Andrew Clavin frames the culture war as a leftist elite vs. "normal people" clash, using the "laurel/yanni" audio clip to mock gendered perception gaps while dismissing critiques of masculinity and Palestinian resistance as misheard. He praises Tom Wolfe’s conservative Judeo-Christian values, contrasts Hollywood’s anti-traditional bias with audience demand for gun-filled films, and defends CIA waterboarding, tying leftist hostility to "hatred of God." A listener’s PTSD fear leads Clavin to blend faith and therapy, while he honors his late father’s voice-acting legacy. The episode pivots to conservative censorship battles, launching Conservatives Against Online Censorship to combat perceived platform bias ahead of election-year restrictions. [Automatically generated summary]
The great question of the day is whether you hear yanni or laurel.
For some reason, the internet went nuts yesterday over this recording.
Listen closely.
Laurel, laurel, laurel, laurel.
Now, some people listen to this and hear the word laurel, and some crazy dames thinks there's some other word in there that doesn't even exist, yanni.
The trick is that the word laurel is recorded at a low register that normal people like men can hear, and yanni is recorded at the same high register at which someone might say, honey, could you please remember to change the toilet paper when it runs out, which is completely inaudible to one half of the human species.
In other fun internet tests, they played a recording of Palestinians saying death to America, and some people heard Islam is the religion of peace.
They played audio of feminists screeching masculinity is toxic, and some people heard we just want equal rights.
And they played news of Donald Trump being elected president, and some people heard the words in Russian.
Clearly, this is a fascinating study of how the human brain interprets sound as opposed to the way Democrats do it.
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-diggy.
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All right, it's mailbag day, and you know what that means.
That means your problems have traveled through your, we've traveled through your life this far with your problems.
After this, you will travel on without your problems because we will solve them all.
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Not that hard when you consider the fact that I'm solving all your problems and the answers are guaranteed 100% correct.
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Left's Grip on Culture00:15:06
So, you know, we talk a lot about the fact that the left owns the culture.
The left owns the culture in this country.
They own the academies.
They own the Hollywood.
They own the news, most of the major news outlets.
But the people are the culture.
And that means that this culture war that we're fighting is a war between a very small minority of people who own outlets and us, we the people, because we are the culture.
And you can see it.
You know, I do want to talk about Tom Wolfe for a minute before we get to all the other news.
Tom Wolf died.
He was 88, I believe.
One of our great novelists.
And one of the reasons he was, not just a great novelist, he was a great writer.
He was a great man of letters.
I think that's really important to put it that way, because he started out doing journalism.
And he did this new journalism was filled with slang and all capital letters and exclamation marks.
But it was journalism.
And what he realized, along with Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, was he realized that when we live in this incredible media world, the truth has become our story.
It used to be that the story about the king, you would never really hear the story about the king.
So you told stories about kings.
But now our kings are on TV.
We see them every day.
Our leaders are operating right in front of us.
And within a year, you find out everything.
And so what these guys realized was that reality had become the new fiction.
And so Wolfe wrote with that insight.
And also he understood, as Stephen King would understand, I think a little bit later than he did.
He understood that even though he himself was a cultured man, a deeply cultured, deeply educated man, he understood that American culture is not based on Homer.
It's not based on the great classical literature.
It is based on comic books and populars.
He realized that the people were the culture.
He realized that our culture comes from this vibrant group of people, not all of whom are well-read, not all of whom are elites.
And he put that language into what he wrote.
And he was a conservative.
There is simply no getting around this.
He wrote, Roger Kimball was writing about this in the Wall Street Journal today.
It's a really good piece if you get a chance to look at it.
But he understood, he made fun of the liberals during the 60s who would host parties for Black Panthers who essentially wanted to kill them.
I think it was called Mau Mau and the Flackcatchers or something like this.
He made fun of the modern art world.
One of my favorite things he did was he talked about how modern art was just theory and it was an actual representation of real life and he was very committed to the representation of real life.
Even when he started writing novels, he would go off and research them just as he would journalism because he wanted to write novels in the tradition of Zola and Dickens with a kind of journalistic flair.
And while, like all artists, he criticized our culture, because artists do that.
They find the things about human beings that are wrong.
He didn't attack our culture, which is two different things.
Let me show you.
Let me just show you one instance of what I mean between the difference.
You can do it with just looking at Tom Wolfe, between the difference of an artist who is culture critical, who is seeing the flaws in human beings, the sinful nature of human beings, and how they're operating in this moment, in this time, and somebody who hates the culture that he is operating in.
