Andrew Clavin dissects the media’s double standard comparing Trump and Obama, exposing hypocrisy in coverage of Russia ties, Cambridge Analytica, and FBI controversies while ignoring Obama’s similar actions. He defends colonialism as a cultural force spreading democracy, contrasts modern Western influence with authoritarianism, and advises parents on addiction while predicting Christianity’s revival through intellectuals—not mass revivals—before closing with Keats’ poetry as a counter to materialism’s dominance. [Automatically generated summary]
President Trump said good morning today, a remark that sent shockwaves through the political establishment.
The New York Times, a former newspaper, issued an editorial demanding the president retract the insensitive remark, which the Times said did not take into account the plight of American blacks and women whose mornings have been permanently marred by slavery and sexual harassment.
Afterward, the president walked outside the White House where he healed the sick and restored sight to the blind, an action to which CNN's Don Lemon immediately objected, saying it violated the separation of church and state.
Lemon then attempted to storm out of the studio, but walked into a corner of the room and couldn't find his way out.
Lemon had to be removed by an emergency medical team.
Later, President Trump plans to walk atop the water in the Washington Mall reflecting pool, which NBC's Chuck Todd said will be an act of war against the environment and will lower the Capitol's clean water standards.
When accused of biased reporting, Todd said the charge was absurd and pointed out that he would soon be hosting a hard-hitting 60-minute special on how Barack and Michelle Obama continue their courageous fight for women's reproductive rights by slaughtering and devouring unborn children.
So that's all right then.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing hunky-dunky ging.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Hooray, it's mailbag day.
Wahoo.
You, woo-hoo, whatever.
I will answer all your questions.
Why Use HouseCall Pro?00:02:28
The answers will be guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life for the better.
Who can say?
But great questions, really interesting questions.
Also, it's a good day because the Austin bomber blew himself up.
And kudos to the Austin police and the FBI.
And I mean, this is why we want to get rid of some of these corrupt guys that Obama installed at the top of the FBI because the FBI at the worker level is at the agent level.
It does such a great job.
One of my brothers once said to me after one of these mass murderers killed himself, he said, why do these guys always kill themselves last?
So if you are thinking of going out and like having a mass shooting, start with yourself.
I mean, that would be try it on yourself first, just to see how it goes.
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Vladimir Putin's Interference00:15:22
All right.
So, you know, I've been watching the news these, actually, this is the last three days now, and the double standard between the way Trump is reported on and the way Obama was reported on, the way Democrats are reported on, has now gotten so egregious that I feel like we could just do the whole show about this every single day.
Every single day, all we would have to do is research the way Obama was covered and the way Trump is covered, because a lot of times Trump is doing the same things that Obama did, that every president has to do.
And with Obama, it was as if it had been discovered, as if a new way of being president had been discovered, raising the country's standards.
And with Trump, it's as if we're being plunged into war and disaster and Watergate-style scandal at every possible minute.
And I keep saying this because this is true about the news, as it's true about the arts, as it's true about education.
It's not any one story, and that's not why they do it.
It is creating an atmosphere.
The culture is the air you breathe without even knowing it.
The culture is when you're afraid to open your mouth because you're afraid it's going to sound racist.
The culture is when you're afraid to say something because you're afraid a woman is suddenly going to accuse you of having bothered her in an untoward way.
The culture doesn't work.
People always think, they think like, ah, Black Panther, here is this kind of Black Lives Matter movie.
I didn't see it.
I'm not criticizing.
I don't know what's in it.
But let's say, oh, here's this left-wing movie.
This is bad.
It's not any one movie, and no one right-wing movie is going to change anything.
It is a question of atmosphere, the culture, the news, information creates an atmosphere in which we think and breathe.
So you really do have to stop every now and again and say, wait, wait a minute, look at the way they do this.
Look at the way they lie.
So, you know, yesterday, Donald Trump is meeting with the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
And bin Salman, he really seems like a pretty interesting guy.
He seems that he's dialing back some of the religious oppression in Saudi Arabia, trying to lighten the load on women, trying to lighten the power of the imams who preach really radical Islam.
We're having trouble with them because there's war in Yemen and we give him weapons and they're fighting war in Yemen, which is really a, what's it called, a proxy war with Iran, I think.
That's why everybody's fighting.
It's all Obama's legacy of strengthening Iran in the Middle East for some vision that I simply do not understand.
I do not know why Obama thought that that was a good idea.
I guess they were going to stop hating us because we let them become as evil as they want it to be.
