Andrew Clavin’s Ep. 595 frames Trump’s confrontational politics as a bulwark against "leftist bullying," citing the Kavanaugh hearings as proof Republicans now resist identity politics’ divisive tactics, though he questions sustainability amid rising self-censorship on race, Islam, and gender. Pastor Jesse Lee Peterson dismisses systemic racism as a "lie," advocating individual accountability over grievance-based narratives, while Clavin’s mailbag grapples with miscarriage trauma, workplace romance anxiety, and a listener’s revulsion over her SS-grandson-in-law—each case resolved by rejecting collective guilt and prioritizing personal agency. The episode ties economic growth to Trump-era deregulation, warns against federal welfare dependency, and ends with a defense of capitalism’s innovation legacy, framing freedom as the antidote to both political and moral coercion. [Automatically generated summary]
The relationship between the President of the United States and the porn star got stormy after Stormy's defamation lawsuit against Trump was tossed by a judge.
In the aftermath, Trump tweeted that Stormy was a horse face.
Stormy in turn suggested the president was sexually inadequate and called him tiny.
An enraged Trump then knocked back a couple of beers, tore off his shirt, and staggered into the street where he stood under Stormy's balcony screaming her name at the top of his lungs.
Finally, Stormy ran outside in her filmy nightgown to try to shut Trump up.
But when the two got close to each other, their anger turned to fiery passion, and Stormy threw herself into Trump's arms, and Trump carried her up the stairs for a night of raucous lovemaking, which left both the president and the stripper feeling simultaneously deeply satisfied and vaguely ashamed of their animalistic behavior.
Trump then retreated to the White House to deal with complex negotiations over the latest troubles in the Middle East.
But that night, after some heavy drinking with friends, Stormy phoned Trump and angrily told him she was returning the first edition of Baudelaire's Fleur de Mal he had sent her as a peace offering.
Trump rushed to the bar to talk some sense into the porn star and the two wound up in his penthouse apartment where he led her to his secret red room stocked with sadomasochistic sex toys.
After tying her up and blindfolding her, the commander-in-chief administered a sensual thrashing, which aroused Stormy so much she threw herself into Trump's arms for a night of raucous lovemaking, which left both of them feeling simultaneously deeply satisfied and vaguely ashamed of their animalistic behavior.
Somewhere near dawn, a disheveled Trump stumbled back into the Oval Office where he announced he would be interviewing candidates for a new personal secretary who would carry his official documents in her teeth while crawling on her hands and knees.
Apparently one S. Daniels has applied for the position.
Andrew Clavin Show: Dawn Edition00:03:38
So I think we can all see where this scenario is headed.
I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin show.
I'm a hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
And birds are wingy also singing hunky donkey.
Shipshape dipsy topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray.
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right.
Whereas the mailbag day, it's mailbag day this very day.
All your problems will be solved.
There she is.
I was ready for this.
But somebody somewhere just crashed into a telephone pole.
Also today at 7 p.m.
Stop, stop.
I can't stand it anymore.
Today at 7 p.m. Eastern 4 Pacific, don't miss our next episode of Daily Wire Backstage with Ben Shapiro, the God King of the Daily Wire, Jeremy Boring, me, and Alicia Kraus, and possibly even Knowles.
Oh, Knowles will be there too.
We'll be taking questions, but only from Daily Wire subscribers.
So Daily Wire subscribers, you'll be having so much fun listening to Another Kingdom early before everybody gets it on Friday and asking questions in the mailbag and all the great drinking out of your leftist tears tumbler.
But you can also come over and talk to all of us at backstage if you want to today, so you can become a subscriber today.
That is the whole point.
We should also talk about Robinhood, because Robinhood is an investing app that lets you buy and sell stocks, EDFs, options, and cryptos, all commission-free.
And it is really fun.
We gave it to the ladies who run the place, Katie and Katie, Katie and Caitlin, and they're now driving, you know, Rolls-World.
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That is in parenthesis, clavin.robinhood.com.
And I know what you're saying in parenthesis, but how do you spell Clavin?
You should check our sponsors.
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There's magazines and shaving.
But if you want the discount, there are no easy claven.
Well, you can even have them bring the meals that you are craving.
There is an E in Andrew, but there are no E's in Claven.
There are no E's in Claven.
K-L-A-V-A-N, there are no easy clavins.
So speaking of Clavin, the universe has now reached peak clavin when the president of the United States is trading insults on Twitter with the porn star that he clearly slept with at some point.
Political Correctness Warfare00:15:34
The world has turned into one of my satires.
I wrote that opening today and I thought, you know, it's almost not a joke.
It's almost like right there.
You know, and I'm suffering myself from a little cognitive dissonance at this point.
We're going to give you a little complexity here.
That should chase away about half the audience.
No complexity.
I don't want complexity.
I just want black and white and right and wrong.
But that's no point.
There's no point coming here if you're not going to hear what I actually have to say.
Here is the living truth.
Ever since the Kavanaugh hearings, I have been in a state of political bliss.
I really have.
I have been so happy with what has happened over the two years of the Trump administration.
I mean, ups and downs, crises, and all this stuff.
