Ep. 528 – What About the Children??? mocks MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Gospel Hour for weaponizing biblical verses against immigration, framing Trump’s border policies as lawful enforcement while dismissing media comparisons to Nazi camps as hyperbolic. The host praises Ted Cruz’s Protect Kids and Parents Act but accuses Democrats of exploiting child separations for politics, defending laws as tools for equality—like smartphones or LeBron James under the law. Shifting to journalism, they critique "rotten" media fabricating EPA scandals while praising John Miller’s literary work, from Lovecraft’s existential horror to Silva’s morally complex thrillers. The episode ends with a scathing rebuttal of feminist op-eds like Why Can’t We Hate Men?, arguing systemic male contributions outweigh patriarchy’s harms—concluding with "Pound sand." [Automatically generated summary]
Not satisfied with restoring the economy, destroying ISIS, and completely crushing our dishonest left-wing media, Donald Trump has now begun to perform actual miracles.
That's right.
The president has maneuvered MSNBC into searching the Bible for advice on how to run the country.
Yes, using his magic power to plunge the left into the darkness of its own mindless rage, Trump somehow induced leftist Muslim reporter Ali Velshi to make the argument that the words of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, should override American law when it comes to immigration.
Sticking with the spirit of what would Jesus do, we actually did dig through the Bible to find passages that lent themselves to the current border practice of separating migrant children from their parents.
And I want to begin with Matthew chapter 19, verse 14.
But Jesus said, suffer little children and forbid them not to come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.
In the wake of this miracle transformation of a leftist Muslim into a right-wing evangelical Christian, President Trump says he now has plans to feed starving multitudes using only a single Big Mac and a side of fries, while the media tries to prove the multitudes weren't as big as he said they were.
He'll also calm storms at sea using only the best words, and he'll make Democrats pro-life by suddenly announcing his full support for abortion.
Actually, that could work.
Trump told Fox and Friends, quote, my miracles are the best miracles, and it's not just me saying it.
Many, many people have said, my miracles are great, unquote.
Meanwhile, MSNBC has announced its new show, the Rachel Maddow Gospel Hour.
According to a network press release, the lesbian Michael Knowles lookalike will, quote, use this holy hour to rail against homosexuality as being out of keeping with the teachings of Jesus, whoever he is.
Unquote.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Hooray for Stamps!00:02:40
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are wingy, 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, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right.
Remember, it is mailbag day tomorrow, and you know the drill.
Go on the dailywire.com, hit the podcast button, hit the Andrew Clavin podcast, hit the mailbag, and ask your question about anything you want.
Answers guaranteed correct will change your life for the better.
Yeah.
But what you got to subscribe to do it.
And once you subscribe, you can also be in the conversation, which is today, this afternoon at 9 at 5.30 p.m. Eastern, 2.30 p.m. Pacific.
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Come on.
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But the good thing is you get to hear your questions asked by the lovely Alicia Krauss.
The Q ⁇ A will stream live on YouTube and Facebook for everyone to watch, but only subscribers can ask Ben questions at dailywire.com.
Check out the pinned comments on this video for more information and join Ben this afternoon in the conversation.
Finally, you may ask yourself, how come I'm always so upbeat?
It's because I don't have to go to the post office.
I love the post office, but you want, just like everybody else, I just don't have time to get there.
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With stamps.com, you can access all the amazing services of the post office right from your desk 24-7 when it's convenient to you.
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And it's fun, too.
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This is an amazing moment.
If you have been listening to the show, I told you this was coming.
Now I'm telling you it's here.
And tomorrow I'll told you, I'll have told you, I'll told you that I told you.
Okay?
This is the way the press works.
Money Talks, Lebron Lies00:15:01
All the fake scandals, all the fake hysteria, all the shouting over things that matter.
Oh, Donald Trump pulled the Martin Luther King bust from the White House.
Oh, no, he didn't.
Never mind.
You know, the correction that goes on page 112 after the scandal, so-called, goes on page one.
Donald Trump said that there are nice, great people in the Nazis.
Never said it.
It never happened.
But the whole Russia collusion, that's the perfect one.
The Russia collusion also never happened.
Just a constant drumbeat of hysteria to build and build the tension and the sense that something is wrong, that something terrible has happened.
And then finally, finally, they get their hands on something that has some kind of emotional valence, some kind of emotional truth, even if they're not telling the truth about it.
And they think, now, now we got them.
This is a turning point.
Everything that happens after this depends on how Donald Trump acts right now.
And if you don't believe me, you got to go back to 2005.
You probably don't remember Hurricane Katrina.
Big deal, exactly the same thing.
With George W. Bush, they had the same kind of scandals.
Oh, he lied about there being WMD in weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Well, he didn't lie.
