Ep. 679 – Chicago Empire blends dystopian fiction—a mass breakout of figures like James Comey (dying in a fiery escape) and James Clapper—with real-world Chicago’s "corrupt Democrat machine," linking Jussie Smollett’s dropped hate-crime charges to Obama-era ties like Rahm Emanuel. The episode critiques systemic failures, from LaQuan McDonald’s shooting to UBI’s flaws, while dismissing moral policing on sexuality, arguing self-examination trumps judgment. A mailbag dives into Another Kingdom’s origins—a Christian thriller free of "melon-headed" sentimentality—and contrasts Hamlet’s feigned madness with postmodern relativism. Legal battles over child abuse and dating anxiety medication underscore pragmatic boundaries, while Islam’s reform potential clashes with its anti-Semitic strains, leaving the host advocating conscience-driven interpretation over blind condemnation. [Automatically generated summary]
In a dramatic mass breakout, several former government officials have escaped from justice.
Tunneling free in the pre-dawn darkness, the dangerous crew raced into the woods, where they split up, hoping to avoid the sweeping spotlights, armed search parties, and howling bloodhounds.
As the law followed in hot pursuit, several clashes broke out between officers and the badmen.
Perjurer and leaker James Comey sprayed the night with machine gun fire as he climbed atop an old gas storage facility trying to escape the federales.
You'll never take me alive, you lousy G-Men, Comey shouted.
I know how dirty the FBI is, and I'll never turn myself into them as long as I can go out with a bang.
Then, with an insane scream of top of the world, Ma, Comey fired into the storage tanks and disappeared in a gigantic ball of fire.
Another renowned perjurer, James Clapper, slogged desperately through a muddy stream, trying to throw the bloodhounds off his terrible scent.
The snarling fugitive traded gunfire with officers before losing them, but later turned up wounded and bleeding on the steps of a nearby cathedral, where he cried out for forgiveness before tumbling down the stairs to the sidewalk where he lay still.
Who was he? asked a passerby of a nearby policeman.
He used to be a big shot, the copper replied.
Escaped communist John Brennan managed to evade the law using the skills he learned in the CIA.
Brennan made his way to the Sixth Avenue studios of CNN, where he'd once strutted around like he owned the world.
Now he found the place apparently deserted and was left to pound pitiably on the locked doors, shouting, Open up, you dirty rats.
Don't you remember me?
I was your pal.
There was no answer, though several anchormen were seen peering through the darkened windows, pretending they weren't at home.
Still at large are Andrew McCabe, Hillary Clinton, and the mysterious gang leader known only as the Big O. Updates as they come in.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Jesse Smollett Police Controversy00:15:31
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
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Yeah, Chicago has a reputation for being a corrupt Democrat town run by a corrupt Democrat machine, but there's a reason for that.
Chicago is a corrupt Democrat town run by a corrupt Democrat machine.
We saw an example of that yesterday in the Jussie Smollett case when a police force with a tainted reputation was overridden by a prosecutor clearly acting under the influence of power.
If you're looking for heroes, you can pretty much forget it.
This is Chi-Town and a city full of Democrats.
It's a sure bet everyone's to blame.
That's the culture that took over this country for the eight years of the Obama presidency, and that's the culture the media is still in love with.
It's not a question of al Capone, where Democrats achieve one-party rule in the government or the press.
It's all Capone.
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Mailbag will be coming up later on.
Oh my God.
We'll be coming up later on in the show.
Great questions today.
So you want to stay tuned for that.
You can tell.
That's how excited she is by the mailbag coming up.
So Jesse Smollett, with a single leap, Jesse Smollett is free.
His records have been sealed by a judge.
The computer records have been wiped clean.
He'll forfeit his, I guess it was 10 grand in bail, and he will either do or has done a couple hours of community service at Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Push, which may be community disservice.
Just so we're clear, right up front, this is corruption per se, right?
Per se means in and of itself.
This is corruption.
Not because I know for a fact that Jesse Smollett is guilty.
Obviously, you all remember he claimed two MAGO crazed individuals attacked him on the street.
The police did a lot of investigation and decided it was two of his pals he paid off to pretend there had been an attack on him, thus insulting every one of the 64 million people who voted for Donald Trump or might continue to like him.
But this is corruption, not because I know he's guilty, but because the way we find out whether somebody is guilty is we have this thing, we call it a trial.
And once you are indicted with 16 indictments, you don't just erase the possibility of a trial.
