Andrew Clavin and Eric Metaxas dissect the left’s occult spectacle at Catland Books—a hexing ritual mocking Kavanaugh, Pelosi, and Clinton—while dismissing it as performative superstition. They pivot to Trump’s measured response to Khashoggi’s murder, contrasting his caution with media hysteria over unverified tapes and Rubio/Graham’s leverage via arms sales. Metaxas defends Trump as a "swamp-draining" folk hero, framing opposition as complicity with Clinton, and warns Christians against political isolationism, citing Wilberforce’s activism. The episode ties cultural decline to faith’s retreat from public debate, ending with Socrates in the City’s philosophical counterpoint to shallow media narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
Witches will be gathering in Brooklyn, New York this weekend to attempt to cast a spell on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
I could not possibly have made that up.
The witches will gather at Catland Books, which says it is Brooklyn's premier occult bookshop and spiritual community space.
So if you find yourself in one of Brooklyn's lesser occult bookshops and spiritual community spaces, then you've come to the wrong spiritual community space.
The invitation on Catland's Facebook page reads, quote, and this is a real quote, please join us for a public hex on Brett Kavanaugh upon all rapists and the patriarchy at large, which emboldens, rewards, and protects them.
Kavanaugh will be the focal point, but by no means the only target.
So bring your rage and all of the axes you've got to grind, unquote.
Now, clearly, witches casting spells on a conservative justice is very politically appropriate since nothing says leftism like bizarre superstition mixed with rage and hideous-looking green-skinned women with warty noses grinding their axes.
In fact, I think the actual dictionary definition of leftism might be superstition, rage, and hideous-looking women grinding axes.
According to the invitation, the hexing will feature a ceremony in which Nancy Pelosi and two other hideous crones dance around a boiling brew in a huge black kettle, singing double-double, We're in trouble, Obama's policies are rubble, I of Newt and Toe of Mitch.
I can't think of a rhyme for Mitch that fits Pelosi, so I'll leave it there.
Anyway, the invitation says there'll also be a second ritual afterward called, again, this is real, the Rights of the Scorned One.
So I guess Hillary Clinton will be on hand as well.
The witches say they're hoping a ceremony of malevolent females intoning useless nonsense in service to the evil one will attract everyone who still believes in the Democrat Party, namely malevolent females intoning useless nonsense in service to the evil one.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Try ZipRecruiter For Free00:03:36
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It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, we are back.
It is Thursday, and yet, once again, I would have to say the Claven this weekend has been canceled.
Tomorrow is Friday, so the third episode of Another Kingdom Season 2 will be available to everyone.
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Do not let what happens here happen to you.
All right.
You know, one of the things that I've been just fascinated by in the Trumpet, I'm always fascinated by the press, obviously.
I'm always fascinated by the media because I'm a storyteller and I'm watching them tell stories and I'm watching the way those stories do set the agenda for what we're talking about.
And one of the things that's been so fascinating about Donald Trump is that he manipulates the media.
Media Pressure Tactics00:15:02
Because he's a media guy, he manipulates them so expertly, not always in ways that I like, but he forces them to cover the things that they would bury.
So, you know, they made fun of him for attacking or making fun of Christine Ford, but he went out there and talked about the fact that she didn't remember things very conveniently and remembered things conveniently, and they said he's mocking her.
But in order to attack him, they also had to report what was true was that she didn't remember a lot of details that would have been able, would have made the story possible to check, but she did remember a lot of details that condemned Brett Kavanaugh.
So it was kind of suspicious.
And he brought that, he forced them to cover that.
Yesterday or the day before, when he called Stormy Daniels Horseface, he forced them to cover the fact that he had won the lawsuit.
So Michael Avenatti, for all his big talk and all his swaggering around and all CNN made him a big, you know, made him a big hero.
He's obviously not very good at what he does.
You know, he actually put her in a situation where she was humiliated and he, by being rooted, just forced them to do that.
Because they hate him so much, you can actually watch the news process go wrong.
This is the thing that fascinates me.
You can actually watch the news.
You know how they say you don't like to see the sausage being made?
You can actually watch the news go into the grinder and come out crap.
You know, like you see actually, like, you know, this Jamal Khajogi thing is so interesting.
It's interesting because it's a developing story.
It's interesting because it's an interesting story.
Interesting, why?
Because we have so many ties to Saudi Arabia.
The area is such a, you know, a hotbed of violence and there's nobody there except Israel that we can turn to who's a good, you know, they always say, why did you back this evil strongman in the Middle East?
And it's like, because Lincoln wasn't there, you know, I mean, we do what we can do, you know.
And so we have this very complex relationship with the Saudi, a lot of money involved, weapons sales, oil, all this stuff.
And now they've done something.
They've got this new crown prince, MBS, they call him, Muhammad bin Salman.
And he's obviously not very good at being an evil dictator.
You know, he's an evil dictator, but he's just not very good at it.
He keeps making these stupid, evil dictator mistakes.
I don't think he probably didn't finish evil dictator school.
You know, I think he probably got through maybe a year of evil dictator school and thought, I have this.
