Andrew Clavin’s Trump Trumps the Trump-Haters dissects Trump’s State of the Union as a masterclass in exposing Democratic extremism—mocking their violent reactions while defending border security, abortion opposition, and anti-socialism rhetoric. He contrasts Trump’s unapologetic strategy with "well-behaved" Republicans, praises his disciplined delivery, and warns against lapses undermining gains. The mailbag tackles faith vs. sexuality for a gay Christian listener, advocating celibacy as divinely ordained, while debating government’s role in security (private sector wins), defending the Electoral College as federalism’s bulwark, and rejecting Hollywood’s leftist adaptations of his books. Clavin ultimately argues that while traditional marriage is sacred, government has no right to deny same-sex couples legal recognition or love—justifying personal freedom over outdated definitions. [Automatically generated summary]
All hell broke loose at the State of the Union address yesterday as President Trump and the Democrats fought a battle of competing symbolic visitors that quickly descended into chaos.
The melee began when the president began speaking about border security and Democrats leapt to their feet and began hurling Honduran children at the podium.
Trump immediately fought back by introducing the bodies of people who had been killed by Mexican drug cartels and were now seated beside the first lady in the balcony.
The Democrats, in a frenzy, responded by introducing a psychotic doctor to perform a late-term abortion on an audience member and then launched into a pink hat protest when the president introduced a heroic fireman who saved the baby's life.
Washington Senator Patty Murray rose to denounce the baby rescue, shouting, quote, Is this the sort of America we want to live in where Mexican gang members are put in prison while babies are allowed to run free?
When dedicated doctors work enslaved to destroy the life of a child, only to have all their efforts reversed at the last minute, we are not progressing toward the country Democrats are trying to create, unquote.
Hysteria continued to spread throughout the House chamber when Trump declared he was sure there were great people on both sides of World War II, while Nancy Pelosi stood up and sang five choruses of the red flag before she forgot who she was and accidentally locked herself in her oversized purse.
Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, became furious when he found out that Harry Reid had used the distraction to confirm 16 more conservative judges.
In a statement released by the ghost of Julius Rosenberg, Sanders said, We never saw such shameful goings on during the good old days in Moscow, where every man who was shot in the back of the head by the secret police received free health care.
Other than that, it was the usual boring State of the Union address.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Shipshaw, tipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, there's no question Donald Trump scored a big hit with this State of the Union address last night.
And when I see him at his best like that, I often find myself wondering why it takes such an outsized character to speak such simple truths.
America is a great country.
It's harder for bad guys to get into a place if there's a wall there.
We should all be able to agree that late-term abortion is unnecessary and criminal.
Socialism destroys freedom, and as a free nation, we should reject it.
These aren't controversial issues.
These are basic statements of fact and morality.
Why does it take a huge, obstreperous orange TV guy to pronounce them so clearly from the presidential podium?
I think the reason is that the left has managed to create a culture in which we hold these truths to be unspeakable.
We're surrounded by movies and television shows, comedian songs, social media, and news reports specifically designed to condemn and destroy anyone who transgresses by mentioning them.
To cast him as racist or sexist or homophobic, you know all the other words.
And Trump just doesn't care.
He's an insensitive man.
He hasn't lived a very moral life.
He's not nice.
He can stand being called all those names.
When you outlaw the truth, only outlaws will speak the truth.
And that's why Trump was standing there at the podium last night and not some more well-behaved Republican.
We'll talk more about the State of the Union, but first, flowers.
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She will love these so much.
She'll bat her eyelashes at you and say, how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So we had a great, oh yeah, and it's the mailbag.
Somebody, the mailbag is coming today.
All your problems will be solved.
And while I'm solving your problems, do me a favor, go on Amazon and please pre-order Another Kingdom, the book.
It comes out March 5th, I think it is.
And I think you'll really like it.
And it really helps me if you pre-order the book and let it move up the Amazon ranks.
Trump's Political Instincts00:05:19
So we had a great backstage last night.
I don't know if you got to see that.
A lot of people were watching.
It went on and on and on.
But after the speech, especially, we had a lot of good conversation about the State of the Union.
And we all agreed that it was a terrific State of the Union.
It kind of built.
It started out not as good as it ended.
But by the time he was finished, he really was shaking the rafters and doing some great stuff.
And the one thing that I can't get anybody, maybe Knowles agrees with me a little bit on this, but I can't get anybody to agree with me that Trump is really playing this game very, very well, and he's doing it on purpose.
Everybody else around here thinks that Trump is just kind of a blundering guy, kind of occasionally does the right things.
