Andrew Clavin argues Hollywood’s Oscars now reward elite propaganda—like Moonlight—over art, ignoring public concerns such as immigration or media bias (e.g., NPR’s suppression of FBI texts). He contrasts Trump’s alignment with mainstream opinion against establishment figures like Chuck Schumer, who dismiss border security despite polls favoring stricter limits. Clavin also exposes alleged FBI corruption, from Lynch-Clinton meetings to missing Strzok-Page texts, urging independent investigations. On faith, he advises Ashley to follow conviction over guilt in choosing Christianity, while citing Harvard studies showing U.S. evangelical growth defying secularization trends, predicting a Christian resurgence as relativism collapses. [Automatically generated summary]
Okay, we're going to talk more today about both the immigration mess and the mess at the Justice Department and how the government and the press really silence the voice of the people.
But as a guy who has worked in the movie business, has had movies made and has made my life in the arts, my entire living in the arts my whole life, I feel like obligated to say something about the Oscars.
The Oscar nominations came out, I guess it was yesterday, and I feel like I should say something about them.
This is what I have to say.
I don't care.
I don't care who's nominated.
I don't care who wins.
I care very deeply about the arts.
I really do.
I think the arts are incredibly important, incredibly humanizing and civilizing.
They create wisdom.
They create the culture.
And even good art that I might disagree with.
Like this year there was a black paranoia, horror movie called Get Out, which I thought was absolutely delightful and intelligent and well-made.
I think that blacks should make their paranoia into horror movies just like everybody else.
And that's what it was.
And it's great.
But here's the thing.
Through much of the 20th century, the movies were America's central art form, by which I mean they were the way we talked to each other through the arts.
And now they're not.
Like all art forms, they have run out of steam.
And when an art form starts to run out of steam and becomes more abundant, the art form divides into popular products that are kind of shallow, but everybody likes them, like all the superhero movies, and good products and intelligent products that speak to and for a very, very small group of intellectual elites.
So that's what you have.
That's why they've doubled the number of movies that are nominated.
You have these big films that really entertain a lot of people but don't deserve to get artistic recognition.
And then you have these tiny, tiny little films that elite people like and they kind of are more what you would call typically artistic.
Now, some of these small elite movies are good and some of them are bad.
And I'm kind of an elite artsy-craftsy guy myself, so I like them.
I enjoy them.
But the Oscars were created when the movies were the public art form, when they were America's art form.
They were a great, big, garish, glitzy, glamorous award show that was meant for all the people because it was a popular art.
All the people were watching the movies.
All the people cared who won an Oscar.
And the movies spoke to everybody through a set of core shared assumptions, that America was a good place, that freedom was a good thing, that Christianity was central to the way we thought and who we were.
All these movies weren't made by people who necessarily held all the same views, but they all held those assumptions because they were selling to the great mass of Americans.
To hold a big, garish, glamorous award show about a tiny teensy little art form that's for elites is absolutely absurd.
A movie like last year's winner, I think it was called Moonlight, is that what it was called, you know, that can win an award with some name like the Teensy Tiny Award for how many intersectional groups can be represented in a single movie.
And the award can be a little golden statue of a homosexual black man transitioning into a Native American woman.
That would make sense because as the movies become an art form for the elites, then they start to be, the awards start to be handed out according to elite leftist philosophical obsessions.
Women have to get some, blacks have to get some.
If you don't, it's the Oscars so white and too many men, all these men are being nominated.
Unfortunately, that has nothing to do with the quality of the movie, which is what we were talking about originally when the Oscars got started.
So if Hollywood is going to give statuettes for participation to some minority woman, whether or not her work is as good as the work of a white man, why do I have to talk about that?
Why should I even discuss it?
I don't even want to come on and say, this woman didn't deserve it, but this white guy did.
I don't even want to have that conversation.
I just want to go to the movies and enjoy the movies.
The awards are now about the people making the movies.
They're about the small elite who care about these tiny movies.
They're not about the rest of us.
And it's absurd.
You know, intersectional quota serving is not a celebration of true American culture.
You know, I used to do this thing at Oscar time.
Whenever the nominations would come out, I would do a comic video or I'd write an article.
You can find these.
They're still up online.
And I would do a fake Oscar show for movies that should win, but they don't win because they didn't get made.
So they would be conservative movies.
So for instance, this year you do a movie about the Islamic rape problem in Europe, you know, Islamic raping women.
They're not going to make that movie.
It's just not going to happen.
Or we do something about illegal immigrants who commit murder and then laugh about it.
Or we do something about a story about a brave reporter who uncovers the corruption in the Obama administration while other journalists cover it up.
Those movies aren't being made because the movies are no longer being made for the mass of America.
They're being made for this small elite, which is in the grip of this leftist obsession that is absurd.
It's based on absurd points.
It's falling apart as we watch.
We don't have to worry about it.
We don't even have to think about it.
We just have to destroy it and start to create our own stuff and move on.
An art form that doesn't address the truth of its time, the problems of its time.
