Andrew Klavan dissects Trump’s polarizing McCain remarks, calling them politically reckless while defending his economic legacy—ISIS defeat, job growth, and military revival—against critics dismissing gains as temporary. He warns suburban voters may reject Trump over such pettiness and critiques Democratic candidates as "leftist clowns," then pivots to Matt Fratt’s argument that 41 neuroscience studies confirm porn addiction, linking it to erectile dysfunction and warped sexual expectations, while advocating age-verification systems—not censorship—to protect minors. Klavan aligns with Fratt on restricting extreme online content but clashes with the left’s selective free-speech hypocrisy, praising Trump’s executive order to defend campus First Amendment rights amid rising authoritarianism. [Automatically generated summary]
The 2020 presidential race is shaping up into a battle of such class, wit, and sanity that it's bound to raise the level of political discourse in this country for years to come.
On one side, we have the exquisite high-mindedness of President Trump, who recently said of the late Senator John McCain, quote, and this is a real quote, I gave him the kind of funeral that he wanted, which as president, I had to approve.
I don't care about this.
I didn't get a thank you.
That's okay, unquote.
AIDS then explained to the president that McCain had not thanked him for the funeral because McCain was in fact dead.
And indeed, that's why he was given a funeral, which by general tradition is something reserved for dead people.
Because living people don't like being put in a box and buried underground.
McCain himself was unavailable for comment, being dead, hence the funeral.
But while Trump's remarks were notable for their lofty philosophical detachment, they could hardly match the refined and stately droolery of Beto O'Rourke.
The Washington Post, where democracy dies in the darkness of sanctimonious self-deception, obscuring a political bias that goes far beyond the bounds of ideological corruption and constitutes a betrayal of both the precepts of journalism and the people the paper is meant to serve.
But I digress.
The point is, the Washington Post reports that Beto, in an effusion of no coward-like whimsy, once took a green turd from his child's diaper, put it in a bowl, and told his wife it was avocado.
The Post further reports that Beto, while trying to recover from his loss to Ted Cruz, ate New Mexican dirt, which was said to have regenerative powers, while several New Mexicans looked on, quietly chuckling into their sleeves, because tourists always fall for that one.
Charging For Canadian Smuggling00:03:23
In short, between the classy behavior of our president and the wit and sanity of the opposition, I'm now charging a reasonable fee to smuggle anyone who asks into Canada.
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, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
You know, it's one thing to joke about the low level of political discourse in this country.
It's another thing to put your face down on your computer keyboard and sob uncontrollably.
Fortunately, my rampant manliness prevents me from doing that, but there are days when the temptation is definitely there.
The 715 Democrats who have so far announced their bids for the presidency are the biggest bunch of leftist clowns to ever plot to destroy the principles of the American founding.
President Trump, meanwhile, has sparked the economy, reformed the judiciary, destroyed the ISIS caliphate, and given our corrupt media the kick in the butt it so richly deserves.
Which is why, when Trump is petty and rude, I just want to smack him, because I think he hurts his re-election chances, and I think he degrades those of us who really, really want to be on his side.
We need him to get re-elected, and that gets harder when his worst opponent is himself.
I will explain what I mean in a moment, but let's talk about wise foods.
You know, I am a very calm, and I'm sort of the opposite of paranoid.
I never think the end of the world is coming.
I don't think there's going to be a tremendous disaster, and we're all going to be huddled up together in our basements or anything like that.
But that doesn't mean you don't take care in case something bad happens.
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It doesn't need to be hot.
You take the contents of the pouch, pour them into the water, stir, cover it, and that's it.
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It's like the MREs that the male's ready to eat that the military use.
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Very good to have when the fire department finally shows up and knocks on your door and screams, how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Speaking of Clavin, the Clavenless weekend is already upon us.
The week seem to fly by because I was flying around out in Ohio, but here it is and you're doomed.
So I just thought I'd let you know you want to get that wise voodoo because the Clavenless weekend is here.
Let's start with this, okay?
Everything has a price.
Everything you do, every choice you make, you pay a price for it.
Clavenless Weekend Approaches00:10:01
I have lived a certain kind of life.
I will tell you, I am more or less proud of the life I lived.
If I ever slept at night, it would help me sleep at night.
I have spoken my mind.
I have said what I've had to say, and I've paid a price.
I mean, I've talked about this, that I can barely get arrested in Hollywood.
That costs me a lot of money.
My books, it's very hard for me to sell books overseas now because of the political correctness that's rampant over there.
You know, I paid a price.
But on the other hand, I know the guys who didn't speak their mind.
I know the guys who kind of looked at their shoes and said, oh, I don't want to say anything it's going to cost me.
They still have jobs in Hollywood.
I look in their eyes.
I know they paid a price too.
Some prices you can see.
Some prices you can't see.
But everything, every decision you make is a price.
Voting for Donald Trump was one of the easiest decisions I ever made and one of the hardest things I ever had to do because it was clear to me that he was the better choice of the people we had for president.
