Ben Shapiro dissects Facebook’s dual hypocrisy—monetizing user data while censoring conservatives, citing suppressed CPAC coverage and blocked Catholic pages—while framing Mueller’s investigation as a politically weaponized distraction. He ties modern "globalist" overreach to Wilson, FDR, and Obama’s executive overreach, warning of a Democratic midterm push toward leftist policies. The episode pivots to media hysteria, mocking fabricated crises like Bolton leaks and subpoena frenzies as tools to undermine Trump, ultimately arguing that conservative inaction in media has let elite bias go unchecked. [Automatically generated summary]
Democrat leaders are warning President Trump not to fire special counsel Robert Mueller.
They say the move could spark a constitutional crisis and Mueller should instead be allowed to overturn the results of a national election because of some meaningless payments to a porn star, thereby starting a second civil war over nothing.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is suggesting Congress pass a law to protect Mr. Mueller so that the Constitution would be protected by a completely unaccountable agent of Democrat Vendetta who would remain in office forever, no matter what he did.
The White House rejected the Democrats' suggestions and says President Trump will instead shoot himself in the foot while pounding his head against the wall until Mueller magically falls down and dies.
In short, our government is in the very best of hands.
And if you all just wait here, I'm going to Canada to get help.
Trigger warning, Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-diggy.
Shipshaw, tipsy-topsy, the round of zippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, it is mailbag day.
You know what that means?
Your miserable existence is about to take a turn, possibly for the worse, but maybe for the better.
You never know.
You never know.
I mean, look at where you are right now.
Anything is worth trying, right?
We will answer all your questions.
We answered a lot of questions yesterday.
The conversation.
I thought that was a really good episode.
I mean, really excellent questions, incredibly brilliant answers.
Obviously, like the mailbag, guaranteed 100% correct.
And I always like talking to Alicia.
You know, she usually won't sit that close to me because of the restraining order, but she has to for the conversation, so that was very pleasant.
But, you know, I just want to point out that all these things depend on your subscriptions.
If you subscribe, you can ask questions, solve all your problems.
If not, if you don't want to part with that lousy 10 bucks, if you're gripping that lousy 10 bucks or 100 bucks for the whole year, you're not only not getting your leftist tears tumbler, but you are also wallowing in these terrible problems that I would solve for you like that for just a lousy 10 bucks.
All right, speaking of solving all your problems, the biggest problem you have to solve if you're a guy every day is you got to shave.
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So yesterday, you know, so much news.
I mean, so much news.
We've got Paul Ryan, we've got this investigation into Michael Cohn, got Syria, and then we've got Zuckerberg, which is one of the things I want to talk about today, Mark Zuckerberg up on the hill testifying before Congress.
And all of it, I just want to put all of it into context for a moment, okay?
I've talked about this before, but I just want to put it all in one place.
Voters And The Freedom Project00:14:43
This, you know, we keep hearing this idea of nationalism versus globalism.
And what I keep saying is globalism is a false flag term.
It's a false term because it's a global world.
It is a global world.
I mean, people can travel the world very quickly.
They can communicate across the entire globe in a split second.
It's going to be a global world.
We share ideas.
We're all on each other's radar.
We see each other.
We see what's going on.
I can use a phone the size of a matchbox to talk to somebody in Mozambique right now.
It's a global world.
That is not the question.
The question is whether we are independent actors in a global world and which ideas are going to matter and which ideas are going to colonize the world.
And also who makes the decisions.
That is the big one.
You know, since progressivism got started, I mean, you can go back to Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson, but since progressivism got started, the idea has been that the notions of the founders were out of date.
So you go back to Wilson.
You're talking about really the beginning of the 20th century, early days in the 20th century.
And you had Wilson saying, oh, you know, what did he call it?
He called our inalienable rights a lot of nonsense.
He said this is mere, he said the inalienable rights of man are mere sentiment and pleasing speculation put forward as fundamental principle.
First college president to become president, which should tell you something about college presidents.
And he said government should do whatever experience permits or the times demand, and the president is at liberty both in law and conscience to be as big a man as he can.
I mean, this whole idea that people as wise as Woodrow Wilson, and people, by the way, on the left, they still idolize Wilson.
He was a terrible president.
He was a racist.
He was a tyrant.
And these are the things that he believed.
He hated the Constitution.
And the idea was the guy's a college president.
Are you the people going to tell a college president what to do in these complex times?
And that was FDR's point too.
He would constantly say, well, the Constitution, it was written back in horse and buggy days.
That was his phrase, back in horse and buggy days.
And he would say, you know, that a couple of people got together and for their time, they were doing the right thing and how wonderful.
But now we're in this complicated age and we need the experts.
