Andrew Clavin’s #Resistance is Futile dissects Trump’s 2017 Jerusalem move as a pragmatic shift aligning with bipartisan U.S. policy, mocking PLO threats and media hysteria while exposing GOP infighting—Flake, Cruz, Corker—collapsing under his pressure. He frames Trump’s chaos as a tool to dismantle institutional corruption (FBI bias, Democratic hypocrisy on sexual misconduct) and contrasts it with Obama’s counterproductive Hitler comparisons. A caller’s trauma from childhood molestation sparks a controversial take: victims must grieve the shattered "divine father" illusion, severing toxic ties for recovery. The episode also pits British "cozy" mysteries against American noir, critiques Charlottesville media bias (ignoring city officials’ failures), and warns of left-wing platform censorship, closing with a Daily Wire tease and Christmas song. [Automatically generated summary]
Journalists, Muslims, European leaders, and other anti-Semites are warning that Donald Trump's declaration that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel will end the peace process in the Middle East.
They also say it will cause the Titanic to sink and keep Pinocchio from becoming a real boy.
Leaders of the PLO are saying that if Trump goes forward with the move, they will unleash a decades-long campaign of murder and terrorist warfare against the Jewish state, which threatens to interrupt the decades-long campaign of murder and terrorist warfare against the Jewish state that they're currently waging, sowing confusion and frustration among Palestinian terrorists throughout the region.
And we wouldn't want that.
Other Arab leaders are also disgruntled by the move and say it could cause their regimes to become oppressive and backward dictatorships where women have no rights and the general public is smothered under violent medieval religiosity, while a small number of fat sheiks reap the benefits of millions in petrodollars, as opposed to the sunshiny utopias they are today.
All in all experts, journalists and other knuckleheads agree, a president who would declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel has lost touch with reality, which is that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, but you're not allowed to say so or Muslims will kill you.
Trigger warning, i'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin showing, also singing, Hunky Donkey Shipshape Dipsy, Topsy Roar is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day hoorah, hooray.
It makes me want to sing oh hurrah hooray, oh hooray, hoorah.
All right, it's mailbag day, if we survive, if we survive the fires that are raging here.
You know, the funny thing is the fires look worse on the news today, but the smoke is better here.
Yesterday, I mean, it's still a little misty.
Yesterday I was having a hard time breathing in here, so it really was.
It was really thick.
Today I can smell it at my house, but I don't smell it.
It's not as bad in here, mailbag day.
And the thing about the mailbag is first, it comes after the break.
So if you want to actually watch the mailbag, you have to come to Thedailywire.com and subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month.
And if you subscribe then you can ask questions in the mailbag about anything you want.
The answers are guaranteed 100 correct.
Where else do you get that for a lousy 10 bucks?
The answers are guaranteed correct and they will change your life on occasion for the better.
And if I don't change your life, then you can talk to Ben Shapiro on the conversation which is coming up tuesday, december 12th, at 5 p.m eastern, 2 p.m Pacific.
If you subscribe today, you can be part of that conversation.
Ask Ben live questions about everything from politics to religion to his favorite comic book characters.
Ben's conversation will stream live on the Ben Shapiro facebook page and the Daily WIRE youtube channel and it'll be free.
Everyone can watch it, but only subscribers can ask the questions.
If you are a subscriber, you can ask questions by logging into our website Dailywire.com, go over to the conversation page, watch the live stream and after that just start typing Into the Daily WIRE chat box where Ben will answer questions as they come in for an entire hour, or until you just stump him and he storms off and off.
Once again, subscribe to get your questions answered by Ben Shapiro on Tuesday, December 12th at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific, and join the conversation.
And stamps.
You've got to have stamps.
You know, it's, I don't know about you, but we are now having the Christmas thing is happening now.
So everything is coming in.
All the, you know, we're ordering the presents, the presents come in.
I will say, it is so much nicer now to do Christmas shopping than it used to be when you had to actually go to the store.
You don't have to go to the store anymore.
You can do it on your computer.
But then you think, oh, but I have to go to the post office.
But you don't have to do that either because you can put the post office in your computer with stamps.com.
Stamps.com gives you every service that you could get at the U.S. Postal Service right at your fingertips.
You can buy and print official U.S. postage for any letter, any package, any class of mail using your own computer and printer.
Then the mailman picks it up.
I like doing this, by the way.
It's actually fun to have the stamps come out, and there they are.
It's just so much, it's such a time saver.
And you don't, here you have to drive through the flames.
You don't burn up.
You don't have to wait online.
You don't have to wait for the post office to open stamps.com makes it easy.
They'll send you a digital scale which automatically calculates exact postage and stamps.com will even help you decide the best class of mail every time, which saves you money.
Right now, you can get a four-week trial plus postage and a digital scale without any long-term commitment.
Go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage, and type in clavin, K-L-A-V-A-N.
Type slowly, that's stamps.com, and enter Clavin, and you can put the entire post office right into your computer.
So there's an old expression that until I looked it up for this show, I always thought was an ancient Greek expression.
It's usually, they usually ascribe it to Euripides, I think, one of the great Greek playwrights.
