Andrew Clavin dissects Trump’s political legacy, contrasting Pelosi’s retreat with AOC’s dismissed radicalism while framing the GOP’s internal divide as a threat to its future. Jeremy Boring argues social media platforms overstep Section 230 by censoring speech, risking legal exposure, but warns conservative alternatives face scalability hurdles. The episode pivots to Ohio’s election, where Balderson’s win highlights the GOP’s need for populist energy over policy purity. Clavin’s mailbag balances sharp political takes—debunking Democratic grievance narratives with data on poverty declines—with personal advice, from celibacy debates to poker addiction warnings, ultimately framing gratitude and moral clarity as antidotes to modern fragmentation. [Automatically generated summary]
With the midterm elections approaching, it's time to take a look at the battles that would be going on for the hearts and souls of the two major parties if they had hearts or souls.
For the Democrats, on one side, they're establishment candidates who want to stick to the tried and true utter failure of the Obama years.
They're running on a platform of economic stagnation, disguised by the sort of virulent race baiting that offers minorities the opportunity to chant angry slogans while wallowing in poverty, violence, and dysfunction.
As establishment Democrat Nancy Pelosi put it, quote, it's time to go forward into the past so that Americans can answer the important questions like, where am I and why is there lipstick on my forehead, unquote.
Mrs. Pelosi then proceeded to walk into her broom closet where she remained for the next 17 days.
On the radical side of the party, there are candidates like Alexandria Google-Eyes Cortez.
These socialists are no longer satisfied with the Democrats' record of slow decay and failure and want to ratchet that up into a program of rapid decay and complete disaster.
Cortez recently outlined her platform telling reporters, quote, if we can just take all the money away from billionaire businessmen and give it to the poor, then the poor will be able to get an education so they'll be prepared to get jobs at the businesses that will no longer be there because we took all their money away.
Then we'll distract the poor from their unemployment and misery by race baiting that will offer minorities the opportunity to chant angry slogans while wallowing in poverty, violence, and dysfunction.
It's a totally new idea, unquote.
Now, for the Republicans, the battle is between those candidates who support Donald Trump and those candidates who will be spending next year selling real estate or singing musical comedy in summer stock.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety blue.
Birds are ringing, also singing hunky-dunky.
Shipshaw dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, hooray, raw.
It's mailbag day.
You are minutes, mere minutes away from having all your problems solved.
You know, I mean, this is, yeah, there it is.
Where's the real Lindsay?
She was wandering around the halls a couple of days ago, but she's gone.
But, you know, we will solve all your problems.
I've got a lot of romantic questions and a lot of romance questions in the mailbag today.
And coming up, we are going to have a serious interview with the God-King of the Daily Wire, Jeremy Boring, and I'll explain why in just a minute.
But first, let us talk about Blue Apron, because it's summer.
It's time to eat, and that means it's time to eat well.
Blue Apron Basics00:02:33
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Blue Apron, it is a better way to cook.
I mean, you know, the left is always saying, we'll give you free this, we'll give you free that.
We are actually giving you free food.
We could be Alexandria Google-eyes Cortez.
So, you know, Mark Twain said that war talk with a soldier who's been to war is always interesting.
Moon talk with a poet who's never been to the moon is always dull.
And I was thinking yesterday, we were talking about Alex Jones being banned off all the social media sites.
And I'm listening to everybody talk about it.
And I suddenly realized most of these people have no idea how the internet works.
Most of us have no idea how the internet works.
But here at the Daily Wire, we have one of the very few human beings actually walking.
I call him a human being.
You know what I mean, though, walking around who actually understands how the internet works.
And, you know, we don't have the God King on too often because the human sacrifice is messy and expensive to get him to actually descend.
But the other thing is, every time Jeremy Boring is on, we're kidding around with him.
And that's because he exists.
And I think it's the rule at the Daily Wire that if you exist, we have to kid around, make jokes about it.
Jeremy Boring built this place.
And the thing is, you know, Ben has been such a wonderful success and such a big star.
And you always take the guy who's the front of the operation and attribute the success to him.
But this place sprang out of Jeremy's head.
And when you listen to Jeremy talk about the internet, you suddenly think like, oh, there's somebody who actually knows what's going on on the internet.
So I thought I would bring him on and let him share a little bit of his knowledge with you and not talk about soccer for 10 minutes.
So Jeremy Boring, the God King of the Daily Wire.
Not that, you're absolutely right about soccer, but, you know.
So what happened is I got a text message this morning from my assistant saying, Drew wants to have you on the show.
Editorial Decisions on Social Media Platforms00:15:24
Absolutely no details as to what we might be discussing.
So I did a lot of reading about soccer this morning.
I wrote some good jokes.
Well, I know you love it so much and you're such a fan.
It's for love of the game.
You love that sport so much.
Here's the thing.
We're watching Alex Jones.
And I know you feel virtually the same way about Alex Jones' idea.
The guy is vile.
We're not defending Alex Jones.
It has nothing to do with him.
I liked it when Lou Ferrigno played Alex Jones.
I really feel like the new Alex Jones is not nearly as amusing.
No, no, no.
Mark, what is it?
Whatever is Ruffalo, Mark Ruffalo.
