Ep. 571’s host skewers Kavanaugh hearings with absurd caricatures—Feinstein’s "flaming hair," Harris as a lizard—while dismissing Woodward’s FAIR! claims (Mattis calling Trump "a sixth grader") as disgruntled sourcing, arguing dysfunction stems from Congress’s gridlock, not the White House. He pivots to soulmates, calling his 30-year marriage "supernatural" but warns against obsessive perfectionism, then tackles listener questions: Michael’s critique of religious poverty teachings, Joey’s unresolved breakup tied to his father’s suicide, and Abbey’s career vs. family dilemma, urging her to prioritize her husband’s ambition. Closing with Trump’s 20-year budget stalemate victory—despite bloated spending—he frames media "Russian collusion" narratives as a distraction from the president’s effective, if flawed, leadership. [Automatically generated summary]
The first day of Judge Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court confirmation hearing provided Americans a chance to hear arguments from Republicans and Democrats alike.
On the Republican side, Senator Orrin Hatch put forward the view that Kavanaugh is a constitutional originalist who would judge each case according to its legal merits.
On the Democrat side, Senator Dianne Feinstein set her hair on fire and ran around in circles, making a squawking noise like a scalded chicken before she threw her skirt over her face and sobbed violently until she exploded, hurling gory fragments of herself in all directions.
On the Republican side, Senator Chuck Grassley said Kavanaugh would help lead the judiciary away from a legislative role and thus return the country to the rule of law.
On the Democrat side, a mob of villagers wearing Tyrolean hats and carrying torches stormed the Capitol, screaming, give us the monster, while Senator Kamala Harris stood above them on a rock, shouting, fly, fly, my evil ones, and unleash your hellish rage against those who would destroy your satanic right to tear their children from your wombs and sell their body parts for cash.
After which Senator Harris transformed herself into an enormous lizard-like creature with leathery wings and flew up into the air, clutching the souls of the unbaptized in her dripping fangs, which insiders say may provide an early clue to the 2020 Democratic presidential platform.
On the Republican side, Senator John Cornyn began to remark that court appointments should not be subject to mob rule, but never finished the sentence because Democrat Senator Corey Booker clutched him by the throat, screaming, everyone who does not agree with me must die, before he was finally brought down by Capitol police, firing silver bullets from a pistol blessed by a gypsy woman.
The hearings continue today, with Republicans filing a written statement declaring Kavanaugh to be qualified and Democrats filing a wordless shriek of anguish that echoed up from beneath the Senate floor and died away to nothingness in the shocked silence that followed.
Your government at work.
Trigger warning of Andrew Clavin.
And this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boom.
And birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is it bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, it's mailbag day, and you know what that means.
You are just mere minutes.
Oh, my God, and people are screaming and dying in this.
Oh, no, I'm sorry.
Just Lindsay welcoming Mailbag Day.
And as you know, that means you are only about 20, 25 minutes away from having all your problems solved, all your questions answered.
But if you want to watch it, you got to be here at thedailywire.com and subscribing for a lousy 10 bucks a month or for 100 bucks a year.
You get the leftist tears tumbler.
Plus, you get to be in the mailbag yourself where you can leave questions before they come and fetch you out of the mailbag and send you home.
And, you know, if you don't do that, you're going to just have to hope that somebody else asks the question that you wanted to ask, which is unlikely unless he happens to be dating your girlfriend, which he may be, in which case you want to write me about that.
So anyway, that's all kinds of reasons to subscribe to the Daily Wire.
That is only one of them.
But I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, where did you get that tremendous head of hair?
And the answer is Hair Club.
All right, I'm kidding.
I don't have any hair.
Do you want to look like this?
Of course you don't.
Of course not.
You want to hold on to your hair or fix the baldness you've got?
And Hair Club understands what you're going through.
They understand what you're feeling.
They know the questions you have.
They're the leader in total hair solutions with a legacy of success for over 40 years.
And whether you're looking to revitalize the growth of your own hair or to learn more about the latest proven methods for hair replacement or restoration, Hair Club's professionally trained stylists, hair health experts, and consultants will craft a personalized solution to ensure you feel your best and get the most out of your hair.
Go to hairclub.com slash clavin today for a free hair analysis and a free take-home hair kit, all valued over $300.
That's hairclub.com slash Clavin for a free hair analysis and free hair care kit.
Experience your hair and your life at its best, only with Hair Club.
I am certain you'll love the club.
Don't let this happen to you.
But you do want to know how to spell Clavin so you can get the deal.
It's K-L-A-V-A-A.
Not all of us, not all of us can carry this with the panache that I carry.
All right.
You know, around here at the Daily Wire, where we love our Ben Shapiro, we like to say that facts don't care about your feelings.
But one of the things I always add, because I'm coming at this from a different point of view than Ben, is that feelings are also a fact, especially in a democracy.
But really in your own life, in any kind of government, the way people are feeling their mood counts for everything.
Just check this with your own life.
And, you know, I remember myself, oh, gosh, back in the 90s, I wrote a book, a novel that was very important to me.
And it was very different from the usual stuff I do, which is crime stories and kind of genre stories.
This was not a genre book.
It was a very personal book.
And I wrote it and I couldn't sell it in America.
I sold it in Britain, but I couldn't sell it in America.