He's been a much better president than I feared he might be.
He's been a very good president, but he does stuff that hurts him and hurts us.
He's not, you know, he's got some kind of mental glitch.
Sometimes it's political.
He's always got his political instincts cooking.
But, you know, I said before that when the midterms happened, he kind of got it.
He pulled back a little bit.
And I said at the time, I don't think he's going to be able to keep that going because of his personality traits.
And I think that's happening right this minute.
You know, the guy has been a good president.
A lot of never-Trumpers say, well, all his achievements are temporary.
You know, sure, he lowered taxes, but the Democrats will come in.
They'll just put the taxes back.
Yes, he cut regulations, but he didn't get rid of the regulatory agencies.
So they'll just put the regulations right back.
You know, whatever it is, you know, yes, they're going to stack this bring for it, whatever it is, they say he's temporary.
A lot of the same people who tell me that his achievements are temporary told me that Obama's non-achievements were going to last, and I said they wouldn't because they were all executive orders.
I was right about that.
The one thing is, it's not temporary when you free Yazidi women from sexual slavery.
That's not temporary.
That's permanent, right?
When they get out, when they're freed from sexual slavery of these horrible, horrible Islamists who took over this huge section of the Middle East in the person of ISIS, that's permanent.
When a guy gets a job, I was just out in Pennsylvania where so many of the coal mines and the steel mills closed and so many people were put out of work and so many families were disturbed and all that addiction happens because men especially are unemployed.
Now the frackers are there and people are coming back and the jobs are coming back and Trump has done a lot of this.
And that stuff, when you give a man his dignity back, when you give him his employment back, when you give him his pride back and he's going to sit with his family and know he's supporting his family, that's not temporary.
And you know, they talk about economics, they talk about bubbles.
Oh, well, it's just a bubble.
If a bubble lasts for a long period of time, because life is short, you know, like if a bubble lasts for 25 years, for 30 years, a man can have an entire career and build up his savings and build up a retirement fund in that time.
That's not temporary.
That's not a bubble.
You know, after a while, you know, nothing lasts forever.
So some of the stuff that Trump has done has been incredibly important.
And when you're sitting in a think tank and you're thinking about the abstract future of the nation and you're thinking, yes, but once Trump is gone, then this will happen and that's happened.
Okay, I get that.
That's fair.
But it doesn't have to do with the lives that he has changed for the better.
And that is a real thing.
And these were people who were forgotten.
These people were forgotten by both the intellectuals on the right and the globalist elitists on the left.
Okay, so he has done a lot of good things.
You know, he was outside yesterday with a map of ISIS.
This was a completely fair point.
He held up this map.
He's like, just watch and listen to what he says.
No, no, we're in Syria.
We're leaving 200 people there and 200 people in another place in Syria closer to Israel for a period of time.
This is a map of everything in the red.
This was on election night in 2016.
Everything red is ISIS.
When I took it over, it was a mess.
Now, on the bottom, that's the exact same.
There is no red.
In fact, there's actually a tiny spot which will be gone by tonight.
So that's ISIS red right there.
And the bottom one is how it is today.
This just came out 20 minutes ago.
So this is ISIS on election day, my election day.
And this is ISIS now.
So that's the way it goes.
That's the way it goes.
That is a perfectly legit point, utterly legit.
You know, when Obama was there with that leading from behind, you know, it's a generational fight, it took him 10 minutes to say, go in there and kill these people, isolate them, kill them, get rid of them.
It matters.
Now you're going to read all the think pieces.
And these, you know, again, it's legit to have the think pieces about the fact, well, the ISIS philosophy is now going to metastasize and now going to spread out.
And that's true.
Obviously, Trump is not God.
He can't erase evil from the minds of men.
But this is important.
John Bolton was talking about this.
Here's Bolton's point about it.
The president has been, I think, as clear as clear can be when he talks about the defeat of the ISIS territorial caliphate.
He has never said that the elimination of the territorial caliphate means the end of ISIS in total.
We know that's not the case.
We know right now that there are ISIS fighters scattered still around Syria and Iraq, and that ISIS itself is growing in other parts of the world.
The ISIS threat will remain.
But one reason that the president has committed to keeping an American presence in Iraq and a small part of an observer force in Syria is against the possibility that there would be a real resurgence of ISIS.
And we would then have the ability to deal with that if that arose.
So I think people have to be clear.
And the importance of the territorial caliphate goes to an ideological point at the center of ISIS's theory of itself, namely that they were a caliphate because under their view of what a caliphate is, it's taking territory.
A very big deal, that last thing he said, the caliphate controlling the territory.
Yes, the ISIS idea is still there.
You know, Trump has no power to erase that.
Nobody has the power to erase that.
But the idea that they had a caliphate was very appealing to young men.
That was part of their philosophy.
Oh, we're going to establish the caliphate.
And there it was, the caliphate, that big red blotch that Trump was holding up on that map, that red blotch is gone.
