Andrew Clavin and David Limbaugh dissect Trump Derangement Syndrome, exposing Washington Post editor Wendy Nudnick’s satirical pamphlet mocking leftist scapegoating of Trump for violence, hurricanes, and childhood traumas. Clavin challenges inflated anti-Semitism statistics, blaming media exploitation over systemic mental health failures, while dismissing claims Trump radicalizes more than ISIS as absurd. Limbaugh’s Jesus Is Risen counters skepticism with resurrection eyewitness accounts, framing Christianity’s historical credibility against secular critiques, and defends Trump’s policies as vital to preserving Western values under leftist assault. Clavin then champions the WalkAway Movement, praising Black Americans rejecting Democratic identity politics for American nationalism, calling it a bulwark against divisive elites and Islamist suppression. The episode frames Trump’s legacy as a counter to radicalism, urging unity over partisan hysteria. [Automatically generated summary]
The Washington Post, where democracy dies in sanctimonious virtue posturing, has issued new guidelines to its reporters in a pamphlet entitled, Why It's President Trump's Fault.
WAPO editor Wendy Nudnick said he distributed the pamphlet because several Post reporters were laboring under the misapprehension that some negative things that happened in the country could not be blamed on President Trump.
Nudnick said he wanted to correct that impression so the paper could once again become the go-to source for uninformed leftists with underlying mental health issues.
Here's a brief excerpt from the pamphlet.
Quote, When a lunatic who supports the president mails bombs to the president's opponents, that is the president's fault because the lunatic supports the president.
When a lunatic who hates the president murders people, that is the president's fault because the president is an evil Adolf Hitler-like monster who uses harsh political rhetoric that creates a climate of violence.
When a lunatic shoots journalists because of a long-standing personal grudge going back to 2011, that is President Trump's fault because President Trump is mean to journalists who are wonderful and very important people charged by the Constitution with informing the public when President Trump is literally acting like Hitler with his harsh rhetoric criticizing journalists.
When there's a devastating hurricane, that is President Trump's fault because he doesn't accept climate change, which Hitler wouldn't do also if he were here instead of sending President Trump to do his evil work of harshly criticizing journalists.
When I was 11 and my mother blamed me for breaking her favorite lamp even after I told her it was the dog, that was President Trump's fault because I'm sure he called my mother and ratted me out because that's what Hitler would do.
Unquote.
In a statement to his staff, Mr. Nudnick said he felt it was urgent to issue the new guidelines because the Washington Post had recently descended into laughable partisan hackery that made a mockery of real journalism, which he said was President Trump's fault.
Pair of Thieves Underwear00:02:30
Tricker warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging also singing hunky-dunky.
Shipshaw dipsy-topsy, the round of zippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, I am back.
What a horrible clavenless weekend, man.
I leave for a couple of days.
I mean, what can you people not hold this country together in my absence for just a few days?
However, the good news is tomorrow is the mailbag.
And so all your problems, political, religious, personal, they will all be solved if you subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month or a lousy 100 bucks for the entire year and then go on the Daily Wire website, dailywire.com, hit the podcast button, hit the Andrew Clavin podcast, hit the mailbag symbol, ask your question.
Any question you want, all answers, guaranteed 100% correct and will change your lives.
Maybe for the better.
I don't know.
Gosh, it's like, I'll do my best.
What can I say?
But anyway, we will get through the aftermath of this horrible clavenless weekend.
But first, let's talk about your underwear.
By golly, that's what I know.
I know you're all thinking about it, so let's talk about it.
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Next time I make my underwear, well, you know, you don't have to make your underwear.
Just get your pair of thieves underwear.
One of the guys who started the pair of thieves says all his wife ever wants to see is him in his pair of superfit briefs and his wife is Jessica Alba.
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There's no ease in Clavin.
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That's it.
Outrage And Its Twists00:15:15
You know, one of the questions I used to get, I just told, Rob, our producer, just told me today that we have a policy of not naming the evildoers who do terrible things to people so we don't give them publicity.
I didn't know that, but I had already stopped doing it.
And one of the reasons I stopped doing it, you know, as a crime writer, when I go around, you know, to crime writing conferences or just any kind of thing where there were fans, one of the questions they would ask me more often than any other was, why are villains more interesting than heroes?
And, you know, if you think about it, you see things like, I don't know, you know, Nightmare on Elm Street, and everybody puts a picture of what was his name, Freddie something or other, you know, with a good thing, you know, Frankenstein, you think about the monster.
The villains of things become icons, and sometimes the heroes don't.
And they would say, well, why are heroes more interesting?
Why are villains more interesting than heroes?
And I would always say, it's because we lie about heroes, but we tell the truth about villains.
We tell the truth about all the villain's faults, all his human longings, all the things that became twisted in him.
They become representative of things that are in us that are twisted in us.
So we recognize ourselves in the villain.
But if we told the truths about heroes, which is what I have been trying to do for my whole career, they become far more interesting.
I've written books like True Crime where the villain doesn't even exist.
You don't even know who the villain is.
You just know about the hero because the hero is so interesting because I tell you all his flaws.