Anyway, he's giving a joint press conference with the Crown Prince, and he mentions that he called Vladimir Putin and congratulated him.
So let's play the cut of Trump on calling Putin's number 11.
I had a call with President Putin and congratulated him on the victory, his electoral victory.
The call had to do also with the fact that we will probably get together in the not too distant future so that we can discuss arms, we can discuss the arms race.
As you know, he made a statement that being in an arms race is not a great thing.
That was right after the election, one of the first statements he made.
And we are spending $700 billion this year on our military.
And a lot of it is that we are going to remain stronger than any other nation in the world by far.
We had a very good call, and I suspect that we'll probably be meeting in the not-too-distant future to discuss the arms race, which is getting out of control.
But we will never allow anybody to have anything even close to what we have.
So Trump was briefed about this, and apparently on the briefing papers, Trump did not see the briefing papers, but on the briefing papers, he was briefed by phone and on the briefing papers, it said in big letters, do not congratulate.
You know, why?
Because Putin's a tyrant.
His election doesn't mean a damn thing.
It doesn't matter.
You know, he's got 77% of the vote, and anybody who didn't vote for him will end up in the Volga somewhere, you know, I mean, or Ljubljanca prison.
And so the guy's, he's a dictator.
He is a thug and one of the strong men who are taking over the world.
In fact, it's kind of hilarious that Saudi Arabia is a bright light in a world that really is closing in with authoritarian governments.
So everyone goes nuts, right?
And you know, Trump talks.
Things come out of his mouth.
He has a different relationship to words than most presidents have, because most presidents, you know, when a president says something, you want it to stick.
But Trump is a negotiator, so he assumes that you understand that he is always taking a position, that he's always making a play with somebody.
He just assumes that you know that, and people go nuts.
So John McCain, cranky John McCain, puts out a statement, an American president does not lead the free world by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections.
And by doing so with Vladimir Putin, President Trump insulted every Russian citizen who was denied the right to vote in a free and fair election to determine their country's future, including the countless Russian patriots who have risked so much to protest and resist Putin's regime.
So the guy who really gets me is this deep state jackass, John Brennan, from Obama's CIA.
This is a guy who was spying, if I recall rightly, he was spying on reporters.
So why he is now on MSNBC and CNN, why he's now talking there, but here he is talking about the Russian call.
This is cut number 10.
Well, I think he's mishandled so many matters.
Just look at what happened yesterday with his call to Vladimir Putin.
Vladimir Putin was the person who authorized the interference in our election.
Vladimir Putin almost certainly was involved in directing the poisoning of an individual on British soil.
And to congratulate him and to treat him so nicely while he treats Americans with such disdain, I think it just demonstrates that he looks at the world through a prism of what is going to help and protect Donald Trump.
That is not what presidents are supposed to do.
I worked for six presidents.
I didn't agree with some of their policies, but all of them, all of them were trying to do what they thought was best for the United States.
That's not Mr. Trump.
He is self-absorbed and he is trying to just promote his own interests and protect his flanks.
Do we have a picture of the president congratulating Putin?
There he is.
Oh, wait, it's the wrong president.
That's Barack Obama shaking hands with him.
Here's the report from the time.
This is in March 11th.
The Russian people and international observers may not see last Sunday's presidential election in Russia as legitimate, but President Barack Obama has now officially endorsed the return of Russian past and future president Vladimir Putin.
President Obama called Russian president-elect and Prime Minister Putin to congratulate him on his recent victory in the Russian presidential election.
President Obama highlighted achievements in U.S.-Russia relations over the past three years.
This is a statement from the White House.
Over the past three years with President Medvedev, including cooperation on Afghanistan, the conclusion and ratification of the START agreement, Obama told Putin he looked forward to Putin's MAVE.
It's the same statement.
He basically said exactly the same thing that Trump said.
Now, you can say, oh, yes, but then we didn't know about the Russian meddling.
Ridiculous.
It's ridiculous.
You know, the Russians have been meddling with our elections forever.
The only reason we know about it now is because Trump was elected.
You know, he even had this thing where he says Obama told Putin that we could benefit economically from Russia's joining the World Trade Organization.
And this could be a reference to the administration, the Obama administration's efforts to get Congress to repeal the 1974 Jackson-Vannick law that prevents the U.S. from giving Russia permanent normal trade status.
And that law did get repealed, although it got repealed.
They also attached the Magnitsky Act to it, but it did get repealed.
