Andrew Clavin argues Billy Graham’s legacy—uniting millions through faith—exposes a modern crisis: secularism’s rise, fueled by figures like Steven Pinker and media exploitation of tragedies, has hollowed out meaning, worsening opioid deaths and despair. He counters materialist claims (e.g., Sam Harris’s text conflicts) with personal testimonies like Louis Zamperini’s, framing faith as a proven antidote to nihilism. The episode ties cultural decline to GOP complicity in debt expansion, evangelical infighting, and Hollywood’s loss of optimism, ending with a satirical jab at "exorcist" Rachel Stavis—hinting deeper conspiracies ahead. [Automatically generated summary]
So Billy Graham is dead, the evangelical preacher.
He was 99 years old.
So a lot of you probably only know him as, you know, an old guy who would occasionally come out of the shadows and say something or people would talk about him.
But when I was a kid, he was like the Pope of America.
He was like a fixture on television.
He knew all the presidents.
He was on talk shows.
And if he made a comment about the news, it was news.
I mean, he was that kind of important person.
Now, in my family, which was a family of liberal East Coast Jews, I think we always looked at him as a little bit threatening.
He was that part of America that was different from us and maybe excluded us and maybe was not welcoming to us.
My father, I wrote about this in my memoir, The Great Good Thing.
My father was a GI during World War II, and the news of the Holocaust, the news that six million Jews had been exterminated in this kind of mechanistic way, scarred him for life.
It scarred my father for life.
He was paranoid.
And anything that he saw in politics, he was a liberal, and anything he saw that was conservative, that was religious, that was overly patriotic, he immediately thought that the Holocaust was coming again.
And I don't mean that it wasn't like, you know, liberals now, oh, you're literally Hitler.
He literally thought it was Hitler.
So, I mean, when he would see a character like Billy Graham preaching the gospel, talking to presidents, talking about Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, he just found it very, very threatening.
And that was kind of the atmosphere in my house.
It took me a long time to realize how entirely nuts this was and to understand that in many ways it was people like Billy Graham who kept this country sane.
It was people like him who brought it back to itself, who reminded it where it came from, of what the underlying ethos of our country was.
He is the guy that the right, that the left usually hated, and yet, and yet even people like Dan Rather said when they went to investigate him as an investigative reporter and then they heard him preach, they almost came to Jesus.
They almost came down and gave themselves to the Lord.
And I think that he, you know, when I get a letter, as I occasionally do, that says something that I said or maybe my memoir helped someone find God and his life, that's probably the letter that makes me feel best because it's not like, oh, I enjoyed your show.
It's not like, oh, I enjoyed your novel.
It's like an eternal win, you know, it's like an infinite, infinite win.
And I always joke that if I have enough of those, when I get to heaven, not only will they let me into heaven, but they'll give me a toaster, you know, that you get an extra little bonus.
But he did that to thousands upon thousands of thousands of people.
I'm going to tell a little bit about that.
All week long, we've been talking about what I think are fake crises.
This gun crisis, this school shooting crisis.
It's not that that's not a tragedy.
It's not like it's not a terrible thing.
But a crisis is something different.
A crisis is something that if you don't get on it, if you don't stop it right away, it's going to lead to a disaster.
That's what a crisis is.
A crisis is something that if you don't turn it around, it's going to lead to a disaster.
I do not think guns are a crisis in this country.
And I certainly don't think the Russian trolling of our election was a crisis.
We've been talking about crisis after crisis that doesn't exist, that is simply a tool that the media, which is the left, is using to take your rights away, to gain more power.
In the case of the guns, it's to take your God-given right to defend yourself away.
In the case of the Russians, it's to delegitimize Donald Trump, who they hate.
But, but, there actually is a crisis in this country that's real, and I think the passing of Billy Graham gives us a good reason, a good pretext to talk about that real crisis.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Tripping.com: Largest Rental Site00:03:25
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Shipshaw, tipsy-topsy, roll around the zippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoora, hooray!
You want to sing?
Oh, hurrah, hurrah. Hooray, hurrah.
It's Mailbag Day.
So we have some great questions that came in.
I will answer as many as I possibly can, personal questions, political questions, religious questions.
My answers, and this is reassuring, my answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life on occasion for the better.
Also, I have to bring this up.
Boy, Lindsay put a picture of herself on Twitter.
She is about ready to explode.
That baby is basically knocking.
She's knocking at the door.
You know, yesterday, you know, Ben was nice enough to do a little interview with me on Facebook Live.
And yesterday, the show shot up.
It got as high as number 12 on all of iTunes.
Now, I hope you understand that this creates in you a patriotic duty as a God-fearing American to put the show in the top 10.
So, you know, give it to your friends.
Tell your friends about it.
Make sure you subscribe on SoundCloud or iTunes.
If you have an Android, sell your Android, get an iPhone so you push it up in the iTunes level.
If, you know, perhaps you have like an older, elderly parent or relative who's no longer quite conscious, move their hand.
You know, morals don't matter.
Nothing matters except pushing the show into number 10.
Anyway, it was wonderful that Ben did that.
If you're a new listener, welcome.
And that gives us an opportunity to tell you about tripping.com because tripping.com is the largest rental site.
What it is, it's a site where you can find rentals for when you go on vacation.
