Andrew Clavin’s Ep. 487 dissects Roseanne’s revival as proof audiences reject anti-Trump narratives, while critiquing Hollywood’s leftist dominance and conservatives’ failure to counter it. Dr. Warren Farrell’s The Boy Crisis exposes how fatherless boys suffer from "heroic intelligence" collapse—lacking purpose due to divorce rates and toxic-masculinity backlash. The episode ties this to systemic biases, like #MeToo’s institutional overreach, before pivoting to a memoir on faith as the antidote to societal division, arguing shared stories—religious or secular—unify better than conflict ever could. [Automatically generated summary]
Two preschools in Sweden are trying to teach kids to be gender neutral, carefully crafting their curriculum around bogus studies by crackpot leftist pseudoscientists.
The teachers at these schools teach girls to be rowdy and aggressive so they can grow up to be obnoxious loudmouths who can't find husbands.
And they teach boys to behave in a feminine manner so when they grow up, they can become serial killers who keep the heads of women in their refrigerators, especially if the heads remind them of their preschool teachers who force them to act like girls.
One of the female teachers at the school told reporters she very much enjoyed working there, saying, Coming into this wonderful gender-neutral environment makes such a refreshing change from being repeatedly raped by Islamist immigrants.
Once Sweden has solved the problem of boys being boys and girls being girls, they look forward to changing other aspects of reality like gravity, the second law of thermodynamics, and idiot Swedes making their children's lives miserable while ignoring their real problems.
Trick warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Oh, honky-donky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, honky-donky-dee-doo.
Shib-a-shib, tipsy-topsy, the world is zippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day, hoorah, hooray.
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
It's always nice to start the show with a little reference to severed heads and refrigerators.
It just gives it, I don't know, it gives it an upbeat feeling.
And speaking of severed heads, we have to say congratulations to Ben Shapiro because he starts his big radio show today.
I think it's in five major markets around the country.
And I think it's going to be a Monday.
Oh, I thought it was today.
Oh, I was reading it off the Daily Wire.
Why We Left Quip00:03:28
You can't trust this paper.
It's like, I got it.
That's fake news.
It's fake news.
Anyway, it starts Monday.
He's in New York, he's in Washington, all over the place.
And I'm sure it's going to go great.
Also, we want to congratulate Charlotte Pence, the vice president's daughter, because her picture book, Marlon Bundo, Day in the Life of the Vice President, is now number five on the New York Times bestseller list for children's books.
And that is in spite of the fact that her father kills and devours homosexuals after he's been drinking.
Whatever the left, what does the left think Mike Pence is doing that they ate so much?
I don't know.
But anyway, that's great.
She was absolutely delightful and charming.
The book is delightful and charming.
And we have another book, The Boy Crisis.
We will have today.
The author, Dr. Warren Farrell, he wrote it with John Gray, who's the guy who wrote Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, right?
But he was talking about the Boy Crisis.
It's a pre-recorded interview.
Really, really interesting.
He had a very different take, I thought, on what was going on, but it really did sound bad.
And just to remind you, there will be a Friday show tomorrow, the Clavenless Weekend.
Curfew for the Clavenless Weekend will not ring tonight.
It is still the Claven-filled, delightfully Claven-filled week.
Speaking of your teeth, your teeth are very important because if you don't take care of your teeth, you come to look like, look at the mirror, that's what you look like.
It's disgusting.
It's disgusting.
And if you want your teeth to look good, you've got to use an electric toothbrush.
My own dental hygienist told me this.
Did I tell you the last time I was at the dental hygienist?
She said to me, she said to me, you have a darkness in your tooth, but it may just be a void.
And I said, God, that's existential.
You know, it's like having a French novel in my face, you know, like the man's search for tooth.
She didn't think that was funny.
I don't know why.
But you want your teeth to look good.
And she told me you have to use an electric toothbrush.
And of course, the problem with electric toothbrushes is that they are roughly the size of nuclear missiles.
They're so huge and bulky.
You got to keep sticking them in the thing to make sure that they are charged, not with quip.
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If you want to put it on your mirror, I like to suction it right here on my head and just walk around with a beautiful Quip toothbrush stock to my head.
I'm sorry, I'm losing it.
Quip subscription plan also refreshes your brush on a dentist-recommended schedule.
This also, my dental hygienist told me, was very important.
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That's really important because I forget otherwise, if they don't deliver them, I forget to change them.
Quip starts at just $25, and if you go to getquip.com slash Clavin right now, you'll get your first refill pack free with a Quip electric toothbrush.
So get one.
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Get your first refill pack free at getquip.com slash Clavin.
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They really are sleek and good looking.
Why We Left Hollywood00:15:08
All right.
So, you know, I've worked, I'm one of the few people, conservatives, who complains about Hollywood, who actually worked in Hollywood.
And I noticed Roseanne, her show where she plays a Trump supporter, was a smash.
I mean, it was way, way beyond expectations.
And everybody's kind of talking about it.
Of course, the left is trying to parse it so it doesn't mean that she was a Trump supporter and the right is trying to say, oh, this is wonderful.
