Ep. 523 – Trump Leaves the Elites Raving mocks Trudeau’s "Love Actually" snub and Trump’s Bieber mix-up while dissecting how his trade wars, Paris Accord exit, and NATO pressure expose elite hypocrisy—from De Niro’s Tony Awards rant to Harry Potter as anti-Trump propaganda. The show pivots to Pride Month, framing it as a coercive power grab disguised as tolerance, citing CrossFit CEO Glassman’s profanity-laced firing of a critic and comparing it to bakery discrimination cases. Suicide rates spike 25% since 1999 despite prosperity, the host argues, blaming cultural decay over antidepressants, insisting love—not pills—heals depression. The episode ends by linking progressive activism to spiritual decline, setting up John Miller’s critique of modern culture. [Automatically generated summary]
Canadian Prime Minister and floppy-haired cutie pie Justin Trudeau says his meeting with Donald Trump at G7 left him petulant to the point of being downright huffy.
At a press conference after their meeting, Trudeau said Trump made him so shirty, he just wanted to stamp his foot, and not in a good bangra dance sort of way like he did in India, but in a very, very snappish, I am not altogether pleased sort of way, which may even include him tossing his hair in a very waspish manner indeed.
Trudeau said he had prepared for his angry press conference by repeatedly watching the scene from Love Actually, in which British Prime Minister Hugh Grant tells off that nasty American president, Billy Bob Thornton, while all the British people look triumphant and the music swells.
Trudeau said he wished he could have some music swelling at his press conference too, and maybe even some Canadians looking triumphant, although he didn't want to take things too far.
When President Trump was asked to respond to the Prime Minister's remarks, Trump said he did not remember meeting with Trudeau, but he had enjoyed the song Love Yourself and thought Justin and Haley Baldwin made an attractive couple.
When told that was Justin Bieber, not Justin Trudeau, Trump responded, whatever, same difference.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clayland, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing hunky-dunky.
Shipshaw, tipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, the Clavenless weekend is over and I am back.
Wow, what a weekend I had.
I finished the sequel to Another Kingdom, so we're gonna, I'm gonna polish it up.
Take me a couple of weeks to polish it up, and then we'll get Knowles in here to record it.
And we should be up.
I hope he'll be up by September.
And Knowles is back from our honeymoon.
We'll have him on the show.
Ladies and gentlemen, got a lot going on here.
We're at Tuesday.
Tomorrow, we've got 7 p.m. Eastern.
We're doing a special live stream in honor of Father's Day with Jeremy Boring, the actual Daily Wire God King, descending to host a roundtable discussion with me and Knowles and Zoe Rachel will be there.
Is Ben Meon going to be there?
Is he going to be in the scene?
Bill will be there.
Oh, it is.
Okay.
He left his name off this thing.
Zoe Rachel will be there.
Nick Searcy.
We'll be discussing fatherhood in our society.
We'll be live streaming on Facebook and YouTube.
And if you're a Daily Wire subscriber, go to dailywire.com to submit live questions, which will be moderated by Alicia Krauss.
That's tomorrow, Tuesday, June 12th at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific.
And the conversation is coming up, which actually will be with Ben Shapiro Tuesday.
That's Tuesday in a week, June 19th, 5.30 p.m. Eastern, 2.30 p.m. Pacific.
And it'll answer all your questions sent in through Alicia Krauss.
The best thing about this is getting to hear Alicia read the questions.
The Q ⁇ A will scream live on YouTube and Facebook for everyone to watch, but only Daily Wire subscribers can ask Ben questions.
To submit your questions, log in to thedailywire.com, head to the conversation page to watch the live stream, type your question into the Daily Wire chat box to have it read and answered on the air.
You got to subscribe.
Again, it's lousy $10 a month, $100 for the whole year, and you can ask questions answered by Ben Shapiro Tuesday, June 19th at 5.30 p.m. Eastern, 2.30 p.m. Pacific.
Enjoy the conversation.
We've got a lot going on.
This is a happening place.
This is where it's all going on.
But come on over.
It'll be fun.
Meanwhile, meanwhile, you should be getting your blue apron food.
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All right, well, that's a lot of business we have to take care of.
Let Us Talk About Man Crates00:15:26
But now we can talk about the news.
Listen, here is, but my thought for the day, my thought for the day is that elites are savages.
You know the scene in the Tough Guy Mystery movie where all the elites are gathered at their mansion and they're having a party and the women are all dressed to the nines and flowing gowns and the guys are in tuxedos and everybody's being sophisticated.
And then the rumpled, crumpled detective comes in and he's wearing a battered raincoat and a hat, smoking a cigar maybe or a cigarette.
And he comes in and he reveals who the murderer is.
And finally, like the mask drops and we see these elites suddenly just spewing hatred.
Yes, of course I kicked the maid to death.
She was just the maid.
What do I care?
I'm the person.
This is happening in front of our eyes.
This is our elites reacting to Donald Trump.