You know, when you're a crown prince, who's going to say to you, no, my friend, you do not yet know how to be an evil.
No, no, I finished the first year of evil.
Yeah, you want a few more years of evil dictator.
He's just not very good at it.
You know, he just keeps bumbling around, kidnapping and killing people and making the country look ridiculous.
And of course, we are very gullible, so like he lets women drive and we go, oh, he's a reformer, you know, not noticing like the 17 journalists who suddenly vanish from different countries as he carries them away.
So the New York Times, a former newspaper, runs a story today, and a lot of people are running the story.
A Turkish official says he's got an audio tape of Khashoggi being killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by the evil Saudi Arabian hit gang that was supposed to have arrived there.
Now, you'll notice no one, I don't believe, at least as of the last time I was looking, which is a few minutes ago, nobody has heard this audio tape.
And we have every reason not to trust the Turks in this situation.
They don't like that.
They have plenty of motives to get between us and the Saudis.
They themselves are vying for power in the region.
But it's a good story.
It's a good story, and you want to put it forward.
What's interesting about the Times is they write it as if they had heard the audio.
They say, they tell you that they haven't, but they write it as if the story is true.
It says, Saudi agents were waiting when Jamal Khashoggi walked into their country's consulate in Istanbul two weeks ago.
Mr. Khashoggi was dead within minutes, beheaded, dismembered, his fingers severed, and within two hours, the killers were gone, according to details from audio recordings and then like a Henry James sentence where you only get to the sense of it at the end, described by a senior Turkish official on Wednesday.
Okay, so this is still the Turks telling us what's going on.
It is not somebody hearing it.
The government of Turkey let out these and other leaks about the recordings on Wednesday.
A Secretary of State Mike Mompeo visited Ankara and an escalation of pressure on both Saudi Arabia and the United States for answers.
Now, here's the interesting thing about this: the Times is actually doing the right thing.
Part of the journalist's job in a situation like this is to bring the pressure.
Why?
Because doing the moral right thing is always a kind of, it always works against real politic.
What does real politic want us to do?
It wants us to work with the Saudis, get them money, get the ally against Iran, get somebody who can work with the Israelis behind the scenes.
All that is good stuff, and we don't want to lose that because this crown prince dropped out of evil dictator school.
We do not want to lose all those things.
So it's complex.
It's an interesting, complex story.
The role of the press in this story is to bring pressure on the government to do something, to make sure they do something, because it would be easy for the government to pass it, let it pass by.
Morality always comes in second place.
I was talking, I was on a, did an interview in Chicago today on Chicago radio, and I was talking about Hollywood and how I never really cared about losing Hollywood work because of the things I said, because I'm a writer and the things I say are what I do.
I wake up.
What makes me wake up in the morning is looking to see, get as close to the truth as I can, and then communicate it in ways that will mean something to people.
So when Hollywood said, yeah, if you do that, we're not going to hire you anymore.
My feeling is that don't hire me anymore.
It doesn't make me a martyr.
It makes me a writer.
It makes me do the thing that I do.
But when I had little kids at home, I picked my fights.
I mean, I was still a loudmouth.
I mean, I was still somebody who would say the thing I probably shouldn't have said.
And I would risk money and I gave up jobs and I did all that stuff and I tried to be a moral guy.
But when you have kids, you play it a little more careful, right?
You don't want those kids to go hungry because they are everything to you and they're your responsibility.
When it's just me and my wife, if my wife starves, like, you know, no, I mean, you know, it's different when you don't have kids.
So when you are dealing with the world and you wanted politics to go right and morality gets in the way, you've got to play it, you know, not immoral, but you've got to play it cautiously.
You've got to balance everything because it's not moral for us to let the Middle East explode because Crown Prince MBS dropped out of evil dictator school.
It's just not, you know.
So Trump is doing the right thing too.
He's waiting.
Pompeo's coming back.
He's going to talk to Pompeo today.
He says by the end of the week, he thinks he'll know what went on, but he's still playing it very cool.
So here he is.
This is cut number five, talking about the situation with Khashoggi.
Saudi Arabia has been a very important ally of ours in the Middle East.
We are stopping Iran.
We're not trying to stop, we're stopping Iran.
We went a big step where we took away that ridiculous deal that was made by the previous administration, the Iran deal, which was $150 billion or $1.8 billion in cash.
What was that all about?
And they are an ally.
We have other very good allies in the Middle East.
But if you look at Saudi Arabia, they're an ally and they're a tremendous purchaser of not only military equipment, but other things.
When I went there, they committed to purchase $450 billion worth of things and $110 billion worth of military.
Those are the biggest orders in the history of this country.
Probably the history of the world.
I don't think there's ever been any order for $450 billion.
And you remember that day in Saudi Arabia where that commitment was made.
So they're an important ally, but I want to find out what happened, where is the fault, and we will probably know that by the end of the week.
But Mike Pompeo is coming back.
We're going to have a long talk.
So that's Trump.
Trump is actually being the grown-up in the room.
Trump is not always the grown-up in the room.
He's been, but in his Trumpian way, he's being the grown-up in the room.
