Andrew Clavin dissects modern media’s weaponization of fiction—from the debunked Russian collusion narrative (backed by bipartisan Senate findings) to the Jussie Smollett case—as partisan tools, while framing Trump’s policies as constitutionally sound and minority-beneficial. He contrasts this with FBI malfeasance during 2016, alleging Clinton-era cover-ups, and pivots to grief as a "hero’s journey," counseling a listener whose wife died by suicide at 30 after CPTSD struggles. Clavin rejects Richard’s call to "destroy" cultural enemies, insisting freedom demands daily defense over absolute victory, then advises an 18-year-old on faith amid loss, arguing objective morality implies God’s existence. The episode blends conspiracy critiques with personal tragedy and ideological battles, ending with a challenge to feminists on career vs. motherhood trade-offs. [Automatically generated summary]
The Grammy Awards garnered very low ratings this year, leading some experts to speculate that the self-righteous leftist politics of semi-talented semi-celebrities is preventing people from enjoying their unbridled self-congratulations.
Pop Diva Taylor Miley, who showed up on the red carpet wearing a loincloth and a pair of nickels, said she was disappointed that more people weren't watching when she won the Best Song Award for her number one girl anthem, Now I'm 12, Screw Me.
In a statement delivered with her face buried in a compact full of white powder, Miss Miley said, quote, I like to think I'm inspiring girls across the country to proclaim their strength and independence while dressing like a $10 hooker and allowing themselves to be used as a penis holster by any droopy-eyed punk who can grunt something half-nice about them before dumping them for the next brainless fool.
So I was really looking forward to accepting my award and telling everyone who they should vote for.
I can't understand why no one was watching, unquote.
Rap singer Jay Hate U said he was also baffled by the Grammy's low ratings.
In a statement released to his baby mama's dealer, Hate U said, quote, when I take time off from expressing my rage against the machine that is paying me millions of dollars to express my rage against it, I expect to receive some praise and attention for the hard work of chanting forced rhymes in an anti-social voice to repetitive non-music with a deafening bass meant to obscure its lack of originality and depth.
I even went easy on the lean so I'd be there in time to lecture Americans on being more moral in their politics.
Why wouldn't people show up for that?
Unquote.
The Grammy failure does not bode well for the Oscar program, which hasn't even been able to find a host moral enough to tell jokes harmless enough to bore all the people who won't be watching anyway because the movies suck.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
There's a theory going around among intellectuals and other buffoons.
You've heard me talk about this a lot because I'm a fiction writer.
And the theory is that much of humanity's moral life is built around fiction.
God is a fiction.
Human rights are a fiction.
The value of money is a fiction.
According to our intellectual friends, these things, God, rights, monetary value, describe things that don't exist outside our stories about them.
Intellectuals say these things because they're dopes who don't understand how the imagination works.
The imagination is an organ of perception, like the eye.
Like the eye, it sees things that are really there in some form and translates them into images the human mind can comprehend.
God, human rights, and value are all real.
Religious rituals and laws and money are the fictions we tell so we can grasp and experience them.
Once you fail to understand that fiction is a way of expressing truth, you come to believe it's a way of creating truth.
And then, congratulations, you're qualified to work as a leftist or in the news media.
But I repeat myself.
Ever since Donald Trump got elected, the left and the news media, but I repeat myself, repeating myself, have been creating fictions about him.
He's racist.
He's an authoritarian anti-constitutionalist.
And of course, he colluded with the Russians to defeat dear, dear Hillary Clinton.
These fictions are bad fictions in that they do not describe any reality but the Trump hatred of the people telling the stories.
Minorities are doing well in this administration.
Trump has acted within the Constitution to a startling degree, especially after Barack Obama.
And now it's beginning to look as if the fairy tale about Russian collusion is going to end happily ever after for the president.
But the intellectuals are right about one thing.
Even false fictions, fictional fictions, can shape history.
That's what the left is betting on.
We're going to talk about that more.
But first, you know, let's talk about another kingdom.
Been promising you that I would tell you how to get the goodies if you pre-order.
The book comes out on March 5th, so you want to pre-order now because there's lots of stuff you can get.
If you're familiar with the podcast, and you should be familiar with the podcast, damn it.
You'll be excited to learn that it's coming out, and you can pre-order at AnotherKingdomBook.com.
If you haven't listened to the podcast, which of course is a real mistake, Another Kingdom is the story of Austin Lively, a wannabe Hollywood screenwriter who walks through a door one day and finally suddenly finds himself in a magical land where he's immediately arrested for having murdered one of the highborn ladies there.
Even people who heard the podcast are going to be able to find new stuff in the book.
So head over to AnotherKingdomBook.com, pre-order, and get awesome bonus content.
And if you've already ordered it on Amazon, you can go on to anotherkingdombook.com and fill out the information and give them your receipt.
And you can also get all the goodies.
Among the goodies is a novella-length prequel that tells the origin story of one of the main characters.
People ask me if there's new stuff.
The book itself pretty much clings to the podcast.
There are some changes, but it's pretty much what was in the podcast.