Bonfire of the Vanities, which was a very, really good book.
I didn't like the last third of it as much as everybody else, but I thought it was a really beautiful book, a really reinvention of the Zola Dickens kind of social novel that had gone out of style.
And it's about a stockbroker in the Reagan era when everybody, when the stocks were taken off and everybody was making so much money and nobody actually knew what stockbrokers did.
And very early on in the book, he hits and runs over a black guy, a black kid, and hides it and covers it up.
And that's the story.
And it was really, it's really an insightful, and in parts, an absolutely brilliant book.
But when it comes to the moral reckoning in the book, the judge at the trial is a Jew.
And the reason he does this, and it's very, very obvious in the book as he does this, is he's telling you that the foundation of our moral life is based on Judeo-Christian principles.
That is why he's doing it.
That is why the judge is a Jew.
It's the same thing in the Sopranos.
In the Sopranos, there's a scene where Mrs. Soprano goes to a Jewish psychiatrist and he says to her, the problem you have is that your husband is evil.
And he just clears everything up.
He just says, these are the values that we live by.
You're violating them.
Same with the judge in Tom Wolfe's novel, Bonfire of the Vanities.
Now, in the movie, the judge became Morgan Freeman.
No one would argue with that casting.
Morgan Freeman's a great, great actor, and he sure as hell looks like a judge.
But the difference is the difference between liberals who feel that our moral center is the violation of our principles in black slavery and black prejudice, which is a violation of our principles, and Tom Wolfe who felt, yes, the culture is unfair to black people, as we could see in this story, although he made incredible fun out of, what's his name, the Reverend Al Sharpton Jr.
But he said, yes, you know, there are inequalities, but our culture is based on a Judeo-Christian basis that is valid and remains valid.
You can hear, here's the scene from the movie with Morgan Freeman Jr., where they call him a racist, and of course he's black, so they can't get away with that.
But his voice is the voice, is a biblical voice.
His voice is a biblical voice as he criticizes the culture, but he represents the best of the culture.
Here it is.
You dare call me racist.
Well, I say unto you, what does it matter the color of a man's skin if witnesses perjure themselves, if a prosecutor enlists the perjurous, when a district attorney throws a man to the mob for political gain, and men of the cloth, men of God,
Take the prime cuts.
Is that justice?
See, it's the voice of the culture.
Because it's Tom Wolfe, it's the voice of the culture condemning the people in the culture, which is much different than condemning the culture.
And again, I'm not criticizing the casting of Morgan Freeman as a judge.
Obviously, who wouldn't cast Morgan Freeman as a judge?
But just the fact that the liberals could not get their mind around putting a Jew as the judge, which is the statement that Tom Wolfe is making in the book, tells you something about the difference of how they look at our culture and how Tom Wolfe and conservative artists, and it's really interesting that some of our greatest artists from the 60s, which you can see as the time when the left took over the culture, are right-wingers.
Tom Stoppard, the other Tom, one of the greatest writers alive, also a Maggie Thatcher guy, and really got nailed for it.
And we're going to see how this operates, how the culture, those who create the culture are at war with the real culture of America in all the politics that's happening today.
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All right.
This is the whole thing.
The left is not culture critical.
They are at war with the people, and the people are the culture.
The people create the culture.
It is the job of artists simply to reflect that culture and to see how people violate the premises of that culture.
That was the voice you heard.
Those were the words you heard Morgan Freeman saying.
Verily I say unto you, he was talking in that biblical voice that men of God have violated the precepts of God as opposed to what the left is saying.
There is no God.
The precepts themselves stink.
And how do you see it?
It's always the Jews.
It always comes down to the Jews.
Why?
Because they stand at the core of our culture.
They stand at the core of what we believe and who we are.
And their Bible does and their Messiah does.
And I know that Jews don't accept Jesus as the Messiah, but he is still the representative of Jewish ideas and was, lived and died a Jew.
You know, you just see this in so many ways.
I mean, you have these terrorists, Hamas, attacking the Israeli borders.
And I know we've been talking about this for days, so I won't go into it forever because it just goes on and on.
And the press just basically acting as if this must be the Jews' fault.
You know, that, by the way, is a big part of Western culture.
That's the part of Western culture the left represents, blaming the Jews for everything.
Let's just take a look at Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, being interviewed by CBS's Jeff Glore, saying, why don't you sit down and talk to these lovely people?
Do you see yourself under any circumstance talking to Hamas?
