Ep. 629 dissects how leftist ideology weaponizes death—from NYT’s Todd May advocating human extinction as "ecological mercy" to radical activists replacing God with social justice dogma, mirroring Nietzsche’s nihilism. The host counters with Deuteronomy’s "choose life" mandate, exposing how materialist critiques strip humanity of moral purpose while dismissing faith as regressive. Callers grapple with spiritual and relational chaos: a daughter’s Spanish immersion pre-K, a father’s betrayal, and an abusive friend’s cycles of remorse, all framed through biblical boundaries—prayer’s role in God’s sovereignty, the dangers of enabling abuse, and the holiday’s true meaning as a values transformation, not just sentiment. The episode ends by rejecting Hollywood’s woke nihilism and Die Hard’s mislabeling as Christmas, arguing redemption—not affection—defines the season’s heart. [Automatically generated summary]
The Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts, and Sciences has been racking its brains about how to air the Oscars now that they've forced comedian Kevin Hart to resign as host because of something that outraged somebody somewhere over something.
I can't remember what.
According to a statement issued by Academy President Sirley Whiteman to the two junior high school students he was having sex with, quote, we've managed to damage a black man's career, so that's proved how virtuously politically correct we are.
But now we need to hire another comedian who can make jokes without offending anyone except the sort of clueless, brainless middle Americans who made this country great so we could live off the fat of the land by making movies no one wants to see and then giving each other awards for them, unquote.
Trying to find a more inoffensive host than Hart, the Academy has so far additioned a white noise machine and a wind-up bunny rabbit, but has recently begun to consider putting on the show without any host at all.
In a statement issued through his ecstasy supplier, Whiteman said, quote, not only will we have no host, but we're considering doing the entire show without any audience as well.
That way it would look more like the movies we'd be honoring and would make a statement about the fact that modern audiences simply are not woke enough to understand such small but beautiful films as Snakey, the tender story of a teenage transgender who decides to cut off his penis and turn it into a hand puppet, or Midnight Blue, the searing expose of how a bigoted police force imprisoned a sensitive young man just as he blossomed into homosexuality after slaughtering his mother and father in their bed.
Unquote.
Whiteman says if the new Oscar show without any host or audience is successful, Hollywood will consider staging the award show without actually making any movies.
Just to see if anyone notices.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Value Without Consciousness00:15:28
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dooky.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is ippitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Ho, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
In the book of Deuteronomy, God tells the people, I have set before you life and death, blessing and curses.
Now, choose life so that you and your children may live.
But there's at least one guy who says, no thanks.
A professor at Clemson University says human extinction would be sad, but might improve life on Earth.
Humans should just lie down and die and make things better.
In a rambling and poorly reasoned op-ed in the New York Times, a former newspaper, this Monday, Professor Todd May suggested it might be sad but not bad if future generations of humanity simply weren't born in order, of course, to save the Earth.
Now, that a stupid opinion should appear on Monday in the New York Times simply proves that it was Monday in the New York Times.
But the particular babbling chain of thought involved in Professor Todd May's death-loving reasoning exemplifies almost every trend of philosophical thought on the left, from the love of transgenderism to the subjugation of art to politics and a very weird but telling practice called Kafka trapping.
We're going to talk about all that, but first, Ben Shapiro has announced his latest book, which I have read.
It's very good, The Right Side of History, How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great.
It's a fantastic read, as I know, and you can pre-order your copy online at any major bookseller.
Do it.
It's good stuff.
You know, the bum, the lousy bum, brings out his book exactly the same time in March as my novel, Another Kingdom, is coming out.
But this is nonfiction, so you can enjoy both the right side of history and also Another Kingdom, which you can also pre-order, and you'll get all kinds of toys and pictures and stuff for your phone.
I bet Ben's not giving that stuff away.
Go to anotherkingdom.editorsexclusives.com and you can order that, pre-order that too.
All right, I got to take a look at this article.
I know it's been around.
People have been talking about it, but I've been waiting to talk about it.
And this is the first time I've really had a chance.
This is an article that was said, would the extinction of humanity be a tragedy?
And he dithers around a lot about what he means by tragedy and the fact that it would be our fault.
But here's basically, let me read you the two sections that says what he has to say, and then talk about, I want to talk about why this reasoning is central to the right.
And it links up with another very important article that came out in Collette.
He says, let me start with a claim that I think will be at once depressing and upon reflection, uncontroversial.
Human beings are destroying large parts of the inhabitable Earth and causing unimaginable suffering to many of the animals that inhabit it.
This is happening through at least three means.
First, human contribution to climate change is devastating ecosystems, as the recent article on Yellowstone Park in the New York Times exemplifies.
Second, increasing human population is encroaching on ecosystems that would otherwise be intact.
And third, factory farming fosters the creation of millions upon millions of animals for whom it offers nothing but suffering and misery before slaughtering them in often barbaric ways, but cooking them in very tasty ways, I should add.
