Ben Shapiro dissects left-wing hypocrisy over Halloween costumes, mocking critics like Al Roker for weaponizing racial history while defending Megan Kelly’s tone-adjustment remark as harmless. He slams CNN’s Hitler-Trump comparisons, citing a migrant caravan admission to debunk media narratives, then pivots to abortion debates, distinguishing intent from societal complicity. The episode contrasts voluntary charity with forced entitlements, condemns Harvard’s racial admissions, and advises callers on marriage, addiction, and ambition—all while framing Trump’s deregulation as a victory over Obama-era bureaucratic overreach. Ultimately, it paints liberal media as performative while championing personal responsibility and free-market solutions. [Automatically generated summary]
Yes, it's time for leftists to start whining and moaning in their ceaseless attempt to squeeze every ounce of joy out of our harmless traditions until we're all miserable, after which they'll ask us to vote for them so they can make things even worse.
So happy Halloween.
Now with some holidays, it's easy for leftists to know what to ruin.
Christmas, for instance, marks the incarnation on earth of a God who loves and forgives us and is celebrated with beautiful music, family gatherings, and the exchange of gifts.
So there's just so much there for the left to crap all over.
But Halloween is different because it deals with the darker elements of the spirit world, many of whom are currently running for Congress on the Democrat ticket.
How can the left attack vampires when vampires suck the life out of everything and are therefore the natural mascots of socialism?
How can they ban zombies when zombies are the living dead who devour people's brains, which describes the entire on-air staff of CNN?
And how can they insult witches who are malevolent females who curse the innocent and therefore represent about 50% of the Democrat base?
But after giving a lot of thought to what joyful aspect of Halloween they could destroy, leftists finally had a brainstorm and started picking on children's costumes.
Leftists now want to dictate what costumes we can and can't wear.
An American can't dress up as a terrorist, for instance, because that's appropriating Islamic culture.
I'll pause it for you to get that joke.
Likewise, a white person can't dress up as a red Indian unless she's a Democrat senator hoping to run for president.
And a man can't dress up as a woman unless he really, really means it.
Now, this raises an important question.
Who the hell cares what these chuckleheads think of our costumes?
The next time some leftist tells you what you're allowed to wear on Halloween, why not just respond with three simple words?
And no, I don't mean trick-or-treat.
Trick or warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are wingy, also singing, hunky-dunkity-dee-doo.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is zippity zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, it's mailbag day.
All your problems will be solved in the course of the next.
Oh, my God.
We should have used ZipRecruiter instead of stuck with Austin.
Well, as we're speaking, some evil lunatic is sending bombs to a bunch of prominent Democrats who's got them.
Hillary Clinton got one.
The Clintons got one.
And George Soros got one a couple of days ago.
And at CNN, John Brennan, I think it was, got one.
So we'll just watch that.
They all have the return address of Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
I'm not actually making that up.
They actually do.
You know what I would like to see?
I mean, this is what our nation, this is what our national conversation was lacking before we were missing an evil lunatic.
You know, we had everything going for us except the evil lunatic.
What I would like to see is I would like to see leftist commentators refrain from blaming this on Donald Trump and right-wing commentators refrain from deducing that it's secretly a left-winger until we find out who it actually is.
I would also like to see a leprechaun riding a unicorn, but I don't think I'm going to see any of those things.
We will leave this.
I don't know.
It's just a guess.
When you think, who's going to solve this case?
The police or some guy on Twitter?
Just a guess.
I think it's going to be the cops.
We'll let them do their jobs and find out who this is.
And then I hope they throw them in an oubliette because this is the one thing we definitely don't need from either side.
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And guess what?
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You know, I want to start.
I was going to start by talking about the important news of the day, but I want to start by talking about something trivial because sometimes trivial incidents actually do tell an important story.
And I've got to, I've got to, before I talk about this, I'm going to have to play some video.
So listen to it because it actually does, you got to hear it before you know what I'm talking about.
And I want to talk about this thing with Megan Kelly, if you haven't heard about this.
She went on her show and they were discussing Halloween costumes.
And of course, you know, I'm not joking.
The left just wants to suck the joy out of everything we do.
Everything is problematical.
Everything has to be reconsidered.
Everything has to be looked at in the light of their woke, brilliant righteousness.
Megan Kelly went on and she was talking about getting in costume, talking about somebody who had put on a white woman who had put on a costume of Diana Ross and made her skin look a little darker so she'd look more like Diana Ross.
And she said, gee, I think this would be okay.
And the people on the show with her said they didn't agree because of the old days when people would do minstrel shows and they would do kind of cliché stereotype versions of black people with the white lips and all this stuff.
Megan Kelly then got slammed, of course, by the Stalinists on Twitter and she had to apologize.
Now, so before I talk about this, because I'm about to tell you why we should very, very much dress up in blackface or whiteface or any other damn thing we please.
But first, I want to hear, I want you to hear the usual, it really is like the Stalinist show trials.
They drag you in front.
Megan Kelly had to go on and apologize for this, which she did with like her eyes filled.
Let's play that first.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the show.
I'm Megan Kelly.