As long as they seek our destruction, what am I going to talk about?
I mean, if somebody said, could you talk to Al-Qaeda?
Would you have discussions with Bin Laden?
About what?
I ask only because, against all odds, the U.S. and North Korea seem to be on the verge of talking.
So sometimes meetings that might be unimaginable end up happening.
You're right.
It's happened to us with our Arab neighbors.
But that's when you have leaders who decided that they abandoned the goal of war and destruction and annihilating the other side.
And by the way, even what has happened in North Korea, that took place because of a very clear message, I think, that North Korea received that the goal of destruction and aggression would be met with very strong, a very strong response.
This is Netanyahu basically setting this guy straight.
You can negotiate with people who want to kill you.
And if you do negotiate with them, you do it by saying, hey, you know what?
Draw.
You draw, I will blow you away, which is essentially what Trump said to Kim Jong-un, while the same people in the press wailed and moaned and complained.
There's all these myths that the press is selling, and it's just intolerable.
But the underlying purpose of this is their hatred of Western culture, which is self-hatred.
And self-hatred is hatred of God.
And hatred of God always comes out in hatred of the Jews.
That's the way it always works.
And the myths they're selling, they're selling the myth that these are unarmed protesters, that are just peaceful protests that are just coming out.
And they're not.
They're sending, you know, they're sending fire over the side.
They're using weapons.
A Hamas guy, and Hamas is behind this, and Iran is behind Hamas.
Hamas official Mahmoud al-Zahar is on Arab television.
And thank heavens for memory.
Memory, M-E-M-R-I, translates what they're saying because we don't know about this.
This is cut number five.
And leave the mic on so I can read it because you won't be able to hear what he's saying.
The guy asks him, you know, the interviewer asked this guy from Hamas about peaceful resistance.
And here's the Hamas guy's answer.
All right, play it.
And leave my mic on.
This is not peaceful resistance.
Has the option of armed struggle diminished?
No, on the contrary, it is growing and developing.
That's clear.
So when we talk about peaceful resistance, we're just deceiving the public.
This is peaceful resistance bolstered by a military force and by security agencies.
And enjoying tremendous popular support.
As for Fatah's peaceful resistance, it consists of rallies, demonstrations, protests, pleas, and requests in order to improve the terms of the negotiations or to enable talks with the Israeli enemy.
The deception does not fool the Palestinian public.
And he goes on to say, he keeps saying, we're deceiving people.
We call it peace, but we're deceiving people.
They keep saying they're killing people at random.
Five, six, there have been like some 60 people killed, like 50 of them were Hamas people.
So it's like somehow they're firing into this crowd, but just by luck, it's the luck of the Jews.
You know how lucky Jews are, man.
It's just the luck of the Jews.
They just happen to be hitting high-level Hamas guys as they're firing into the crowd.
It is the fact that the Jews represent the West.
They represent it in their culture and they represent it in their traditions that so inform who we are and what we believe.
You know, that is really what, you know, it's really interesting.
I saw Ethan Hawks, really good actor, and he was on TV and he was on one of the late night shows, Seth, what's her name or whoever?
Seth Myers, thank you.
And he's talking about guns.
What's the problem with gun control?
And listen to what he says.
You know, people have been talking so much about gun control in this country.
And I noticed recently, like, if you put in a column every movie I ever did where I carry a gun and every movie where I don't and my salary, like if I asked my father to do the math, I really think it would be about 92% to 8%.
Really?
And when I realized that, you realize how much our identity is wrapped up about what we want and how we see people and how hard it is to sell a movie without a gun.
I mean, no wonder we're in turmoil.
I'm not sure if I'm all over this subject.
Gun Control Controversy00:04:18
And I'm sure if you look, and they're always, if there's a gun in the movie, I'm sure it's on the poster.
I know, that's for sure.
But Devil's Advocate, I do think that if you tried to take the swords out of Shakespeare, same thing.
It would fall apart.
Yeah.
Yeah, you got it.
Pretty quickly.
Pretty quickly, you wouldn't.
They did a production back in the day where swordless production and it was just guitars and it did terribly.
Yeah.
I don't think it is.
So what Hawks is realizing there, not that I don't know that that would ever occur to them to change their mind.
What he's realizing there is this is part of life and the culture reflects life.
The culture reflects the life of the people, the people of the culture, not him.
His job is to represent the culture.
Ethan Hawkes is not the culture.
We are.
The people are.
And his job is just to represent us.