And that's an amazing thing.
And that's not a temporary victory.
That is a true victory.
and the people who are being oppressed.
These are horrible, horrible people.
And the way they treat women is absolutely appalling.
The way they treat everybody is absolutely appalling.
They have no ability to govern.
They have the ability to kill and maim and oppress, but they have no ability to govern.
They are the face of, you know, I'll talk about this more in just a second because it's an important point.
Let us talk about calm and we all need to remain calm, right?
Stress is a big deal and calm is the number one app to help you reduce your anxiety and stress and help you sleep better.
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And I have to say, I was listening to them and I was kind of laughing because they were so quiet and so calm.
And while I was laughing, I fell asleep.
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You'll drift off thinking, how do you spell clavin?
It's k-l-a-v-a-n.
No ease.
And clavin, I just make it look easy.
That's it.
You know, I feel bad for Muslims who are just living their lives and praying their prayers.
And I know there are a lot of them.
And they just want to live their lives and pray their prayers.
But they have to speak out about this.
They have to speak out about this.
I feel the same way about Catholics.
There is a problem with sexual malfeasance in the Catholic Church.
Maybe some of it's been erased.
Maybe it's better now.
But it's all being exposed.
And I think that good Catholics, decent Catholics, have to speak out.
I don't know.
I'm not a Catholic, so I don't know if that sexual malfeasance has to do with Catholic ideas about sexuality, but that's a debate I would certainly listen to.
I'd like to hear.
The same thing with Islam.
There is a problem with worldwide violence in the House of Islam.
I'm not a Muslim.
I can't say for sure that this is keyed into their philosophy, that it is endemic to their philosophy, but that's a debate I would like to listen to.
And it will only come about if Muslim, decent Muslims come out and say, hey, I'm embarrassed by this.
This is embarrassing to me that people behave like this, that treat women like this, that they enslave women and kill people.
This is an embarrassment to me.
This is why people like Ilhan Omar and Linda Sarser and Rashida Talib, these people are damaging.
They're damaging because they don't speak out.
They don't say these things.
And, you know, Linda Sarcer tells you Sharia law is a wonderful thing.
Sharia law is an atrocity.
It's an atrocity.
And I think that Muslims who want to live their lives, they have to talk about this.
I know it's dangerous because they'll come and kill you, but you have to speak out about this because this is a problem.
All right.
Why Trump Supporters Stay Silent00:14:53
So Trump has done wonderful things.
So he goes to Ohio to a tank manufacturer and the tanks manufacturer is doing well.
Why?
Because Trump is restoring a military that Obama went out of his way to nearly destroy.
He nearly left us helpless.
He nearly left us defenseless.
Trump is spending the money that has to be spent to restore our military.
As Ronald Reagan used to say, it's not a budget item.
It's a necessity.
You have to do it.
In 18 months, the last 18 months, Trump has brought something like a half a million manufacturing jobs back to the country.
Those are the jobs that Obama said you would need a magic wand to bring back, a magic wand to bring back.
I don't know what magic he thinks he has, that he's going to bring back these manufacturing jobs.
Trump brought them back half a million of them.
It is now the lowest unemployment in history for low-educated workers, workers without a high school education.
These are the people that Trump said he would help.
He has helped them.
And like I said, giving a man a job, letting him sit with pride with his family, let him support his family, letting him feel useful and be useful in the world is a permanent victory if those jobs last.
The salaries of uneducated people are up 6%, which is more than other salaries and other wages are also rising.
And so this is something that he can talk about and something that he should talk about.
And one of the reasons this matters so much is when the left comes in and they pull all these new socialist ideas that they think are so popular and it destroys the economy, it will be really clear what happened.
We won't have to argue about what happened.
It will be really clear that socialism does this to economies.
So Trump goes and he gives this speech.
And what does he do?
He goes off on John McCain.
And I'm going to talk about this in a minute because I know what some of you are thinking and I'm going to respond to it in a minute.
This is the first cut about McCain, cut two.
So I have to be honest, I've never liked him much.
Hasn't been for me.
I've really probably never will.
But there are certain reasons for it.
And I'll tell you, and I do this to save a little time with the press later on.
John McCain received a fake and phony dossier.
Do you hear about the dossier?
It was paid for by crooked Hillary Clinton, right?
And John McCain got it.
He got it.
And what did he do?
He didn't call me.
He turned it over to the FBI hoping to put me in jeopardy.
And that's not the nicest thing to do.
You know, when those people say, because I'm a very loyal person.
John McCain campaigned for years to repeal and replace Obamacare, for years in Arizona, great state.
I love the people of Arizona.
But he campaigned for years for repeal and replace.
So did Rob.
So did a lot of senators.
When he finally had the chance to do it, he voted against repeal and replace.
He voted against at 2 o'clock in the morning.
Remember, thumbs down.
So, you know, I could tell that Trump, this was written into the speech.
This was not ad-lib.
