Ep. 433’s A Yuge Year for Patriots contrasts Trump’s 2017 policy wins—tax cuts (corporate rates slashed to 21%), 19 Supreme Court confirmations, and deregulation—with media moralizing over personal flaws, arguing governance should prioritize rights over scandals. Michael Knowles joins to dissect the Magi’s Zoroastrian roots in Matthew’s Gospel, linking Herod’s reign to astronomical records like Saturn-Jupiter conjunctions while dismissing naturalistic star explanations as miracles. The episode pivots from economic triumphs to theological debates, framing Christ’s nativity as cosmic proclamation and critiquing secular culture’s hunger for meaning, before teasing Stephen Wilford’s appearance. [Automatically generated summary]
After this week, this podcast will be over until next year, and you'll be left with nothing but the celebration of God's incarnation on earth and the salvation of all humanity.
Which, okay, is also pretty good.
So let's take a look back at 2017, a year in which I made one remarkably accurate prediction of the future, namely that no one can predict the future.
After an election that took almost everyone by complete surprise, the left told us that Donald Trump was going to be worse than Hitler, and the right told us that his outlandish personality would destroy the conservative movement.
Even I, my own remarkable self, thought Trump was going to be no more than a mediocre Democrat president.
Instead, Donald Trump, a political neophyte, a New York loudmouth who plays fast and loose with the truth, a massive egotist, and a not altogether pleasant human being, has delivered conservatives one of the greatest years in living memory and has made our government more moral in the process.
That this has been a great year for conservatives is undeniable.
The economy is in high gear, stocks are up, unemployment is down, energy production is up, business expansion is up, and so on.
ISIS, which took more than 23,000 square miles of territory after Obama left Iraq and refused to intervene in Syria, is now in control of a portisan and a book of matches.
19 constitutionalist judges have been appointed and 40 more have been nominated.
The biggest regulatory rollback in American history has been launched, which is boring but usually important.
And the rule of law has been restored at the border.
We're out of the absurd and costly Paris Accord.
Net neutrality, the most cleverly named government power grab ever, is gone.
Our foreign policy is righted and revitalized.
And a mainstream news media that has become little more than the information arm of the Democrat Party is in self-destructive disarray.
If the tax bill passes tomorrow, and it's still an if, it will cap an unbelievable string of conservative successes.
Now, you can tell me none of this is really Trump's doing, or it's just an accident, or that disaster lies right around the corner, and I'll politely pretend to listen while thinking of something more important, because for me, every good day is a good day, and if I can string enough good days together, the world won't be my problem anymore.
But what about this insane idea that Trump has made our government more moral?
How is that possible when Trump has sex with Vladimir Putin while he's disguised as a Russian prostitute?
When he kills and eats black people in his spare time, when he hates women and goes into insane temper tantrums fueled by 48 cans of Diet Coke a day.
Okay, even ignoring Maggie Haberman's fantasy life, or as it's also known, the front page of the New York Times, Trump is not always statesmanlike, not always nice to people, and not always strictly honest.
But I didn't say Trump was moral.
I said he has made government more moral.
After all, what is the moral purpose of government?
We know the answer because our founders told us.
They said we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that to secure these rights, government are instituted, governments are instituted among men.
That's right.
Government exists to secure our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Only in liberty can we treat each other ethically because only in liberty can we make the choices that are the necessary condition for ethical life.
Trump has made our government more moral by making less of it.
Fewer regulations that allow unelected bureaucrats to dictate how we live.
Fewer bureaucrats who are seeking to expand the power of their agencies.
Fewer judges who will write law instead of obeying the law.
And as far as I can tell, Trump has stopped using the IRS and Justice Department for political ends like silencing his enemies and skewing elections.
This is what moral government looks like.
And even if every male senator in Washington is grabbing the backside of some unsuspecting female while at the same time voting for more limited and less corrupt government, the senators are immoral, yes, but the government is more moral.
And that is why we should never let the leftist press game us with scandal hysteria, but should keep focused on voting in those who will help fulfill government's moral ends.
Trump has delivered conservatives an astoundingly successful year and made the government more moral in the process.
You don't have to like him to salute him.
I salute him.
Well done.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky.
Shipshape tipsy topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
Quip For Holidays00:03:01
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray.
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, we have America's sweetheart, Michael Knowles, who'll be here to talk about the nativity today, the star of Another Kingdom, our suspense, fantasy suspense podcast.
I'm thinking we're going to suspend Another Kingdom for the holidays this Friday and the next Friday.
We'll start to bring it out again.
There's only three episodes left to the first season, so we'll bring it out again after the holidays because everybody will be traveling.
Maybe we'll put up something and discuss it a little bit between me and Knowles and talk about our experience.
We'll put up something for you to listen to, but this is a good time to use your holidays, to put your holidays to good purpose, to catch up on the first 10 episodes.
That's what you should be doing.
That is how Christmas is celebrated around the world.
It's a universal celebration of the birth of goddess, listening to Another Kingdom episodes.
All right, I just made that.
So, you know, I don't know if you, I have this thing where every single year I get to the night before Christmas and I start making sure I've gotten enough presents for everybody and I've gotten the right presents.
I realize I've shorted my wife on the stocking because stockings are hard.