Yeah, Mark Ruffalo.
Not as good as Alex Jones.
It's true.
But, you know, they've banned him, and everybody's talking about the First Amendment.
It's not about the First Amendment.
It's about free speech.
Free speech is an American tradition, an American way of living.
It does have to do with the First Amendment.
It protects it from the government.
But free speech is something we should all be in favor of.
And this seems to me like the beginning of a way of deplatforming all right-wing conversation by declaring it to be hateful.
Yeah, I feel like when people say things, you know, if you've been tracking this conversation on social media over the last handful of days, it seems like there's a divide, especially on the right, between those who say it's a First Amendment issue and those who say that it's the right of private companies to determine what goes on their platforms.
But actually, neither one of those is wholly accurate.
And that's because there are regulations about what kinds of things can and cannot be published.
Not what can and can't be published as a strictly speech issue, but what can and cannot be published by these internet platforms within a very narrow carve out they received from the government to avoid libel law.
And that's the actual part of the conversation that matters and the part that no one's having.
There's a thing called the Communications Decency Act.
And the way it works, basically, I mean, think about it this way.
If you write something in one of your books that's wholly inaccurate and let's say it defames someone, your publisher has an obligation to catch that before they publish the book.
It's why in traditional newsrooms, you have fact checkers who work diligently traditionally.
I don't know what they do for a living now, but fact checkers who make sure that the things that are in articles are true.
It's because once you publish that as a publishing organization, you bear liability for whatever libel takes place.
Well, obviously, that's very difficult in the age of social media because in theory, social media is a platform wherein we publish what we want to say, and it doesn't go through any sort of editorial vetting by the platform itself first.
So for that reason, it was very important to Google in the early days, even Facebook in the early days, even some organizations that aren't with us anymore.
This goes back to the pretty early days of the internet, to make sure that they weren't considered publishers who had editorial responsibility and therefore liability for libel and slander and defamation and harassment and instead be viewed only as communication platforms.
So for example, you write something bad in a book.
It's untrue.
Your publisher publishes it.
They get sued rightly.
for slander or libel.
You say something libelous or slanderous to me over the telephone.
Well, no one can sue AT ⁇ T. AT ⁇ T has absolutely no obligation to vet for those sorts of things because they're not publishing.
They're not making editorial decisions.
They're only a communication platform.
So basically, what Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act says is that Google and Facebook and Twitter and all these social platforms are considered communication platforms like AT ⁇ T, not publishers with an editorial voice like the New York Times or whoever publishes your schlock.
I mean, because that is the important thing.
We're using them to communicate with each other.
They are not telling us.
So have they got any right to regulate us at all?
I mean, have they got any?
In fact, that very same Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act gives them a lot of latitude to make sure that there's not obscene or harassing or violent kinds of communications that happen on their platforms.
For obvious reasons, we all want them to be able to filter out direct threats against other people.
The problem is the reason that they were given this latitude in the first place was on the premise that they were going to be open forums for open political discourse.
So we gave them the right to avoid libel lawsuits because they're not editorial, except to the extent that they're making sure that we're not threatening each other or, you know, we can say bad things about each other.
We can even say untrue things about each other.
We can't say like, I'm going to crack your skull or they can take that down.
What these platforms are basically saying now is, no, no, no, the same authority that we have to make sure there's no violence on our platform should also give us the right to make sure there's nothing that we don't like at all on our platforms.
And what people like Senator Ted Cruz and others are saying is, well, no, we only gave you the protection in the first place because the idea is that this is an open area where people can freely discuss their views and not be subject to your editorial.
If you're going to have editorial oversight, if you're going to decide what kind of opinions are okay and not okay, we should be able to sue you for libel.
You're making editorial decisions.
Now think about what that means for these platforms with billion plus users all saying all manner of untrue things about specific individuals all the time.
You know, they would never survive the wave of lawsuits that would come their way if they actually were treated as publishers, which they should be if they're going to make decisions editorially about guys like Alex Jones.
You know, I have not heard, first of all, I haven't heard anybody else talking about this, and I've been listening to everybody talking about it.
The other thing is the distinction, people keep saying they're a private company as if it's like a bakery where, you know, like the right guy.
Are these private companies?
Well, they're private insofar as they're not public companies.
They're not state-owned companies, of course.
But they're not private companies.
They're publicly traded companies.
Mark Zuckerberg doesn't own Facebook.
He owns a disproportionate amount of Facebook.
But he made a decision to take Facebook to public markets and allow other people to own large portions of Facebook so that he could have billion dollar win, multi-billion dollar windfalls.
And it's a little disingenuous for these guys to want all the benefits that come along with not being privately owned.
And then only when they're being asked to actually give any mind whatsoever to people who disagree with them, many of whom, by the way, own shares in their company, only then do they say, no, we're privately owned.
Well, yeah, those days are long gone, buddy.
Back when Facebook was a wholly owned product of Zuckerberg's brain, I agree.
You should be able to do whatever Mark Zuckerberg wants.
Now he has obligations, not only to his customers, but to his shareholders.
And these sort of super CEOs in Silicon Valley, I think uniquely among businessmen in the last century or so, don't want any actual obligations to their shareholders.
They just want the shareholders to send them the money and get out of their way.
