Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court appointment reshaped free speech and gun rights, with Jenna Ellis defending Janus and NIFLA as First Amendment wins over union coercion and forced abortion referrals. The host mocks leftist attacks on platforms for figures like Ann Coulter while dismissing Justices Sotomayor and Ginsburg’s dissent as emotional. Obama’s legacy—IRS targeting, Benghazi lies, and "babies in cages" media distortions—draws harsher criticism than Trump’s policies, framing progressive policies as corporate manipulation and cultural overreach. Faith and science coexist, the host argues, with God as the source of meaning beyond physics, urging listeners to align careers with divine purpose through prayer and self-reflection. The episode ends by warning that woke culture’s restrictions may backfire, risking freedoms for future generations. [Automatically generated summary]
Democrats are furious that a conservative 5-4 Supreme Court majority is standing up for the Constitution and the rule of law.
Democrats hate that stuff.
All the guns and freedom of speech.
It's yucky.
Anyway, this is bringing home to the Dems the importance of Donald Trump's appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the court rather than Merrick Garland, who was the pick of President Pajama, or Bahama, whatever his name was.
I can't remember now that his legacy is little more than a handful of sand washed forever out to sea by the rising tide of events.
Anyway, left-wing blogger Matthew Iglesias tweeted, quote, the theft of Merrick Garland's Supreme Court seat is legitimately the greatest heist in world history.
And we know this must be true because Iglesias describes himself on his Twitter page as, quote, a bold truth teller who refuses to be silenced, unquote.
I'm not making that up.
The man calls himself a bold truth teller who refuses to be silenced.
I know it's hard to imagine that level of pompous-assed, humorless self-regard, but there it is.
Where was I?
Oh yeah.
Anyway, I figured if this bold truth teller who refuses to be silenced says the appointment of Gorsuch was the greatest heist in world history, we ought to make a movie about it.
We can call it Ocean 63 Million, in which approximately half the American electorate, using strictly legal and constitutional means, delay a Supreme Court pick until by strictly legal and constitutional means, they elect the president they want to pick the judge they want.
Here's the trailer for the film.
You're either in or you're out.
Right now.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Klavan, a bold truth teller who refuses to be silenced.
And this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
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, it is mailbag day.
Huzzah!
And we're going to...
Ah, my god!
Oh, sorry.
We're going to bring back Jenna Ellis, the Constitutional Attorney, to talk to us about the latest Supreme Court decisions, all of them going in a good way by one, that one Niels Gorsuch vote.
You know, the never Trumpers, every time you would defend, every time they thought Trump did something bad, they would say, oh, yeah, but Gorsuch, but Gorsuch.
Yeah, my feeling is, but Gorsuch, baby, yeah.
And this coming Monday, July 2nd at 7 p.m. Eastern, we will be joined by the special Jordan Peterson to celebrate Independence Day.
The God-King of the Daily Wire himself, Jeremy Boring, will descend from on high to host a new edition of Daily Wire Backstage with me, Shapiro, and Knowles to look back on our country's birth and ahead to its future.
Subscribers will even be able to write in live questions for us to answer on the air.
That's this Monday, July 2nd at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific, with special guest Jordan Peterson.
You can find our special live stream on Facebook and YouTube.
Do not miss it.
Hey, you know, I always end on Wednesday with tickety boo news, but I want to start with a little tickety boo news.
I want to send my congratulations to the great Nick Searcy, international film and television star.
Nick Searcy, I think he won, I can't remember, it was either the Peabody or the Nobel Peace Prize, one or the other.
Nick directed my script for the Gosnell film, a film about the abortion doctor who was, he was the worst serial killer in history, but nobody would cover the story because he was an abortionist and they didn't want to cast bad light on abortion, basically.
And it took them three years, but John Sullivan and the rest of the team over there have finally gotten a distribution deal for this movie.
I think it's going to open in 750 theaters, and then it'll be released.
So that is excellent, excellent news.
And also, we want to talk about legacy box.
I don't know about you, but I never used to take movies or pictures or anything until everything went digital.
And now I take them all the time, but they just kind of vanish, right?
So we got a legacy box, and we're putting everything.
We are now in the process of gathering up all our movies, pictures, everything, putting them in the legacy box.
And what they do then is they send your legacy box filled with your old home movies and pictures, and they do the rest.
They digitalize your entire life onto a thumb drive or the cloud or DVD like magic.
And then you've got it.
Because all these things disappear if you don't have them this way.
You got them forever and you can pull them out whenever you want them.
There's never been a better time to digitally preserve your old home movies, film reels, and photos.
Why Speech Cannot Be Compelled00:15:20
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Enter that code and save 40% on your legacy box.
There's no ease.
How do you spell it?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
There's no, I just make it look so incredibly easy.