Our elites are revealing that instead of being what they think they are, what they want us to think they are is these elevated, cultured, intellectual people who are looking out for a better world.
They just show that they have their own interests.
And if you roll a bowling ball down their alley and you break apart their interests, you make it harder for them to do business, harder for them to make money, harder for them to get respect, suddenly they turn into anti- It's like that scene.
Yes, I kicked her, I killed her with my bare teeth.
This is what they've become.
So we see this at the G7.
I mean, look, I'll raise a doubt that I have about Trump.
But in general now, I think we have to start to trust the Donald.
I think we do.
He destroyed the Iran deal and we heard, oh my gosh, this is the worst thing ever.
Obviously, it was a good idea.
He pulled out of the Paris Accord.
Now the sun is going to hit the earth because the gods will be angry.
Nothing.
It was fine.
That was a bad, bad deal.
He was right.
He told them they had to pay more for NATO.
And those are our allies.
And he was like, yeah, why aren't they paying for NATO?
Now they're paying more for NATO.
He did all this stuff.
We were told that his treatment of Kim Jong-un was going to destroy the world because the nukes would fly.
And now they're having this conference in Singapore.
They're actually having a meeting.
So it's time to start to think about the fact that maybe he knows what he's doing.
At least he knows what he doesn't want.
We know this so far.
He knows what he doesn't want.
He goes to the G7 and they're screaming, he insulted the Europeans and he didn't sign the communique.
If you read this communique, I noticed that nobody published the communique.
I had to hunt the communique down.
It's just this statement, this bland statement of European socialist values.
It's like we're all going to be European socialists.
I'm glad he didn't sign it.
You know, they can stuff their communique.
Like, first of all, why don't they go to their countries and find out why their women and girls are being raped while their police turn a blind eye?
I mean, if they're not going to defend the West, how do they become the representatives of the West?
You know, they put out this picture.
You know, you have those two pictures.
They put out a picture of that.
There's Obama at the G7.
We're all buddies.
He's got his arms around everybody.
And here's Trump at the G7, like facing them down.
It's like, I would rather have this guy standing up for me.
So I trust him.
I'm not sure yet that he has a plan.
I hope he has a button.
Basically, basically, all he's saying is that we pay high tariffs on their stuff, which is true, and they don't pay as high as we do, which I also think is true.
I'm not sure that's as true with Canada as it is with the EU, but it is true.
So he talks about, here's basically what he was saying.
Here's cut number seven, where he sums up what his problem is with everybody.
I think the relationships were outstanding.
But because of the fact that the United States leaders of the past didn't do a good job on trade, it's going to change.
I mean, it's not a question of, I hope it changes.
It's going to change, 100%.
And tariffs are going to come way down because people cannot continue to do that.
We're like the piggy bank that everybody's robbing and that ends.
We had extremely productive discussions on the need to have fair and reciprocal, meaning the same.
People can't charge us 270% and we charge them nothing.
That doesn't work anymore.
The relationship that I've had with the people, the leaders of these countries, has been, I would really rate it on a scale of zero to 10.
I would rate it at 10.
That doesn't mean I agree with what they're doing, and they know very well that I don't.
So we're negotiating very hard tariffs and barriers.
So, all right, so they're in this argument, and he says the relationships are good, but we're having a disagreement.
We're in a negotiation.
He leaves town, and Justin Bieber, you know, you know that it really is.
Remember that movie, Love Actually?
Hugh Grant is the British prime minister, and Billy Bob Thornton is the evil Bush, because it was evil Bush who was in office then.
We never had these movies when Obama was in office.
No, no, no.
It was always what a wise, wonderful person he was.
But then we have the evil Bush, and he comes in and he wants, I can't remember what he wanted U Grant to do, but U Grant stands up to him, and here's the triumphant scene.
The friend who bullies us is no longer a friend.
And since bullies only respond to strength, now onward, I will be prepared to be much stronger.
And the president should be prepared for that.
So Trudeau is obviously watching this again and again, waits for Trump to leave because he doesn't want Trump to knock his block off, right?
And then comes out with this kind of wimpy version of that.
The United States has moved forward with significant tariffs on our steel and aluminum industry, particularly to not take lightly the fact that it's based on a national security reason that for Canadians who either themselves or whose parents or community members have stood shoulder to shoulder with American soldiers in far-off lands and conflicts from the First World War onwards,
that it's kind of insulting.
And I highlighted that it was not helping in our renegotiation of NAFTA and that it would be with regret, but it would be with absolute certainty and firmness, that we move forward with retaliatory measures on July 1st, applying equivalent tariffs to the ones that the Americans have unjustly applied to us.
I have made it very clear to the president that it is not something we relish doing, but it is something that we absolutely will do because Canadians, we're polite, we're reasonable, but we also will not be pushed around.
You're a mean man white man.
You want to see a mean man white man.
So Trump now tweets, you know, what a weak guy.
