Andrew Klavan and Matt Walsh clash over abortion’s moral and legal roots, with Walsh defending overturning Roe v. Wade as correcting judicial overreach—not activism—while framing it as a clash of worldviews tied to human dignity. Klavan mocks progressive hysteria over Supreme Court appointments, dismissing claims like Adam Schiff’s Russia-Trump collusion as baseless, instead warning of a "deep state" and socialism’s creeping threat. The debate pivots from constitutional battles to cultural nihilism, with Walsh contrasting Game of Thrones’ despair with art that upholds truth, before Klavan praises Babylon Berlin—even its Trotskyist allure—for its cinematic grit. Ultimately, the episode frames freedom’s fight as a zero-sum war between democratic governance and unelected judicial power, with abortion as both symptom and battleground. [Automatically generated summary]
Antifa, the fascist anti-fascist group that is actually fascist, is protesting a proposed new law that would force them to take off their masks while they're beating people up.
It's a true story.
The Unmask Antifa bill would mandate harsh jail sentences for anyone who, quote, injures, oppresses, threatens, or intimidates any person while wearing a mask, unquote.
Fascist anti-fascist leader Adolph Fascist says the new law singles out Antifa unfairly just because they put on masks to injure, oppress, and intimidate people instead of, say, asking for candy on Halloween.
The fascist anti-fascist Mr. Fascist said, quote, this bill makes no sense.
How in the world am I supposed to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate people without wearing a mask?
Everyone would be able to see my face and identify me, and then there would be consequences for terrorizing my fellow Americans.
Is that really the sort of country we want to become?
Unquote.
Fascist anti-fascists like Mr. Fascist claim they are not fascist because they call themselves anti-fascist while assaulting innocent people in the streets like fascists.
In a recent interview, the anti-fascist fascist Mr. Fascist said, quote, as an anti-fascist, I believe in freedom, and so I should be free to beat the living crap out of anyone who disagrees with me.
Taking off my mask would hamper me in that important work.
Plus, I might catch a glimpse of myself in a nearby storefront window and realize what a degraded monster I've become, which would be just plain depressing, unquote.
The Unmasked Antifa bill was proposed by three Republicans who brought the bill into Congress, where Democrats responded by putting on masks and beating them up.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
Birds they be singing, yo.
Also be winging yo.
No ease in Clavin, though.
This is the Clavin show.
Tickadee boo.
Hunkity donkade.
Tickadee boo.
Hunkity donkadee.
That was from Brett Siegel.
No, it is not going to replace our fantastic theme song.
But somebody on Twitter criticized my theme song yesterday and said, they said I laughed too much and they didn't like my theme song.
I thought, man, you are just wound too tight.
And at the same time, Brett sent that in, so I thought I would just use it.
To send us off into the Clavenless Weekend, it makes the Claveness Weekend a little more tolerable that you don't have to listen to that again.
YouTube has been manipulating the subscription feed to curate your choices, which means that users may not be notified if a channel goes live, even if you subscribe to our channel.
So in order to make sure you receive notifications for our live videos, you should not only subscribe to Daily Wire on YouTube, but also ring the little bell so you know when we post new content.
Also, you want to watch out for the conversation that's coming up Tuesday, next Tuesday, July 17th at 5.30 p.m. Eastern, 2.30 p.m. Pacific.
I will answer your questions, moderated by our lovely host, Alicia Krauss, who has agreed to waste to waive the restraining order so I can sit close to her.
The Q ⁇ A will stream live.
I wonder, is Alicia annoyed by these jokes?
She hasn't said it.
I talked to her yesterday.
She didn't say anything.
The Q ⁇ A will stream live on YouTube and Facebook for everyone to watch, but only subscribers can ask me questions over at DailyWire.com.
Check out the pinned comments on this video for more information.
Once again, subscribe to get your questions answered by me, Andrew Clavin, on Tuesday, July 17th at 5.30 p.m. Eastern, 2.30 p.m. Pacific, and join the conversation.
I'm a disgusting human.
I'm just degraded.
I don't even know how to.
You know, we got Matt Walsh coming on later with his globes.
I think Matt is bringing his globes because they make him look so intelligent.
But I really, there are a lot of stuff I want to talk to him about, but especially about Roe v. Wade and the abortion controversy.
He's really interesting on that topic.
Meanwhile, summer is upon us, and you know what that means, barbecues and bugs.
They are all over the place, the bugs, and you've got to get yourself a Dynatrap.
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Nancy Pelosi, I think I caught one day, and a couple of other Democrat politicians.
It really is useful and will clean the place out.
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It is a safe, silent, and simple solution to household insect control.
And it really does.
It collects them.
It's so easy to clean.
You just pull the thing out and they are gone.
And hopefully you can get rid of half of Congress that way.
All right.
So we're watching, it really is interesting.