And that's why movies with guns sell, because people need guns.
They want to be able to defend themselves.
They see themselves as heroes, as independent actors.
They don't want to sit there and wait for the police to show up because when seconds count, the police are minutes away.
And I think it's just amazing that it never occurs to Hollywood to say, huh, maybe the people should speak to us instead of us talking to the people all the time.
Maybe the people should be allowed to lecture us instead of us lecturing the people.
They see themselves as the great wise men, but really it's their audience who should be informing them.
That was what made the movies great in the old days when you had a bunch of immigrant Jews who loved this country who said, what do the people want?
You know, yeah, we want to tell them that we're part of the country, that they should like us as well, but they were happy to make movies with Bing Crosby as a priest.
They were happy to make movies with religious people, with patriotic people, because they understood that that's what the people were, that the people were the culture, and they were serving that culture by creating art, right?
Our culture, as what they call culture, is really just a vehicle for elites to attack the people.
And they never changed their mind.
You know, let's look at this for a minute.
Yesterday was the day they celebrated or celebrated, memorialized police who had been killed in action.
And Donald Trump went out and made a speech.
Let's take a little bit of a look at this.
One of the things the mother of a fallen officer was breaks your heart.
The mother of a fallen officer was standing behind him, hugging him as he spoke, just as he spoke, just like leaning her head against him and hugging him for the words that he was saying.
That's the people.
That's the culture.
Listen to what he says.
They're praying for you.
They're grieving with you and pledging to you that we will never forget our heroes, ever.
This morning, I especially want to speak to the young sons and daughters who join us here today.
I want you to know that your moms and dads were among the bravest Americans to ever live.
When danger came, when darkness fell, when destruction loomed, they did not flinch.
They were not afraid.
They did not falter.
They stared down danger, raced down alleys, chased down criminals, kicked down doors, and faced down evil.
Brave.
You know, I hear a lot of people on the left saying Donald Trump is stupid.
Let me put it this way.
If he's smart enough to say that, right?
To say that simple thing, that the police are the good guys in a fight with evil and it makes them brave, you know, then how stupid are they that they can't say it?
You know what the op-ed, the top op-ed in the New York Times was today?
This is the day after this, but it's obviously the day that they're reporting on this.
To honor Eric Garner's life, reform the police.
Now, Eric Garner was the guy who was accused of selling cigarettes off tax, and the police attacked him, and he resisted arrest, and the police wrestled him to the ground, and later he died after a cop put a stranglehold on him.
Why would I honor that guy's life?
You know, I'm not even going to comment on whether they used deadly force or shouldn't have used the force.
You know, I wasn't there.
I don't know.
What am I going to honor that life?
Why Honor Eric Garner?00:02:52
Why?
What is there in that life that I should honor?
I don't understand that.
Why is this the day when Eric Garner should come up?
Why is this the day?
Were there no cops?
I mean, I know the answer to this question, but were there no cops murdered in New York at the instigation By killers inspired by the words of Barack Obama, hating on the police, where there are no cops for them to talk about.
We're going to honor the life of Eric Garner.
Why?
Why?
I don't understand that.
I do not understand it unless you hate the very culture that you're in, unless instead of creating culture and being culture critical, which is fair and part of the job of the press, you're simply trying to destroy the culture.
That's why the press is hated in this country, by the way.
It's not because they're cultural critical.
It's not because they criticize.
We all know the powerful have to be criticized.
It's because they hate the very underlying structures of the country.
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Approval of Gina Haspel00:03:39
But also, if you just want the news from us, I want to deal with one more story before we hit the break, which is the approval of Gina Haspel to run the CIA because this is completely in keeping with the theme of the day, the theme that I'm talking about here.
She has been approved by the Intel Committee, and she's guaranteed, basically guaranteed, she's won enough Democrat support where she'll be approved all the way.
That was the last I heard.
I don't think they've moved on to full approval yet.
But anyway, she will be approved.
And they were attacking her because she ran a station where terrorists were waterboarded.
And I have said many times that I don't understand why, if you think a terrorist is staging an attack, he shouldn't be waterboarded.
I wanted waterboarding jihadists to be part of the Olympics.
You know, there would be like water, you know, polo, and there would be water, you know, dancing, and then there would be waterboarding jihadists, which I just thought was a great idea.
And she was questioned by a number of Democrat senators about, you know, she has said, I'm not doing this anymore.
The rules changed.
I'm following the rules.
I'll just play one of these cuts because we're running short of time.