It is the job of the New York Times, and here I'm giving credit to the New York Times, a former newspaper, a newspaper that I think has really become leftist trash, but that is doing the right thing.
Bring the pressure.
Make sure the government knows that we expect them to do the moral thing.
There's Donald Trump doing the right thing, saying what he's supposed to say, that wait, wait, this is a complicated situation.
We've got a lot of stuff going on.
Let's get the facts first.
We're not going to do the Brett Kavanaugh and just say people are guilty because somebody accuses them.
We know there's a lot of mystery and deception going on in the Middle East.
Let's wait.
So two folks doing the right thing.
Who else is doing the right thing?
I think the senators are doing the right thing.
I think when Lindsey Graham came out and said, this will not stand, I'm not going to deal with these people.
I think he was doing the right thing.
Marco Rubio talking about it too.
He's just making sure that they know that the government, because the government is not just Trump, the government is the legislature as well, making sure that they know.
So here's Rubio doing the right thing.
Luring someone into a consulate where they're thereby murdered, dismembered, and disposed of is a big deal.
And by the way, this happens to be a green card holder of the United States who have been a journalist, but he could have been a maintenance worker at the Washington Post.
It wouldn't have mattered.
It's a human being whose life was taken by a direct act of a foreign government by luring them into a diplomatic facility in a third country.
I mean, any one of those factors is bad.
Put them all together and it's catastrophic.
And as far as arms sales are concerned, it's not the money.
There are other countries we could sell that to and ports.
It's just not the money.
Arms sales does give us leverage over a country.
When they have our weapons systems, they need our maintenance.
They need our replacement equipment and the like.
And that gives us leverage over their behavior.
That's why we're talking about arms sales now because it's leverage.
But they'll buy those weapons from someone else.
But I don't care how much money it is.
There isn't enough money in the world to purchase back our credibility on human rights and the way nations should conduct themselves.
We lose our credibility and our moral standing to criticize Putin for murdering people, Assad for murdering people, Maduro and Venezuela for murdering people.
We can't say anything about that if we allow Saudi Arabia to do it and all we do is a diplomatic slap on the wrist.
Marco Rubio doing the right.
You know, I talk so much about the lies and the dishonesty and the leftism and the bias of the press, the idiot bias of the press.
I just wanted to point out that this is the way things should work.
All right.
Trump should be the grown-up in the room.
Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham should bring some pressure.
The New York Times should bring some pressure.
This is the way things should work.
This is the negotiation in motion.
This is the way we get to a place where finally in the end we say, well, this is how we're going to punish Saudi Arabia, but this is how we're not going to blow up the relationship altogether.
That's what we're trying to get to.
Everybody's got to play his part.
Now, let's watch this turn to garbage because of our media, okay?
That's how it should work, and that's how it does work a little bit.
And now let's watch it turn to garbage.
First of all, we have the detectives of the press, the Sherlock Holmes of the press.
They found the murderer of Jamal Khashoggi.
They have found out who did, is responsible for this crime.
This is cut number 10.
We've got a president that has already named journalists as being the enemy of the people.
So don't be surprised when other countries take on a journalist, murder them, chop him into pieces, and dispose of them.
Did Donald Trump, who has always been critical of the Washington Post, always been critical of his ownership, did anybody in the administration, did Jared Kushner, did they give MBS sort of a nod and a wink to say it's okay?
The president expressing concern that Jamal Khashoggi is a reporter.
He's a columnist, really, and a critic of the Saudi government.
That stands in contrast with a message that the president has frequently sent to the American people and to his supporters that the media are the enemy of the people.
How do you square those two?
I wonder if you look at what's happened the last 12 days and you wonder if enemy of the people rhetoric, not just from President Trump, but also then from other world leaders, has anything to do with this, anything at all.
Brian Stelter and Joe Scarborough and the rest of the, they should put their heads in a bucket just to wash the crap out of their brains, okay?
Because this is like, you know, put your petty bias, if you want to sit around at dinner and say it's all Trump's fault, but don't go on TV, don't go in front of a camera and take your petty, stupid, biased point of view and blame the American president for killing a man, which is essentially what they did.
That is the news turning to crap.
You saw what it should look like when it works right.
There's nothing wrong with taking a stand and saying something must be done.
There's nothing wrong with bringing pressure.
That's what the press should do.
It should bring moral pressure on the government because the government wants to act always in terms of real politic, but the press should be there as a moral voice.
Donald Trump didn't do this.
Donald Trump, you know, they keep saying, well, all he cares about is the monies.
Now, all he cares about.
You know, he didn't do this.
He didn't kill anybody.
They are the enemy of the people because they do this garbage.
You know, this is an actual serious situation, a delicate foreign policy incident, an international incident that has to be dealt with.
Unbelievable.
And then, just to make sure, just to make sure that they haven't quite destroyed every vestige of responsibility, every vestige of trust we would ever have in them, they have to make it about their little, their little game that they play, identity politics.
It has to be about race.
So Jason Johnson is on MSNBC, and I don't usually pick on MSNBC because I know they're just leftist clowns, and they denounce it.
It's not like they lie about it like the New York Times.
But you just have to listen to this.
Cut four.