Whom the Gods Would Destroy00:13:23
In fact, one of the great American poets was the first person to put it in the way that I'm going to say it, which is whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
And you see this, this is in the Bible, too, when Saul, the king, is rejected by God.
God doesn't just depose him, he makes him insane.
And that's the first thing he does.
And there's a lot of this in the Greeks, in the ancient Greeks.
They do have things like evil appears as good to the minds of those who the gods lead to destruction.
In other words, God doesn't have to hit you with a lightning bolt.
He just takes your own mind and turns it against you.
And I would never compare Donald Trump to the Greek gods, but I have to say I have never in my life seen a man who causes his enemies almost by magic to destroy themselves.
I mean, he doesn't do anything to them.
They do it to themselves.
I mean, it is just amazing.
Like everything, it's almost like this kind of magical, it's got to be instinctive, right?
He can't, I don't think he sits on like Mount Oval Office, you know, with his thunderclouds over him, plotting this out and figuring out how to do it.
And as I keep saying, I don't think he's playing three-dimensional chess.
I just think he has an instinct for driving people out of their minds.
This is one of the best, really it's the best two weeks, I think, of his presidency with the tax thing and now this idea of moving, not moving, declaring honestly that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, which is just the simple truth.
But it's just, you know, we saw this during the actual primaries.
We saw 16 candidates.
And remember how he wiped them out?
You know, people keep saying, oh, it was the bullying and it was the name calling and all that.
But it wasn't true.
It was the way they imploded.
Remember Marco Rubio making those kind of ugly remarks about Trump's hands?
And you think, well, Trump can do it.
Why can't Rubio?
Because it doesn't fit Rubio.
wasn't his personality.
We expected to act like a normal politician.
But he just lost it.
He got so tired.
Yeah, see, I myself.
That's right.
That was my tribute to Marco Rubio.
I was drinking the water.
But, you know, it was just, they would get so mad and so angry and nothing, everything bounced off him.
Nothing stuck to him.
It would drive him crazy.
Ted Cruz did the same thing.
Remember when Ted Cruz went to the convention?
First of all, Ted Cruz thought he was going to outsmart.
Ted Cruz's thing was his brain.
He's brainy, and he was the candidate I want.
I'd still love to see Ted Cruz become president.
I'm not sure that'll ever happen.
I think he's a really good guy policy-wise.
But he just thought he was going to outsmart and outplay Trump by going along with him, calling him my good friend Donald, and sticking with him and all this stuff.
And by the time he turned on him, it was just too late.
And then he went to that, remember, he went to that convention and he made that speech about follow your conscience.
And I went on, I came on the show and I said that was a mistake.
That was just, it was a moral error and it was a political error.
And people yelled at me for three weeks.
I got letters for three weeks about what a fool I was.
You know, Cruz was doing the right thing.
But he didn't.
He blew himself up.
And now he's playing the game.
He's playing along with Trump because he sees that he can get policy stuff done, which is what he's about.
And good for him.
And I appreciate that.
And Hillary Clinton.
I mean, Hillary Clinton, that line about deplorables, that's not what sunk her ultimately, but it certainly stuck.
And it was that anger that just he makes people do things that they don't want to do.
You know, I'm watching some of these Republicans who are opposing them.
And, you know, there's this imaginary world of the mainstream media where they're all heroes and they're right, but they're really running for their lives.
Bob Corker and Senator, you know, Jeff Flake, they're kind of saying, we're going to fight them.
Goodbye.
It's like, all right, we're going to stand and fight.
I'm gone.
You see this kind of trail of smoke.
Yesterday, I mean, just talk about trolling someone.
Trump was having a lunch and he sat, had Jeff Flake, who hates him, right, sitting right next to him.
And Flake wrote a check to Doug Jones in Alabama.
Do we have a picture of the here it is?
$100 check to the Democrat candidate in Alabama with this virtue signaling subject line at the bottom.
It says country over party, country over party.
I'm sorry, it's one thing to say, I can't vote for Roy Moore.
He's just a bad guy.
And if you're not from Alabama, you can do what I do, which is thank God Almighty I don't have to make that choice, you know, that I'm not morally involved in this choice.
But to actually contribute to the other party is just crazy.
I mean, Bill Crystal has been tweeting things like, you know, suddenly my inner feminist and my inner socialist is awake.
You think like, yeah, Bill, could you just move to the back of the room, take your inner feminist and your inner socialist with you?
I mean, all these people are just blowing themselves up.
So yesterday, Trump has a lunch and he sits Flake next to him and tells people that the Republican Party is more unified than ever.
And if you're watching, you can just watch Flake's face as if he just bit on a lemon.
Look at this.
There's a great spirit in the Republican Party like I've never seen before.
Like a lot of people have said they've never seen before.
They've never seen anything like this, the unity.
So I think a lot of very good things are going to happen.
It's going to happen very fast.
I want to thank you all for being here and let's have a great lunch and let's talk about trade and let's make great trade deals instead of the horrible trade deals that we all got stuck with.
In fact, if you look at, if you just see Flake, he just looks like, why am I sitting here?
Why reminded me of that picture of Ted Cruz when he had to make phone calls for Trump and he just looked like he had been condemned to hell.
Remember Chris Christie, when he joined Trump, he would stand back with Trump just looking like, I am died and I've gone to hell now.
