Ben Shapiro dissects leftism’s collapse, mocking Kim Jong-un’s fear of Trump while citing Reuters polling showing Democrats losing midterms—not to Trump but to their own policies: Venezuela-style economic ruin, MS-13 gang surges, and cities like San Francisco crumbling under virtue-signaling chaos. He contrasts leftist moral decay—like Starbucks’ capitulation to racial grievance theater—with conservatism’s "reality-based" pragmatism, tracing his own shift from anti-Trump skepticism to support for policies that curb welfare dependency and immigration-driven decay. The episode ties personal crises—a listener’s abusive marriage, another’s depression—to broader failures: leftist ideology fosters both societal breakdown and individual paralysis, while accountability, whether in politics or relationships, demands decisive action over performative outrage. [Automatically generated summary]
The North Koreans are demanding that President Trump ensure Kim Jong-un's safety before they meet for a June summit.
The demand came after Kim gave a speech to the North Korean Congress.
Here's an excerpt of the speech in the original, and I will do the translation.
Hello, someone please help me.
An angry orange man from America is scaring me.
I don't know what he wants, but he scares me very much.
Help me, please.
He yells and is very orange, and I am afraid.
He wants to take my missiles away and give the people money.
Then I will have no missiles, and the people will find out they have not been eating well and they will hate me.
I cannot sleep at night because of the scary orange man.
I want my teddy bear or I will kill everyone in the whole world.
President Trump says if Kim doesn't come to an agreement soon, he's going to slap him so hard his hair will fly off and kill the two people standing next to him.
Ever since that, Kim has not come out of his room and Heinz hides under the bed cuddling his blankie.
So the negotiations are proceeding apace.
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.
Shipsha-tipsy-topsy, the world is in.
It's a wonderful day.
Hooray, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hooray.
All right, it's mailbag day.
Ben!
Ah!
Oh, sorry.
It takes me by surprise every time.
That means your problems are solved.
You know, this is amazing.
Every week, a couple of more people now go off into the world happier than they were before, all because they invested a lousy 10 bucks a month in subscribing to the Daily Wire, which means you can be in the mailbag and ask your questions.
And also, if you pay a lousy $100, you get the full year subscription and the leftist tears tumbler so you can sip your leftist tears while I solve all your problems.
You know, I really had a good time filling in for Shapiro on Monday, and I know a lot of people listened to it and thought, why doesn't Ben get ziprecruiter.com and hire somebody better than that?
Because ZipRecruiter is the smarter way to hire people for your business.
It learns what you're looking for, identifies people with the right experience, and invites them to apply for your job.
These invitations have revolutionized how you find your next hire.
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The right candidates are out there, and ZipRecruiter is how you find them.
Businesses of all sizes trust ZipRecruiter for their hiring needs.
Right now, my listeners can try ZipRecruiter for free.
That is right.
That's free, which is even less expensive than not free.
Just go to ziprecruiter.com slash dailywire.
That's ziprecruiter.com slash daily wire, all one word, ziprecruiter.com slash daily wire.
And you'll never have that experience that Shapiro had where all his shows were canceled after Monday.
He can't understand it.
He was doing so well.
And suddenly I went on and saw ZipRecruiter is the smartest way to hire.
All right.
You know, there's a new poll out that shows that this projected Democrat blue wave, this imaginary Democrat blue wave, is suddenly receding.
Not so much, you know.
And I know that the left, especially the hard left, the base of the Democrat Party, thinks this is because of Trump and the evil of Trump and the corruption of Trump.
It's because of leftism.
It's because of them.
It's because of the base of the Democrat Party.
The problem they have, you know, I believe leftism is a wrong per se, a wrong in and of itself.
I believe that it is wrong to take people's property away.
I believe it's wrong to curtail their freedom beyond what you need to do to protect other people's freedom.
believe this leftism is morally wrong per se.
But the other thing about leftism is it doesn't work because it has no real sense of human nature.
And that means we can see in front of our eyes what happens to the places that leftists control.
We can see leftism in operation and it's not working and it does terrible things.
This new poll, I mean, it's an amazing new poll.
It's released on Monday from a left-leaning news publication, Reuters.
It showed that Democrats are paying dearly for their disastrous week last week where they lied about President Trump's comments regarding violent MS-13 gang members.
But I think it's more than that.
I think that is what leftism makes them do.
The Reuters poll revealed that the double-digit lead that the Democrats held over Republicans last month in generic ballot voting for the 2018 midterms among registered voters is now completely gone.
And Republicans are now in the lead for the first time in this generic, in this generic poll.
Recent polls have also shown that Republicans could win up to nine seats in the Senate and the millennials are leaving the Democratic Party in droves.
And again, they think the problem is Trump, but the problem is leftism.
We can see what it does.
We can see what it does, turns countries into, like Venezuela.
We can see what it does to cities like LA and San Francisco and Chicago, which are now cesspits Portland because of leftism.
But also we can see what it does to them, to human beings.
This thing with Tommy Laron.
Tommy Laron is this kind of blonde, good-looking firebrand on Fox, and she's always, you know, she's a provocateur, kind of in the Ann Coulter mode.