Kamala Harris, just she is the senator from California, so you know the quality that we send to this country.
When we send you a senator, you know you are getting the very, very best quality Democrat lunatic.
So she's questioning, she's questioning Gina Haspel, and she's asking her whether it's moral to torture somebody.
And, you know, Gina Haspel is kind of dancing around the question.
And finally, I'm sorry.
I want to go with the Jack Reed one.
I'm sorry.
Kamala Harris, everything I said about Kamala Harris is true, but I want to go with the Jack Reed one.
He asks her the question, well, would it be moral if they did it to a CIA agent, which is such a stupid question.
And here it is.
You have an operations officer who is captured.
He's being waterboarded.
I've asked you very simply, would you determine that to be immoral and something that should never be done, condoned in any way, shape, or form?
Your response seems to be that civilized nations don't do it, but uncivilized nations do it.
Or uncivilized groups do it.
The United States says a civilized nation was doing it until it was outlawed by this Congress.
Senator, I would never obviously support inhumane treatment of any CIA officers.
We've lost CIA officers over the years to terrorists.
I just gave an example.
Khaled Sheikh Mohammed personally killed a Wall Street Journal correspondent and filmed that.
I don't think there's any comparison between CIA officers serving their country, adhering to U.S. law, and terrorists who, by their very definition, are not following anybody's law.
You have to explain this to a Democrat.
You have to explain it to him.
You know, you just have to explain that.
There's no comparison.
And same thing with Israel.
You know, the other myth that they talk about?
They say, why did Donald Trump move the embassy to Jerusalem without getting any concessions from Israel?
And I agree.
You know what concessions he should get from Israel?
He should get the concession that they live by the rule of law.
Oh, wait, they do that.
He should get that they give women full rights.
Oh, wait, they do that.
He should get the concession that they give all religions full rights as opposed to all the Arab countries in the region.
Oh, wait, they do that.
We don't need concessions from them because they're not doing anything wrong.
And they just can't figure this out.
They cannot figure it out because they are not the culture.
We're the culture.
They are at war with us.
The culture war is actually a war against we, the people.
Aligning Imagination With Reality00:15:30
You know what?
We're going to do the mailbag in just a minute, but I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube because you guys don't subscribe.
If you would subscribe, we would not have to cast you out into the exterior darkness where there is great wailing and gnashing of teeth.
It's worth a lousy $10 a month or a lousy $100 for the full year.
Plus, you get leftist tears.
So when you wail and gnash your teeth, it'll be filled with leftist tears instead of your tears.
All right, come on over.
the mailbag is about to begin.
All right.
The mailbag.
Yeah.
I wonder.
I wonder how, you know, we haven't heard from Lindsay.
She's got a baby now.
I don't even know how they're doing.
All right, from to King Clavin the first, Lord of all that is satire.
First, I wanted to thank you for your show.
For the last two years, I was homeless and sleeping in a car due to a horrifying childhood and one poor life choice.
Some of my only brief moments of joy at the time were listening to downloaded episodes of your show on an old phone as I worked my way out of my situation.
Now I have worked my way to prosperity in my early 20s and have a good life, but live in constant fear at the irrational thought of having everything taken from me like it was before.
How would you recommend overcoming fear once it has started to consume your day-to-day life?
Could the solution be found in faith or is it wiser to look in therapy?
Looking forward to reading The Great Good Thing and happy to finally subscribe.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you.
It's great to hear that we were talking to you when you needed us and I'm really thrilled that you've gotten out of here.
Listen, you're suffering from kind of like a post-traumatic stress, it sounds like.
You had a bad situation.
I had a bad situation in my youth where I went into terrible depressions and I cured them, but for a long time after that, I was always afraid they'd come back.
Once you realize, this is why Jesus teaches you to walk on water, because once you realize that you're moving on faith, you know how quickly things can be taken away from you.
So you've been traumatized, basically, and you want to get over that.
I don't see why you have to choose between faith and therapy.
I think both are really good systems.
Faith, you're going to need faith because, you know, Jesus will take your hand.
He will let you walk on this water that we're all walking on, pal.
I mean, all of us are living life moment by moment.
You're not going to go back.
You're not going to fall back.
You're going to be fine.
But, you know, it's not a bad thing to go to a therapist just to talk this through and get rid of the trauma.
You know, help the trauma.
They have really good systems for doing that.
There's one system that just deals directly with this.
I can never remember what it's called.
It's a kind of behavioral therapy they have now.
