Ep. 568 – No News, All Agenda skewers media hypocrisy—from CNN’s Don Lemon conflating a kaleidoscope with racism to The New York Times glorifying Stormy Daniels’ extortion past—while exposing Google/Facebook’s shadow-banning of conservatives. The host ties this to historical purges like McCarthyism, then pivots to mailbag dilemmas: Eric’s struggle balancing love for his transgender sister at her wedding, Anthony’s defense of faith against suffering, and Zachary’s despair over unchecked national debt (now $34 trillion). Closing with Andrew Klavan, the episode warns free speech gains are fragile, as tech giants weaponize platforms while politicians ignore fiscal collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
Leftists React to Trump's McCain Treatment00:02:12
American journalists and other duplicitous leftists are very, very upset at President Trump's treatment of the late Senator John McCain after this past weekend when Senator McCain became the sort of Republican leftist like most.
The New York Times, a former newspaper, published a scathing editorial pinned by Times editor-in-chief Blithering Prevarication III, saying, quote, John McCain's patriotic commitment to not breathing stands as a stern rebuke to the foulness of foul Donald Trump and other foul Republicans who insist on remaining alive.
If only they could learn from McCain's example, we would say nice things about them too and then bury them, unquote.
At CNN, America's most trusted source for hysterical mendacity, Don Lemon stared sincerely into the camera and then realized it wasn't the camera but a child's kaleidoscope and then became so fascinated with the shifting colors, he forgot whom he was about to call racist.
Then he remembered it was Donald Trump and stared sincerely into the kaleidoscope and said, quote, although I called John McCain a racist when he was alive, now he's dead, so he's a great man whose legacy proves that Trump is a racist because he's still alive, which is racist, unquote.
When Lemon was told the camera was actually behind him, he spun around 360 degrees and continued talking into the kaleidoscope because he never quite figured out the whole degrees thing, which he says is racist.
Trump offended the mainstream media by refusing to lower the flag to half mast after McCain's death, then lowering the flag but giggling behind his hand, then quickly raising the flag again, then lowering it when no one was looking, and finally issuing a statement saying, quote, if John McCain was so great, how come he's dead, unquote.
As NBC's Chuck Todd put it, quote, Trump's treatment of McCain is childish and only proves that he has cooties and is a doo-doo head, unquote.
So the behavior in our nation's capital continues at its usual level.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
And birds are wingy, also singing hunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is it bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Inside Jaws Summer Finale00:02:27
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, the last mailbag day of the summer.
So now is your chance.
I might please stop.
Remember that guy who wrote in, were you here when that guy wrote in and said every time he hears this, he's driving his truck listening to the podcast and he veers off the road, you know?
I just like playing it for that reason.
All right, that last mailbag day of the summer, we will solve all your problems.
The answers are guaranteed 100% correct.
The rest of the summer will be great and even into the fall.
You know, over the weekend, I think I mentioned this already, I saw The Meg, and I hate to say this because I'm a big Jason Statham fan.
I think he's a really terrific action star, but this picture, it's so bad, and it's funded by the Chinese, so everything in it is like they're talking, it's like they're talking English like it's your second language, even the people who are English.
It likes talking very slowly and delivering the joke.
And every scene, it's about a gigantic shark, right?
And every scene is right out of Jaws.
And all I could think was, what a great movie Jaws was.
And if you want to learn the story behind Jaws, you can listen to Inside Jaws from Wondery Podcasting.
This is a new pod, Wondery podcast.
This is a new podcast that's got an incredible story to tell.
You're going to love it.
It's called Inside Jaws, and it's written and hosted by Mark Ramsey, the man behind Inside Psycho and Inside the Exorcist.
Inside Jaws takes you on an immersive journey through the making of 1975's pulse-pounding hit film, the first ever summer blockbuster.
Follow one of the most prolific filmmakers in history, Steven Spielberg, from the making of his first 8mm Western as a young Boy Scout to the rocky production and groundbreaking release of a movie that changed the film industry forever.
This is a tale of guts and glory.
You don't want to miss it.
Listen today by subscribing to Inside Jaws on Apple Podcasts or heading to wondery.fm slash insidejaws.
Or you can listen to the first four episodes ad-free by signing up for Wondery Plus at wondery.com slash plus.
That's w-o-n-d-e-r-y dot com slash P-L-U-S.
Go subscribe to Inside Jaws today.
It's a great story, by the way, the way Jaws was made.
It really was.
They really made it, you know, on the fly.
McCarthy And The Communists00:15:54
And of course, it worked out.
It was one of the great shows.
Not quite as awful as The Meg, but it really was terrific.
All right.
You know, Monday, we started out this week.
We were talking about kind of being in social media hell because Senator McCain died and there was a shooting in Florida.
And just I couldn't help but notice how the social media just goes through the same thing again and again.
And I said, the reason I think that we keep getting in the same arguments without ever moving off the dime is because we're not really arguing about what we're actually arguing about, which is freedom, which is about liberty.
One side of us believes in the founders' vision of liberty.
