a pitch on Friday, too, but the lady got sick, and so that didn't, they've delayed that.
But I'll let you know about that.
That comes after the break, though.
So you want to subscribe, you want to come over to the dailywire.com and subscribe for just a lousy 10 bucks a month.
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It's at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific, and this time it will be with our very own Ben Shapiro.
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He'll be a great subscribe today, and you can be part of the conversation and ask Ben questions live.
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This weekend was incredible.
I think with Another Kingdom, we may have actually cured the Clavenless weekend.
I mean, this weekend was incredible.
And by the way, the mainstream media thinks that they're doing great.
And they're just like in rubble all over the ground.
So we are here today, courtesy of stamps.com.
That is the reason we are not at the post office.
We love the post office, but with things moving at the pace they move in the 21st century, you got to take the post office, bring it home, stuff it into your computer through any means necessary, and then you'll have everything you need without having to wait online, without having to depend on their hours to have them be open.
You can just do it anytime you want.
Stamps.com brings all the services of the U.S. Postal Service right to your fingertips, into your keyboard.
You can buy and print official U.S. postage for any letter, any package, any class of mail using your own computer and printer, and then the mailman picks it up.
And it's just possible you might be mailing a lot of stuff right now.
I know we are like, we have like a factory.
My house has now become like Santa's workshop like this.
All these decorations, these wonderful decorations, we have the mistletoe for, you know, the kind of horrible doings that go on here that I'm sure will be a scandal 10 years now down the line.
But if you're mailing stuff, and I'm sure you are, stamps.com makes it easy.
They'll send you a digital scale, automatically calculates exact postage, and stamps.com will even help you decide the best class of mail every time so you're not wasting your money.
Right now, you can get a four-week trial plus postage and a digital scale without any long-term commitments by going to stamps.com.
Click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in Clavin.
That's K-L-A-V-A-N stamps.com and enter Clavin.
And you, like me, will never have to go to the post office again because it will be right there in your computer.
All right, huge stories over the weekend.
So, I mean, just amazing.
So much news that it was hard.
It was hard to believe it was all happening in one weekend.
Let's start with tax reform.
Okay.
Tax reform, you know, I always hate to talk about these bills because they get mashed up and changed.
And at this one, they were writing things in the corners while they were voting over it.
And so let's stipulate right away that this is a messy way to make a bill.
The bill is going to be imperfect and all this stuff.
But what the left is saying about this bill is they are simply lying.
The idea that this bill is not a middle-class tax cut is just untrue.
I mean, even if you look at it in the, you know, the smallest way possible, it is going to work out for a tax cut for just about everybody.
There'll be a small number of people whose taxes go up.
I'll probably be one of them.
It's going to be people who are doing well, but they're living in blue states.
I mean, that's going to be the people.
But I think it's going to be under 12% of the people might see a little bit of a rise.
It's not going to be the poor.
It's going to be a tax cut for the middle class and this huge tax cut for corporations, which is great because it is going to bring at least a million jobs in here.
If it works, you are going to see an absolute surge in this economy.
It won't be like anything you've seen since the comparison between the Carter economy and the Reagan economy.
Now, the reason Obama's economy was not as bad as the Carter economy is because the Reagan economy was so good.
It made us so rich for so long with the help of Bill Clinton, who kept it in place, that when it crashed, when there finally was the 2007 crash, you know, that was a huge crash, but there were no breadlines.
You didn't see people, you know, there were no Hoovervilles or anything like that.
That was because Reagan made us all so rich that we could survive, made the country so rich that we could survive a big crash, a crash really as big as the Great Depression, without actually having a Great Depression.
So Obama, though he was completely, his handling of the economy was awful, it wasn't quite as bad.
He had his 1% growth, his slow growth, the new normal.
Democrats were always telling us, this garbage, it's the new normal.
It's not garbage.
It's the new normal.
Well, it's not.
It only took Trump 10 minutes to bring us up to 3.3% GDP.
This will do even more.
And you know how you know it's great?
The reaction of the left.
Do you have your leftist tier tumbler ready?
Get your leftist tier tumbler ready.
Listen to this.
Kurt Eichenwall, he's the guy with the, what was that, tentacle porn?
He's the guy that got caught with tentacle porn.