She's in a restaurant, a rooftop restaurant in Minnesota, and she's with her mom and dad.
And she suddenly, somebody just starts screaming obscenities.
A couple of people started screaming obscenities with her.
She got into it a little bit with them.
And as she's walking out, there's a little video of somebody just tossing water at Tommy as she's walking out the door.
Unbelievable, unbelievable.
Even worse, even worse, they put this out on Twitter.
And all these people on Twitter are going, yeah, that's it.
That's the way I would do the same thing.
She has no right to hate.
It's hate.
It's hate.
Well, let's listen to her response.
She was on Fox News and Tommy responded.
This was something that was embarrassing for me and embarrassing for my family.
At the end of the day, I'm a person too, and I do get humiliated and embarrassed just like anyone else, but I'm tough.
My family's tough.
We can handle it.
I think that those that threw the water and that were applauding and laughing about it wanted to get their 15 minutes of fame by making a video of me.
I think looking back, those are the people that are going to be embarrassed by their actions.
I think their parents raised them better.
And furthermore, you don't have to like me.
You don't have to agree with my political opinions, but you don't have the right to throw things at me.
So they put this up, and a lot of people are screaming and are congratulating the people who did this to her, screaming the obscenities and throwing the water, including Kathy Griffin, who said, you know, it's not cool.
It's not cool to take physical action.
But look what leftism did to Kathy Griffin.
See, we see what it does to people.
I'm just talking about the practicality of it.
I'm not even talking about the morality of leftism.
I'm talking about the practicality of it, what it does to Venezuela, countries like Venezuela and Russia, what it does to cities like Chicago and San Francisco, and what it does to human beings and turns them into that.
Why?
Why?
Because leftism, the thing about leftism is that once we know that it doesn't work, we realize it's never about the problem.
It's about how it makes the problem solver feel.
It's about the problem solving.
Ever notice when people start talking, leftists start talking about blacks and the problems in black communities and the crime, they always end up talking about whites.
They always end up talking about whites.
It's always about, well, it's white privilege and white policemen and white this and white that.
It's never about the actual people who have the problem.
It's always about other people.
And why?
Because leftism is actually about how it makes white people feel.
It's not about solving problems for black people.
If it were just about solving problems for black people, white people would be for it, right?
We don't want problems in the black community.
White people aren't sitting around going, yeah, I'd like there to be crime in Chicago.
You know, no, nobody's thinking that.
Nobody's thinking that.
So it's always about, it always comes down to the white people because what it does is it makes you feel, it confers on you a sense of righteousness, a sense of virtue, a sense that you're doing these things for people.
And when it doesn't work and somebody says it's not working, you lose that.
You lose that sense of righteousness.
And that's why people, who attacks a woman like that in a restaurant for her opinions?
Who does that?
You have to be a degraded human being to do that.
And it's leftism that makes people degraded.
If you look in the mirror, if you're tweeting, yeah, go ahead, that's what I would have done, look in the mirror.
When a philosophy does that to you, when a philosophy turns you into that, change your philosophy, basic rule of life.
Change your philosophy if it turns you into that, right?
Have you noticed on, if you go on Twitter, there are, I'm, on a guess, thousands of people who say, I've taken the red pill and I used to be a liberal, like me, I used to be a liberal, but now I'm a conservative.
Nobody, you can't find anybody who used to be a conservative and became a liberal because conservative, conservatism is ennobling.
You know, we get in a lot of arguments.
I'll call them arguments, but they're not hostile arguments.
We get a lot of arguments here at the Daily Wire.
We, you know, Ben will see something one way and I'll see it another and Knowles, we don't care what Knowles thinks, but you know, he has an opinion too.
And we're all into it and yelling at each other.
But we all change our opinions.
Nobody ever says, oh yeah, you were right.
But we do change our opinions.
When we hear something, yeah, that makes sense and all this.
That's ennobling.
That makes you grow.
That makes you better.
You are thinking.
We do remember.
You know, I started out obviously very much against Donald Trump during the primaries.
I haven't changed my opinion about him as a person, but I see that no matter what kind of person it is, he's doing a great job as president.
Why don't I care that he's a bad person or that he's done bad things?
Because my problem is the country.
That's what I care about.
I'm not here about myself.
I'm not here to feel righteous.
I'm not here to feel like a good person.
I'm a Christian.
I already know I'm not a good person.
I already know I suck, right?
That comes with the religion.
That's the first thing on the religion.
Not a lot of people know that.
They think it's like, you know, we believe in one God or something like that.
No, I suck.
That's the first thing it says.
So I don't have that sense of righteousness.
And conservativism also makes the world better.
You know, what I'm saying here is that it's not about people.
And this is another thing that leftism does to people.
It makes them, because the actual ideas don't work, they have to glorify the human beings.
We don't have to do that.
I can say to you, you know, I don't really like Donald Trump very much as a human being.
I can say that because we agree that the point is the principle, the point is the country.
The thing that we want is the freedom.
The freedom is going to be here after Donald Trump is gone.
It was here before Trump got here.
It'll be here after he's gone.