But it does, the novella-length prequel is an entirely new story that nobody else gets unless they pre-order the book.
There's also an author's guide, a map of the Another Kingdom world, and illustrations of the characters you can put on your phone and stuff.
You do not want to miss it.
AnotherKingdom at AnotherKingdomBook.com.
Also, you want to find out about Bull and Branch.
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They're just so comfortable as you lie awake asking the big questions.
Investigation Unveiled00:15:34
You know the big questions.
How do you spell Clavin?
It's K-O-A-V-A-N.
I will never get tired of that joke.
I'm just going to use it one day.
I'm just going to be this little crumpled old man.
How do you spell Claven?
All right, we got the mailbag coming up and that's the mailbag will come up.
There will be that scream.
You will hear that scream again.
So this Russian collusion thing has been absurd from the start.
I mean, it always was.
The idea of Donald Trump as Boris Badenoff, you know, calling Putin on the phone.
It was based on the idea that he kind of kept saying nice things about Putin, but Obama said nice things about Putin.
George W. Bush said nice things about Putin.
American leaders are naive when it comes to dealing with gangsters.
Putin is a gangster.
His government is a gangster government.
It is the government of basically a czar brought back.
This is a people who have never been free.
They had a czar, then they had communism, which is a form of slavery, whether it's communism or socialism.
It's a form of slavery.
They've never been free, and they had a couple of minutes of freedom.
And Putin took advantage of the fact that they were disgruntled and unhappy and basically bought, sold the country to his friends.
And Americans have been falling for his routine for years.
I mean, for one administration after another has fallen for him.
Trump was just the latest in the gang.
Now, last week, Richard Burr, who is the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and they have been doing a very bipartisan investigation.
Unlike the investigation in the House, which has been, you know, that McCarthyite Adam Schiff is running it now, but he's always been kind of leaking information and using it for totally political purposes and grandstanding.
The Senate investigation has been quiet and mostly bipartisan.
And last week, Senator Richard Burr, who was the chairman, the Republican chairman, he kind of suggested, look, we haven't found anything.
We have no proof of collusion.
Now, Mark Werner, who is the ranking Democrat, says he disagrees.
He says the investigation is ongoing, but NBC has had an exclusive report from Ken Delanian saying that he's got sources on the committee who tell him that both sides are now saying that after two years, the Senate Intelligence has wrapped up its investigation and they have no evidence that Trump colluded with Russia.
All of you will get a refund for the money they spent on this investigation.
I'm just joking.
But let's just listen for a minute to Ken Delanian telling a very disappointed MSNBC anchor that they've got nothing.
After two years and interviewing more than 200 witnesses, the Senate Intelligence Committee has not uncovered any direct evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.
That's according to sources on both the Republican and the Democratic side of the aisle, Hallie.
And careful viewers and readers will note that Senator Richard Burr, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee who leads this probe, essentially said that in an interview with another network last week.
But what I've been doing since then is checking with my sources on the Democratic side to understand the full context of his remarks, because that was essentially a partisan comment from one side.
But this is a bipartisan investigation.
And what I found is that the Democrats don't dispute that characterization.
The disagreement comes, though, over that pattern of contacts that we've all seen and heard about over the last few years, more than 100 contacts between Trump campaign officials and Russians.
The Democrats say that those remain highly suspicious and that there's a pattern here that still raises questions.
But the Republicans say that we just don't know in the end what those were.
And Richard Burr said publicly, look, the motives for those are unclear.
So Ken Delaney, they don't want to let this go.
They can't let it go because they have built up this entire mythology.
I mean, look, Trump won because he outsmarted a terrible, terrible candidate.
I mean, Trump may not have been that great a candidate either, but he outsmarted Hillary Clinton.
She was always a bad politician.
She was a bad retail politician.
She was a bad wholesale politician.
She had a history of corruption that was as long as your arm.
She had a scandal ongoing during the campaign that was a genuine scandal, a real scandal.
And they just, the fact that the Russians were diddling around trying to divide people, which they always do, I'm sure we do it to them as well.
It's just spy versus spy stuff.
It's not that big a deal.
They just seized on that and they have now spent millions of dollars, you know, chasing this down.
Even Delaney tweeted after this.
To be clear, the Senate Intelligence Committee has not found evidence exonerating Trump either.
So I tweeted back to him and I said, you know what?
They haven't found evidence exonerating you either.
You can't find evidence exonerating something from the kind of crime.
I mean, there are certain crimes that only that if you can prove somebody else did it, then you're off the hook.
If you can prove somebody else committed the murder, then you didn't commit the murder.
But this kind of crime, you can't prove it.
It didn't happen.
He was talking to the Russians.
He was talking to all kinds of people.
He was a novice.
Trump and his campaign was filled with second-raters and novice people because none of the mainstream Republicans, the professionals, would join the campaign.
So he was stuck with a lot of people who were kind of sleazy, like Paul Manafort.
I'm sure they were talking to all kinds of people, but the idea that Trump was colluding with Russia to overturn the election, to skew the election, is just a nonsense.