You actually have to have some kind of plea bargain.
You do it in public.
You do it out front.
This is corruption.
But I want to let you know, I mean, I want to give you a really good picture, if I can, of what happened and why I take no side except the side of no corruption, which means you've got to leave Chicago.
And when Obama was in Washington, you would have had to have left Washington too, because remember, Obama was a Chicago Paul.
What we are looking at is the culture that he came out of, and you'll see his fine hand moving in this just a little bit.
You know, and just so we're clear, like, I didn't really think Jesse Smollett should go to jail.
I thought this was, you know, a bad crime in the sense that he took up police time.
I think there were 18 murders in Chicago while the police were investigating this.
I thought he deserved to be slapped around and humiliated and tried and maybe fined and maybe forced to do a lot of community service.
But, you know, I wasn't looking for vindictiveness or vengeance.
I was looking for justice.
Anyway, you can just see this Jussie Smollett cut.
He came out.
He was just so full of remorse and apologized to everybody.
This is the cut for it.
I've been truthful and consistent on every single level since day one.
I would not be my mother's son if I was capable of one drop of what I've been accused of.
This has been an incredibly difficult time.
Honestly, one of the worst of my entire life.
But I'm a man of faith, and I'm a man that has knowledge of my history, and I would not bring my family, our lives, or the movement through a fire like this.
I just wouldn't.
So I want to thank my legal counsel from the bottom of my heart.
And I would also like to thank the state of Illinois for attempting to do what's right.
Now, I'd like nothing more than to just get back to work and move on with my life.
But make no mistakes, I will always continue to fight for the justice, equality, and betterment of marginalized people everywhere.
So again, thank you for all the support.
Thank you for faith, and thank you to God.
Bless y'all.
Thank you very much.
I love the way with actors.
It's all about him.
So obviously I was joking when I said he was remorseful.
He's sticking to it.
He's sticking to his story.
He's going back to work.
He tweeted out, see you all Wednesday.
That's when his show Empire, I guess, is on.
The Empire writers are tweeting out and attacking the police and saying that it was all false stuff, which it pretty obviously was not.
I mean, this was not some kind of vendetta by the police.
Rahm Emmanuel, former Obama chief of staff, I guess, former Obama guy, was now mayor of Chicago and he just struck back.
This is the state attorney, Kim Fox, her name is.
She dropped the charge.
She had, well, I'll get back into the weeds about this in a minute because it's really worth hearing.
It's a really interesting story, but Rahm Emmanuel was well and truly ticked off about this.
To then use those very laws and the principles and values behind the Matthew Shepard hate crimes legislation to self-promote your career is a cost that comes to all the individuals, gay men and women who will come forward and one day say they were a victim of a hate crime who now will be doubted.
People of faith, Muslim or any other religious faith who will be a victim of hate crimes.
People that are also of all walks of life and backgrounds, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation.
Now this casts a shadow of whether they're telling the truth.
And he did this all in the name of self-promotion.
And he used the laws of the hate crime legislation that all of us collectively over years have put on the books to stand up to be the values that embody what we believe in.
This is a whitewash of justice.
He's not a happy guy, and neither is the police superintendent, Eddie Johnson.
Let's play him too, because we're going to get into where these guys come from too.
Prosecutors have their discretion, of course.
We still have to work with the state's attorney's office.
I'm sure we'll have some conversation after this.
But again, at the end of the day, it's Mr. Smollett who committed this hoax, period.
If he wanted to clear his name, the way to do that was in a court of law so that everyone could see the evidence.
You all know what the bond prophet said.
You know, we all know what it said.
So, you know, I stand by the facts of what we produced.
If they want to dispute those facts, then the place to do that is in court, not CC.
So Kim Fox, right, is the state attorney.
She's the one who made the decision to drop this.
Kim Fox, and I'm going to talk about her more in a minute, but first, she got a call right away when this happened.
The minute the story hit the news, he got a call from Tina Chen, who was a former chief of staff of Michelle Obama.
Okay, this is all the Chicago way, right?
It's Chicago way.
And she said Tina Chen was complaining about the police, basically, and the police chief.
And here's a little video we have of that.
I want him dead.
I want his family dead.
I want his house burnt to the ground.
All right, maybe that's not the real video.
It's all Chicago.
It's hard to tell him apart.
But Tina Chen calls up and she says, listen, I've given your number to the Jussie Smollett family, okay?