He's a senior writer for Newsweek.
Hey, it's all good.
You know, it's not that there's anything wrong with tentacle porns.
Is that an abuse of people with tentacles?
I don't know.
So he's a senior writer at Newsweek, contributing editor for Vanity Fair.
Here was his tweet.
America died tonight.
Economics.
Just keep in mind, this is a tax cut.
It's like a tax reform.
America died tonight.
Economic suicide adopted to feed the insatiable greed of donors who have been refusing to dole out dollars to GOP until they got their tax cuts.
Voters fooled by propaganda and tribal hatred.
Millennials, move away if you can.
USA is over.
We killed it.
And by the way, millennials, feel free to take that advice if you want.
My favorite, I think everybody's favorite, was the actor, comedian, and actor Patton Oswald.
And you think like, why, you know, because everybody's on Twitter, so why quote these people?
But Oswald does have one of the most popular podcasts, I think, on the air.
He says, is there any going back after this tax bill scam to America?
Does it matter now if Trump is impeached?
There's no America now, at least.
And then he said, not the America we knew.
Sorry, feeling real despair this morning.
I mean, this is unbelievable stuff.
It really is.
It's just like, well, let's play.
And it's not like it was just people on Twitter.
It's just Bernie Sanders commenting on it.
A day that historians will look back on December 1st, 2007, and they conclude that today is a day of one of the great robberies of criminal activities, if you like, in the modern history of this country because the federal treasury is being looted tonight.
So this is like a guy comes into your house and steals your TV.
The police catch him and give you your TV back.
And Bernie Sanders says, they're robbing this poor man to give TVs to the rich.
It's like, it's not your money, Bernie.
It's the money.
Where is it written that if somebody makes a lot of money, it suddenly belongs to you?
How does that happen?
It's his money.
The money in that treasury that you're talking about is coming from people who earned it.
You didn't earn it.
You did nothing except try to turn this country into Venezuela.
So what are you talking about?
And of course, the stuff about John McCain, just unbelievable.
John McCain supported the bill, and he has brain cancer, and people took to Twitter.
These leftists took to Twitter en masse to basically wish him dead.
And not just dead, but a horrible suffering death.
And, you know, my answer, my feeling about that is: how do you then look at yourself in the mirror and say, these Republicans, they have no compassion.
They have no empathy.
And I hope you die, John McCain.
You know, how do you reconcile that?
All right, that's a big, I mean, it's a huge story, and it now has to go to committee, and then they still have to pass it again, so it can still founder.
Things can happen to it, but it will be big.
And Trump is hinting that he may actually now go for the kind of entitlement reform that he said he wasn't going to do at first.
But if he's now on board with that, this will be an historic.
I mean, this presidency, you know, I get it.
I talk about the fact that I don't like the way Trump behaves all the time.
But this presidency for first year has been Y-U-G-E huge.
I mean, so here's the second one: the indictment from the FBI.
So Michael Flynn pleads guilty to lying to the FBI about a few phone calls he made to Russia after Trump was elected.
He said he didn't make them.
He said he didn't say the stuff he did.
He was talking to Kislyak, the Soviet, the Russian ambassador, about the fact that Obama was putting sanctions on Russia for their meddling.
He talked to him about a scurrilous UN resolution that condemned Israel for having settlements.
And Jared Kushner apparently wanted him to say to them to delay that vote because Obama, breaking with all American history, was not going to veto the vote.
And he let it pass, which was just an awful, awful, ugly, stupid thing to do.
And he apparently, Flynn, knowing, he must have known it was being taped.
And of course, the FBI knew it was taped and knew what was on it.
He apparently lied about it.
He has pled guilty to this.
You have to listen to this montage of the mainstream media basically going nuts over this.
There aren't many more dots after Mike Flynn, right?
Your dots go to Kushner and then the president.
There really are no other dots here.
This is a case that reaches directly into the heart of the Trump administration, into the Oval Office.
People now who have believed that the president's sort of loose way with information and facts was his best defense now think that the president is in danger and exposed.
I do agree.
This is a big moment where if you're on the fence, you start to think, geez, is this whole thing going down?
Is it Watergate?
Breaking news.
ABC News.
Brian Ross is reporting.