I mean, he really has a power that is, it's quite amazing to look at.
It's just an amazing thing to see.
And I've started to ask myself, what is it?
What drives people crazy?
Because there's one person, I'll get to this in a little while, there's one person who hasn't quite been driven crazy by who seems immune.
Some of the people, Mitch McConnell is one of them.
Mitch McConnell figured out, stop fighting with him, do your job.
That's why the tax thing got based.
He just said, you know what?
He had to.
He had to have gone to all those people who hate Trump and say, look, are we the senators?
Are we going to do Senate stuff or not?
Are we going to sit around banging our head against this guy?
And they fell in line.
That was a smart thing to do.
That is an old-hand, old professional thing to do.
But even this thing with Roy Moore, think about this for a minute.
With Roy Moore, Trump now has supported him, given him a kind of a bland endorsement saying, I need his vote.
I need his vote.
And the RNC has shown up, and all the anti-Trumpers, especially on the right, they're clutching their pearls and saying this is the end of our moral nation, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But meanwhile, because the left, the Democrats, up till now, have been the party of it's okay to molest people sexually because they've been the party of Bill Clinton, right?
Now, in order to get at Trump, in order to have some kind of moral position from which to attack Trump, they have to clean house.
It's like Trump has this ability to turn people on themselves.
So John Conyers just said he's resigning.
That doesn't, as far as I'm concerned, do we have a cut of him?
Do we have a cut of cut?
Yeah, but let's play Conyers resigning like he's a king.
He's going to appoint his son to replace him.
Do you think that these allegations at all will impact that legacy?
Oh, absolutely not.
My legacy can't be compromised or diminished in any way by what we're going through now.
This too shall pass.
And I want you to know that my legacy will continue through my children.
I have a great family here and especially my oldest boy, John Conyers III, who incidentally I endorsed to replace me in my seat in Congress.
But this doesn't give them any, as far as I'm concerned, any moral credit.
The guy's 80 years old, 80-plus years old.
He's appointing his son to replace him in Michigan, where we have the wonderful Democrat achievement of Detroit, of taking a vibrant living city and sucking every ounce of life and business out of it.
That's like, thank you, Democrats.
So this doesn't give him any cred.
And now they've got all these other, like, so Chris Matthews, for instance, is trying to play this Roy Moore thing.
He's trying to roll this up.
This is a talking point because I've heard a couple of other people say this.
He makes this little joke on Hardball.
Ask Republican State, would you want to be one of them, one of the grand old pedophiles, the GOP?
Do you want to be part of that?
You want to be part of that?
Because every cheap shot Democrat in the country, and there are a few of them out there, will use it in every campaign.
You're numbered amongst you're one of the crips in the bloods, basically.
You're one of them.
But, you know, we all remember, we all remember what it was like when Ted Kennedy died, Ted Kennedy, a guy who left a woman to drown, and Andrea Mitchell on CNN was like, oh, I think she was on CNN then.
I can't remember.
Andrea Mitchell was like, it was raining.
The heavens are weeping for Ted Kennedy, you know.
And one guy in the Boston Globe magazine wrote, If Mary Joe Copechny, the woman he left to die in her car while he arranged his alibi, if Mary Joe Copechny were alive today, she would support Ted Kennedy.
I was like, I thought, yeah, if Mary Joe Copechny were alive today, she'd have a reason to support Ted Kennedy.
But she doesn't because she's dead because he left her there.
So now they've got Al Franken on their hands, right?
So six female Democratic senators have called on Al Franken to resign now.
I simply do not know how he survives that.
Tomorrow he says he's going to make an announcement.
Maybe he's going to try and tough it out.
But when you've got the senators coming forward, and look, I don't want to impugn their motives.
Maybe they just think enough is enough because now there is a seventh woman who says he tried to forcibly kiss her and all this stuff.
But I don't want to impugn their motives, but they have to do this.
They have to do this or they have simply no moral standing.
So Trump's, Trump, the very fact that, remember all the women with the pink hats, you know, protesting that Donald Trump said this stuff on the Hollywood access tape, all the kind of grotesque things he said about what women will let you do if you're a celebrity, which we now know are true since these women didn't come forward for 10 years.
But still, it did indicate there were plenty of complaints against Trump that he did untoward things just like Al Franken.
But instead of it destroying him, it's destroying all the people around him because in order to get at him, they have to throw these people overboard.
So it's like, instead of, you know, I don't know what's going to happen with Roy Moore.
I said from the beginning the best outcome for me would be if he got elected and then thrown out of the Senate.
But this could end with the Democrats losing a vote in the Senate, which would just be, I mean, it's insane the way this happens.
It's almost, it's almost magical.
Then there's the FBI, and things are just getting absolutely worse with the FBI.
I mean, there's now what is Judicial Watch.
These are the guys who keep filing FOIA claims to get the documents, pry the documents out of the Justice Department, the FBI, that they don't want to give.
So now they say that there is, that one of the senior prosecutors assigned to special counsel, Robert Mueller, is biased against President Trump.
If you remember, back at the very beginning when Trump put out that travel ban, which now the Supreme Court says he can put forward until they hear the case, the travel ban has gone forward and it's not a Muslim ban.