We're watching these battle lines being drawn, but they're not the battle lines that people tell us that they are, especially the press, because the press is left-wing.
So they tell us, oh, this is about, you know, they're being drawn overseas, they're being drawn in Congress, they're being drawn in the Supreme Court.
And it's especially true of this kind of amorphous deep state they are being drawn over.
The battle lines, they say the battle lines are abortion versus non-abortion.
I say it's between whether laws are made in the Supreme Court and imposed upon us or whether we obey the Constitution and we each get to vote for laws in our individual states.
They say the same thing.
It's about gay marriage or something, but it's not about gay marriage.
It's like, you know, we on the right can disagree about gay marriage.
What we can't disagree about is whether the Constitution includes an enforced right to gay marriage.
All the Constitution does is enumerate the powers that the federal government has and that means that any powers that aren't mentioned in the Constitution aren't there.
You know, there were founding fathers who did not want a First Amendment because they said, well, we don't mention the right to regulate speech in the Constitution, so everyone will know that they don't have the right.
Fortunately, wiser heads prevail.
So they are, you know, it's so important to the left to gin up hysteria over each new issue every day because they want to keep us away from the real issue, which is the structure of freedom, which is set out by the Constitution.
The enumerated powers, the separation of powers, the rule of law, all of these things they want to override because it's always an emergency.
Remember Rahm Emmanuel said, don't let an emergency go to waste?
That's what he meant.
What he meant was, never let an emergency go to waste because you can use the hysteria that you gin up to override the Constitution, override the rules to freedom.
And, you know, I was talking, I think it was this week, earlier this week, about the fact that socialism, even if it worked, which it never does, it kills innovation, it kills freedom, it kills everything.
But even if it worked, it would be slavery because they take away the fruits of your labor.
They decide how to spend your money.
Why do they own your time?
Why does the state own your time, which you use to create property and money?
But it also, because it violates freedom, it degrades people and it twists people.
There was a piece in the Wall Street Journal this morning.
I wish everybody could read this by Erika Kamasar, a psychoanalyst.
She's the author of Being There, Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters, which it really does, by the way.
I mean, all these women who have babies and then go right back to work, I think they're making a big mistake, both for their own lives and for the life of their children.
I think they should be free to make that mistake, but there it is.
She points out that Sweden has very high personal income tax rates and one of the highest personal income tax rates in the world.
And the leftist socialists are always pointing to Sweden as a model of socialist society.
And she says the money that they get from taxes pays for the kind of support many American women would welcome.
But it comes with pressure on women to return to the workforce on the government's schedule, not their own, because once the government is paying the price, they're in charge.
They get to say what they do.
If a mother decides she wants to stay at home with her child beyond the state-sanctioned maternity leave, she receives no additional allowance, which creates an extreme financial burden on those families.
And the pressure is social as well.
A 30-2-year-old friend told me that she was in the park with her two-year-old son when she was surrounded by a group of women who berated her for not having the boy in daycare.
That's socialist life.
That is socialist life.
They pay for your maternity leave, so therefore they decide when your maternity leave ends.
And if you decide, hey, I want to stay and raise my kid, not only the government, but the society itself is opposed to you.
You know, there was a letter in the Wall Street Journal just a couple of days ago where a woman said when her husband got promoted, she told her son, I've been promoted too.
Now I've been promoted to your full-time mother because we can afford for me to stay at home.
So I just want to show you some of the ways in which they distract us from the true fight, which is the fight to stay free.
Free with all its inequalities, free with all its problems, free with all its mess.
And free with all the fact that we have to solve problems a little more slowly than if it was imposed by the great poobahs up above us.
Yesterday, there was this exchange, amazing exchange.
It was on MSNBC.
Katie Tour is talking to JD Vance, who wrote, I thought, the very good memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.
He is a mild, moderate conservative.
And listen to her question.
She is talking about the fact that we want to appoint judges.
See, I said this yesterday, but just to repeat, they want to appoint judges who will give them what they want, who will say, you have to have abortion.
You have to have gay marriage.
We don't want to appoint justices who say, you can have abortion, you can have gay marriage.
We want to appoint justices who say, this is what the Constitution says.
This is who decides.
Because as Thomas Sowell is fond of saying, it's not what's right or wrong.
It's who gets to decide what's right or wrong.
That's what keeps you free.
All right, so listen to the way Katie Tour asks this question.
Then listen to JD's answer, right, which is a very calm, very reasonable, conservative answer, and just the fact that she can't hear a word he's saying.
Based on where Americans stand on the issues, and Americans have really moved in a much more progressive direction over the years, do you think it's appropriate to continue to take such a strict originalist view of the Constitution, given it's 2018 and not 1776?
Well, I don't know that Americans have become more progressive on everything.
Certainly times have changed since 1776, but how you interpret the Constitution is ultimately different from what policy preferences you want.