You know, I really want to ask you a couple more questions, but I have to pause to make you some money with an ad.
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Okay, so now they've taken Alex Jones off every platform that he's got.
Except for Twitter, which, again, good for them.
Good for him.
I mean, he seems to have, what is Jack?
Is that what he goes?
At Jack?
He seems to have some propensity to respond to people's outrage and to people's feeling of unfairness.
But the rest of them have taken him off.
What does he do?
What is Alex Jones' recourse?
Well, he has very little recourse, I think, legally speaking, because of this ambiguity that exists around the Communications Decency Act.
I think that he actually probably does have good grounds for a suit.
The problem is, they say that bad, I don't know, I'm not a lawyer, bad case makes bad laws.
Hard cases make bad laws.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The problem is that Alex Jones is not a very sympathetic character for us to all rally around.
He probably won't make really cogent arguments about the Communications Decency Act, for example.
He'll probably try to make it about the First Amendment, which will just confuse the issue more.
Or he'll say that George Bush is actually behind banning him from social media, which is just going to be pretty deplorable to me.
So what does he do from a legal point of view?
I don't know.
What does he do from a business point of view?
Well, this is why it's not strictly speaking a First Amendment issue, right?
Because there are a lot of places where Alex Jones can still publish his video content.
He hasn't been banned from the public square.
He hasn't been sort of blacklisted from existence.
He hasn't been Soviet style erased from history.
He has websites.
He has servers.
He's going to do just fine.
His radio show, I'm sure, is going to actually boost because of this, because when the left really attacks someone, the right tends to rally around them, even if it's distasteful to them.
So I think in the short term, he'll probably see gains.
In the long term, though, if you can't play on these platforms, you can't win in American culture today.
I mean, the truth is, there's never been anything in the history of the world like the existence of Google, which owns YouTube and Facebook for the basically, they control the flow of almost all information in almost all countries in the world anymore.
So in the long run, I do think this deals a huge blow to Alex Jones.
So that's my last question.
Then I'll let you go because I know the ceiling starts to cave in if you're not actually running the place.
Is there, I mean, we complain about all these things, but we never build them.
The right is not building Twitter.
It's not building YouTube and Google.
Is there some way we can do that?
Is there some way we can strike back over the long term?
You know, it's a challenge because we have a tendency on the right when we do try to build something like this to ghettoize.
So, you know, if we built a conservative Facebook, well, automatically now, you've gone from a platform with a billion people engaging to a platform with, you know, if you're super successful, a handful of million people, you'll never actually influence culture.
And people won't want to engage in it over time because their other pals aren't there.
I mean, the truth is, other than you and me, most human beings don't select all of their friends on the basis of political leanings.
Most people actually sleep through the night on those bola brand sheets.
They don't have these dirty, dirty consciences like you and I do.
So I think it's a real problem if we ghettoize.
And the other problem is even if conservatives do build things like this, they quickly lose control of them because institutions naturally over time become left, right?
I mean, it's the nature of an institution to become left.
People on the left like to decry big business as, you know, the Republican Party is in the pockets of big business.
But of course, almost every big business is a major tool of the left in any sort of culture war because they want to be broadly appealing.
They know the people who cry the loudest when you appear to take sides are on the left.
The people who are going to protest outside your stores are on the left.
The people who are going to throw rocks through your windows are on the left.
The people who are going to boycott you are on the left.
So risk-averse large corporations tend to become left-wing over time.
So I don't know.
I think it's a real challenge.
Could we build the technology?
Well, that's the other problem.
It's not a bootstrap your way to YouTube world anymore.
The wild west of the internet is over.
It's a multi-multi-hundred million dollar play to scale.
It's not necessarily to build, but to scale one of these platforms.
You can't scale it if you're only talking to a handful of million hardcore political activists.
It's a real challenge.
I don't know what the answer to it is.
Jeremy Boring, God King of the Daily Wire.
Thanks a lot.
That was really fascinating.
I appreciate it.
Thanks.
Yep.
Thanks for having me.
You know, this is the thing.
I was listening all day yesterday.
I was reading about this.
And for the last three days, reading it, nobody's talking about this because nobody really understands what the internet is.
And I have been in rooms with Jeremy where he's talking to some multi-multimillionaire trying to raise funds or trying to get interest in what he's doing.
And literally, this is literally true.
He'll be talking to these guys.
And most people have that kind of money or older.
And Jeremy will be saying, well, we're going to be on Facebook.
And they'll say, Facebook, nobody uses Facebook.
That's what he's up against.
Let us talk briefly, I think, before we get to the mailbag about this Ohio election yesterday.
I'm very, very wary.
You do not hear me reading a lot of tea leaves because I believe the future is not ours to know.
And what we do is we just, it is natural to human beings to seize on what little information we have to tell the future with.
And the problem is, is each election is different and each election is both local and national.
And you never know what's going on in these districts.
And when you have a special election in August, you can bet that it's going to be anomalous.
It's going to be different.
So they have a special election.
Troy Balderson in this very, very Republican state, very, very Trump, a very, very Republican district running for the 12th district, running against Democrat Danny O'Connor.
He seems to have eeked out a victory.
And everybody is saying, well, what does this mean?