All right.
You know, it's funny.
We know they hate Trump.
And now we know that they hate you because you voted for Trump.
In fact, the Grabian people put together a montage of the left just hating on you because you voted for Trump.
This is cut seven.
You play away.
If you vote for Trump, then you, the voter, you, not Donald Trump, are standing at the border like Nazis, go, you here, you here.
And I think we now have to flip it.
And it's a given the evilness of Donald Trump.
If you hold down the woman while the rapist is raping her and you didn't rape her, are you a rapist?
Tens of millions of people voted for him after he showed his cards for years.
But are you saying that?
Are you suggesting that they're racist?
Yes.
The people who vote, all the people who voted for Donald Trump are racist.
Yes.
If Republicans weren't so racist, they could encourage black people who are morally conservative to be on their side.
Those people who are supporting what he's doing here are racist, period.
It's the movements and people that are speaking up for things, whether we're talking about civil rights movement, whatever else, those movements should be nonviolent, but they should not be non-confrontational.
So these policies that this administration is putting forth are intentionally cruel.
They are racist.
And it is our job as citizens to speak out against that.
Now, does that mean that we're going to be violent?
No.
But does that mean that Sarah Sanders can have a nice, quiet dinner with her family when she's taking our tax dollars to implement this policy?
I don't think so.
But now, so they hate Trump, they hate you.
And now it turns out they hate the law.
They hate the law itself.
I mean, they hate the law enforcing the law at the borders, and they hate the fact the Supreme Court is making decisions by a narrow, this narrow majority, this Gorsuch majority, 5-4, that basically just says the law is the law.
When they ruled supporting Trump's travel ban, you know, let me just read you what the law says, okay?
Whenever the, this is the law passed by Congress.
Whenever the president finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation and for such period as he shall deem necessary suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or non-immigrants or impose on the entry of aliens any restriction he may deem to be appropriate.
So when Trump said we're going to deem all those Muslims in Venezuela and North Korea, but also Chad, Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia, and he said it was because of their vetting process.
This is the third time they finally got it right, but he said their vetting process wasn't any good.
Chad fixed its vetting process and was taken off the list.
When they said this, they said, okay, that's the law.
He has the right to do it.
I don't particularly think this is an important restriction, by the way.
None of these people have attacked us.
This is not going to make us any safer.
The danger is coming from within, the danger of the people, the young men who get convinced of this nonsense ideology.
But he has the right to do it.
And it's not for the courts to say, oh, I'm sorry, we don't like President Trump.
And that's essentially what the dissent was.
We don't like Trump, so he doesn't have the right to do it, even though the president does.
There was also a major, major, this is huge decision saying that you don't have to.
Well, you know what?
Let us bring on Jenna Ellis.
Jenna Ellis is the director of public policy for the James Dobson Family Institute.
She's an accomplished constitutional law attorney and has a background in criminal law, contracts, public policy, leadership, and ethics.
She appears all over the place, but happily she appears here and she has her book, The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution, A Guide for Christians to Understand America's Current Constitutional Crisis.
Long time, no see, Jenna.
It's like I know.
We're BFS now.
It says you and me.
like this.
Well, it's been a busy week at the Supreme Court.
We have to talk.
Let's talk first about this latest decision about public sector unions.
Can you explain what they decided?
Yes.
So this is the latest in the compelled speech cases, regardless of whether it's over an abortion pregnancy center, whether it's about union workers, whatever the context.
This case in Janus was another compelled speech case and where the Supreme Court, through Justice Alito, and again, like you said, that very slim 5-4 majority saying the government cannot compel you as an individual to participate in or subsidize speech that you fundamentally disagree with.
So this particular case was in the context of union workers who were forced to subsidize union representation that they may disagree with.
And that was the central issue in Janus.
But again, this was just a long line of cases this week, actually, and also following the Masterpiece Cake Shop case that really stood for the principle that the First Amendment is valid and that the government is not going to tell you or me what speech we have to participate in and what things we have to advance.
So basically, before this, if you got a job, say as a teacher and you joined the teachers' union and the teachers' union was using your money, you had to pay them the money.
You had to be in the union to work and they used that money to support candidates you didn't like.
There was nothing you could do about it, right?
But now you don't have to, do you not have to join?
Is that what it is?
You don't have to join the union now?
You don't have to pay the fees.
You don't have to.
Yeah, so this overturned in 1977 precedent that had upheld a similar law, basically saying if you were part of this collective bargaining agreement, you didn't have a choice and you had to pay the union dues.
And this is saying that payment, that contribution is speech, and the government can't compel you to essentially support the collective bargaining agreements and any other form of the union that will contribute to speech that you fundamentally disagree with.
And I mean, this is- Which is a great ruling.
