Ep. 622 dissects leftist power’s corruption through Joe Biden’s Bush funeral politicization and Apple’s "hate speech" censorship, exposing hypocrisy in their embrace of corporate control over free speech while ignoring institutional abuses—like the FBI’s Russia probe or Me Too’s excesses. Ross Douthat’s NYT op-ed on WASP elite decline reveals meritocracy’s exclusionary paradox, while Michael Flynn’s legal fate debunks media-driven Trump downfall narratives. Anger management advice pivots to interfaith marriage and Madison’s "happiness" critique, rejecting UBI satire for targeted systemic fixes. The episode clarifies conservatism’s rejection of far-right extremism and mocks climate doom-mongering, framing prosperity—not fear—as the antidote to both moral and economic decay. [Automatically generated summary]
Left-wing politicians and journalists are gathering for the funeral of President George H.W. Bush in the hopes of degrading the solemn event by spewing hate-filled rants against Donald Trump.
Former Vice President Joe Biden told reporters, quote, I haven't yet decided whether I'm actually going to lift Bush's body out of the coffin and hurl it in Trump's direction, or if I'm willing to settle for simply transforming a religious occasion into a partisan hate fest against the man who destroyed the fine work of my old boss, Barack Havana, or banana, or whatever his name is.
It's hard to remember now that nothing is left of his legacy but moats of irrelevant dust drifting into eternal darkness on the indifferent winds of history, unquote.
Nancy Pelosi also says she hopes to use the Bush funeral to launch a low-rancorous Jeremiah ad against the current president.
In a statement Pelosi accidentally left in her car prior to forgetting where she parked her car, prior to forgetting where she was at that very moment, prior to forgetting her own name, Pelosi said, quote, the tragic death of a man I despised in life seems the appropriate moment to remind America that my particular political opinions are more important than whatever religion I used to be before I converted to abortion, unquote.
Mainstream news outlets will also join in the Bush funeral tirades.
CNN's Don Lemon stared soulfully into the camera he keeps in his walk-in closet and then remarked in a lugubrious voice, which turned out to be the only voice he had, quote, we the media hated this man in life, but in death we can sentimentalize him with the purpose of degrading the nation's mourning with our political rage.
And of course, as always, anyone who disagrees with me is racist, unquote.
Politicians and journalists plan to begin their Bush funeral rants right after they finish their John McCain funeral rants sometime next year.
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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Send 23andme's DNA00:15:41
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Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, amazingly, it is already mailbag day, which means it must be Wednesday, which is kind of a shock.
Oh my God.
That's where we're already screaming wildly.
And after the show, I'm getting on a plane and going to Wisconsin, I think.
I'm talking to Beloit College.
I think it's like 25 degrees there.
I suspect that, you know, I was invited to this one by the left.
Let's send Clavin to Wisconsin in December.
That'll work out well.
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You know, yesterday, I played what I think was a stunning example of smiley-faced fascism.
You remember Jonah Goldberg's book, Liberal Fascism, and that had that smiley yellow face on it with a Hitler mustache.
This was Tim Cook talking about Apple and how it was going to ban what he called hate speech from his platforms, which include the App Store and iTunes, so all the podcast venues, and that it was a sin not to, because the inner voice of conscience was sacred, and his inner voice of conscience was going to guide him to know what speech was hate speech.
And I pointed out that my inner voice of conscience tells me that the right thing to do is let everybody speak, because freedom of speech is more important than my personal way of looking at things, because only when you let everybody speak do you move beyond your own prejudices and get the broader view that is a thousand voices arguing the point so you can hear which of them is making the best argument.
That is what my inner voice says.
And I was thinking about this.
I talked about this a little on the show.
I was thinking, why is it the left used to understand, the left used to understand that corporations are power centers and therefore prone to abuse their power.
The left used to be all about this.
Not so long ago, remember when the Occupy movement was dumping litter all over the streets of America?
They were sitting there going, the evil corporations.
We used to laugh at them because they were on their iPhones, you know, using Google to send text messages.
All these things that they were using came from corporations.
And of course, corporations are wonderful.
It's nothing inherently wrong with corporations.
There's something inherently wrong with great concentrations of power, something inherently corrupting with great concentrations of power.
As Lord Acton, the great historian of freedom, said, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
And I was thinking, why did the left forget this?
Now, of course, the answer occurred to me after the show, and that's why I wanted to come back to it, that we shifted from a manufacturing economy to an information economy.
In the old days, corporations used to be more right-wing.
Why?
Because a manufacturing economy is about objects and selling objects, and right-wing conservative principles apply, right?
You can make a car and you can sell it on TV by draping a half-naked woman across it, and I hope you do, but once I buy the car, if it breaks down, I'm going to dump the half-naked woman by the side of the road and go trade in the car and get a better one.
I'm going to buy it from somebody else.
So one of the reasons that Detroit fell apart and the American car industry fell apart was because it was so wealthy it thought it could just give everything to the unions and the unions thought they could just take everything and ultimately the conservative principles destroyed that manufacturing center.
And manufacturing anything you, anytime you make a product, it's got to be a good product.
You've got to hold to basic conservative principles.
Competition is important.
Competition makes your product better.
All these things that we talk about in capitalism, all of them help you when you're a manufacturer.
Information, information is inherently an emotional industry.