I mean, you have to remember this, that Obama was telling businessmen, he was bringing businessmen to Russia to try and set the big red reset button that Hillary Clinton did.
You know, all I'm saying is this, you know, Trump has been much tougher on Russia than Obama ever was.
He's imposed new sanctions on him.
He signed sanctions for their human rights abuses.
And he has continued to punish Russia with like, oh, gosh, he's done all these things.
He's approved the largest sale of lethal defense weapons to the Ukrainian forces.
That's a big one, right?
Because that was something that Obama never did.
So he has been very tough on Russia, but it doesn't come out of his mouth.
He doesn't say it because he uses words differently from other presidents.
I'm not saying whether that's good or bad, but meanwhile, meanwhile, let us never forget, we'll never forget this one moment with Obama and Dmitry Medvedev when Medvedev was the outgoing president and Vladimir Putin was about to take over and everybody knew that Vladimir Putin was now going to become a dictator and he leaned over in this hot Mike moment and said, you know, I will have more flexibility after my next election.
Here it is.
We'll just play it for a sec.
I will transmit this information to Vladimir.
And what was he talking about?
U.S. plans for an anti-missile shield, bedeviled relations between Washington and Moscow despite Obama's reset in ties between the former Cold War.
He was telling him we don't have to put missiles in Europe to protect them.
And I'll be able to do that once I'm not running for election.
He knew the people would get angry about it, so he was just whispering in his ear.
When this was brought up to a CNN anchor woman, she didn't even know this had ever happened.
That's how bad the double standard is.
Again, it's just to create an atmosphere of crisis and corruption and malfeasance in the Trump campaign that simply didn't exist when the Obama administration, with its corruption and its malfeasance and its crises, was actually in office causing a lot of the problems we have now.
The other thing is this Facebook mining thing.
Let me read this.
This is absurd.
You know, this is the Trump campaign got some of its voter information on voters by mining information off Facebook and get an app and it downloads or you send questionnaires to people and they use this organization, Cambridge Analytica, during the primaries.
Now, this is important.
They used it during the primaries, Cambridge Analytica.
After the primaries, the Trump campaign found that the RNC, the Republicans, had better information than Cambridge Analytica, so they just went with the basic party information.
Here is CNN in 211 reporting on the fact that this was obviously before the 2012 reelection, reporting on the fact that Obama is using apps to mine information off Facebook.
So this is CNN reporting on that.
Obama may be struggling in the polls and even losing support among his core boosters, but when it comes to the modern mechanics of identifying, connecting with, and mobilizing voters, as well as the challenge of integrating voter information with the complex internal workings of a national campaign, Obama's team is way ahead of the Republican PAC.
Alone among the major candidates running for president, the Obama campaign not only has a Facebook page with 23 million likes, roughly 10 times the total of all the Republicans running, it has a Facebook app that is scooping up all kinds of juicy facts about his supporters.
Users of the Obama 2012 app, Are You In, are not only giving the campaign personal data like their name, gender, I mean, it's like he's a genius, okay?
Now here's the New York Times on Trump doing exactly the same thing.
How Trump consultants exploited the Facebook data of millions.
During a week of inquiries from the Times, Facebook downplayed the scope of this leak and questioned whether any of the data still remained out of its control.
But on Friday, the company posted a statement expressing alarm and promising to take action.
This was a scam and a fraud.
You know, and now, and now Senator Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota is calling for an investigation.
She wants Facebook to come in and testify, play the cut number five, her describing what happened on Facebook.
We've learned now things that they thought were safe weren't safe.
50 million people in America have now had their data basically breached.
And I know they don't like that word breach, but the last time I checked, if someone broke into my apartment with a crowbar, it would be the same as if the apartment manager gave them a key and let them in and let them take stuff.
And in this case, they've taken their Facebook friends, they've taken their addresses, things like that.
And then we find out that they gave it basically, we believe, to a campaign.
And there are all kinds of potential legal violations here.
The first and foremost is Cambridge Analytica itself and how that works with the Trump campaign.
And is that truly the value, a couple million dollars compared to what I think someone has said maybe $100 million in value?
That's a potential major election violation.
Then you have Facebook itself in 2011 signed a consent decree with the FTC because of privacy issues and said they'd pay $40,000 for each individual violation.
So this is just the beginning of what I consider a focus on what we need to focus on, and that is the sanctity of the privacy of this data.
Suddenly, the data is sacred.
And you know, Facebook is reacting because here's the thing.