And I want to begin with two words.
I'm sorry.
You may have heard that yesterday we had a discussion here about political correctness and Halloween costumes.
And that conversation turned to whether it is ever okay for a person of one race to dress up as another.
A black person making their face lighter or a white person making theirs darker to make a costume complete.
I defended the idea, saying as long as it was respectful and part of a Halloween costume, it seemed okay.
Well, I was wrong, and I am sorry.
One of the great parts of sitting in this chair each day is getting to discuss different points of view.
Sometimes I talk and sometimes I listen.
And yesterday I learned.
I learned that given the history of blackface being used in awful ways by racists in this country, it is not okay for that to be part of any costume, Halloween or otherwise.
Okay, I want to play before I talk about this.
I want to play one more clip just so you have the whole picture because of course with this stuff, no apology is ever enough.
They are after blood.
They are not happy.
You know, it's not like, yeah, okay, Megan, you made a mistake.
You know, I disagreed with you.
Now I convinced you.
You've come over to my side.
Never.
It is never, ever enough.
I'm not going to play Don Lemonhead because who cares what he thinks.
But just on her own network, right?
On her own network, they come on and they have two commentators, one of them, Al Roker, the weatherman, discussing this and why even this is not enough.
Most of the online criticism addressed the fact that there were no people of color represented in that panel, pointing out that what we saw was a conversation that people generally have in a private space where there are no repercussions.
But this learning moment really gifted us the opportunity to have this conversation in a public discourse.
So we now have the courage and we have the platform to have conversations like this, even when they're uncomfortable because we can see they're still necessary.
Well, it is uncomfortable, obviously, because Megan is a colleague at NBC News, but it's, yeah, I know you.
Well, look, the fact is, while she apologized to the staff, she owes a bigger apology to folks of color around the country because this is a history going back to the 1830s, minstrel shows, to mean and denigrate a race wasn't right.
I'm old enough to have lived through Amos and Andy, where you had white people and blackface playing two black characters, just magnifying the worst stereotypes about black people.
And that's what the big problem is.
So I'm a person of color.
My color is white.
And here's what I want to say about this.
This is crap.
Are you telling me, are you telling me that a little black kid, if his hero is Batman, he can't put on a Batman mask and be Batman?
Are you telling me that a little white boy, if he wants to be, what's his name, this guy, Black Panther, he can't dress up as Black Panther?
You know, there's a movie about Jackie Robinson, the great baseball player, obviously first black guy in the major leagues.
And there's a scene in this movie, genuinely moving scene, where they're traveling on a train, they look out the window, and there's a little boy playing baseball, doing what we all did, what all of us, I did, certainly, when I was a little boy, pretending to be his hero.
And his hero is Jackie Robinson, and he's a white boy pretending to be a black man.
That's a victory.
That's a victory.
We know it.
When we see the movie, we understand this is a victory.
The good guys won.
That's the whole point.
The good guys won this battle.
Look, of course there are costumes that wouldn't be right if they express hatred, if they express disrespect.
I don't want to see anybody dressing up as a Klansman or a Nazi or anything like that.
That's not the point.
That is not the point.
But what about your hero?
What if he's a ball player?
What if your hero's a ball player and you're a white kid and you want to dress up as a black ball player?
If you want to wear his jersey and that's not all right?
You know, Al Roker, listen, this is not a personal attack on Al Roker.
I shook hands with him once.
He seems like a lovely guy.
He's my age, okay?
We're on the exit ramp of life.
It's not the job of old people to transfer the pain of history to young people.
You should learn history.
You should know history, but you don't repeat it.
But you don't have to live in history.
My father hated Germans.
He hated German people.
Well, I could understand that.
He fought in World War II.
Of course he hated German people.
The Holocaust was a raw nerve for him.
You know, I totally get that.
It's not my job to hate German people.
Those people are all dead.
The people who did that stuff are dead.
The new people are not responsible.
We won.
When I say we, I mean the good guys won this fight.
We understand there were injustices in this country.
Those injustices are over.
People felt ashamed.
People felt all the things.
Why won't they let the wound heal?
Well, it's obvious why, because they think they get power from it.
You know, if this was still Amos and Andy, if this was still minstrel shows, I'd say, okay, yeah, so that's disrespectful.
But how is it disrespectful to have somebody when your hero is somebody of a different color?
We should all be dressing up as one another.
You know why?
Because we are one another.
There's no difference.
We are one another.
We're all Americans.
We should be able to dress up as one another.
And to say, oh, in the old days, it used to be one thing, and therefore it's still that thing.
You know, the American people are much, much smarter than their intellectuals.
The American people are much, much smarter than their commentators.
They're perfectly able to see things that aren't, so to speak, black and white.
This is ridiculous.
This is ridiculous.
And why these people think that they should have some power, some say over what people do with their kids, what their kids want to do if they're not their parents, I have no idea.
And the idea that Megan Kelly had to be dragged.
You know, there are people on the right agreeing with this, saying she said something stupid.
I don't think she said something stupid at all.
I'm totally on her side.