You can say, well, information is all about numbers and all about fact.
But which information do you tune, turn to first?
Do you turn to the thing with all the 17% of this and 87% of that?
or do you turn to somebody, you know, destroying the left and the outrageous thing that somebody on the left said.
Information is all about emotionalism, and so is leftism.
Leftism is about getting people to panic so that they surrender power to you.
Now, it's important to remember, as right-wingers, it's important to remember here, the thing is, the problem is the concentration of power.
It's not the philosophy.
The concentration of power affects all people the same.
This is the thing.
People are not good or bad.
In every movement, there are good and bad people.
In every movement, there are people whose intentions are good.
And in every movement, there are people who are good.
I mean, obviously, there are movements that are so inherently evil that no good person would join them.
But in most movements, there are people who are decent.
But power, all of those people are going to go over a range of morality, and all of them are corruptible by power.
And so that is why our founders said, you know, we are going to put the power centers off each other.
And that is why these things like Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, which are monopolies, essentially, monopolies of information, are getting out of control and are starting to abuse their power.
These are big corporations silencing people, individual people, deeming their opinions hateful.
That's just a decree, right?
That's not an actual description of anything.
That is just a decree from a very powerful person, Tim Cook, in his fantastic corporation of Apple.
It's just him decreeing that those voices of individuals will be crushed by his corporation, will be silenced by his corporation.
And I think that we should definitely look at the way these things are governed.
If they're governed as platforms, they should have to let everybody speak because they can't be sued.
They're getting a benefit from this.
So this is the thing that we as conservatives are trying to conserve.
We're trying to conserve the idea of playing power centers off each other.
And when we see, for instance, Congress losing its power to unelected bureaucrats, we say, oh, that's a bad thing because Congress is supposed to be a central power that plays off against the president and the judiciary.
When we see the judiciary being used to make law, no matter what the law is, even if we agree with it, we say, no, that's not their job.
They're supposed to play referee.
When we see the president acting outside of his role and using executive actions to do what the legislature should do, we know that something is wrong.
We are trying to conserve this idea of power.
And this is one, you know, there's a really interesting Ross Duthot over, well, we'll go, you know, Ross Duthot is not one of the knuckleheads over at Knucklehead Row.
He's actually pretty bright, but he works at Knucklehead Row.
So let's go over to Knucklehead Row.
So Knucklehead Row, of course, the op-ed section of the New York Times, which is populated almost entirely by knuckleheads.
Charles Blow, one of the most aptly named writers, aptly named people, along with Jeff Flake, is over there.
But Ross Duthot is one of the better guys, a guy I like.
I don't always agree with him, but I do like him.
He's talking about why we miss the WASP.
He's talking about George W. Bush's, George H.W. Bush's funeral going on now, and why it is that people are suddenly kind of aware that, oh, we've lost something in this generation of people.
And it was a generation of WASPs.
It was a generation of high-class people who kind of gathered together and went to the right schools and did the right things and knew the thing.
And he says that has been replaced by a meritocracy, right?
Doesn't matter if you're a WASP.
Doesn't matter if the guy from Eaton called in.
But he says, one of the lessons of the age of meritocracy is that building a more democratic and inclusive ruling class is harder than it looks and even perhaps a contradiction in terms.
You can get rid of the social registers and let women into your secret societies and privilege SAT scores over recommendations from people in high places, and you still end up with something that is clearly a self-replicating upper class, a powerful elite filling your schools and running your public institutions.
Not only that, but you even end up with an elite that literally uses the same strategy of exclusion that WASPs once used against Jews to preserve its particular definition of diversity.
For instance, keeping out high-achieving Asians from Harvard, with the only difference being that our elite is more determined to deceive itself about how and why it's discriminating.
So if some of the Elder Bush's mourners wish we still had a WASP establishment, their desire probably reflects a belated realization that certain of the old establishment vices were inherent to any elite.
And this is really important because this is the thing that undermines and makes a nonsense out of intersectionality and out of identity politics.
People with power remain people with power.
And so all Duthat is saying here is even when you have a new aristocracy, they will still behave like the aristocracy.
They will still exclude people.
They will still ignore the voice of the people.
There is no equality.
There's no such thing as equality.
Somebody's going to be at the top, and those power centers have to be controlled by placing them in opposition to other power centers.
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One of the things that makes me a conservative as opposed to a leftist is that I think conservatives are much more uncomfortable with power.
And I think that leftism basically includes power as one of its goods, assuming all the time that the revolution is going to come and they're going to win.
And so that's why you get this kind of weird stuff where people say, only the government should control guns.
And you say, you want Donald Trump to control guns?
Well, no, no, that's terrible.
They forget that they sometimes are going to lose and they can't always cheat their way back.
But what the WASPs knew, what the WASPs knew is this thing that was written into our Constitution and described in the Federalist Papers by James Madison, his famous quote, I think it's 51, Federalist 51.
James Madison said, if men were angels, no government would be necessary.
If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.
In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this.
You must first enable the government to control the governed and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.
And that's the problem that we're facing today.
We're facing the loss of this understanding that power centers need to be opposed to other power centers.
And so when Tim Cook gets up there and says, Apple is going to, in my inner light, my inner conscience, going to decide who gets to speak and who's hateful, he is forgetting that he is just on top of a very, very powerful corporation.
