Andrew Clavin’s Trump Gets Trumpier mocks partisan extremes—Feinstein blaming Persian diets, CNN exploiting traumatized kids—while defending Trump’s policies against media double standards, like EPA rollbacks vs. Obama’s "fascistic" regulations. He dismisses Scandinavian welfare as parasitic on U.S. power and slams racial grievance studies, arguing his generation should focus on moon colonization over identity politics. Tariffs on China are called ineffective theater, with Clavin favoring collective pressure over unilateral trade wars, then pivots to Shakespeare’s sonnets’ ambiguities and the cost of losing liberal friends post-conversion. Faith is framed as intuitive, like gravity, while Sinclair’s anti-"fake news" ads are branded Orwellian, setting up Ming Ya Ying Ma’s China deep dive. [Automatically generated summary]
A crazed female Persian Vegan Animal Rights Act of shot and wounded several people at YouTube's California headquarters yesterday and then killed herself.
And of course, there's nothing funny about that, but that's not going to stop me.
After the shooting, Democrats immediately called for new laws forcing Persians to eat more meat, while Republicans defended the American right to indulge in cultish dietary fads with no nutritional science to back them up.
Dianne Feinstein told reporters, quote, Only in America do we have Persians running around without enough beefsteak in their bellies to keep them from becoming homicidal, unquote.
While Republican Mike Lee said, quote, when our founders wrote the Constitution, they foresaw that there might one day come a time when crazed females might indulge in idiotic diets that just make them want to kill and kill, unquote.
Meanwhile, CNN covered the story by interviewing several children who had been traumatized by watching the incident on CNN.
Allison Camaroto announced, quote, these are the young people who will save our country, while the young people wept hysterically and tried to hurl themselves out the studio window to avoid being used to push the network's political agenda.
The last word went to Donald Trump, who tweeted, quote, my thoughts and prayers are with our wonderful ranchers who supply so much great American beef to so many terrific American restaurants, unquote.
Everyone agreed that the YouTube incident provided a welcome relief from talking about guns.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin.
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I'm so jet-lagged and exhausted that if I just keel over in the middle of the show, you'll have to forgive me.
It is mailbag day, however.
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Background Checks00:14:34
So, you know, thank you to Young America's Foundation and Hobart and William Smith College's Young Americans for Freedom for hosting me last night.
I gave a speech there and it was quite an experience.
I mean, first of all, I love talking.
to college students.
I think it's really interesting.
You really hear things you don't hear too often.
But I have to tell you, there was some shameful, shameful stuff.
I mean, my event was really great.
The people were great.
Lots of left-wing students came up and talked to me.
They were civil.
They were polite.
They were intense and passionate.
And we disagreed, but we disagreed in a civil way.
And that was fabulous.
At previous events, I was told that there was real name-calling, shouting, not actual violence, although a table was turned over.
And what is really just shameful about it is that the administration is giving these people no protection and giving the conservatives no protection and basically allowing troublemakers to do what they want.
Now, as I say, my event was absolutely great, and it's not the students.
My problem was not with the students.
It was the faculty.
To counteract conservatives having speakers, what they did was a faculty member held his own conference talking about the wonders and beauties of communism and how the Soviet Union just kind of didn't do it right, you know, but communism really works great.
And I just, I think that if you are teaching communism to young people, I think you are a bad person.
I think this is something, you know, they talk about the science is settled, the science is settled.
This is something that doesn't work.
And, you know, somebody asked me about this after the Q ⁇ A period.
Someone asked me about places like Norway, you know, places that like Bernie Sanders is always talking about.
Somewhere in Scandinavia over there, communism, socialism works great.
And what is, you know, I said to her, I gave her all the usual answers, you know, that these are homogenous, small, homogenous societies.
They actually are not socialist societies.
They actually have open to free market, even though they have a lot of high taxes and a lot of welfare spending.
They're still not, you know, actual socialist societies.
But then, you know, they have this thing in France.
It's called something like the esprit d'escalier.
It means the spirit of the wit of the staircase when you think of something to say after you leave.
And after I left, I thought, you know, let me ask you this about Scandinavia.
Do they use cell phones?
Because then they're living off capitalism.
Do they use cars, light bulbs, electricity?
All the things that were invented under capitalism, are they using those things?