Why You Need An Electric Toothbrush00:02:31
You know, one of the things that I can't help but notice as this election comes on, I don't have any inside information.
Nobody has any inside information on these midterms.
History and the polls we have so far say that the Republicans hold the Senate, lose the House.
In my gut, in my gut, I feel that that's not what's going to happen.
I mean, I feel when I see the panic on the left, when I see the panic in the media, when I see the crowds turning out for Donald Trump, I've never seen anything like that before.
The enthusiasm just seems to be all on the right.
And I think there's a possibility that we hold both houses, which would be revolutionary.
If that happens, if that happens, we're going to see something.
Well, we're seeing it now.
We're going to see something now.
And I'll talk about that in just a second.
But first, I have to talk about my teeth or your teeth, anybody's teeth.
You want your teeth to look good.
You got to use an electric toothbrush.
I love my electric toothbrush.
My dental hygienist told me that was the way to go because I complained about the fact that my teeth weren't getting clean.
And she said, you got to use an electric toothbrush.
She was right.
The problem with regular electric toothbrushes is they're big and ugly.
They look like bazookas.
They're hard to carry around.
Quip has solved that problem.
Quip is an electric toothbrush that looks like it was designed, I don't know, by like Apple.
It's just so sleek and so nice, and it's easy to pack.
And it makes brushing your teeth simpler, more affordable, and even enjoyable.
It's got a built-in two-minute timer which pulses every 30 seconds and that reminds you to switch sides of which part of your teeth you're brushing, which is the way you're supposed to do it.
And that makes you get a full, clean, full and even clean.
It's three out of four of us use bristles that are old, worn out, and effective.
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They are backed by over 20,000 dental professionals.
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And if you go to getquip.com/slash Clavin right now, you get your first refill pack for free with a Quip electric toothbrush.
That's getquip.com/slash Clavin.
It's G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash Clavin.
And I know what you're asking yourself.
You're asking yourself, how do you spell Clavin?
There are no E's in Clavin.
I just make it look easy.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Shattered Left Narrative00:08:43
So Donald Trump has so shattered the left, so shattered their narrative that they are running around picking up individual words and trying to put them back on the racist board.
They're trying to put them back on the racist board.
Anything he says, I'll grab that word, and it's got to be racist.
You want to see one of the, you know, sometimes I play these clips in a certain order because I just want you to see in real time what the press is doing, how the press is taking their taking each word he says and trying to attach racism toward it, whether there's racism connected or not.
So we've got obviously this caravan.
Now they're saying it's like close to 14,000 people.
I don't know how many people it is, but it's marching here.
And we've got, of course, that evil president, this is Cut 10, the evil president, talking against these poor illegal immigrants.
All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected, but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country.
The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants.
The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers.
That's why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens.
In the budget I will present to you, we will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the workface.
Austin, don't you know when I say evil president, you're supposed to play Trump?
This is the second time, the second day in a row.
Yesterday, you played Obama when I said insulting the poor, the poor illegal aliens.
So Trump goes up and he makes a speech where he says he takes on, he's always accused of being a nationalist.
And the first meaning of national, well, let's play this one quick clip.
It's cut number seven, cut seven, where he's talking to the crowd and he says, yes, I'm a nationalist.
A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly, not caring about our country so much.
And you know what?
We can't have that.
You know, I have a word.
It sort of became old-fashioned.
It's called a nationalist.
And I say, really, we're not supposed to use that word.
You know what I am?
I'm a nationalist, okay?
I'm a nationalist.
Now, the first meaning of the word nationalist is basically a patriotist, somebody who cares about his nation or the, you know, the concerns of his nation.
It can also be used to mean a jingoist, somebody who cares too much, you know, who's just America right or wrong, America all the time, you know, who doesn't want to criticize when America does something wrong, which goes beyond patriotism into just kind of, you know, obsession or chauvinism.
So Jim, look at me, I'm Jim Acosta, is in the Oval Office, and he asks Trump, well, when you say you're a nationalist, isn't that a dog whistle meaning that you are a white nationalist?
And here's, this is cut number one.
Cut number one.
Here is the question and Trump's, the beginning of Trump's response, just so you hear kind of what he's saying.
Ms. Brother, just to follow up on your comments about being a nationalist, there is a concern that you are sending coded language for a dog whistle to some Americans out there that what you really mean is that you're a white nationalist.
I've never even heard that.
I cannot imagine that.
You mean I'm a nationalist?
No, I never heard that theory about being a nationalist.
I've heard them all.
But I'm somebody that loves our country.
When I say a nationalist, I don't like it when Germany's paying 1% of GDP for NATO, and we're paying 4.3%.
I don't like that.
That's not fair.
So he says to Trump, do you mind if I take your word and translate it to mean that you're a racist?
Trump said nothing about race.
He said, so you don't mind, do you, if I appropriate the word, take it out of your mouth, and now redefine it to mean you stink, right?
That's what he wants to do.
And Trump's response is detailed.
It goes on and on from there.
I didn't want to play the whole thing.
He says, we're not being treated fairly.
I want to take care of America first.
I want to make sure that he's the president of the United States.