And that actually became over time, that became kind of standard in TV when you had stories like Sopranos and Breaking Bad where the hero and the villain would be the same guy.
But that's not what I was talking about.
What I was talking about was good guys, people who were good guys, but they were flawed.
Maybe they cheated on their wives.
Maybe they drank too much.
Maybe they lied.
They did all the things that people do.
But they were still good guys because they took that path.
And the thing is, good guys are unique because each one of us has a path to decency that is different from every other.
So it's really the good guy who is more interesting if, if you are willing to overcome the audience's unwillingness to see his flaws, if you force the audience to look at his flaws and they see, oh, he became a hero even though he wasn't perfect, even though he had all these flaws.
Because really, bad guys are like the devil's NPCs.
They're the non-playable character.
They're the faceless legions of evil who all do the same damn thing.
They all say the same damn thing.
Whenever they contact me, I hear, you know, whenever I hear from the anti-Semites, they all have that same snickering little demonic giggle and they all have found some line in the Bible that they think justifies their nastiness.
And they have some set of facts.
It's always the same.
But I find it, we have to talk, of course, about anti-Semitism when you have a killing like the one they had in Pittsburgh.
But the thing that I'm finding so hard right now, and I'm sure this is true of you too, is I'm finding it hard to find out what's not happening in America.
What is not happening in America?
We know things that are happening.
We know there was terrible shooting.
We know before that that loon was sending out bombs to Democrats and anti-Trump people.
But what is not happening?
Are we in the midst of a surge of anti-Semitism, a surge of hatred, a surge of violence?
Is that really what's going on?
You know, I really do not believe that.
I do not believe that.
There's this poll from, I don't know, it's one of the, I guess it's the Anti-Defamation League.
They've sent out this thing saying, oh, anti-Semitic violence has skyrocketed in the last year.
And the whole point of it is to get Trump.
It's just to say, oh, how terrible Trump is and Trump is inciting violence.
The stats they use are very, very suspect.
The stats they use are very suspect.
They count all kinds of things.
They talk about this shooting in Pittsburgh as if we haven't had shootings.
We've had plenty of shootings in Jewish neighborhoods before in Jewish facilities.
This guy had the luck of the devil and he killed more people than some of these other shooters have.
But that's just, you know, that's the way these things break.
But we have had this stuff before.
The problem we're having, the problem we're having is this system we have fallen into.
We all know it.
We all know it's true.
The system we have fallen into of trying to pin our, trying to pin evil actions on whatever it is we don't like in life.
It's video games.
I don't like video games.
I don't like the Second Amendment.
So it must be the Second Amendment.
I don't like President Trump.
So it's all President Trump.
And yes, do I believe the left does this more?
Yes, because I believe the left controls more of the narrative than we do.
The left controls more the networks, entertainment, academia.
So yes, they do it more, but we do it too.
And we start answering, well, you didn't blame Obama when the five cops were killed in Dallas and all this stuff.
And look, we degrade ourselves.
I mean, for a while, for a while, and I talked about this while it was happening, that guy, Anthony Jeselnik, remember he had that show called Thoughts and Prayers and he made a joke about how thoughts and prayers don't mean anything.
And suddenly it was wrong to send thoughts and prayers.
I mean, how low does your national conversation have to sink before you can't send thoughts and prayers to strangers who are heartbroken?
There's nothing else you can do for them.
So you do that.
So look, I don't want to play down the evil of anti-Semitism.
I don't want to say that we're not angry at one another.
We are angry at one another.
There's a lot of anger in the streets when you have politicians being chased out of restaurants and you have people going on TV and saying that we should do more of this.
We should get in people's faces.
When you have the TV station telling you that because a woman accused a man of sexual malfeasance, if you don't believe her, you're not believing all women, that kind of madness, that insane level of debate where if you don't agree with something, suddenly, you know, I hear people saying, oh, if you hate George Soros, you're anti-Semitic.
Like George Soros, who has done everything he can to destroy the state of Israel, to destroy America.
But he happens to be racially Jewish.
It's not like he's going to shul.
The guy has nothing to do with being actually Jewish.
He just is racially Jewish.
So if you don't like George Soros, now suddenly you're contributing to anti-Semitic violence.
And the left politicizes everything.
They do, they do, they do.
They politicize everything.
But let's just stop for a minute and talk about what's not happening.
Remember they had that poll.
Some organization called More in Common had that study called Hidden Tribes, where they came out and said the thing that headlined the news about it in the right-wing press was that people hated political correctness.
Everybody was talking about people hated political correctness.
But buried in there too was this fact that 25% of Americans are traditional conservatives.
25%.
That's a quarter.
One in four of Americans are traditional conservatives.
8% are progressives.
Everybody else doesn't want to belong to any group, is willing to compromise, is happy to talk.
They called them the exhausted majority.
That makes, so just doing a fact, that's 33, 67%.
That's what I always say.
I always say 70% of America could come to terms about 70% of the issues, right?
So we're not living in a hate-filled world.
We're not living in a place where everybody is screaming at each other and hates each other.
That's not what's happening.