He used the same intelligence that everybody else had.
And all the Democrats said the same thing.
We need regime change.
And when he went into Iraq to have regime change, suddenly it was like, oh, he lied.
There are no WMDs.
The Valerie Plame scandal, I won't go into it now, is utter nonsense, complete nonsense.
Had a special prosecutor investigating that.
Big deal.
It was utter nonsense.
But then Hurricane Katrina hit.
Okay, and just so you remember, Hurricane Katrina was a disaster in New Orleans and all along that southern coast.
New Orleans was run by corrupt Democrats for like a hundred years.
Every now and again, a Republican would wander through, but mostly the term for governor and mayor of New Orleans, governor of Louisiana and mayor of New Orleans, was a couple of years in office and then a couple of years in prison.
They were absolutely corrupt, the Democrats, and they would funnel money, any federal money they got, they would spend on their own patronage, and they didn't put it into the levees where a lot of it was supposed to go.
The storm hit, the levees broke, the city flooded.
It was a disaster.
People were drowning.
People were out of homeless.
Terrible.
Whose fault is this after 100 years of Democrat governance?
George W. Bush's.
George W. Bush called the governor of Louisiana and said, you want help with this?
And she said, no, no, no, it's fine.
And then George W. Bush, everything that happened there was the fault of W and the Republicans, and the administration cracked.
Here is a montage just to show you how they treated George W. Bush for, I guess he blew too hard and he caused the storm and then the levees collapsed, which he had nothing to do with.
And here's their reporting on it.
If the majority of the hardest hit victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans were white people, they would not have gone for days without food and water, forcing many to steal for mere survival.
Their bodies would not have been left to float in putrid water.
They would have been rescued and relocated a hell of a lot faster than this, period.
We've repeatedly given tax cuts to the wealthiest and left our most vulnerable American citizens to basically fend for themselves.
And once again, Bush finds the photo op.
Some black folks to hug, some white men to bond with.
For years, we have cut our taxes, cut our taxes, and let the infrastructure throughout the country go.
And this is just the first of a number of other crumbling things that are going to happen.
Did government neglect turn a natural disaster into a human catastrophe?
And was it rooted in racism?
George Bush doesn't care about black people.
The president's image of compassion was shaky to begin with, even though he calls himself a compassionate conservative.
Bill Clinton felt your pain.
George Bush flew over it.
This is inarguably, inarguably a failure of leadership from the top of the federal government.
How is this happening in the United States?
And the other refrain was, had this been Nantucket, had this been Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, how many choppers would it...
And the administration cracked.
They basically did not come out and defend themselves until the day Bush left office when he finally pushed back, when he finally pushed back.
Now, Donald Trump is enforcing the laws of the border.
And they're calling this, what do they call it, no tolerance or no, what is the word they use?
Zero tolerance policy.
Zero tolerance policy is enforcing the law.
It has nothing to do with zero tolerance.
It has nothing to do with zero.
It has nothing to do with tolerance.
It is just the rule of law.
They are just enforcing the law.
And we've got these people coming over.
They use children to get through.
Some of them are real families.
And it is tragic.
We're not throwing these children under the bus here.
That's not the point.
I'm just saying that all we're doing is enforcing the law at the border.
Listen to the way they have picked up on this because they think they've got their Katrina moment going.
Well, the images are just those of concentration camps, families being cut apart.
I know children are being marched away to showers.
I know they're being marched away to showers.
Or they're being told they are, just like the Nazis had said that they were taking people to showers and then they never came back.
Look, bottom line, Donald Trump increasingly looks like Hitler in Nazi Germany.
He's looked like concentration.
It's not unusual punishment, John.
I said this yesterday, but increasingly Donald Trump is turning this nation into Nazi Germany and turning these into concentration camps.
What's happening is very American in that this is how the country was founded.
This is what happened 76 years ago to Japanese Americans in internment camps.
Now, look, I know we're not Nazi Germany, all right?
But there is a commonality there.
I know it would be controversial, but I felt a warning flare.
You're so concerned about what's going on.
And all of us are so concerned.
We see these heartbreaking images, and it's so, so awful.
So this is causing panic on the right.
And you see the Wall Street Journal, you know, these people who don't understand what's at stake, who don't understand that the playbook, this is not about the children of the border.
It's not about the children of the border.
We can fix that.
That needs to be fixed, and we can fix it.
It's not about that.
It is about undermining the administration.
And it's about seizing this moment.
This is what everything they've done, all the lies they've told, all the panic they've created, all the disaster scenarios that didn't pan out.
This is what they were waiting for.
I told you they were going to do this, and they're doing it.
And you watch the right.
Bill O'Reilly today, and we love Bill O'Reilly.