It's the freedom we're trying to preserve, this unique idea that we, the individual, is really what the government is about.
It's not about the government.
So do you remember when Obama?
I brought a couple of things, it's like show and tell.
I brought a couple of things into work just to remind you of what it was like when Obama was running for president.
And it was like the second coming, right?
They had that thing.
This thing actually turned my stomach.
And not because of these poor children, it's not their fault.
But where they had these little kids come out and sing the Obama song.
Play this again, to remind people.
We're going to spread happiness.
We're going to spread freedom.
Obama's going to change it.
Obama's going to lead them.
We're going to change it and rearrange it.
We're going to change the world.
Yes, we can.
Yes, we can.
And yes, we can.
I mean, to me, using children like that for a political candidate and convincing them that their ideals are connected to this human being.
I mean, one of the things the Bible says is put not your faith in princes or in any human being that cannot save you.
You know, to teach these children that their ideals, which are good, you know, freedom and a better world and all these things, all kids should believe in those things, but to teach them that their ideals are tied to a human being.
You know who else thought this?
Obama thought it.
You know, we have cut number nine.
Just remember this speech that he made after he won.
Generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless.
This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.
You know, the New York Times, a former newspaper, has a story today.
Deep in the desert, Iran quietly is advancing its missile technology.
And I thought, I read that and I thought, but that can't be right because that would mean that Barack Obama was a gormless buffoon.
You know, it's like he was a gormless.
He didn't know what he was doing.
He didn't know what he was doing and he was a leftist and leftism doesn't work.
And so they're furious.
It corrupted the press as they protected him from the truth.
You know, when your enemy is reality, the price of the battle is your soul.
You lose your soul because you're fighting reality.
You have to accept reality first.
I mean, it's one of the reasons, like, I don't really like the welfare state, but I think the welfare state has helped to preserve capitalism.
And so I think, all right, a little bit of welfare state, we've got to cut it back and keep it down.
But it's actually worked against the logic of socialism.
It actually saved capitalism from socialism.
Okay, I'll make that compromise.
I'm not an absolutist in any way, but they guys, you know, the base of the Democrat Party is saying to the Democrats, resist, resist, resist, Trump, Trump, Trump.
But really what they should be resisting is the base of the Democrat Party because they're the problem.
They make it easy on Trump.
You know, Trump went to Planned Parenthood, gave a speech at Planned Parenthood, I think it was yesterday, and maybe the day before.
But he's cutting back, you know, there's this Title X family planning program, which was established to send government funds to family planning agencies, but not to fund abortion.
But it goes to Planned Parenthood because they pretend they have other family planning roles instead of abortion, which is very dubious assertion, but they say they do.
And they say, well, this money doesn't go to fund our abortions.
But of course, money is fungible, right?
It doesn't matter if you give it to me here, I can use it there.
I'm not going to say I'm not going to spend that money there.
How do you know which dollar it is that's going into this stuff?
So Trump is saying we're going to cut this back.
And of course, I think this is a tremendous thing.
And he goes out and he starts to rip on the Democrats at this speech before Planned Parenthood.
He's celebrating the fact, which is true, that this is a very anti-abortion, a pro-life administration.
And he goes after the Democrats on abortion.
Listen to what he says.
It's cut number three.
Why Starbucks Matters00:09:20
The House just passed the bill.
The Democrats and the Senate are doing everything within their power to block it, although some are actually on our side, but they are working overtime to block it.
So the story is 18 midterms.
We need Republicans, and that will happen.
On this issue, like so many other issues, the Democratic Party is far outside the American mainstream.
Far outside.
The United States is one of only seven countries in the world to allow elective abortions after 20 weeks when unborn babies can truly feel the pain.
Yet, Democratic senators like John Tester, Heidi Heitkamp, Claire McCaskill, Debbie Stabenow all voted against the 20-week bill and in favor of late term abortion.
See, we're talking about, this is so brilliant because all the press does is try to make people feel that that's not a mainstream, but what he's saying is not mainstream and he's turning it on his head.
The thing is, we can see what leftism turns people into.
At 18 weeks, at 18 weeks with those, what do they call ultrasound things, you can see a baby in the room smiling.
You can see it clapping.
You can see it sucking its thumb, okay?
20 weeks, he's right.
20 weeks, a baby feels the pain when you murder it, when you assassinate it.
So, you know, what kind of person supports that?
What kind of person?
You know, it's kind of like the thing with the MS-13 people where they're sitting around talking about the spark of divinity in a MS-13 gang member.
And you think like, what kind of person is doing that?
And part of that is just reacting to Trump, but part of it is leftism failing and making people defend the failure, that makes them defend the failure.
The rule of law, I mean, this is so basic, the rule of law.
Just saying, hey, we make the laws, and then we have to obey the laws.
And if we don't like the laws, we change the laws.
You know, Thomas Homan, who's the acting director of ICE, you know, the immigration and customs enforcement, he goes up before Congress and from California, one of our own, the lovely Congresswoman Nanette Barrigan, she calls them anti-immigrant.
She says, ICE is anti-immigrant.
