Ben Shapiro dissects leftist hypocrisy over patriotism, mocking guilt-trips about slavery while defending Trump’s flag event as a bulwark against cultural decay. He frames Europe’s collapse—driven by mass immigration and speech suppression—as proof of socialist stagnation, contrasting it with America’s potential revival through self-reliance. A listener’s comic book scam and a 30-year-old’s relationship dilemma highlight moral clarity over relativism, while grief is reframed as a desert to cross via faith. The episode ends by exposing the Paris Agreement’s climate panic as a leftist power grab, predicting tech will outpace their obstruction once freed from ideological chains. [Automatically generated summary]
According to the media, Donald Trump is enjoying a great economy because of Barack Obama.
Barack Obama had a bad economy because of George W. Bush.
Whenever Obama's economy was bad, it was Bush's fault.
Whenever Trump's economy is good, it's to Obama's credit.
Trump's presidency is Obama's.
That's why it's so good.
But Obama's presidency was Bush's.
That's why it was so bad.
In the entire eight years Obama was president, it was really Bush being president, ruining everything.
But this last year and a half, when things have gone so well under Trump, Obama was secretly president, being Trump, as opposed to when Obama was president and it was really Bush.
Obama saved the economy with his brilliant, geniusy economic genius.
Obama believed that if you took money away from the rich people who produce things and gave it to the poor people who don't produce things, the poor people would then help the economy by buying things from the rich people who hadn't produced those things because their money had been taken away.
Thus, the poor people could buy things the rich people would have made if the poor people hadn't taken away their money.
Trump's theory is different.
His theory is stop taking people's money and they'll make things and buy things.
But the only reason that works is because Trump is secretly Obama in like disguise or something.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
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Life is tickety boom.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky beam.
Shipshape, tipsy topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, it's mailbag day today, and if that were...
Ah, my God!
What the hell?
Oh, sorry.
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You know, I have to tell you this.
I watching the f?
Nfl flap yesterday and also watching this stupid thing about not having a beauty pageant during the Miss America pageant.
The left is trying to school us to hate ourselves.
The left is trying to school us to hate ourselves.
They're trying to tell us that our natural passions, our natural desires, are somehow evil in and of themselves because they think that people, they think that people are naturally good.
They don't understand the fall of man and broken humanity.
So they don't understand that really, first of all, your passions are gifts from god.
Your desires are gifts from god.
They define who you are, they define the shape of you.
They're like salients.
Salients are the things that stick out.
They're like the things that stick out of you, your desires, your passions.
The trick of life, the whole trick of life, is training your passions to the good right, attaching your passions to the good.
You're not supposed to get rid of them.
You're not supposed to hate your desires.
You're not supposed to hate your erotic desires your, your ambitions uh, your even your desire for money.
You're not supposed to hate those things.
You're supposed to attach them to the good.
You're supposed to get money by doing something that other people will like.
Use the money for the good you're supposed to use.
You know what?
What would your life be like if say, you know you're in love with your wife, you're erotically attracted to your wife, but you also know that she is good.
Right, you've discussed this with yourself.
Should I marry this girl?
Is she really good, is she somebody, or am I just attracted to her?
You understand that there's a difference between your passion and and her quality.
But once you can bring her quality, once you realize her quality is good, what would a man be like who didn't have a passion for his wife?
You know you love your mother right, but you want your mother to be good.
If your mother is evil, then you might have to break off that love, you might have to break off that attachment.
But what would a man be like if he didn't love his mother?
That he'd be unnatural, there'd be something wrong with him.
Think of it.
Think of it like a glass and wine.
All right, so you got.
The passion is the glass, the good is the wine.
Right, you fill the glass up with the good.
If you don't fill the glass up with the wine, if with the good, then all you've gotten is an empty glass.
Your passions are empty.
They're attached to whatever they just attach themselves to.
That doesn't work.
But if you have no glass, the wine goes nowhere.
You have nothing that will.
It's not enough to know what's good.
You have to love the good.
It's not enough to uh, you know to care think oh my, you're not a Vulcan, you know.
It's not enough to say ah, my wife has these wonderful qualities.
You got to love your wife, you know.
You love your uh, your mom, and you got to love your country.
Because this is what I want to get to, patriotism, patriotism.
Patriotism is a natural passion.
You shouldn't be afraid of your patriotism.
Every person loves the place that he comes from, but of course, you want your patriotism to be informed with the good, what is good about your country.
And there might come a time.
There might come a time when you find oh, my god, my country is doing something so evil that my passion has to be redirected.