And this is a point that conservatives make pretty often about the Supreme Court, that whether you want the laws to move in a progressive or a conservative direction, the Supreme Court is a separate institution with a separate mandate under our constitutional structure.
So, for example, if you want abortion to be outlawed or you want abortion to not be outlawed, that is a question.
And there's an open debate about whether that question should be decided by the Supreme Court or that question should be decided by voters and by state legislators and by federal legislators.
That is a question to me that's about constitutional structure, not so much about policy preferences.
Well, the arc of history has shown that opinions have become more progressive.
She can't hear a word he's saying because she doesn't want to know that that's the fight.
Because once you put it like that to people, once you say, hey, guess what?
We're not arguing about the issue.
We're arguing about the framework under which the issue is decided.
People get that.
People are not stupid.
But if you can get them ginned up, if you can get them excited, if you can say your rights are going to be taken away, if you can say, oh, look at the babies being pulled from the mommies at the border, you know, then the rule of law, then the Constitution, then the structure that maintains this freedom that is so precious and so rare, it has sprung up a few times in human history and died very rapidly.
We have kept it alive for a very long time, relatively speaking, a couple hundred years, which is a long time for freedom to live.
Making Neighborhoods Safer00:02:42
It doesn't just drop out of the sky.
It was built by minds and men who died and lived and thought to build this thing and they want to tear it down.
So in order to tear it down, they have to get you excited about each new issue.
I'm going to give her a pass on the 1776 Constitution.
There was no Constitution in 1776.
I'm glad Katie Tour knows that 1776 was a thing.
I'm just glad she can make that reference somewhere.
All right, let's talk about having a safe neighborhood because we have got a lot of problems here.
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But really the question is, how do you spell Clavin?
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But you must remember, there are no ease in claven.
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I love that song.
It's kind of like the national anthem, isn't it?
It just hits you right here.
Okay.
It's nothing like the national anthem.
Okay, so they gin up hysteria and they're always hysteria all the time.
And they have this thing.
I love this thing on the left where if somebody says something forcefully, no matter how stupid it is and people applaud, that's supposed to give it legitimacy.
Trump's Putin Meeting00:15:01
So like Joy Behar, who had, I think, won the award for saying the stupidest thing about Brett Kavanaugh, the new Supreme Court pick.
Listen to the way she talks.
She is saying something so stupid, so ungrounded in fact, but the fact she says it forcefully and people applaud is supposed to mean something.
Why would a president who's under investigation by the FBI for obstruction of justice and collusion be allowed to pick a Supreme Court justice who will be there?
I'll be dead.
There are many people in this room who will still be alive and need abortions and what have you, need health care.
How dare he be allowed to do this while he is under investigation?
How dare the president be allowed to fulfill his constitutional right and duty when they are creating a false narrative?
I don't even know what she's saying, but how dare he?
As long as she says, how dare he, and they applaud.
So then listen to the stuff they're talking about.
Some of this stuff is actually kind of scary.
And we're going to talk to Matt Walsh about this when he comes on the show later on, about this kind of this division, how powerful the division is between the left and sane people.
The division between the left and people who see reality.
This is on CNN.
An ex-CIA agent is on CNN.
And listen to the way she talks.
She had put out a tweet saying the Republic is burning.
And listen to her.
This is the way, this is a former member of the deep state.
And this is the way the people in the deep state are thinking.
Now, what we're seeing is how weak these institutions are when it comes up against authoritarian measures.
So the institutions themselves aren't built for this.
And our democracy is fragile enough right now, I think, because of the erosion that's happened, that we're starting to see and not feel quite as impactfully as we should some of the things that authoritarians have typically done throughout the years.
So for instance, we have two branches of power, executive branch and Congress, who we were hoping would not act as their self-interest.
That doesn't appear to be the case at this point.
So we're still relying upon the Supreme Court to be able to do that.
And that, you know, is going to be determined by what happens with when Kennedy retires.
But for me, it's really just about seeing how DC has changed and the evolution of DC since I've left the CIA and what has happened with all of these institutions and how easy it is for Trump to denigrate them just through a tweet and continually attacking these institutions.
That to me is hugely problematic.
And I just feel like we're not seeing the sense of urgency in all of this that we need to at this point.
So her tweet says the Republic is burning.
This is not hyperbole.
She's talking about tweets.
How is it not hyperbole?
How is it not hyperbole?
What is she talking about?
The democratic institutions, she says, are not strong enough to withstand that.
And Kirsten Powers, who is a smart woman, she's an intelligent woman, she picks this up.
She picks this hysteria up because the issues are more important to them than the structure that preserves the freedom under which we decide these issues.
Listen, I'm shocked that Kirsten Power is on this.
Listen to her.
This is what happens in every country before the fall.
Some people say people are being alarmist.
Everybody's overreacting.
When things are starting to crumble, people literally say our institutions are too strong.