Listen to what Thomas Homan says, because I've been making this point for a long time.
First of all, no one on this panel is anti-immigrant.
We're law enforcement officers who enforce a law that you all enacted.
So to sit there and say that we're anti-immigrants is wrong.
We are enforcing laws.
If you think it's okay to enter this country illegally, they shouldn't be arrested.
That's just wrong.
The laws clearly state, and you enter the country legally, it's a crime.
And no one's up here saying all illegal aliens are criminals.
A certain percentage of them are criminals.
They commit yet another offense after they're here.
I have said many times, I certainly understand the plight of these people, and I feel bad for some of these people, but I have a job to do.
I have to enforce law and uphold the oath I took to enact the laws enacted by you, Congress.
See, that virtue signaling, that thing that leftism gives you the sense of righteousness and virtue, falls apart when you look at the logic of the fact that they passed the laws, and now they're telling us, oh, yeah, you don't want to obey that one.
It's only the laws that make us feel good about ourselves that we should obey.
Change the law.
Go in and change the law.
Make your arguments go before the people.
You're the people's representatives.
Change the law.
You know, we went through this in the 70s.
I'm sure most of you don't remember this, but we went through this in the 70s when our cities became cesspits and crime skyrocketed.
And the streets were filthy and people were lying.
And it's going to happen again.
We can see it happening again in cities like San Francisco.
I have friends who just got back from Portland, Oregon.
They said they now have a right to rest law where you can sleep on the verge beside the sidewalk.
So outside your home is a homeless guy sleeping on the street.
That's what New York used to look like during the leftist 70s.
We saw it already.
We can see it with our own eyes.
This is the problem they have.
That's why their press is so important because they think they can cover it up, but they can't cover it up forever and they can't cover it up if the president is talking about it.
We can see with our eyes what leftism is.
We don't like it.
And that's the problem they have in the midterms.
It's not Donald Trump.
It's not they're not resisting enough.
They're normalizing Donald Trump.
It's none of that.
It's their base believing in the principles that cause cities and countries and human beings to become degraded.
You know, I have to talk about Starbucks for a minute, Starbucks Nation.
I think that we're becoming Starbucks Nation.
I'm not going to Starbucks anymore, and I'm not boycotting them.
I love Starbucks.
I mean, Starbucks coffee, I always thought, was great.
It's stronger.
You know, I love really strong coffee.
Only my wife makes the coffee I like outside of Starbucks.
She really, I don't know what it is.
It's that magic wife touch she has, but partly it's her coffee, as the old joke goes, the spoon stands up on it.
In her coffee, the spoon doesn't only stand up, it kind of does a dance.
It goes like, ooh, I feel good.
It's good to be in this coffee because it's so strong.
And Starbucks coffee is strong, like European coffee.
I used to love coffee in Europe.
They come over here and they think our coffee tastes like water with a little ground in it.
And I like that European coffee.
I like Starbucks coffee.
I'm not going in there anymore until they straighten themselves out.
Starbucks is not a bigoted company.
Starbucks is not a racist company.
There is nothing racist about Starbucks at all.
Not a thing, not a nothing.
But they bought into this thing.
They got played by a couple of guys who came in and sat there and tried to use their bathroom, didn't buy anything, refused to buy anything, refused to leave when the police told them to leave, refused to leave when the police told them to leave.
They weren't buying anything.
They were violating store rules and they refused to leave.
And that's my problem.
That's a race problem.
That's not a race problem.
That's a loitering problem.
That's a trespass problem.
So the first thing Starbucks, and Starbucks, of course, has been apologizing.
Oh, okay, now everybody can use any drug dealer who wants to come in and use it, you know, go in, smoke, drink.
But now they're saying, well, no, you can't do that and you can't use drugs and you can't.
So now they're going to police that.
But the underlying, there's two problems here that really have turned me against Starbucks.
One is that they accepted this kind of bullying.
They didn't just say, hey, are you kidding me?
We hire all kinds of people.
We serve all kinds of people.
We don't have a problem.
The problem was these two guys.
That was the problem.
They didn't have the nerve.
They didn't have the nerve because they live in that leftist universe where anytime somebody says racist, you're supposed to fall over and cower and curl up in the corner and say, oh my gosh, please beat me, beat me.
It's like a Stalin show trial that you're supposed to come out with the sign, I apologize, and all this stuff.
They didn't stand up for themselves.
That's the first thing.
But the second thing is they have accepted the underlying idea that business is bad.
The reason you have to buy something when you go into a Starbucks or should have to buy something before you can use their facilities is because they are a business.
They're not just a meeting place like one of these clowns said.
They're not just like some, you know, the third way of getting together, a place we can sit together.
They're a business.
They make their living doing this.
Now, the thing about capitalism, I mean, we're talking about the virtue signaling.
And the thing about capitalism is it doesn't give you a lot of chance to virtue signal because capitalism uses our natural greed and ambition so that it serves other people.
In capitalism, if I obey the law and I want to get rich and I want to have my ambitions, I got to do something that you like, like give you a cup of coffee you're willing to overpay for because Starbucks is overpriced, but the coffee is so good and the place is so nice that you pay the overprice for that.