And it broke my heart.
It was just a genuinely heartbreaking experience.
While that happened, when my heart was broken, the world seemed to me a very dark place.
Now, because I'm an artist, I understood, because this is what novelists know.
What novelists know is your life is never quite rational.
You think you're being rational, but your feelings and your experience and your upbringing, they all play into your mood and into your philosophy.
While I was in this dark place, the world seemed to me like a dark place.
And I remember saying to my wife, you know, I know this is just me.
I know everything is fine.
You know, they know the world is ticking along as it usually is, but everything just looks terrible.
It looks like the culture is collapsing.
It looks like politics are going bad.
And it's all because I couldn't sell this book.
And I feel bad.
And anyone who's ever experienced, as most of us have, some kind of setback, ill health, or the ill health of someone you love or one of your children having problems or losing a job or missing a promotion, anything like that, that just puts you in a lousy mood.
You suddenly feel, you don't think to yourself, oh, I am in a lousy mood.
What you think is everything is bad.
Everything is bad.
And this is one of the reasons I hammer so much at the culture because I know what the news, the dishonest news people at NBC, like guys like Chuck Todd, the dishonest news people at CNN, guys like Don Lemon and Cuomo, you know, all these people who are selling you crisis, they're selling you panic.
They're selling you the fact that, oh, everything is terrible.
They don't have to win each time.
They don't have to sell you each story.
Their stories can be debunked, like the recent Lanny Davis story.
The CNN doesn't even have to retract it.
They just go on to the next lie, the next panicky story, because they're trying to affect a general mood.
They're trying to give you the feeling that something is terribly wrong.
And when you think about it, nothing's terribly wrong.
Things really are tickety-boo.
Things are going pretty well.
Economy's ticking away.
ISIS is gone.
Judges are better.
Regulation's better.
The business world is feeling pretty good about Donald Trump.
Everything is fine, except the news.
Everything is fine, except the news.
So the other day, there was a pre-release of Bob Woodward's new book about Donald Trump with the subtle, you know, graceful title, FAIR!
FAIR!
That's how you have to read it.
It's not just the word.
You have to read it in that journey.
It's FAIR by Bob Woodward.
FAIR!
So it just tells all this stuff that's going on behind the scenes, says Woodward, and we'll talk about that in a minute, says Woodward, in the Trump administration.
So I'll read you just a couple of them.
I think this is from the Boston Globe.
It's their list, but the list is the same everywhere.
After a January National Security Council meeting in which North Korea was discussed, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told close associates the president acted like and had the understanding of a fifth or sixth grader.
Now, Mattis, I'm not sure he disavowed that particular quote, but he has called the whole thing fiction.
He says the book is fiction.
So he denies it.
White House chief of staff John F. Kelly told colleagues that he thought the president was unhinged.
In one meeting, Kelly said to Trump, said of Trump, he's an idiot.
It's pointless to try to convince him of anything.
He's gone off the rails.
We're in crazy town.
I don't even know why any of us are here.
This is the worst job I've ever had.
Kelly also, he issued a statement saying the idea I ever called the president an idiot is not true.
As I stated back in May and still firmly stand behind, I spend more time with the president than anyone else, and we have an incredibly candid and strong relationship.
He always knows where I stand, and he and I both know this story is total BS.
And by the way, even Ann Coulter got into a four-letter shouting match with the president.
He is an obstreperous guy.
He surrounded himself with macho men.
I'm sure they have lots of screaming arguments.
But anyway, this is the story.
I'm just giving you what Woodward is writing.
Trump was vicious in his remarks about Attorney General Jeff Sessions, saying he's at one point to an aide.
This guy is mentally retarded.
He's this dumb Southerner.
He couldn't even be a one-person person country lawyer down in Alabama.
Trump says he never said it.
He loves Southerners, never said those words.
Trump called Mattis saying he wanted to assassinate the Syrian leader, Bashar al-Al-Assad.
I'm not sure why that's bad, but apparently he said after Assad launched a chemical attack on civilians in April 2017, Trump said, let's kill the bloody lot of them.
And Mattis hung up and told the senior aide, we're not going to do any of that.
We're going to be much more measured.
That makes perfect sense to me.
I mean, there's a chemical attack.
Trump blows up and Mattis says he'll calm down and we're not going to do anything.
Senior aides conspired to remove official papers from Trump's desk so he couldn't see or sign them.
In one case, an aide prepared a letter withdrawing the United States from NAFTA.
Cohn told the aide, I can stop this.
I'll just take the paper off his desk.
The United States remains in NAFTA, though it's renegotiating new terms with Canada and Mexico.
I don't believe that story.
That story is not true.
I do not believe somebody took a page off the president's desk to keep him from signing it.
That is a garbage story.
That's the kind of story you might say to a reporter, you might brag about, but it didn't happen.
I would bet money that that didn't happen.
You know, one of the things about these things, I'll talk more about Woodward and his sources in a minute, but one of the things about this is like, there's always an underling who says the boss is an idiot.
All underlings think the boss is an idiot.
There's always an underling who's going to blow things up.
There's going to be people who are dissatisfied.
There's always somebody who just wants to be quoted in a Bob Woodward book and all this stuff.
So a story like that, I don't know.
That just really smells to me.