Does this mean that the Republicans are going to have, you know, are facing the big blue wave because Trump won, you know, he underperformed Trump in almost every part of the district.
And the thing is, now this, by the way, they'll probably face off again.
This is a guy resigned from Congress to join the business council.
And so they'll probably, these two guys will probably be facing off again in November.
So there's only going to be like a 90-day election, basically.
But the thing that I did look at here, because if not as a prediction of the future, I think it is a warning to the GOP.
Trump voters didn't really show up.
The rural Trump voters didn't really show up.
And the guy won anyway.
So good news, bad news, right?
Good news is the guy won even without a big turnout from the Trump voters.
Bad news, the Trump voters didn't turn out.
And there is a real problem with this going forward because we know the left is going to be motivated.
They're going to be motivated by hatred.
They hate Donald Trump.
They want the resistance going on.
They want impeachment.
Trump Voters Didn't Turn Out00:04:21
They want all those things.
And they could bring this presidency really to a halt, especially in domestic ways.
And if they won, I don't think they're going to win the Senate.
But if they won the Senate, they would really stop all the judges being appointed and all this stuff.
And so the problem Trump has, to some degree, is his success.
You can't motivate people to get to the polls on foreign policy issues when foreign policy is going well.
And foreign policy is actually going very well.
I mean, Trump is doing a good job keeping the world kind of stable right now.
And our enemies are on their back heels.
And our friends are on their heels a little bit thinking, well, maybe we should pony up in NATO.
Maybe we have to pay a little bit more for our defense.
Maybe Trump has got something to say about immigration that we're going to have to let our people hear instead of silencing everybody who tries to talk about it.
And so his success in that way is not going to play.
And he should be taught.
Obviously, people should be talking about the success of the economy.
And I hope they are talking about those things.
But there is also another issue.
And this Henry Olson, I hope we'll have Henry Olson on soon.
He can explain it better than I can.
But Henry Olson has observed that the swing voters are not dedicated to party.
And they're of two types.
They are the swing voters who voted for Mitt Romney and then voted for Hillary Clinton.
And there are the swing voters who voted for Barack Obama and then voted for Donald Trump.
And the ones who voted for Clinton are not coming back.
They're probably lost.
But the ones who voted for Obama and then voted for Trump, they don't care about a lot of the things that we care about.
They care, what they do care about and what Trump is doing that they like is the immigration thing and the trade thing.
And when I say the trade thing, what I mean is the America first thing.
And a lot of Republicans, a lot of conservatives are very uncomfortable with this trade thing because they're afraid it's going to ditch the economy.
And they're afraid that, you know, we always believe in the most freedom.
We believe in free trade.
But Trump is speaking into the hearts of many swing voters when he talks about the fact that they took our manufacturing jobs, they manufactured things where it was cheap, and they came over here and we lost our jobs.
And his success at bringing some of these manufacturing jobs back, remember Obama said he doesn't have some magic wand and on the internet it says abracadabra pal, you know, like, because they're coming back.
You know, he has a lot of cred with them.
And if these candidates go into these districts and say to them, hey, you know, I feel you.
I feel that this is a problem and that we've got to stand up for America and I'm going to support Trump in this.
And also just the loving on America that Donald Trump does.
You know, because I'm a culture guy, I feel that the intellectual right does not understand this.
I think both the intellectual left hates patriotism because they hate the West and they really don't like the country as it stands and as it was established.
But the right is uncomfortable with patriotism too because it's animal, it's passionate, it's native, atavistic.
It comes out of the heart and they don't, you know, that stinks of the mob and they're afraid it's going to get out of control.
But breathes there a man with souls so dead who never to himself has said, this is my own, my native land.
Patriotism is natural to people, like mother love is natural to people.
And I think that if we don't speak into America and if we don't say, you know, into the American heart and say that we love this country, and you can, you know, Say what you will about Donald Trump, and I've said a lot of things negative and positive about him.
He has a visceral love of this country.
Remember when that Marine's hat blew off and he put it back on?
Just recently he got out of his motorcade and went and said thank you to the fireman.
He does have this visceral connection with the ordinary people in this country.
And nobody's ordinary.
I don't mean that, but I mean economically ordinary.
The people who don't stand out for their political opinions, the people who aren't celebrities, the people who make the country run, the people who built it on their backs, the people who suffer when we abandon them, the people who are insulted when we insult their faith and their patriotism.
Those are the people he speaks to.
And you can call it populism.
You can call it cynical.
You can call it anything you want.
But it's part of what being an American is.
It's part of what belonging to any country is.
And some of these Republicans, if they are not ready to speak into that and are just going to talk about the fact that they hate the left and the left is loony, they're going to lose.
They're going to lose because they're not going to inspire people to come out.
You know, a lot of times when you turn on TV and you talk about turnout, they talk about the ground game.
But turnout is not just about the ground game.
It is about inspiration.
And maybe it's about inspiration more than anything.
And we've got to inspire people and get them out, or we're going to lose not just the Congress, we're going to lose the presidency as well.
Done with Shame00:14:51
All right, we've got the mailbag coming up, but you've got to come on over to thedailywire.com or you can listen to it on YouTube.
But you could just watch the whole thing if you would subscribe.
You could be part of the mailbag if you'd subscribe.