I'm not attacking him personally, but he sends out a tweet.
Well, you know, the administration is right to enforce the law, but they can't stand up against these crying children.
They'll be destroyed.
And the Wall Street Journal is saying, keep saying this new Trump policy.
It's not a new Trump policy to separate children from their parents.
That's what they want you to think.
It's a new Trump policy to enforce the law.
They have to separate the children when they put the parents in prison, when they incarcerate them.
They have to separate the children.
That's what they're doing.
So they're just following the law.
Now, let's pause here for a minute to talk about why this matters.
You know, we keep using this phrase, the rule of law, and it sounds heartless.
It sounds mean.
It sounds like I don't care about these children, and I do, and I'll get to that in a minute.
Here's why the rule of law matters.
This is a cell phone.
This is a smartphone, okay?
I'm holding it up if you're listening.
This is a smartphone.
It is a tool.
It's a tool for doing something.
With it, I can get on the internet.
I can talk to people.
I can do research.
I can do anything I want with this amazing instrument.
What if Nancy Pelosi came along and said, oh my God, the children are suffering because Clavin has this phone.
Get rid of the phone.
We'll still be able to talk to each other.
We'll still, you know, it's about heart.
It's about feeling.
It's about compassion.
It's about Jesus.
Get rid of the phone and we'll still be able to talk to each other.
Well, of course, you know, that's nonsense.
That's a tool.
That's a tool for communicating.
Without that tool, I'm just shouting at people, right?
Without that tool, I can't get on the internet.
The law is a tool in this country for equality and freedom.
The law, the rule of law is our tool for equality and freedom.
You cannot throw it away and have your equality and your freedom any more than you can throw away that phone and still get online in the palm of your hand, okay?
Here's how it works.
I'll use LeBron James because I know it drives the left mad whenever I use LeBron James.
LeBron James is privileged.
He has stuff I don't have.
I have exactly the same amount of desire and drive to be a pro basketball player that he does, but he got born with the talent.
He got lucky, so he's got millions more dollars than I have.
He plays sports.
He's famous.
He's got all this stuff that I don't have.
If LeBron James does something really bad, beats up somebody, say, if I beat up somebody, we go before a judge.
The rule of law is supposed to be the same for both of us.
That's the way that we are equal.
That is the way we are equal, and it's the only way that equality can be preserved.
Once you start to say, well, you know, LeBron James, I kind of dig him.
I watched his games and Clavin, I don't know who he is, you know, so let's put Clavin in jail.
But, you know, use some heart, let's have some compassion.
Once the rule of law falls apart, we're no longer equal.
Now LeBron James's money, his luck, his privilege overrides me and my fair treatment.
Only by obeying the rule of law do we have equality.
What about freedom?
Freedom is the same thing, right?
You're free if the law, we elect representatives.
Our representatives make the law.
These guys represent us.
That's why they're called representatives.
They represent us.
So they go and they make the law on our behalf, right?
If that law is just thrown aside, is disobeyed because somebody at MSNBC thinks it's not nice, then we have lost our power through our representatives.
When Barack Obama said, I am not going to support the Defense of Marriage Act.
We're simply not going to prosecute people who violate the Defense of Marriage Act.
He became king.
He's king now.
The laws that my representatives passed don't matter anymore.
You don't like the Defense of Marriage Act?
Override it.
Veto it.
Have your representatives go to Congress, get rid of it, get rid of the law.
That's how you do it.
That's how it works.
If they're not doing it, you are not free.
If they're not enforcing the law, so it's hilarious.
It's hilarious to see the people who enforce the law saying, what do you do?
This is incredible.
You're enforcing these laws.
How can you do that?
Change the law.
It's up to you.
So if you want to see whether these guys are serious, I mean, because they do not want to help these children, they just want this moment.
They just want the Hurricane Katrina moment.
Ted Cruz came out and he said, you're right, this is terrible.
Here's a law that we can pass.
Here's Ted Cruz.
All of us who are seeing these images of children being pulled away from moms and dads in tears, we're horrified.
This has to stop.
I am this week introducing legislation, the Protect Kids and Parents Act, that will mandate that kids must stay with their parents, and it will also expedite the proceeding.
If the Democrats vote for this, I will eat my shirt, okay?
I'm telling you.
He wants to double the number of federal immigration judges, authorize new temporary shelters with accommodations to keep families together, mandate that illegal immigrant families must be kept together, absent aggravated criminal conduct, provide for expedited processing and review of asylum cases.
Those are the cases that take so long and why the children have to be taken away according to court ruling, and that can only be fixed through the legislature.
What the Democrats want, what the left wants, what the press wants, aside from undermining this administration, is they just say, oh, well, let the people go into the country.