The Jesse Smollett family then gets in contact, texts Fox, texts the state attorney, and says, you know, we have, we're really worried about what the police are going to do with this case.
And she says, well, I'll try and get the FBI to take over the investigation.
And Jesse Smollett's family says, oh, OMG, that would be a big win for us.
After that, Fox recused herself from the prosecution, but the police say this is garbage.
This is from PJ Media.
Martin Prabe, the second vice president, the fraternal order of police, said once again, she, Fox, is throwing the Chicago Police Department completely under the bus, which she'd been doing for the last two years in office.
He said Fox never truly recused herself from the case since her underlings remained involved.
And he said, what's the difference between her recusing herself and her underlings having the case?
What really has been recused here?
Nothing.
So obviously the police just feeling that the state's attorneys, and this is bad, right?
This is the prosecutor who's basically at odds with the police.
That's not what you want.
You want the police doing the arresting and the prosecutor doing the prosecuting.
That's what you want, especially in a town like Chicago that is riddled with crime.
But how did Fox, obviously under the influence of influence?
I mean, obviously, this is a woman.
This is a corrupt, like I said, this is corrupt per se.
This is corruption per se.
So we know that she was not doing the right thing.
And the prosecutor is saying, well, we haven't exonerated him.
They exonerated him.
They took his records off the computers.
I mean, they sealed the books.
The only way any justice is going to come to this guy, this actor, is by the FBI saying, well, you sent yourself a threatening letter and that violates federal law and going after him for that.
I don't know if that's going to happen.
But do you remember LaQuan McDonald?
This is a case a long time ago.
I think it's 2014.
He was shot by the police.
And the police said we shot him in self-defense.
And they did an autopsy.
And the autopsy brought this into question.
And you remember that Obama and Eric Holder and the Obama's corrupt justice department was making a big deal about any shooting that happened between the police and a person of color.
Even if the police officer was black, it didn't matter.
They were constantly accusing police departments around the country of being racist, even though every study shows that the police do not use more force with black suspects than they do with white suspects.
They don't use more fatal force with black suspects than with white suspects.
But the feds were using this as a way to take over police departments, and the police departments were starting to dial back their enforcement, and that meant crime was going up in the worst neighborhoods.
So all of it was a complete boondoggle.
As far as I'm concerned, it was done to distract people from the failures of the Obama administration.
Let me pause here for just a second.
We'll get back to this really interesting Chicago corruption story in just a minute.
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So the Laquan shooting, right?
It's the typical thing, right?
The newspapers are putting out pictures of Laquan and his graduation, and he's an honor student.
It's like, remember, if you've read Bonfire of the Vanities, you know the routine.
Turned out in the autopsy, he had angel dust in his system, so he was probably on drugs.
But it also turned out that the wounds were not consistent with wounds of self-defense.
Plus, there was a dashboard cam, and this was the big thing.
There was a dashboard cam video, and Rahm Emmanuel and basically the entire police establishment.
This is before, I should point out, this is before Eddie Johnson was the police chief.
The entire police establishment suppressed this video when the video came out.
It showed that he had been, the suspect had been walking away when they opened fire.
One of the police officers went to prison for murder, and there were protests all over town.
And then Emmanuel had a very difficult time winning, re-winning the nomination for mayor because leftist candidates almost forced him out.
When he got back in, the police superintendent was replaced, and the state's attorney lost the election, and this woman, Fox, came in.
So she was sent in on this wave of reaction to the police, to a police shooting that looks like it was not as good as it should have been.
And now she's, of course, now they've got this Hellian leftist who's got ties to the Obama family basically shooting down anything with another guy, Smollett, who also has ties to Michelle Obama.
So it's like everybody in Chicago.
This is the entire Chicago way.
That's what they call it, the Chicago Way.
And, you know, George Soros was in there donating money to help get Fox elected, hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to Breitbart.
So this is a political war in a dirty town.
And it's all, and listen, I love the cops.
You know, I really do support the cops, but the Chicago police and the Chicago crime, the way the Chicago crime is, there's something truly wrong in that city.
Chicago's Political Storm00:06:11
And it's all Democrats.
It is all Democrats.
And we talked about this yesterday, right?
This is the way a Democrat city is run.
You can't say, oh, the police are the good guys, like I want to say.
You can't say necessarily the police are the good guys and the state attorney, the bad guys.
It's all a question of influence.
It's all a question of power centers.
