Ep. 618 frames The Women’s Bible as a feminist distortion of scripture, replacing figures like Ruth with fictional characters while dismissing traditional virtues. Trump’s presidency is a "mirror" exposing systemic failures: the Clintons’ protected scandals, Obama’s unfulfilled promises, and Mueller’s $35M Russia probe lacking evidence. Polarization stems from feminist grievances redirected at Trump, while Socrates and Jesus are hailed as moral truth-tellers through indirect methods. The episode concludes that Trump’s chaos reflects deeper societal fractures—economic thriving masks cultural decay, where relativism triumphs over absolutes. [Automatically generated summary]
Feminist theologians are preparing to issue a rewritten version of the Bible.
So hooray.
The book will be called the Women's Bible to help distinguish it from the real Bible.
And according to the authors, it will emphasize feminist values, which will also help distinguish it from the real Bible.
Feminists have long been angry at both the Old and New Testaments for raising up female characters with typical girly traits like virtue, courage, intelligence, and holiness.
and will now be able to turn to this new book to find women with feminist traits like endlessly complaining about nothing and speaking with screechy voices that are absolutely intolerable.
For example, and I promise this is a real example, the feminists are angry about the scene in the Gospel of Luke where Jesus visits the sisters Martha and Mary and Martha is busy preparing to serve supper.
The feminist authors have reinterpreted the Greek so that it now says Martha was not serving but was a deacon of the church.
And the Son of God can just get his own damn supper before being crucified for the sins of all humankind.
The feminists who wrote this book are both Catholic and Protestant, but they've reached out from those two branches of faith into a middle darkness of heresy and moral depravity to produce an ecumenical volume that can engage the entire Christian communion in error and sin.
Now, instead of reading about Ruth, whose devotion to God and family became a byword, and Judith, who single-handedly killed the villainous general Holofernes, and Esther, who rescued her entire people from annihilation, and the Virgin Mary, who surrendered her very body to the salvational work of God, we'll be introduced to new characters, like Sheila, who is just really ticked off right now, and Tiffany, who can't even.
As one of the book's authors put it, quote, and this is a real quote, we are fighting against a literal reading of the text, unquote.
Well, congratulations, sweetheart.
So are we all.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety boo.
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Also, you want to get another kingdom.
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So here's the theme of today's show.
Why Trump Reflects Failure00:06:30
Donald Trump is a mirror that drives men mad.
I have been thinking about this because I cannot help but look at this country right now and notice that things are going really well.
Are there problems?
Sure, there are problems.
Is there anything to get hysterical about?
I would say no.
I would say things are good.
The economy is good.
You know, we're kind of at peace.
This thing that's happening in Afghanistan, we lost three soldiers over there.
I still think there's a good reason to pull out.
I think Trump's instincts were right on this.
But still, we're largely at peace.
The president is doing mostly clever stuff.
Everybody gets hysterical about everything he does, but getting out of the Iran deal, surely the right thing to paris.
And everybody is so angry and everybody, especially on TV, is so crazy.
And I start to think, what is it about Donald Trump that drives people crazy?
And obviously it's a cliché to talk about Trump derangement syndrome, especially because there was a Bush derangement syndrome.
They invented that phrase for Bush.
And they certainly was a Mitt Romney derangement.
So that's just the usual hatred of Republicans.
But Donald Trump does something to people.
And I've been thinking about it.
And I really think what he does is that he reflects.
And by the way, before I say this, this has nothing to do with his own flaws as a human being, his own mistakes as president.
Everybody has flaws.
He's a big character.
He has big flaws.
He's made mistakes as president.
Nothing to do with that.
But he reflects people's failures back at them.
And the reason they can't let go of his image is if they let go of his image, they have to admit what was going wrong up till the moment Trump arrived and why Trump is here.
Because they don't want to take responsibility for it at all.
And this is whether people on the right or on the left.
My attitude toward Trump has remained exactly the same.
It has been my tragic attitude toward everything.
I have a tragic attitude toward life, that some things can't be helped, that some decay, lives are going to decay, your life is going to end, everything built by human beings falls.
We're just trying to defend the day.
We are trying to keep free for another day because we know eventually freedom collapses.
All systems of government collapse.
Plato and Aristotle told us this, but we keep our republic alive for one more day, and that is a victory.
That's my attitude.
So we had a choice in this election, right?
It was between Trump with all his flaws, and they are big flaws.
He's a guy who brags about committing adultery.
He's a guy who had some questionable business deals.
He's a guy who's made statements that nobody, certainly I can't embrace.
All those things are true.
The other person he was running against was a serial criminal.
She was a woman who had taken money.
I have to say allegedly because it's never been proved, But she had clearly, it seems to me, used her foundation to take money in return for selling government favors.