You pay it for the experience.
But there's no virtue signaling in that.
You have to choose to be good under capitalism.
You have to choose to say, yeah, I made a lot of money and I'm going to give some of it here.
And most of these guys do.
Most of these billionaires, they give plenty of money away.
Most millionaires give plenty of money away.
Capitalism does have a lot of charity in it, but it's individual charity.
It's not enforced charity like socialism.
So people don't like capitalism because it doesn't make them feel good because they're not forcing other people to give money away.
You have to have your own righteousness.
You have to do it.
So what they accepted was that there was something inherently wrong in their being a business.
They not only accepted this baloney of this race-mongering baloney, which I just is appalling to me.
I don't know why every business doesn't do a Chick-fil-A didn't stand up for their right to have their own beliefs and their right to have their own world and the way they run their business.
But they accepted the idea that it was wrong that they were a business.
This is the Silicon Valley syndrome.
We're changing the world.
You know, we're not just inventing iPhones.
We're changing the world.
You know how you change the world?
You invent an iPhone and you make billions of dollars for it.
And the world is a better place because we chose your iPhone because it made our world better.
That's why we gave you the money for it.
They accepted this notion that they were somehow just the friendly face and it wasn't friendly if you had to pay.
You have to pay because it's a business.
You have to pay because that's how they make their living.
Making Yourself Whole00:15:17
And it just, I just find it appalling that they let this happen.
And we, you know, again, we see you.
We see the world of the left.
We see it eating its own.
We see it taking an innocent company like Starbucks, which is just selling an overpriced cup of coffee in a nice place, and we see them being accused of racism and that they have to fall to their knees like somebody at a Stalinist show trial.
That to me is just appalling and it's appalling.
They fell for it.
And I ain't going in there until they knock it off.
And I don't think I'll ever go back in there unless they actually turn around, which is very unlikely.
All right, we got the mailbag coming up.
And you know what that means.
Your problems are minutes away from being solved, but we've got to say goodbye to Facebook and to YouTube.
If you come to thedailywire.com, subscribe.
If you just come over there, we'll let you listen to the whole thing.
You can listen to the show, but you can watch the whole show right on the site and you don't have to bounce around and you don't have to be cut off and cast into the exterior darkness where there is great wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Plus, you can be in next week's mailbag and then your problems will be solved as well.
Come on over to thedailywire.com and while you're there, please subscribe.
It's the mailbag.
Is that a new one?
It sounds different.
All right, never mind.
From tomorrow.
We've got some very intense personal ones this time.
So we're going to read these.
From Tamara, hello, great and wise man.
I guess this is to you, Rob.
Oh, no, it's me.
I'm having a difficult time in my marriage due to my husband's tendency to tear a strip off me whenever some little thing goes wrong.
That means criticizer and attacker.
Granted, he does a lot and is an incredibly hard worker and a great father to our three boys.
He has a high-pressure lifestyle full of work and balancing the kids' schedule, as do I. I'm a stay-at-home mom.
However, I'm his emotional punching bag, and I believe I'm taken for granted since we don't believe in divorce.
I grew up without a dad and was hell-bent on doing life properly when it came to my own children, but I find myself increasingly saddened and jaded at the state of our marriage and looking at apartments and divorce lawyers online.
I'm no pushover.
I stand up for myself, but I'm exhausted at having to stand up for myself.
My boys are unfortunately watching us fight too.
My husband can't understand why I would rather watch a million episodes of the Michael Knowles show than ever have sex with him.
That is bad.
Things are really going wrong here.
Even one episode would be too much.
He keeps telling me the problem is that I can't forgive when forgive is all I've done for the past 15 years of our marriage.
I think the problem is I have no more trust in him or faith that he'll ever be good to me.
I need to know how to get through to him as I really am growing tired of all the berating and belittling I'm being subjected to.
I really did not sign up for that in my life when I decided to get married.
First of all, obviously when I get a letter, I only know what you tell me in the letter and I'm going to take it at face value.
But I also think there are two sides to every story and you do want to look at yourself and just say, okay, where's my contribution in this?
You know, am I making a contribution?
Maybe you're not.
I don't know.
I'm just going to, but I'm going to take your email at face value and just assume that you are in the right.
First, if that's the case, if he is really being this hypercritical of you and taking everything out on you, I have to challenge your assertion that he's being a great father to your three boys.
Your three boys are not seeing how to treat a lady and how to treat a wife and how to cherish somebody.
And the most important thing a father can do is create a world of respect and love in the household.
And he can't do that if you're constantly pounding on your wife and picking on her, whether you're working hard or not.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter whether you're working hard.
If you have three boys, and I assume if you've been married 15 years, then they're all still at home and they're all still pretty young, divorce is a very, very serious thing.
It's going to shatter their world.
It's going to be a big deal.
However, you do not have to be abused.
And that's what's happening.
Taking your letter at face value, you are being abused.
That is abuse.
It's emotionally abusive and it's wrong and there's no excuse.
That's it.
So here is what I would suggest.
The one thing you do not want to do is threaten divorce and not mean it.
