Ep. 534 mocks leftist outrage over Anthony Kennedy’s retirement, exposing their hypocrisy in demanding judicial overreach while opposing Gorsuch’s confirmation—now pushing for delays on Trump’s nominee. George Weigel argues Western decline stems from abandoning Judeo-Christian roots, warning Islam must internally reform tolerance and secularism or risk conflict. The episode ties leftist cultural wars to alienating moderates, contrasts Trump’s mixed legacy with Clinton’s failures, and critiques Pope Francis’s diluted Catholicism while praising John Paul II’s moral leadership. [Automatically generated summary]
So there's some news you might have missed yesterday if you were focused on the retirement of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and how it caused many Democrats to melt down into yummy, yummy leftist tears suitable for drinking in this handsome tumbler available with your year-long $100 subscription to the Daily Wire.
Even comes with a cap so your leftist tears won't spill as you're dancing happily around the room as if Kennedy's retirement were a cross between a Jewish wedding and the Mamma Mia sequel.
The other news is that Donald Trump has agreed to a July 16th meeting in Helsinki with President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
Hearing of the meeting, special counsel Robert Mueller jumped excitedly from his chair and cried, quote, aha, at last I have proof that Trump is colluding with the Russians, unquote.
He then ordered a raid on the White House, surrounding the Rose Garden with G-Men carrying Tommy guns who shouted at President Trump that he was surrounded and should come out with his hands up.
When someone explained to Mueller that it was legal for Trump to meet with Putin and was actually just normal foreign policy, Mueller responded, quote, well, then I guess this raid was pretty stupid, and I should get back to spending millions of taxpayer dollars investigating things that never happened and charging people with crimes that wouldn't have existed if I hadn't been investigating them for no reason in the first place, unquote.
President Trump says that he's looking forward to the Helsinki meeting with Putin so they can discuss Putin's plans for throwing the midterms into chaos.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky.
Shipshaw, dipsy-topsy, no one does it easing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hooray, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, the Clavenless weekend is upon us already.
Hard to believe.
This week has been so packed with news.
It just went flying by.
But we have George Weigel today.
Great interview with George Weigel, a Catholic intellectual who will discuss what went wrong with the West.
Really, really interesting guy, very eloquent, very intelligent.
There's Catholic guys, you know, they have this 2,000 years of tradition weighing on them.
It lifts them up, unless it's Knowles, and then he just drags it down.
Also, on the 4th of July, in a special live stream this coming Monday, July 2nd at 7 p.m. Eastern, we will be joined by special guest Jordan Peterson, and we'll be celebrating the 4th of July Independence Day.
Jeremy Boring, the God-King of the Daily Wire, will host a new edition of Daily Wire Backstage with me, Shapiro, and Knowles to look back on our country's birth and look ahead to its future.
Subscribers will even be able to write in live questions for us to answer on the air.
Again, 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.
Don't miss it.
You know, I've been watching the Matt Walsh show.
I don't know if you've been watching that.
You know, Matt does his show out of a car.
It's a token of our respect for him.
We don't give him a studio or anything like that.
So he's been kind of bolstering himself up by talking about the fact that he has a globe.
He has a globe, and he thinks that makes him look kind of intellectual and intelligent and superior to some of us who actually have a studio.
And I don't want to cause a global conflict with Matt.
He saw that I actually have a globe myself.
And I didn't put it forward like that because I don't have to.
I don't have to put my globe forward.
But he went out and bought another globe.
And, you know, that's fine.
That's fine.
He can have two globes if he wants.
Why The Left Paved The Way00:13:27
You know, one of the problems you'll notice on the left is that because they never hear any other arguments, they get really angry whenever they confront us.
They don't know what we're thinking or why.
And that is a good reason to read magazines.
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So obviously hilarious.
We've got to get into some of this.
While I was on yesterday, Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement.
And the funny thing about this is like Kennedy was largely a conservative justice.
He was usually the conservative swing vote, except on some very, very high-level, high-profile social justice things like gay marriage.
He was the vote that put that over the top.
Abortion, he was always defending it.
And so the left has just gone insane over this.
I mean, you'd think that they loved this guy who was constantly voting for the right.
You'd think they'd loved him, but they went.
Here was just a token of their reaction.
I can't stop when I get like this.
I can't stop.
I'm hysterical.
I'm a dynamite.
And that was the editor of the New York Times.
So you can imagine how it was with people down the line.
I have just one, you know, you know, it's funny.
All we heard about up until this moment were babies crying at the border.
And all we heard is babies crying.