His inner light is no better than anybody else's inner light.
I take that back.
It may be better than some people's.
It may be worse than others, but it is not this positive.
It is not the thing that should be deciding who gets to speak in America.
And that's one of the ways you know you've gone wrong is when you start to silence people.
This is also what has happened, I believe, at the FBI during this collusion investigation, this Russian collusion investigation.
You know, the more I have thought about this, you know, it's easy to see this as a conspiracy against Donald Trump.
And I think in some ways it was a conspiracy against Donald Trump.
But if you look at it from the point of view of the people who did it, the guys like James Comey and John Brennan and the people who started this and leaked it to the press and made sure it went on after Bush, after Trump was elected.
I sort of can see what they were seeing from their positions of power.
Remember, this is after eight years of Barack Obama, so one group has had the power in these groups and been appointing these people for eight years, and they're fully expecting Hillary Clinton to continue that reign of incompetence into the next four, if not another eight years.
That's a long, long time to have power.
And so they see this upstart coming up, this Donald Trump who has bad manners, who doesn't know a lot, who doesn't seem like he's ever read the Constitution, and who said a lot of stupid stuff about Russia, who kind of took Putin on his word, who kept saying, you know, it would be a good thing if we could get together, when again and again, we had already seen George W. Bush fooled by Putin and another president named Barack Obama completely fooled by Putin.
They had both been fooled and Putin had revealed himself to be a murderous wannabe czar.
That is who Vladimir Putin is.
And so I could really see how you would look at this upstart who's not one of us.
He's not one of the group.
He's on the opposition.
He's suddenly tearing apart your candidate who you were sure you were going to win and he's talking nice things about Russia.
How you stumbled into any, oh, on top of which he appoints Paul Manafort, this guy who's been supporting an abusive Ukrainian clown and has been a voice, a very, you know, I won't say corrupt, but a very disreputable voice for people in the Ukraine, murderous people in the Ukraine, and he joins the gang.
Rumblings of Impeachment00:14:52
I can really see how you might say, well, it's our responsibility to investigate this without stopping to think like, hey, this is the FBI infiltrating an opponent's campaign.
Maybe we shouldn't do this.
That's the corrupting influence of power.
It's not that it makes you evil.
It's that it makes your good seem better than it is.
It makes your moral sense, exactly what Tim Cook said, it makes your moral sense seem better than it is.
If you weren't the moral person, if you weren't the good person, why would you be here to be the investigators in the FBI and the CIA and all these people?
And now we see, you know, today, or yesterday, I guess, it was announced that the last man who was involved, Bill Pricestap his name is the last man who was involved in these intelligence investigations into the Hillary Clinton investigation, which blew up so badly and that she basically was excused for her reckless handling of classified papers because of Comey's arrogance, because of that arrogance of power that we've seen in James Comey, because he announced that, oh yes, well, I declare as an investigator,
he was not supposed to do this, that he declared that she hadn't committed a crime, which was nonsense.
The last guy is retiring.
They say it has nothing to do with this investigation, but it means that the FBI has been cleaned out of these people.
It has been, all these people have either been fired or reassigned or demoted in some way because they forgot what power does to people and nobody was there.
And that's why when the press says, oh, we can't attack the FBI, that undermines the public's faith in our institutions.
Screw the public's faith in our institutions.
The public doesn't have to have faith in our institutions.
The public and certainly the press should have eternal suspicion of all powerful institutions and all powerful people.
And that's why we shouldn't worship Donald Trump or Barack Obama or any of these other people who have power.
We should always be looking at them askance because angels, we don't have angels to govern men, only other men.
So Michael T. Flynn, they now, Mueller has now put forward his recommendation that he receive no prison time for his absurd process charge they brought against him of lying to federal investigators.
I believe it was an absolutely nonsense thing that they used.
Look, you know, think about it.
Put yourself in Flynn's position.
You make a misstatement or you forget something or you say something not quite right.
And they say, well, now you've lied to us.
We're sending you to prison for 10 years.
And to defend yourself, it's going to cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Your family is going to be ruined.
Your good name's going to be dragged through the mud.
They're going to do everything they can.
What do you do?
You say, okay, well, how do I get out of this?
And so he cooperated.
And they say, well, he cooperated so much that we are going to let him go.
And of course, the press, as ever, as ever, they said, oh, this is clearly a sign that the noose is tightening around Trump's neck.
The walls are closing in.
Here is Phil Mudd, the former CIA guy who oversaw CIA intelligence over Iraq when they got everything wrong, when they got everything wrong.
Here's the guy, Phil Mudd, is one of the people responsible for giving us the idea that we had to go to war in Iraq.
But here he is on CNN, and here's what he says about this announcement that Manafort, Manafort, that Flynn was not going, probably not going to go to jail.
The specific reference is to cooperation on Russia.
So if you put the quantity of information together, the fact that there's specific reference to Russia, three ongoing investigations mentioned in that document, I'm going to tell you one thing I take away.
There's about a size 16 shoe going to drop here, and that shoe is not going to be related to lying or to just financial irregularities, which we've seen in the past.
I think they're centering in on Corinthians investigation, which is what Flynn and others are saying about cooperation with Russia.
I think it's going to happen.
This must be the end of the Trump administration.
Just ask the media.
Today is a turning point.