They can stand up against this.
And the fact of the matter is the first institution that goes is the media.
And that's the first institution that Donald Trump is trying to tear apart and talks about the media being the enemy of the people, which is authoritarian speak and has Republicans now parroting this constantly about fake news and how you can't trust anybody in the media.
That's just literally like out of Vladimir Putin's playbook.
I mean, this is, you know, when Scott was saying, well, this isn't, you know, we don't want what Vladimir Putin wants.
Well, we who?
Donald Trump seems to very much want what Vladimir Putin wants.
He acts exactly like Vladimir Putin, the whole government by spectacle.
That's something that, you know, that Putin did, where you just create everything as a spectacle to the point that nobody can trust anything anymore.
And so they just tune out.
First of all, this is amazing.
She feels that being criticized.
I mean, what has Trump done?
When has he silenced her?
How is her, you know, if she were living in a dangerous, she would be in danger.
She would be, you know, they would be trying to shut her down.
All Trump has done is fought back against the constant, constant bias of stations like CNN.
And suddenly that's the hysteria.
That's where our government is going to fall.
And when they're sorry, this thing with Russia is starting to make me a little crazy because she says he wants exactly what Russia.
over in Brussels telling Germany to ditch this $11 billion pipeline.
Without that pipeline, without his oil, Vladimir Putin is sitting on a corner on 52nd Street with a tin cup.
I mean, what are they talking about?
Donald Trump is, you know, it's funny that to me, if you want to find a threat against the Republic, how about the fact that Lisa Page, the FBI lawyer, or as Trump called her in a tweet, the layer, he left out the W because she was, I don't know if he did this on purpose, you know, because she was messing around with Peter Strzok.
She refused to show up for a subpoena.
She just did it before the House.
I don't want to.
I'm in the deep state, man.
I outrank it.
I don't have to show up.
You know, Strzzok is on Capitol Hill now testifying, and he was saying, oh, I would never, just because I said we've got to stop Trump, just because I said we had a backup plan, just because I said, you know, don't worry, I'm going to stop this.
I won't let this happen.
That doesn't, you know, I am trained.
I am a trained FBI agent.
Trust me.
You know, this is the guy, by the way, who also vowed, you know, he's sworn to tell the truth, but he also vowed he would be faithful to his wife.
So I don't know why we should trust him at all.
If you want to find a threat, I mean, that's the kind of threat that worries me.
I don't hear these people naming one thing, not one thing that Trump has done, except tweet.
But it's all about this.
And this hysteria about Russia, Trump is in Brussels, and he makes this speech.
He gets up and he talks about whether Putin is his enemy.
This is cut number two.
He's been very nice to me the times I've met him.
I've been nice to him.
He's a competitor.
You know, somebody was saying, is he an enemy?
He's not my enemy.
Is he a friend?
No, I don't know him well enough.
But the couple of times that I've gotten to meet him, we got along very well.
You saw that.
I hope we get along well.
I think we get along well.
But ultimately, he's a competitor.
He's representing Russia.
I'm representing the United States.
So in a sense, we're competitors.
Not a question of friend or enemy.
He's not my enemy.
And hopefully someday, maybe he'll be a friend.
It could happen.
But I just don't know him very well.
I've met him a couple of times.
And when I did meet him, most of you people were there.
See, Trump's not an ideological guy.
I don't necessarily agree with what he says.
I think Putin's an enemy.
I think Putin's an enemy.
But I get it.
This is the way he operates.
He operates on a person-to-person basis.
Now, listen to the left.
Jonathan Chait.
I think I talked about this yesterday.
I did about his conspiracy there.
It's on the cover of New York magazine.
They've got a cover where they transpose the letters so Trump's name and Putin's name are kind of blended together.
He puts forward this idea and he himself says it's an extreme possibility.
But of course, anybody can say this stuff, right?
He's got no proof of it that Trump went to Russia and since then he has been a Russian agent trying to destroy us all by selling NATO down the river.
Listen to this guy talk for a minute.
Everyone always says, well, this has been Trump's view forever.
All this stuff he's saying about the Western allies splitting us apart from the West and how he's sort of pissing on them all the time and saying, you know, we should let them go their own way.
That's just what he's always thought.
It's not really what he's always thought.
It's what he's thought since 1987.
He never thought that before then, or at least he never said it before then.
And in 1987 is when he went to Moscow and he's feted by the Russians in towards Moscow.
And then he comes back.
Then he starts talking about running for president for the first time.
And then he starts talking for the first time about how our allies are a bunch of freeloaders and we should kick him to the curb.
Yeah, we should say that he is, I mean, I just want to be clear here.
He is really consistent on that point, right?
The idea that this sort of zero-sum view that our allies are free-riding and we're paying for it.
He takes out full-page ads that are $100,000.
He sounds identical to how he does now, right?