Now, this is a thing we talk about all the time because I'm kind of, I kind of, of a creature of habit, I like to go to a hotel and my wife sometimes says, you know, why don't we just rent a place?
And, you know, I usually say what I say to her, don't make me come over there, woman.
No, that's not what I'm, I'm joking.
I have to tell my audience I'm joking because they think, oh, is that how I'm supposed to talk to my wife?
No, it's not.
I always, but I finally listened to her and started.
We have on occasion rented a place.
And the difference is, if you get a place like that through tripping.com, you don't get a cookie cutter hotel.
You have enough room.
You can get all kinds of amenities that you can't get at a hotel, a hot tub if you want one, or a stocked, fully stocked kitchen or free Wi-Fi, all the things that people get that you can get if you rent somebody's place through a place like Tripping.com.
And Tripping.com is the world's number one site for vacation rentals.
It's trusted by millions of travelers, featured by the New York Times, Travel and Leisure, Forbes, and more.
And Tripping.com can just help you find a great place to stay while you're on vacation.
It might be a townhouse, might be a house on the beach.
With Tripping.com, OneSearch lets you filter, compare, and sort over 10 million available properties on trusted sites like VRBO, TripAdvisor, Booking.com, and more.
Don't wonder if you're getting the best deal because you'll save an average of 18% per night by booking your vacation with Tripping.com.
So don't forget, if you want to save time and money while booking the perfect vacation rental for your next trip, head to tripping.com slash clavin today.
And you might say, well, I'm tripping.
I don't remember how to spell clavin.
Night's Crisis Reporting00:09:54
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So that's T-R-I-P-P-I-N-G.com slash clavin, tripping.com slash clavin.
It will improve your vacation life.
So this thing has gotten out of hand, you know, this thing with the guns and the hysteria and the crises.
CNN has now crossed over.
You know, remember when Donald Trump said that these people are the enemy of the people?
They're the enemy of the people.
They have crossed over into a kind of disgusting craziness.
They are using the traumatized children of this disaster to push gun control.
They're feeding them lines.
Let's just take a look at that montage.
Did I send you that montage?
Yeah, let's just play this montage of them coaching these poor kids to sell their agenda.
Do you have a message for the lawmakers?
Do you have a message for Congress, for the president?
David, we wanted to have you back because your interview yesterday got a lot of attention with us because you made this personal appeal.
I mean, you just looked at the camera and you said to everybody listening, we're children, you're adults.
Figure this out.
Children are dying.
Did you hear from any leaders?
Did you hear from anybody in power after that yesterday?
Some people who say there's nothing you can do to stop somebody if they want to kill, they're going to find a gun no matter the law.
As a 16-year-old student who just went through this in your community with your friends, what would you say to the adults?
I want to read one of the president's tweets from over the weekend.
What do you think of this tweet and others from the president this week?
Look, we have examples of other countries that have done more and have passed national gun control laws.
And guess what?
Gun violence went down.
Shockingly.
Do you think that you and your friends are going to finally do what it takes to make a difference on this issue?
You know, what I would like to do is I would like to bring in some traumatized kids from the ghettos of Chicago and Baltimore and St. Louis and New Orleans, cities that haven't been run by a Republican since the Jurassic Age.
I'd like to bring in some of the kids of the relatives of the kids who are being killed there every single night by stolen guns, by guns gotten illegally.
And I'd like to ask them, you know, shouldn't we have a city that's run by Republicans?
Wouldn't you want to prefer to have your city run by Republicans?
Wouldn't you prefer if your mom had married your dad?
Wouldn't you prefer if the culture of drugs weren't sweeping over your neighborhoods?
You know, it's disgusting.
It is disgusting what they are doing.
And it's not the kids' fault, obviously, and I'm sure their parents are hearing from psychologists saying, well, it's good that they're talking about it.
It may be good that they're talking about it, but not on CNN and not being used to express an opinion.
You know, people's opinions change between the time they're 16 and the time they're 25.
They may not want to go back and see that they went on TV saying something that they no longer agree with.
And remember, it's not that people don't have a right to be opposed to the Second Amendment and the God-given right to defend yourself.
They do have a right to be opposed to that.
It's that they're not giving them a chance to hear the other side of the argument, to hear the side about freedom.
I mean, this is the same, CNN is the same place where they told us that the lady in North Korea was winning PR victories over Mike Pence, the vice president of a free country.
I mean, they're saying stuff about Donald Trump.
There was an article in the Washington Post by an assistant professor at the University of Richmond where he was comparing Trump to Perron, the Argentine dictator, Juan Peron.
And we've seen Evida, you know, this is like this communist dictator and saying, oh, Trump is much worse.
Trump is much worse.
You know, Peron did some good things.
He did some good things.
And as I was saying yesterday, we know that fascists can do some good things.
They used to say the Nazis made the, no, they said Mussolini, the fascists made the trains run on time.
Fascists do good things.
Kings do good things.
Communists do good things.
But you're not free when you have those people running your country.
So this is a question of freedom versus slavery.
And as long as we got people like CNN who think freedom is slavery, we want our guns.
And the other thing about this is, again, they're using emotion to tell us there is a crisis.
And I'm sorry, you know, but I'm taking this from an article today in the Wall Street Journal by John Carlson.
The number of guns in America rose nearly 50% between 1993 and 2013.
During the same period, gun homicides fell by nearly 50%.