Because in Norway, they invented the paperclip, and that's about it.
So they say, well, these people are incredibly happy.
Yeah, they're happy because they're living off us, essentially.
Plus, they're living off our protection, our military protection that they don't have.
I know they don't like to hear that, but that is true.
I mean, they are being paid for by the engines of capitalism by us insofar as we remain a capitalist country.
And I just think it's all, it's just phony to teach these kids this stuff.
And the other thing that really bugged me, and I, you know, again, the kids themselves were lovely, and I'm not knocking them, but they have been trained to look at everything through the lens of race.
And they do not understand, you know, and it's hard to, I said to them, they were shocked.
I mean, you could see in their faces.
I said to them, not one of you is going to ever be stopped from doing anything you want to do because of race.
I said, your generation is going to colonize the moon.
The last thing you should be thinking about is race.
But they think about everything in terms of race.
And it is just a way of controlling them, keeping them on the farm.
And so is shutting down conservative speakers.
And anybody, anybody who shuts down speakers is just trying to control you.
I don't care.
I don't even care if it's a hateful speaker.
You can always defy a hateful speaker with better ideas.
The worst thing that can happen is you laugh at them or argue with them or walk away.
But when they're shutting people down, it's because they only want you to hear their opinions.
Speaking of which, there is this meme going around about the Donald Trumpster that is in like every paper about how suddenly Trump is unleashed.
Before he was being held back by his advisors, but now he's cleaned out all of his advisors and he's only surrounded himself with people he likes, which translates into people the media doesn't like.
And this is just, oh my gosh, now everything is going to go kerflooy, you know.
Some guy, a guy named Matthew Walther, writes for The Week, and he hates Donald Trump, and he wrote a piece called Why Trump is More Popular Than Ever.
And I just want to read a little bit of this because it's finally like a little, it's like a little light bulb going on in a journalist's mind.
He says, it's not surprising that after a little more than a year in office, many people who voted for the president still support him.
But it's surprising that a president who has been the object of more negative reporting than any in our history still enjoys something like the same middling base of support he had before taking office, unless it's the negative reporting that is, in his mind, the problem, which I suspect is very largely the case.
You can only ask, in other words, he's saying that the hysterical anti-Trump reporting is making Trump more popular.
Drudge had him at 51%.
I think it must be Rasmussen.
He's usually seen around 42 or 46, somewhere in there.
But still, his popularity is going up.
So this guy says, you know, you can only ask adults to participate in the fiction that a retweet of a wrestling gif is a credible threat of violence against some nerd reporters at a cable station or delight in what you hope will be the failure of American trade policy before they decide to tune you out.
Very largely, this had already happened by Inauguration Day.
By now, the work of MSNBC and the New York Times and PolitiFact is complete.
Millions of Americans do not know the difference between what is true and what is false and have decided that they do not much care.
There was, I like fondly to imagine, a different course that might have been taken here.
It is just possible, I suppose, that members of my profession, journalism, could have exercised their reasoning faculties to decide what in the administration was good and what was bad.
We chose not to exercise this responsibility.
So this meme is going around.
It was meeting both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal today.
Here's Trump.
He's talking and he says he'd like to pull our troops out of Syria because ISIS has been largely cleaned up.
So here is Trump saying that to a reporter.
I want to get out.
I want to bring our troops back home.
I want to start rebuilding our nation.
We will have, as of three months ago, $7 trillion in the Middle East over the last 17 years.
Nothing, nothing out of it.
Nothing.
So here's the New York Times reporting on this.
On foreign policy, President Trump reverts to candidate Trump.
Now, you could translate that into non-Timesian English to say President Trump is trying to uphold his promises as a candidate because what he's doing is he's fulfilling his America First agenda, pulling us out of foreign wars he thinks are done and he thinks we're not getting out of them.
But this is the New York Times.
President Trump has been commander-in-chief for 14 months, but to an uncanny degree, he still sounds like the armchair statesman who ran for the White House in 2016.
Far from learning, far from learning on the job or modifying his views to fit the imperatives of America's global role, as did so many of his predecessors.
Mr. Trump is falling back on the familiar mix of belligerence and isolationism that fueled his America First campaign.
So by being who he said he was, he is doing something terrible.
