Andrew Clavin dissects Trump’s National Prayer Breakfast pivot—his newfound solemnity masking media hysteria over the Rob Porter scandal, which he frames as a deliberate distraction from FBI surveillance and Obama-era DOJ corruption. Joanna Hyatt of Live Action argues 75% of Americans now support first-trimester abortion bans, citing Maris polling, while debunking back-alley myths and pushing graphic anti-abortion videos to shift cultural tides. Meanwhile, Clavin pivots to Pre-Raphaelite gothic tragedy—Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s exhumation of his opium-addicted muse Elizabeth Siddal to reclaim lost poems—before teasing Man of the Woods and Justin Timberlake’s fatherhood. The episode ties Trump’s pragmatism, pro-life momentum, and Victorian macabre into a critique of media obsession and generational change. [Automatically generated summary]
You know those times when you have so much to say, you don't know where to start?
This is one of them.
Going to the prayer breakfast in D.C., speaking to so many people of faith, watching Trump speak, it gave me so much to think about.
I've hardly processed it yet.
But at the same time, I want to talk about the ongoing Nixonian cover-up by our news media, who continue to do everything they can to hide and minimize the abuses of power of the Obama administration abuses that continue to haunt us today.
A case in point is the coverage of Rob Porter, the Trump staffer who's resigned after two of his ex-wives claimed he beat them up.
Now, just to be clear, if anyone I worked with beat his wife, not only would I expect management to fire them, I personally would pick them up by the ankles and repeatedly smack the top of their heads into the sidewalk.
I hope you're listening, Knowles.
That's a joke.
I'm not joking about what I would do, but I'm joking about Knowles, never in a billion years.
So, my point is: that Porter is a scandal, but it's not a big government scandal because whatever happens, it won't make you richer or poorer, safer or more exposed, freer or less free.
It doesn't speak into some massive corruption within the government.
It's just a major competence foul-up.
But the left sees it as a way of taking your mind off the FBI scandal, continuing to poison women's minds against Trump, and maybe getting rid of John Kelly because he's doing such a good job.
As I was traveling home in the plane last night, I was able to switch back and forth between Fox News and CNN on mid-air satellite TV because we live in an age of miracles.
Fox News covered the new budget, CNN covered Rob Porter.
Fox News covered Rob Porter, CNN covered Rob Porter.
Fox News went on to cover the war in Syria.
CNN covered Rob Porter.
Fox News covered the FISA scandal.
CNN covered Rob Porter.
After a while, I began to think I was going to switch over to CNN and see Don Lemon swinging a watch back and forth saying, You're growing sleepy.
You will forget the corruption in Obama's Justice Department.
You will think only of Rob Porter.
What's interesting to me about this is after watching Trump at the prayer breakfast, it's obvious that the president has learned how to change his tune since a year ago.
But the news media continues to sound like this.
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.
Ship-shaped tipsy-topsy, you're 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, my friend Joanna Hyatt will be with us today.
She's working with live action who are doing taking the fight against abortion in a really interesting, different cultural direction.
And she is, of course, she is one of the most eloquent people I know and really talks about this well.
Make-To-Order Suits00:02:22
So I look forward to that.
And we will stay on just because that's the kind of hairpins we are here.
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But you should subscribe just because that's the kind of hairpins we are.
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Presidency's Elevating Influence00:15:34
Maybe not some of you, but most of you will be proud to have you.
So, all right, I went to the prayer breakfast.
I have to talk about this first.
And it was amazing.
You know, it was amazingly uplifting.
You know, you're just in a hotel with thousands of people of faith gathered together to talk about their faith experiences.
I went to, there is a media dinner before.
I spoke at that media dinner last year.
And it was one of the most successful speeches I think I've ever given.
But at the same time, it was nice to go back there and listen to other people without being terrified of having to speak in public.
So I went to that, and then I went to the prayer breakfast where Trump and other congressmen and people of faith speak.
You know, recently, because I'm preparing for what I hope will be the second season of Another Kingdom, I've been going back and reading a lot of the books that inspired me when I was younger about King Arthur and a lot of the legends from that period because a lot of Another Kingdom takes place in a sort of pseudo-medieval world.
And, you know, it's interesting when you go back and read classic literature.
And I'm reading some of the philosophy that shaped me as a young person.
I'm rereading a lot of things.
And it improves your mind.
And when I say that, what I mean is it gets you out of that Twitter social media craziness where everything is about the moment and everything.
And it suddenly returns you to the important things in life.
Because the fact is, the fact is, listening to Aristotle figure out what's right is more interesting and deeper and more relevant than listening to a brain scientist explain to you how the brain thinks about what's right.
You know, that's really interesting, and I'm thrilled we're doing it.
I'm thrilled that we live in a world of such scientific knowledge and technological miracles.
But it's more important what Aristotle was actually doing.
So going back into that world really is elevating.
And the same thing was true with this faith gathering, is that when you talk to people, and I've noticed this before, but I just really, it really came home to me again.
When you talk to people of faith, you are talking to people.
They're not better than people of no faith.
They don't pretend to be.
They're not more moral.
Anybody can be moral.