He's not the president of the world.
He wants to take care of the country.
That's why we hired him.
That's why we pay him, although he doesn't take the money.
That's his job, okay?
So now it's been explained.
Acosta asked this question.
He got the answer.
Here's Jim Acosta later going on CNN, right, to tell Trump that Trump got, no, no, Trump got it wrong.
Acosta knows what Trump is saying, not Trump.
I pressed him on this in the Oval Office, asked him, well, are you trying to say that you're a white nationalist?
What about these concerns out there that you're dog whistling to your base, that you're sending coded messages to your base?
And he says, well, I haven't heard a theory about that.
And then he went on to say, well, you know, there are trade issues and so on as to why he is attaching this label to himself.
But Anderson, when you're demonizing immigrants, migrants coming up from Central America trying to make their way to the United States and apply for asylum, when you're demonizing Middle Easterners and making the suggestion that they're terrorists and so on in that caravan without offering any proof, and then calling yourself a nationalist in front of thousands and thousands of people, I don't think it's a stretch for a lot of Americans out there to wonder whether or not the president is secretly considering himself a white nationalist.
You don't know what you're saying.
I know what you're saying.
I'm here to tell you what you're saying.
It reminds me of when David Brooks told us that the Islamists weren't killing us because of Islam.
They were killing us because we were racist.
And the Islamists are saying, no, no, we're killing you because of Islam.
They go, no, I know what you're saying.
I'm a journalist.
I'm a trained journalist.
I know what you're saying.
They will take any word they can find lying on the ground and stick it back on that racist board.
They do not want these wounds to heal.
They don't want them to heal.
They think they get political energy out of it.
They think they get political traction out of it.
So Jim Acosta, Jim, look at me.
I'm Jim Acosta.
His question is the important thing, not the president's answer, right?
Journalists are supposed to ask questions in order to get answers.
No, no, no.
Jim Acosta asks questions because his questions contain all the information you need.
Now, luckily, luckily, Joe Scarborough has looked into this.
We didn't play this cut yesterday.
No, Joe Scarborough has looked into this and he has got it all figured out.
He has figured out the trick behind Donald Trump.
Here it is.
But this is what they had for Adolf Hitler's psychological profile.
And for those of you in the midst of reading World War II government reports, you'll find it fascinating.
His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off.
Never admit a fault or wrong.
Never concede that there may be some good in your enemy.
Never leave room for alternatives.
Never accept blame.
Concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong.
Get it, wink, wink.
Joe Scarborough, doing amazing research, has figured out that Trump is literally Hitler.
Trump is literally Hitler.
There's a guy, Bruce Bartlett, a CNN commentator.
He's an historian.
He sends out a tweet.
I wish I were making this.
I really do wish I were this funny.
The key differences between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler.
Hitler served honorably in the military.
Trump didn't.
Hitler was faithful to his wife.
Trump cheated on all his wives.
Hitler wrote a book.
Trumps were all ghostwritten.
Trump is worse than Hitler.
He's worse than Hitler.
By the way, the reason Hitler was faithful to his wife is he married her and then killed himself.
It was like they were married for 20 minutes.
But Trump, these guys, they're so desperate.
They're so desperate.
They have turned themselves into a Greg Gutfeld monologue, except not as funny.
You know, remember Greg used to run those monologues and they would all end in, if you disagree with me, you're literally Hitler.
This is it.
If you disagree with him.
And one more thing before we get to the mailbag.
We want to get to the mailbag because I know you have problems that I will, all of which I will solve.
They keep saying this thing, oh, Trump is speaking about without any proof that there are criminals in this caravan.
First of all, they all want to be criminals because they want to break into our borders.
But he's talking about there's no proof.
Believe the Migrants?00:02:50
So far be it from Jim Acosta to do some, I don't know, reporting and go down to the caravan and find out.
But here we have an interview with a guy on the caravan, cut number nine.
Here's what he says.
Criminals is everywhere, okay?
It's criminals in here.
I mean, it is.
But it's not that many.
I mean, it's good people here trying to get it through Mexico and then get to the United States.
But that doesn't mean that everybody's a criminal.
Thank you, Jim.
You don't have to thank me.
I got the proof for you.
There it is.
There's the proof.
I mean, believe all migrants, right?
So we got to believe the guy when he tells you he's surrounded by criminals.
Scott Adams had a great tweet today.
He said, he said the, you know, he always talks about persuasion and who is doing the better persuasion.
He said the Republican slogan is jobs, not mobs.
And the Democrat slogan is, well, not everybody in the caravan is a criminal.
So that's why, I don't know, like I said, I got no more inside information about the midterms than anyone else.
But I don't know, man.
I do not believe, I certainly don't believe there's going to be a blue wave.
And I feel there may be something very, very different coming down the pike.
And I certainly hope so, because I think if they get that message, if Chuck Schumer, who's just a political animal, Nancy Pelosi, just a political animal, if she gets the message that this resistance stuff is blowing up their chances for re-election, the resistance will fade away, I do believe.
Got the mailbag coming up.
We got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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First of all, it's a lousy 10 bucks a month.