We believe the country was built for the express purpose of protecting our liberty, that the Constitution is there for that reason, that the whole machinery, this whole, I call it a Rube Goldberg machine of all these different parts kind of in battle with each other, the states against the feds, the Congress against the executive, the judiciary against the Congress, all these things, these balances of power in this machine were built to preserve your liberty, to keep the government so busy fighting each other that they're not coming after us and hampering our rights and taking our rights away.
As I'm watching the news now, I'm just thinking like, not only are we not arguing about what we're arguing about, but there's no such thing as a news story anymore.
The story is not the story.
The story is always the agenda.
You know, if you go back, if you go back into the 40s and 50s, you'll listen to liberals, and they've been talking about this now for, you know, 50 years, 60 years, talking about the Red Scare.
Go on Google and Google movies about the Red Scare or movies about the blacklist, okay?
And you'll get movie after movie, The Front.
You'll get Good Night and Good Luck, Guilty by Suspicion, Chaplain.
All these pictures, all these films are about the following thing.
There were spies, Soviet spies, American Soviet spies, in the State Department at a very high level.
And Truman, Harry Truman, got a lot of them out.
But still, when they were exposed, it was exactly the same as today when Alger Hiss was exposed.
The press was like, oh, why?
This is a wonderful liberal upper class person.
Why would any, if you ever want to read a great, life-changing book about this, read Witness by Whitaker Chambers.
Whitaker Chambers was the kind of overweight, sloppy former Russian spy.
I think he was, was he gay?
I don't know.
I think he was married.
I can't remember.
But he was a sloppy, kind of not very classy former Russian spy who exposed Alger Hiss in the State Department, and the press jumped on Whitaker Chambers.
Hiss was eventually convicted of perjury.
It was a big deal.
So there actually were Russian spies at the very top levels of American government.
But then Joseph McCarthy took the fact that there was this threat of Soviet spies.
These were people who believed that the Soviet Union was the future, that communism was the future, that this was going to solve all the problems that they had had during the 30s with the depression and all that.
It was all going to change once the wonderful communist system came in and helped us all out.
And so they became spies thinking that they were doing the right thing.
Joseph McCarthy came along and he turned this into, as they always call it, a witch hunt.
That doesn't mean there were no such thing as witches.
There were communists at very high levels.
But that doesn't mean McCarthy was a good guy.
McCarthy was a demagogue.
He played off this.
He played off people's fears.
He played off the fact that everybody was afraid that the Russians were coming, the Russians were coming.
And what he would do is he would say he had evidence of, he had names.
He would wave a closed envelope and he would say, I have evidence that there are these spies in the army, in the State Department, here and there.
But he never produced the evidence.
In fact, we have a video of him.
This is cut number seven.
Play cut number seven, a video of Joseph McCarthy saying there's evidence and then coming up with nothing.
The Russians offered help.
The campaign accepted help.
The Russians gave help and the president made full use of that help.
And that is pretty damning, whether it is proof beyond a reasonable doubt of conspiracy or not.
Do you know of any instance where the Russians said, we're going to do it this way, we're going to do it through Wikileaks, we're going to do it through DC leaks.
This is how we're going to get this information out there?
I can't comment.
That is an issue that we have been investigating.
And I don't want to comment at this point or not what the state of that evidence is.
Sorry, that wasn't Joseph McCarthy.
That was Adam Schiff.
Same difference.
It's the same thing, right?
They're just using the Russian scare to get people afraid and work their political will.
And the story is not the story.
The story is the agenda.
That's what you're seeing.
When you see the Russian collusion story, you're seeing an agenda.
You're not seeing the real investigation into Russian meddling, which I'm sure is going on.
So one of the things that happened, and this was not Joseph McCarthy, because McCarthy was a senator, but over in the House, they had what was called HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and they began calling up anybody who had ever had any kind of communist leaning.
And it was kind of, it was unfair because people, intellectuals and even working class people thought, oh, this wonderful communism has come.
Somebody once said, I've seen the future in the Soviet Union and it works.
And so people joined these communist clubs.
But as the stories of Stalin's atrocities came forward, people got wise and they saw what it was and they saw what the left always is, which is this controlling, overbearing, tyrannical philosophy that wants to force everybody into a vision of goodness, even if it means killing tens of millions of people.
A lot of people left.
And so it was kind of unfair when the House Un-American Activities Committee would call them up and they would say, you know, they would call them before Congress and say, you were a communist.
Now name your friends who are also there.
Name people.
So it forced you into the position of being a rat.
And it was overdone.
It was, you know, too much.
It was too much an overreaction to what was actually happening, the fact that there were actually spies.
And it happened in Hollywood.
So it happened in Hollywood, and they went after some guys who, writers and actors and producers and directors who had been Hollywood, who had been communists.
And people started getting blacklisted, right?
So there was this blacklist.
You couldn't work because you're a communist.
And talented people, Dalton Trumbo, a terrible human being and an absolute communist, but he was a terrific writer.
He wrote Spartacus under a pseudonym, great film.
But there were guys who said, you know what?
These communists are bad guys, and I'm going to testify.
I'm not going to go to jail.
I'm not going to ruin my career.
And guys like Ilya Kazan, who was one of the great directors of the 50s, Bud Schulberg, a really good writer, they testified.
And people started to ostracize them once the blacklist sort of went away.