But it's a huge deal because these teachers unions, most of these public sector unions are big Democrat funders.
I mean, all this money is going right from the pocket of teachers to the Democrat Party.
Is that not fair to say?
Yeah, and this is why a lot of the headlines that you see today is the Supreme Court strikes a blow to unions.
Or we saw in the National Institute of Life and Family Advocates, the NIFLA case that was just handed down yesterday.
You know, the Supreme Court favors the pro-life movement over abortion rights.
That's not true.
What the Supreme Court is doing is simply applying the Constitution faithfully and accurately, like an umpire in baseball.
They're simply just calling balls and strikes fairly.
They're not actually saying we like unions or we don't like unions.
What they're saying is that the Constitution does not give the government the ability to compel speech in these particular contexts.
And that's actually a good thing.
So it's not them picking and choosing winners and losers.
It's not about whether or not they like unions, whether or not they like pro-life pregnancy centers, whether they like abortion rights.
This stands for the proposition the government cannot compel speech.
Now, for the long, a long time, the Supreme Court has been really good about the First Amendment, very strong on it.
But Elena Kagan, I think it was today or yesterday, when this decision came, she accused them of weaponizing the First Amendment.
I mean, as far as I'm concerned, they can nuclearize the First Amendment.
You know, they can just blow all restrictions on free speech right off.
But what is she talking about?
What is her point of view there?
Yeah, and this is in the Janus dissent.
And what's so ridiculous is that the left is making an emotional appeal because weaponizing sounds like a bad thing.
And so to weaponize the First Amendment, it's basically saying, oh, no, the government isn't going to compel you to now participate in all of these things that actually advance the leftist causes.
So that's basically weaponizing us to go out and support the speech that we deem appropriate, that we, the people, can actually participate in speech that we want.
So her term of weaponizing really is saying the First Amendment is going to protect you in the way that the Constitution actually intended.
She's just using a really negative term.
That's very disappointing from Kagan because she is a little smart.
I mean, Sotamaya is I think is kind of a knucklehead, but Kagan is a smart woman, and it's sad to hear that from her.
Now, on the case of the abortion, the anti-abortion clinics, these are emergency pregnancy clinics in California that want to encourage you not to have an abortion.
And California said, well, you have to tell them that they can get an abortion.
And the Supreme Court said, no, they don't believe in that.
They don't have to say it.
What about the argument that there are laws on the books that compel abortion clinics to tell you that you don't have to do this?
Is that covered by this law as well?
By the decision?
So there's a difference here between giving women all medically sound information about a medical intervention.
And that's what Alliance Defending Freedom argued in this case, is that there's a difference between saying, if you want a medical intervention, which is an abortion, because if a woman is pregnant, unless something naturally happens where they miscarry, abortion is always a medical intervention.
An abortion doesn't happen naturally.
So if you are going to get any elective procedure, then doctors always will give you the adequate information so that you can make a sound decision.
And so what basically the difference is, is if you go to a pro-life pregnancy crisis center and you're saying, you know, I want to be here to talk about all of this, then what the California law was doing was trying to compel those providers to say, well, one of your options is a medical intervention when that's actually not related at all to their health care decisions.
So that's a fundamentally different circumstance in those equations.
This particular case in NIFLA talked about how a pro-life pregnancy crisis center does not have to refer for abortion.
So Andrew, this would be the same thing as if we were holding an Alcoholics Anonymous group and every single person who came through the door, we had to have these big placards, we had to have brochures, we had to inform them, here's where you can get state-funded alcohol down the street.
That's what this was about.
Well, Jenna, thank you so much for coming on.
I really appreciate your putting this in the context of the First Amendment.
I didn't quite see that connection, and it really is, it's good, it's excellent news.
It's too bad it's only a 5-4 margin, but hopefully it'll get bigger over time.
It is.
And this is why the midterms matter.
We have to keep a really good Senate that will approve the next, hopefully Trump nomination to the Supreme Court.
And this is encouraging, but you're right.
It's a very slim margin.
Jenna Ellis, thank you very much, Director of Public Policy for the James Dobson Family Institute.
We'll see you again soon, probably.
Sounds good.
Yeah, anytime.
All right, thanks.
You know, I didn't even actually think about that, that all of these are covered by the First Amendment.
And if you think that they like the First Amendment, let me read you something that was in the New York Times, a former newspaper, that they ran a, they have a philosophy column, and it's called the stone or the rock, I think because the people in it, that's what they have in their heads.
And this was called the ignorant do not have a right to an audience.
And he talks about Ann Coulter, Jordan Peterson, and who is the other one?
The Charles Murray, he talks about.
And he says that if you think these people have a right to an audience, he says you can't silence them, but you don't have to give them a platform.
That means that colleges shouldn't have to invite them.