The idea that like we're getting abused, we're getting taken for granted, and we're paying for other people's defense.
We're paying for other people's defense who we're defending against the Russians.
Right, at that point particularly, yes.
So it really dovetails with Russian foreign policy interests then and now.
Now, again, that's probably a coincidence, but it might not be.
I mean, I think, you know, you have to take seriously the possibility that it's not a coincidence.
It's amazing.
That's amazing what he just said.
I mean, Trump is over there, like I just said, and like he just said, he just said that Trump is over there telling them that they shouldn't be buying Russian oil while asking us to defend them against Russia.
And he says, well, that's Russian policy.
That ain't Russian policy.
Russia wants to sell the oil.
That's all they've got.
That's all they've got is the oil.
So it's one thing for this clown, Jonathan Chait, to make this stuff up because I love the stuff.
I love the stuff we have no proof, but it could be.
It's like, I have no proof the guy is from outer space, but it could be.
I have no proof the guy's not a Venusian, but he could be.
He could be.
I noticed that Venus was in the sky, and then Chait was on TV.
Just saying, just saying.
Insane.
But it's one thing for this guy to do it.
It's another thing for Adam Schiff, this McCarthyite congressman, who has been just sending innuendo, Russian innuendo after Trump again and again and again.
He's on with, what's this guy's name?
Lawrence O'Donnell, Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC.
And listen to Schiff.
He's talking about Trump is going to meet with Putin on the 16th, I believe it is, in Helsinki, but he might meet with him alone.
And we can't trust him to do that.
Listen to this.
We are told there will be a one-on-one meeting where it will simply be Putin, Trump, and the translators.
Do you have concerns about that?
I certainly do.
And I think there's clearly a reason why the president wants to meet alone with Putin.
And that is he wants to be able to leave that meeting and be able to make any claim, no matter how at odds with the facts about what took place, knowing that Putin will not challenge him on it, knowing that he can represent whatever is in his interest, even though he isn't going to be willing to confront Putin on our elections.
He's not going to be willing to confront Putin on Russia's invasion of its neighbor or the support of a war criminal in Syria.
But Trump can claim whatever he wants.
That is certainly dangerous, I think, to our interests.
We don't know what representations he will make to Putin, what understanding they may arrive at that they keep secret.
But it is very much in Russia's interest.
Something about that bland little smile on his face.
I just find it incredibly sinister that he's sitting there telling us we can't trust the president of the United States to sit down in a room alone with Vladimir Putin because what's he going to, you know, that's where they pass the radioactive secret.
I don't know what the hell he's talking about.
But I mean, this guy's a congressman and a powerful congressman.
It is amazing.
It is amazing to me that he is sitting there on television saying this.
But this is it.
It's silence, you know, shut people up, emotionalism, conspiracy, panic, anything they can do to distract you from the fact that we're in a battle, we are in a conflict, but the conflict is not what they say it is.
It is not between what the left wants and what the right wants.
It's between what the left wants and a system of government that has lasted over 200 years for a change that has kept us free.
That's what we're trying to preserve.
I'm willing to lose and win under a system of freedom.
I'm willing to lose even things that I, even on issues that I hold incredibly dear, even on issues that are incredibly important to me, I'm willing to lose if I am free to speak, to fight, to vote.
When he got five guys at the Supreme Court just decreeing that this is how I'm going to live, not so much.
And by the way, well, we'll talk about this more with Matt Walsh.
You know, we're going to stay on, but please come on over to the Daily Wire and subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month or 100 bucks for a year.
You get to listen to me, Ben, maybe Knowles, I don't know, but also Walsh.
You know, Matt Walsh, I have no idea who this guy is, but they wanted it.
I am actually a really interesting fan of Matt's because I don't always agree with him.
In fact, sometimes I very powerfully disagree with him, but I always, always admire him.
He's known through his writing, podcasts, and speeches as a fierce and articulate defender of truth, moral values, religious liberty, and the Christian faith.
You can find him here on the Daily Wire, and his podcast is also on Daily Wire's YouTube channel, Facebook page, and iTunes.
And follow him on Twitter at Matt Walsh Blog.
Matt W-A-L-S-H blog.
Matt, how you doing?
Good, Drew.
Thanks for having me on.
Awesome.
Pleasure.
I'm really glad to talk to you.
And congratulations on your globe.
It makes you look very intelligent.
Thank you.
In fact, I forgot.
I don't know if you can see that.
Yes.
Put it right there.
You look more intelligent, even as you even just lifting that up made you look much more intelligent.
So thank you.
So I have to tell you, I read your stuff all the time, and I find your point of view incredibly bracing because I'm much more lax in my devotion to some Christian doctrine than you are.
And I have to hold myself up to your opinions and see sometimes if I agree with you.
But let us start with something we agree with, which is abortion.
And with Kavanaugh, the left is going through its usual panic.
