Ep. 583 – Who Stands for America? dissects the Kavanaugh hearings as a politically weaponized spectacle, where Democrats’ hypocrisy—dismissing Bill Clinton’s accusers while demanding Kavanaugh’s conviction—exposes their double standards, while Jenna Ellis frames the Me Too movement’s rush to judgment as a threat to due process. The episode contrasts Trump’s UN speech—celebrating $10T wealth growth and military strength—with media distortions, then pivots to callers: a husband urged to mend his marriage, a student encouraged to join the military at 22, and a grieving father advised to heal over blame after his wife’s abortion. The Gosnell film’s censorship reveals Planned Parenthood’s complicity in infanticide, while the host predicts conservative values reshaping culture amid millennials’ delayed marriages, framing today’s chaos as a backlash against progressive extremism. [Automatically generated summary]
Democrats are charging that Republicans have already made up their minds about Brett Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford, whereas they say they believe Ford and that Kavanaugh is clearly guilty.
Democrats say it is appalling and sexist that Republicans would not allow Ford to testify and that forcing her to testify is appalling and sexist and she should not have to testify, which would be appalling and sexist, so she should be made to testify, which would be appalling and sexist.
Democrats say it is despicable that the Republican senators who will question Ford are all white men.
So Republicans have appointed a woman to question her, which Democrats say is despicable.
Democrats say it is horrifying that Brett Kavanaugh is accused of exposing his penis to a woman when they were both in college.
The Democrats say penises should only be exposed to little girls in elementary school restrooms by boys who are really girls and have penises somehow.
Democrats say we must believe all women and that it's horrible that Mrs. Kavanaugh would defend her husband and they don't believe her.
Some Republicans point out that the Democrats did not believe the women who accused Bill Clinton of various sex crimes, including rape.
But Democrats say that's different because Bill Clinton was a Democrat in power at the time he was accused and so his accusers were not credible, whereas Judge Kavanaugh is a conservative, so the women who accuse him are credible.
And to prove it, they'd even be willing to believe the women who accuse Bill Clinton now that he's out of power and doesn't matter anymore.
Democrats say Judge Kavanaugh is not entitled to the presumption of innocence because this is not a criminal trial, but instead is a lynch mob style panic, which is not covered by the Constitution.
Democrats say they will continue to publicize unsubstantiated charges against Kavanaugh because they are defending long-standing Democratic traditions like hypocrisy and lying.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Unsubstantiated Charges00:14:25
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Shipsy-tipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right.
I'm going to be sorry when this Kavanaugh thing is over and I have to start making satire up again.
I mean, they're just writing the satire for me.
They've been so despicable during this whole thing.
It's the mailbag day, most importantly, and all your problems are like within.
Oh, my God.
I can't stand it anymore.
Pardon me just a second while I have a heart attack.
45 minutes from now, all your problems will be over.
And if they're not, it's your fault.
And we also have Jenna Ellis, constitutional lawyer Jenna Ellis, to talk to us about the upcoming hearings that are speeding at us.
If they come off, the hearings will be tomorrow.
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So conservatives love to talk about absolute truth.
And we always say there's not your truth and my truth.
There's just the truth in all this.
But it is also true that life is a little complicated.
And when you have different principles, you see things differently.
So when Islamists attack the World Trade Center, I see the ugly results of a violent philosophy that has been nurtured by injustice in the Middle East.
Reverend Jeremiah Wright sees the sins of America coming home to roost.
And Reverend Jeremiah Wright and his parishioners, some of whom you may have heard of, see America's sins coming home to roost.
If America addresses past injustices against black Americans, I see a great country growing into its excellent principles, but somebody else sees a country laid bare, its sins laid bare, and how it's evil exposed.
So that's what like Colin Kaepernick sees in America.
So, just a current example, some people saw these creeps who recently chased Ted Cruz and his wife out of a Washington, D.C. restaurant.
Some of them saw this as some kind of just protest.
Here is Ted Cruz in a Washington, D.C. restaurant, and listen to these people.
We believe survivors, we believe survivors.
They go hotter than you, there!
We believe survivors!
God bless you, tell you!
I'm not letting my wife through!
You know, every lynch mob that has ever been formed was shouting just that.
We believe the victim.
Every lynch mob, every single one.
See, because it doesn't matter what you believe.
What matters is the truth.
And that's why we have judicial processes, and that's why we have the assumption of innocence.
But the point I'm making is what you believe does affect how you see things.
So those people who have demeaned themselves and degraded themselves and turned themselves into animals and into a mob, they see themselves as doing something heroic, right?
So the way what you're what you're seeing is the way you see things changes what you see and who you are.
And it also reveals who you are.
It reveals what you stand for.
Just one more before I talk a little bit more.
I want to talk about a couple of things today.
I want to talk about Trump at the UN as well as the Kavanaugh story.
Bill Cosby got sent away for three to ten years for the stuff that he was doing over many years.
He drugged women.
He's been convicted of this now.
Many, many women have come forward.
He drugged women and had sex with them in their sleep.