Some of it was ad-lib, but I mean, some of it was written into the speech.
And what he was trying to do, I think, was he was trying to explain why he had gone off on McCain on Twitter because he got bad press for it.
And I think, as he said, I'm trying to save, I'm saying this to save time of explaining this to the press.
So that's why he was making it in the speech.
Now, here's what I know a lot of you are thinking.
McCain stank.
McCain was a bad senator.
McCain feingold was a disaster.
His vote not to repeal and replace, Trump is absolutely right.
It was a betrayal.
It was a betrayal of his.
He ran on it.
He promised to do it.
He didn't.
He voted it down.
I'm sure he did it to get back at Trump.
He was, his weak sauce campaign against Barack Obama was sacrificial lamb stuff.
It was about his own honor and it wasn't about the country.
And he gave us, I mean, he helped to give us Obama.
Even I had a hard time voting for him.
And his personal complaint, Trump's personal complaint about him about the steel dossier is true.
Apparently, McCain got hold of the steel dossier, all that stuff about, you know, the prostitutes in Russia, all that nonsense that has been, and he passed it around Washington.
He had an aide pass it around Washington, hoping it would leak to the press and finally BuzzFeed ran with it, okay, which was, you know, it was a despicable, you can say anything about anybody.
The press should not be, not have been running it.
Everybody has this idea, oh, we have to save America from Donald Trump.
And instead, they've plunged themselves and the country into the muck of their own leftism and their own dishonesty.
I'm not arguing with what McCain said.
And I know this St. John McCain stuff in the left-wing press also drives people nuts.
It drives me nuts.
You know, this St. John, oh, how wonderful John McCain.
When John McCain was running for president, the New York Times ran a completely unsubstantiated piece about him having a mistress, completely unsubstantiated, completely unproven.
They ran this huge, huge piece that really had, it was embarrassing.
I mean, if you could be embarrassed for the New York Times, which is now a former newspaper, you would have been embarrassed for it.
They loved McCain because he was the maverick, meaning he was kind of a liberal.
They loved McCain because he wasn't a typical Republican.
He wasn't a conservative until he ran against their guy, Obama, and then they ripped him to pieces and they did anything they could to stop him.
And he was angry all the time.
And they portrayed him as this little angry imp, you know.
So this whole idea that now he's dead, he's in newspaper heaven is garbage.
Okay, get it all.
There's a price you pay for everything.
If you, your spouse, is doing something that is legitimately wrong, spending too much money, he or she is not paying attention to the budget, putting you guys in jeopardy.
Do you go to your spouse and say, look, idiot, stop spending so much money?
Or do you go to your spouse and say, sit down, we have to talk.
You know, I love you, but, okay, the way you say things and where you say things and when you say things and about whom you say, these matter.
These matter.
Seven months, the guy was a war hero.
He was a legit war hero.
I mean, the real deal.
He was also a senator.
He spent his life in service to the country.
I didn't agree with him.
I didn't like him.
But the guy did what he did, you know, and he's gone.
There's nobody there to fight with.
He can't punch back.
You know, talk about punching down.
That's punching down below the ground.
I mean, listen to this part about the funeral.
I talked about it in the opening, but it is kind of hilarious, you know.
I endorsed him at his request, and I gave him the kind of funeral that he wanted, which as president, I had to approve.
I don't care about this.
I didn't get thank you.
That's okay.
We sent him on the way, but I wasn't a fan of John McCain.
So now what we could say is, now we're all set.
I don't think I have to answer that question, but the press keeps, what do you think of McCain?
What do you think?
Not my kind of guy, but some people like him, and I think that's great.
I gave him at a funeral, and he never calls.
I gave him a funeral, and where did he thank me?
You know, it's just absurd, and it's small, and it's petty.
And here's the thing, okay?
There's two things about this.
Well, you know what?
First, let's just play.
How can you blame, even if you hate McCain, even if you didn't like him, even if you agree with President Trump step by step, which I kind of do, I kind of agree with his assessment of McCain.
Even so, even so, you can't blame McCain's longtime friends from coming out and defending him.
And as Megan McCain defended him on the view, and here's Senator Johnny Isaacson, I think from Georgia.
It's deplorable what he said.
That's what I called it from the floor of the Senate seven months ago.
It will be deplorable seven months from now if he says it again.
And I will continue to speak out because there's one thing that we've got to do.
You may not like immigration.
You may not like this.
You may not like that.
You may be a Republican.
You may not be a Democrat.
We're all Americans.
There aren't Democratic casualties in Republican calculations on the battlefield.
There are American casualties.
And we should never reduce the service that people give to this country, including the offering of their own life, to anything but political fodder in Washington, D.C., or anywhere else for that matter.
Okay, so two things about this, right?
One, and probably the more important one, it hurts him with undecided voters.
It hurts him with those people, the women, the suburbanites who didn't vote, who voted Democrat in the midterms, even though they voted for Trump or voted Republican, yeah, Republican in the general, who voted against him in the midterms because they just don't like the man.