It's a lousy $10 a month, a lousy hundred bucks for the entire year.
I will answer all your questions and my answers will change your life, possibly, possibly for the better.
Come on over, we'll start the mailbag.
The mailbag.
Woo, yeah.
All right.
Like I said, a lot of romantic questions, but we'll go through as many of them as we can.
I know it annoys people when we don't get through a lot of them, but I do my best.
From Zach, dear Mr. Clavin, I respect you very much, and you are a great and wise mentor that I often look to for guidance.
So here I am seeking your wisdom.
What does a guy do when he has found a girl he likes a lot, but she has some baggage?
Her baggage is that she has two kids with two different guys.
She is really into me as well.
I don't look down on her for this, but it's just an odd predicament to be in, and I don't know how to proceed.
I want to get to know her more and be with her more, but her other obligations put me in a weird place.
Do you have any useful advice?
Yeah, I have some advice.
One, you know, you say you don't know how to proceed.
Proceed very, very slowly.
These are not small mistakes.
They are big mistakes.
You made them twice with two different guys.
And what you want to know is, has she changed?
Now, obviously, you say she's into you, so she is interested in winning you over, and she's going to put on her show to win you over.
But you want to know that this is a person, this is not the same person who made those mistakes.
You want to know that this is not a person who has said, oh, I get it, I'm doing something wrong.
You know, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
You know, the second time, the light's got to go on, right?
I mean, I always try myself not to make the same mistake twice, but twice, okay.
But you want to make sure that this is not a person who's going to make that mistake again.
The other thing that, just as a piece of advice, do not get into these children's lives until you are absolutely certain you are going to stay.
She should be aware of that too.
And it's something that you can tell about her if she's not aware of it.
You do not want to become a father figure to these children, An adult male who is going to win their affections if you are not going to be around.
So take this slow.
That is my advice.
Take it really slow.
Do not become part of the children's lives until you're sure you're going to be part of this lady's life forever, really, because one thing they do not need is men coming in and going out again and abandoning them.
That's my advice.
Good luck.
Drew, I have lived most of my life as an atheist and throughout my 20s, I was riddled with despair and depression.
Even then, I was quite ashamed of how I treated both myself and women around me.
I've since become a Christian, and in the last 12 months, my life has completely turned around and I am able to treat myself and others much better.
I feel like I have a new heart.
That's great.
I'd love to hear that.
I really do.
However, while I am a much more joyful man overall, the self-inflicted wounds of shame from the past still haunt me and now even more so.
On the scale of things, most people would see my past actions as trivial, but I carry them around.
They weigh me down and I really do struggle to forgive myself.
I don't know where God fits in because if he took away all the pain, I would feel like I got away with it, which isn't what I want.
But I also know after all these years, I'm unable to forgive myself alone.
You know, he goes on to say, I have a beautiful fiancé, and my life is otherwise pretty great, but at times I struggle to move forward with it, and I sometimes feel like I don't deserve the life I have.
I love your show.
Never miss an episode.
Please keep up the good work.
Yeah, this is from Anonymous.
Listen, pal, you got to let it go.
You know, this is the thing.
Read the Gospels.
The Gospels are not about wallowing in shame.
Guilt is a tool to let you know when you are doing something wrong.
You let go of the thing you were doing wrong.
You stop doing it.
You fix whatever you have broken insofar as you can.
And a lot of times in the past, we can't fix too many things.
And sometimes going back and even apologizing to people just brings up bad memories that they don't want.
Sometimes you just got to leave it behind.
Guilt is a tool that is given to you to know these things.
But wallowing in guilt is a strategy of the other guys.
That's the other guy's side, right?
He always wants to tell you that you are a bad person.
Christ is telling you he loves you.
He is telling you you are off the hook.
He's telling you he absorbed your sin and now you've got to let it go and live the life he has planned for you.
This is the life, this life with your fiancé, this life where you feel joy.
That's the life he wanted you to have when he made you in the womb, pal.
That is the life he wanted you to have.
And to let it go because it took you a while to get there and you did things that you didn't like, we all have, believe me, by the way, I'm speaking from experience here.
I'm not just talking off the top of my head.
I know exactly what you're talking about, and I know exactly the logical bind where you feel like, oh my gosh, if I let this stuff go, then I'm not being punished enough.
The point is not punishment.
The point is forgiveness and joy and the joy that you can create going forward.
Because if you don't let yourself go forward, then you're not going to create the life that you can give your fiancé and your wife and your future wife, the life you're going to give the children of joy and knowledge of God.
Those are all things for you to create.
So you have work to do.
You have business to do.
It is to be done in joy.
It will arise out of your joy.
It will be created by your joy and your love of God.
Let cut everything else loose.
Cut everything else loose.
It's hard.
Listen, there are things I've done.
I wake up in the middle of the night.
If I ever go to sleep, I wake up in the middle of the night sweating, but I know that I am forgiven by God.
I know that God has absorbed my sin, sin and my punishment.
You got to let it go.
That is the only thing to do.
Don't get caught up in the logic of it because that is, you know, oh, I should be punished and all this stuff, because that is coming from another place, not from God.
From Rex, Mr. Clavin, I've listened to your podcast about a year now and have thoroughly enjoyed your humor and powerful command of the English language.