Bill Cosby, as I think I've mentioned before, was a tremendously important character to me when I was growing up.
When I was maybe 11, 12 years old, he was a hero to me.
Like, I can't even think of what, you know, other kids had baseball player heroes.
He was a hero to me.
He was a role model.
He was a way that you could be funny, but he was manly because he was in that show I Spy, which I saw every single episode of.
I had every record that he had.
I saw him in concert time and time again.
I talked my father into taking me to California to meet him while he was filming his first special.
I met him while he was filming the opening of the special.
I mean, he was a genuine for about a year or so.
He was a genuine hero of mine.
And to see this happen, it breaks my heart.
It breaks my heart.
But here's the thing.
Even though we see things differently according to where we come from and what we believe and what we feel, we see things differently.
I saw, I have no, there's no doubt in my mind that justice was done.
He should go to prison.
I think the victims are what matter here.
But because he was so important to me, I have empathy for him.
I feel for him.
See, he must be a very, very sick man to do what he did.
To me, that's not even a sexy thing to do, to drug somebody and sleep with her while she's asleep.
That just seems to me like some kind of bizarre fetish, but that's the bizarre fetish he has.
And because of that, he did terrible things to people.
Listen to his publicist, Andrew Wyatt.
Listen to what he says after the conviction, after the sentence.
Mr. Cosby's doing great, and Mr. Cosby knows that God is watching over him.
He knows that these are lies.
They persecuted Jesus, and look what happened.
Not saying Mr. Cosby is Jesus, but we know what this country has done to blackmail for centuries.
So Mr. Cosby's doing fine.
He's holding up well.
And everybody who wants to say anything negative, you're a joke as well.
Thank you.
Did you sexual assault women marketing rape?
Thank you.
He starts out by saying, you know, they persecuted Jesus too.
And then he says, well, I'm not saying he's Jesus, but.
And of course, that's just distortion because your principles have to override your feelings.
I have feelings for Bill Cosby because he was my hero, but my principle is that what he did was terribly wrong, a terrible, terrible thing to do, and he's got to pay for it.
And he's got to go to prison.
And his wealth and his fame and his contributions and his incredible talent.
He was a brilliant comedian in his youth.
Those things don't matter because the principle matters above all things.
So let's take a look at what happened at the UN yesterday as Donald Trump made this incredible speech, a really powerful speech that he made to the UN, and how people reacted to it and what it means the way they reacted.
First, he started out, there was this brief moment when he was doing his usual Trump braggadocio thing, and they laughed at his typical Trumpian-ness.
Here's that.
In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.
America is so true.
Didn't expect that reaction, but that's okay.
Now, I want to play Mika Brzezinski's reaction because it is typical of the press's reaction.
I'm just not picking on her.
This is basically the way the left-wing press played it.
I think it was a significant moment.
What you saw there tells you a lot about how the world leaders see Donald Trump.
And they are openly laughing at him, at his tweets and his loyalty oaths, at his sexism and his makeshift meetings with dictators, at his lies and his reality show policies, aren't they?
The world is laughing at the President of the United States, and Donald Trump's America has become the butt of a big joke.
So who's laughing at him?
Iran?
You know, Germany, as he said himself, has just made a devil's bargain with Vladimir Putin to become dependent on his oil?
Germany, which actually likes Russia more than it likes us.
Who's laughing at him?
Syria, China, who's been cheating people for all these years and oppressing their own people?
Who's laughing at him?
And I thought he handled that moment with charm.
It was a typical moment of Trump braggadocio.
I'm not saying it wasn't, but I thought he handled it with genuine charm, and they ended up applauding for it.
He kind of won them over.
Then he goes on to prove what he says.
He talks about his accomplishments.
Here's cut number two.
America's economy is booming like never before.
Since my election, we've added $10 trillion in wealth.
The stock market is at an all-time high in history.
And jobless claims are at a 50-year low.
African American, Hispanic American, and Asian-American unemployment have all achieved their lowest levels ever recorded.
We've added more than 4 million new jobs, including half a million manufacturing jobs.
We have passed the biggest tax cuts and reforms in American history.
We've started the construction of a major border wall, and we have greatly strengthened border security.
We have secured record funding for our military, $700 billion this year and $716 billion next year.
Our military will soon be more powerful than it has ever been before.
So laugh at that, you know, laugh at that.
I want you to hear how the New York Times, a former newspaper, covered this.
They fact-checked them, right?
They have a woman there, Linda Q, as a fact-check reporter for the New York Times.
Must be the most thankless chore in American history, right?
She checks the facts just to make sure none of them get in the paper.
You know, it's like, wait, check that fact, put that fact down.
Get that fact back out of my newspaper.
So she's checking the facts, what he just said, and she says, well, he's right that the United, first, there's a headline that says something like false or exaggerated or I don't remember what it is.
He's right that the United States stock market is soaring and unemployment rates for Hispanics, African Americans, and Asian Americans have reached record lows, but, but he omitted less flattering indicators when describing an economy booming like never before.
For example, listen to this.
