Andrew Clavin’s Your Culture is My Underpants mocks Russian collusion absurdities while framing cultural debates as a war between "creators" and "parasites," defending Kanye West and Kaziah Dahm against "social justice warriors." He dismisses socialism as parasitic, praising capitalism’s innovations while attacking welfare’s family-destroying effects. The episode pivots to Rod Rosenstein’s impeachment threats over Clinton’s email cover-up, exposing FISA abuses tied to Steele’s discredited dossier, and contrasts U.S. energy independence—fueled by fracking—with OPEC’s failures. Clavin’s crusade against "truth indifference" culminates in a defense of life’s sacredness, rejecting utilitarianism and secular morality as flawed, while framing the culture war as a clash between divine order and parasitic ideology. [Automatically generated summary]
The New York Times, a former newspaper, says it has obtained a list of questions that Special Counsel Robert Mueller wants to ask President Trump as part of his investigation into imaginary collusion with Russia during its completely ineffectual attempt to rig our election, which is very important because The Times reported that Mueller had as many as 50 questions he wanted to ask the president, including some questions like,
where do you get those great red ties and what club do you use off the fairway on the fourth hole at Mar-a-Lago that do not appear to have anything to do with Russian collusion, but since that's imaginary anyway, the special counsel figured he might as well get a few golf tips in while he was at it.
But there are also some important and possibly tricky questions on the list, including question 17.
If you had colluded with Vladimir Putin, what would you have said to him?
And could you please speak slowly and clearly into the potted plant while you're answering?
And if possible, do a Russian accent.
There's also question 23, where's the collusion?
Talk, you smarmy lowlife, or I'll smack you with this phone book again.
And question 36, if I admit I've been wasting the public's time money, would you give me a job in your administration?
Trump's lawyers say they are weighing whether to allow the president to answer Mueller or to sneak him out of the White House through the Rose Garden disguised as a Chick-fil-A delivery guy.
Trump himself was unavailable for comment because he was busy ending the Korean War.
Trigger warning, I'm 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.
Shipshaw, tipsy-topsy, the round is a bitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, that one caught me a little off guard.
I write these things and then I forget them and I hit the jokes and they crack me up.
Today is the last mailbag before.
Ah, God.
Oh, this place is terrifying.
Please, please help me.
Get me out of here.
This is the Clavenless Week is coming.
Speaking of terrifying, something that Jess was just telling, our makeup lady was just saying that this is earthquake weather because it's really cold now.
It's going to be 90 degrees.
For some reason, that's earthquake weather.
That would be fitting because the Clavenless Week is coming.
So prepare yourself, store water, food, little pills, possibly, you know, if you just want to check out.
But the Daily Wire, the good news is the Daily Wire is now on Apple News.
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And you should remember, because I won't be here to remind you, that May the 13th is Mother's Day, and you know what that means.
Right.
For once in your lousy, ungrateful life, you have to do something nice for somebody besides yourself.
It should be your mom because she gave birth to you.
And if she didn't, she took care of you and pretended she gave birth to you.
So go to 1-800 Flowers.
That's the best way to do it because they have got a truly, it really is a truly beautiful, beautiful 24 multicolored roses bouquet for just $24.
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And 24 multicolored roses for only 24 bucks is really a good deal.
It expires soon.
So to order 24 stunning multicolored roses for only $24, go to 1-800Flowers.com, click the radio icon, and enter code Clavin.
How do you spell it?
I knew you'd ask.
How did I know that?
It's like I can read.
It's like I'm psychic.
I don't know.
I just have these feelings sometimes.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N1-800Flowers.com, code Clavin.
So the title of today's show is Your Culture is My Underpants.
I am wearing the complete Chinese history.
The entire Ming dynasty is now embroidered on my butt.
All of black American history is in my crotch.
It's like, why?
I'll tell you why.
Because it's not your culture.
Your culture is not yours.
It's just there.
And I am a free American and I will do anything with your culture I choose to do.
I chose to put it on my underwear and I won't even tell you what I'm going to choose to do with it later on today.
Why Culture Isn't Private00:14:58
But, you know, these guys, you know, bullies and parasites.
Socialists and social justice warriors are just parasites and bullies.
They have these wonderful names, socialists, social justice warriors.
They're just parasites and bullies.
Yesterday was May 1st.
And May 1st, I remember when May 1st, we would dance around the Maypole and the Knights would have jousts.
And I go back a long way.
It used to just be you celebrate spring and you celebrate love and it was the lovely, the lusty month of May, as they said in Camelot.
And then in the 1800s, when was it?
It was 1886.
There was a big riot in Chicago in Haymarket Square.
It was called the Haymarket Riots.
Very famous.
There had been a big strike of workers.
They were mobilizing for an eight-hour day and all these things.
And on May 4th, the police came into this demonstration and a bomb went off.
It killed four cops, I think it was.
And it killed four cops and like seven civilians.
I'm sorry, it killed seven cops and four civilians.
My mistake.
Seven cops and four civilians.
A huge riot started, the famous Haymarket riot.
Eight anarchists were convicted.
One of them committed suicide.
Several of them were hanged.
It turned public opinion against the workers' movements, but it also, the workers then got these martyrs from the hay market, you know, the guys who were killed because they said that it hadn't been proved that they were the guys who set off the bombs.