And the one thing you do not want to do is go through with the divorce before you have tried every possible thing you can to fix this situation.
So what I would do in your situation is this.
I would first come to a decision.
Do I mean it?
Am I ready to leave?
Am I going to go?
Will I do it?
Because there's no bluffing about this.
If you bluff, you only make the situation worse.
If you come to the decision that you are ready to leave, that you're ready to go, then I would go to my husband and say to him, here's the deal.
Here's the deal.
I'm ready to leave.
I cannot do this anymore.
You have hurt me too badly.
I'm ready to get a divorce.
But I would happily save this marriage with you if you will come into couples counseling with me.
I will happily save it if you will come into couples counseling with me.
But if you will not, I'm leaving.
If you will not, you got to go.
There's no bluffing about this because if you bluff, you just make it worse.
It just goes on and on and on forever, okay?
But if he will say, if he says, as I hope he will, because by the way, a lot of husbands, this is just true, a lot of husbands don't take this situation seriously until the wife actually walks out and then they're shocked.
They're absolutely shocked.
This happens again and again.
The husband suddenly says, what?
What happened?
She says, I've been telling you for 10 years that you've been abusing me.
Yeah, but you didn't say we were going to leave.
So if he says, which I hope and believe he will, he says, yes, I will go into couples therapy, then put all your money on it.
You got to really do it.
You got to really go into it.
You got to find a good therapist.
Listen to what he or she tells you.
Work together to patch this marriage up for the sake of your children.
It doesn't have to be Cinderella.
It doesn't have to be a romance, but it can't be abusive, right?
Because these children need their parents.
They need both their mom.
They need both their dad.
If possible, they need them in the same house, treating each other with love and respect.
And obviously, in the case of sex, if you're denying sex as a weapon, you can't do that.
But I can see why you wouldn't want to have sex with someone who's abusing you.
You've got to solve this problem for your kids' sake.
You really do.
And so if you actually mean it and you're ready to go, tell your husband you're ready to go, but you're willing to work it out and then work it out.
All right.
From Amanda to the wise Mr. Clavin, my question for you today concerns depression and motivation.
Hopefully this isn't too similar to past questions regarding this.
I was diagnosed with serious depression a few years ago and have thankfully come a long way since then with the help of therapy and meds, but I still feel like I'm dragging my heels.
I can't help but feel impatient about the fact that my health is not where it once was and that I want to move forward with my life.
But whenever I know I should be doing something productive to achieve that, I can't find the motivation to actually get on with it.
Even if it's just going out for a walk on a nice day or picking up a book, I'm starting a full-time program again at university and I'm worried that if I don't start working on my mental stamina more, I'll run the risk of burning myself out once in school.
Do you have any advice on how you kept up with your depression maintenance once you started to feel better?
And how did you motivate yourself to do things even when you felt that you may not have had the energy?
Cheers, Amanda.
Okay, again, I'm taking it at face value.
When you say that you have felt better due to therapy and meds, I'm assuming that you remained in therapy because one of my bugbears about this is, you know, I understand that some people do need meds.
I get it.
I think they're way, way over-prescribed.
I mean, incredibly over-prescribed.
But I do think that some people need them.
But they're supposed to be to prop you up so you have the energy to go into therapy and you should continue to go into therapy because depression doesn't hit you out of the blue.
In 99% of the cases, it is due to something in your past and things in your past and not really being able to work it out.
So I hope you're still in therapy.
Let me, though, assuming that, let me just address the actual question because this is a real deal.
How do you build discipline?
First, you got to understand there is no doing it without doing it.
It ultimately comes down to you.
There is no like, oh, I don't have the energy.
You got to do it.
And if you fail to do it, you got to do it.
Go back to doing it.
You know, don't say, oh, I failed now.
I'm not doing it anymore.
Go back to doing it.
If you're trying to do something.
So, you know, I'm a very disciplined person and I've built my discipline over time, but there are always things we have to work on.
I always keep my drinking in check because I love alcohol, but I don't like being a drunk.
I don't like drinking.
I don't like being drunk at all.
And so, you know, I have to be careful.
Don't step over the line.
Don't step over the line.
And I do it in certain ways.
Here is my technique.
And if it works for you, great.
First, decide what you want to accomplish and then do less than you think you can.
So there's two things you got to do when you're depressed.
One is you got to get exercise.
And the other is you got to associate with other people.
You got to do something.
Be in a book group, be in a church group, go out and feed the homeless with other people.
Something that's going to bring you into contact and conversation with other people.
And you got to get exercise.
Those are the two things that really, really will help you out of your depression.
So if it's a card game, I don't care what it is.
It doesn't have to have any moral content.
If it's a card game once a week or a church group once a week or something once a week, the other thing is you got to get exercise.
So the first thing you do is you set a goal that's lower than you can achieve.
If you think you maybe can run for 15 minutes every day, run for five.
Run for seven.
Run for less than that and do it every day or whatever goal you set for yourself.
Then as you get the discipline to do it and you know you're going to do it after say a month or two months or three months, then start to increase it just a little bit, a little bit each time.