It's no longer an art form.
It's just a form of distortionist propaganda.
So the Intersectional Quota Awards for left-wing distortionist propaganda is not something that's interesting to me.
I care about the culture.
I care about art.
I don't care about leftist propaganda patting itself on the back.
My only hope is that the oppressed movie actresses of America wear their black protest dresses really low enough to show off their magnificent cleavage.
So Michael Knowles will have something to look at when I force him to watch the Oscar show, so I don't have to.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Shipshaw, tipsy-topsy, go welcome to zippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, it's mailbag day, so we're going to answer all your questions.
Got a lot of good questions.
We have to record, we have to use an old recording of Lindsay now because Lindsay is so big with her child that she could, if she whooped like that, the kid would be born at this point.
So she has to, we'll only use an old recording.
But the mailbag will be coming up.
The answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life on occasion for the better.
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So, you know, talking about the Oscars, we're talking about this division that has come about in our country between the elites and the people.
And that division has always been there, but there used to be a commitment of the elites to the people.
You know, Lincoln talking about government for the people, by the people, of the people.
You know, that commitment is gone.
I really feel the elites and the people are now so divided.
This has happened in Europe, but it's happening here.
And this is one of the reasons I think you get Donald Trump.
So, you know, they had this government shutdown, and obviously the Democrats got their butts kicked.
I mean, Trump is really good at this.
He didn't stand down.
He knows who his base is.
But the thing about you have to remember about not just the Democrats, but the Republicans, is they're not on the people's side in this.
A poll came out.
A poll came out.
You know, here is the thing we're talking about when we're talking about immigration.
We're not talking about little Juan and how sad he looks.
We're not talking about, oh, this man has been here and he served in the Marines and what a good person.
There are all kinds of sad stories on all sides.
That's not what we're talking about.
We're talking about three problems.
Illegality, the rule of law, who decides who comes in.
That's what the rule of law is about.
We decide.
We decide who we want, where they come from, what we need, then we let them in.
That's on us.
So the rule of law, these are the people who pass the laws.
It's not too much to ask that they obey the laws and enforce the laws.
It really is not.
And when they start crying, and when Chuck Schumer starts weeping over this one or that one, you know, all I feel is, hey, you're a senator, you pass the laws, obey the laws, enforce the laws.
The second thing we're dealing with is Muslims.
And that's a shorthand way of saying people who come into this country who may have philosophies that don't adhere to Western values.
And Western values are very specific.
They have a history.
They came from somewhere.
It's not enough to come here because you need some money.
It's not enough to come here because you can get a job.
It's not enough to come here because they're chasing you out of the other country.
You have to come here because you want to be an American.
And Trump is absolutely right about this.
And the third thing is people who take jobs from the lowest workers.
You know, somebody said this, I wish I could remember who it was in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, made the point that you can't say, on the one hand, say, oh, we have these problems because automation is taking jobs away from the working man, and then say, oh, but we need more working men to come in and take jobs.
That doesn't make any sense.
It's one or the other.
So these are the three things that people are worrying about.
And a Harvard Harris poll, taking as the shutdown was just about to happen, found that Americans strongly support granting citizen rights to illegal immigrant dreamers, guys who are already there, but they strongly back President Trump's three demands for a border wall, limits to the chain of family migration, and an end to the diversity visa lottery.
Diversity is not, by the way, our strength.
Our strength is our creed, and we want people to come in who will live by that creed.
The public demands a lower overall legal immigration.
They want less people to come in legally.
Americans want annual legal immigration capped at 500,000 a year or less, far lower than the current annual rate of 1.3 million.
The survey asked respondents what level of overall legal immigration they would like to see.
A stunning 35% said the level should be fewer than $250,000, 250,000 people a year, okay?
So all they talk about, because the media is part of this elite ignoring the voice of the people, all they talk about is the fact that 77% want to legalize the DREAMers, but they don't understand that that is part of a package of saying, yes, these people are here, we get it, they made a life here, we get it, but close the damn borders.
I mean, it is time to stop this.
And the same, you know, this is exactly what happened in Europe.
This is exactly what happened in Europe.
Year after year after year, the polls said, no, we don't want a million Muslim refugees coming into our towns.
And the people, the politicians would talk tough, and then they would let them come sweeping in and do nothing, absolutely nothing about it.
And as a result of that, you get this very ugly bigotry, this anti-immigrant bigotry rises up.
And the average American, the average person who just says, no, wait a minute, let's enforce the rule of law, let's think about this, is now standing next to a Nazi.
And that gives the Nazi credibility.
And you don't want that to happen.
You want to deal with these problems before hateful feelings kind of blend with reasonable feelings.
So this is what makes, one of the things you have to remember is the Republicans are not all on our side on this one.
You are talking about guys like Jeff Flake and Lindsey Graham.
They are effectively Democrats.
They're effectively let everybody come in.
So Lindsey Graham is complaining about Stephen Miller, you know, basically the immigration hardliner in the Trump administration.
And he's working with Dick Durbin to send over what they're calling a bipartisan agreement.