They'll come back when we need them.
When we want to deport them, they'll just report in for deportation.
They want the open borders because they know that's how their voters get in.
They are not trying to solve the problem.
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You know, when we were doing that Father's Day show with the God King Jeremy Boring and Ben and Knowles, Ben had this moment where he said one of the things he does to keep peace with his wife is when she starts to talk to him, he stops her and he says, is this one of these things where I just listen to your problems or is this one of these conversations where I'm supposed to solve your problems?
So I went home and my wife said to me, I liked what Ben said there.
I liked that Ben said.
And I said, forget it.
Forget it.
When you tell me your problems, I am going to solve your problems.
I do not have a mode of just listening to your problems.
What do you want to do with your problems if not solve them?
You want to frame them?
You know, I love women.
I do.
I love talking to them.
I love listening to them.
However, just because a person happens to be a woman, that doesn't mean the crazy thing that she's saying isn't crazy.
When a woman says to you, I don't want you to solve my problem.
I just want you to listen to my problem.
If I have the capacity to solve it, I want to solve it.
That is what Ted Cruz is doing.
And if the Democrats come back and say, oh, no, we don't want to actually solve pass any laws.
We don't want to build a wall.
We don't want to defend our borders.
We just want to sit here and talk about how you're abusing the children.
You will know that this is what I say it is.
It is what they are hoping will be a Katrina moment.
Now, here is the difference.
Trump is standing up to them.
And I want to see how long he can do this.
Despite the cries from the right-wing press, oh, you'll never withstand this blow.
You'll never withstand the emotional thing.
What about the children, the children crying and all this stuff?
Trump is standing up to him.
He made a speech, which I got to say, listen, you know how I feel about Trump.
I like a lot of the stuff he's done.
I don't always admire him as a person.
I admired him yesterday.
I really did.
Check out cut number six.
This is Trump striking back against the Democrats.
I'll say it very straight.
Immigration is the fault in all of the problems that we're having.
Trump Stands Up00:06:07
Because we cannot get them to sign legislation.
We cannot get them even to the negotiating table.
And I say it's very strongly the Democrats' fault.
They're obstruction.
They're really obstructionist, and they are obstructing.
The United States will not be a migrant camp, and it will not be a refugee holding facility.
Won't be.
You look at what's happening in Europe.
You look at what's happening in other places.
We can't allow that to happen to the United States.
Not on my watch.
For the rest of the world, you look at everything that's taking place.
Pick up your newspapers this morning, and you see, we want safety and we want security for our country.
If the Democrats would sit down instead of obstructing, we could have something done very quickly.
See, you can say that's playing politics, but it's playing politics back.
It is fighting back.
It is what the Bush administration did not do.
Carl Rove has talked about this.
Carl Rove, Bush's W's advisor, he said, we should have fought back.
We didn't realize how much they hated us.
We didn't realize they weren't going to give us a fair break.
We should have fought back.
Trump knows, and he gets it, and it's driving them mad.
And I'm telling you, the situation with the children can be fixed.
It won't be fixed because the Democrats do not want it fixed.
The press does not want to fix.
This is what they want.
What is happening right now is what they want.
And, you know, Kirsten Nielsen, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, who's in charge of this stuff, she came out and made the most rational arguments where she said it's cowardly for the people who pass the laws to tell us not to obey the law.
Congress and the courts created this problem and Congress alone can fix it.
Until then, we will enforce every law we have on the books to defend the sovereignty and security of the United States.
Those who criticize the enforcement of our laws have offered only one countermeasure, open borders, the quick release of all illegal alien families and the decision not to enforce our laws.
This policy would be disastrous.
Its prime beneficiaries would be the smuggling organizations themselves, and the prime victims would be the children who would be plunged into the smuggling machines and gain recruitment on the trip north.
There's a lot of misinformation about what DHS is and is not doing as it relates to families at the border.
And I want to correct the record.
Here are the facts.
First, this administration did not create a policy of separating families at the border.
We have a statutory responsibility that we take seriously to protect alien children from human smuggling, trafficking, and other criminal actions while enforcing our immigration laws.
It's all about this.
I mean, what she just said is completely inarguable.
You know, I love that thing with Jon Stewart saying it's inarguable, and then he repeats it.
This is like Twitter.
People think on Twitter, if you say something over and over in capital letters, that somehow magically becomes true.
That was like Jon Stewart.
It's inarguable.
It's unarguable.
It's an arguable.
Except it's not true.
It's not true, so you can argue about it.
You know, this is, we quoted Jazz Shaw at Hot Air.
He's doing a great job, and he's no big Trump supporter or anything like this.