We're winning the culture.
But I wanted to take a look at it and really think about what that meant.
Now, I've talked about this before, but I am one of the very few people.
There are people who would kill their mothers to get the Hollywood career that I had.
I was dragged into it by accident.
This is true.
I wrote a book called The Scarred Man, and it was my first kind of first thriller I wrote that got a little notice.
I mean, actually, that's not true.
Some of my other thrillers had won awards, but this got a little bit more notice, a little bit more publicity, and it went around Hollywood, and it sold.
It got a big sale to Hollywood.
It was really the turning, it was the economic turning point in my life.
I was actually sitting on my bed computing whether I had enough money to get to the end of the month.
This is absolutely true.
And the phone rang, and I reached around behind me, picked it up, and said, hello.
There was a man there I had never spoken to before in my life.
He turned out to be my Hollywood agent, which I didn't even know I had.
And he had sold my book, The Scarred Man, for what to me was then a shower of gold.
And it absolutely changed my life.
And it changed in an instant like that.
I then got a phone call from a movie producer who had started a new studio, was working in a new studio.
And she said, you know, I read your book.
You obviously are a screenwriter.
You're a natural-born screenwriter.
I will hire you to write any screenplay you want.
And I said, eh, I don't want to do that.
So I love to tell this story to aspiring screenwriters so they go home and hang themselves, you know, because they think like, I would kill, I literally would kill my sister to get that.
You know, and I just, I just didn't want to do it.
I loved writing novels.
I still love writing novels.
It's what I wanted to do.
But this lady was very nice and she said to me, I will go get any piece of material that you would like.
And I was working at Columbia Pictures where I was a reader and I'd read this wonderful book by Simon Brett called Shock to the System.
And I said, I would do that if you got that.
And she optioned it and I wrote it and they made it into a film right away.
And it's a good film, Shock to the System with Michael Cain.
And so over the years, I've just been able to work in Hollywood from time to time until I became a loudmouth conservative.
Now, I have never claimed that my career ended because I was a conservative, because at the same time I became very noisy about it.
The business kind of tanked the movie business tank.
There was a writer's strike and the people who hired people got very angry at the writers.
So it all kind of happened together.
There are definitely, definitely people who will not work with me because of my politics and that it's so hard to work in Hollywood that that just makes it even more hard.
But there is no question in this world if they think for a minute that conservatives don't get at least graylisted.
That's ridiculous.
They are graylisted.
It is hard to work.
And you know, it's hard to work because you go in to a meeting and you talk and you try and sell something and they're talking about how stupid Donald Trump is.
And if you're an honest person like me, I don't want to just sit there and smile with a, you know, a stupid grin on my face pretending because once you do that, they own you.
They own you body and soul because now you can't come out and say what you really think.
And I'm very polite, but I always say, no, I'm on the other side of their question.
I don't mind Trump so much.
Whatever I say, I say something.
And it can end the conversation.
And certainly, I know for a fact, certainly a lot of people have me in meetings and then they Google me and they see the stuff that I'm saying to you right now and they don't want to work with me.
So there's definitely, definitely this leftward tilt toward Hollywood in terms of hiring, in terms of fair hiring.
It is not fair.
And it's our fault.
It's our fault on the right, as I've said a million times.
So it's our fault that we don't build our own studios, that we don't make our own movies, that we don't use YouTube cleverly enough, that we don't promote things, that we're afraid to come out and say the things that we want to say.
And we also don't support the artists who do it.
If the artist doesn't meet every little criteria, criterion of right-wing philosophy, we won't go and support that.
We want our right-wing art to be incredibly right-wing.
It's got to be like, ah, it's right-wing.
Jesus, it's Jesus with a gun.
Jesus is coming with a gun.
This time he has a gun.
It's Jesus too.
He's coming back.
And this time he has a gun.
So we're not that good at supporting the arts.
And so the left has taken them over.
And it's a problem.
I mean, I really do think it sets a lot of the tone of the country.
So now Roseanne, using her star power, which is considerable, comes back.
And she was always kind of a representative of the working class.
She does this show and she plays a Trump supporter.
And it's a huge, huge hit.
And even, you know, we should play the piece.
I didn't play this piece yesterday where she was sitting with Jimmy Kimmel.
Did we play this?
I don't think we did, where she just told Jimmy Kimmel.
I don't think we did, but let's play it anyway.
She just was sitting with Jimmy Kimmel and she told him the truth about what he is, not what he is doing.
And it wouldn't matter if it was just him.
It's all of them.
Every single comedian is anti-Trump.
And that is the problem.
It's not one person.
It's not that there's some people who are on one side and some people on the other.
It's that they all believe the same thing.
So she really went off on him.
I know you were a very liberal, socially liberal person in general.
I'm still the same.
You all move.
We do.
You all went so far out you lost everybody.
I mean, seriously.
You're probably right.
A lot of your audience, and including me, I just want to say this, Jimmy.
A lot of us, you know, no matter who we voted for, we don't want to see our president fail.