But it's not a bipartisan agreement because Graham and Durbin are on the same side.
So here's Graham talking about Stephen Miller.
What are you saying, Steve Miller?
I'm saying that I think the reason we yank these things back is because Mr. Miller, I've known him for a long time.
I know he's passionate and I know he's an early supporter of the president.
But I'll just tell you his view of immigration has never been in the mainstream of the Senate.
And I think we're never going to get there as long as we embrace concepts that cannot possibly get 60 votes.
One of the concepts that I just completely reject is that we have too much legal immigration.
You know, Mr. Miller wants to restrict legal immigration at a time we have a worker shortage.
We're a declining population.
We need more legal immigration.
So Mr. Miller has evolved on a pathway to citizenship.
But for every green card you give a DACA recipient, he wants to take one out of the system.
And I don't want green cards just for computer engineers.
So you heard the key phrase in there was Mr. Miller is out of the mainstream of the Senate.
Miller and Trump are right in the smack dab middle of the mainstream of the people.
And it's the people who these guys are supposed to be representing and serving.
Look, the people aren't always right.
The voice of the people is not, contrary to popular belief, the voice of God.
But they do have a really good feel about things like this.
And when he says, you know, we need more workers, we have a worker shortage.
If we have a worker shortage, how come the life expectancy rate is going down because people are killing themselves with opiates because they're in despair and they don't have a job?
What the hell is he talking about?
He is talking about a very small elite group of people that includes him and the Senate.
And it includes Chuck Schumer, because now Chuck Schumer got burned.
He got burned by his failure to play up the government shutdown as good for Democrats.
The first time ever, the first time ever, and if you don't think Donald Trump is making a difference, it's the first time ever Democrats lost a shutdown fight because Trump stood up to them and he went to the people through Twitter and he called it the Schumer shutdown.
He rebranded it.
They called it the Trump shutdown, but it's, you know, he called it the Schumer shutdown.
He outdid them.
He outdid them.
So now Schumer has to talk tough.
And now Schumer is, you know, even the press is attacking him.
And Schumer is now talking like, oh, well, the wall is off the table and we're not going to give you anything.
Here he is.
Here he is threatening.
He's threatening the Republicans.
because this is cut number two.
Okay, Chuck is an emotional guy, but here he is.
The Republican majority now has 16 days to work with us to write a bill that can get 60 votes and prevent the DREAMers from being deported.
The clock is ticking.
16 days.
That's not much time.
Got to get moving.
Leader McConnell, his Republican colleagues, all of us should hear the countdown clock ticking to protect the 800,000 young DREAMers from deportation.
We can get it done.
Every Democrat, all 49 of us, supports DACA.
The pressure now is on Leader McConnell in the Republican Moderate Caucus to help find us a solution that protects the 800,000 DREAMers and can pass the Senate.
What about Protects Americans?
Seriously, I mean, who does this guy serve?
You want to know who he serves?
They were outside his apartment in Brooklyn protesting.
The DREAMers and the immigrant activists were out there.
This is cut number seven.
I thought Schumer should have called ICE.
I'll have you bums deported.
You won't let me sleep.
So they send this bipartisan bill, but it's not bipartisan because Lindsey Graham and Jeff Flake and Durbin are all the same party on this.
They are all, they do not stand for the people.
They stand for the Senate.
They do not stand for the people of this country.
Trump does.
This is Trump definitely standing right in the mainstream.
And they send this bipartisan deal to Trump.
And here's Sarah Sanders' reaction, cut three.
I'd like to leave no doubt where the White House stands on the Flake, Graham, and Durban Agreement on Immigration Reform.
In the bipartisan meeting here at the White House two weeks ago, we outlined a path forward on four issues.
Serious border security, an end to chain migration, the cancellation of the outdated and unsafe visa lottery, and a permanent solution to DACA.
Unfortunately, the Flake-Graham-Durbin agreement does not meet these benchmarks.
In fact, it would not secure our border, encourage more illegal immigration, increase chain migration, and retain the visa lottery system.
In short, it's totally unacceptable to the president and should be declared dead on arrival.
The president has been extraordinarily consistent on the immigration and what his priorities are.
His views are shared by the vast majority of the American people and have bipartisan support in the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives.
All true.
You know, this is why I never care about the sex stuff.
And I have to say, you know, they're attacking the evangelicals, some of whom are letting Trump off the hook on his sexual shenanigans.
But I've always been this way.
They can't attack me on hypocrisy.
I was this way with Clinton, too.
This is not the thing that I care about.
So now there's the story about a porn star who was spanking Trump with a Forbes magazine.
My reaction to that was, Forbes, you know.
But if the guy is speaking for the people, if he is speaking for the people and the people are right, I mean, if the people are not being fascist, they're being very sensible, they're the ones who are being rational.
They're the ones who are being logical.
Lindsey Graham is not.
And Chuck Schumer, when he does his crying routine and the tears running down the face of the Statue of Liberty, this is not rational.