The Democrats, obviously, are the big government people.
They don't believe in freedom of speech.
They do not believe in it.
Every single Democrat voted for a rewrite of the First Amendment that would have given Congress the power to decide what should be protected by the First Amendment at election times and what not.
They do not believe in free speech.
They do believe in massive government controlling every aspect of your life.
So Facebook looks at that.
And even if every single person who worked at Facebook weren't a left-winger, and they are, because of course you get fired in Silicon Valley even for wondering if maybe men and women are not quite exactly the same.
So everybody at Facebook is a left-winger.
But even if they weren't, their bread is buttered on the side of the people who oppose free speech because they're the people who will investigate them.
They're the people who will shut them down.
It's not the Republicans.
The Republicans are ticked off too and should bring them in and should start to talk about the fact that there is no competition for spreading information online.
That is a problem online.
It is not, it isn't, you know, capitalism needs its bookends just like every other thing that people do.
Every single thing that people do needs to have bookends, right?
You and I can argue, but I can't strangle you during the argument.
That's the bookend on our argument.
Everything, including capitalism, needs to have bookends.
And it could be that the people who spread information have gotten so big that they need in some way to be broken up, not limited in what they can do, but broken up so there's more competition.
And so the conservatives win, as Facebook is doing, when Facebook starts to change their algorithm purposely to fight against, not against the misuse of information by political people, only to prevent someone like Donald Trump from getting elected again.
Panic Over Fake News00:05:45
That's why they're doing it.
That's why the panic matters.
That is the whole way it works, is panic about fake news.
Therefore, Facebook and Google and YouTube bring in left-wingers to police their news.
The panic, that atmosphere of panic, is what they're using to silence speech of conservatives.
And they are.
And this is like, you know, they then bring in this Cambridge Analytica and they start to do investigations into it.
And the investigations, you know, I mean, they show you it is frightening the way these guys can use information.
There is one, play the, this is an undercover investigation into Cambridge Analytica done by British Channel 4.
And they went undercover and interviewed these guys.
Play cut number two on how they can use this information to create fears you don't even know you have.
The two fundamental human drivers when it comes to taking information on board, effectively, are hopes and fears.
And many of those are unspoken and even unconscious.
You didn't know that was a fear until you saw something that just evoked that reaction from you, right?
And our job is to get, is to drop the bucket further down the world than anybody else.
Understand what are those really deep-seated underlying fears, concerns.
There's no good fighting an election campaign on the facts because actually it's all about emotion.
It's all about emotion.
And what they can do is they can find out the kinds of places where you're likely to go and suddenly you start seeing stories that cause you to be fearful of your guns being taken away or fearful of the evil guns that are going to come and kill your children in schools, whichever side they happen to be getting paid for at the time.
The other thing that they did, and this has nothing to do with Donald Trump, there's no accusation.
The way they run these stories is they say the Trump-related firm or a firm that Trump worked with.
They keep doing that.
And the other thing they talked about is they use entrapment to destroy the reputations of politicians that they don't like or that their clients are running against.
And they caught this guy, Alexander Nix, who runs the firm and was just suspended for this video right here.
This is cut number three.
We'll have the whole thing recorded on cameras, which language count face of our guy.
And we'll have to postpone it to that.
So it'll look on Facebook or YouTube or something like this.
So that's really bad.
And they do this investigation and they basically tar Trump with the fact that he worked with this company.
But, you know, let me read you just a little bit of this Victor Davis Hansen piece, which you can find at American Greatness.
The whole point is the atmosphere of corruption, the atmosphere of disaster, the atmosphere of crisis that they're creating every single day, even when just when Andrew McCabe was fired because Obama's an Obama-appointed inspector general told told the FBI that McCabe had lied and the FBI's essentially internal affairs system recommended to Jeff Sessions that McCabe be fired.
That was Trump going to war with the FBI.
We saw Chuck Todd in our truly low moment in journalism, Chuck.
Good job.
You know, saying, oh, this is Trump at war with the FBI when there's no evidence whatsoever.
So Victor Davis Hansen says, here are a series of questions that do not seem to trouble anyone, but the answers to these should expose why so many of the people today alleging scandals should themselves be considered scandalous.
And I'll read these quickly because I want to get to the mailbag.
But VDH has these questions.
Had Hillary Clinton won the election, would we now even know of a fusion GPS dossier?
Would assorted miscreants such as Andrew McKay, Bruce Orr, Lisa Page, Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele, or Peter Strzok now be under a cloud of suspicion?