You got to come up with kind of small, you know, gifts that don't cost a zillion dollars, but that still, when she takes them out of the stocking, she'll be happy, you know, get something.
This year, easy answer, get a Quip.
Quip is this toothbrush that it's an electric toothbrush, which you really need, which really work better than ordinary toothbrushes because they keep you, they make you brush enough times and they vibrate right.
But it's designed so it's thin and sleek and good to look at.
And also you can travel with it.
It's not like these big ones that look like a bazooka.
You can use them at home, but you can't take them with them.
It's a new electric toothbrush that packs just the right amount of vibrations into an ultra-slim design with guiding pulses to simplify better brushing at a fraction of the cost of bulkier brushes.
Quip comes with a mount that goes right on your mirror, fitting seamlessly into your daily routine.
And Quip also offers, and this is important, an optional subscription plan that delivers new brushheads on a dentist-recommended three-month schedule for just five bucks, including free shipping worldwide.
And just in time for the holidays, Quip is the ideal size and price to gift anyone on your list.
You can even include automatic brushhead deliveries for a year to ensure your gift keeps on giving until next holiday.
The Quip Electric Toothbrush is featured in just about every gift guide this year, including Oprah's O-List, Men's Health, and Forbes.
Quip is backed by a network of over 10,000 dental professionals, including dentists, hygienists, and dental students.
And Quip starts at just 25 bucks right now.
In fact, you can go to getquip.com slash Clavin.
It's getquip.com slash K-L-A-V-A-N and get your first refill pack for free with a Quip Electric Toothbrush.
That's your first refill pack free at getquip.com slash Clavin, G-E-T-Q-U-I-P.com slash Claven.
Good idea for a stocking.
Why Taxes Are So Unpopular00:14:24
The reason that people can't see that Trump has made our government more moral on the left and the right is that the storytelling power of the news media has taught us to confuse personal morality with moral action and moral action with judgment of others, okay?
Now, this is what all storytelling does.
All storytelling personalizes themes, right?
It doesn't tell you, oh, it's hard to make a decision.
It tells you the story of Hamlet.
And this is why fictional stories are more true than true stories.
They're more true because the person that embodies the theme doesn't actually exist, so you don't waste moral energy trying to decide whether you should elect Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
He's just there, and then when the story is over, you're left with the themes, but Hamlet vanishes into the imaginary world.
History can sometimes work like this and sometimes deliver moral lessons, but the news media almost always gets it wrong by confusing different levels of morality in different kinds.
They confuse personal morality with moral action and moral action with judgment.
Now, let me give you an example of the difference between moral action and judgment.
Let's talk about sex, because that's all anybody's been talking about recently, is sex scandals, and this one did this wrong.
I have two different sets of sexual morality.
I have what I expect of myself, and I have what I can rightly demand of you, right?
Of myself, I expect quite a lot.
I don't want to give you too much information, but I certainly want my body to be the representative of my soul.
I want my body to live out the love that I feel and not just go after things, little twitch excitements for my body.
Those are things that I talk to God about and live out as much as I can.
Sometimes blow it, sometimes get it totally wrong, but that's where I'm guided.
I don't feel, I know that I don't have the right to judge you.
I know this because God said to me, do not judge, lest ye be judged.
When God stands in front of the, when Jesus stands in front of the woman taken in adultery and says, yes, you can stone her as long as the person who has no sins throws the first stone, he's not condoning adultery, obviously.
He's letting the woman totally off the hook because nobody can throw the stone.
He's saying what is right and wrong is still in place, but that doesn't mean you are the one to judge.
That's what that story tells us, okay?
So I have a different set of morals when it comes to you.
I expect you not to break the law.
I expect you not to hurt people who can't fight back and probably not to hurt anybody if you can help it.
Those are the things I feel I have the right to expect because those are not sins.
Those are crimes.
Big, big difference.
So when they tell us, oh, some guy 30 years ago was accused of this, was accused of that, my question always in government is, is he depraved?
If he's not depraved, then he can be in government.
If he's just a sinner like me, if he's just a flawed guy like me, that's something that I can live with.
The other thing, that's how we confuse moral action with judgment.
And the other thing, as I said before, is we personalize moral stories because what a senator does that's moral or not moral in my life is his votes, right?
And now if he's depraved, obviously I can't trust him to vote properly.
I can't trust him not to do damage.
He's not above the law, so he has to be penalized under the law if he commits a crime.
But if he cheats on his wife, you know, I'm sorry.
Like, that is not, you know, unless that's a sign of his utter dishonesty and depravity, that is not something that I'm necessarily going to vote against him for.
The left and the right are both getting this wrong, the left because they've lost their minds.
They're hysterical.
But, you know, they've just, the New York Fed just raised its estimate of fourth quarter growth in this country to 4%.
They're going out, the companies are going out, it was reported in the Wall Street Journal today, they're going out to parents' conferences and saying, listen, don't send your kids to law school because the law field is glutted.
Teach them to come and work in our factories, to make stuff, to do stuff.
And can this be a bad thing that a kid doesn't have to go to college and learn his feminist professor's stupid theories, but instead can learn a trade and do something that he's suited for and help the economy?
I don't think that's a bad thing.
I think that's a good thing and might destroy some of these universities that are just, that truly do need to be destroyed because they're operating on a moral plane that is absolutely despicable.