And normal, that's normal American life, normal life in any country, probably.
But the fact that there were still enough people to stand up to the kind of panic and leftist bullying and lying and the massive, massive influence of this dishonest, corrupt press, the fact that there were still guys who I had thought had just dissolved into that sort of pudding of political realism, you know, guys like Lindsey Graham, just you know, just kind of sitting there, oh, whatever,
suddenly had this spine and stood up.
And it had to do with Trump.
It really did have to do with Trump.
And it just has made me blissful.
And, you know, I know that the midterms are coming up, and we don't know what the result of that is going to be, because I think it's going to be totally a turnout election.
And I don't think the polls can really tell us as much about turnout as they can about preferences.
So we don't know what's going to happen.
So maybe in a couple of weeks, I'll be miserable.
But right this minute, I have been really blissful.
And it does make me laugh when Trump is calling this hooker.
I mean, is it fair to call her a hooker?
She took money after sex.
I don't know.
Let's call her a porn star, calling her horse face.
And listen, I understand when Samantha B called Ivanka Trump the C-word, the left was like, well, is that really bad?
Is it really, you know, is it really, you know, it's like, yes, it is.
But they can get away with it.
It's always fine for them.
And they call Trump everything in the world.
They call him a fascist.
They call him Hitler.
They sit and have discussions about how he's really Putin in disguise.
And the fact that, and then when they turn around, when the left turns around and says, wow, you really shouldn't call people horse face if you're president of the United States, you tend not to listen to him.
But I got to be honest, it bugs me.
It bugs me.
Trump has done a great job.
And he has done a great job by being them.
He has stooped to their level.
He has done what people always said, what people on the right in comment sections have always said to me, no, you know, you're too nice.
You're too polite.
You got to get rid of that.
We've got to fight the way they fight.
And they were right.
He broke through.
He has broken through political correctness.
He has broken their identity politics.
They're running around like chickens with their heads cut off.
If you guys show up, if the right shows up for these midterms, instead of just sitting around with a grim face on, pounding their fists and cherry-picking between this Republican and not that Republican, if you show up and the GOP wins in the midterms, this will have been two of the greatest years for American governance that have existed in the modern world, really, since Reagan.
These will be two fantastic years.
They're already two fantastic years.
So he's achieved a beautiful thing, and he's achieved it by being as bad as they are, and he's broken their horrible, you know, identity politics.
But at the same time, we have to stop and think for a minute.
Is this really what we want our politics to be like from now on?
Do we want the left, do we want to beat the left politically but lose the culture so that from now on our presidents are going to be these boars shouting?
Or do we just think Trump is a one-off and we want to build something else after he's gone, which is what I think.
We really should start thinking about that.
And one of the things we have to think about is the fact that the left has enslaved us with their identity politics, groupthink, which we throw back at them.
I've always thought this was wrong.
You know, they say, well, blacks are this.
We say, well, you're just as racist as we are.
Instead of saying, I don't care about blacks.
I don't care about race.
I just don't care.
Every time you mention the word color, my eyes glaze over.
I think it's stupid.
I think it's stupid to rank people according to their color.
I think it's sinful.
I think it's ugly.
I think it's stupid and mean.
We're not going to do it.
I don't care what you say.
I don't care what your figures say.
I don't care anything about what you say.
I'm not going to listen.
Instead, we throw it back in their face.
Now, there was this recent poll that got covered a lot, and I covered it, that a full 80% believe that political correctness is a problem in our country.
Young people don't like it.
Nobody likes it.
The only people who like it a little bit, 66% hate it, are people with post-graduate degrees.
So it's good for the elites.
Political correctness is good for the elites.
Why?
Because if people can't say things, then we're going to keep the status quo.
You think it's revolutionary to keep people from saying things, but it actually maintains the status quo.
If people are turned against each other, the elites walk away with all the prizes.
So it's good for rich people.
It's good for corporations.
No controversy, no speech, nothing like that.
But there's a part of the study that wasn't covered.
And Charles Lane wrote about it, The Washington Post.
If you ever watch Fox News and you watch the Brett Baer show, Charles Lane is a kind of civil voice of liberal dissent on Fox News.
I always kind of enjoy having him there.
He shows up on the panel afterwards.
And he writes about the fact that in the same study, it shows that 51, between 51 and 66% of Americans agree that there is a pressure to think a certain way about controversial topics and that they are afraid to speak out.
68% report that it is acceptable for me, the person reporting, that it is acceptable for me to express what I think about race or Islam only among people who are like me.
They're afraid of saying it in public.
On immigration, 73% feel that way.
On gay, lesbian, and gender issues, the figure is 70%.
70% of Americans are afraid to say a man is a man and when he puts on a skirt, he doesn't become a woman.
Or maybe I disapprove of homosexuality, which is a perfectly reasonable point of view to have.
You know, it's not a reasonable point of view to hate people, but it is a reasonable point of view that certain behaviors are wrong and certain behaviors are right.
You can argue it.
It should be debatable.
People are self-censoring themselves.
Now, Charles Lane writes, a certain measure of self-censorship is necessary to democracy.