Right.
You know?
Right.
I know.
Because we don't want pants.
And yet we've seen it over again.
You want pants?
You want pants for the freaking president?
No, I don't want to.
Well, then zip that f ⁇ ing.
Because this is the thing, and we're going to get to this in a minute.
Roseanne is, in fact, very socially liberal.
So John Puthoritz, who is a good cultural observer, he's writing at the New York Post.
And this is his reaction to Roseanne's success.
At the beginning of March, the Academy Awards featured performers talking about intersectionality and dreamers and jokes about how an Oscar-nominated movie about a gay awakening was made to annoy Mike Pence, and the show got the lowest ratings in history.
Tuesday night, the premiere episode of The Revival of Roseanne featured a working-class grandmother saying grace before dinner and concluding with thanks for making America great again.
And the show got the highest ratings of any network program in six years.
Hollywood is now faced with indisputable evidence that there's a huge potential audience out there for programs that don't actively insult 63 million Trump voters.
Now, in fact, this is not indisputable evidence, with all respect to J-Pod.
correlation, right?
We don't know.
People may not be watching the Oscars because there are a lot of other things to watch.
They may be watching Roseanne because they happen to like Roseanne.
But it does seem logical that not actively insulting 63 million people is good economic policy.
I mean, you know, it's, again, there's a lot of stuff, a lot of choice on television.
It's not that you have to, you can't actively insult them.
It's that every show shouldn't actively insult them and some shows should agree with them.
That just seems to me good business policy.
You know, put out something for everybody.
You've got all these different channels, a million different channels now.
Put out something for everybody.
I mean, this is it.
So how obvious is that as a business model?
I mean, why is it that I should be graylisted?
They should welcome me.
They should say, oh, this guy can reach people we don't reach.
This guy talks to people we don't talk to.
Good.
You know, this is, let's bring him in.
Let's bring in the next, you know, the next right-wing writer we can find.
Let's have them all in there.
But it's such a closed shop and they don't understand what they're doing.
So now, Ben had this reaction where he noticed, he said, there's something else going on in Roseanne that should disturb conservatives, the redefinition of Trump supporters as blue-collar leftists rather than conservatives.
Roseanne's character is pro-gay marriage.
This is Shapiro talking, pro-gay marriage, pro-abortion, feminist, and pro-transgenderism.
And the implication is that she is a good person because of these views.
The real difference between Trump voters and Hillary voters, they're saying, are economic in nature, not cultural.
And now, that to me is another point of view that I'm perfectly happy to have on television.
I'm perfectly happy to have a Trump voter who is culturally liberal.
My problem is that there are no cultural conservatives on TV because they just imagine us as hateful.
That is the problem.
That is the problem.
It made me think, this is what it made me think.
Like, how far apart are we in this country?
Obviously, obviously, the far right and the far left hate each other.
Now, the far right, I mean, I think we all hate the far right.
You know, if we're talking about the alt-right, the guys who think things are racial and the guys who want to insult other people for their race and all those people, you know, I don't think there's room for them in an American movement.
I don't think there's room for people who hate each other on the basis of race in an American movement.
This has nothing to do with your racial theories.
It has nothing to do with what you think, the reality of race.
I'm talking about hatred, right?
But the left, the left is wide swaths of the mainstream left is now so far out there.
They're so far out there that they just cannot conceive of how anybody could disagree with their stupid opinions without being hateful.
So they can't create that character.
They cannot create, they do not know how to create a character who's not a feminist or who thinks being gay is a sin, but isn't hateful.
They can't imagine that Mike Pence, here's something I will tell you.
I would bet every penny I have that if there were some objective tolerance meter, Mike Pence is a more tolerant human being than Jimmy Kimmel.
I would bet every nickel in my pocket, you know, that Mike Pence is a far, far more tolerant person in practice than Jimmy Kimmel is.
He is sustained by his faith.
He believes his faith puts certain limits on moral action.
But I'll bet in terms of actually dealing with people, I will bet that the vice president is a much, much more tolerant person.
But they can't imagine that.
The thing is, on our side, we can't imagine that there are plenty of concerns.
I mean, ask yourself this, really, okay?
Nobody wants a gay guy running a baker out of business because the baker's religious and won't go to his wedding and won't cater his wedding.
I don't think people want that.
When they take polls, they always, I hate these polls because they skew the questions.
But it seems to me about 70% of the people feel that that is oppressing him, oppressing the baker religiously.
On the other hand, it's now between 65 and 70% of people who actually are fine with gay marriage.
And it's about 70% of people who are fine with people being gay.
People, sometimes I've heard people blame Obama for this.
It's all they all followed Obama.
I think that's absolute nonsense.
It is following the logic of our creed.
Our creed is that all men are created equal with equal God-given rights.
And ultimately, the internal logic of that leads us to include women, include people of all colors, include people who behave and act differently than us in their private lives, which is none of our business.
The problem, I think, see, these are the things I think we agree on.
I think we actually agree on this.