The CNNBC All-America Economic Survey has polled 800 adults across the nation, and for the first time in 11 years, more than half of the respondents to the survey rated the economy as good to excellent.
And if you don't think that's going to show up in the voting booth, despite all the trumpeting of Trump's unpopularity, it is.
So, I mean, let's talk about the way they talk about this tax bill.
A tax bill, I think, in terms of what it does for corporate taxes, cutting them from 35% to 21%, I think is excellent.
In terms of individual people, it's kind of a dog's breakfast.
It's kind of muddled.
I think everybody will get a tax cut, probably, except very high-earning people.
Even high-earning people might get a tax cut.
But listen to the way they're talking about it.
Listen to the way they conflate politics with morality.
The left has always done this, right?
Why is it the left calls you names?
You believe in freedom, so they call you a fascist.
You don't believe that people should be judged according to race, so they call you a racist.
Why?
Because they conflate their virtue with their politics.
The left has always done this, but what's disturbing to me now is that the right is doing it as well because they're so upset about Donald Trump.
Let's listen to a little bit of Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary, hyping the tax plan that they say is going to pass on Tuesday.
I'll believe it when I see it because now John McCain is sick and he's back in Arizona, so he won't be there to vote.
It's a narrow, razor-thin margin they've got.
But let's see.
Let's hope that it comes through.
Let's play cut number one of Nuchin selling the tax plan.
Over 90% of people will be able to fill out their taxes on a postcard.
The corporate tax rate going from the highest in the world at 35% to 21% makes us competitive.
And more important, we fix a system where we now tax on U.S. income, which is all about creating U.S. jobs.
We're going to bring trillions of dollars back on shore.
Now, so that's very important in bringing the money back on shore, of course, because it all went off because they couldn't be sure of what Obama was going to do next, what his regulations were going to do, so they didn't want to bring their money back in the country.
And it's also costly, and they're cutting down the cost of bringing money back into the country.
All that is really important.
Now, so that's kind of what's basically happening.
It's a cut in taxes.
Here is Will Bunch at Philly.com, a liberal columnist.
This is the thing.
Most people think that this bill is going to raise their taxes.
Now, why on earth would that be, right?
It's because the news media is selling, relentlessly selling this idea that this is going to raise their taxes.
It's going to cut almost everybody's taxes.
But listen to Will Bunch.
Listen to the way he talks.
There's a reason the tax bill is so unpopular.
It's a terrible idea.
Arguably, if approved, it's the worst law to be enacted on Capitol Hill since the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which allowed the return of captured, escaped slaves up north to their whip-cracking masters down south.
Cutting your taxes is the same as allowing slaves to be rounded up from the north and sent back to the south.
I mean, think about that for a minute.
Think about the level of stupidity, panic, hysteria, and moral confusion that you would have to have to rate that.
Remember, this is your money.
And listen, let's listen to Morning Joe talk about this, because this is really fascinating.
It's pure virtue signaling.
The entire panel, every word they say makes literally no sense except as a sign that they're virtuous people.
Listen.
We're going to have to look at Medicare.
We're going to have to look at Social Security.
And we're going to have to save it for our children and save this economy for our children.
But every time the Republicans talk about taking care of this, all they do is, let's go after Medicaid.
Well, no, but they also, in fairness, they want to cut Medicare and Social Security as well.
But their idea of saving it is to cut the benefits.
Paul Ryan has made very clear that next year's agenda, which they can also do a lot of this, not Social Security, but they can do Medicare with 50 votes, is to go after Medicare.
Donald Trump has said he won't do it, but he said a lot of things he hasn't done later.
We'll see what happens.
And I'm also tired of Hawks talking about how we always need more defense spending.
It doesn't matter necessarily what it is, but let's just keep piling on the defense spending when clearly the national debt is the greatest looming national security challenge we face right now.
And we don't spend a whole lot of time on this program or any programs actually talking about one of the elements that Steve just alluded to, actually pointed out: Marco Rubio's child tax credit.
The hardest job in this country is being poor.
And tax bills like this ensure that poverty for many, many people is going to be both a life sentence and a death sentence.
So it's going to kill the poor.
The tax bill is going to kill the poor.
But listen to what they said before.
They say they want to reform entitlements, but the only way they can think of reforming them is cutting them.
First of all, that's not true.
The way that entitlements should be and have to be reformed is by pushing them up in age when Social Security was passed.
It was passed to kick in at 65.
People died at 63.
The life expectancy in America when Social Security was passed was 63.
There were 15 people working for every one person who got Social Security, so it was an easy deal because it's not an insurance system.
They pretend it is, but it's really just a wealth transfer from working people to non-working people.
It's simple.
And now there's like two people working for every person on Social Security and Medicare.
It's simple.
Raise the time when people, not for people who are right around the corner from retirement, but for millennials and so forth, say, when it's 70.
Nowadays, you live to 80, you live to 90, God willing.
Let Social Security work a few more years and let Social Security kick in when you're 70.
And you will save all these entitlements for another generation.
So they're just parading, oh, you don't want to do that.
And you're raising the military, raising military expenditure when the military does need money.
Ronald Reagan said that's not a budget item, it's a moral item, and it is.
And finally, this idea that being poor is a job.
Being poor is a job if you pay people to be poor, which is what essentially the Democrats want to do.
They always say, wow, this is a big success because so many people are on the program.