I have curtail my passion.
But what would a man be like, a woman be like, if he didn't love his country, there'd be something twisted and wrong with you.
The other day I was trying to quote this poem by Walter Scott, and I can never quote anything from memory.
I just haven't got the capability of memorizing things.
But the lay of the last minstrel, let me read this to you.
Listen to what Walter Scott, one of the kind of forgotten great writers, he was just a fantastic writer, and he's kind of gone out of style temporarily.
But he talks about what it would be like to have no patriotism.
He says, breathe there the man with soul so dead, who never to himself hath said, this is my own, my native land, whose heart hath never within him burned as home his footsteps he hath turned from wandering on a foreign strand.
If such there breathe, go mark him well.
For him, no minstrel raptures swell.
Poets are not going to sing about this guy because he doesn't love his country.
High though his titles, proud his name, boundless his wealth as wish can claim, despite those titles, power, and pelf, the wretch, concentrated all in self, living, shall forfeit fair renown, and doubly dying shall go down to the vile dust from whence he sprung, unwept, unhonored, and unsung.
He is not worthy of remembering.
He is nothing because he doesn't have this natural passion, this natural love of country.
You're not supposed to hate yourself.
You're not supposed to hate the fact that you like looking at women in bikinis.
You're not supposed to hate the fact that you love your mom.
You're not supposed to hate the fact that you love your country.
And the left is trying to school you to that.
They say, oh, you know, you like looking at women.
You're objectifying women.
You're a patriot.
That's jingoism.
That's nationalism and tribalism.
No, no, you're supposed to love your country.
It is one of the good things about you.
You have to simply train it to the good, attach it to the good.
Compare what Walter Scott said about the patriot.
Compare it with this.
We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.
That's not loving your country.
How would it be if before a wedding, five days away from the guy's wedding, he said, I am fundamentally, you know, five days away from fundamentally transforming this woman.
And women do that too, you know, five days away.
I am fundamentally five days away from fundamentally transforming this man.
That is not love.
That is not patriotism.
You love your country.
You love your country.
And of course, that means, you know, and you know what love means because you love yourself, right?
You let yourself off the hook a little bit.
You overlook some of your bad qualities.
You try to make yourself better.
You work on yourself.
These are all things we do in love, you know.
So you love your country in the same way you love yourself, same way you love your mom, all these things.
And it drives me nuts that they tell us that the patriotism is bad.
So, okay, the NFL.
This is, you know, and all these people, especially the intellectuals on the right, this also drives me a little crazy.
They tell us these things don't matter.
They say, oh, you know, politics is downstream from culture, but don't care about the NFL.
Politics is downstream from culture, but don't care what Samantha B says.
Why are you worried about that?
That's the culture.
That is the culture.
That is the culture that affects the narrative that affects who gets elected 20 years from now, right?
I mean, a guy, an essential socialist like Obama, would never have been elected president once, let alone twice, if we hadn't been trained to look at somebody talking like that and looking like that to some degree as a presidential candidate.
He looked like the candidate we'd been told would be good.
He was not a good candidate.
Speaking of which, Father's Day, you know, one of the things about being a father is teaching your children to love the good.
I used to say, I used to say to my wife, it's not enough that we do right.
Our kids have to see us loving the right, enjoying the right.
And as a reward for that, I expect some Omaha steak.
By golly, as a reward for being a great father, I expect some Omaha steak because they are just, they really are good.
They've got everything.
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The Omaha steaks come delivered, hand-trimmed, flash-frozen, and vacuum-sealed.
Meats come directly to your door in an Omaha Steaks cooler.
It's very cool.
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Bison is the only one here I haven't tried, but all the rest has been great.
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Right now, Omaha Steaks is giving a limited-time offer to my listeners for Father's Day at $49.99, a 78% discount.
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Go to omahasteaks.com, type Andrew in the search bar, grab your dad, and fire up the grill.
All right.
Eagles Cancel White House Visit00:07:32
So, yesterday, there was this, the Eagles, having won the Super Bowl, were supposed to come to the White House to celebrate.
And at the last minute, they canceled out.
Trump got mad and said, Well, instead, we're going to have a celebration of our flag and we're going to talk about why we salute the flag.
And everybody said, That's not fair because the Eagles didn't kneel during the season.
They didn't kneel, protest the flag.
But, but they did pull this thing where they said, Oh, only 10 of us, and some said only one of the Eagles was going to show up.
And they said it at the last minute.
So it was political.