Michael Flynn promised full cooperation to the Mueller team and is prepared to testify that as a candidate, Donald Trump directed him to make contact with the Russians.
Hooray!
The president is in contact with the Russians, the president-elect.
So this last thing that she's referring to, this piece of baggage is referring to, is a report from Brian Ross that it was candidate Trump as opposed to president-elect.
You know, I noticed this when the story was being reported, but it was the weekend and I was kind of hearing it out of the corner of my ear and I was thinking, wait a minute, this conversation took place in December, so the election was already over.
So here's Brian Ross reporting this wrongly.
He has promised full cooperation to the Mueller team.
He's prepared to testify, we are told, by a confidant, against President Trump, against members of the Trump family, and others in the White House.
He is prepared to testify that President Trump, as a candidate, Donald Trump, ordered him, directed him to make contact with the Russians, which contradicts all that Donald Trump has said at this point.
As well, we're told that Flynn made the decision to cooperate only in the last 24 hours, that he is distraught about the decision but feels he's doing the right thing for his country, that he was facing huge legal bills of more than a million dollars, and that he said that finally he had to go ahead and do this for that reason.
He expects to put his house on the market.
He is saving seriously.
This is the same guy.
This is not the first time this has happened.
This is the same guy who remembers the Aurora shooting in Colorado at the Batman showing in the movie theaters 2012.
He's the guy who looked up the suspect.
The killer's name was Jim Holmes.
Was it James Holmes?
I think that's what it was.
So he went and looked up Jim Holmes, founded Jim Holmes, who belonged to a Tea Party in Colorado, and went on the air and said this might not be him, but this might be connected to the Tea Party.
And of course it wasn't him.
I mean, Jim Holmes, it's like John Smith.
You know, it's like it's absurd.
He's also the guy who said that Saddam Hussein was behind the anthrax attacks back in 2001.
I mean, he has made some major, major errors.
So they suspended him for four weeks without pay.
And my feeling about that is if they suspended him by his ankles, that's okay for four weeks.
That would be okay.
Otherwise, he should be fired.
That's unforgivable.
And especially given his record.
I mean, what does it take to get fired from ABC?
How many wrong stories?
And by the way, for those people who say that Donald Trump is not responsible, at least in part, for the stock market rise, the minute people heard this, the stock market tanked by like 350 points.
Crime and Investigation00:06:03
So it was people thinking, oh no, Trump's in trouble.
Is he in trouble?
Let's go through the story really quickly because I want to get to Michael Knowles.
You know, I should break here.
I say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come on over.
You can listen to the rest on YouTube or come on over to the Daily Wire and you can listen.
But if you want to watch it, you've got to subscribe.
It's a lousy $10 a month and you can be part of the conversation with Ben coming up.
It's next Tuesday, right?
Not this Tuesday.
next Tuesday.
So let's talk about this Flynn thing, because what he did was he lied to the FBI.
He didn't even have to talk to the FBI, but he lied to the FBI, which is kind of strange because he must have known, not only must he have known that he had been recorded, but they knew, they knew what was in it already.
So why were they even asking the questions?
So the going story on the mainstream media is that he cut this deal and they only charged him with this very minor, what's called a process crime, because he didn't actually do anything criminal.
He just in the course, the crime wouldn't exist if it weren't for the investigation itself.
That's process crime.
And so the going thing on the mainstream media is, well, they only charged him with this because he's agreed to spill his guts and he knows all this dirt.
He was the national security advisor for like 20 minutes and he was like, you know, he's going to get Trump and he's going to get Jared Kushner and all this stuff.
This is probably garbage.
So let's think about this for a minute.
Mueller was appointed to investigate Russia, Trump's, the Trump campaign's collusion with Russia.
The collusion with Russia was basically this.
Trump supposedly, you know, this is the charge.
giving something to the Russians in order to have the Russians attack Hillary Clinton, which almost assuredly never happened.
So if that's what he's hired to investigate, why is he investigating something that happened after the election was over?
That's the first thing, all right?
So it's a very, very minor charge.
Second, and some of this, you know, I thought of a lot of this myself, but then it was confirmed for me by Andrew McCarthy, who is an expert on these things, who's a former federal prosecutor, and he's been writing great stuff over at NRO about it.