But basically, you're dealing with post-traumatic stress.
And it wouldn't be a bad thing if you had a horrifying childhood to talk about that too.
You know, I mean, mental health is mental health, and God will help you and support you in getting mental health.
But we also have doctors.
You don't turn to God and say, you know, cure my kidney stones.
You go to the doctor and you pray to God that all will be well.
And that's the way it works.
And so I don't think you should limit yourself to only one.
From Jake, dear Grand Mass, it's also misspelled.
It says, Dare Gernard Mateser Andrew Klava Kalvan.
You have mentioned a few times that your dad was a great voiceman.
I was wondering if there's a website or somewhere that his work is available to listen to.
You know, there's not.
When he was in his prime, which was like in the late 50s, early 60s, and through the 60s, I should say, he had a show called Clavin and Finch where he did all these voices and Finch was the straight man.
There are a couple of what they call air checks of that around, which you can find online.
His name was Gene Clavin.
You can find those online.
But they didn't record his shows.
And he once said to me that his biggest regret, one of his biggest regrets in life was that his show was written on air, he said, and it no longer exists.
He had some, me and my brothers had some DVDs of his later shows when he was just Claven in the morning, and we donated those to the Broadcasting Museum in New York, so they're available there.
But if you search online, there are some things, but no, there's no website dedicated to his shows because most of them just don't exist anymore.
From Cameron to he who, despite having no ease, puts the tickety in tickety boo.
I've been reading a book on the history of the Christian church and recently got through this section on scholasticism.
From what I read, these men applied the teachings of Aristotle to interpret the faith and believed God could be reached through reason.
However, the church leaders who followed the school claimed Christianity must be taken on faith alone.
You know, it's funny, the way we get the word dunce is in their references to Duns Scotus, who was one of the scholastics, and they made fun of him after the period of scholasticism passed.
They made fun of him, and that became the word dunce.
Anyway, I find myself hopelessly in between these two positions.
It seems to me that God has given us reason to apprehend ourselves in relation to him.
However, it seems equally apparent that there are things utterly beyond our logical capacity.
Could you please comment on how you think reason, faith, and perhaps also the imagination play into the Christian life and worldview?
Thanks, Cameron.
Great question.
I mean, I could talk about this for the next hour and a half, so I'll try not to.
First, I think you have to understand what faith is.
And I've said this before, but it's important.
Faith is not the belief in any old thing that somebody tells you, any old crazy notion that somebody says, well, it's in this word of the Bible.
I mean, Shakespeare said the devil can quote scripture to his purposes, and that is absolutely true.
You know, you're not supposed to believe what you can't believe.
You're supposed to believe.
Faith is when reason tells you something is true, but you can't see it.
And you can't prove it because you can't.
It's not something that exists in the material world.
That's faith.
Faith is just, they call it the leap of faith, but I always call it just a step of faith.
It's always just taking the next step.
So, for instance, like I can see with my eyes and I can reason with my mind that some things are evil, whether everybody believes they're good or not.
There was a time on earth when everybody believed that slavery was normal and typical and just the right thing to do.
It wasn't.
It wasn't even then.
Even then, it was wrong.
Once you understand that, once you understand that, you then have to have faith in that because there's no way to prove it.
There's no way to prove that if you went to planet Nazi, you know, Nazism wouldn't be right in some cosmic way.
We know it wouldn't.
We reason that it wouldn't, and then we believe in what we reason.
So, reason, you know, faith is the step to the reasons that you can't see, to the things that are immaterial.
The imagination is really important if you use it in the wordsworthian sense of your inner life, the inner experience of being a human being, the place where most of the important things in your life take place, right?
I mean, you need food, you need money, but you also need beauty, you need love.
These are the things that religion provides, and you experience God in your imagination because, as the Bible says, no one has ever seen God, so you experience Him in that inner life, that imagination.
The trick to this is the same as with faith.
It's aligning your imagination with the world, with the real world.
You don't want to have an inner life that is out of keeping with the world.
The best example I can give is the example of someone who falls in love with someone who's not worthy of them.
And you think, like, oh, this is the greatest guy on earth.
Oh, this girl is an angel.
This is wonderful.
And really, she's, you know, whoring around, and really he beats you.
And so, your imagination, your inner world, is out of keeping with reality.
So, you want to learn how to get reality.
And that is one of the reasons I do recommend therapy for people who are unbalanced in their perception of reality.
You've got to fix that.
That's a lifetime occupation: making sure you see reality clearly, and then you want to train your emotions to be in keeping with that.