And yet he sounds very much like another president I used to know who sounded a little bit like this.
This is cut number five.
American workers built this country.
And now we need American workers to rebuild this country.
That's what we need.
It is time we take some of the money that we spent on wars, use half of it to pay down our debt, and then use the rest of it to do some nation building right here at home.
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All right, so that was Obama saying the same thing.
It's time to come home.
It's time to help the American workers.
And the reason we were in Syria, lest we forget, is because Obama pulled out of Iraq, because Obama let the Syrian civil war go on without doing anything.
And Obama basically remembers, said, ISIS, it's the JV team.
We don't have to fight ISIS.
It's no big deal.
And they set the entire Middle East on fire.
So how did the New York Times cover Obama pulling out of Iraq?
President Obama, listen to this, this is from 2011.
President Obama, who first ran for office campaigning against the war, has never wavered on his promise to bring the troops home.
The last few thousand will be out of Iraq by year's end.
We celebrate their return, but this country must never forget the intolerable costs of a war started on arrogance and lies.
So Obama keeping his campaign promise, and he did.
It was a stupid promise, and he kept it.
That was a sign of integrity and honesty.
But Trump keeping his campaign promise is the worst thing ever.
And, you know, this is true on everything Trump does, everything he does.
It's not judged like the guy said, oh, is this policy good or is this policy bad?
It's judged on Trump.
It must be bad because Trump did it.
It's like gluten in that Seth Rogan film, This is the End, where he says, you don't know what gluten is.
And Rogan says, sure, I do.
Gluten is everything bad.
That's the way they treat Donald Trump.
And so they do this.
You know, also, there's a piece in the Wall Street Journal, same pieces in the New York Times.
Trump plunges ahead with America-first nationalist approach.
And he blames the fact that all these guys have been fired.
This is Gerald Seib.
He blames the fact that all the guys were fired and that not enough is getting done in the Senate and Congress.
And by the way, I don't want to get too deep into the political weeds about this, but Mitch McConnell is to blame for a lot of stuff that's going on because he is slow walking everything.
He is playing it so safe that nothing gets done.
And Trump decides, well, you know, I don't need to negotiate.
I don't need to compromise.
I don't need to talk to anybody because they're not doing anything anyway.
And he goes off on his own.
So again, there's this caravan of people heading for the border, and Trump says he's going to call the National Guard and send them in to defend the border.
Here's Trump just saying that.
Until we can have a wall and proper security, we're going to be guarding our border with the military.
That's a big step.
We really haven't done that before, certainly not very much before.
But we will be doing things with Mexico, and they have to do it.
Otherwise, I'm not going to do the NAFTA deal.
NAFTA's been fantastic for Mexico, bad for us.
We've had our car plants moved to Mexico, many of them.
We make tremendous numbers, millions of cars in Mexico that years ago didn't exist.
They closed in Michigan, they closed in Ohio, they closed in other places.
Now they're starting to move back because of what we've done with regulation and with taxes.
They're starting to come back into our country in a big way.
But I told Mexico very strongly, you're going to have to do something about these caravans that are coming up.
And I just noticed that the caravan now, which is toward the middle of Mexico, coming up from Honduras, is breaking up very rapidly.
That's because Mexico has very strong immigration laws, as we should have.
So, you know, obviously this is because he's racist, because he hates Mexicans, because he's a warlike, you know, starting a war on the Mexican border.
But let's listen to another president I used to know talking about the border as well when he was not president, but when he was campaigning.
This is cut number four.
We all agree on the need to better secure the border and to punish employers who choose to hire illegal immigrants.
You know, we are a generous and welcoming people here in the United States, but those who enter the country illegally and those who employ them disrespect the rule of law and they are showing disregard for those who are following the law.
We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently, and lawfully to become immigrants in this country.
So that's why we need to start by giving agencies charged with border security new technology, new facilities, and more people to stop, process, and deport illegal immigrants.
That guy is tough on those illegal immigrants, isn't he?
I don't think he likes Mexicans very much.
I think that's the problem with him.
You know, all I'm saying is that Trump is doing what he said he would do, and Obama-wide.
Obama said he was going to do stuff that he didn't do.
He did not stop the border and then blamed us for wanting our borders to be secure.
I mean, and, you know, here, I'll give it to you in a nutshell.