The notion that more guns mean more crime is simplistic and false.
And the fact that crime is going up, that these shootings are going up, here's from USA Today.
Since 1990, there have been 22 shootings at elementary and secondary schools in which two or more people were killed, not counting those perpetrators who committed suicide.
Whereas five of these incidents have occurred over the past five plus years since 2013, claiming the lives of 27 victims, 17 at Parkland, the latter half of the 1990s decade, WISP witnessed seven multiple fatality shootings with a total of 33 killed, 13 at Columbine.
So it's not a crisis.
It's a tragedy, and they're using the tragedy, your emotions that are naturally ginned up during a tragedy, as they should be.
They're using those emotions to make you feel it's a crisis because they know that in a crisis, you might do something stupid like give up your right to defend yourself.
And the other crisis about Russia, I'll talk about that in a minute.
But first, let us talk about Bowl and Branch.
If there's something I know about, it is bed sheets.
Why?
Because I never sleep, but I do go to bed.
I lie awake all night, and you want really, if you're going to do that, you want really, really comfortable sheets.
And same thing is true if you're going to go to sleep.
Bowl and branch are comfortable sheets.
What makes them unique is each sheet is crafted from 100% organic cotton.
And that means bowl and branch sheets not only feel incredible, but they look amazing.
And for some reason, when you wash them, they get softer and softer.
I don't know.
They start out really nice, but then they get better and better.
Since Bowl and Branch sells exclusively online, you don't pay that expensive retail markup.
So it's half the price for twice the quality.
You'll love these sheets.
Try them for 30 nights and see for yourself.
If you're not impressed, return them for a full refund fund or send them to me.
I'll wash them and use them myself.
Anyone who sleeps on bowl and branch sheets loves them.
That's why they have thousands of five-star reviews.
The New York Times, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal all rave about them.
And three U.S. presidents have Bowl and Branch sheets.
They won't tell us who they are.
Go to BullandBranch.com today and you'll get $50 off your first set of sheets plus free shipping in the U.S. when you use the promo code Clavin.
And you think to yourself, I'm so comfortable, I forgot how to spell Clavin.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
That's no ease.
There's no ease in Clavin.
That's why I'm up all night because I never take any ease.
It's $50 off plus free U.S. shipping right now at bullandbranch.com.
It's spelled B-O-L-L, right?
Because it's cotton.
Bowlandbranch.com, promo code Clavin, bowlandbranch.com, promo code Clavin for 50 bucks off, a really comfortable set of sheets.
The other crisis they're ginning up is the Russian crisis.
And I'm going back to CNN because they are, this is criminal.
CNN did something so despicable yesterday.
They went to a ordinary human being who voted for Trump and basically accused her of colluding with the Russians.
This is after Rod Rosenstein said that in the 13, the indictment of 13 Russian trolls, no Americans, including Donald Trump, wittingly sided with the Russians or colluded with the Russians.
They go to this ordinary woman, they show her house, they tell her name, they dox her, basically, and listen to this bullying piece.
I mean, this guy, this guy is going to have to answer for this at some point in the big court upstairs.
You know, listen to what this guy does to her.
What part of it in this is a cover-up?
Do you claim that's not true or what?
The Russians?
I don't care if they were involved or not.
That to me is the least important thing.
But they were involved with you.
Did you guys know that?
They weren't involved with us.
You know, just make sure that you report it correctly.
But you guys were involved with being patriotic, right?
Very, very patriotic.
Being patriotic was the group that contacted and helped organize some of these activities that you posted on your own Facebook account.
Those were legitimate.
Those were Russians.
They were not Russians.
I don't go with the Russians.
That group was Russians.
I had nothing to do with the Russians.
Well, apparently you did.
No.
Maybe you didn't know it.
Oh, please.
When you're talking like this, I don't want to have anything to do with you.
Well, I'm talking with you.
Those people that were with me were all Trump supporters.
Very, very much so.
And all apparently following the direction of groups that were associated with Russians who were actually infiltrating.
BS.
And please, please report that.
I don't believe that, I know all the people that were with me, okay?
They were at my meetings.
They're all Trump supporters, okay?
This guy ought to go home and look in the mirror if he wants to see what a lowlife looks like.
Because yesterday, we played CNN covering an anti-Trump rally ginned up by the Russians that the Russians had done.
And they were covering it like it was a revelation, like it was expressing the will of the people.
Why didn't we get this guy's address?
You know, John Nolte once said to me, you know, Nolte over at Breitbart, the late John Nolte, because he used to be here.
We were having dinner one night, and he said, every time, every time these guys come out and expose something about an ordinary American, we ought to have an organization that researches them and finds out who they're sleeping with and finds out what porn they use.
Because this is an obscene thing to do, but it's all to tell you that your vote was helping the Russians, that if you voted for Donald Trump, you are a bad guy.
So because of the death of Billy Graham, I want to talk about something that has been on my mind for a while.
Why Didn't We Get His Address?00:14:53
It's about what is a crisis in this country.
Because Steven Pinker, who's a writer that I like, I think he's a psychologist or a psychiatrist, but he writes science books.
And he's got this new piece about the Enlightenment.
And I'm going to come back to Pinker.
And I want to make it clear that the reason I'm using Pinker is he's an entertaining writer, he's an intelligent man, and I, as far as I know in the public sphere, I don't know him privately, but as far as I know in the public sphere, he's a man of goodwill.