It's all a question of which part of the Democratic Party is fighting with which part.
And that was the Obama White House, the IRS that silenced conservative voices during the re-election campaign.
The State Department that went around lying about Benghazi and that was headed by Hillary Clinton with her classified information on her cell phone, basically where anyone could get their hands on it.
The Justice Department that did this whole Russian collusion thing against Donald Trump spying on an opposition candidate during an election year.
Just an amazing, amazing kind of corruption.
And yesterday, by the way, listening to the show is like listening to the news a day ahead of time.
I went after the press on Monday.
They went after the press later on in the day.
I started talking about the Obama administration.
Here's Donald Trump yesterday being questioned about where he thinks this Russian collusion narrative came from.
They and others created a fraud in our country with this ridiculous witch hunt where it was proven very strongly.
No collusion, no obstruction, no nothing.
We are doing so well.
We've never probably had a time of prosperity like this.
It's been great.
You're introducing the people who want the investigation in New York in the name of the president's act.
How high up do you think it went?
I think it went very high up.
I think what happened is a disgrace.
I don't believe our country should allow this ever to happen again.
This will never happen again.
We cannot let it ever happen again.
It went very high up and it started fairly low, but with instructions from the high up, this should never happen to a president again.
We can't allow that to take place.
The Pressure The Pressure I don't want to say that, but I think you know the answer.
He asked if this conspiracy came from the west wing of the Obama White House.
In other words, did it start with Obama?
Of course it started with Obama.
You know, what on earth do you think the Justice Department went after?
They started investigating Trump's campaign without Obama knowing about it.
Of course, it did, but Trump's not saying it.
And people are saying, wow, that's an amazing thing for him to say.
It's an obvious thing for him to say.
This is the kind of corruption that Democrats live off.
Every city, every Democrat city is run like this, almost every one of them.
And they pick on Donald Trump, rightly, by the way, for associating guys like Michael Cohen.
I mean, guys like Michael Cohen, listen, I know these guys from New York.
They are just these make-believe tough guys.
They always fold when the law comes after them.
And you shouldn't be hanging out with them.
It says something bad about Trump that he was.
But then just take Michael Avenatti, now under arrest and charged with this kind of grotesque, gangster-esque extortion of Nike, telling him they had to hire him for $10, $20 million to clean out or he was going to destroy them.
Now he's giving press conferences where he's releasing this information he threatened to release.
But just listen to the way Avenatti was treated by the press.
Okay, when they're attacking, the next time they're attacking Trump for associating with Michael Cohn, listen to the way they treated Avenatti.
Stormy Daniels lawyer, Michael Avenatti, is laying down the law.
And is he really thinking about running for president?
Joining me now live, the man himself, Michael Avenatti.
Let's talk to somebody who understands the system very well.
Michael Avenatti.
He's Donald Trump's worst nightmare.
Michael Avenatti.
Michael, thanks so much for being here.
Did you talk to Stormy Daniels last night?
What was her reaction?
Did the president just get a new challenger for 2020?
Stormy Daniels lawyer Michael Avenatti may have just tossed his hat into the ring.
Looking ahead to 2020, one reason why I'm taking you seriously as a contender is because of your presence on cable news.
First, let me take a moment to brag on my former student, this dude right here.
I think of him as in a justice league with Robert Mueller to save our democracy.
A nine-year-old boy has been reunited with his mother in Guatemala, and the person who helped make this happen?
Stormy Daniels' lawyer and potential presidential candidate, Michael Avenatti.
So when we're talking about a corrupt Democrat machine, we're not just talking about Chicago.
We're talking about Obama's Washington and we're talking about the press because it's all the same thing.
You know, yesterday, Cocaine Mitch McConnell had to call the vote of the Green New Deal, this absurd thing that Alexandria Occasional Cortex wrote and proposed, right?
Got no votes.
Even some Democrats voted against it.
All the other Democrats voted present.
They didn't want to have to say anything.
And Alexandria Occasional Cortez said, she said, oh, I told them, I told them to vote present.
Like they're all marching to her orders.
Mike Lee, Senator Mike Lee, God loved the guy.
He got up and gave a speech that was as hilarious as anything I've seen in the Senate.
I wish I could play the whole thing, go online and watch it.
But this is just a minute of this speech where he addressed the Green New Deal with, as he says, the seriousness it deserves.
I rise today to consider the Green New Deal with the seriousness it deserves.