Today was historically bad for President Trump.
Today was a turning point.
The beginning of the end for the Trump presidency.
The beginning of the end.
Breaking news.
We have another bombshell.
Mike Pence might have to assume the office of the presidency.
The call for impeachment.
Rumblings of the word impeachment.
Breaking news.
Another bombshell out of the White House.
I believe this is the beginning of the end.
I do too.
It's really the beginning of the end.
The beginning of the end.
He may be feeling the walls closing in on him.
All the walls closing in on him.
The walls closing in on him.
Breaking news, a new bombshell.
One astrologer says this means the beginning of the end for President Donald Trump.
The beginning of the end of the Trump presidency.
Trump will resign.
Trump is going to resign.
Is this the tipping point?
I know we've said it over and over.
You think this is a tipping point?
And over and over.
This is a tipping point.
And over and over.
Breaking news, President Trump off the rails.
This is the beginning of the end day.
It's the beginning of the end.
It reminds me a lot of the last days of Nixon.
Breaking news tonight, new bomb show.
This is the beginning of the end.
So once again, it's the beginning of the end of the Trump administration.
I don't know what it means.
It really does seem to me that they stumbled into This kind of conspiracy mindset, and that because they had so much power and there was no one there to tell them no, and because everybody on both sides disliked and feared Donald Trump, there was nobody to say, you know what, you were acting badly and doing the wrong thing, and they have used this investigation.
I'll be really surprised if Mueller comes up with a plausible case that Donald Trump was on the phone with Vladimir Putin trying to commit a crime.
I really do, because first of all, collusion, as I say, is not a crime, and I don't know.
And all they've got on the Russians so far is that they took out some ads on Facebook.
But all of this, again, coming back to power, there is a story, the Me Too movement too.
The Me Too movement, insofar as it's a legitimate movement, not a feminist trope, insofar as it's not some way of attacking men or, you know, all men, but insofar as it does point to the ways that women are treated in places of power.
Again, it's about abuse of power.
It's about men having power that women don't have, women having something that men want, and men abusing, you know, that's a perfect mode of an opportunity for a crime.
You know, and that, again, it is power centers.
There is a story in the New York Times, which used to be a newspaper.
There's a story about Les Moonves, who a big, big, big influence on TV, being the chairman and chief executive of CBS for years and years, brought that network to the top of the heap.
Just he was regarded as basically king of CBS and one of the true power centers in Hollywood.
A story from a draft report made by outside lawyers hired by CBS to look into sexual misconduct allegations against him.
Now, this has to be taken with a grain of salt because CBS has to pay Moonvez.
They've kicked him out and they'd have to pay him something like $120 million in severance pay.
And so maybe they're just trying to slander him.
But some of these stories have been confirmed in at least some ways.
And they basically say that he had women in the organization who were on tap to give him oral sex when he wanted it.
And those women or such women could not be touched in the organization.
And there's this one story that he did apparently admit to some of it, that he had a doctor, he went for a doctor's appointment, Dr. Ann Peters, and that when he went for the appointment, when Les Moonves went for the appointment, he grabbed her when she fought her way out of his grip.
He basically, as she put it, he satisfied himself in front of her.
And Peters went to Arnold Kopelson.
Now, I worked pretty closely with Arnold Kopelson on Don't Say a Word.
I got to know him.
He was a real old-fashioned Hollywood guy, a real guy from the kind of old school of which Joel Silver is one and our old friend Weinstein, Harvey Weinstein, is one of them.
And Kopelson, she told him, don't go on the board at CBS because he attacked me.
And Kopelson said, this was a long time ago, and we all did that, she says, Kopelson said.
And Kopelson said, I don't care if 30 more women come forward and allege this kind of stuff.
Les is our leader, and it wouldn't change my opinion of him.
All I can say, I can't confirm that Kopelson did any of that.
I can say it was in keeping with his personality.
He was kind of that guy.
I always got along with the guy, but he was that guy.
And again, I'm not passing judgment on this particular case.
I'm simply saying that when you, look, a woman in that situation, you can say that she's acting of her free will.
She could leave that job instead of giving oral sex to the boss.
And she is, you can say that she's complicit and she was degrading herself and willing to be degraded.
But you're the boss.
You're in charge.
You've got the power.
It is your job to treat people with respect.
It is your job to elevate people, not to degrade them.
I mean, here I degrade people, but look at the kind of people I'm working with.
But I mean, I mean, in places when you're working with nice people, you're supposed to elevate them and mentor them and help them.
But when you have power, it is just gets very, very easy to see why your needs go first, why your needs cover everything.
So anyway, I just want to point out how much of what we're talking about is not really about left and right.
It is about the fact that the left has a kind of power now it didn't necessarily have before.
A cultural power, an informational power, and a corporate power.
And that is, if it is going more and more wrong, if it is becoming more and more radical, it's becoming more and more censorious and more and more controlling.
It may not be completely part of their, just part of their philosophy.
It may simply be that too much power has collected in their hands and needs to be broken up.
Some of these organizations need to be regulated and they need to be broken up.
We have the mailbag coming.
It is coming right up, unfortunately.
There she is again, by golly.
Unfortunately, if you are on Facebook and YouTube, you can listen.
I think you can keep listening on YouTube.
If you want to just watch the whole thing, here's what you do.