Look, babies, here's a picture.
Here's a baby.
It's crying.
That's from 2014.
It's still, it's crying.
It's a baby.
It's crying.
Suddenly, it's like, I don't care about babies crying.
I'm crying.
That's what matters.
It's like the left just to anything.
It's all emotion.
They just always follow their emotions.
I have one message for the left about this.
This is your own damn fault.
It's you who insisted that the Supreme Court, first of all, it's you who insisted that the government should put its grubby little fingers into every single aspect of our lives.
The Constitution gives the government, the federal government, enumerated powers.
It's not supposed to have any other powers except those mentioned in the Constitution.
But it's you guys who have extended that power through interpreting the Constitution any way you want, just making it up.
It's like a living document.
It's a living document.
It's like C's for Constitution by the, you know, it just leaps up anytime it wants and rewrites itself.
Now the federal government decides who gets married, who can get married, what laws the states can make about marriage, what laws the states can make about abortion.
You know, basically you have like a Chicago Paul like Obama sitting in Washington telling people in Arkansas who should use the bathrooms in their public schools.
Oh yeah, a girl says he's a guy, a guy says he's a girl.
That's the bathroom.
The president of the United States is going to dictate that to Mississippi.
It's going to dictate that to Connecticut.
It's like, what on earth?
That is not the way our government was supposed to work.
This is supposed to be enumerated powers.
It's your fault, lefties, that this court has become that important.
It shouldn't be that five unelected justices get this decision.
You know, get to make decisions that affect us all so deeply.
If the government were smaller, if the government were obeying the Constitution and only having the enumerated powers in the Constitution, then the Supreme Court's decisions, every now and again, they'd make an important one, but it wouldn't be like every single one was dealing with every single one of us.
It's the left.
When you saw these decisions that we were talking about yesterday, these enforced speech decisions, it is the left that wants to tell you how to feel.
It's the left that wants to tell you how to think.
It's the left that wants to tell you how to say.
They think that freedom just fell out of the sky and it will be protected no matter what we do.
They do not understand that it's our laws, our Constitution that protect us.
And when you interpret the Constitution rightly, even if you don't get what you want in that minute, it still is protecting you.
And the left just doesn't get it.
They only go with the results.
They never care about the process.
So even what they did with the filibuster paved the way for this moment when Trump basically has a free hand to appoint the kind of justice we hope, we hope will be the same kind of federalist, constitutionalist justice like Gorsuch.
It was the left who paved the way for this.
Remember, it's 2013, they said, you know what?
Filibuster doesn't count anymore.
Filibuster, forget the filibuster.
You don't need 60 votes to appoint judges.
They left the Supreme Court out of this.
They said all the other justices, all the other federal justices, just a majority vote.
And remember, Mitch McConnell, this is cut number nine.
He told them he was so upset about this, he told them not to do it.
Here's just to remind you what that was like.
Once again, Senate Democrats are threatening to break the rules of the Senate.
Break the rules of the Senate in order to change the rules of the Senate.
And over what?
Over what?
Over a court that doesn't even have enough work to do?
The majority leader promised.
He promised over and over again that he wouldn't break the rules of the Senate in order to change them.
If you want to play games, set yet another precedent that you'll no doubt come to regret.
Say to my friends on the other side of the aisle, you'll regret this, and you may regret it a lot sooner than you think.
So he told them they were going to regret it.
Harry Reid sent out a tweet saying, oh boy, I'm glad people encouraged me for filibuster reform.
It's always reform when they do it.
They just got rid of this rule of filibuster, which by the way, I wish they'd get rid of altogether at this point because it's outdated, it's being misused.
But they didn't care.
It is your own damn fault, lefties.
You did this.
You did this.
And then on top of this, right, Neil Gorsuch is appointed by Trump.
And because of the resistance and the pink hats and the people in the streets and all the anger from the left because they cannot stand legally losing an election, all of that stuff, Chuck Schumer said, well, we're going to filibuster Gorsuch.
Gorsuch didn't change the balance of the court.
Gorsuch was replacing, as you remember, Antonin Scalia.
So he didn't change the balance of the court.
Why filibuster him?
He was also unimpeachable.
He was also a great justice, as everybody agreed.
So why a filibuster him?
Didn't matter.
Chuck Schumer had resistance, resistance, resistance.
And they didn't think Mitch McConnell would blow him up.
And he did blow him up.
And he nuked him.
And he said, okay, then we're not going to have the filibuster.
Even Ben, remember Ben was saying, like, you know, he'll never do it.