I don't think so at all.
I think he's got great political instincts.
I think he's like a running back.
He knows where the daylight is and he goes for it.
But he also adapts and he changes.
And he realized after the midterms, he realized that some of his obstreperousness, some of his loudness, some of his belligerence was not playing well with a lot of segments of the American people.
And unlike other politicians, he wants to get things done.
That's his whole thing.
His whole thing is he wants to accomplish things.
You know, you look at some of these other people, guys like Jim Jordan.
I don't mean to pick on Jim Jordan.
I like him, but he's an absolutist about the wall.
But where's his wall?
He's an absolutist about immigration, but where's his bill?
He hasn't passed anything.
He hasn't gotten anything done.
He's just insisted that it's his way of the highway.
Trump will deal, he'll do things, and he wants to get things done and he wants to see some results.
So he's been keeping a low profile.
He's been very untrumpy, and he has let the Democrats do what the Democrats do, which is show themselves to be loony as guano.
I mean, the guy, the people on the left are out of their minds, and Trump knows they're the best thing he's got going, so he's kept a low profile.
He set up this moment.
He made the speech where he explained his point of view from the Oval Office.
He made an offer that was a perfectly reasonable offer on border security.
By the time he showed up, it was the left who looked ridiculous.
And he got some great theater.
He got the Democrats sitting on their hands when he announced that there was low black and Latino unemployment.
I mean, that's what they're not applauding for that.
Some of them didn't applaud for the kid with cancer.
They're not standing up for a child who's sick.
Kamala Harris was sitting there shaking her head when Trump said he wanted to end sex slavery.
Oh, no, you don't want to do that.
And Bernie Sanders, this is my favorite moment, was Bernie Sanders frowning when Trump denounced socialism.
And Nancy Pelosi, you know, everybody's, obviously everybody in the press and on the left, but I repeat myself, wants to depict Nancy Pelosi as this sharp, shrewd, tough operator.
But I just thought she was a boar last night.
She's standing behind him reading the speech and fidgeting and rolling her eyes.
It was incredibly rude.
And they didn't do that to Obama when he was giving State of the Union addresses.
And obviously, the best one was the women.
All the women show up in white for suffrage because they had to work so hard to win the vote.
Oh, wait.
No, they didn't.
They just got elected because women can get elected anywhere they want now.
So I don't know why they were wearing that.
I remarked at the time it was interesting and different to see a lot of Democrats wearing white without the hoods.
But I think that he just made fools of them by celebrating the fact that there were so many women in Congress, so many women in the workplace, so that they had to stand up.
And it was a great moment when he played them.
Let's play the moment just when Trump, this is cut seven, Trump basically playing the Democrat women, milking standing ovations out of them.
No one has benefited more from our thriving economy than women who have filled 58% of the newly created jobs last year.
You weren't supposed to do that.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
All Americans can be proud that we have more women in the workforce than ever before.
Don't sit yet, you know, like this.
And exactly one century after Congress passed the Constitutional Amendment giving women the right to vote, we also have more women serving in Congress than at any time before.
And they're all jumping around and high-fiving each other.
A lot of people said this, but the only thing they applauded for was themselves.
They're so busy celebrating themselves.
And it's not like they did anything to get there.
I mean, obviously they ran the campaign, but they're not the ones who gave women the vote.
They're not the ones who had to fight the fight.
They're the recipients of that.
They're the ones who should be grateful instead of complaining all the time, but that's all they do.
And he just made them, you know, it's funny, he made them look, he made himself look good in the way he was joking with them and the way he ad-libs.
It's really Trump at his best.
He's at his best when he has a written speech and throws in a couple of ad-libs, as opposed to when he's doing the crazy stuff that he does.
But again, if he wasn't that crazy guy, I don't think he'd be standing there.
I think Hillary Clinton would be standing there.
Aggressive Trump Attack00:08:50
If he wasn't that belligerent guy who didn't care about being called racist, he wouldn't be the president.
And I think that that's the problem we have, that the fact that he will stand there and say those things.
Like here, his best moment, the best moment in the speech was the hit on socialism.
I mean, this was really good stuff.
This is cut number nine.
And it's just stuff that you do not hear people in his position, enough Republicans saying as loudly and as distinctly and in this venue where he's surrounded by his opponents as well as his supporters, you just don't hear this enough.
Two weeks ago, the United States officially recognized the legitimate government of Venezuela and its new president, Juan Weida.