There is no reason to think that those practices are going to go away anytime soon.
Quite the opposite.
Humanity then is the source of devastation of the lives of conscious animals on a scale that is difficult to comprehend.
Now, a lot of these environmental problems, of course, would be solved if the professor just stopped reading the New York Times, the New York Times, which is where most of the problems exist.
You know, I mean, we do make a mess of things before we clean things up.
Human beings do make messes before we clean them up.
We created the London fog.
If you've read about that in books, there was a London fog that you could peace super, they used to call it, that you couldn't see through.
They got alternate forms of burning, of heating rather than coal, and the London fog went away.
LA used to have a green smog that would roll in all that and make it very, very difficult to breathe.
Catalytic converters solved that.
Human problems are very often solved by human beings inventing new stuff.
I would guess that we are not far away from ways of storing solar energy and wind energy that will make those forms of energy useful as they are not right now.
All right.
But, but he is dealing with the torment that is inflicted on animals by the mass creation of food, you know.
And by the way, let me just say that while I want to solve this problem last after I solve the problems of human beings, I mean, as long as a child is suffering on Earth, I care about this much more than a goat.
But I do believe we could treat animals better.
I will say that.
I think animals could be treated better.
More important that we eat and love and laugh and be merry than that we do that, but I do think that it is something on the list of things that we are going to have to do, that we're going to want to do eventually.
But he says, nope, there is just too much torment wreaked upon too many animals and too certain a prospect that this is going to continue and probably increase.
It would overwhelm anything we might place on the other side of the ledger.
Our own science is revealing the richness of the lives of our fellow creatures, that they have consciousness and complex emotional relationships with each other.
And this ironically gives us a reason to eliminate our own continued existence.
In other words, because we are harming other conscious creatures, we should eliminate our existence.
Now, he says, one might ask here whether, given this view, it would also be a good thing for those of us who are currently here to end our lives in order to prevent further animal suffering.
We kill ourselves.
Although I do not have a final answer to this question, he says, I guess we can all count ourselves lucky.
Otherwise, we might open the door and Professor Todd May would be outside with an axe.
But he says, I do not have a final answer to this question.
We should recognize that the case of future humans is very different from the case of currently existing humans.
I love the New York.
You know, I read the New York Times every morning just for the satire.
He says, to demand of currently existing humans that they should end their lives would introduce significant suffering among those who have much to lose by dying.
In contrast, preventing future humans from existing does not introduce such suffering since those human beings will not exist and therefore not have lives to sacrifice.
The two situations are not analogous.
This guy is like a cartoon character in his takeoff on academics, but here he is in the New York Times.
He says, it well may be then that the extinction of humanity would make the world better off and yet would be a tragedy.
It's a tragedy because it's our own fault.
See, our tragic flaw was that we are doing these terrible things.
I don't want to say this for sure, he says, since the issue is quite complex.
It's quite complex whether we should all die or not.
But it certainly seems a live possibility and that by itself disturbs me.
Again, the fact that the New York Times is running comically stupid philosophical op-eds is not news, right?
It's the New York Times.
It's the op-ed page.
It's, you know, it's Knucklehead Row that there's another knucklehead involved.
It should not surprise us.
But it's important because of the way he's thinking and why he's wrong.
And in the middle of this article, he kind of flirts with some of the reasons why he's wrong and he dithers about them for a while.
But here's the thing, okay?
Every value that he's talking about is a human value and would cease to exist without humans to notice it.
The idea that consciousness is a good and suffering is a bad is a human value.
The value of other people's, of other consciousness, of animals' consciousness, is a human value.
The lion that rips the throat out of the antelope does not give a crap about the antelope's consciousness.
That, to value another creature's consciousness, is a human value.
No humans, no value.
We give that value.
We bring that value with us.
This is why God had Adam name the animals because we create those values because we can put them into words and in words we can explore their meaning and create values.
Just to know consciousness, just to want consciousness, just to avoid a truck coming at you is not giving value to something or giving meaning to something.
You have to have language to do that.
So when you say, would it be good for us to die?
The question is, good for whom?
If we weren't there, the goodness of our dying would be erased, right?
Any good that would come of our dying would be there, good and evil, human values, things that we see on Earth, that we create and we understand.
Now, some of you are saying, well, wait a minute, what about, I mean, really, to pause for just a minute, the only important thing about the Earth, when people say we must save the Earth, Gaia, our Mother Earth, the only important thing about the Earth, the Earth is a rock.
It is a piece of rock floating in the vastness of space, spinning around a star, just in the right place to support life.
The only thing important about that rock is life.
The only thing important about life is human consciousness.
Why?
Because it gives value to everything.
It is the thing that gives value to everything.
All right.
Now, some of you may say, well, wait a minute, what about God?
And that, of course, is exactly the question.
When we see these values, when we see the value of another consciousness, are we seeing something that's there or are we creating that value?
Is it just valuable to us?
Now, I would say, I would say, we're just discovering that value.