Now, that may be shallow, that may be wrong, but they do it, and it hurts him with those people, and it means that we lose.
It means we lose voters, right?
That's the first thing.
That's the political consideration.
And secondly, the impulse to protect your own, which I understand in the world as it is, the impulse to protect your own means you sitting there going, like, yeah, go get that dead guy.
Yeah, go tell you tell that war hero all the mistakes he made.
You tell people about that because he's dead and he can't get back at you, and that's the way we ought to be.
It degrades you, it degrades you.
I'm sorry, there's a price you pay for everything.
I think it is important to me that Trump wins.
It's important to me that he goes forward.
But no, no, that's not the way people behave.
That is not the way.
You know, you cannot condone that behavior because it degrades you.
And here is what's at stake, okay?
I don't know if you heard about this.
In New Zealand, where they had the horrible shooting, they just banned in a big, big hurry.
They just used the emotion that was generated by that atrocity and they banned basically all semi-automatic weapons.
Here is their prime minister.
Today I'm announcing that New Zealand will ban all military-style semi-automatic weapons.
We will also ban all assault rifles.
We will ban all high-capacity magazines.
We will ban all parts with the ability to convert semi-automatic or any other type of firearm into a military-style semi-automatic weapon.
We will ban parts that cause a firearm to generate semi-automatic, automatic, or close to automatic gunfire.
In short, every semi-automatic weapon used in the terrorist attack on Friday will be banned in this country.
Now, that's a really good law because it means the next time somebody does this, because the guy who does this doesn't care what she bans, has absolutely completely indifferent to what Jacinda Ardern bans.
He doesn't care.
The guy's going to do this next.
But one thing she has ensured is that no one will be able to defend themselves against it.
That's the one thing she has ensured.
And you don't think they want to do that there, that here?
You don't think that's where the Democrats are heading?
Let's go to the Democrat Publicity Department, CNN, Brooke Baldwin.
Listen to her, react to this.
Did you notice how quickly New Zealand is taking action on guns?
72 hours after this attack.
At least one gun shop owner is refusing to sell certain guns in the magazines that enable them to use more bullets.
New Zealand's biggest online auction site has banned semi-automatics and associated accessories, saying that it is clear public sentiment has changed.
That's a quote.
My point is this.
They have all come together to try and find a solution as fast as possible so this doesn't become routine.
Routine?
In America, it's just the opposite.
Instead of coming together to come up with concrete solutions like this, each side runs back to its partisan corners.
Sales of guns often go up after mass shootings.
It is a crisis in America, no matter which side you are on.
Not a crisis to me.
That's not a crisis to me that people go and buy guns when they have to defend themselves.
Why is it good for it to be fast?
Why is it good for it to be fast?
Charlie Cook over at National Review, who's one, you know, he's now an American citizen, but he has this plummy English accent, and he is one of the most intelligent defenders of the Second Amendment.
And I said to him once, why do we have to listen to a defense of our Constitution in your plummy accent?
And he said, I'm doing the job most Americans won't do.
So he wrote a piece at National Review, a great piece called Quick, Act Before Anyone Can Debate You.
And he says, one doesn't have to be opposed to strict gun control as I am to find the argument for haste both dangerous and a little creepy.
Indeed, I am struggling to imagine many other circumstances in which the suggestion would be as uncritically repeated.
Some of the worst legislation in all of history has been passed in the middle of crises or in the immediate aftermath of tragedies that engendered extreme emotional responses.
Invariably, don't listen to the naysayers is bad, bad advice.
So too is, if the government is swift, it can do anything it wants to do.
And as for don't let the dissenters show you they are good people, well, I'll let you decide whether you want to live in any country that heeds that counsel.
Patience, consultation, consideration, these are not bad words.
Haste, that's the enemy of freedom and of good government too.
Thank goodness that our system tends to be slow.
All praise to our checks against the transient and the frenzied.
You know, this, it's like the Electoral College.
Gun confiscation, the rush to overcome your common sense and your logic and your traditions and your history and your constitution in the wake of a tragedy so that you're all emotional.
The same thing with the Electoral College.
It's all about wresting power away from the people and giving it to the government.
All those people that you heard Hillary Clinton talking about yesterday and a million times before, all those deplorables out there who are not forward-looking and who don't like you because of the color of your skin in her imagination, all those people have guns and it makes it a little harder to do the things you want to do to them.
Same thing with Brexit.
Why can't they have Brexit?
Because no one in the political class wants Brexit because it gives the power to the people and admits that the power is with the people.
This is a movement that is ongoing in the left wing, in the Democrat Party.
It's a movement to tip the balance of power forever to the side of government control.
It is what it is.
It's a movement, and they will do it if Trump loses, and he will lose if he doesn't get hold of himself and behave like a human being.
I'm telling you, you know, you can back him all you want.
You should back him because he's all we've got.
But just remember, there's a price you pay for everything and there's a price you pay for that kind of bad behavior.