I mean, it really, it really is.
If anybody, of course, of course, it was Hillary Clinton who was colluding with Russia to get dirt, to get misinformation on Donald Trump.
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Anyone comes to your home, you just say, how do you spell Claven?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
No E's in Claven.
I just make it look this incredibly easy.
So then everybody rushes out.
The guys rush out to basically keep this fairy tale, this fiction going, because if they drop the fiction, if it turns out, look, they'll never find out that Trump didn't collude with the Russians.
All they can find out is that they have no proof that he did.
That's the best that can happen.
But they're not going to let it go.
They're not going to let it go.
Here's just a sample.
Here is John Brennan, the ex-CIA chief, who lied to Congress about the fact that he was spying on him.
This is the guy who sat down and said, oh, no, we're not spying while he was crawling around inside their computers.
Here he is desperately trying to keep this illusion alive.
There's collusion in plain sight.
Donald Trump at the end of July openly called on Russian intelligence to find Hillary Clinton's emails.
There were engagements at the Trump Tower.
There were the back and forth between various individuals who were affiliated with the Trump campaign and Russian individuals.
That collusion, I think, is quite obvious and apparent.
What the Mueller team is doing is trying to determine whether or not the engagement rises to the level of criminal conspiracy, whether they violated the law.
You can collude without violating the law.
And I know the Senate Intelligence Committee came out and said they found no direct evidence of criminal conspiracy, but that's not the Senate Intelligence Committee's remit.
It is the FBI and a special counsel's team to do the criminal investigation.
I was hoping that the Senate Intelligence Committee was going to look at what the Russians actually did.
How did the government respond, the intelligence community, the law enforcement community?
What can we do to better prepare ourselves in the future to prevent the Russians from interfering in the election?
Do the intelligence community agencies need to have greater authorities or tools or capabilities?
Does there need to be greater collaboration between the federal government and the states in order to ensure that the voting infrastructure is going to be better protected?
These are the things that our congressional committees should be doing.
But criminal investigations should be left to the Department of Justice, the FBI, and a special counsel.
So what's he going to do when Mueller comes out and doesn't have anything?
I think the Mueller investigation is going to be a bust as well.
Now, who knows what Mueller will say.
You know, John Dowd, who used to be Trump's lawyer, and he claims that he has seen everything that Mueller has.
He's seen all the evidence.
And he says he is predicting now that they may not even issue a report because they've got nothing.
They have got nothing.
Here he is talking to ABC.
I will be shocked if anything regarding the president is made public other than we're done.
You know, I were.
But you know, the president has and his lawyers have been fairly transparent.
I mean, it's, you know, everybody knows who the witnesses were, and the White House documents are another question, particularly the communications by counsel with the president, which we gave to Bob.
So, I mean, Bob, I mean, there's no time in history has anybody had this kind of look at communications with the president.
Do you respect what Mueller is doing?
I know you know Mueller well.
Well, I respected it in the beginning.
And I started out, and it's my style, is I always trust the other side until I did it.
In my opinion, on March 5th, we were done.
He had everything.
He said he had everything.
So his point about this is that this is like a grand jury investigation that is secret.
It is kept from the public because you don't want to, you know, as the old saying goes, you can indict a ham sandwich and you don't want the people to get the impression that people are guilty.
But that's exactly the impression, of course, they're trying to create.
That is the idea.
That is the story that they want to tell.
And of course, the whole thing about this, the whole thing that's so unfair is, look, the Democrats are telling a story, the Republicans are telling a story.
I'm not going to tell you that the Republicans come out and they're shining angels of truth.
That's nonsense.
That's not the point.
The only point is, is that this massive, massive organization for communication, the American media, is all, almost entirely all on one side and is basically ginning this fiction up.
It is making sure that everyone hears this fiction and no one hears anything contradictory.
You know, Adam Schiff, tailgunner Adam, as I call him, because he really does remind me of McCarthy, of Joseph McCarthy, the old guy of like I'm holding in my hand an envelope filled with the names of communist conspirators.
He keeps going on television and saying that he's got the proof, he's seen the proof.
So now he goes on Meet the Press and he says, oh no, you know, we're actually expanding our investigation.
He's on the House Intelligence Committee.
Now we're going to get his tax returns.
We're going into everything, his shoe size.
We're going to find out everything about him.
You know, Adam Schiff is going to be hanging outside Trump's window, peeking through to see what's going on in his bedroom.
Here's Schiff on Meet the Press, and then I want to tell you what's so startling about this interview.
Our priority is to make sure the President of the United States is working in the national interest, that he is not motivated by some pecuniary interest or fear of compromise or actual compromise.
That's the length and breadth of it.
So in terms of the president's business, we're not interested in our committee and whether he's a tax cheat or he's not worth what he says he is or those issues.
What we're interested in is, does the president have business dealings with Russia such that it compromises the United States?
And the perfect example is something we know about already.
And that is as a presidential candidate, while he was telling the country he had no business dealings with Russia, he was pursuing the most lucrative deal, I think, of his life and seeking the Kremlin's help to make it happen.