And they made a movie.
It's one of the classic films of all time called On the Waterfront with Marlon Brando, in which Marlon Brando plays a dock worker.
The docks are owned by the mob.
And it's about will Marlon Brando testify against the mob.
And what Kazan and Schulberg were saying is, hey, sometimes ratting people out is the right thing to do when they're really rats.
And so all this stuff has gone on and on forever, the horror, the horror that people in Hollywood were signed.
I mean, God forbid they had been Nazis, then nobody would worry about it.
They were communists, which resulted in far more deaths than the Nazi regime.
The communist regime murdered far, far many people.
You know, that they were that Hollywood was silenced, they were furious about it.
But the story was never the story.
It was never about the fact that people were silenced.
It was about the fact that they were silenced.
It was never about the fact that HUAC overstepped its bounds or Joseph McCarthy overstepped its bounds.
It was always about the fact that they wanted to sell leftism and they got caught hooking their wagon to the star of the Soviet Union, which was an oppressive, murderous slave nation, slave empire, and they got caught, but they still want to push that agenda.
Now, they're doing the exact same thing, and they're simply reporting it from the other side.
They're trying to gin up fear against the Russians, just like the right did, just like Joseph McCarthy did in his day.
They're trying to gin up fear against the Russians to silence conservative voices and overturn the voice of the people who elected Donald Trump.
And Trump is talking about it, and he is ticked off that Google and Facebook and Twitter are silencing conservative voices.
And he said so, you know, Google, the head of Google, has refused to testify, but the other Facebook, the other social media guys are going to come to Capitol Hill and testify.
And Trump said, this is a problem yesterday.
Here he is talking to the press.
Yeah, I think Google is really taking advantage of a lot of people, and I think that's a very serious thing, and it's a very serious charge.
I think what Google and what others are doing, if you look at what's going on at Twitter, if you look at what's going on in Facebook, they better be careful because you can't do that to people.
You can't do it.
We have tremendous, we have literally thousands and thousands of complaints coming in, and you just can't do that.
So I think that Google and Twitter and Facebook, they're really treading on very, very troubled territory, and they have to be careful.
It's not fair to large portions of the population.
Okay?
So the point is here, right, that they're doing exactly the same thing that HUAC and McCarthy and all of the Red Scare people did in the 50s and that they've been complaining about for all this time.
But all those complaints, all of history as told by the left is not history.
History is not history.
It's the agenda.
So the guy from Google comes out, his name is Nick Sakrasek, and he's like Google's product manager and just gives this pro-face denial that there's any chance that Google is slanting their searches in favor of the left, which they are certainly doing.
But he just looks straight in the camera and says, nope, not happening.
Search is not used to set a political agenda, and we don't bias our results towards any political ideology.
We continually work to improve Google search, and we never rank results to manipulate political sentiment.
I mean, I've made the comparison before, but it is like the Martians in Mars attacks who say, we come in peace as they blow you away.
Of course they are.
Now look, part of this, part of this is left-wing prejudice so baked into our communication society that they don't even see it.
So for instance, they're going to privilege mainstream outlets.
They're going to privilege the New York Times.
They're going to privilege the networks.
They're going to privilege CNN, which they consider mainstream.
Those are all far-left.
I mean, the New York Times, when I call it a former newspaper, I'm not kidding.
It is a far-left vehicle.
It is a vehicle that promotes socialism.
It's a vehicle that rewrites the communist atrocity, the atrocity of the Soviet Union almost daily.
They try and sell you the idea that it was nowhere near as bad as you thought it was.
And by the way, if you were reading the New York Times, where they buried the story of the starvation famines that Stalin purposely caused that killed something like 10 million Ukrainians, where they buried it in the New York Times, maybe you wouldn't have known it was as bad as it was.
But these were people who signed on to communism, who never quite bought.
They told you that it wasn't a communist who killed John F. Kennedy.
They've been lying about it forever.
And now they continue to lie about it.
They're a left-wing newspaper.
They used to be a newspaper that slanted left.
Now they are a left-wing rag.
And so when you privilege those things, you are automatically privileging left-wing information.
But that's not the half of it.
You know, Eric Weinstein, he's the guy from Field Capital, very bright guy, says the denial from Google is ominous.
Google regularly biases searches in countless political ways, anti-gun, pro-multiculturalism, et cetera, anti-extremist.
According to many experiments I've run, it does so in a fashion that is so transparently obvious as to be comical.
I have found this too.
I mean, James Dammore, the guy they fired for saying men and women are different.
I mean, that's a punishable offense at Google.
They fired him for saying that.
The big study comes from the Media Research Center, which you can get.
You go on MRC and you can download their entire study, something like 40 pages.
Talks about the fact that Twitter, we know, is shadow banning.
Project Veritas caught them shadow banning conservatives.
Facebook's trending feed has been hiding conservative topics.
And we saw that egregious attack on our friend Dennis Prager and that whole absolute, I mean, they're so dishonest.
Why not just come out and say, you know what?
We got to straighten this out.
Why not straighten it out?
Instead, they say, oh, no, it's just a mistake.
We just happened.
We just happened to, you know, ban all of Dennis's videos.
Google search, especially as you come into an election.