Come to dailywire.com and subscribe.
The whole thing just streams on the website.
You don't have to move around.
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You also get to be asked questions in the mailbag.
You get another kingdom, which is coming to an end.
It's only got two more episodes after this one.
I think number nine goes live on Friday, and then there's one episode after that.
Am I right about that, or is it eight?
Yep, no, I am right about that.
Okay, so it's number nine goes live on Friday for everyone, but then 10 will come out for subscribers, and you get to watch the whole thing.
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Mailbag.
Yeah!
We just do a whole 45 minutes of Lindsay screaming.
From Brian, you mentioned the other day you haven't lost your temper in a very long time.
I, on the other hand, have always had problems with controlling my temper.
When I was a teenager, my mom told me how my uncle also had problems with his temper, and it cost him his marriage after, in a fit of rage, he threw his young daughter against a wall.
He had a very troubled life and ultimately died very young and alone.
Ever since I learned this about my uncle, I've worried that I could be one fit of rage away from this happening to me.
What advice do you have for those of us who struggle with anger?
Well, I'll tell you a couple of things.
I mean, I'll tell you what I do.
I mean, when I say I haven't lost my temper, that doesn't mean I don't get angry sometimes.
There are perfectly good reasons to get angry.
And when I have a good reason to get angry, I get angry.
But I'm a very results-oriented person.
What I want is to do the things that I feel it is my job to do.
And I don't like it when people get in my way, especially if they get in my way out of ego and stupidity, which in Hollywood happens a lot.
They ruin things simply because they had an idea and they don't like the fact that their idea was rejected and they want it to go in there and stuff like that.
And sure, that makes me angry.
But one thing I have often done is when I get angry, I will just go off for a moment and talk to myself about what I want, what I want to achieve in this situation, and how I can achieve it and what's the best path and whether I think I can achieve it.
And that tends to calm me down because a lot of anger, I think, is based on fear that this person is going to get in your way.
Most of the time, I find that people can't get in your way if you handle yourself well.
If you refuse to do the things that you're not going to do and you are determined to do the things that you are going to do, you don't really have to get angry very much.
You can be very polite and just say no when you have to say no.
However, you're talking about losing your temper.
You're talking about having no control when the moment of temper comes.
And that's true.
That doesn't happen to me very often.
And that's something you really have to look into.
And I'll tell you why.
I'll tell you why, okay?
Think about people who beat their wives.
Think about people who punch their wives.
The same people usually don't punch their bosses.
They don't punch people who are bigger than them.
They don't punch their other big guys.
They punch their wives because they can, which means that inherently, when they think I can't control myself, what they really mean is I'm not controlling myself because my wife is smaller than me and I don't have to control myself.
So you can control yourself.
That's the first thing.
The first thing is when you tell yourself I can't control my rage, I have to let it out.
And when I say rage is the devil's cocaine, one of the reasons I say that is rage makes you feel like you're righteous.
Oh, my wife really deserves me to scream obscenities in her face and shake my fist at her, that kind of thing.
But you don't do it when somebody is more powerful than you are.
So you can control yourself and you should control yourself and walk away and think about what's bothering me here.
What do I want from this situation?
What can I get?
How can I compromise sometimes?
How can I help the other person get what she or he wants too?
You know, that's a good way of going forward, I always feel.
You know, I'm not here to win.
I'm here to get things that are good for as many people as possible.
If there is something that is taking you beyond that, you should explore it.
That's the kind of thing that you go into therapy for.
There are classes on anger management.
There are classes on how to control yourself and a little self-exploration to find out where that anger comes from.
A lot of anger comes from guilt.
A lot of anger comes from fear.
And if you're out of control, if you're out of control, the two things are, are you out of control or you're just not taking the effort to control yourself because the person you're talking to is weaker than you are?
That's the first thing.
And that's probably true.
And the second thing is what's causing you to be that angry?
I mean, most of the time I get angry, it was useless.
It was not important.
All I had to do is go to somebody and say, hey, could we handle this together, please?
And the person was more than willing to help out.
It's just not a good way.
It's just not a good way to get what you want done.
So self-exploration and self-control are key.
And taking a little time, that old saying about counting to 10 is really important as well.
From Ashley, hi, Mr. Clavin, Keeper of the Ease.
Happiness and Conservatism00:15:13
I am soon to be engaged to my loving and sweet boyfriend.
Congratulations.
We get along tremendously and are happier together every day.
The one main issue we have is that I come from a Jewish background and he's a Christian.
I do not strictly practice Judaism by any means, whereas his Christianity is very important to him.
We have spent time recently discussing the ways in which our different faiths can impact our future together.
Do you have any advice on an interfaith relationship or marriage between a Christian and a Jew?
And how important do you believe it is that two individuals share the same faith when joining together in marriage?
Well, first of all, because you're not a devout Jew and it's not that important to you, I really, and because you guys obviously love each other very much, you're going to be fine.
You know, it is more harmonious if you are both in the same religion, if you can both go to the same church.
It is more harmonious, but you will be fine.
It's not going to be dispositive.
It doesn't sound like he is ranting, you know, standing over your bed with a cross and saying, convert, convert, which would be annoying of him.
It seems like you guys have got that all figured out.
Problems that are up ahead, I think you should decide before you get together how you're going to raise the children.