So now, May 1st, these guys go out and they protest for socialism.
And all around the world, there are marches for socialism.
Anarchists are out there, you know, like setting fires.
They're carrying pictures of Stalin.
And, you know, I mean, they are.
Stalin, I mean, Stalin was this guy.
You're sitting next to Stalin and he would say, you know, I'm going to appoint you my successor.
No, I think I'll kill you instead.
That's what it was.
It was like you lived in this palace with Stalin and he would just, you know, snap his fingers and they'd take your husband away or you away or your kids away and they'd shoot you down.
And this was after he had slaughtered tens of millions of people by causing famines in order to, and he would say, you know, well, you know, these are, what did they call them?
I can't remember.
Krulat, something like that, some word they had for these poor peasants who just had a little bit of land, so they were chasing them off the land.
Really, socialism is always a disaster.
It always is.
But here's the thing about it.
It always, the reason I call it a parasite is when you listen to people praise socialism.
What they do is it's globalism for me, but for me, but not for thee.
It's globalism for me, but not for thee.
When an American worker loses his job, but some poor worker gets a job because of globalization, right?
So the workers that we have who have rights and who get paid better, they lose their job and the job goes off to another part of the world.
These citizens of the world types, these elite globalists, they say, oh, well, you know, it's all in all, it's a net gain.
You know, yes, so American workers lost their jobs, but the worker in this poor country, he got a job.
So it's a net gain for we citizens of the world.
So they're big citizens of the world when it hurts America.
But, but when America looks bad, suddenly it's all one nation at a time.
So then they suddenly say, well, Norway, you know, people in Norway are much happier than, you know, polls, you know, surveys actually show this.
People in Norway are much happier because of the social spending.
There's all this social spending in Norway, and they're much happier than in America.
And my feeling is, yeah, did they use cell phones?
Because they were invented by capitalists.
Do they use cars?
Because those were invented by capitalists.
Do they use computers invented in America?
Do they use the internet invented by us?
Everything they use that makes their life so happy came out of the competitive, harsh world of capitalism.
Do they have an army that would protect them if Vladimir Putin one day said, you know what?
I'd like Norway.
I think I'll have Norway.
You know, that would be nice.
No, they depend.
They know that Putin won't invade them because our army protects them.
They live off capitalism.
If they're happy, they're happy in the way children are happy.
Because when my kids were little, they were happy because they didn't have to make a living for them.
That's why they're happy.
Socialism is a parasitical, it's a parasitical system.
It just lives if it doesn't live off capitalism.
If it doesn't use what capitalism has, it collapses like you get in the Soviet Union, like you're getting now in Venezuela.
And then they have to build walls around the country to keep people out.
Here in capitalist countries, we build walls to keep people from coming in, right?
But there they want to build walls to keep their citizens out because people want to get out.
They want to make money.
They want to do things for their own profit because they're human beings.
It's always, it's always a parasitical system.
And because the thing about Marx, they had that article in the New York Times that I was making fun of yesterday.
Happy birthday, Carl Marx.
You were right.
Marx was right about nothing.
He was not, first of all, his entire first premise is that capitalists make money by exploiting the workers.
And the reason he said this is because he thought that the value of something, you take some scrap metal, some workers put together a car, and now the scrap metal is worth more than the car.
So the workers must have added the value to the scrap metal.
But where they get the plans for the car, where they get the money to build the factory, where they get the money to build all the cars, you know, you can hire another set of workers.
Kind of hard to get that many billionaires to build factories and very hard to get somebody to come up with the idea of the car.
So it's like not really, I mean, workers do add value to material.
I'm not saying that they don't.
I'm just saying that they don't add the same kind of value that the capitalists add.
They don't add the same kind of value that the creators add.
And the other thing, of course, is if capitalists are exploiting the workers, why is it that countries like ours, where we have so many billionaires, I think we have five times as many billionaires as the Middle East and Africa combined, okay?
So you'd expect to see exploited workers all over the place.
Instead, you see workers who are fighting obesity.
They have to decide which cable channel to watch.
Our workers, our poor, never mind our workers, our poor are the rich in other countries.
Our poor are the upper middle class in Mexico.
I mean, so people, things go really well here.
And so, yeah, there's a relative disparity between the billionaire capitalist and his worker.
There's a bigger disparity maybe, but everybody is doing so much better because capitalism raises all ships.
Everything about Marxism is wrong.
You know, I had dinner with Rupert Murdoch once.
Have I told this story before?
I had a dinner.
It was me and like three other guys.
And we just had dinner at Rupert's house up in the hills of Beverly Hills.
Beautiful, beautiful house.
You come in and the butler takes your jacket and offers you like, what can I get you?
And I like single malt scotch.
I figure it's Rupert Murdoch.
I'll bet he has my scotch.
He did.
You know, they just go off and get, oh, it's just a beautiful, beautiful thing.
And at one point, I guess I can call him Rupert.
We had dinner together.
Rupert said to me, so you write screenplays, and of course he has 20th Century Fox, right?
He says, if a man comes, and I've gotten this from studio heads before, by the way, if a man comes to my house and fixes my toilet, I pay him once and not again.
If you come in and write a screenplay, why do I have to keep paying you residuals?
So I began to answer him because the answer is I'm not, as a writer, I'm not a worker, I'm a creator.