I'll give it to you in one clip, okay?
Pruitt Dialing Back EPA Standards00:03:02
Scott Pruitt, EPA guy, right?
He is dialing back some of the mileage standards that the Obama administration had.
And anything that involves the environment, it must be good, right?
Anything Obama did that involved the environment.
Listen to the way CBS reports this.
I mean, you want to talk about fake news.
Listen to the way that CBS reports them dialing back these Obama regulations, and then I'll tell you what the regulations really are.
The EPA will announce plans today to reverse Obama-era fuel standards meant to fight air pollution.
The move sets up a showdown with environmental groups.
The Trump administration is set to roll back one of President Barack Obama's signature policies on the environment.
The move comes from the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, that's Scott Pruitt.
Today, Pruitt is expected to announce a reversal of tougher Obama-era standards for rules on greenhouse gas emissions and fuel economy.
That would set up a showdown with lawmakers and environmental groups.
Meanwhile, the White House is reportedly reviewing reports that Pruitt paid a below market rate to live in a Washington condo tied to an energy energy lobbyist.
Energy industry lobbyist, that is.
Chief Brady is at the White House with more chip.
Good morning.
Well, good morning.
Pruitt says rolling back greenhouse gas emission and fuel economy standards will help not only the car industry, but also consumers.
But it's expected to ignite a firestorm of criticism here in Washington.
A firestorm of criticism that hasn't happened yet, but they're reporting on the future.
But that's not what is so dishonest about that.
First, these ethics violations that everybody's coming at Scott Pruitt are completely political.
They are completely political.
That apartment that he was using, he got it at a market rate.
The person who gave it to him did not have any business in front of the EPA at the time.
They're talking about his travel expenses, which are less than previous EPA administrator travel expenses.
This is a hit job on Pruitt, and I hope the president knows it is, because Pruitt is doing an excellent job dialing back and completely overweening EPA.
Secondly, the signature legislation of the Obama era is absolute garbage.
This thing, they basically misused a Nixon-Carter era, you know, cafe standards, they call them, corporate average fuel economy standards, that was from back in the 70s when they had gas shortages and people were waiting online for gas.
And they misused this to mandate a fleetwide average of 54.5 miles a gallon, a number they made up completely.
In fact, the 0.5 was like a little dig at the car industry.
It was just a joke.
You were allowed to get around these standards by selling electric cars at below cost, so in losing money.
So the car industry was supposed to lose money to serve the government's electric car agenda, which is fascism, basically.
It's the government telling businesses how to run themselves.
And I don't mean fascism like a curse word.
I mean literal fascism, where the government is telling business how it's run instead of communism where they just take the business over.
Skillshare And Principles00:15:19
These regulations were a complete joke.
They were complete, they did very, very little for the environment.
They had very, very little environmental effect.
And this kind of outrage that's going on is just Obama good, Trump bad.
Let me stop here and then I'll wind this up so we can get to the mailbag.
But first I have to talk about Skillshare.
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All right, I'll wind up what I'm talking about with Trump just so I can get to the mailbag.
Bobby Jindal, former Louisiana governor, he wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal that just sums it up.
He says, Trump keeps his predecessors' promises.
He says, true enough, President Trump has wrapped his policy proposals in harsher rhetoric than his predecessors, and he threatens to go much further than they contemplated.
It's also true, however, that many of his actions were previously promised by Democrats and Republicans alike.
Now that there's a politician who finally seems to be doing in office what he pledged to do when campaigning, voters can be forgiven for supporting him and for wondering why this makes him or them deplorable.
You know, Obama even said he was going to, and so did Hillary say that she was going to renegotiate NAFTA that's supposed to be such a shocking thing.
Jindal goes on to say the lesson is that rhetoric matters.
Establishment politicians have been borrowing nationalist rhetoric to win elections and then maintaining the same old activist foreign policy, free trade and lax immigration enforcement.
They have spent years offering cheap talk with no intention of following through.
Now they are shocked that Mr. Trump, an outsider, does not play their sophisticated game.
If they believe in a liberal multilateral world order governed by institutions and rules they see as being threatened by Mr. Trump's ethos of American First, they should make that case, but they should trust voters enough to do it honestly.
Basically, the media cannot believe that the voters meant what they said, that Trump meant what they said.