Even if you think you're not going to have children, children have a way of appearing.
I don't know how they do that, but they do it.
And you want to talk about that.
I would recommend to you thinking very strongly about following your boyfriend's slash soon-to-be husband's faith, not joining his faith if you don't believe in it, because you shouldn't join a faith that you don't believe in, but following the rituals.
Most of going to church, for instance, is charity work and fundraising and getting together and having caught.
You know, most of that stuff is stuff you can do without saying, I believe in Jesus.
You know, those are things that you can do.
Those are good things for a family.
Those are good things for kids.
They give them a center.
They give them a way of thinking about morality and a way of talking in Sunday school.
I think if you can live with your kids learning about Christianity and your kids being raised as Christian and being baptized and taught that stuff, I think you should try and live with that.
I think that that would be a good thing for your family and a good thing for the two of you together.
And you may find that your husband knows something you don't.
But even if you don't, being a participant in that is not going to kill you.
So those are the only things I would recommend.
The harmony between the two of you is the most important thing that your children can have.
The love between the two of you and the kindness and politeness between the two of you is the most important gift you can give your kids.
But having a common practice, having a common practice, I think really does help a family and does contribute to the harmony of the family.
From Veronica, dearest Andrew, in Monday's episode, you talked about Mia Love, about Madison saying that the, James Madison saying that the object of government is the happiness of the people.
I think that's completely incorrect.
Happiness and joy and a lack of despair are found in purpose, God, family, life goals, standing for certain values.
The government cannot supply these things.
Perhaps it's the government's role to spread patriotism and an optimistic view.
Happiness would be a million-dollar universal basic income check, food delivered to your home, a supply of weed, and a prostitute to make sure you're cared for and happy.
Isn't it best for the right to continue to preach personal responsibility and hard work?
Maybe they could spread the message more effectively and strategically, but I don't think the conservative message should be watered down or softened or apologized for just because people's feelings are hurt by hard truths.
What do you think?
I think you're wrong.
But I think you're wrong in certain ways.
I mean, obviously what you're saying about how individuals find happiness is, of course, true.
Purpose, God, family, life goals, standing for certain values.
All of that is quite true, and the government can give you none of that.
So I agree with you.
But do you think that Madison, when he said that the object of government is the happiness of the people, could possibly have been thinking about a million-dollar basic income and food and a prostitute and weed?
Do you think that actually makes people happy?
I think that actually makes people miserable.
I know people who live like that.
I know people who live on some kind of dole, who are doped up all the time with weed.
I know people who live a sexually promiscuous life.
None of them is happy.
Not one of them is happy.
So I don't think that is a fair definition of happiness.
But I think we can assume that it's not what James Madison meant when he said that happiness, the people's happiness, is the object of government.
The reason I brought up that quote, and it's a quote that is something that's talked about a dozen times in the Federalist papers, and of course it's in the idea that the pursuit of happiness is part of the government's role, protecting the pursuit of happiness, is because I think conservatives too often take the tone that you took in this letter.
And I think it is off-putting, and I think it is not selling what we're trying to sell, which is limited government, limited power.
When James Madison talked about the happiness of the people, he was talking about the political happiness of the people.
He was talking about a world in which there is as much peace as it's possible to have, as much prosperity as it's possible to have, in which the people's property is protected, and the people's safety is protected, and the people's traditions and lives are not interfered with by the government.
That is how the government provides for the happiness of the people.
When you have situations of crisis, when you have neighborhoods that are in crisis, when you have neighborhoods like in the neighborhoods where people are dying of opiate poisoning, which is, I believe, what I was talking about at the time, when you have neighborhoods like poor urban neighborhoods where people are being killed and where people are having children out of wedlock and where drugs are rampant.
When conservatives sit down and say, well, that's just a matter of behavior, I think they're talking out their rumps.
I think they're talking nonsense.
I think the tragedy of those areas is a true tragedy.
And if government can intercede in there without impeding on our freedom, without taking away our freedoms, I think government has at least a responsibility to address what's going on in those neighborhoods.
That doesn't mean I have to take money away from somebody and give it to somebody else.
It may mean empowering churches to go in.
It may be empowering businesses to go in.
For instance, I'm a big fan of enterprise zones that bring businesses into areas that are hurting, where people don't want to go, that brings training programs, that makes it worthwhile for businesses to come in.
To say that the government should be so limited that it can't respond to the anguish of its populace is not conservatism as is not founding values.
Reagan didn't believe in it.
The founders didn't believe in it.
It doesn't mean a massive, massive welfare system that pays for every single thing you do, or your description of that.
It does mean having to care for the happiness of the people.
I think when people are miserable, the government needs to think about it and think about what it can do, all the while remembering that we want to preserve our liberty and preserve our republic.
I think when conservatives talk like this, I think they're shooting themselves in the foot, basically.
And I think it's wrong as well.
I don't think it's the way to go.
From Lynn, amazing ruler of the multiverse clavin.
Love the new beard.
After reading The Great Good Thing, my memoir about my conversion, I still have a lingering question.
I have never heard you personally address.
Was your wife a Christian?
I guess this goes back to the other question, too.
Was your wife a Christian when she met you?
If not, did she also convert to Christianity?
Did she follow you on your spiritual journey, or did she have a separate one from you?
How did that affect your marriage?
Thank you for your daily wisdom and humor.