Hopefully we'll try and get him on by the end of the week to talk about it.
But when you are trying to move up the ladder, to pyramid up the ladder to get the top guy, you charge the lower guys with the crime.
In other words, you charge him with Russia collusion to prove, once he confesses to that, you've proven that the crime exists.
But Mueller isn't doing that, or Mueller or however it's pronounced, he's not doing that because obviously it didn't exist.
He's investigating something that didn't exist.
So now he's just justifying his existence, probably by going after an obstruction of justice thing.
But I mean, here's the first thing.
Back when this happened, back when these conversations first were exposed, a reporter asked the State Department, this is Obama's State Department, whether it was a bad thing for Flynn to be in touch with the Russians.
I think his name is Mark Toner of the State Department.
This is his response.
This building doesn't see anything necessarily inappropriate about contact between members of the incoming administration and foreign officials, no matter what country they're from.
No, right?
No.
And again, this has been ongoing.
I mean, we stand ready if they want to work through the State Department to contact some of these individuals, but we have no comment or no problem with them doing such on their own.
So Trump had the absolute right to fire James Comey.
So if they're going after him on obstruction of justice, how can you be charged with obstruction of justice for doing what the president has the absolute right to do?
And there's some talk about the Logan Act, under which no one has ever been convicted.
It's a 216-year-old act that was passed under John Adams that is constitutionally very suspect to begin with, which basically says private citizens can't engage in negotiations with foreign powers that wrongfoot the government.
I mean, it's like he has nothing.
It is like he has nothing.
And the girls on the view can throw their cards up in the air and sing hallelujah all they want.
But I don't think they have anything.
Meanwhile, the FBI is covering itself in shame.
They had this guy, Peter Strzzok.
And now, it's four months ago, Peter Strzzok, who headed the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails, was caught sending anti-Trump texts to the FBI official he was having an adulterous affair with.
So he's cheating on his wife with a woman in the FBI, and he's sending her things criticizing Trump.
So Mueller fired him from the investigation, but they have hidden this fact for four months.
And this is the other thing they've been hiding.
I mean, Judicial Watch and Devin Nunes on the House Intelligence Committee, they have been going after the FBI.
Nunes is ready to hold the FBI in contempt for not turning over material about the strzok.
And meanwhile, Judicial Watch got all this emails after months and months and months showing that when Loretta Lynch met with Bill Clinton on the famous tarmac meeting, the FBI didn't investigate how that took place, whether that was wrong.
investigators, who leaked it?
Who leaked it to the press?
So the FBI, you know, Trump is tweeting today after years of Comey with the phony and dishonest Clinton investigation and more, running the FBI.
Its reputation is in tatters, worst in history, but fear not, we will bring it back to greatness.
And he's right.
And not only are they in tatters, but the mainstream media, they look like buffoons.
And all these people who are attacking this tax reform, is anybody going to hold them to account if it works, if the economy skyrockets, if people who are poor suddenly have jobs, if people who are in trouble suddenly are off welfare?
Is anybody going to hold these people to account and say, hey, weren't you the guy who said America is dead?
America died because we cut taxes a little.
America died because we let people hold.
You know, the Obama administration passed a law saying you have to buy this or the government can punish you.
Trump is trying to get a law passed that says you can keep more of your money, and that's supposed to destroy America.
That's supposed to destroy American freedom.
Bringing Hollywood to Google00:06:35
This is an amazing moment, and the people who really need to notice it are the people on the right.
We need to stop accepting the premises of the left.
We need to stop accepting that Donald Trump's behavior is the most important thing going on here, that Donald Trump's tweets are the most important thing going on here.
They're not.
They're not.
What is happening is a transfer.
What is really happening is that freedom is being preserved for another four years.
And I know that's kind of melodramatic, and I'm not saying, oh, Donald Trump is a saint who's bringing us our freedom.
All I'm saying is freedom is fun.
Freedom is full of problems.
Freedom is full of troubles, but it's fun because you never know what's going to happen next.
If you're living in North Korea, you know damn well what's going to happen next.
You know what's going to happen tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that, you're going to bow down on your knees with this little clown's foot on your neck.
But here, we're still fighting.