It's a big success when everybody gets off the program.
There are ways to inspire people and motivate people to get off of welfare, to get off of disability, which obviously under the Obama administration wasn't happening.
So it's all this kind of moral confusion, a sense of morality without actual morality.
And they're even interviewing Bernie Sanders, who says, we did everything we could to stop this bill, but we failed.
Is there anything more that opponents like you could have done to stop this?
Well, I think we did everything that we could.
But at the end of the day, what you had is people like Mr. Mnuchin, who himself is worth $300 or $400 million, the President of the United States, who is worth several billion dollars.
As you mentioned, some 4,000 or 5,000 lobbyists doing everything that they could to write a bill which significantly benefits the wealthiest people in this country and the largest corporations.
The latest analysis that we have seen suggests that 72% of the benefits go to the top 5%.
My guess is that 60% of the benefits will go to the top 1%.
And at the end of the decade, because the benefits for the middle class are temporary, while the corporate benefits are permanent, at the end of the decade, over half of the middle class will be paying more in taxes.
So here's a guy who honeymooned in the Soviet Union, a slave state that collapsed in absolute chaos.
Here's a guy who said quite recently, I think it was like 2012, I'm not sure how long ago, he was talking about Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, said, that's where the American dream has gone.
I mean, poor children are eating cats in Venezuela to stay alive because of socialism, because of the stuff this guy believes in.
Why is he telling us how to handle the American economy?
It's like, thanks, Bernie.
Could you just move aside, please, you know, and let a sane person.
You know, the Democrats didn't used to do this.
This was also written up in the Wall Street Journal.
The Kennedy tax cuts were pushed by the Democrats, obviously.
The 1981 tax rate rebate had Democrats support.
Ronald Reagan's tax cuts were pushed by Dick Gephardt and Dan Ruskinowski, Katowski, however you pronounce his name, Bill Bradley.
And by helping to craft the tax cuts, and Bill Clinton raised taxes too.
I mean, he raised taxes, but he cut taxes with Newt Gingrich later on.
By helping out, by joining the legislative process, the Democrats could have put stuff they like in this bill.
They could have had a carbon tax or something like that, which, you know, a lot of Republicans support too.
I'm not so sure about that, but we do want to cut down on carbon.
We want to take care of the environment.
So, you know, they could have done that, but they've just, they've gotten so enamored of resistance.
They have so conflated their moral stance with Trump's personality, with Trump's personality, instead of the moral work of government.
You know, Trump may be an immoral man.
He may be a bad guy.
You know, I don't like him all that much.
He certainly does things that I don't like, but that doesn't mean he's not doing the right thing and making our government better.
The Democrats could have chipped in.
They could have chipped in, but they took hold because they owned the news media.
They knew the news media would tell a story in which Trump was Darth Vader and they were the resistance and that was going to be great.
And so they did nothing and they got nothing in this tax bill.
And that's on them.
They refused.
If they had offered votes to help the Republicans, the Republicans would have taken those votes.
And in a minute, I'll tell you what the right is doing.
That really bothers me too, because we're becoming like the left in our reaction to Trump.
Trump is driving a lot of people nuts.
The Wise Men Arrive00:15:22
But first, more importantly, let's talk about cookies.
You know, I am old enough to remember when if you bought cookies in a store instead of making them yourself, it was like cardboard with like little kind of brown stuff in it.
And you just like ate it and you thought, like, gee, this kind of reminds me of what a chocolate chip cookie would be like if, you know, I had a chocolate chip cookie.
Then Mrs. Fields came along, and it was a revolution.
I mean, I remember the first time I bit into one of these.
I tasted one on their show recently.
I almost went through the roof.
They are so good.
They're soft.
They're sweet.
They really taste great.
And they make also great holiday present, great thing to bring out on Christmas.
Mrs. Fields cookies have been around now.
It's 40 years.
It's that long.
Geez.
Everyone loves them.
And, you know, I can remember the first time I bit into one and just thought, oh, wow, this is a whole new thing.
They're just so good.
Mrs. Fields cookies are freshly baked, ready to enjoy right out of the box, so everyone can have what they've always wanted right now.
Here's an exclusive deal for my listeners.
Go to mrsfields.com, click on the microphone on the upper right-hand corner, enter the code Clavin, K-L-A-V-A-N, because I knew you were wondering.
You will save 20% on any, that's a good deal, 20% on any Mrs. Fields product, including their best-selling Peace, Love, and Cookies tin.
And for my money, you can keep the Peace and Love.
Just give me those cookies.
It comes with holiday favorites like Nibblers, bite-sized cookies, brownie bites, and more.
Just click on the microphone and enter promo code Clavin to get 20% off any product at mrsfields.com, mrsfields.com.
Still time to get those for the holiday.
We've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, but America's sweetheart and star of Another Kingdom, Michael Knowles, will be coming on to talk about the nativity, and we will continue this conversation on thedailywire.com.
Come over and subscribe.
Give a subscription for Christmas.
It's a lousy $100 for the entire year.
And you could put this in your stock, a leftist tumbler, because the way things are going, pal, you're going to need it.
You're going to need it.
You know what?
We should make this about twice the size.
We should make a twice the size leftist tumbler in hopes we have an even better 2018.
Come on over to DailyWire.com.
You know, on the right, it's like we can't take yes for an answer.