People are being so much more rational than the elites.
It really is nuts.
And this is also true on this scandal or possible scandal within the FBI.
You know, we talked about this a lot yesterday about these texts that came out between these FBI lovers in which it seemed clear that Loretta Lynch, right, blandly sinister Attorney General Loretta Lynch, that when she sat down on the tarmac and met with Bill Clinton on that tarmac in July 2016, she already knew, she already knew that Comey was going to clear Hillary Clinton.
And it really makes it look as if that meeting, look, I don't know this.
I'm not saying this is a definite thing.
I'm not saying this is exactly what's happening, but I'm just saying, look, this is what it looks like at a glance.
It looks like she sat down with him to give him the thumbs up, to say, it's all going to be fine.
I can't send you an email, so I'll meet with you personally.
I'm going to give you a wink and a nod.
It's all going to be fine.
And this, by the way, by the way, is completely out of keeping with what Comey, James Comey, the former FBI director, testified when he said there was no coordination.
Here's Comey testifying that he did not tell Loretta Lynch what he was going to do.
And then the capper was, and I'm not picking on the Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, who I like very much, but her meeting with President Clinton on that airplane was the capper for me.
And I then said, you know what?
The department cannot by itself credibly end this.
The best chance we have as a justice system is if I do something I never imagined before, step away from them and tell the American people, look, here's what the FBI did, here's what we found, here's what we think.
And that that offered us the best chance of the American people believing in the system that it was done in a credible way.
That was a hard call for me to make to call the Attorney General that morning and say, I'm about to do a press conference and I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to say.
And I said to her, I hope someday you'll understand why I think I have to do this.
But look, I wasn't loving this.
So according to the guy who was running Strzok, the guy who was running the investigation, Hillary Clinton, who was at the top level of that investigation, Loretta Rynch already knew what he was going to do, which means either Comey was out of touch or he was not telling the truth to that committee just there.
So I mean, it's a story.
And look, again, I'm just telling you what it looks like.
I do not know, but it is a news story.
And how many people hearing that five months, five crucial months of these text messages have disappeared?
How many people who hear that are going to go like, well, it was an accident?
Is that what people are really going to think?
We don't know because the networks won't report it.
ABC still isn't reporting it.
I didn't see a single story about it in the New York Times.
I'm not saying they didn't do it because maybe it was buried somewhere on page C23 or something like that, but I didn't see any story about it there.
They're obviously keeping it down.
Let me just play you a brief audio clip of NPR because NPR is the core of this elites.
You know, they think they're fair.
They think they've got it right.
This is NPR reporter Ryan Lucas being interviewed about what this story means.
And listen to some key things.
Let me tell you before I run it.
They always, whenever the left-wing media wants to cover something up, they always say, well, the Republicans are making a big fuss about it.
They don't just tell you the story, right?
It's just, it's Republicans are making a big fuss about it.
When Democrats are making a big fuss about it, they don't tell you that.
Then they tell you the two sides as if the two sides were equally balanced, which would be fine if they didn't start with saying it's really Republicans who are building this up.
They ascribe it all to Republican political maneuvering and they leave out crucial facts.
Just listen to this piece of NPR.
It is a masterpiece of propaganda that actually believes it's the news.
So Republicans have been pushing this memo at a time when the special counsel's investigation is going forward.
Secret Meetings Unveiled00:05:28
They've also been really playing up some text messages between an FBI investigator and a lawyer at the Bureau.
What's going on there?
That's right.
The president himself alluded to that yesterday on Twitter.
These are texts between an investigator who is a senior FBI official involved in the Hillary Clinton email investigation in the Russia probe and an FBI lawyer.
The Justice Department has provided the text to Congress.
There are texts from about a five-month stretch that were missing.
The Justice Department says this was because of a technical glitch when the FBI upgraded its phones.
But again, the focus on the text and the memo are both part of basically a long-running effort by some Republicans, particularly in the House, to paint the FBI and the Mueller team as politically biased.
So he doesn't mention that they were having an affair.
It's just an FBI agent and a lawyer.
He doesn't mention that they have to wring these texts out of the Justice Department.
They didn't just hand oh, yeah, here's everything we got.
It took them a long time to get them out.
He doesn't mention, you know, he talks about the fact that these emails disappear.
He doesn't mention that it's a crucial time in this timeline.
He doesn't mention any of this stuff.
And again, I am not saying that there was a conspiracy to get Donald Trump at the FBI.
I'm saying that there is evidence that there might have been.
And some of the people who have seen more of this evidence are saying that there might have been.
You know, I have to play this.
I wasn't going to, but I got it.
Senator Ron Johnson was on the Brett Baer show yesterday.
And if you can see this video, it's great because he says something that Bear hasn't heard before.
And you got to remember, Baer is a reporter.
He used to be a reporter.
Now he's an anchorman.
So he's got to run the show.
But the reporter thing goes off in his head.
And you can just see it.
It's like a little flare.
It's like a little, you know, like that volcano in the Philippines.