We stand with the Venezuelan people in their noble quest for freedom, and we condemn the brutality of the Maduro regime, whose socialist policies have turned that nation from being the wealthiest in South America into a state of abject poverty and despair.
Here in the United States, we are alarmed by the new calls to adopt socialism in our country.
America was founded on liberty and independence and not government coercion, domination, and control.
We are born free and we will stay free.
That was great.
Even Nancy Pelosi had to applaud that a little bit.
But how could Bernie Sanders was sitting there grumping, you know, we didn't have speeches like this back when I was honeymooning in the Soviet Union?
And Alexandria Casional-Cortex, I mean, she was really stuck.
Her response was hilarious.
And I will get to that in a minute.
But first, we got to talk about Lightstream.
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All right, AOC talking about socialism.
He's on with, what's his name, Chris Matthews.
And I love this exchange.
What did you make of the president?
So I thought pretty aggressive statement about Venezuela tonight.
And he talked about being a socialist country and how we're never going to be a socialist country.
It was pretty truculent, but it tied the notion of socialism to that particular regime.
What do you think about the president and why he did that?
Well, I think that he needs to do it because he feels like he feels himself losing on the issues.
Every single policy proposal that we have adopted and presented to the American public has been overwhelmingly popular, even some with a majority of Republican voters supporting what we're talking about.
When we talk about a 70% marginal tax rate on incomes over $10 million, 60% of Americans approve it.
70% of Americans believe in improved and expanded Medicare for all.
A very large amount of Americans believe that we need to do something about climate change and that it is an existential threat to ourselves and to our children.
And so I think he sees himself losing on the issues.
He sees himself losing on the wall, on the wall on the southern border, and he needs to grasp at an ad hominem attack.
So, first of all, I love this.
It's an ad hominem attack on socialism.
I mean, the woman's a Latina.
You think she'd be able to speak Latin, or maybe that's not what that means.
An ad hominem attack is when you attack a person instead of his philosophy.
It's when you say, oh, you're a racist instead of saying, no, you're wrong because of this, this, and this.
It's an attack on the man, right?
But she's saying, but his attack is an attack on socialism as a philosophy.
We are a free country.
Socialism is a government takeover of the means of production.
You know, one of the things about socialism that is confusing for people, and it's the reason AOC can get away with the garbage she's talking about, is socialism has changed.
You know how when you're a leftist, you never have to say you're sorry.
You just change.
You know, you say like, oh, women should be able to sleep with anybody they want, just like men.
And when that doesn't work out, it's like you suddenly say, why are men taking advantage of women all the time?
You just change.
You just change your position to the conservative position without ever saying the conservatives were talking like that all the time.
Socialism used to be that the government owned the means of production.
But when it turned out that that, of course, destroyed countries, it destroyed economies because it meant there was no innovation, there was no competition.
When has government ever done anything, anything better than the private sector?
Never.
It never has, and so it just destroyed the country.
Socialism has now changed, where you get to keep the means of production, but when you make a profit, they steal your money.
So that's a different thing.
It's a different thing than what Marx started out with.
They know that when you take over the means of production, you don't make any money, so they let you keep the means of production, but then they steal the money that you made and they spread it around to buy votes with programs that don't work.
And so what she's talking about is that.
And that destroys countries much, much slower, much more slowly, because what it destroys is your incentive to work.
You work to make money.
You work to improve your condition.
And they just take that right away from you by saying, no, no, no, we know.
We know how to spend your money.
You know, you earned it, but we know how to spend it.
And when she says that people like the things that she's proposing, like Medicare for all, I want to see a poll that says, Do you approve of Medicare for All?
And then you get that number.
And then, do you know what Medicare for All is?
Because nobody does.
And once they find out that it's just socialized medicine, they don't like it.
Once they find out that when you tax billionaires 70, 80, 90%, they leave the country and take their jobs and take their businesses with them.
They don't like that so much either.
So people like these things in ignorance.
They like the way they sound.
They like the sound of free stuff.
But free stuff is very, very expensive and they don't like it when it shows up.
Anyway, I just love the ad hominem attack on socialism.
Finally, the other thing that was just great was he did address abortion.
He got to it a little late for me.
I wish he'd kind of opened up on it and he was a little short on it, but at least he said the words.
There could be no greater contrast to the beautiful image of a mother holding her infant child than the chilling displays our nation saw in recent days.
Lawmakers in New York cheered with delight upon the passage of legislation that would allow a baby to be ripped from the mother's womb moments from birth.
These are living, feeling, beautiful babies who will never get the chance to share their love and their dreams with the world.