This is, of course, a picture of former President Ronald Reagan naturally firing a machine gun while riding on the back of a dinosaur.
You'll notice a couple of important features here.
First of all, the rocket launcher strapped to President Reagan's back.
And then the stirring, unmistakable patriotism of the Velociraptor holding up a tattered American flag, a symbol of all it means to be an American.
Now, critics might quibble with this depiction of the climactic battle of the Cold War, because while awesome, in real life, there was no climactic battle.
Flint's Political Dominance00:03:28
There was no battle with or without Velociraptors.
The Cold War, as we all know, was won without firing a shot.
But that quibble actually serves our purposes here today, Mr. President.
Because this image has as much to do with overcoming communism in the 20th century as the Green New Deal has to do with overcoming climate change in the 21st.
So he's kidding, but Alexandria Occasional Cortex is not kidding.
She just felt that it was appalling that her virtue signaling by putting forward this absurd legislation should be mocked, that her virtue signaling should be interrupted by a vote where nobody voted for this thing.
But listen carefully to her response.
This is not an elitist issue.
This is a quality of life issue.
You want to tell people that their concern and their desire for clean air and clean water is elitist?
Tell that to the kids in the South Bronx, which are suffering from the highest rates of childhood asthma in the country.
Tell that to the families in Flint, whose kids have, their blood is ascending in lead levels.
Their brains are damaged for the rest of their lives.
Call them elitist.
You're telling them that those kids are trying to get on a plane to Davos?
People are dying.
They are dying.
Flint, Michigan.
Republicans in the state of Michigan tried to save that town, Flint, Michigan.
This is where you'll remember the water was filled with lead and it was poisoned because they were taking it out of a polluted river.
Kevin Williamson, writing in NRO, said a word that is curiously scarce in coverage of the disaster in Flint, Michigan, Democrat.
Flint, like Big Brother Detroit down the way, has a long history of political dominance by the Democratic Party.
Its current mayor is a Democrat.
So was her predecessor.
The mayor before him, Don Williamson, was a career criminal and a Democrat who resigned under threat of recall.
His immediate predecessor, Democrat James Rutherford, is a longtime politico and it was elected to finish out the term of Woodrow Stanley, who was recalled because of the financial state in which he left the city.
Stanley was in effect replaced by Democrat Darnell Early.
On and on.
It was all a Democrat disaster.
And guess who kept the Flintwater emergency secret?
The Obama EPA.
They knew about it for six months.
They didn't release it, so people were being poisoned that whole time.
It was all the Democrats.
The whole thing was the Democrats.
And now, you know, Stephen Law has a piece.
He's ahead of a GOP PAC, and he has a piece in the Wall Street Journal saying that Democrats now are so certain they'll win the White House in 2020 that they aren't only measuring the drapes, they're contemplating an extreme makeover of government that would advance and lock in an ambitious progressive legacy.
They proposed H.R. 1.
They passed H.R. 1, which would make it almost impossible to stop fraudulent voting, almost impossible to criticize government people.
I mean, it was really just trying to bring back the Citizens United to get rid of the Citizens United case.
They want to stack the Supreme Court.
They want to get rid of the Electoral College.
They want America to be Chicago.
They don't want Al Capone.
They want Al Capone.
And they're really going to work at it if they win the majority in 2020.
Coming up tomorrow at 7 p.m. Eastern Time, 4 p.m. Pacific Time, tune in to our next episode of Daily Wire Backstage.
The God King of the Daily Wire, Jeremy Boring, Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, and me.
Struggle With Authority00:15:21
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Ha ha ha.
Daily Wire subscribers get to ask the questions.
Make sure to go to dailywire.com and subscribe today.
We got the mailbag coming up in just a second.
Stop screaming at me.
I can't, my nerves can't stand.
whatever I was going to say, pretend I said it, and then come over to dailywire.com.
Mailbag.
Wow!
Yeah!
Now I'm ready for it.
All right, from Jake.
Andrew, I love you, but also I've been hearing a lot about universal basic income, and the more I read about it, the more the idea seems good.
What are your thoughts on UBI and do you think there will ever be a time when technology forces us to adopt a more, and I hate to say it, socialist mentality on the economy?
No, UBI is a big, big, big mistake.
You know, it was proposed by Milton Friedman in that book, Free to Choose, but his proposal was based on the idea that all other welfare, all other programs would be gotten rid of.
And he said it was a pipe dream.
To take that seriously, to take that literally is a big, big mistake.