You can just see the reporter thing goes off in his head because he hears a piece of information he didn't have before and he catches Johnson out.
Listen to this.
So what this is all about is further evidence of corruption, more than bias, but corruption at the highest levels of the FBI.
And that secret society, we have an informant that's talking about a group that were holding secret meetings off-site.
There's so much smoke here.
There's so much suspicion.
Let's stop there.
A secret society.
Secret meetings off-site of the Justice Department.
Correct.
And you have an informant saying that.
Yes.
Is there anything more about that?
No, we have to dig into it.
This is not a distraction.
Again, this is biased, potentially corruption at the highest levels of the FBI that is now investigating.
And by the way, Robert Mueller used to run the FBI.
He is in no position to do an investigation over this kind of misconduct.
So I think at this point in time, we probably should be looking at a special counsel to undertake this investigation, but Congress is going to have to continue to dig.
Brett Baer, he's the last television newsman.
Well, Jim Acosta is running around making a fool of himself and parading himself.
Brett Baer is actually covering the news.
You can just see, wait, wait, you got an informant that there were secret meetings off site in the Justice Department?
Anything else about that?
And he's still the anchorman, so he's running the show.
But I love that.
I just love that when that torch off.
Listen, all I'm saying is it's a story.
The truth doesn't come out if they don't cover it, right?
That's how the truth comes out.
That's how they covered up the IRS scandal in the Obama administration is the press just dropped it.
So it's cover the, you know, cover the story, find out where the truth lies, put pressure on the government.
That's what journalists do.
And I hate this argument about, oh, our trusted institute will lose trust in our institutions.
If our institutions don't deserve trust, let's clean them out and start again.
That's how you work.
That's how democracy works.
These guys are not above the law.
I do not care who they are.
I do not care about trusting them.
I care about getting at the truth.
And the government and the media, the media, the Senate, and the movie industry are all separate from the voice of the people, and they're trying to silence and ignore that voice.
Hey, speaking of the voice of the people, on Tuesday, January 30th, our president will speak to the nation in his second State of the Union address.
Remember that first one was great.
It was one of his best speeches ever.
And this is an exciting event.
And where would you watch it if not here at the Daily Wire, starting at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific?
We will be hanging out with you for the whole time leading up to, during, and after the address.
We'll be drinking, we'll be smoking, we'll be talking about every off-teleprompter remark.
You will hear everything we have to say, and we will make utter fools of ourselves and make utter fools of the government as well, which deserves it.
Catch live streams at thedailywire.com, DailyWire, Facebook, or Daily Wire, YouTube.
And you spend the evening with Ben and me and Knowles and Daily Wire, the God-King of the Daily Wire, will actually descend.
We have wires.
He insists on this.
We have wires.
We lower him from the ceiling.
Jeremy Boring, the God-King of the Daily Wire, will be lowered from the ceiling and will descend among us and will talk to us.
We will relentlessly mock everybody that we possibly can.
We'll also have some special guests who will come in.
And so stay tuned for that and find out who will drop by.
That's next Tuesday, January 30th.
We'll start at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific.
Follow us on Facebook and YouTube and get notified when we go live so we can spend every unforgettable moment together and even the forgettable ones.
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Why We Left Judaism00:06:35
And then you can be in the mailbag, which is a little uncomfortable.
But while you're there, you get to ask the questions and we will change your life on occasion for the better.
Come to TheDailyWire.com.
Okay, let's hear formerly non-pregnant Lindsay celebrate the mailbag.
Soon.
Soon we'll have a new, the Lindsay Jr. will be there to also scream, which I'm sure he or she is, what he or she will be doing.
All right, from Ashley to the infamous drinker of leftist tears, Mr. Clavin, I was raised in a Jewish household that was much more culturally Jewish than we were religious.
I had a bot mitzvah, which is a bar mitzvah for girls, and spent a lot of time in synagogue not knowing what was going on since the services were in Hebrew.
I remember that, by the way.
I spent a few years claiming to be spiritual, which I now realize was a cover for just not knowing what to believe in.
I'm now dating a wonderful Christian man who I fully intend to marry.
And he has taught me a great amount about Christianity that I was once unaware of.
We read your book, The Great Good Thing, together, and I found myself relating very much to your views on religion.
I feel stuck between trying to learn about Judaism to see if there was something that I was missing or learning about Christianity to see if it's possible to share a faith with my significant other and my future family.
And I have remained idle between those two places for several months.
Do you have any advice on how to move forward?
Well, yeah, Ashley, I mean, look, I can't tell you what to believe.
I can't tell you where to go.
But I can tell you this.
The fact that you're frozen like that, that you're paralyzed between the two, indicates that this is an emotional problem, not a theological problem.
And my guess, and it is a guess, but my guess is that you feel guilt for letting go of your Judaism and embracing Christianity.
And, you know, I can't tell you whether that's the right thing to do.
If you want to study it more, study it more.
I cannot tell.
I'm not going to tell you.
I mean, look, let me be honest.
I'm a Jewish convert to Christianity.