And then we had the case of the governor of Virginia, where he stated he would execute a baby after birth.
To defend the dignity of every person, I am asking Congress to pass legislation to prohibit the late-term abortion of children who can feel pain in the mother's womb.
Let us work together to build a culture that cherishes innocent life.
And let us reaffirm a fundamental truth.
All children, born and unborn, are made in the holy image of God.
You know, you can talk about, and it's absolutely fair to talk about, the craziness of the fact that it's Donald Trump who has done anything but live a Christian life or even an upright life, who's the guy who's talking about this.
But it is connected.
Grip of Reckless Ideology00:15:22
It's connected to the fact that he's a reckless man.
He's a reckless, insensitive guy who has put his marriage vows at naught, as we used to say, who's slept around.
He's done all kinds of things that evangelical Christians or even just moral human beings would look down upon.
And it may be funny that he's the person standing there, but it's because he's that guy that they couldn't take him down with all the stuff they pull.
And it always works on people because people lose their courage.
They lose their courage when they get hit with, oh, you're a racist.
Oh, you're a sexist.
If Republicans could learn nothing from Donald Trump, if they could learn nothing, it's that the only strategy is not to care.
It is just to keep on walking, look straight ahead, and keep on walking.
And when he's talking about Virginia, by the way, that place is going into so much trouble now.
I don't know if you've heard the latest news.
This is breaking today, I think it is.
You know, how did it go?
First, it was the governor who showed up in blackface in his yearbook.
And then it was the lieutenant governor who was accused of having raped a woman in 2004.
There's now a story being reported from, where is it?
It's from NBC News that Fairfax, Justin Fairfax, the lieutenant governor, was in a meeting on Monday night and he was referring to this lady, Vanessa Tyson, who claims she was attacked.
He claims it was a consensual relationship.
It was before he was married.
And two sources in that meeting say Fairfax just unleashed a tirade of foul language against her saying, F that B, I guess we'll have to say.
And so that he's in trouble.
So if he can't take the office, if Northam resigns, if Fairfax can't take the office, it would fall to the Virginia Attorney General, who now admits that he wore blackface.
What the hell is going on in Virginia?
It's like, is nobody comfortable in his own skin in Virginia?
So he is saying that he wore blackface.
And I love the headline in the New York Times, by the way, a former newspaper.
The headline in the New York Times reporting this was that he admits that he used dark makeup.
I mean, even the guy himself said, I wore blackface, but the New York Times can't quite, it's a Democrat.
They can't quite bring themselves to do it.
All in all, I mean, I thought it was a terrific speech.
It got great.
I loved it.
Yeah, it got great immediate reviews.
People really approved of the speech.
And it just shows that they approve of Trump when he's, his best stuff is always when he has a written speech.
In Poland, that was one of his great speeches.
His first State of the Union address was one of his great speeches.
CNN could not even bring themselves to report the positive reaction to the speech.
Here is David Chalian, their political director, reporting the poll that people approved and saying, yeah, but our polls don't mean anything.
This is our first look at a brand new instant poll, but it is among speech watchers.
So I just want to stress here that for a State of the Union address, the president's partisans, his supporters, tend to turn out to watch the speech.
This is true of a president of either party.
So tonight, we saw a heavily Republican-skewed audience turn out to watch the president's speech.
But look at this, a very positive reaction from those who watched the speech tonight.
59% very positive, 17% somewhat positive, 23% negative.
I want you to see that very positive number, how that compares to Donald Trump's performances in the last couple of years when he's given a speech to a joint session of Congress like this.
You'll see that he was, again, tonight at 59%.
He was down at 48% very positive a year ago.
Back when he first started the job and he addressed the Congress, he was at 57%.
So he's back up.
So if only Republicans are watching the speech, how come in 2018 his polls dropped to what his basic popularity ranking usually is?
It doesn't make any sense.
Obviously, this was a great speech.
It was a terrific speech.
And it was a speech that he's being reasonable.
He's doing this thing to the Democrats, that the Democrats, the Democrats, because they despise him so much, don't even see how well he's doing, how strategic he's being.
He is being reasonable.
He's put them in a position where they're being unreasonable.
He's hitting them on the places where they're being unreasonable on abortion and on socialism.
And he's then saying, give me my wall.
Walls keep people out.
And it just makes perfect sense.
And interestingly, I thought Stacey Abrams, who delivered the Democrat response, always a tough thing to do, always a tough thing to compete with the president, you know, standing in the House like that.
But they were ready, because she's a black woman, they were ready to give her everything, all the praise in the world.