The value is there, but we are discovering it.
The reason it's there is because God sees that consciousness as well.
Obviously, this professor doesn't think that, because if he saw that the value of the other animal's consciousness was absolute, he would also see that the value of our consciousness is absolute, and the value of the consciousness of generations to come is also absolute, because that also exists in the mind of God.
He is reasoning without God.
Now, what happens when you reason without God?
Because there is a God, and because things only make sense with God, who exists, right?
When you remove him, in order to reason it all, in order to speak it all, you have to put something back in its place.
What does Professor Todd May put in its place?
He puts himself.
He puts the idea that his reasoning about this, his thinking about this, is somehow important enough so he can destroy anybody who could think the way he thinks and reason the way he reasons.
His entire conversation would vanish off the face of the earth.
Now, what does this have to do with leftism?
For this, I want to turn to another article that was in Quillette by a fellow named Connor Barnes, who was a former anarchist, right?
And he talks about what it's like to be in an anarchist community.
He says, commentators have accurately noted how social justice seems to take the form of a religion, right?
When you eliminate God, the world makes no sense simply to reason.
You have to put something in the place of God.
You can put your own conscience.
There has to be a consciousness there.
You can put your own consciousness.
That's what most people do.
They put their own consciousness.
But you've got to put something there.
So he says, social justice seems to have the form of a religion.
This captures the meaning and fulfillment I found, Connor Barnes found, in protests and occupations.
It also captures how outside of these harrowing festivals, everyday life in radical communities is mundane but pious.
As a radical activist, much of my time was devoted to proselytizing.
Non-anarchists were like pagans to be converted through zines and wheat-pasted posters rather than by Bible and baptism.
When non-radicals listened to my assertions that Nazis deserved death, that all life had developed into spectacle, and that monogamy was a capitalist social construct, they were probably bewildered instead of enticed.
Deep and sincere engagement with opposing points of view is out of the question.
You know, last night I had a dear friend over the house.
He's a liberal.
We got into a discussion.
We found so much in common.
We found somewhere between us that we agreed on, including his dislike and rejection of identity politics, of silencing people, so much that we agreed on, even as we disagreed on who the good politicians were and what the good policies were.
But if you're a radical, deep and sincere engagement with opposing points of view is out of the question, says Connor Barnes, because it has replaced God.
Radicalism is like a clan, too suspicious of outsiders to abandon cousin marriage, and like incestuous offspring, radicalism's intellectual offspring accumulate genetic load.
Escape from the paradigm of suspicion is hindered by kafka trapping.
Okay, and I'm going to come back in a minute and talk about Kafka trapping because this is something I've noticed.
I've actually spoken about it before, but I never had a name for it before.
And I love this name from the writer Kafka.
But let's just pause for a minute because Connor Barnes was on with Tucker Carlson and spoke a little bit about what his life was like and where all of this led him.
And let's listen to that for a minute.
What was your view of violence?
So violence, there's a shifty way people talk about it.
Direct action and diversity of tactics, which is a subtle way of saying, if somebody wants to be violent, we're going to turn our head and be okay with it.
So it's not a nonviolent movement.
No, no, no, no.
How did she get into it?
I was a pretty unhappy teenager, and I'm told that happens a lot to teenagers.
And I went looking for an explanation.
And I ended up just reading a lot of radical literature and found more and more radical literature until I found things that explained that happiness wasn't something you had much control over.
Capitalism was keeping you down.
So he gets into the art.
He got into a circular argument.
And the circular argument was based on and worked through this thing, Kafka trapping.
Now, I'm sure most of you know who Kafka was.
He wrote these really wonderful and excruciating novels, one of them being The Trial, in which a man is charged with something.
He's never told what.
He's never told how he can address the charge.
It's kind of like being investigated by Mueller.
You know, you just, the charges come out, and the charge is the charge, and asking about the charge is part of the charge, and you just find yourself in this bureaucracy.
And Kafka was predicting and noticing the bureaucracy that was going to become the hell of the 20th and then the 21st century.
So Kafka's characters were in this trap.
So Kafka trapping is the idea that opposition to a radical viewpoint proves the radical viewpoint.
Breaking Down Purpose00:11:51
And I'm sure you've heard people say this.
An example of this is a woman says, you know, being a feminist just made me miserable.
And they say, well, that's because you've been convinced by the patriarchy to be against your own interests, right?
So the fact that you are against feminism proves feminism's point, okay?
Where does this come from?
And Connor Barnes continues and writes about this.
There is an overdeveloped muscle in radicalism, the critical reflex.
It is able to find oppression behind any mundanity, any normal thing.
Where does this critical reflex come from?
French philosopher Paul Ricour famously coined the term school of suspicion to describe Karl Marx, Frederick Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud's drive to uncover repressed meaning in texts and societies.
Today's radicals have inherited this drive by way of Foucault and other Marxo-Nietzsche.
Now, this is wonderful stuff because a lot of it comes from Nietzsche, okay?