He was all meek and mild while he was in the room with me and then he attacks me behind my back.
Peter Navarro goes on Fox.
He's the Trade Council guy.
And listen to Peter Navarro escalate this war of words in a big hurry.
There's a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door.
And that's what bad faith Justin Trudeau did with that stunt press conference.
That's what weak, dishonest Justin Trudeau did.
And that comes right from Air Force One.
Now, I'll tell you this.
To my friends in Canada, that was one of the worst political miscalculations of a Canadian leader in modern Canadian history.
I suspect that's probably true.
You just get the feeling there's just going to be like a hole in the floor where Trudeau used to be.
So the New York Times is running a story.
Trump is destroying the West.
He's negotiating.
He's negotiating with our allies who maybe got too used to thinking of us as daddy.
Maybe they got too used to thinking of us as daddy and now we have to take care of ourselves.
Maybe.
I'll get back to this in just a second.
But first, we got to talk about man crates.
Man, you got to say that man crates because it's Father's Day is coming up.
And as you know, when you ask your father what he wants for Father's Day, he says, he says, I don't know, whatever, whatever, you know, whatever.
And then you don't give him anything, you give him a tie, and he's hurt, right?
But if you give him man crates, he will be happy because it's not just the gift, it's the way it comes.
It comes in a gigantic crate, a wooden crate.
You can have it taped up with duct tape, is it true?
And then it comes with a crowbar.
You pry it open.
Some of your dads are going to want to pry it open with their teeth.
That's the way I like to do it.
Just rip into it, rip it to shreds.
But it's got great stuff like knife-making kits, whiskey appreciation.
That's the one I got.
It had a beautiful decanter in it and some great glasses.
It's for the dads who like finer things but like to rip open a crate before they get them.
Get your special Father's Day discount today at mancrates.com slash Clavin, K-L-A-V-A-N.
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Go today to mancrates.com slash Clavin, mancrates.com slash Clavin.
Great gift.
It really is.
They're really fun.
So at this point, I think it's a rational thing for us to say, well, let's, Trump has got a weird style.
He's a little bit over the top.
Let's see what he's doing here, right?
What has he ruined?
Whom has he oppressed?
The economy is great, right?
Peace.
ISIS is gone.
The judge appointments are good.
Israel is our friend again.
You know, what's the problem?
We're not going to war with Canada.
You know, we're in an argument with Canada.
That's okay.
What is the problem?
But the elites, what he's disturbing is he is disturbing the system by which the elites became elites and the system that keeps the elites in place.
And that's why this, I mean, what on earth is happening that these people are so angry?
Did you see the Tony's?
You know, the Tony's of the Broadway Play Awards.
Robert De Niro gets up at the Tonys.
I'm embarrassed for the guy.
A guy was a great actor in his day, you know.
This is his speech at the Tony's, and listen to the audience reaction.
I'm going to say one thing.
Trump.
It's no longer down with Trump.
It's Trump.
It's a rapturous standing ovation from these wealthy theater-going clowns.
I mean, you know, this is like, these are the people who save up to go to the theater.
People who save up to come over from Jersey, come in from Connecticut, come in from Long Island to see the theater because the tickets are so expensive.
They save up.
And basically, when you say that, you're telling every single person who voted for him, thinking, well, maybe he'll do some good things.
Maybe he'll do some.
You're telling every single one of them the same words.
It's not just Trump you're saying that to.
It's everybody who supports him, everybody who thinks he deserves respect as president of the United States.
You know, they interviewed this woman, Noma Dumazweni, who does the Harry Potter show.
Harry Potter classic bridge and tunnel show.
That's what they call it.
That means that the suburban people like to come in.
The sophisticated New Yorkers are supposedly going to, you know, see Denzel Washington do Eugene O'Neill, but the Bridge and Tunnel people are coming in to see Harry Potter.
Listen to what she says.
One thing that's surprising about Harry Potter is that even though it doesn't, it's not as overtly political, like something like Angels in America, I sort of feel like there are moments in it.
There are things that happen with he who may not, who must not be named, that have real resonance today, particularly in America.
Are you aware of that?
Do you feel that?
I really do believe that that's why this is resonating a lot at the moment.
London when it started, beautiful.
And there was a moment where we went, okay, this is the story we're telling.
But now, two to three years later, since we've opened in London, to be here, you go, actually, this story's getting deeper and deeper and deeper.
And we as all, us human beings, are all fighting to be connected, but especially to be seen.
If you're not seen or not heard, that's where dangerous stuff happens.
That's where people under the radar do very cruel things.
And that's what this play is about.
And it's about bringing things into the light, letting your light shine.
This is what JK has always been about.
Let the darkness out into the light.
And that's why I'm very proud to be here telling this story right now, because as you intimated, those things are very important.
Should the president come see the Harry Potter, Harry Potter, and the Christchild?
No.
Thank you.
Anybody else?
Yes.
Yeah.
Really?
Really?