And he says you're listening to Jon Stuart Mill, who wrote the famous book on liberty, in which he talked about basically that any given opinion that someone expresses, you have the right to express your opinion.
Basically, John Stuart Mill is the founder of what we call classical liberalism, which is your freedom ends at the other guy's nose.
You have a right to swing your fist until it reaches the other guy's nose.
Then you got to stop.
And what he is talking about is the arguments of Herbert Marcuse or Marcuse, who was a truly dangerous thinker, who said basically that his moral opinion, he was a socialist, he said basically that moral opinions had the quality of fact and you could not and you could censor people who disagreed with you and you had to.
And this is the New York Times is allowing this guy, well, you know, listen, freedom of speech, let him have his say, but it tells you where these people stand.
They hate Trump, they hate you, and they hate the law.
And you know, one of the things we talked about earlier, I think it was this week, maybe last week, was that the law, the rule of law, protects your freedom and it protects your equality.
If we are all governed by the same law, we are all equal.
You and a gazillionaire are equal if you both have to obey the law.
Bill Cosby has all the popularity and all the money in the world, but he can be brought to trial for breaking the law.
If the law is just what we want it to be, if the law is just what the mob at the moment says, then you don't have that equality and you don't have freedom because your freedom depends on your representatives making the law.
If the law that they make, whether it's at the border, whether it is the Constitution, if the law that they make is overruled by the sound of crying babies, by your emotions, then you have a problem.
If you say to your representatives, hey, you know what, this is a bad situation, change this law, then you have deliberations, you have debates, you have all the things that are put in place to keep your freedom and your representation and your equality alive.
When you lose that stuff, it just all becomes emotion.
Here's how the New York Times, a former newspaper, here's how they covered Sonia Sotomayor's and Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent on the travel ban being legal.
Now remember, the Supreme Court, as Jenna said, they did not say the travel ban was a good thing.
They didn't say it was smart.
I don't say it's smart.
I don't even think it really matters that much.
I just think it was kind of to fulfill Trump's promises.
But basically, the argument that Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg made was that Trump had said so many nasty things about Muslims on the campaign trail that even though this wasn't a Muslim ban, we had to regard it as an anti-Muslim ban because of the things that he said.
So in other words, Trump could not do what the law said a president could do because they didn't like the things he had said elsewhere.
Wants and Needs Beyond Body00:14:14
That was the argument they were making.
That is a dumb argument.
I'm not a lawyer.
You don't have to be a lawyer to see.
That is not a constitutional-based argument.
That is an emotion-based argument.
So what does the New York Times do?
They sell it to you.
This is like out of some old movie.
Listen to the way they wrote the story.
And it takes paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs before they tell you what the dissent is.
They never really tell you what the dissent is.
Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., reading for the majority, spoke clinically.
Justice Stephen Breyer followed, working his way through his dissent mildly and analytically.
Then it was justice.
I got to give it some drama because that's the way they want to read it.
Then it was Justice Sonia Sotomayor's turn.
Steely and unwavering, she began.
The United States of America is a nation built upon the promise of religious liberty.
Our founders honored that core promise by embedding the principle of religious neutrality in the First Amendment.
The crowded courthouse fell silent.
In upholding President Trump's ban on travel from several predominantly Muslim countries, a lie, right, because only some of them were Muslim countries, Justice Sotomayor continued, the Supreme Court had failed to safeguard that fundamental principle for the next 20 minutes.
She remained resolute as she delivered.
I mean, you've got to be kidding me.
You have got to be kidding me because it's all emotion.
They want the rule not of law, but of emotion.
And it's just, it is driving them crazy that this Gorsuch is making the difference that is keeping the rule of law in place.
And listen, we're winning today.
We're winning this week.
It has been a really good week for the people who love the, you know, forget about Trump.
You know, it's not about Trump.
It's about the Constitution.
It's about the law.
It is about Trump being able to do what the law says he can do, even though he's Trump.
Even though he's Trump, he is the president.
He's duly elected.
He gets to do what the president gets to do.
But you know, there was an election.
There were primaries and elections, primaries yesterday.
And in New York, in the 14th district, which is part of Queens and Manhattan, a staunch Democrat who had been in, who has been in the House for 20 years, was thrown out in favor of a 28-year-old socialist.
She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
His name is Joe Crowley, and her name is, let me see if I've got it.
Yeah, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and she's in her 20s, and she won, okay?
And so now they've got this socialist, and this is, do not mistake this, this is the future of the Democrat Party.
This is the way they're going if they keep going in the direction they are.
And she said, she was very open.
She says she supports impeachment, and she wants basically open borders.
Let's listen to cut number 12.
I would support impeachment.
I think that we have the grounds to do it.
I think what really we need to focus on is making sure that we are advocating for the policies to win in November.