And I think he's doing things that are wrong.
And I'm going to point that out, but I think he's a person of goodwill.
And somebody that I'd love to have him on the show if we can get him, if we can get him on the show, I'd love to debate him about it.
But he wrote this piece in the Wall Street Journal, I guess, kind of promoting his new book about the Enlightenment.
And he says, things are going great.
He says, consider the U.S. just three decades. ago our annual homicide rate was 8.5 per 100,000.
That's three decades ago.
11% of us fell below the poverty line as measured by consumption and we spewed 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide and 34.5 million tons of particulate matter into the atmosphere.
That's 30 years ago.
Fast forward to the most recent numbers available today, the homicide rate is 5.3, a blip up from 4.4 in 2014.
3% of us fall below the consumption poverty line, and we emit 4 million tons of sulfur dioxide and 20.6 million tons of particulate despite generating more wealth and driving more miles.
And this is fantastic news.
I mean, going around the world, poverty is falling.
Disease, those horrible plagues that almost wiped out humankind, they are falling.
Hunger, all these things are all going away.
All the predictions that we were going to become overpopulated, they were all overtaken by science.
Now, Pinker says this is due to the Enlightenment.
And one of the things that really gets me, not just about Steven Pinker, but it gets me about a lot of these atheist science writers is they really know their science, but they don't know their history and they don't know their theology.
And when they start talking, I mean, Pinker writes a whole, one of the books he read, he wrote, he writes a whole thing about how there's no ghost in the machine.
Well, the ghost in the machine is an idea.
I don't have time to go into its history right now, but it's an idea that came of age after the Renaissance as a reaction to certain kind of scientific thinking.
It is not the way most people have thought about the soul forever.
I mean, Plato wrote about the fact that there's no ghost.
It's not like your soul can blow away after you die if there's a high wind.
So in other words, he's arguing with things that most Christians, most believers don't believe because he doesn't study theology.
He studies science and then he thinks, oh, oh boy, you know, this is like really good.
Now, I want to compare him.
So he's talking about, he gives credit to the Enlightenment.
But the thing is, there were many Enlightenments.
There was the French Enlightenment, which was all based on rationality and reason, and it ended with the terror.
It ended with people tearing each other apart in the name of reason, beheading each other in the name of reason.
Then there was the British Enlightenment.
And remember, the British cracked down on revolutionary.
They did not want the French Revolution to spread, and so they started jailing writers.
They had a big crackdown about it, but they maintained a liberalization of policies.
They moved into the future, bearing their traditions with them, and they owned the next century.
They invented the steam engine.
They basically guided the Industrial Revolution.
It came out of England.
They invented America, right?
They invented the Constitution.
Those guys who were based in Britain, those Anglo-Americans, invented the Constitution.
It was from them, many, many of them, people of faith and an atmosphere of faith and a country full of faith.
It was many of them that guided us into the present.
Now, here it is.
So things are going great.
But here's another thing.
This is why I say it's a crisis.
Life expectancy in the U.S. fell for the second year in a row in 2016.
Now, think about that for a minute.
I mean, if that is not a guide to how well things are going scientifically, life expectancy in America fell two years in a row.
Now, it may be a blip.
Two years is not a trend, but it's still, it's an important statistic.
And the life expectancy was nudged down by what?
Opioid overdoses.
People are killing themselves.
They're killing themselves trying to stop some kind of internal pain.
Now, the House Republicans are taking this up today, and good for them.
But I think that, you know, I am a deep believer in trying to solve your problems without drugs altogether.
I'm not a doctor, so don't go off your meds because I said so.
I'm just saying that, you know, even when you take antidepressants, it should be in order to get off antidepressants.
You should take them unless you have a strictly scientific imbalance and it's not caused by the events in your life.
You should, you know, try to get off the antidepressants through therapy.
And if the antidepressants help you do that, that's fine.
So what I'm talking about is I'm talking about a world where things are going great and everybody is miserable.
Louis C.K. did a routine about that.
Everything's fantastic.
Everything's amazing and everybody's miserable.
And that seems to be really true in this country and throughout the West.
In Europe, they're not even having children anymore.
In Japan, they're not having children anymore.
They're dying out.
And then the elites say, well, we have to bring in more immigrants.
And you think, well, why don't you just have more children?
You know, I said this to somebody the other day.
I said, he said this.
We have to bring in immigrants.
He was from another country.
I won't say which because it was a private conversation.
But he said, we have to bring in immigrants because we're not having children.
I said, well, why don't you get people to have more children?
And he said, well, we're already, we've got all kinds of benefits for people with children.
I thought, well, maybe that's not giving people benefits is not what makes them have children.
You know, maybe it's hope and a sense of themselves and a sense of a mission in life and a sense of purpose.
I want to play for you Billy Graham at his peak.
And I want to compare him to Pinker and some of these other guys.
And again, I think Pinker is a wonderful writer and a man of goodwill, but I just think he's wrong.
I think the way he thinks is wrong.
I read the book Unbroken.
Wonderful, wonderful book.
And if you just saw the movie, you shouldn't go read the book about Louis Zampurini.
He was an Olympic distance runner.
He ran in the Jesse Owens Olympic in 36.
He shook Hitler's hand afterwards and all this.
And he became an American soldier.
He was captured by the Japanese.