To the extent that people refrain from gratuitously broadcasting bigotry, it promotes trust and rational discourse.
But for all that, this report confronts us with a disturbing reality.
We're a long way from the double morality of Eastern Europe, where people say one thing but are thinking another thing in their minds.
But we are apparently living among millions of our fellow citizens who routinely lie or dissemble about their political opinions out of fear.
And it's not, I lived in England.
It's not just Eastern Europe where they did that.
They did it in England too.
People do not say what they mean.
They're afraid to even think what they think.
And that is a horrible, horrible thing.
And they do it.
Here's how they do it, okay?
It's basically a trick.
It's a rhetorical trick.
Here's how it works.
Four steps.
First, they organize people into grievance groups, right?
You're black, you have a problem because you're black.
That's the only one where they have at least a historical, has a historical reason for existing.
But they organize you into race and sex and transgender.
They've gotten to the point where they're going to have people with red hair who believe they're women, who are actually dressed as men.
They're going to do anything they can to keep the divisions going.
So they organize people into grievance groups.
Then the important one is they associate the grievances of those groups with the right.
So only the left can save them.
Only government action and restraint using force, which is what leftism is, taking people's money, restraining their speech.
That's what leftism is.
Only the use of force by the government can relieve that grievance, okay?
So they associate the relief of grievance with the left.
And they, three, they demonize right-wing ideas as being somehow against those groups.
So everything you say turns into an insult against black people.
Everything you say is an insult against women.
And it's always the group that is being offended, right?
You know, it's only in the West, it's only in the West where we believe in individuals, right?
Most of the world believes in this kind of groupthink.
And so it's very powerful in the human mind.
And number four, you demonize anyone who steps out of the grievance group to speak his or her mind.
We saw that his or her own mind.
We saw that with Kanye West.
He escaped from the identity plantation.
They set the dogs after him, the dogs being CNN and NBC and ABC and the New York Times.
They set him after bring that guy back.
So that's how you do it.
You put people into groupthink, which is very natural to mankind.
It's only in the West where we believe in individuals.
And then you associate their grievances with the left.
Everything the right says is an attack on them.
And of course, anyone in the grievance group who dares to think independently also is crucified.
A great person to talk about this with is my friend Jesse Lee Peterson.
He is, he is, when I met Jesse Lee Peterson, I thought I was an honest man until I met Jesse Lee Peterson.
He's a pastor, an author, the host of the Jesse Lee Peterson Show on Newsmax TV.
I am going to be with him at an upcoming town hall on Tuesday, October 23rd at 7 p.m. Pacific.
Is that over at Bond, Jesse?
Can you hear me?
Is that the Barn headquarters?
All right.
And thank you so much for being a part of that.
I'm honored that you'll be back.
I want everybody and their mama to come.
We're going to have Republicans, Democrats, Independent Christians, atheists, everyone going to come, right?
All right.
And it's going to be October the 23rd, 7 p.m. at the headquarters of Bond in L.A.
They can go to jesseleapeterson.com to RSVP and get more information.
Okay, what are we going to be talking about?
We're going to be talking about the upcoming election.
Who they think is going to win, why and why not, their feelings about the Great White Hope.
You know, Brandon Trump.
You know, you and I had a big debate during the primaries where you said Trump was going to be great and I said he wasn't.
And you turned out to be so right.
How come you don't mock me more?
How come you don't like send me nasty tweets?
I told you so.
Because I believe I know your heart, and I believe you want what's right.
You want what's right for the country, for everybody, really.
You're not like one of those evil people who just disagree just to be disagreeing.
And so I respect men and women like you.
Ah, well, thank you.
That's a lovely thing to say.
Let's talk a little bit about this thing.
But I got to tell you this: the great white hope has been amazing so far.
He's been amazing.
He has been amazing.
More than I even imagined that he would be.
And it's going to get better.
You haven't seen anything yet.
It's going to get better.
Do you think, how do you think the midterms are going to go?
I believe that the Democrats will lose out again because they've been acting awfully.
So bad, I know, so bad.
And so even, you know, the Democrats who are Democrats, they're decent people, but they're Democrats.
I think that has been a turnoff for them.
Now, the four left, left, right radicals, they're going to go for the Democrats no matter what.
But the decent Democratic voters, I think they have been completely turned off by what they've seen with the trial.
I mean, with the hearing for Josh Kavanaugh, with the attacks on the Republicans and people who disagree with them, the encouragement of violence by the wicked witch of the West, Maxine Waters.
Yeah.
I'm glad you didn't actually say that out loud, Jesse.
I know you're just thinking it there.
So I think that the Democrats are going to lose out and they should lose out.
We don't need those type of people to be in charge of making decisions about our country.
You know, you have been one of the really solid voices against identity politics, which the left has used so powerfully.
It seems to me there's some hope that it's crumbling in front of our eyes, or is that too optimistic?
No, it is crumbling.
And I've noticed for the last 20-something years, I've been saying that there's no such thing as racism.
Racism does not exist.
It has never existed.
It's a made-up lie.
It's an illusion.
And you hear this from a man who was born on a plantation.
I grew up under the Jim Crow laws.
I had to pick cotton and all that good stuff.