Once you are giving people guaranteed income, what's going to happen?
Then every time somebody runs, it's like, how can you live on this guaranteed income?
It's like the minimum wage.
Oh, the heartless Republicans are stopping us from giving more to the poor.
Guaranteed income, it should be guaranteed through college.
It should be guaranteed till death.
It's just going to get, it's just a terrible, terrible tar pit that you're going to sink into.
On your second part of your question, of course, technology changes the way we live.
I frequently argue, you know, people think I'm against feminism because I don't want women to do whatever they want.
Nonsense.
I want women to do exactly what they want and what they can work out with the people around them and the people who love them and the people they love.
It has nothing to do with that.
It has to do with this narrative against men, that men somehow oppressed women.
Women's condition has changed, and that is what has brought about change.
And one of the ways it changed was the Industrial Revolution broke up families.
It destroyed the home industries that were women's source of economic strength and power.
I mean, read Proverbs 31 in the Bible and listen to what a woman was actually doing before the world became industrialized.
She was a businesswoman.
She was running a home.
She was doing all this stuff.
She had enormous power and enormous relevance and importance.
And a lot of that was taken away, including the value of children, because children started to leave home to work in the cities where the factories were.
So technology does change everything, but it never changes anything the way people expect.
Remember, the Luddites were the guys who were tearing apart the machines.
They were smashing the machines because they thought there was going to be no work.
Well, there's much more work now.
There's much more wealth.
There's much more for everybody because of the machines.
But there has to be transitions, and sometimes those transitions can be painful, and not everything that comes along with technology is good.
The idea that some expert should sit in a room going saying, well, now everything will be done by robots and there won't be any work.
Of course, there'll be work.
Technology creates more jobs almost always.
I think it always does, actually.
And so just telling people that they don't have to work is stripping their lives of meaning.
They're not going to all go off like occasional Cortex says and whatever she said we were going to do.
They're all going to invent rockets or something like that.
They're going to be on opiates.
They're going to be depressed.
Study after study shows that men never recover from losing their jobs.
It's a bad, bad idea.
It is not the way to deal with transition.
The way to deal with transition is through training, flexibility, all kinds of trade colleges and things like that.
It's just a bad idea.
From Margot, dear supreme master of all the multiverses, I've heard you say several times on your show that sex is one of the great consolations of life, especially when I say it, especially when discussing the matter of homosexuality.
However, for Christians, shouldn't God be the true consolation for us?
And if so, then what's wrong with those who are same-sex attracted remaining abstinent?
Wouldn't God give them ample grace for their sacrifice and living out the virtue of chastity?
Life without sex can be joyful, or is sex necessary for happiness?
No, of course not.
And that is not at all what I'm saying or the context in which I say it.
Many gay people struggle, many gay Christians struggle with the idea of whether they should be abstinent, and I think that they should struggle with that and struggle.
I think all of us should struggle with how we use our sexuality and how we live out our sexuality.
What I have said is that romantic relationships and sex are one of the great consolations of life because life is tragic and it's painful and it's hard.
And this is one of the things that gives us joy, especially romantic love.
And I mean it in the context of romantic love.
What I mean by that, what's important about that, is I don't think you or I should have the power to decide what God says is necessary in another person's life, what sacrifice is necessary in another person's life.
The idea of what I have to sacrifice, what things I have to do, is so all-consuming that the idea that I should be sitting down and saying, oh, no, no, you know, you can get a divorce even though Jesus said you shouldn't, but if you're gay, you can't come to church anymore.
I do not think that that is properly thought out Christianity.
I've never made a decision on whether gay sex is a sin or not because I don't know because it's not something I'm doing, right?
I want to be thinking about, I mean, it's in the Bible, do not judge lest you be judged.
Don't walk around taking the moat out of somebody else's eye.
Take the plank out of your own eye.
That is a lifetime occupation.
It doesn't mean, I mean, Jesus says, first take the plank out of your eye and then you can criticize the moat in another eye.
He's being sarcastic.
I mean, it takes your whole life to get anything like a clear vision.
So my only point is, before you sort of like offhandedly say, oh, give up one of the key consolations of life, romantic love and sex, pay attention to yourself and think about, you know, your own sins and your own sacrifices that you have to make.
That's my only point about it.
I'm not saying that the decision to be abstinent for anybody, homosexual or heterosexual, is always wrong or not something you should do.
It's not my decision.