But ultimately, I think that what we need to kind of focus on is ensuring that we can, you know, when people break the law, potentially break the law, that we have to hold everyone accountable and that no person is above that law.
Do you see yourself, Alexandria, as more of a Democrat or progressive?
Would you say I am a member of the Democratic Party this morning?
I'm absolutely, I'm proud to be a Democrat.
I was raised in a Democratic family with Democratic values.
But it also means that the Democratic Party is a big tent and there are so many ways to be a Democrat.
And I'm proud to bring to Congress an additional perspective and a lens towards what the future of the Democratic Party may be.
That's amazing.
You should hear, we should also play this.
I know we're getting a little tight on time because I want to get to the mailbag, but we should play this response about the border.
She wants to eliminate ICE.
She wants to get rid of ICE.
And listen to what her idea of a secure border is.
Well, we absolutely do need to make sure that our borders are secure, to make sure that people are safe in passage.
But what we need to realize and remember is that ICE was established in 2003, right at the same time as the Patriot Act, the AUMF, the Iraq War.
And we look back at a lot of that time and legislation as a mistake now.
And I think that ICE is right there as a part of it.
It has its extrajudicial nature, is baked in to the structure of the agency.
And that is why they're able to get away with black sites at our border, with the separation of children.
We are committing human rights abuses on this border and separating children from their families.
And that is part of the structure of the agency.
We can replace it, and we can replace it with a humane agency that is directed towards safe passage instead of the direction of criminalization.
What do you mean, black sites?
What do you mean about black sites?
So I was just, yes, yes.
So actually, we were just hopping off MSNBC and they were talking about it.
Basically, what we have is that people are not able to access, even our own members of Congress are not able to access what is happening in these sites.
So the black sites thing is nonsense.
But what she said is she wants to rearrange it so we have safe borders for safe passage.
Safe borders for people breaking the law and coming into the country.
That's what she wants.
So listen, people ask, will socialism come to America?
And the answer is yes.
Why?
Because socialism is death and death comes to everything.
Freedom is a living thing.
All living things die.
Socialism is the form by which free nations die, okay?
And this is the first lump you find.
And this is why you have to fight every day.
This is why I support Trump even when I get angry at him, even when I don't like him.
I support him because every day is a day.
One day, America will die, but not today.
And that is the conservative message we are always fighting.
We're like the doctors.
We're always fighting death.
You ultimately lose because all things die, but not today.
And that's why it matters.
That's why today matters.
You don't get a lump on your body and say, oh, well, I won't check it out because eventually I'm going to die.
You fight it every step of the way.
And we are fighting for our country every step of the way.
It's going to be my lifetime, your lifetime, hopefully the next lifetime.
You never know.
You never know when death will come.
Not today.
That is the attitude you've got to have.
And this woman is the first whiff of this in the Democrat Party.
It doesn't mean it can't be cured.
Doesn't mean we can't get rid of it.
But you've got to fight it every single day.
We've got the mailbag coming up.
Come on over to thedailywire.com.
While you're there, subscribe.
Then you can be in the mailbag where it's stuffy, but all your questions get answered.
All right, the mailbag.
That's what I was going to say.
All right, from Tori, dear host of the best podcast I have ever listened to.
That is, in fact, my middle name.
I left my husband of 30 plus years because he lost his job 10 years ago, never attempted to find a new one.
He isolated himself from friends and family and would not seek help despite the pleas from everyone who loved him.
He tells me that he committed to love me through sickness and health, and that obviously I made an unchristian choice not to do the same.
On a good day, I believe I didn't have a choice, and I know I'm living a better life away from abuse and darkness.
On other days, I need to ask the question about whether this is an acceptable reason to leave.
I should also say we have three kids, and I waited till they were all adults to make this impossible choice.
Thanks for any light you can bring to this darkness, Tori.
Tori, I absolve you.
I let you off the hook.
You are now free to live your life.
If you were being abused, you don't tell how you were being abused, but if you were being truly abused and you waited till your kids were gone, I think you have done everything you can do.
You were not meant to live a life abused.
And the three reasons to get divorced are abuse, adultery, and addiction.
It sounds like there were a couple of those in play here.
If that's true, if I'm right, if I'm reading a little bit between the lines, just let yourself go.
This is not about Jesus.
Jesus did say that there were reasons to get divorced.
He said sexual malfeasance.
But remember, Jesus was also one of the important things about Jesus was he was a man in his time as well as the Son of God.
He was a man in his time, speaking to people in a time.
And he was speaking at a time when if a woman was divorced, she could be divorced basically by a guy saying, I divorced thee.
You know, when a woman was divorced, she had nothing.
She was left out in the middle of nowhere.
And he was protecting her from that.
However, however, you are a family.