It was striking back at Trump for his flag argument that he was having with the NFL and for the fact that the NFL was forced to cave by the people because Trump stirred up the people.
So it was about the flag.
It's not fair to say that the Eagles were completely innocent in this.
So Trump gets up and he gives a speech, and everybody starts yelling that this is ridiculous.
This is not about patriotism.
What I want to tell you here is this: they want to say that this is about race, but it really is about patriotism.
And yes, patriotism, because it's a passion, can be abused in the same way your desire for a woman or a man can be abused.
Passions can be abused.
That's why you have to train them to the good.
It's not about hating your passions.
It is about training them to the good.
But I want to go back 2014, the Olympics, and I just want to point out that the left has been preaching against patriotism itself.
They're training you to hate your natural passions, your natural loves.
I want to just show you this.
This is the Olympics, right?
This is the one that was in Sochi or something.
I think it was Salt Lake City.
Salt Lake City, was it?
Oh, because it was an American thing.
That's right, it was American.
Sorry.
Thank you very much.
And this is Matt Lauer, serial woman abuser, and Katie Couric, and they're interviewing athletes.
Listen really carefully to how they are dictating the narrative, right?
The athletes aren't saying anything about patriotism.
They are telling them how they have to feel about patriotism, which is, you don't want to go too far with it.
You don't want to do too much.
Listen.
But you're expecting even a greater wave of patriotism here in the United States in this particular time than other countries have shown when they've hosted the games.
Well, you know, I don't know than other countries, but I certainly expect the stands to be rocking.
I expect the flags to be flying.
And, you know, the expression of patriotism is fine for any country that hosts the Olympics.
We want to express our nationalism as a part of the world's community, and I expect to see that.
But we have to also be careful and draw a line not to let our patriotism get in the way of the games in general.
Obviously, the opening ceremony, the games themselves will be very patriotic in feel.
And yet, sometimes the international community can interpret that as arrogant nationalism.
Obviously, you've got to balance those two things.
Are you all clearly you're mindful of that?
How are you going to do that?
Can you imagine, I mean, the Olympics is where countries compete, so your country is your team.
Can you imagine saying to somebody, go to the Yankees game, don't root too hard for the Yankees, you know, give Boston a little love, you know, give me, you know, I mean, that's not the way sports works.
That's not the way countries work.
That's not the way passion works.
You're supposed to passionately love your country.
It doesn't mean you don't criticize her.
It doesn't mean you don't have to make her better all the time.
Just as you like yourself and as hopefully you like the people you like, you know, you try and you do want to tell them when they're messing up, but you love them.
You cut them slack.
You invest your passion in them.
Listen, plus, they don't know what they're talking about.
CNN's Angela Rai comes on and she says, you know, that the national anthem is problematic in and of itself.
Okay.
See, this is the thing I'm saying, that they keep trying to blame this on Trump.
They keep saying that Trump started this, but they started it.
They started it a long, long time before Trump got there.
They started it when they started telling us that our passion for our country, our love for our country was bad per se.
That's when this started.
Here's Angela Rai telling us that the national anthem is problematic in and of itself.
Let's be really, really honest here.
That's what he can't handle, the ego blow.
Instead of having people around him that are not yes men and yes women and yes people, he has people that continue to lie on his behalf.
The Eagles didn't volunteer not to go.
They uninvited the Eagles.
That's the issue.
This is all about his ego.
And we're going to now end up in a midterm where we're talking about the national anthem.
The national anthem is problematic in and of itself.
There's a second verse that Colin Kaepernick brought attention to that has yet to be discussed on broad platforms.
In addition to that, people have every right to go through the practices of practicing free speech.
I didn't mean to say practice twice, but the bottom line is we have the opportunity to say, this is something that's bothering me.
Until this country serves me the same way that it serves so many other people, I have a right to protest.
And you should pay attention to what those issues are if you're a real leader.
That thing about the national anthem is total garbage, by the way.
She was talking about the third verse, not the second verse.
Here it is.
As he remembers, the War of 1812, Battle of Fort Henry, and we win the battle.
We're fighting the British.
The song goes, and where is that band who so vauntingly swore that the havoc of war and the battle's confusion, a home and a country should leave us no more?
This is such a badly written song.
It really is.
But he said, he says, where's the band that swore that they would destroy our country?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.
And the star-spangled banner in triumph off wave.
So she thinks, and Colin Kaepernick thinks, that that reference to slaves is to the slaves that were held in the South, and they're the slave, nothing can save them from the terror of flight.
