Andrew Clavin dissects leftist culture’s unraveling, mocking Justice Stevens’ gun-control op-ed as a rare leftist hypocrisy admission while framing Trump’s defiance as the catalyst for political correctness’ decline. He contrasts post-9/11 liberal narratives blaming systemic issues with the Cruz shooter’s case, where kindness failed, and argues Walmart’s Cosmopolitan ban proves leftist self-destruction. Conservative voices like Roseanne Barr and South Park creators—openly Republican yet culturally liberal—signal shifting cultural power, while Clavin’s psychological theory links anti-Semitism to repressed guilt over deicide. The episode pivots to PI films as conservative allegories of individualism versus liberal trust in government, recommends noir classics like Chinatown, and ties his political shift to rejecting liberalism post-Bakke and Reagan’s economic triumphs. Concluding with moral arguments against pedophilia rooted in Aristotelian virtue and Christian purpose, he contrasts Buddhism’s detachment with Christianity’s struggle-driven meaning, previewing Warren Farrell’s discussion on the "crisis for boys." [Automatically generated summary]
Writing today in the New York Times, a former newspaper, 97-year-old retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens says the Second Amendment should be repealed.
In an op-ed dictated to his nurse Helen, whom he mistook for his late brother Harold, Stevens wrote, quote, it's about time these who's mawtsits repealed the whatchama call it so we can get rid of those Tommy gun things before one of these flappers has too much bathtub gin and someone gets hurt, unquote.
After putting a bowl of applesauce on his head and shouting, look, mom, home from the Navy, the retired justice went on to write, quote, it was so good to see all those whipper snappers out in the street demanding to have their constitutional rights taken away.
Back in my day, people wanted to be free and all such nonsense.
And look how badly that's turned out.
Why, I can't even find my socks, unquote.
Here at the Daily Wire, we applaud the Stevens op-ed.
We feel that if a 97-year-old man, an 11-year-old girl, a bisexual communist sympathizer, and a googly-eyed teenage Nazi all agree Americans should give up their guns, we clearly need more guns.
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I should get one of those fast readers to do that stuff.
You know, they always have the guy.
All right, we're going to get back to that Stevens op-ed.
Nicholas Cruz's Impact00:15:05
This is a former Supreme Court justice saying we should repeal the Second Amendment.
But there was another Times op-ed that really struck me very, very powerful.
You know, here's the thing.
We talk about this all the time.
Donald Trump is this enormous figure.
It's really hard to talk about the Times and to talk about politics without talking about Donald Trump.
And he's a man with big flaws, and he's a man who's accomplished much as our president, doing a really good job in his first year.
But one of the things that I think has been most positive about him arises from some of the stuff that I find most negative about him, that he basically has shattered political correctness.
Or let's put it this way.
He's put his fist in political correctness and put a bunch of cracks in this left-wing wall because political correctness is basically an abuse of our good manners.
It basically took our manners, which are based on gentlemen treating ladies in a certain way, treating each other in a certain way, signaling our goodwill toward one another, and it transformed that into our good manners were based on left-wing propositions.
If you made certain kinds of jokes, you were a racist.
If you said things a certain way, you were a racist, you were white privileged, you had this, you had that.
It was all about shutting people up, using their manners.
And that is an expert use of culture by the left.
Good job, left.
If you want to destroy freedom, the best thing to do is to wrap people in these chains of culture and these chains of manners.
So anything they say, so people just stop and think before they speak, afraid of violating left-wing protocols.
Trump is just too rude.
He's just too rude.
He doesn't care about politeness, which is bad.
But because of that, he also has shattered political correctness.
There's a reason, there's a reason that Facebook and YouTube and Google and Twitter are all panicking and trying to shut us down.
It's because whenever we speak freely, we win, because our arguments are better than theirs.
Their arguments make no sense.
Nothing the left says makes any sense.
It's internally contradictory.
You can take an argument anytime you can take an argument of the left and beat it with an argument from the left.
The same argument, the same people are destroying their own arguments.
I mean, the one I always joke about is that men and women are exactly the same.
There's no difference, but a man can be a woman in a man's body.
And I always think like, well, if they're exactly the same, how would he know?
How would he know he had a woman inside him?
So they abused our good manners.
And because Trump doesn't have good manners, he's, you know, I think it was yesterday, Dennis Prager, which this cracks me up because Dennis Prager is one of the most mild-mannered, you know, gentle, thoughtful, intellectual conservatives.
He's nothing radical about him.
And he puts out these wonderful Prager U videos and he puts them out on YouTube.
And YouTube is so shocked to find that people still believe in the Ten Commandments or that maybe Islam is not the best religion in the world.
Stuff that he has brought in experts, including me, to talk about, that they are defunding and restricting his videos.
So he sued them.
And he said they are violating my First Amendment rights of speech, but also it's false advertising because they said they were an open platform.
So the judge, Judge Lucy Koe, threw the suit out, although she threw it out without prejudice, so he can amend the suit and come back and file it again.
But he threw it out.