Barack Obama, right in that wheelhouse, basically saying, oh, if I could lock my, what did he say once?
He said something like, if I could solve all these problems without passing laws, I'd do it.
The assumption being that he knew how to solve the problems.
He and his experts knew how to solve the problems.
It was just the Constitution slowing him down.
That's the basic idea.
And so when they talk about globalism, they're not really talking about globalism.
They're talking about rule by the expert elite.
And why would anybody want to get in the way of the expert elite?
And the idea is, look how wonderful we've done.
Look at all the machines you have.
Look how healthy you are.
Look how poverty has gone down.
But of course, the idea that this was done by experts leading is not right.
It's not accurate.
I mean, after all, Barack Obama had all the experts in the world to help him.
And what happened?
I mean, he set the Middle East on fire, right?
He got out of Iraq, like the experts said, and Syria and Iraq went, you know, ISIS went through there like a firestorm.
You know, he made these deals.
You know, Barack Obama was saying, I don't know, it was 2014.
Syria has no chemical weapons anymore.
Look how well we've done.
Syria has no chemical weapons anymore.
Well, now we see that Syria does have chemical weapons.
So the experts, not so much.
The experts are wonderful.
True experts are wonderful.
But they need to convince us.
We are the judges.
We're the jury.
We're the voters.
They need to come to us and say, this is why you do what you do and stop lying all the time and stop peddling hysteria like some of the climate change people do.
You know, I believe that climate change is a problem, things we have to address, but the hysteria is just to gain power for these elites.
So in these last couple of days, we've seen really this move on the part of Mueller.
And I said this yesterday, it may be that he has something on Michael Cohn, or it's not really Mueller now.
It's been passed off to the Southern District in New York, but it's still the feds going after Michael Cohn, the president's personal attorney.
And the word today is that they're going after payments to women that Trump slept with.
And my question to these people is not like whether, you know, obviously nobody's above the law, but my question to these people is, are you really going to tell us that you're going to overturn an election because women Trump sleeps around?
I mean, that's what you're telling us?
Is that really what you're going to say?
Are you really going to say to Kim Jong-un, the guy coming to speak with you and negotiate with you over nuclearizing your continent, is in trouble because he slept with someone?
Is that really what you're going to tell us?
I mean, is it really true that you're going to throw this guy out?
You're going to impeach him?
You know, when the right tried to do that to Clinton, the voters rightly rejected it.
I said so at the time.
I felt the same way at the time.
I thought this is not, the voters elected Clinton.
This is not how you tell him.
It's over unless he is committing high crimes and misdemeanors about governance.
You know, this is not what you do.
And so, you know, I'm really sorry to see Paul Ryan.
Paul Ryan announced today that he's not going to run, obviously, Speaker of the House.
And I know a lot of conservatives hate Paul Ryan.
And I would add to this, I don't think Paul Ryan was a very good Speaker of the House, although he put forward his accomplishments today.
Here's Ryan talking.
Probably the biggest achievements for me are first, the major reform of our tax code for the first time in 36 years, which has already been a huge success for this country.
And that's something I've been working on in my entire adult life.
Second, something I got much, much more invested on since becoming Speaker, is to rebuild our nation's military.
And after tax reform, addressing our military readiness crisis, that was a top priority that we got done last month as well.
These I see as lasting victories that will make this country more prosperous and more secure for decades to come.
There are so many other things that we have gotten done.
And of course, I'm going to look back proudly on my days at the Budget Committee of the Ways and Means Committee.
So here's the thing about Paul Ryan.
Was he a great Speaker of the House?
No, he wasn't.
He was not a cat wrangler.
He was not that guy.
He was not the institutional man that he needed to be.
And he talks about the things that he accomplished that he's happy about.
But I know, I know his chief concern was the overspending and the debt of the government and that what he really wanted was to reform our entitlement program.
Entitlements are like regulations, like over-regulation.
Entitlements are the largest problem that nobody cares about.
They are the biggest problem we have that people don't care about.
Why don't they care about it?
They don't want to lose their entitlements.
They don't want you to take the government to take their entitlements away.
You know, there's the old joke, tell the government to keep their hands off my Medicare, which they want.
They think the government should not be involved in their lives unless they're getting money and then they want the money.
Paul Ryan put forward an absolutely sane and sensible way to do this.
Entitlement reform, by the way, is called the third rail of American politics, because if you step on it, you die, right?
Paul Ryan had the guts to step on it, and he tried his best.
He put forward an absolutely rational plan when they instituted Social Security to kick in at 65.
People generally lived till 63, so it wasn't going to bankrupt the government.
Now people live till 80 routinely.
There's nothing wrong with saying to the young generation, hey, you're going to have to wait an extra two, three, four years before this kicks in.