And I didn't hear the word racism growing up at all.
I heard that it's a spiritual battle.
It's a warfare between good and evil.
It's either right or wrong.
And there are good people in all races and there are bad people in all races.
And we should judge people based on character.
But the children of the lie, you see that.
I see that.
Yeah.
What is that?
The fall of the, oh, from the fall of state TV.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Be aware of the children of the lie.
They are made out of issues to appear to be physical.
And so they've come up with terms like racism, sexism, homophobiaism, Islamophobiaism, dead be dad Islam, right?
And so you can't solve problems that doesn't exist.
But if you see it for what it is, you see it as right or wrong, you can resolve it.
And that's the only way we're going to solve these problems from looking at exactly what they are and not what the children of the lie are calling them.
When you say there's no such thing as racism, do you believe that there's such a thing as a racist?
No, there's a hater.
A hater, okay.
Yeah, in your father's state, you have anger, right?
Yeah.
And all men and women who have anger have been, they have fallen away from God from within and from above.
And so they're in an illusion.
And Satan is their father.
And so they're playing God by judging and hating their fellow man.
It's enough to see injustice and deal with it, but don't resent it.
Because when you resent it, it blinds you and you're now subject to it.
And so that's why people think it's about race because they're angry and can't really see what's going on.
So what I tell them to do is to go and forgive whomever they are angry at.
And most of the time it starts in the home with the parents.
Go and forgive your parents.
And when you forgive them, God will forgive you.
And he will take that spirit of darkness away from you and allow you to see.
Then you can see it has nothing to do with male or female.
It has nothing to do with color.
It's either right or wrong, good or evil.
It's spiritual.
That is really, I think if people were actually able to think like that, we'd be a lot further along the line to the kind of freedom we want to see.
No question about it.
That's right.
Now, I've already humbly admitted that you were right about Trump and I was wrong.
The guy's doing a great job.
Does it bother you as a pastor, does it bother you this, you know, when he's saying, tweeting insults at this woman, this porn star, Stormy Daniels, who I think is pretty clear he actually had an affair with.
Admitting Mistakes Matters00:06:02
Does it bother you to have a president who behaves in that way?
Is that a negative for the country?
Not one iota.
Okay.
Don't beat around the bush here.
We have to call it what it is.
One of the big mistakes that Christians have made and that right-of-Republicans have made in the past is that they try to cater and appease evil.
You cannot appease evil at all.
You can't give it any room in your personal life or public life because it will destroy you.
Its whole mission is to deceive and destroy.
And so the Republicans have been afraid to stand up to evil and call it what it is, but they have allowed themselves to be called every name in the book to a point that they're afraid to stand up for themselves.
If you call an evil woman evil, all of a sudden you hate women.
If you call black people, not all, but most raw, you hate blacks.
But you got to call it what it is, because if you don't, it will end up destroying you.
So when the president, when these people attack, if you notice, Andrew, they're always attacking and calling Christians all kind of names.
And now they're attacking men.
Every man on earth is now a rapist, a murderer, I mean, an abuser or a molester, right?
They call you whatever they want, but they cannot handle being called out.
And so by the president calling them out, they're having a hissy fit.
It's like putting water on a witch.
And so they're screaming, yelling, right?
But the Christians have to be careful not to be emotionally caught up in their overreaction to the president.
Otherwise, you're going to identify with evil rather than identify with good.
So we have to be logical and not emotional.
All right.
So fair enough.
But when you look back on Trump's, you know, obviously kind of loose sex life and the way he lived, does that bother you at all?
Do you think that's a bad example, for instance?
You know, you work with young men.
You try and get young men on the straight and narrow not to live that kind of life.
Is he a bad example to them?
Not at all.
And the reason for that, because that's who he was then.
That's not who he is today.
And we don't have a right.
If someone apologizes or repent and their life changed, we have to see that person for who they are now because we all have sin.
I mean, if you look back on my life, I used to be so into having sex with women that I didn't even think I could live without sex.
But I realized now that that was wrong.
I was in a faller state.
You know, I had this anger for my mother.
And all men who have anger for their mothers hate all women.
So they become attracted to what they hate.
And so they try to get something from women that they don't have to give.
And that is love.
And men think sex is love, but it's not, right?
And so when I forgave my mother, God forgave me.
He gave me back my own identity.
I no longer have her mindset and her emotions.
Now I have the same perfect love for all people.
And so I'm not into having sex out of wedlock.
I could wait.
You know, I could date and get to know the person.
They get to know me without bringing the emotion of sex into it.
Because the moment you have sex out of wedlock, you're blinded to the person that you're dating.
And men and women are blinded.
It's based on emotion.
And so I don't do that now.
I'm a different person now.
And so that's who I should be judged by or discerned by who I am today, not what I did in the past.
And that's how I see the president.
The president is not doing that today.
He's setting a perfect example right now.
And that's what I appreciate about him.
Fair enough.
Fair enough.
I got to ask you one last question, then I got to go.
But what was your reaction when you watched Kanye in the Oval Office?
I was happy.
I was like, right on.