So let's talk about Nietzsche just for a minute.
Nietzsche said that without God, without God, there can be no objective morality.
So all that's left is to find what he called the genealogy of morals, where morals come from, to analyze them.
The word analyze means to take things apart, okay?
So to take apart our morals and examine them and look at them and go back and see where they go because there is no objective morality without God.
Both Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud were dedicated to de-spiritualizing things that had been spiritualized before.
So Karl Marx, not to get too deep in the philosophical weeds, but he said, I'm going to turn Hegel on his head.
Hegel wrote a book, which is really hard.
I read it.
It's almost incomprehensible, but it's a book called The Phenomenology of Spirit on How Our Spirits Develop.
Marx took that theory and took the spirit out of it and made it all about money.
Going back to feminism, you hear Marx in feminism when they say, oh, women, it's unfair.
They don't make as much money when they stay home and take care of the kids, as if money were the only thing life was about.
Freud did the same thing with Christianity.
Freud took Christianity and he based it all on sex.
So instead of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, you had the id, ego, and superego.
All the things of Christianity were sort of recreated as based on our erotic impulses.
And so again, without God, without the spirit, there's nothing left to do but analyze, but take things apart.
The people who do this today are guys like Jonathan Haight, Yuval Harari, Steven Pinker, maybe it's Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker.
And sometimes we like these guys because they say conservative things, but we should be really careful with them because their reasoning is always materialist.
It's always, if I take this apart, I get here, I can get here, and if I can create an evolutionary story about this form of morality, then this form of morality is useful.
The problem with that is when it becomes useful to kill babies, when it becomes useful to create human beings and just use their body parts for other richer human beings, they will do that as well.
Without the idea of the spirit, without the idea of God setting the rules, you're going to get lost in that world.
And it may be fine.
It may make everybody happy and it'll still be an atrocity.
Here's the thing.
The physical world is infinitely analyzable, infinitely take-apartable.
You can take it apart forever.
You can break everything down into smaller and smaller bits.
And so you can always find some injustice.
You can always find something wrong.
Oh my God, they're playing baby it's cold outside.
Every tradition, every convention, everything that we do, oh my God, you married a female, a man married a woman and had children.
Oh my capitalist construct.
The fact is, the fact is, the beaten path in a free society is usually the best path unless it's not, right?
The beaten path is there because people chose it again and again.
They chose it in a free society because it worked for them, because it was good for them.
So following the beaten path is usually the path of wisdom.
Now and again, you look up and say, oh, here's a terrible injustice that has to be fixed.
Let's leave the beaten path or broaden the beaten path and do something new.
Here's a situation that doesn't work anymore.
Let's enlarge it.
Let's turn the path a little bit.
But normally, on a normal day, the beaten path is the right way.
This is why leftists are always taking it apart because they don't believe in the spirit.
The thing about the spirit is the spirit is not analyzable.
Think of it like this.
A car can be taken apart.
The experience of driving a car is a hole, right?
You can't take anything out of it or it stops.
When a car breaks, you have to take it apart and put it back together.
When a car is working right, the experience is all you need, right?
You don't need to take the car apart when the car is working properly.
Most of the time, the beaten path is working properly.
Most of the time, our traditions are in place because people chose those traditions again and again.
The car does not need to be taken apart.
What the left gets wrong is always a question of spirit.
It is always removing the spirit, the wholeness of life, from life and being left with nothing left but materialism.
It is again and again.
And ultimately, what you come down to is why live at all?
Life itself can be taken apart and analyzed until there's no purpose to it.
And the life of an animal is more important than the life of a human being.
And this is why in Deuteronomy, God said, I have put before you life and death.
Now choose life so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice and hold fast to him, fast to him, for the Lord is your life.
That's why it says that, okay?
And that's why the left is so wrong about this and so wrong about destroying every tradition they can lay their hands on.
There's nothing wrong with including new people in our traditions.
There's nothing wrong with including new traditions that help out excluded groups.
But there is something terribly wrong with disassembling the traditions of the majority that have lasted and served us so well.
It is almost time for our next episode of the conversation.
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All right, we are going to break from YouTube.
We're no longer on Facebook.
Nobody tells me anything, but apparently we're no longer on Facebook.
And the mailbag is coming up.
All your questions will...
You know, oh my, there it is.
For a minute there, I saw it flash before my eyes, but I didn't hear the scream.
We only play that to kill drivers.
That's the only reason we play it.
But we'll be playing it again in just a moment.
We have really good questions today, and I finally got to the mailbag in time to answer as many as I possibly can.
Well, come on over to DailyWire.com and hear the rest of the show.
Mailbag.
Yeah!
All right.
From Peter.
Master Clavin, my pastor recently did a sermon on Luke chapter 12, 22 to 28.
Then Jesus said to his disciples, therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear.
For life is more than food and the body more than clothes.
Consider the ravens.
They do not sow or reap.