We are still fighting the power.
We're still taking our money back from the power.
And I think Trump deserves a lot of praise for that.
I think he really does.
All right.
Let's bring on a man who deserves absolutely no praise at all.
Have we got Knowles in the next?
There he is.
Oh, my God.
I take it back.
I take it back.
You deserve praise.
You know, I just got this whole thing out of my closet.
Just dusted it off this morning for our first day of advent, second day of Advent.
That is a beauty.
I was about to say you deserve no praise, but you deserve praise for that alone.
Did Cynthia make that?
Oh, Cynthia, the only talented person at the DLY, of course, made this.
And I also wore it as a bit of like a good luck sweater because how did your meeting go?
Oh, actually, we've got a segment we can do.
We've got the news and tax cuts.
I don't really care.
What's going on with Another Kingdom?
Are we going to be stars?
I went in to one of the hottest producers in town.
Now, people who don't understand this, you have to understand getting something on TV is a question of jumping over hurdles, one hurdle after another after another.
So no matter how, when you get there, until that thing is on the air, you have not gotten over the hurdles.
But I just really, I've worked with this woman before, and when I first worked with her, they were just starting up.
I don't want to name the producer, but they were just getting started, and they were kind of nowhere, and they were in danger.
You didn't know if they were going to succeed or not.
And I came back from my meeting, one of several meetings with her, and I called my agent and says, this is one of the smartest women in Hollywood I've ever met.
I just really like her as a story person.
Meanwhile, in between that time and now, they've become huge.
They just have a couple of very big successes.
So I walked in, and I really like her as a person, too.
But I walked in and they immediately start bashing Trump.
I mean, this is the thing I keep trying to explain to people.
It's just they don't mean to do it.
They're not being mean.
It's just they kind of assume that everybody's on the same page.
And it's just conversation before a meeting, just like you might say, you know, how's your wife and all this stuff?
Isn't Trump an idiot?
You know, that kind of thing.
And my rule about this is I never allow them to assume that I agree with them, but I won't start a fight because I'm there to sell something.
I'm there to sell my material, right?
So I didn't say anything at first.
The woman had done, she'd listened to like four episodes, which is amazing, of the Another Kingdom.
That's three more than I've listened to.
That's a lot of episodes.
I don't know if you know this, but you actually read the episodes.
It was some drunken stupor, I'm sure, yeah.
So if nothing else, you now have a major producer in Hollywood who knows that you have no talent whatsoever.
I'll take it.
Only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
That's what they say.
Exactly.
So she was into it.
She was definitely into it, but I pitched the whole thing because there was another guy in the room.
So I pitched the whole thing.
And they did.
And at one point, I finally said, because I know if they haven't Googled me already, and like I said, we worked together for a fairly long time on a project.
If they haven't Googled me already, they will Google me eventually.
So at some point, I said, look, you know, I just want you to know that I'm a politically incorrect guy, so politically incorrect that I sometimes feel that I'm toxic and I don't really do a lot of these meetings anymore.
And she didn't blink.
So I thought like, yeah, she knows.
She knows who she's talking to.
And I even said at one point when they were talking about, oh, Trump, this, Trump, that, I said, you know, I'm kind of enjoying myself with this, all this.
I didn't say I, you know, because I don't love the guy.
You know, I have my problems with the guy too.
And when they're talking about how rude he is, I can agree with that and all this.
But I did say, I did warn them.
So I don't know.
She's gotten back.
She got back to my agent the next day and said, I'm still into this.
I'm going to do some more due diligence.
I want to listen to more of the show.
Can we get rid of Knowles?
I said, absolutely.
Of course.
Please, that's necessary to the contract.
So I'll probably hear more today.
But I have more pitches to do.
More people have heard it and want to do it.
Look, the odds are always against it, but they didn't kick me out of the room.
Let's put it that way.
They did not say, we're not going to do this.
They didn't call up.
You usually find out pretty quickly whether they're out of it.
She has done absolute due diligence.
She is listening.
She is talking about it.
So we'll see.
You have more courage than I do.
I think it's because you're much more famous and successful than I am.
Because when I'm on set or in a rehearsal or whatever, I've been in a lot of these situations, either with film or theater, and they start talking about politics.