I'm actually inventing something, so you have to pay me every time you use it.
And you're really getting off well.
Because, you know, it's not only socialists who don't understand how economics works.
It's billionaires.
Now, the thing about billionaires is billionaires don't listen.
They talk.
This is absolutely true.
Every billionaire I've ever met doesn't listen to.
They talk.
And the reason they talk is because they figure if you were as smart as they were, you'd have a billion dollars.
And it's true.
There's a certain wisdom that billionaires have because they're like cops.
They see the worst in people because they almost never see anybody who's not asking them for something.
I mean, people just feel like I remember we had a billionaire in a church I belonged to, and he loved me.
And I could never figure out, you know, why does this guy love me?
Because I never asked him for anything.
I never wanted anything.
I made my own living.
I didn't have to ask him.
But everybody else was like, I have this charity.
I have this fund.
I have this business.
So they get a certain wisdom about people.
But Rupert didn't understand where the goodness of what I did was coming from and why I got paid on a perennial basis.
Let me tell you, here's a story, true story, right?
I gave this once in a speech about copyright, because a lot of people don't think there should be copyrights.
You shouldn't be allowed to have an intellectual copyright.
I said, let me tell you about copyrights.
Here's how copyrights work.
I worked my fingers to the bone to become a good writer.
I really worked.
I worked through the night.
I would go to school sometimes.
A lot of times I didn't go to school, but I would work through the night to become a really good writer.
I would read and read and read, study, study, study to become a good writer.
One day, after I had my daughter, she's a little baby, right?
I lived in an apartment in New York and we had walled off a little nook for the baby and we would sleep in the bedroom.
And every night I would walk across the living room to check on the baby to make sure she was still breathing, right?
Because you worry, the kid will just stop.
You know, that's what you do.
Once you have kids, you worry for the rest of your life.
One day I'm walking across the living room and I thought, wouldn't it be weird or scary if I looked into the nursery and she was just gone and the baby was gone?
And I got this idea for a novel about kidnapping.
It became my novel, Don't Say a Word.
Now when that idea occurred to me, I was a practiced writer.
I had honed my craft.
I'd already won some awards for writing.
I was a really good writer.
That book became, ultimately, it became a bestseller, but it also became a movie with Michael Douglas.
A lot of dollars were generated by that film.
It was the number one film in the country when it came out.
It was the number one DVD for weeks and weeks and weeks when it came out as a DVD.
It generated a lot of jobs, okay?
Now, my life has generated jobs for a lot of people.
My creativity has generated jobs for a lot of people.
It has also put kids through schools.
I won't say I put my wife through school because she was part of the money that I made.
So she put herself through school, essentially.
But all of that fed into people becoming productive members of society.
What do socialists do?
What do socialists do?
They do nothing.
What do they create?
They create nothing.
What do they add to society?
Nothing.
Those guys who are marching in the streets in Europe and burning things and setting on fire, where have they ever created a moment of wealth, a penny of wealth?
All they talk about is how to pirate the wealth of other people.
And so they're complete parasites.
They're sitting there.
They think they're important because they've got their fists in the air.
They think they're important because they're screaming words like justice that they don't understand because justice means getting what you deserve.
It doesn't mean taking what somebody else made and taking it for yourself.
That's not justice.
That's being a parasite.
So they're complete parasites.
And when they then try to justify their existence by working for social justice, a word that means not justice, right?
Because justice is a word that actually has a meaning.
It means people getting what they deserve.
Social justice means taking from people who have earned things.
They become bullies.
They just, that's all they do is their entire, you know, there's this girl out there.
And this is why, by the way, I talk about not apologizing, why not apologizing is so important.
This girl, Kaziah Dahm, 18-year-old girl.
Do we have a picture of her?
Can we put a picture of her up?
She posted her prom picture, an absolutely lovely young lady, 18 years old.
She's got this dress that looks like it has a kind of Chinese pattern.
I mean, nothing but joy in this picture.
The guy is standing there thinking, how did I get this lucky?
He's thinking, if I just hope that Kaziah does not find out the truth about me, because I am now the luckiest kid in America.
And he is.
She's absolutely beautiful.
She's adorable.
She's wearing the dress.
Twitter, the bully place, the place where bullies go because they don't get punched in the face as they deserve.
So they go on Twitter because they can bully people.
They start, one guy said, what did he say?
My culture is not your prom dress.
Guess what?
Yes, it is.
Yes, it is, my friend.
Your culture is her prom dress and my underwear because I am wearing Chinese underwear right this moment.
It's just pictures of Chinese people on my butt.
That's what it is.
Because you don't own your culture.
You didn't do anything to create it.
You didn't do anything.
You haven't created anything.
All you are is a bully.
You're not a warrior.
You're not fighting for justice.
You're just bullying a pretty girl who's given this guy joy and having joy in her prom dress.
Luckily, luckily, finally, finally, some of these people are standing up to these bullies.
And she did.
She said, I would do it again.
I mean, they just came after her.
And after, it's like, what do these people produce?
What do they produce?
They didn't even make my underwear.
I had to paint those Chinese people on my underwear.
I had to do it myself.
So I'm really happy she's standing up for him.
I'm really happy.
This is something that it is emanating from Donald Trump.