It would have saved the program for years to come.
There's not like there's money.
That money you pay into Social Security is not in a box somewhere and they're doling it out.
As you get old, you are simply being supported by the work of younger people.
And so to keep that at a minimum and to keep from going broke, we should have done what Paul Ryan said.
He was wrong-footed by Donald Trump, who said he wasn't going to do it.
And I'm really sorry to see it.
And I'm sorry to see him go because it seems to me that a lot of Republicans are deserting and it does look right this minute that this could totally change.
It does look like a blue tide is coming in the midterm election.
And that is going to be a really sad fact because Donald Trump is not so principled that he won't govern to the left if that's the Congress that he has.
So the thing is, in trying to cut entitlements and trying to cut debt, Ryan was trying to cut back the state.
And you always have to remember you're always in the minority when you're trying to do that because all the other actors in this are part of the state.
Conservatives are in the minority.
Republicans and Democrats are in the majority.
Now, Democrats at their furthest level want the state to be everything.
They're socialists.
They want the state to take over the means of productions.
They want the state to run every aspect of your life.
But the spectrum stops somewhere around people who want the state to grow more slowly.
They want it to take over your life more slowly.
And then the conservatives are kind of the outliers.
So it's in this context that I want to look at Zuckerberg's testimony yesterday.
He's still testifying today.
But first, we should talk about the Freedom Project Academy because you always hear old folks like me saying, when I went to school, I walked five miles in the snow.
We're lying.
But it is true that education has changed.
When I was a kid, we learned civics.
We learned why America was the way it was.
We learned how it worked.
And America's schools are nothing like that anymore.
We grew up in safety.
We weren't learning about safe spaces and protecting ourselves from ideas we didn't like.
And even though technology continues to offer new opportunities for learning, we can all agree the traditional moral values, which were once woven into the fabric of the classroom, have practically disappeared.
So you should consider Freedom Project Academy's fully accredited Judeo-Christian classical online school for kindergarten through high school.
This is an incredible interactive education where students attend live classes every day with teachers and fellow classmates from across the country.
But it's online, so you don't have to walk five miles in the snow, although you can if you want to, if you, you know, if that's something that you feel will bring you back into the traditional past.
FPA doesn't accept a penny of government funding, which allows them to stay committed to teaching students how to think, not what to think.
Families can enroll students full-time or start with a single class.
It's entirely up to you.
Here's what you do: go to freedomforschool.com, freedomforschool.com, and request your free information packet from Freedom Project Academy.
Enrollment ends in July, but classes fill up fast.
So go to freedomforschool.com, freedomforschool.com, and please remember to tell them that I sent you.
If you know who I am, if you don't know who I am, look in the mirror, make sure you know who you are, and then go and tell them that I sent you so they will continue to sponsor us.
So Zuckerberg goes up to Congress, right?
And this is a kabuki show.
You know, this is a pure show.
When Barack Obama was lifting information for his campaign off Facebook, all we heard about was, wow, this young new president who knows so much, he can use Facebook.
When there's some proof that Facebook helped Donald Trump get elected, it's like, call Zuckerberg, call that young man into the principal's office right now.
He needs a good talking to.
And the thing about Zuckerberg is Zuckerberg is a BS artist.
I mean, Zuckerberg has been giving the same speech forever, right?
So he goes out before and he apologizes for the fact that his security has been breached and information has been stolen.
Play cut number eight.
Oh, that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well.
And that goes for fake news, for foreign interference in elections and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy.
We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake.
And it was my mistake.
So here's from Wired magazine, right?
In 2000, in 2003, one year before Facebook was founded, a website called FaceMash began non-consensually scraping pictures of students at Harvard from the school's intranet and asking users to rate their hotness.
Obviously, it caused an outcry.
The website's developer quickly proffered an apology.
This was Mark Zuckerberg.
I hope you understand this is not how I meant for things to go, and I apologize for any harm done as a result of my neglect to consider how quickly the site would spread and its consequences thereafter.
I definitely see how my intentions could be seen in the wrong light.
2006, three years later, the young company Facebook blindsided its users with the launch of Newsfeed, which collated and presented in one place information that people had previously had to search for piecemeal.
Many users were shocked and alarmed that there was no warning and that there were no privacy controls.
What did Zuckerberg say?
This was a big mistake on our part, and I'm sorry for it.
We really messed this one up.
We did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them.
2007, a year later, Facebook's beacon advertising system, launched without proper controls or consent, ended up compromising user privacy by making people's purchases public.
What did Zuckerberg say?
We simply did a bad job with this release and I apologize for it.
I'm not proud of the way we've handled the situation and I know we can do better.
By 2008, Zuckerberg had written only four posts on Facebook's blog.