He'll never do it.
But he did.
He did.
And he said, you know, you took the filibuster away.
I told you you were going to regret it.
Now we're taking it away for Supreme Court justices too.
So yesterday, Mitch McConnell was hilarious because Mitch McConnell has that kind of turtly face.
You know, it almost has no expression on it.
You know, you've heard the expression, he looks like the cat who ate the canary.
He looked like the cat who bit Chuck Schumer's head off and then spit it out.
That's what he looked like.
He's like this little glow coming out of it.
Here's just a note of him telling the left, telling Schumer, ain't going to be no resistance this time.
We have the majority and we're going to push it through.
The Senate stands ready to fulfill its constitutional role by offering advice and consent on President Trump's nominee to fill this vacancy.
We will vote to confirm Justice Kennedy's successor this fall.
As in the case of Justice Gorsuch, senators will have the opportunity to meet with President Trump's nominee, examine his or her qualifications, and debate the nomination.
I have every confidence in Chairman Grassley's conduct of the upcoming confirmation process in the Judiciary Committee.
It's imperative that the president's nominee be considered fairly and not subjected to personal attacks.
Thus far, President Trump's judicial nominations have reflected a keen understanding of the vital role that judges play in our constitutional order.
Judges must interpret the law fairly and apply it even-handedly.
If you are filling up my leftist tiers tumbler, lefties, this is your own damn fault.
Everything about the situation is the fault of the left, every single thing about it.
There's nothing about this that the right has to take any kind of blame for whatsoever.
They made the court too strong.
They basically said we can interpret the Constitution any way we want.
Even today, even this week, as these decisions were coming out, when they had that decision that the travel ban was okay, was so obviously in the law that Trump had the power to put in this travel ban into effect.
Even then, we don't have to obey no law.
We don't need no constitution.
You know, they are the guys who did this.
They're the guys who made the court so powerful.
If the court, by practice and habit and custom, had remained within the confines of the Constitution, the states would have retained the power that they're supposed to have, and it would not be as epic a problem for the left as it is right now.
And you know, Schumer is, because they're so upset about Merrick Garland.
You remember Merrick Garland was the pick of Obama, but he was about to leave office, and so they held it up for a year and said, no, we're going to have this election.
So now, Chuck Schumer hilariously is saying, oh, well, now you should hold it up because there's a midterm coming up, not a presidential election, but a midterm coming up in the hopes that they will win the Senate and this will energize their base.
And Schumer goes on the floor in what even he must know is a desperate, desperate argument that is never going to go anywhere.
He goes on and makes this play.
The Senate should reject anyone who will instinctively side with powerful special interests over the interests of average Americans.
Our Republican colleagues in the Senate should follow the rule they set in 2016, not to consider a Supreme Court justice in an election year.
Senator McConnell would tell anyone who listened that the Senate had the right to advise and consent, and that was every bit as important as the President's right to nominate.
Millions of people are just months away from determining the senators who should vote to confirm or reject the president's nominee, and their voices deserve to be heard now, as Leader McConnell thought they should deserve to be heard then.
Anything but that would be the absolute height of hypocrisy.
You're a mean, mad white man.
He is a mean, mad white man, and he's not going anywhere with this.
Senator Mike Lee had the best response to this.
Mike Lee is the guy that Ted Cruz and a lot of conservatives would like to see get the appointment.
I suspect he's not going to because he kind of stood against Trump and Trump can hold the grudge, but maybe not.
We don't know.
So Dianne Feinstein also pushing this, and Shannon Bream reads Feinstein's statement to Lee's response is classic because it's just so honest.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, of course, the top Democrat on judiciary, says this.
There should be no consideration of a Supreme Court nominee until the American people have a chance to weigh in.
Leader McConnell set that standard in 2016 when he denied Judge Garland a hearing for nearly a year.
And the Senate should follow what she's calling the McConnell standard.
Yeah, two very important distinctions there.
Number one, that was a presidential election year.
This isn't.
Number two, we have the majority.
They don't.
That's the biggest single distinction.
That's the one that matters.
So they can wish that all they want, but they know that we're going to confirm whoever President Trump happens to nominate.
See, that's as close as a senator can come as saying, screw you, basically.
Although these days he could probably just say that.
But it really is different because the Republicans had the advantage when Garland was nominated, and they have the advantage now, and they're certainly not going to wait around for the midterms or anything else.
They're going to do this as quickly as they possibly can.
And they should.
I mean, they should.
But most of all, I mean, this is the left's fault that this is such a panic attack.