It is no question that it is emanating from his pugilistic nature.
Some of the things that are very disturbing about him, the way he fights like a lion whenever anybody insults him.
But some of that is rubbing off on people.
Kanye West, he is another one.
Kanye West is on TMZ and he went on a rant.
And I love when people go on right-wing rants, they went raving or they lost it and said these things.
But he's just being, Kanye is just being Kanye at this point.
I was just talking to Knowles about this wonderful old book called Being There is Made Into a Movie.
And Being There is about this kind of complete innocent who walks around saying these kind of innocent things, but everybody keeps interpreting them as wisdom.
And I feel like we're all doing that with Kanye now.
Like I had no idea what Kanye is talking about.
But he says he loves Donald Trump.
Play the first cut.
This is cut number two.
And it's just nice to hear the guy not backing down because they've been bullying for days.
Maxine Waters said, we have got to get control.
Kanye has got to ring.
You know, it's like, what business is it of hers what Kanye says.
Anyway, I just like the fact that he is saying what he's saying.
Cut number two.
My righteous point of view is free thought.
Now, if you want to ask me, I don't have extremely strong political opinions.
You could talk to John Legend if you want some political.
I've never been into politics.
I just love Trump.
That's my boy.
Like, you know, it's like so many rappers.
You'll look at a video of Snoop Dogg loving Trump, but then he get into office and now they don't love him.
Like, Trump is one of rap's favorite people, right?
But we talk about this, that before he was elected president, people in hip-hop, it was an in thing to put Donald Trump in your rhyme somewhere.
And by the way, I am in hip-hop, but I'm not just in hip-hop.
I'm a black person in the black community, but I'm not just that.
I feel like one thing is people try to minimize me to artists, hip-hop, black community.
Yeah, I'm always going to represent that, but I also represent the world.
I represent not even the future.
It's the now.
2018.
We're in the now, bro.
You know what I mean?
And I represent the now and I represent what the possibilities of a new peaceful planet.
People Try to Minimize Me00:15:44
We're at the beginning of it.
You saw it in North Korea, but people denounce that.
And you say, you said this thing, you put this whole thing.
People love to say all, every, blah, blah, blah.
It's not that.
It's 100 sides to every story.
So if you talk about Trump, yeah, there's things.
There's a laundry list of things that I don't have in front of me that my friends will text me or write me emails to say he did this, Some of them Obama did too, you know?
But he just, it wasn't that, you know, it's loud.
It's like, wow, the room is quiet in here.
What the hell is he talking about?
I don't know what he's saying.
I heard the part that he loves Trump.
And that thing about Trump being in all those rap songs is true because in rap, you know, they've always got the gold and the jewelry.
And Trump has that kind of, you know, rich guy, belligerent rich guy attitude that they love, that the rap guys love.
So he's absolutely right about this.
Then he goes off on some other thing.
Like, I have no idea what he's saying, but I'm just glad he's saying it.
I really am.
I'm really glad that he is not backing down.
I think we should just celebrate that.
Like the guy, the guy is weird.
But then he said this thing about slavery.
Everybody got upset about this.
Play that one.
When you hear about slavery for 400 years, for 400 years, that sounds like a choice.
Like, you were there for 400 years and it's all of y'all?
You know, like, it's like we're mentally in prison.
I like the word prison because slavery goes too direct to the idea of blacks.
It's like slavery, Holocaust, Holocaust, Jews, slavery is blacks.
So prison is something that unites us as one race.
Blacks and whites being one race.
That we're one, we're the human race.
Prison unites us all.
We're all in prison as the human race.
I mean, people were picking on him because he said slavery is a choice, obviously not.
Although he said there weren't slaves here for 400 years.
I mean, there haven't been Europeans here for 400 years.
So I don't even know where that meme comes from.
I'm not sure where that thought comes from.
Who knows what he's saying?
But I'm just glad he's out there.
I'm glad the other one, Matt Groenig, you know, they were picking on Apu.
That really broke my heart because I love Hank Azaria, who was doing the voice of Apu.
And Groenig said, I'm proud of what we do on The Simpsons.
And I think it's a time in our culture where people love to pretend they're offended.
They love to pretend because there's power.
You know, if you can bully an 18-year-old girl into being sorry she wore a prom dress, you're a big man.
You're a big man on Twitter.
Yeah, you can go home.
You can go home, you know, brag to the guys.
Yeah, I bully.
I made an 18-year-old girl so bad about her prom dress.
I mean, that's who they are.
My favorite, I think, has been Roseanne.
I'm not even a fan of Roseanne.
I was out of the country when her show was big, but she has been, she was on Jimmy Fallon, and he brings up delicately, because Fallon, every time he touches Trump, it explodes in his face.
But Fallon asks her about this.
And she's, again, these guys are now demonstrating how not to apologize.
But then also with the big hit comes people that aren't so happy as well.
If you say that you're a supporter of Donald Trump or oh, yeah, people are mad about that.
Yeah.
But, you know, I don't give a yeah.
I mean, is that how you do it?
Everybody has to, well, everybody had to choose for themselves according to their own conscience who they thought was the lesser of two evils.
You know, everybody chose that.
So I'm not going to put anybody down who didn't vote like me.
This is America.
It's a free country.
And, you know, when you weigh it all together, you know, I just think I just felt like we needed a whole new thing all the way, bottom to top.
