Andrew Clavin and Roger Kimball frame Mexico’s migrant caravan as an "invasion," defending Trump’s military response while rejecting racial or cultural framing—Kimball compares Trump’s nationalism to Churchill and Reagan, dismissing left-wing attacks on his policies. They critique academia’s "revolution" by tenured radicals, lamenting lost free speech, and expose media hypocrisy over Trump’s Stormy Daniels scandal versus JFK’s unpunished affairs, arguing selective outrage undermines credibility. The episode ties immigration enforcement to broader cultural battles, framing Trump’s presidency as a bulwark against progressive distortions. [Automatically generated summary]
So here's an old joke about a dumb guy on a game show.
And in the old days when I heard this, I was a kid.
They said it was a Polish guy because Polish people were supposed to be stupid.
And nowadays they would probably say it was a blonde.
But I don't want to be prejudiced at all.
So let's just say it's a blonde Polish guy.
So there's this dumb guy on a game show and he just can't get anything right and he doesn't get know any of the answers to anything.
And the MC begins to feel sorry for him and decides he's going to ask him the simplest question that he can come up with.
And the MC finally, just so he can win a little money, says to the dumb guy, what is the meaning of Easter?
And the dumb guy says, oh, oh, yeah, yeah, I know that.
I know that.
On Good Friday, you know, Jesus was crucified and then they put him in the tomb and rolled the rock over.
And the MC says, right, right.
And he says, then on Easter Sunday, the tomb rolled back and Jesus was resurrected and he stepped outside.
And the MC says, exactly.
And the dumb guy says, and if he sees his shadow, there'll be six more weeks of winter.
You'll be happy to know that that dumb guy is now working for NPR.
I'll explain it all.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boom.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky.
Ship shaped dipsy topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hooray, hooray.
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hooray, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, welcome back.
I hope you had a wonderful, wonderful Easter.
You can see I'm not broadcasting from our studios.
I'm broadcasting from beautiful downtown Rochester, New York, where I'll be speaking later.
I see this background.
It looks like I'm in an elfish prison or something like that.
But I had a beautiful, beautiful Easter.
Lots of lovely, lovely things happened.
Among them, my daughter, Faith Moore, published a piece today in the Wall Street Journal on Disney princesses, which I hope you'll take a look at.
It's on the op-ed page.
And I think she'll be on with Knowles later in the week.
Tomorrow is the mailbag.
We have a lot of announcements today.
Tomorrow's the mailbag.
So if you're a subscriber, and if you're not a subscriber, subscribe.
Go on thedailywire.com, press the podcast button, press my podcast, then press the mailbag.
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For the rest, you're done.
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Please send those in as soon as you can.
And what else have we got?
Oh, we've got the conversation coming up.
That's not coming up for a while, though.
That is coming up.
I will tell you in a moment, as soon as I know myself.
There it is.
It's April 10th at 5.30 p.m. Eastern, 2.30 p.m. Pacific.
I will be there.
You can just, if you haven't already joined the conversation series, it's the monthly Q ⁇ A hosted by Alicia Krauss, where we answer any and all questions from politics to the personal.
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And it's good when I'm on because I know everything.
All right.
Now, one more thing before we get started.
What is it?
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Easter's Resurrection Narrative00:06:44
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All right.
I had a beautiful Easter, really rich, deep, emotional Easter.
The night before, Saturday night, I was sitting up a little late, perhaps, dozed off, and I woke up, and there was the Ten Commandments, because it was also Passover, was on the screen.
And I woke up just in time to see Moses, or if you were a formed Jew, Charlton Heston, formed Jews, I think, believe in Charlton Heston, but Moses parting the Red Sea.
And I don't know if you remember the scene, you know, the soldiers, the Pharaoh's soldiers are coming to get the Jews as they're escaping from slavery and they're up against the Red Sea and people start to doubt whether they're going to be killed.
And Moses says to them, you know, 10 times you have seen God do these miracles.
What is your problem?
And Edward G. Robinson is there.
He plays the voice of doubt.
And Edward G. is like, ah, you know, are there no graves in Egypt?
See, that we're going to die.
They're taking us out here to die.
And then, of course, Moses says, behold, the mighty work of the Lord.
And the Red Sea parts, you know, and I was thinking, it was, the movie's a little dated now.
It's a little clunky.