The problem is trying to force these values down your throat, trying to force you to participate in these values, trying to force you to celebrate these values, and the resultant idea that if you disagree, you are hateful.
Listen to Sandra Bernhardt.
Sandra Bernhardt was a loudmouth lesbian comedian.
I never thought she was very funny.
She was on the original Roseanne program.
I don't know if she's on this one.
I think she is on this one as well.
And she played the lesbian friend.
She came out as gay.
And she went on TV promoting the new show.
And the guy asked her, how could women vote for Trump?
Listen to the incredible ignorance.
What's the word I'm looking at?
Insularity.
The incredible insularity of this answer.
It is what my friend John Nolte calls bubble-dumb.
She is in a bubble.
She's not a dumb person.
She's in a bubble, and it makes her dumb.
White women for Trump.
Can't understand it.
Don't know where it comes from.
Other than, you know, being, I think it's a couple of issues.
It's being either under the thumb of your husband or it's, for the election, it was being so offended by Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton's legacy that you turned on her.
Or feeling inadequate, feeling like, how can somebody be so educated?
How could somebody have brought themselves up from their own experience and gone to the top, educated herself, fought for rights, civil rights, and equality.
And I think that's threatening to a lot of women.
How do you mean?
Threatening to women.
Yeah, a lot of women have compromised, given in, gotten married, raised their kids, and not had the luxury of being able to think for themselves.
That's an amazing, I would play that every day.
That is an amazing, amazing moment of a woman who cannot understand.
I can understand why leftists want to be leftists.
I can understand their good motives.
I really can.
I understand that they think the world should be more fair and they think that the rich are too rich and they have all these observations.
I understand.
I don't think they're idiots.
I don't think that people are.
That idea that she said they gave in, they compromised and got married.
I mean, does she not know how far, how distant from most of our lives that comment is?
This is what I'm talking about.
When I hear my friends who are on the left talk about Donald Trump, I always try to explain to them and they get so angry at me.
They will not listen.
I was taught, you know, the other day, I was bumped into Glenn Beck, and I was asking him, because Glenn Beck thinks about these things a lot, and I said, how do you get this message across?
I'm not trying to tell them how evil Obama is.
I'm trying to tell them what he looked like to us.
The radicalism, the radicalism of Barack Obama, the radicalism of his vision, the disdain he had for ordinary people, the power he thought he should have to reach into our neighborhoods, to reach into our schools and tell us who should use the bathrooms in our elementary schools.
He thought he should have that power.
That's how brilliant he was.
That's how, you know, when he said, I want there to be a million little Obamas, he wanted them in each one of our schools to have a little Obama in it telling us what to do.
They did not understand.
They can see, anybody can see how obstreperous Trump is, how rude Trump is, what a loud guy he is, but they can't see on their side what Sandra Bernhardt sounds like to us, to the rest of us.
They can't see it.
And Hollywood, I know, is like this.
They cannot understand why what she just said is offensive.
Let me show you something.
You know, maybe you don't remember when Obama was running for reelection.
Obama's Life of Julia00:15:12
He put out this video called The Life of Julia about how much better Julia's life, an ordinary woman's life, was going to be under Barack Obama than under Mitt Romney.
And it was such a disaster that you now cannot find it on the internet.
They have scrubbed it from the internet.
They won't even leave it up there because it is such, so revelatory of their view of life.
So I found a guy who had put together kind of slideshots from the original video.
And we just have those.
And I'm just going to, can we put those up?
I will read them in case you can't see.
Are they up?
Okay.
So here's the life of Julia.
And we're already, she's now around 27 years old.
We've already gotten through her birth and her childhood.
And it says, each one of these things starts under President Obama.
For the past four years, Julia has worked full-time as a web designer.
Thanks to Obamacare, her health insurance is required to cover birth control and preventive care, letting Julia focus on her work rather than worry about her health.
Under Mitt Romney, Romney supports the Blunt Amendment, which would place Julia's health care decisions in the hands of her employer.
All right, the next slide.
Can we see the next slide?
Under President Obama, Julia decides to have a child.
Well, I told her not to get under President Obama.
He never uses protection.
So under President Obama, Julia decides to have a child.
I mean, think about that for a minute.
Think about the vision of the world encapsulated in that sentence, right?
Under President Obama, Julia, under the glowing, you know, beneficent rule of a godlike President Obama, Julia decides to have a child.
And throughout her pregnancy, she benefits from maternal checkups, prenatal care, and free screenings under healthcare reform.
Let's see another one.
Under President Obama, Julia's son, Zachary, starts kindergarten.
It's like, thank you, President Obama.
I mean, the public schools in their neighborhoods have better facilities and great teachers because our beloved leader, President, I mean, does this not sound like the most fascist garbage?
Show me another.
Under President Obama, Julia starts her own web business.
Now, the thing I want to say about this too, and you know who makes a great point about this, is Jonah Goldberg talks about the fact that what this is missing is human relationships, churches, associations.
She has no husband.
Her son gets on that school bus.
He never comes back.
He's gone.