And he was tortured.
I mean, the scenes of torture in this book, she writes the book so well that it's not unbearable, but it's horrible.
It is horrible.
He was tortured beyond the ability of a normal human being to imagine.
And he came back and he was, of course, he was, of course, broken.
The fact that he lived through the things he lived through, just the time he was on the raft before he was rescued by the Japanese, and then the torture he went through afterwards, that anybody could live through this is a testimony to his internal fortitude.
But after that, he was broken.
He became a drunk.
He loved his wife.
And one day he woke up with his hands around her throat because he thought he was strangling the guy.
He had a dream that he was strangling the guy who tortured him.
He was filled with rage.
He was unreachable.
His wife, even though he loved his wife, he was going to lose her.
He was unreachable.
And he walked in and he heard one of Billy Graham's early sermons.
He would set up this tent and so many people showed up that Graham, even though he was losing his voice, kept pushing on, kept going out, and he went there and he was saved.
And when I say he was saved, never mind what happens to him after death.
You know, let's put that aside for a minute.
He was saved in this life, too, because God came into his life, and the last half of his life was just as beautiful as the first half had been, more so, because he was suddenly helping other people.
That anger fell away from him.
He forgave the man who tortured him, which is an amazing thing to have done.
I don't think I could have done that, but it transformed him.
You only have to do that once.
You only have to do that once, as far as I'm concerned, to get the toaster when you get to heaven.
Billy Graham did this tens and tens of thousands of times.
I don't know how many times, probably millions of times.
Let's just play the second take, number 13, Billy Graham preaching and his heyday about the fact that the truths of the Bible are revealed not to the wise, but to the little children.
This cross, this preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the scripture says, is wiser than all the men of all the ages.
Wiser than all the university professors.
Wiser than all the intellectuals.
It's foolish to the world.
But God says this very foolishness is wiser than this world.
That's an old-fashioned, you know, fire and brimstone kind of style of preaching.
It's kind of gone out of fashion.
But this thing brought people.
I think he's in Madison Square Garden.
He would fill the garden, like the Beatles.
He would fill the garden and people would find themselves coming to Christ.
And, you know, he's the guy who talked to George W. Bush when W was using drugs and drinking.
We don't know exactly what he was doing, but we know it was bad.
He took a walk with Billy Graham and he came and changed his life.
This was a powerful, powerful guy.
Now, let's compare this to Pinker talking about why he doesn't believe in God and why it's not a scientific idea.
I think that using the word God or the attitude of faith toward that which you don't know is a cop-out.
It's a way of slapping a label onto something rather than trying to understand it.
Or since we may not understand everything, just say there's some things we don't understand.
To invent stories that sound as if they were true or could be true, to pretend that they're true just so that we can have a story, I think is unsatisfying and it could even be immoral because it could lead you to mistaken policies, to getting in the way of your best understanding of how the world works, to doing things that lead to more harm than good.
And this is a narrative that a lot of these guys, Sam Harris to Christopher Hitchens, a guy whose prose I just love, sell.
And the way it works is they compare the best of science with the worst of religions.
So they compare a cure for diseases from science, and then they compare a Christian bigot who goes out and hurts somebody in the name of his religion.
If instead they compared the atom bomb to the Christian charity, then they would have a harder argument to make.
No science.
There is no science for taking the rage out of Louis Zampurini's heart.
And the thing, the other thing they talk about is they talk, they'll point to the brain and they'll say, here's a light that goes off when you experience God.
So therefore, that's where God lives.
And I say, well, here's a light that goes off in your brain when you experience rain.
You know, I could touch that and make you experience rain, but you wouldn't get wet because it wouldn't be true.
The question is not whether you experience God in your brain.
question is are you experiencing something real now how do you know that how do you know that something you experience that's subjective is real when i first met my wife i picked her up hitchhiking she got in my car i knew exactly that i had found the woman of my dreams 40 years later without we've had one argument in 40 years i i adore her to this day Obviously, I was right, but I can only know that through lived experience.
There's nothing in my brain that they can look at to know that.
Over the course of 40 years, I'm sure I've felt a million things about my wife, but I've never stopped loving her.
So I was right when I saw her.
That subjective experience related to something true.
When the anger and the rage fell from Louis Zampurini's heart, when the tendency to depression fell from my heart, I was experiencing something real that nobody can do.
They can give you a pill that stops you feeling your depression, but they cannot give you a pill that improves your life and suddenly gives you an understanding of who you are, why you were made, where and where you come from.
It is a different thing.
You know, all of the arguments, the thing that gets me about the arguments of the atheists is not that they don't have the right to make them, not that they're bad people for making them.
None of that is true.
What gets me is their arguments are not very good.
I've heard Sam Harris.
Sam Harris would say, well, there are books that disagree.
The Koran says you can't believe that Jesus is the Son of God.
The Bible says you have to.
Well, there are books on science that disagree too.
And science has changed his mind and science has been wrong.
That's a ridiculous thing to say.
I mean, I'm just saying it's not that Harris is a bad guy.
You know, that has nothing to do with it.
I'm just saying it's not a good argument.
Whereas the argument of Louis Zampurini's inner life is an argument.
That actually is an argument.
It's circumstantial.
You know, when you go in, people watch TV and they hear somebody say, that's just circumstantial evidence.
So they think circumstantial evidence is no good.