It includes non-Muslim countries and it doesn't include some Muslim countries.
But remember the then acting Attorney General Sally Yates said she wasn't, she ordered her staff not to defend the ban.
So the Justice Department was saying we're not going to support the President of the United States executive order, which was insane.
And Andrew Weissman, one of Mueller's deputies, sent her an email, apparently, saying, I'm so proud and in awe.
Thank you so much.
All my deepest respects.
So it's like, you know, the FBI, even the FBI goes after him and they explode.
You know, here is Newt Gingrich just noticing the phenomenon.
I don't think I fully appreciated until this evening how really important it was for Donald Trump to win.
If Hillary Clinton had won, none of this would have surfaced.
They just would have kept covering up all the corruption.
And they would have just kept taking care of themselves.
So the very fact that you had this disruptive figure in the White House, all of us are learning some pretty horrifying things about how sick the system is, how sick the entire process is, in ways I would have thought were impossible.
And I have the greatest respect for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
And it is astonishing to me that you could have people at the top who are this corrupt, this profoundly dishonest.
Why We Shave with Dollarshaveclub00:02:42
So here's this guy who is supposed to be Trump, who's supposed to be the authoritarian.
He's supposed to be corrupt.
He's under investigation for this Russia thing, which is a nonsense, if you ask me.
And yet, who is getting burned?
And if you watch the mainstream media, they're not covering it, so they don't see it, but it's still happening.
It's happening whether they see it or not.
And we'll discuss in a couple of minutes why Trump has this weird power, this bizarre power, because it's not strategic, it is instinctive, but it also has to do with the system itself.
But first, we have to talk about shaving.
And when you're talking to me, you are talking about a guy who knows shaving.
If there's one thing I know, I have so much real estate to shave every morning that it is really like mowing the lawn because I've got the head, I got the face, I got the back of the neck, I got everything to shave.
And even before they became sponsors, I belong to the Dollar Shave Club.
I heard about it on the radio.
I thought, I will try this out, and it has been terrific.
I have moved up.
I originally started.
What they do is you subscribe essentially, and they send you every month.
They send you a new pack of blades so that you don't have to go to the store.
You don't have to fiddle with the thing that now has an alarm on it.
So if you go in and reach for a blade in the drugstore, you get thrown out by security.
You don't have to pay a fortune for a blade that you then discard.
You get a fresh blade.
I change my blade every week, which I have to.
And I started out with the kind of, they call it the humble twin, I think, the humble twin.
And now I've moved up to their executive one because it just gives such a great shave.
It has so many blades in it.
I keep saying that it's still shaving me half an hour after I'm done.
So you can do this for yourself.
Give it to somebody who needs it, dollarshaveclub.com with a gift membership and e-gift cards available.
Dollarshaveclub.com can help cover the names on your holiday shopping list.
So I want you to try this out.
And I know you're going to like it because I mean, like I said, I shave.
I shave more than you shave.
I shave better than you shave.
And I shave with dollarshaveclub.com.
So I've arranged for you to try your first month of their best razor, which is the one I use and I just love it, along with travel-sized versions of their shave butter body cleanser.
And yes, even their wipes.
They have wipes.
I have not tried those, but I have tried the shave butter, which is great.
And it's all going to be for just five bucks.
And after that, replacement cartridges ship for just a few extra bucks a month.
It's the DSC Starter Club, the Dollar Shave Club Starter Club starter set.
So you get yours for just five bucks exclusively at dollarshaveclub.com slash clavin.
That's dollarshaveclub.com slash clavin.
Your entire body could look like my head.
Dollarshaveclub.com.
All right, we got a break from Facebook and YouTube.
Role of a Father in Crime Fiction00:15:32
We've got the mailbag coming up.
All your problems solved, all your questions answered.
Answers guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life on occasion for the better.
But you got to subscribe to be in the mailbag.
So come on over to thedailywire.com, listen to the rest of the show, and while you're there, subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month or 100 bucks for a year, for which you get the magical leftist tears tumbler, which has remained utterly full these past two weeks.
No matter how much I drink out of it, it just stays full because there are so many leftist tears.
on over to thedailywire.com.
All right, I want to get to the mailbag with time to spare, so I'll just go quickly through the Trump saying that he's going to announce, he may be doing it while I speak, that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.
Everybody's going nuts about this, but you know, both parts, this is on both parties' platforms.
The Senate voted to affirm it like 90 to nothing this year.
Presidents have been promising to do that.
We have a clip.
This was played on Fox last night.
There's a clip of three presidents in a row promising this is going to happen.
As soon as I take office, I will begin the process of moving the United States ambassador to the city Israel has chosen as its capital.
Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided.
We will move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem.
And we will send a clear signal that there is no daylight between America and our most reliable ally, the state of Israel.
So it was a little, when Obama was speaking, it was a little hard for the Jews to hear him with the knife he was plunging into their back.
But what Trump has—the way it works is, by law, our ambassador has to be in Jerusalem.
But every couple of years or whatever it is, every few months, the president signs a waiver saying, OK, well, we're not going to do it yet.
And Trump signed the waiver when he first took office, and then it came up around again, and he said, you know, I promised that I was going to do this.