The part that interested me about this is she said, first of all, YouTube, which is owned by Google, is not a state operator, so it's not bound by the First Amendment.
You know, in this, we come in here and they can stop us from saying things if they want to.
They don't, but they could, you know, because it's a private business.
But here's the best part.
She says, plaintiff Prager alleged that YouTube violated the Lanham Act by falsely advertising YouTube as, quote, a forum for open expression by diverse speakers and quote, an equal and diverse public forum, right?
And he says in reality, they were discriminating against conservative viewpoints.
And she goes on to quote all the things that Prager was complaining about, you know, that YouTube said voices matter, that YouTube says is committed to fostering a community where everyone's voice can be heard.
And the reason this is not false advertising, says the judge, the court finds that all of these statements constitute mere puffery.
So she says, they're lying.
They're lying.
It's advertising.
They're lying.
It's like saying, oh, it's the best car in the world.
And then you buy it and say, well, it's not the best car in the world.
And you sue them for false advertising.
She's saying all that stuff was a lie.
So basically, this finding throws Dennis's suit out, but it also justifies Dennis' suit by pointing out that these people, YouTube, Google, has just become another mainstream media big corporation defending big government from reason.
That is what big corporations do.
Big corporations love big government because they crush the little guys.
Google's a big corporation.
They love to crush the little guy.
So they love to crush conservatives.
So they've got to silence guys like Dennis Prager.
And that, you know, so it's like he lost the suit for now, but he won the point.
You know, he won the point.
Anyway, basically, so the purpose of PC, the purpose of political correctness is to stop debate because we win debate.
It's always about silence.
You know, you can see this.
There was the CNN panel.
They've got these kids, right?
They're mobilized these kids.
And I think it's blowing up in their face and they know it because now they're starting to back off.
But they mobilized all these kids against our gun rights, our Second Amendment rights, that are there to protect us from an overweening government.
They're there in case we have to have a revolution.
So the government always remembers that it's not going to be that easy to come and crush us.
That is why we have guns.
And also for self-defense.
I mean, it's important.
We shouldn't have to depend on the government to defend us, as they say, when seconds count, the police are minutes away.
You know, it's not that the police aren't trying to do a good job.
It's just they can't be everywhere.
So they have this panel.
And just listen to this.
This is the way that political correctness and leftist education has caused these kids to be unable to debate.
When I was this age, I could debate.
You know, I wouldn't say I was smart.
I wouldn't say I was wise.
I wouldn't say I knew anything, but I knew how to hold an argument.
Listen to the way these kids argue.
If we had more armed guards in our school, again, it would perpetuate the school to prison pipeline.
We have to be cognizant.
And how would it do that?
Just help me understand the law.
Because if you're treated like a criminal, you're going to act like a criminal.
Exactly.
And this mindset, the way that we are socialized in schools as being seen as criminals, as being black bodies, then that is going to contribute to your way of life.
I'm not white.
I'm not black, but I am a person of color.
And I don't feel comfortable.
I'm walking around and I'm looking at these cops and I'm like, do they think I'm up to something because of the color of my skin?
And that's how all of my friends that are black in my school feel.
And I don't receive the same airtime as some of my friends.
And it is because I'm not white.
We shouldn't use white privilege as a dirty word.
It is what it is.
White privilege comes out in structural racism.
Why can't they talk about their experience?
Well, I don't.
Why are you guys attacking white people?
Somebody's not afraid of it.
They're not attacking white people.
It's not affected by a system that we built.
We're talking about racism that white people implemented into this country.
Anyone can be.
Anyone cannot.
Let me say something.
When you have 20% of a population, the entire United States population committing 50% of the homicides, that's not just you're the victims.
So it just evolves into these people shouting names at one another, racist, right?
And the people talking are talking about, you know, as a black person, as a person who's not black, but he's not white, but he's a person.
It's like, what has that got to do with the issue of whether the teens would be safer with guns in the school or not?
I mean, that is the issue.
They have been reduced to this by whom?
By the adults, because the adults, this is exactly, I mean, you could even hear, was that, who was that, Allison Camerada?
Yeah.
You could hear her saying, well, why can't they speak about their experience?
Who cares about their experience?
The part that I loved was Don Lemon.
And all right, you can say Don Lemon is the stupidest person in the universe, so it's not fair.
But still, he was modeling this very way of talking.
This is where the kids get it.
They get it from the adults.
Listen to Lemon shutting this woman up because she dares to question the authority of these children.
You tell the kids to shut up.
Sorry, Steve hasn't spoken either.
No, you don't tell them to shut up.
I think they have a right to do this.
But I also think that if you criticize some of what they're saying, then all of a sudden you're the bad guy.
You are the bad guy.
No.
You are.
You are.
You kids are unimaginable.
You let them vent and you move on.
You're an adult.
You let them vent and you understand that.
You're an adult.
Maybe you do understand more than they do, but you let them vent.
Just as you let a gold star widow or a gold star father or a gold star mother vent.
You don't want it to go by without pushing.