GDP growth is healthy, but it reached higher points as recently as 2014, which is garbage because it once spiked during the, maybe twice spiked during the Obama era as Obama sat on the GDP with his stupid regulations and his stupid health care plan.
This is a new unleashed economy.
This is an economy on the run because of Trump's policies.
All right.
Now she goes on, the unemployment rate is at an 18-year low, but it's higher than several months during the 1940s, 1960.
I mean, what I'm saying is the way you feel, the way you see things reveals who you are.
It reveals what your principles is, what your principles are.
And wage growth is still slow, she goes on.
You know, the point is, these are amazing accomplishments.
I'm not telling you to like Trump.
I'm not telling you Trump is a good guy.
I'm telling you he's doing a great job.
These are amazing accomplishments.
And finally, the reason, the reason the New York Times and all the left is so pinched, so angry, the reason Mika Brzezinski and a lot of the press, when they hear that laughter, they feel like, oh my goodness, oh my goodness, Iran is laughing at us.
Now we're the butt of jokes in Iran, you know, which I can't say on the air what my reaction to that is.
But this is why.
It's what Trump said, he defended American exceptionalism.
He defended, he said, we don't want an empire.
We do not want to run an empire.
We don't want to tell you how to live.
We want to live the way we want to live.
And he excoriated Iran.
He defended his trade principles by pointing out what China is doing, that it's not free trade if China is messing around with us.
But then he just talked about the America that he wants to protect and defend and to serve as America's president.
This is cut number five.
As for Americans, we know what kind of future we want for ourselves.
We know what kind of a nation America must always be.
In America, we believe in the majesty of freedom and the dignity of the individual.
We believe in self-government and the rule of law.
And we prize the culture that sustains our liberty, a culture built on strong families, deep faith, and fierce independence.
We celebrate our heroes.
We treasure our traditions.
And above all, we love our country.
See, when the left sees has a pinched view of what Trump is doing, when they have a pinched view of what Trump is saying, when they cringe at the laughter of the UN, a corrupt, low organization, this is what they hate.
What they hate is that visceral patriotism that I believe he actually feels and that he is also putting forward, that vision of a country that is free, that loves its freedom, that loves its traditions.
Fundamental Questions in Senate Vote00:15:38
That is like saying the name of Jesus to a possessed soul.
Remember those scenes in The Exorcist where the priest sprinkles the holy waters?
Ah, she's vomiting green.
That's what you're getting from the New York Times.
The New York Times is like their head is spinning around 360 degrees and green bile is spewing out of them because he mentioned what America is, how great it is.
That's what they don't like and that's what they don't support.
And if you want to know, you want to see them not supporting it, let's turn to this Judge Kavanaugh thing.
There's a new charge coming out from Michael Avenatti.
He's got some woman who says, oh, there were gang rapes at least parties went to, Kavanaugh's already denied this very forcefully.
But here's Chuck Schumer talking about whether Kavanaugh in the hearings that are supposed to be on Thursday, they're very upset too because the Democrats say there is going to be a vote on Friday no matter what.
Let's see if they stick to that.
Here's Chuck Schumer talking about whether at these hearings Kavanaugh has the presumption of innocence.
It's not a legal proceeding.
It's a fact-finding proceeding.
We do this with every major nominee.
And countless times, I think 10 times in the last year, when new information comes up, the FBI goes again and does its background check.
This is standard operating procedure.
And the question looms, why are our Republicans deviating from here?
This is not a criminal trial.
This is not a, this is true.
Find the fact.
You have two diametrically opposed stories.
And there are two issues.
A, which story is right?
And if, if Dr. Ford is telling the truth, then Judge Kavanaugh's credibility is in great question.
But people, do you agree then that he has the, quote, presumption of innocence?
I agree that this is not, that's a criminal trial.
What I believe is we ought to get to the bottom and find the facts in the way that the FBI has always done.
There's no presumption of innocence or guilt when you have a nominee before you.
So let's bring on Jenna Ellis.
She's the director of the Dobson Policy Center, a contributor to the Washington Examiner, the Federalist, and our own Daily Wire.
Her book, which we had a long interview about, you should go back and find that because it was a really good interview.
It's The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution, a guide for Christians to understand America's current constitutional crisis.
Jenna, good to see you.
Good to see you, Jerry.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, I feel at this point we should charge you rent on the studio.
We've talked to you so often.
What did you think of what Chuck Schumer said?
This isn't a legal trial, so he doesn't have the presumption of innocence, true or false.
False.
And he's definitely speaking out of both sides of his mouth because individuals have constitutional protections regardless of the context of a Senate confirmation or a criminal trial.
The fact that he's saying there's no presumption of innocence, yet we're going on this fact-finding mission, and somehow we can determine what the truth is, there's always the presumption of innocence.
There's always fundamental fairness.
There's always constitutional protections, particularly when we have a Senate confirmation hearing.
I mean, the presumption of innocence is so basic to our system that it's not even mentioned in the Constitution, right?
They just mention due process, and then out of that grows the presumption of innocence.
Have I got that right?