This is such a crazed, you know, wild leftist tears moment.
That it's all their fault.
But most of all, it is their fault because they have become antagonistic to the most basically held beliefs of the American people.
And when I say the American people, I'm not just talking about right-wingers.
I am talking about a large swath of people who are not on the left.
Left's Antagonism Crisis00:15:22
Those people who are Democrats, liberals in the old sense of the word.
I mean, now a liberal is a conservative, right?
A liberal is basically the classical liberals and the conservatives are basically the same people.
There are areas of disagreement between them, but they're basically the same people.
And a lot of these people vote for Democrats because their parents voted for Democrats.
Their grandparents, they just don't break away.
They don't look at what is happening.
But the left has made it very hard to ignore.
You know, law professor David Bernstein wrote a piece in the Washington Post, and he is quoting a piece from Sean Trend in Real Clear Politics.
Here is Sean Trend talking about what liberals have done in regards to religious people, right?
Because most people in this country are still at least enough religious to pray in secret.
You know, they may not go to church every Sunday, but they still believe in God.
Here is his list.
Democrats and liberals have booed the inclusion of God in their platform at the 2012 convention.
They've endorsed a regulation that would allow transgendered students to use the bathroom and locker room corresponding to their identity, attempted to force small businesses to cover drugs they believe in deuce abortions, attempted to force nuns to provide contraceptive coverage.
They forced Brendan Eich to step down as chief executive officer of Mozilla due to his opposition to marriage equality, fined a small Christian bakery over $140,000 for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding, vigorously opposed a law in Indiana that would provide protections against similar regulations despite having overwhelmingly supported similar laws when they protected Native American religious rights, which is exactly right.
It's only Christ they hate, and then scoured the Indiana countryside trying to find a business that would be affected by the law before settling upon a small pizza place in the middle of nowhere and harassing the owners.
In 2015, the United States Solicitor General suggested that churches might lose their tax-exempt status if they refused to perform same-sex marriages.
In 2016, the Democratic nominee endorsed repealing the Hyde Amendment, thereby endorsing federal funding for elective abortions.
I mean, this is basically the hatred that they have shown toward religious people.
It has ginned up evangelicals, but I think it offends everybody.
It is the thing that makes them, that puts them at odds with the rest of us.
I mean, you know, Bernstein in this WAPO piece, he talks about the Obergfeld same-sex marriage case, right, where the Supreme Court declared that the founders meant for the Constitution to protect the right of gay people to get married.
That's what George Washington was thinking.
That was what Thomas Jefferson was thinking when he wrote the Constitution was, you know, we got to make sure that, I guess he would have called them sodomites.
I mean, back in the day, I guess we ought to make sure that they get married.
No, I mean, you know, the thing is, you know how tolerant and accepting I am of gay people.
You know all that.
But the Supreme Court had no business.
It's not in the Constitution.
The enumerated powers do not grant the federal government rights over who gets married in what state.
They just don't.
And if you don't protect that stuff, you'll lose everything.
So there was an exchange between Alito and the Solicitor General arguing for same-sex marriage.
And Alito says in the Bob Joan case, the court held that a college was not entitled to tax-exempt status if it opposed interracial marriage or interracial dating.
So would the same apply to a university or a college if it opposed same-sex marriage?
And the solicitor general said, you know, I don't think I can answer that question without knowing more specifics, but it's certainly going to be an issue.
The left didn't know that that exchange existed.
The left didn't care, but the right knew and the evangelicals knew.
And they set themselves at odds with anybody who was a devout Christian.
And maybe, you know, some of that Christianity was not necessary.
You know, maybe some of the beliefs in that Christianity are not inherent in the gospel.
Maybe they are.
I'm not arguing that at all, whether that's true or not.
The point is that this is what people believe.
It's their deeply, deeply held belief.
And the Democrats and the left have been spitting on those people forever.
So there's no sympathy from them for them from the right.
The final thing, the final thing that is their fault is perfectly encapsulated in the top editorial in Knucklehead Row.
So let us take a long walk to the op-ed page of the New York Times, or as we like to call it, Knucklehead Row.
This is written by the editors, and all I really have to read you is the title.
It's with Kennedy Gone, justice must be won at the ballot box.
It's like, wow, you mean you have to convince people to vote for your ideas?
What a concept, New York Times.
What a concept.
You know, because they thought they could rule by fiat through the court and through the regulatory agencies, they haven't tried to convince us.
They thought they could spit on us.
They thought they could tell us boo the God that we worship.