They have no storeroom or barn, yet God feeds them and how much more valuable you are than birds.
See, if the professor had read this, he would know.
Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life since you cannot do this very little thing?
Why do you worry about the rest?
Here is the question from Peter.
My question to you is, how can I be sure to tell the difference between worrying and not caring about life choices such as faith, career, relationships, food, and clothing?
Thanks.
Love the show.
This is such a good question.
It is largely a question of attitude.
What you're talking about is attitude.
Because remember, when he talks about the ravens and he talks about other things, when he talks about the ravens, they do not sow or reap.
They don't sit around smoking dope either.
You know, they actually go and do the things that ravens do.
You too must do the things that men do.
Support your family, have a career, express the desires of your heart in the work of your hands.
These are the things that men do.
And you too must do these things as the raven goes out and finds its food and builds its nest.
You too should do this.
Create new children.
Love your wife.
Build a career.
All of those things.
But the question is, how do you do them and with what attitude and to what end?
Think about this for a minute, all right?
A little baby, a toddler, stands up and takes his first step.
And if you've ever seen this, it's an absolutely delightful, wonderful moment in a child's life.
And the child is so proud of himself and it takes so much effort to do it.
And he has to work so hard and he falls down and he has to have the courage to get back up, even though he fell down and bumped himself and cried.
And the parents are sitting there and they're so proud of him and he pulled himself up and he started to walk.
But there was no possibility he wouldn't do that, right?
It is his nature to do that.
That is what children do.
So even though it was an effort, even though it took courage, even though it's an achievement, it was going to happen anyway.
It was going to be done anyway, okay?
The same is true of your best life, right?
Same is true of the work you're going to do, the efforts you're going to make, the courage you're going to need to do the things, the risks you're going to take, the children you're going to love, the way you're going to raise them, the wife you're going to love and hopefully sustain and support as well.
All of these things should be done.
None of them need to be done in anxiety.
None of them need to be done in worry and fear.
A plant grows toward the sun.
It doesn't worry about, hey, where's the sun?
How am I growing toward the sun?
Just doesn't.
And that is the way that Jesus wants you to do it too, because he is the sun.
If you follow him and if you put your sights on him, he will take you to those places.
He didn't make you to sit still.
Just like he didn't make that baby to just lie on its back forever.
He made it to stand up and walk and to have that achievement and do that thing.
He made you to take the talents that you have and use them and develop them.
He made you to bring money home to your family so that they can eat and live and enjoy each other.
And I think so that your wife can raise your children and have time to do that in her life.
And all that stuff can be done without worrying at all.
Now, it's tough.
It's tough.
You will worry because you have a body and your body will dictate those worries.
But you should learn.
I mean, if you begin to learn now the difference between what your body is feeling, envy, anger, worry, anxiety, and what your soul needs to develop and to become the soul it's supposed to be, if you can separate those two things, you will get a lot of joy out of life instead of a lot of worry and anxiety.
And that's what Christ is trying to give you.
From Tyler, one true God king of the Daily Wire, I fear I may have caused a divorce.
Learning to Separate Body from Soul00:13:36
I found out a few weeks ago that my good friend and his wife were getting a divorce.
I was very sad for them and their one-year-old daughter, but in our profession, in the military, it is all too common.
I've been regularly checking up on him to see if he's all right.
The other night at three in the morning, he texted me saying he was not all right, that the reason his wife divorced him was because she had fallen in love with me.
And he blamed me and was quite distraught.
His wife and I did have a great friendship.
We had much in common.
I asked many of our other friends who were always around us if they thought I had acted indecently or flirtatiously.
They thought I had not.
My question is, should I confront him in his grief and explain the irrationality of his thoughts or leave it alone?
Also, am I to blame, for I do find her to be a wonderful woman, but I've never thought of her in that way and still do not even think of her that way with the recent revelations.
Well, I can't answer whether you're to blame because I wasn't there.
Friendships between men and women are always fraught.
Pretending there isn't is a lie.
It's just lying to yourself.
Lying is never good.
Anytime there is a man and a woman in a relationship, the issue of sex and romance and erotic attraction is on the table.
So I don't know whether you are to blame.
I don't know whether there was an element of that that you should have seen coming.
It's a little hard to believe that she fell in love with you without your noticing it, but it can happen.
But let's answer the question of what you should do.
What I would do, what I would do in this situation is I would craft a letter, not blaming him at all, but a letter addressed to him in love and say, I want you to know that this was not my intention.
I did not mean for this to happen.
It did not happen to me.
I did not feel this way about your wife, but we did have a lot in common and I was a friend.
And I will talk to you.
I will be happy to talk to you about this and sit down with you man to man and talk to you face to face anytime you want.
I would send that letter and then I would leave it alone.
If he doesn't get back to you, he doesn't get back to you.
If he doesn't want to talk to you, he doesn't want to talk to you.
If he wants to write you an angry letter, he writes you an angry letter.
Don't go get into a flame war with him.