He basically said, I don't care.
It was a brown journalist.
He's not an American.
And I'm perfectly happy with our relationship with Turkey.
And I'm perfectly happy with our relationship with Saudi Arabia.
I just want to be clear about what you're saying.
You think it might have been different if it was a different person?
Oh, yes, yes.
I think there is a possibility.
Look, I'm not going to name any particular news networks, but I suspect that if this was someone who was an American who was born here of a different color and perhaps representing a news outlet that the president was more happy with, he may have a very different opinion about how serious this is and whether or not Saudi Arabia should be held accountable.
You know, when I hear this, when I hear that he doesn't care, that Trump doesn't care about this guy because he's brown, a brown journalist, which he barely is, the words that come to mind are the immortal words of Chris Cuomo.
You are not a banana.
I Conceived of It As a Humor Book00:15:14
Chris Cuomo, that is the worst insult that Chris can throw you.
You are not a banana.
You know, this is the way you get guys like there is a video going around.
You may have seen it because it's practically gone viral.
A video going around of this guy tearing up signs in Texas for Ted Cruz.
Like, what makes this guy think that his point of view is so precious that he has the right to commit these acts of vandalism?
But he's tearing up signs and the guy who put the signs there goes after him with the video cam and gets him on tape.
And this is how you get this guy.
It's this constant barrage of bias and stupidity, twisting every story to their left-wing purposes, every single story, creating this cloud, this atmosphere that something is terribly wrong when nothing is wrong except in Saudi Arabia.
Look at this video of this guy tearing up the Ted Cruz signs and being challenged by the guy who put him there.
Appropriate response.
That would be a good idea.
You know, I have bought 100 of these.
I'm about to put more out.
Cool.
All right.
Well, I'll feel better about the...
The Cruz!
I hate the Cruz!
I hate the Cruz!
It's the exorcist!
The guy's been possessed by the spirit of CNN.
They're going to bring in a priest and they're going to do a service over him and Don Lemon is going to spew out of his mouth.
This great green slime of Don Lemon.
I mean, this is how you get these guys.
This is how you get these guys who are screaming at people in the street, who are vandalizing buildings.
This is how you get these college students who think their rage is the same thing as righteousness.
You know, this is how you get them.
I mean, really, I really feel like, you know, I can't remember who it was who played the priest and the exorcist, but they should just bring him in and just like see if he just vomits up Chris Cuomo.
He just vomits up MSNBC.
Unbelievable, unbelievable.
And the only thing I can tell you is the only thing that really struck me is they have kept such watch over the culture to make sure that they can do this.
You know, remember how they canceled Last Man Standing, the Tim Allen show, because he plays a conservative in the show.
And they finally, they brought it back because audiences were angry about it.
It has just come back and it's doing great in the ratings.
It is doing great in the ratings.
And you know what's doing badly in the ratings?
The Connors, the show that they revamped after they fired Roseanne Barr, which I really feel they never should have done that.
They never should have done it.
Everything they do is to protect this voice that they have, this power that they have, to set the narrative, to make it seem as if everything is about Trump, that Trump is going over and killing journalists because they're brown.
I mean, that is basically the story that you were hearing from all those people.
Trump is letting journalists die because they're not the same color.
You know, it's like, what on earth?
What on earth?
And that's how you get these crazy guys.
And you wonder, like, why is everybody angry?
It's not because of the politics.
It's really not.
Things are going really well in this country.
We keep hearing there's a crisis in this country, a crisis of insanity, induced insanity, because these guys have control of the narrative and they will not share.
They will not let it go.
They're pulling down Facebook pages like crazy.
They knocked my friend Gay Patriot off Twitter.
While meanwhile, Louis Farrakhan is calling Jews termites on Twitter.
Not a word, absolute silence from the Twitter folks about this.
Why?
Because Louis Farrakin isn't a right-winger.
That's why.
They're just, they're in the run-up, in the run-up to the midterms.
They are just trying to silence conservatives.
They are so desperate to hold on to this narrative.
And they don't understand, or maybe they do and they don't care.
They don't understand that this is what's causing the division.
If you let people talk, they will talk it out.
If you let people say what they want to say, we Americans will find a way.
You know, we're going to stay on Facebook and YouTube today so you can hear this excellent interview with my friend Eric Metaxas.
But please subscribe.
There's so much to subscribe for at this point.
We've made it absurd.
It's absurd.
I mean, you're sitting there with 10 bucks.
What are you going to do?
Turn it into a paper airplane?
What can you do with 10 bucks when you can get in the mailbag and get all your questions answered with 100% accuracy?
Where else can you get that kind of guarantee?
You can hear Ben, you can hear Knowles, you can hear Walsh.
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And if you subscribe for the year for a lousy hundred bucks, you get the leftist tears tumbler, which, God willing, you're going to need as the midterms come closer.
All right, let us talk about Eric Metaxas.
He is a great guy and one of the truly entertaining, thoughtful people in the world.
He's a New York Times number one best-selling author for his biography of Martin Luther and of Bonhoeffer, which I thought was a terrific book, a really good book.
He hosts the Eric Metaxas show, which is nationally syndicated.