Those kids are not going to change the Second Amendment.
They're not lawmakers.
They're not, but we are elevating them to a point where now that they're beyond reproach, become a widow.
They're elevating them.
And they deserve to have every elevation because of what they went through.
And we should listen to them because I can't imagine what they went to.
And if I went through something like that, I would want people, I would want to be able to vent as much as possible.
I would say he should be smacked in the head, but it would have no effect.
It's made of rock.
She says we're elevating them and we can't attack them.
He says, no, no, no, we're not elevating them, but we are.
And you are the bad guy.
They are modeling shutuppery.
That is what they were modeling.
But because of Trump, because of Trump, some of this is starting to shatter a little bit.
And even from the left, we're starting to hear some.
Today there was an op-ed in the New York Times that I don't even know if they understood it.
It was supposed to be kind of, it included some anti-gun rhetoric, but it was by a young woman who had tried to befriend this school shooter in Florida, Nicholas Cruz.
And the headline is, I tried to befriend Nicholas Cruz, he still killed my friends.
I'm just going to read a little bit.
It says, I am writing this because of the disturbing number of comments I've read that go something like this.
Maybe if Mr. Cruz's classmates and peers had been a little nicer to him, the shooting at Stoneman Douglas would never have occurred.
This deeply dangerous sentiment expressed under the walk up, not out hashtag implies that acts of school violence can be prevented if students befriend disturbed and potentially dangerous classmates.
The idea that we are to blame, even implicitly, for the murders of our friends and teachers is a slap in the face to all Stoneman Douglas victims and survivors.
She says she has been, Cruz threw an apple at her at one point.
And she says, a year after he assaulted me, I was assigned to tutor him through my school's peer counseling program.
Looking back, I am horrified.
I now understand that I was left unassisted with a student who had a known history of rage and brutality.
No amount of kindness or compassion alone would have changed the person that Nicholas Cruz is and was or the horrendous actions he perpetrated.
I don't even know if the Times understands how this destroys the narrative of everything being America's fault, right?
Remember after 9-11, if you don't remember, after 9-11, Noam Chomsky, guys like that, the liberals, David Letterman on television started to ask the question, why do they hate us?
Why do they hate us?
It's like asking, why did Nicholas Cruz hate those students?
And she is telling you, it's not.
You know, it's a kind of moral narcissism.
It's the idea that other people have no being, have no philosophy, have no motives.
So if you change your behavior, you can control their behavior.
I mean, that kind of self-hatred is also a kind of narcissism, which we know is one of the diseases of the left.
It's like, you know what it's like?
It's like a wife who's getting beaten by her husband, saying, you know, if I can just, if I can just get breakfast right, if I don't burn the toast this time, he's not going to beat me.
Well, he is because he is a bad guy.
He is a bad guy.
The people who did 9-11, bad guys.
Nicholas Cruz, bad guys.
It's just their arguments.
When the truth comes out, when people speak the truth, because this woman is actually saying something that you don't often hear, it's always good for freedom.
It is always good for freedom when the truth comes out.
Even Justice Stevens' article, as far as I was concerned, was a breath of fresh air because they keep saying, oh, we don't want to take your guns away.
We don't want to take your guns.
We don't want to repeal the Second Amendment.
We don't believe in gay marriage.
We just want gay people to be free.
They always do this.
And then it's always too late.
Toothpaste is out of the tube.
You can't put it back.
This is the way it is.
We don't want to open borders.
But if anybody comes in here, he's free to stay.
And anybody who says there should be a border is a bad guy.
I mean, this is the way it always works.
So I'm glad Justice Stevens said what he said.
Let them try.
He says, this is a Supreme Court justice, right?
A former Supreme Court justice.
He said overturning the Second Amendment would be simple.
Getting rid of the Second Amendment.
To change an amendment, you need two-thirds of the Congress and three-fourths of the states, I think.
So it's not very simple.
My feeling is go for it, pal.
Go for it.
If people don't want their freedoms anymore, they don't deserve their freedoms.
You start with an anti-Second Amendment repealing the Second Amendment, and I'll start with an amendment banning abortion.
And we'll see which one gets passed first.
At least, you know, it's out in the open.
You know, another thing that all this I feel is happening because the left has been thrown back on itself by Trump's refusal to acknowledge their moral superiority just because he's so rude.
You know, Walmart has banned cosmopolitan.
Cosmopolitan is this feminist piece of garbage that sells sex.
It's a pornographic.
It sells the most self-destructive sex attitude towards sex, the most trashy, slutty attitude towards sex, an attitude that is bound to make you unhappy.
Walmart just banned it because of the Me Too movement.
So it's the left eating itself.
And by the way, when the left is eating itself, it goes really well with leftist tears.
So you might want to get the tumbler.
Anyway, but now, also because of this, the right is starting to get a little bit of a voice in the culture because all of this is cracking.
And people are saying, well, these people are out there.
I mean, they're leaving in Hollywood.
I just had this conversation with my agent yesterday.
I said, in Hollywood, they are leaving so much money on the ground by not doing a show.