That seemed really clear to me.
And even if all that, even if a history of whitewater, of stoning the investigator, Ken Starr, when he was trying to investigate her shady dealings down in Arkansas, even if all that was washed away, and the money coming into the foundation that disappeared and the money coming into the foundation where people got favors for it, even if all that was erased, here was a woman who was openly against the First Amendment,
and she was openly against the Second Amendment and was clearly going to have the ability to at least appoint one judge and, as we now know, would have been able to appoint two Supreme Court justices to secure a world where the First Amendment was going to be permanently crippled.
We know this because of her hatred of Citizens United, which was a pure First Amendment case.
And we know that her feeling about the Second Amendment was that Heller was wrongly decided, so he didn't have the right to bear arms.
It seemed to me that that was a, especially after eight years of Obama and his leftist policies, which she would have nailed down for good, it seemed to me that that was a genuine threat, a genuine threat to the American experiment.
I'm not saying the country would have gone up and smoked.
I'm not saying it would have been the apocalypse.
I'm saying the country, I do not think, would have recovered anytime soon from the depredation of this dishonest and anti-American woman.
That's what I think.
And so it was an easy choice for me.
I didn't like voting for Trump.
I've been extremely happy with the things that he has done, with his policies.
I don't have to list them again, but the judges and the regulations and all that stuff and the tax cuts.
But anyone who rewrites this history to say, oh, it would have been fine if Hillary had been elected, it would not have been fine.
It was not going to be fine.
I mean, they would not have held off on the Supreme Court justices forever.
She really wasn't.
She's also tremendous incompetent.
Anybody who says this is fine.
And these guys, I don't want to name them like Max Boot, but these guys on the right who will not let it go, who rewrite histories to say that she was not criminal, these guys who say, oh, you know, Obama didn't use the IRS to silence his opposition.
He wasn't corrupt.
They are being childish.
And why are they being childish?
Because their vision failed.
A lot of these guys were neoconservatives who hooked in to the George W. Bush freedom agenda.
And that freedom agenda has failed.
We can see that in Afghanistan.
We can see it to some degree in Iraq.
We can see it throughout the Middle East.
The fact that we still have to deal, we have to deal with Saudi Arabia so as not to deal with Iran tells us that the freedom mission in the Middle East failed and they will not accept it.
And Trump, with his, you know, Bush lied us into war nonsense and with his basically isolationist ideas, his isolationist feeling is a reflection of that failure.
But more than that, there's a reflection of the failure of conservatism, people like me, to reach out and feel the pain of the people in the middle of the country.
You know, guys like, I really like Kevin Williamson.
I like him personally and I like his mind and I like what he writes.
But he comes from what he himself would call a hillbilly background and he's very strong in blaming people for their own failures because he lived with it and he saw it and he sees the dysfunction that leads to opiate addiction, the guy who won't leave his community to find a job elsewhere.
And he blames them for that.
And a lot of people blame the unemployed for their own unemployment.
It's kind of like blaming, it's the same thing as blaming black people in their community for the dysfunction in their families without taking into account that when your mom is a crack whore and your dad's long time gone, it's not that easy when you're 12 to get your mind right.
Reflections on Failure00:15:44
It's not that easy to put things together, especially when the schools are a mess.
So it's not enough.
It's not enough to say you're free, pick up and move, go find a job.
Conservatism failed those people, and Donald Trump reflects that failure back.
And that is a lot of the reason why people cannot accept Trump, even as a tragic choice, which I think to some degree Trump was.
He's not a polite guy.
He's not, how can I put it?
He's not like the kind of person we want to represent us at all times.
But the conservatives cannot accept that something went terribly wrong as indicated by the fact that Trump wiped his opponents away and the GOP and went on to win.
Then there's the women.
Then there's the women.
And I'll get to that in just a minute.
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And I know what you're asking, sure.
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Let's talk about women.
Yesterday, last night, I read a piece in New York Magazine about marriages falling apart over politics since Trump is elected.
And the women in these pieces, especially the left-wing women, were nuts.
They were nuts.
And I know some of these women, by the way, I know women like this.
And they were nuts.
And sometimes they left their husbands or dissed their husbands or bullied their husbands or disrespected their husbands because their husbands, not that they didn't hate Trump, but they didn't hate him enough.
Okay?
Let me read some of their testimony.
Here's one woman who says, part of what causes fights is that I don't want to hear his side.
And he hates that.
I can't imagine why he would hate that.
Mostly I tell him he needs to think about this more clearly before he talks to me about it.
And then I walk away.
I've heard his side for 30 years.
I'm ready to hear new points of view.
Change can't happen if we keep talking about excusing behavior.