I...
I hated Donald Trump.
I started out hating him.
I then gave him a pass when he was elected president.
I said, you know what?
Everything starts today.
I can't do anything about it.
I can't make him not president.
So let's start judging him from this moment on.
He does things that would make my hair curl if I had hair to curl.
He says things that I don't like that cheapen the public discourse.
But the fact is, as I've said before, he's Randall Patrick McMurphy.
He's the guy who breaks up the soft tyranny of the madhouse that we have been living in.
We have been living in for 50 to 60 years.
So, you know, there's been a lot of writing.
There's a big piece in the New York Times by this left-wing evangelical talking about how right-wingers are now just listening to the gospel according to Fox.
David French, a guy I just love, I think he's a terrific guy.
He's a good writer.
He was a legal fighter for free speech in universities.
Really, he's a veteran, went over to Iraq, left his family.
I mean, just a totally decent guy.
I completely disagree with him about this.
He was interviewed by Ross Duthot in the New York Times, which is a former newspaper.
You may not have heard of it.
Not that many people have anymore.
But he was interviewed, and he's a total anti-Trumper.
And he said this, and I just disagree with this entirely.
Christians don't get to compartmentalize, he said.
When we're the living representatives of Christ's church, we don't get to proudly support politicians who lie and commit dishonorable acts for the sake of a few policy wins.
I know it's fashionable to scorn mainstream or respectable politicians or ministers, but these individuals at least had the virtue, as imperfect as they were, of a degree of personal honor and integrity.
The church always must be mindful of its witness, and it can't sacrifice its moral credibility to a culture by declaring, I did it for the judges.
I completely disagree with this, and I'll tell you why.
It is not for us to necessarily, when electing someone, to judge him on the basis of his relationship with God or his personal morality.
That is not compartmentalizing.
It is our duty as Christians to judge him on what will give us the most moral government.
And as I've been arguing all through the show, we have a more moral government today than ever.
It's not compartmentalizing.
It is ceasing to conflate categories of morality.
You don't want to confuse categories of morality.
I pointed this out when Ted Cruz went to the convention and made that speech about vote your conscience.
And I said Cruz was wrong to do that.
The moral thing to do at that moment was to support his party.
And if he couldn't support Trump in good conscience, no problem.
Don't show up.
But don't show up and essentially try to stab your party's guy in the back unless you literally think he's Hitler, unless you think he's a genuine going to do bad things with the government.
Trump has done good things with the government.
Nobody could be more surprised than I am.
But let's not preserve our egos and our fake virtue by not appreciating what we see right in front of us.
This has been an amazing year.
And you can't behave morally unless you understand where your moral duty lies and what is actually happening.
Can we get, what's his name here?
Michael Knowles?
Is he around?
There he is.
Oh, Mike.
What a nice jacket, man.
He's looking at the moment.
Oh, come on.
You know, I'm just coming in hot from the land of the sunrise, all the way from the east.
That's right.
You were in New York till like one o'clock this morning.
I was.
I came in because I'm a Method cultural correspondent.
So I really, if we're going to be talking about the Magi and the wise men from the Orient, I want to live that as well.
You are traveling in from the East.
You know, I just, I want to, for a last time before the holidays, I just want to congratulate us on another kingdom.
And I think we're talking about, we're going to suspend it for the holidays, I think, now.
Isn't that ours?
I was, you know, I was a little torn on this, but I think we have to.
If my own travel is any indication, nobody has time to do anything.
Everyone's getting presents and traveling and moving.
So I think it'd be a good idea to kind of catch up a little bit and make sure that for the end, which gets really exciting very fast, people are in a state of mind where they're not distracted by buying whatever for grandma, you know, and baking cookies and all of that.
Right.
And it really isn't the last three episodes that all things are explained and resolved and it's exciting.
Yeah, so we hold it.
You'll have something to look forward to.
It reminds me when we were recording the last three episodes, we had to pause a number of times because I'd be recording the bin and I'd say, oh, wow, man, of course, I knew it.
I remember that story.
That is true.
All right, but enough about us.
Let's talk about God.
Okay, fair enough.
Enough about us.
God, what do you think of us?
What do you think about it?
Don't ask that question.
Don't ask.
It's not going to end well.
You know, you've been doing a great, great job talking about.
We talked about Mary's agreement to be part of God's plan and the wonder, the miracle of God actually becoming dependent on a human being to actually, her will, her free will, loving our free will so much that he actually depended on it to carry out his plan.
We talked about the genealogies, which people don't think about too much.
But let's talk about the actual nativity.
We get these Christmas cards every year with the wise men and the star and all these ox and the ads.
All the animals, the talking animals.
What's it all about, Alfie?
So this is the point that everyone thinks of when you think of the nativity, when you think of the crash.
This is so important that it's the scene that Barack Obama tried to ban from the White House.
You know, he tried to ban the display of the crash in the East Room.
This is the moment when the wise men come from the East.
And it's also the most creative moment, the most creatively interpreted moment, because it contains so much.
It contains literal events, and then there is so much theology that comes out of it.
So the event as it's reported in Matthew is now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, saying, Where is he who has been born king of the Jews?
For we have seen his star in the East and have come to worship him.
So we know immediately this is grounded in history.
They ground it in a place.
Matthew says it's in Bethlehem.