And his new book is Donald Drains the Swamp, which is a kids' book, which we'll talk about, about guess who draining the swamp.
Pretty hilarious.
Here is Eric Metaxas.
Eric Metaxas, it is good to see you.
Thank you for coming on.
It's good to see you.
This technology is scary to me.
It's unbelievable.
It's amazing.
I can almost smell you, almost smell you, really.
A lot of people say that.
I don't know what that is.
So you are now, you have gone from writing your best-selling books for adults.
You're now trying to poison the minds of little children by teaching them about Donald Trump.
What on earth would cause you to sink to that level?
Why would you do such a thing?
Well, a lot of things could cause me to sink to that level, but I will tell you specifically what caused me to sink to that level specifically.
First of all, it's an interesting thing.
Now, have you shown the book to has the audience seen the book or should I hold up my copy so they know what we're doing?
We will, through the magic of technology, we will have the book shown on the book.
The reason I ask, because when you look at it, of course it looks like a children's book, but I didn't conceive of it as a children's book.
I conceived of it as a humor book for adults.
Some people know that I joke around, I've written humor.
Even when I was back at Yale, I was the editor of the humor magazine.
I've written humor for the New York Times and whatever.
But now the whole magazine, the whole paper is humor.
So I no longer write humor for them.
But I said, I want to write something that celebrates this president in a fun way and then kind of, you know, pokes some fun at the swamp and the bipartisan members of the swamp.
And I thought of this kind of fable and I said, wouldn't it be fun to do a humor book that's like a children's book?
The problem, Andrew, is that the humor is so sweet.
It's not mean political humor that it works also as a children's book.
So lots of people are buying the book for their kids.
And really, it works as a children's book.
It's a cute book about a caveman named Donald who goes up against the swamp creatures and drains the swamp.
It's very cute.
So adults will find the humor in it because there's a lot of adult kind of humor.
But at the same time, it's sweet.
It's not meant to be mean.
You are an early Donald adopter.
You really sort of saw what was coming pretty early.
Am I right about that?
Well, I would say that the genuine answer to that would have to be yes and no, because there were people who saw it far earlier than I did.
I'm a New Yorker, so I have mixed feelings.
In other words, I have been in a world that it's like we know Trump, we know how he thinks.
And I thought of him as a Bulgarian, as somebody who, when it came to the culture, he did, he bothered me.
There's something about the way he came across and things.
But during the primaries, a friend of mine, the guy who actually is my co-author on this wonderful book, and he's the illustrator of the book, Tim Raglan, I was talking to him on the phone.
We're old friends.
And he said, Eric, you're missing it.
This guy's a folk hero.
And I said, what do you mean?
And he starts saying, have you seen these rallies?
Watch him.
He's a folk hero.
There's nobody like him.
So I started watching him and I thought to myself, you know what?
I'm buying what this guy's selling.
This guy's hilarious.
He's unbelievably funny.
He connects with the common man like no one I've ever seen.
And what he says actually makes sense.
Frankly, I was shocked.
And I was, I sort of fell in love with him.
I actually, I mean, if you can believe it, I wrote a humor piece for the New Yorker, kind of making fun of Trump, right?
And they published it.
It was called A Few More Trump Bible Verses, kind of making fun of his biblical illiteracy.
I remember that, yeah.
Right.
But in the course of making fun of him and writing in the voice of Trump, I found myself having an affection for him.
And I sort of said, this is really, this is a folk hero.
My friend is right.
So I pretty quickly, I mean, depending on when people jumped in, but it was still in the primaries.
I wasn't able to announce it, you know, publicly.
I have a radio program.
I have a lot of people that might disagree, but I said, when he finally won the nomination, I'm going to have to, you know, go with him because obviously the antithesis or the antithesis, his enemy, his opponent is, you know, Hillary Clinton.
I don't think we have much of a choice.
But I was astounded how many people still said, I will never vote for him.
And I thought, I don't think you understand.
There's actually not a third candidate.
And I kept thinking, am I missing something?
Is Ross Perot running?
What did I miss?
John Anderson, who's running?
And the fact of the matter is, to this day, there are people who they seem not to like Hillary, but they would never pull the lever for Donald.
And I, look, I think at the end of the day, those people are wrong.
But I try to be friendly about it because there's so much bitterness.
And the reason I wrote this book, I frankly thought we need humor.
We need to have some fun.
You can even give this book to your liberal friends to kind of tweak them in a way that's not nasty because it's not a nasty book.
It's meant to be fun.
Yeah, I don't think actually non-nasty political humor is legal anymore.
I think that that you may you may find the police at your door.
So you're you've been a powerful Christian voice, and I'm going to talk about that more in a minute.
But one of the attacks that we hear from the Never Trumpers has been, how can Christians support this man who is clearly not himself a Christian and has lived a life that is not what we would call a Christian life?
What's your response to that?
Well, there's a hundred responses to that.
First of all, let's say that you agree with that, right?
Well, then, how can you support Hillary Clinton by not voting for Trump?
Because we can't say that she is a Christian.
In fact, you know, you'll know them by their fruits, right?