That's a different form of collusion, but it is equally compromising to the country because it means the President of the United States is looking out for his bank account and not for the United States of America.
Now he's criminalizing Trump's business dealings, which, and remember, Obama brought businessmen over to Russia to try and do the reset.
Remember the reset?
He was bringing them over because he got taken by Putin too.
You know, I mean, these guys are constantly being taken by this guy because he's a good gangster.
But what's shocking about this, and James Freeman pointed this out in the Wall Street Journal, what is shocking about this is two years ago, Adam Schiff went on that same show with Chuck Todd and said, I have evidence of more than circumstantial evidence, he said, that associates of Donald Trump colluded with Russia to rig the 2016 election.
That's what he said, to rig the 2016 election.
And he had more than circumstantial evidence.
He has never, just like Joseph McCarthy, has never produced that evidence.
And Chuck Todd didn't say a word about it.
He didn't say, two years ago you were here and you said this.
Let's go back, let's find out what you've got.
It's time for you to show your cards.
He didn't.
He never will.
None of them ever will, because this is the way they tell the story.
This is the way they create the fiction.
They not only tell only one side, but they don't tell the other side.
It's the same, you know, it's two sides of one coin.
They not only constantly tell you about this horrible Russian collusion that went on, but anything that turns, anything that disproves that, or at least shows that it didn't happen or shows that there's no proof that it happens, that gets suppressed or explained away.
And that is the thing.
And meanwhile, meanwhile, only evil Fox News, the mean, nasty, rotten conservative Fox News, is reporting what I think is the genuine story, which is the FBI's malfeasance on this entire thing.
The investigation never should have started.
And while the investigation was going on, they were basically covering up for Hillary Clinton.
This is from Fox News, newly released internal FBI emails, and these had to be pried out of the FBI by judicial wash.
They show the agency's highest-ranking officials scrambled to answer to Hillary Clinton's lawyer in the days prior to the 2016 presidential election, the same day then-FBI Director James Comey sent that bombshell letter to Congress saying that he had to review hundreds of thousands of new classified emails found on Anthony Weiner's laptop.
But at least Anthony Weiner is a guy you can trust.
The trove of documents turned over to the FBI also included discussions, listen to this, by former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, right?
She's the lover girl who was struck and sending texts back and forth saying we've got to stop this evil Donald Trump from taking over our government.
Discussions by former FBI lawyer Lisa Page concerning a potential quid pro quo between the State Department and the FBI in which the FBI would agree to effectively hide the fact that a Clinton email was classified in exchange for more legal attaché positions that would benefit the FBI abroad and allow them to send more agents to countries where the FBI's access is ordinarily restricted.
They were dealing with them to cover up for Hillary Clinton.
The FBI would cover up for Hillary Clinton if when Hillary Clinton got elected, or the State Department, which Hillary Clinton had run, would help them out with these attaché positions they wanted.
Racial Slurs And Anger00:14:55
You know, there will come a time, there will come a time when this will be reported as one of the worst cases of press malfeasance ever.
I mean, really, this is a case of press malfeasance that they have not hunted down the FBI and on the excuse of not wanting to damage the trust that the American people have in their institutions, which, by the way, is the job description of a journalist.
A journalist's job is to damage the trust you have in your institutions so you keep watch on them and make them feel afraid.
The government should be afraid of the people, not the other way around.
The government should be afraid of journalists.
Do you think Barack Obama's government was afraid of journalists?
I don't think so.
Speaking of fairy tales, by the way, before we break for the mailbag, we've got to go back to this story about Jussie Smollett, the guy from Empire.
Remember, I talked about this.
I admired Smollett a lot.
I loved the show Empire in the first season.
And he had this hate crime that he said happened to him in Chicago.
And I said, you know, if it happened, I hope they dropped the bad guys down into an oopliette and never let them out.
It was a terrible thing.
He was attacked by guys.
He said, we're shouting MAGA and we're calling he's gay and black and they were shouting racial slurs and gay slurs and all this stuff.
And they put a noose around his neck.
Well, the cops in Chicago have gotten like every minute of his journey on videotape, except they say for about 60 seconds, and they have not found it.
They asked for his phone records and he submitted phone records to the police, but those records have been rejected because they were not, they were redacted.
They were edited.
And they said these are not good evidence.
They are looking for evidence that he was talking to his manager at the time of the attack because his manager says he heard the shouting.
He heard the racial and homophobic slurs and the Chicago PD hasn't seen them.
Now, it looks like this is unraveling.
It really does.
I mean, I didn't want to say that when I heard it.
I just had an instinct about it when I first heard it because it was just too on the nose.
It's like when you hear one of those quotes, like George Washington says, you know, you should listen to Fox News.
You think, eh, that doesn't really sound right to me.
This just didn't sound right to me.
It does sound like it's unraveling.
It could still, they could still find some evidence about it.
He's going to go on TV tomorrow, I think, on Good Morning America.
And they showed a clip of him crying about it, and he's going to make an emotional plea.