So, you want to love virtue, not vice.
You want to love a woman or a man who is worthy of you, not a scoundrel.
You know, you want to celebrate beauty in Michelangelo, not in Jackson Pollock.
You want to celebrate beauty in the things that are beautiful and understand that some things are not beautiful, except in the most cosmic sense.
So, that's the way those things I feel those three things interact.
You know, reason does take you where you need to go in terms of understanding the world, but that doesn't mean that you can prove everything that is reasonable.
And so, you have to have faith in things that you can't prove.
Faith in the axioms of life, the things that can't be proved through absolute logic, but we know them to be reasonable and true.
All right.
I could go on about this forever, but I won't.
From Brandy, dear Mr. Clavin, I'm a conservative teacher in the public education system.
I emphasize the Constitution and its applications as much as I can in my class.
I teach social studies.
By the way, I have great rapport with my students and support from the majority of parents.
But in the last couple of years, I've gotten a few emails from parents insisting that I'm pushing a Republican agenda in my classroom because of my emphasis on founding documents.
I've always taken special care in my class to show multiple sides of issues, and my students know one of the main mantras in my class is to ask questions and filter things for yourself.
Any advice for me moving forward?
Well, I certainly think you should address the parents who are complaining and explain your point of view.
I certainly think that you should let your students know that they are free to voice their opinions when you have these discussions.
I mean, it sounds like you do that already.
Make sure that, and make sure because you are a conservative, your job is not to teach conservatism.
Your job is to teach the kids to think and to teach them the facts.
So, you know, do a searching moral inventory and make sure that these parents who are complaining don't have anything to complain about.
I mean, it's possible, you know, we all make mistakes.
It's possible that you do shade over to the right, to your natural bias to the right.
Make sure you correct that and that you're just teaching the founding documents and what the founders thought about the founding documents and then let the students debate them from a point of being informed by your information, by the fact that they now know they're not just talking about their feelings, they're talking about what is actually in the documents and why they agree or disagree or whatever.
So that's my answer.
You should address the parents.
You should look into yourself and make sure that they don't have a case and you should make sure that the kids know that they can say whatever they want to say.
From Michael, oh, magnificent Clavin with crystal vision clarity.
Now that the Supreme Court overruled the sports gambling law, would you consider gambling a sin?
I can see it being a vice, but I can't find it being called a sin in the Bible.
What's your take on it?
Well, first of all, just let's make sure we understand what the Supreme Court said.
The Supreme Court said that the federal government did not have the right to coerce the states into outlawing betting on sports, which is a really important part of federalism.
They weren't supporting gambling.
They were supporting federalism.
They were supporting the states' rights to make their own laws and not be coerced by the government.
It was a good decision.
It was seven to two.
So it was, you know, it was about, that was about freedom, not about gambling.
My own take on gambling is that I take on a lot of things that are, you call them vices.
Some people call them sins, but I leave the judgment of sin to God.
I mean, I know that there are things that are crimes.
I know that there are things that are wrong, but I leave the judgment of sin to God because I believe that sin is a question of what direction you're facing, whether you're facing in the direction of God, and that only God knows.
And so I really leave judgment to God in these things.
And I think that I wish more, you know, it's funny.
You know, I was just, I was on a religious show and I said to him, you know, Jesus at the Last Supper in his last few minutes gave instructions to his disciples.
His instructions were not, you know, figure out who goes to heaven and then get back to me.
You know, it was not, you know, figure out whether you believe in transubstantiation and then kill everyone who doesn't.
That's not what he said.
He said, love one another as I have loved you with sacrificial love.
That's how they'll know who you are.
So I think, you know, we want to get to the love and not so much the judgment, which is really judgment is mine, saying, saith, vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.
Gambling, you know, I gamble a very little bit.
I play poker with my pals.
I come in, I know exactly how much I'm going to lose if I lose, and I know I'm not going to win that much.
If I win, I can afford it.
I'm not addicted to it.
You know, certainly gambling is a powerful addiction.
If you find yourself spending money you don't have or spending money and not having fun, you know, spending money compulsively, if you find you can't stop, then I think you're degrading yourself.
And degrading yourself does seem to me to have the whiff of sin about it.
That always is something that I think about in my life.
I think like, maybe this is giving me pleasure, but I'm degrading myself.
Maybe that's a sin.
Maybe I won't do that anymore.
And so like, you know, I'm very loose about gambling because I think that it can be pleasurable, it can be fun, but you got to do it at a level that makes sense.