And this is, I guess, when Trump was happening and even before then.
And I just keep my mouth shut.
Because they don't do it to be mean.
They do it because it's so unfathomable that somebody would vote for a Republican.
And I just keep my mouth shut.
So it's probably better that you're very open about it.
Here's the thing.
Here's the way I figured it for myself.
You're an actor, right?
You're there to play other people's.
I live by my words.
My words have to say what I mean.
They have to talk, you know.
So I never want to go in there and pretend to be something and then have them find out I'm something else.
And so now my word doesn't mean anything, right?
And also, I think of it if I'm going to survive, which I'm probably not in Hollywood.
I've kind of thought like I won't survive.
I don't care.
I'll live another way.
But if I'm going to survive, they have to realize that you can be on the other side of these questions and be a decent person.
I've kind of been protected by the fact that I love gay people.
I've never had a problem.
All my life.
I've never had a problem.
So I'm not in that camp.
I'm not in a place where they absolutely go blind.
And I understand when they say Trump is rude.
I agree Trump is rude.
But I'm a small government libertarian conservative.
And if you can't work with a guy like that, you can't work with half the country and you can't entertain half the country.
So I'm actually bringing them an audience that they don't necessarily have.
And I think it's worth it to me to be, it's worth it to me to be honest because I live by my words.
But not us actors.
We just lie.
We're just pain liars.
So if you're watching producers, I disavow Andrew Clavin.
I disavow Donald Trump.
Please hire me.
But please, the audience has been so good.
We're almost up to like 1,300 five-star reviews.
Genealogies of Jesus00:07:39
Please keep coming.
Come and send your friends because we need you to listen to have support.
It is so helpful.
It is really, really helpful.
I love seeing that when I look at all the arts podcasts and it's like NPR's Whisper Hour, you know, or whatever.
And then you just see, Andrew Clavin's another kingdom, baby.
Keep it going.
So enough about us.
Let's talk about Jesus Christ.
Let's talk about the divine logos of the universe.
Yes, exactly.
Rebirth of mankind.
So here's the thing.
I think we should do three.
We have three Mondays.
You're on every Monday.
We have three Mondays before Christmas.
I think we should talk about some of what this means, some of the theology behind the nativity scenes.
There's an irony because we always talk about the war on Christmas.
And I do believe the war on Christmas.
I'm a belligerent.
I'm standing firmly on the side of Christmas.
I'm defending Christmas like a First Crusade.
But there's also a cultural, I won't even call it a war, just a total cultural neglect of Advent.
It speaks to our, we feel uncomfortable in time and space.
We don't like anxiety or anticipation, so we just want to rush ahead to Christmas.
But all of the beauty of Christmas develops and grows and flowers in the Advent, in waiting for it to come and understanding what it means to wait and what we're waiting for.
And so I guess we should begin at the beginning.
We should begin at the genealogies that are presented in...
People think this is the most boring part.
The begat, begat, begat, and he was the son of so-and-so and so-and-so.
Yeah.
You know, when people read the Bible, whenever they read the genealogies at all in the Bible, they're like, oh, yeah, great point, great point.
Skip, Yeah, whatever.
I'll figure out the family tree later.
But there's so much theology in the genealogies, even the way they're presented.
There are two, you could say there are two traditional genealogies.
There's one in Matthew and one in Luke.
I think really there are three because there's John, too.
John, I think, serves as the punchline, John 1.
I hate to admit it, but that's a brilliant point.
Thank you.
All right.
Or one, baby.
27 years and one good point.
So in Matthew, the genealogy begins exactly as you would suspect.
It begins at Abraham, and it goes through three generations of 14 to get to Jesus.
So you have Abraham to David, Solomon to the Babylonian captivity, and then on to Jesus.
The numbers here are important.
The Hebrew letters of the name David add up to 14.
So we're seeing the Davidic promise, the Davidic message coming through the genealogy of Jesus.
But what's really strange, probably the most interesting component of Matthew's genealogy are these four women.
He includes four women in it.
So it's patrilineal.
It's passed down by the men.
But then we hear about Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and the wife of Uriah.
And, you know, these women, some of them are sinners.
Rahab is a prostitute.
He's a hooker.
He's a hooker, yeah.