The hirelings there are the mercenaries, the German German mercenaries that the British would use.
And the slaves are the impressed, they used to impress people into the service in the Navy.
So if you're out wandering drunk one night, a couple of guys would come, grab you under the shoulders, hurl you on a ship, and you were in the Navy.
That was how the British got a lot of their people in the Navy.
Those are the slaves that he's talking about.
These people are just dumb.
It's just dopey.
All right.
So anyway, you know, they keep saying that, and the other argument she makes is that this is about free speech.
If it's about free speech, I want to know, if the left is about free speech, I want to know why that cake baker who wouldn't bake a cake for Halloween because he was a Christian, who wouldn't bake a cake with adult themes, as they call them, because of sexy themes, because he was a Christian, when he said, I will not decorate a cake for a gay wedding, why that was wrong, why it was okay for someone not to decorate a cake against gay marriage, but when he wanted to decorate a cake for gay marriage and he refused, that was not okay.
They were trying to tell him what to think, what to say.
So they're not about free speech.
It has nothing to do with free speech.
Nobody is curtailing these guys from protesting.
My only argument with them is their protest is, their protest should be, we love this country, but it's not living up to its standards.
Here's why.
In which case, okay, I'll listen.
I might not agree, but I'll listen.
But if what you're saying is, but then if that's what you're saying, salute the flag because you love the country.
If what you're saying is this country stinks and we don't love you, then to hell with you.
I don't care what you think.
All right.
Father's Day, you know, all I'm trying to say is that they have been attacking our patriotism, our passions, just like they're attacking our passion for looking at women in bathing suits.
That's not the problem with us.
We are not supposed to dislike who we are or what we are or our own humanity.
D-Day Reflections00:04:03
We're just supposed to train our passions and our desires for the good.
Hey, get ready because we have a special treat for our audience in honor of Father's Day.
This Tuesday, June 12th at 7 p.m. Eastern, Daily Wire God King Jeremy Boring will descend from on high or the attic, wherever it is he's been, and he will host a roundtable discussion with the mighty Ben Shapiro, the mighty me, Andrew Clavin, and Knowles, whatever he is.
We will discuss what fatherhood means, why fathers matter, and how fatherhood will stand up to an increasingly anti-male culture.
Subscribers will even be able to write in live questions for us at dailywire.com.
That's this Tuesday, June 12th at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific.
You can find our special live stream on Facebook and YouTube.
So don't miss it.
So while we're talking about patriotism and the things people do for patriotism, today is D-Day.
If you think people go to war because they admire their country, or you think they go to war because they've thought it out, they sit in the library and they think, yes, you know, my country is good.
It really is.
You know, those things inform their passion, but they go to war for war for passion, for love of country, for love of the things that we have here, which is there's a lot to love here.
And they went to war in 1944, June 6, 1944, fighting a truly evil and disastrous enemy that would have taken over the world.
The Nazis and their Axis partners would have taken over the world if America had not stood up to them and joined with our allies in France and Britain and around the world to fight them back.
And these guys, you know, I remember as a kid, I had a junior high school teacher who was at D-Day.
He stormed the Normandy Beach.
And I remember him talking, telling us about it and talking about the carpet of bodies that he ran over as he was charging these machine guns and they were just raking the beach.
I'm sure you've seen Saving Private Ryan, the opening scene of that.
They were just raking the beach.
And he said he was, and when he talked, he was full of what now I would recognize as PTSD, his tone got impassioned.
He fell over his words.
We should not forget this.
You know, let's just take a listen to CNN did a special where they interviewed some of the veterans and they remembered what happened.
The front went down and we jumped into the water.
The water was up to our necks.
We weren't the first troops.
The infantry was first.
We were the mortar following the infantry and the bodies were all over the place.
First thing I had in my mind was death.
I was thinking about that.
I think I was going to come back because there was a lot of guys all around me.
They were floating in the water.
There was one kid I looked on and there was Michael, is his name was.
And he's trying to talk and nothing is coming out.
And he was, I made him out to say, help me.
But things are so chaotic there, you couldn't help anybody.
You had to get out of there.
A group of four of us, we headed up and we go through a minefield.
The whole area was mined.
So as we're traversing this high ground, I hear pop, and in my peripheral vision, I see this fellow to my left, an explosion, and him flying through the air.
And I just kept going as fast as I could.
Yeah, I just kept going as fast as I could.
You know, there's this book.
One day I'm going to do a whole show about this, this Howard Zinn People's History of the United States.