I don't know where Donald Trump is in faith, but one thing I know is that his policies, generally speaking, are very, very favorable to people who have a traditional, historical, pro-American view of things.
Hillary Clinton was very clearly the antithesis to that.
So the idea that I could say, you know what, I'm so religious and so holy, I'm not going to vote for any of these dirty people.
Well, if you do that, you let the bad guy win.
There were plenty.
Now, you know, this as a Jew, and I know this as the author of Bonhoeffer, there were plenty Christians in Germany in the 1930s who did not stand up to Adol Hitler because they were too holy to get their hand dirty to politics.
You want to talk about having blood on your hands?
When you sit on your hands, you can get blood on your hands.
Let me put it that way.
And these people sat on their hands, and there are a lot of people sat on their hands when Romney was running because I said, I'm not going to vote for a Mormon.
I'm a Christian and he's not a.
This is not how you make political decisions.
And I think that if people cannot live in the real world and understand that sometimes you have to get political, I mean, if the Germans had gotten political and stood up to Adolf Hitler, we never would have had the Holocaust.
I hate to put it that bluntly, but when religious people start saying that politics is too dirty for me to get involved, let me tell you something.
The people who hate you and who hate your God and who hate everything you stand for, they're not afraid to get involved in politics and we need to get involved.
And so I really think that when people say this about Trump, that he's this or he's that, Donald Trump just got in two very pro-Constitution, pro-life, historical originalists, excuse me, on the Supreme Court.
Now, what do we think Hillary Clinton would have done?
I don't even think somebody like George W. Bush would have the guts to put in people the way Trump did.
And so you have to give him credit for that.
He's not our pastor in chief.
He's meant to be a politician and a president.
And so I find most of these arguments really to be beside the point.
But people are very emotional and I don't know what to say.
So that's why I wrote a goofy humor book.
You know, there's a piece.
I think you and I are on the same page that one of the biggest questions of our time is whether Christianity is going to continue as a major force in the West.
And I think that this is something that people have been talking about in Europe for a long time.
Today there was, I believe it ran today, it was an article in the New York Times that has gotten harder and harder to speak about God.
He says that, you know, once he moved to New York, he found that the language that he would use to speak about God had actually deserted him.
That seems to me like a real thing.
Do you believe that that is actually something that's happening?
Do you find that to be a problem in New York?
Essentially, I do.
And the author is a friend, Jonathan Merritt.
We disagree strongly politically, but I think he's quite right on that.
He's a Christian.
But here's the thing: I think that Christians often are guilty of marginalizing themselves.
For example, they say, well, I can't vote for Donald Trump because that would mar my witness as a Christian.
And I think, what kind of witness do you think you have today?
Tim Thibault, who really never did anything wrong ever, he was vilified by the angry secular atheist left when he did everything right.
So the idea that you can just avoid this and avoid that and don't vote for a Vulgarian like Donald Trump and people will like you and accept your crucified savior, that's a joke.
Anybody who's paid attention to the culture, I mean, look at Billy Graham.
Billy Graham was just a champion with movie star looks, and many people vilified him.
People of faith will always be vilified.
So the question is not, does that mean we change our tactics so that we become something we're not?
I mean, the question is, do we do the best we can?
Do we pray for our enemies?
Do we love our enemies?
I really think that people can worry about this so much that we marginalize ourselves.
I think that we need robust voices for faith in New York.
Big Questions and Intellectual Honesty00:04:57
I live in New York, as you know.
We need robust voices for the Christian faith and for God all through the culture.
And to the extent that I can do that, I will.
But I think there's a reason most of my fellow evangelicals voted for Trump.
And when people make that sort of a dirty political calculation, that's not fair.
That's wrong.
And I have to say that if you care about the unborn, which I do, you're going to vote for the person you think is going to protect the unborn.
William Wilberforce, one of the greatest men in the history of the world, was vilified for bringing his faith into politics.
Why did he bring his faith into politics?
Because he actually cared about the suffering African slaves.
If you care about those who are suffering and being murdered and so on and so forth, you have to get political.
I think there's no way around it.
And I think people who say there is are missing something.
What do you make of voices?
There seem to be a lot of voices out there that want the meaning that Christianity supplies, but literally cannot bring themselves to believe.
And I'm thinking of the Italian philosopher Marcello Perra wrote a book, why we should call ourselves Christians, not why we should be Christians.
He's an atheist.
But Jordan Peterson is another one.
I love Jordan.
But, you know, it's almost a sport here.
Whenever we see Jordan Peterson, we ask him if he believes in God.
It's like shooting in a man's feet to watch him dance because he won't quite answer the question.
And he has said, you know, I don't want to be pinned down.
I act as if there was a God, which is the exact phrase that Pera uses as well.
What do you make of these voices of people who want the meaning, but don't want the conviction?
Well, I think they can get away with it.
What I mean by that is nobody's putting a gun to their head said, look, you can't have it both ways, pal.
Choose now.
The reality is you can't have it both ways.
In other words, in this culture, you can have it both ways.
And you can understand that, you know, it's kind of like saying, I'm going to commit adultery, but I believe it's wrong.