And she kind of, you know, it was a very flat speech, I thought.
And it did have this thing, which I just really dislike because it is what the Democrat Party does.
I mean, the whole thing about this country now is really we are the beneficiaries of the greatest generation.
They won the war.
They got rid of institutional racism.
They have improved health, technology, all these things.
We're benefiting from that.
We just should just be waking up and saying thank you every day.
But instead, it's the constant complaining from the left.
And here is Stacey Abrams on racism, cut number 13.
I just found this kind of interesting.
Go ahead.
In this time of division and crisis, we must come together and stand for and with one another.
America has stumbled time and again on its quest towards justice and equality.
But with each generation, we have revisited our fundamental truths.
And where we falter, we make amends.
We fought Jim Crow with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
Yet we continue to confront racism from our past and in our present, which is why we must hold everyone from the highest offices to our own families accountable for racist words and deeds and call racism what it is, wrong.
I want to find a politician who's calling racism great.
You know, who doesn't know that racism was wrong?
We passed laws because they were laws that had to be overturned.
We don't have to confront every racist heart.
We'll never be done.
We don't have to confront every racist word, every untoward thing that somebody says, every little trace of tribalism that's in every human mind, every single one, no matter what color they are.
This is the problem with the Democrats' agenda.
The problem has already been solved insofar as government can solve it.
I mean, government can only do what, government can only correct what government has made wrong in the first place.
Jim Crow was bad law.
The laws overturned it with good laws.
That's great.
But what are you going to do?
You're going to outlaw thoughts?
You're going to outlaw speech?
Of course that's what they want to do.
And it's just, they've got nowhere to go.
They're not dealing with the problems of the future.
And bizarrely, Donald Trump is.
And I say this one more time.
It is, it's wonderful to hear a president stand up and speak common sense.
It's amazing that it has to be a guy like Donald Trump, that we've created a culture where only a guy like Donald Trump is belligerent and insensitive enough to speak commonsensical truths.
The question is now, is he strategic enough?
Is he restrained and disciplined enough to keep that demeanor that made that State of the Union address so good in the future?
If he starts tweeting out the garbage again, if he starts calling people horse face again, if he starts calling people names again, he wastes it all.
He throws it all away.
I think, I think the midterm has taught him, the midterm loss has taught him something.
But whether or not he can actually put those teachings into action through discipline, it just remains to be seen.
All right, we've got the mailbag coming up.
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The mailbag.
Oh, yeah!
What is it with you, Austin?
You're just like pressing that button, I think.
All right, from Sam.
I think he has a thing for Lindsay.
I think that's what it is.
All right, from Samuel.
Hi, Andrew.
I was discussing the issue of abortion recently with my family and was shocked to learn that my mother had an abortion when she was in college.
She had a very hard life and was young at the time.
As we both know, kids make dumb decisions.
I love her dearly, but I don't know how to process the fact that my mother had an abortion.
She's rather liberal, and this loss doesn't seem to bother her nearly as deeply as it pains me.
Both premarital sex and the abortion of a child are acts that I disagree with morally.
She holds the opposite beliefs.
I'd like to discuss the abortion with her, but fear that it might ruin the close relationship that we've always had.
I'm both mourning the loss and struggling with the ideological differences behind it.
Well, first of all, you should discuss the abortion with her, but first you got to get your own mind right.
It is not your job to judge your mom.
You know, your mom created you.
You don't judge her.
You can judge the way she treated you.
You can judge the way she brought you up, but you love her.
You're close to her.
She must have done a good job.
So it's not your job to judge her life.
I agree with you about abortion, and I think it's a really big problem.
But, you know, I told this story last night on the backstage, but let me tell it again for those of you who weren't watching that.
You know, when I was learning to fly, I got really interested in flying stories and stories about heroic flyers.
And I was watching a movie about the Tuscahie airmen, the black flyers from World War II, and there was a scene in it where this evil senator got up and was denouncing that they were letting black people fly the planes and was using this horrible, horrible racist rhetoric.
And my daughter was watching, and I don't know, she was maybe 16 or something, and she said, is this guy insane?
Is he insane?
And I said, no, he's not insane.
He's in the grip of a psychopathic idea.
Good people do bad things in the grip of psychopathic ideas.
A perfect example is George Washington, not only a great man, but also a good man who held slaves.
How is that possible when we know slavery is evil?
It was because his culture was in the grip of a psychopathic idea that it was okay somehow to keep another man in bondage.
Good people do bad things when the society is in the grip of psychopathic ideas.