But if you go into a court of law and you serve on a jury, they will explain to you that some circumstantial evidence is dispositive, is proof.
If you look out the window and there's snow and you walk away and you come back and there are footprints in the snow, somebody walked in the snow.
That's circumstantial evidence.
The evidence of what God does in people's life is evidence.
It lasts over time.
Just like my love for my wife, it lasts over time and it can be experienced.
These guys, without meaning to, without being bad guys, are contributing to this crisis in America.
When you tell people that they're just a bunch of chemicals and they can solve their problems by opiates, they're going to die of opiate overdoses.
When you tell them that there's no purpose to their life, that nobody made them, nobody loves them, their sense of right and wrong comes as just a kind of random relative idea.
You take away from them every single thing they have of value, everything they have of value.
Their house is not valuable.
Their love is not valuable.
Nothing is valuable if they themselves are not there.
If you tell them they have no free will, they have no soul, they have no spirit.
These guys, with all the best wishes in the world, thinking that they're saving us, are really starting a crisis.
And it is what's so, what makes it a crisis.
I know I always come back to the media, but it's the media's fault.
What makes it a crisis is that when they make these bad arguments, the media makes them famous because they are saying what the media wants you to believe, that there's no God, there's no purpose.
You have to depend on the state for everything.
You're going nowhere.
They are wrong.
And that's a crisis.
Billy Graham is silenced.
God is still speaking.
If America stops listening, that will be the real crisis.
We got the mailbag coming up.
I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
But come to the Daily Wire and subscribe.
It's a lousy $10 a month.
You can be in the mailbag and I can solve all your problems as well for a lousy $100.
You get the leftist tears tumbler, which fills up like magic every time I speak.
Come on over to thedailywire.com.
got the mailbag coming up.
All right.
Mailbag.
All right.
So we got to get her baby in here to do a, you know, like mailbag.
Whatever babies say.
All right, from James.
Clavin, from a new subscriber, welcome.
Are Republicans afraid to address the national debt?
Because in order to do so, they would need to make cuts that would make it impossible for them to be re-elected.
Basically, yes.
The Nature of Government Expansion00:04:15
The thing is, it is the nature of government to get bigger.
It is the nature of people to want to be taken care of.
It is the nature of people to not want to give up anything that they've been given, anything they feel is free, that they've been given, never mind that it eats into their freedom.
It is the nature of people not to notice that their freedom is being eaten away.
There is never any incentive, never any incentive for politicians to make us more free, except the will of the people and the understanding of the people.
That's why when the left invades our universities, when they take over our TV stations, when they take over our entertainment industry, that's why it's so powerful because there's always incentive for the government to grow bigger and crush.
And the bigger the government, the smaller the human being.
And it does, you know, the welfare state does make people's lives better until it stops, until you become Europe and you're not having children anymore, until you become Japan, and nothing matters anymore because everything's being taken care of.
So you don't need children.
You don't need purpose.
You don't need life.
The Muslims come in and take over your country.
You don't even know how to fight anymore.
You don't even know how to stand up because they took your guns away.
So it is really a matter of philosophy.
That is why conservatives are always fighting against the tie.
That is why conservatives are always the minority in the Republican Party.
And they have to have big voices, loud voices, angry voices to get anything done.
It is the nature of government to grow.
And so the debt, it goes against these guys' nature.
It gives them everything they, every penny they spend, buys them votes, buys them power.
Why would they cut the debt?
All right.
From Richard, Dr. Clavin, you have shared in the past criticism you've received from evangelicals for various reasons.
It says, I believe one was the fact that you disproved the story of Samson by being Jewish and not losing your strength after shaving your head.
Very good.
All right.
We Christians can be very hard on our own, occasionally causing converts to subsequently leave the faith.
How has it been for you?
And has it caused you to have similar thoughts?
Love your personal theology and podcast.
Well, thank you.
You know, the thing is, you have to find God first and then find a church.
You can't, you know, maybe it works if you walk into a church.
I am part of the, I was baptized into the Episcopalian church.
I hate the Episcopalian Church.
I love the liturgy.
You know, I have philosophical differences with the Catholics, but I'm basically a Catholic in theology.
And I can't join the Catholic Church for a lot of reasons because of some of the things I disagree with.
And I don't want to pledge to something that I'm not going to fulfill.
But if you find God first and you find Christ and you read the Gospels and you root yourself in the Gospels and in good theology, then a church, the things that happen in church don't matter as much.
So I can go to a church and listen to some liberal sermon and it just goes right past me because I know that guy.
He's not Jesus.
He's speaking from the pulpit of Christ, but he's abusing that privilege.
You know, I don't like it when people, you know, denounce me.
Nobody likes to be denounced.
And I really dislike it when I say something like, I believe the Bible should be, somebody wrote in the other day and said the Bible should be read literally, not literally.
And that's what I believe.
I believe there are different genres in the Bible meant to communicate different things.
Every time I say that, somebody says, you're calling God a liar because it's the word of God.
It's not the word of God.
Know how I know?
The Bible says it's not the word of God.
It says Jesus is the word of God.
So, you know, yeah, I don't like that stuff, but I'm rooted in Christ.
I'm rooted in the gospels.
I'm rooted in 2,000 plus years of theology, some of which is excellent.
And I read a lot of it and I pay attention.
It's up to you.