It's a little corny, but I found it incredibly moving.
And, you know, I was wondering why I found the story so moving.
And one of the ways to read any important story, any good story, whether it's a true story, any story that moves you, is as what is called a psychomache, which means a psychic battle.
And that means when you read something as a psychomache, it means that every character in there is you.
It's also just a battle that's going on in your own mind.
And you can read almost any great story, even true stories.
You can read them as a psychomache.
And I was thinking as I was watching that the reason this moved me so much is because it was like a little symbol, a little parable of my own life.
That in my own life, when things rise up and things look difficult, I frequently turn into Edward G. Robinson and saying, ah, you know, we're through now.
Things are, it's all over, see?
And then, of course, you know, if I look back, I see that all through my life, God is part of the waters.
And that doesn't mean that everything always goes great.
What it means is you get, you continue your march to the promised land, your march to the life you're supposed to have and the soul and the joy that you're supposed to have if you just keep your faith and you keep moving.
And that has happened to me again and again.
And what was getting me about this is it really pains me to see how the media covers religion and especially how they cover Easter.
And some of this is, you know, left-wing hostility toward Christianity because the left hates Christianity because they hate Western culture and Western culture comes out of Christianity.
It's kind of like getting angry at your mom all the time because you don't like who you are.
And some of them, but some of them are believing Christians who just want to wrestle Christianity into saying what it is they wanted to say.
The guy I was referring to, that joke about the game show, I was referring to MPR, which was writing a story about the Pope.
There's this old atheist guy, he's in his 90s or something like this, who says he's had many conversations with the Pope and he didn't take any notes, but he remembers them.
And he's always publishing this stuff that says the Pope said something he almost certainly could not have said.
And he published something saying the Pope had said there's no hell.
And the Vatican pushed back and said, the Pope believes what the church believes, which you are in, you know, if you don't follow Jesus, you are in danger of the pains of hell when you die.
And NPR was reporting this.
And at the end, they just wanted to remind you, they said Easter is the day celebrating the idea that Jesus did not die and go to hell or purgatory or anywhere like that, but rather arose into heaven.
Easter is on Sunday.
And of course, Christians, like most of America, which means most of America, generally believe that Jesus died and was buried and went to hell.
And he did what was called harrowing hell.
Harrow is like a rake.
He harrowed Hell Warrior.
He took all the people who had died before salvation arose, who were not supposed to be in hell, and he lifted them out of hell.
And then on the third day, he rose.
And it was just kind of like, you know, you're writing about religion for NPR, which is supposed to be this quality network.
Can't you even know what Easter is, the major, major holiday of the major, major religion from which all of Western civilization springs, from which your country's principles spring?
Really?
I mean, you went to journalism school and nobody said, you know what, when you write about Easter, you ought to know what it's for.
But then there were all these guys who were writing from an ostensibly Christian perspective, trying to like just stretch Christianity into left-wingism.
So, you know, and I listen, I feel people on the right do this a little bit too, that, you know, it's traditionally in the Christian religion.
You know, there are things that we believe, things we believe about marriage, things we believe about sexuality, all this.
But Jesus didn't come to earth for that.
He didn't look around and say, oh, people are running around having too much sex in the wrong way.
I better hurry to earth, you know, get my cape and I'll fly it on to earth.
You know, that's not what the religion is at its essence.
It really is about salvation for all mankind, life in abundance for all mankind.
So at CNN, or the church of CNN, John Blake, a producer, he writes how Easter became a Me Too moment.
Okay.
And he talks about, he writes about Mary Magdalene being the first, the women were the first to see Christ risen, and they ran back to tell the men that they had seen the risen Christ.
And the book of Luke says, but the men did not believe the women because their words seemed to them like nonsense, right?
And he says, well, this is, you know, like, just like Me Too, that women have all these things to say, but men don't believe in them because they're women.
The men didn't believe the women because they didn't not believe the women because they were women.
They didn't believe the women because they were telling them that a dead man had arisen.
That was kind of like, it sounded like nonsense to them.
And, you know, it's just, it's just like this twisting of things.
And the one that really bugged me was this cheap shot that Stephen Colbert took at Donald Trump.
Because Stephen Colbert does know.
He's a Catholic, a believing Catholic.
I've always had the feeling that Colbert is a pretty decent guy.