Don't push it to the point where you can't do it anymore.
Just keep the discipline going.
Just keep building on what you do, but don't stop doing it.
Do less than you can do, okay?
The other thing with this, and again, if you want to go out for three days and associate with people, go out for one day.
You got to do this.
These are the two things.
You got to get exercise.
You got to associate with other people.
The other thing is try to develop a mindset that's positive, right?
Like when you're trying to eat less, don't think about eating less.
Think about how good you're going to look.
Think about how healthy you feel.
Think about how you feel, how your digestion is better.
You know, if you drink a little less, you sleep better.
You wake up in the middle of the night because I don't sleep very much anyway.
I can read and my mind is clear.
Those are the things I think about.
I don't think don't drink so much.
You know, I think like, oh yeah, if I do this, then bad things are going to happen.
So think about the positive things that you're developing.
And if you do that, you know, if you get out and you get exercise and you associate with other people and you do some therapy, I think you can beat depression even without the meds.
Don't, you know, I'm not a doctor.
Don't go off meds because I say so.
But I think that the important thing should be making your life whole, making yourself whole.
Okay, from Evan.
Dear Professor X of the Daily Wire, is it from the X-Men?
Is it Professor X?
With so many books and movies making their way to Broadway, which one of your literary works could you see as a musical?
That's pretty funny.
You know, because I write crime stories, there wouldn't be a musical, but I've always, I have this one book called Man and Wife, which is the book I always recommend to women who don't like bloody criminal stories.
And I always thought it would make a good opera or operetta.
You know, it's very dramatic, has very big characters, but in a very domestic and dramatic situation.
It reminds me, there's a one called Seance on a Wet Afternoon that's been made into an opera.
And Henry James's Turn of the Screw has been made into an opera.
And I've always thought man and wife would make a good opera or operetta.
All right, from Ashley.
Hi, Mr. Clavin, aka drinker of leftist tears.
I could really use your guaranteed correct thoughts on the following question that I've been struggling with.
I used to want to go into teaching psychology and conducting research in universities.
I know universities are losing to the radical left and that the field of psychology is being consumed by social justice warriors.
Too true.
But I feel guilty walking away from the training of those who will be responsible for the mental health of future generations.
I'm not sure when to keep fighting or when to walk away and could use some advice.
Thank you in advance, Ashley.
You wanted to teach psychology.
I get it.
You know, first of all, you should never stop fighting.
Never stop fighting.
I mean, they're wrong.
We're right.
They're wrong.
I mean, that is the thing.
They're wrong.
We're right.
And psychology is an important field.
You can be very helpful as a psychologist.
You know, I think what I would do in your situation, and you're absolutely right about the psychological field that is filled with social justice warriors, and you do not want to give them any quarter whatsoever because it's harmful to people's psychology, not helpful to do social justice war.
What I would do is I would build a career that wasn't dependent on them.
And you might do it by doing what I guess is called clinical work.
I mean, I would see clients.
I would see, I would do therapy.
And once you do therapy and you're building a successful career with that, you can start to write about it.
You can write a column, even a blog.
You can start to write about that.
Then you can start to teach.
You can start to lecture.
You can start to go places.
And that way you don't have to be beholden to the university.
Now, there are universities that are not as taken over by the left.
I mean, we hear about the ones that are because so many big ones are.
But there are universities where they still hire you so you can try them too.
But, you know, being a psychologist is something you can do on your own.
It's something you can build your own career with.
And once you do that, you can then use the authority you get from your successful career to become a voice against what they're saying.
And that way they can't stop you.
And that way you can actually be open and start to teach people through other means without actually standing in a class.
That's what I would do because you shouldn't stop fighting.
It's an important fight.
It really is.
So I got a lot of emails about Devin Nunu's or Nuni's name and how it wasn't funny.
And a lot of them were lovely and just explained your point of view.
And thank you very much.
And I hear it.
I'm not here to annoy you.
I'm really not.
I just love kidding around.
I have a big, crazy sense of humor, and I use it and it comes out in Devin Nunes' name.
Some of them were enraged.
Enraged.
Am I wrong?
Is that unfair?
No, it's true.
Some of them were enraged.
And all I can say about that is if you're enraged about me saying Devin Nunu Nono, you're too enraged.
That's too angry.
You don't want to be that angry.
You're a conservative.
You should be full of joy.
You should believe in God.
You should have God in your life.
You should have freedom in your life.
We're winning.
We're winning.
It doesn't matter if I make jokes about Devon.
You should be happy.
But I do have to play this piece about, because a lot of people just said, oh, the joke was getting old.
And I get that.
You know, the thing is, I always berate myself for not sticking with running gags because I like a running gag, but I get tired of them.
I get tired of just about anything doing it too often.
So I used Kafifi for a long time, Kafefi and I for a long time.
And then I stopped.
And Noel stole it.
He's like, you know, I can't leave these jokes lying around because he takes them.
But I mean, I do let my running gags die after a time, but this cracked me up.
Argument About Personhood00:06:15
But then I saw Chuck Schumer making this speech and he's attacking Devin, whatever his name is.