I've heard all kinds of people brag all kinds of things, especially in the movie business.
You hear people, I told him, and I told him this.
I backed him into a corner.
Baloney.
John Dowd, then Trump's personal attorney, staged a practice session to see if Trump would commit perjury if he were questioned by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Dowd peppered Trump with questions and elicited stumbles, contradictions, and lies.
In a meeting with Mueller, Dowd talked about the session and explained to Mueller why he was trying to keep the president from testifying.
I'm not going to sit there and let him look like an idiot.
That's probably true.
Let's just play Sarah Sanders' reaction to this.
Obviously, Trump has disavowed the entire thing.
Look, he may have hundreds of hours of tapes, but I think most of those probably come from some disgruntled former employees.
It's a lot of anonymous sources.
What I can tell you is I've worked alongside the president under the president for the last three years.
I was part of his campaign.
I've been part of the administration since day one.
And I can tell you that the president, everything so far that I've seen out of this book doesn't depict what's going on in the building behind me.
The president laid out an agenda very clearly during the campaign.
And since day one of taking office, he's delivering on that agenda every single day.
You can't have the type of success that this president has had if what that book says is true.
And you have people like General Mattis, General Kelly, two American heroes come out and call the book pure fiction.
I would certainly rather take the word of those two individuals than a couple of disgruntled former employees that are anonymously attacking this president, trying to make him look bad for no other reason, I guess, than to build themselves up.
Now, you know, Stephanopoulos is about to say, he breaks into her and says, you know, oh, this is only one of many books, but the other books have been completely discredited.
Michael Wolfe's book and Amarosa's book.
I mean, who believes this stuff?
But Woodward is a different guy.
Now, the brief on Woodward is always this, that whoever talks to him gets to tell the story.
So in other words, if you're his source, you get to tell the story.
He does not go to five other people and then report all the different things that they say.
If he gets contact with you, if he has access to you, you are going to get to affect the book.
And Woodward says he tried to contact Trump.
Trump says he never heard about it.
Here's a conversation they had on the phone, which Woodward recorded with Trump's permission.
You know, it's a tough look at the world and your administration and you.
Right.
Well, I assume that means it's going to be a negative book.
But, you know, I'm sort of 50% used to that.
That's all right.
Some are good and some are bad.
Sounds like this is going to be a bad one.
It's a chance missed, and I don't know how things work over there in terms of getting you.
Well, if you would call Madeline in my office, did you speak to Madeline?
No, I didn't.
Madeline is the key.
She's the secret because she's the Rajah.
She's the person.
Talk to Kelly.
Well, a lot of them are afraid to come and talk.
You know, they are busy.
I'm busy.
But I don't mind talking to you.
I would have spoken.
Yeah, I spoke to you 20 years ago.
I spoke to you a year and a half or two years ago.
And I certainly don't mind talking to you.
And I wish I could have spoken to you.
Well, but nobody called my office.
You need to know I made maximum effort.
All right.
It's too bad.
I'm just hearing about it.
And I heard I did hear from Lindsay, but I'm just hearing about it.
So we're going to have a very inaccurate book, and that's too bad.
But I don't blame you entirely.
Accurate, I believe.
All right.
Okay.
Well, accurate is that nobody's ever done a better job than I'm doing as president.
There's Trump standing up for himself.
And at least they're talking to each other.
So that's a good thing.
But here's the thing.
Woodward is a, I don't think he makes stuff up.
I don't think, you know, he's been accused of all kinds of things, but nobody likes it when you report stuff like this.
But this does not mean it's accurate.
All I'm saying is the person who talks to Woodward gets to tell his story.
Laws and Dysfunction00:13:21
That is the brief on him and always has been.
Do not listen.
Do not listen to this garbage from the left, which you will now hear about he's a legend, he's a legend, Watergate, he's a legend, because he brought out books about Obama, too.
And when he did that, the left went nuts.
Remember, he said, what did he say?
He said Obama has no plan to deal with the war on terror.
He said Obama has said things like, oh, we can sustain a terrorist attack if we have to.
He said an Obama aid.
He never used the word.
Woodward never used the word that he threatened him, but he said, you will regret going up against us, I think.
And the left went nuts.
David Plough, former Obama campaign manager, claimed that watching Woodward was like imagining my idol, Mike Schmidt, facing live pitching again.
In other words, he'd lost his stuff.
Former LA Times reporter Steve Weinstein said Woodward is senile.
Politico White House reporter Glenn Thrush wondered if Woodward was humped up his book sales.
He was trying to hump up his book sales from Geo Piers.
Woodward does duty with the phony outrage machine was a Huffington Post headline.
They went after him.
They said he had disgraced himself.
I remember this vividly, that suddenly the fact that Woodward was reporting harshly on Obama, and he really did report harshly.
He said the guy really didn't know what he was doing, suddenly Woodward was trash.
Now he's a hero again because he's after Trump.
You know, all of this speaks well of Woodward, except that I really do feel that, you know, here's the thing.
Let's say it's all true.
Let's say there are people back there and they're calling Trump an idiot and they're throwing things, they're stealing papers off his desk.
It's working great.
The country is in great shape.
The economy is great.
You know, we're at peace.
It's like the judges, he's points are great.
The regulations are good.