He's a Sunday school teacher.
He really does know what this is all about.
So he used it.
He has this dumb cartoon.
Beach Body on Demand00:03:38
I think it's called Our Cartoon President.
And he used this to attack Trump, making Trump look like the worst unreligious guy.
Do we have a clip from this?
Can we play that?
How was church today?
Uneventful.
They love me over there.
President Satan.
That's what many are calling President Trump after he was caught on a hot mic, committing the biggest religious gaffe since Reagan armed the Taliban.
Was that Joseph guy a putz or what?
Clearly, he wasn't taking care of Mary's needs.
I mean, if God knocked up my wife, he'd never drank again.
I'd cut off God's piss, sir.
I think that's a hot mic.
Mike, stop acting like a tech buff.
You think your great-grandfather hunted dinosaurs.
How do grown adults still worship Jesus?
I mean, where was Jesus when the Taj Maha was at a standstill with the unions?
So, so of course, you know, Hillary Clinton was very upset about it, and she issued this statement.
To me personally, this video is disgusting and reprehensible.
It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose to denigrate a great religion and to provoke rage.
Oh, wait, that was the Benghazi Islamic video.
I forgot the left doesn't complain when people attack Christianity, only Islam.
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Last one of this Christian thing, and then I'll move on to this other thing that is bugging me.
Jonathan Wilson Hartgrove, who is in fact, I think, a Christian writer, he wrote, on Easter Sunday, Christians must remember how easily and often our faith is used to defend white supremacy.
That is what you should be thinking about on Easter Sunday.
It's just like every, you know, it's just everybody, everybody has got to be, has got to get like Jesus on their side instead of doing what you're supposed to do, which is paying attention to your problems, your sins, and not judging other people.
Just saying, just saying.
Law and Border Effects00:15:02
So speaking of, you know, racial matters, Trump is back on the warpath on immigration and he is being accused of white supremacy.
They always make this into a racial issue, which I don't think it is.
But, you know, he signed this budget bill that didn't include, included just a little bit of funding for the wall, and Ann Coulter went after him.
I mean, first he was spanked by the porn star Stormy Daniels.
Now he's been spanked by Ann Coulter.
Come to think of it, he's living out my fantasy life.
But here she was with Howie Carr on the radio.
This is the first cut where she just really went after Trump.
Do you still believe that Trump is e pluribus awesome?
Not if he's not building the wall, and it sure doesn't look like he's building it now.
It looks like he's just going to see how long he can take his voters for a ride.
Maybe he'll come around, and I think it isn't helping to have these Cro-Magnons saying, oh, no, it's 3D chess and just applaud everything he does.
You've got to put some pressure on it.
Did you call us Deplorables Cro-Magnons?
No, I'm calling the people who go around claiming every time he destroys his presidency.
No, it's really some complicated plot that will somehow endure to it.
No, it isn't.
No, it isn't.
He's not.
He's failing right now.
The presidency isn't over yet.
He can still come back and do it.
But, you know, people who voted for him shouldn't be cheering every time he betrays them.
And this is a total betrayal for him to sign that bill.
It is a total betrayal for him not to build the wall.
And to pretend like it isn't, yeah, he can come back.
And as I told the New York Times, if he does, I'll start a committee to put him on Mount Rushmore if he builds that wall.
But right now, if you want to make a bet, I don't think we're getting a wall.
So, you know, let's flame.
She said, apparently she got into an obscenity-laced argument with him, and they were screaming curses at one another, but she says it's all right.
He cursed at her first.
So now there are 1,000 to 1,100 Central American refugees, whatever you want to call them.
They're coming out through Mexico up toward the border.
And Drudge has got this being played like it's an invasion.
He's saying how far away they are.
They're getting closer.
He's telling it.
And now Trump is saying that he's going to send the military out there.
And the media is basically saying, oh, you know, this is not an invasion.
This is a protest they hold every year.
And they just come out and they kind of ask for, they ask to get asylum, political asylum, because they're coming from some very terrible places.
But the people on the ground there, even the people who are sympathetic with them, basically say they're coming in.
Some of them will ask for asylum and then the rest are going to try and break across the border.
And so Trump has got the army going down.
And now that, you know, the thing is, now that Trump called them out on it, Mexico is doing something about it, is trying to stop them and saying, no, no, you're not going to do it.