We're going to lose Roe v. Wade.
We're going to lose everything.
And Tommy Larin, is that how we pronounce her name?
Tommy Laron had this.
Do we have a cut of her?
Can we play it?
Let's just play what Tommy Laron said about the Supreme Court and Roe v. Wade.
My problem is with some of my fellow conservatives who have put it out there that we are, quote, coming for Roe v. Wade.
That is a mistake because we are putting it out there and implying that we are sending a justice to the bench to carry out religious judicial activism, which is a mistake and is unconstitutional.
And if we as conservatives are going to imply that, if that's going to be our messaging, we might as well spit on the Constitution.
That is not what we stand for.
If we are not going to uphold the Constitution on its merit, who will?
That is up to us to do.
So that my real problem here, regardless of my views on abortion, pro-life, pro-choice, is the messaging of our Supreme Court justice and how he will handle Roe v. Wade if it comes to that point.
Okay, I don't want to coax you into a battle of wits with an unarmed woman, but tell me what's wrong with that point of view.
Oh, what's wrong with it?
I mean, do you have six or seven hours if you get into it?
Argument Over Abortion00:11:05
I mean, what she just said is that is Nancy Pelosi-level leftist garbage.
I mean, it's, and when I say Nancy Pelosi level, I mean in how progressive and extreme it is and also how lazy and frankly stupid that talking point is.
It's spitting on the Constitution to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Now, we also, I don't know if Tommy understands this, but we have to be able to, in some way, separate the discussion of Roe v. Wade from the discussion of abortion itself.
Because the legal argument against Roe v. Wade is that it was a terrible legal decision where they found in the Constitution a right which is clearly not enumerated.
So, you know, the justices in Roe v. Wade, as you know, said that the right to abortion can be found primarily in the 14th Amendment, which, by the way, protects us from having our, you know, being deprived of life without due process.
It also protects us.
It says that we get equal justice under the law.
So they found in that the codification of our right to kill human beings.
I mean, it's madness.
So if people were being honest and rational about it, you'd have a bunch of pro-abortion people who said, you know what, I believe abortion is okay.
But of course we have to overturn Roe v. Wade because there's nothing in the Constitution about it.
So to overturn Roe v. Wade, Tommy, is to undo a previous example and maybe one of the most heinous examples of judicial activism.
So that is not itself judicial activism.
That is just writing the shit.
That's all that is.
And about abortion itself, let's move it out of the legal realm for a minute and about abortion itself.
I think that Roe v. Wade is what has caused this division in our country.
Is there some way that that division, you wrote recently, I think, that you didn't feel that this division could be healed and abortion is one of the reasons.
Do I gather that right?
Yeah, I think that, I mean, abortion is, I think, the central foundational issue I would agree with you.
In our country because it gets right, and this is one of the reasons why I don't think, as conservatives, we can say, oh you know, we have a big tent and even if you're in favor of killing babies, we can still have you in the tent because it's, it's a foundational issue.
It gets down to like, what do you believe?
What are your core values and principles?
And so me, as a conservative, I consider my core value is, among them is the sanctity, the sacredness of human life, the worthiness of of of human life, and also the objective nature of morality, that there is a natural moral law upon which our legal system is based.
So it's where you fall on.
That is kind of gonna is going to determine where you fall on abortion, and then, and then from there, it's going to determine where you fall on pretty much every other issue, and that is just a.
There's a great chasm there, I think then, separating the two sides, or the various different sides that are themselves splintering into smaller sides.
But there's this great chasm that I don't think can be bridged it.
It would require one side or the other to just give up and say, never mind, we were wrong about this, and I don't think that's um going to happen.
So all I see is the division growing deeper and deeper.
You know, one of the things I I truly admire about you is the, the integrity with which you hold to your Catholic faith, which is going to keep you from spending eternity with Michael Knowles, among other things, god willing, god willing.
And what do you say to people who say gee, all you're trying to do here is impose Catholic Sharia on our free, secular American government?
What's your argument to that?
Well, the first thing I say is, stop being an idiot, because that's a.
That's not really an argument, I guess, but that's how I open the argument.
Probably not a good strategy.
No that's, that's I I. What i'm trying to impose is the same foundational doctrine, and it is a doctrine that our founding fathers imposed.
I mean, let's remember that the United States is supposed to be different from pretty much every other country that's ever existed in the history of the world in that it was founded on a, a creed, on a, on a, on a doctrinal creed, and that is that human rights are innate, are endowed by a creator.
They are these objective, real things that are inherent to our, to our nature, and they can't be removed or taken away um, by by any force at all.
So i'm just trying to bring us back to that which is so.
My point is to be pro-life.
It does not require you to be Christian, certainly doesn't require you to be Catholic um, that's not a Christian or Catholic position, but it is in some ways.
It's a scientific position.
It's a position of well, these are human beings, that's a biological fact.