Here's a show for Trump supporters.
Here's a comedian who supports Trump.
They're not doing it.
Who got the idea?
Roseanne, Roseanne Barr.
I mean, you know, here's a woman.
She was a big, when I was out of the country in the 90s.
I never really experienced Roseanne Barr.
Now she's back playing a Trump supporter.
And the trick here is that she's very culturally liberal.
She's just economically in favor of Donald Trump.
And you may say, well, that's bad, but I don't think so because I think that's true of a lot of Trump voters.
I think that's one of the things we have to take into account that a lot of these Trump voters are actually Democrats who have come over to the Republican side for the economic America first message.
But even so, Roseanne, here's a scene from the first episode.
And Roseanne has, it's her sister, I believe, comes in wearing the pink hat and the nasty woman shirt.
And she looks so stupid that, I mean, it's just, it's a commentary in and of itself.
But listen, watch the scene.
Pink Hat Commentary00:15:14
Prince.
Or senator or doctor or captain of industry because girls can be whatever they want to be.
I want to train cats to bark.
Good.
I think it's cool.
And Jackie thinks every girl should grow up and be president.
Even if they're a liar, liar, pantsuit on fire.
I think we know who's a liar and who's on fire.
Roseanne.
Hey, Jackie.
DJ.
Welcome back.
Thank you for your service.
Thanks.
But I've been out of the Army for three months.
Oh, I've been off the force for years, but I can still taste the adrenaline.
How's the missus?
She win the war over there yet?
Not yet.
Okay.
Well, thank her for her service.
I brought salad.
Thank you for your salad.
Hey, everybody.
This is the first dinner together we've had as a family in a long time.
Let's try to survive it.
Yeah.
First, let's say Grace.
Jackie, would you like to take a knee?
Dear Lord, thank you for this food and for bringing our son DJ home safe from Syria.
Please protect his wife Gina and all our troops still overseas.
Please watch over our son Jerry, who's on that stupid fishing boat where apparently they don't get phone calls.
But most of all, Lord, thank you for making America great today.
Reacts, just a nasty woman shirt is enough satire for me.
They're praying at the table.
I mean, it is a different voice.
And she is a person basically of the left.
She was big friends with Hillary Clinton until they had a falling out.
The movie Chappaquitic is coming out.
I love this.
I love this.
Here's a scene from the movie Chappaquittic.
This is Teddy Kennedy showing up.
I believe at this point, the woman is still in the drink drowning because he didn't go back to rescue her.
And he goes to get a friend for help.
But listen to this line.
This is an incredible line.
Hey, Joe Gargan, you've got a problem.
Sure thing.
What the hell happened to you?
You better get Paul, too.
Come on, Teddy.
What's the big idea?
I'm not going to be president.
Not, I killed a girl.
I'm not going to be president.
And CNN in the review said this is about one of Kennedy's darkest hours.
I thought, one of Kennedy's darkest hours?
I mean, you know, also, it's only one of his darkest hours.
So that really indicates that just killing a girl, you know, that's one of those things.
I've done a lot of things wrong.
That was one of them.
I mean, they picked up that narcissism of the left.
You know, I'm not going to be president.
It's amazing.
And the other day, and now this was not a surprise to me, but the guys who do South Park, they won an award from the left-wing activist group, People for the American Way, which is from, what's the guy's name?
The guy who did All in the Family.
He runs People of the American Way or he started it.
And they got up to accept the award.
And first they had Larry Elder introduce them.
And then they said, we're Republican.
And everybody started kind of chuckling.
Ha ha, it's a joke.
And they said, no, seriously, we're Republican.
Now, anybody who has ever watched South Park knew they were libertarians, certainly.
And if you watch Team America, which was part of it was really funny.
I mean, they're very grotesque, but they had a scene in Team America with Sean Penn where he was blaming Bush for everything.
And by the way, you'll see at the bottom, it says he's a member of the Film Actors Guild, but it only has the initials F-A-G.
So this thing was Sean Penn.
Here it is.
Last year, I went to Iraq.
Before Team America showed up, it was a happy place.
They had flowery meadows and rainbow skies and rivers made of chocolate where the children danced and laughed and played with gumtrop smiles.
So Penn got so ticked off.
He wrote them a letter and then published it, you know, screaming.
Matt Damon was cursing at him.
But this is all one thing that is happening.
I understand these are just little beams of light that are flashing through.
But because Trump is so belligerent, people who are not belligerent, people who are just trying to make their point, people who are just trying to say what they have to say, suddenly have this incredible damp towel of political correctness unwrapped from around their faces and are feeling a little bit bolder.
I think it is a huge thing.
I think it is the thing.
If I had to pick one thing that Trump has done, I'd have to pick two.
It's the judges and this that I think are going to have a real effect because I don't care.
You can throw out the lawsuit against Google and YouTube, but now we know.
We see you, YouTube.
We see who you are.
And now we know.
And it's not going to be long before people start to build their own platforms, before the government starts to say you've got a monopoly on information.