Anyone can behave well.
That's not the point.
They are living a life that is deeper, richer, truer.
The things they think about are more real, more relevant, more meaningful, more profound.
I mean, everything.
And it doesn't matter whether they're intellectual people or non-intellectual people.
When you sit and talk to them, you can talk to anyone about faith and have a deeper conversation.
And, you know, sometimes in the mailbag, we get these questions from people who think they're being clever.
They raise what they think are paradoxes or contradictions or things to disprove faith, as if people haven't been doing that for thousands of years.
They think they just came up with the big idea, you know, but they send it to you.
And the thing is, those questions do require intelligence and cleverness, but faith requires something much deeper and richer than cleverness and intelligence, which after all is only one of the gifts that people got.
So Trump, like I said this yesterday, but just to repeat it, last year, or the day before yesterday I was on, Trump was like a guy who had been invited to the big boys table but didn't know how to use the silverware, didn't know which fork and knife to use.
This year, he knows.
Last year, after beautiful speeches of people of faith, this year, like Steve Scalise, the congressman who was shot, was there, and a soldier who had lost his eyesight in Iraq and a bombing, you know, these very inspiring guys.
And last year, after this very inspiring speech by Barry Black, the Senate chaplain, Trump got up and made this kind of cynical, you know, remark about how, yeah, maybe we should pray for Arnold Schwarzenegger because his ratings are so bad in the apprentice.
That Trump is gone.
I mean, here's just a cut of him.
And listen to this.
This is a different Trump than we saw a year ago or even six months ago.
Our rights are not given to us by man.
Our rights come from our Creator.
No matter what, no earthly force can take those rights away.
That is a different tone.
And I noticed this.
We all notice this in the State of the Union, that he's talking quieter.
He's not hitting those big heights.
He's not adding all the wonderful, wonderful, wonderful adjectives as before.
There are only two possible reasons for this.
One is he's bored with the presidency.
He's had it with the constraints of democratic governance.
And he's bored and he's getting tired and he's old.
And if he's not interested, he just starts to talk like that.
The other reason, which seems far, far, far more likely from a guy like Trump, is that he's doing what works.
Trump is at his core.
He is a capitalist.
And he's almost in some ways the avatar of capitalism.
And I'll talk about that in a minute because it really is important.
But he does what works.
That doesn't always, that has nothing to do with morality.
That has nothing to do with being a high or low person.
But he's figured out that when he speaks as president to a faith gathering, he has to be serious.
He has to be quiet.
He has to talk about faith.
It's not about Arnold Schwarzenegger's ratings, okay?
Now you can say, and of course I would say that that doesn't mean his character has changed.
But that's only partly true.
You know, Kurt Vonnegut wrote a book called Mother Night, and the theme of Mother Night is you become what you pretend to be.
And it's very possible.
I mean, the presidency, people have noticed this through the years, that the presidency elevates people, and it's very possible that a Trump who pretends to be the president will start to become, in part, the president.
But let's just say, let's be cynical and just say his character remains the same, but he's changed.
And he's singing a different tune.
He's doing the presidency, okay?
The press has not changed at all.
They have not noticed for a moment that they have been hysterical from the minute he was elected, from the minute they lost the election, from the minute this guy who they didn't understand, didn't know, and didn't want, became president.
They have been hysterical.
Not just the press, but the press is the mouthpiece of the Democrat Party, the Democrat Party in general.
Dan Henninger at the Wall Street Journal, he wrote a really good piece today called The Trump Panic.
And he says, historians will record that the Trump panic gripped all Democrats, some Republicans, scores of intellectuals, foreign leaders, journalists, and members of U.S. security agencies.
On Election Day, two FBI officials, our friends Romeo Peters Strzok of the Bureau's counterintelligence division and Juliet Lisa Page, his lover, exchanged text messages.
Page said, OMG, this is effing terrifying.
And Strzzok responded, OMG, I am so depressed.
Henninger goes on to say, recall how routine it was then to hear or read that the new U.S. president resembled Hitler or Mussolini.
Democracy was at risk, even as such non-Hitlerian pillars as Jim Mattis, Rex Tillerson, and Gary Cohn joined the government.
And you can still see this overheated rhetoric is in their minds.
This idea that Trump is just absolutely beyond the beyond is in their minds.
Here is Eric Holder, who they say is thinking of running for president.
I can't believe that.
But this is the guy who is the first Attorney General to be held in contempt of Congress for stonewalling them about what the administration was doing.
So he exemplifies the corruption of the Obama administration.
He himself called himself Obama's wingman.
Just stop for a minute and imagine Jeff Session saying, I'm Trump's wingman.
This is the Attorney General saying this.
He stonewalled Congress.
He was held in contempt.
Now, this is what he's saying about Trump.
Would you make a better president?
How was that?
It was pretty good the way I snuck that in there, right?
That's pretty good.
I think any one of my kids would make a better president than Donald Trump.
But I think there are any number of people who would be a better president than the person we now have in the White House who has, as I said, broken through those norms, conducted himself in a way that's inconsistent with what's best about this nation, labeled people in very inappropriate ways, use inappropriate terms when talking about countries, turning his back on our immigrant heritage.