Once he grows up, she doesn't have a kid anymore.
She doesn't need a life because she's under President Obama.
Why should she need, why should she need a church?
Why should she need a school board?
Why should she need all the associations that make our lives worthwhile when she's under, by golly, she is under President Obama.
And this is the vision that they have.
And this is the thing that is driving the right nuts.
It's not that we disagree so much.
It really is not.
It is not that I don't believe of all the people I know, and I know plenty of people who think homosexuality is a deep and terrible sin.
Most of those people, I would say almost all of those people, do not want gay people persecuted by law.
They simply think they should repent in order to get into the kingdom of heaven, which is really nobody's business, but God's and theirs, you know?
And in other words, if you don't want to believe that, I do not think they want to restrict your freedom of action at all.
Most of these people that, and I've talked to them about this, most of these people feel government should get out of the marriage business.
You know, churches can have their marriages.
People can make marriage contracts.
Most of us are pretty libertarian when it comes to the law.
We just want to be left alone.
And we want if TV, if the wise creators in Hollywood did not spend every moment thinking of ways to make us feel like they hate us, if the wise news directors at ABC, CBS, and NBC did not spend every moment thinking about how they can make our president look bad, if the people in the academy did not spend every moment teaching our children that boys are girls and girls are boys and socialism, if you love the taste of cats,
socialism is one of the great ideas that has ever been had.
If they would just stop, stop trying to force all of us to live under President Obama or under some other beneficent leadership.
I think we agree on so many things.
We could just leave each other alone.
People want to be in their communities.
They want to have their values.
They want to have their lives.
I think Roseanne, in a way, represents a lot of things that a lot of us believe in.
It's not that we want to attack each other.
It's just that we want to be left alone and we want some respect for the way we live and the way we think.
And I think that really that would go such a huge, huge way into helping us start to have conversations that actually make sense.
All right, let's talk about the boy crisis with Dr. Warren Farrell.
He is the co-author of this book, The Boy Crisis, Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It.
He wrote it with John Gray.
Dr. Farrell has been named one of the world's top 100 thought leaders by the Financial Times and has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Forbes as well.
And he is, you know, I saw this on the he's like a board member for the National Organization of Women, and I asked him about this, and he has a really interesting response when he comes to talk about feminism.
Let us listen in.
Dr. Farrell, thank you very much for coming on.
The book is The Boy Crisis, Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It.
Very powerful stuff.
Why don't you begin?
I mean, this is something that is just now kind of bubbling to the surface.
People haven't really been talking about it up till now, but what is the boy crisis?
Basically, I started the research on this about 11 years ago when I began to sort of notice that in all 63 developed nations, boys were falling significantly behind girls, both academically in every subject, but especially in reading and writing, which are the two biggest predictors of success.
And I saw that they were falling behind socially.
Their emotional intelligence wasn't as great.
Their physical health was deteriorating.
Their IQs were going down.
Their sperm counts were getting lower.
Their emotional, their social skills were not as good.
And they were more likely to be depressed, not have friends, be withdrawing into video game addiction, not just video games, which are fine, but the addiction is not.
And then they were getting more engrossed in video porn and porn in general.
And so, and from this, and most importantly, so I started asking what's the causes of this.
And I noticed that developed nations have in common that they have more permission for divorce.
And they also give more permission for women being able to have children without being married.
So in the United States, for example, 53% of women who are under 30 who have children have them without being married.
And so I started looking at these two populations of women who have children without being married and women and divorced families.
And I found that some of the people who were divorced and some of the women who had children without being married were doing fine, but that was a relatively small percentage who had a lot of father involvement.
And then the significant percentage that did not have a lot of father involvement were doing very poorly.
They were having children that were having problems on more than 70 different metrics that I was able to detect.
And so while I was ultimately able to identify 10 different causes of the boy crisis, the single most important of those 10 causes was father, minimal or no father involvement or what I ended up calling dad deprived boys.
And this is across the developed world.
Across the developed world.
We don't have perfect data beyond the academic data on all developed nations, but it is showing up on every nation we've been able to study.
Well, the PISA, the United Nations studies of academic competence finds it in all developed nations.
And then beyond the academic comfort, beyond the academic measures, we have just from all over the world, but not every single country, we have different measures of emotional intelligence, depression, suicidal behavior, discipline problems, and so on.
And the patterns are amazingly similar.
This huge breakdown between boys, the boys that I would ended up calling dad-enriched boys, they're actually doing probably by most measures better than our fathers were and better than boys used to do.
They're really doing because in the old days, boys had what used to be called a sense of purpose in being able to know that if you're a boy and you live up to everything you're supposed to do as a boy, you'll prepare yourself in a sense to be disposable, disposable as a warrior or disposable by working so hard at the workplace that you did whatever you needed to do to support your family.
And disposability isn't a great sense of purpose, but what was behind that sense of purpose is you were applauded and rewarded for being a hero.
Your parents looked up to you.
Your father was proud of you.
Girls were attracted to you.
Guys respected you.