So it's not the way, I mean, it's not as it may not be quite as clear as Trump is saying, but it's certainly not as benign as the media is saying, the pro-immigration media.
And of course, the left, if you want to know what the left thinks, you go to CNN and they're saying it's all about race.
There's April Ryan and Jolly.
When they talk about wanting educated and wealthy immigrants only, they're talking about white.
They're not talking about bringing diversity into the country.
Donald Trump is playing to this base instinct that is wrong and immoral.
And what you said, it speaks more about...
Controlling the browning of America.
Controlling the browning of America.
That's what he's trying to do.
You know, the thing about this is, you know, sometimes the right talks like this too.
I've heard the right talk about all these people coming in and, you know, it's getting rid of our culture and all this.
But it really is about culture and ideas.
It's not about race.
And the idea here is the rule of law.
And this is something that the Democrats, the left has lost entirely.
The idea that only a nation of laws, not a nation of men, is a fair nation.
Only a nation of laws is an equal nation.
If there is a law that will put me in prison, like, oh, just say putting out classified information or misusing classified information, then that law should put Hillary Clinton in prison too.
And it shouldn't vanish because she's powerful and I'm just me.
You know, that's not the way that's supposed to work.
And when there is a law, the law is supposed to be enforced.
But with Barack Obama, he would just say, well, we're not going to enforce that law.
You know, with the family law that was deemed to be anti-gay, we're just not going to enforce it.
And now it's like, we're not going to enforce the border.
We don't need this.
We need the voters.
We want those voters to come in, so we're not supposed to enforce it.
And the people on the right, like the Wall Street Journal, who are very supportive of even illegal immigration, really should get their minds right because the question is not who is coming and how many are coming.
The question is, who do we want?
How many do we want?
And what law should we pass, right?
Because once the law is passed, they should obey the law and the border.
Look, I'm not saying we should go to war with these guys coming up from Mexico.
I'm just saying that they should obey the law, just like everybody else.
And Trump is just right about this.
Now, there are plenty of people, I'm sure, who hear this and it touches off some racist thing in them and it makes them happy, but that's not the point.
The point is the rule of law.
Hey, we're going to go to Roger Kimball.
He is one of my favorite cultural observers.
He's a cultural critic.
He's the editor and publisher of the New Criterion, which is one of the only true highbrow right-wing cultural magazine.
And he's president and publisher of the great encounter books.
He's the author of many books himself, including Tenured Radicals, The Rape of the Masters, and The Fortunes of Permanence, Culture, and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia.
Here is an interview I did with him earlier, Roger Kimball.
Roger, it's good to see you.
Thanks for coming on.
It's great to see you, Drew.
How are you?
I'm good.
I am good.
You are, as I have said before, you're one of the, first of all, you're one of the brightest observers of culture out there and one of the few openly intellectual supporters of Donald Trump.
I think Trump has lost a lot of the intellectual right, but you have stayed with him.
So let me put those two things together and ask you this question.
Do you think that Donald Trump has had an effect, any effect, on the culture?
I think he's had a huge effect on the culture.
Yeah, I think he's had a gigantic effect on the country, which includes the culture, of course.
And I think that the effect has been largely beneficent.
Okay.
And if people talk about his tweets and so on, his untoward language, I actually like a lot of that.
I thought it was brilliant when he described the tubby tyrant of North Korea as locked man on the floor of the United Nations.
And not simply because it was funny, but also because it had a deeper purpose to it.
And I think that purpose is now coming to fruition as we see Kim going to South Korea for the Olympics.
They're going to have talks.
He's had to take a special train to Beijing so they could tell him what he has to say.
Let me just say this.
If Donald Trump is able to solve North Korea's nuclear problem, which of course is also our nuclear problem, diplomatically, that will be one of the greatest diplomatic coups in the 21st century and 20th century.
And it will be, as he would like to say, huge.
So, I mean, Donald, you know, many of my conservative friends find it impossible to make that leap from the primary season of 2016 to the reality of today.
But when we look at what has happened in the 13 months or so that Donald Trump has been president, it's really quite extraordinary.
The judicial appointments, I mean, everybody on our side of the aisle, everyone sane, understands that this is gigantic because it's not just Neil Gorsuch.
It's scores of other judicial appointments, which are going to remake the judiciary in a fundamental way.