Let's talk in a minute about what is.
I think we have two real problems that we're really facing that we need to talk about that actually are happening.
First, let's talk about a problem we don't have, which is having to go to the post office.
Post office is great.
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So what is happening?
Two things.
There are two things happening.
One, we have a problem dealing with mental illness in this country.
Nobody wants to talk about it.
And the reason nobody wants to talk about it is because it doesn't fuel the hate machine.
It doesn't fuel the outrage machine.
Outrage is what you tune in for.
You tune in for outrage because outrage gives you a little chemical burst of satisfaction.
Everybody wants that outrage.
You want to get that outrage.
We all want it.
I'm not talking about you.
I'm talking about me.
I'm talking about all of us.
We all want to hear about how it's the other guy's fault and what's the stupidest thing anybody said.
And by the way, we're going to get to that because a lot of stupid stuff got said.
We'll talk about it.
But, but all of these guys who have committed these acts over the years, these mass killings, almost all of them, not all of them, but almost all of them, are mentally ill.
I am not stigmatizing the mentally ill.
Most mentally ill people do not commit violence.
Most mentally ill people do not commit violence.
But, but because of this reluctance to stigmatize the mentally ill, we have neglected the fact that our system for taking care, forcibly taking care of those who need care has collapsed.
We no longer have asylums that we can commit people to.
We can commit them.
There are a few of them, but you can't get in.
It's hard to get in anywhere.
It's hard to get people to stay in there.
Once they're in, it's hard to make sure they get treatment, to force them to get treatment.
Sometimes they get committed and they don't get the treatment they need.
We now have treatment that would work, that would help people.
We got to get them.
You know, they think the left does this more than the right.
They think, you know, I contacted an expert about this over the weekend.
I contacted an expert and the first thing he said to me is, he said, I'm a raving liberal, but only conservatives will talk to me.
Only conservatives will talk about mental illness because we don't care about stigmatizing people because we're bums.
But, you know, we don't care.
We want to say, look, this is the problem.
These are the facts.
Let's fix it.
When you leave a mentally ill person out on the street or out free and he needs treatment, he becomes violent.
He ends up in prison.
Okay.
He ends up in prison.
That's a nightmare because first of all, he's already done harm to somebody.
That's why he's in prison.
And second of all, he's not going to get the treatment he needs.
We need asylums.
We need a way to commit people.
Every cop on the beat will tell you this is true.
Every police officer will tell you.
And what's so heartbreaking is the families of these people will tell you.
They'll say, I knew he was violent.
I knew he was going to go bad.
I couldn't do anything about it.
He wouldn't take the meds.
He wouldn't do what he had to do.
He would take them for a while and then they'd make his mind fuzzy and he'd stop taking them.
They all know we all know this needs treatment.
And because the left won't treat, won't stigmatize them.
What they say is, well, everybody, they'll say, well, you know, 30% of people are mentally ill.
You go, what do you mean 30%?
You know, they can't sleep at night.
They worry too much.
That's not mentally ill.
It's mentally ill when you think Martians are living in your fillings and telling you to kill people.
That's the kind of mental illness I'm talking about.
Plenty of people, plenty of sane people have killed Jews because of anti-Semitism.
But the guy who did this in Pittsburgh, he was also crazy.
And you don't know, you know, I mean, this is something we could work on together.
You do not know.
Even anybody who is anti-Semitism is a hatred of God.
The reason people hate Jews is because they hate God, because God used the Jews as a doorway back into the world.
They remind us of this.
They have inculcated much of our moral system comes from Jewish thought.
That's why we hate them.
We blame them for killing Christ because they represented all of us in the Christ drama.
Christ himself, a Jew, all Jews.
You know, people always quote these lines from the Bible.
When I criticize America, right, I love America.
I love America.
But I criticize America because I love it and because we want to fix things that are wrong with it.
When the Russians call me up, as they have occasionally done and asked me to go on their TV shows, or recently I got asked to be in a documentary that was going to be made by a guy who was sympathetic to Russia and was basically being made for a Russian audience.
I refused.
Why?
Because when I criticize America in Russia, that's saying something different.
When you read the Bible and people say things about Jews, you're listening to Jews talking about Jews.
That is different.
It is not anti-Semitism.
It is not hatefulness.
When Jesus says, hey, you guys, you're messing up here.
He is a Jew talking to other Jews.
So don't tell me that this excuses some kind of foul hatred against Jewish people.
It does not.
Jesus was a Jew.
Everything about Christianity blossoms out of the soil of Judaism.
So, you know, we have the second problem we have, but what I was going to say about that was basically evil people have done things without being crazy, but this guy was crazy.
We need a system for dealing with it.
The other problem we have is this.
8% of people are progressive radicals.
I would guess 90% of the media, maybe that's overdoing it.
85% of the media are part of that 8%.
That's a problem.
That should not be true.
We cannot fix that by law because of the First Amendment.
But listen to the garbage that was coming out after this incident in Pittsburgh.
Listen to the things people say.
There's this one woman.
Everybody's played this, but it really is worth playing.
This is this GQ reporter, Julia Yaffe.