And I've talked about Trump's style and how often I don't like his style.
I've talked about some of the things he does that I don't like, but this is what he ran on, and this is what he's doing.
And it is simply, and so much of it was promised by his predecessors.
And either the media knew they were lying or didn't care they were lying because they were Democrats.
And so Obama good, Trump bad, that is the reporting.
And of course, Trump's popularity will rise if they continue to do that.
All right, I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come on over to thedailywire.com while you're there, subscribe for lousy $9.99 a month or whatever.
Maybe it's, let's call it 10.
Oh, we'll call it 10 bucks.
10 bucks a month.
It's 100 bucks for the whole year.
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I'm traveling without my leftist tears tumbler.
No leftist tears.
That's why I look like this.
So you can get all that.
And you can ask questions in the mailbag.
And on April 10th, you can ask questions in the conversation.
Come on over the mailbag.
You guys are getting slow.
All right, from Lucy.
Dear Andrew, most brilliant of all pundits anywhere and author of the one podcast that is essential and indispensable, all true and all on my business card.
You are a Christian and you do understand, I think correctly, that the vast majority of Christians do not wish to be mean to gays.
However, what really bothers a lot of us is that according to the gay agenda, children are not entitled to a real mom and a real dad.
In other words, we don't care what consenting adults, we don't care.
Christians don't care what consenting adults do in the bedroom.
That's between them and God.
But when it comes to kids, not only is abortion wrong, but children are absolutely entitled to their own biological married or second best adoptive mom and dad.
Your opinion?
Question mark.
First of all, as always, as always, you have to distinguish between gay people and gay activists.
I mean, this is entirely two different things.
Same thing with black people and black activists, women and feminists.
You know, these things are not the same.
And that has been, you know, when you talk about how narrative, how the left controls the narrative, that's the narrative.
The narrative is that these are all the same, that the Dan Savage who sells his disgusting anti-God bullying agenda, that he is gay people.
And he's not.
He's just Dan Savage.
But they put him on TV because the ordinary gay guy isn't going on TV.
He's doing his job.
He's going to work.
He's doing the things that we all do.
And I think that that is the problem.
Obviously, when you're fighting against these activists, you have to fight.
I've said this a million times, but these guys who go and sue, who look for some small businessman who will not make a cake for a gay wedding and then sue him out of business, those are bullying thugs.
I don't care what they believe.
I don't care who they sleep with.
That's the thuggishness.
That is the thuggishness.
And you're absolutely right.
Most of the Christians I know at this point are just like, hey, I may believe it's a sin, but that's your problem.
I'm not here to judge your sins.
And we are not here to judge other people's sins.
That is absolutely true.
So all I would say about this is, yes, of course you're right.
The best case scenario for a child is a married biological mom and dad.
Studies show, I think it's wonderful when people adopt children who need adopting and when they marry somebody who has a child and take care of that child as if it were their own.
But studies show that people do the best they do is when they have a biological mom and dad in the home staying together.
And so yes, that makes divorce when you have young children a real problem, you know, and it makes all kinds of different arrangements that we're supposed to say, ah, when all families are alike, all families are loving, all families are the same.
It's just not true.
And children deserve the best we have, not the second best, not the third best.
So of course, you know, you're right about that.
But again, this is not something that I think, you know, I'm sure a lot of gay people would agree with you.
And those are not the guys they put on television because they are controlling the narrative to sell their agenda.
From Scott, hey, Andrew, assuming the tariffs are not good economic policies, how can the United States pressure China and the EU to drop tariffs on U.S. products?
Great show.
Thank you, Scott.
Boy, that's a complicated question.
You know, first of all, I don't understand why steel tariffs that Trump was talking about are supposed to threaten China, which doesn't give us very much of our steel.
I mean, a lot of our steel, the people who send us our most steel, is Canada.
So I'm not sure I understand why those tariffs just seem kind of like wild things to help our industries.
They're supposed to help our industries, but not really things to deal with China.
And the thing is, China is a rogue state, and China is a dangerous state.
In fact, tomorrow, my friend Ning Ya is going to come on and talk about China.
She's really, what did I call her?
Ming Ya Ying Ma.
It's terrible, terrible.
She'll never forgive me.
But she will come on and talk about China.