Maybe we should break this up a little bit.
It's not going to be long if you keep silencing conservative voices when conservatives are going to strike back and finally, finally, finally get into the culture the way they should.
Mailbag is coming up.
I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come on over to the dailywire.com, subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month, lousy 100 bucks for the entire year, plus the leftist Jeer's Tumblr.
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And the mailbag.
What is that one second delay?
It makes me crazy.
All right, from Elizabeth.
Hi, Drew.
Why do people have a problem with Jews?
Why is anti-Semitism a thing?
Why are Jews targeted differently from any other religion, say like Protestants, Mormons, Buddhists, etc.?
They certainly are.
It's a good question.
I write about this, by the way, in my memoir, The Great Good Thing.
I write an entire chapter.
I think it's called This Thing of Darkness, and it is about my take on anti-Semitism.
And I will summarize it quickly.
I mean, first of all, there's an historical element to this.
I mean, the Jews were always separatists.
They were always saying, we don't want anybody in our religion.
Our religion makes us good.
You're barbarians.
That always ticks people off anyway.
But that would have been normal because a lot of people felt like that.
The whole word barbarian is a Greek word because the people who weren't Greek sounded to them like they were saying ba, ba-ba.
So they called them barbarians.
It's really where the word comes from.
But because Christianity was a breakaway sect from Judaism, and because the Jews were ticked off about it, I mean, preaching Christianity in the middle of Jerusalem, which is what they were doing, was dangerous, right?
There was already animosity between the Christians and the Jews.
But then in 70 AD, the Jews had an uprising against the Romans and the Romans crushed them.
They destroyed basically Palestine.
They threw them out.
If you go to Rome, there's still the Arch of Titus, I believe it is.
It still has carvings about this, people carrying the soldiers carrying away the menorahs and all this stuff.
It was an absolute disaster for the Jews.
Some people believe that this was the abomination of desolation that Jesus was talking about, that this he was warning them, turn the other cheek because these people will kill you.
Some people actually have that as their theology.
But the point was, after this, it speculated that it was very useful for the Christians to distance themselves from the Jews, saying, we're not those Jews.
We're new Jews.
This is not that thing.
And they pose Christianity as opposed to the Jews.
And of course, part of this was the theology that it was, quote, the Jews who killed Christ, the Jews who killed Jesus.
And as I say in my book, I feel like that's not even an English sentence, because when you say the Jews, who are you, you know, I didn't do it, you know, I wasn't there.
So I just feel like that's a very strange thing to say.
But it was part of the theology that the Messiah had come.
The Jewish Messiah had come to the Jews.
They hadn't recognized him.
And now the religion had gone off to the Gentiles and the Jews had been cut out of the religion.
I think there's a psychological element to this that grew up over time.
By the time you're in the Middle Ages, the Jew, most people had never seen a Jew, but the Jew was the killer of Christ.
And when they do their Easter plays, the Jew would come on as the evil Jew and he would be plotting against Christ.
The idea that the Jews were deicides, killers of God, became a very, very powerful preaching idea within the Catholic Church.
And the Catholic Church says, well, you know, we always defended the Jews when they were attacked by the mob.
Well, maybe that's true, but the mob was incited by these ideas.
And, you know, we talk about the Crusades being defensive wars against the Muslims.
When the Crusaders would go marching off to fight the Muslims, they always pause and kill some Jews on the way on the theory that why should we fight the infidel in Outreamer overseas when we've got infidels right here, so let's kill them on the way.
So I believe there's a psychological element to this.
I wrote about this in my novel, The Uncanny, and I called it The Uncanny because Freud had written a book called The Uncanny about what he called the return of the repressed.
If something is so horrible in your past that you repress it and it becomes unconscious, it keeps coming back in deformed ways.
And this is what I believe.
I believe that the Jews' relationship to God represents all of our relationships to God.
So that all the things that the Jews did, anybody would have done, but they were the ones chosen to illustrate this in history.
Everybody killed Jesus.
Everybody.
Anybody who was there, if you were there, if I were there, we would have done the same thing because the light of God is so powerful and it shines on all our flaws and we hate him for it and so we would have killed him.
It was easier instead of accepting that guilt to blame it on the Jews.
And that, so in other words, it was kind of self-hatred being projected outward.
That's my psychological take on it.
And I really believe that people, in the end, that people hate Jews because they hate God and they hate God because they hate themselves.
And God's light shines on you and shows you who you really are.
And the Jews introduced this God into our world.
He introduced the idea that we are sinful and fallen.
And we hate them for those things.
It's basically a way of punishing ourselves for killing God by blaming it on the Jews.
That's the way I think about it.
I say it a little bit more clearly in my book.
It's a very complex thought.
But if you read the book, there is a chapter on it where I felt I explained it pretty well, at least my point of view.
From Joseph, Dear Clavin, August Imperator of the Shaven Pate, I have always been fascinated by the intrigue and Baroque atmospheres of the private investigator genre of movies.
Love PI movies.