Yeah, and we as America have fundamental fairness and have these protections and have due process in place because we understand.
And remember, historically, our founding fathers coming from England and seeing how religious liberty in particular and some of these other types of issues were happening in their system of justice, they wanted to make sure that we understand that our freedom and our liberty can't be foreclosed by any government actor in any way without due process.
And so for Kavanaugh to be going through a confirmation hearing, of course, when there's an accusation, he should have the presumption of innocence.
It is always on the claimant, even in a civil context where you're not talking about criminal penalties.
It's always on the claimant or the accuser to bear the burden of proof and to make sure that their allegations can be established by whatever standard of proof is in place.
But that becomes the problem in this type of context because the Senate really can vote any way that it wants.
And are any of us really thinking that the senators, especially the Democrats, are going to be swayed in any way by whatever testimony comes out on Thursday?
No, this is a campaign against Kavanaugh because the fundamental issue here is to not have a conservative majority on the court.
If it had been Kavanaugh, if it had been Amy Coney Barrett, whoever Trump would have nominated, they are threatened by their activist majority and they would have targeted and tried to derail and delay any confirmation.
This isn't about truth.
This is about politics.
Why do you think it is that Roe v. Wade is the big scare tactic?
Why do you think that, that is the thing that is at the center of everything?
How did that get to be the center of everything?
Well, because if we look back at the cultural problems and the issues here with the sexual revolution and the progressive left, they have targeted the institution of the family and the institution of the church for the last 50 and 60 years.
And abortion as a method of birth control is central to their line of thinking to attack the family because we have to be able to have sex without consequences.
And that's what they believe that the proposition of Roe versus Wade stands for.
And while they claim that they're standing for women's rights and all of that, what they're doing is actually taking away the protection of the context of the family that we see that God ordained.
And so this is going not just to legal issues.
This is a fundamental threat to their centrally held ideology that we need to have abortion as a method of birth control.
And that's what they are fundamentally scared of.
It's kind of ironic that they're using sexual malfeasance to defend sexual libertinism, but I guess that must make sense to them somewhere along the line.
What do you think of bringing in the Republicans, obviously conscious of the optics of having old white men question a woman who says she's been sexually abused?
They're bringing in a woman prosecutor from Arizona, I believe it is, to question her.
And whatever the Republicans do, the Democrats protest.
But the Democrats are protesting that.
How do you feel about that as a mode of questioning at a Senate committee here?
You know, I think it's fine.
I mean, the Senate at this point, of course, the Republicans and Chuck Grassley in particular are going to be very concerned about optics.
And I think that it's fair that because they want to take seriously these allegations, then they're bringing in someone who is a sex crimes expert, who is able to then lead that type of line of questioning so that it doesn't appear like the senators are bullying her in any way.
And so to have somebody who will come in and be fair and objective in terms of the line of questioning, that's probably a good strategy.
And the Senate can actually perform the process however they want.
A confirmation hearing isn't even constitutionally required.
So the fact that Mitch McConnell is saying, okay, we are done.
Holding the vote on Friday.
That's a great idea to just stop the nonsense to say we're voting.
And the Constitution provides for removal of justices if anything actually is provable in any of them.
Ah, interesting.
But then they would be stuck with actually having to prove it.
So, my last question: this Me Too thing, which I have to say, I have sympathy for.
I've seen women mistreated.
I work in Hollywood.
I know exactly the way that transactional sex goes down there.
But at the same time, it seems to me it's being used as a bludgeon against due process.
I ask you this both as a constitutional scholar and as an official girl.
Isn't there some danger that this Me Too thing is what's that?
That's going on my resume now.
Isn't there a danger that this Me Too thing is so emotional that it can override our rights?
Absolutely.
And I actually wrote a piece in the context of the Me Too movement last year for Washington Examiner that says the headline is: in the context of sex crimes, there's no right to be believed.
And that's really the problem here: as an official girl, I have a huge problem with having any sort of allegation just be believed on face.
That goes flagrantly against our constitutional protections in the interest of liberty.
Because what if the tables were turned?
What if we were back in what the feminists claim in the 1950s were so oppressive and that any man could simply claim anything about the integrity and the sexual integrity of a woman?
Would we want that?
Would we want a man to be able to say that and everyone just believe that about our integrity?
Absolutely not.
So why are we now in 2018 turning the tables and being so anti-man that we and also anti-women to just say that any claim has a right to be believed?
That's why we have the process.
That's why we have a court of law.
That's why we have the legal system.
And I think that it's dangerous to be so gender bifurcated that we're willing to believe people simply on the basis of gender.
That's actually completely against what the left would say.
They don't want anyone to be unequal on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, race, religion.
I mean, that's what the civil rights movement was all about.
And so for the left to claim that somehow a woman on the basis of gender has a right to be believed more than a man on the basis of gender, they're actually going fundamentally going against their own civil rights movement in the 1960s.
It does seem that way.
Jenna Ellis, thank you.
You should probably just stay there because we'll have you back by the end of the day.
It's always great to talk to you and great to see you.
Thanks a lot, Jenna.
You too.