You are one flesh.
You don't want to get divorced for no reason whatsoever.
If you were being abused, and it sounds like this guy was really in bad shape, you were free to leave.
You let the kids grow up.
And I absolve you.
I set you free.
You have an official absolution from the Andrew Clavin Show.
That is gold.
You can take that right to the bank.
From Rick, Dear Andrew, the nature of the universe has been explained from moments after the Big Bang all the way through the evolution of life on Earth in a very consistent and robust way.
God's place in such an objectively explained universe lies in our gaps of understanding, which is always shrinking due to objective science.
Yet, the data show that religious people live happier and more productive lives.
I want to have this happier and more productive life.
Also, is it not rational then to simply act as if God exists, even though I don't believe in it in my heart, because I am a rational actor and God's existence is unprovable and apparently unlikely.
Why is absolute faith required when one can simply refer to the Bible as a set of wise teachings divorced from reality, but filled with important life lessons?
Okay, everything about this letter is untrue.
That's the first thing.
But no, no, I shouldn't say that.
I shouldn't say that.
First of all, you know, in moments when your faith wavers, to act as if you had faith is not a bad idea.
David Mammet wrote that in that wonderful movie, The Verdict.
And Mammet always writes these wonderful lines and says they come from somewhere else, then they're so good that you think they do.
So he says, in my faith, we say, act as if you have faith, and faith will be given you.
It's just Mamet.
But anyway, all right, let's get back to the letters.
The nature of the universe has been explained from moments after the Big Bang when time began, all the way through the evolution of life on Earth in a very consistent, robust way.
In other words, we know a lot of the mechanics of life, which we didn't know before science came.
God, first of all, exists out of time, and he is not matter.
He is the meaning of matter.
So it's fine that we know all the mechanics of the way things work.
We don't know the meaning of the things, and we don't know what they represent.
So just think of it.
It's the same as language, okay?
I say 2 plus 2 equals 4.
Everything that happened just now was physical.
You heard it through the sound waves.
You heard it in your ears, the mechanics of your ear.
My brain fired to let me say that.
My voice, my breath stirred my vocal cords.
All of these things took physical form.
But 2 plus 2 equals 4 has no physical form.
2 plus 2 equals 4 is the meaning of what happened, right?
God is like that.
What happens in life, what happens in history, what happens in your heart, all of it is explainable, but the meaning of it is above that.
The idea of it is above that, and that is where God lives, and that is what you have faith in.
What you have faith in is that you are not just some piece of meat that is flicking from the womb to the grave with no meaning whatsoever, that this is a moment that is happening in God's mind, and you are his idea, and that idea goes on as long as God goes on.
And that is why in Christianity they preach the resurrection of the body.
It's because you are matter.
God speaks through matter, and you will have a body beyond this body, another kind of body in the future.
So none of the science that you're talking about, this God of the gaps you're talking about, is the God of foolish people, okay?
Just because foolish people have foolish ideas about God, they also have foolish ideas about science.
Foolish people's foolish ideas do not disprove the thing that they're talking about.
The science that you're all talking about is wonderful, it's delightful, but it speaks nothing into the meaning of things, which is what we're talking about when we're talking about God and religion.
I hope that did that answer the question?
I think so.
Sorry, I got distracted by trying to remember the name of the movie.
From Doran, in response to my interview with John Miller, what books would you recommend from Daniel Silva and Dean Kuntz?
Oh, first of all, Silva has a series, and I'm one of those guys who likes to take series from the beginning.
I always read the beginning.
His first book is probably not his best.
He gets better as he goes along.
But just pick up, his guy is named Gabriel Alon, and just Google that series and read it.
It's so, I mean, it is so addictive.
In fact, I like to buy, there's this used bookstore I go to here called The Iliad, which I just love, and I like to go and pick up his books, and they sold out of all his books, so I can't get the next book in the series, and I could order it and pay for it, and I probably will, but I always love to go to The Iliad as my excuse.
Kuntz is terrific.
I mean, Kuntz is a really, and he's a fan of mine, by the way.
He has sent me a fan mail.
But Kuntz is great.
Intensity is a wonderful book.
He has a lot of, oh, there's one, what is the one, ah, geez, I'm missing all these titles.
But almost everything he does is good.
Intensity is a really, really powerful one.
The silent corner, the whispering room.
He's just got a lot of really great books.
And you can just go, you can almost go and pick one up at random.
He is so intense and such a good writer.
He's kind of like the Stephen King, he's a huge bestseller, but people always go to King first, but Kuntz kind of occupies a little bit of that space in a much more morally intense and astute way.
He really is a good thinker as well as a good writer.
From Cole, dear hateful Lord Clavin, hated by some leftist hate groups, but not by the hateful Southern Poverty Law Center.