There's something about the lone man on the edge of the law that strikes me as supremely compelling.
Unfortunately, this genre seems to have fallen out of favor recently.
This is true, and I'll tell you why in a minute.
The most recent example of a well-crafted PI movie I can recall was A Walk Among the Tombstones starring Liam Neeson.
I saw that.
It was good.
It's based on Lawrence Bloch, who was, if you've never read him, he's a very good PI writer.
However, there is little before and nearly nothing after, of which I'm aware.
I'm a millennial and hoping you could give me your top three all-time favorite PI films.
Thank you for all you do, your disciple Joe.
You know, there's a theory, and I don't know who first came up with this theory, but there's a theory that police shows are for liberals because it's a trust in government, and PI stories are for conservatives because it's about a lone man taking on the system.
In TV, for the last 20 years, you could not sell a private eye show.
That's changing a little bit now that there's so many TV channels.
But before, before maybe three years ago, you could not sell a private investigator story.
They just wouldn't even listen to it.
You'd say, it's about a private eye.
No, we don't want it.
And I said to somebody once, I said to a producer, why won't you listen to a PI thing?
And she said, liberal, of course, she said, the world is just too complicated for a man alone to solve the problems.
That is, of course, the classic Wilsonian liberal argument.
The world is too complicated for individuals.
It now has to be solved by the experts.
So that is why there's some hostility toward PI movies.
However, there have been some great, great PI movies.
You have to go back into the black and white.
As a millennial, you've got to go back into the black and white era to get the really good ones, the best.
I'm not going to tell you the three best because some of them are just great.
Here's some great ones.
The Maltese Falcon, probably the greatest private eye movie ever made.
That's with Humphrey Bogart.
You got to see the one with Humphrey Bohr, The Big Sleep, also with Humphrey Bogart.
Murder My Suite with Dick Powell, which is also based on a Raymond Chandler story, like The Big Sleep.
The Thin Man is a funny one, also based on a Doshel Hammett story, like The Maltese Falcon.
The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Murder My Sweet, Thin Man, Harper, which is based on Ross McDonald, one of the modern masters, and stars Paul Newman.
Lots of fun, a little dated because it takes place in the 60s and has hippies and things like that.
Chinatown, if you've never seen Chinatown, excellent movie with Jack Nicholson.
Clute with, uh, uh, what's his name?
Um, Donald, um, who's the, who's the guy in 24?
Does anybody remember?
What's that?
Sutherland.
He force.
Donald Sutherland, his father, is in Clute.
One really strange one is Angel Heart.
It has a supernatural story, but it's a really good story, very ugly and scary.
And if you've never seen, I don't know if you can get these, but if you've never seen the TV shows Harry O and The Outsider, they're probably a little dated as well, but they're very good private eye stories.
Also, if you've never read any of these books, you know, read The Maltese Falcon, read The Big Sleep.
They're some of the greatest writing in American literature.
Read, what are some of the other really great, oh, read Eye the Jury, Mickey Spillane, really interesting story.
That's really good.
All right.
Dear Andrew, The Haven from Insanity Clavin, you talk about your transformation from atheism to Christianity, but I have not heard much about your transformation to conservatism.
Is it related to your religious transformation or has you always been a conservative at heart?
No, it's not related, weirdly enough.
They two happened kind of at the same time.
Really, really not.
I shouldn't say that.
They didn't happen at the same time.
But the conservative, the transformation to conservatism happened first.
I was always a disgruntled liberal, especially when political correctness came.
I thought political correctness was terrible.
I remember when the Bacchi decision came in, which allowed affirmative action.
I remember saying out loud, the left, the liberals, as we called them then, because they were still liberal, liberals have run out of ideas.
Once you have to impose racial quotas, you have run out of good ideas.
But what really changed things was the lies they told about Ronald Reagan, because when Ronald Reagan became president, he was a warmonger.
Why Do We Know Some Things Are Wrong?00:06:15
He was an idiot.
It was just like with Trump.
He was a fool.
He was a movie actor.
He didn't know what he was doing.
He was just playing a part, all this stuff.
And I believed it.
I believed all of it.
I thought Reagan was the biggest idiot I ever met.
I thought he was going to get us all killed in a war with the Soviet Union, all of it.
And everything Reagan said came true, and everything he did worked.
Everything.
So the economy took off.
And there was, oh, it's going to be a disaster.
The economy took off for the next 25 years.
And they try to give Clinton credit.
Nah, it was Reagan.
Clinton was just managing, did manage well the Reagan economy.
They tried to give Mikhail Gorbachev.
They gave him the Nobel Prize for the fall of the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev did everything he could to keep the Soviet Union alive.
It was Reagan who brought it down, Reagan and the Pope and Margaret Thatcher who brought it down almost single-handedly because everybody was attacking them every single day.
Nobody knew the Berlin Wall was going to fall.
Nobody knew the Soviet Union was going to fall except Ronald Reagan.
And when it fell, I was like, whoa.
And it really had an effect on me.
I thought he was the only person who said it was going to happen.