Obviously, they wouldn't.
If Clinton had won, would we now know of any Russian-supplied smears against Donald Trump?
Would a FISA judge now be complaining that he was misled in a warrant request?
Are any Russian-related interests currently still donating millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation?
Why is Bill Clinton?
This is a great question.
Why is Bill Clinton no longer being asked to speak by various groups, including those with Russian ties, for $500,000 and above per talk?
Because they can't trade with them for political favors because they've lost political power.
That's why that's the answer.
What is the qualification for lying or giving false information to FBI investigators?
And did the information supplied to the FBI by Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin concerning their knowledge of the use of Hillary Clinton's private server qualify?
In other words, why was Michael Flynn indicted for this when Hillary Clinton and her gang of thieves weren't?
What would have happened had the FISA court justices been apprised by the FBI and the Justice Department that the submitted steel dossier was paid for by Hillary Clinton, impossible to verify by the FBI, and the sole source for news stories that were being used in circular fashion.
In other words, this entire scandal, this whole scandal, could be summed up by one sentence.
It's the scandal that the Democrats lost.
That is the scandal that everybody's covering.
They're covering it every day from any angle they can.
All the danger, all the crisis, all the hysteria is that they lost.
And they are the media.
The media and the Democrat Party are the same people.
And that's what's so shameful and that's what causes this atmosphere.
And this is why I keep saying, you know, conservatives say, well, we should make a conservative movie.
No, we need to take back the culture.
It takes a major, major effort from all hands on deck.
All right, we got the mailbag coming up.
All of your questions answered, answers guaranteed 100% correct.
Cultural Redemption Effort00:10:08
But you got to subscribe to get your questions in the mailbag.
So come on over to thedailywire.com and subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month or 100 bucks for the year.
And you can then ask your questions and your problems, too, will be solved.
All right, the mailbag.
I saw Lindsay on Twitter just talking about how exhausted she was with her new baby.
That is the thing they don't tell you.
They don't tell you what level of exhaustion it is possible to reach with a new baby.
From Ronald, Dear Andrew, you have talked about gender roles in marriage on your show, and I would greatly appreciate some advice.
I agree that a man should protect his wife and children.
However, I am blind, and I do not think I will be able to physically protect my future family like a sighted person can.
I would not be very good with a gun, for example.
Do you have any suggestions?
I'm currently single, but this will be an important consideration for when I marry.
Thank you very much and keep the satire coming.
You know, you know what?
Every single one of us at some level has limits, physical limits, mental limits, to our image of our ideal manhood and to our ideal personhood.
And you have a disability.
Being blind is a disability.
And yes, you are not going to be a big help in a shootout with the Daltons.
You are much more likely in your life, instead of having a shootout with the Daltons, to come into have to protect your family from the culture, from dishonesty, from having a father who doesn't live up to his fatherly role.
Your manhood is built in, you build your manhood through courage and integrity.
That is what all of us do.
All of us have limits.
I mean, you know, like I used to be a fairly tough customer.
Now I'm an old guy.
I don't know.
Like, I don't want to get in any fights with anybody.
Most of us don't want to get in fights.
Most of us can avoid getting in actual fights.
You protect your children by being there, by being their dad, by showing them what courage and integrity looks like.
You have, I don't mean to be a Pollyanna at all.
I understand that being blind is a disability, but you have also the opportunity to show them that that doesn't stop you, that that doesn't stop you from being a man, that doesn't stop you from showing them what courage and integrity look like.
You know, you're much more likely to face moral dangers than physical dangers, and your children, if you arm your children with a father's guidance and a father's example and how moral dangers are faced, you will have done for them everything that God needs you to do.
And I think that you shouldn't worry about that in the least.
All of us, all of us have shortcomings.
All of us have some kind of disability.
None of us is what we want to be.
None of us lives up to what we want to be.
But you have the opportunity to show them what fatherhood looks like, and that is everything.
From Spencer, dear Kobe, LeBron, Michael Jordan, Clavin, you notice that those guys and I are never seen at the same time.
I was just listening to a conversation between my intellectual cousins and his mother about raising children.
My cousin claims that he doesn't need religion to teach his children rational thought and reason, and that he doesn't need God to teach his children to not kill the person walking down the street.
His mother, on the other hand, is very religious, and I wanted to back her up with the argument that without God, right and wrong is simply an opinion.
But after this claim, I would have run out of talking points, as I feel he would have responded with something resembling, well, isn't listening to God's word simply listening to an opinion too?