It's during the time of Herod.
He actually gives us the years that this is happening.
We see some parallelism.
So Luke's account of the Nativity draws a parallel with Augustus, the so-called Prince of Peace sitting in Rome.
And Matthew begins with Herod, the so-called king of the Jews, a quasi-messianic figure, also serving at the favor of Rome.
So these Magi come, and we don't know very much about them.
We know they come from the land of the sunrise.
They come from the East.
They're represented in a lot of different ways.
But there are four basic definitions of Magi.
It seems they're Zoroastrians.
So this is a monotheistic religion, quasi-monotheistic religion, out of Persia.
These were probably people of a priestly caste in Persia.
But there are other connotations that this brings.
Magi are considered professors of supernatural knowledge, of magicians, and at the bad end, they're deceivers or seducers.
You know, in the Acts of the Apostles, Paul calls a magus, one of the Magi, this guy Bard Jesus, a son of the devil, an enemy of all righteousness.
They can be pretty bad too.
And this ambivalence, this ambiguity, Pope Benedict writes about this, and he says, this is the ambiguity of all religion.
These Magi can be of this priestly, monotheistic class, looking for the star in Bethlehem and following that journey toward Christ.
But just as easily, the Magi and religion in general can lead you away from God.
It can lead you into some pretty bad stuff, as we see in certain religions around the world.
Enough on that.
So for the historicity of this, we have to talk about the star.
What is this star?
St. John Chrysostom says it was just a miracle.
So there's no natural explanation for this whatsoever.
You know, the sun is dancing around it or whatever.
But there actually is some historical evidence for this star.
We think now that Jesus was born sometime between 7 and 6 BC, which is a little awkward because BC and AD are named around him.
So we got it wrong by a few years, but that's okay.
During this time period, we do have records of a conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in the constellation Pisces that would have created a very bright star.
There are records in Chinese astronomy tablets that point to a similar bright star that appeared and stayed for a while just a couple years after that.
So we do have records of this.
Now, Tacitus and Suetonius say that at this time, there was speculation everywhere that the ruler of the world would be born in Judah.
So he would be the king.
These are the two great Roman historians, too.
That's right.
They're the two great Roman historians.
And even Flavius Josephus, another.
It's a Jewish Roman historian.
Right.
He also writes about all of these prophecies that are going around in the time.
He ascribes it to Vespasian, who is decidedly not Jesus, to gain favor with him.
But it's in the air.
There's this air that a Messiah will come out of Jerusalem.
And it so happens to have been in the years around the birth of Jesus.
Now, how do we get the kings?
How do we get the ox and the ass and the talking camels and the nice little ceramic displays that we see on lawns?
So we read these in light of the Old Testament.
So we read the Christmas story in light of Isaiah, which says, the ox knows its master, the donkey its owner's manger, but Israel does not know.
My people do not understand.
So with that one line, an ox and an ass made it into the cave where Jesus was born.
And the Magi we read in light of Psalm 72, which says, may the kings of Tarshish and of the coastlands render him tribute.
May the kings of Sheba and Seba bring gifts.
So all of a sudden, these priestly Zoroastrians got bumped up to kings.
We also read it in light of Isaiah 60, which is, all from Sheba will come bearing gold and incense and proclaiming the praise of the Lord.
Foreigners will rebuild your walls and their kings will serve you.
So now they're kings.
And we added some camels to the crib.
And later on, we've also interpreted these three Magi, these three kings, as corresponding to the ages of life, youth, maturity, old age, all of which find their meaning when they ground their reality in Christ.
I think there are so many wonderful interpretations.
Obviously, it's an infinite, infinite story.
But a lot of the stuff about one of them is traditionally black.
They have names, Balthazar, Larry, and Curly, I think, are the other ones.
That's right.
But those are all later accretions, right?
Those are things that come on, that are put on the story later.
They're not in the Bible.
Very little is written about this.
I mean, we're talking about a paragraph or two.
But a lot of this comes out of our reading backwards.
Why is one of them black?
Well, because this is all of the world being led through the Jews, being led to the Jews, to the king of the Jews, who will redeem everybody.
We see this with words like rejoice.
We see this with Greek coming in, that the king of the world, the prince of peace, will be born of the Jews, but he will rule for the whole world.
All nations will come to him.
And that's where this journeying aspect is the key, because Herod plays a role here.
We know that the Magi saw the star, they are led by the star, and they talk to Herod, the king of the Jews, and they say, hey, you know, there's a star over here.
We're looking for that king of the Jews.
And he says, huh, yeah, king of the Jews, eh?
Well, go and search diligently for the child.
And when you found him, bring me word that I too may come and worship him.
But he's not a good liar, King Herod, you know, he was not very good at this.
So the Magi leave, and they go and they find him.
And it's written, they departed to their own country by another way.
And what does that mean?
Well, they didn't want to go to Herod.
They went physically by another way, but they went back to their home country theologically and metaphysically by another way as well.
They've found the king of the universe.
They've found the Logos incarnate.
And it's changed their view and their life forever.
They have found a new way in Christ.
Finding Christ00:13:52
And that star, what that means is that the cosmos speaks of Christ.
So maybe we can't understand it.
Maybe we can't explain the conjunction of Saturn and Mars and Pisces or whatever.