I'm tired of signing this waiver.
So he's going to sign it, but he's giving them notice that this is going, there's going to be a move.
It could take years.
They say it could take up to four years to actually move the embassy because of the security.
And the argument that the PLO is making is, don't do that, we'll kill you.
And you think like, well, yeah, but you're killing people anyway.
Yes, but now we'll kill you because of this.
So it's not really that good an argument.
Plus, why should we be held hostage to a miserable, miserable creed that really has no excuse for going after Israel?
There's all kinds of ways this problem could have been solved.
The Palestinians, and for some of them, it's not their fault.
They've been cut off from the rest of the Arab states because they want them there as a way, a wedge to get rid of Israel.
And so Trump is just basically acknowledging reality.
It's really interesting, the New York Times, because the New York Times is among the people who are destroying themselves by being driven mad by Donald Trump.
They say, here's their headline.
The New York Times, a former newspaper, reports, President Trump plans to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move the American embassy there, upending nearly seven decades of American foreign policy and potentially destroying his efforts to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
This is the imaginary peace process that we're always trying to protect, that never does anything, that never brings peace, that doesn't even exist.
It's not even there.
Mr. Trump's decision, a high-risk foray into the thicket of the Middle East, was driven not by diplomatic calculations, but by a campaign promise of all things.
Maybe the campaign promise was driven by diplomatic calculations.
See, the thing about Donald Trump, the one person who has not so far been driven mad by him is Barack Obama.
The one person who is only now starting to make mistakes going after Donald Trump is Barack Obama.
Why?
Because Barack Obama is a troll.
He's an expert troll.
He's not only a great politician, he was expert at driving the right insane.
He made us, he knew exactly what to say to make us crazy.
And to some degree, I think it blew up on him because he lost all these seats, all the state governments, all the Democrat strongholds fell around him because he was so busy making us crazy.
But it did make the right make mistakes.
And so he understands what Trump is doing.
But just the other day, it may have been yesterday, he was at some economic conference and he started to compare Trump to Hitler.
I mean, if this had been the other way around, if former President Bush had done this to Obama, are you kidding me?
I mean, the papers would have set the world on fire with this.
He says, this is Obama speaking.
That's what happened in Germany in the 1930s.
We have to tend this garden of democracy or else things could fall apart quickly.
The danger is in growing complacent.
That's what happened in Germany in the 1930s, which despite the democracy of the Weimar Republic and centuries of high-level cultural and scientific achievements, Adolf Hitler rose to dominate.
60 million people died, so you've got to pay attention and vote.
So he's basically saying Trump is Hitler, our democracy is under attack, which is going to, you know, that's Obama being trolled.
But I think there are two things.
One is Trump doesn't care.
He doesn't care about the status quo.
And everybody, right and left, is invested in the status quo.
They're invested in the fight taking place the way the fight takes place.
They're invested in the sides being drawn, the way the sides are drawn.
Everybody is.
That's their profession.
Whether it's the commentators on the radio, whether it's the New York Times, whether it's the Democrats, the Republicans, they are all invested in the status quo, and he doesn't care about it.
And it drives them nuts.
It makes them nuts.
And so they end up defending a status quo, which, when you think about it, hasn't been going that well.
When you look at North Korea building its weapons, not going so well.
When you look at the endless death and murder in the Middle East that is always putting Israel on the defensive, not going so well.
And that is something that he is like a revolutionary, and it's making them crazy.
And most importantly, he is destroying the way we discuss things.
And the reason that makes the left so mad is because they have controlled the way we discuss things all this time.
They've just decided what words are racist, what attitudes are racist.
They've decided that whether an individual is racist matters.
I'm not sure it does.
They've decided what's sexist.
They've decided all of these things.
And now, because Trump will not fall down when they say these things to him, he is changing the status quo.
And I think so many people are invested in the way things are that I just think it drives them nuts.
Plus, he's a troll.
He knows exactly instinctively what will make them crazy.
All right, let's do the mailbag.
What happened to Khafifi last week?
So we have different, we have different Lindsay cross.
All right, I got a really tough one today, and I'm going to give some tough answers, so it may take a little while.
Dear Mr. Andrew Clavin, the name is withheld, which is fine.
As a sophomore in high school, I was molested by my dad.
Four years later, I was raped at a party at my friend's house by a guy who I considered a close friend.
I never reported either incident and have only been able to confide in one of my friends about these occurrences.
I've attempted to be in romantic relationships since these things happen, but I quickly begin to feel overwhelmed and claustrophobic, causing me to end the relationship before it can be, it can develop into anything serious.
I would someday like to settle down and have a family, but I can't seem to get past trust issues that I've developed, especially with men.
How do you recommend that I overcome this distrust so it doesn't continually hold me back?
So I have a two-part answer to this.
One is pretty standard, and the other is a tough, hard saying, as they say about the Bible.
I have something hard I have to say about this.
And some of you may disagree, but I'm going to tell you what it is.
The first part, this straightforward part, is in this situation, you need to get therapy.
I always feel kind of weak.
It's a weak answer to say get therapy like I'm punting, but there are certain things.