Say what you have to say.
Tell him what you told me.
And then shut up and let him make the next move.
And if that move is to sit down and talk with them, sit down and talk with them in the same spirit of explanation.
Because, you know, anytime there's a friendship between a man and a woman, it is a fraught thing.
And you just shouldn't, you just can't overlook that.
And so you should understand that he has reason to feel angry with you, whether you're to blame or not.
From Jody, hello, teacher, my daughter is being pressured by her husband and peers to put her four-year-old daughter into 100% Spanish immersion class in pre-kindergarten.
Everything would be in Spanish, arithmetic, reading, alphabet.
This is all the rage.
My reaction to this was intense, to say the least.
Though I made it clear to my daughter that this was a decision she and her husband must make and that I'd not butt in, the thought of it cuts me to the core.
I don't see why my granddaughter, who has the advantage right now of an exceptionally good vocabulary, should be hobbled in this way in the earliest years of her learning.
Am I overreacting in your opinion?
I've searched my soul for any signs of racism or animus in this feeling, but I know I'd feel exactly the same if she were being forced to learn German or Norwegian.
I'd really like to hear your perspective.
You are the wisest man I know.
All right.
You know, Jodi, that can be a man or a woman's name, so I don't know if you are the father-in-law or the daughter or the mother-in-law.
Here's the first, this is a question in two parts, really.
The first thing is this.
The whole art of having a son-in-law is understanding that he is now the head of your daughter's household.
He is now the head of your daughter's household.
Every happy marriage I've ever seen, the husband was the head of the household in some sense.
That can take a thousand different forms.
And that can take a thousand different forms, but it's always been true in every happy marriage I've ever seen over time.
It's possible that somewhere there's a happy marriage where the wife is the head of the household, and I have nothing to say about it.
I've never seen it.
I've never seen every marriage I've ever seen where that was true.
I was just happy there was such a thing as antidepressants because the guy was living in a hell of sorrow and sadness.
But it's possible that that's true.
There is no such thing.
There is no such thing as a happy marriage in which the father or mother-in-law is the head of the household or has any damn thing to say about what goes on in the household.
So that's the first thing.
Butt out.
It's none of your business.
I know I have a grandchild.
I know what you're feeling.
I know it's a terrible thing when you think things are not going the way you want them to go.
But unless there is danger to life and limb, your job is to be supportive and loving and answer questions when, give advice when advice is asked for, and then to stay out of it.
He is the guy who is going to make this decision with his, hopefully in tandem with his wife, hopefully in consultation and tandem with his wife.
That's the first part of this.
So you have to butt out.
Whatever happens, it's their decision.
It is totally their decision.
They don't even need to know your opinion if they didn't ask for your opinion.
That's number one and really the most important point.
The second point, are you overreacting?
Yeah, I actually think you are.
Here's why.
I think that being bilingual is a wonderful gift for children.
I think that you learn languages best when you're little.
And kids who grow up in bilingual households have a lot of advantages and it's a wonderful thing to have.
And it really increases your abilities, your thought abilities, and your ability to do business later in life.
And it's just a great thing.
Whether this is the best way to do it, I don't know.
I suspect it needs more research, whether complete immersion.
I'm assuming, by the way, they're speaking English at home.
So your daughter's not, your granddaughter is not going to stop hearing English.
So she would just become bilingual.
If it were I putting my kid in a school, I would not go for full immersion.
I would go for some kind of half part-time immersion.
But again, not my kid, not your kid.
You know, that's a decision they have to make.
In any case, it's not going to be damaging.
She's not going to come home and suddenly be Hispanic.
She's not going to learn, have a lesser English vocabulary.
I don't believe that at all.
This may not be the absolute best way to do this, but I don't think it's going to be a harmful way.
I don't think you should think that, and I don't think you should be that worried about it.
Yeah.
Okay, from Dane.
Dear Clavin, I'm 24 years old, and my parents had been together for 30 years.
Both of them are in their 50s.
I found out on Monday that my mom, who has been taking, quote, business trips, unquote, to Washington State, cheated on my dad.
She wants a divorce.
Merry Christmas, right?
They had a big fight and I yelled at my mom the angriest I've ever been.
Looking back, my mom has been extremely resentful these last few months and I find it hard not to replay every conversation and every fight through a new lens I didn't want.
I'm saying all this because your advice has been extremely helpful and I guess I don't know what to do.
My sisters who are 20 and 27 are devastated.
They didn't see it coming.
My dad, who has been nothing but loving and supportive, is just angry and in shock.
I don't blame him.
All I want to do when I think about this is yell.
We all moved to California to support my mom's getting a new job two years ago against my better judgment.
And now she does this.
I can't believe she has any good reason, not with how good my dad is.
What do I do?
What should I say?
Thanks for all your help.
Love the show.
This again is a double question in here.
I have a lot of questions.
I got to tell you, Dane, I have a lot of questions about this letter, okay?
You're 24 years old.