Even some of these trade deals are beginning to, I still have my doubts.
I'm still keeping an eye open, but at least he's pushing forward with the trade deal.
He's made some agreements with Mexico.
He looks like there, it looks like Canada is going to come to the table.
You know, so if this is the way he runs things, that's too bad for the people who work there.
But what do we care, right?
I don't work there.
The question I have is, does Woodward have any sources?
Watching TV and seeing what is happening at the Kavanaugh hearings?
Because if you want to talk about dysfunctional, you want to talk about dysfunctional, take a look at what the Democrats paid people to do, it now seems.
It now seems they paid people to protest.
They brought in mostly women screaming and yelling about Roe v. Wade and other things.
Linda Sausser, anti-Semitic fan of Sharia law, was carried out on the first day.
Let's take a quick look at what's happening.
I mean, just talking about dysfunctional, you know, Woodward is saying, I've got sources that say there's a dysfunctional White House.
You want to talk about Crazy Town?
It's on TV.
Take a look at this.
So that's the way Democrats do democracy, right?
That's the way Democrats think democracy should work, where a woman who supports Sharia law is being carried out of our legislature, a woman who supports the atrocity of Sharia law is being carried out of our legislature, the pinnacle.
Our ideas, the constitutional ideas are the pinnacle of human legal thinking.
And a woman who supports Sharia is being carried out of there in protest.
Really?
Really?
I mean, that's what Democrats think is going to make us think like, ah, yes, Democrats, that's what we need for the midterms.
But even worse than the chaos that they were paying to have and the staging and the kabuki show is the actual arguments they're making.
Ben Sasse yesterday, and I know a lot of people have paid attention to this, but it's worth going over because Ben Sasse in two minutes said more wisdom than I've heard from the mainstream media certainly and certainly a lot of our politicians, because we need to go back to basics.
I keep saying this again and again.
We need to go back to basics.
And Ben Sass, in about two minutes, delivered in his opening statement a statement about why things are like this that is just so important.
And we got to play at least a little bit of it.
Let's start with how he talks about the system.
For those of you who don't remember, Schoolhouse Rock, do you remember that?
It was an animated television show where they would sing little songs about how a bill works, how Congress works, little civic lessons.
Here is Ben Sasse's cut number four on how the system is supposed to work.
The solution is to restore a proper constitutional order with a balance of powers.
We need Schoolhouse Rock back.
We need a Congress that writes laws and then stands before the people and suffers the consequences and gets to go back to our own Mount Vernon if that's what the electors decide.
We need an executive branch that has a humble view of its job as enforcing the law, not trying to write laws in the Congress's absence.
And we needed a judiciary that tries to apply written laws to facts and cases that are actually before it.
This is the elegant and the fair process that the founders created.
It's the process where the people who are elected, two and six years in this institution, four years in the executive branch, can be fired because the justices and the judges, the men and women who serve America's people by wearing black robes, they're insulated from politics.
His point here is so important because really it centers on the legislature.
I really feel this way, that the Supreme Court has been hijacked by leftists who feel that you can appoint people like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Breyer, guys who will not think about the Constitution, who talk about the living Constitution, which is a Constitution, as Anton and Scalia would say, that it's a new day every day.
It just says different things on the Constitution every single day.
And those on the conservative side who want to uphold the law, who are not there to make law, but are there to referee whether the law fits into the context and the construction provided by the Constitution.
The failure in the legislature, the frozen nature of the legislature, the deadlock, that's the word I'm looking for, the deadlock in the legislature, is what is seriously wrong with the country.
I mean, when you have two sides that can't sit down and make immigration law, when you have, you know, Chuck, gosh, who's the head of the Senate, the Democrats?
Senator Chuck Schumer, thank you.
I just blocked that name.
Like other unpleasant things, I just blocked Chuck Schumer's name.
When you have Chuck Schumer waving a pin at the press saying, the president, the president should be making the law.
The president should be making laws about immigration.
And nobody in the press thinks to say, excuse me, you're the legislature.
The legislature means you're supposed to be making law.
That's a problem.
And what SAS is saying there is, when you make laws, when you make legislative laws, this goes on the right and the left.
This is not just on Schumer.
This is on both the left and the right.
When you make laws about immigration, you are going to displease somebody.
You are going to displease the people who want to throw out all the evil Mexicans, and you're going to throw out all the people who want to let in all the wonderful Mexicans, whatever they're thinking, you know, you're going to displease people on both sides, and you may get unelected.
You may get thrown out of office.
That's your job.
And the legislature is frozen.
Each side is playing to its base.
They can only make the absolute law that is going to satisfy the base on the right and the base on the left.
And so they can't make any law.
They can't compromise.
They can't talk to one another.
They can't be seen to be weak.
Because if they're weak, they're going to have the right or the left mobilize against them and throw them out.
That is not the way the legislature is supposed to work.
We're a divided country right now.
That means our legislature has to compromise because we have to compromise.
And that's the way the world works.
If that doesn't happen, if that doesn't happen, you have a Supreme Court making law, five people passing laws over you, an executive making law with his pen and his phone like a king, and then it becomes necessary to slander people, to bork them, as the Democrats, a method the Democrats invented as Kavanaugh is being borked right now.
And SAS talks about that.