I mean, if you came to me and said, oh, I have a mole on my cheek and it's changing color and bleeding, you know, and I said, well, you should pray and have an upbeat attitude, I would be letting you down.
I say, no, you've got to go to a dermatologist, right?
When you have a wound, the kind of wound that you get from your father molesting you or from being raped, you really need to work it out.
I don't know so much about the rape, but your father molesting you is something you have to get.
You have to rearrange the way you perceive relationships because a father doing that just damages your ability to bond with other people.
And you've got to find a good therapist, you got to find a therapist you like, you got to shop around until you find one who's smart enough to deal with it, but you got to find that.
Here's the hard part.
Let me see how to get into this because it really is a difficult thing to say.
You know, Sigmund Freud did not believe in God.
He was a staunch atheist.
And he believed that God was an illusion that we created by projecting our fathers into the sky.
We perfect the idea of our father and we project him into the sky and that's the illusion that is God.
Now, I think by all logic and by any reason, it must be the exact opposite way around.
There is absolutely no evolution.
There are plenty of evolutionary reasons why we should expect our father to feed us and support us and be strong enough to protect us.
But there's no evolutionary reason I can think of why we expect our fathers to be just and wise and kind and merciful.
I think what it really is, is that we project God onto our fathers.
We know who God is in our hearts.
We are born with that knowledge.
And when we see our father, he is in a position, a godlike position over us, and we expect him to behave the way we would want God, the way we expect God to behave.
And of course, every father fails in that.
None of us is perfect.
But you get a lot of cred with your kids for at least trying to toe that line, to be wise, to be just, to be kind, to be good, even though you know you're not going to be perfect.
When a father transgresses to this degree to sexual molestation, you've lost him.
You've lost that representative of God in your life.
And I have seen again and again, because I've lived a long time, I've known a lot of people, I've known a lot of people that this has happened to.
I have seen people destroy themselves because they couldn't accept the fact that they basically had no father on this plane, on this plane.
They wanted to continue to have a make-believe relationship with their father.
They wanted him to continue to have a role in their lives.
They wanted to continue to have Christmas with dad because they couldn't accept and mourn the fact that their father had failed them utterly.
Not a little bit, but utterly.
When a father molests you sexually, he has failed you utterly.
He has failed his role utterly.
And you have to let him go at some level.
And when you go into therapy and when you talk to somebody, remember that it is natural for every child when a father abuses them, whether he does it by hitting them too much or by molesting them, it's natural for a child to blame himself because this father is God, so he must be doing the right thing, so it must be you who's to blame for it.
And when you realize that that's not true, that your father is too flawed to have done his job, it is just a terrible, terrible grief that comes over you, just as much a grief as if he had died.
And I just want to warn you as you go forward and you heal this wound, and I know you will, you'll heal it if you put the work into it and if you dedicate yourself to it, because you have to.
You have this one life on earth and you want it to be as joyful and as rich and as loving as it can be.
And if somebody, and look, look, history has hurt us all.
Every single one of us has been damaged by history.
You have had a bad shot and I'm really sorry it happened to you, but you will get past it.
But one of the things you're going to find, I believe, that you have to do is you're going to have to mourn the fact that for some reason God put you in this position to not have a real father in this level.
I hope you find people who fill that role.
I hope God can fill that role for you in your life.
I think he can.
But you're just going to have to learn to live with that because I've seen so many people destroy themselves trying to hold on to the illusion that their father is a father.
And I just think a guy who puts his hands on his daughter or his son is in that way has just failed utterly and has to be let go in some deep emotional way.
All right.
That is a hard saying, man, because I know how tough it is.
Believe me, I do know how tough it is.
From Ryan, hail, almighty king of words, and a voice only Morgan Freeman can rival.
Feh.
Morgan Freeman.
No, he does have a great voice.
You know, when my daughter was born, I was standing next to the guy who plays Darth Vader.
What's his name?
James Earl Jones.
And he had just had a child, and I'd had a child.
And we both had these big voices and we're standing.
In those days, he had pay phones.
We're both standing to each other.
Yes, we've had everybody's fine.
I thought this sounds like central casting.
All right, my roommate, who is also my cousin, just moved in with me.
He has a rough past dealing with drugs.
My family assured me he was doing better at 28 years old and he was getting his act together.
So he moved in, and in a month, he got two more DUIs in Arizona.
So he has three now.
He has not had his court dates yet, so we don't know if they're going to convict him or not.
My family is everything to me, and kicking one of my family out of my home when they're on bad times does not sit well with me.
But at the same time, I have to protect my home and pay my bills, kick him out.
Do it kindly, do it, you know, give him a chance to get his feet under him, but you do not want drugs in your house.
When you are dealing with drugs, you're not dealing with the person, you're dealing with the drugs.
This is the whole thing about addiction.
When you are dealing with somebody who's addicted to something, you're no longer dealing with that person.
You are dealing with the substance.
You do not want him in your house.
I know he's your family.
You can take care of him.
You can look in on him.
You can do anything you want, but get him out of your house.
And like I said, do it kindly and give him time.
But you're not doing him any favors by supporting him while he destroys himself.
From William, dearest Darth Clavin, there it is, right?
It all comes together.
Everything comes together.
It's a beautiful tapestry.