Guest On Pornography00:15:01
We've got a guest coming up, a really interesting guest.
Matt Fratt is going to talk about pornography.
And usually we break that and just, you know, kick you out of here if you're not a subscriber.
But we're not going to do that today.
We want you to hear the whole show.
But still, come to dailywire.com, subscribe.
You get my show.
You get Shapiro.
We'll give you a little off because you also get Knowles' show.
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But you also get to be in the mailbag where I solve all your problems.
I mean, that is a good deal for $10 a month or $100 lousy bucks for the whole year, for which you also get the Leftist Tears Tumblr, which is made of diamonds painted black.
And to just keep your leftist tears hot or cold.
All right.
Let us bring on our guest, Matt Fratt.
Matt Frad, F-R-A-D-D.
Matt Fratt speaks to tens of thousands of people every year.
He's the best-selling author of several books, including Does God Exist? A Socratic Dialogue on the Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas and the porn myth, exposing the reality behind the fantasy of pornography.
His podcast, Pints with Aquinas, which sounds really like a pleasant afternoon.
I have to say, Pints with Aquinas receives hundreds of thousands of downloads every month.
And he has a course, Strive, a 21-day detox from porn.
Matt, it's nice to meet you.
Thanks for coming on.
G'day, Andrew.
I'm a big fan.
It's lovely to be on your show.
Oh, well, thanks very much.
I want to read you a very short paragraph from an Atlantic article.
There's a big Atlantic piece by Kate Julian about why people aren't having sex anymore, why young people aren't having sex.
She says there's scant evidence of an epidemic of erectile dysfunction among young men, and no researcher I spoke with had seen compelling evidence that porn is addictive.
As the authors of a recent review of porn research note, the notion of problematic pornography use remains contentious in both academic and popular literature.
Is that true or false?
No, it's bloody false.
Right now, there are currently 41 neuroscience-based studies on porn users, and every one of them supports the addiction model.
There are two anonymous studies, not anonymous, two studies that claim to show that pornography is not addictive by Nicole Prouse, but they have been seriously questioned by some of the world's top neuroscientists.
And when it comes to erectile dysfunction, this isn't a scare tactic, you know, thrown out by Christians and other people who hate sex.
These are some of the top urologists, like Dr. Abraham Morgenthaler, who's the clinical urologist at Harvard Medical School.
Norman Deutsch, who wrote the book, The Brain That Changes Itself, said we shouldn't call it erectile dysfunction.
We should call it porn-induced impotency since the problem isn't below the belt.
It's between the ears.
And just, I think, everyone's common experience.
If you're somebody who consumes pornography with any regularity, is your life a lot better?
Are your relationships a lot more fulfilled?
I think more and more people are saying, no, they're not, and they're choosing to do away with porn for those reasons.
Is porn, this explosion of pornography, is it just because of technology?
Is it just because now it's there?
I mean, there was always pornography, but now it's right there, a click of a button, or is it indicative of a greater disorder in our sexual lives and our sexual thinking?
Well, I think it's important to point out, right, that sex is good.
Sexual desire.
Sexual desire is good.
If you don't experience sexual desire, that's not a sign of holiness, but that you might be dead, right?
So all of these are good things.
And it's precisely because they're good that when they become twisted, they become really ugly.
You can't make something ugly that is already ugly.
You can't make trash ugly, but you can make sex ugly precisely because it's beautiful.
And I think so.
We've always had an interest in sex and ought to, but with the advent of the internet, porn has become immediately anonymous, accessible, and affordable.
And because of those three A's, porn use has skyrocketed.
And now most people are being exposed to pornography, both young boys and girls, at around the age of eight to 12.
Is there, I know a lot of feminists complain that the kind of, that porn basically you start, because it is an addiction, you start with simple porn and you wind up looking at the most violent and disgusting things that actually change the way you relate to women and what you expect a woman to be like when you're actually with a real live woman.
Is that fair complaint?
Yes, it's very fair.
One of the key neurotransmitters in the pleasure reward centers of the brain is called dopamine.
And neuroscientists have discovered that when one consumes pornography with any regularity, dopamine begins to atrophy and the reward center in the brain is in a state of dopamine craving.
So it's as if you've reset the pleasure thermostat and now in order to boost it again, you need more porn and more deviant forms of porn just to feel normal.
So, I mean, when you think about it, no one wakes up at the age of 25 having never seen porn and thinks, I want to watch insert weird fetish here.
Rather, we spiral into it.
We begin with the quote-unquote vanilla porn.
And after a while, it doesn't cut it anymore.
And we have to keep pushing the envelope to feel the same level of excitement.
That really is scary.
That's a scary idea.
And what about the complaint?
And I've heard this from women who are not particularly feminist, that men expect of them behaviors and reactions that simply are not in the human repertoire, that are not the way people normally behave when they're in bed together.
Right.
Pornography changes what's called our sexual template.