And the problem with China is they're trying to establish all the good things that a free market gives you without giving people freedom.
And it's dangerous that if that works, I do not think it'll work.
I have faith that it won't work.
But oppressors and tyrants are infinitely creative and they may make it work.
And that will be a very bad thing.
If they have all the benefits of capitalism and free markets without being free, that's going to be a bad thing.
I don't think it's going to work ultimately.
But they are a rogue state.
They steal our technology.
They steal things from us and they really do play unfairly.
The best solution that I can think of is something like, you know, I'm not an expert in the Trans-Pacific deal that they were trying to put together, but something like that where we band together with traders in the region, establish rules for fair play and hold China accountable as a group.
You know, this is a global solution because it's global trade.
You hold China responsible as a group and punish them as a group instead of starting some kind of trade war that is going to hurt us as much as it hurts them, maybe more.
So that's my take on it.
I assume right now that Trump is using tariffs as a negotiating technique.
And so I think like, so I think you have to wait and see what exactly he's trying to pull here.
But I think the only thing we can do is form some kind of trade agreement arrangement and deal with China that way.
From Christian, if you could ask Shakespeare one question and be guaranteed an honest answer, what question would you ask him?
Well, actually, you know, that's funny.
I love Shakespeare.
Shakespeare is like at the center of my reading life and my artistic life in every possible way.
But I'm not that interested in asking him questions because of what Socrates said about artists, that when artists work, they have some kind of muse who talks to them and makes them create beautiful and wise things, but frequently they're not wise themselves.
So you could get one question of Shakespeare and find the guy was allowed or find he didn't know anything.
You know, you just never know.
But if I had one question to ask him, I would ask him to clear up the story behind the sonnets because they're very mysterious.
They hint at homosexual love, and I don't believe from reading Shakespeare that he could have possibly been gay.
He may have just been imitating Petrarch and doing that, but I would like to know who the dark lady is.
I would like to know all these mysterious things that the sonnet doesn't tell.
It tells this wonderful story of the love between that among two men and a woman.
And, you know, I would just like to know what he was talking about.
And was it autobiographical at all, or was he just making it up?
That would be the one thing I'd actually be interested in hearing.
From Leon.
Dear Andrew, have you lost any liberal friends due to your conservative views?
Have I ever?
Yes.
If not, what is the best way to keep a meaningful friendship going when I virtually disagree with everything politically my friends bring up?
We have been friends for our whole life.
I have recently taken the red pill while my friend is in deep with campus leftists.
Thanks for the advice.
Huge fan of the show.
It's a problem.
What I can say is I lost most of my liberal friends right after I realized I was a conservative because it was like being a religious convert.
I couldn't stop talking.
My bad.
I could not stop talking about it.
I couldn't stop bringing it up.
I couldn't stop like just with the amazement that everything that was on TV in the news on CNN was a lie, you know, and I just wanted to tell everybody.
I wanted everybody to know.
They didn't want to know so much.
And so really, I should have kept my mouth shut a little bit more.
It's not that you have to lie.
It's not that you have to lie, but everything is in politics.
You don't have to discuss politics.
You can even say to your friends, you know, we disagree about politics.
Let's not talk about it.
I still have liberal friends, thank heavens, and I sometimes say to them, you know, we won't talk about it if you're going to talk about it.
Talk about principles, not people.
I always say this.
Don't talk about Donald Trump.
Don't talk about how much you hate Obama.
Just talk about principles and what you believe in.
It's hard to do because I have to say that beyond what aboutism, Trump is doing this.
Well, what about when Obama did this?
Leftists don't really understand how offensive Obama was, how radical he was, how against a lot of the American ethos he was.
And so they don't understand why when Trump does things, even when he does things in ways we don't like, even when he talks in ways we don't like, why we just think like, you know what, we ate it, now you eat it.
It's like those to whom evil is done do evil in return.
And so, you know, it's really hard to stay off the personalities, but it's something that you can do.
And I think it's important to do it because I think you should have friends who are left-winger.
I mean, this is one of the things I really loved about being at the college yesterday.
I like hearing what the kids have to say.
I like hearing the arguments they make and why they care so much about race and why they think things that aren't true about gender.
And I think that young people experiment with ideas and I think that that's fine.
What really bothers me, again, is not the leftist.