As an author of crime fiction and having lived in Britain for many years, can you explain how British crime fiction is different from American crime fiction, you know, other than their funny accent?
It is funny, isn't it?
Yeah, sure.
You know, it's almost the difference between men and women in a way.
Most of the truly great British crime writers, and there have been so many great British crime writers, many of them are what they call cozies in the business.
Agatha Christie, Marjorie Allingham, P.D. James, Josephine Tay, who is absolutely, if you haven't discovered her yet, she is absolutely great.
The great mystery writers, so many of the British ones are women, but that's not to say that there aren't men.
It's just that they tend to be more intellectual.
They're great mysteries, tend to be more intellectual.
They tend to deal with community, which is something in Britain.
You know, you think of the British, classic British mystery taking place in a village with little cottages and the vicar is one of the suspects and all these people in this kind of closed society.
And they tend to be very beautifully observational, brilliantly written.
I mean, I'm not a big Agatha Christie fan because I don't like cozy mysteries, but she's brilliant.
I can see how brilliant she is.
And on the occasion when I'm in the mood for an Agatha Christie, I always do enjoy it.
Our great mysteries, they're almost not mysteries.
They're more, you almost have to call them crime fiction.
Our great mystery and our great invention in the mystery world is the tough guy novel.
Cozy Mysteries vs. Tough Guys00:05:14
There's just no question about it.
Our greatest writers are James M. Kane, Raymond Chandler, Dashel Hammett.
Even today, some of the Dennis LaHane is terrific.
They're still in that vein, and they are much more masculine, much more violent, much more independent.
They are almost always about a man alone coming into a situation and solving the crime, basically shooting his way to the end of the crime.
Now, all this is a big, big generalization.
There are plenty of cozy American writers, plenty of tough guy, British writers, but I'm just saying when you think of what the British mystery is, it really is more in the cozy vein.
And when you think of what the American mystery is, you think more, my mind anyway goes directly to the action tough guy story.
Somebody once pointed out, and I cannot remember who it was, but somebody once pointed out that people who are conservatives and independents, people who want to do things on their own, like private eyes, because they're private.
They don't exist in an organization.
If you look on TV, the private eye has almost ceased to exist because the left now runs Hollywood.
It's almost all about organizations, the FBI, the police department.
You know, it's almost always about organizations.
It may come back.
These things happen in cycles.
But the great detective stories are almost always about American detective stories are almost always about private eyes, guys who are on their own.
It's just a really interesting difference between the two.
Again, all big generalizations, plenty of exceptions.
From Kayla, Mr. Clavin, I'm writing concerning my stepson.
Pardon me.
Although he's not biologically mine, my husband has custody of his kids, and I raise them and love them as my own.
That being said, he's only nine and has started to present with very serious anxiety.
We have sought proper psychological assistance, could move.
But aside from that, we have begun to pray every night.
This seems to help him sleep through the night without nightmares, one of his many struggles.
So I would like to get him more involved with religion.
I truly think it would help him, but he refuses to go to Mass, and I'm afraid that I'm not versed enough in Scripture to help him myself.
What can I do, or what part of the Bible can I look to in order to bring him closer to God and ultimately help him heal?
Really great question.
It might help, by the way, and hopefully you say you've got psychological assistance.
Hopefully the psychologist will deal this.
This might help to know what's happening in his original family or what his history is.
Those are just psychological things.
In terms of the Bible, you might think of reading him children's versions of Bible stories, especially from the New Testament, which tends to be less violent and more loving, or at least expressing the love more openly.
Pearl S. Buck, one of the great writers, wrote a beautiful book called The Story Bible.
I think it's out of print, but I don't think it's out of date.
You might look at that.
I read that to my kids when they were little.
And so instead of forcing him to go to Mass, which might not mean anything to him, might scare him, whatever, introduce him bit by bit, and you'll learn a little bit about the Bible yourself.
Because I think that it is good for him to know that God is watching over him, that God loves him, that God cares about him and knows his name and knows who he is and knows how afraid he is and will be with him.
And I think that maybe some of the Bible stories could help him with that.
Certainly there are books that will help you, you know, help a child relate better to God.
let's see i got time for maybe one more um i'm sorry sorry um Dear Supreme Overlord of Intellectuals, this is from Joe.
Dear Supreme Overlord of Intellectuals, I've recently started dating this girl.
On our third day, she told me that she had been married when she was 17.
I'm 23 and she is currently 22.
We have been dating for a couple weeks, and I really enjoy spending time with her, but being a person who always looks into the future, I worry that I will always think about her previous marriage and being able to commit myself to her.
Should I even worry about this?
Any other advice?
You know, it's an interesting thing when you deal.
I mean, I'm very good at letting the past be the past, you know, especially if it's happened before I was there.
You know, I just think like she couldn't have known what a really good deal she was going to get.
So she may have made a couple of mistakes.
You know, I don't know why you should get obsessed over that, why you should obsess over this if you really like her.
I would, you know, you don't, obviously you don't give me all the information that I would need to make my own decision, but you want to make sure she's not hiding things from you.
She's not being dishonest with you.
Make sure the marriage is over.
It would be a big one.
But, you know, I think it would be best to let it go if you really like her and trust her a good deal.