So if people begin viewing pornography at an early age and start spiraling into all sorts of weird fetishes, they might believe that they've just been sort of programmed in a certain way to say, prefer certain types of violent sex or to prefer animals to people or even to prefer whatever.
But in actuality, studies have shown that as they get off of porn, their sexual template goes back to normal.
But I think, yeah, I think that's fair to say that when you consume pornography, I mean, this is why porn leads for some people to erectile dysfunction.
I'm a Christian, but I run a podcast with an atheist.
His name's Noah Church, which is a really ironic name for an atheist, actually.
And the reason he quit porn was because he tried to have sex with his girlfriend and his penis didn't work.
I mean, that's going to freak you out.
Yeah, that's a bad day.
Yeah, no question.
It's a bad day.
So he went online and he researched and he literally found tens of thousands of other young men and they're all experiencing the same problem.
And even things like Viagra and Cialis weren't working.
And they realized that it had to do with porn.
And after dropping the porn, they found that sexual function came back.
Wow.
All right.
So let's talk about this because I know guys were addicted to porn.
It's a hard addiction to break.
You offer a program for this.
What is the solution for the individual?
Yeah.
So for the last eight years, I've been traveling the country and speaking almost exclusively on porn.
I joke that my mom is super proud of that.
And this is the first time I've kind of been able to put all of the wisdom I've learned into one 21-day course.
We're literally putting hundreds of thousands of dollars into this course.
It's very high production value.
And it's basically my way of coming alongside these men and walking them step by step, giving them the information and resources that they need to achieve long-lasting sobriety.
The first course will launch in five days from now.
We're going to have tens of thousands of people from around the world joining.
And it's not an isolated experience.
It's something that you go through with men.
You watch a three to five minute video every day.
There's a challenge that you're asked to complete.
You're asked to communicate in the forum.
And then at the end of the 21 days, we put you into triad video small groups so you can continue this journey with accountability partners.
And again, the whole point of this, it's not to shame anyone.
It's not to make anyone feel bad.
It's just about coming alongside people and saying, if you want a more beautiful life, if you feel that pornography is getting in the way of your most cherished relationships, you know, we're not here to judge you or shame you.
We're just here to say there's a way out and you're not alone.
So now you have a podcast called Pints with Aquinas, which I, like I said, I think that's going to, I'm going to be daydreaming about that for the rest of the having pints with Aquinas.
What could be more fun than having pints with Annorn?
But so you're obviously a religious person, but this is not a religious course.
Correct.
Is there, you know, in AA, they say you have to have a higher power.
Can you break the porn addiction without having a higher power?
I think so, because I know several people who are self-declared atheists who have been free of pornography for years.
That said, yes, I am a Christian.
And so I bring a sort of Christian anthropology to the table in this course.
Like, I actually think that it's not a cliche or a hallmark line to say we've been created by love, to love, and for love, right?
That we have love as our origin, vocation, and destiny.
And if we don't get love right, we won't get bloody life right.
And so for that reason, I don't apologize for being Christian, but that said, any man of goodwill will, I think, get a lot out of this course because we don't base the course on religious dogma or biblical texts.
We kind of base it on, I think, common sense, science, and logic, while certainly appealing to the beauty of God and the beauty of a relationship one can have with God.
But it's not heavy-handed, and I don't think anyone would be put out by it.
Well, let's step back for a minute.
Those are the individual treatments.
If you step back and look at the culture in general, is there a way?
I mean, here in the U.S., we cherish our First Amendment.
I don't want to see speech censored at all.
Is there a way, is there something that the society can do basically to help people or to prevent some of this?
Well, interestingly enough, pornography isn't protected under the First Amendment.
It is speech.
It's just not protected speech.
So it's sort of like slander.
You can slander me and then I can sue you.
That said, I understand where people are coming from, where the last thing they want is for government to step in and regulate something, even something they don't agree with.
But I think we should point out there is a difference between, say, censorship and regulation.
So right now, I think most decent people would say a child shouldn't be able to walk into a gas station, buy and consume pornography.
Like we should not allow that.
Well, why think that what happens offline is less real than what happens online?
It's not.
I mean, the fact is, you know, our children can try and go and see 50 shades of stupid in the movie theater, be denied, and then while turning away, could look up something 500 times as bad.
And I think that's unacceptable.
And I think we're seeing the destruction all around us.
And so I think that there's something we should look into and develop here.
There's a great group called the National Center on Sexual Exploitation up in D.C. who are actually doing work putting pressure on companies to make sure that they are making it more difficult for children to be exposed to pornography.
Really interesting.
Matt, where can people find you?
Where do they go to get you?
Yeah, well, strive21.com.
If they want to check out the course, Strive21.com.
So, yeah, cheers.
All right.
Matt, it's really good talking to you.
I hope you'll come back and talk again.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you, Andrew.
That is really interesting.
And I have to say, as a First Amendment purist, I think that is absolutely true that there are some things that can be restricted for health reasons.
I'm very, very wary about it.