My lady friend and I are both strongly religious and adherent Christians, but we likely won't get married for a few more years until she finishes university studies.
In the meantime, we're remaining celibate because that's how we interpret the Bible, no sex until marriage.
To understate the reality, it's a challenge.
What is the purpose of this sex, no sex until marriage concept?
And what benefits might it confer to people who practice this compared to people who don't practice this?
Thanks for your time.
Okay, but first let me tell you what I can't do here.
I can't speak as a theologian because I'm not a theologian.
And I can't speak from experience because I didn't live this life.
I did not live this life.
I've lived a faithful married life, but I did not live a celibate pre-married life.
But it is pretty clear that you do a lot less damage this way.
Consider the fact that if you live in a culture that values virginity and you take your girlfriend's virginity and then break up with her, you have now put her back into a culture where she is less valuable to that culture.
So that is, you know, right there is a terrible thing to have done to her.
And again, I'm not speaking as a theologian.
I'm not speaking even as a moralist.
I'm just talking practically here.
Obviously, the risk of pregnancy, which is always real, which really, you know, the thing is, we always think about sex like it's like just a fun couple of fun few minutes that you're having, but you're actually doing that thing that humans do when they want to reproduce.
And so, you know, there's always the chance of the baby coming.
And I have to tell you, from people who have lived, who have lived a life of celibacy until marriage, they recommend it highly.
The argument on the other side is always, well, you don't know you're sexually compatible and you don't know that you'll get along.
I have never heard anybody complain about this, actually, from the celibate side of it.
I never heard anybody say, oh, yeah, and then we got into bed and we couldn't work out our differences.
What they say instead is that it takes marriage and it elevates it into another state.
So before you're in that state, you are not married and then suddenly you are married and you get it.
You get the complexity of becoming one flesh and you get the depth of it and it all becomes very important.
The one thing that leapt out at me, your letter, by the way, on another topic is, why don't you just get married?
I mean, so she's still in university.
You know, I don't know, when my wife and I married, we had nothing.
We had nothing at all.
She was working to support a guy who wanted to make a living as a writer, which is virtually impossible.
What a clown she was.
But I fooled her by actually making a living as a writer.
And, you know, I mean, we made a lot of mistakes and all that, but I'm just saying that, you know, when you get married, then your life will be together and you'll put her through university together and you'll travel through universe together and then you won't have this problem.
From Jamie, a wise and mighty lord of the multiverse, that is what is on my office and my studio door now, I think.
I'm a single guy in my mid-20s who used to work as a writer, but I haven't had a steady job for over a year.
Most of the freelancing gigs I got didn't pay nearly enough.
So I started playing poker to pay the bills.
Over the course of the last year, what started out as a short-term solution has gradually morphed into my full-time job.
I go to the casino four days a week to play mid-stakes cash games.
And after doing my taxes, I've actually discovered I'm making more money playing poker than I ever did as a writer.
But I'm not happy.
I don't feel as if I'm doing anything useful.
The only human beings I speak to are my landlord and the guy who runs the poker room.
Playing poker has taken a serious toll on my health.
I've gained a lot of weight.
I eat junk food.
I rarely shave and my apartment is a pig sty.
I'd also like to get married at some point.
No girl wants to go out with a guy who doesn't have a steady job.
My question is, what do you think are the first steps to getting my life on track?
Nobody really wants to hire a guy who has been out of the job market as long as I have.
If you have any suggestions, I'd appreciate hearing them.
First of all, I think you're in trouble.
You know, I think you should take stock here because I think you're in actual trouble.
I don't know if you're a gambling addict.
I have no way of knowing that whatsoever, but you are not living a good life.
And the thing is, as long as that life goes on, every day that it goes on will be a day that you can't get back when you will not be living the life that you were meant to live, that you were given when you were given life.
You know, you can get a job.
I would get myself, just speaking for myself, I would get any job to get out of the poker racket.
I would stop playing poker.
I just stop, just completely.
Because first of all, to test whether I'm addicted to it, if that's part of the problem, I would just stop playing poker.
I would get myself a job.
This is a great job market.
People are hungry to hire people.
You can move to find a job.
You can find a job ranging from a store clerk job to, yesterday I just saw a thing where truck drivers, they're desperate to find truck drivers, all kinds of jobs out there now.
This is a great market to find a job.
Anything would be better than what you're doing now because you're destroying yourself and you're ruining, as you say yourself, you're ruining your chances for the future.
Then, then start to make a plan.
Start to make a plan.
Writing is not a career plan.
This is the career plan that I followed.
I was out of my mind.
And I am one of a number of people that's probably smaller than the number of major league baseball players who have done what I have done.
Okay, so that's not a good plan.
I'm not saying you can't do it.
I'm just saying don't make that your plan.
Make your plan to earn a living in a way that is good for you where you can also write.
And then write your way to the point where you're making a living and then you can leave the other job behind.
That is the smartest way to do this.
But get out of what you're doing now.
You are really hurting yourself and it's not going to get better by itself.
You have got to take this and do it.
Get yourself a job where you can eat and pay your rent and whatever it is and then start and then start the program of building a writing career.
That is how you do this.