First, you tell us, first of all, that's a London accent, I think.
So first, you're a foreigner on our soil telling us our president can't come to your lousy show.
So that's supposed to draw us.
I mean, what would it take for them to stand up and say, you know, I was given a gift.
These people were.
They were given tremendous gifts.
They have tremendous talent.
My gift is to entertain and delight you.
My gift does not give me any great insight into who you should vote for or what decisions you should make, what political decisions you should make based on your life.
I'm only here to entertain and delight you.
I have my opinions.
You have your opinions.
You know, I'm so glad you're delighted by my play and sit down and shut up.
What would it take?
What would it take?
Andrew Garfield, another good actor, he's in Angels in America.
Angels in America is a not bad play that has that gay people, you know, a lot of gay people in the theater, a lot of gay people involved in theater, a lot of gay people like to go to the theater.
Angels in America is this triumphant moment for gay people because it was this open gay play that arose out of the AIDS crisis.
If you watch the play, it's absurd.
Its thesis is absurd.
Its thesis is that Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy's secretly gay, vicious lawyer, was somehow, somehow his not coming out was somehow responsible for the AIDS crisis, as opposed to people going to bathhouses and sleeping with 22 people in a single night.
You know, maybe that had something to do with it.
No, it's because Roy Cohn was secretly gay.
And so Andrew Garfield gets up and gives this speech, you know, accepting this award.
He can't just make his thank you speech.
We are all sacred and we all belong.
So let's just bake a cake for everyone who wants a cake to be baked.
So what if I said, let's all be in a play about how wonderful Adolf Hitler was?
Let's bake a cake saying that Trump is a great guy, saying make America great again.
You know, why does he get to it?
Where did they determine that they have the right to say what gets expressed, what opinions are okay, what opinions are going to be canceled and censored?
You know, what is he talking about?
It's because he thinks, oh, I'm an actor, but you are just a cake baker.
That's not an art.
I am an actor.
You make cakes.
You don't have a right to express your feelings, your religious beliefs.
It's unbelievable.
They're even hoping, you know, John McCain, and he hate to go after John McCain at this point.
I know he's very ill and I wish him well and this is not a personal attack, but he tweets to our allies, right?
the G7 people.
Bipartisan majorities of Americans remain pro-free trade, pro-globalization, very questionable, and supportive of alliances based on 70 years of shared values.
Americans stand with you, even if our president doesn't, John McCain telling the Europeans that we stand with them rather than with our president.
I mean, how low can you go?
Pride Paradox00:15:43
Bill Maher is wishing for an economic collapse so we can get a Trump.
Listen to this.
this economy is going pretty well.
We have to, what?
You're, why?
Why is that funny?
It is going well for now.
For now, right.
That's my question.
Thank you.
That's my question.
I feel like the bottom has to fall out at some point.
And by the way, I'm hoping for it because I think one way you get rid of Trump is a crashing economy.
So please bring on the recession.
Sorry if that hurts people, but it's either room for a recession or you lose your democracy.
There's a guy who doesn't know what it's like to go home and not have a job and not be able to give your kids things and not be able to pay for things.
You know, I mean, what is he talking about?
What are they all talking about?
What is happening in this country right now, aside from the fact that Trump is obstreperous, what is happening that is making them so—I put together this montage because the left is always talking about civility.
I just want to play a montage of just these are things I picked out at random and asked the guys here to put together of the way they talk about the president of the United States.
I think he came off like an idiot today.
He is like a child.
I'm going to say it very bluntly.
He's mentally ill.
Racist.
Racist.
A wild animal.
It's either he is so stupid that he doesn't understand.
No, no, it's possible.
We got Donald Trump in the first place as a punishment for not being good enough citizens.
Trump.
Trump.
It's only because he is spoiling the assumptions that they live by and that make them rich, safe, elites that make them admired.
That's what they're so angry about.
It is nothing that he has done.
They cannot cite a single thing that he has done that has endangered this democracy.
Hey, I have to talk about, you know, I have no sentimentality about celebrities.
When celebrities die, I don't get choked up.
It doesn't reach me.
And one of the reasons is it's not that I don't miss them.
It's not that I didn't admire and respect them.
But I know that they have family members who are actually in grief and who will be grieving past this day.
So I don't like to get all elaborately sentimental about it.
I have to tell you that I actually choked up when Charles Krauthammer sent out a letter saying that he only has weeks to live.
He's been off the Fox News special report panel where I used to tune him in just to find out what I thought.
I would just tune in.
What's my opinion?
Oh, here's Charles Krauthammer.
Now I'll know.
And he wrote this lovely, stoical letter, very much in keeping with his personality, saying, I leave this life with no regrets.
It was a wonderful life, full and complete with the great loves and great endeavors that make it worth living.
I'm sad to leave, but I leave with the knowledge that I lived the life that I intended.
You know, it's funny.
I remember standing with my pal Crowder, Steve Crowder, when we were both at PJ TV and we were watching him on TV.