It's up to you to have this relationship with God.
The church, I think, can really help.
I'm struggling right now because I can't find a church where I feel comfortable.
It's bad not to be surrounded by my fellow Christians, but I work here at the Daily Wire where there are a lot of them running around.
Even Knowles is kind of a Christian, right?
I think, what is he, a Catholic or something?
That's almost a Christian, right?
Oh, I'm joking.
I'm joking.
But anyway, that's the thing.
Find God first, find Christ first, and then the church will fall into place and the things that people do will kind of roll off your back a little bit.
From Benjamin, greetings, Clavin, ye, whose intellect rivals that of Socrates.
Dilemmas and Detachment00:09:09
I have a dilemma.
My college is having a racial unity day on Monday.
The school wants everyone to wear black in solidarity for our school's racial diversity.
I really don't want to do it because it seems idiotic and divisive.
Should I wear black that day and go against my Christian beliefs and be accepted by society or not wear black and fear being rejected and chastised by my peers?
I can't tell you what you would do.
I would never do it.
I would just not do it.
I mean, you know, I take the heat because it's worth it.
And then if, you know, if they really come down on you, you'll see what they're made of.
If they discuss it with you, that will give you a chance to calmly and quietly explain why you're not doing it.
So make sure you have that argument ready before you do it.
That's just, I'm just telling you what I would do.
I can't tell you what you should do because there will be a cost for it.
So you've got to decide whether you want to take that cost.
From Clark, dear Clavin, God of tough guy protagonists, my sister has gotten in a position where she is making romantic and career decisions against her better judgment.
I will warn her beforehand.
She will do it anyways.
And when it inevitably ends horribly as warned, she comes back and my wife and I console her.
She agrees with our warning completely before she makes her terrible decisions, but does it anyway?
This has been going on for years and I'm at a loss what I can do for her or myself.
Thank you.
Yeah, I've been in this situation.
Probably a lot of you have.
Here's the thing.
You got two things you got to do.
One is you have to detach.
And when I say that, I think it's Al-Anon, one of those alcoholic places.
They say detach with love, you know, loving detachment.
When I say detach, it means you have to take yourself out of the equation.
You know, you can't put your happiness, your life at risk, or you can't tie your happiness and your life to what she does.
She obviously is self-destructive.
That's the first thing.
And the second thing is, maybe you can change the nature of the conversations you have with her.
A lot of people, and I've worked on hotlines and I've run into this a lot of times, a lot of people thrive off this exchange.
You know, they like the warning and the disaster and coming back hang dog.
They want you to do that.
That's part of some kind of neurotic cycle that they're in.
So maybe you can just break your part of that cycle by starting to listen to the deeper issues of why she's trying to hurt herself.
What is she trying to do?
What is it that makes her feel that she's unworthy?
You know, I mean, I've sat with, I have literally sat with women who I knew were marrying some disastrous guy, and they'll say, well, that's what I deserve.
And this is your whole life.
You know, you're throwing away.
You know, so people have these things in them that make them self-destructive.
Maybe you should be talking about that.
Maybe you should stop giving warnings.
Maybe, you know, she already knows.
She's obviously thriving off that system.
That system is working for her in some ways.
So the first thing I would detach emotionally, I would stop getting angry, stop getting dire, stop being urgent, and then sit and talk to her and see where she's coming from and why, try to find out maybe why some of this is going on.
That would be what I would do.
Dear Lord Clavin, stopper of the hammering and master of single nostril breathing.
How did they know that I, that's something I try to do in private.
My girlfriend and I are two years into our relationship as of tomorrow, but I'm having a hard time with her whenever she brings up any political matters.
I am a conservative libertarian while she is a moderate progressive, as far as I know.
Lately, she has gotten more outspoken about how much she hates Trump and conservative media while she's preaching the young Turks and so on as gospel.
I've tried to discuss where she is wrong in a tactful way by making her follow her own reasoning out.
Yeah, that's always a bad move with women.
But she just shuts down and dismisses everything I say.
We've been happy for the past few years, and it's just gotten increasingly difficult of late.
Should I continue trying to make it work by holding my tongue or should I break it off?
All right.
So, you know, this has gotten very difficult in the age of Trump because Trump sets women off.
And one of the things about women, you will notice, is that sometimes when they are set off, the difference between their emotions and reality disappears, okay?
So if you say to somebody, say to a woman, you know, your life has actually gotten better under Donald Trump, they don't care because he sets them off.
And I can see why he does.
He said things about women that are disgusting.
You know, he's done things, I suspect, he's accused of doing things that are disgusting.
And they just feel like, why is this guy being elevated?
Some reason didn't bother as many of them with Clinton or JFK.
All of these guys did these things.
But some reason Trump is just so open about it.
And so he lacks the hypocrisy to cover it up.
And the press, of course, wants to expose every little thing.
And so it just sets them off.
So here's the thing.
The question is, are you happy?
Are you happy together?
Is this a problem that is just kind of expressing some deeper conflict between you that is making you miserable?
I, you know, I feel incredibly blessed to be in the marriage I'm in.
But one of the things that before I got married, before I met my wife, I just thought to myself is I am not living in a fractious home.
I am not living in a place where we argue every day, where, you know, I have to have a power struggle every day.
I'm setting down some guidelines from the start.
I'm going to let my wife know how I'm going to live.
And that's an important thing to go into.