But I don't think that's the important aspect of the women.
I think the important aspect is they're not Jews.
None of those women are Jews.
All of them?
Yeah, I don't think any of them are Jews.
And so I could be wrong on that, but I'm pretty sure they're all Gentiles.
And so what you have is the introduction into the message of Jesus of the Gentiles and saying that the mission of Christ is not just for the Jews.
It is through the Jews to more people.
It also ends with Mary.
So there's a fifth woman that it ends with, who is a Jew, and that's Mary.
And so it goes on and on and on and on to Joseph, the husband of Mary, the mother of Jesus.
So Joseph is Jesus' legal father, and so through Joseph, Jesus belongs to the house of David.
But he isn't his biological father.
I suppose in another sense, he is because Jesus is the son of God.
But it's separate.
It brings out, Jesus comes from elsewhere.
He comes from God himself.
And in this, you know, there are so many Old Testament prophecies that are fulfilled in the genealogy of Jesus, and obviously in the life of Jesus.
But they're never fulfilled in the way that you would expect.
They're not fulfilled in a way that a human might say, well, he's not Joseph's real son, so it doesn't count, and he's not the Messiah.
That misses the point.
That misses.
I think you might suspect that if the Messiah is going to come, the fulfillment of God's promise to man and salvation of man, it might not be the way you think it's going to be.
It might come.
Right.
Well, the prophecies, as our friend, the God-King of the Daily Wire, Jeremy Boring, is always saying, the prophecies are not so that we can tell the future.
They're so that when the future comes, we'll know that they could tell the future.
That's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
And so you have this complement to Matthew's genealogy in Luke.
Because Luke's genealogy doesn't begin with Abraham.
It begins with Jesus and it goes backwards.
So what's interesting about the two of them is they disagree on most of the names.
They agree on Jesus and a few others, but a lot of them are different.
Even the father of Joseph is different in Luke than it is in Matthew.
I think the reason for that is they're not interested in the individual people here, the individual names.
They're interested in the theological message and what Christ's birth means.
Not to say that there isn't historical value to some of these names, but where they disagree, I don't think it's a big deal.
So we go from Jesus, and it descends backwards, all the way back to God.
It says, yada, Enos, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.
Wow.
And one message here, Pope Benedict suggests this in his excellent book on the infancy narratives.
I love that.
It's so good.
It is just, it reads like a little poem.
Your recommendation got me to read it.
And it shows that the human roots are the opposite of what we think.
So when we think of genealogies, we think back from the past all the way up to the present.
But the human roots don't lie in the depths.
They lie in the heights.
They lie in the Jesus.
They're also in Lucas's, in Luke's genealogy, there are 77 names, 7 times 11, which is an apocalyptic formula, but it's also, more generally, it's a number of ultimacy.
Jesus says you should forgive your brother not seven times, but seven times seven, 77 times, right?
Humanity starts anew in Jesus.
And that fullness, that fulfillment is, I think, the ultimate theological message.
And then there's John.
So we get the forward generations, we get the backward generations.
We see what that means in our relation to God.
And then John says, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
Dwelt, meaning more vividly, to pitch his tent.
So this is a reference to the sacred tent of Israel in the wilderness, and it means that the beginning itself has come to us.
So even asking, who is this man Jesus?
Pilate asks, where are you from?
Jesus gives him no answer.
In John, it says, the Jews grumbled about him because he said, I'm the bread that came down from heaven.
And they said, is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?
We know Jesus.
He isn't some piece of bread or something.
They're all asking, who is he?
In these genealogies, we get a dual answer.
Somehow we can know exactly who he is.
We know exactly where he was born.
In the particular, the universal becomes totally well known, but his origin is ultimately a mystery.
And that mystery is expressed in John.
That's great.
That's great.
And so what happens in the world does come from another place.
And it happens in, there's all this nature involved, all this begetting involved, and yet the source of it is so mysterious as to blow your mind and to blow open humanity.
That's great stuff.
Hey, I have to say, you've lived up to your sweater.
Abused Children's Passion00:05:20
You know, we'll not put this on today.
It doesn't elevate you.
I'm sitting in my bathrobe and I kind of do my Harvey Weinstein preparation.
But when I put on regal garments like this, I really need to elevate the conversation, I think.