And Crowder turned to me and said, why does he sit so funny?
And I said, well, he's virtually a quadriplegic.
And Crowder didn't know, and a lot of people didn't know.
I mean, he never talked about it.
He never asked for pity for it.
He never asked people to admire him for it.
He wrote about it a little bit in his book of columns, but he really just went about the, it was just a tragic accident.
He did something that I have done is he dove into the wrong side of a pool.
I did that.
I broke my nose one of them many times.
I broke my nose, but a little change in direction, same thing could have happened.
It's just a tragic, tragic accident.
He never played off it.
The reason I feel so connected to the guy, though I only met him once, I introduced him at a function once.
But the reason I feel connected to the guy is when I came back from England and I started to realize, oh my gosh, I've become a political conservative, I started to look for voices that I could admire and respect.
And they didn't have to say things that I agreed with.
Krauthamer believed a lot of things I don't believe.
He was pro-abortion.
You know, he had probably more interventionist idea of American power than I have.
But that didn't matter.
All I cared was that they cared about freedom, they cared about liberty, and that they had integrity.
And he had integrity.
He had grace.
He didn't scream at people.
He didn't have to, you know, he didn't have to talk in a melodramatic way to make his points.
Even, and, you know, the one time I remember strongly disagreeing with him was when Obama and Hillary were in a primary and he said, no, there's no way a guy named Barack Hussein Obama is going to be the president of the United States.
And I remember saying, oh, yes, he's going to win.
Don't you understand?
But the reason he thought that was because he thinks more highly of the American people than perhaps we deserve.
And I always thought when he got his predictions wrong, it was always because he had elevated the people above what they sometimes do, because sometimes they do dumb things like electing Barack Obama.
Just a great voice who really helped me find my voice in politics.
And look, it's a wonderful life that he made out of sheer courage and grace and skill and talent.
And that's a beautiful, beautiful thing.
And I'm sorry to see him go.
All right.
We got Michael Knowles coming up.
We've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Oh, but you know, I should tell you before you go that you can now get us on Amazon Alexa and the Google Home device.
If you use one of these virtual assistants, you can get the Andrew Clavin show with a simple voice command once you enable the skill on Alexa or ask Google to talk to the show.
For more information, check out our pinned tweets on Facebook and Twitter.
Come on over to thedailywire.com, subscribe so you can be in the conversation and ask us questions on Father's Day special tomorrow.
And then we'll have Michael Knowles.
Knowles is coming, is back from Hawaii.
He was in, what, I guess, Wauke, celebrating his wedding, and I guess trying to keep it.
I guess it was good to be on an island so your wife couldn't escape.
Oh, you're back.
And you got a lay.
I think it's always good to get laid on your honeymoon.
It's very important to get laid on your honeymoon.
It's really, you know, Drew, it was really something.
You're right.
I came straight from Waikiki.
I applied a lot of 70 SPF sunscreen and I still became transracial.
You are transracial.
I got to say, you could identify as a black woman, I think.
In that shirt, I think.
Well, I use the honeymoon discount a lot.
I'd go to every restaurant and bar and I'd say, you know, I'm on my honeymoon.
Give me free drinks or whatever.
So maybe if I can get more privilege points for that, I'll do it.
But I've learned a lot about marriage, you know.
Oh, yes, now you're a married man.
I'm a married man.
I've been married for nine days now.
And you guys would always give me advice on marriage.
You and Ben and the God King.
But I finally realized something about marriage.
I've been married a full nine days now.
And I just didn't realize that what marriage is really about is people giving you a lot of presents and then having dinner in a tuxedo and then floating around on a beach.
That is the real meaning of marriage.
That's what marriage is.
I'm glad you found that.
You know, I noticed that all the guys were giving you advice and they were giving you this very good but very complex and deep advice.
And my advice was don't sleep with other women.
That was right.
You know, it's very good.
It's very good to go to a beach for your honeymoon, I realize.
Because you get married, there's this rush of adrenaline, you're so happy, it's so beautiful.
And then you go to a place where you actually sit and you wave goodbye to every other bikini.
You say, no more to you, no more to you, goodbye.
See you later.
Thanks for the memories.
Yeah.
And you say, no more.
You're so much luckier than you deserve, though.
You could easily spend the next 60 years going like, I don't know how that happened.
Grace abounds.
It's the mycological argument for the existence of God is sweet little Elisa, Saint Elisa Knowles.
That is an excellent.
That is the sixth argument for existence.
So you come back and it's Gay Pride Day, which I think is a, you know, I think it is just to keep you, just to remind you that they want to be married to each other.
That's right.
And what I'm missing, too, you know, also to remind me.
It is.
It's Gay Pride Month, actually.
June is Gay Pride.
It's a gay pride month.
They get a whole month to be proud.
Well, but I think it's actually gay pride.
I think it's really gay pride all the time at this point.