And make your plan, but first get out of what you're doing because you're destroying yourself.
From Jesper, I'm a conservative-leaning libertarian Dane living in Denmark.
Denmark is a market-driven capitalist country with low national debt, a decent trade surplus, a balanced national budget.
We do have very high taxation, 50% on average, that pays for our not-awful single-payer health care system, free schools and universities.
I happen to like our system.
It seems to work for us here in Viking Land.
In liking our system, have I failed utterly as a human being?
Can I even call myself a conservative?
If Americans tally up expenditures, I've seen several studies that show that U.S. citizens actually pay 50% in taxes.
Don't hate me.
I don't hate you.
First of all, you're talking about a free market with high social spending.
A lot of people say this is the way to go.
It's not inherently evil like socialism is.
It does have problems to me.
I mean, I hear that I haven't actually been to Denmark.
I hear it's a wonderful country, a delightful country to be in.
It doesn't produce much for the world.
And I hear that people in Denmark who want to start businesses leave because it's not very conducive to business.
It's not conducive to some kinds of freedom.
But the thing is, a small, homogeneous country like Denmark is can sustain more social spending because there is more agreement inherently in the population on what money should be spent on than there is in a country like this where everybody wants something different.
Okay?
a great big multicultural country like America and it's huge.
I mean, Europeans do not understand how huge this country is.
It is huge.
It is multicultural.
It is just disparate and diverse.
If Tennessee decided to have big social spending, I wouldn't have anything to say about it.
If New York said, no, we're not going to have, it would probably be the other way around, but just talking off the top of my head, if New York said, no, we're not going to have social spending, I would say, fine.
Anybody who doesn't like that, move to Tennessee, right?
That's the point of a small place.
Big places have to have a different system.
We have this federalist system where different states can be experiments in democracy.
That's why I'm so opposed to federal power, because it limits the ability of states to act as they want to act.
It limits the ability of Texas to say, hey, we're a conservative state.
Look how well this is going.
And for California to say, hey, we're a leftist state and we're dropping into the sea because we suck.
You know, that is what the whole point of federalism is.
So you live in a country that's as big as one of our states, one of our smaller states, I think, if I'm not incorrect.
So you can do your experiment and leave if you don't like it.
So I don't hate you.
I understand you like it.
It's good.
I still think that there are things that are wrong with it.
Like, for instance, the fact that you don't get invaded because they know we'll protect you.
So we're paying for your military, your military security.
You use cell phones.
We invent cell phones.
You use cars.
I know that they don't really like cars over there, but you use cars.
We invent cars.
And that, I think, is the difference between a vibrant, free capitalist society and a society with high social spending, which I think ultimately withers and dies.
Magic Marriage Mystery00:02:39
But while you're having a good time, have a good time.
It is much different in a small, homogenous country than it is in a country like this.
Gosh, we're running out of time so fast.
Hi, Supreme from Lynn, Lynne, L-Y-N-E.
Hi, Supreme Oracle Clavin with no ease.
I read your book, The Great Good Thing, and loved it.
You fell in love with your wife instantly.
You saw her and that was it.
How has this lasted until now?
Isn't love at first sight quite shallow?
First of all, I'll go home and see if she's still there.
How did you even know that you could build a life with her?
This has puzzled me since I read the book.
Thanks for your wonderful show.
You have taught me how to speak to lefties in a way that they will more or less understand.
You know, my wife and I did everything wrong.
We were picked by God to be together.
We were soulmates.
We were meant, obviously.
There's just no question in my mind that we were meant to be together.
We did so many things wrong that I wouldn't recommend other people doing.
But I did know when I met her, the minute I sat down next to her, and that basically my search was over.
I mean, obviously, over time, you don't, we lived together for several years.
And I have to say that during that time, it was not like I didn't have doubts.
If I had had no doubts, I'd have married her right away.
But I did know, and what the magic of our marriage, and it has been a magic marriage, is beyond our control and is something, one of the things that led me to God was realizing that this love does not come from us.
It comes through us from somewhere else.
Dear love Dr. Clavin from Benjamin.
And thank you for the book, The Great Good Thing.
You will love this book.
It is a really good book.
You should buy it.
Dear, dear, dear love Dr. Clavin from Benjamin.
I know a girl.
She is the best woman I've ever known and she would make a great wife.
She is in love with me, but I am not in love with her.
What do I do?
Hey, if she's a great girl, she deserves someone who loves her, not you.
So get out of it.
If you're not going to marry her, if you don't love her and you're not going to marry her, and if you don't love her, you shouldn't marry her.
Let her go.
Let her find somebody else to be attached to.
Break your own heart, not hers, and let her go and find somebody else.
You might want to ask yourself if she is the best woman you've ever known and she would make a great wife why you don't love her.
I'd be really interested to know that.
But, you know, love is mysterious.
And if you don't love her, let her go because she deserves, obviously, she deserves to be loved.
She deserves a husband who loves her.
From Duncan, if you had young children today, would you send them to government schools?
No.
I mean, look, that depends on the neighborhood.
You know, I sent my son to a public school because we actually moved to a neighborhood that had the best public school, one of the best public schools in the country.
We did it on purpose.
And then when he got out, I sent him to public.