If you really, really believed it was wrong, maybe you wouldn't commit adultery.
I think that there are plenty of people that, let's put it this way, people like Jordan Peterson and Marcello, is it Perra?
Para.
Yeah, Para.
Para.
Folks like that, I think if a gun were put to their head and they said, listen, you need to choose, they might choose and they might choose God.
But the point is nothing's forcing them to choose so they can have it both ways.
But here's the reality.
And you know this, Andrew.
Either there is meaning in the world, either there is good and evil or there's not.
If there's good and evil in the world, you need to tell me where you get it from.
When somebody says to me, hey, racism's wrong, I go, oh, really?
Well, I agree with you, but I know why it's wrong.
Why do you say it's wrong?
Go.
If you take God out of the equation, you tell me why racism is wrong.
People will sputter and say, well, but I just know it is.
It just is.
It's like, no, no, I know it is, but I know why it is.
And the same thing with why was Hitler wrong?
Or was he just wrong for him?
There are people that they can't be intellectually honest.
And in this country, nobody forces you to be intellectually honest.
In the West, nobody forces you to be intellectually honest.
But if you lived in the gulag with Solzhenitsyn, if you were in Kim Jong-un's Korea today, you're going to be forced to figure out what you believe.
You want to believe that good and evil stands apart from what the dictator says?
Well, at that point, you better be a Christian because you're not going to have that right.
So I think people are just being intellectually dishonest because they're allowed to be.
That's a great point about the West.
There's a great point about the West.
You run this thing in New York.
I've been fascinated by when I'm in New York, I'm usually there for such a short period of time and I have a lot of family.
So I've never gotten to go to it.
But you run this thing called Socrates in the City.
What is that about?
And why did you start that?
Well, people can go online.
We've posted videos.
We film everything in HD, so many more people watch it online as a TV program than actually are at the events.
But Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living.
And then he blew his brains out in an alley.
I remember reading about that.
Yeah.
Socrates said, because I'm Greek, I kind of thought, okay, in New York City, you know, speaking as a Christian, a person of faith, conservative, I thought a lot of people don't think about the deeper things.
We don't think about it.
We don't examine our lives because at cocktail parties, you don't want to talk about the meaning of good and evil or whatever.
You know, you stop doing that as an undergraduate.
And when you enter the real world places like New York, you avoid those conversations.
I thought that's not healthy.
Socrates was right.
The unexamined life's not worth living.
Let's examine the big questions.
So I said, I will interview people who have something to say.
And it doesn't always need to be on the big questions, but it always touches on the big questions.
The other day, we had Mark Helpren, the brilliant novelist and conservative writer.
We've had all kinds of people from all across the spectrum.
Frankly, I interviewed my friend Dick Cavett about celebrity, and he interviewed me about miracles.
Socrates in the City is just meant to be kind of a long form.
It's kind of like the Dick Cavit show, except not on ABC or PBS, but it's something that I feel we need.
So if people want to go to SocratesandCity.com, you can watch.
Brilliant Insights from Mark Helpren00:09:03
I interviewed John Lennox, one of the most brilliant minds of our time.
He's a professor of mathematics at Oxford, but he's written on science and faith.
Just brilliant.
So there's a lot of wonderful stuff, but we're going to be doing a lot more of them in the future.
Eric Metaxas, when we first met, you told me we were living proof that in Christ there is no Jew or Greek.
It's always great to see you.
Thank you very much.
The new book is Donald Drains the Swamp.
I'll talk to you again soon, hope.
Thank you.
All right.
Stuff I like.
This is stuff Andrew Hay did.
That's a redo, rather a rerun from Brandon Toy.
I like that one.
Are we going to choose one of these?
You think of it?
I think we should do the next week or the next couple of weeks.
We'll just do the favorites.
Okay.
All right.
Fair enough.
Halloween.
You know, I've been watching The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix, and I'm really conflicted about it.
I watched the first two episodes and I decided to stop.
And I'll tell you what, first, let's talk about this.
The Haunting of Hill House is one of the most famous haunted house novels ever written, and certainly probably the most famous written by an American, unless you count Henry James as an American.
He kind of became a British subject after a while.
And he wrote The Turn of the Screw, which is one of the most famous ones.
But The Haunting of Hill House is just hugely famous, a wonderful book.
And if you haven't read it, Shirley Jackson, she was just a tremendous writer.
She wrote a famous short story called The Lottery, which everybody used to read in junior high school.
I don't know if they do anymore.
And she wrote, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, one of my favorite gothic novels.
But The Haunting of Hill House, I guess, is her masterpiece.
Listen to the opening of this.
Every time they make a movie of this, this is the third filmed version of it.
Every time they make a movie, they always put this in because it's so brilliant.
This is the opening of the novel, the first paragraph.
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.
Even larks and Katy dids are supposed by some to dream.
Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within.
It had stood so for 80 years and might stand for 80 more.
Within, walls continued upright.
Bricks met neatly.
Floors were firm and doors were sensibly shut.
Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House.
And whatever walked there walked alone.
What I love about this is you forget where it starts.
By the time you get to that powerful last line of the paragraph, you forget that it starts.