Because I looked, I said, wait a sec, wasn't like last month Gay Pride Week and Gay Pride this?
And I looked on Wikipedia.
I took a list of all of the gay pride events.
And there are major national gay pride events every month of the year, January through December.
Did somebody really?
There are.
The reason that June was selected is because of the Stonewall riots in New York.
A bunch of cops tried to shut down an illegal bar.
They didn't have a liquor license, but it was a gay bar, so it provoked all of these riots, and it's credited with starting the gay pride movement.
And it's amazing to see how that movement has transformed.
I've always wondered why pride was chosen as the emblem of the gay rights movement.
This bugs me too, yeah.
It doesn't, you know, because when this began, one of the guys who started the gay pride movement, he actually used the phrase, gay is good.
And this was a play on Stokely Carmichael's Black is Beautiful.
At the same time, 68, I think it was, gay is good.
And there's an argument to be had there, right?
The argument is, you people say that this behavior is bad morally, and I think it's good morally, and here's why.
And I'm going to explain why it's good and why it's better to help.
Perfectly fair argument.
Totally fair argument.
There is no argument that pride is good.
You know, I have to tell you this.
I live in West Hollywood, which is to gay people what the jewelry district is to Hasidic Jews, okay?
I mean, and when I say that, I'm not actually joking.
You walk through it, when you walk through parts of, or drive through, nobody walks anywhere, when you drive through parts of West Hollywood, virtually everyone is gay.
There's rainbow flags everywhere with the city flag and the country flag and all this.
So I'm driving by a church that I often go to, and there are rainbow ribbons coming out.
And I thought, like, okay, you know, listen, I know this church, and they feel that, you know, homosexuality is fine.
And it might have been Joseph's Technical or Dream Code.
You're not sure.
But pride is one of the seven deadly sins, right?
I mean, it's not the gay, it's the pride.
And then I drive past another church, and they've got a big rainbow flag and says, affirmation.
And I thought, oh, yeah, I remember Christian affirmation, except not.
Exactly.
You know, St. Thomas, following the lead of St. Gregory, said that pride is, please pardon the pun, the queen of all sins.
Because it's the first sin.
It's the sin that causes Adam to fall and mankind to fall out of the world.
And Satan to fall.
It causes Lucifer to fall.
That's right.
It is the MacDaddy of all sins because it causes all of the other ones.
And just to celebrate pride really doesn't make a lot of sense.
And it leads to all of these bad things.
If you look, because you actually do see the spirit of pride in this modern movement.
There was this CrossFit employee, ironically a legal researcher at CrossFit.
His name's Russell Berger.
And he came out and he said, you know, I don't celebrate pride.
I think pride is a sin.
I don't think CrossFit should celebrate pride or force its employees to or force its clients to.
And so what do you think happened?
And one of the reasons he said that is he said the pride movement is so intolerant of other views.
It's really bad.
It has all of these bad implications.
So the CEO of CrossFit, Greg Glassman, called Berger a zealot and said that he, quote, needs to take a dose of shut the F up, and then he fired him.
Really?
He fired him.
To prove him, to prove how tolerant they are.
How tolerant they are.
You know, this is, you know, I feel a little bad about this because I've always been kind of pro-gay rights and feel like gay people should be left alone.
Yeah, look at my shirt.
Yeah.
Exactly.
That is why we let you in here with that shirt.
But these guys, they give gay people a bad name.
I mean, this thing with the cake in the cake baker in Colorado and people saying, what do you mean he can say that I don't want to make this cake?
It's unbelievable the oppression and the intolerance.
It's funny.
There are two ways to look at this.
If gay people have the right to be gay because people have the right to do what they want.
They have the right to do what they want.
But if they have the right to do what they want, then certainly I have the right to disagree with them or dislike them or not celebrate them.
I mean, by the logic that gives them their rights, you have the right not to approve them, the same logic.
So essentially what they were saying, they pretended they were saying that they want to be free, but what they were really saying is you've had the power, now we want it.
That's right.
And pride doesn't have a lot of logic.
And coming out of this intersectional conglomeration of left-wing ideas, it really isn't about reason.
It's about I'm going to have the power now.
I'm going to force you into submission.
And there's a real irony here because you see the baker, you see that florist in Washington, you see this CrossFit employee, you see all of this happening.
And the trouble with pride is people rarely know when it's affecting them.
You know, if Adam knew that he was falling for it, he probably would have still been in the garden now, and Satan would still be in heaven.
It's very insidious.
And ironically now, this pride movement, this intolerant pride movement, has become the mainstream culture.
Every company is doing it.
Every company is forcing its employees basically to deal with it and its clients to deal with it.
And if you contradict that orthodoxy, you will be ruined.
Your livelihood will be ruined.
Your business will be ruined.
Your reputation will be ruined.
And it's this incredible inversion from the days of Stonewall.
You've seen the tables completely turn and it's not a pretty thing to watch.
It really is not.
And we've lost the plot.