Thank God, because I know that it's influencing a lot of people, especially young black men and women who have not heard outwardly another black person stand up and speak the truth and say it like it is.
Now, it'd been nice if he had not cursed because we should give respect to the White House.
You know what I'm saying?
But the fact that he's put it out there, it's influencing a lot of black men and women.
And even Maxine Water said, the wicked witch with the low IQ, she said that Kanye should be quiet or he should shut up or something because he is influencing other black people.
They don't want black Americans to take a real look at the Democratic Party and see that the party has used them and that the Republican Party platform is the best platform for them.
God, country, freedom, independent thinking, an individual, strong military.
The Democrats don't want the blacks to see that because if the blacks abandon the Democratic Party, it's over for the party.
It's over for them, no question about it.
And that's what Kanye is doing.
He's influencing.
I hope so.
All right.
So I'm going to be there at your town hall on Tuesday, October 23rd, October 23rd, Tuesday at 7 p.m. Pacific.
And is there a website people can go to look it up?
Yeah, jesseleipeterson.com.
JesseLeepeterson.com.
Jesse, it's always great talking to you.
Look forward to seeing you at the town hall.
I totally enjoy talking to you.
You ask good questions.
You make good comments.
And I love talking to people like that.
Thank you so much.
It's always a pleasure.
Thanks a lot.
All right, buddy.
All right.
We got the mailbag coming up.
God, that guy is great.
He is.
He's like on another plane from most people.
So we got the mailbag coming up.
Got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Is YouTube back?
It was down last night.
It's back as far as I know.
Yeah.
All right.
So, but, but come on over to dailywire.com.
You can listen to the whole show there.
If only, if only you would subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month or 100 bucks a year.
are you doing with that money anyway?
You're just sitting there with your, you know why you're clinging to that money?
Finding Solace Beyond the Bible00:14:51
Because you have problems.
You know how you get rid of your problems?
You send in stuff to the mailbag.
I solve all your problems.
All right, the mailbag is coming up.
The mailbag.
Yeah.
Another driver dropped off the road.
All right.
From Adam.
Hello, Andrew.
I sincerely hope this reaches you as I have nowhere else to turn.
My fiancé and I have been engaged for about a year.
Shortly after our engagement, we found out she was pregnant.
We couldn't have been happier, started doing everything we could together to prepare to bring our child into the world.
However, she ended having a miscarriage at 12 weeks.
She started going into a downward spiral since then.
She's become an alcoholic.
She will not open up to me, will not seek counseling with or without me.
And it feels more and more like we're not even in a relationship.
To top things off, I just found out, ironically, she admitted this while intoxicated, that a few months ago she got really drunk with some people at a bar, ended up going to one of these strangers' house to continue hanging out with everyone and ended up cheating on me with one of them.
She claims to have been so drunk that she cannot remember who it was.
I cannot begin to tell you how devastated and angry I am at her, not just the adultery, but that she kept acting like nothing happened for months.
All I could tell was that she was depressed and kept thinking it was due to the loss of our child.
Not that she cheated on me and was keeping it from me.
I even asked her if she had cheated on me at one point and she lied right to my face.
Now that she's told me, she's groveling saying how sorry she is and how much she loves me.
I just don't know if I can trust anything she says, and I'm tempted to throw her out of the house.
Any advice would be life-altering.
Thank you.
Well, that's horrible.
That's a really sad story.
I'm so sorry you lost the child.
I'm going to be like blunt about this.
If I were in this situation, I would get out of it, and I'll tell you why.
You're talking about marriage.
Marriage is for life.
It should be for life.
You should be thinking about it for life.
Over the course of 40 or 50 years of your life, you're going to laugh together and you're going to cry together.
Terrible things are going to happen and good things are going to happen.
That's every life, every life.
What has happened here is she has revealed that there is some incredible internal structural weakness in her, that a moment of grief, which is a true moment of grief, and I'm not in any way belittling her grief, destroyed her, destroyed her morality, destroyed her self-control, destroyed everything about her.
Now that, unless you are willing to sign on to someone who in that situation, in a crisis situation, is going to fall apart on you and maybe cheat on you again, I think at this stage in your relationship where you are not married, this is the time to end it.
That's what I would do.
And I know that's hard, and I know it's a hard saying, because you might say, well, don't you want to stand by her in her moment of grief?
If I were married to her, yes.
If I were married to her and we had a child, absolutely.
But in the situation that you're in, this is a warning sign that over the course of the next decades, when things like this will happen, sad, sad things will happen in life, she's not going to be able to handle it.
You're going to be alone, and you're going to be toting around this wreck of a human being who can't even stay sober enough to keep your relationship intact.
So I know it's judgmental, but it's also your future.
You're talking about your future.
The rest of your life is a long time, and you want to find somebody that you can live with in harmony, even in the bad times, because the bad times will come.
All right.
Well, that was tough, wasn't it?
Yeah.
But the way I see it.
From Matthew, dear supreme leader of the multiverse.
I like it when people use it.
It's so hard to ask people to use my title.
I've read your memoir, The Great Good Thing, and can report that it didn't, in fact, change my life for the better.
So thank you.