You know, even if you have a lot of money, even if it doesn't hurt you to lose, you know, $10,000, I'm not sure that losing $10,000 is such a good idea.
You know, when I talk about playing a poker game, I'm talking about 50 bucks every month or something like that.
And seeing my friends and having drinks and pizza, and it's like, that's worth 50 bucks to me.
You know, that's worth 50 bucks.
I'm a mediocre card player.
I know I'm going to win sometimes.
I know I'm going to lose sometimes.
It doesn't seem to me a sin to enjoy that at that level.
But of course, anything, anything can be an idol and anything can come and grip you and drag you down.
All right.
Tickety-boo news.
I just want to relay this from our friends at Newsbusters, the Media Research Center.
You know, an election is coming up, and it is becoming increasingly clear that many in social media are moving to silence conservative voices.
We've had terrible problems with YouTube last week where they were cutting, making it so that I couldn't get monetized on my videos or even blocking my videos and using any excuse that they have to do this.
If the guys at the Young Turks curse on the air, nobody says anything at YouTube.
If Ben Shapiro uses even a slight slangy word, they give him a problem.
This is bias and it's not right.
And I think the people at YouTube, in their hearts, they know this and maybe would work to fix it and to be fair to all of us.
Because look, I think anybody who listens to the show realizes I don't hate anybody.
I do not hate anybody.
And I certainly don't hate anybody according to where they come from.
I love the fact that America is filled with all us mutts together trying to find out how to make our creed make sense.
Twitter, too, has virtually admitted to shadow banning people they call trolls, but we just know this skews to the right.
There are very few alt-right fascists in this country, very few.
They hold meetings and 100 people show up.
They're bad guys, but there's just not that many of them.
There are plenty of people on the communist left and on the jihadist Muslim radical station who get full rights to speak their peace while conservatives who hold individual rights in the Constitution get harassed and silenced.
And this is true also on Google, where they really make it tough now to find the conservative news you want.
And they put people like Snoops and Snopes and PolitiFact who are left-wing fact-checkers.
They put them up top whenever you Google anything that is conservative.
So the Media Research Center is in response, I'm reading this off their site, in response to the continued restriction and censorship of conservatives and their organizations by tech giants, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and YouTube.
The Media Research Center, along with 14 leading conservative organizations, announced that the formation of a new permanent coalition, Conservatives Against Online Censorship.
And you can go onto Media Research Center and you can press the link and go to Conservatives Against Online Censorship.
They demand that we get transparency.
We need detailed information so everyone can see if liberal groups and users are being treated the same as those on the right.
Conservatives Against Online Censorship00:02:22
They would like clarity on hate speech.
Hate speech is a common concern amongst social media companies, but no two firms define it in the same way.
And too often it comes to just mean conservative ideas and especially conservative jokes because we do make, we will make more shocking jokes, but it really depends on what you mean by them.
Provide equal footing for conservatives.
Top social media firms such as Google and YouTube have chosen to work with dishonest groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Absolutely true.
It's a hate group.
Mirror the First Amendment.
Let the people speak.
Let us all speak.
Go on to a media research center and link that and join in with this because I just think, you know, a lot of these people are people of goodwill.
I believe this.
I believe it about Facebook and YouTube and Google.
I really do believe that these are people of goodwill, but they are surrounded by a left-wing culture.
And when you're surrounded by that culture, there's nobody there to say to you, no, that's not hateful.
It's actually in the Constitution.
No, that's not hateful.
It actually is classical liberalism.
You know, no.
The problem is that the left sets the terms of what will be called racist.
And then when you say, you know what, I'm against welfare.
Well, that's racist.
Well, who says it's racist?
It has nothing to do with race.
All kinds of people accept welfare.
And I'm not against it entirely, but I do think it's misused.
So anyway, I just think that this is a fight worth fighting.
And I think that if we don't sit back, if we start now, because the idea, of course, is to censor conservatives during the election like the IRS did during Obama's reelection, I think if we start now, maybe we can get some fair treatment.
Maybe we can appeal to their better angel, the better angels of their nature, and make sure that this election, we all get a chance to speak.
Tomorrow, we have a, speaking of that, we have an expert on free speech on tomorrow.
Do you remember her name?
Nadine Strassen.
Nadine Strassen.
She just gave a great interview on free speech.
You don't want to miss it.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Clavin Show.
We'll see you tomorrow.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Emily Jai.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing Production.