Every single one of them was an apology or an attempt to explain a decision that upset users.
2010, after Facebook violated users' privacy, on and on it goes.
This is what he does, and it's not going to change.
The whole point of this, the whole point of this is it's not going to change in terms of them making money, giving your information to advertisers.
Cheryl Sandberg, the CEO of Facebook, was on with Savannah Guthrie, and Savannah asked her, you know, is there an opt-out button?
Listen to her response.
So here's how our business works.
We don't sell data ever.
We do not give personal data to advertisers.
People come onto Facebook.
They want to do targeted ads, and that's really important for small business.
But people want to show ads.
We take those ads, we show them, and then we don't pass any individual information back to the advertisers.
You don't have to pass it because you collect all the information and then you target the ads for the advertisers.
That's the situation that you charge the advertisers.
Cheryl Defends Data Practices00:15:36
That's right.
And that's a very good service.
That's a privacy protective good service.
Could you come up with a tool that said, I do not want Facebook to use my personal profile data to target me for advertising.
Dude, you have an opt-out button.
Please don't use my profile data for advertising.
We have different forms of opt-out.
We don't have an opt-out at the highest level.
That would be a paid product.
That's their business.
Their business is commercials, and They use your information to send you the commercials they think you want to see.
And there's no, they're holding you for ransom, essentially.
I love this as a paid product.
There's no, you can't opt out of that because that's the business.
That is how the business, it's like when you fast forward through commercials on television, you are stripping them of their business model.
That is how they make their money.
So they're not going to change.
And they are tracing you.
I mean, Senator Wicker asked Zuckerberg if they were following you after you left Facebook.
And here's what Zuckerberg says.
There have been reports that Facebook can track a user's internet browsing activity even after that user has logged off of the Facebook platform.
Can you confirm whether or not this is true?
Senator, I want to make sure I get this accurate, so it would probably be better to have my team follow up and I know that people use cookies on the internet and that you can probably correlate activity between sessions.
We do that for a number of reasons, including security and including measuring ads to make sure that the ad experiences are the most effective, which, of course, people can opt out of.
But not entirely.
They can't entirely opt out of it.
So I don't mean to crucify Zuckerberg.
Everybody's picking on him because he's kind of weird looking and he's obviously one of these computer geniuses and he's a little offbeat.
But that's not the point.
He shouldn't be there.
The only reason he was called, the only reason he was called there was because Donald Trump won the election and the big state doesn't like it.
When I say that, I don't mean that like in some kind of conspiracy.
Every time he uses the term deep state or big state, people picture those scenes in the movies where two guys in a trench coat sit in a bench in Washington and arrange an assassination.
That's not what it is.
It's bureaucrats who never get fired and look at the elected officials like a passing fad.
You know, what are they there for?
And Trump has annoyed them and Trump has cut some of their power, a lot of their power, really, when you talk about the regulations that he has cut back.
And they don't like it.
And all of this is about this.
And it is about silencing a certain type of voice.
Now, we call that voice conservative voices, but in this case, it really is the American voice.
It's the voice that says, no, we don't want to be governed by experts.
Or if we are going to be governed by experts, we want them to convince us first.
We do not want them to have the power, as so many bureaucracies do, to come in and tell me what I can do on my land, what I can do with my property, what I can do with my business without passing a law.
That's what we're fighting against.
So Ted Cruz, God bless him, God bless Ted Cruz.
To me, I'm ready to bronze the guy.
I mean, really, he has been one of the really good actors in this.
He has, in spite of what President Trump said about him, which was wrong during the election, Cruz has worked with him.
He's done his best to keep the government going, and he's done his best to continue to speak for his values, which are our values or my values at least.
And he gave it to Zuckerberg on the one issue that, as far as I'm concerned, that really matters, which is the fact that Facebook has a virtual monopoly on information, Google, YouTube, virtual monopolies on online information, and they are censoring one kind of speech, the speech that says to them, you should not be all-powerful, the people should rule.
Here is Cruz in one of his finest hours.
Well, Mr. Zuckerberg, I will say there are a great many Americans who I think are deeply concerned that Facebook and other tech companies are engaged in a pervasive pattern of bias and political censorship.
There have been numerous instances with Facebook.
In May of 2016, Gizmodo reported that Facebook had purposely and routinely suppressed conservative stories from trending news, including stories about CPAC, including stories about Mitt Romney, including stories about the Lois Lerner IRS scandal, including stories about Glenn Beck.
In addition to that, Facebook has initially shut down the Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day page, has blocked a post of a Fox News reporter, has blocked over two dozen Catholic pages, and most recently blocked Trump supporters Diamond and Silks page with 1.2 million Facebook followers after determining their content and brand were, quote, unsafe to the community.