I mean, this, you know, if your wife is talking to you like that, yeah, you're in big trouble.
I mean, this is not the kind of wrath you want to deal with from the woman in your household.
I mean, this is a horrible, it's a horrible way to treat people.
Another woman says the same thing talking about Brett Kavanaugh.
She said, we had some friends over for dinner and we had an argument about whether this kind of trial by mob that's happened in the press is unfair.
My friends, a man and a woman, took the position that a man shouldn't have his reputation ruined because of an allegation.
I disagreed.
And as the conversation kept going, I got upset.
Finally, I said that it's obvious none of them had been sexually assaulted.
And I think that the statistics bear out that women never get due process when they've accused somebody.
The accuser doesn't get due process.
The accused gets due process because he or she is the one with everything on the line.
My line is, she says, cultural change is like a steamroller.
It flattens distinctions and some people will get hurt and I'm okay with that.
You know, I mean, that's like me, you know, that's like a rich guy saying, yeah, well, poverty is painful and some people get hurt.
I'm okay with that, you know?
I mean, that's a woman who's lost her mind and lost her way.
It was interesting, the only couple here that actually worked things out was the one couple where in the article where the woman supported Trump and she was willing to let her husband's leftism go and just be kind about it.
And he had to be convinced, but ultimately they compromised.
These women, women who are talking nonsense like this, and the women of the Me Too movement, such as it's represented in the press, not the real Me Too movement, where women are saying, hey, stop abusing us, with which I'm completely in sync.
I'm completely in favor of not abusing women.
But these women who are so angry that they're willing to get rid of due process, that they're not willing to listen.
I've heard enough of this.
I'm not going to listen to anybody anymore.
That kind of attitude.
These women are not, were not brought on.
This was not brought on by Donald Trump.
This was brought on by 30 years of protecting the Clintons and burying these stories so that Bill Clinton first and then Hillary Clinton didn't have to be exposed.
Bill Clinton was legitimate, legitimately, convincingly accused of rape.
And now the left, and there's a documentary that's doing it and there's other places where they're doing it, they're starting to take these stories seriously, but they suppress them and they suppressed them right through the last election.
If you are angry, ladies, and you, and believe me, I've heard some of these stories.
I understand you have a right to be angry.
It's not because of Donald Trump.
It's because of Clinton's, the Clintons running the left and suppressing these stories for 30 years.
If I couldn't be heard for 30 years, if anybody couldn't be heard for 30 years, you would be angry.
And Donald Trump, being the kind of borish guy he is, the billionaire playboy that he is, he is a good target.
They tried to target George W. Bush, but they were just covering up for the Clintons.
They tried to target Mitt Romney, stuffing women.
Remember, he was stuffing women in binders?
He was stuffing women in binders after this clown, Clinton, was actually chasing women around the room and exposing himself and potentially allegedly raping them.
You know, and they were covering this up and they covered it up for Hillary again.
They covered up her role in allegedly silencing these women, bullying these women into silence, and certainly openly in the press, calling on the press to investigate them.
All of that they covered up.
When they got to Trump, they got a real good image of that guy, that abusive guy, that guy who puts his hands on you, that guy who looks up your skirt, that guy who says nasty things.
Oh, and if you're a celebrity, women let you do this and that.
He's a good mirror for that.
But the picture, the image they're seeing in that mirror is the image of their failure to address this since Bill Clinton was president back in the 90s.
So it's not, it is not, I'm not forgiving Trump for who he is.
I'm saying that he operates as a mirror for the failure of the left to deal with the true valid complaints of women in the workplace and women, you know, in history.
I mean, look, people are bad, people are sinful, and women are weaker than men.
And women have something men want.
That is the situation that we live in.
That's the tragic situation of life, also part of the glorious situation of life in the relations between men and women.
But it is a problem, and it certainly becomes a problem in the workplace when you have feminists telling you that men and women are exactly the same and everybody can treat everybody equally and chivalry is oppressive.
When you have feminists telling you that, you've got a problem.
That problem was suppressed because of Bill Clinton and because of Hillary Clinton.
And Trump reflects that suppression and reflects that failure.
And finally, and probably worst of all, Donald Trump is a reflection of the one thing the left cannot accept.
Obama failed.
He was a failure.
I've talked about all the ways he was a failure, certainly a failure in the Middle East.
Certainly he suppressed the economy.
His health care bill was one of the biggest pieces of garbage that's ever gotten through, a completely partisan vote.
There's never been a bill that important that only got through without one single vote, that got through without one single vote from the other side.
Obama was a failure in every possible way, and they cannot accept that.
And so it has to be.
I mean, why do you think Trump is there?
Why is Trump there?
If Obama was not a divisive, failed president, if he was not a guy who alienated the opposition, what happened to all those Democrats in state houses across the country?