Do you know how you pronounce her name?
Jaffe, maybe?
She's Jewish.
She comes out and says this about press, all they want to do is blame President Trump.
President Trump, by the way, the most pro-Jewish president in my lifetime, three Jewish grandchildren, three of his grandchildren are Jews, moves the embassies of Jerusalem.
B.B. Netanyahu can't love the, loves the guy so much.
It's a little embarrassing.
It's like, get a room, Bibi.
I mean, of course he does.
All Jews should love this guy.
He's doing a great job for them.
Here's what she said about him.
This president, one of the things that he really launched his presidential run on is talking about Islamic radicalization.
And this president has radicalized so many more people than ISIS ever did.
I mean, the way he talks, the way he, the way he.
That is, that's just, it's, it's.
The way he talks, the way that he allows these people, the way he winks and nods to these groups, the way he says, I know I'm not supposed to say it, but I'm a nationalist.
The way that he hams and haws when he has to condemn these people and kind of gritting his teeth kind of says, fine, okay, I condemn this.
But then, you know, and also.
President's Radicalizing Language00:08:42
Wait, hold on.
For you not to push back on that.
You're about to push back on that.
I'm about to bring it back.
For her to say that the president of the United States has radicalized more people than ISIS is irresponsible.
Now, some of you may have forgotten who ISIS is because President Trump destroyed them.
Okay, so some of you may have forgotten, like, well, who's ISIS again?
And remember, they used to have a caliphate until President Trump wiped it off the face of the earth.
You know, if that's, she apologized for that in that kind of creepy little apology way they have it.
It's not really an apology.
But before she said that, she tweeted out, a word to my fellow American Jews.
This president makes this possible here where you live.
I hope the embassy move over there where you don't live was worth it.
So in other words, it's the Jews' fault for wanting the embassy to be in Jerusalem where it belongs.
Today, I went out of my way not to bring in any cuts from MSNBC where they're just being absolutely disgusting, but that's not the problem.
The problem is not MSNBC.
They represent the 8%.
They represent that 8% progressive radicals.
That's fine.
They should have their stupid little television station that they can watch.
I'm completely in favor of that.
It's the mainstream.
It's the fact that the mainstream are all saying the same thing.
I brought in this montage from our pals at Newsbuster.
This is Sarah Sanders.
We cut her out.
This is just the press hammering Sarah Sanders.
Isn't it all President Trump's fault that an anti-Semite killed Jews?
But he's also harshly attacked some of the very people that received those pipe bombs.
And this morning, suggesting that the news media is responsible for the anger in the country.
How does he do that when, in the case of the pipe bomber, this was somebody who went to Trump rallies.
This is somebody who had a van covered with attacks on the media and praise for the president.
The shooter in Pittsburgh is somebody who was provoked, it seems, by the caravan that the president has spent so much time talking about.
Why is he out there when you say he's trying to unite the country?
Why is he out there?
But at his rallies, since the suspicious packages began being mailed, the president has called out Vaxine Waters by name at his rallies.
He's stood there as his supporters chant lock her up in reference to Hillary Clinton.
He continues to call crocodile Hillary Clinton.
Will the president stop using that kind of language in light of the fact that these individuals were targeted?
Shouldn't you reserve the term enemy for people who are actually the enemy of the United States rather than journalists?
So let's remember, I always like to go back down memory lane.
Let's remember what Nancy Pelosi said when the Bernie Bro shot up congressmen at the Virginia ball field, right?
And they asked her, they said, well, shouldn't the left tone down its rhetoric?
Somebody actually asked, had the temerity to ask Nancy Pelosi, shouldn't the left tone down his violent rhetoric?
Here's her response.
I think that the comments made by my Republican colleagues are outrageous beneath the dignity of the job that they hold, beneath the dignity of the respect that we would like Congress to command.
How dare they say such a thing?
How dare they?
So this sick individual does something despicable, and it was horrible what he did, hateful.
But for them to all of a sudden be sanctimonious as if they had never seen such a thing before.
And I don't even want to go into the President of the United States, but in terms of some of the language that he has used.
So again, let's go there another day.
But since you asked, how could they possibly say such a thing?
First of all, the timing of it all.
Everybody is so sad, so concerned, so coming together.
You know, let us all take a step back, examine our own conscience, see what negative attitudes we can all curtail.
But the sanctimony of it all, really.
Really?
So, you know, the sanctimony of it all.
So now we're hearing this.
And you know, they keep saying, well, Trump is the president.
Trump is the president, but the media is the media.
The media is a great cloud of information, a great cloud of narrative that surrounds them.
Trump is the only voice loud enough to cut through it.
When he blames them, he's correct.
When he says they are acting badly, he is correct.
I don't particularly like the enemy of the people line either.
I know he's too stubborn to ever let it go, but still, still, we have two problems in this country.
We have lots of problems in this country, of course, because the country's filled with people.
If we could just get rid of them, we wouldn't have any problems.
But as long as it's filled with people, we're going to have a lot of problems.
But the two big things that are going on is we have failed the mentally ill.