This society has been in the grip of a psychopathic idea.
I don't believe Ralph Northam, when he sits around and talks about leaving a baby to die, I don't believe he's a psychopath.
I don't even believe he's evil.
I believe he is in the grip, he is in a culture that has a psychopathic idea.
It's like a poison gas.
It makes things come out of your mouth.
It makes you do things that you shouldn't do.
Your mom was in a bad situation, obviously.
She was poor.
She was in the grip of a psychopathic idea.
You have got to forgive her before you talk to her.
You've got to let this go before you talk to her.
And then you can sit down and discuss it with her and even tell her your feelings about it, as long as she doesn't feel that you, her son, are judging the life that she led when you don't know that much about it.
You know, this is a terrible moment.
We know when we have elected officials recommending infanticide that something has gone horribly, horribly wrong with our culture.
She is in the grip.
She was in the grip of it.
She may still be in the grip of it.
It's not your job to free her.
If you want to know about it, that's one thing.
If you want to talk to her and reveal your feelings about it, that's one thing.
But if you're going to judge her, wait until you get your mind straight.
From Matt, dear Andrew Clavin with no ease, I am a guy in my mid-20s now, but I grew up in a very conservative Christian family going to church, attending youth group, and the whole nine yards.
From a young age, I've wanted to please God and love him and still desire to do so.
I have also only ever been attracted to guys.
I never wanted these feelings and attractions and fought against them most of my life.
However, now I find myself absolutely in love with a guy and would love nothing more than to spend my life with him.
I value your perspective.
What should I do?
Wow.
Okay.
Well, first of all, you should do the right thing.
And the right thing is not what I say it is.
It's not what Andrew Clavin thinks is the right thing.
It's not what your pastor or somebody in your church thinks is the right thing.
It is what God thinks is the right thing.
And so how are you going to find this out?
Here is a kind of interesting thing.
I came upon a piece of information over the, over the weekend, I think it was, that just kind of struck me and really got to me and was very interesting to me for a lot of different reasons.
And when I saw your email, when I saw your question, I really thought this piece of information was sent to me so that I could talk to you about this.
Because obviously, I'm not gay, I'm not in your situation, I'm not the guy who's going to solve your problem and figure out what the right thing to do is.
But recently, you know, the fact that this came to me, I just, I'm just telling you my feeling here.
I don't speak for God, but it seems to me that God has his eye on you, he loves you, he knows where you are, he knows where you got to be.
If you follow him, you will find the right way.
And here's something that might help, is this piece of information that there is a movement of gay Christian people who are struggling with this very, I'm looking for the name of it right here, but who are struggling with these very issues.
And what really strikes me about this is this is unique in history.
This has never happened before.
It's never happened before in the history of Christianity that gay people were suddenly thinking, well, I love Christ, but I'm also gay.
What do I do?
And they have this lingo because they're young people and young people have to have internet lingo for everything, where they talk about side A and side B.
And side A, I hope I'm getting this right.
You can find out yourself, but side A, I believe, is gay Christians who think that they can have a relationship and still be Christians.
And side B, I believe, is Christians, gay Christians who think, no, they can be gay, but they have to be celibate.
And there is a forum, let me see if I can find it, where they talk about this.
They all use this side A, side B thing, but there's a forum called something like, yeah, Queer Christian Forum, and I'm sure you can find it on Facebook, where they're talking about this.
And the reason I feel like you are in the middle of an historic event.
You know, gay people are trying to figure out how it is that they can be Christians.
All I know about it, because I can't tell you, I can't tell you if this is a sin because I don't have the desires, I don't have to deal with this.
I understand the pain because straight guys too find loves, love people that they can't have for moral reasons and have to walk away and that leaves a scar, but it's not quite as bad because there's always some other woman that they can have morally.
But a gay person is being told by a large part of Christian tradition that he can't have anybody.
And erotic love, romantic love is one of the chief consolations of a tragic life.
I mean, I think that it's a big deal to deprive yourself of that.
And whether you should or not is a big decision.
So I think you should go to these people.
I think you should go and listen to the conversations.
There are books that have been written about this.
And I think you should read scripture, pray on it, obviously, and find your way.
Power in Healthcare and Insurance00:10:33
Make your own choice with God.
You know, do not make your choice because of anything I believe.
Don't make it because of what anybody else believes.
But make it through scripture, through prayer, and by listening to the discussions of what thoughtful people are having.
This is an amazing moment.
It's an amazing moment for gay people who are Christian, who are not leftists, who are just going to throw tradition away, but want to find a way forward.