I just finished reading Dennis Prager's book, The Rational Bible, Exodus, and believe that too changed my life for the better.
I'm looking forward to reading that.
I'm now looking for annotated versions of the rest of the Bible.
There is an overabundance of recommendations online, given that I found both your memoir and Dennis Prager's work deeply moving.
Can you recommend any annotated Bible or annotated subset thereof that I should read next?
I have to tell you something.
I have never found an annotated Bible that I like.
And the reason is, the reason is I'm not looking for someone to tell me this sort of orthodox interpretation.
I'm looking for someone to set the Bible in context so I know what the person who was writing it was trying to say.
So for instance, if I'm reading the prophets, I find the prophets very difficult to understand if I don't know the context and the history in which they're making their prophecies.
So to that end, I can't recommend the Bible, but I recommend sincerely, not just out of nepotism, but also out of nepotism, my son is publishing his translation and commentary on Isaiah, and it's spectacular.
I mean, first of all, he's got it so that you pass the, it's online and you pass the mouse over certain words and it comes up and tells you, you know, what is a serial?
Why does it matter in this context?
And then his commentary is very deep and rich.
He's a fairly intelligent fellow.
I don't know.
He's like, you know, as long as he doesn't come home and try to live off us, he must be a brilliant guy.
If you want to find it, go to Twitter at Spencer Clavin.
It's S-P-E-N-C-E-R.
I have no idea how you spell Clavin, but it's at SpencerClavin on Twitter.
And you can go from there and subscribe and he'll send it to you in an email.
But it really is good.
I'm not kidding.
His Isaiah is good.
And I've just never found, if you're listening to this, listeners, if you've got some commentary that you love, some annotated Bible that you love, let me know and I'll take a look at it.
I have bought a number of them and I've never quite found one that really did the trick for me.
From Brenton, dear Supreme Leader Clavin, I've always wanted to get married, but recently I've had a change of heart.
I'm in my early 30s and after a lot of disappointments over the years, I finally decided that I like who I am and don't need marriage to define my life.
Then I met a girl who was just incredible.
That is the way this happens.
She's quite possibly the coolest girl I've ever known.
We have a lot in common.
I'm in the process of developing a friendship with her.
I'm quite confident that she does not know that I like her.
I have a huge problem though.
I work with her.
I already deal with anxiety.
I've had multiple anxiety attacks, including chest pains, and I do not want to screw something up and potentially make my life miserable at work.
I'd like to ask her out, but feel that the stakes are just too high.
Should I just be satisfied with having a good friend and enjoy the single life?
Or is it worth the gamble?
Thanks, Brent.
That's two questions, really.
And you've got to deal with the anxiety first.
I mean, you don't have to deal with the anxiety before you do anything else, but you have to deal with the anxiety.
Why are you so anxious?
What is making you like that?
Have you always been like that?
Is it something that happened in your life?
You know, you should not be walking around with anxiety attacks unless it is some physical thing you have and then you just have to live with it.
But what it seems to me that you're saying, it seems to me that you are giving in to these attacks.
What you're saying is, if I approach this girl, I put myself in a situation of anxiety, which is true.
You do.
As you say, a lot is at stake if you think you've met the girl who might be right for you.
So lots at stake.
So you're going to be anxious if you approach her.
But why can't you handle anxiety?
So I would deal with that.
I would deal with your anxiety.
Get a counselor if you need one.
Get a psychotherapist if you need one.
I deal with that.
And then, yes, I would definitely get out of the workplace, someplace where you're not, where you're just having a cup of coffee together, taking a walk together, out of the workplace.
What I would say to her is this.
Listen, I do not want to make you uncomfortable.
I know that work is a difficult place for this, but I find you a really appealing person and I would like to get to know you better.
If you're not in with that, that's fine.
I will go back to, we'll just go back to working together.
But I want you to know that I feel that way and I'd like to know you better.
I mean, you don't have to like, you know, throw yourself down on your knees and propose to her.
Just say, you know, you find her an appealing human being and would really like to get to know her better and see where that goes.
She may be waiting for you to do it.
I would guess, my guess is that she is, actually.
But also, you've got to deal with the anxiety, because what you're saying is, I'm going to curtail my life and bow to king anxiety, let anxiety control my life.
And you do not want to do that.
You want your life to be your life, not your anxiety's life.
From Therese, I followed the Gosnell story closely when it was in the news, what little coverage there was.
I watched the documentary, 3801 Lancaster, even though I knew how it ended.
The movie Gosnell had me on the edge of my seat at times.
How is that possible?
How did you write a suspense story for something that's such a well-documented historic episode?
Well, I'm a crime writer.
I've been doing this all my life.
And the thing about suspense is what makes people suspenseful, what makes a scene suspenseful is character.
So if the character is a stock character, you're going to get cheap suspense.
You can do that.
You can put, you know, he's the good guy.
He's on the cliff.
Is he going to fall off the cliff?
But good suspense writing, elevated suspense writing, creates characters that you care about and then you care about the outcome for them.
And you don't actually know, even if you know what the historical outcome is, you don't know what the outcome for the character is.
And you're living with, if it's written well, you're living in that character.