To a great many Americans, that appears to be a pervasive pattern of political bias.
Do you agree with that, Assessment?
Senator, let me say a few things about this.
First, I understand where that concern is coming from because Facebook and the tech industry are located in Silicon Valley, which is an extremely left-leaning place.
And this is actually a concern that I have and that I try to root out in the company is making sure that we don't have any bias in the work that we do.
And I think it is a fair concern that people would wonder about it.
Let me ask this question.
Are you aware of any ad or page that has been taken down from Planned Parenthood?
Senator, I'm not, but let me just ask you to.
How about moveon.org?
Sorry?
How about moveon.org?
I'm not specifically aware of those.
How about any Democratic candidate for office?
I'm not specifically aware.
I mean, I- You know, I frequently wonder and rant about the fact that the right doesn't build its own media.
The right doesn't.
We sit around and we complain about Hollywood, but we don't build a studio.
We sit around and we complain about the fact that Google is now unfairly ranking conservative content and unfairly fact-checking conservative content by liberal fact-checkers like Snopes and PolitiFact.
We rail about the fact that Twitter is shadow banning, among others, Senator Cruz.
We rail about the fact that Facebook is shutting people down, but we don't build Facebook.
We don't build Twitter.
We don't build Google.
And therefore, our complaints kind of sound ridiculous.
And I keep wondering, why not?
Why not?
I always, for years, for years, I looked at Fox News and I thought, this thing is so successful.
Why isn't there a conservative comedy channel?
Why isn't there a conservative movie studio?
If we know that this is an audience base, why don't we use it?
It just occurred to me that the reason is, is the people who do this are the elites.
And you're asking them, by supporting conservatives, you're asking them to give up power to the people.
Virtually one man has done that in history, George Washington.
Remember the king said George III said if he does that, if he turns down the kingship, basically, he will be the greatest man on earth.
And these people, you know, when you ask them to stop silencing Glenn Beck, when you ask them to stop silencing Ben or me or any conservative voice, when you ask them to silence Planned Parenthood instead, or at least allow right-wingers the same freedom of speech that Planned Parenthood and Media Matters have, you're asking them to cede power.
And people don't do it.
And so the reason we don't build these things is because we're not the elites, we're the people.
I mean, even the elites among us, even the elites among us, are the people.
The elites among us are working for national review.
They're not billionaires building stuff.
And so this is the problem.
And the problem with these tech guys is they are completely untouchable in terms of high taxes and high crime.
None of the wages of leftism are going to touch them.
They're not the ones whose behavior is going to be constrained at some poor schmuck out in Indiana somewhere wherever.
What did Hillary Clinton call it?
Indianapolis or Indianapolis place or something like that.
It's those people who are going to get hurt by liberalism.
They're untouchable.
So why should they do it?
And I think that the only way to get them to do it is to make sure we keep the blue wave back if we can, that we keep the people in government, the get the people into government who will support the people because the elites, they're just never going to exceed power.
All right, we got the mailbag coming up.
But, but, we now have to cast you into the exterior darkness.
If you're on Facebook or YouTube, come on over to thedailywire.com to listen to the rest.
I know you can listen on YouTube, but the advantage of coming over to the Daily Wire is that you can subscribe while you're there, and then you can ask questions in the mailbag, and then your life won't be the way it is.
All right, mailbag.
I just love doing that as fast as I can to see if I can throw them off and see how long it takes them to get to Lindsay.
All right, the mailbag from Ethan, Dear His Shininess.
My name is Ethan, and I'm an up-and-coming electronic music producer and DJ with a morality question for you.
I've become successful enough to perform at venues, clubs around the state, and an unfortunate part of DJing my style of music is that rap hip-hop music is often mixed in.
I despise where that genre is going with its sex and drug-ridden themes, but I play it sometimes in my live mixes because it's what the crowd wants, person to person.
I am the opposite of a hip-hop rap artist, Christian, abstinent, conservative, and I consistently try to impact lives so the better.
How should I deal with this issue of misrepresenting what values I stand for in my live performances?
Thank you so much for taking my question.
Love the show.
All right, that's a genuinely difficult question because you've got to make a living, and I understand that.
But you do not want to be in a position of putting forward values, of being at odds with your own values.
Now, the arts are special because the arts include people saying things that we disagree with for a higher purpose.
In other words, I write novels and stories that have evil people in it, who say evil things, who use bad language, some good people who use bad language and do bad things because I'm trying to produce a sense of what it's like to live as a human being.
I do not feel that that is contra my values.
Those are my values.
It is my value to tell the truth.
In your case, you are putting forward as a performance other people's works.
And I think you actually are responsible for culling some of that stuff out of what you do.