I know, and I'm bitter about it.
My question is, do you find yourself more annoyed by the left now during the Trump administration or before by the Flip Orama Obama administration?
Wants And Desires00:10:34
Well, much more during the Obama administration.
Obama, I thought, was really doing harm to the country.
There was no way of knowing that Trump was going to destroy his legacy and blast it into little radioactive bits that would float away such that you can't even remember President the Pajama's name.
But, you know, we didn't know that.
So it was a very intense time watching him basically supersede the Constitution with his pen and his phone, corrupt the government.
That was the worst thing.
Corruption is so bad because it doesn't matter if you have constitutional government, if the IRS is going to silence you.
It doesn't matter if you have a First Amendment, if the IRS can silence you.
It doesn't matter if you have the rule of law, if the Justice Department is so corrupt, it's spying on an opposition candidate.
If the State Department is sending out people to lie to cover up its mistakes in Benghazi, it just doesn't matter.
So that was truly annoying.
What makes me really sad, I must tell you, is children, young people, being schooled in ignorance in our universities so that they no longer know why we believe the things we believe, why we have the rules we have, why we say free speech.
I mean, you have to go and explain to them that once you shut down somebody's speech that you disagree with, then your speech can be shut down.
And then it all depends on who's got the power to say what ideas are smart and what ideas are stupid.
That's what that moron in the New York Times doesn't get, right?
Once you start to silence people, then it's all about who has the power to silence people.
And we don't want it to be about that.
We want it to be about free speech, free argument, ideas, changing hands.
So it was much more dangerous during the Obama administration.
Now I'm really sad that some of these people are supporting the socialism that destroys and just don't know why we have the ideas we do.
From Frank, Andrew, love your show.
Why do you think the Republicans have done such a horrible job explaining the law regarding detention of immigrant minors?
They have just said repeatedly it's the law without explaining how all the different areas such as minors not being allowed, expedited removal proceedings, the 2016 Ninth Circuit Court ruling and everything else.
Republicans stink when it comes to describing things.
I mean, if you listen to the emotionally charged terms that Democrats and leftists use to sell their bad ideas, and then listen to the dull terms that we use to sell our good ideas, it is a shame.
And that is one of the things, one of Trump's big strengths.
They say, babies in cages, babies in cages.
You turn on MSNBC, that's all you hear.
Babies in cages.
As if children weren't separated from their felonious parents every day across the country.
That is what you have to do when people commit a felony, have to take their kids away.
You know, they get babies in cages.
Racial profiling.
That sounds really bad.
What does that mean?
It means a cop who is schooled and knows his district, knows his beat, and looks around and sees a black guy in a hoodie who shouldn't be there that he thinks, ah, that guy is suspicious.
I know it because I'm a cop.
He's supposed to pretend that the fact that the guy is black didn't have anything to do with it when sometimes it just does.
But racial profiling sounds bad.
Objectifying women, which means men like beautiful women, they like to look at pretty girls.
That sounds bad.
We come up with the administrative state, right?
They build a structure to come and rip your freedom away by fiat, and we call it the administrative state.
I mean, that's why things like the deep state, right-wing intellectuals say, oh, the deep state, it sounds like a conspiracy.
It's emotional.
You've got to appeal to people's emotions somewhat, even though, especially when you're selling good ideas, we're just bad at it.
From Veronica, dear Andrew, how does one decide what to do with his or her life?
What's more important?
God's will, skills, passions, money, lifestyle, all of the above.
Life is truly overwhelming.
There are too many options.
How can I narrow it down when I have many different interests and skills?
And where does God's will factor into it?
Or is it a factor at all?
Please help.
Really good question.
God's will is everything in this matter because God has a plan for you, not for good, not for evil, but for good.
He built you with desires.
Those desires get broken and twisted by life, by original sin, by your history, by people teaching you bad stuff.
And what you're trying to do is get back to the desires that God implanted on you.
He gave in you.
He gave you a purpose.
You know, seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these other things will be given unto you.
Don't go after the money.
Don't go after the fame.
Don't go after hierarchical superiority.
I don't care what anybody says about that.
Go after the thing that you were made to do.
And the thing that you were made to do is not...
See, the reason God's will matters is because we get confused about these things.
we start to think like, oh, you know, I want power.
I want to be president of the United States.
And then you think about it, do I really, should I be president of the United States?
Was that really what I was made to do?
Maybe I was made to be a mom.
You know, maybe I was made to be a homemaker.
What is it that I'm supposed to do?
If you're listening to all the things that people tell you you should do and you're not listening to the voice of God who will tell you what he made you for and will clarify your desires and put you in the right direction, prayer really helps with this.
Listening to yourself in an honest way, listening even to your dreams, looking at your daydreams, I mean, looking at your daydreams and see, like, for instance, when I was young, I thought I wanted to be famous.