All right, we got the mailbag coming up, but we got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
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All right, mailbag is coming up.
It's time for the mailbag.
Yeah.
See, that time I was ready for it.
I don't overreact.
Oh, stop!
We'll just go back.
Would you just go back there and slap him for Heidi, dear Supreme Overlord Clavin?
If by chance Kavanaugh doesn't get confirmed, Do you think it'll be the nail in the coffin of Republicans, or do you think it'll tick off enough people that they'll go to the polls and vote in November to stop the Democratic takeover of our country?
I think it will be the end of the Republican Party.
I think it will be devastating.
If he is not confirmed, if they back down, if somebody gets the jitters and turns away, I think the Republicans will be voted out of office en masse.
Even I may not show up to vote for them, and I think it's very important that we show up and vote for them.
But if they can't do this simple little thing, yeah, we should screw them into the ground.
From Bobby, dear Andrew Clavin, all spelled with ease, ha ha ha.
You know, I'm sorry, would you visit this guy's house, please?
I really hope you get this question because I often find that much of your advice regarding ethics resonates very strongly.
My wife and I are going through the in vitro fertilization process, and of course it is extremely taxing, but I've been thinking a lot lately of the ethical implications of creating embryos manually.
There are many choices that the process offers us, and I believe it is possible to navigate IVF in an ethical way, but I would like to get your opinion on the IVF process as a whole and what your stance is on it.
What do you think?
I love your show and have been barely surviving the Clavenless weekends for some time.
You know, I'm not a doctor, and so if I get any of the facts of IVF wrong, forgive me.
As I understand it, eggs are extracted and several of them are inseminated and fertilized.
I have absolutely no ethical problems with there being this wonderful scientific technique that can get you a baby when you can't have one in the ordinary way.
I have absolutely no, I have no ethical objections per se.
There are some ethical objections that happen if several eggs are implanted and some have to be aborted.
Then you have that problem.
If some eggs, usually they inseminate a number of eggs at the same time, as I understand it.
Again, if I'm wrong, forgive me, but that's how I understand it.
So those are the ethical things you want to watch out for.
You want to make sure that these eggs are not being destroyed.
These actual fertilized eggs are not being destroyed.
But other than that, the actual process itself doesn't bother me in the least.
You say there's an ethical way of doing that.
And if there is, then, you know, do it and good luck.
From Nicholas, Mr. Clavin, I need help, and I hear you're good at that.
Two months ago, my wife divorced me.
I haven't seen my stepdaughter since, and I haven't talked to my ex-wife in about a month and a half.
The whole event came completely by surprise, and she did it only two days after our first anniversary.
Since then, I've been completely miserable.
This amount of rejection is destroying me.
I feel like the orphan I once was.
I drink almost every night, and I hate myself more than I've ever hated anything.
I've been a Christian my whole life, and even that is on shaky ground.
There is so much more I couldn't explain in this message, but there's anything you could think that would help me, it would be greatly appreciated.
Yeah, first of all, stop drinking.
That's the first thing.
Don't cut down.
Just stop.
Stop drinking right now.
Just knock it off, because that is not helping.
You can come back to drinking later when you put yourself together.
You know, I'm not there, and so I have to make some assumptions that I take out of your letter.
If this divorce came to you as a complete surprise one year after your marriage, right, something was terribly wrong in this marriage.
Something was really broken in this marriage.
If I were you, what I would do is I would stop thinking about the marriage and start thinking about yourself and start putting yourself together and asking yourself some questions about the way you behaved, about what was going on in this marriage, and how you can go forward in a new way.
If your wife walks out on you after a year and it takes you completely by surprise, something was deeply, deeply wrong.
I'm not saying it's your fault.
I'm not saying it's her fault.
I'm just saying that the fact that you are crashing and burning is indicative of something much bigger than the actual divorce.
What you need to do now is you need to put yourself together.
You need to redeem yourself in your own mind.
Stop drinking, go to church, get yourself put together if you need help, get the help, but make sure that you are the person that you are supposed to be.
And I would, in the meantime, leave your wife and your stepdaughter alone.
She obviously had very, you know, it takes very strong feelings to walk out like that.
So I would concentrate on yourself right now because something went terribly wrong in that relationship.
And insofar it obviously involved two people, insofar as you're one of them, I would fix that one.
Redeem Yourself00:10:54
That's what you have power to do, and I would do it.
Hello, Mr. Clavin from Dillon.
I live in an apartment complex that's not in the greatest of neighborhoods.
It's very clear that my upstairs neighbors have issues.
Frankly, there's a man beating his wife, and I can hear it all.
Part of me thinks I should notify someone, and the other part tells me to mind my own business.
Do you have any advice?
I can tell you what I would do.
I would call the police.
I would call the police while it was going on and report domestic abuse.
You know, you can't break in there yourself because it's a very easy way to get killed.
A lot of times, as police officers will tell you, it's the wife who attacks you when you stop the husband.
So these things are incredibly complex, but you can't just, I wouldn't be able to just sit there and listen to somebody beat up his wife.
I would call the cops.