Yeah, there are any number of people who I think would be a better president than Donald Trump.
Now, Trump has done some of those things.
He has, you know, violated norms of conversation and argument, but he hasn't made like a disastrous deal with Iran.
You know, he hasn't pulled out of the Middle East and set it like ISIS on fire to burn the Middle East.
He didn't sit on our economy in the name of fundamentally transforming the greatest, freest, most powerful, most generous country on earth.
He didn't do any of those things.
So the need for panic is a little bit off the grid.
So under this panic, Henninger goes on to talk about this, the insulated and, I believe, corrupt Obama, FBI, DOJ lost its way and started to spy on Americans and spy on an opposing political campaign because they were in a panic.
And so did the media.
The media had already become so partisan, even under Clinton, really, they had become partisan, certainly under Bush.
But as they became partisan in support of Democrats and against Republicans, Obama used that to lure them down the road of corruption because his administration was so corrupt they had to close their eyes to corruption.
These are reporters.
Their whole instinct, their whole purpose in life is to get dirt on powerful people.
And yet that was suppressed, not so much by the reporters, but by their bosses.
And now it's suppressed by the reporters too.
They have learned that their job depends on covering up for Obama.
Old reporters would have quit if they were told not to cover stuff like this.
Now that's not going to happen.
They're going to go out and do what they do.
Cheryl Atkison, the last reporter in America, she had this incredible description of the press, and it is exactly accurate.
We have invited some of the propagandists into our newsrooms.
We allow them to dictate the talking points and messages du jour.
And it's getting more difficult, I think, to find sort of down-the-middle unbiased reporting.
I've never seen anything like it.
In fact, I commented that, you know, I've never in my lifetime seen open government groups and journalists so uncurious and begging not to be told about alleged or supposed violations of citizens' rights.
She's right.
They are begging on air.
We see them on CNN, in the New York Times, at the networks.
We see them begging not to be told.
Because why?
Because if they're told that the Obama administration was corrupt as it was, they're also being told that they let it happen.
And so, as I've said before, you know, once you start to rationalize your bad behavior, that's how you get worse.
If they said, you know what, we blew the Obama administration in the name of our ideology and racial pathology, then they could start to cover Trump as they should.
And there's plenty to cover about Trump, good and bad.
Some of the things he's accomplished have been absolutely terrific.
Some things obviously flawed.
Now we're seeing stuff about Trump that we've been worried about, we conservatives have been worried about.
We see with this the new government funding bill is basically paving the way for two years of funding the government, pushing, they say, the deficit up to Obama-era levels.
Now, I'm a little bit, I have to say, I'm a little bit doubtful about this because I think they are misreading, they're miscalculating the effect of the tax cuts.
What they always say is, well, if you cut taxes by a dollar, it's going to raise the deficit by a dollar because now we don't have that dollar.
But the truth is, when you cut taxes, the economy booms, you collect more taxes.
That's almost always true.
It's on a graph, you know, you can cut too many taxes.
But I do think that that will cut down the deficit if they use it to that effect.
And also, the funding that they're approving in this new bill is not the funding that makes us bankrupt, which is entitlement funding.
It's the funding that you can't turn off, the spigot you can't turn off.
That's what needs to be done.
But Trump has promised not to do it.
So he's very big on keeping his promises to his base.
I don't know if he won't do it.
I don't know if he won't turn around and say, look, I made a mistake.
We have to do some of this stuff.
But right now, this is a scary bill that raises spending to a catastrophic level.
So Rand Paul, who sometimes I like and sometimes I think is a showboat, tried to hold this bill up through procedural measures.
And he made a speech, I have to say, that really did ring true, which is cut number six.
When the Democrats are in power, Republicans appear to be the Conservative Party.
But when Republicans are in power, it seems there is no Conservative Party.
You see, opposition seems to bring people together and they know what they're not for, but then they get in power and they decide, hmm, we're just going to spend that money too.
We're going to send that money to our friends this time.
The hypocrisy hangs in the air and chokes anyone with a sense of decency or intellectual honesty.
The right cries out, our military is hollowed out.
EVA spending has more than doubled since 2001.
The left is no better.
Democrats don't oppose the military money as long as they can get some for themselves.
As long as they can get some for their pet causes.
The dirty little secret is that by and large, both parties don't care about the debt.
So that's Rand Paul, and he's right that there's a lot of not paying attention to the debt because present money is what gets you elected.
And by the time the debt comes due, in the time the debt really hurts us, you'll be out of office and you don't care anymore.
That's how LA is run.
That's how California is run entirely.
We're completely broke because we can't pay off our pension funds.
And they're going to have to tax people in all kinds of ways to pay off those pension funds.
And ultimately, the guys waiting for their pensions are going to get screwed.
But we keep talking about how we have this wonderful surplus because we're taxing people so much.
And it really is a question of time.
So Paul is right about this.
Meanwhile, the left was against this because it doesn't attach the DACA, the DREAMer bill to the spending, right?
That's what they wanted.
So Nancy Pelosi got up and just made a complete buffoon of her.
She can't make a buffoon of herself.