Now we have judges that will interpret the law.
They will not endeavor to make social policy by legislating from the bench, which is what they should be doing.
That is gigantic.
What he has done with our energy policy.
I mean, the United States is on the brink of being a net exporter of energy.
We will probably be the world's largest energy producer in a couple of years.
That is huge.
You know, it turns out you can drill your way out of the problem.
And what he's done with regulation.
It's easy to say that.
But what that means is, what that means is that he has sparked a fire under the gigantic machine of American productivity.
And he has turned up the volume on American optimism among businessmen.
It's extraordinary what he's done.
Then, I mean, there are so many other things.
What his Secretary of Education is doing to close down this obscene anti-free speech and anti-due process jihad that has been conducted on college campuses for the last eight years.
He's shutting that down.
That is a tremendous thing for the cultures.
And, you know, we could go on and on listing these items.
What I find difficult to understand is how some of our friends on the putative right can make the same list that I just gave you and add a few other items and then say, I still wish that Hillary Clinton had won.
What does that mean?
Well, you know, to make their argument, to be the devil's advocate here, one of the things that they complain about with Trump is that he is so divisive.
He puts people off so much that the left is now energized to the extreme.
Ted Cruz was telling Ben Shapiro this yesterday that the left is going to have twice the number of voters for the midterms that they had before, and that essentially Trump will destroy the, we'll have a couple of victories.
We've had these victories, but then the party will be destroyed.
Do you see anything in that?
Well, I mean, I know that argument, but I don't believe it because what did Donald Trump do?
He energized people much more than the left is energizing them, seems to me.
I mean, the left has energized a tiny but vocal and impolite cohort of people who go around and smash things and shout people down and parade around stages with the severed head of a mannequin purporting to be Donald Trump,
and they scream at the sky and they write intemperate tweets about how venal Donald Trump is and so on.
But it's actually a very tiny group of people, in my judgment.
And the argument that somehow he has destroyed the Republican Party.
Well, let's see.
We have the White House, we have the Senate, we have the House of Representatives, we have most of the governor's mansions, and we have most of the state legislatures.
So if that's a Republican Party that's been destroyed, bring it on.
And the idea that this recent election in Pennsylvania was somehow a bellwether.
This is what's going to happen.
Well, that would be a good thing, actually, if here you have a guy won by 600 votes who is probably the single most conservative Democrat out there.
But is that where you see the Democratic Party going?
I don't.
I think the Democratic Party is the party of Bernie Sanders at the right end and the party of people like Foca Hontis at the left end.
It really has.
I just don't see it.
I think that I doubt that the Democrats will take the House.
And I will bet you a nickel that the Republicans pick up Senate seats.
Wow.
Wow.
All right.
I'm going to hold you to that.
I want that nickel.
We'll have a dark and stormy Daniels.
You wrote a piece called, could Trump Do Anything to Win Over the Never Trumpers?
Could he?
No, I don't think so, because I think it's not what he does.
It's who he is.
And it's not even quite who he is.
It's who it's they've created a monster.
And the connection between this monster of their imagination and the reality that it's Donald Trump is very tenuous.
And so every time he tweets something that they don't like, that they think is impolitic, every time that he misspeaks, every time that he fires someone, they say, oh my God, can you believe it?
You know, this is such a horrible man.
He's going to destroy the Republic.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump is actually governing, I think, more or less the way that Eisenhower governed.
I mean, it's a calm, cool, steady hand.
The fact that he has made so many changes of personnel, in my view, is because he could not get people to work for him at the beginning.
I mean, if you look at the situation in January 20th, 2017, and today, how much things have moved in his direction.
Not just the approval ratings, although those have moved too, but the quality of his staff, of his cabinet.
It's extraordinary.
I mean, who could be better than John Bolton as National Security Advisor?
Maybe Mike Flynn, but he's unavailable at the moment.
Who could be better than Mike Pompeo, you know, as Secretary of State?
These are people with backbone who understand the way the world works and the world's a dangerous place.
I'm glad that they're there.
Betsy DeVos is terrific.
Scott Pruitt is a national hero.
It's a great team.
And you have to compare what it was on January 20th when his Republican Congress wasn't quite sure whether they're going to take his phone calls.
Now, he got a huge tax plan through, all kinds of good stuff.
Did he get everything?