Listen to what he says.
While an investigation is open and active, demands for oversight are tantamount to interference, especially when the folks demanding the information are the most biased, irresponsible actors.
A man like Devin Nunes.
You're a mean, mad white man.
Chuck Schumer is a mean, mad white man.
Devin Nunes.
And then people tell me, well, it's Nunes.
And then somebody else says, there is other people saying, Nunes, it's not just me.
It's not just me.
Anyway, it strikes me as funny.
I won't do it if it's going to drive you crazy.
But if it drives you crazy, you should think about why it's driving you so crazy.
We're just kidding around.
We are just kidding around and having a good time.
All right.
Tickety-boo news.
So what Trump and Mench, Michael Pence, are doing in this abortion fight is great.
It genuinely is great that we now have, as Trump himself said, we now have a pro-life president of pro-life, vice president of pro-life Congress, and obviously they're up against Roe v. Wade, but they are doing wonderful things.
And just the fact that they're reminding us that they are in the mainstream, that people do see, you know, we talk about that 20-week old baby, but that's five months.
That's five months old.
But also great, also tickety-boo, is the fact that science is really on our side and is more and more.
You know, Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest minds in the West ever, I believe, I didn't refresh my memory on this, but I'm pretty sure that he said that abortion was allowed until what's called the quickening when you could hear the baby move.
And a lot of people say, well, Thomas Aquinas, you know, a father of the church, said you could wait till the quickening.
But of course, he didn't have ultrasound.
And ultrasound and all these scans and all this that are showing us these babies laughing and clapping their hands and sucking their thumbs in the womb are really helping us change people's intuitive mind.
And I've said this before, but the same people who are tearing down, same kind of people who are tearing down Robert E. Lee's statue in this generation are going to be tearing down Nancy Pelosi's statue in the next generation when it really becomes clear what a baby is and how much it is.
Now, personally, I think the DNA is dispositive.
I think the fact that you can be convicted of a crime on the basis of DNA shows that DNA identifies you as an individual and it's unique to you.
The baby's DNA is unique.
And I keep hearing this argument that, well, it's not fair to force this woman to carry a life to term.
And there is this argument about this famous violinist.
Have you heard this?
All right, this is a big argument.
And somebody tweeted me and said, what's the answer to this argument?
I think it was originated by a woman named Judith Jarvis Thompson.
She says, I propose that we grant that the fetus is a person from the moment of conception.
How does the argument go from here?
Something like this.
I take it, every person has a right to life, so the fetus has a right to life.
You wake up, here's her proposition.
You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist, a famous unconscious violinist.
He's been found to have fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help.
They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own.
The director of the hospital now tells you, look, we're sorry, the Society of Music Lovers did this to you.
We would never have permitted it if we had known, but still they did it, and the violinist now is plugged into you.
To unplug you would be to kill him.
But never mind, it's only for nine months.
By then he will have recovered from his ailment and can safely be unplugged from you.
Do you have the right to pull away and let the violinist die, which obviously I think you do.
And people say, wow, I read this on philosophical website.
What a great argument.
It's not a good argument.
It's what's called, I believe it's what's called.
I'm not a philosopher, but I believe it's what's called a category error.
It is taking one category of thing and comparing it to another category of thing and expecting them to correlate in terms of moral arguments or any kind of arguments.
The woman grants that the fetus is alive, that the fetus is a person, right?
If the fetus is a person, then the woman is a mother and the fetus is her child.
That is the relationship they're in.
It's a unique relationship.
There is no other relationship with mother and child.
And we acknowledge that mothers have a responsibility to their children.
If the child could only thrive on breast milk, the mother would not be allowed to walk away from that child and not feed him or her the breast milk because that would be, because it's her child.
It is her child.
And we also know that the child didn't just appear there.
The woman took an action and had sex, and that created the child.
So the only way you could connect that would be through a rape.
But still, even though that's a rape, a rape that causes a pregnancy is a tremendous injustice, a tremendous crime.
It's a tremendous crime, but the criminal is not the baby.
The criminal is the criminal, is the rapist, right?
So it's still a mother with a child.
It's a totally different and unique category, and she does have a responsibility to keep that child alive.
You know, the thing is, the reason they don't want to accept this, of course, is because of the freedom of the woman, which I'm very in favor of.
I want her to be free, but I don't want her to be free at the cost of somebody else's life.
But if they start to accept, if science forces us to accept the uniqueness, the individuality, the humanity of the child, we're going to have to reconsider our attitudes towards sex.
And you know what?
That's going to be a good thing for everybody, because right at this minute, our attitudes towards sex are so broken and it's hurting so many people, especially young women.
And so when young women start to reconsider what sex is, what it's there for, what it means, and what it does to them, I think that that's going to be a good thing rather than, oh, I created a human, let's kill it and go back to having sex.
Freedom vs. Life00:00:48
I think that is a good thing.
I think it's happening.
I think it will happen because I think the science is ultimately irrefutable.
We have a great interview tomorrow with Mike Rowe, isn't it?
Oh, yeah, good, really good interview with the great Mike Rowe.
Be here for that.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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