She's already there.
But she did this thing where she, this, Mr. Smith goes to Washington thing where she got up and filibustered and talked about how wonderful the dreamers are.
And I just have to play this one clip because there you have Rand Paul talking sense, right?
And that's the right.
And now on the left, Nancy Pelosi talking unbelievable crap, but she's talking about how wonderful Mexican people are, I guess.
I'm reminded of my own grandson.
He had a very close friend.
His name is Antonio.
He's from Guatemala.
And he has beautiful tan skin, beautiful brown eyes, and the rest.
And this was such a proud day for me because when my grandson blew out the candles on his cake, they said, did you make a wish?
And he said, yes, I made a wish.
He said, well, what is your wish?
He said, I wish I had brown skin and brown eyes like Antonio.
So beautiful.
So beautiful.
The beauty is in the mix.
So would it have been beautiful if Antonio wished to have white skin?
I mean, it's just nuts.
I don't want to insult the woman's grandson, but I mean, like, oh, come on.
She is absolutely out of her mind.
But here's the thing.
Here's the thing about Trump, because the reason he doesn't care about debt the way I think he should, because debts, you know, you can't pay off government debt.
It's not like we're supposed to be out of debt.
It's just that out-of-control debt will destroy a country like it did Greece.
It will destroy trust in your country and trust in, you know, in governance and trust in your monetary system.
Capitalism's Dangers00:04:36
But Trump doesn't care because he is the ultimate capitalism.
And capitalism, which people don't always understand, is all about debt.
It is all about credit.
And there's good about that and there's bad about that.
Here's Trump in the campaign.
Let's just remind you what he said about debt.
He was talking about the fact, and this was something the press couldn't understand at all, that interest rates are definitely going to go up and so we can buy back our debt at a discount.
But here is what he said about debt that made a lot of news at the time.
You know, I'm the king of debt.
understand debt better than probably anybody.
I know how to deal with debt.
So I love debt.
But you know, debt is tricky and it's dangerous.
But let me just tell you, if there's a chance to buy back debt at a discount, you have to.
In other words, interest rates go up and the bonds go down and you can buy debt.
That's what I'm talking about.
So Trump is absolutely right about this.
But the essential thing that he said is that he loves debt, but debt is dangerous, okay?
So let's go back to what I said before about Trump being the living spirit of capitalism.
He is the avatar of capitalism.
Now, capitalism, you know, I love capitalism.
It has lifted more people out of poverty than any other human system ever has.
I mean, it is on track to eliminate poverty.
It has expanded the sciences because capitalism needs the sciences in order to expand and the sciences need capitalism in order to fund what they do.
Capitalism includes hucksterism, overblown sales techniques.
It's the best.
It's the biggest.
It's the greatest.
Come and buy it.
That's Donald Trump.
Capitalism involves a certain amount of amorality and cynicism, like selling trucks with Martin Luther King speeches, you know, like, yeah, you know, Martin Luther King, buy my truck.
You know, Martin Luther King said this, so buy my truck.
Capitalism does that, and Trump is like that.
Capitalism sometimes doesn't care what's right or wrong.
It just cares what works.
Trump can be like that too.
But, but, okay, capitalism is also faith in the future.
That is the only reason capitalism exists is because people will loan money to other people to take their business, to begin their businesses, in the faith and hope that that business is going to succeed and expand and create enough money to pay back that debt with interest.
That is the essence of capitalism.
Capitalism is based on trust.
That's why when people get nervous, the stock market drops because they're losing their trust.
Now, hopefully they only lose it for a day, but they keep it in the overall system that's going forward.
Capitalism is about faith in the future.
And that is, yes, that includes a certain amount of cheerleading and carnival barking and a certain amount of risk, too, but it also involves hope and faith.
Progressives are locked in the past.
Before there was technology and science and things were changing, you could make the argument that wealth was a zero-sum game.
You could make the argument that the prince in his tower, in his palace, was in his palace because you were out in the street starving.
You could make that argument.
But ever since capitalism, you can't make that argument anymore because when the princes of capitalism make money, they don't sit around in a tower.
They reinvest it and they hire you to fly their private planes and take care of their pools and their houses.
And they hire the rest of us, I should say, to do those things.
And capitalism grows and it grows and grows.
Progressives are lost in the past with this zero-sum, and they're not hopeful.
I've been playing that stuff all week.
It's all about, oh my God, don't touch the earth because the earth will run out.
Don't do this.
Don't make too much money because then you're evil and people will be poor.
Don't go into space.
There are too many problems here.
They want us to languish in fear and real conservatism, trying to conserve what we have instead of trying to go out and get more.
And that's why they don't trust the people, because the people invent stuff.
The people improve things.
Left alone, if you give them capitalism, the people will make new stuff.
They'll go in their garage and say, hey, I wonder if I could make a machine that can add.
You know, I wonder if I can make a machine that can talk around the world in a single second.
Trump is right about two things.
Debt is dangerous, but debt is great.
Credit is great.
It's the basis of our system.
But it's dangerous because faith is dangerous and the future is dangerous and change is dangerous and giving power to the people is dangerous.