What happened to all those Democrats in local and national government throughout the country?
Everybody was afraid to say the emperor was wearing no clothes, but they voted out every single Democrat all around him because he was an utter failure.
And Trump, every time they look at Trump, that's what they see.
And why do you think Obama can't keep his mouth shut?
Why do you think he can't stay home like every other president before him and just stay out of it?
He is out there.
You know, he said something, we have a clip of him.
You know, the one thing that Obama loves, he's got to give this to him, he really loves Obama.
Barack Obama loves Barack Obama.
And the things he says about himself are so revelatory and so perblind to his own failings that they really tell you why Donald Trump is president of the United States.
Play this Obama clip.
The core values that we brought into the office, pretty homespun values, you know, tell the truth and try to see the other person's point of view and treat people kindly and with respect and work hard and think things through.
And, you know, we were able to sustain that in a difficult environment for that to sustain.
And not only did I not get indicted, nobody in my administration got indicted, which, by the way, was the only administration in modern history that that can be said about.
In fact, nobody came close to being indicted.
I mean, that is, weirdly, one of the most damning things he could say.
He had Eric Holder, an attorney general, who called himself his wingman.
He said, I've got to be there to protect my boy.
He went before Congress and stonewalled him, and then Obama backed up his stonewall by claiming executive privilege so that Holder was held in contempt of Congress, the only attorney general ever held in contempt of Congress.
That's why nobody was indicted.
The fact that nobody was indicted in his administration is testimony to the corruption in his administration, not to the cleanliness of his administration.
It's the fact that he ran the government like a Democrat, urban machine.
But he loves himself.
And when you sit there and say, oh, we try to get along with people, be respectful to people.
Was he respectful to people when he bathed the White House in rainbow colors after Oberg fell, after the Supreme Court decided in favor of gay marriage?
Hey, listen, you know that I'm like a gay-friendly guy.
I don't really care about gay marriage.
But a lot of people had deep, deep religious convictions.
And when that, when just a majority of judges, right, not a majority of the people who actually represent us, decided that the Constitution that the founders meant for gay people to get married, which was absurd, he bathed the White House, the people's house, in rainbow colors, telling half the country, a solid half the country, stuff it.
Go get stuffed.
We don't care about you.
This is not your house.
I am not your president.
Go to hell.
He was a divisive, terrible president.
The reason, the key reason Donald Trump is president of the United States is because he made people, Obama made people so angry they were ready to start shouting back.
And they sent a man who was willing to do that to Washington, D.C.
And they left, cannot stand the reflection of their own failure in the presence of Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is a mirror that drives men mad.
And you know, this is part of this Russian investigation.
I'm listening to this Russia investigation.
All this news is starting to leak now, which is really interesting.
For a while, there wasn't a lot of stuff coming out of the Mueller camp.
I'm not sure how much of this is coming out of the Mueller camp.
There are these two guys, Roger Stone, you all know Roger Stone, he's kind of the operator, and Jerome Corsi, who's this guy, you know, he's one of these birther crazies.
You know, he has all these conspiracy theory stuff.
But they're coming out and they're talking about what Mueller is doing to them, how Mueller is getting.
I mean, these are older people, you know, and Mueller is treating them like perps.
He's pulled in off the street.
I mean, the fact that Paul Manafort is somewhere in solitary confinement, I'm sure you feel safer in your home knowing that Paul Manafort is not going to come to your house and do whatever.
You know, Manafort is not a guy I respect.
He's not a guy that has a very good reputation for honesty or integrity.
But what is he doing in solitary confinement?
Really facing 10 years in prison?
And Mueller has this real problem.
In fact, Alan Dershowitz, you know, yesterday I played, I want to play this because yesterday I played Alan Dershowitz saying that Mueller's final report is going to be devastating.
But here's what he meant.
What he meant was, I thought he meant that stuff was going to come out, but apparently he's now clarifying this to say that he thinks Mueller is on the warpath and that Trump is right about him, that he is not being fair.
The president has to be ready and his team has to be ready because Mueller is not going to produce a neutral report.
He's not going to be fair.
He's going to produce what he believes is going to be a devastating attack.
He's going to put together everything.
He's going to use information from Manafort and others without necessarily disclosing that they're liars.
And so the president's team has to be ready.
And that's why I've suggested that the president's team demand that on the day that the Mueller report is released, that their report is released as well, that the public gets a chance to see both reports.
In other words, that when the Mueller report is produced to the Justice Department, it has to be turned over to the TPR.
How can the president's team prepare a statement not knowing what to do?
No, no, no.
Here's what has to happen.
Mueller report gets sent to the Justice Department.
The Justice Department doesn't release it.