Jonah Agrees With National Picks00:08:16
No.
I mean, that's not the way it works.
It's very weird that Barack Obama was traditionally more presidential, certainly more presentable in some way, and yet he was an absolute radical left-winger, whereas Trump seems so outlandish in some ways.
And yet he's really a traditional, he is what you say.
He's a traditional Republican, and nothing that he has done has been really extreme at all.
Well, Barack Obama has a very good, he has a good tailor.
No question about that.
As David Brooks pointed out.
And someone taught him to read a teleprompter in a convincing manner.
You know, you move your head to the left, then you move your head to the right, and you just keep doing that.
And you use locations like, folks.
Yeah.
Folks, we're just going to solve this problem.
Meanwhile, we're going to take over the healthcare industry of the country, and we're going to have a world apology tour where I'm going to, as president of the United States, apologize to everyone.
That's not the way you get things done.
I mean, Donald Trump understands that America is a powerful nation and that in order to get things done, he needs to live up to that power.
You know, it's, and he's done that remarkably well.
I mean, we've got seven more years to go, but we'll see.
I'm reading Jonah Goldberg's very entertaining new book, and Jonah Goldberg is a very powerful voice for the Never Trump side.
And one of the arguments that he makes is that he's very, very upset by what he calls the tribalism, the nationalism of Donald Trump, as opposed to, and he opposes it to patriotism.
That in other words, if a patriot loves his country for its ideals and for its creed, but doesn't necessarily just follow it over any cliff that's available, where he says that Trump is essentially just calling to this blind nativism in people.
Do you agree with that?
Yeah, I don't agree with it.
I like Jonah.
He's a very entertaining writer, as you say, a smart man.
I'll fill in all of those kudos.
But I don't agree with that.
I think Donald Trump is a nationalist the way that Winston Churchill was a nationalist or FDR was a nationalist or John Kennedy was a nationalist or Ronald Reagan was a nationalist.
Nationalism, properly understood, it seems to me, is the most important bulwark for sovereignty and ultimately for the kind of freedom that we cherish in this republic.
People say, well, what about, isn't it like Nazi Germany?
Well, no, the operative word in national socialism is socialism.
That's the operative word.
And as for the tribalism and so on, I don't see that.
It was like people would say the same thing about the Tea Party.
It seemed to me that the Tea Party people I met were housewives and accountants and doctors and lawyers and talk show hosts like you.
And they were ordinary people who wanted their country back, who thought that national sovereignty was a good idea and that the president of the United States should be first of all speaking for the United States.
He should put America first, to coin a phrase.
And Donald Trump, I think, does that.
You could say, well, are tariffs the right way to do that?
Well, maybe not.
Maybe they are.
Maybe it's a strategy.
Maybe it's a deal making shit you play when you go into a game.
I don't know the answer to that.
But the idea that somehow there's something nativist or something tribal, these are supposed to be negative words.
You get the image of semi-clad natives dancing around a cauldron looking for a missionary to put into it.
That's not what's going on at all.
It really isn't.
In my view.
One of my favorite of your books is Tenured Radicals, which is about the universities.
And you mentioned Betsy DeVos changing some of the rules there.
But has anything improved in our universities?
Are academies still what they were?
I mean, I keep seeing left, right-wing speakers shouted down and these riots.
And have we lost the young, do you think?
Well, I'm not sure we've lost the young, but I'll tell you a story that will answer your question.
I wrote an essay for the new criterion called Retaking the University back in, I don't know, 10 years ago.
And my idea was that we would appeal over the heads of the faculty and the graduate students and the deans and the provosts and the presidents to alumni, to parents, to donors.
And they would see that what had happened to these institutions was a revolution whereby all the things that they had been entrusted to do, they were now doing the opposite.
So universities exist.
They're given incredible privileges in our society because we counted them to preserve and transmit the highest values of our civilization.
We think that's worth doing.
I think it's worth doing, but it turns out they're not doing that.
They're trashing.
They're trashing our civilization.
So I thought we could appeal over the heads of uh, the tenured radicals who run the institutions now to these other groups.
But it turns out I was wrong.
Uh, you can't do that.
I I, I was going to write a book with that title and began and I said, you know, it's just too far gone.
Uh one, one person who uh read the article said, well, you know Kimbles it's, you know, it's kind of an okay idea, but this is back in 2006, or something said, you know, we got a lot of military hardware around here and I think what we should do is put it, put it to good use.