We're leaving them out there to commit these violent acts, these mass acts of violence.
We have failed them.
And the other is that 8% of the people dominate the media, dominate the narrative.
What's really happening in this country, if you walk out there, look at the police.
I mean, I don't even know how to talk about this.
Look at the police who run into a synagogue when there's problems there, who run into a mosque if there's problems there, who run into a black neighborhood if there's a problem there, while that 8% on the media talk about how racist they are, how racist the police are.
Listen, this is a country where a handsome Dan who has never done a damn thing for anybody can pretend to be a cop and make $250,000 a week.
But our real cops who make considerably less than that a year, right, show up for all of us.
They show up for all of us, no matter who you are.
Why?
Because it's America.
Because it's America.
Who healed the shooter?
Who healed the shooter after he went after the Jews?
Jews.
Jewish doctors rushed to aid him.
Why?
Because they're Americans.
Because this is America.
This is what it's like.
What I saw, what I saw after this atrocity, and it is an atrocity, and anti-Semitism, every time one of you guys, it's not, obviously it's not you guys I'm talking to, but every time somebody writes me and tells me what a cuck I am for standing up for the Jews or tells me, you know, like, oh, this Bible line, you know, forgives their hatred and all this stuff.
Look, this is a real evil thing.
It is the devil's flagpole.
It always has been the way the devil announces himself.
It's always with anti-Semitism.
But what's really happening in this country is President Trump went and gave a speech after this.
And whatever he says, it's not enough and it's no good and everybody's going to attack him.
But he's standing in the heartland of the country, standing in Illinois.
He's standing with a bunch of people.
Some of them may have never met a Jew, you know.
And they're cheering for him.
Just play what he said.
This evil anti-Semitic attack is an assault on all of us.
It's an assault on humanity.
It will require all of us working together to extract the hateful poison of anti-Semitism from our world.
This was an anti-Semitic attack at its worst.
The scourge of anti-Semitism cannot be ignored, cannot be tolerated, and it cannot be allowed to continue.
We can't allow it to continue.
When I see, you know, he went on to say they're trying to eradicate the Jews.
We're going to eradicate you.
And the crowd went wild.
When I see this country, this Christian country, this mainstream Christian country, and out in the middle of the country, they are cheering this president they love with his three Jewish grandchildren, and he's saying words like that.
And I have lived in other countries and I've been around a lot of places in the world.
This is the greatest country on earth.
You have won.
If you are here, you have won the lottery of life.
It doesn't mean it's perfect.
It doesn't mean everybody's great.
It doesn't mean there's no bigotry and all this stuff.
But this is an incredible country.
That's what's happening here.
What is happening here is America, which is a blessing.
It is a blessing.
So these horrible things that happen are being magnified by 8% of the country who own too much of the media.
That's one thing.
And we have a problem with the mentally ill that we're not treating the mentally ill.
But meanwhile, meanwhile, out on the streets, out in the churches, out in the temples, out in the people's homes, this is a country where people are getting along every day with people who are nothing like themselves, who are rooting for people who are nothing like themselves.
And we're going to return and talk about that a little bit more at the end of the show because some beautiful stuff happened over this weekend that got erased, got erased by all the violence, got blown away, as it were, by all the violence.
But we'll talk about it more.
Judeo-Christian Influences00:15:03
We're going to have David Limbaugh first.
We're going to talk about him, about the resurrection.
He has a new book out about the resurrection.
Meanwhile, take this moment because we've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
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All right, David Limbaugh needs no introduction.
He is a political commentator, nationally syndicated columnist with Creator Syndicate, a lawyer, and multiple-time best-selling author.
His latest book, Jesus is Risen, provides a riveting account of the birth of Christianity.
Here is David Limbaugh.
David Limbaugh, thanks so much for coming on.
Thanks for having me.
So Jesus is risen, Paul and the early church.
Let's start with this.
What's the thesis of the book?
Why should we be studying things that happened after Jesus has already left the building?
Well, this is the fourth in my Christian-themed books.
And just so I set the table here, the last one was about the gospels, and this one is about the book of Acts and seven, I mean, six of Paul's 13 epistles.
So I just go along the biblical text and either summarize it or paraphrase it and sometimes quote it verbatim and then interlace commentary from some of the great Christian thinkers and then some of my own from one of the lesser Christian thinkers.
And so, well, obviously, if Jesus is who he says he is, the Son of God, then it is relevant for all times.
And if he is correct that the way to the Father is through him and only through him, then people ought to take heed and listen.
So, as C.S. Lewis says, he's either the Lord liar or a lunatic.
We don't have any other option available to us.
So when you come to the question of who Jesus is, it has eternal consequences.
At least Christian doctrine teaches that.
The Bible teaches that.
So we ought to at least address it with sobriety.
Well, no question about that.
But why this particular, what do we get out of this particular part of the Bible?
Obviously, when Jesus is speaking to us, when he's acting, we can see that this is a direct delivery system, that we're hearing the word.
What are we hearing from these guys after he's gone?
Yeah, well, he sent the Holy Spirit to them.
He told the apostles, go to Jerusalem.