The New York Times, a former newspaper, one of the other things that they're panicking about, they're panicking about so much at the Trump administration is Scott Pruitt at the EPA, right?
He's dialing back these intrusive, illegal, unconstitutional regulations that the EPA uses to control like how long you run the water in your bath, basically.
They come over and say, yeah, that bath is a public waterway, and we're going to regulate that.
That was the Obama administration's policy.
And Pruitt has been dialing this back and dialing back and holding the EPA accountable.
It is a completely unaccountable, lawless organization, and he's holding it back.
So they've had one pretend scandal after another with Scott Pruitt.
The New York Times runs on the front page.
For Pruitt AIDS, the boss's personal life was part of the job.
Senior staff members at the Environmental Protection Agency frequently felt pressured by Scott Pruitt to help in personal matters to obtain special favors for his family, according to interviews with four current and former EPA officials.
He says at least three EPA staff members were dispatched to help Mr. Pruitt's daughter, McKenna, obtain a summer internship at the White House, the current and former staff members said.
That's page one.
The next day, page A17, and you know those little correction boxes they have?
They have a little correction box.
An article on Saturday about senior staff members at the Environmental Protection Agency who said they frequently felt pressured by Scott Pruitt to help in non-work matters included an item that erroneously described Mr. Pruitt's use of his position for personal matters.
While a Virginia lawmaker, William Howell, said he wrote a letter of recommendation to the University of Virginia Law School on behalf of Mr. Pruitt's daughter, he actually wrote it while Mr. Pruitt was the Attorney General of Oklahoma.
This is on page A17.
In other words, the entire thing didn't happen.
It was a non-existent thing, but if they keep hammering him and then put the apology down on A17 where nobody ever sees it, it creates this aura of hysteria, this aura of wrongdoing.
And then one day, because we all make mistakes, Pruitt will make a mistake.
He will do something that they can nail him on, even if it's unfair.
And they'll say, yes, but this is just part of the string of hysteria that we created.
This is part of the string of corruption.
That's what they're doing to Trump now on the border.
He should stand tall.
He should fight him back.
He should get his people out there.
When Kirsten Nielsen was making that speech, when she was talking to the press, one of the reporters was playing an audio of children crying.
I mean, that about says it, doesn't it?
If children cry, the rule of law goes out the window.
If the rule of law goes out the window, so does your freedom.
So does your equality.
Trump is doing the right thing.
The law should be fixed.
Ted Cruz is right.
They should fix it so they can enforce the law and keep families together where possible.
That's what they should do.
But that's not what the Democrats want.
Journalism's Role in Corruption00:05:01
That's not what the press wants.
They just want this Katrina moment.
All right, we've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
But remember, the mailbag is tomorrow.
So come to thedailywire.com, subscribe.
It's only a lousy $10 a month.
Come on, it's ridiculous.
You hit the podcast button, hit the Andrew Clavin podcast, hit the mailbag, ask questions about anything you want.
I will answer.
And those answers are guaranteed correct.
I mean, where else do you get a deal like that?
I mean, come on, guaranteed correct.
And, you know, for 90 days, but after that, they may not be true.
All right, we got a really good interview with John Miller coming up.
Come on over to TheDailyWire.com.
All right.
John Miller is a pal and also one of the best writers about important popular fiction.
And he has written a book called Reading Around Journalism on Authors, Artists, and Ideas.
I like to talk about authors, artists, and ideas.
The news has been so overwhelming that we never get a chance.
John is the director of the Herbert H. Dow, the second program in American Journalism at Hillsdale College.
He runs their journalism department.
He's also a national correspondent for National Review.
He writes for the Wall Street Journal all the time.
But his pieces, when I read them about pop, when I say pop fiction, I don't mean just the latest spy novel.
I mean the great popular writers of English and American history.
It's like eating cake.
It's like just, it's such a, it's so great to see a mind like John's engage with this kind of literature.
We talk together.
Here it is.
John, it's great to see you.
Thanks for coming on.
Thanks for having me on, Drew.
I got to tell you, when you write about writers, I love it.
I love this book.
I really do.
I mean, it's one of those things you can dip into and you don't have to read it from beginning to end right away.
But I just love your stuff on, especially on popular culture, but also on some of the classics.
It's just great.
I mean, I see.
Well, thanks so much.
I appreciate you saying that.
So we're going to talk about this, but before we talk about this, you are the head of the journalism department at Hillsdale.
Is that right?
Yeah, I run the journalism program at Hillsdale College in Michigan.
Okay, so here's what I want to ask you.
I want to ask you a couple of things.
One is Hillsdale College has this wonderful reputation of being kind of different from all the other universities.
Does it deserve?
Now, I know they're your employer, so you can't bite the hand, but what is different about Hillsdale?