And two years ago, when you were 22, you moved to California to support your mom getting a new job.
Why are you still part of this family economically?
Why are you not working on your own?
Why are you not living wherever you want to live and doing what you want to do and developing a family of your own?
That would be my first question.
Now you're 24.
The other thing is this.
Your mom and dad had a big fight and you yelled at your mom the angriest.
Why were you involved in this fight?
Why were you involved in your mom and dad's fight?
You are 24 years old.
You are a grown-up person.
You're a grown-up now.
This is a very sad, very painful thing for you, but it is not your life.
This is a very sad, very painful thing in your life, but the divorce is not your life.
It's their life.
It's not your relationship.
It's their relationship.
What you have to deal with is your grief and sorrow and sadness that this is happening, not what should be happening between mom and dad.
That's between mom and dad.
This is their relationship.
You don't know anything about it.
I mean, you do not, you think you do, but you don't.
Okay.
So what I see here is a failure, your failure to detach from this situation.
Not from your pain, not like you shouldn't feel pain, not like you shouldn't feel grief, not that you shouldn't feel anger, and certainly not that you shouldn't give emotional support, especially to your father, who is the wrong party here and with whom you're having a better relationship.
But you have no role in solving this problem.
You have no role in making this better.
You have no role in bringing your mother to reconciliation or your father to forgiveness.
You only have a role in supporting them and dealing with your own anger and grief.
I feel like there's something wrong here that you haven't grown up to the place where you should be in time.
If you're 24 years old, you should be living somewhere else and you should have your own life.
And you, again, I can see this is devastating.
Believe me, I mean, my kids are both grown.
God forbid, if my wife and I ever broke up like this, that would be devastating to them.
It would be between my wife and me, and they would just have to deal with their pain, and so do you.
From Stephen, dear Supreme Overlord Andrew of House Clavin, then it goes on, grower of beards, drinker of tears, and mother of dragons.
My mother gifted me a subscription.
It's kind of a weird thought, but my mother gifted me a subscription to Daily Wire and hoped I wouldn't see the email notifying me of the gift so that it would be a surprise on Christmas Day, but I did see it, so here I am.
All right, fair enough.
Great gift.
I know that we are supposed to pray in order to build a relationship with God, but why do we ask for things in prayer?
One Christian apologist I've read said that God actually gives us a say and lets us have input.
Meaning the chances of receiving whatever we are asking for go up when we ask than if we never asked at all.
This explanation is hard to swallow.
Could the outcome really change by asking for a sick person to be healed or for our troops to be blessed?
Thanks.
Okay, the problem here is you're trying to think yourself into God's mind and you just can't do it, okay?
The best thing I can tell you, I disagree with people who say you shouldn't ask for things.
I've heard people say, oh, God is not my butler.
I don't ask him for anything.
I think that's crazy.
I think that's crazy.
I bring everything to God.
I just, you know, my desires, my hopes, my dreams, and certainly, certainly the suffering of my friends and the people I love and even people sometimes out in the world that have somehow reached me.
I bring it all to God and pray for good outcomes and pray, of course, you know, with the proviso that his will be done, obviously.
But still, I pray for these things.
And here's the way you have to look at it.
This is not a full way of looking at it.
But we live in time.
What you're talking about is causation, right?
You're talking about when we pray, does something then happen because we pray?
That's the way humans think of things because we live in time.
Causation happens in time.
I knock over the glass, the glass falls over.
That happens in time.
God sees things utterly differently.
He lives outside of time.
He lives above time.
He is greater than time.
So the best way to think of it is when God made the world, your prayers were figured in to the creation.
That's the closest I can come to a world without time, beyond time, because I don't live beyond time.
I can't even imagine what that is.
But God can, and God sees the world that way.
Your prayers, I believe, are part of the structure of the created world.
And so, yes, they were taken into account.
Do they create different outcomes?
Well, they already have from God's point of view.
They have created the world.
They are part of the creation of the world as it is, including those outcomes.
On top of this, in your life, now trying to get out of the mind of God where we can't really be, in your life, prayer and the answers to prayers, whether they are yeses or no answers, will bring you closer to God, will give you a deeper and richer understanding of the wholeness and beauty of God and of the role of God in your life.
And that will change you, and that will change the world.
And in your life, those are always good changes if you keep an honest relationship with God and try to understand who God is through reading the gospels and react to that God and not impose other faces like your dad's face on God or anything like that.
That will always be helpful.
So pray away because it will always be a helpful thing.
A Year of Secrets00:06:29
From Macy, oh man, I'm running out of time.
I can't believe it.
Overlord of Chuckleheads and all things tickety-boo, I've been close with my best friend for about a year.
Every couple months, we hit a snag.
He has an extremely troubled past, which includes a father who was either incarcerated for dealing drugs, strung out, or abusive, died of an overdose when my friend was 13.
My friend has gone through stages of drug and alcohol abuse with all imaginable horrors.