And I kind of wonder if that, more than anything else, is what Trump hysteria is all about.
People who are afraid of the future, people who are afraid of the people, people who are afraid of trusting in the capitalist system.
There are all kinds of things about Trump that I dislike.
Rape and Incest Arguments00:15:14
I've talked about this a lot.
But his capitalism is not one of them.
Capitalism does make things better, even as it is ugly and huckstery and fake.
And Trump, carnival barker that he is, has so far made this country better.
And there's just no arguing that.
This is a better country than it was a year ago.
It is working better.
Things are going better.
And I hope that continues.
We will see.
All right.
Before I get to Joanna Hyatt, who I want to get to in just a second, I have to talk about the Valentine's Day conversation.
I don't know if you saw Knowles' video for this.
It is one of the funniest things I've ever seen.
I won't put it on because it's all visual.
And if you're listening, you won't be able to understand it.
But it made me feel that I had degraded myself simply by working in the same building with the man.
No, Knowles, it's hilarious.
It's hilarious.
And what it's advertising is that on Wednesday, February 14th, which is Valentine's Day at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific, the conversation will stream live on the Daily Wire Facebook page and the Daily Wire YouTube channel and will be free for everyone to watch.
But subscribers will get to ask Knowles questions like, why are you here instead of in church on Ash Wednesday?
To ask questions as a subscriber, log into our website, dailywire.com, to watch the live stream and then head over to the conversation page.
I hope somebody will ask that question.
By the way, why are you here and where are the ashes on your head?
After that, just start typing into the Daily Wire chat box where Knowles will answer all live questions as they come in for an entire hour.
Once again, subscribe to get your questions answered by the sad and dateless Michael Knowles, who has nothing to do on Valentine's Day, but sit here and talk to you guys.
It's Wednesday, February 14th at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific.
Join the conversation.
All right.
So a couple of, about a week ago, two weeks ago, we had Andrew Hyatt on, the director of the new film, Peter, Paul, Apostle of Christ.
I mess up the title every single time.
It's going to be, that's Sony's big Easter release, Paul, the Apostle of Christ.
And when I first went to one of Andrew's screenings, this incredibly attractive, eloquent young lady came up to me and said, hi, I'm the sex lady.
And I thought, gee, I've dreamed about this day for 30 years, but I never thought it would really happen.
But Joanna Hyatt, Andrew's absolutely beautiful and intelligent and also beautiful wife, was the sex lady because she would go around giving speeches about responsible sex and how to treat yourself, how to treat your body, how to treat your soul.
She had a wonderful line.
She would say, there's no condom for the heart.
And I thought that was an absolutely brilliant line.
She is now the director of Strategic Partnerships for Live Action, a nonprofit that educates the public on abortion and the humanity of the pre-born.
They have terrific, very successful videos.
We'll talk to her about it.
Joe, it's wonderful to see you.
You're so kind, but you forgot to mention I was about 35 weeks pregnant when I said that.
Steve, were you?
See, I just, that's why you were so beautiful.
That's really good.
That's why you're so beautiful.
I feel like a beef whale at that point, but I knew what I was talking about, I guess.
I guess so.
I guess so.
Well, you look great still, and it's lovely to see you.
I always say I never see my friends.
I only interview them at this point.
Oh, you look great from 1,500 miles away.
It improves me tremendously.
So you're working with live action.
Who's the leader of live action?
Lila Rose.
That's right.
Lila Rose.
About 15 years ago.
And it's got this really interesting way of approaching this.
But I want to talk to you first about this recent vote in Congress that failed to outlaw abortion after 20 weeks, which I keep reminding people is five months.
Now, I looked at that failure and I asked myself, do they really want to do this?
And that's what I want to know.
Do you think that there's any political will to curtail abortion or stop it?
I think it's shocking to me how extreme the Democrats are, except for the three that did vote in favor of the bill.
But, you know, you've got a Maris poll just came out that showed three-quarters of Americans actually want to limit abortion to the first trimester.
So you've got the Democratic Party voting over here and the American public's on the other side of the spectrum.
And so I think they are so entrenched with the abortion lobby that they can't see even beyond what's best for them as a party.
Republicans, I think, do have the will to do it.
Not all of them.
Murkowski and Collins consistently vote in line with anything that promotes abortion, protects Planned Parenthood.
So we need to see a shakeup of the Senate before we're going to actually successfully, I think, jump some of these hurdles.
But you think it's possible?
You don't think this is just virtue signaling?
Okay.
I think it's possible because the people are in agreement with restricting abortion.
And so it's more alerting them to, hey, your senator, your congressman voted actually in a way that's very extreme and outside the norm and against what you believe.
So if you want to see changes, change who's in office.
You know, I mean, one of the things that always strikes me, I think it strikes everybody who deals with this subject, is that if it is true, as it seems logically it must be, that an unborn child is an actual human being, you know, an actual individual, not the mother, it's not the same DNA, it's not the same, it's not the same person.
What's happening in our country, which I think is, what, 3,500 abortions a day, is a catastrophe on a major scale.
I mean, I always tell people that while they're pulling down statues of Robert E. Lee, remember the statues of the people who supported this atrocious moment that we're in are also going to be pulled down when people catch on.