You know, there's plenty of hip-hop and rap.
I hate this stuff.
I'll be honest with you.
But there's plenty of hip-hop rap that doesn't front those kind of values, that doesn't put forward the worst of the worst.
And yeah, I think you do have a responsibility to go through some of that and make sure you're not playing the worst of the worst.
You know, I mean, it's not, I'm not a, I don't expect you to be a prig about it.
I know the venues that you're in, but still, some of that stuff is violent, vicious, nasty stuff.
Its treatment of women is unforgivable and unacceptable.
And yeah, I do not think that should be part of your act.
I mean, that's my, look, I can only give you my, you asked for my opinion.
I can only give you my opinion.
I do not think that it is right to take the worst of the worst and front it as part of what you are doing and part of what you're communicating.
So that's probably not the answer you want, but that's what I think.
From Colleen, hi, I subscribed and was waiting right at 2.30 for the conversation to start, but it started later and I had to go pick up my daughter and I didn't get to ask my question.
All right.
I love what you do at the Daily Wire.
My kids come running to listen to your theme song, and I have thoroughly enjoyed listening to Another Kingdom.
This 30-something housewife gave it five stars.
However, I do have a question about the scene where Austin is with the nymphs.
Is there a deeper meaning there?
The scene reminded me of a kind of baptism and evoked echoes of Bernini's ecstasy of St. Teresa in what the artist, in which, in that the artist uses things of the sexual realm to more powerfully convey a deeper spiritual reality.
Really intelligent question, and I can only explain to you why I can't answer the question.
I cannot answer the question because the artist's intentions shouldn't get in the way of, in my opinion, of the audience's experience.
The artist's intentions should not get in the way of the audience's experience because the artist does not always accomplish what he intends, but sometimes accomplishes something far better than what he intends.
And so it's not my job to say to you what the scene meant to me.
It's your job to explore the scene, which you seem to be doing a great job of doing, and to understand it in terms of your own life and your own experience and your own reading.
And so I put a lot of stuff into what I write.
There's a lot of subtext.
There's a lot of understanding of other things that go into every scene I write.
But it's for you to kind of have that experience.
It's not really a puzzle.
It's not really a game where you have to puzzle it out.
It's more of creating an experience.
But I love the question.
From Joshua, dear Andrew, I was in a long-distance relationship with a girl for two years.
I loved her.
We'd see each other every couple of months.
But in between those times, I'd cheat on her.
I knew it was the wrong thing to do, but I enjoyed it too much.
We broke up for reasons unrelated, stayed apart for a while, but are now friends and talk to each other on occasion.
Maybe she should know the truth.
I don't want to hurt her.
Can you give me some advice?
You're not going to like my advice.
Your problem is not what you tell her.
Your problem is that you're kind of a weasel.
I mean, it's a weasly thing to do to betray your partner and then say, gee, I didn't want to do it, but I liked it.
I enjoyed it too much.
I mean, that's not a good reason.
That's a crummy reason.
So you behaved really badly.
Now, you could have said, you know, it's none of my business what relationship you have.
You could have told her this relationship is an open relationship and I don't see you enough, so I'm going to go out with other girls and sleep with other girls.
You know, that's none of my business.
But what you did was lie and you mistreated her and you betrayed her.
And so that's your problem.
That's the problem you're facing, that you're that guy.
That is your problem, that you are that guy.
So your question is, do I tell her now that we're friends that you're that guy?
My answer is, stop being that guy.
Stop being that guy.
Now, part of stopping being that guy is, yes, being honest with the people around you.
You know, when you speak honestly, when you lie to your friends and the people you like, you're bending the air in front of you.
You know, you're bending the lens so that they can't have a clear relationship with you.
Lies distort the atmosphere between people.
But your problem, it's a subsidiary problem whether you tell her, you should tell her because you should be honest and straightforward with everyone you deal with.
But that's your problem.
The problem is you should be honest and straightforward with everyone you deal with and enjoying lying and enjoying betraying somebody is just a crap excuse.
And so that's what I think.
Fix your life and then you'll know and you'll know that you should be honest with her about this as about other things.
From Justin, benevolent.
When you're right in here, don't forget when you're writing in here, you're coming here to be insulted.
Justin says, benevolent overseer of the universe, my girlfriend recently started antidepressants.
Placebo Effect Concerns00:02:19
She had many deaths in her family this year, which caused her depression.
It concerns me that her mood was brighter the day she started, and she attributed that to the meds.
I know enough about them to know that it takes much longer than that for them to take effect, and she was experiencing the placebo effect.
She's in a much better mood than she was before, but I'm concerned about the long-term effects.
I appreciate any insight you can give on this.
All right.
I always have to start these things with telling you I'm not a doctor.