He's now clean and lives a life along the paths of Jordan Peterson's worldview.
But every few months he seems to hit this dark place and I'm often the target of his lashing out verbally or cutting me off completely for a week or two.
I've been there for him without fail, taking any blame or hate without apology, because I know all the crap that he's been dealt and feel he deserves to be loved regardless.
I know that he does this, but I'm still left hurt and reeling when it happens.
Is there a point where I should just keep him at a distance or should I love him unconditionally as Christ loves us?
All right.
Macy sounds like a woman's name.
This guy has been your friend for a year, your best friend for a year.
This is an abusive relationship.
This should not be happening.
I don't care what his problems are.
You are not his punching bag.
You should not be in a relationship where you get abused and he never apologizes.
And then he comes back and then he this is a tangled machine that you have gotten into for a year and and have been and you've been letting him abuse you.
You should not be abused.
You should not let him abuse you.
It should stop.
And so you're either going to have to address it or pull back and get out of the relationship.
I don't care what's happened to him.
It doesn't matter what's happened to him.
You are not there to be abused.
You are not made by God for abuse.
And so what I would say is if right now you guys are in a good place, talk to him about it.
Tell him it's not going to happen anymore.
It's going to be the next time it happens, the relationship is going to be over.
The relationship is going to end.
And then you're going to have to stick to that.
If he is unkind to you, if he's abusive to you, if he cuts you off, you can't be there for him when he gets back.
And so you should tell him beforehand.
So in the hopes it doesn't happen, but you should not be caught up in this kind of cyclical relationship.
It will go on and it will get worse.
All right, I got to stop.
Let's do some tickety boo news.
You know, I had something else I was going to do for tickety boo news, but I don't want to end the show without this.
Is diehard a Christmas movie?
The Fox has put out a new trailer in which it obviously is.
Here's the trailer.
This is John.
Nice beer.
He just wants to spend Christmas with the family.
Is Daddy coming home shoot?
We'll see what Santa and Mommy can do.
But when he gets stuck at the office party, Merry Christmas!
It'll be a holiday.
Merry Christmas!
they'll never forget.
Ho, ho, ho.
This Christmas is a time of miracles, so be of good cheer.
Only John can drive somebody that crazy.
Get ready to jingle some bells and deck the halls with bows of Bruce Willis.
Get together, have a few laughs.
Alan Rickman.
Do you really think you have a chance against osmistic cowboy?
I became together in the greatest Christmas story ever told.
Got some bad news for you, Dwayne.
Hans Booby, eat it, Harvey.
I'm starting to get a bad feeling up here.
Merry Christmas.
Die Hard.
It's brilliantly done.
Alipundit on Hot Air says it's not a Christmas movie because Christmas movies are the what defines a Christmas movie is affection, familial affection, romantic affection, friendly affection, whatever.
And it has to be at the center of this and it's not at the center of diehard.
I'm going to answer this question once and for all because Alipundit is wrong.
At the center of Christmas movies is not affection.
That is one of the reasons Hallmark Christmas movies are so cloying and why they are not really Christmas movies.
They're simply love stories set at Christmas.
And this is an adventure story set at Christmas.
Christmas is about the transformation of values from earthly values to godly values.
And that's what makes a great Christmas story.
If you look at the only two really great Christmas stories outside of the gospel, if you look at a Christmas Carol and you look at It's a Wonderful Life, which as I've mentioned before, are mirror images of each other, right?
One is about a greedy guy who goes back and looks over his life and how it has made people miserable.
The other is about an overly generous guy, a tremendously generous guy, who goes back and looks at the world if his life hadn't existed and how people would be miserable then.
In both of these cases, the Scrooge and George Bailey come back happy without their life situation having changed.
Their life situation is exactly the same before their vision as after their vision, but they are now happy.
Why?
Because they have transformed their values from one set of values to another set of values, and that has given them joy.
They understand their life differently.
And that's what actually Christmas is about.
It is about a set of values coming down into the world and transforming our world, giving it the possibility of joy, even in the misery of Scrooge's life, even in the trouble that George Bailey has gotten into, right?
The joy exists even in the troubles of our life, which include death, includes sickness and death.
And so that's what great Christmas stories really are about.
The only person who's in a Christmas movie in Die Hard is Holly, the wife, whose values are transformed in the course of the movie.
That's not true of John McClain.
He's the same tough guy as he was when he walks in.
But Holly realizes that her marriage is the most important relationship in her life and more important than her business life.
And so she's transformed.
She's actually in a Christmas movie, but McLean isn't, and neither are we.
Great Christmas Stories Transform Values00:01:02
All right.
I'll be back tomorrow.
Last day before the Clavinless Christmas begins, so you don't want to miss it.
You want to suck up all the Clavin-y goodness you can to get you through the holidays.
Be there tomorrow.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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, Tucker Carlson hit with advertiser boycotts.
President Trump talks about pulling American troops out of Syria and Michael Flynn gets clocked by a judge.