But it seems to me that somehow the culture has to shift before we can deal with this.
The mindset has to shift.
And that's kind of what, is that the idea of live action?
Yes.
And that's what we're working on is getting people to understand actually what is abortion and the humanity of the child.
And, you know, a couple years ago, we released a series of videos called abortion procedures.
And we used medically animated graphics because we know that seeing a real abortion can be quite traumatic.
And we wanted to invite people into the conversation who might not actually know what abortion is.
And so you see these four videos narrated by a former abortionist.
And the response has been overwhelming of people saying, I had no idea, this changed my mind.
And I think we assume everybody knows what abortion is, but we're actually not talking from a place of knowledge because that word has been kind of cleaned up and dressed up.
And one in particular that was striking to me, we took it to the streets and showed it to people.
And one guy said, he starts off with, you know, we asked him, are you pro-choice?
He goes, well, I'm hella liberal.
So of course I am.
And at the end, after watching one video, he says, I think we're more humane in the way that we put down animals than we treat these children.
And so being able to understand in three minutes what abortion is about is why live action exists to be able to help change people's hearts and minds.
Because you're right, we have to move the culture before we can really see politics respond to where people are at and a demand for a change on behalf of the unborn.
I mean, it always seems to me with the left that nothing drives them crazy so much as the truth, the direct truth.
And when I listen to the people at Planned Parenthood, and I have to believe that these are not like satanic evildoers who like delight in killing children.
I mean, I have to believe that they are not seeing what's right in front of their eyes.
But when I listen to them as a writer, when I listen to their use of language, the fact that they will not say the words, they will not talk about an unborn baby, they will not say, you know, they constantly direct words away from the facts of the matter.
So let me just run a couple of their arguments by you and just let me hear what you have to say.
I mean, the big one is always, well, if we outlaw abortion, there'll be these back alley abortion.
We'll go back to this world of back alley abortions and women will be dying all over the place.
Well, I think first of all, we have to remember that those numbers that they're based off of were trumped up.
When Larry Larder and Latter and Bernard Nathanson were pushing for abortion, they inflated the number of women that were getting these back alley abortions.
And those abortions were occurring, by the way, by very reputable doctors.
So it's not, for the most part, women were not taking coat hangers to themselves.
And the reality is right now, women, you know, go and get abortions because it's easy, it's accessible.
And in a lot of these places, it's really the only option presented.
Staggering numbers of women will say, I felt like abortion was my only choice.
I felt like I didn't have any other support.
And so the emphasis is saying, how do we come around a woman and really support her as a community?
There's a lot of government programs.
There's a lot of private organizations that do excellent work in walking through women in these situations.
And the left wants to completely discount that as though a woman is not strong enough or capable enough to walk through a pregnancy and raising a child.
And I think it's fear-mongering.
And you won't actually see massive amounts of women running to grab coat hangers and find doctors in back alleys.
What you're going to see is women who are saying, you know what?
I think there might be a better way.
And I think I can do it.
And we as a society can step up and support them and help them in that.
The argument that always stopped me, and it took me a long time to come around to where I am.
I was pro-abortion for a very long time.
And I've told this story before, but I lost an argument with a friend.
I argued with him till two in the morning and I walked away and I thought, gee, I lost that argument.
And it still took me over a decade to change my mind.
And the argument, the reason was, is I want people to be free.
I'm not an entire libertarian, but I'm mostly a libertarian.
And I want women to have the lives they want.
And I understand that there's a tremendous disconnect between, you know, a drunken hookup that you might have and suddenly not only have you got a baby inside you, but it's that guy's baby, you know, some clown's baby that you didn't even like to begin with.
So what is the argument?
I mean, when women say, hey, you know, you're forcing me to carry this child, how do you respond to that?
Well, I mean, first of all, no one's forcing anyone.
We're not bandaging you up and keeping that baby inside of you.
But I think, one, it's a disconnect of understanding rights.
You know, like that child also has rights.
And you as a woman got these rights to choose what to do with your body.
Well, when did those rights begin?
And if they didn't begin for you in the womb, then when at what point?
Because that same child that you are now carrying has rights that need to be on it.
As you mentioned, it's a separate person.
And, you know, cases of rape and incest, I understand that was not a choice, although that child still has value.
But in every other situation, you made the choices that got you to that place, which is really hard for us as a society to talk about.
And I think the root issue is that we don't want to address that our sort of freewheeling sexuality has gotten us to this place where we still have to deal with consequences.
And the left doesn't talk about that.
This total reproductive feminist movement wants to say, you know, your body, your choice, and yet you have to deal with what those choices lead to, just like you would with a sexually transmitted infection, you know, the emotional impact.
That's why I talk about no condom for your heart, because we don't talk about the emotional.
And so the idea is that in this case, you have two competing rights.
And, you know, the Constitution guarantees the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
If you don't have life, you can't pursue the others.
And so that child's right to life in this case, I would say, trumps your right to be able to take it or leave it.
And there are a lot, again, a lot of people who would happily take that child and raise it and love it.