And so even though you might die at the age of 18 in the military fighting against the Nazis occupying the United States, you nevertheless were a hero.
And heroic intelligence, while it was the opposite of health intelligence, heroic intelligence is socialization for a short life.
Health intelligence is socialization for a long life.
And even though it was socialization for a short life, it ended up being a sense of purpose for boys.
And the problem is today, we're taking the toxicity from the things that boys learn to be heroes, and we're calling it toxic masculinity, as opposed to recognizing that it is the residue of heroic masculinity.
When a boy has to disconnect from his feelings in order to say to himself, when the going gets tough, the tough get going.
If I die in the process, no problem.
If I save somebody, that's the big issue.
And so, but not connecting with one's feelings is part of a series of things that we learned as boys and men that really were that was not healthy for us and therefore is toxic.
But just calling it toxic masculinity is pejorative to understanding the serving that men did and boys did to protect their country and to be willing to die before women died.
You know, we often say things like, women are civil, men are civilized by women.
Well, that's true on one level, but the opposite is also true, that the result of us going to war and working in the coal mines allowed women to be more civilized by being able to stay at home and talk with people and talk with children.
And so it took both sexes.
So the entire way we've framed masculinity has led to boys going into college and high school, hearing words like male privilege, as opposed to men, our fathers and grandfathers fulfilling their obligation and responsibilities.
And that's made boys feel like I can't even say anything as a boy, because I will just be told to shut up.
You have male privilege.
And that's increasing the toxicity toward boys today.
What's the connection?
I mean, part of this just sounds like a dad crisis, which I think is really true and is spreading throughout, certainly throughout the lower classes.
It's really interesting that the divorce rate among upper class people is actually quite low and marriage is quite high.
But among the lower classes where they need it most, the dads are missing.
What's the connection between that and the loss of heroic intelligence, which seems more, unless I'm misreading this, it seems more of a societal problem that society itself is rejecting the sacrificial nature of heroism in boys.
Yes.
So you have in the developed countries, there's permission for divorce and permission for freedom.
Where there's that permission for freedom, among the good things that happens is that we are able to say our nation is relatively safe.
We don't have to worry about being completely wiped out in terms of having all these boys go off to war.
There are more people who died in the Battle of the Summit, World War I, than have been lost in all the wars in Afghanistan and so on.
And so there's so that we have fewer men used that way.
So we can begin to explore things like not having to be a hero.
What's the tension between heroic intelligence and health intelligence?
We want our boys not to be so fearful that they just withdraw at the first sign of a threat.
But at the same time, we want them to know the edge, the balance between the heroic intelligence and being healthy and taking care of yourself and not calling each other chicken when they're unwilling to do some unsafe activity in order to prove yourself a male.
But the boys who don't have father, so all of those things are things that are happening in all developed worlds as a result of technology, as a result of capitalism usually.
But then we then have a new set of problems that came from the solution.
The solution was development and not having to be preoccupied with survival.
But then the freedoms oftentimes freed the families not to be united with fathers.
And then that created in the very families that didn't have a sense of purpose automatically built into masculinity.
That required more need for guidance from fathers to get boys to a much more nuanced state of, who are you, sweetie?
You're a beautiful young boy who has this type of skills, this type of orientation.
And I want you to make use of that orientation in such a way that maybe you can do something like write a book.
But most people who write books can't make a living doing it.
Here's a way to balance the freedom and the creativity of writing a book or being an actor with the ability to make money.
That is a nuanced set of transitions that have to be developed in boys, and they can be developed in boys to some degree by women.
But as a rule, mothers only do not allow the boy a role model to see what he could be like.
If there's a divorce and the father doesn't have access to the son, the son doesn't have much of an inspiration to be a father himself and say, do I really want to be a father and have two or three children then who then can't see me?
And the father's living in an apartment and the mother moves away and I don't want to be in that situation myself.
That doesn't inspire me.
And then also my grandfather, he sold product X that he didn't believe in, so he could make a living to be able to support me.
Why Boys Are Struggling00:06:37
I really appreciate that from my grandfather and my father, but I don't really want to be doing that.
And so in Japan, countries like that, they call this type of training to be an executive, which the feminists call male privilege, they call Kuroshi, which is death at the desk or death from overwork.
So one of the most popular games in Japan is a game called Kuroshi.
And so the person who wins this game win, the reward is you off yourself, you kill yourself, because that's the, you know, that's male privilege being, so what this is what I call in the boy crisis, the uncommon wisdom of our younger generation.
They see that there aren't many ways of being a respected male that also allow one to be one's unique self, one's creative self.
And so that catches many.
And so when the, where there isn't a father figure to guide boys from the old purpose, the old sense of purpose to a new sense of purpose, boys experience a purpose void.
And that is that combined with no fathers and no male teachers and caregivers.
And then if the boy is non-academic, if in the old days, our grandfathers, if they weren't academic in their orientation, they went from, they may have dropped out of high school, but they could have become a good mechanic, focused on machinery and used their physical strength.
But we've morphed in our society from muscle to microchip or from muscle to mental.