And of course, with a movie, it has to be acted well as well.
You're living in that character and you're experiencing what they're experiencing.
And so it's suspenseful even if you know the ending because you're living through the suspense with them.
And that's how you do it.
I mean, everything for me in writing is about not just the events.
It's about which character is in the events.
That's how you know you have a good story when you've got the right character to go with those events.
From Josiane, I believe it's pronounced.
Recently I found out that my son-in-law is the grandson of an SS officer who is in a concentration camp.
Wow.
He said, my son-in-law says that he was a good Nazi who escaped to South America and had a daughter raised by a Brazilian family.
I grew up in post-war Belgium and heard all the stories of horror inflicted by the Nazis.
There were no good Nazis, especially in the camps.
That's absolutely true.
My immediate emotional response was to detach from my son-in-law.
I don't believe I will ever be able to be in the same room with him.
I have a one-year-old granddaughter.
My question to you, wise Andrew, how can I have a relationship with him and my daughter?
I have suggested a divorce.
Is that wrong?
Yes, it's definitely wrong.
First of all, this guy didn't do anything.
This is his grandfather.
You do not get cursed by the evil that your grandfather did.
You're absolutely right.
There were no good Nazis.
There were no good Nazis in the camps.
It was a foul, vile, satanic philosophy and their actions were satanic.
But this guy wasn't there.
He didn't do this.
He can't help who his grandfather was.
Now, he was obviously told, like, you know, Elizabeth Warren, he was told this family lore that there was such a thing as a good Nazi.
What I would say about this is let it go for now.
Let your anger go.
Let the subject go.
Go in love to your son-in-law and your daughter and your granddaughter who needs you.
Let them have their happy marriage.
Do not get in the way.
That would be a foul thing to do.
That would be the wrong thing to do.
After you've calmed down, after you've recovered yourself and come back to yourself, you can have a loving, calm conversation about the fact that there were no good Nazis.
You don't have to get him.
He doesn't have to curse his grandfather.
You don't need to get him to that place.
But you can express that to him.
But I would not do it even for a year.
I would just wait until you've got your senses back because it's not right to blame.
He could be the son of a Nazi.
It would still not be right.
You judge him on his philosophy, on what he does.
Now, if you find that in fact he's an anti-Semite or he's hateful in some way, that's a different story.
But that's not what you've told me.
What you've told me is just that his grandfather did something and that he has been told ways of dismissing it.
He may not know anything about the Holocaust.
He may not know anything about World War II.
The important thing for you to do is have a relationship with your daughter, your granddaughter, and your son-in-law.
And I think you need to put this aside in love and go forward.
It's just not right to curse somebody for the deeds of his grandfather.
It doesn't make any moral sense at all.
From Norm, Guru Drew, I just got back from watching the Gosnell movie with my Tuesday morning Bible class.
It was the most disturbing movie I've ever seen.
I'm really glad I went to see it.
Everyone in my group was speechless after the closing credits.
I've heard that a lot, that the audience is speechless afterwards.
When we did regain the ability to speak, all agreed that it was a marvelously done movie.
Something I had thought about from this case, how much of a time difference would there be in the baby being killed in the womb, which would have been legal, and the baby being killed after birth, which got Gosnell convicted for murder.
Is it merely a matter of minutes between legal abortion and illegal?
No, it's not.
In most states, the limit is viability, which is considered to be 20 weeks or something like that.
It's different in each state, but it's usually around 20 weeks.
But when you think about 20 weeks for a minute, it's five months, right?
That's like five months.
So a five-month-old fetus is a baby, you know, and it may not be viable outside the womb.
It's still a baby.
So it's still savage, a savage thing to do, but it is legal.
Gosnell was doing them.
He was the place that people went to get late-term abortions.
Many of them poor, many of them black.
Many of them had several abortions and were basically using it as a form of birth control.
So anyway, there is a difference.
It's not like one minute the baby is in most states, it's not one minute you can do it and one the next minute you can.
But it is pretty far advanced to me.
To me, 20 weeks is a pretty savage thing to do.
The entire thing to me is barbarity.
It's just barbarity.
I mean, I think we have to get our minds right about this.
From Carlos, dear conservative Commander Clavin, the Constitution is pretty great.
So I was wondering what changes, if any, would you make?
I'd probably add to the Third Amendment, the government cannot force any wartime behavior on its citizenry.
I wouldn't do that, actually.
I think there are emergencies in which freedom takes second place.
That's why the left is always declaring emergencies.
You know, it's like a climate change emergency because they're always trying to get rid of freedom.
But there are real emergencies in which the government has to call you up.
The one thing I think the Constitution should have is it should forbid the federal government to redistribute money.
I know that every free nation ultimately develops a social spending system.
I think it should be done by the states if it's done at all.
I do not see the moral, I see the benefit of it, but I think it has also crippled people.
There was a wonderful editorial about this.
I hope to talk about this another time, but about how, yes, it has alleviated poverty.
Social spending does alleviate poverty, but it also reduces people to dependency at the same time.
So I think there should be other, there are other ways of alleviating poverty beside that.
And I think it would be great if the Constitution just said, you can't do it.
You can't do it.