See, this is the thing.
They don't care after the election.
After November, they'll be happy to kind of make it fairer, a little bit fairer.
YouTube, of course, we have problems with YouTube every day.
They demonetize our videos and they say how controversial they are, but they don't do it.
Do they do it to the Young Turks?
They don't, do they?
No.
Yeah, and they don't take them down.
If I use material from an entertainment source, they will cut us down.
They'll say, oh, you violated copyright.
They never do it to the left.
And they rely on these groups that hate conservatives to do their fact-checking for them.
The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, they're all, these are all guys who think that we are hateful because we believe in the Constitution and because we believe in liberty.
There's even at Facebook, there's even now a movement.
James Barrett was writing about this on our own Daily Wire.
There's a movement against their culture.
Here's his story.
He says, on the same day that President Trump unloaded on the political bias problem among major tech communities, including Google, the New York Times published a memo penned by Facebook senior engineer Brian Amarigue, laying out the company's problem with political diversity and calling for a movement within the company to promote more tolerance of people with political views other than just the leftist views he says are currently enforced by employees.
Since he posted his memo last week, dozens of fellow employees have joined this movement.
The memo is titled, We Have a Problem with Political Diversity.
He says, We are a political monoculture that's intolerant of different views.
We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack, often in mobs, anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology.
We throw labels that end in OBE and IST at each other, attack like you're an Islamophobe or you're a racist, sexist, attacking each other's character rather than their ideas.
So if they're having a movement within Facebook to stop it, you know it's happening.
I mean, that's a big clue that it's happening.
So just going back, we know now, we know now to look at all of the history the way the leftists told it and say, wait a minute, wait a minute.
You know, what was the real story?
Doesn't mean the story is the opposite.
It doesn't suddenly mean Joe McCarthy, who was a drunk and a demagogue.
It doesn't mean he was suddenly a good guy.
It simply means that the Red Scare, there wasn't a phobia.
It wasn't a phobia.
There were Reds in the State Department, and the left tried to cover it up.
And some of the people who got caught up by HUAC and by McCarthy deserved it.
Some of them were actual communists working in the government and in touch with Moscow and in touch with people who wanted to turn this into a communist government.
Some of those people still, you know, their descendants, their intellectual descendants still working both in the government and in the news departments and in the academy.
And, you know, every story is like this.
I mean, it's all about what I was talking about on Monday.
It's all about whether you believe in liberty or not, whether you're trying to get people so upset about some other story, whether you're trying to use the story so upset that they'll give up their guns, give up their constitutional rights, allow the Supreme Court to write law instead of the legislature, allow the president to use his pen and his phone, as Obama was fond of saying, to make law instead of the legislature.
It's all about breaking that Rube Goldberg machine, that Rube Goldberg machine that protects your freedom.
The Left's Rationalization Of Violence00:14:48
And, you know, everything they do is like Trump the other day.
He's talking to Christian leaders.
And there was a tape that was put out.
And CNN and NBC both say they have heard this tape.
And Trump is trying to get the Christian evangelicals behind him for these midterms that are coming up because he's afraid that people will support him, but they won't leave, get off their duffs and go to the election booth to vote for other Republicans.
And he's saying, if you don't vote for Republicans, if I lose the Congress, if I lose the House, if I lose the Senate, we're going to lose my agenda as well.
So he's trying to pump people up.
And he says to them, this election is very much a referendum on not only me, it's a referendum on your religion.
It's a referendum on free speech and the First Amendment.
It's a referendum on so much.
And he said, it's not a question of like or dislike, whether you like or dislike the candidate.
It's a question that they, the Democrats, will overturn everything that they've done, that we've done, and they will do it quickly and violently.
And violently.
There is violence.
When you look at Antifa, these are violent people.
Okay?
So the left goes nuts, right?
And when I say the left, what I mean is the media.
And Chuck Todd.
Chuck Todd, remember, remember, Chuck Todd brought on a Antifa supporter, a guy who had written a book, the Antifa Handbook, I think it was called the Anti-Fascist Handbook, brought him on twice to promote his book, to promote his point of view.
And now he's shocked, I tell you, shocked that there is violence going on in this casino, that Donald Trump is making reference to violence.
Chuck Todd is shocked.
He's trafficking in this part of the Republican base.
It's not fair to call it the Republican base, although that's what it is now.
But I think the Trump voters.
He's trafficking in their conspiracies.
Yeah, and he touched Antifa.
An issue in Portland, Oregon.
Okay, I will grant you that.
And in some places, but this is not a giant issue.
This reminds me a lot of his reaction, initial reaction to Charlottesville.
This desire to talk about violence on the left as somehow equal to or perhaps greater than violence on the right.
He wants to rationalize violence.
Right.
I think he just wants to rationalize violence.
Yeah, that's it.
That's it.
Donald Trump is just rationalizing violence, but all violence on it.
It's not a big problem.
It's not a big problem on the left.
I mean, have you seen what happens on campuses when conservatives try to talk?
Have you seen what happens where, you know, all of these riots, even the riot in Charlottesville would not have happened, would not have happened if the left had just let the what, you know, like the five right-wingers who show up for this stuff.