But it's also kind of a spiritual position, in that i'm saying human beings have worth and value.
And I admit that that is a spiritual conviction.
But it is the same spiritual conviction upon which America itself is founded.
Now that's that's an excellent argument.
All right, so let's let's move on to something where I always disagree with you.
Whenever I read your pieces about the arts, the arts are all in all to me.
I mean, the two things I love in life are walking in the forest and enjoying the arts.
And those are places where I feel like I am actually in the presence of God.
You have written things, for instance, like you feel that it's actually wrong for a Christian to enjoy Game of Thrones, one of my favorite shows ever.
And by the way, I should just say you didn't write this in a censorious or hectoring way.
You were putting forward a very quiet argument, very calm argument.
But isn't there something about the arts that is supposed to show us all of life?
Is art supposed to be limited to only the nice and only the good and the beautiful?
No, I don't think it should be limited, I think, but in my mind, there's a point to art, which goes beyond merely showing you something.
I don't think art is merely to put something in front of us for us to view or gawk at.
I do think that all art is supposed to lift us up to some greater truth and to beauty, which is not to say that all art must itself be pleasant to look upon, but it should bring us closer to some truth.
That's my fundamental belief about art.
And my problem is that so much of, and I agree that television shows, movies, all that can be art, but much of it, the vast majority of it, in my view, is not designed with that purpose in mind, and it does not have that effect.
Instead, it brings you down into the muck, into the dirt.
It's designed so you could gawk at whatever nudity and grotesque violence or whatever else.
And I think also a lot of art these days is also just kind of, it brings you down into kind of misery and despair and then just leaves you there.
It just says, all right, well, see you later, and leaves you there in the despair.
And I don't, I don't, it just, it seems pointless to me.
What's the point of that?
And by the way, I say that as someone, I've watched plenty of shows that have, and movies and so on that have no effect besides that, because there is this weird draw to it as well that I recognize, but I think we need to resist it.
And I also, and with Game of Thrones, I think Game of Thrones is an example.
I've used it as an example.
I think it's a good example of that.
I haven't watched the show much myself because of this conviction I have about it.
So it's possible that I'm wrong about that particular show.
It is interesting.
I mean, my argument with this is that I actually enjoy sometimes a nihilistic work of art because I know nihilism is part of the creation.
In other words, I know that people being nihilists is a point of view that exists in this world, in God's world.
And it's not a point of view I share.
It's a point of view I powerfully oppose.
But I like to experience it to know my fellow man, I guess.
I guess that's my argument.
With Game of Thrones, it is funny because part of it is so exploitative and debased that it gets in the way of some of the things that are brilliant about it.
So I see that point.
Here's the last thing I want to ask you about.
And this will really get you.
I've been having a problem.
I'm an Episcopalian, which is Catholic Light.
And I'm an Episcopalian for a very specific reason, but recently they've gotten so far left and crazy that I've talked about the fact that I really think I may have to leave the church.
And a lot of people wrote to me saying I should become a Catholic.
A lot of people wrote to me saying I should become a Mormon as well.
Those were the two I got most from.
My problem with Catholicism, I'm going to put it in front of you and see what your response to this is I feel that in the last analysis, my prayerful reading of scripture, along with being informed by great theology, I'm a big Pope Benedict XVI fan, so I read his theology and I compare what I'm thinking.
Ultimately, my conscience has to rule over the authority of the church.
Why is that wrong?
I think that you do have to follow your conscience in the end.
And that if you're, you know, the distinction here is that there are things that are objectively wrong.
I guess you would agree, right?
That there are things that are objectively wrong and objectively right.
And you could do, now, theoretically, if you really feel your conscience is calling you to do a certain thing, and it turns out that that thing is objectively wrong in the end.
My belief, and also the Catholic belief, if you like, is that you did an objectively wrong thing, but your moral guilt would be severely mitigated in the eyes of God because you really thought that you were following your conscience.
So that's, I guess that's kind of the interplay between the authority of not just the church, but scripture and your own conscience.
Because when you talk about, well, you got to follow your conscience, well, there's also, you know, you got to follow your conscience as opposed to the church.
Well, then there's also scripture as well.
So, you know, what if scripture tells you do X, Y, Z, but you really feel your conscience taking you another direction?
So you're going to run into that.
Even without the church, you could still theoretically run into that confusion.
So we, go ahead, sorry.
Well, is that something that if that happened to you, if you said, you know, I've really prayed on this, I've thought about it, I've read scripture, and I disagree with the church on this important issue, what would you do then?
I would recognize, I mean, ideally, you know, if I'm doing the right thing, I would recognize that my own understanding is flawed.
I'm a limited person.
And I have my own biases, my own temptations, and I would recognize that it's flawed and I have to conform myself with this higher truth.
The same as if I read something in scripture.