Of course, I think that's what you should do.
Of course, I think that's the right decision.
I didn't convert to Christianity for fun.
I converted to Christianity because I believe it is the living truth.
It is the actual literal truth of God's work in our world.
So obviously, that's the side I'm on.
But the one thing I can tell you for sure is this.
You have no obligation to anything but the truth, and you owe no debt to anyone but the Lord of life.
Okay?
You have no obligation to your family here.
You have no obligation to Judaism.
When I converted, people read my book, The Great Good Thing, and they wrote reviews online, including on sites like at PJ Media where I worked, telling me that I couldn't, I was not allowed to convert because I hadn't become a Jew yet.
I hadn't studied Judaism enough.
And my reaction to that was, huh, next time I'll consult you instead of the king of the universe.
It's like, I just thought, you don't get a say.
Nobody gets a say.
Follow the truth.
Follow joy.
Follow God.
That's what you should do.
And if you remain frozen, that's an emotional problem.
That's not a theological problem.
There's nothing to stop you from reading about Judaism if you want to, but if you feel this pull toward Christ, go toward Christ.
I did not really feel like a religious Jew until I found Christ.
That brought me into Judaism, which sounds like a contradiction, but as I hope you find out, it is not at all.
That's my answer: that you have no obligation except to God's call.
From Laurie, Dr. Clavenstone, I presume.
I know you're not a feminist.
I'm an anti-feminist.
And the complimentarian in me worries it's silly to ask this question.
Who are some female authors or poets you admire in the Western canon?
Do you think great authors have the same greatness, or are great male authors and great female authors different somehow?
Really good question.
You know, there are many women authors that I admire.
Look, so far, so far, most of the truly great authors have been men.
When I say great authors, I mean authors who wrote great work after great work after great work.
Guys like Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy.
The only one who stands up among them is Jane Austen.
She is the only person who wrote great work after great work after great work.
She wrote six novels.
Four of them are terrific.
She is a great genius.
But there are many women who wrote great books.
Not that, I shouldn't say many.
There are several women who wrote great books.
Middlemarch is a wonderful book.
Jane Eyre is a wonderful book.
Wuthering Heights, I'm not as fond of, but it's definitely up there among the great books.
One of my favorite authors living today is Donna Tarte.
And obviously, as more women have been able to write, more good writing has come out of women.
And so you're asking, is there a difference between the way men and women write?
It's a good question.
You know, I would say, yeah, there definitely is.
I can almost always tell.
I mean, I shouldn't say this as a brag, but when I'm reading an article, I can almost always tell within one paragraph whether I'm reading a man or a woman.
I think that when you read great women writers, though, they have, like Jane Austen, when they do movies of her books, they're always very fluffy and they're full of carriages and bonnets and all that.
You read her book, she's just as nasty as it's possible to be.
Very insightful, ironic.
I do think I stopped reading novels by women in the modern era because I found them all dishonest.
I found feminism had made them dishonest.
But a good woman writer, I will not say a good woman writer writes like a man.
Women write like women, and I'm not sure what that is exactly.
It is not about, it's not about emotionalism, it's not about interior life.
It may be a sort of attention to the detail of social interaction that defines them.
I mean, Henry James had that, but not like Jane Austen had it.
You know, I think that when I see, when I read women writers, the one thing they're really good at is that the very small details of the way people interact.
But I think each writer is his or her own person.
And I think that there's no essential difference between great male writing and great female writing.
I wouldn't want to limit that in any way, because a guy like Henry James is, in a way, a female writer.
He's a very feminine writer.
I think he's one of the great writers of all time, but he is a feminine writer.
And somebody like Jane Austen has insights that normally has a kind of nastiness and hardness that normally you would think would come from a man.
So it's very hard to, it's very hard to detail.
Like I said, Jane Austen is the only female writer I would call a great writer on the level of the greatest of male writers.
I don't think anybody has matched any female has matched her yet.
And by the way, just as a side note, I'm a big ghost story fan, and women have written some of the best ghost stories.
They write terrific ghost stories.
I don't know why, but they do.
Marriage Troubles and Ghosts00:05:04
From Here's another God question.
I try not to do too many of them, but from Samuel, dear Andrew, healer of broken souls, you suggest that one ought to pray in solitude to build his or her relationship with God, but what if one hears nothing even after many prayer sessions?
Surely at a certain point it can seem like one is praying to mere silence.
How can the religious battle the thoughts of hopelessness that seem to accompany the feeling of being far from God when traditional religious practices seem to fail?
Well, here's the one thing I can tell you: there is a God, and when you pray to him, he will answer you.
So, if you're not hearing him, the question is, why not?
Right?
I mean, that is follow faith.
You know, even sometimes when you don't feel faith, you can will faith.
I mean, by saying to yourself, what would it be like if I believed?
Well, if you believe there is a God, you believe that he answers you when you pray, ask yourself why you're not hearing him.
I would suspect that the reason that you're not hearing him is because you're not quieting yourself enough.
This is something that takes a little bit of practice because you want to project answers onto God.