It sends it over to the president's team.
They then have a week to write a rebuttal, looking specifically.
Then once their rebuttal is ready, both reports are released at the same time.
And Dershowitz makes the really good point that because Mueller has basically busted most of the people he's busted for lying to him, for lying to the FBI, not for anything having to do with Russian collusion, but he's turned the screw on them, saying, you lied to me and you're going to go to prison if you don't talk to me about Donald Trump as he tries to work.
But the problem he has is once you convict a guy for lying, he's not a good witness anymore.
So I think it sounds to me, and I haven't heard anybody else say this, so this is my conjecture.
It sounds to me like Mueller is getting a little bit desperate.
You know, most of the prosecutors I've ever met, and I met a lot of prosecutors, most of them are honest people who want to get to the truth.
But special counsels and special prosecutors, I've never seen it not happen.
Mueller's Desperate Gamble00:04:12
They find themselves in this position where after spending $35 million, if they come up empty-handed, they look pretty stupid.
You should say the right thing to say was, yeah, we spent $35 million.
Now we know that nothing happened.
But they don't.
The indictment of Scooter Lippy, a classic example.
They got nothing.
That was the stupidest case ever.
It was another one of these political cases that the media got everybody excited about, just like this Russian collusion case.
I think, I mean, I think Trump has a really good point here that there should be an investigation into how Hillary Clinton got Russian intelligence as dirt on Trump and then use that dirt with John Brennan to start a wildfire in the media and then use that to get the FBI to investigate Trump's campaign.
I mean, I think that to me is a lot more Russian collusion than any kind of meeting in Trump Tower, or certainly what they're saying now, well, they knew about WikiLeaks and Wikileaks letters came from the Russians and therefore that's somehow collusion with the Russians, which just seems crazy to me.
I just, you know, I want to get to the mailbag, but I do want to play one more cut of this Jerome Corsi talking to Tucker Carlson and telling Tucker about what it's been like, what it's like.
And again, this is not a guy I have high respect for, but here he is talking about what it's like to be under the heel of this investigation.
The special prosecutors blow you up.
They do this, what I call perjury trap.
It's really, you know, they ask you a question.
They have material they won't show you.
You've forgotten about it.
They say, you just lied because this email you forgot about in 2016 proves your current memory is wrong.
I mean, it's a memory test.
And then they accuse you of lying.
It's completely rigged and it's politically driven by Clinton operatives who have an agenda.
And if you can't give them, Roger's right, if you can't give them what they're looking for to fill their narrative, they blow you up and charge you with a crime.
And he talks about the fact that this has cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend, which of course they also use to make you come clean.
If it's going to ruin you and your family and you have nothing to leave your kids, he's an older guy.
You know, that's a good incentive to start talking and even to start making things up.
And it sounds like Mueller is trying to get him to do that and he can't quite do it.
I could be wrong.
It's just a guess.
I'm beginning to whiff desperation coming out of this investigation, but we'll see and we'll probably see pretty soon.
My only point is all of this stuff, all of this stuff is a form of madness.
Trump is an outsized figure with outsized flaws, but he's doing a good job as president of the United States.
The hysteria that's coming, the radicalization of the young that is beginning to appear, that polls are starting to show that the young think this is a terrible racist country and they're falling prey to the nonsense they're learning in college.
This whole thing, this whole thing is a reflection of a failure, a failure of conservatism, of classical theoretical conservatism, which did not pay, which turned a blind eye, a kind of Dickensian eye to the people who are unemployed in the middle of the country, a failure of women to hold to account Hillary and Bill Clinton for the things that were being done in the name of feminism, in the name of protecting abortion, and of course for the failure of Obama and the left to save the country as they promised they were going to do.
Trump has many flaws, but he's doing a decent job as president.
The country is doing well.
It is the reflection of themselves that is driving people crazy.
Trump is a mirror that makes men mad.
I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
The mailbag is coming.
Oh, oh, oh, you're thinking to yourself, if only, if only I have subscribed for a lousy 10 bucks a month.
If I'd subscribed to DailyWire.com for $100, I'd have gotten an entire year of chances to get in the mailbag.
I'd have gotten my leftist tears tumbler.
I'd get Another Kingdom season two when it comes out on Monday.
I'd get all these shows.
Oh, I weep, I weep that I didn't do it before.
But where there's life, there's hope.
It's not too late.
All right, the mailbag.
Yeah!
Socrates And Jesus On Death00:14:55
I missed that woman.
All right, from Chris to the wisest man in the West.
Why?
That's, of course, you're in the right place.
Why was Socrates the wisest man in Greece because he knew nothing?
I've been thinking about this a lot, and it doesn't make a lot of sense.
Can you explain it?