See, I just love this.
I love that this is happening.
It's happening because of Trump.
It's also happening in support of Trump, but it's happening because of Trump.
It's happening because people are tired of these guys who don't produce anything.
They are parasites and then they are bullies.
There's no justice in it.
There's nothing social about it.
It is just parasitism and bullying.
And that's all it is.
And these people are creators.
You don't have to like Roseanne.
You don't have to like Kanye, but they create stuff.
They create jobs.
They create wealth.
They create money.
They create.
They do what capitalists do.
They make stuff that other people use, that other people live off.
They invent stuff.
They make stuff.
They build stuff.
They create wealth.
And all the rest of these guys are just mouths.
And what they're asking for is a piece of the pie.
You know how you get a piece of the pie?
Make a new piece.
Make yourself a piece of the pie.
Bake the pie.
Become a creator.
Because these guys, as far as I'm concerned, they can all pound sand.
Your culture is my underwear.
That is what I want you to take away from this conversation.
Speaking of people who create things and jobs and wonderful atmosphere here at the Daily Wire, starting this Sunday, May 6th, you can watch and listen to more Ben Shapiro in a brand new edition of his podcast, the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special, in which Ben hosts weekly in-depth conversations with the nation's best and brightest on politics, news, culture, and everything in between.
The best part is for current Ben Shapiro show subscribers because you won't even need to hit a separate button to listen.
These episodes will show up in your feed.
So subscribe now.
Get them all.
This Sunday's premiere episode will feature Jordan B. Peterson.
He will be singing the entire score of the sound of music.
I just made that up.
Tune it in.
All right, we got the mailbag coming up.
If you want to be in the mailbag when I come back from my vacation, because this is the last mailbag to solve your problems during, before my vacation, come on over to the Daily Wire and subscribe.
I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
But if you come on over to the Daily Wire, you can listen to the rest of the show.
If you subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month, lousy $100 for the whole year, you can just watch the show there and ask questions in the mailbag.
It will change your life, maybe for the better.
who knows.
All right, the mailbag.
I was I was prepared for it this time.
I just have to get ready.
That's all I ask.
God, stop, stop.
I can't.
Oh, sorry.
Just a little sterile.
All right.
From Calvin.
Oh, grand and wise one, do you think we give too much credit to the left winning the culture war?
It seems like most people I talk to in my life on both sides of the political spectrum are ignorant to what is going on in the country and the world anyways.
You know, no.
Look, I think that we sometimes get too crazed and fearful of the left.
But I think that if we don't pay attention, the creep of the culture is really bad and has an effect before you know it.
It changes, it moves the Overton window, which is the phrase they use for what is acceptable to say, and it moves it steadily to the left.
I mean, you have now Facebook declaring they're going to decide what is hate speech and what is a hateful site and what is a real news site.
And you can bet who's going to suffer from that?
Conservatives.
Why?
Because they're all leftists and they think leftism is true.
They don't understand that it's just an opinion.
That is a creation of culture.
That's a creation of movies.
That's a creation of all the comics on late night being all on one side, all the comics on Saturday Night Live.
I mean, this is why it's so important that these people are fighting back.
So yeah, the thing about the culture is people don't have to know what it is.
They just have to go see Star Wars or Avengers or whatever and get that message coming through to them that some things are okay and some things are not okay.
Some opinions are out of bounds.
You know, there was a wonderful episode on Silicon Valley where a gay guy was running, he was running a website, a dating website for gays, and they found out he was a Christian.
And everybody went, oh, no, we don't want you at the meeting.
We don't want you.
You know, it was obvious that Christianity had become the new homosexuality, just as prejudiced as people were before.
They had just shifted that prejudice over.
It is important to get those messages out.
It's important to get them out in episodes that are not necessarily Christian, that are filled with profanity and sex, so that people are watching and get the joke and they see what's happening.
I think the culture is really important because it creeps up on you.
And it takes sometimes 20 years before it to change an attitude.
But it's just like if you've ever stood on the shore and you feel the water, the waves go under your feet and you feel it eating away the sand under your feet.
That's what the culture is like.
From Spencer, oh, Lord Protector of the Realm of Decency and Cogent Thought, Clavin, I was curious as to what drew you to write crime novels in particular, as opposed to, say, science fiction or fantasy novels.
Was it because crime fiction, more than other genres, explores some specific aspect of the human condition that interests you?
Yeah, I mean, partly it was an accident of my personal history.
If there are any accidents, I doubt that.
But like, it partly was the fact that I write about this in my memoir, The Great Good Thing, was that looking for role models of how to be a man, looking outside of my immediate family for role models of how to be a man, I discovered the tough guy writers, guys like Hemingway and Raymond Chandler and Doshel Hammond.
And a lot of them were detective story writers.
So Raymond Chandler especially became an idol of mine, someone I really admired because I admired his hero and wanted to be like that hero because he was a man who stood for something in a corrupt world.
That was what to me became sort of the image of what manhood was.
It was to stand for something and to be uncorrupt in a corrupt world.
But also it began to serve another part of my personality, which is part of my personality both inborn, I'm sure, and because of my personal history, which is an obsession with knowing truth from falsehood.
I'll tell you something.
I have lived an enormously fun life, especially after the age of 30.