But the thing that really bothers me about this is like, I don't have any sources in the Chicago police.
I was as honest as I could be that it was just my feeling about it, that I admire him as an entertainer.
I think he's a terrific talent.
But the story didn't gel to me.
Now, if I can do that, shouldn't so-called journalists have done it?
And yet, Grabian has put together a montage of the journalists reporting the story with complete credulity.
Why?
Because it is a fiction that describes the world as they see it.
It is not a fiction that describes the truth.
It describes their feelings about things.
And just like a faked hate crime is a fiction.
Let's take a look at just a little bit of this montage.
His attackers hurled racial and homophobic slurs.
Two people yelled racist and homophobic slurs.
Racial and homophobic slurs.
Not only homophobia, we're talking about racism.
We're talking about hate with steroids.
They are looking for two suspects who are apparently wearing Make America Great Again hats.
The offenders uttered, this is MAGA country.
The hate crime went down early this morning in Chicago.
Officials are investigating the alleged assault as a hate crime.
And now police say they're investigating this as a possible hate crime.
Anyone attacked in a hate crime like this is an outrage.
This is stomach-turning, mind-boggling information.
It's out of control.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi tweeting, the racist, homophobic attack on Jussie Smollett is an affront to our humanity.
And Senator Corey Booker said the vicious attack on actor Jussie was an attempted modern-day lynching.
Kamala Harris calling the attack an attempted modern-day lynching.
I'm so shaken by the story.
This is horrible to report.
So, you know, they want this to be true so desperately.
They think this is what America is.
So they're telling this story because they think it represents the truth.
But it does represent a truth.
It represents the truth of their internal world, of their dislike for this country, their distrust of this country, their hatred of ordinary people.
And I've said this before, but you cannot love freedom if you don't love the ordinary people who are the beneficiaries of freedom.
You know, you can't want people to be free if you don't like the people.
This fiction, if it turns out to be entirely a fiction, if this turns out to be a made-up hate crime, and if it doesn't, I'll come back and talk about that.
But if it turns out to be what it looks like now to be an actual piece of fiction, an actual untruth, then you have to figure out what truth that fiction tells.
And what it tells is that Justie Smollett and all those people you just saw do not trust this country, do not trust the people of this country, expect this sort of thing.
And when it doesn't happen, and when somebody says it happens, they're just all too willing to believe, like the story of Russian collusion.
All right, mailbag coming up.
Got to say goodbye to Facebook.
Yes, yes.
If I could scream like that, I would.
We've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come to dailywire.com.
Why?
Because if you want to ask questions in the mailbag or see the entire show stream there, Shapiro show, Knowles' show, Matt Walsh's show, all of that stuff, you've got to subscribe.
It's a lousy 10 bucks a month, 100 bucks for the entire year.
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And most importantly, your money comes to us.
I'm over to dailywire.com.
All right.
The mailbag.
Yeah.
From Ash.
Well, we've talked about this, but we'll talk about it a little bit again.
Hey, Drew, your satire is the highlight of my day.
I just started listening to Another Kingdom when I should be sleeping.
Thanks for that.
And I'm about halfway through season one.
It's amazing, and Knowles does a great job with the material.
I'm thinking about pre-ordering the novel, but I'm curious if there are differences with the podcast or if it's essentially just the book version of the dramatic reading.
Once again, there are changes in the book.
I did some corrections that I wanted to change, things that I wanted to change, but it's not much.
It is the story from the book.
I think if you read it, you will find new stuff in it, stuff you didn't see, because you'll be able to go over it more carefully.
And if you pre-order it at anotherkingdombook.com, if you pre-order it, or if you have pre-ordered it and go to anotherkingdombook.com, you will be able to get a lot of goodies, including a novella-sized prequel.
I think it was 40 or 50 pages of prequel.
It's a long story about the world of Another Kingdom and tells the ordinary story of one of the characters.
All right.
This is a heartbreaker from Shane.
Hello, Mr. Clavin.
Last Monday, after a long battle with CPTSD, which is complicated post-traumatic syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder, and depression, I came home to find my wife had taken her life at 30 years old.
We were married for nearly 10 years and survived many suicide attempts.
She suffered abuse of all kinds throughout her childhood, which was the cause of her CPTSD.
Her prostitute mother was incestuous with her and allowed men to abuse her, causing intense shame that never left her.
I'm struggling with intense feelings of guilt because it happened after I took our one-year-old son and went to my parents' house.
Many times I felt like I had to choose between being with our son and trying to talk her down.
I'm devastated because despite our difficulties, she was always my best friend.
We spent so much time together because I work from home and we shared everything, including our Christian faith.
We dreamed of having a big family someday.
Do you have any resources, advice for grieving a suicide?
Well, first of all, dude, I'm so sorry that happened.
That is a genuine, genuine, black tragedy.
Very, very tough to deal with.
You, let me see how I can put this to you.
You have been given a hero's journey.
You have been given a hero's journey.
What you are going to go through now is really tough.
It's really tough.