And I call them right-wingers, but they're not.
They're the white supremacists, let's call them, the five or 10 or 20 white supremacists who call it, if they just let them go and laughed at them, none of this would happen.
Antifa is the source of a lot of this violence, and a lot of this street violence is from the left.
All those Seattle riots that take place, all those anarchists, those are leftists creating that violence.
When you saw the way the Tea Party showed up and they had their meetings and they cleaned up after themselves and then you saw the way Occupy showed up and they had rapes and they left filth all over the place and yet the press said this is wonderful.
And so the problem, what Chuck doesn't realize is the problem is not Antifa.
The problem is him.
The problem is him.
The problem is mainstream guys in ties and jackets sitting on TV with the power of that camera in front of them saying, it's fine.
It's fine.
It's not the same.
Here's Don Lemon.
I got to say, that guy's a brick.
Here's Don Lemon, a living brick, telling us that there's a big difference.
This is cut number two.
Big difference between Antifa violence and other violence.
Says it right in the name, Antifa, anti-fascism, which is what they were there fighting.
Listen, there's, you know, no organization is perfect.
There's some violence.
No one condones the violence, but there were different reasons for Antifa and for these neo-Nazis to be there.
One, racist fascists, the other group fighting racist fascists.
There is a fascist.
There's a distinction there.
It really is as if a guy in a white sheet showed up and burned a cross on a black man's lawn and said, I'm here because I'm anti-Klan.
What difference does it make what you call it?
People name things the wrong things all the time.
But for Don Lemon, boy, if you say you're anti-fascist, and you put on a mask and hit somebody over the head, that's different violence.
That's the problem.
The problem is the condoning of violence from these guys because the story is not the story.
The story of Donald Trump saying, you know, there's a problem with violence on the left, that's not the story.
The story is hiding the fact or rationalizing away the violence on the left because you are for the left.
They're doing this on just about everything, but I have to just make one point.
I got to stop because I want to get to the mailbag and I want there to be time.
But I have to make one point that when you do this, when you don't ground yourself in the facts, and this goes for us too, I mean, this goes for the right to, if you don't ground yourself in the facts, if you don't ground yourself in values.
I mean, I am going to go off on a little tangent here.
This whole thing where everybody hates Jeff Sessions, oh, what a terrible thing Jeff Sessions recused himself.
Jeff Sessions may have done the wrong thing.
He may have mistaken the world as it now stands.
I'll grant that.
I don't know if that's true or not.
But Jeff Sessions is an honorable guy who is trying to act according to his sense of honor.
If we don't have room for that, if we're willing to distort our values to support Donald Trump, down we go.
We just become the left.
And if you want to see distorted values, remember, I think it was this week, Resident, that the New York Times wrote that thing about Stormy Daniels as a feminist hero.
Now Vogue has chimed in, and this designer who refused to design a dress for Melania Trump has designed a dress for her and they put her forward as some kind of fashion symbol in Vogue, which is the fashion Bible, right?
That's the fashion world's Bible.
And they put this porn star and what can you call her?
A loose woman.
I don't know what to call her, but she's obviously some woman who extorted her rich lover, had sex with a married man, extorted her rich lover, not excusing Trump by pointing out what Stormy Daniels is, okay?
And now they're so desperate.
Their agenda is so important, so much more important than their facts, so much more important than their values, that they descend into self-parody.
Here is Brooke Baldwin on CNN interviewing the writer of this Vogue story, Amy Chozick, on Stormy Daniels and who she really is.
I really wanted to get at kind of the psychological and personal toll that it has taken on her being one of the president's chief adversaries.
What is that like?
And so we really kind of dove into that over a couple conversations.
She's very dry.
She has this sardonic wit.
And it was something that she kept kind of relying on every time the conversation got too heavy about this weight that really millions of Americans have placed on her shoulders, seeing her as this kind of beacon of the resistance.
She's sort of this perfect adversary.
She really is.
I mean, I tried to dig into that a little bit.
What makes her such a perfect adversary?
And it's partly that.
She cannot be humiliated.
I mean, she told me that working in the adult business, there's been harassment her whole life.
She said, I did not turn on Twitter and get called a whore for the first time.
Your biggest takeaway after sitting down with her?
I think just how, you know, fun she is.
I think people have a perception about porn stars and what their kind of sex-fueled lives are like.
I mean, she's a working mom.
I mean, talking about her 15 minutes, some of her friends I talked to were like, yeah, she's got a family to support.
Is she cashing in when she can?
Sure.
And so just kind of how different it was from our perception of this, you know, glamorous or whatever you think about porn stars.
She's a working mom.
She's got her horses in Texas.
A gun.
She's got a gun.
She's a Republican.
She's fun.
She's a fun, working mom.
She's a fun, working mom.
I mean, listen, this is what you turn yourself into.
This is what you turn yourself into when you put your agenda above your values.
This is what's happening in the news.
This is why the news business is in disrepute with everybody.
They have put this left-wing agenda above their values, which should be telling the story, should be bringing the news to people.
You know, Fox News' slogan, we report, you decide.
That should actually be the slogan of every journalist.
They are reporting the agenda, not the story.
And I just play this.
It's like a warning.
It's like a warning.