From Canada, help.
You know, this actually is in the book.
It is in The Great Good Thing that my wife was baptized as a Catholic when she was, I think, 15, though she did not believe.
She was an atheist, though she wanted to believe, and she was an atheist when I became a deist before I became a Christian when I believed in God.
She remained an atheist and then had an experience where her mother died in her arms, I think literally in her arms, and that changed her.
And after that, she actually came to believe in God.
And when I joined the church, she came with me to the church, as I was talking before, and ultimately she became involved in the church as well, and I think now would describe herself as a Christian.
So our journeys were separate, but they were, by the grace of God, they were kind of in tandem and happened at the same time.
And of course, I never said to her, you know, woman, you know, I believe in God and you must too.
I mean, it just was something that happened to us kind of around the same time.
She had a very dramatic experience with her mother and it really changed her.
That is in the book, though.
From Tommy, T-O-M-I, dear Orozgo Aficionado, it appears that I have entirely misjudged you.
Episode 5, season 2 of Another Kingdom evidences a depth of understanding of the gospel that I never dreamed you had.
It is truly inspired.
I heard you say that the whole of the story came to you in one sitting.
In looking back on the story as the podcasts have been created, did you take any personal note of the depths of the illustrations of truth in this portion of the story?
I'm not going to answer that question because I don't talk about the things that I write because I think you should experience them on your own without my voice coming in.
I will tell you that a lot of people say this to me.
I entirely misjudged you.
You have a depth of understanding of the gospel that I never dreamed you had.
This is not the first time I have heard that.
They really, they usually, the two things that people get wrong is they think that because I'm a nice person, I must be easy to bully.
And the other thing they think is because I don't condemn people.
I don't condemn gay people.
I don't condemn, I don't talk about sin and I don't judge other people's sin and I believe in the judge.
They think that I don't understand the gospels.
This is something I get a lot.
I don't hate enough people to be a good Christian.
I'm not saying that that's what you thought, but I do hear this a lot.
So I'm glad.
Anyway, I'm glad you found truth in the book.
I'm really happy with the book.
I am delighted with it on all sorts of levels.
So I will say that much.
All right.
Let me do one more.
I know it's getting late, but I'll do one more from Mark.
I generally agree with your podcast.
I listened to your podcast and I generally agree with your views, but I find your and Ben's practice of vilifying the, quote, far-right or those to the right of yourself as being equally evil and vile as the left, self-serving and annoying and false.
You never identify who these far-right folk are, and if you do, say Trump, you dislike some general and subjective facet.
I don't need you to try to constantly demonstrate how even-handed and fair you are, how yours is a position of moderation.
Mine isn't a position of moderation.
I'm a right-winger.
The Nazis were bad people, but they were socialists.
They were on the left, not the right.
The KKK were bad people, but they were on the action arm of the Democratic Party.
They favored slavery, not freedom.
The groups espousing racial supremacy in Europe and the USA are identity political groups who aren't allowed to join the leftist identity politics parade because they are the wrong color, sex, or sexual practice.
They certainly aren't conservatives of any variety at all.
Just tell the truth, don't virtue signal by tacitly accepting leftist propaganda that what are in fact leftist or leftist identity politic groups are far right.
They aren't conservative or pro-freedom at all.
Just because the left calls Antifa anti-fascist doesn't make them so.
Mark, I'm sorry, I have to disagree with this.
I really do.
And first of all, I don't think I'm virtue safe.
My virtue just radiates off me.
I don't need to virtue signal.
It's like a light that just gleams around me.
I don't have to virtue signal.
Here's where I disagree.
When I, I'm not speaking for Ben at all, so Ben, you'll have to address himself.
But when I'm speaking of far-right or alt-right people here, I'm talking about the anti-Semites and the people who have said horrible, horrible things to both Ben and me when we have criticized Donald Trump, their anti-Jewishness, and some of them are racist in fact.
Some of them do talk about the blacks, and when they have that phrase cuck, it means a white man who likes to see his wife sleep with a black person, which I think is an inherently racist concept.
That anybody who disagrees with Donald Trump is somehow that person.
I think there are racists on that side, and I think that those are right-wing positions.
But here's where I disagree with you.
Go through this history.
And even the way you say it, it shows where I think you're wrong.
It says the Nazis were bad people, but they were socialists.
They were on the left, not the right.
The Nazis were, in fact, socialists, but they were also nationalists.
They were also connected to the right in many ways.
They were also conservative in the sense of trying to bring back conservatives, we're always going back into the past, trying to conserve something, bring back a fantasy idea of Germany.
It is very hard to say, to place the Nazis.
They were a psychopathic philosophy.
The Ku Klux Klan were demonstrated.
See, then you switch terms, right?
Now suddenly you say the Ku Klux Klan were Democrats.
And that's true.
They were Democrats.
But that doesn't mean that they were not conservatives.
They were trying to conserve the Jim Crow, the slavery days, and the inequality in the South.
So they were Democrats.
Yes, it's true, but they were conservative Democrats.
And one of the things that happened when the South went Republican is the racists were basically purged, but the conservatism remained.
And these people were conservative about racism.
So I think you have to call them the KKK.
They were Democrats, but they were also conservatives.
You can't say somebody is not a conservative because he's a socialist, and this person is not a conservative because he's a Democrat.