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.
So what she's saying is this haunted house is in a condition of absolute reality.
So the rest of us are actually not seeing ghosts.
We are living in this fantasy world, which is just a brilliant kind of mind-bending concept.
So they made this into one of my favorite ghost movies.
I have two favorite ghost movies.
One is The Innocence, which is The Turn of the Screw with Deborah Carr, and it's written by Truman Capodi.
And it's just so subtle and so quiet and all about the characters and all about what is happening within the people, not about any boost stairs, not about anybody jumping out.
And the other is The Haunting, which is The Haunting of Hill House, 1963.
Now they remade it with Liam Neeson, and it was awful.
They remade it in the 90s with Liam Neeson.
It was just awful.
But this is a wonderful, wonderful film.
I've put it on stuff I like before, produced and directed by Robert Wise and starring the wonderful Julie Harris and Claire Bloom.
And here is a story.
Julie Harris and Claire Bloom are sharing a room together and it's dark and Julie Harris starts to hear voices through the walls and she grabs hold of Claire Bloom's hand because she's in the bed right next to her and they're holding hands in the dark and what you hear is Julie Harris's internal monologue.
I will take a lot from this filthy house for his sake, but I will not go along with hurting a child.
No, I will not.
I will get my mouth to open right now and I will yell, I will yell, I will yell.
Stop it!
What?
What, no what?
Whose hand was I holding?
She wakes up.
She thinks she's holding Claire Bloom's hand.
She thinks she's in the bed next to her.
She wakes up and the bed is moved across the room and she says, whose hand was I holding?
That to me is brilliant.
That's like the scene in Paranormal Activity where they spread flour on the floor and they wake up and there are footsteps in the flower.
You don't have to show people anything.
It's just scary.
It is scary to think of that.
So what is driving me crazy about the Netflix version of The Haunting of Hill House is that they do scenes like that and then they ruin them with some big boo scare or some act of disgusting something, you know, some bug crawling out of her.
Or not, not that.
It's just the twisted faces and jumping out at you and all this.
They do it so brilliantly and then they ruin it with that, with a jump scare.
And I stopped watching it after too, because it was driving me nuts, you know.
But Stephen King tweeted that he thinks it's a work of genius.
He loves it.
People are loving it.
So I'm going to go back and try it again.
Here is the brilliant, the trailer is brilliant because they show you a lot of the subtle stuff they do.
They do all the subtle stuff that I love.
I mean, they do stuff where, like, for instance, something will just be in the corner of the room and they won't even focus on it, which I just love that stuff.
And then they'll blow it with some big jump, you know?
So I guess they're serving younger people who love that stuff, who don't like subtlety.
But here's the trailer for The Haunting of Hill House.
In any case, read the book because it's one of the great books as a wonderful American novel, Shirley Jackson, wonderful American writer.
Here's the trailer for the Netflix version.
Now I want you two to get good rest.
What if I have a bad dream?
I'm sure we can handle any dream you have.
What if I dream that you sent us away into the dark and we get hurt?
Really hurt.
I'm so sad and scared of the dark out there that I put poison in me for years and years until my blood turns into poison and my heart breaks right in half and I can't feel anything happening.
I can't stand it.
It's my jaw wired shut.
So it's got some spooky stuff in it.
I'll go back and look at it again if Stephen King.
Stephen and King has great taste in this stuff.
I mean, he's the one who pointed me to The Little Stranger, one of the best ghost stories I've read recently.
And so, but read the book.
Shirley Jackson is Haunting of Hill House.
It's a wonderful short novel for Halloween that you'll really like.
It's interesting to me that both The Haunting of Hill House and The Turn of the Screw are about sexually repressed women.
And a lot of ghost stories are about women.
It's really interesting.
I mean, if you think of horror stories, The Exorcist is about a girl basically becoming a woman.
It's basically about monarchy or her first period is really what that movie is about.
And Rosemary's Baby is about a woman giving birth and all that.
Women are just scary.
You know, their bodies change and it's all kind of weird.
It's like, you're just a scary bunch of people, ladies.
All right.
You know, again, not a Clavinless weekend.
Please, please, tomorrow, Another Kingdom Season 2, Episode 3 will be available to everybody.
Go on to iTunes and subscribe and give it five stars.
We really could use the support.
It's doing very, very well.
We're really happy with it, but we would like it to do even better.
Or subscribe to dailywire.com and you can get the whole thing with the reads and everything.
Also, if you're in LA, come to Politicon and I'll be there Saturday at 4 p.m. doing a panel entitled Draining the Swamp.
I think Ann Coulter will be there with me.
So anytime I get to sit next to Ann Coulter, it's a very dangerous situation for all of us.
On Sunday, I'll be joining the rest of the guys at the Daily Wire.
We'll do a town hall-style event.
If you can't come and watch it, you can go on and see it on dailywire.com and maybe subscribe.
It would be that way.
On Monday, it'll be there for subscribers.
All right, great.
In the meantime, you've got me here sitting there talking to you.
Monday Show Premiere00:00:41
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I will be back in this seat again on Monday.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
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Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
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The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing Production.