You're not using it.
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Give it to us.
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And we get to the mailbag in just a second.
All right, the mailbag.
Now he gets it right.
All right.
From Robert.
I think he just pitched forward his head to hit the button.
He's just, from Robert, dear master screenwriter Clavin, I just watched the Gosnell movie, and I don't know if the theater was cold or if my skin was just crawling.
A lot of movies are exaggerated, even when based on actual events.
How much of Gosnell was puffed up to make it a movie?
Please tell me a lot.
Looking for Permission00:15:30
No, I'm almost nothing.
I don't think I made up anything, except, well, there are characters made up to represent various people, like characters will be joined together, but all the crime is real.
A lot of it, I basically condensed the trial transcript.
I spent a day with the cop, Woody, who did the interview with Dean Kane, plays in the movie, and talked to him about it and used things that he told me.
But no, I didn't have, I wish I had to make it up.
It's all real.
From Ryan, dear Lord of the Arts, I do not want the U.S., somebody today called me both a king and a gesture, which I thought was just what I want to be and saves money.
I can self-entertain.
Dear Lord of the Arts, I do not want the U.S. to go into universal health care and I want the U.S. to rapidly decrease its welfare spending.
I believe I have good fiscal arguments for opposition to universal health care and welfare, but I cannot think of a strong moral one.
How do people not have a right to health care and welfare when they do have a right to life?
How do they not have the right to entitlements that help support that life?
You know, that's actually a bad argument, I have to tell you.
When it says you have a right to life, it means no one can take your life away.
That's what that means.
It means no one can take your life away without due process.
Without due process, you cannot have your life.
You have the right to live.
You have the right to be left alone.
Almost every right you have involves being left alone.
It doesn't involve me doing anything for you.
So I have the right to life.
I have the right to my life.
And my life is made up of time.
I use my time.
And in the way I use that time, I might make money.
If you take that money from me, you are taking my time.
You are taking my life.
You do not have the right to my property.
You don't have the right to my time.
You don't have the right to my life.
So the thing is, you have the right to be left alone and to live your life.
And when you live your life, you have to take care of yourself.
That is the whole point of being free.
You want to know what's moral.
What is moral is freedom.
That is your moral peg on which you hang your argument.
Once you say, don't you have the right to everything that sustains life, then I have to pay for your groceries.
I've got to pay for your medical care.
I've got to pay for your house.
I've got to pay for everything.
And then you're a socialist.
And once you're a socialist, your time no longer belongs to you because everything you produce with your time belongs to the state and the state decides it.
How is it fair?
How is it fair that I go out and bust my chops to support my kids, which I did, and I go out and do the things that I have to do to support my kids, and I get the check for my work, my time, my contribution, and you, because you have the guns of the government, you get to say, oh, no, no, you don't get to spend that on what you want to spend it.
You have to spend it on what I want to spend it.
That's tyranny.
In order for us not to have tyranny, each of us has to take care of himself.
Now, when people can't take care of themselves, there should be systems to take care of them.
They don't have to be government systems.
In an ideal world, and I know we're so far from this, it's almost not worth talking about it.
But in an ideal world, that is something we do voluntarily through our churches, through our organizations.
And the reason is, when I do something voluntarily for you, I elevate both you and me.
I elevate me because I show that I have charity.
I show that I can open my hands and give you my money.
And I elevate you by making you responsible to do something with the money I gave you because you're looking me in the eye.
It's not an entitlement.
It's not something you're entitled to and you don't have to respond to.
It creates responsibility in you.
Charity elevates.
Entitlements degrade everybody.
It is really a shame what has happened to people under entitlements.
They have become dependent.
They have become less than they can be.
They become mediocre.
Their lives become mediocre.
It is not moral to treat people like that.
Just because you're ill doesn't give you the right to come to my house with a gun and take my money away.
And that is essentially what government health care does.
From Adam, dear infallible dome of chrome, that's a new one.
I may have that put on my business card.
I'm pro-life, and I used to vehemently hate anyone associated with abortion, including the women who had them.
When I found out that someone I love had an abortion, which she regrets, I was forced to reexamine my views.
I certainly haven't changed my stance on the issue as a whole, but I find myself feeling far more sympathetic to the women and even more angry with the doctors and lawmakers that make abortion possible.
I was recently challenged on this with the question, if it's murder, then aren't the women murderers?
And if they're murderers, shouldn't they be in prison?
I couldn't answer.
How would you have responded?
We live in a very sick society on this subject.
And people, good people, have abortions.
And it is really a shame.
If you ever watch the movie The Giver, there is a scene in that that is, I couldn't believe it actually got into a Hollywood film, where it's one of these dystopian stories and they kill a baby.
And somebody watching says, how can he do that?
And they say he doesn't know what he's doing.
And I talk about this a lot and I won't go into it at length because I know I've said it before.
George Washington was a hero of liberty, one of the greatest heroes liberty ever knew.
George Washington could not understand for a long period of his life why his slaves wanted to be free.
Why?
because he lived in a society that was sick on the question of slavery.
And when you live in these societies, when you live under that narrative, it screws up your head.