Don't let this happen to you.
Don't become this woman spouting this nonsense about this woman who has had, look, you know, it's not a moral, I have my moral judgments about Stormy Daniel, but it's not a moral judgment to say being a porn star is a degraded life.
It's a degraded life.
That is a life where your body is being used for the degraded entertainment of men.
The men who are watching it are degrading themselves.
And I would not, I'm not exempting myself.
I know what I'm, you know, I know what we're talking about.
But still, still, to elevate this stuff because you're so desperate to get your hands on the throat of the president is just embarrassing.
You have just turned yourself into an embarrassment.
And that's why, you know, down deep, down deep, when the story is not the story, you become, you become this vehicle of absolute nonsense.
You become a vehicle of absolute stupidity and twisted values.
Just tell the truth.
It will set you free.
All right, we've got the mailbag coming up.
I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
But if only, if only you would come to thedailywire.com and subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month or a lousy 100 bucks for the entire year, you could be in the mailbag now saying, please, running out of the mailbox, please, please.
And then you could ask questions and I would answer them all.
Come on over for the mailbag.
The mailbag.
Oh, yeah.
I just always like to picture that truck going off the road, killing dozens.
All right, from Eric.
Oh, great and wise Clavin knower of all the best words, whose cranium reflects God's light and banishes the darkness.
True, and whose name is not spelled with ease.
Four years ago, my younger sister came out to my family as a transgender male.
Having been raised in a conservative Christian family, this has caused some drama, to say the least.
She insisted that we call her by a new name and use male pronouns.
I think you can tell by the pronouns I'm using a bit of how I feel about it.
However, out of respect for her wishes and a desire not to create a divide between us that would prevent me from further speaking into her life, I acquiesced and do, as does the rest of my family, at least while in her company and when referring to her the majority of the time.
Thankfully, our family has not split over this and still regularly spends time together eating, laughing, and enjoying one another.
She eventually married her girlfriend of several years.
And again, while none of us really supported the marriage, I and all but one other family member attended the wedding because she deeply desired for us to be there.
She knows generally how I feel about everything and I assume thinks I'm a bit blinded by my conservative Christian views.
She also knows I love her immensely, which has enabled us to have dialogue about the whole issue on occasion.
I wonder though if I am approaching this in the right way.
Am I being hypocritical?
If I am just enabling and encouraging a lifestyle I do not agree with, I think may ultimately be unhealthy.
Or if I should continue to stay the course I'm on, I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Love the show, and thank you for helping to keep me sane.
God bless Eric.
Eric, I think you're doing exactly the right thing.
You are not in charge of her life.
You are not in charge of her life.
She knows how you feel.
You're not being a hypocrite.
She obviously understands your feelings about this, but you are giving her God's love.
That is what God would do.
God sits down to dine with sinners and gives them love.
It may save them, and it may not, because they have their own free will.
Your sister has her own free will.
She is living a life that you disapprove of.
It may be, it may be she's in so much pain with who she is that it's the only life that will give her relief.
I don't know.
I'm not speaking for her or against her.
I'm just saying that you're doing the right thing.
Give her the love.
Let her know how you feel.
If there's ever a chance that she wants to come to you and talk about it, she can do it otherwise.
I think that you and your family are acting admirably.
I think you are acting admirably.
What would you gain?
What would she gain?
What would God gain by you constantly hammering her about something that she already knows you feel?
I mean, what would she gain?
But she might gain.
She might gain a path to God through your love.
And that is the only path as far as I'm concerned.
And so I think you're doing the right thing.
From Anthony, Mr. Clavin, how do you explain the Christian message to people who are emotionally troubled?
I was speaking with a friend the other day, and she said she can't believe in a God that does so many bad things to people.
How would you provide a Christian-like comfort to those who are resistant to God because of an emotional issue?
There are actually two questions in this letter or two issues in this letter.
One is really the same as the letter before, that you show the face of Christ by representing the face of Christ, the love, the values, the joy, and the respect that God shows to people, even in their sin, even in their trouble, even in their mistakes.
And that, I think, does so much more than preaching.
It does so much more than preaching.
Obviously, you want people to know where your joy comes from.
You want people to know what your values are rooted in.
But preaching it is different.
Saying it occasionally, or at least letting people know what it is is different than hammering people with it.
I always think a lot of times when I hear people preaching, I think they're preaching for them, not for the person they're talking to.
When you preach for the person you're talking to, a lot of times you don't need the words.
You just need the love.
The other thing, though, I just want to bring up that there's also this other issue in here where somebody says to you, she can't believe in a God that does so many bad things to people.
That's an argument.
It's an intellectual argument.
And you don't want to, when people are emotionally troubled, getting into intellectual arguments with them is really not going to help.
You know, that you're not going to convince anybody by logic to come to God.
You convince them by showing them what God is through your love.
But I do think, just so you know, the answer to that argument is that how do you even know it's unjust that things, bad things happen to people?
How do you know it's unjust?
How do you know, where does that value come from?
What is your knowledge that some things are bad and some things are unjust and some things are right and some things are wrong?
Where does that come from?
If you know it beyond, you know, just your relative values, just the fact that you were taught it, just the fact that America is a kind of good country where you learn those values.