He wasn't the wisest man in Greece, Chris, because he knew nothing.
He was the wisest man in Greece because he knew he knew nothing.
Now, what does that tell you?
That tells you that everybody else knew nothing and didn't know they knew nothing.
You know, it really helps when you think about this to think about Socrates and Jesus.
I have frequently said that Socrates and Jesus are the twin telemons, the pillars.
The Telamon is a pillar that's shaped like a man, and they are the twin telemons of Western civilization, and they have a lot in common.
One thing that they have in common is they both arose at a time when the intellectuals and the sophisticates were saying, were believed in relativism, believed that there was no such thing as right or wrong.
As Hamlet says, nothing either good or bad, but thinking made it so.
You think one thing is right.
The question is, can I argue in such a way to make it appear that the good is the bad, and then I win the argument, and all is well.
Socrates had the sophists who believed in just making an argument, whether they were responsible to the truth or not.
And Jesus, of course, had the Roman sophisticates like Pontius Pilate, who said, What is truth?
Laughed when Jesus talked about being the truth.
He said, What is truth?
Both Socrates and Jesus understood that there is such a thing as truth.
Both Socrates and Jesus did not state the truth directly.
And this is one of the things about the difference between Christianity and Christ, that Jesus spoke in parables.
Why would you do that?
Do you think it's because a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go round?
No, it was because truth is very hard to state.
You cannot state truth directly.
Moral truth is something that is a little bit amorphous.
When Jesus would say things like, yeah, you know, stone a woman for adultery, but let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
That's a very, you know, it's a very, very dicey thing to say.
It's very shocking to both people, both conservatives and liberals.
Socrates, his approach was to ask questions.
He wouldn't make statements.
He would just keep asking questions to prove that what you said was untrue.
He didn't tell you what was true.
And both Jesus and Socrates were killed for this.
They were both judiciously murdered, judicially murdered for blasphemy.
It was blasphemy to say, yes, there's truth, but no, the truth is not a series of rules, a series of statements that can be proved empirically.
The moral truth is much more complex than that, and I'm going to get to it by showing you that what you believe doesn't really hold up.
That's why they kill people.
They don't kill people for saying, don't do this, don't do this, this is right, this is wrong.
They kill people for telling the truth about the truth, which is that you don't know what it is.
You can only approach it in a very, what's the word I want?
An instinctive, an instinctive way.
You are built with an instinct for morality, and you have to use that instinct with your reason and with your compassion to get to the truth.
So Socrates was the brightest man because he knew he knew nothing.
You know, you only have to listen to people to see how desperately they want rules for life.
I mean, look at like Jordan Peterson's bestseller, 12 rules for life, you know, the rules for life.
Jesus and Socrates do not deliver that.
They do not deliver it, and that's what gets you killed.
That's the kind of thing that makes people really angry.
It's also what makes you the wisest man in the world to know you don't know you know nothing.
From Olivia, dear Andrew Cleveland, just kidding, with ease, they put in these.
I love your podcast, learn so much.
Every time I listen and value your opinion very much as I feel we have very similar worldviews and values, I would like your thoughts.
My boyfriend of two years recently broke up with me.
We were long distance for a while and we're just about to move in together.
For a bit of background, he is obsessed with politics and one day wants to run for office.
He wants to talk about politics all the time.
It's all he researches.
I loved his passion and had no problem with his obsession as I like to learn new things and learned a lot from him.
His reason for breaking up with me is that he has always wanted to be with someone very similar to him, obsessed with politics.
I'm struggling with moving forward as I keep begging him to change his mind.
I thought we were going to get married one day and still love him with all my heart.
We kept Christ in the center of our relationship and truly had an amazing relationship.
After we broke up, he even said this was easily the best relationship he has ever had and that I am so amazing in every way.
I was so blindsided by this.
Do you have any insight for me from a guy's perspective?
Maybe there's something I'm missing and he should be with someone more like him, though I think differences are a good thing.
Well, first of all, let me give you a piece of advice.
All right, Olivia.
My piece of advice is this.
Whatever girls do when their hearts are broken, do it.
Do it, get over them, move on.
That's my advice.
And I'll tell you why in a sec.
Whatever, you know, if it's eating chocolate like I see on TV or gathering with your girlfriends and talking it out and crying it out, whatever you got to do, do it and move on as quickly as possible because you want to be in a relationship that's going to develop and thrive.
I can tell just by reading this that you are a person of great warmth, a person who is very giving, a person who's very open and loving and spiritual.
This clown, you deserve better than a clown who doesn't get that, okay?
This clown made a big mistake and you got to let him live with that mistake and walk away and find somebody who appreciates what you are because you are going to be an incredibly valuable asset to any man who truly loves you and an incredibly valuable asset to the people you create together and the family you make together.