It's hard to see the truth.
You know, the statistics are something like worldwide, there are 40 to 50, between 40 and 60 million, million abortions a year that we can live in that society, that I can sit here and talk to you and not be out like storming the barricades, is an indication of how sick the society is.
Murder.
Is some it.
Murder includes intent.
You know.
Murder is not just killing somebody.
That's manslaughter.
Murder includes an evil intent.
Many of the people who have abortions because they live in this sick narrative, they don't have an evil intent.
They may even have a good intent.
They may feel that they're not doing anything wrong.
They know not what they do.
The question is not apportioning blame to people in this terrible situation.
The point is to heal the sickness of the society.
How do you do that?
Laws do matter.
It does matter that we should be able to discuss what laws we have.
That's why Roe V. Wade is such a travesty, because it takes away our right to debate what laws we have and vote for what laws we Have.
If people have to argue about abortion, if they had to debate abortion, we'd be in a much, much different situation.
If you could go on TV and say, yeah, this is what a baby looks like at 20 weeks.
Look, here's a picture.
We didn't have these before.
Now we do.
Now we know.
You know, Thomas Aquinas said, oh no, a baby is not alive until it moves.
Because why?
Because he didn't have ultrasound.
He didn't have the gizmos we have now that can show us the truth.
If we can debate these things, that's what we're looking for.
We're looking to change minds.
We're looking to change ideas.
We're looking to heal the sickness of the narrative of this society.
We're not looking to punish people who are infected with the sickness.
We're looking to free them from that illness and cure them.
Aaron, dear grand ruler of the multiverse, I've been listening to your show now for nearly two years, and I have you and Ben to thank for my return to a state of mind of thinking about God and being more religious.
As before, I always considered myself an agnostic.
I've got a relationship question for you that's really been weighing on my mind for the last couple of months.
I've been dating this girl for coming up on a year now, and I have to say that objectively, she seems like the kind of girl I should be proposing to.
We have nearly all the same interests.
She's a former lefty who red-pilled herself.
I find myself constantly having the urge to look elsewhere for female attention because I feel less and less attracted to her physically.
This feels incredibly shallow to me, and I don't want to be the kind of guy that breaks up with a girl because she's not the body type I'm looking for.
I'm looking for some super idealized version.
I'm not looking for some super idealized version of a goddess woman, but I think at best I find her cute.
I'm not sure if this is the kind of thing I should just push away and chalk up to me being a young guy with raging hormones or if this is a valid excuse to break up in a way I think I'm looking for permission.
Listen, you know, I can only tell you, on this, I can only tell you how I would feel about this.
First of all, I would not marry a woman to whom I was not attracted because I think when you fall in love with somebody, you are attracted to them.
I have fallen in love with women who didn't look attractive to me before I fell in love with them.
They became attractive to me when I did.
So I would say as an indication, your attraction here seems to be an indication that you're not in love with her, that you don't love her.
If you're not in love with her, you should not propose to her and you should also stop dating her.
You should set her free to go and date somebody else.
It is not right to lead women on.
It's not right because you can't make up a decision to steal her time and her life.
So I would say, you know, to me, this would be an indication that I wasn't in love with her.
That's what I can tell you personally.
And if I knew I wasn't in love with her and wasn't likely to fall in love with her and becoming less and less attracted to her, I would move on.
It's not shallow.
It's part of love.
Part of love is eros.
Part of love is attraction and physical attraction.
And hopefully that lasts you for your whole marriage and for your whole life.
And I don't think it's shallow at all.
From Rob to the leader of men and Knolls.
Long time listener, love the show, keep up the good work.
My question is regarding the Harvard lawsuit.
This is about Asians saying they're being discriminated against.
I have a bud that went to Harvard and explained to me there's a different angle on the situation.
Students are not admitted solely based on academic marks, but also on extracurricular activities.
Yeah, you know, so what he's saying is, how do we know that it's racism?
That's what the case is about, basically.
It seems to me when I saw the news story and I read the news story about it, it seemed to me that Harvard was using these extracurricular ways as ways of keeping Asians out because they didn't want to go all Asian, basically, because Asians do very well in school.
If that's the case and if they make that case in court successfully, I do not believe that people should be chosen due to their race.
I don't believe it.
I don't believe that diversity in that sense is a strength.
I believe that having to compete and live up to the quality of the school is a strength.
And people should go to the schools they can get into and that they deserve to get into.
That's what the case is about.
Now, if Harvard can prove no, you know, we didn't care that they were Asian.
It wasn't about that.
It was that they didn't have any extracurricular activities.
Fine.
But it sounded suspicious to me, I got to say.
From Annette, Dear Andrew, I'm afraid my husband is an alcoholic.
We've been married for going on eight years.
We just had our fourth baby.
Thanks to his hard work, I'm able to homeschool our kids.
He's an underground minor and works out of town one week away, one week home.
When he's home, he drinks a lot, upwards of six beers a day, woof, every day, sometimes as many as 12 to 15.
So he's an alcoholic.
He isn't belligerent or cruel.
In fact, he becomes a big teddy bear.