Those are two different things: Democrats, Republicans, and conservatives and liberals.
The groups espousing racial supremacy in Europe, see, the thing is, Europe and the USA have different kinds of conservatism.
We are trying to conserve the Constitution, which, as you say, is freedom-loving, and so we are not the same as people in Europe.
Some people in Europe, not all, but some conservatives in Europe are trying to preserve the racial makeup of their countries.
This is getting more and more rare over there, I'm happy to say, but it still exists.
It's still there in Eastern Europe.
And sometimes it hides behind a rational attack on Islamic philosophy, which is perfectly fair.
You can attack Islamic philosophy and therefore limit the number of Islamic people you bring into your country, but sometimes people are hiding racism behind that.
Here's the thing: look, American conservatism, as I see it, as I define it, is the defense of the Constitution.
And that's what you're saying.
What you're saying is you believe in freedom, you don't believe in identity politics, and I agree with you.
That is American conservatism.
But there are people on the far right who are bigots.
There are people on the far right who would oppress in the name of conservatism as the left oppresses in the name of leftism.
There's no philosophy on earth that guarantees goodness, right?
No matter where you go, there's always a version of every philosophy that is evil.
Why?
Because people are sinful and they're flawed and they're broken.
So when you stand for conservatism, one of the things I do when I give speeches a lot of times is I'll start by saying, this is what I mean.
This is what I stand for as a conservative, because these names get passed around, you know?
These names get passed to different versions of different things.
In America, as I see conservatism, it is an attempt to defend the Constitution and its wonderful system for setting power centers off each other so that the people remain free.
And insofar as that is conservatism, I agree that the people who are opposed to that are not conservatives, but some of them are on the right, and some of them are trying to conserve things that you and I, thank God, don't want to conserve.
Affordable Climate Change Solutions00:03:30
And that's why we talk like this.
We are making sure that the house is clean.
Even William F. Buckley did this.
William F. Buckley chased the anti-Semites out of the conservative movement and therefore made it the terrific movement it has since become.
And that is a good thing to do.
It is a good thing to clean your own house.
All right.
Tickety-boo news.
So last week, I think it was, it may have been the week before, but last week there was a report that came out from 13 federal agencies predicting that if significant steps are not taken to rein in global warming, all kinds of terrible things will happen.
And the New York Times, a former newspaper and a lot of places, kind of lied about this saying, it's Trump's own report and Trump is ignoring it.
And Trump ears from the New York Times.
Trump has taken aggressive steps to allow more planet warming pollution from vehicle tailpipes and power plant smokestacks and has vowed to pull the United States out of the useless Paris Agreement.
As if all these things were going to make our air worse and this is all nonsense.
It wasn't Trump's report.
The report was started under the Obama administration.
I think it has to, it is a required report that has to be made.
But here, let me just give you the result of this.
Here's Katie Tour from NBC and MSNBC on how she feels about climate change.
I read that New Yorker article today and I thought, gosh, how pointless is my life and how pointless are the decisions that I'm making on a day-to-day basis when we are not focused on climate change every day when it's not leading every one of our newscasts?
Can you save us, Brittany Spears?
Can we be saved?
Can we indeed be saved?
Katie Torr's life is pointless.
I could have told her that, but not for the same reasons.
Here is the thing.
The New York Times, even the New York Times article starts out by saying this new report says the damage from global warming will knock as much as 10% off the size of the American economies by century's end.
And Holman W. Jenkins Jr., who is one of the best writers on climate change over at the Wall Street Journal, says, what does this assessment actually say?
Because 10% is, he says in 2090, this is what it says, in 2090, the U.S. will experience annual climate-related costs of $500 billion.
$500 billion is not 10% of today's economy.
It's 2.5%.
It's 10% of 1971's economy.
And as we grow and as the economy grows, it will be even less.
In other words, climate change, the change that is coming, is affordable.
The things that we'll have to do to deal with climate change are affordable.
They're things that we will be able to afford.
And what's more, as we become more technologically adept, as we invent new things, climate change is actually going to go down.
Climate change does not get worse as we become more developed.
It gets better.
And it says, he goes on to say, Holman Jenkins goes on to say, over the past 15 or 20 years, the climate beat in the press has been handed over to reporter activists who've decided that climate science is impenetrable, but at least nobody ever got fired for exaggerating the risks of climate change.
Their ignorant crisis babble is why electrics everywhere now believe climate and prosperity are necessarily at odds.
This is why they're rioting in Paris because they want business to, they want there to be a living wage.
They want to be able to live instead of having their gasoline tax.
Climate Improves With Development00:01:29
Every study, he goes on to say, including the U.S. government's latest, shows the opposite.
Continued prosperity is essential to mitigating the risks of climate change.
As we become richer, we'll be able to pay for more of the things we have to do.
And as we become more technologically advanced, we will pollute less and have more ways of changing the pollution that is going into the air.
That's good news, not bad news.
It is tickety-boo news.
In fact, everything, everything is tickety-boo.
All right, I'll be back tomorrow for the last show of the week.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Technical producer, Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production, copyright, forward publishing 2018.
Coming up on the Ben Shapiro Show today, former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn receives no jail time, but what has he told the Mueller investigation?
The stock market takes a serious dive.
And Barack Obama giving some signals who he might support in 2020.