Well, next time we're going to talk about Mary, the Queen of Heaven, and speaking of heaven, your show comes on after this.
What are you talking about?
Very heaven.
Oh, today is all time.
Today is extra cofefe.
Obviously, we're going to talk about tax reform.
We're going to talk about how everybody told us we'd never get tax reform, just like everybody told us Trump wasn't going to win, just like everybody told us every other thing they've been wrong about.
But we're going to talk about the best which is yet to come and the evidence for it.
Yep, excellent, excellent.
Thanks a lot, Knowles.
We'll talk to you again next month.
All right.
from Knowles.
It's a natural segue to our crappy culture.
People keep writing to me and saying I should stop picking on Knowles.
And I just want to say no.
I refuse.
That's why Ben and I lobbied to have him hired because we needed somebody to beat up on.
That's the whole point.
You know, I've been talking today about the way in which we accept the premises of the left and that maybe we shouldn't.
Maybe we should be thinking more radically.
Maybe we should be starting a, now that Donald Trump is shattering, is broken the China in the China shop, like the bull he is, maybe we should be establishing the revolutionary conservative values that founded this country again.
And what I just want to give you a hint in our crappy culture of what we are going to come up against and what we've been coming up against all this time and why maybe Donald Trump's rudeness is not always a bad thing.
There was a website called Small Dead Animals.
I think it is a Canadian website.
I think it's a lady in Canada.
She posted a video of a council meeting with the mayor of New Brighton, Minnesota named Val Johnson.
And they're talking about, she's talking about white privilege, which is this absolutely nonsense idea that somehow you should be guilty for being white.
I mean, every time I see somebody tweet, it's okay to be white, I think, okay, it's great.
I love it.
What kind of stupid thing is that to say?
It's like if God made it, you can be pretty sure it's okay.
You don't have to second guess yourself.
Anyway, on this website, Small Dead Animals, she writes, it's the Social Justice Warrior playbook on display.
And here is the Social Justice Warrior playbook.
One, proclaim anything you wish, no matter how ludicrous.
Two, if anyone dares disagree with you, call them a racist, bigot, homophobe, or Islamophobe.
Three, if they dare object, scream at them that they are out of order and to stop interrupting you.
Four, start shaking and crying, proclaiming how passionate you are about what you're saying.
Five, do whatever you need to do to make yourself out to be the victim.
So when one of the women, and there are all these men there who sit there like eunuchs, I think is the word I'm looking for, this one woman stands up to her and says, listen, I was born poor.
I don't need to listen to this stuff about white privilege.
And here is what the mayor of New Brighton, Minnesota, Val Johnson, here is how she plays out the Social Justice Warrior playbook.
What I heard was a racist statement.
What I heard was a racist statement.
No.
You're just crediting.
God damn, Gina, I'm passionate about this.
I'm so passionate about hearing all sides of the story.
And for you to disregard the fact that this is so amazing.
Privilege exists is beyond me.
That's amazing.
I'm passionate about that.
Who cares?
I'm passionate about the fact that you're a knucklehead.
And this, I think, I seriously do believe that we conservatives have suffered.
It's like we're like abused children.
We have suffered this for so long.
And I'm talking about decades.
We have suffered this for so long that like abused children, we tiptoe around afraid of setting this off.
And I think that the glory of Donald Trump is that in his belligerence and in his boorishness, he knows no fear about this stuff.
And I think some of us, all of us, need to at least imitate that much of him, that much of him.
We really need to avoid this and start to think: oh, wait a minute, is the premise of feminism right?
Is the premise of all this racist talk right?
Is this what we want from the world?
What is it we, never mind what we hate about them, what's phony about them, what's hypocritical about them?
What is it we are trying to build?
And that's when I think we have to start going back to our sacred texts like the Gospels, but also to our founding texts like our Declaration, our Constitution.
Remember what it is that we believe.
And that's where the university system has been trying to train you out of all this time.
They've been trying to soil and stain these texts with their stupid theories about feminism and racism and all this stuff.
You have to watch your own mind that you don't accept.
You don't let their premises seep into your mind.
Let us end.
Sacred Texts and Pentatonics00:01:20
We got to play some music for the Christmas season.