I think that for me would be the right thing to do.
From Joseph to he whom crushes his leftist enemies and hears the lamentation of their weirdos.
Longtime fan, your podcast is the best on the internet and it ain't even close.
Sorry, Ben.
I'm a senior undergraduate in engineering who does not know where his future is going.
I know what you say about predicting the future and at some point you have to choose one path over another.
I have a job lined up in industry after school if I want it.
However, my childhood heroes have always been military men and through harsh physical training that I've kept up with since childhood, I am prepared to pursue a combat role in the armed forces.
This ticks my dad off as he would like me to take a stable job while I can get it and avoid risking possible injury or death at age 22.
I honestly can't say I am overly enthusiastic or if I will hate myself for not doing something I feel so strongly about.
I pray a lot on this and ultimately I think I want to be able to say I did something for the people I care about that they could have not done for themselves.
I also think I would enjoy it if I'm being honest.
Should I take the engineering job and feel it out for a year or two or just cut straight to what I want to do?
Yeah, I would, I would, if it were I, I would join the military.
I mean you say it sounds like you really have an intense desire to join the military.
It's not your father's life.
It's your life.
It's not his future.
It's your future.
And it's an honorable, decent thing to do.
You've been trained.
It sounds like you're training for it.
It sounds like you're really eager to do it.
That is, if I were in your shoes, that is what I would do.
I don't see if you're a good engineer, the military experience will only help you when you come back to get a job.
And you might love the military.
You might not, and you'll find that out, but you're still young enough.
I would do the thing, the youthful thing in my youth.
So in other words, at 22, you can go into the military, come back, still be young enough to be an engineer.
If you're an engineer and 10 years go by, the military might not be as good an option.
From Ian, I'm a California Christian recovering and returning from my earlier rejection of my faith.
While lost, I married a Kiwi woman that rejected her strict Christian upbringing.
She was honest and virtuous at marriage, and today, yet she is insulted by any notion I make of her returning to Christ.
She has a very strong affinity for many of the leftist lies, most prominently on abortion.
However, her libertarian streak, even if it's left-sided, is our common ground.
I'm thinking the best I can do is improve myself, following Christ so much that by my example, I show her life in Jesus Christ as the best.
However, I failed to walk in Christ well as my human fallen ways annoy her.
We have two children, a girl two and a boy, five.
Before our girl, we had a boy with trisome 18.
My wife terminated him when it was clear he would live at best a few weeks after birth, but I was not ready to kill him, even though I knew it would bankrupt us and end our marriage if I insisted we see if he would be healed by Christ in my prayer.
I know God is not a genie, but I was faithful as best I could be.
That whole loss-murder of our son to end his pain in her eyes and somewhat in mine too has been a real strain on us.
And she was horrified that the doctors kept asking for her consent.
On and on.
All right.
First of all, let's divide this into two parts.
The first thing is leave your wife alone about her faith and about her politics.
She is an independent person.
She has the right to believe what she wants.
What God wants of you now, your mission from God, if I may say so, is that you have two children, a girl two and a boy five, and what they need is they need their father there and they need their mother there and they need their father and their mother in as much harmony as possible.
So it is not your job to cram Jesus down your wife's throat.
That is not your job.
Your job is to keep your marriage harmonious and good for those two children.
And your wife is a free person and hopefully you're right.
If you follow God in an honest and loving way, she will say, hey, this isn't so bad.
I like this.
I like what this is doing to my husband.
But if you make it a source of conflict between you, then she looks at this and says, ah, this Jesus is getting in the way of my marriage and ruining everything.
Here's the second part.
You guys have suffered an enormous tragedy.
The death of a child, whether in the womb or out of the womb, the death of a child is one of the, it can be a key factor in destroying a marriage.
I can't remember what the statistics are, but they are very high.
Marriages fall apart after a child dies.
It is something you really have to work on and defend against.
Dump this murder routine, okay?
Dump it.
You know how I feel about abortion.
I'm strongly opposed to it.
But you have lost a child.
That is the important thing.
You have both lost a child.
You are both in shock and in mourning and in grief.
And even though it has passed a long time, you clearly haven't dealt with it.
You're clearly angry at your wife.
It comes across that you're angry with her.
You're blaming her for what you call murder.
You know, it is time to deal with the grief, okay?
Let's forget the morality about it for a minute, because first of all, it's over.
It's time to deal with the grief.
It is time to process this terrible, terrible event that has happened in your life, for which I'm terribly sorry.
Good for you guys for staying together so far and for keeping together and moving on.
But it is not God.
When you hear a voice who wants you to go over and over and over the morality of something until it destroys your marriage, until it leaves your children fatherless, until it makes your home, that's not God's voice.
That is not God's voice.
You're not following God when you do that.
This is a terrible thing that has happened.
If there is some answering to do, it will happen before the throne of God.
You don't need to bring justice here.
You need for you and your wife together, using help if you have to, to deal with this tragedy that has happened to you both and to make sure you guys survive it as a couple so that your children have parents.
That's where I come down on that.
All right.
I recently attended a debate.