And he says, I want to tell the history of the United States from its point of view of the victims.
I want to tell about the Constitution from the point of view of slaves.
But what if I did that to you, of just told the worst parts of your lives?
The truth is, the truth is, there's not a single person walking around politically free on the planet Earth who is not free because of people like this.
You know, yesterday, I guess it was yesterday, Monday, we had, it's now Wednesday, right?
Monday, we had Jacob Ario, and we were talking about comic books, and he said millennials feel they have no great enterprise like this to participate in.
Values Ring True00:17:11
But, you know, this is a great enterprise fighting back evil.
Once the evil is gone, the great enterprises are to produce more good, more children, raise your children.
That's a big enterprise, that's a mighty enterprise.
Settle planets, extend freedom through the world.
That's what we're here to do.
And it's all because of guys like this and their passion and their love of country.
Believe me, believe me, it's not the Matt Lowers and Katie Kirks of the world who go out and do this stuff.
It's the people who love their country.
All right.
You know, I'm reading this really chilling true crime book about the Golden State killer.
It's by, you know, I can't remember.
It's called I'll Be Gone in the Dark.
The woman died just as she was finishing the book and didn't get to see him caught, but it's about home invasion.
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We got the mailbag coming up.
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All right, the mailbag.
Woo!
Yeah!
All right.
Lindsay put up a picture of her baby, her daughter, on Twitter.
Gorgeous kid.
What a beautiful, which, of course, she was gorgeous, so that makes perfect sense.
From dawn, greetings, Master Clavin.
I have highly enjoyed Mr. Shapiro's Sunday specials and found a recent remark by Dr. Drew thoroughly thought-provoking and craved your response to his premise.
The pair discussed the role of human sacrifice throughout human history, and Dr. Drew stated, this innate desire is satisfied presently for many Westerners by Christ as a human sacrifice, extending to the sacrament of communion as a cannibalistic act.
Please illuminate for me how this anthropological insight relates to the veracity of our faith, eternally grateful dawn.
You know, one of the through lines of the Bible is about sacrifice and about human sacrifice.
And kind of, you know, I read the Bible as a developing story.
It's a history.
So things change and people's understanding deepens.
And God gives us more information as we are prepared by our history to understand it.
So it's not like every minute everything is coming at us all at once.
The very first thing God does when he creates the Jewish people is he takes, he says to Abraham, go sacrifice your son, Isaac.
Abraham goes to sacrifice the son Isaac and God says, what are you doing?
He says, well, you told me to stop doing that.
Don't do that.
Here is a goat.
Sacrifice the goat instead.
Up until that point, human beings are sacrificing their sons.
And all through the Bible, all through the Bible, when you hear somebody and he did what was wrong in the eyes of God, which is all the kings of Israel who are doing all the wrong thing, what they're doing is they're going back to the celebration, the worship of Baal, who demands the sacrifice of sons.
But that moment is the moment when God chooses his people and says, you know, do not sacrifice.
Use a symbol instead.
Okay, that's really, really important because all of life is symbol.
All of life is symbol.
We symbolize who we are.
Our flesh symbolizes our being, right?
People think like, well, isn't the soul some kind of shadowy ghost inside you?
No, no, you are the language that speaks your soul.
Your flesh is the language that speaks your soul, and God is training us to understand that.
The entire idea of parables, you ever think why Jesus speaks in parables?
People think, well, a story makes a point better.
No, he's telling you that the things that happen have meaning, right?
The very act of understanding a parable is understanding that the things that happen have meaning.
The same with sacrifice.
We feel guilty or we feel like we want to control things.
So we sacrifice to God and we're sacrificing our kids.
And God says, no, sacrifice a symbol.
And then that prepares us for his sacrifice, his sacrifice of his son, Jesus, for us.
Because essentially, God is self-sufficient.
He can take care of our guilt.
He can take care of our sin in his own sacrifice to himself.
He takes sacrifice out of our hands and does it once for all.
And he has first trained us to that through indicating how symbols work, how ritual works, how ceremony works.
And then he does the real thing that is leading us.
It is showing us through the flesh of Jesus, through the flesh of Jesus, is taking us in to the meaning of life.
So the whole thing about sacrifice, I mean, that's why, you know, I've said this many times, but it's important.
They call Satan the accuser.
I think that is even what it means.
We are not supposed to wallow in our guilt.
This is another thing that the left does when it's teaching us to hate ourselves.
It says, well, you held slaves.
You think, yes, but then we stopped, you know, and the people who did it were guilty.