It's not the agenda of people who are liberals, who are Democrats.
It's the agenda of people who want to silence everybody else.
Those are the people who really bother me.
From Mercedes.
Dear Andrew, why should I believe in God?
If I should, then how should I go about it?
For reference, I'm a Christian but have been questioning my beliefs.
Would love your help.
It's only one reason to believe in God.
Same reason you believe in gravity.
It's real, and your life will go a lot better if you believe in it.
The same thing with gravity.
Stop believing in gravity.
Things just don't go as well as they do when you do believe in gravity.
And the same thing is true of God.
And unlike gravity, which you can test, an idea, a belief that you can test immediately just by stepping off a cliff and you can test finally, God takes a little bit of time to start to understand what he has done in your life.
I think I was talking about this yesterday, about the scene where Moses parts the Red Sea, even though people are screaming all their doubts and people are screaming all their doubts, even though God has done all these miracles in their lives.
When I wrote my memoir about this, The Great Good Thing, you know, Kierkegaard said, the Christian existential philosopher, Kierkegaard said, this is a summation of what he said, not the exact words.
He said, life has to be lived forwards, but it can only be understood backwards.
And when I wrote my memoir, The Great Good Thing, I was shocked at how obvious God's presence had been in my life even before I believed in him.
I mean, it was comical.
It was comical how dense and stupid I had had to be to miss him doing what he was doing in my life.
That's how different it was to look back on my life with faith and understand that he had been there all along.
It was so obvious.
So that's the reason.
Finding Faith Through Prayer00:04:12
And how do you start?
Well, I started with prayer.
I think prayer is the best way.
I always say, find a place where you can be alone.
Find a place where you can talk out loud.
Don't try to trick God.
Don't try to tell him how pious you are.
Don't try to say only the things you think you can say.
He already knows it all.
Just be as honest and blunt about the things that are bothering you, the things you want in life, the things that trouble you about yourself, the things that trouble you about the world.
And you'll see.
I mean, one of the reasons I came to faith was after five years of praying, my life was transformed, and I think yours will be too.
And that's the reason.
That's the reason.
All right.
Another biblical question we have time for.
Nathan, I've been listening to your interpretation of the biblical text.
And though I agree there is an element of metaphor in things like the days of creation representing a different span of time than the word implies, some of your other claims sound somewhat like the Jeffersonian interpretation.
Now, I don't think that's fair, but okay.
This seems to explain away unbelievable claims and narrows down the scope of the text to only the most literal pieces of historical accounts.
Where do you draw the line and who decides what to take literally and what was meant for hyperbole?
First of all, I don't discount the miraculous.
I do not discount the miraculous.
I do believe in miracles.
I don't believe in magic.
And I'm a very practiced reader.
I've read a lot.
As Noel says, I have read all the books.
And when I'm confronting something that I believe is conveying truth through mythology or truth through legend, I think I recognize it.
So I'm not dismissing things that are miraculous or things that don't happen every day.
I'm just looking at stories the way they appear to me.
The question of who decides is the great question of Christian history.
Because, of course, you have the Reformation when you have the church that says we decide.
God guides us.
God formed this church.
He is running this church.
It's like the Supreme Court.
The reason the Pope, when they say that he is, you know, that he's infallible, they don't mean he's always infallible.
They don't mean when he says it looks like it's going to rain today that it's got to rain.
They mean on certain areas of doctrine, his word is final.
You know, his word is the final word, just like the Supreme Court.
In Protestantism, there's a lot of different sects, a lot of different beliefs, but there is this belief that essentially it's between you and the text, between the believer and the text.
You have a personal relationship with God.
He will guide you instead of guiding the church.
do not need the priests in between.
My feeling about this is right in the middle, okay?
I believe that I said this to someone last night, that Catholics are right about everything except Catholicism.
When I look at theology, I'm frequently reading Catholic theology.
Benedict, in my lifetime, has been the greatest theologian alive, Pope Benedict XVI.
Just a Ratzinger, he sometimes wrote under before he was Pope.
I think he's a brilliant theologian.
C.S. Lewis, of course, was not a Catholic, but he was so close that there's very little difference.
But the thing is, the thing is, because I believe in maybe just because I'm an American, but also because I believe in freedom.