This is from R.J., I recently attended a debate on theism versus atheism.
The atheist, a former Christian, at one point mentioned that we innately know right from wrong from birth.
If this is not a result of the soul and possibly reincarnation, what possible logical underpinning could an atheist have for this?
Well, there are plenty of things.
They say that evolutionarily we developed certain ethical considerations that come from survival.
People who had these ethical considerations survived.
They developed.
They had corollaries.
And so basically, it's almost like game theory, a kind of moral idea grew up out of it.
What I don't understand is how an atheist knows these things are true, or are actually in fact good, and what he thinks good is.
Because it seems to me, if one thing is morally better than another, it must be closer to what is right, what is absolutely right, right?
If something is moral and something is less moral, if you put it on a graph, the more moral thing is closer to morality.
If you have an absolute good to which these things are related, and that's the only way you could judge them, it seems to me, if you have an absolute good, that absolute good must be a conscious entity because you cannot have goodness that can't choose, right?
A hurricane isn't good or bad.
It is a choice that is good or bad.
And so once you have a moral world, once you believe there is a moral world, I believe you have God.
It's not that, it's not that our moral sense couldn't have developed by natural means.
It could have.
But the fact that it is moral, the fact that it is a moral sense, the fact that we do know that these things are right and not just stuff that developed weirdly, that, it seems to me, is in fact an indicator, a very strong indicator that there is a God.
From Aaron.
Hi, Andrew.
This will be the last one.
I enjoyed your discussion with Neil Tyson and hope you will interview more scientists.
Like Dr. Tyson, I'm an astrophysicist.
Unlike him, I'm a conservative.
I sometimes have trouble communicating with my fellow conservatives when they speak on scientific matters without being informed.
For example, when discussing evolution or the Big Bang, I believe in God, and I believe religion is a force for good.
I also know that the idea of a 6,000-year-old earth is indefensible and objectively false.
How important do you think it is for people to believe in objective truth when that truth doesn't have any serious moral implications?
Are these discussions a waste of time?
Please help.
Really good question, because there's a wonderful line in the first Sherlock Holmes story where it turns out that Sherlock Holmes doesn't know that the earth revolves around the sun and Watson is shocked and Sherlock Holmes says, whether the earth revolves around the sun or the sun revolves around the earth, what difference does it make to me and my work?
And I've always thought that was an actual good question.
But here's the thing.
Obviously, it is not worth pounding on people about this.
But I agree with you.
I do not think we should.
I think that if it turns out that the world is 6,000 years old, the people who are going to prove it will be scientists.
Therefore, we should listen to what the scientists are saying.
If they're honest scientists, if they're not trying to sell us a bill of political goods or whatever, if they are honestly doing the work of science, it is scientists who do science.
It is science who give us the facts.
There is nothing wrong with our reinterpreting the Bible according to the facts.
In fact, we should do that.
It makes us grow in our faith.
It makes us grow in our understanding.
It makes us grow in our knowledge of God.
The world is, nature is a book in which we can read the work of God.
The heavens speak of his handiwork.
It says so in the Bible.
It says so in the Bible.
And what does it also say?
The spirit gives life, but the letter killeth, right?
So it even says in the Bible that we're not supposed to be that literal.
It literally says in the Bible that the Bible isn't literal.
So, you know, I'm not saying the Bible is all metaphor.
I'm saying it works in different genres.
I think it is really important to let people do the work that they do.
And I think it is important.
I love science.
I love learning new things.
I love it when the scientists say, hey, here's a really interesting thing.
It doesn't make any sense to us.
What I hate is when scientists use the authority they get from being scientists to preach to me about theology about which they know nothing.
It is amazing to me that brilliant thinkers like Steven Pinker, when they talk about God, sound like idiots.
Even the guy, the biologist, Dawkins, when he talks about theology, it's clear he has read no theology.
Bible Verses and Literal Lies00:02:39
So all I would say is, you know, stick to your guns.
I think that scientists should do science.
God can take care of himself.
He made the world.
He wants us to know about it.
He made us in his image, which means he gave us reason.
Our minds are made to understand the world.
That very fact speaks about him even through nature.
That's where I stand on it.
I know a lot of people disagree.
I've listened, by the way, a lot of people have written in and say, you've got to listen to this guy or that guy.
And I have gone on YouTube and listened to their arguments.
They are not very convincing if you know about actual science.
Even the guy who led the genome, the Genome Project, is an evangelical Christian.
And he said, when I looked at the very basic stuff of life, I could see the traces of evolution.
And so he believed it.
All right, I got to stop there.
Before we get to tickety-boo news, I have to talk about this thing, the Gosnell movie coming out in October.
It's supposed to open in theaters October 12th.
They're taking it around the country and pre-screening it to get excitement going and to get some promotion for it.
They were going to put it in a hotel in Austin, Texas, and Planned Parenthood convinced them to cancel the screening.
They convinced Planned Parenthood came in, and because they were going to have a Planned Parenthood 400-a-plate gala dinner, they convinced the Hyatt in Austin to cancel the screening.