I know this is wrong, but I can't seem to complete my thought on how I would respond.
Thanks.
Love the show.
You know, this is kind of the Kantian paradox.
This is Immanuel Kant, the philosopher, said that we can't need the revelation of the Bible because how would we even recognize it as revelation if we didn't know right from wrong already?
Okay.
Now, obviously, Immanuel Kant was a great philosopher.
I am just a barefoot teller of tales, but I think that is actually missing the point.
The point is, God has already revealed to us in giving us the sense of right and wrong.
He has already given us the conscience to recognize right and wrong, but it is shaped by and guaranteed by God's presence and by God's word.
And God's word also helps us to know how to get to the right and wrong we want to get to.
Ask your intellectual cousins this.
If Hitler had won the war, if every country on earth were now a Nazi country, if everybody on earth were now a Nazi country except for the Nazis' victims who had no power and no voice, would Nazism then be right?
Everybody would think it was.
If everybody on earth were a Nazi, would it still be right?
Would it still be right or would it be wrong anyway?
If nobody knew anymore that Nazism was wrong, would it still be wrong?
I think you have to agree that it would be.
And if you don't agree with that, then when your kid comes to you and he is surrounded by playmates who all say the same thing, ah, drugs, great.
Love drugs.
Drugs are great.
It's only the old fogies.
And remember, that's your kid's world.
Your kid's whole world is going to be his friends and his peer group.
And if they're telling him, oh, stealing, great, it's great.
Where does his morality, what is his morality then anchored in?
Because the world of his peers is going to be more important to him at that point than the world of his parents.
What is his morality anchored in?
It's not anchored in reason.
Reason tells you that if you can get away with something, you should get away with it.
This is the question I never understand.
It's not why you should be, it's not why you should live.
It's why you should not kill the other guy and take his stuff and rape his women if you can get away with it, if nobody's there to stop you.
Look, you don't need religion to teach right from wrong, but you know right from wrong because of religion.
After all, not every culture grew up with our sense of right and wrong, our sense that individuals have dignity, our sense that women have equal rights.
Not everybody has that.
That didn't come from nowhere.
That came from our religious perspective.
It came from the world that we built and the logic of the God that we worship.
So he has that logic already, but he's indebted to it without knowing it.
So what he's doing is he's living on religion's dime without paying religion back.
So he can successfully teach his kids right from wrong because he grew up in Christendom, because he grew up in a world shaped by the Christian religion.
And that's all he's doing.
He's just saying, I don't need that.
He's standing on the shoulders of a giant and he thinks that he's flying.
That's basically it, right?
He doesn't realize that he is standing on this world that was built by the gospels.
From Patricia.
Hi, Andrew.
I have read Dynamite Road, but I'm unable to find the two next books in this trilogy on Amazon.
They are on Amazon.
I think that some of them are out of print and you have to get old versions of them, but you can.
And they still sell them on Kindle.
They're called Shotgun Alley and Damnation Street.
And you can still get them on Amazon.
I checked.
Dear, this is from Christian.
Dear Master of the Multiverse Clavin, I heard you talk with Knowles about how colonizing wasn't evil.
Could you go more in-depth about what you meant?
Yes.
Imperialism.
Imperialism has become thought of as the great evil.
Many great evils come from imperialism.
While being imperialistic and while colonizing other countries, people did evil things.
They oppressed, they enslaved, they killed, they did all kinds of evil things.
But in that process, something really important happened, and I would say it was in fact the reason why we have nation-states.
So if you go back to the Greeks and then the Romans, Greek culture at its height was one of the greatest cultures that has ever set foot on the earth, right?
Greek culture, with its philosophers, with its playwrights, with its understanding of freedom, it basically is the birthplace.
That is the birthplace of democracy.
It's a Greek word, democracy.
The Romans were a much more militaristic, much more domineering, much less thoughtful people.
And it was they who spread the Greek culture to all the lands that they conquered.
Civilization lives in Caesar's footsteps.
You can almost trace Caesar's conquests and say, ah, that's where freedom eventually grew up.
So Rome was like a machine for spreading through imperialism for spreading Greek culture.
I believe that Britain and America are in exactly the same relation.
Nothing is exact, but in a very similar relation to the Greeks and the Romans.
The British thought up so much of what we think of as modern liberty, so much of the Constitution and the Declaration, are completely owe their birth to the British system of common law that grew up through their centuries.
And we have not contributed quite as much thought.