The power isn't in the Constitution.
So you shouldn't be able to do it anyway.
It is all stuff that basically FDR bullied them into permitting.
All right, I got to wind up, but I'll do one more.
Benefits vs. Dependency00:05:29
Dear Lord Clavin, my brother and I used to be very close, but he has not spoken with me or several other family members since the election.
He took great offense to a YouTube video that I shared, and he labeled me a racist and unaware of my white privilege.
He tried to shame me rather than have a conversation.
I never complained about his left-wing causes, emails and forwards over the years, but the tolerance is not reciprocated.
He has such strong hatred for Trump and anything he touches, and he has stated, I'm done.
Should I take him at his word or how might I reach out to him?
Do I have or wait to wait for a Democrat to take the presidency before I can talk to my brother again?
I have this in my own life, Jonathan.
It is really weird to me that I, for eight years, Obama, they just don't understand.
They do not see themselves that Obama was just as offensive to me as Trump is to them in so many ways.
I never started, I would argue with them about it, but I never stopped talking to anybody.
I never cursed anybody.
I never said, and yet they feel it's just fine to just write you out of their life like that.
It is an amazing act of sanctimony and self-unawareness.
That word I have no, that word there is no word for, cluelessness about oneself.
And the only thing you can do is, you know, you can write one email, one email to your brother and say, look, this is the way I feel about this.
I never did this to you.
I'm sorry you do this to me.
I'm always here for you.
I love you.
But I'm not going to reach out to you and be insulted.
Contact me when you calm down.
That's the only thing I think you can do.
And then you have to live with that.
You have to live with that.
I mean, you have to live with when you say goodbye to somebody.
They might not come back.
You got to live with it.
Like I said, I have this in my own life.
I've had to do this with people.
I'm here for them if they want to come back and talk.
But at the same time, I just think I cannot break through the sanctimonious idea that somehow by disagreeing with them politically, you are committing an atrocity that means they should write you out of your life.
It's ridiculous.
tickety-boo news.
Well, as I say, there's so much tickety-boo news.
I really have been in a state of bliss since the Kavanaugh.
You know, the thing about the Kavanaugh thing is not Kavanaugh, though I think he'll be an excellent judge.
It's not that.
It is the overcoming, the turning back of this tide of panic and hysteria, this media war that has been waging.
It was the victory over panic and hatred and the end of due process and identity politics.
It just made me feel bliss.
But there's plenty of other reasons.
The U.S. is now the most competitive country in the world, regaining the number one spot for the first time since the collapse in 2008.
All this talk that the recovery started with Obama is garbage because the recovery started, would have started under a stuffed cat.
It would have started under anybody.
When you have a crash in America, our economy is so strong, it always bounds back in accordance with the crash.
So normally, when the crash comes, if it's a bad crash like this one was, the recovery is big and strong and very quick.
And that is the way it has always been.
Milton Friedman pointed this out.
It's the way it's always been with Obama.
He sat on the recovery with his stupid health care bill, with his complete regulation of businesses, with his changing regulations and his incredible red tape.
And now Trump has taken that off and the economy is soaring.
But in keeping with that, I want to mention the death of Paul Allen, who was Bill Gates' partner in founding Microsoft.
Bill Gates said that personal computing would not have existed without him.
There's a little bit of an obit, it's really an op-ed, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal today in which they pointed out that the founding of Apple and of Microsoft and Apple came in the 1970s when, first of all, anybody would have said that IBM was going to be the greatest computer company, but instead, Microsoft and Apple came to dominate the desktop computer revolution.
But as it says in this editorial, the late 1970s were also a time full of angst about whether America's best days were over, right?
This was happening when Jimmy Carter, when Richard Nixon was, you know, when Watergate was happening, when Jimmy Carter followed, Jimmy Carter gave that famous speech where he said America is in a malaise and where did it come from?
And everybody, the left, was saying, oh my goodness, America is ungovernable.
And this is just before Ronald Reagan came.
All I want to say about this is this, that conservatives are very good at reading the tea leaves and seeing disaster.
But you do not know what's coming and you do not know what is happening now.
You do not know who is sitting in his bedroom, who is a 15-year-old somewhere sitting in his bedroom dreaming the dreams that are going to make a beautiful, beautiful future.
That is why we leave people free to make those futures.
That is why we don't try to write the future or have the government demand or command what the future is, but just let people dream it up in their garages, dream it up in their bedrooms, and set them free to do the things that they have to do.
There's fracking here because we have property rights.
Microsoft and Apple became so big because we have capitalism.
When these big companies get so big, they start to become socialists.
Why?
Because that kills the competition and leaves the monopoly free to them.
We should not let that happen.
We should always, always be supporting the little guy who dreams.
And the only way to support that little guy is to keep people free, keep socialism out, and keep corporations from becoming what they ultimately become, which is a force, a power pool that wants to preserve its power.
All right.
Keep Corporations Free00:00:50
The backstage is coming this afternoon.
What time is that?
Four o'clock Pacific.
Four o'clock Pacific, which is who knows what it is in the East.
You guys make up your own rules as far as I can tell.
And we will be back again tomorrow.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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