We um, you know, we fire up the tanks and we go first, you know, let's say, to Cambridge, and we can't be too wordy because they don't get up too early.
There's a 10 o'clock in the morning, we start firing and we keep firing until it's a smoldering room.
Maybe that's plan b, you see.
So you know it it is.
It is curious drew, that the, the intellectual center of gravity and cultures uh, is sometimes in uh, the academy, and sometimes it's not.
Um, I think this is a period of time when it when it really isn't.
Of course, you know the sciences engineering yes, it is, but for the humanities, for those disciplines that pose the question, how should we live our lives?
What is the good life for man?
That is, you know, the universities are stuck in this self-infatuated, narcissistic insanity.
And I think most of the interesting work that's being done on those sorts of questions is being done outside the university.
And so I think the answer to this is probably twofold.
One is to strengthen those institutions.
whereby you know this interesting work is being done outside the university, and to think about alternatives to the university, everything from Moocs, you know, these online things, to starting new colleges that are um, frankly devoted to um, you know, to preserving what's valuable in our, in our civilization.
I mean, there are a few exceptions, like Hillsdale College.
But once I say Hillsdale College, it's not that easy to come up with a, a list of additional.
But there are others, but there are not not that many others, and what that requires is a.
You know, I have to stop you because i'm just out of time and I won't be able to play it.
But that, that that is.
That is one of the no.
That was one of the most fascinating answers to that question i've heard.
JFK's Legendary Love Life?00:04:08
So i'm i'm really uh glad you said it.
I hope you'll come back and we'll continue the conversation.
Yeah, i'm always Roger Kimball.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
All right, we're back.
It's time for sexual follies.
But before we get to that, I got to say goodbye to Facebook and Youtube.
Come on over to Thedailywire.com, you can listen to the rest of the show and while you're there, you can subscribe so you can watch the whole show right there on the site without being cast out into the exterior darkness.
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All right, we're back.
it's time for sexual follies.
So CNN is doing a documentary on JFK, and it's going to talk about his relationship with Judith Campbell Exner, who was both his mistress and his wife.
I believe she slept with Frank Sinatra, and she was also the mistress of a mob boss named Sam Giancana.
And there were for a while some conspiracy theories that this is what got Kennedy killed.
Sam Giancana did work for the Kennedy administration.
But anyway, my point is that CNN advertises this by saying JFK had a legendary love life.
Did one of his affairs connect him with the mob?
So this is after weeks of CNN telling us how evil it was for Donald Trump to mess around with the porn star Stormy Daniels.
But when JFK did it, and JFK did it with everybody, I mean, he slept with every woman who came anywhere near him.
When he did it, it was legendary.
I mean, JFK made Jackie's life an absolute misery.
He slept with women ranging from Ingrid Arvad, who hung out with Hitler.
He deflowered a 19-year-old virgin in the White House.
There were two women who were nicknamed on his presidential staff.
We were nicknamed Fiddle and Faddle.
And it is said that when Jackie Kennedy, then Kennedy, was giving a tour of the White House, she introduced them as the women my husband is said to be sleeping with, you know.
And it's kind of funny that after this whole Stormy Daniel, the latest poll after this Stormy Daniels scandal, if you want to call it that, is that Trump's popularity is increasing with men and as it's decreasing with women.
So men are looking at this and going, yeah, you know, Stormy Daniels is a good idea.
I mean, it just seems to me that sexual morality is a little like Christianity for the left.
They use it to get what they want.
And over time, what does that do?
It just makes you completely inured and completely hardened to the idea that anything they say has any meaning except as a ploy for political power.
I really do think, and maybe if we have a chance, we'll talk about this more tomorrow.
I really do think that it's the media, it's their hatred, it's their constant, constant harping on things that Donald Trump does that they have already praised in other presidents, including, you know, pre-apism, you know, this sexual wildness that some powerful men have, that they just cannot let a woman go past them without grabbing her.
And the fact that they hammer Trump about it, but they just praise it.
It's legendary in the Kennedys and always, we always treated it like that, really tells you why their voices, their moral voices, mean absolutely nothing.
All right, the mailbag is tomorrow.
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Mailbag Tomorrow00:00:36
I'm Andrew Clavin.
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