I mean, my first 28 years were a little difficult, but after that, it has really been an enormously fun life.
But if I had to pick one thing that disappointed me, it was my realization that people didn't care what the truth was.
I thought mankind moved toward truth and that people recognized truth when they saw it.
And then I realized, no, it's like, that's not, that's, I mean, Christianity got it closer.
You know, if the truth were incarnate and came to life, we'd kill it.
You know, that would, that was, that's Christianity gets it exactly right.
And so the crime genre is all about people trying to find the truth.
It's whether it's a Hitchcockian drama like I tend to write, where somebody doesn't know whether he's being hunted or why he's being hunted and suddenly his whole world is turned upside down, or whether it's a simple, straightforward mystery.
It's about people trying to find the truth.
And that has always just been an obsession and the great story of humankind to me is the guy who stays non-corrupt and tries to find the truth.
From John, dear Saint Claven of the Blessed Woohoo, Christ spent much of his earthly ministry talking about caring for the poor and afflicted.
Even beyond Matthew 25, there's plenty of evidence to suggest that Christ holds a special contempt for those who refuse to help the poor.
As someone who is generally conservative myself, I wrestle with the sometimes conflicting assumptions about those in poverty that I hear in both the Gospels and dogmatic American conservatism.
I was curious how you personally deal with that tension or if you even find that tension to be there.
You know, I don't find it, I find it the tension sometimes there between conservatives and Christian teaching, but not between conservatism.
I don't think that Jesus was preaching to a movement or to a country.
I think he was preaching to you.
I think he was telling you what you should do with your life.
And so my problem with social movements is frequently they don't, they should be judged, as Thomas Sowell would say, they should be judged on their outcomes, not on their intentions.
And so a lot of times, for instance, Poor black people's lives were improving more before the great society that was geared toward helping them than they were after the great society because the great society destroyed families by paying welfare to people who had illegitimate children and not allowing fathers to come into the house because you lost your benefits.
So all of these things don't often work, whereas you know if you give a man a sandwich, he will eat that day.
I mean, that's why, you know, that's why a lot of times I tell you, don't give money to people on the street.
But, you know, I believe in helping the poor.
I mean, one of the tensions in my own life is I believe that God actually wants me to be doing the things that I'm doing.
That is to be writing, to be speaking, to communicate.
And sometimes when I volunteer my time to people who are underprivileged or I volunteer my time to people who are trouble, I sometimes feel that I'm not using my time the way God meant me to use my time.
So there's a tension there.
But I do not feel that leftism helps the poor.
I feel it destroys economies.
I feel it destroys initiative.
I feel it destroys families.
It hates the family.
It has to hate the family because it wants all the power centered on the government.
It destroys associations that help the poor, like churches and clubs and things like that.
So I do not feel it is good for the poor.
You cannot judge it on its intentions and on its language.
You have to judge it on its outcomes.
And I feel leftism is actually bad for the poor ultimately.
All right.
From Peter, King Clavin, from a longtime subscriber, a first-time mailbagger, today I was horrifically disturbed by a conversation regarding Alfie, the British baby sentenced to death by bureaucracy and socialized health care.
The men I was chatting to, all young professionals in their early 20s, wanted him to die.
They not only defended the decision to let Alfie die, they defended Iceland's policies of aborting babies who show signs of Down syndrome and said parents shouldn't determine if a life should be saved because not every life is worth living.
How do we go on as a society?
Is there a way to save these people?
This is the battle we're in.
This is the battle we're in.
It's not about taxes.
It's not about anything else.
It is the battle to preserve the concept of life and the concept of humanity as sacred, the concept of a person as a sacred individual who is experiencing life in a unique way that deserves to be preserved.
You know, I think that this is the argument we should be having all the time.
I mean, it's not a question of preaching, it's a question of living it.
It's a question of being an activist for it.
There is a whole strain of intellectual thought that essentially says the brain, the mind is an illusion, the self is an illusion, that you are just flesh.
What they don't understand is that most religious people, most thoughtful religious people, feel that, yes, you are just flesh, but your flesh is an incarnation of a spirit.
It's not that the spirit is somewhere else or it's that a ghost in a machine, that's not an idea that really holds together, and really it never did.
It is much more like the Catholic notion that you are incarnate, an incarnate something, an incarnate person.
And so I don't know what to tell you except that there is going to be this battle.
This is going to be the conflict of our age.
It is the thing we're trying to fight against.
It is the thing we're talking about.
It is the reason we bring up God from time to time and the importance of the soul and who will win.
That is in God's hands.
We know we win eventually, but whether we will win today, that's always the question.
From Ricardo to the grand fantasy author Clavin, I finally finished Another Kingdom, Another Kingdom, the fantasy podcast starring Michael Knowles.
I finally finished Another Kingdom, and it was great.
What are your favorite literary tropes that you never tire of reading?
Also, don't tell Knowles, but his performance in Another Kingdom was stellar.
By the way, if you haven't listened to Another Kingdom, we are working on the second season, so come in here the first season.
You can get it wherever podcasts are sold.
It's Andrew Clavin's Another Kingdom performed by Michael Knowles.
The Conflict of Our Age00:12:49
When you say literary tropes, I'm not sure exactly what you mean.
What I love, the moment in a story, whether it's in a movie or a book, when you get the story.