I don't want to get in the way of what doctors are prescribing.
But I am going to give you my personal opinion on this.
A woman who has suffered family deaths is not depressed.
She's grieving.
That is a totally, totally different thing.
And, you know, grieving can lead to depression.
Depression can be part of grieving.
But the person, you know, I don't even know if this was a psychiatrist or just an MD who prescribed these drugs.
But to prescribe these drugs was, just to prescribe them was reckless.
And yes, you're right.
It does take a while for SSRI drugs to kick in.
And she probably was experiencing a placebo effect.
So she's been, this stuff really ticks me off.
She's been prevented from experiencing her grief.
She's been prevented from working through her grief.
It's possible that some drugs might have been helpful in that process, but that's not what's happening.
She's just essentially being drugged to keep her from annoying the doc.
So now, you know, what you want is to get her off, but you can't do that without a doctor's help.
You can't do it without, you can't do it by nagging her.
You can't do it by fighting with her.
You know, it's just that she should be going to a mental health professional to help wean her slowly off these drugs.
And that is, you know, something you might want to try and arrange with her by saying to her that you would go into counseling with her and help her do this.
Because just from your letter, I don't know the whole story, but just from the facts I'm getting from your letter, it seems to me that somebody really misstepped here and misused these drugs and she should be weaned off them.
But you're going to need a doctor's help.
Don't ever do it yourself because there's all kinds of bad consequences of doing that.
Again, I'm not a doctor.
I'm just reading your letter.
I'm not on the scene.
You know, you want to get much, much more expert and close advice before you do anything.
But if you want to get her off it, you're going to need a doctor's help.
All right, from Ashley.
Why Traditions Matter00:02:26
Hi, Andrew, I've heard you say several times in regards to your conversion that you did not feel like you were a Jew until you found Christ paraphrasing.
Would you please be able to elaborate what you mean by the statement?
Yes.
And yes, it's not that I didn't feel like I was a Jew.
Obviously, racially I was a Jew, but I didn't feel there was any connection to the religion of Judaism until I became a Christian.
Why?
Because I was raised, as I tell in my book, The Great Good Thing, I was raised in a household where we were taught the rituals of a form, a moderate form of Judaism, and we did celebrate high holy days.
But really, my parents didn't really believe in God.
And my father was probably an agnostic.
My mother was a stone atheist.
And whether or not, whatever they believed, God was not a presence in our family life.
We didn't pray when we went to bed.
We didn't say grace over dinner.
We didn't talk about what God wanted for our lives and why and who God was.
We didn't talk about any of those things.
And for someone like me, to whom it is important that things make sense and to whom integrity is important, it made the religion make no sense.
So here I was, an all-American boy.
All I cared about was baseball and astronauts and playing soldier out in the backyard and sports.
That's all I cared about.
So why was I going to the school where they taught me a foreign language?
Why was I listening to these hyper-solemn people talk to me about Israel?
What was Israel to me?
It meant nothing to me.
Without God, Judaism is a beautiful religion, but without God, it's just an empty shell.
Without God, Christianity is an empty shell.
Any religion is an empty shell without the reason for its being.
There's no reason, as far as I'm concerned.
I mean, I know people talk about traditions, but what do I care?
My traditions were American traditions.
My forefathers were Jefferson and Franklin and Washington.
Those were when I went to school.
They told me those are our forefathers, and I believed them.
I was an American.
I was a fully assimilated American.
So why were those traditions, why did those traditions matter to me?
And ultimately, I just felt completely detached from them.
When I returned to God, when I returned to God through Christ, I was worshiping a God who came out of the Jewish tradition and re-embodied that tradition and refashioned it into a new covenant.
And so in accepting that covenant, I was also connecting myself to the tradition that I had been raised in, because now the tradition made sense to me in a way it simply hadn't before.
Failed Marriage Concerns00:03:06
And that's what I mean.
What I mean is now it matters the history of the Jews as a religious people and their journey as the chosen people of God matters to me in a way it simply didn't before because there was no God in my life and the God, and even after a while when there was a God, he was just a generic God and it was only in accepting Christ that he became the God of the Jews, the same God of the Old Testament.
Can I do one more?
Let me see.
Yeah, one more.
From Dane.
Dear Supreme Overlord Clavin, I have a love question for you.
My girlfriend and I are madly in love and want to get married someday.
However, she and I are only 23 and she has already been through a marriage that didn't last and has some reservations about marriage.
She wants to still get married and have lots of kids, but is now cynical that that will ever happen for her.
It doesn't help when all of her friends' marriages seem to be falling apart too.
My parents are still together and my grandparents loved each other till the day they died, so I don't have this poisoned outlook on marriage.
What should I do to help the pessimism, fear she's developed of marriage?