They thought they could do all this stuff.
And now, now, when there's a chance that Trump will really remake the court in a conservative image and a constitutionalist image, they're thinking like, oh my gosh, maybe we should make an argument and stop calling people racist all the time.
That would be new.
It is all the left's fault.
This is a five-alarm fire for them.
It is all their fault.
You know, I have to tell you, the one way you know that the left is at odds with a large swath of America in a way the right simply isn't because the right has a very big tent is the fact that they have to lie all the time.
You know, Obama had to run as a moderate.
Remember, Obama ran as a moderate that first time.
He played down a, oh, I'm not for income redistribution.
I'm not a socialist.
Later on, before he left, he said, you know, Bernie Sanders, he agreed with Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders just wanted to move too quickly.
So he is a socialist.
He is, you know, he basically is a European socialist.
Now, they have this problem that this Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won this election in a liberal district in Queens and Manhattan.
And the thing about this is the guy, Joe, what was his name, Crowley?
I think it was Joe Crowley.
Yeah.
He didn't campaign because he just thought he had a like a 30-point lead.
So no one showed up at this election.
I mean, whether this election actually shows that this is the way the party is going is up for grabs.
So here's Nancy Pelosi, but there certainly is a huge leftist pull in the Democrat Party.
So here's Nancy Pelosi, and the reporters are saying, gee, you guys are getting kind of young and progressive, aren't you?
And she slaps them down.
Listen to this.
They made a choice in one district.
So let's not get yourself carried away as an expert on demographics and the rest of that within the caucus or outside the caucus.
We are, again, we have an array of genders, generations, geography, and the rest, opinion in our caucus, and we're very proud of that.
The fact that in a very progressive district in New York, it went more progressive than, well, Joe Crowley is a progressive, but more to the left than Joe Crowley, is about that district.
It is not to be viewed as something that stands for everything else.
Are we excited about another generation of people coming into the Congress?
I am particularly excited that so many women are running across the country because when I came to Congress, usually people had raised their families or done something else before they came.
The men were on average 10 years younger when they came.
And now we have women stepping up earlier, weighing home and work in a way that is going to benefit all of the American people.
So that's Nancy Pelosi lying and saying, don't worry, we're not becoming communist.
And here is the lady who actually won, Alexandria Casey O-Cortez, saying, yeah, no, we are going communist.
I think that we're in the middle of a movement in this country.
I feel this movement, but that movement's going to happen from the bottom up.
That movement is going to come from voters.
There are a lot of really exciting races with extremely similar dynamics as mine.
It's not just one district.
You look at Ayana Presley out in Massachusetts.
Same exact situation.
So here's the thing, though.
Nancy Pelosi's 78.
You are 28.
We can do the math.
Okay.
So Stanny Hoyer, the minority whip, 79.
Jim Clyburne, 77.
Yeah.
Okay.
Is that going to stay that way?
Can someone like Nancy Pelosi, and this isn't about her as a human being, this is about the leader of your party when it comes to Congress.
Is it time for new blood?
Younger blood.
You know, I do think that we do need to elect a generation of new people to Congress on both parties.
You know, I think that some of the issues that we even have today may have to do with some of the calcified structures and relationships.
And in certain seats where it's appropriate, I think that a new leaf can actually mean a lot of opportunity for the party and our future.
So the old lady, basically Pelosi, is saying, yeah, we're not going communist.
The new face of the party is saying, oh, yes, we absolutely are.
We're absolutely going socialist.
This is the way it's going.
So all of this stuff has put the Democrats at odds with the normal.
You know, I mean, this is not a socialist country, not yet anyway.
It's still alive.
It's still, you know, believes in freedom.
It still believes in capitalism.
All the things that have made this country great are still in operation.
They're always under threat, but they're still in operation.
And I think that it is because the Democrats have lost touch with the whole middle of the country, the entire middle of the country, that they have to rule by fiat.
They have to force things down our throat.
And when they lose the power to do that through the Supreme Court, they just panic.
It is all their fault.
All right, we got this amazing interview with George Weigel coming up.
We're not going to cut away.
We're going to let you watch and just stay here and see the whole thing.
But that is all the more reason that you should feel incredibly guilty for not subscribing.
Should subscribe.
Lousy, 10 bucks a month.
You can ask questions in the mailbag.
Lousy, 100 bucks for the whole year.
And you're going to need this.
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This leftist year's tumbler.
I mean, what are you going to do without it?
George Weigel is an American author, political analyst, social activist.
He currently serves as a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
He was the founding president of the James Monroe Foundation.