And so that morphing to a new type of society that is more mental and microchip oriented means boys have to be educated because even to be a welder, you have to know physics and chemistry if you want to make more than just a simple wage.
And so all of these things have not been addressed in the last 50 years.
Is there a way, I noticed that you are one of the rare men who is on the board of now, the National Organization of Women.
It feels very much to some of us that what used to be the fight for women's just ordinary rights, human rights for women, has become an anti-male movement.
It feels like feminism has become a very aggressive, attacking movement, telling boys, like you said, that they have privilege, telling boys that they're toxic, telling men that they're rapists.
All men are rapists, that kind of thing.
Is that a problem too, or is that just something that gets played up by the media?
I'm afraid that is a problem in part because it gets played up by the media.
It is definitely a message that goes out there from the women's movement.
We have like me too.
And so me too is all the complaints by women about men who clearly overstepped what any emotionally intelligent man would do.
But at the same time, you don't have a hashtag my role model, meaning my role model was a male mentor who mentored me through to be the CEO or to be the assistant CEO.
We don't have women saying a great man, hashtag great man, who was a husband or a father who helped to be supportive.
And so boys are looking all around them.
And if they have a perspective on this, when, you know, if they were at a frat party and they met a woman who came to their frat house knowing that she would be drinking and the two of them drank and they made love or had sex.
And the following morning, the woman realized, my God, you know, her boyfriend from another town was calling, couldn't get through to her.
And she said, well, I was at a party and I got drunk and I got raped.
And then the boy goes from blaming her to, oh my God, I'm so sorry.
What can we do?
And the guy goes, well, wait a minute.
You said this was perfectly consensual.
You were high, but he's not allowed.
If he's in college, he can't even have due process.
And so you only, because the college could lose as much as $800 million a year in federal monies, which is what Stanford University gets from federal monies.
And if they start looking like they're a school that discriminates against women and isn't sensitive to a woman's complaint, they are in extreme jeopardy.
And so that has been a real problem.
I'm running out of time.
But I do want to ask you this last question.
What do you see going forward as some of the solutions on offer?
I mean, we can't lose generations of boys.
They are so important.
I really feel sometimes the way boys go, that there goes the society.
What do you think we should be looking at?
Well, first, to get fathers much more involved.
Second, to make sure we understand exactly what fathers contribute to the parenting checks and balances, to understand what the tendency of fathers to do, emphasize boundary enforcement to help with postpone gratification, the value of rough housing and being able to distinguish between being assertive and aggressive.
And so that father involvement and not just the male figure, but the biological father has a huge positive impact.
Number two, having males go into schools that have male caregivers, male teachers, male preschool teachers.
That's very important.
If there's no possibility of getting males involved or fathers involved, making sure that the Cub Scouts and the Boy Scouts and other, if you're a faith-based person, that you get your boy involved in a faith-based community that has boys and young men's groups with a good, responsible male mentor to facilitate those groups so that boys can express feelings and see that that's something that boys can do to make sure couples' communication,
that the ability to communicate and hear each other begins in first and second grade so that boys learn that it is part of what in Denmark, all classes get together and they learn how to hear each other and listen to each other.
And so that helps boys not have to withdraw into depression and feeling rejected.
And then that type of thing.
Father's Disappointment00:05:47
I'm going to have to stop you there.
Very, very interesting.
The boy crisis, why our boys are struggling and what we can do about it.
Thank you very much, Dr. Farrell.
Really interesting.
This thing with fathers is huge.
And missing fathers, it is just huge and shattering for boys.
And I wish people would talk about it a lot more than they do.
Speaking of fathers, it is Holy Week and I've been talking about this all week.
And today is Maundy Thursday.
And people say, Maundy, Maundy, Maundy means is from a Latin word meaning commandment.
This is the day we celebrate the Last Supper, remember the Last Supper when Jesus gave the commandment, a new commandment, which is that we love one another as he had loved us.
My father died on Maundy Thursday, about 14 years ago, I think it is, which was just like now, it came together with Passover.
So it was kind of a meaningful thing for me.
When I realized that I was going to become a Christian, I thought the one problem this is going to create, the worst problem it's going to create, is going to bring my father and I to absolute blows.
I mean, my father and I never really got along, but we had made a separate piece.
He loved the grandkids.
He was a great granddad.
He's a good person.
You know, he just wasn't a good father for me.
I shouldn't, you know, I don't think he, I'm not sure whether he was a good father for my brothers.
They would have to say that.
But for me, we didn't get along.
And we'd always had a really hard time.
But we'd made a separate piece.
But this, I knew, was going to end that piece.
Because when I was a kid, I've told the story many times, but he walked in on me reading the Bible and he got so upset.
I was reading the Gospels.
And he got so upset.
I was reading them for literary purposes.
I had absolutely no faith whatsoever.
I didn't think it was a true story.
I was just going through it because I realized how important it was to Western literature and I wanted to be a writer.
I was about 15, I guess, 14, 15, and he walked in on me, which always cracks me up because he could have walked in on me, not just reading porn.