We've contributed, like the Romans did, we've contributed a lot of technology, a lot of transportation, a lot of information.
And through that, we have begun to spread what is essentially British culture to the whole world in the same way that the post-Greek empire culture was called Hellenistic because everybody had gotten a taste of it.
Now we are living in a world where everybody sort of knows that we're supposed to behave like the British.
So our colonialism is a good thing in that way.
What is good in the new world is we don't really use troops.
We don't really put troops on the ground.
We don't really take your government away and replace it with our government.
We don't install Pontius Pilate.
We can do it simply by information and example.
And that's why, that is why the left's attacks on America through the movies and through television and through news.
That's why they're so damaging because those people need what we've got.
They have lost their faith in freedom.
They've lost their faith in capitalism.
But it's capitalism and freedom that the rest of the world needs.
And as you see, as we see authoritarianism encroaching all over the world, I'm not blaming all that on Hollywood, but Hollywood bears some responsibility for not spreading the good news of British culture, which is what we're here to do, basically.
So that's why I think colonialism and imperialism is a good thing.
Faith in Freedom Lost00:09:34
But obviously, if you can do it without soldiers and without killing people, I'm for that.
From Kay, Lord Clavin, my 21-year-old son, though very smart and filled with potential, struggles with adulthood, to say the least.
Though not a troublemaker, he consorts with troublemakers, is irresponsible, unkempt, smokes pot, and can't keep a job.
He's also disturbingly antisocial, depressed, and paralyzed by fear.
He doesn't live with us, but is still a part of our lives.
I believe he needs professional help.
He definitely has ADD or may even be bipolar, and he doesn't know how to go about seeking help, and of course has no money.
I know enough about not enabling addicts to know that he has got to do this himself.
Do you have any advice for him?
You know, he doesn't have to do everything himself.
I think it's really good that he's living away from you, and I don't think he should be in your house, and I don't think you should be supporting him.
I think all that is right.
But there's no reason you couldn't pay for treatment.
There's no reason you couldn't pay to get him to a psychiatrist, which I think is what he needs.
If you're right and he is bipolar, he's going to need some medication.
That's an actual physical disease, even though it manifests itself in mental ways.
But I think that getting him treatment is something you could definitely do.
And then the other thing, Kay, I don't know if you're mom or dad here, but I think that the other thing you should do is get treatment for yourself.
Alanon, I'm always a big fan of Alanon.
They teach you a lot of tricks about how, they call it, what do they call it, separating with love or something like that, where if in fact he is an addict of some sort, you have to understand that there's only so much you can do and there's things you can't do and you have to know how to get away from that emotionally and yet give what help you can.
But you shouldn't feel like you can't do anything for him.
You can't support his habit.
You can't take him back in.
You can't pay for his life.
But you could maybe help him out getting treatment.
That may be something that would turn the tide for him.
From Samuel.
Samuel, dear misspelled Clavin, what is Christianity's best chance for a revival?
I've read of the spiritual revival that preceded the American Revolution, but I fail to see if the circumstances exist in modern culture that would permit such a revival to reoccur.
As you know, spirituality is the trend now.
What will Christianity need to do and vehemently address in order to enable a large cultural shift to Christ?
I believe, and I actually believe this will happen, I believe that this time it has to come from the intellectuals.
I think the intellectuals destroyed the temple.
The intellectuals have to build it back up again.
I think tent revivals are great, and I think bringing religion to the people also great.
But I think that they cannot withstand the slow, steady hammering of every possible communication outlet attacking Christianity.
Has this happened before?
Yes, it did.
In the 18th century, when the French Revolution exploded, and they call this the Enlightenment.
See, this is the other, this drives me nuts.
When people talk about the Enlightenment, and I'm reading Jonah Goldberg's book, where he's always attacking the Romantics.
And he always says the Romantics were a reaction to the reason, the age of reason, with feelings.
And that's not right.
That is just not right.
The age of absolute reason resulted in the French Revolution, which resulted in terror, tyranny, and world war.
And what the British Romantics were reacting to, they were saying, well, that didn't go so well.
You know, the entire world is now devolved into war, or the entire world as we know it, as Napoleon tries to conquer everybody and reign and deliver French tyranny on everybody.
Maybe we miss something in the age of reason.
And what they understood that they missed was the internal experience of being human, the soul.
At the same time, there was what was called the Oxford movement, where intellectuals began re-embracing Christ.
And this got Wordsworth, the great romantic poet Wordsworth, ultimately became part of the Oxford movement.