We're talking about his book, The Fragility of Order: Catholic Reflections on Turbulent Times.
I have been reading the essays in it.
It's really a collection of essays.
And it really is powerful stuff because he has this vision of what it is that makes democracy work and that it's not disconnected from the church.
It's not disconnected from Christian belief.
And this interview, I could have gone on for another half hour with his interview, but we'll bring him back and talk to him again.
Fascinating stuff.
George Weigel, thank you very much for coming on.
I really appreciate it.
Nice to be here with you.
Let's start with the big picture from your book.
You know, after the Cold War, many of us were hopeful that there was going to be a new order coming out of the fall of the Soviet Union.
20 years later, it doesn't look very much like that.
What do you think went wrong?
I think a number of things went wrong, Drew.
The United States took something of a holiday from history in the 1990s during the Clinton administration.
And then in the post-9-11 world, I think we failed to understand that this civilizational struggle between the West and jihadist radical Islam was going to take the better part of several generations to resolve.
We're not a patient people.
We're used to orderliness, or at least some degree of it, in our own public life.
But we've even seen that come unglued a bit in the last 25 years, too.
The post-Cold War world has not been a time of civic renewal in America.
It's been a time of civic deconstruction and decomposition in many ways.
So we're at a very challenging moment here in the early decades of the 21st century, testing whether the promise of freedom lived nobly that was laid out by, among others, Pope John Paul II, Václav Havel, other great figures of the Revolution of 89, is going to be vindicated in fact.
You know, you write very eloquently about the role that the church, specifically the Catholic Church, has to play in supporting democracy and supporting freedom.
Can you explain that a little bit?
Yeah, I would broaden the categories and talk about biblical religion.
I think the civilization of the West is like a stool that rests on three legs.
One of them is Jerusalem, biblical religion.
The idea that human life is not just one darn thing after another.
It's not cyclical.
It's journey.
It's pilgrimage.
It's adventure.
It's heading somewhere.
And within that notion of journey is another crucial notion of the dignity of every individual human being made in the image and likeness of God.
The second leg of the stool is Athens, Greek, classical Greece, the human faith in reason, the capacity of reason to get at the truth of things.
And then the third leg of the stool is Rome, conviction that law rather than brute force is the superior way to organize public life.
Those are the building blocks, the foundation stones of the Western world.
And we saw how the biblical religion leg can renew the others during the 1980s.
John Paul II was a crucial figure in the collapse of European communism because he ignited a revolution of conscience in which people took the risk, as he put it at the UN in 1995, of living in the truth, of living for freedom.
And freedom understood something as something more than doing it my way, to quote the great moral philosopher Frank Sinatra.
Freedom as common purpose, freedom as noble enterprises jointly engaged in.
The revolution of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe was a different kind of massive social change because it was informed by moral truth.
We tend to forget that in the Western world today.
We think democracy is a machine that can run by itself.
Lack of Reality Contact00:12:10
Well, it isn't.
It takes a certain kind of people living certain virtues so that the machinery of democracy produces genuine human flourishing and a society that is building a common good, not just a sum total of little individual goods.
So there's so many places I want to unpack that.
Let's start with this one.
Does this mean, if this is the center of and the support of our way of life, does this mean that Islam is inherently incompatible with what the West is trying to do?
When Pope Benedict spoke about this, it started riots around the world and he had to kind of back off a little bit.
Do you feel he was right to back off?
Do you feel that this is a fight we have to have?
I think Pope Benedict's Regensburg address to which you're referring is perhaps the most misunderstood papal speech in several hundred years.
What the Pope was saying is that for Islam to live with the rest of the world, it has to develop from within its own religious resources a theory of religious tolerance and a theory of social pluralism, a theory of the separation of religious and political authority in a just society.
Those two points.
Can Islam develop within itself an understanding of religious tolerance, including the legally protected right to change your religious location, if you will, to convert from one religion to another?
And can Islam find a way to legitimize again from within itself the distinction between spiritual authority and political authority in a 21st century state?
Those are going to be two very significant developments, and they're going to take a while.
But those are the right questions.
And the Pope was right to put them on the table, and they ought to keep being pressed today.
And there may be some indication that this is beginning to happen.
I mean, we see the beginnings of some wrestling with this, even in Saudi Arabia today, with the crown prince evidently trying to find some path forward beyond this narrow sectarian Salafist form of Islam.
But it's incumbent upon Western people of faith, Jews and Christians, to keep pressing these questions with Islamic interlocutors.