Maybe he's not an idiot.
Maybe he's not a cowboy.
Maybe he's not a movie actor.
And that was the slow, slow beginning.
I was living in England when I started to make this turn.
So it wasn't until I got back, because I was completely out of American politics.
It wasn't until I got back and started listening to Rush and reading the National Review.
They had a great column then called The Corner where everyone would go and just chat.
I used to call them my imaginary friends.
And I thought, these are the guys who are speaking the things that I'm thinking.
And so maybe I'm a conservative, which was shocking to me because my father had told me that conservatives were Nazis.
And so it was just a shocking revelation to me that these were my friends.
And that basically is what happened.
And finally, I think it was John Pethoritz put something on the corner about poets.
And I finally chimed in because I knew a lot about poetry.
And Pethoritz said, oh, I read your book, you know, True Crime or something like this.
And we got together and started talking.
And I realized that these were the people, these were my homies.
And they were actually saying, speaking the truth.
And that was how I changed there.
I will say that it did have connect to my religious transformation only when I realized that I could believe something that far from the way I'd been raised.
I realized that may have freed me a little bit to believe in Christianity as well.
Hi from Adam.
Hi, Mr. Clavin.
I unfortunately haven't had the time to read a novel for quite a few years and will soon have that luxury available to me again.
I've been a fan of your political commentary for some time now and I'm interested in reading some of your novels.
I'm a huge fan of sci-fi, mystery crime, and fantasy.
Which novel should I begin with?
I would begin with Werewolf Cop and then also listen to the podcast Another Kingdom.
Those are my kind of most science fiction fantasy books.
Most of my books are crime novels, but Werewolf Cop, I think it's one of my best novels.
Terrible title, but one of my best novels.
And Another Kingdom, the podcast, you'd also enjoy.
From Jeroen, we get a lot of questions from him, but he always asks good questions.
Dear brave Sir Clavin, in today's show, it's been a long time since I've been elevated from a knight for a long time.
As I'm writing this question, you mentioned people wanting to make child sex robots for pedophiles.
I'm certainly many recoiled in horror, as I did.
But given the theme I noticed of the episode, why do we know some things are right and some things are wrong, it got me thinking, why do we know pedophilia or even something like bestiality are wrong?
There's a general consensus.
They're listed in the Bible as wrong, but that just begs the question, why is it in the Bible?
How do we know pedophilia is wrong?
And more generally, how do we derive the conclusion that any given sexual act is wrong?
Okay, two ways.
There are two arguments about this, both of them true.
The one is the argument about consent, because many things that we think of as sexual crimes are not actually sexual, or are only sexual incidentally.
They're actually violating other kinds of, they're committing other kinds of sins.
And when you rape somebody, for instance, it's a sexual crime, but the sin you're committing is you're violating that person's freedom, their right to consent with their own body, their right to do with their body with their will.
A child and an animal cannot give consent to something like sexuality.
Certainly an animal can't, and certainly a child cannot.
A child cannot understand what sex is, why it is difficult, why it's important, why it's complex.
If you, as an adult, rape a child, you're committing, it's rape.
It's simply rape because the child cannot give consent.
So that is one reason.
The other reason is more complicated and there has more angles to it, which is, of course, the kind of Aristotelian argument of the purpose of things.
You know, the purpose of what is the purpose of your body.
And that is where a lot of sexual morality comes from.
It is not, oh, I hate gay people.
It is that sexuality has a purpose and you're not using it for that purpose.
And that is basically breaking the law of virtue.
Now, like I said, there are a lot of complicated arguments here.
You can get to a lot of different places.
But I do think it's true that if you don't understand yourself as a human, you don't understand yourself as a spirit, as a being, as a thing with a name that God knows, you cannot know how to use your sexuality.
Once you understand that, it becomes clearer that love has to be involved, that respect has to be involved, that you have to use it in a situation where the consequences will not be murdering the child in your womb.
You have to use it in situations where the consequences will not be breaking the hearts of people or using their bodies as if they were objects.
Those are all things that go into the morality of sexuality and can be very complex, and you can get to different places that way.
But there, too, again, you are misusing your body when you attack a child or an animal.
And it really is.
I mean, the thing with consent, it's just rape.
I mean, it's raping an animal, it's raping a child.
Dear Lord of Lofty Thoughts and Prognostications, you are my last hope.
I've searched and searched, but I can't find the lyrics to your theme song.
Specifically, I don't understand what the birds are singing.
This is from Francis.
They're singing hunky-dunkity-doo, right?
Isn't that what they say?
Hunky-dunkity-do is what they're singing.
From Isaac, your authorliness Clavin, I've watched your show for a long time, and occasionally when something great happens, you played a montage of scenes from old movies where characters sang happy songs.
This is the Trump happiness montage.
Crossing Paths with Purpose00:06:45
I could really use the positivity in my life.
I haven't seen it in a long time, and I miss it.
Yes, this is what we do when Trump scores a major victory that we approve of.
So we will play the Trump happiness montage to end today's mailbag.