But it means that the cosmos and the creation itself is speaking of the divine Logos, which is incarnate in this person.
And as the church fathers wrote, as Gregory Nazianzen wrote afterward, astrology comes to an end at this moment, in the peak of astrology of a star leading these men to Christ.
That is the end because now we have the Logos itself in human flesh.
You know, it's such a beautiful thing.
You know, I've often said that if I were going to make a movie of the Christmas story, it would actually start with the road to a mouse when the two disciples after the crucifixion are walking along and Jesus, they don't know it's Jesus, but he walks with them and he explains to them that the entire Old Testament is actually a prophecy of his coming and then they break bread with him and they recognize him.
And really what it does is, you know, I've written horror stories and scary stories and a lot of times in horror stories what you do is you take spiritual concepts and you physicalize them so that people, instead of taking the mass, they kill and devour somebody, something like that.
Somehow life becomes horrible when you interpret it purely in a fleshly way.
But what Christ does, he takes the entire history of a people and he spiritualizes it.
And in doing that, he spiritualizes the entire cosmos.
So we start to see that what looks like flesh, which looks like stone, what looks like wood, is really God's word speaking to us at every moment.
And it is a symbol for the real thing, which is the metaphysical.
And even on the Emmaus Road, they're walking along and Jesus is just being Jesus.
And he's explaining that the whole Old Testament is this prefiguration.
But they only recognize him when he breaks the bread.
They only recognize him in this physical moment, and yet they journey with him just as these Magi are journeying toward Bethlehem.
They don't know what they're going to get.
They don't know that they're going to end up at a cave or in a house, I suppose, where this little infant is.
But they journey with him because we can't understand always how the cosmos is speaking of Christ.
But with faith, we know that it is.
It always is.
It's great.
What are you talking about on your show today?
Today, I'm talking about this is my favorite subject, this CDC ban word list.
On the one hand, it's total fake news.
On the other hand, I love it.
This is perfect trumpiness, extra special coffee.
So we will go through leftist euphemisms and how Trump is smacking them all around.
Brilliant, brilliant.
The Michael Knowles show comes up after this.
America Sweetheart, Michael Knowles.
Good to see you.
I'll talk to you soon.
See you later.
That was great.
That was really good.
You know, I have to say before we get to our crappy culture, that I always feel that sometimes the most important stories are the least covered.
And there was a story in the New York Times, a former newspaper, about this Harry Reid boondoggle, where he took $22 million and funneled it to a friend of his in Nevada who believed that UFOs are among us, that aliens are among us.
But in doing this, they got this piece of Air Force footage where they started to collect stuff where the guys flying in the Air Force spotted stuff in the air, and they have this one piece of these pilots coming upon a UFO.
Have we got this footage?
I mean, it's unbelievable.
Look at this.
There's a whole tweet of them.
Look on the AFA.
My God.
They're all going against the wind.
It looks just like a flying saucer.
That's not an LNS though, is it?
It is LNS, dude.
Well, if there's a wind thing, it's rotating.
It's rotating.
He starts out by saying it's a drone, but then they don't know what it is flying so fast.
It's keeping up with them, and it's flying into the wind, so they don't know what it is.
What I want to know, what I want to know is if the aliens are here, which I think is a thoroughgoing possibility, why not?
If they're here, why don't they say hello?
You know, I mean, if they're hostile, they could wipe us out in a snap.
I mean, if they have the technology to get here, they're so far advanced that we'd have no chance to fight them.
And if they're friendly, why don't they say hi?
You know, I can't understand it.
It may be that they just look at us like we're ants, you know, like why would you say hello to ants?
All right, never mind.
I just wanted to bring that up.
Our crappy culture.
So many of you may be wondering how I got through this entire show without mentioning Star Wars.
I didn't see Star Wars, but I'd be happy to review it anyway.
It was kind of disappointing.
I kind of feel like it's, you know, I got excited to see it, but then I went and I felt it was kind of empty.
The special effects are great, but something about the characters doesn't really make sense anymore.
And I walked out with us trying to hide my feeling of despair by overpraising it.
It's like, this is such a crappy franchise.
It's so bad.
You know, the funny thing is when you go back and watch the original show, the original movie, it's a parody.
It's a takeoff, a satire that constantly winks at the audience about the old Flash Gordon silent, you know, the little, they show them before the main movie.
They'd have this corny little serial, Flash Gordon, and he was just remaking those in this big way.
But people were so hungry for the heroism, so hungry for the mythos, so hungry for the hero's journey that they just devoured it.
And now it takes itself so seriously, A, and B, because it's from these leftists, it's all, you know, oh, this one is black, and that one's female, and I'm sure one of them will turn out to be gay.
And who cares?
Who cares?
You know, it's just, I do not care.
So I'll go see it because I feel like it's a part of our culture now.
It's this good degraded part of our degraded culture.
But what I watched over the weekend is I watched this film, Mother, which I didn't go to see in the theaters because it sounded so grotesque and ugly that I didn't want to actually see it blown up on a big screen.
Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem, some, what's her name?
Michelle Pfeiffer is in it.
So there are going to be spoilers in this.
If you don't want to hear the spoilers, turn it off because I don't want you to see it.
It's a depressing, sad, ugly little movie.
And it's a movie that can't be understood except as a parable or an allegory.
You can't enjoy it except for the first 20 minutes.