I got kind of famous and I thought like, oh yeah, I don't really care about this.
This is not what I cared about.
And I always noticed in my daydreams, I always wanted to be a writer.
All I ever wanted was to be a writer.
In my daydreams, as a kid, I was always a writer, but I was always writing under a pseudonym because I didn't want anybody to know who I was.
You know, I never really wanted to be in the public eye like that.
I just wanted my books to do well, you know.
And so paying attention to what you really want and what God made you for is the way to find out what you do in life.
It works great, by the way, and it can be done.
Don't be overwhelmed.
Take your time.
It is a blessing.
It is a blessing that you have so many options, so many choices.
God bless America.
God bless the free world that you have so many choices as a young woman.
I think it's a wonderful, wonderful thing.
I got to stop there.
I've gone over my time.
But let us go to tickety-boo news.
So one of the things I've been hammering about is the fact that the left has such control over the means of communication that they managed to create the idea that they are far, far more powerful than they are.
Starbucks, great example, let themselves be cowed by social justice warriors and protests into basically admitting that they did something racist when they chased two trespassers off out of their building and called the police on them because they wouldn't pay for anything.
They wouldn't buy anything as the rules were in Starbucks.
Now, we find out from the Washington Times, Starbucks may have appeased progressives with its social justice workshops and open bathroom policy, but such moves have failed to caffeinate the company's bottom line.
The coffee giant stock took a tumble Wednesday after CEO Kevin Johnson announced that Starbucks would close 150 company-owned stores next year instead of the expected 50 with an emphasis on underperforming shops in densely populated urban areas and lowered growth projections.
Same thing with the NFL.
Starbucks was an untouchable franchise.
NFL, untouchable.
Star Wars, untouchable.
Start to pump in that social justice warrior stuff and suddenly it's not so untouchable because you know what?
They're not in the majority.
I mean, people don't want to be like this.
Tracy Ullman, God love her, has a hilarious bit.
And I noticed that like you couldn't get it on YouTube for a while.
Now it's up there.
But I don't know if they're shutting it down or not.
But she had a thing where she has a woke support group for people who are so woke they can't enjoy their lives.
And the thing that's so important about this is when these voices start coming out and they start becoming popular and people, she is in England, a very, very well-respected comedian.
She really can be hilarious.
When this stuff comes out, we start to realize, oh, you know, most people feel like this.
Most people laugh at this stuff.
Just because they're the ones doing the shouting doesn't mean they have the power or we should give them the power.
Take a look at this.
It is hilarious.
Okay, everyone, welcome.
This support group is for people who are so woke that they are finding it impossible to have any fun at all.
We have somebody new with us this week.
So would you like to introduce yourself?
Hi, I'm Oscar.
I think like a lot of you guys, for me, it started with the little things.
Signing an online petition, going on to a march.
Well, I mean, before I knew it, I was writing to The Guardian about LGBT representation in the Harry Potter books.
Which is shocking, by the way.
All right, Lily.
We've all read your blog.
Don't worry, Oscar.
You've come to the right place.
All of the young people in this room are ruining their lives by being overly virtuous.
That's actually a microaggression to say young people, because it carries subconscious bias towards the elderly.
Actually, what you're doing is denying agency to the elderly, which is arguably much worse.
This is what I'm talking about.
You see, it's a slippery slope.
One minute you're carrying a reusable water bottle, fine, and the next minute you're arguing that water is racist.
Oh my god, is water racist?
No, no, it's just an example.
Right, how did you guys get on with the homework that I set you?
Guys isn't an especially inclusive term.
Not now, Jamie.
By homework, do you mean having to watch that old people sitcom?
It's called Friends, Lily.
And you were supposed to watch it and enjoy it.
Well, I tried, but I found it deeply problematic.
Why?
Well, there's the homophobia, the transphobia, the fatism, and the slut-shaming.
And could Chandler be any more annoying?
You can't go through your 20s worrying about every aspect of everything.
You have to pick your battles.
And just remember that it doesn't really matter because by the time you hit your 30s, most of you are going to be massively right-wing anyway.
Have any of you started to think that maybe poor people don't deserve benefits?
No.
Well, watch out for that one because that's how it starts.
Look, I understand this has all been a bit much for some of you, so let's take five and have a hobknob.
I found the word hobknob very phallocentric.
Off, Jamie.
We couldn't play that last line, but it is the funniest line in the video.
Listen, if the culture starts to shift, and this is what I've been, the drum I've been beating now for 20 years, but if the culture of this sort of thing starts to shift, then, then we can keep our freedom alive for another generation and even another one after that.
I do believe we will.
I do believe we can.
A Hobknob Moment00:00:36
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
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