If you know it beyond those things, it's because those values come from a consciousness greater than your own.
And the very fact that you know that the world is broken, that the world is not the way it's supposed to be, is proof that there is a greater consciousness that has instilled those values in you and upholds those values.
Where Do Values Come From?00:11:13
From Jonathan, Lord Clavin, enforcer of order and sustainer of universes.
I have been on my shoulders.
I have been interested in writing for a long time, and while I am really good at creating in-depth universes, I have problems building plot depth and creating interesting characters.
What are the steps that you take in writing a fictional story and how do you develop characters?
Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks.
You know, by the way, I'm not a big science fiction fan, although recently I wanted to educate myself in science fiction, and so I looked up what are the big classics in science fiction and found to my surprise that I'd read almost all of them, so I guess I know more about it than I thought I did.
But science fiction frequently is based on big ideas and doesn't really have very good characters, doesn't really have characters that matter.
And that to me is a shame because I think its characters, characters are mainly what I come to stories for to get an in-depth representation of the human race.
And so I love it when a science fiction story also has great characters, but they're very famous stories.
I was thinking of Childhood's End, which is a really fascinating piece of science fiction, but the characters are all kind of cutouts and they're not very good.
So I'm just saying that science fiction is a realm where that often happens.
However, to answer your question, in terms of plotting, I'm a big outliner, and one of the good things about outline is you can see that your story is too simple.
You can see that it needs more depth.
You can see that it needs more twists and turns.
You can see it on the page before you're deep into it.
And putting those things in would mean rewriting 100 pages.
When you only, you know, an outline, maybe say it's 10 to 20 pages, a really good long scene-by-scene outline, you can see when something's wrong and just shift it around more like writing a screenplay, and that really works.
As for character, dude, it's about observation.
It's about looking at people, learning people, seeing what people are.
You don't create characters when you sit down to write.
You create, you store characters by observing the world and keeping your eyes open and trying to understand people.
And it's one of the reasons that I'm a kind of person who would rather listen to you talk to me than me explain you to yourself.
That is one of the reasons as a writer.
One of the things about being a novelist and not a journalist primarily is that I just want to get things right.
I just want to describe things.
Journalists are basically telling, like I said, they have an agenda, but a novelist, a good novelist, is just trying to describe the world as it really is.
So look at people without judgment.
Don't pass judgment on them.
Just look at who they are.
Just look at how they act, look at how they behave, and see if you can translate that onto the page.
I mean, that's kind of where you start.
That's the writer's art.
From Zachary, Mr. Clavin, I was ecstatic when Trump got rid of 10 expenditures, which essentially ended the climbing national debt.
Later, he gave in to a demand for a spending bill that has not only granted more spending, but a spending that is greater than the horrific Obama administration.
Will the debt ever be addressed?
And that is a really good question.
I think it is a crisis question.
It's the unspoken crisis.
It's the thing that Paul Ryan is retiring without having addressed, the thing he wanted to address, the thing he tried to get people into involved in, so they would start to dial back entitlements and advance Social Security so you collected it a little later and that would help the debt.
The problem is, the problem is, is the structure of electoral politics favors stupid spending.
So for instance, one of our big problems in California is unpaid pensions, right?
We haven't got unfunded pensions.
Why does that happen?
Well, the guy, the police or the firemen come to the mayor and they say, we want a raise.
And the mayor says, look at my budget.
I don't have any money in the budget.
I can't give you a raise.
And they say, well, give us higher pensions.
And the mayor thinks to himself, huh, the pensions don't kick in for 10 years.
I'll be out of office.
What's the diff, right?
So he does it.
He's not responsible for it.
When the bill comes due, he'll be in Florida on the beach, you know, when California collapses.
And when some governor, some governor has to go to the police and the fire department and the municipal workers and say, hey, guess what?
We can't pay your pensions.
We don't have the money.
We would have to tax everybody to death to pay off your pensions.
That guy is not the guy who made the concession in the negotiations.
Same thing is true on the federal level.
So easy, so easy for these people on the left to say, oh, free this and free that.
And I always say, you know, the word free has no meaning.
There is no, I mean, maybe the stars and the moon belong to everyone.
The best things in life are free.
But when you're talking about the labor of others, it all costs money.
When they say free health care, that word means nothing.
When they say free education, nothing.
When you hear somebody say free, what you should translate that into is, I am standing before you talking nonsense, so you will vote for me.
But the thing is, when you vote for that guy and the bill finally comes due, he's not going to be there anymore.
You know, then they say to you, oh, we just have to raise taxes on the rich.
We just raise taxes on the rich.
And then when all the jobs leave and the economy collapses and the spirit goes out of the country, they're gone.
It's already over.
So the structure is built to encourage stupid spending.
It takes somebody with moral courage like Paul Ryan to come out and say, we got to address this.
And he failed because it was easier.
And Donald Trump is partly to blame for this.
He's not only to blame for it, but he's partly to blame for it for saying, I will not touch your Social Security.
Touch it.
You got to.
It's the ballast of the debt.
It's where most of the debt is coming from.
It can be reformed and preserved without destroying the country and without destroying a generation.