You can enjoy it as a story, and then it's obviously not a realistic story.
It's a story of this woman, Jennifer Lawrence, who is a younger woman married to an older poet who's blocked.
And he's written a great book, a great book of poetry, but now he can't get going again.
And she's trying to make a perfect house for him so that she can make an old house perfect for him so that he will be inspired again to write.
She's trying to take care of him.
She worships him.
She loves him.
She's trying to make things right for him.
But he's ignoring her.
He's not making love to her.
And he can't write.
And suddenly, into their world comes this couple.
I can't remember.
Do you remember the name of the actor who's the God figure in the oh, never mind?
I won't go off on it.
But anyway, this very excellent actor, love the guy, comes in, and his wife comes in, and then their kids come in, and one of the kids kills the other.
And we realize we're watching the Garden of Eden.
We're watching Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel play itself out.
And finally, she gets pregnant.
I'm going to tell you the whole story, so turn it off if you don't want to hear it.
She gets pregnant and he finally comes to life with her pregnancy and he starts writing this poetry and crowds turn up.
They love his book so much.
They turn up, they start a religion, they worship him, and he likes it.
He's digging it.
He's digging.
He's all about his ego.
And she, meanwhile, is watching her home be torn apart by these lunatics.
And they start wars and they start killing each other, rapes, everything.
They start these fake religions around them.
And finally, it all ends in fire and flame and death.
And then the whole thing begins again.
And it's obvious.
And the director, Darren Aronofsky, said this essentially.
It's obvious that mother, Jennifer Lawrence, is Mother Earth and this home is the home to humanity.
And Javier Bardim is this weird version of God as a kind of anticreative force.
He is a creative force, but he wants to be worshipped.
He's out there for the ego.
He's got an ego.
And he basically destroys the earth that loves him and rapes her, takes her place apart.
Her children, the child is obviously Christ.
The child is killed.
People are horrible.
And then it all begins again through her love.
So the earth prefigures God.
Sort of the earth and God are in this kind of constant repetitive relationship.
And what made it so sad is it's earth worship.
It's idolatry of the earth.
And when you have an idol above, when you put an idol above God, people begin to hate people.
And this is a hateful movie about people.
All the people in it are corrupt, evil, disgusting, rude.
They destroy the earth.
I mean, that's what it is.
You're destroying the earth.
You're destroying the earth.
And God is essentially participating in that because, why?
Because Aronofsky is worshiping the wrong thing.
He's worshiping the earth instead of the God who made the earth.
You know, it's the earth.
They make it as if the earth were there before God, which makes absolutely no sense.
You know, it's God who makes the earth and the earth that is responsible to him.
And this has nothing to do with being anti-environmentalist.
It has to do with what you worship.
The whole show is an act of idolatry.
I've been watching all these wonderful shows on TV, and I've talked about some of them.
The Good Place and this wonderful film Search Party.
And now I'm watching this really excellent adventure show, Nightfall, K-N-I-G-H-T Nightfall, on the History Channel, which moves the Holy Grail story from the Arthurian time of the Arthurian legend, moves it to the Knight Templar, moves it up in time, essentially saying, well, yes, it actually happened, but it happened later in time.
And all of these stories, all of these stories are hungry, hungry for God.
They're hungry for the presence of God.
Search Party is about the meaninglessness of life without God.
The Good Place is trying to reimagine God and kind of get out of some of the judgmentalism that they feel is in the Old Testament and in the Christian religion.
And Nightfall is actually so far a very pro-Christian film.
I keep waiting for them to slip it at a Mickey and turn it all around.
I don't know what's going to happen.
I mean, I do know what's going to happen because I know what happened to the Knights Templar, but I don't know how they're going to play it.
And everywhere I see this hunger, everywhere I see this desire, everywhere I see this realization that relativism has collapsed, the logic of relativism has collapsed.
And I keep saying to people, you know, even while we're speaking, even while we're speaking, the intellectual class, our thinking class is changing and becoming more religious, and that that is going to trickle down to the rest of us.
This did happen before.
I always compare this time to the revolutionary time that's sometimes called the Romantic Age, when the French Revolution upended all religion and all government and all ideas, and then slowly conservatism closed back over it, but then began to be liberalized.
And there was a thing called the Oxford Movement, which ultimately claimed a lot of intellectuals where they started.
It started in Oxford and they started to bring back the Christian and ultimately Catholic religion to some degree.
It swept Wordsworth into it, and it really was brought about, ushered in the Victorian Age, which to my mind, the Victorian Age in England, is one of the greatest and most civilizing and productive ages in human history.
And I see that happening again.
And every time I say this to people, they say, no, no, it's all bad.
Everything's, you know, because bringing good news to conservatives is like running naked through church.
It's like the last thing they want to see.
But in fact, the good news came once in Bethlehem.
It is coming again.
What are we doing tomorrow?
We've got a guest on tomorrow?
Stephen Wilford.
Stephen Wilford, the guy who shot the shooter in Texas.
Excellent.
I've talked to him.
Really, really interesting cat.
He will be here tomorrow.
So will I.
I hope you will be too.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
We end with the piano guys and a bunch of pop singers delivering an excellent Christmas carol.
Angels from the realms of glory bring your flight o'er all the earth.
Andrew Klavan
Production Credits00:00:23
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.