But I think we have a lot of work to do stepping backwards to help people understand your choices have consequences.
You cannot separate sex from reproduction, however much you think you can.
I once very tentatively mentioned this to a feminist that, you know, babies don't just get in there by lightning.
You actually have to do something.
And she said to me, I don't know anybody who thinks that way.
And I said, I think that you may have hit upon the problem there.
But she never spoke to me again.
So I guess I overstepped on it.
Now, let's talk for just a minute.
I'm running out of time, but I do want to cover that one thing about rape and incest.
That's always the question that they ask pro-life candidates.
But they never ask the pro-choice candidates.
They never say, you know, are you in favor of aborting a child because it has red hair?
Because that's legal.
It's legal to abort a child because he's a Libra instead of a Capricorn.
So, I mean, they never ask him that question.
But how many, do you know how many abortions are due to rape and incest?
The numbers are that 1% of abortions are due to rape and incest.
And so those who, you know, there's actually a group called the 1% who are children who have been born out of rape and incest.
And they say our, like, our situation justifies the abortion of 99% of people.
And the tragedy is, you know, those 1%, their value, their inherent worth is not compromised by the circumstances of which they were conceived.
I mean, a lot of us were probably not expected, but our parents didn't say, oh, well, you know, because I didn't plan for you.
And so I think the problem is we have to acknowledge the horror of rape and incest.
Absolutely.
Like that, what that does to a woman is horrific.
But to try to fix one violence with a second violence is not going to fix the issue.
And in fact, it just leaves her further wounded instead of really offering help and healing and being able to take that life that she is now carrying.
And who knows what the potential is for that child?
Just because its father was a rapist does not mean it is going to grow up to be that.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm talking to Joanna Hyatt of the director of Strategic Partnerships for Live Action, run by Lila Rose.
I want to ask you one last question.
I think it was Gloria Steinem.
I won't be held to that, but she had this.
One of the few things she said that I actually agreed with was that a lot of women believe that abortion is justified in two cases, the health of the mother and their personal case.
And that was why she believed that abortion rights would never be overturned.
When you're looking at the future with the stuff Live Action is doing, are you hopeful?
Do you think that this is a fight we're going to win or not?
Yes, I do think it's a fight.
One, a thousand doctors internationally have said that there's no medically necessary case for a woman to abort her child in order to save life.
And so, you know, that argument's taken out.
And then I think once people begin to understand really the humanity of their child and also as we as society come around and support these women, then they're not going to see abortion as their only choice.
They're going to realize that there is hope and there are great and beautiful things that can come out of this.
And we're seeing a shift.
We have one of the most pro-life generations we've ever had in this country.
You have slowly, the Supreme Court is shifting in the right direction.
And so I do think it's just a matter of time and education, which is what Live Action is focused on, is educating people, this generation and the next, so that we do shift it.
And I do believe we're going to see changes potentially even in my lifetime, at the very least in my children's lifetime.
Elizabeth Siddle's Influence00:06:37
Wow.
From your mouth to God's ears.
Joanna Hyatt, thank you from Live Action.
It was really good talking to you.
I hope to see you soon.
Thanks, Drew.
Have a great day.
Bye-bye.
Well, that was hopeful.
I was happy to hear that.
All right, stuff I like.
We need stupid sounds for stuff I like.
There's always this thing comes up, but it's not.
You know, this week, I think it was this week, I talked about the painting Hylas and the Nymphs by John William Waterhouse.
It was taken down by the Manchester Museum, and I started talking kind of off the top of my head about the pre-Raphaelites, whom I love.
And they were a group in the 19th century, in the Victorian era, who believed that everything after Raphael lost the richness of the medieval and the Gothic.
It was kind of the Victorian era's sentimental version of the Romantic because they were trying to recapture what was being lost in the scientific revolution, which was the importance of the inner life of man, the legitimacy and the centrality of the inner life of man.
And one of my favorites of the pre-Raphaelites was Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
And you may know his name because his sister, Christina Rossetti, wrote the poem.
She was a wonderful poet, and she wrote the poem that became the Christmas Carol in the bleak midwinter.
And if you ever listen to the lyrics of that, you think like, oh, wow, those are really of another quality.
That was Christina.
He was also Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
He was very connected.
He was homeschooled and he was very connected to Romantic writings.
So he loved Edgar Allan Poe.
He loved Lord Byron.
And he was one of the guys who restored William Blake his posthumous reputation.
William Blake died without ever having sold, I think, that can't be right.
He was completely obscure when he died, one of the great English Romantic poets, a very strange guy, a visionary poet.
Everybody thought he was crazy.
But Dante Gabriel Rossetti collected his works and kind of restored his reputation posthumously.
He built, began to help build his reputation.
Now, in 1850, this is the part I want to get to, though.
In 1850, Rossetti met a woman named Elizabeth Siddle, and she became not only his model, she ultimately became his wife, and she became one of the models of all the pre-Raphaelites.
Just put up one of the pictures.
I sent in some of them.
This is her as Proserpina, Proserpine, whatever they called her.
Proserpina was the daughter of Ceres.
She was kidnapped by the king of Hades and brought underground.