You want to project even silence onto God.
You want to feel that God isn't there.
But if you just let yourself be quiet, especially after prayer, a lot of times the answers will come to you.
If you just let yourself go still inside, a lot of times you will start to find God, God's will for your life, God, how God is relating to you.
And again, I've talked about this many times, but you want to get rid of those things that you superimpose on God, like the face of your abusive father or the face of some authority figure in your life.
You want to get rid of those two.
It's a process, but trust that God is there.
Trust that He's answering you.
And if there's silence, ask yourself why you can't hear and start working on yourself.
And that will take you.
Every person has a path to God.
Every person comes fully equipped with a path to God.
It's like the accessory that everybody has.
So if you start to work on yourself, you'll find that path inside you.
Yeah, okay.
From Tiffany, I normally would not ask outsiders for advice, but I'm at a loss.
My husband and I were young when we got married.
I was 19 and he was 27.
We were both in the Army.
He's from California.
I'm from Tennessee.
We have three children together and have now been married for nine years.
So I'm assuming your children, I'm going to assume you had the children in wedlock and so the children are young.
As I've gotten older, my priorities have changed.
I'm tired of living in California.
I pay the bills and the cost of living is almost suffocating.
Boy, you got that right.
If I was to die today, my husband would have no clue what bills to pay.
I'm retired and my income will not change no matter where we live.
I've tried to live in California for seven years, but she wants to go back to Tennessee.
If we moved to Tennessee, we could live on my income alone.
My husband does not seem to care about the same things that I care about.
We've really started fighting about things when he told our children that Jesus wasn't real.
We've talked about a divorce and have agreed to the terms.
We still love each other, but our differences are becoming a real problem.
We both come from divorced homes and we don't want to put our children through that.
While we still have love for each other, we are afraid that if we stay together, we will start to hate each other.
Can we save our marriage?
Well, I don't know if you can save your marriage, obviously.
That's yet to be determined.
I can tell you this, though.
People look at this the wrong way.
They say that we have these problems and therefore our marriage is in trouble.
But the truth is actually the reverse.
Your marriage is in trouble and therefore you have these problems.
So the thing is, you want to work on the marriage.
The marriage is not you and it's not him.
It's a third thing.
It is devastating to young children when people break up.
Now there are things that trump that, addiction.
They usually say it's the three A's, addiction, adultery, and I can't remember what the last one is.
Abuse.
Those are the three things that trump that.
But if those things are not there and you say you still love each other and there might be a chance for you to get together, what I would say is work on the marriage and see if the other problems start to get less.
So what does that mean?
It means working on the way you communicate, the way you talk about things, the way you relate to your children.
It could be very helpful to get a third person, a therapist in here who can work with couples and teach them to communicate.
So many times, so many times in marriage, people are talking about, they're talking about one thing, but they're using words that describe another.
So you're having an argument about the paint in the living room, but you're really having an argument about the fact that you feel neglected or that your husband isn't working.
Why isn't your husband working?
You might be having all kinds of anger issues and not know why.
And sometimes a therapist, a marriage therapist, can help you with that.
But the thing is, I think the marriage is worth working.
I can't tell you, I promise you the marriage can be saved, but I can tell you that with young children, the marriage is worth working on to save.
And I think that the two of you should really do that, even if it means bringing in a third person, a counselor.
From Ali Andrew of the House of Clavin, Keeper of the Nine Realms, do you think Vito or Michael was the better Godfather and why?
I'm also curious if you prefer Godfather One or two.
This is an urgent, urgent question.
This is my last one I'll be able to take.
But I believe there are very, very, very few sequels that match the first movie.
And they famously say that Godfather 2 was one of those sequels.
Rebirth Of Christianity Metaphorically00:07:26
I do not believe that.
Godfather 1 is as close to a perfect movie as I've ever seen.
I believe it's, I think it may be the last great American movie that was ever made.
Godfather 2 is great because of the arc of Michael Corleone.
That's what makes it great.
But it's inherent in the Godfather 1.
Godfather 1 is just a brilliant, brilliant movie.
And I think Brando is brilliant.
And all the actors, what a cast, what a cast it has.
It's just a wonderful movie.
It is far, far better than the second film.
tickety-boo news.
So one of the things that I keep reading about, and I read a book, I finished a book over the weekend that I'm going to talk about tomorrow, and there's stuff I like that was one of these books.
But I'm hearing again and again intellectuals who are saying that they understand that the West is in trouble and Europe is actually collapsing because of the disconnect from Christianity.
And yet, as intellectuals, they just can't believe.
And the sense that we always get from our elites is that the world is secularizing.
It's only a matter of time before we do without God.
Fewer and fewer people are going to churches.
The churches of Europe are empty, and so on and so forth.
I read a couple of articles this week that really brought that into question.
Glenn Stanton over at The Federalist quotes a research paper by scholars at Harvard University and Indiana University at Bloomington, who wrote this piece, and I'm reading from the abstract of the actual research.