And the fact that this guy didn't know that means he's not worthy of you.
He's not worthy of you.
The things that he's saying, I'm not going to tell you this is 100% true, but the things that he's saying make me think that you said that you were long distance and he said, oh, he wanted somebody more like himself.
That makes me think that he may be eyeing somebody who is more like himself and he thinks this is going to be better.
And the reason I tell you to move on quickly, because if that's true, if he has somebody else in mind or he's even been seeing somebody else on the side without your knowing it while you guys were apart, eventually either that's going to work out for him and they'll live happily ever after, in which case you want to have moved on, or it's going to break down and he's going to come crawling back to you, in which case you want to have moved on.
You are better than he is, and I think you should just take the hint and find some, let your heart break, wipe, cry your tears, move on to somebody else.
Dear teacher of the masses, since we were born on the same day, same month and same year, either you'll make my life better with your answer or you are my twin brother from another mother.
Either way, this is from Deborah.
As a follower of Christ, what are your thoughts on the best way to approach Jewish folk that still do not accept that Christ is the long-awaited Messiah?
I imagine you've had this conversation many times.
Also, how can your believing followers pray for you in this season of your life?
Now, that's a nice question.
Thank you.
Be blessed and keep on telling the truth from Deb, the other twin.
Well, and praying for me.
Pray that I have both guidance and time to finish the work that I was meant to do.
That's really what I want.
I want guidance and time to finish the work that I was meant to do because it took me so long to figure out what it is that I feel a little bit behind and I'm going to need a little extra time to get everything that I want to get done or that I think I'm supposed to get done.
Obviously, God will be in charge of that, but a little petition from him wouldn't hurt.
Listen, I leave people alone.
I leave people alone and I leave Jewish people alone.
And if they want to talk to me about this, it will come through that they want to talk to me about this.
Otherwise, I simply live, I try to live openly in the joy of Christ, and I hope that's appealing to people.
It does no good.
You know, if it did good to grab people by the front of the shirt and say, believe, you know, why can't you believe?
I would do it.
It does no good.
It merely alienates people.
The Jewish religion is a beautiful, noble cathedral of a structure built up over thousands and thousands of years.
Jesus lived and died in the Jewish religion.
It is a beautiful religion.
And you don't want to, there's no way to say to people, yeah, it's a good religion, but this is better.
If you are in that conversation, what I emphasize, because I believe it's the truth, is not some kind of superior ethics to Judaism in Christianity, because I don't believe there are superior ethics in Christianity.
It's the nature of the relationship.
It's the closeness.
It's the knowledge of God that you get when he instantiates himself, the word we learned yesterday, in human form.
The mind of man is not capacious enough to take in the nature of God.
But when it sees God in front of him, in front of it as a human being, it suddenly has a relationship.
That's what Jesus said.
You were my servants, now you're my friends.
That is a change in relationship.
And that's what I think the difference between Judaism.
That's why I think Christianity is a New Testament out of the Old Testament, out of the Jewish religion.
And that, to me, is the big draw and the big benefit and the big change.
But again, leave people alone, you know, that you will bring them Christ in the way you live in Christ, not in the words that come out of your mouth and certainly not by hectoring them.
From Brianna, my brother, who is 11 years younger, he's age 21, has recently started dating a girl and my family and I like her very much.
They're both Christians, have the same value.
He has come to me and shared with me that he's feeling conflicted and doesn't quite feel a deep connection with her.
His married friends seem to have unknowingly put extra pressure on him to move along faster in the relationship than he seems ready for.
My brother and this girl were just getting to know one another and now they're officially boyfriend and girlfriend.
And he seems disappointed in himself for being pressured into this.
And my dad and I agree that he should give it a few months and see if it works out since the relationship is still so new.
But I would like to know what you think he should do.
I watch your show every day and I love your unique perspective on relationships and Christianity.
Well, here's the balance.
The balance is, you know, you don't want to hold this girl up from finding the guy that she should be with because women have a limited period of time in which they can safely have children and they want to start families and they want to be in a relationship.
It's going to be better for them the earlier they do it.
So you don't want to hold her up.
It does sound to me that like the kid was pushed beyond where he was in his feelings and didn't have a chance to explore those feelings.
So what I think that I would advise him to do is I think I would advise him to sit down with this girl and explain to him to her where he is and maybe work out that they could just back off a little bit and get to know each other a little bit more.
It's very possible that his friends were right, that she is the girl he should be with.
Sometimes guys can be so dumb, but I can preach this from that perspective.
Guys can be incredibly blind to relationship stuff.
We're just not that good at it.
We're not built for it.
And sometimes we just don't see it.