People have pasts, you know, they come with pasts.
And to eliminate, you know, to just think, I've gotten this question before about people who it's very important to them that their bride be a virgin.
Claus Coming to Town00:07:06
And I do understand that.
I do understand the impulse there.
But, you know, there are different ways to be a virgin.
And sometimes people are virgins, even if they have had a relationship before.
They're virgins in other ways, like they're virgins when it comes to love or true commitment or true dedication.
I would find out about it.
Sometimes you can learn a lot about a person by what happened to them in another marriage.
But if you can help it, if you can help not obsessing about it, I wouldn't.
I just wouldn't.
I just let it go.
I mean, it's just something that you'd have to deal with.
You'd have to work through in your own mind.
And if you can't let it go, you can't.
But if you can, I think you should.
All right.
Those were some really interesting questions.
I got to say, mailbag, I really like hearing from you, and I like hearing from you instead of hearing from me all the time.
I think it's just really interesting, introduces new subjects into the mix.
Let's do some tickety boo news.
So sorry, these things always crack me up.
So there was a really interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today about a special report commissioned by the city of Charlottesville.
We all remember the terrible riots there.
And it came out, and of course the media is completely ignoring this report.
But it's about how the city mishandled these demonstrations.
Really, it was the left-wing counter-protesters who came in looking for trouble.
Obviously, I have no sympathy whatsoever to white supremacists of any kind at all, but that doesn't mean the counter-protesters weren't there looking for trouble.
And so to avoid giving the counter-protesters the impression the police were ready for a fight, officers were denied permission to don riot gear.
A proposal that local militants be asked to sign statements for swearing violence, that was rejected by the city.
A proposal to close the whole of downtown to vehicle traffic was rejected.
A petition from local businesses to cancel the event was rejected.
A single officer was assigned to the intersection where the woman was murdered by a right-winger, and she was later killed.
She was killed in a vehicular homicide.
There was one lightly equipped school resource officer who would be withdrawn when events went south.
The local police chief's plan, this is amazing, listen to this.
The local police chief's plan was to let the violence at the August 12th event get out of hand and then declare an unlawful assembly to justify unleashing a Virginia state police riot force to disperse the crowd.
So the idea was to let the riot, you know, just stupid, stupid stuff.
The point I want to make about this is when we heard this story, it was all about Donald Trump.
It was all about the press hating Donald Trump.
It was all about the press making out that Donald Trump had said something he hadn't said.
He said that there are wonderful people on both sides, clearly from the context, meaning there were wonderful people on both sides of the question, whether statues should be put up or torn down.
He was not saying there were wonderful people on the sides of the Nazis.
That this idea that there is some special evil to the white supremacists, but no special evil to people who gang up on them and attack them and shatter the American commitment to free speech.
Anything to get at Donald Trump, anything to twist what he said and make it as bad as it could possibly take it in the worst possible way.
The thing I just want to point out about this is these stories come and go, but the lies remain.
And that is the way the mainstream media has worked for decades.
That they come up with this story about Donald Trump, they twist his words, and then forever after they feel utterly justified in calling him a white supremacist, of saying he's given comfort to the white supremacists, of saying that he sympathizes with them, of saying all the things that they say instead of covering the story.
Their job is to cover the story.
If they were journalists instead of partisans, they would cover the story.
If they covered the story, what they would find is this entire incident really is on the hands of the city fathers who let it get out of hand on purpose.
And I think that the thing that I think is so important is that you go back to original stories when you hear people, especially in the news media, when you hear them making offhand remarks about people, whether on the left or the right, when you hear them making offhand remarks, make sure to get the facts.
It's those things that they slip by you when they just let them, you know, they just say it offhandedly as if it were a fact when it's really a lie that's just been encrusted over time.
I think it's really important when you read the news to try and get the facts.
They're making it harder and harder because Google is starting, I think, to favor left-wing news over right-wing news.
Twitter is shutting people down.
They shut down an editor, PJ Media, for no apparent reason.
They won't let her on.
YouTube, obviously part of Google, is shutting down Dennis Prager, who is suing.
There is, in fact, a push to take back the news from the right, which has finally gotten a voice in the media.
So you have to do a lot of work just to find out what's true.
And part of it is coming here to the Daily Wire and listening to me and Ben and even Knowles, who occasionally says something that makes sense, and reading the stuff here to make sure that you're getting the whole story.
We have Andy McCarthy coming on tomorrow.
Andy McCarthy has been one of the best writers on the subject of the Mueller investigation.
He was a federal prosecutor who knows a lot about it, and he will be here tomorrow to discuss it.
Be here your own selves.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
We will end with the chairman of the board, The Great Sinatra.
Now, here's one that most kids like.
This kid does too.
Stand by.
You better watch out.
You better not cry.
Better not pout.
I'm telling you why.
Santa Claus is coming to town.
He's making a list and checking it twice.
You're going to find out who's naughty and nice.
Santa Claus is coming to town.
He sees you when you're sleeping.
He knows when you're awake.
He knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.
Oh, you better watch out.
You better not cry.
Better not pout.
I'm telling you why.
Santa Claus is coming to town.
He sees you when you're sleeping.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Technical producer Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing Production.