This is cut number six, and how bad that is and why that shouldn't happen.
So the question before us today is not what does Brett Kavanaugh think 11 years ago on some policy matter.
The question before us is whether or not he has the temperament and the character to take his policy views and his political preferences and put them in a box marked irrelevant and set it aside every morning when he puts on the black robe.
The question is, does he have the character and temperament to do that?
If you don't think he does, vote no.
But if you think he does, stop the charades.
Because at the end of the day, I think all of us know that Brett Kavanaugh understands his job isn't to rewrite laws as he wishes they were.
He understands that he's not being interviewed to be a super legislator.
He understands that his job isn't to seek popularity.
His job is to be fair and dispassionate.
It is not to exercise empathy.
It is to follow written laws.
Contrary to the onion-like smears that we hear outside, Judge Kavanaugh doesn't hate women and children.
Judge Kavanaugh doesn't lust after dirty water and stinky air.
No, looking at his record, it seems to me that what he actually dislikes are legislators that are too lazy and too risk-averse to do our actual jobs.
That bingo.
I mean, bingo.
And so instead of this, I mean, look, Bob Woodward may be right in every single particular.
Maybe every day in the White House, somebody's calling somebody else an idiot, and maybe Donald Trump is going off half-cocked and people are stealing papers off his desk.
I don't buy it, but maybe, you know, some of it's true.
Maybe all of it's true, whatever.
But that seems to be working really well, okay?
That seems to be working really well.
What's not working is the legislature.
What is not working is a group of people who cannot get together and agree that this is a completely qualified individual to serve on the Supreme Court.
He should not be slandered.
Some of the things that happened yesterday were disgusting.
The young lady, if you can see her sitting back, a pretty brunette sitting in back of him, is a lady named Zina Bash, one of his former law clerks.
She had at one point her hand resting on the crook of her arm and it made a sort of circle of thumb and forefinger, which has become this kind of internet meme that that is somehow, that's the A-OK sign, right?
That's the OK sign.
Somehow, this is now a white supremacy sign.
That went around the world, you know, like a lie before the truth could put its pants on.
It's a disgusting thing to do to her.
First of all, this shouldn't be important, but she's half Jewish and half Mexican.
Unlikely she's a white supremacist, just saying, but still, that should not, you know, that you can get busted for giving the okay sign.
I know what sign I give to that.
It's not the okay sign.
That's ridiculous.
You know, the fact that Kavanaugh's parents were in tears watching them hammer him, the fact that his children had to be removed under security.
And also, this guy who lost his daughter, God bless him, as a terrible thing, is Fred Guttenberg, who lost his daughter in the Parkland shootings.
That's a terrible, terrible thing.
But he went up to shake Kavanaugh's hand.
It was pretty obvious that security surrounded Kavanaugh and shoved him out.
And then he said, oh, he refused to shake my hand.
He refused to shake my hand.
This is disgusting.
You know, I mean, this is a setup.
He was invited there for political purposes.
Another man, Andrew Pollack, who also lost his daughter in the shooting, said, Judge Kavanaugh is not responsible for the Parkland school shooting.
He said, I too will never see my daughter again.
And blaming President Trump and Kavanaugh of all people for Parkland is completely illogical.
And he blames the school board, the police, and the FBI, who actually all failed to do their jobs in this case.
So, I mean, this is the kind of thing, the reason this is happening, the reason this is happening is all goes back to the legislature.
It all goes back to a legislature that will not take the risk of being voted out of office, that will not pass a law, that will not compromise, that is too answerable to its donors and to its base, and is frozen solid.
It is frozen solid.
And, you know, there's not a crisis in this country.
This country is not in crisis.
Donald Trump is not a crisis.
He's an obstreperous businessman, an outsider, doing what he said he was going to do.
He's got traits I don't like.
He does things I don't like.
He does things I think are great.
He has traits that I think are hilarious and fun.
All those things are true.
That's not a crisis.
That's not a crisis.
That's just news.
That's the news.
That's not a crisis.
Believe me, when you see a crisis, you will know it.
It's a crisis when you don't have a job.
It's a crisis when you can't say what you want to say without getting banned and shadow banned and mobbed and losing your job.
It's a crisis when you can't speak the truth.
Those are crises.
This is not a crisis.
This judge is not a crisis.
And they're just trying to set that up because they know if they can affect your mood, it will affect the politics of the country and especially it will affect the midterms.
Finding Family Connections00:15:33
All right, we got the mailbag coming up.
All your questions answered.
All the answers true.
Come on.
What else can you ask for?
Come on over to TheDailyWire.com and listen to the rest of the show.
And if you are listening to the rest of the show, subscribe so you can just watch the show right here.
I mean, come on.
All right, mailbag.
What the hell was that, Austin?
What kind of delay was that?
All right.
He's just trying to give me a heart attack.
I think he just wants me to not know when it's going to go.
We may just do this for 20 minutes.
Forget the mailbag.
Just have a screaming.
All right, from Spencer.
Oh, Shapiro in 30 years Claven.
In Ben's, Ben can only hope.
He can only hope that he'll be like that.
In Ben's recent Sunday special interview with Mike Rowe, both Ben and Rowe seem to express considerable skepticism about the idea of finding a romantic soulmate.
I was hoping that you could elaborate on your own views regarding soulmates.