And maybe he's in a position where now he feels that he's gone beyond what he wanted to get to.
That doesn't mean he wouldn't get to it eventually if he had some time.
So I think that he's got to be honest with her and tell her where he is so she can participate in the decision of how far she wants to take this along before she moves on to someone else.
I think that's the only way it's going to hurt her feelings a little bit, but I think it's more important that he tells the truth.
More important that he tells the truth and gets to the right place in the right time than that he leads her on, pretending he feels a way that he doesn't feel.
All right, I'm running out of time, but I'll take one more.
From Brett, are you in favor of the death penalty?
Why or why not?
I think I've answered this before, but it's all right.
I am not in favor of the death penalty as it presently stands.
To convict a man of a capital crime and then put him in prison for 20 years or even six years or 10 years and then execute a man who is no longer the man who committed the crime is to me intolerable.
The idea that you can walk down the last mile five times in the course of 10, 20 years and be pardoned at the last minute, that's cruel and unusual punishment.
Just the very idea that you have to wait 20 years to find out what happens with this thing over your head.
I know that the guys who are mostly the people on death row have committed intolerable crimes still.
Still, we have to be better than they are and keeping them there for 20 years is absurd.
It's also absurd to the victims, by the way.
They need closure.
They shouldn't have to string out this experience.
I have suggested a number of times, and I've run it by a couple of lawyers now, and they all say it's constitutional.
I have suggested that if we are going to have capital crimes, there should be a special commission for capital crimes, maybe three people who are dedicated for 365 days to finding any exculpatory evidence they can, any evidence that gets the guy off the hook.
And if after a year, they can't do that with DNA and all this stuff, if they're just dedicated to that one case, they can't prove this guy is innocent on the 366th day you carry out the sentence.
That to me would be not cruel and unusual.
I do think that there are certain kinds of murders, certain kinds of crimes that deserve the death penalty and where only the death penalty can knit the fabric that is torn by those crimes.
And so that's where I stand as it is.
I just think it's a mess and I don't think it's fair and I don't think it's right.
I'd rather have no death penalty and have life imprisonment than just drag people for 20 years and then execute them 20 years later when they're half insane with waiting.
It's just not right.
It's not the way the state should behave.
It's not the way we should behave.
That's all I got time for.
Tickety-boo news.
You know, I was talking about the Me Too movement and how it is to some degree a reflection of the frustration women have felt being silenced for 30 years in order to protect Bill and Hillary Clinton, because that's what it was.
I mean, the society basically ignored this problem for 30 years to protect Bill and Hillary Clinton in the hopes that she would follow him into the White House and he would not be impeached.
That's what happened.
That's why women are so crazy on this issue.
Instead of being like, hey, this is a serious issue.
We have to address this, but instead are saying things like, yeah, we should be able to kill a guy if he, you know, it doesn't matter if we have due process.
So it was a delight to read, you know, of all places, the New York Times, a former newspaper, a report of a French comedian named Blanche Jardin.
I think that's how it's pronounced.
It's G-A-R-D-I-N, who is a feminist, but she rejects feminist cant.
Blanche Jardin's Take00:02:29
And she talks about the Me Too movement, and she says some hilarious, some hilarious lines.
She had this one line about Harvey Weinstein.
She said, you know, it's wonderful that from now on it's clear to everyone that producers no longer have the right to rape actresses.
But there's something that isn't clear that we need to clarify.
Do we still have the right to have sex in exchange for roles?
Because if we can't do that anymore, we'll have to learn lines and go to casting calls.
And frankly, we don't have time for that.
She is a supporter of Louis C.K. and she had a wonderful line.
She says Louis C.K. really saved her from going crazy because he explores the dark side of human nature and helps her.
And she says, she's comparing him to Harvey Weinstein in the Me Too movement.
And she says, if we put a producer who rapes actresses in the same bag as a guy whose fetish is to masturbate in front of women after asking if he can do it, that means our modern society has a big problem with nuance.
It's not the Me Too movement that's wrong.
It's the rage.
Anger is the devil's cocaine, and these women are suffering from anger and suffering from rage because of what the left wing, which is of course the Academy and Hollywood and the news media, what the left wing did to protect Bill Clinton.
They are suffering not from Me Too, which is what they're really suffering from, but what is making them crazy is the rage.
And the rage comes from the repression that's taken place.
And here's a woman who seems to really know that, and she seems to be pretty funny, too.
I'd like to see her.
I haven't just read about her in this article, but Blanche Jardas.
It's interesting that there are still, as there always are, there are still reasonable voices of all kinds on the left and the right, men and women.
They're always there.
We got to find them.
And that, the fact that they're there, is always a sign for hope.
We will be back tomorrow.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show, and we will see you then.
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