It's a historical moment.
Listen, I truly think when you have people who run our states talking about killing babies, talking about infanticide, this is a moment when it wouldn't surprise me if God is going to call his people to himself and say, we've got to regroup here.
And some of those people are not going to be the people that other religious authorities expect them to be.
Remember, Jesus sat down with people who religious authorities thought were totally out of line.
Jesus had dinner with them.
There is no one who should bar the door to God to you or anybody else.
So God loves you.
He's watching you.
He knows where you are.
He knows where you've got to be.
But you've got to go and talk to him about it and figure out your way.
Not me.
It shouldn't be.
It's not me making the decision.
It's going to be you.
But do it with discernment.
And it's your life and it's important.
And figure it out.
And then, as I say, do the right thing.
From Michael, do you think that security, for example, the police, is a function that is better in the hands of the government or that it would be better suited to the private sector?
If the government is the proper instrument for providing security like the police, what's the difference when it comes to providing health care?
Security isn't something we would want to leave up to insurance companies.
Why would we want to subject our health to them?
Okay, this has to do with the function of things.
Things have a purpose, a telos, an end that you put them to, right?
One of the proper functions of government is the protection of people who are from harm from others.
It's protecting people from harm from others and dealing out justice to others.
That's the first foundation of a state.
The first reason you have a state is to take the power of violence out away from families and individuals so they're not constantly having feuds and revenge, you know, acts of revenge that go on for generations.
And you give that monopoly on force and monopoly on justice to the government so that it gets dispersed into the community.
That's how in the Greek myths, that's how the furies kind of get buried beneath the city because they give that function to the government.
That is a proper role of government.
When you hear the socialists say, well, that's socialism because government is paying for it, absolute crap.
It is not.
That is a proper role for government to protect you from other people and to deal out justice when you've been harmed by other people.
That is the proper role of government.
Healthcare is the proper role of doctors and their customers, the patient.
That's who should be doing it.
Name one thing, one thing that government does cheaper or better than private people.
It's not that private enterprise couldn't do policing better.
They might be able to do it better and more efficiently, but they morally should not have the right.
That's not true with healthcare.
Healthcare morally belongs in the private sector.
And just like televisions get cheaper and cheaper, healthcare would get cheaper if it was governed by competition and by customers.
The fact that you don't know what you're paying for health care because there's just this copay and insurance takes care of it and blah, blah, blah, and the government does this and does that.
That's why prices go up.
Prices do not go up when people know what they're paying and can say, yeah, I want this but not that.
I'll take that but not this.
I want that test but I can't afford that one.
That's how prices come down.
And it's the insurance companies have blown this because they want to ensure everything.
You shouldn't have to ensure checkups.
If checkups weren't insured, price of checkups would go down.
You should have insurance for catastrophes.
You should have insurance for things that you can't pay for.
And then it's a good bet for the insurance company, a good bet for you.
So the government has nothing to do with this.
Everything they touch gets worse.
And healthcare is exactly the same way.
All the problems we have with healthcare come from the government, not from the private sector.
Even the restrictions on insurance companies, which makes insurance worse.
From Nicholas, do you believe the electoral college system should be replaced?
If so, with what system?
If not, then why not?
I don't believe it should be replaced because I think it defends federalism.
It remains, it keeps power in the states.
It means that if we're just going to have popular elections, then all the places where the populations are have all the power.
And I do not think that Tennessee should be entirely governed by California or by New York.
And that's why the Democrats want that, because obviously people gather in cities, more people are gathering in more cities, and those are Democrat votes, so they want to get rid of the Electoral College.
This is not, the e pluribus unum does not mean all the immigrants become one people, although it's come to mean that, and that's a perfectly good meaning, but it means 13 colonies, 13 states that become one country.
We are a confederation of states.
That's the federal system.
And the Electoral College keeps that alive, and I think it should be kept alive because I think people have the right to live as they want to live in their localities and not be governed by Washington, D.C. or New York or California.
From Jason, Dear Andrew, if a studio ever decided to make another one of your books into a movie, would you sell them the rights if you knew that they would change the message into a leftist message?
That's a really good question, and I actually know the answer to this because I've been in similar situations.
Once you have sold the rights to your book, you have no power to affect what they do.
Unless you're the author of the Harry Potter books who had so much power, she could negotiate those.
But most authors sell the rights to their books and have no power to affect the script.
If you're a screenwriter, you don't really have that much power to affect the outcome of it.