So the question is here, if this becomes a permanent relationship, if it becomes a marriage and just goes downhill, you're going to be deeply, deeply unhappy.
So the politics is secondary.
The first thing is, are you happy?
Is this the woman you want to be with?
That's the first thing.
If the answer is no, well, then this problem is solved.
You just break it off.
If the answer is yes, you do want to stay with her, then you have to find a new way to deal with this.
I mean, she is having an emotional experience about Donald Trump.
She is having this emotional experience.
That's a big deal in women's lives.
I think in men's lives, emotional experiences are kind of like, yeah, whatever.
You know, that's my emotions.
I'm done.
You know, but I think in women's lives, emotional experiences are a bigger deal.
You know, you might want to listen to what she's saying without arguing with her.
You might want to just tell her you disagree with her.
You might want to just let her vent from time to time.
You might want to use opportunities to say what you think is good without making it an argument.
You know, back off, basically.
Back off and let her have her experience and accept that it's her experience.
And that doesn't mean you shut up.
That doesn't mean you don't express your opinion.
That doesn't mean you let her brow beat you into changing your mind.
It simply means that you don't have to argue with her every time she says something that sets you off.
Don't let her set you off.
But that's if you, first you got to decide whether you actually want to be with her.
That's just not a question I can handle.
I'm running out of time, but I'll take one more.
From, the name seems to be Selvier.
Andrew, I'm an aspiring screenwriter who grew up with 80s Hollywood movies and their unapologetic patriotism and optimism.
When I came from Austria to Los Angeles to attend film school, I was surprised by the rampant anti-Americanism and pessimism.
Do you think there's a chance of Hollywood ever coming back to the same optimism and patriotism as depicted throughout the 80s?
Yes and no.
I think that there is a chance of Hollywood becoming more diverse if conservatives start to realize that this is an important vehicle, not just for entertainment, but also for ideas and attitudes.
So when conservatives, the problem with Hollywood is yes, do they lock out conservatives?
Yes.
But do conservatives go and storm the doors and buy the studios and start studios?
No.
And conservatives are constantly, you know, first they make trashy kind of G-rated positive rah-rah movies without having without any depth and without any kind of Artistic scope, artistic vision, but also they just don't put the kind of energy into it.
There are no think tanks about entertainment.
Think tanks don't have any people who are expert in popular culture.
They don't have any people, they don't have any awards.
There are no review venues where people who really know movies and TV can review them.
They'll give the, you know, most of the conservative magazines will give a review to some guy who's a political writer and then wonder why he didn't do a good job reviewing the movies.
So that's on us.
If conservatives come to their senses, then Hollywood will become more diverse.
Hollywood will never become again, I shouldn't say never, but it doesn't look anytime soon like they will become again what they were at their peak in 1939 because they had this studio system, which was essentially a form of indentured servitude, and that has been broken up.
And that meant that the businessmen ruled.
Right now, what you've got is a system where a lot of the talent rules and talent is stupid and talent is leftist and talent doesn't really know as much as businessmen and they don't react to profits.
And since profits have now become so diverse, I mean, I'm getting into the high weeds, but they make their money no matter what they do, basically.
So I think it's very possible that Hollywood will get more diverse if conservatives come to their senses.
I don't think it's ever going to go back to being a unified voice in favor of America, which it was at its greatest moment.
All right, I'm out of time.
I wish I had, there's a couple more I wanted to answer, but I can't.
Let's do some tickety-boo news.
How long is this Daily Mail TV?
We have a clip from Daily Mail TV about a woman who is an exorcist in Hollywood.
What do they call her?
The sister of darkness.
And she says she has cast demons out of Oscar winners, politicians, and movie bosses.
Let's just watch a little clip from the Daily Mail TV.
Rachel Stavis: Exorcist in Hollywood00:02:20
Rachel Stavis is a 37-year-old self-proclaimed exorcist who has seen demons, what she calls entities, in everyone, from grannies to high-level politicians.
Is Donald Trump possessed?
I get asked that all the time.
I will say there was entity involved in the election.
I stand by that.
There's definitely entity involved.
At a mutual friend's party, Rachel met and befriended actress Megan Duffy, known for her role in the 2013 film Maniac.
She says to me, I don't want to alarm you, but you have an entity that's attached itself to you, and it's holding you back from the things that you want in your life.
But it took two years of friendship before Megan, who was raised Catholic, let Rachel perform an exorcism on her.
There was a tiny bathroom with just a toilet and a sink.
I didn't see anyone in there, but I was hearing almost a footstep shuffling.
At some point, she summoned a spirit and I had this clicking in my right ear.
And then all of a sudden, this loud buzzing ringing.
It was like, and then when she finished the chant, it stopped.
I call this tickety boo news because if she actually succeeds in chasing all the demons out of Hollywood, the traffic is going to be so much better here tomorrow.
Tomorrow.
We've got Sebastian Gorka.
I'm going to ask him about ObamaGate, one of the biggest scandals of my lifetime.
And we will talk about that.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
Remember, in the meantime, it is your job as an American to push the show into the top 10 on iTunes.
Don't forget, that is you lose your citizenship if you don't listen, I think.
Isn't that the law?
Yeah, we have to double-check that, but I think that's what it is.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
We will see you again tomorrow.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Technical producer, Austin Stevens, edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And their animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.