Surely you would consider your own unusually blessed marriage to be an instance of two soulmates finding and completing each other.
But do you think God actually does create every single man and woman to be perfectly compatible with a single corresponding member of the opposite sex?
And if this is so, how should we go about trying to find our soulmate without driving ourselves insane and traveling all over the world in search of her?
First of all, I do believe there's something supernatural about my marriage.
When I look back, the fact that I picked up a hitchhiker, the fact that I recognized her on sight as the partner of my life, the fact that we have been together in such insane harmony when I am such a difficult person to live with.
I mean, she's a dream, but I'm a total nutcase.
The fact that we have been together, there is something about it that does seem touched by an angel.
But first of all, that doesn't guarantee anything for anybody.
The fact that when you look around, life is unfair.
The fact is, it may be that I have a soulmate and you don't.
That's entirely possible.
We do not know.
But the other thing we don't know is we don't know the future, right?
I didn't know when I married my wife that I would be sitting here 30 plus years later and saying that.
I didn't know, right?
So, you know, Kierkegaard said, life must be lived forward, but it can only be understood backwards.
So looking backward, I say, yes, there's something incredibly supernatural about this, but I didn't know at the time.
So you would indeed be driving yourself crazy if you were looking for perfection.
I didn't think, you know, except in the glow of love, I didn't think my wife was perfect.
I never thought anything was, I've never thought anything was perfect in this world because nothing is perfect in this world.
I simply knew that I loved her and I thought we could build a life together and I wanted her to be the mother of my children.
That's all you can ever know.
That's all you can ever know.
So don't drive yourself crazy about it.
If 40 years down the line, if you treat each other well and you're good to one another and you take care of the little things in your life together and you understand that you are of different sexes and that is going to give you a different perspective, you're like two lenses on a stereo opticon, you know, that give the world three dimension.
If you understand those things, you may find that 35, 40 years down the line, oh yeah, this was my soulmate.
This is my soulmate.
But you can't know in advance.
So I mean, the thing is, you want to make your choices wisely.
You don't want to make your choices in the grip of infatuation, but you don't either want to be so logical that you count somebody out for ridiculous reasons.
Go forward, you know, like make your heart clean and then trust your heart.
First make your heart sane and then trust your heart.
And you'll find your way.
And if you have a soulmate, believe me, you're not going to miss her because God won't let you.
That's what he means.
If that's the person he means for you to have, you will have him or her.
All right.
From Michael, dear Elis Glafin.
I come from a very Catholic heritage, but grew up very much media influence and secular, so I'm now only now late in middle age coming into a closer relationship with God.
Besides offering daily thanks and prayer, I listen to Bible reading Psalms every day with all the talk about, with all the talk about camels and needles.
Okay, this is a comment Jesus made where he said, it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.
With all the talk about that, selling everything and giving it all to the poor and other references to poor being good and wealth being damned, there seems to be a constant insistence on poverty.
I just don't believe in poverty, not for me, not for you, not for humanity.
I get that charity is good and that the love of money for its own sake is bad, but I believe that it is basic and righteous for a man to perform good, honest work, to be responsible for himself, his wife, and his children, and so on.
He says, does God really command poverty for his people?
Am I a sinner for trying to make good?
Absolutely not.
You are absolutely not a sinner for trying to make good.
This is a beef that I have with religious, organized religion.
Even though I believe in organized religion, I also believe that you have to follow your conscience and read the gospel yourself and understand what's being said.
Too many religious people read the gospels as if they are religious texts.
They're reports about a religious event.
There are reports of a cosmological anomaly, right?
Something that happened that is special in the life of this planet, the earth, and the life of this species, humankind.
And we get four reports of it because that gives us a full idea of it from four different people because different witnesses see different things.
What's the difference?
Okay.
Jesus meets a rich man and the rich man says, how do I get in the kingdom of heaven?
And Jesus says, well, follow these commandments.
And he says, I've done that.
And Jesus then said, okay, well, give your money to the poor.
And a guy gets into a pulpit and he says, Jesus wants you to give all your money away to the poor.
Jesus didn't say that.
He didn't say you should.
He was talking to that guy.
It's an event that actually happened.
It's a recording of a conversation.
But my beef with religious people is so often they read the gospels as if they weren't true, as if they didn't really happen, as if you weren't reading about a real man in a real conversation at a real moment in time.
But you are.
That is what you're reading.
So when he said that to that man, when you read the conversations that Jesus has with ordinary people, he always finds the thing that they need.
They find somehow the core of what is keeping them from letting go of themselves and entering into God.
And in this case, it's obviously with this guy, it's his money.
And why does Jesus say the obvious truth that it is harder for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God than a camel through the eye of the needle?
Because when things are going well, even for a moment, we've talked about before when things are going bad and the world seems dark.
When things are going well, the world seems absolutely fine.
I mean, never mind wealth.
If you're just having good sex, you think you're at the pinnacle of bliss.
And the idea that maybe, you know, on occasion you should think about, you know, other kinds of bliss, a deeper kind of bliss, a richer kind of life in which your life does not depend on the approval of others, in which your life does not depend on you having physical pleasure in that moment, in which your life does not depend on being wealthy, that's a hard place to get to.