If I knew that they were going to make it have a message that I thought was truly wrong, I wouldn't take the money.
I think I can say that.
It's a hard thing to say, but I think I can say that pretty well.
Once I took the money, I would understand that it was out of my control.
So I've had conversations with people before they bought or optioned one of my books or one of my properties where I would say, where are you going with this?
You know, before the show The Americans came out about the Russian spies, I was called into a similar project.
It may have been that project, I don't know.
And they asked me if I would be interested in doing it, and I said I would be happy to do it, but I'm not going to make the Soviet Union look like the good guys.
That's just not going to happen.
And thanks for coming in, and we'll see you later.
So if I knew I wouldn't do it, once you sell the script, you've got to let it go.
And if they muck it up, I mean, you know, Clint Eastwood, in my novel True Crime, the guy on death row is white, and he was put there because, you know, one of the reasons there was a rush to judgment is because they needed to answer the leftists who were crying out that the death penalty was unfairly applied to blacks.
That's what happened.
In the movie, they changed it so that it was a black guy on death row.
I was unhappy about that, but once I had sold the rights to the book, it was theirs to make, and it was Clint Eastwood's movie, not mine.
My product is the book, and I stick by that.
I mean, I always quote James M. Kaine, the great American mystery writer, who said they asked him, he had things like double indemnity, great, the postman always rings twice, great books turned into great movies.
And they asked him how he felt about what Hollywood did to his books, and he said, Hollywood did nothing to my books.
They're right over there on the shelf.
And that's the attitude I've tried to maintain.
All right, I'll take one more.
There's another gay marriage question here, but why not?
This is a guy who used to be on the fence about the gay marriage issue.
Finally, hearing some sound arguments and logical arguments against same-sex marriage, I changed my mind.
I believe the only reason the government has any say in marriage in the first place is for the protection and social development of children.
That's not entirely true.
It's also for the protection of women.
The natural consequence of a sexual relationship between a man and a woman.
The government should not have to give out legal certificates for people who love each other.
I find that absurd.
As someone who repeatedly states that you stand for gay rights, what is the best argument you have heard from the anti-gay marriage side, and why do you think it fails?
The best marriage I've heard from the anti-gay marriage side is that gay marriage isn't marriage.
Marriage has meant one thing through all of human history.
It has meant a relationship between a man and a woman, sometimes a relationship between a man and several women, occasionally a relationship between a woman and several men, but always between opposite sexes.
So the best argument I heard was that it's not marriage, so why change?
It's not right to change the definition.
The reason that ultimately doesn't work for me, I mean, I feel that if you're talking about sacramental marriage, if you're talking about classical sacramental marriage, you are talking about an unbreakable bond between a man and a woman that is not subject to divorce except in the most extreme situations.
That's what you're talking about.
Once you have no fault divorce, once marriage becomes a kind of provisional relationship, which it became after the 60s when they had no fault divorce, to me, you've already changed the definition of marriage.
That's why this argument fails.
Once you can walk away from your wife and your kids because you like somebody else or you're just not as sexually turned on as you used to be, once those are the reasons you can get a divorce and walk out of your marriage, who cares who gets married?
What difference does it make?
It's not marriage anyway.
I think the churches should be allowed to restrict the people that they marry to whoever they feel is sacramental marriage.
I think that, you know, gay people in government terms should have the right to get married if there are benefits that come with it.
And there are, like tax benefits and things like that.
So, you know, it's complex because I actually believe that if you're talking about the sacrament of marriage, I think there is a hierarchy of relationship.
I think that the relationship between a man and a woman is central to society in a way the relationship between two men isn't.
I think we have more of an interest in that relationship.
We have more of an interest in sex when it can produce children.
And so therefore, by corollary, we have more of an interest in any relationship between a man and a woman.
Still, I think that the government does not have the right.
No matter what churches have the right, no matter what God has the right to do, the government does not have the right to tell people that because we don't like the way you have sex or we don't like the way you're attracted to people, you have to live your life without the consolation of erotic love.
The government should not have that power.
That's too much damn power for the government to have.
Government Rights Debate00:01:08
All right, I'm done.
I think I'm just going to end the show right there so I can let Knowles get in here.
But we will be back tomorrow, and that'll be the end.
So you'll want to be there to suck up all the Clavin-y goodness before the Clavinless weekend begins.
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.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Adam Sajovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Yesterday on Daily Wire Backstage, we had a blast reviewing the State of the Union address.
There were drinks, there were cigars, there was mockery, all sorts of the stuff that you are looking for in any analysis of the State of the Union address.