Grief is, I've said this before, but grief is a desert that has to be crossed on foot.
And what I mean by that is it is going to take as long as it takes.
It is a distance you have to travel.
It's not a time.
It is a distance you have to travel.
You have to travel it on foot.
And it matters where you come out the other end.
And it especially matters.
And why I say it's a hero's journey is everything now is about your son.
Your son has suffered this tragedy too.
Your son has obviously suffered from a lot of chaos that was in the home.
You took your son away.
You don't have to feel guilty about that.
You were protecting your son.
That is your main first job here.
You have to protect your son.
And now, now you have to serve your son by getting well, by crossing this desert of grief, which you're going to be crossing, and getting to the right place on the other side.
You have been given a sword, which is your Christian faith.
So you're going to be able to fight the demons.
We were talking about the imagination earlier.
All those demons in fiction, all those dragons, all those bad guys, Darth Vader, they all represent things.
They represent things that you can't see, that eat at the human heart, that eat at the human mind and soul, and that especially attack you when you are weak with grief or some other kind of malaise or difficulty.
So you are going to be in this desert fighting dragons, and it may go on a long time, and it may go on past the point when your friends can tolerate it.
Your friends are going to start to say, shouldn't you have gotten over this by now?
Grief is a desert that has to be crossed on foot.
You just got to keep going.
What matters, what matters is the direction you go on.
And for that, your Christian faith is going to be a very important thing.
Christ is like the North Star when you're in a desert like this.
Sometimes, sometimes you're going to lose the sense of his presence.
You're going to lose your faith.
But you just have to will yourself.
The will is just as good as faith in this situation.
You have to will yourself to believe and follow the love and forgiveness and justice of Christ to the other side of this desert.
You're going to come out scarred.
You're going to come out different, but you don't have to come out damaged.
You don't have to come out brutalized.
You have to.
You have to.
You have to do this right.
If it takes counseling, get counseling.
If you have to explore painful parts of your past and your relationship with your wife, do it.
Do it.
You owe this to your son.
Your son needs you.
You've got to come through this.
You've got to do it in the best possible way you can.
It is going to be painful, pal.
I can tell you.
I can actually testify to you.
It is going to be terribly, terribly painful.
But you are assigned this task in service to your son.
And Christ is both your sword and the star that you're going to have to follow across this territory.
I don't envy you, but good luck.
From Richard, it is clear from all reports about the millennial generation and those that follow them that they know nothing of history, economics, literature, or anything about our shared values.
This is because that is the way they were taught.
The communists, stop talking about socialists, liberals, or left-wingers.
This entire approach is a communist one.
Have successfully burrowed through the educational institutions, grad school, college, secondary education, elementary school, and preschool.
They ruin our education system.
They run our education system.
How do we destroy this evil, not counter it, destroy it?
What concrete steps do you advise?
No one ever discusses this.
You know, you're not going to like my answer to this, but I think that you need to develop a tragic, a more tragic sense of life.
You cannot be happy without a tragic sense of life, because you can't be happy living in a dream.
The reason I say this is this is a very angry letter.
It's a very angry letter, and it has expectations that aren't going to come true.
You can't destroy evil of any kind.
Evil lives forever.
You know, evil is a real thing.
This is the battle that we are always in.
It's the battle for freedom.
There will come a time in America when freedom dies.
The reason is freedom is a living thing and all living things die.
Your job is like a doctor to try and keep it alive one more day.
That's your success.
That's the only thing you can do because eventually freedom will die.
You just don't want it to happen today.
You don't want it to happen in your lifetime.
You try to keep it from happening in your children's lifetime.
But the anger in this letter, you know, I always say to leftists, if you're this angry, if you're this unhappy, if you're this miserable living in a country like America, something's wrong with your philosophy.
You know, if you walk around angry every day of your only life, this is the only life on earth you're going to have.
You do not want to spend it angry.
You don't want to spend it hating people, even people you disagree with.
So, you know, you have to understand that this is the tragic fight we're in.
We fight this every day, and you're supposed to do it with joy, and you're supposed to live with joy.
You can't destroy it.
Are our children being mistaught?
Yes.
Are they in trouble?
Yes, every generation is in trouble.
Has there ever been a generation that didn't look at kids today and think, oh my gosh, these kids today, they are in trouble.
They will learn things.
They will learn about taxes, and they will learn about what it means when you give people you thought were good people the power to control you and they will have to take up the fight and they will have to fight every day just like we do.
You know, that is the way of the world.
There's no place where the evil is destroyed and all is well except in the movies.
That's the end of a movie, but all we can do is fight each day.
We had a major victory when Hillary Clinton lost.
Hillary Clinton, I believe, would have hastened the end of the American experiment.
We're going to have victories and defeats coming up ahead, and you're going to have to be able to live with those in a way that does not strangle your joy.
So listen, you know, it is true that we have to take back, fight to take back the culture.
It's true that we should fight to take back the educational system.
It is absolutely shameful.
It is absolutely shameful that anyone can think it's an education when people are being banned from campus who have views that disagree.