Some of them should be punished.
Certainly an entire civilization was gone with the wind after the Civil War.
But now we haven't done that.
The only thing we can do is go forward and let the guilt trail off behind us as we go forward without treating people that way.
That human sacrifice has been taken care of.
It's done.
And it's done forever.
And that's a through line in the Bible.
From Jonathan, questions.
Greeting, O Lord Clavin, the king of humor and hater of ease.
While I have great hope for American culture in the coming decades, I have far less confidence about our European friends.
How do you see the European situation developing culturally in the next 10 years?
Do you think it can make a comeback or will it be doomed to be divided between the far left and ultra-nationalist groups?
You know, I have said this, but I think it's important.
It's important to understand the world that we're in today, to understand that Europe is dead.
Western Europe, certainly.
I mean, Eastern Europe, you say, well, there's nationalist movements there.
There's extreme nationalism.
If it succumbs to that, it too will be dead.
But if what they're doing is pushing patriotism, if they're learning freedom, having suffered and been delayed in coming to freedom by the communist slave states that conquered them, if they do that, then they might be all right.
They may re-energize the rest of Europe.
Western Europe is dead.
When you are letting people in who do not believe in your values and you're letting them sweep into your towns and villages, rape your women, and then you're prosecuting people for revealing, for reporting that they're raping your women, your country is dead.
Your culture is dead.
You are no longer producing the great works anymore.
It is just being devoured by these invaders who are coming into the country.
It's not about the fact that, like, it doesn't mean that every one of them is bad.
It means that Europe has lost the plot of its own existence.
So I think that's important.
So when it's important because so many people are selling us European-style governance, European-style socialism, European-style pacifism.
But, you know, part of being alive is fighting for yourself.
Part of being alive is arguing and screaming and demanding things and being self-reliant and having inequalities.
Inequalities are part of life.
You know, when dead people are all the same, slaves are all the same.
Free people are different.
Free people rise, some rise, some fall.
All the things that the left hates about us are part of the fact that we are alive.
And I think we have to understand that Europe is dead.
Look, can it come back to life?
Of course, this is a history.
It's not biology.
Dead civilizations do rise again.
They do have a second birth.
I kind of believe that what's going to happen is Europe is going to become an adjunct of us.
And that in that, they'll have some kind of secondary shadow life than the one they have now.
Right this minute, this is a culture that simply doesn't even believe in its own existence.
Dear Lex Luther, that is not one of my titles.
Being a writer of various things like novels, screenplays, and podcasts, have you ever thought of writing a comic book or graphic novel as Stuffy Artnerds like to call them?
This is from Jack.
I did write one, and I got burned.
I wrote one called Jenny in the Darkness.
It is a really good story.
You can go on Amazon and see the jacket.
A young woman in Poland did the illustrations.
They were beautiful.
The company basically just disappeared.
They paid us, they paid us some of what they owed us, but not all of it.
And they vanished.
And now I can't get the rights back, even though the company doesn't exist.
I mean, I guess I can get the rights back somehow, but I don't know how to go about it.
It's very difficult to do.
And so I've lost this part of the story.
I may do it again as a novel or as a screenplay.
It's a really good story.
I enjoyed doing it.
I loved the work.
It was lots of fun.
I would do it again, but I'd have to do it with a company that wasn't fly-by-night.
Apparently, this happens a lot in the comic book business.
I was taken, really taken aback by it.
From Andrew, I am not feeling very hunky-dunky.
When I was younger, I did not consider the importance of morals, values, and ethics.
I didn't view those things as the foundation on top of which a strong relationship can be built.
See, this is what we're talking about, training your passions to the good, as I should have.
I am now 30 and I've left my old perspective.
In the past, I've committed myself to living a virtuous life.
However, I'm not convinced my girlfriend shares the same views on these subjects.
Her viewpoints are malleable and easily influenced.
Because I'm dating to marry instead of just dating to date, I wonder what I can do about this.
She often tells me she's committed to the same principles because she follows some of the same thought leaders I follow, such as you, Ben, Jordan Peterson, Christina Hoffsommers.
We're seven months into our relationship.
I'm feeling non-committal.
I'm not looking for an ideological twin, but I do believe some very basic moralistic values should be in alignment for a healthy relationship to be realized.
Should I hold out or hope for change or simply move on?
You know, I don't have enough information to make, to answer your question.
So I'm going to have to speak generally.
Like, I do not know what kind of values you're talking about specifically.
Values are important.
They're important in a relationship.