No, it's because I believe in freedom and I believe that virtue has to be chosen.
You have to choose virtue.
You have to train your heart to love virtue and then choose it for the love.
I believe that you have the right to override even the Pope.
And so I believe, it's not that I believe that I'm infallible.
It's simply that I believe that I will listen with great seriousness to the great theologians.
And then if I disagree, I will go to God with my disagreement and follow that path because I believe he means me to think for myself.
He means me to be free to choose my way.
So, you know, that is the way I read the Bible.
I'm very, very serious about, you know, not just saying, oh, this is not true.
And I pick this and I pick that and this.
I'll choose this verse and I'll choose that verse.
In fact, a lot of times in my church, the Episcopal Church, I feel that that's what the priests are doing.
But I don't do it.
I'm very serious about it.
And I don't dismiss anything lightly.
But there's a lot of backing theologically from my reading of, for instance, Genesis.
It's not like, I mean, the Catholic Church reads it a lot closer to my reading than to the literal reading.
All right, I got to stop.
Sinclair's Ad War?00:03:56
Let us do tickety-boo news.
So I just want to finish this thing on the press with this.
I don't know if you saw the Sinclair ad, but I just love this for the sheer comedy of it.
Sinclair is a conservative, Sinclair broadcast group.
It's a conservative network of about 200 television stations, 614 channels in 89 U.S. markets.
And it's different than everybody else because they're conservative, right?
And they kind of support Trump.
And so they put out an ad and they asked their news anchors to read the ad.
This is an ad for Sinclair News.
And some wag got the idea of putting all the different newscasters together reading the ad.
So it looked like they were zombies reciting this kind of text.
But it was just that different Sinclair stations were reading the same ad.
So here's the compilation that they put together.
Pulse news has become all too common on social media.
Unfortunately, for some members of the use of platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda control.
This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
So basically it's saying there's a lot of fake news out there.
Social media promulgates fake news.
The other guys use social media to spread the, to report their news.
We don't.
The other guys don't get it right.
We do.
That's all it was saying.
That's the ad.
I mean, is there a news station in America that hasn't essentially put forward that ad?
Because they're conservative, just like we're talking about with Trump, the media went nuts.
Here is a montage of the media going nuts.
It's like something out of the movie 1984.
Georgia Orwell online, too.
Historians will be looking at this and saying, the people who spoke out against the erosion of democratic institutions in this time were the ones who were on the right side of history.
It's not journalism.
It's propaganda.
Most of us have heard this kind of thing in totalitarian regimes where somebody has to repeat what the government says.
In this case, it's what the corporation says.
There has to be an understanding that this style propaganda has to stop.
I spent a lot of time in China, which is a country that has an actual state media, and it rings very familiar.
This is the way authoritarian states operate.
I mean, it is.
What Trump and what now Sinclair is doing is conflating this idea of fake news, which is the purposeful manipulation and fabrication of fact, with stories that they find somehow unflattering.
And that is really what's chilling to democracy.
And I'm sure.
They're saying, trust us, we're fair.
We're the ones that are honest.
Don't believe the others.
And that is sort of an echo of President Trump's anti-media messaging.
I would just like to say to all of my fellow broadcasters that you are the biggest bunch of knuckleheads that has ever walked the planet.
There are guys who paint the size of barns for a living who would be better journalists than you are.
And that is utterly absurd.
First of all, they kept blaming Trump.
Trump had nothing to do with it.
It was a Sinclair media ad, Sinclair Broadcasting ad.
These guys are so dopey, so pretentious, so full of themselves that they can't even see what a bunch of dopes they really are.
It is just amazing.
The only thing about it is it makes life a lot funnier than it would be without them.
So Sinclair Broadcasting did an ad.
It was Orwellian.
It was the end of the world.
I hope that, for instance, CNN never does an ad about how their news is an apple, but everybody else is a banana, because that would just be, you know, Orwellian, it would be Brave New World.
Wonderful On China00:00:58
Come again.
I got to say thank you to the media today for just like being the funniest group of morons walking around in America.
All right, your ma will come on.
She's wonderful on the question of China.
She will be here tomorrow.
I guess I'll still be in Manhattan.
I have no idea where I am anymore, but I seem to still be upright.
And if that continues, I'll be back.
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 their animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.