And it did restore the reasons behind Christianity so that, in other words, people could believe in it again.
And C.S. Lewis did this again during World War II when he started reminding people of why we believe what we believe.
That it's not just, oh, you know, don't be gay, don't drink, you know, wear a tie and go to church.
It actually is a reason.
for believing and a reason and the believing gives you the reason for living.
Very important.
So that's where what I believe will actually happen.
The thing that people are struggling with, because so many intellectuals know this, I've said this before, but so many books are now being written where they say, you know what we're missing here?
We're missing Christianity.
I can't believe myself, but it would be nice if it came back.
And the stumbling block they have, I think, is the miraculous.
They're having a hard time believing the miraculous because this stuff don't happen.
We all agree on that.
This stuff don't happen.
If it did happen, we wouldn't think, gee, who was this Jesus that he was doing these things?
And Jesus constantly refers to the miraculous as proof of his mission.
He says, go and tell John the Baptist what I'm doing.
Go and tell him that the blind are given sight.
Go and tell him that the lame walk.
So those are the things that intellectuals are going to have to recover their belief in because I think that is what Christ is, is he is proof of what we already know.
We already know that we're people.
We already know that we have free will.
We already know that Andrew is Andrew, John is John, Jane is Jane.
But Jesus delivers us proof of the fact that those things are eternal, that they matter more than the physical world.
In fact, it is the spiritual world that's in command.
So that's what I think it's going to take.
I think it's going to take the intellectuals to step up and recover their faith.
And I believe they already are doing it.
It's happening quietly off in the side, but it will happen.
It will happen more publicly eventually.
All right, I think we have to go to tickety boo news.
Let's do it.
All right.
Today is World Poetry Day.
So I am going to read a short poem, one of the great poems.
I decided since it's World Poetry Day, I'm going to read what I believe.
And if there's one I'm not thinking of, you can write and tell me.
I believe is the greatest poem ever written about reading poetry.
Okay.
And it's by John Keats, my favorite poet, called On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.
And just to give you a little background, in Keats' time, which is this time we're talking about, this time of the transition from the Enlightenment age or the age of reason to the Romantic era, the translations of Homer were very formal and polite.
But Chapman was this medieval translator who had given a much more earthy translation.
And so one night he and a pal sat up, as George Chapman, he and a pal named George Cowden Clark sat up together reading the Chapman's Homer.
And it was a revelation to Keats.
And Keats was, Clark said Keats was shouting with delight as some passage of a special energy struck his imagination.
And at 10 o'clock the next morning, Clark woke up and he found this sonnet, one of Keats' earliest and greatest sonnets, on his breakfast table.
The sonnet was lying there.
And the sonnet talks about Keats is talking about, he says, much have I traveled in the realms of gold.
And he's talking about traveling through the literary world, the world of the imagination, the world that the bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Apollo was the god of poetry.
So he's talking about traveling through this world, but he never, and he traveled through the expanse of Homer's world, but he'd never really seen it until he read Chapman's translation.
And then, and this is the important part, he compares the experience of reading Chapman's translation to all the scientific discovery and all the new world discovery that was going on.
He said, when I read Chapman's translation, it felt like I was discovering a new planet because I think it was Uranus had just been discovered.
And it felt like discovering the Pacific.
And he makes one of the most famous mistakes in literature.
He says Cortez discovered the Pacific.
It was actually Balboa.
And he was told that it was a mistake and said, I won't change it because I need that extra syllable for my sonnet.
But what he is saying is all this science is great.
All this discovery is great.
The new world, it's all great.
But the most important discovery is still the internal search for yourself, for the thing that art gives you, the thing that God gives you, guarantees and shows you the way toward.
That is what matters.
And all these people who are talking about now how science has done such miracles, it really has done such miracles.
Diseases that ravaged the world are gone.
Our age expectancy, our life expectancy is so much greater.
Famine, virtually gone.
All these things are wonderful, but they don't mean a thing if you ain't got your life, your inner life.
And people's lives mattered even when there was famine, even when there was disease, their lives mattered to them because of this internal search which art helps and which religion helps.
So here's John Keats on World Poetry Day on first looking into Chapman's Homer.
Much have I traveled in the realms of gold and many goodly states and kingdoms seen.
Round many western islands have I been, which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told that deep-browed Homer ruled as his demeanor.
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken, or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific and all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien.
Produced By Teams00:00:40
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
We'll see you 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.
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And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production.