Now, here's my question.
Gosnell killed babies outside the womb.
He killed living babies.
That's what he was convicted of.
He was a serial killer.
Why is it that Planned Parenthood thinks he was an abortionist, but this is what he did?
Why is it that Planned Parenthood thinks killing babies outside the womb is going to cast a bad light on abortion?
What is it that is so similar about killing babies outside the womb and killing them inside the womb that makes them so frightened of letting this film be seen?
Why didn't reporters cover this trial, the trial of the most prolific serial killer in America?
Why didn't they cover it?
Because they knew it was so close to abortion that there was no difference between the killing, what he was doing, and what abortionists were doing.
Here is Dean Kane, who stars as Woody, the cop.
I forgot his first name.
His last name was Wood, so they call him Woody.
Great guy.
The cop himself is a great detective, a terrific guy.
And here's Dean Kane talking about the film and the flack he's gotten over it.
What inspired you to do this film?
Well, I read the script.
Andrew Clavin wrote a very, very good script.
It was a very compelling story for me.
And I said, this is a great story to tell and a great character.
And I want this story out there.
And I'm happy to jump into it.
I know in the movie and even the trailer shows those empty media benches.
Absolutely.
Why do you think the media were hesitant to cover this?
I think because, again, abortion's a bad word.
Victorian Age Return00:04:05
They don't want to talk about it.
They'll talk about, like I said, women's reproductive rights, but they don't want to talk about the reality of what this guy was doing.
That was horrible.
It's horrible.
This guy is an abortion doctor and he was killing live babies.
And that's his murder, period.
I don't care how you slice it.
The babies were born alive, and he was killing them.
And it's absolutely ghastly and awful.
I want to thank Dean Kane for that very kind.
We're going to have him on, right?
He's going to come on the show.
Good.
He'll come on the show.
I thank him for his kind words about the script for Gosnell, which I did write.
And didn't I tell you to cut that out?
It was embarrassing.
Oh, no, I told you.
I told you if you cut it out, I'd fire it.
I knew it was one or the other.
I couldn't remember.
All right, tickety-boo news.
You know, one of the things that underneath this puritanical hysteria on the left, which is really just manufactured to get rid of Brett Kavanaugh, but is also part of this Me Too movement.
What we're watching is we're watching the complete and utter and total failure of left-wing culture.
We heard Jenna talking about the fact that they wanted to have this kind of libertine sex, and now they're saying, oh, in this libertine sex, women get hurt.
Well, you betcha, that's why.
One of the reasons why conservatives warned against it.
Marriage, which the feminists were so down on, marriage was created to protect women.
It was created by the church, the kind of marriage that we have today or had was created by the church to protect women.
So what we're watching is the failure, the complete failure of feminist leftist sexual culture.
That's what we're watching.
Underneath all the noise, this happens all the time, by the way.
The left says something, it fails, and then they blame the right.
They just move on to the next thing, blaming the right.
They say, You right-wingers are Puritans, and you won't let us have sex, and you don't think women are the same as men.
And then, when it turns out we were right about everything, they say, You right-wingers, you don't believe a woman when she complains about being raped at a party when she got drunk.
And they say, Yeah, we're the ones who told her not to get drunk at a party with guys.
That was us, remember?
Yeah, well, that's because you blame the victim.
Whatever it is, it's our fault.
But they keep screwing up, their culture keeps collapsing.
Their ideas are the ones that are false.
The good news here is that even though there is going to be the Victorian age, which I believe is coming back, a version of the Victorian age is coming back to us.
The Victorian Age was filled with kind of absurd prudery.
They say that they would cover the legs of tables in the Victorian Age because they reminded them of women's legs.
You know, that is the old saw about the Victorian age.
However, it also was an age of great productivity, of great liberalization and the true word of liberalization, and of sexual propriety as well.
And I've noticed just recently that the divorce rate over the last few years has just plummeted, something like 18%, I believe it is.
And they don't know why.
They think it may be possibly because the baby boom generation is aging out, you know, the baby boom generation that wrought this wreckage on our culture.
I've always said, I wish the baby boom generation would just die without taking me with it.
But unfortunately, I can't arrange that.
It also may be that the millennials are waiting a little bit before they get married and maybe getting married with more judgment.
But the fact is, the divorce rate has dropped 18% from 2008 to 2016, which is pretty amazing.
So that's a good thing.
That is the collapse of the leftist idea that they imposed on us.
The true story behind this is that among upper-class people, people with money, successful people, the divorce rate is even lower than that, but they're afraid to preach it because the left still owns the vehicles of the culture.
When we get involved in culture, when we have spokespeople, when we start talking back to the left on TV and in the movies and on the news, when that happens, and it's starting to happen now, then we will be able to point out that this is what we were working for all along.
It is they who destroyed it in the first place.
It's we who are building it back together.
All right, tomorrow, we will be back right here.
And the hearings will start.
I don't know whether there'll be in time for us to cover them, but we'll get back to them on Monday if we don't tomorrow.
Building Back Together00:00:34
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring, senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
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.