I did this in Rome last December with a group of Islamic scholars and jurists.
And I said, look, it took the Catholic Church about 200 years to come up with a Catholic theory of religious freedom and a Catholic understanding of social pluralism in a democratic post-ancien regime world.
It's going to take you guys a while too, but maybe we can help you do that if you understand that you're going to have to find these resources from within your own tradition.
The notion of some very brave people, I think of Ayan Hirsi Ali, for example, that the only answer to this problem of Islam and the rest of the world is for 1.2 billion Muslims to become good secular liberals is just not a real world prescription.
That ain't going to happen.
So there needs to be some other alternative.
Meanwhile, it is terribly important, both for our own safety and for the safety of those Muslims who are the primary victims of Islamist and jihadist terrorism to do everything we can to defeat that scourge of civilization throughout the world.
So let's bring this home then.
What about the home culture?
We have all these fights about gay marriage, for instance, and certainly gay tolerance.
I live in Los Angeles where I may be the last straight man walking around.
How do we balance our tolerance with our neighbors, our American sense that everybody should be able to do as he pleases in his own home, with the need to defend our culture and to keep this biblical religion, as you put it, at the core of our governance?
Well, what biblical religion does for us is it helps us see the world accurately.
And so much of our public life today, it seems to me, is confused because of a lack of reality contact.
One of the essays in this book we're discussing is called The Importance of Reality Contact, Deep Truths and Public Policy.
If you keep telling yourself, A, that someone can look in the mirror in the morning, see the attributes of a man, say to themselves, I am really a woman, and then the rest of us have to salute and say, yes, you are really a woman, we're building a society around a lack of reality contact, and that just can't be good.
The aggressiveness of the LGBTQ movement, I think, has to be contested not least on grounds of religious freedom, but also on just grounds of sheer civility.
Take the Masterpiece Cake Shop, for example.
That Baker won on a very narrow Supreme Court decision because the Colorado Civil Rights Commissioners were so blatantly anti-religious that even Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan could recognize it on the Supreme Court.
But the case should never have happened anyway.
There were a gazillion other places that could have baked a cake for that event.
This was not an assertion of someone's civil rights.
This was an attempt to use state power to compel Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cake Shop, to say, yes, I think this is all great, and I'm all for it.
That's bullying.
That is what Pope Benedict called the dictatorship of relativism.
The use of coercive state power to impose an ethic of I'm okay, you're okay, and nothing's not okay on everybody else.
And that is lethal to democracy.
So let's move on to the dread question of Donald Trump.
When he was running, I think I referred to him as the first post-Christian presidential candidate in his emphasis on winning, his attacks on people for not having enough money, his bullying aspect.
And yet he seems to be doing an actually good job running the country.
Can we, as religious believers in good faith, support a man who is obviously very personally flawed?
Well, there have been lots of personally flawed presidents, senators, representatives, Supreme Court justices, emperors, kings, queens, whatever.
So that's called the human condition.
President Trump should be judged on, first of all, on performance.
And by that measure, I'm reasonably pleased with some things.
I think his judicial nominations have been quite good.
I think his economic policies, including both deregulation and the tax reform, seem to have gotten the economy back in gear again.
I do think that he let us down badly in Singapore by not addressing the grotesque human rights violations that are a normal part of state policy in North Korea, and then by describing this murderous little thug as a talented man with a great personality, whatnot.
This is just, this is really warping reality.
Again, there's a lack of reality contact.
And I worry that in his appeals to the base, his base, in the United States, he's aiming low.
I think presidents should aim high.
Presidents should summon the American people to live out the noblest of our aspirations, not to live out the basest of our fears.
And this constant appeal to a nation under assault by what?
People picking fruit in the Yakima Valley?
I don't think so.
There's lots of things assaulting the United States today, but that's not high on my list of problems.
So I think it's a mixed picture.
It's certainly better than it would have been under President Hillary Clinton.
You might have been interviewing me in Guantanamo.
That's very close.
Maybe you'd be there too.
Exactly.
Exactly.
It would be an easy interview, yeah.
I wish that there were more of a summons to nobility rather than an appeal to some very primal fears.
You know, I actually am already out of time, but I have to ask you one last question generated by your original statement.
You were talking about the Pope, Pope John.
You know, I'm not a Catholic, but your last two popes were two of the great heroes of my life.
John Paul II, obviously, bringing down, helping so much to bring down the Soviet Union, and Benedict, my favorite living theologian, just one of the great reads out there.
Not so much your new guy.
Where do you feel?