I just want to show her I'm not like those guys.
How do I do that?
That's actually, I'm sorry, but that's actually the wrong question.
You know, the problem here is that she has a problem.
It's not anything that you do.
Obviously, you want to treat her well and be a good boyfriend and possibly fiancé.
That's obvious.
But she has a problem.
She has a problem.
It's indicative.
It's indicated by the fact that at 23, she has a failed marriage, that she comes from such a culture of failed marriages that she clearly has a damaged outlook toward this.
And what you have to do, I'm sorry to say this, but you have to protect yourself a little bit here.
If in treating her well and loving her, you can move forward toward marriage and family and children in a safe, sane way, that's great.
That is absolutely great.
But you should be careful, too, that maybe she is not equipped to do that.
You know, maybe she actually has a point.
Maybe she's worried for a reason.
In your case, what I would do is I wouldn't say this to her, but I would say, I'm going to be a great boyfriend for the next year, year and a half, and I'm going to watch and see where we are.
And if nothing has changed, maybe it will be time for you to move on.
Because she may not be equipped to, she may not be equipped for the thing that she wants in life, in which case you don't want to be drawn into that.
I know that's a hard saying, but I just think that it doesn't help either of you if she has another failed marriage.
So what I think you should be watching for is whether this is something that is just entrenched in her, in which case she may need some kind of therapeutic care, or whether it's a passing thing that you're treating her well and being a good boyfriend will cure.
There's nothing, you don't have the power to change her attitude.
I think just be with her for a time and see what happens.
But if it turns out she's not going to change, I think you may have to step out the back, Jack.
Montage of Imagined Crises00:03:59
All right, let's move on to tickety-boo news.
So we here at the Daily Wire, who made this montage, Rob?
Did you make this?
The Andrews put together.
We hear Robert Sterling, our producer, working behind the scenes with a massive crew.
We put together this montage because what I wanted to show you is that creating crisis during a Republican presidency is what the media is about.
The idea is to make you feel that we are in a crisis when we are not.
Right this minute, we are not in a crisis.
There are lots of dangerous things happening in the world.
There are lots of things happening in the world that I don't particularly like.
But the idea that somehow the government is falling apart and Donald Trump is so outlandish that we cannot possibly stand this another day is taking place in the imagination of the media and their job is to draw you into their imagination.
So we put together this montage of people basically covering this.
It's like, you know, here I am, I'm a reporter covering the inside of my own head.
So I just wanted to show you people imagining the crises because this is only from the last week, right?
I mean, this is just stuff I collected over the last week, just peddling to you the crisis that's in their heads.
I saw the scary face of John Bolton behind the president.
Then I saw the next scene sitting next to him today.
And what kind of advice do you get from Bolton?
Attack.
Exactly.
Yeah, would any of us put it past President Trump to decide that a nice little military adventure in Syria might be a nice distraction from this?
I mean, how about Wag the Dog, Susan?
Well, I was at Barry Levinson last week.
I've been reminded, he's the director of that film where a president in fiction decided to start a little war to cover up for a hanky-panky.
The challenge is stiffer than any we faced in my lifetime.
I remember the early 70s when President Richard Nixon was authorizing burglaries and firebombing and break-ins and all of that.
And we survived that.
But this is something different.
Let's say that Donald Trump decides he doesn't want to give an interview with Mueller, but Mueller says, oh, but you will.
And he is subpoenaed to interview Robert Mueller.
And Donald Trump simply says, I don't recognize that subpoena.
Normally, a person who refuses to testify before a grand jury winds up being incarcerated for the time period of the grand jury, which can be up to 18 months.
So one way to enforce it is to have Donald Trump taken by the federal marshals and put in federal prison until he testifies.
We're in a constitutional crisis.
The President of the United States has made clear to those around him, those who are closest to him in the White House and among his friends, that he is determined to shut down this investigation.
And the moment he has chosen to actually act on it, apparently, is when the special prosecutor and other prosecutors have gotten hold of his lawyers' computers, which have perhaps evidence of real conspiracy between the President of the United States and others.
Why is former Secretary of State Madeline Albright warning that President Trump could turn America into a fascist country?
Having to live in perhaps a country that is, wow, that's in decline.
And in the face of that declinion, is a B-list reality act.
I'm just glad I don't live in their heads.
That's all.
But thank you for this little tour of your putrid imaginations.
It's been great visiting, and now I'm going to return to America where things are actually going pretty well.
I just love, listen, I feel bad for them, but don't let them sell you their vision.
Owen Benjamin On The Show00:00:43
Owen Benjamin, the comedian who has been under fire for his openly right-wing views, will be in the studio with us, right, tomorrow.
Don't miss it.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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.