We're going to win so much.
We're going to win at every level.
We're going to win economically.
We're going to win with the economy.
We're going to win with military.
We're going to win with health care and for our veterans.
We're going to win with every single facet.
This thing always makes me laugh.
My, oh my, what a wonderful thing.
We're going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning.
Yay!
You say, please, please, it's too much winning.
We can't take it anymore.
I feel pretty.
Oh, so pretty.
I feel pretty and witty and gay.
We have to keep winning.
We have to win more.
I got a wig, boy.
What is this about that thing?
It always cracks me up.
All right.
So it's Holy Week, and we've been talking about our old friend Uncle Jesus all week and what some of just some of the things that have been on my mind recently.
And yesterday I was talking about the fact that when God speaks, two things are happening.
One is God is speaking, and the other is people are hearing.
And what we get is what people heard.
You know, and we have to kind of figure that out.
And that makes the laws of the Jews very particular to the Jews.
And I was thinking that you could sort of deduce from that.
You could say, well, isn't God speaking to everybody through all of nature?
So aren't all religions a path to God?
No, only my religion is a path to God.
Yours is going to get you sent to hell.
No, I'm joking.
But, you know, I was thinking about this in relationship to Buddhism, and not because I dislike Buddhism, but because I like it very much.
I practiced Zen for many years.
It was incredibly helpful.
The meditations focused my mind.
I remember I have no shot in basketball.
I never have had a shot.
They used to send me in basketball in high school.
They used to send me in just to foul people because I was bigger than everybody else, but I had no shot.
But when I was meditating, doing Zen meditation, I became really good at waste paper basketball and I would win bets and I would get all these quarters in my pocket because I would be winning at the radio station where I was working for.
So I really like it.
But there came a point when I sort of, the beauty of it went past me, or I went past it.
And I began to feel that sitting, meditating was like being dead.
And one of the things about the Buddhist philosophy is it is an attempt to achieve happiness by letting go of desire.
The idea is that life is suffering, that you suffer because you desire things and you hate other things, you have aversion to other things, and if you can let go of your desires and your aversions, then the changing passage of time and the things that happen to you don't affect you anymore and you are elevated above suffering.
And the idea here also is that you have no self, so the self is really not a permanent thing and you're trying to hold on to the self, let it go.
So it actually was a little bit like being dead because you are letting go of the self.
And I started to think, you know, I'll let go of myself when I'm dead, but now I have desires.
I have things that I desire, and I'm willing to suffer for those desires because it seems to me that I was made with a purpose.
I have a purpose inside me, a path inside me, and I want to express that path.
And I didn't know that was putting me on the path to Christianity, but I really do believe it was, because Jesus' attitude was a little different.
He did say things like, if you lose yourself, you'll find yourself.
Although the word there means, it's a very complicated word.
It means self and soul and life.
So sometimes they translate it, if you lose your life, you'll find your life.
And he said, take up your cross, deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.
And so he actually isn't telling you to rise above suffering.
He's telling you almost to embrace suffering, but embrace suffering in following him and following the logos, embodied logos of the world.
And this is much more in keeping with the kind of Western way of finding joy through virtue, by finding joy by doing things according to their purposes.
So for instance, you know, I'm a writer.
I write stories.
If I sit down and write stories, and I've done this from time to time, just thinking, I'm going to make a lot of money with this story.
I'm going to make a, the story gives me no joy.
Now, the story may be great.
I mean, if Shakespeare wrote plays just to make money, some people think he did, I doubt it.
But if he did write plays, he'd still be Shakespeare.
He'd still be Shakespeare, but he wouldn't have joy.
I sit down to write, and always I try to write the most beautiful, most exciting, most delightful thing that I can write.
I'm always in the story itself, not thinking about the money until it's time to sell the book.
And then it's time to think about the money.
But the book has been created in joy, in virtue.
And that, I think, is closer to what Jesus was saying when he said, take up your cross and follow me, because if you have your desires and you follow your desires, you're going to fail.
You're going to lose.
You're going to suffer.
If you live as a person, as an actual human, you're going to feel the pain and sadness of the world.
You are not going to rise above it.
You're not going to be a Buddhist at peace with everything.
You are going to cry out from the cross from time to time, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
And that, to me, is what Jesus called life in abundance.
And that is a very different way to live.
And you can see it in the different attitudes of the Buddhists who are looking for peace.
They're looking for placidity.
You look at their societies.
That's kind of what they hold up.
And we hold up this kind of action, determination, achievement, building things, making things.
I'm not condemning the society, and I'm certainly not condemning Buddhism.
I'm simply saying that it is a different path and it leads you to a different place.
And for me, the Christianity is clearly the life in abundance that I'm looking for.
That's it.
Tomorrow, we have Warren Farrell, who wrote this really interesting book about the crisis for boys, which is certainly a crisis.
It is going to be interesting.
And like I said, we've got a Friday show as well.
So be there tomorrow.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
is The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Christianity's Path to Abundance00:00:19
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 Jesuit Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.