He's never had any consequences.
I try very hard not to be a nagging wife, but I'm finding myself becoming one over this.
I ask him to slow down, and he says he will limit himself to four a day, and he's back up to six the very next night.
Yeah, he can't because he's an alcoholic.
I'm afraid there's something he's going through emotionally.
Any advice would be a godsend.
I don't have many people I can reach out to because I make a point not to speak negatively about my husband to our friends or family, and he refuses to speak to a pastor or counselor.
I'm not sure how much longer our relationship can sustain this.
Wow, that's really a tough problem.
This is what the Irish call a good man's weakness.
He's not a bad person, but he just drinks too much.
So you're in a tough spot, and you're not going to be able to talk him out of drinking.
You can't talk an alcoholic out of drinking.
And so nagging him forever is not a good idea.
You've got four kids.
You're taking care of the kids.
That's your priority.
That's what you got to do.
You've got to get some help.
You have got to get some help.
Al-Anon deals with this all the time and they can help you.
Your pastor, choose one.
I so respect, I have to tell you, I so respect your commitment to not bad-mouthing your husband outside of the house.
I so respect that.
You got to find at least one person or Al-Anon, which is anonymous, and they are committed to not going public.
You got to find somewhere where you can get support and understand how to live with this guy, because he's not hurting your kids.
He's not hurting you.
You don't want your kids to lose their father, but he's got a problem, and that means you've got a problem.
It's a really tough problem to deal with.
I'm so sorry that you're dealing with it, but you got to get help because you're not going to be able to talk him out of it.
You can stop nagging him.
Stop nagging him because it's not going to work.
There may come a time when the children have gone and you're in the clear, or if he's doing something so bad that you have to do it, there may come a time when you have to give him an ultimatum.
You either stop drinking or I'm going to leave.
If you do that, you're going to have to live up to it.
But right now, what I would say is find one person or Al-Anon and get help because you are in a situation that you can't do it alone.
You need help and stop nagging him because it's just not going to work.
I'm running out of time, but I'll do a couple more.
Jesse, hi, Andrew.
I've been married for just over a year.
I love my wife very much.
I know she has some interest in having a child.
However, I don't feel that we are in the best place financially to have a child and I don't see that changing in the near future.
I'm torn.
I want to give my wife a child, but at the same time, I want to be able to provide a good life and get prepared.
I know that you are never really prepared for a child.
I've heard Ben say on this show that he thinks that couples who are married are morally obligated to bear children for the future generation.
That is such a very Jewish thing.
That's really funny.
That's a real Jewish tenet of Jewish thought.
What are your thoughts on this?
Do you feel married couples are morally obligated to have children?
And also, should I take our financial situation into account when determining when to have a child?
Any advice will help.
I don't think you're morally obligated to have children.
I do think children are just a great gift.
And my father, who didn't often give good advice, but he did give me one piece of advice that actually was good, which he used to say, children, every baby brings its own loaf of bread into the world.
Every baby is born with its own loaf of bread.
And what he meant by that is, you find some way.
You find a way.
When you have a child, you don't just leave him out there.
You're a responsible guy.
You love with your wife.
You find a way.
She'll find a way to bring in more money.
Listen, I love kids.
I wish I had more.
I would happily have more.
And so I can't tell you to have a child, obviously.
I can't advise you to have a child.
But I would put it before anything.
You know, I would put it before anything.
And especially if your wife wants one, she's only got a certain amount of time in which she can do it.
It means so much.
When you get older and your child has grown and you have children out in the world and you start to have grandchildren, you will be so happy.
You will be so happy you had those children.
If you truly feel that it's going to crush you, then maybe try to solve that problem first.
But I'd have, I personally, I did personally.
I was broke when I had my first kid.
I was absolutely broke.
I wasn't broke for long.
I wasn't broke for long.
That kid showed up.
I thought, man, somebody's got to feed this kid and it ain't going to be anybody else but me.
And I got rich real fast.
Kids made me rich.
Kids made me a man.
They made me rich.
You solve the problem.
You solve the problem.
So I wouldn't solve the problem first.
Let the kid come.
That will solve the problem.
One more.
From Veronica.
Here, oh, wow, this is the Hollywood question.
This is the great Hollywood question.
Dearest Andrew: How do we know when dreams are just dreams and when they are attainable goals?
I always feel like if I had just woken up an hour earlier, studied more, worked harder, I could have, would have, should have.
How can I know the balance between accepting that life is in Hollywood and I probably won't be that one in a million, and knowing when my lack of achievement is really my fault and I can do something different?
When Dreams Are Goals00:06:01
You can't.
You can't know.
Artists, people like me, we risked our whole lives.
We risked, you know, when I first started getting big checks for my writing, people would say, wow, you know, you write a book and you make that much money.
I said, no, I wrote 10 books and I made that much money.
If you prorated over all the time I spent when I had nothing, all the time I spent eating noodles and not taking the promotion that another guy took instead of me because I wanted to write, because I didn't want to work harder, and you take all that, I'm being paid just enough.
They can't pay me enough for the risks that I took.
And how do you know?