You know, it's funny because you think what they're really essentially saying is that we have the right to tell you what to believe.
But they don't ask themselves the question, well, who has the state?
The state has the right.
You know, your corporation has the right.
Are these the things you believe in?
Do you believe that Donald Trump, who is the head of our federal state, do you believe he has the right to tell you what to think?
Do you believe that the corporations, those evil corporations we always heard so much about, that they have the right to tell you what to think?
It is an amazing thing that they think they can choose it on a piece-by-piece basis, on a case-by-case basis, but they don't realize that once they sacrifice the principle, you've lost your right to free speech.
And it's such shallow thinking.
You play that Andrew Garfield clip of everyone should bake cakes and all this, that when Andrew Garfield bakes me a cake frosted with Robert De Niro's tears, delicious tears, then I will believe he's anything other than a hypocrite.
But of course, that's what we're getting out of that side.
It really, it really is true.
And it's sad, you know, because I do believe that the majority, I believe that most of the gay people I've ever met are natural conservatives.
You know, they work hard.
They want to be, and these are the people I work with in the business and all that.
You know, they just want their home life and all this.
I don't want them picked on.
I don't want them oppressed.
I don't want them insulted or bullied, anything like that.
But I do want people to be able to have their religious beliefs.
What is so hard about that?
And it really does become a case of them against Christianity because they haven't got the guts to go after Islam.
So they're going to go after Christianity where they basically say, yes, we love you, but you shouldn't be doing this.
You don't see a lot of Methodists hurling gay people off of roofs in Ohio.
That's not something that really happens.
The Methodist method, yeah.
The Methodist method.
So it's very, it's just, it is a really shallow attack.
And I totally agree.
There is such a natural conservatism to a lot of the gay people that I know.
But it's because of that, its position in this intersectional web of chaos and destruction.
I think it's being really wedged in and political gay activism, political pride activism, I think, has really, really hurt whatever movement there could be for acceptance and being nice to everybody, including gay people.
Over-Prescribing Antidepressants?00:09:06
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right, what are you doing in your show today?
So today we're talking all about boys to men.
I have gone from being a boy.
Yes, you have.
I'm now a man in some sense.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, and nobody's getting married, so that qualifies me for something.
I have to tell you, Knowles, while you were away, I actually remembered that you existed and was thinking about it.
I thought, gosh, I actually respect him for doing this.
I may change my entire opinion of him.
I know.
This is the one thing.
But it's really, there's a lot of fodder today because you've got everything from boys like Justin Trudeau to men like Donald Trump or Charles Kratheimer for that matter.
So we will cover the gamut of manliness.
All right, good enough.
I'm a shirt.
Just to mix things up a little bit.
All right.
I'll talk to you soon.
Back to Michael.
I know.
What am I going to do with this newfound respect for Michael Knowles?
It's just going to change my entire attitude toward life.
All right.
Our crappy culture.
So speaking of really crappy things, I mean, here is here's a crappy thing.
There have been two recent celebrity suicides.
And as I said before, I don't get sentimental about celebrities.
And these happened to be two celebrities I had no emotional connection to at all.
Kate Spade was the designer of purses mostly.
And I knew her because whenever my wife would ask for a purse, I knew that that was the first one I should look up because she liked her purses and all that.
Anthony Burdain, you have to be a food guy.
I wasn't a food guy, but I heard I have friends who just loved him, really smart friends who just thought his show was absolutely delightful and that his attitude was really delightful.
And so here are two people who have contributed to the culture.
They both of them had young children, I think one 13-year-old daughter, one 11-year-old daughter, and they killed themselves.
And that tells you something.
I mean, it's not always true that what celebrities do represents the wider culture, but in this case it does.
I mean, here are two worthwhile lives.
All lives are potentially worthwhile.
Here are two people who thought, as suicidal people do, they thought that, oh, people would be better off without me.
That's just not true.
Their children are going to suffer with this for the rest of their lives, and they're not better off without them.
But the point is that it represents something that is going on, at least in American culture, where suicides have skyrocketed 25% in the years between 1999 and 2016.
And that doesn't mean that that is higher than it's ever been.
It has been as high before, but it does mean that something is wrong, okay?
If they told me that, which is also true, when they say that depression has risen, that's also true, that may not mean anything because it may just mean, oh, well, people are more comfortable reporting depression or the definition of depression has changed or more people just use that word when they mean they're sad.
It's a very hard thing to parse whether people are actually more depressed than they used to be.
But it's not hard to parse whether people are killing themselves if the rate of suicide goes up.
That tells you that something is going wrong.
Now, when that happens, there's no shortage of people who want to tell you what's wrong with society.
I mean, this is the thing.
People make their living telling you the apocalypse is coming, that the environment is going down the drain, that climate is going to be destroyed, and something is terribly wrong with our society.
The God people always say we've turned away from God.
The family people always say our families are falling apart.
And people who don't like technology will say the internet is making us more isolated.