He could have walked in on me living porn at that point.
And he was furious.
And he said to me, if you ever convert, I will disown you.
And I was, obviously, at that age, I was making a living.
I wasn't worried he was going to disown me.
But I did realize it was going to just bring us to any end to any separate piece we had.
But I realized I had to tell him because I knew that I'm a public person.
I knew I would give an interview at some point or write an article about it.
And he'd read it in the paper.
And I couldn't have that happen, even though we didn't talk much about personal things.
I still didn't want him finding out about it in the paper.
So I thought, well, he's going to come out and visit.
Maybe I'll tell him then.
I was juggling with it.
I hadn't been baptized yet.
And he came out at Christmas time with my mother to visit, came out from New York.
And he came over and he was having a problem seeing double.
And he went back home.
They went home back to New York.
And I kind of laughed about it because my father was always cutting trips short, either for health reasons or for some made-up emergency.
It was just a neurotic habit he had.
So I just figured it was a neurotic habit.
It wasn't.
He had a brain tumor and he was going to die.
And so I realized that I couldn't tell him.
I couldn't tell him this major revolution in my life because it just would have broken his heart and done nothing for him in the last six months of his life.
So I ended up going back, this kind of split-screen life.
The priest who was going to prepare me, the Episcopal priest who was going to prepare me for baptism also lived in New York.
And I would fly back to see my father, who was slowly failing.
And then I would go from his apartment downtown to see the priest and talk about preparing for baptism.
And finally, and if you want to read more about this, it's in my book, The Great Good Thing, which is my memoir about my conversion.
But finally, I went back and I was actually literally sitting down.
I was lowering my backside into the chair to have a drink of wine with the priest.
We were in a restaurant right outside Bryant Park, which is the park near the library in Midtown Manhattan.
And my brother called me and told me my father had gone into the hospital and I knew at that point that it was the end.
And I went to the hospital many times.
I was supposed to leave the next day, but of course I delayed my flight and delayed my flight.
And it was Holy Week.
And I remember once running through the rain because I got a call.
This was the end and I better get there.
And I ran through the rain and I got up to Grand Central Station and it was six o'clock, so it was rush hour.
And there was a line for cabs stretching all the way down 42nd Street.
And I went up to the front guy in the line and I said, I want to take your cab.
My father's dying.
And the guy looked at me with this look that summed up New York, like, oh yeah, oh, oh, right, oh, right.
And then he gave me the cab and let me go.
It was a classic New York.
He didn't trust me, but he decided the better part of Valor was to let me go.
And so his family was gathered around him.
My father's family was gathered around him.
And he died on Maundy Thursday.
And I waited around a while to help my brothers deal with the aftermath.
And then I flew back just for Easter, and just in time for Easter.
And I remember, I have this vivid, vivid memory of sitting in this church that I had been attending in preparation for baptism.
And I was sitting there, and everything seemed to be bathed in golden light.
And part of that was the sun coming in through the fantastic stained glass windows that they had.
And part of it was just this kind of aura of grief and exhaustion that was surrounding me.
And of course, realizing that an amazing transition had was taking place in my life.
I had lost a father who I had never gotten along with and found a father who was giving me so much joy and so much insight into the world.
And so I am, I have to tell you, I can testify.
So it was very, it was a sad story, but at the same time, it was a very joyous transition for me, not my father's death, but my conversion.
Bound by Joy00:02:33
And I can testify that this idea that we can't be bound together by ideals and ideas and stories is a false idea, this idea that we have to be at daggers drawn with one another.
We are bound together by the stories that we believe in.
And what really, really matters is whether or not those stories are true.
You can bind a country together in their hatred of the Jews, the way Hitler bound Germany together, but the Jews don't deserve your hatred.
And hatred, of course, is a poison that ultimately poisons the person who is feeling it himself.
But if you bind people together on the idea that they have rights and that they're free, that story happens to be the true story.
You do have rights.
Those rights are given to you by God, and you are made to be free.
And if you bind people together on the idea of a God who loves them, who died for them, who forgives them, that too is free.
And when you have that story, when you know a story, the way you know a story is true, the way you know that the story that you're living, the narrative you're living is true, is over time, your joy increases, and it only increases the more you understand the story, the more your joy increases.
That is not true when your story is false.
Because when your story is false, what you have to do is keep finding more and more victims to blame for the fact that your story is false.
That is how you tell.
That is the proof test of the truth of a story.
If you have to keep finding other people to blame for your misery, you know that story is false because you'll never run out of people to blame.
And that is why our old friend Uncle Jesus said, judge not lest he be judged, right?
Because if you are looking at the other guy, that means you are not, you don't have the joy from that story.
The story is not filling you up with the truth and with joy.
I am evidence.
I am living evidence, living proof that these are the things that bind us together, not blood, not anything else, not history, nothing else.
It is these things that bind us most together.
I got to say goodbye.
We have a show tomorrow.
So the Clavenless weekend is not here yet.
You are saved.
Curfew shall not ring tonight.
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.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.