You know, you can't, you're not going to get along with somebody who, for instance, if you think she should be an at-home mother and she thinks, no, that's the last thing I want to do.
That is not a good basis for a marriage.
You're not going to get along with somebody if she believes in open marriage and you believe in fidelity, right?
That's not going to work.
You know, a person can be, you know, I don't agree that this is necessarily moral, but a person can be a generally good person and say, well, I believe in open marriage.
I'm going to be very honest about what we're going to do here.
And that's the way it's going to be.
That may be a mistake, right?
It may even be a moral mistake, but it doesn't mean the person is doing something evil because he's telling you that's the way.
Those are the rules of the game.
But if the other person thinks he's in a faithful relationship and she's running around, that's not going to work.
So I don't know.
But other things, for instance, you can get along with.
You can get along with somebody who votes differently if it's not like a very, you know, if you're not on totally, you know, far ends of the scale.
You can get along with people who have different attitudes toward money.
That can lead to a lot of clashes as well.
But it doesn't have to.
One person may say, you know what, I just need a certain amount of money.
The other person may be more ambitious.
You can meld those things together.
So I don't know what values you're talking about, but values matter.
And you should talk them through and decide what you mean.
She doesn't have to believe everything you believe, but you better know, especially because kids will come as they have a tendency to do.
You better know what you're going to be teaching those kids and what she is going to be doing too.
And don't kid yourself about it.
You say she's malleable.
She may say what you want to hear, but that may not be the truth.
You're going to have to judge.
From Ben, Dear Andrew, you often say that grief is the price we pay for love.
That is true.
Last weekend, I lost a very close friend.
I'm sorry to hear that.
I've been trying to deal with the loss.
I have been blessed to have a life filled with the love of my wife, friends, and family, so I know that eventually this will be something I have to deal with again.
My question is this.
Are there any strategies you have specifically for dealing with loss?
And what is the best way that I can be there for others who are feeling the same way I am?
Well, one of the things I also say, I do say that grief is the price for love.
Of course it is.
We live a life that ends.
But I also sometimes say that grief is a desert that has to be crossed on foot, by which I mean there is no hurrying grief.
You have to get over it as you get over it, but you do have to take the journey.
You do have to walk through it.
You don't just sit there and wallow in it.
You don't just fold your tent.
You don't cross your legs and sit in the sand.
You walk across that desert and you keep moving and you keep going forward and you acknowledge your grief.
You acknowledge your grief.
You know, one of the things that I have found really helpful in times of grieving, I find this helpful all the time, but especially in times of grieving, I find prayer immensely helpful because I want to know, I want to know your thing.
It really is a good metaphor.
You're crossing a desert, but where are you going to come out?
You know, you're going to come out in a wasteland or you're going to come out in Holland.
You know, you're going to come out someplace good.
You want to come out someplace good.
You want to come out deeper, richer, wiser.
And those are the things that you want to bring to your family, bring to your friends.
I mean, that's part of what being a friend is, part of what being a father is, is leading people to themselves, leading people to become their best selves, leading people to the person that God made them to be.
And that is what you want your grief to do.
You are taking a journey.
You want to get to the right place.
You don't want to get to a place of bitterness.
You don't want to get to a place of annihilism.
You want to get to a place of faith and trust and greater knowledge of life.
And those are the only things I can tell you because the pain, nothing I say, is going to make the pain less.
Nothing I say is going to make the pain last any shorter period of time.
Usually they say about a year.
It takes about a year.
That has been my experience as well.
You do come out of it and you just have to keep that journey going.
Keep walking forward and doing what's right and trying to figure out what this means, what it means to you, what it means about life, what it means about God, and spread those around and to teach those things to the people you teach.
One more from Sam.
Oh, Captain Mike Clavin.
In art and architecture school, in art and architecture.
This is weird.
In art and architecture school, I was constantly taught by leftist faculty that it's better to judge the process of design than critique the product of design itself.
That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
But it is leftism, right?
It's leftism.
Your intentions are what matter, not what you actually accomplish.
I saw many of my fellow students get away with horrible designs by justifying it with their process.
Of course you did.
One teacher told us that we could present our project as a blank sheet of paper as long as we can convince him that we thought long and hard about it.
Another architecture provider.
Well, you know what's wrong with this is the same thing that's wrong with leftism in general.
Leftism is the same way.
You say, well, my intentions were good.
It doesn't matter that Baltimore descended into chaos because I really meant well, you know.
And that's why I always quote the famous saying, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and how powerful the saying that is.