I mean, I busted my chops to put my kids to private schools because I hated the public schools so much.
Depends on the neighborhood.
The 20% Poorest Living Like Middle Class00:05:51
I mean, it really does, to be fair.
If you're in a neighborhood that has good conservative schools that are not teaching them, you know, what kind of sexual lives they should leave and they're not really boys if they don't think they're boys.
You know, you can make that decision yourself.
But if not, I think it is worth homeschooling.
I think it's worth doing anything to keep them out of some of these government schools, which really are bad.
I guess I got to stop.
It's too bad.
I had a lot more, but you'll come back.
Rob saved some of the good ones, and we'll come back to them later on.
Meanwhile, we've got to move on to tickety-boo news.
You know, one of the things, there's a great line in Steven Pinker's book, Enlightenment Now, where he says, success erases its own footprints.
And that is one of the things that I think keeps the Democrats in business because conservatives solve the problems, they raise the problems, conservatives solve the problems, and then they take it to the next level.
So, you know, the Civil Rights Act, a greater percentage of Republicans voted for it than Democrats.
I think after that, there was really not much more the government could do to help the lives to help us become a more just and fair country.
But the Democrats just keep saying, oh, we're oppressed.
Well, how are you oppressed?
Well, people look at me funny when I get in an elevator and cops stop me more when I drive through rich neighbors.
That's not oppressed.
That's not oppression.
Those are like minor little glitches in your life that you can learn to live with and talk about.
So maybe they'll go away over time.
But that is not oppressed.
That is not what oppression looks like.
So they keep upping the ante.
There was a piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday or the day before by Bruce D. Meyer and James Sullivan, who did a, who had written a report which said, based on historical, this is from the White House Council of Economic Advisors.
They helped write this report for the White House Council of Economic Advisors, which said, based on historical standards of material well-being and the terms of engagement, our war on poverty is largely over and a success.
And they point out that neither the right nor the left wants to admit that this.
The left, because they always want to expand social programs, because that's their campaign.
We will give you free stuff.
Alexandria Google Eyes Cortez is like, we will give you free stuff.
How do you pay for it?
Yesterday they said, how will we pay for it?
Well, we had wars and we didn't pay for those.
Yes, that was a bad idea.
You do not want to run on bad ideas.
You want to run on good ideas.
Try that.
Not bad ideas.
Yes, good ideas.
That will help Alexandria Google Eyes Cortez do much better going forward.
None of the candidates she endorsed, by the way, won.
So she's not as powerful as people think she is.
Anyway, the thing that they're saying is they keep that, and now the right doesn't like it because they don't like to admit that maybe the war on poverty was a success.
But what these guys say is if instead of focusing on reported incomes, what they did was they measured poverty based on consumption.
Because when you look at just incomes, you're not including all the good things that these government programs have given them.
So you're not including all the other benefits they get.
So he says, we measured, they say we measured what food, housing, transportation, and other goods and services people are able to purchase.
This approach, which captures the effect of non-cash programs and accounts for the known bias in the measurements, demonstrates clearly that there is much less material deprivation than there was decades ago.
Other indicators support this finding.
According to the American Housing Survey, the poorest 20%, listen to this, the poorest 20% of Americans live as the middle class did a generation ago, as measured by the square footage of their homes, the number of rooms per person, and the presence of air conditioning, dishwashers, and other amenities.
In terms of housing problems like peeling paint, leaks, and plumbing issues, today's poor haven't quite matched the living standards of the 1980s middle class, but they are getting close.
The 1980s is not that long ago, so they're saying that our poor are like the middle class of the 1980s.
That is amazing.
You know, one of the experiences I had when I came into Nairobi in Kenya, I was on, went on one of these kind of safaris, and we came in through Kenya and we drove through their into Nairobi and we drove through their slums.
And I looked out the window and I thought, oh, I get it.
There's no poverty in America.
There is nothing in America that looks like this.
Now, today there are in some leftist cities where the homeless are on the streets, and that looks a little bit like what Nairobi looks like.
But these were places where people had to walk with a bottle on their head to get water.
These were places where they were living in sheds that were built of pressed tin with cardboard walls and pressed tin roofs and all this stuff.
They were just living in sheds, lean-tos.
In America, things are going really well.
And this is the thing about all the panic on the air and all the screaming on the air and all this stuff, the clickbait and the panic.
Things are going, life is tickety-boo in this country, pal, and we should really be enjoying it.
We should be grateful for it.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't see the problems, doesn't mean we shouldn't fix them, but you can fix a whole lot more in gratitude and come together a whole lot more in gratitude than you can in bitterness and by pretending that the problems are still the same as they were 50, 60 years ago.
They are just not.
That is amazing, tickety-boo news that really are the 20% poorest people in this country are living like the middle class did a generation ago.
Amazing stuff.
All right, we will be back tomorrow, which is the last day before the Clavenless weekend.
So be here to suck out every drop of Clavin-y goodness before the Clavenless weekend begins.
It's like being a Clavin camel.
You got to be like a Clavin camel.
Suck out the goodness, and then you can make it across the desert of the Clavenless weekend to the next Monday.
I'll be here.
Suck Out the Goodness00:00:38
You'll be here too.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Emily Jai.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing Production.