If you have banned Ben Shapiro from your campus, you should be fired.
If you've banned Ben Shapiro from your campus, you should not be working to educate the young.
The young should be able to listen to every possible idea, even extreme ideas, and should get education that helps them to judge those ideas in relationship to freedom.
You're absolutely right about this, and that is what we have to do.
We have to fight that fight.
I mean, we have to fight the fight in the universities.
We have to fight it in Hollywood.
We have to fight it in the news business.
We have to fight it everywhere where the left has managed to monopolize the tools of communication.
But you're not going to destroy anything.
You're not going to destroy evil.
Don't think that's going to happen.
And you shouldn't be hating on the people who are fighting their corner as well.
You should be, understand that some of these are people of goodwill who think these things are true and will argue with you.
And if they argue with you, you should have the facts.
I'm just trying to, I'm just responding to the tone of this letter, which seems so, it just seems angry.
I mean, if you're going to walk around angry, then you have to look at your philosophy because life is short.
From Remington, what a great name.
From Remington, hey, Andrew, big fan of the show and Another Kingdom.
Why I Avoid Drugs00:02:28
In high school, I really avoided drinking and drugs.
I struggled with that decision at times because it often excluded me from certain social events where those kinds of choices were taking place.
Sometimes my peers called me uptight because I didn't want to engage in those choices or be around them, and it was very disheartening.
I plan on making the same choices, avoiding drinking and drugs, when I go to UNLV this fall, although I would like to hear your thoughts.
Am I actually being uptight by avoiding these kinds of choices?
Am I missing out on anything by avoiding these choices, or am I making a good call?
Thanks for all you do.
You know, I grew up in the 60s and 70s, and everybody was taking drugs.
And all I would hear from people, and to understand the story, you have to know I wanted to be a writer so bad, I think I would have killed.
That is what I wanted.
I thought it was the most noble profession.
I wanted to live up to the standards of my heroes who were all novelists and writers.
It was so important to be a novelist.
And again and again and again, people would say to me, how do you think you are going to be a fiction writer if you don't take these drugs?
If you don't take LSD, especially, mushrooms especially, and cocaine, how are you going to be a fiction writer?
And I used to sit there and I felt bad.
I felt bad when they would say that because I wanted so desperately to do what I came to finally do.
You know, I wanted it so desperately.
But I used to think everything I do as a writer is going to be my imagination engaging with the world in an honest way.
And taking drugs is not an honest way of engaging with the world.
Plus, I'm afraid it's going to mess up my brain, which is the only thing I have to do this profession with.
So I never took them.
I smoked dope a couple of times because everybody was, you know, that was just kind of going around and it clearly wasn't as damaging as the other stuff.
I always hated it, by the way.
But I never took the drugs and I felt bad too.
I felt excluded too.
There were times, I remember times sitting in a room when everybody was on mushrooms.
Everybody, all my friends were on mushrooms and I wasn't and feeling just like a, yeah, like the, you know, wallflower at the party.
I am so glad I did not do that.
I cannot tell you.
First of all, a lot of my friends who told me these were breakthrough drugs that were going to change the world are dead.
That's the first thing.
A lot of them, I mean, friends, people I really like, did things like walk out in front of trains or just die of cancers that I'm sure had to do with the fact that they had abused their body so badly.
You know, I am so glad I didn't do it.
My mind is still operational.
And I, you know, I drink and I had to really fight because I love drinking and I had to cut the booze down and I had to really fight to do it.
That was worthwhile too.
I mean, now I drink half the time I don't drink at all.
I drink a lot less when I do drink and I'm so happy I did that.
Moving Toward the Good00:05:49
So listen, you know, you just, you're making the right decision.
If this is right for you, if this is what you feel is right for you, do not do it.
It does not pay off.
There's no benefit to it except fitting in, and fitting in is overrated.
I mean, it really is.
You know, now they're talking about this stuff micro-dosing, and people micro-dosing LSD.
People keep telling me it's a breakthrough.
And I just keep saying to them, maybe it is, maybe it is, but all the people who told me cocaine was a breakthrough are dead.
All the people who told me LSD is a breakthrough are now a lot stupider than they needed to be.
You're not making the wrong decision.
You're making the right decision.
And all I can tell you is I've been there.
I know what it's like to feel when everybody's doing it and they want you to do it too.
Don't listen to them.
Believe me, you'll be happier later on.
From Dan, hi Andrew.
I'm 18 years old and a little over a year ago I lost my dad to a sudden heart attack.
I have been struggling with faith for a while now and just recently read your autobiography.
What do you believe are some of the most solid pieces of evidence for the existence of God?
Well, I'm sorry you lost your dad.
That's very sad.
You know, the way I came to God was from what, you know, I think there are different paths that people take to God.
Some are emotional, some are experiential.
Mine was logical.
I came to ask myself whether there was anything moral or were the postmodernists right and all morality was relative.
So I said to myself, I mean, first of all, the idea of postmodernism was that there was no truth.
And I thought, well, that doesn't work because if there was no truth, if there is no truth, that's true.