And the lefties are always saying, well, we need more government programs to deal with mental health issues.
All of those things may be true, or may be partly true, or may have something true in them, okay?
But they're awfully big ideas when you're talking about an entire culture.
Because the fact is, in many ways, we're living in a golden age.
I mean, you sit, you know, I was sitting on a friend's balcony over the weekend looking out over the, you know, not over Beverly Hills, looking out over Los Angeles, and I could see a Trader Joe's like down below me.
And I was thinking, I can get in my car and in two minutes go buy some of the finest food available in a package, bring it back up here and cook it and eat like the Pharaoh never ate.
Like Pharaoh never could dine the way I can dine by taking out a plastic card and spending just a couple of bucks.
And it's unlikely that that Trader Joe's is going to go away, leaving us in a state of famine.
We're living in many ways in a golden age.
But I think we can say something about this.
And I say this, I want to say this as somebody, I've written about this in my memoir, The Great Good Thing.
And I've lived two lives, as I've said many times, at least two lives.
Up until the age of 28, I was a twisted, sick, depressed human being.
I was in terrible, terrible mental state.
And it culminated with my seriously contemplating suicide.
And I was cured by a psychiatrist.
And that doesn't happen very much.
This guy was a brilliant guy.
I was motivated.
I did not want to be an unhappy person.
And I was cured and became more and more joyful from that moment on.
My life has just been, it's annoying.
I mean, everybody who knows me is deeply annoyed by the level of joy that I experience in life.
And especially since I found God, that also just increased that.
After that, I worked for a couple of years, volunteered for a couple of years on suicide hotlines.
And so I talked to people, and I think I can say that I was an effective counselor.
And here's what I want to point out.
So I put that forward as my credentials to talk about this.
Here's what I want to point out.
At the same time that our suicide rate has been climbing, the use of antidepressants has also been skyrocketing.
It is up 65%, the use of antidepressants between 1999 and 2014.
Now, antidepressants were really just becoming worthwhile around that time.
So that may be overstated.
But still, at the same time, the use of antidepressants was going up, the rate of suicide was going up.
Here's what I'm not saying.
Whenever you talk about this, you have to tell people what you're not saying because people hear what they want to hear.
I'm not saying that these drugs are useless.
I'm not saying they never helped anybody.
I'm not saying they can't be carefully used and bring people out of their depression, help them get therapy.
What I am saying is it seems to me that we have evidence that they are being vastly, vastly over-prescribed.
And when they are prescribed, they are not being prescribed in tandem with the human interventions that actually are what solves depression.
Because here is my observation, having been depressed and having been cured, it is love that cures you.
It is love that cures you.
You know, my psychiatrist was a brilliant man.
He had a lot of brilliant ideas.
He had great therapeutic technique.
But when I looked back over it after I got out, and I looked back on it, I realized I didn't agree with a lot of his ideas.
It wasn't the insights that I had.
It was my love for him as a mentor.
And I believe he returned that love because we were very similar kinds of people as a sympathetic soul.
He was the only mentor I've ever had in my life.
And it was that that really saved me.
Of course, the love of my wife, the love of my children, the love of friends.
I think when I was talking to people on hotlines, I was acting out of love.
And by that, I mean Christian love, which is acting on our common heritage in the heart of God, that we all live in the heart of God.
We are all of infinite worth to God.
If you act that out on your life, you're expressing love.
That doesn't mean just feeling affection for somebody.
The problem with these drugs is that they represent a strain of scientific thinking that we are chemistry sets that can be adjusted to taste and not spirits.
And that thinking is incorrect.
It is simply wrong.
We are spiritual beings.
We are the people we think we are.
We are the Andrew and the Joe and the Michael Knowles, that person that we live with every day who has memories and dreams and hopes and desires.
We are that person.
And that person can only be reached by the love of another person.
When they carefully use drugs, when they carefully prescribe drugs in order to get you out of a sloth so deep that you can't react to love, that can be really useful.
But it's the love, the love of people and the love of God that cures you.
That does not mean, here's another thing I'm not saying, that does not mean it's anybody else's responsibility when you take your life.
Only you can decide not to take your life.
But it means that whether you are prescribed drugs or not, it is the love of therapists, of volunteers on hotlines, of brothers, of friends, of wives and husbands.
It is that that's going to save you.
And do not let a doctor tell you that he just gets your prescription right.
It's going to cure you.
That's just not true.
You have got to find links to other human beings to beat this thing.
And I really do believe we can beat it.
And I think that we need to just re-examine the way we use pills.
All right.
Tomorrow is Tuesday.
Not mailbag yet, but we have a guest.
Who's our guest?
John Miller.
John Miller.
What's that?
We're finally going to play.
Andrew Klavan Show Teasers00:00:45
There's an interview we did a week or two ago.
John is a really terrific critic talking about literature.
And we will have that tomorrow.
Be there then.
I'm here now.
And I will also be there then.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
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.