And Ceres went in search of her, but when she finally recovered her, she'd already eaten.
Pluto had given her six seeds of a pomegranate to eat.
So every six months she had to go back underground, and every six months she came back to the top.
And Ceres, who was the goddess of grain, that's how we got the seasons, essentially, because while she was gone, she mourned, so there was no grain, there was no growth, it was winter, and when her daughter would come back to her, it would be summer.
And so if you look, if you can see it, this is Elizabeth Siddle with this incredibly beautiful red hair.
Give me another one, another one of the pictures that we put out.
Here she is as Beatrix, who was the muse of Dante, who helped guide him to heaven in the divine comedy.
So that's, of course, very meaningful because Dante, Gabriel Rossetti, shared the name with Dante, and so Elizabeth Siddle was his muse.
But the most famous painting of Elizabeth Siddle was not done by Rossetti.
It was done by Millais, John Millais, who painted this.
This is the famous picture of Ophelia, the drowned Ophelia, which in Hamlet, Queen Gertrude comes in and gives this description of how she gathered all these flowers and then lay there in her dress slowly.
She was mad, and her dress slowly filled with water, and then the water carried her down and she was drowned.
And that, again, is the beautiful Elizabeth Siddle.
Now, these guys were just like most male artists.
They were terrible people.
They were constantly on drugs.
They were constantly cheating on their women.
And Rossetti was no different.
This is my favorite story about, you'll see, it's kind of a grim story.
It's my favorite story about Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddle.
He really just treated her badly.
He cheated on her, and he would offer to marry her, and then at the last minute he would pull out.
And she answered this by continually getting sick.
And when he finally did marry her, they had to carry her to the wedding because she was so sick and wan and had lost so much weight.
But because she was constantly sick, she started taking laudanum.
Laudanum was opium.
It was just like today that you get addicted to opiates.
She got addicted to opiates, and she finally died of an overdose in 1862.
Now, Rossetti was absolutely shattered.
So when he buried her, he buried a journal with her that contained many of his poems because he was also a poet.
And he was not as good a poet as he was an artist, but his poetry became fairly famous.
She was buried in Highgate Cemetery, which if you've ever been to it is one of these wonderful Victorian cemeteries.
It looks like a living ghost story, okay?
But after a while, he couldn't stand the fact that he had buried his poetry.
And some of his friends were creating poetry, and they were becoming famous poets.
And he wanted to publish some new poems, but he didn't have the old poems to publish with them.
So he got permission to disinter the body so he could recover the poetry.
And he was so ashamed of this that, though he got legal permission to it, he went out in the dead of night.
Oh, he didn't go himself.
He sent his men out in the dead of night with torches and they dug up Elizabeth Siddle.
And because of the laudanum, she was very well preserved.
So she looked, and they said that her hair had grown.
Now, that actually doesn't happen.
Your hair doesn't grow after you die.
But what happens is you shrink, you know, you start to shrink.
So she had that lush, beautiful red hair.
And apparently they dug her up in the torches and all this stuff.
And they got back the poetry and they published the poetry, which was attacked.
It didn't do very well.
But they brought out the poetry in the dead of night in this wonderful Victoria.
It's like a Victorian ghost story.
Rossetti never got over this.
He was haunted by this for the rest of his life.
He was haunted by the guilt of having dug up Elizabeth Siddle and probably by the way he treated her as well.
But it's a wonderful, wonderful story.
If you've never experienced the pre-Raphaelites, you probably have without knowing it.
You probably have calendars with them on it.
But take a look, look them up, because they just made such beautiful, beautiful gothic, sentimental, but also wonderful paintings that took us back kind of into a medieval era with the new techniques that had come along since the Renaissance.
And they really are beautiful.
And Elizabeth Sittle was at the heart of many, many of their paintings.
Pre-Raphaelite Beauty00:02:29
All right, enough of that.
On to the Clavenless weekend.
I'm sorry if you haven't seen another, Listen to Another Kingdom, Listen to Another Kingdom, and that will take you through the Clavenless weekend.
We will end, as always, with some music.
You know, I never watched the Super Bowl halftime show, but I am actually kind of a fan of Justin Timberlake.
And the reason I'm a fan of Justin Timberlake is if you remember him, was it InSync?
He was one of these boy bands.
They always had that kind of like yearning, you know, thing where they were singing for 12-year-old girls and all this.
But Justin Timberlake actually had talent and he had a sense of humor about himself.
And he's actually grown as an artist.
So I went and listened to the signature, the title song of his new album.
And it's actually, he's just good, you know, and he says, it's called Man of the Woods.
And he says the whole album is really about his son, who is named Silas, which apparently means man of the woods.
Anyway, we'll end with that.
I am Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
The Clavenless weekend begins.
Survivors gather here on Monday.
and I'll see you then.
Been a minute since we had some time to breathe.
So if you see another side of me, that's okay because you know.
That's okay because you.
I hear the making up's fun.
But then your hands talking fingers walking down your legs.
Hey, there's the false that someone's knocking like they know.
Baby, don't you stop it?
There's so much in your hand slides down the light.
And girl, you know I brag about you.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Technical producer, Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
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