And that's self-contradictory.
So that theory is just stupid, right?
That theory does not hold up.
But what about the theory that moral truth, that the truth of subjective experience is completely relative?
So we see the sky and we think it's a solid dome over our head, and then with more information we find out, no, it isn't.
You know, is morality something that just changes with the times?
It's just what fits the times?
Or is there a central moral truth that just remains the case?
Ultimately, ultimately, there's no proof of any of this.
I don't think God wants there to be proof.
I don't think he wants there to be proof because that would take your choice away and it's very important to God that you come to him freely.
That's how important freedom is to God, that he will not have, he will not be proved.
Otherwise, he could just say, right with his hand on the sky, here I am, gang.
There's no proof of this, but the evidence seems to me entirely in favor of the idea that there is such a thing as moral truth.
If every single person on earth, and this was true at some point, there was a point when everybody on earth thought slavery was normal and therefore fine.
Even slaves, they may have been unhappy that they were the slaves, but they thought it was normal and therefore fine.
Was it right when everybody thought it was right?
If everybody was a Nazi and they tortured children and everybody thought that was right, would it be right?
I cannot believe that to be the case.
I simply cannot believe that to be the case.
I don't think anybody believes it to be the case.
I think if you landed on Nazi world and you were the only person saying it was wrong, you would be right and everybody else who had been there before you would be wrong.
I mean, I just think that that seems to me, even people who have reasoned themselves out of that don't believe it.
Everybody believes it.
Once you have moral order, once you have an essential objective moral order, it seems to me you have to have God.
Why?
Because there has to be something to which the good is closer.
If here you are and you move toward the good, you are moving towards something.
You are moving toward an ultimate good.
The ultimate good has to be a personality.
Why?
Because only things that can make choices can be good.
You can only be good if you can make a choice.
You have to be a consciousness, a personality.
And therefore, the ultimate good is a consciousness of personality.
And that was what led me essentially to say, wait a minute, there is such a thing as God.
There really must be.
Then, on the basis of that, and kind of on a whim, I started to pray.
And if you've ever heard the old expression, it's not that seeing is believing, it's believing is seeing, that was incredibly convincing to me.
Once I started to pray over the course of time, the experience of dealing with God was just undeniable.
Information came to me, wisdom came to me, insight came to me that simply could not have come from myself.
I don't have time to detail it now, but things happened that were just this short of miraculous.
Things that I suddenly knew that I would not have known without prayer were true, came true, you know, came true in front of me.
So that's the evidence.
Look, faith, the way we talk about faith when we talk about losing faith or having faith, a lot of that is a feeling, and feeling doesn't matter.
If you stop believing in Brazil, Brazil would still be there.
God is the same way.
So interact, you know, interact.
Pray to God.
Talk to God.
Listen to God.
You know, read about God and see if that will help you find your way.
You're sad.
You're sad that your father died.
And that, of course, is you should be.
That's a situation for grief.
And grief sometimes will stifle your faith.
But that faith that is stifling is just a feeling.
It's just a feeling.
You can break through that by following God to himself.
And he will show you the way to do that.
All right, I'm out of time.
You know, I don't have a lot of time for a final reflection, but I really want to say this one thing.
You know, I was at a party the other day and I was talking to a bunch of guys, younger guys, and they were all saying to me, we were talking about women, as guys often do.
And we were talking about the fact that a lot of younger women dedicate themselves to work and think that they're going to get something out of their careers and don't get married and don't have children.
And then they find, gee, you know, they're not as desirable as they were when they were young.
They can't have children as easily as they could when they were young.
And all these guys were saying that girls are missing out.
And I felt that that's true too.
I feel that those women, with the exceptions of those who are career girls by nature, I feel those women are missing out.
But I don't know.
Maybe I'm wrong.
I would like to hear from women if you could.
Women's Perspective Needed00:02:02
Rob, can you remind me what our address is?
A. Clavin at DailyWire.com.
A. Clavin at dailywire.com.
I don't want to hear from men about this.
I just want to hear from women.
Let me know, am I wrong about this?
Am I wrong that these girls are making a mistake?
It seems to me that the great vast majority of them are making a mistake.
That the experience of marriage, the experience of children, the full-time experience of raising a child, if you can afford it, are worth not missing.
And they're best done while young.
And it seems to me that there is time, you know, life is short, but life is long.
You know, there's time on the other end of that to get a job and learn a profession and go to school.
But in your youth, that to dedicate yourself to a home, to a family, to children and a husband, may actually give you more joy than the feminists want you to know, that maybe the feminists are telling you something and you're believing them wrongly.
But I could be wrong.
So I'd just like to hear from you if you can.
Give it me again.
It's aclavin at dailywire.com.
Send it there.
And if you do, I will...
What's that?
No Ease in Clavin.
That's right.
How do you spell Clavin, Rob?
No Ease in Clavin.
That's right.
So A. Clavin at DailyWire.com.
Let me know, and I will deal with it if we get some good letters.
I'll read them on the air.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
We'll see you tomorrow.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
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Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
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