Do you feel that the church has taken a step back, or is this a necessary lull?
Or what is going on with Francis?
I think if you look at the living parts of the Catholic Church around the world, whether we're talking about North America or Africa or whatever pockets of vital Catholicism exist in Europe, it's those parts of the church that have embraced John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
If you look at the places where the church is dying, particularly in Western Europe, look at Ireland, for example.
It's those parts of the church that are trying to make the failed project of what I call Catholic light, like Coca-Cola light, you know, work.
And it doesn't.
So that's the empirical reality.
And I think people who admired and esteemed John Paul II and Benedict XVI can take, ought to take a lot of comfort from that in the present air turbulence in the church, which I do discuss as well in this book.
The book is The Fragility of Order: Catholic Reflections on Turbulent Times, a collection of terrific essays by George Weigel George.
Catholic Light Fails00:04:44
Thank you very much for coming on.
I hope you'll come back.
There's a lot of more questions I'd like to ask.
I'd enjoy that very much.
Good to see you.
Thanks very much.
Thanks.
Really good stuff.
Stuff I like.
That one was from Timothy Ricola.
If you want to add your entry into the Stuff I Like sweepstakes, what is the address, A. Claven?
A. Claven at Dailywire.com.
A. Claven at DailyWire.com, and you can send your stuff I like theme song, and we'll pick one eventually.
I may even put it up for a vote at some point.
Who knows?
Yeah.
Stuff I like.
You know, I rarely take recommendations from Ben Shapiro because what does he know about culture?
I mean, really, let's face it.
However, when the man is right, he is right.
And he sold me on this picture, The Death of Stalin.
And it is absolutely great.
It is really funny.
Here's just a brief clip from their trailer.
I propose we call a doctor.
Oh, my God.
All the best doctors are dead.
I can't remember who's alive and who isn't.
It's Comrade Stalin.
I'll take it from you.
We need to stop putting together a planet.
How come you run and plot at the same time?
We should get Stalin's children here.
What are you doing to my father, you jackals?
How old are you?
I'm old.
You're not old.
You're not even a person.
You're a testicle.
Everything's going to be fine.
This is not exactly fine, is it?
My father's lying there with his head open.
Stalin would have wanted the committee as one.
All those in favor.
Terry, you animously.
Rusht.
Not rushed.
Whatever.
Not rushed.
Would you stop with this?
I want to make a speech at my father's funeral.
No, no problem.
Technically, yes, but practically.
When I said no problem, what I meant was no.
No problem.
So this is what happens to the top of the Soviet order after Stalin, one of the true monsters of history, a man responsible for tens of millions of deaths, and who was randomly handing out lists of assassinating people.
What happens when he dies?
And it's the power struggle that follows with Steve Bussemi as Nikita Khrushchev.
Just a great, great cast of expert old men who know exactly what to do with this thing.
And here's the thing about it.
If you read the book, The Red Czar, The Court of the Red Czar, it's called, it details what happened when Stalin dies.
And the events in the film are almost exactly accurate.
It is based on a French graphic novel.
And the events are almost exactly accurate.
And the only thing that's funny about it is the way they read the lines.
I mean, this power struggle is real.
The murder is real.
The only thing that's funny about it is the way they film it, the way they act it.
And so it's all just the real horror.
It's called a comedy of terrors.
That's its subtitle.
And it just gets the comedy of being in an insane situation where you were following a madman with respect.
It reminded me of the comic version of the film Downfall.
I'm sure you've all seen the scene from Downfall where Hitler screams over the map and they put funny things under it.
Downfall is one of the best movies of the last 30 years, just a wonderful, wonderful film.
But what always struck me about Downfall is everybody in it behaves in a kind of honorable way if they're serving George Washington.
If they're serving somebody decent, they're being loyal, they're being steadfast, they're standing with their man.
It's just that he's Hitler and he's out of his mind.
He's a little cockroachy, little satanic madman, and they're giving him their best.
They're giving their best to the worst.
And that is a tragedy, and it's an almost unbelievable tragedy.
This shows exactly the same thing, except it shows the kind of horrifically comic version of that.
And it just captures what these philosophies that people follow, socialism, communism, fascism, all these things that people follow instead of freedom, instead of basically the system where the most number of people have the most power that is possible when it all devolves into these one mad person, how the whole world goes insane.
I must now, I'm sad to say, cast you into the Clavinless weekend where there will be great wailing and gnashing of teeth, but we will be back here Monday for the 4th of July week, and the survivors can gather here with us then.
Philosophies Gone Mad00:01:38
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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