If I read, Jesus said a lot of very challenging things.
And I might read some of those things and say, wow, I don't know if I can do that.
I mean, it just doesn't make total sense to me.
But I also realize that I have to humble myself to this authority and follow it, even if it doesn't make sense to me.
And that, I would submit, in the end, is what faith is all about.
It's about walking forward to the light, even when you don't quite understand everything around you.
And that's what it means to be a Christian, I think.
Matt Walsh, the host of the Matt Walsh show here on the Daily Wire.
It is great to talk to you.
Walking Forward to the Light00:04:47
I love listening to you.
I love reading your stuff.
And I hope you come back.
We'll talk again.
Yeah, I enjoyed it.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks a lot, Matt.
Really good.
You can just get Matt right here, right?
Yeah, Daily Wire.
See, you're not even subscribing.
If you're not subscribing, what are you doing?
Look at your wallet.
Look at that 10 bucks.
What are you doing with that 10 bucks?
Nothing.
Nothing.
Give it to us.
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All right.
It's time for stuff I like.
It's time for claving on the mic with stuff I like.
Hell, I love that.
That was great.
Jess whited.
Whited.
Excellent.
Excellent.
All right.
At some point, we're going to have to pick one of these, right?
I guess so.
One day.
Yeah, one day.
Right.
Babylon, Berlin.
Really liked it.
Watched the whole thing.
It is a German television show based on a novel by Volkler Kucher, which I will definitely read.
He's based on a series of novels.
It takes place in Weimar, Berlin.
So we know that these people are doomed, right?
We know that the Nazis are on the way, but the Nazis are mentioned once, I think, in the sixth episode because they're really dealing with the communists so far.
And it is, you know, the world of cabaret I was talking about last week, I think, was stuff I like.
You know, first of all, let me tell you what's great.
The atmosphere is great.
It has this song.
I love the song.
This is the theme song.
Let's play the theme song.
It's this kind of German-like despairing existential angstriden music to which all the flappers are dancing happily.
And here's a little cut of that.
To ashes, to straub, it means to ashes and to dust.
To that.
Everybody's dancing happily, but they're going to ashes into dust.
This song got caught in my head, so I kept singing it, but I don't know any German, so I was making up double talking.
I was just going on, Hein Ganden Scheinden Sein, Arganta.
Anyway, the atmosphere is great.
The two leads, Volcker Bruch and Liv Lisse Fries, are so good.
They're so charming and they're so watchable and charismatic, the two of them.
Broek plays this police detective, Gary Anroth, who is sent from Cologne, which is a kind of provincial little town, to Berlin in pursuit of a political, really on a political mission.
And he gets wrapped up in homicide in this great big case about stolen communist gold.
And Liv Lisa Fries plays this kind of, she's actually a prostitute.
She's a flapper.
She's sinking into prostitution, but she starts to pretend that she's a cop, basically.
And she starts to worm her way into the police force.
They meet Hute in one of the great meet-cute scenes I've ever seen where the two of them, she is filing homicide pictures and he's in vice.
So he's got all these photographs of terrible, you know, just S ⁇ M, disgusting sexual stuff.
And they bump into each other and their pictures, their photographs fall together and they have to sort out the corpses from the guys dressed up in iron leather masks.
And when they finish sorting them out, he turns to her and he says, I hope you're in homicide.
And she says, I hope you're in vice.
They walk away at really good stuff.
The plot, the plotting is the big problem.
The plot makes sense.
This is very big to me.
I don't like plots that don't make sense, but it only makes sense once you accept that it's outlandish.
All right.
So in other words, Rob and I are sitting here and we suddenly realize we're long-lost brothers.
That makes sense, but it's outlandish.
And that's the kind of plotting that this has.
Other than that, it is very, very gripping.
It gets better and better.
The last episode is just as much fun as it's, you know, once you relax and you say, okay, it's a little outlandish, but I'm going to have fun with it.
Outlandish Plotting, Gripping Tale00:02:25
It is as much fun as it's possible to have.
And like I said, these two leads are just revelations.
I don't think they'll never come to America because they seem, maybe they will.
Maybe they'll just get the accent right, but I just think they are just delightful, the two of them.
Lots of sex, lots of nudity, so be warned about that.
But just a really, really entertaining show.
Oh, and one of the things you should be warned about, a little soft on the commies, you know, because they get the Stalinist comies.
They know they're the bad guys, but the Trotskyist commies are kind of the good guys, a little bit, not so much.
All right, the Clavenless weekend is upon us.
I am sad to say I must leave you for a few days, but try to stay alive.
Hide under the bed.
That's all you do.
Spend your weekends hiding under the bed.
If you survive, we will be back here again on Monday.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show, and here is the Kingston Trio with a lovely song, Long Time Blues.
Long time gone is the evening train.
Long time, blues is nicking pain.
Long time, blues is nicking pain.
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