That's one of my favorite things.
The one I always think of is Die Hard.
I love that moment when you realize, oh, I get it.
The terrorists have taken over the building, but this tough cop is in there barefoot and unarmed, or he just has a gun, and I get that's the story.
Or you think of lethal weapon, where you think, oh, I get it.
Mel Gibson is so nuts, he's so crazy that he is a lethal weapon.
So he will be, his craziness will be the lethal weapon.
I love that moment in stories.
I love stories, any story where a mystery has to be solved.
And it doesn't have to be a murder, but I just love any story that starts with a question, like, how are we going to do this?
How is this going to happen?
What happened?
We were talking a little while ago and stuff I like about the Aspern papers, what the suspense that's just created when you do not know what's going to happen next.
Those are the things, those are the moments that I love, the moments when a story congeals and you get what the story is.
I mean, there are some writers who don't even do that, some great writers.
Dickens occasionally doesn't do that.
Trollope hated plots.
You hardly know sometimes what a Trollope novel is about, and they're still great writers.
But I just love that moment when you think, oh, Hamlet, he's supposed to avenge his father, but he can't because he doesn't know what the truth is.
And you think like if you took Hamlet out of that story and put in Othello who's too quick to guess at what the truth is, then it wouldn't be that story.
It's this wonderful coming together of character and plot.
That's the thing I'm always looking for in what I do and what other people do.
From James, Clavin, oh, Lord of the Deplorables, a topic for discussion in one of my classes I wanted to get your take on.
Can someone be moral without believing in God?
My professor made the argument that even someone who lives by traditionally moral values without believing in God is even more moral because they're doing so without fear of hell or hope of heaven.
That's ridiculous.
I mean, that argument is just as ridiculous as it can possibly be.
You don't do good because you fear hell and hope for heaven.
You do good as a part of a pathway that you believe goes into the next life.
You believe that the moral order is larger than any given life, including yours, and that you will get to partake of that moral order as you go forward beyond this life.
That's why you do it.
It's not some kind of payoff.
And even the idea that people who don't believe in God are doing it for some, just because they're just that good is just not human nature.
Everybody does good for their own purposes and because they feel good about it.
There's always a measure of selfishness about it.
We never are detached from any of that.
However, can a non-religious person be moral?
Absolutely.
Of course he can.
Of course, non-religious people can be moral.
The problem is their morality makes no sense.
That is the problem.
And the big problem about making no sense is that sometimes under stress, when you make no sense, you have nothing to fall back on.
And I just finished, I've talked about reading this book by Steven Pinker.
He's a humanist, and he says, oh, just doing good for the best, the most benevolent thing you do for everybody is the most benevolent thing you can do for yourself.
And it just makes perfect sense.
It doesn't, because there's never a reason when you can get away with something not to get away with it.
You know, God, if there is a good and a bad, let me put it the other way, if there's a good and a bad, a moral good and a bad, there must be something toward which those tend.
There must be a good toward which that goodness tends, right?
Something that is good must be closer to good than it is to bad.
So there must be an ultimate good.
What is the nature of an ultimate good?
In order to be a moral good, it has to have a will, right?
You can't, a hurricane isn't good or bad.
It may be bad for you, but it's not doing evil.
It has to have a will.
And the will has to be free in order to choose good or bad.
So the ultimate good is going to be a will that wills good.
And that is as close as you can get to a definition of God off the cuff.
So I think that once you talk about morality at all, once you believe, once you believe, here's what you have to believe, the leap of faith you have to take to get to God.
This is it.
It's not even a leap of faith.
It's a tiptoe of faith.
The leap of faith you have to take is that if every single person on earth were a Nazi, Nazism would still be wrong.
There was a time on earth when every single person believed in slavery.
Slavery was still wrong when every single person believed that.
It wasn't right back then, and people just didn't, you know, and people got to define it however they wanted to define it.
It's not an opinion.
It is not an opinion.
Once you believe that there's such a thing as objective moral good, you're stuck with God.
And so the point, the point, my only point is, of course, you can be a good person.
Anybody can be a good person.
You can be a bad person and believe in God.
But if you want to have a moral system, if you want to believe that there is a moral system and you want to be making sense when you do it, you have to believe in God.
All right.
I want to move on to just one other thing, end the mailbag there, and just talk about this fight that's going on between Congress and the Justice Department, which is really interesting to me.
Some people in Congress are drafting articles of impeachment against Rod Rosenstein, saying he's stonewalling on giving documents, subpoenaed documents to Congress.
They especially want documents about the investigation to Hillary's email.
And so here's Congressman Matt Gates describing what they're looking for and why Rod Rosenstein shouldn't be standing opposing them.
I think Mr. Rosenstein ought to be more worried about what he's put his name on.
For example, the FISA warrant renewal.
After the FBI knew that Christopher Steele was lying and was not trustworthy, Rosenstein himself signed the document to spy on an American citizen with no justification.
He also put his name on the pleading to silence the whistleblower in the Iranium 1 case.
Now, I'll say this.
Rod Rosenstein's understanding of extortion seems to depart from the law.
The definition of extortion is forcing someone to do something that they have no legal obligation to do under some threat.
Rod Rosenstein has an obligation to follow the law.
That's all we want him to do.