Why is it so admired?
Well, first, it's a small liberal arts college and only 1,400 students here, but it's college as it should be.
Unlike a lot of schools that are moving away from a traditional classic curriculum, we ask that of our students.
We demand that of them.
So they come and they get trained in these great works and they get it from great teachers here.
And what do you teach in journalism?
What's your philosophy that you bring to that?
Well, the first point is we believe you learn journalism by doing journalism.
So we don't teach it that much.
But primarily, we get the students to work on the campus newspaper and to work at the campus radio station and to learn how to write, learn how to talk, and learn how to perform in these different kinds of media.
That's cool.
So if you learn journalism by doing journalism, they can't go to CNN, for instance.
Exactly.
Although CNN ought to hire my people.
Yeah, yeah, they probably, but that would change everything.
You know, I hammer the journalists all the time because I really do feel that they are living in a make-believe universe in which they're oppressed, in which they're heroic.
And in fact, they're just spewing the Democrat line.
I mean, I know it's an old song and the conservatives are always singing it, but am I totally wrong about this?
You know, I say that journalism has never been better than it is right now and it's never been worse than it is right now.
And it's never been better in the sense that we have so much information available at our fingertips.
I remember when I got into journalism 25 years ago, if I wanted to, and as a young reporter in Washington, D.C., if I wanted to know what President Bush said at last week's press conference, you know, I couldn't Google it.
I had to, you know, call the White House press office and beg them to fax me a transcript, right?
And maybe they would do it and maybe it would come through and maybe the fax machine would actually have paper rolled up in it and all that kind of stuff.
You know, but now it's just at our fingertips and it's at the fingertips of everybody.
And so our ability to gather information and put it together and assemble it as journalists never has been better.
And so I think, well, I like to think that it's really helped my work when I write on politics and candidates and elections and policies and so on and so forth.
Having said all that, you're right.
There's plenty of rotten journalism out there.
And sometimes I like to say, you know, we shouldn't let 99% of all journalists give the rest a bad name.
Yeah.
Ghost Stories Attack Assumptions00:15:01
All right.
Let's talk about Reading Around, which is a series of books, a series of pieces on authors, artists, and ideas.
And of course, one of the things that I love so much about this is, well, it says, you have a quote here, a blurb that says, one of the best literary journalists in the country from the Chronicle of Higher Education.
You are.
There's no question about this.
One of the things I love about it is you write about, you write seriously about genre writers.
And as a genre writer and as somebody who takes genre writing seriously, it is wonderful to see that.
One of the first pieces I ever read by you that I just thought was utterly great was a piece about H.P. Lovecraft.
Explain a little bit for people who don't know who H.P. Lovecraft is, explain a little bit who he was and why you feel he's an important writer.
So he's one of the great horror writers in American literature.
If we think, you know, sometimes Edgar Allan Poe is called the greatest horror writer in American literature, and that's that's that's an okay claim.
That's a that's a defensible claim.
Um, I kind of prefer Lovecraft and think he's better than Poe, but he's in that tradition of you know, the sort of macabre writers who include who include uh Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce and so on.
And and and Lovecraft wrote primarily in the 20s and 30s.
Uh, he wrote for these pulp magazines that nobody took seriously, he was poorly paid.
Uh, and a lot of what he wrote, frankly, is trash, it's not worth reading.
But when he is good, he is really, really good.
And he has a handful of stories, about a dozen, some of them short stories, some of them almost novella-length stories that just um make my head spin.
And when I discovered them as a teenager, um, they just made me think longer and deeper and harder about a lot of first things.
And so, he's a genre writer, he wrote for these trashy pulp magazines, and yet he's dealing with some of the some of the biggest questions out there about, you know, why are we here?
Does the universe care?
And so on and so forth.
And his answers to those questions are often troubling.
And I find myself in adulthood disagreeing with them.
And yet he's riveting.
Yeah, yeah.
No, he's a terrific writer.
And as you say, at his best, he is really good.
You and I share a kind of fascination with actual ghost stories, which is a kind of a very, very, it's kind of like jazz.
It's a very limited sphere.
You write, M.R., you write about M.R. James in the book Arthur Macon, two writers I just love.
What is it about these stories?
I cannot stay away from them.
I do not go a year without reading at least one collection of them.
What do you think it is that is so amazingly gripping about them?
That's a great question.
And I ask that of myself all the time, and I'm answering it in different ways.
You know, Edith Wharton, a great American novelist who wrote her share of ghost stories, talked about the fun of the shudder, the idea that a good ghost story can create a kind of pleasing sensation.
And I think we can experience that when we just enjoy it and can scare us.
And it's paradoxically, we can take a kind of pleasure in that.