It is a hard place to remember when you have a lot of money and things are fine and everything's going well and you're healthy.
It's a hard place to remember that this is only momentary, that everything will end and you need an attitude that is going to be with you when you face death, when you face hardship, when you face poverty.
You're not supposed to be poor just for fun.
The point is that all the good things in life are wonderful.
All the good things in life are wonderful, but they keep you from seeing the deeper truth.
They sometimes keep you from seeing.
As everybody knows, when you do something that you fail at, you have a project and it fails, you learn a lot.
When you have a project and you succeed, you don't really learn anything, you know, because you think it's you did it, but it's really so much luck involved and all these things.
So what Jesus is telling you is that you have to look to the higher meaning of your life at all times, even when things are going well.
Of course, you should try and do well in your life.
You should try and succeed.
You should be generous with your money.
You shouldn't fall in love with your money.
But of course, you should try and do well for your family and yourself.
It has nothing to do with that.
It has to do with seeing the greater truth at all times.
From Joey, hey, Drew, I was curious what your opinion was on my situation.
I was seeing a girl last year.
She ended up flunking out of our university and moved 100 miles away back at her mom's house.
We tried to make it work, but she got really depressed, eventually started cheating on me.
After a certain point, she just ghosted me.
I have never loved anyone as much as I had loved this girl.
I would have died for her, and my own father committing suicide was easier to get over than her.
I feel like I never got closure, and for the most part, I'm normal again.
But it's been about eight months, and I still think about her all the time.
And because of that, I don't feel like I'm over her.
If she called me today, I don't know if I would be able to tell her no.
Any advice on how to help me not to think about her anymore?
Yeah, I do have good advice about this.
Obviously, this is not a good relationship.
This is not a healthy relationship.
This is not something you want to recover.
It's not somebody you want back in your life at all.
At all.
This is over.
You're going to have to man up and get past it.
So how do you do that?
Well, there's a couple of things.
First of all, you're going to think about her.
She got under your skin.
You know, she's going to come into your mind.
You have to practice a little bit of Zen here.
When you're doing Zen, you're trying to clear your mind and thoughts come into your mind.
You don't stop them.
You don't suppress them.
You acknowledge them and you let them go.
They're like balloons.
You just let them go and let them float away.
When this girl comes into your mind, as she's going to, don't obsess about it.
Don't continue to think about it.
Let it go.
Do not have conversations with her about whether you're going to get back together with her.
It's over.
It should be over.
She's not good for you.
Let it go.
The other thing about this, and move on.
I mean, just move on with your life as you seem to be doing and just having a hard time letting go of the pain of her rejection.
The other thing is, there's a very strong chance.
You mentioned the suicide of your father in here.
There's a very strong chance that the reason it is harder for you to deal with this girl leaving than with the suicide of your father is that you're channeling some of the emotion about your father's death into this girl leaving.
You've got to separate those two things and maybe go back and deal with your feelings about your father's death, even if you didn't get along with him, even if you didn't live with him, even if you didn't know him.
The suicide of a father is a painful, large thing, much bigger than this girl not working out with this girl.
Deal with that and see if that helps you.
Really, even if you need to get some help, deal with it and see if that helps you with the other problem.
From Abbey, High King Clavin, my husband and I moved to the West Coast a little over a year ago from the East Coast for his job.
He has recently gotten an excellent opportunity with his new company, but it requires a six-year commitment.
And I was hoping that after two to three years, we would be able to find another opportunity closer to home.
It's hard on me to be away, and I know it's difficult to our extended families as well, who we can only afford to visit twice a year or so.
What do you think?
Should we tough it out for the sake of his career or put family first and consider finding a job on the East Coast?
How would you approach this problem?
All right, since you asked me how I would approach this problem, I will tell you how I would approach this problem.
My career is, because I'm a writer, my career and me are like united.
They are basically one thing.
I would do anything to continue to do the work that I love to do.
And my wife knew that when she married me, and she understood that there were going to be sacrifices that we made for my work, because my work, without my work, I suffer.
I suffer a great deal, and my life loses its meaning.
I feel that God put me here to do this thing.
This is why I'm here.
He put me here to put words together to express certain things.
That's my role.
So I would not go back.
I would do what your husband wants to do for his career.
I would just use your Skype, use your whatever it's called, FaceTime.
Talk to your family from afar.
Visit your family when you can.
As his career gets better, you'll be able to travel more.
You'll be able to afford more.
But pay attention to his career because if you go back, and if he feels the way I feel, and if you make him go back or nag him about going back or make him feel bad about staying and doing what he has to do, he will resent it.
And that resentment will build up over time and he'll feel like he didn't get to be who he was supposed to be because of you.
And you do not want that situation in your marriage.
Work means a lot to men.
It means more to men than it means to women.
Obviously, there are exceptions.
Most men, work means more to them than almost anything.
It is part of their identity.
It's not that his work means more to him than you.
It is that he is his work.
And so in loving you, it is him and his work loving you.
And so to make him sacrifice that because you're a little lonely, because you're having a hard time settling in, is not a good idea.
It's not a good idea for you.
It's not a good idea for him.
The other thing is, if you do make that commitment, and if he does feel the way about work that I do, and which I suspect he does, if he does make that commitment, you've got to make the commitment too.
You've got to settle in.