And what's most telling about his viewpoint are his most recent comments to the New York Times, where he said he doesn't believe that the Congress has a constitutional authority to conduct oversight.
I think that means he's not reading Article I correctly, particularly our power to appropriate funds, and then of course ensure that those funds are used in accordance with the law.
Here, the FBI and Department of Justice departed from the law.
They did so because they were out to get Donald Trump, and now they want to evade oversight, and it's something we're not going to let them do.
So now the left is saying that the reason they're doing this and coming after Rosenstein is because they're running interference for Trump.
And so that's their argument.
And Rosenstein, the thing that Gates was referring to, he was giving a speech for Law Day at the New Museum of News in Washington, and he said this.
He was laughing at their articles of impeachment because it's just a draft that leaked to the press.
Here's what he said.
We have people who are accountable.
And so I just don't have anything to say about documents like that that nobody has the courage to put their name on and that they leak in that way.
But I can tell you, there have been people who have been making threats privately and publicly against me for quite some time.
And I think they should understand by now the Department of Justice is not going to be extorted.
We're going to do what's required by the rule of law.
And any kind of threats that anybody makes are not going to affect the way we do our job.
We have a responsibility.
And we take an oath.
That's the whole point.
When you take these jobs, you need to be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
And that actually is a pretty thorough process.
And then you raise your right hand and you swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
You promise to bear true faith and allegiance to the same.
You take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, so help me God.
And that's your responsibility.
Now, I'm not going to take a side on this yet because I think that Rosenstein, I haven't got a read on Rosenstein, a very hard guy to take a read on.
There's a lot of things that they've said against him, a lot of things are said for him.
But, you know, so far, I do not want to see the Justice Department compromised, and I don't want to see Congress compromised either.
However, I will say this: this talk about the rule of law is very high.
But when you have James Comey going around selling his book and talking about the rule of law after he leaked memos that were almost certainly the property of the government and certainly classified information, he was asked the other day, what would have happened if Hillary had won?
And I just want you to listen to the pomposity with which this guy goes to the rule of law and his imaginary world of Hillary Clinton.
Listen to this.
What would your life be like if she won?
I also don't know the answer to that.
I think I would still be the FBI director.
And the reason I say that is someone asked me to compare the two, and it's too hard for me to compare the two, except Secretary Clinton is someone deeply enmeshed in the rule of law, respect for institutions, a lawyer.
And so, given that background, I'm reasonably confident that even though she was unhappy with decisions the FBI had made, she would not fire the FBI director as a result.
Hillary Clinton was deeply immersed in the rule of law.
Here, in case you've forgotten, it is Trey Gowdy cross-questioning James Comey about Hillary Clinton's statements to the FBI.
Secretary Clinton said there was nothing marked classified on her emails, either sent or received.
Was that true?
That's not true.
There were a small number of portion markings on, I think, three of the documents.
Secretary Clinton said, I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email.
There is no classified material.
Was that true?
There was classified material emailed.
Secretary Clinton said she used just one device.
Was that true?
She used multiple devices during the four years of her term as Secretary of State.
Secretary Clinton said all work-related emails were returned to the State Department.
Was that true?
No, we found work-related emails, thousands, that were not returned.
So I am all for Rod Rosenstein and the Justice Department and the rule of law, but it doesn't really sound like their idea of the rule of law is the same as the rule of law.
That's all I'll say about this for now.
All right, tickety-boo news.
This is from Stephen Moore, the economist and Trump supporter.
He says: the Energy Information Administration reports that the U.S. could surpass Saudi Arabia in oil and gas by the end of the year.
With massive oil and gas shale reserves, we could be number one in the world before the end of the decade.
The Wall Street Journal confirms that U.S. oil production is expected this year to surpass Saudi Arabia's and that we will rival Russia for number one in the world.
American production will rise to almost 11 million barrels a day, the most ever in American history.
Doesn't it seem like yesterday when the left was running around shrieking about peak oil, more like peak idiocy?
Last week, Reuters argued that the American shale boom should be called Donald Trump's Revenge.
The story reported that U.S. oil now floods Europe at the expense of OPEC and Russia.
It couldn't have happened to a couple of nicer guys.
America is now selling more than a half million barrels a day, thanks in no small part to the end of the oil and gas export ban in 2016.
What all of this means is that we are getting very close to the day when America returns to becoming a net exporter of oil.
This would reduce our trade deficit by more than 200 billion a year.
Saudi Arabia is still a major player in the market that can move the world price by turning on and off spigots, which is why we've had this recent spike in gas prices to more than $3 a gallon, and that's due to Russia and Saudi Arabia's production cuts.
But the OPEC nations can no longer hold the world's hostage as they did in the 1970s when we had gasoline lines and price controls and had to bow to the Saudi oil sheiks.
This is great news.
And you know why?
You know why it happened?
It happened because we have property rights.
It happened because you can own the land beneath the land.
And so it made sense for capitalists to develop fracking to get out that extra energy.
And that is why it is happening: because of capitalism, capitalism produces stuff.
Socialism lives off the stuff that capitalism produces because they're parasites and bullies.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Tomorrow, last day before the Clavenless Week, store up supplies.
You're going to need them.
I'll see you then.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Produced By Mathis00:00:19
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring, senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Technical producer, Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesuit Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.