I like stories that are haunting, that leave me thinking, leave me checking behind the curtains before I go to bed.
And that's not for everybody, is it?
My wife can't stand it.
And this is, you know, not everybody likes a good horror movie.
You know, even the good horror movies, there are plenty of bad ones.
I mean, not everybody's into that, but I've always found pleasure in it.
And one of the things that a good ghost story does is that it attacks some of the materialist assumptions that are out there in our culture all the time right now.
They're supernatural stories, of course.
They can't be explained through normal science.
And if you're like me and you believe, as you know, the famous line from Hammond, there's more in heaven and earth, Horatio, than is dreamt of in your philosophy.
If you believe that that's true or that maybe it's true, a good ghost story can really speak to that.
I had a student once who, very sweet young lady, who said, Mr. Miller, why do you like ghost stories?
Sort of appalled at the notion.
This is a good church-going kid.
She goes to church every Sunday morning and so forth.
And I said to her, If ghosts are real, it means that there's life after death.
And that just stopped her in her tracks and it made her think differently about the whole thing.
And I don't know if ghosts are real.
You know, Charles Dickens said, you know, M.R. James, I think, said, I'm willing to consider the evidence if you present it to me.
Yeah.
And, you know, of course, I approach a lot of this stuff with skepticism.
But if ghosts are real, it does mean that there is an afterlife.
And that has a pleasing possibility to it.
I agree that there's something under the chill that is encouraging.
I've never had 10 people in a room and asked if anyone has seen a ghost and gotten, and I've always gotten someone who says yes.
If you have 10 people in a room, someone has experienced something ghostly.
I never have, but I have to.
Have you read Susan Hill at all?
No.
You should try her.
She wrote The Woman in Black, which has been running in the West End forever, and they made it into a bad movie, but her ghost stories are absolutely terrific.
You write about Frankenstein, but moving on from ghost stories to the Gothic, you write about Frankenstein and said something really surprising, which was you felt, I mean, obviously Mary Shelley is always held up by feminists as a great writer.
It is a great book, but you actually peg it as an anti-feminist book in some ways.
Well, so Frankenstein, written two centuries ago by Mary Shelley when she was a teenager for Crying Out Loud, is in some ways the very first work of science fiction.
We sometimes think of it as a horror novel, and it does have elements of horror, that's for sure.
But that's a legacy of the universal monster movies from the 1930s more than anything else.
But it's a serious work of fiction that deals with ethics and our responsibility to each other and what it means to be a person and so on.
And yes, she's often put forward by feminists as a great feminist hero.
And part of that is the mere accomplishment of a woman in that world writing what she did.
And it wasn't unheard of.
I mean, this is the time of Jane Austen, of course, one of the great geniuses of our language.
So women did have plenty of achievements back then, but it was harder, that's for sure.
And so she's presented as a kind of an important figure, you know, you go girl, Mary Shelley, you know, that sort of a thing.
And I think we can give them that.
Sure, sure.
But it's also a cautionary tale about broken homes and bad parenting and a lot of the things that we might associate with contemporary feminism.
And Mary Shelley, Mary Shelley is a complicated figure, and Frankenstein is a rich book with lots of different meanings and possible interpretations.
But one of them is a quite conservative reading that says, don't mess with things you don't understand.
And sometimes the things that are closest at home and dearest to us are in fact the most important.
You know, the other thing that you do in this book, reading around journalism on authors, artists, and ideas, you take certain writers seriously who are not normally taken seriously.
Guys that I really like and I read all the time, guys like Dean Kuntz and Daniel Silva.
I'm working my way through Silva's stuff.
I find it just addictive.
Isn't he great?
He's so entertaining.
I like the fact that the guy goes and kills the enemies of the Jews, which is everyone.
It's like if you're some Danish guy who kills you for something that happened in Denmark thousands of years ago.
But no, he really is entertaining.
And Kuntz is just a riveting, riveting writer.
What is it you see that these guys are doing?
You call Dean Kuntz an artist of ideas, which I agree with.
What is it you see them doing that other people don't get?
Well, first and foremost, they're entertaining writers.
I mean, I pick up a Daniel Silva book, and I'm just going to get caught up in the story and enjoy turning the pages.
I want to know what's going to happen.
Same with Dean Kuntz.
They're just great storytellers on the surface.
But beneath it all, they're dealing with quite serious topics.
Dean Kuntz has considerations of bioethics, government, overweening government.
I mean, his topics change from story to story.
Daniel Silva, of course, you mentioned his great hero is Gabriel Alan, who is with the Israeli Secret Service.
And he marches around the world, mostly Europe, trying to defend Israel against its enemies.
And you read this book, and it's a great story.
It's a great espionage story.
It's all these cat and mouse games with him and the terrorists and so forth.