I'm going to ascend now.
I'm going to leave you now.
Someone greater than me is going to be here, meaning the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit would come.
Wait for instructions from him.
Go to Jerusalem.
So they waited and he came at Pentecost and all the ensuing happened.
The relevance of the book of Acts is the history of the early church and how the apostles were on fire to spread the gospel through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Peter and Paul are featured prominently in this book.
And then after Paul plants these churches throughout the Roman Empire, he gets reports back about how they're doing and whether they're following the true gospel that he delivered to them, finds out disturbing reports in some cases that they are not.
So he writes them letters, plaintively begging them to come back to the true gospel.
And you see the personal grieving that he's going through, almost like he birthed children and he sees them going astray and he wants them to come back.
And he writes these local, very personal letters to them and giving them Christian instruction, how to reunite in harmony.
Don't follow the false teachers.
Don't follow the pagan influences and follow the true gospel as I delivered it to you.
And then he also delivers Christian doctrine.
And someone asked me, well, what would Paul say to the churches today?
I said, well, he would say exactly what he said then.
That's why these letters, though they were written to individual churches and sometimes individuals, are of universal and timeless application.
They are exactly what the churches look to today for guidance and how they ought to be operated.
One of the things I'm always impressed about when I'm reading about this portion of the Christian story is the incredible danger all of them were in.
I mean, they were in really hostile territory.
And I think almost all of the disciples were killed, I believe.
I mean, everybody was martyred.
They were talking to people.
Would the people they were talking to have known if they were complete lunatics?
Would they have known, you know, they were saying that Jesus had risen from the dead.
It wasn't a mile outside of Jerusalem, was it, that this had happened.
And they were talking to those people.
Would they have reacted the same way, do you think, if it was all a scam?
No, in fact, what I am fond of saying about this is that Christianity is not a religion that was developed from the ground up by human beings to God, developing their own idea of an abstract God and through abstract theology or philosophy.
It is grounded in history.
After Christ was with the apostles during his earthly ministry, and he was crucified and died, they still were dubious that it was all true.
Peter denied him three times.
It was only when he appeared in his bodily resurrection over a period of 40 days to them and to as many as 500 people at one time, as Paul reports in 1 Corinthians, that they became believers, that they were transformed from cowardly skeptics to bold proclaimants of the gospel.
And they have actually witnessed him in the flesh in his bodily resurrection.
They would not, you could say, well, some other religions, a lot of other religions and beliefs have martyrs.
What's the difference?
The difference is they may, they honestly do sincerely believe that what they are dying for is true, but they don't have anything based on history.
These apostles, would they, it's even conceivable that they would have died a martyr's death for something they knew to be a lie.
They're saying it happened.
They saw it happen.
So why would they go off?
What possible benefit could it bring them for doing it?
And so I'm interested in Paul when he's being tried for heresy and defiling the temple by the Jewish authorities.
He turned to one of the kings and said, you know this is true.
It didn't happen in a corner.
And that bears directly on your question.
Everybody knew it happened.
Not everybody, but it the word was out that it had happened.
That's why they were so worried about it.
It was a threat to their existing religion and their authority there.
There are people now who say that this religion uh, it's backward, it's over, it's irrelevant to the scientific world.
Uh, guys like Steven Pinker who are saying, if we fall back, that everything we have comes from the enlightenment, if we fall back into religion, we fall back into medieval darkness.
What's your response to that I I?
My response is that that's uh, history revisionism.
I believe that the, that Christianity gave rise to modern science.
All the major early great scientists were Christian.
Uh, and there's nothing incompatible between between Christianity and science.
Christianity is based on an overwhelming body of evidence uh, that is sifted through our reason.
We believe what we believe in a rational way.
Obviously, faith is something different from reason, but faith is compatible with reason.
It involves a?
Uh, an act of the will to put your trust in Christ.
The enlightenment, of course, had some beneficial influences and I?
I guess, if you look back at the founding of the United States uh, there's this ongoing debate about whether it was primarily a product of the enlightenment or of Judeo-christian tradition.
I think it was primarily the Judeo-christian tradition.
The overwhelming number, the overwhelming majority of our founders were Christians, strong practicing Christians.
Of course, the Enlightenment had some influence, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and some others uh were skeptics or deists or or whatever you want to uh, however you want to denominate them uh, but the, the large majority of those framers were Christians, and I think that uh, there is nothing, as I say, there's nothing, incompatible between that and science, and I disagree with Pinker.
See these, and I think, by the way, Pinker's an interesting guy.
I've read quite a bit of what he's written, especially on writing.
He's a great.
Have you ever read his books on writing?
No no, he's a wonderful writer yeah yeah, but sometimes he's so far out there in some of his social stuff.
But it you you, the Christian, Judeo-christian tradition teaches that god, that that man is made in god's image.
That's what gives rise to our inalienable rights.
If we weren't, if we evolved from some rock or some primordial soup, what possible basis is there to claim we have uh, inalienable rights?
And those rights are what gives us, or at the root of the civility that we ultimately have to give toward each other and the, and of our laws, which are designed to protect us and our liberties.