So I'm not, I won't say I'm optimistic, but I haven't lost all hope.
That's the way it comes because people with courage do come along.
I will give you one more here.
Laura, this is interesting, from Cody, Lord Clavenus.
Firstly, thank you so much for your show and Dauntless Pursuit of Truth Telling, the Daily Wire podcast and articles.
Yours especially are a bright spot in my day and in this dark world.
My question, how do you feel about the modern day application of the third commandment, do not take the name of the Lord your God in vain?
When I was young, my grandparents would not even allow me to say gosh or golly for fear of being too close to taking God's name in vain.
Today, standards even for Christians seem to be relaxed, but it still grates on me to hear it.
I would love your thoughts on this and other things in a similar vein.
Thank you, Cody.
From MT, what is this, Montana?
I think so, yeah.
Really, it's such an, I could go on forever on this and I won't.
But, you know, our language, we have allowed our language to get degraded.
You know, we have allowed our we've allowed ourselves to be convinced that four-letter words don't have any meaning.
It's just being a prig to say that you shouldn't use them.
We use them in conversation.
I'm as guilty of this as anyone.
I'm not saying I'm not, but we use them to, as, you know, as adjectives and commas and whatever you want.
Women use them, which is always a bad thing because women set the tone of conversation and men will clean up their act if women clean up theirs first.
That will happen, as they just took down a sign in a school that said, if you act like a lady, men will act like a gentleman.
That is true.
That is simply, that's why they took it down because it's true.
We can't have any truth running around in our schools.
And I think this is also true, that like to not to use the word with God, the name of God, circumspectly is to teach yourself, to train yourself to respect your Creator.
It is to teach yourself that.
It is not a question of, ooh, you did a bad thing, of, oh, you're naughty, oh, you know, you're a sinner.
It is simply to train your own heart and mind in respect for God, which will make you happier, smarter, and wiser.
That is why you do it.
And it is interesting to me that the only word, the only word that still seems to have meaning is the N-word, such that if you use the N-word in the sentence, oh, what an awful thing it is to use the N-word, you get fired.
I mean, it's insane.
It is insane.
And that's the kind of thing we were talking about earlier when I showed the Stormy Daniels thing.
When you have a stupid set of values, like, yes, use the Lord's name in vain.
Yes, use four-letter words.
You have a stupid set of values, you end up in a stupid place.
You end up living a stupid life.
And a life in which a person can say, oh, you know, the N-word, that's awful and get fired is insane.
And a life where people don't think about God and don't pay him the due respect, not, again, not because it's evil, not because it's wicked, just to train their own minds in what's important is a degraded life.
And I am as guilty of it as anybody else.
And I'm not looking down on anybody.
I'm simply saying that you're right.
It's too bad.
All right, I got to stop.
really went long, but let's go on to tickety-boo news.
I will make this quick.
You know, when we talk about the media and when we talk about censorship and when we talk about the censorious left cutting down conversations on campus and in HR in corporations and shutting everybody up and everybody's called a racist and everybody's a sexist, we should also remember, we should also remember that that is a reaction to the extraordinary leap in free speech that we have taken over the last 50 years.
Even the cursing I was just talking about is part of a leap in free speech.
I would like to see responsibility come along with that speech, not such that you yell at me whenever I say something you dislike, but such that I say to myself when I wake up in the morning, hey, you know what?
Watch the way you talk.
I mean, I still, I still try very hard to watch the way I talk around ladies.
I have to say the ladies don't like it because they go out of their way to curse in front of me.
But I try.
I try because I believe in it.
I try because I believe in it.
I do try not to use the name of God in vain.
You know, I try and do it.
But the thing, the point I want to make, that our free speech right now is at a peak.
What we're fighting for is something we didn't have 50 years ago.
And that's a wonderful thing.
We shouldn't forget that.
It is a good thing that an artist can say whatever he wants to say.
It is a good thing that we have all this media where the right can fight back against the claustrophobic, smothering influence of the left.
We have got voices that we didn't have 50 years ago.
Remember, it used to just be CBS, ABC, and NBC with a kind of mild left-wing slant.
And now those have become far-left venues.
But there's the Daily Wire, there's PJ Media, there's all these other voices out there.
It has become more various.
It has become more free.
What we're fighting for is something new and great.
And we should appreciate the greatness of it as we battle the people like Google and Twitter and Facebook who, for their own reasons and for their own political agenda, are trying to take it away.
The reason they're trying to take it away is because we have it.
That's why.
And we should appreciate the fact that we have it every day.
And it is a beautiful thing.
And even listening to people curse when they shouldn't is part of that.
I would rather have to listen to people use foul language than listen to people who were not allowed to speak their minds.
Okay.
So I think we should just stop every now and again.
I appreciate that.
We've had a great Supreme Court on this for decades defending free speech.
And I think we should just cherish it and fight all the harder to keep it.
All right.
We'll be back tomorrow.
Last day before the long Clavenless weekend is coming, so you do not want to miss it.
Last Day of the Klavan Show00:00:43
You're going to need all that claven-y goodness to get you through the three-day, four-day, good golly, the four-day clavenless weekend.
So be here tomorrow.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
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.
Technical producer, Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And their animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.