You've got to make friends.
You've got to find a church or however you worship.
You've got to find places to go, people to talk to, a new family that you can surround yourself with while continuing to keep contact with your family.
The only exception I would say to this is if he doesn't feel that way.
If he too feels like, ah, you know, my work doesn't mean that much to me.
I'd much rather be around your extended family.
But if he just is just saying that, don't listen to him because you want to give him what he needs.
You do not want to go down the line with him blaming you.
One more.
Hi, Andrew.
A few years ago, my mom did a course on ancient mythology.
She went into it a nominal Catholic who sometimes went to Mass with me and definitely believed in God.
She came out of it an atheist.
One of the reasons is that the similarities in ancient mythologies convinced her that Christianity was in many ways just another iteration of those myths.
I don't see how this argument against Christianity also works against theism, but alas, it has in her case.
Given how widely read you are and having read about your faith journey and the great good thing, I was hoping you might have an insight into why the similarities in ancient mythologies aren't a good reason to discount Christianity.
Thanks for all your wisdom.
Yeah, I mean, this is, listen, I started, I came from the other direction.
I started studying mythology.
I was a big study of mythology.
I read The Golden Bough, which is a very famous work by Fraser, Sir James Fraser, I believe his name is, where he did essentially this.
It's almost an encyclopedic work.
I read the abridged edition, but it just tells all the different mythologies around the world that kind of remind you of Christianity.
And Fraser didn't want to step over the line, so he never says, oh, look, they're just like Christianity.
But that's essentially what he's saying.
Joseph Campbell, who was kind of Jordan Peterson before there was Jordan Peterson, Joseph Campbell talks about the hero with a thousand faces, how all the myths re-echo the same themes again and again.
Here's the thing about this.
I mean, C.S. Lewis said this best, and I'm not going to quote him.
I don't remember the exact words, but basically he said, these are the good dreams of humanity.
If it was built into humanity, that we were going to fall, if it was built into humanity that our Savior was going to come, it makes perfect sense that the order, that the central, the central vehicle of our salvation would be written into our souls and written into our minds.
I think that is true in the same way I think our deaths are written into our minds.
I think we're aware that we're going to die.
We live with that knowledge underneath the surface all the time.
In the same way, I think our salvation is written into our souls.
And these myths, these other myths are kind of forerunners of this, of the idea that this is what is going to happen.
This is what salvation looks like.
When Jesus comes, as C.S. Lewis said, it's one of his great lines, it is the myth that really happened.
It is the myth that is true.
Jesus' life is a myth.
It does follow a mythic journey.
But if you look at your own life when you get to be older, you will see that your own life has followed a mythic journey as well.
Good Job Myth00:02:59
Why?
Because those things are written into, in a kind of Jungian way, those things are written into the unconscious, the collective unconscious of humankind.
So they don't disprove Christianity, and they certainly don't disprove theism in any way, shape, or form.
So I can understand why the shock of seeing those things.
It's funny, a lot of things depend in life which direction you're coming from.
I came from the direction of knowing all the myths and then being convinced that, yes, Christianity was the myth acted out in human history.
But if you come from the other direction, kind of half believing, and as you said, your mother was a nominal Catholic, and then come and find those myths, that can be a shock and it can seem to debunk the thing you believe in.
So it really depends which direction your journey takes you.
All right, tickety-boo news.
I just have to conclude with this story from the Washington Examiner by Paul Bedard.
Trump breaks 20-year fouled-up budget gridlock, scores big wins.
President Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and House Speaker Paul Ryan have teamed up this summer to do something that hasn't happened in two decades, write and pass department spending bills instead of lumping everything together into a massive omnibus package.
The House and Senate are moving at a brisk pace to pass the appropriations bills with the Senate leading approving nine of 12.
What's more, the Trump administration has pushed through key priorities on wall and Pentagon spending, as well as curbing wasteful programs.
Now, the bad news here is the budget has gone up.
The budget is going up.
I'd like to see it go down.
That won't happen until they start to tackle entitlements, which I hope they will.
But this is important.
These omnibus bills are a legislative atrocity.
I mean, they just are a terrible thing because nobody can negotiate over what you want here and where things go, and nobody takes responsibility for anything.
We're talking about the legislature taking responsibility.
Trump is doing this.
And Mitch McConnell and other leaders in the Senate and Congress are saying that Trump is the reason this is happening because he said, I will not sign another omnibus bill.
Okay.
So I just put that forward to you as they're selling you the chaos, as they're selling you the evil, as they're selling you this absolute garbage of this Russian collusion story, that Trump is doing a good job.
Trump is an obstreperous person.
He is not the typical president.
We didn't try to elect the typical president.
He can do things when he does things that I think are wrong or stupid and he says things that are stupid.
I say so.
You know, people yell at me for that all the time.
I get flack from you guys all the time about that, but I always say so.
But he's doing a good job.
And we hired him to do a good job.
He's not your daddy.
He's not your lover.
He's not your soulmate and he's not your role model.
He's the president of the United States and he's doing a good job.
America is in the grip of a non-crisis.
Okay.
It's in the grip of a non-crisis.
Don't let them affect the way you look at the world.
Technical Producer Austin Stevens00:00:38
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
We'll see you again tomorrow.
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 our animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production.