You know, there's a book called by Marcello Pera, an Italian philosopher and politician, called why we should call ourselves Christians, in which he sort of laments the lackluster response to Islamic terrorism and feels that Europe is basically descending, is basically disappearing.
And yet the book is called why we should call ourselves Christians because he himself is an atheist uh, and he believes that we should cling to the Judeo-christian principles, but he can't believe what?
What's your response to that I?
I find that interesting because a lot of um reasonable non-hostile, Unhostile atheists, as opposed to the new atheists, Christopher Hitchens, and those who are affirmatively hostile to the religion, believe that they acknowledge that Christianity and Judaism were positive influences on society.
And even though they don't believe they think we should gravitate toward those because they're healthy for society, I find it an amazing disconnect.
I'm not saying it's irrational, but where do they think those ideas came from?
Now, you know, Pinker and Hitchens and probably Harris and these guys, they think that these great ideas, these profound ideas, developed organically over the years, and that man developed his own morality by the bootstraps and through centuries of enlightenment.
I just radically disagree with that.
These ideas that we have that are worth saving can be traced directly back to the Judeo-Christian tradition.
But can you get rid of, can you hold on to the ideas without having the faith?
I guess that's what I'm asking because Pero seems to feel that you can't.
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
I think when you take the roots out of it, what do you have to anchor it?
What justification is there?
What compelling argument is there to keep these principles?
First place, the entire secular left would disagree with you that these are beneficial ideas anyway.
So what do you have to ground them in?
You know, one of the things that I disagreed with you about that I'm really happy to have you here to explain it to me more fully in your book.
I think it was Jesus on Trial.
You basically held that to get rid of a literal reading of the creation and fall story in Genesis is to lose your Christian faith.
And I believe that every word of the Bible is true, but I don't believe that every word is true in the same way.
And I don't read that Genesis story necessarily literally.
Why is that a threat to my ultimate Christian faith, which is in the resurrection and the salvation of Christ?
I don't remember saying that or saying that in that way.
I don't have any problem.
Let me put it this way.
I respect both the new earth, the young earth, and the old earth positions on this.
I think that science, the overwhelming body of science is that it's an old earth.
And then you can read scripture and say it requires us, if we read it literally, to say that there's a young earth.
But then other people who I respect just as much say know there are gaps and there are other interpretations that say it can be compatible with an old earth.
I'm more inclined to believe it's an old earth, but I don't think it's irrational to say it could be a young earth because things aren't always as they appear and different ways of testing, whatever.
But whatever it is, I don't want people to think that we're hostile to science.
I wouldn't sit there and say something that I know to be true scientifically can't be true because it's incompatible with my belief, my Christian belief system.
No, I don't think we're, I don't think we're at odds on that.
I think obviously, even though I believe the Bible is inerrant, I don't think it's, I don't believe in a dogmatic reading of it.
Okay.
Okay.
But I don't want to sidestep this.
If you please explore that further, if I'm misunderstanding or if I stated something, but I don't think what you described is what I have.
No, I just, well, let me think of what I, well, what I did say, this is the only thing I can think of.
I think that evolution, the idea of macroevolution, is incompatible with the Judeo-Christian worldview.
I don't know what Jews believe on this.
Need to talk to Shapiro about this.
But I think, here's why.
Here's what I really believe.
And this may be what you like.
The Gods, the Bible specifically says God was made in man, man was made in God's image and different in kind from the other species.
We didn't evolve from one of those lesser species.
I think to say we did is incompatible with the Christian worldview and with the Bible.
And by the way, I don't think it's supportable by science anyway.
I don't think they can demonstrate any links, any of these missing links.
The evidence that they base this on is so shoddy, it's unbelievable.
And our so-called common ancestors, of course, we have common DNA, but we are distinctly different.
And God specifically made us in his image.
He didn't make us to evolve into his image.
That's my belief.
You know, I wanted, we're running out of time, and I want to just get you, get a couple of things on the immediate political situation.
Identity Politics and Nationalism00:06:19
You've been a supporter of Donald Trump.
Do you recognize, you know, with them, you know, him sending obscene tweets at Stormy Daniels and her sending obscene tweets back?
Do you recognize any danger to Christians in supporting a guy who hasn't lived a particularly Christian life?
Well, I don't know about a danger.
It's not ideal.
And I originally supported Ted Cruz, and I was not a big fan of Trump.
Once the choice became binary, which I believe it did in the general election, I became a strong supporter of Trump.
And I've been a great admirer of what he's done in office.
I think he's really stuck to his promises.
I think he's given us a template on how to fight, which is what we are missing, which is why the Tea Party rose up, which is why we have Trump.
Trump is, I don't want to say he's a symptom, but he's a result.
He's an outgrowth of this movement that was going on.
I radically disagree with the Never Trumpers who say he's a cult.
This is not, and people do appreciate him because he may be the perfect guy, the only guy who we could have coalesced in in this movement, but this movement was going to find someone.
It just so happens pretty good with Trump.
The problem with Trump is with the good, you get the bad.
You can say, well, take away his tweets.