But certainly, you don't even have to pay anything or get through any kind of a wall to see the most disgusting stuff on the internet.
And I don't see why that's necessarily the best possible thing.
All right.
Finally, before I let you plunge into the clavinless weekend, where there'll be great gnashing, weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, President Trump is expected to issue, this is from the Wall Street Journal, is expected to issue an executive order Thursday directing federal agencies to tie research and education grants made to colleges and universities to more aggressive enforcement of the First Amendment.
This is according to a draft of the order viewed by the Wall Street Journal.
The order instructs agencies, including the departments of education, health, and human services and defense, to ensure that public educational institutions comply with the First Amendment and that private institutions live up to their own stated free speech standards.
The order falls short of what some university officials feared would be more sweeping or specific measures.
It doesn't prescribe any specific penalty that would result in schools losing research or other education grants as a result of specific policies.
You know, this is so necessary.
It's a tragedy that this is necessary.
It is a tragedy that we have.
I've said this before, it is really true.
The battle we are in is not the battle between left and right.
I am perfectly happy to see, you know, Nancy Pelosi and Jim Jordan debate.
I'm perfectly happy to see them both appear on campus and debate their ideas.
Any left-winger, any right-winger, I'm perfectly happy to see them debate.
We are in a battle between the left and free speech.
We're in a battle between the left and liberalism, liberalism which should contain both conservative and left-wing ideas.
There's no problem with that to me.
I'm willing to debate anybody and talk to anybody and listen to anybody, but you cannot, you know, I think it was Bill Murray who said, you know, it's hard to win a debate against a smart person, but it's impossible to win it against a stupid person.
That's the kind of thing we are up against.
Listen to this.
Here is a piece in CNN reacting to Trump's proposal when Trump first proposed this executive order.
Terry Kainfield, a lawyer trained at UC Berkeley, wrote this on the CNN website.
For years, those on the right and far right have complained that universities shun their ideas.
In 2017, when white supremacist Richard Spencer was disinvited to speak at Auburn University after the campus police cited safety concerns, he sued the university for violating his free speech rights, won his suit, and was ultimately permitted to speak later that year.
And last year, protests at Berkeley erupted ahead of a planned appearance of right-wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulos.
Students and other members of the community didn't want him there because of his alleged neo-Nazi and white supremacist views.
He denies he's a white supremacist.
In response to the backlash, Yiannopoulos accused the protesters of being opposed to free speech.
Those are her examples.
I went through the whole piece.
Those are her only examples, okay?
She doesn't cite the fact that there are riots when Ben Shapiro has shown up at places.
She doesn't cite the fact that I have been barred from, I mean, look at this face.
How could you borrow this face from your university?
She doesn't cite the fact that people like Charles, oh, I can't remember his name, the guy who wrote Coming Apart, that he has been attacked.
Heather McDonald has been forced into a room with the police surrounding her as people hammered on the doors and terrorized her.
She doesn't talk about any of that stuff.
What she does is typical of the left, the sequestered left.
They think the right wing is people that most people on the right wing completely reject.
Richard Spencer is not a person that people on the right approve of.
He's an alt-right guy.
I think he should be allowed to speak.
I think people should debate him.
Why The Right Centers Around Extremes00:02:36
I think people should make fun of him.
I think people should point out what's wrong with his ideas.
But that's not the problem.
They do this all the time.
They talk about, and the news media does it.
They talk about the right as if it were centered around its extreme people.
And they don't talk about the fact that the leftist extremists are running for president.
The leftist extremists are in Congress.
Our extremists are on the comment section of Breitbart.
Their extremists are in the government.
And I think that that is a huge, huge difference.
And you could only make that argument to people who never get outside and hear opposing views.
If Jordan Peterson keeps you up at night, you just are not getting out enough.
I mean, come on.
You know, this is what's going wrong.
It is, again, here is Donald Trump, the great villain, the great man who's not fit for office, who somehow just managed to stumble into destroying the caliphate, who somehow just managed to spark the economy that Obama sat on for eight years.
Somehow, in his stupidity, I don't know, he somehow managed to put constitutional judges, justices on the Supreme Court, and conservative judges throughout the judiciary.
I don't know how he did any of that because he's so stupid and so insane.
But he's the guy who is defending the constitutional protection to free speech.
Donald Trump is doing that, not Brian Stelter, not CNN, not the New York Times.
Donald Trump is doing it.
If we lose him, after him, the deluge, you know.
And so he's got to take care of what he does, and we have got to take care of what we do and make sure that doesn't happen because it's a dangerous moment.
It's a dangerous moment.
The left has lost its mind.
It doesn't matter because the Clavenless Weekend is here.
None of it, so few of you are going to be back.
But those of you who survive, we will be here Monday.
I will be here on Monday on the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm Andrew Klavan.
Hurrah!
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.
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The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, New Zealand's government bans sale of semi-automatic weapons and the Wooks Golds Come for Jordan Peterson.