I mean, this is utter nonsense.
You don't do art for yourself.
Art is a form of communication.
You're trying to communicate something.
It doesn't come from you.
It is given to you and you are giving it to somebody else.
So what the hell difference does your process make?
What difference does it?
You know, let me give you an example of how deep this goes.
I believe that you should do a thing for its inner meaning.
You should do a thing for its inner worth, right?
So I approach my writing.
I don't approach my writing to make money, though I hope to make money.
I approach my writing to communicate beauty and delight and hopefully wisdom, right?
Not the wisdom that comes from me, the wisdom that comes through me into the writing.
I do it for that reason.
The guy next to me may do it just for money.
He may not care.
He just says, hey, I just do this for the lark and I can make a good money off it.
There's a big market for what I do, so I'm going to do it.
The guy next to me may be Shakespeare, and he's still going to write Shakespeare.
And I'm going to write what I write, which is not going to be as good as Shakespeare, though it's great.
It really is great.
You should try it.
But it's not going to be Shakespeare.
The difference is I'm going to be joyful because I know what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.
I'm going to be joyful.
He's going to be a cynic, but he's still going to be Shakespeare.
So it has nothing to do with the quality.
But the quality is what matters in the end, right?
You have to, to do it right, you have to do something that communicates what you're trying to communicate.
That's what art is.
What they're teaching you is nonsense.
It's nonsense.
The process may give you joy, and that's important, but it is nonsense that that's all that matters or that it should be judged on the process.
It's a way of getting out of your responsibility.
It's a way of getting out of your responsibility to do what's right.
Climate Panic Forecast00:03:03
The left does this all the time.
I mean, look at their crummy cities that they turn to cesspits of homelessness and poverty and crime.
And they say, yes, but you're racist because you don't believe the things that I believe.
It's nonsense.
All right.
Tickety-boo news.
I wanted to get to this yesterday, and I didn't have time, but it was a column in the Wall Street Journal next to my column in yesterday's Wall Street Journal.
Climate change has run its course.
This is by Stephen F. Hayward.
He's a resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California at Berkeley.
And he says, climate change is over.
No, I'm not saying the climate will not change in the future, that human influence on the climate is negligible.
I mean simply that climate change is no longer a preeminent policy issue.
All that remains is boilerplate rhetoric from the political class, frivolous nuisance lawsuits, and bureaucratic mandates on behalf of special interest renewable energy rent seekers.
He notices the way this issue has decayed, the way it has fallen apart as people started to realize that the price of fixing certain things was so high it would have essentially destroyed civilization.
And instead, it was used by the left as an umbrella under which to sell their policies.
He says a good indicator of why, this is great, this is what I love, a good indicator of why climate change as an issue is over can be found early in the text of the Paris Agreement.
The non-binding pact declares that climate action must include concern for gender equality, empowerment of women, and intergenerational equity, as well as the importance for some of the concept of climate justice.
Because you know that if you don't have gender equity, the sun gets hotter.
This is how, no, this is true.
This is a physical problem.
If you do not, if you are not a feminist, the sun gets hotter and hotter until everybody dies.
If you are a feminist, the sun cools down.
That's how that's the communication between people and the sun.
Also, human sacrifice helps.
So, in other words, this issue had become a vehicle for causing panic.
In panic, as Rahm Emanuel taught us, you don't let a crisis go to waste.
In panic, people will give up their freedoms.
That's what it was all about.
That doesn't mean, I actually believe, of course, we should take care of our environment.
Of course, we should follow the science and see what we have to do to keep the environment good, our climate working.
But think about it for just a minute.
They won't pay attention.
He says this in the article.
They won't pay attention to nuclear energy, which is so clean and so useful because it doesn't fit in with their green idea.
So all they do is attack fossil fuels, which we need to run a civilization.
So they're not serious about it.
Until they get serious about it, we don't have to have a serious response.
But ultimately, we will have to face the environment, make sure that the things we do do not destroy the planet.
Obviously, we all want that.
And by the way, I think we will do it once the leftists get out of the way.
I think the technology will come about and we will take care of it.
It's not that I don't think there are climate threats, but I don't think the climate movement will deal with them.
Facing The Environment00:00:55
That's what I'm saying.
I think they're just leftists spreading panic and creating crisis, so we'll surrender to what they want.
That's it.
All right.
We'll be back tomorrow.
We have Selena Zito, right?
Oh, excellent.
Selena Zito, she wrote The Great Revolt and about the Trump coalition, and we will be talking to her and so many other things.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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.