But beneath it all is a sense that the state of Israel is worth defending, that freedom is not for free, and that we've got to fight for these causes and that Israel is a worthy state and needs friends in the world.
Yeah, and he doesn't whitewash Israel either, but he just says this is a good place and it deserves to live.
So one of the questions I get asked all the time, because books have kind of gone out of fashion.
A lot of people don't read anymore.
Their vision is very limited.
If you don't read books, I really believe this.
If you don't read actual books, your vision of the world becomes incredibly pinched and small.
Where would you begin if you wanted to educate yourself to the great literature?
How would you start to do that?
Well, I think it has to start in childhood, frankly, to develop that habits of reading when you're young and the enjoyment of it.
But if you want to catch up, though, you say, here I am.
But what if it's, what if, what if, yeah, what if, what, what, what, what's, what's, where do we start now?
Yeah.
First, I would say, if you're not in the habit of reading, go pick up a Daniel Silva book or a Dean Kuntz book and just enjoy the story.
Then you can think hard about the topics and learn a lot and so forth.
Ultimately, what are the great books?
You know, very quickly, we get to Homer and the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Aeneid by Virgil and all of that and Dante and Milton and so forth.
That's all great stuff.
You can ease yourself into that too.
I mean, there are great works of American literature that we can pick up right now.
Huckleberry Finn.
Yeah, great book.
What a great book that is.
And I'll tell you, we just did at Hillsdale College, we just did an online course on Mark Twain.
And I have a piece in that.
I do a little roundtable with the lecturers.
I learned so much about Mark Twain just taking that course.
And I always thought he was a good writer and actually teached some of his journalism here at Hillsdale College.
But I just rediscovered Huckleberry Finn in a way that was unexpected and profound because of these great lectures.
So that's another way.
Take an online course with Hillsdale College.
So we have them on Shakespeare.
We have them on Jane Austen.
And as I mentioned, this Mark Twain one was really good.
Or read Ernest Hemingway.
Another great writer gives us a lot to chew over and who's deceptively simple.
He's very easy to read, very easy to read.
John Miller, one of my favorite writers about writers, reading around journalism on authors, artists, and ideas.
It really is a terrific book, John.
He did a great job.
Thanks, Drew.
Thanks for reading it.
It's great seeing you.
All right.
sexual follies.
I would like to respond to an op-ed that recently ran in the Washington Post.
It was called Why Can't We Hate Men?
It was by Susanna Denuda Walters, the director of the Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Northeastern University.
So basically, she's unemployed.
She's not doing anything.
She says, it seems logical to hate men.
I can't lie.
I've always had a soft spot for the radical feminist SmackDown for naming the problem in no uncertain terms.
I've rankled at the, but we don't hate men protestations of generations of would-be feminists and found the men are not the problem.
This system is obfuscation too precious by half.
He says, here in the land of legislatively legitimated toxic masculinity, is it really so illogical to hate men?
For all the power of Me Too and Time's Up and the women's marches, only a relatively few men have been called to task, and I've yet to see a mass wave of prosecutions or even serious recognition of wrongdoing.
On the contrary, cries of witch hunt and the plotted resurrection of celebrity offenders came quick on the heels of the outcry over endemic sexual harassment and violence.
So, men, the world has little place for feminist anger.
Women are supposed to support, not condemn, offer succor, not dismissal.
We're supposed to feel more empathy for your fear of being called a harasser than we are for the women harassed.
So, men, if you really are with us and would like us to not hate you for the millennia of woe you have produced and benefited from, start with this.
Lean out so we can actually just stand up without being beaten down.
Pledge to vote for feminist women only.
Don't run for office.
Don't be in charge of anything.
Step away from the power.
We got this.
And please know that your crocodile tears won't be wiped away by us anymore.
We have every right to hate you.
You have done us wrong because patriarchy, it is a long time past to play hard for team feminism and win.
Here's my response.
Pound sand.
That's my response to this op-ed.
You know, as long as you're using the cars and computers and air conditioning and birth control pills invented by men, you should be just so happy to have us around.
As long as you are raising the children who are given to you by men and having fathers who have taken care of you, as long as you are being pulled out of burning buildings by men, having police show up at your house to protect you, the fact that there are bad guys in the world and they are bad guys in the world, and that in some ways bad guys are worse than bad women because they're stronger and have more power is fine.
But that you say that this is a whole problem with the sex and you're going to hate us, hate your back, baby.
That's all I got to say.
It's a nonsense op-ed.
It should never have run.
It's just a piece of garbage.
All right.
Tomorrow we've got the mailbag.
Ask your questions.
I will answer them and all your problems will be solved.
I mean, come on.
It's a great deal.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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