It says, recent research argues that the United States is secularizing, that this religious change is consistent with the secularization thesis, and that American religion is not exceptional.
But we show that rather than religion fading into irrelevance, as the secularization thesis would suggest, intense religion, strong affiliation, very frequent practice, literalism, and evangelicalism is persistent.
And in fact, only moderate religion is on the decline in the United States.
We also show that in comparable countries, intense religion is on the decline or already at very low levels.
And this is an absolute truth: that the decline, what they call the decline of religion, is actually the decline of liberal religion.
It's actually the decline of religion that can't stand up for itself and say what it has to say.
And, you know, religion doesn't have to be hateful, even though it does sometimes draw borders around moral activity.
Somebody wrote to me on Facebook the other day and said, How do you feel about gay marriage?
And I said, well, it's nice of you to ask, but I'm already married, because I actually don't think that religion is about, that the Christian religion, Christianity specifically, is about condemning other people or telling other people what they should be doing.
It is about finding what God's sacrifice means in your life and finding your way forward and becoming the kind of person who lives the way God wants him to live and does it almost naturally.
Another article was called, Is There a Christian Revival Starting in France?
This was from the paper The Week, and it was by Pascal Emmanuel Gobry.
And he says, yes, churches in the French countryside are desperately empty.
There are no young people there, but then there are no young people in the French countryside, period.
France is a modern country with an advanced economy, and that means its countryside is emptied.
And that means the church is built in an era when the country's sociological makeup was quite different.
Go empty.
But he says, my wife and I now live in an upper-cross neighborhood with all the churches full of upwardly mobile professionals.
When we were penniless grad students, we lived in a working-class neighborhood, and on Sunday, our church was packed with immigrant families and hipster gentrifiers.
It was only recently that I was struck by the fact that imperceptibly, the majority of my college and grad school friends who were Christmas and Easter Catholics when we met now report going to church every Sunday and praying regularly.
If you are a regular listener to the show, you know that I've been predicting for a long time that there will be a rebirth of Christianity from the top because the for two reasons.
One is that the arguments against it are collapsing.
Relativism, the arguments that have come to replace it, relativism, multiculturalism, these are collapsing.
They are inherently internally contradictory, and so they don't make any sense.
But the other thing is, is that for a long period of time, hundreds of years, the discovery of science actually operated maybe not logically, but apparently against religion.
So everything, when you started to explain that, no, you know, God doesn't come and with his finger move the planets around, but they move in a certain way, or, you know, that there are rules to science, it begins to seem, well, everything will be explained.
You know, now we know that the brain does certain things, the brain will explain everything, and so we don't need God anymore.
But in fact, science at the top and bottom is bottoming out into a new kind of science.
And I'm not trying to prove God through science.
I think that's ridiculous.
But I'm just saying that there's a new kind of science, including quantum physics, in which the perception, the perception of the observer changes the phenomenon.
And when you start to realize that the logic of big life doesn't necessarily hold at the extreme levels of life, you start to realize that a lot of what's in the gospel makes sense.
If the will of a person can change the state of nature, then the will of a special person, a godly person, might really change things to the point where he could heal, walk on water, actually triumph over death.
All these things become more possible and may even help explain some of the things that scientists are actually confused about.
The presence of an overarching will, a God, might actually answer some of the questions.
And this is not God of the gaps.
This is a God of science that might answer some of these questions.
The fact is, the fact is, Christianity, at least as I understand it, makes perfect sense.
I do not live in, I live in a world that has an underlying supernatural aspect, but I do not live in a world of superstition.
I do not live in a world of magic.
All of those things, I think I was more superstitious before I became a Christian.
You know, with Christ, a lot of times, I think actually Jesus says something like this.
It's not that seeing is believing.
It's believing is seeing.
That when you embrace Christ, God through Christ, you start to realize one of my biggest fears was that I would become less realistic.
I have in fact become more realistic.
And I think that that is a sign that God is not metaphorical.
I shouldn't say that.
All things are metaphorical.
Language itself is metaphorical.
And flesh is a metaphor for the spirit.
And God in flesh is a metaphor for himself.
And so it is metaphorical, but that doesn't mean it didn't literally happen.
I think when a metaphor is that perfect, when it describes the world that well, I think that there is every chance that the metaphor itself is literally real.
And so I just think that there's reason behind religion that does not back the reason of elite secularism and relativism.
And I think keep watching these signs because I'm telling you, this thing is coming.
It's going to be a wave.
It's going to come from intellectuals as well as ordinary people.
And if it's happening in France, one of the least religious countries in the West, it will soon be happening everywhere.
So that's good news.
Tickety boo news.
All right.
Tomorrow we have Andy Weirs with us, right?
Well, he's going to run next week.
Tomorrow we have Henry Olson.
Oh, we have Henry Olson.
Great.
Henry Olson, one of the great electoral observers.
We'll talk to him about the midterms and the elections coming up and how things are going for both the GOP and the Democrats.
So that should be interesting.
Henry Olson On Midterms00:00:39
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'll see you then.
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