Well, then that would take away some of his great tweets and some of the things we, but I don't take him as seriously.
And this Selena Zito serious versus literally, like I used to be outraged when he would accuse Ted Cruz's dad of shooting.
Now I look at that and just laugh my head off.
It's so absurd.
I don't take Trump seriously on that level.
I will say this, though.
It's hard to argue with people criticizing him when he does what he did today, not today, whenever it was, about the Stormy Daniels thing.
He doesn't need to get so caustic.
Yes, he's a little egomaniacal.
I wish he wouldn't do that.
But on balance, it's Trump.
He's harmless on these things.
I really think he's harmless.
And I've talked a lot about this with my Christian friends.
Is it compatible with the Christian worldview to support Trump?
I think it's compulsory that we support him, given these meta issues that we face.
We face the existential threats to this country.
The left wants to fundamentally change.
In fact, the people that say we share common goals with the left are just so delusional.
I can't.
No, we don't.
We don't just share the same goals.
We get to them a different way.
They want to radically destroy the foundational principle of this nation.
We have to fight.
It's a war.
I don't mean it's a physical war.
I mean, I'm not Kurt Schlichter after all.
Bills and Normal's plug for Kurt.
I would never sink to calling you Kurt Schlichter.
That would just be cruel.
No, he's a great American.
I'm just kidding.
He's a good buddy.
But you know what I mean?
But it is going to be tough.
We don't have to fight as dirty as they do, but we have to fight as intensely.
And Christians, I am not, I do not feel the slightest bit guilty for supporting Trump.
I don't, I can't defend some of the things he does, but on a policy level, I'm very happy with what he's doing.
I really am.
Now, we got some things to change.
We got to get entitlements under control.
We got to get spending under control.
But how do you do everything at once?
These liberals are just creating chaos all over.
But on entitlements, we got to convince Trump first.
He's with us on most of the issues.
Somebody's got to get his ear on entitlements.
Yeah, no, I agree with you completely.
David Limbaugh, the book is Jesus is Risen Paul in the early church.
Thanks very much for coming on.
It's great talking to you.
You too.
Thank you.
Thanks a lot.
Really interesting writer on Christian issues, David.
You know, I made a mistake that I've neglected to play the lefties dictionary today.
K is out.
You can find it, but we'll play it.
We'll play it here tomorrow, but you can also find it on YouTube.
I just want to talk about one thing.
You know, instead of doing sexual follies, I have to talk about this walk away movement that went by.
The walkaway march happened over the weekend, Brandon Stratch's march.
And Candace Owens was also there with what she is calling hilariously Blexit, which is the black exit from the Democrat Party.
And it was really moving.
I mean, thousands of people showed up for the march, but also to see the black political, young black political leaders who showed up for a meeting, personal meeting with President Trump and were so thrilled to see him and were so pro-American.
One of these guys was asked, he was wearing a MAGA hat, and he was asked, when was America great?
When was America great?
And here is part of his response.
She asked me the question on my hat: when was America great?
I answered it like this.
America has been great from the very start because this nation was founded on the principles of freeing us from tyranny.
Okay, there was slaves and so forth.
But there were a lot of people of all colors, let's say white, in this nation that did not feel like that was correct.
And this nation from that time has been moving out of tyranny, from bondage in one way or another, whether it be from Britain or whether it be from slavery as a whole.
In case she doesn't know, there was a Civil War.
And in part, I say in part, a whole lot of white people, if you look at history, died because they wanted this nation and people like myself to be free.
I believe that.
Wait a minute.
Let me get myself together.
Because when you talk about this country, I do love the country.
Yeah, he loves it.
You know, and I got to say, you know, like we so want, we so want people to come back to not just walk away from the radical left, walk away from the Democrat Party, walk away from identity politics.
Identity politics is, I've said it a million times, say it again, identity politics is racism with a smiley face.
The melting pot was the right idea.
The melting pot that we are all Americans is the right idea.
You cannot have it both ways.
You cannot have it both ways.
I really pray that people like Brandon and Candace will turn this movement into something big.
It's not about President Trump.
President Trump will come and go.
It is about this country.
It is about all of us understanding that we are here under the creed of equality, under the creed of freedom, of individual liberty, of individual rights, of the individual pursuit of happiness, that we are here as a community, as a community of individuals, doing these things together.
Crisis of American Nationalism00:01:29
It does not matter.
Truly, it does not matter.
And, you know, I know I hit on the Muslims sometimes because of the fact that the attacks on them have been silenced.
The criticism of Islamism has been muted and people are getting silenced over it.
But I know that there are plenty of good Muslim Americans too.
That is what this is all about.
It's what this is all about.
And when Trump talks about being a nationalist, that's what that is about.
It's not about white nationalism.
It is about American nationalism.
And all of us should get on that train.
All of us should get on it.
It is a true problem.
We have a true problem, which is that a radical 8% dominate so much of the media and are creating this aura of crisis, this cloud of hatred and anger between us.
It doesn't have to be there.
It itself could become the crisis that they're trying to foment, but it doesn't have to.
We don't have to listen.
We can all of us walk away.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
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