Every kid in Hollywood is wondering that.
It really is true.
You come out here, people come out here with their dreams.
They come up here and out here and sacrifice.
They live tough.
And a lot of people, especially writers, are smart people.
They could be lawyers.
They could be engineers and do other professions.
What I would say is this, however, there's always some little success that keeps you going.
And you truly, truly do not want to get to be 50 and find out that you're an ex, a wannabe writer, a wannabe actor, somebody who didn't get to do the thing you who wasn't made, picked, selected to do the thing that you wanted to do.
So if you take two years and pour it in, pour all your efforts into it, and wake up early, you know, if you really feel you're not working hard enough, that may tell you that you don't really want to do it enough, right?
I always joke with people: do you want to be a writer or do you want to have written a book?
You know, it's a very, very different thing.
I love what I do.
I sit down and I want to do it.
I die if I don't do it.
You know, it's not the having written the book.
It's the writing the book that matters to me.
I would give yourself like a deadline.
I really would.
I'd give myself a deadline.
Because one of the things that I noticed when I looked back on my career, it didn't seem like this when I was living it.
But the minute I got sane, I started to succeed.
I was crazy for a long time and I finally healed that.
The minute I healed that, I started to succeed.
It was almost like instantaneous from the minute I wasn't.
If you're not getting some kind of real feedback, and I'm not talking about, oh, this might work, and oh, I got a little goose here.
You know, after two years, three years, this probably isn't your game.
It probably isn't your game.
What I would say is don't be an, I don't know what your dream is.
Don't be an ex-ballerina.
Don't be an ex-actor.
Move on to something else.
Life is short, but life is long.
There's plenty of time to do other things in your life.
So live out another dream.
Find the dream.
You know, a lot of us, all of us, I think all of us, are busy trying to tell God who we are.
Let God tell you who you are.
Let him tell you who he made you to be.
Go do that thing.
Leave behind the dream.
Go do the thing that you were meant to do.
You know, the dream may come back around.
You never know.
You never know.
You know, it's very possible that if you let go of the thing, you'll have time to do it in some other way.
It'll come back into your life if you're meant to do it.
But I would give myself a deadline.
I would live up to that deadline and I'd walk away when the deadline, you know, listen, I did this.
I did this.
And I would, you know, I would have walked away if I didn't make it.
I would have done something else.
I never wanted to be an ex-writer.
That's an ex-wannabe writer.
So it's a tough question.
I wish I could give you an absolute answer, but I would say give yourself a deadline starting now.
Live up to it.
And when it's done, walk away.
All right.
I can't do it anymore.
tickety-boo news.
I'm actually out of time, but I just want to mention this one thing.
There's one hobby horse I have that's so boring that I try not to talk about it, which is regulation and how much cost regulation levies on businesses and how much freedom it takes away from us to have these unaccountable unelected agencies pass what are essentially laws.
And if you don't obey their laws and you want to appeal, you have to appeal to the agency.
I think that's unfair.
I think it's un-American.
Obama loved those regulations.
He ran the country with regulations.
He forced people to do and think and say what he wanted using regulations.
Trump, the evil Trump, the evil authoritarian Trump who's secretly Hitler, who's literally, the guy's literally Hitler, doesn't want to run your life.
He's been cutting back on the regulation.
That was another difference.
He forgot about not only did Trump ghostwrit his book, but he also didn't kill any Jews.
That was another thing.
He actually moved the embassy to Jerusalem.
That's just a little difference.
Oh, you can kill anybody.
Oh, yeah, that's another difference.
That's just popping into my head now.
But aside from that, aside from not being evil, not killing people and loving the Jews, he's Hitler.
But Trump has been cutting back on these regulations.
And what is really interesting, the people during Obama, the people who said there was too much regulation on business and industry soared from the average of 37% during the eight years of the George W. Bush presidency to a whopping 48%.
Almost half the country felt there was too much regulation.
But now, after just 21 months of the Trump presidency, it is back down to 39%.
And 33%, there's just, says just there's just about the right amount.
That means that they're not feeling the burden.
And the reason, I know it's not, regulation isn't interesting, but the reason I talk about it is because people like me don't feel regulation so much because of the First Amendment.
People who talk and write for a living, news people, journalists, they don't feel this stuff because the First Amendment protects them from regulation.
But if you're a farmer, if you're a rancher, if you run a store, if you just want to braid people's hair, the government comes after you, oh, you need a license to braid people's hair.
Yeah, you know, you need a bulletproof vest, too.
You know, what kind of stupid thing?
You don't need a license for that stuff.
All this stuff is just a way of controlling you, just a way of getting money out of you, just a way of feeling powerful as you're sitting in your office pushing papers around.
It's bad stuff.
Trump has really done a good job dialing it back.
It's one of the best things he's done, though not one of the most exciting.
All right, we will be back tomorrow.
We're going to have a long Clavenless weekend, but it doesn't matter anymore because you've got another kingdom.
So, right, you said you cuddle up to that.
But I'll talk about that tomorrow.
Come here tomorrow.
Be there with us.
The Andrew Klavan Show Production Team00:00:39
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