From Brian, hey, Andrew, I appreciate your take and insight and commentary and love listening to you daily.
My question is, where did you get the inspiration to write a book like Another Kingdom?
It's such a unique story and one that draws you in and is gripping and exciting with plot twists at every turn.
Also, what are some of your other books you would recommend?
I like thrillers, political espionage, and military thriller books.
Well, thank you.
The inspiration for Another Kingdom came to me out of nowhere.
I mean, really, I do believe it was from Another Kingdom.
I was stuck.
I was stuck on the idea of how to continue my novel writing career as a Christian with a new vision where some of the old questions and themes that applied to my old thrillers, even though I think that they are legitimate themes, were no longer coming out of the heart of me, that I had to kind of go back in time to write those books.
And I wanted to write the new things that were coming to me as a person who now had faith and was looking at things in a different way, and I could not solve the problem.
I didn't want to write happy talk, melon-headed Christian books where guys die and everybody celebrates because they're going to heaven because I don't feel, I don't experience life that way.
I don't think most people do.
And this story came to me full-blown.
It came to me from beginning to end, which never happens to me.
I couldn't believe it had happened, and I went to write down the outline.
I thought, I'll just write down a few sentences and wrote the entire outline very, very quickly.
I've been really happy with it.
I think it's one of the best things I ever wrote.
And that's where it came from.
From other books, if you like thrillers, I don't really write political espionage and military thrillers, but I've written politically tinged books.
True Crime is one.
Identity Man, Identity Man, it may not be the best book I ever wrote, but I think it is one of the most perfect books I ever wrote.
It's a book that really works.
And of course, Werewolf Cop.
Ignore the title and read it.
It's very good.
From Sarah.
Hi, Andrew.
My sister is a poster leftist.
I just got married a few months ago, and as soon as I got engaged, my sister went on and on about how the entire concept of marriage is barbaric.
She wasn't coming, which deeply hurt me.
I was engaged for a year.
She made my life much more stressful.
Two days before the wedding, she decided to come, but when she was there, she was rude to me and tried to be the center of attention by telling all my other guests about how awful I am.
I've tried to forgive her.
She has made it clear that she's not sorry and she thinks that her behavior was justified.
My question is, is it possible and necessary to forgive someone who's not sorry?
And is it useful to forgive them when you know they're going to continue treating you that way?
We've talked about this before, but do not confuse forgiving somebody, letting go of your grievances, with having them in your life.
Your sister is not just a leftist.
Her leftism is part of a disturbance she has in her head, part of which is focused on you.
There's no, absolutely no reason to have this woman come continually come, even though she's your sister, continually coming into your life to run you down, to talk to your friends, to make your life stressful.
You can let it go and not harbor anger against her.
And if you can, I think you should.
I think that will make your life happier.
But you don't, you know, she doesn't get a free pass to come into your life.
You have to set boundaries and say, no, if you're going to come into my life and run me down and make me unhappy and take the joy out of my wedding and take the joy out of my marriage, you don't get to be in my life.
I forgive you.
God bless you.
I hope things go well.
But no, you know, I'm not, you can't do that.
There's a difference between being forgiving towards someone and allowing someone to abuse you.
From Matthew, greetings to the reader of all the books.
It seems to me that Hamlet actually went insane instead of pretending to be insane when he said there is no right or wrong, but thinking makes it so.
I've heard you make the case before the other way around.
Where am I wrong?
Well, first of all, this is one of the great debates in literature.
So it's not like I have a definitive idea about it, whether Hamlet pretends to be insane to fool the king and get the goods on the king, or whether he has actually gone insane.
I believe that one of the underlying themes of Hamlet is the destruction of the authority of the church.
Hamlet is studying where, even though the play takes place before the Reformation, Hamlet is studying where the Reformation began, where Luther nailed up his 99 theses.
I've now forgotten how many theses it was, but he's studying there.
And what Shakespeare is saying is once the authority of the church is gone over time, how will you ever make a decision?
How will you know right from wrong?
How will you be able to tell when your emotions change the entire way the world looks?
How will you be able to tell what reality was?
Everything he said came true.
And in the mad scene, you see basically postmodernism and deconstructionism being worked out.
It's amazing.
I mean, every part of the theory of postmodernism and relativism and deconstructionism is there, including the relativistic statement, nothing's either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
And I think what Shakespeare is saying, I think that Hamlet is pretending to be mad, but his pretense is real.
So in other words, I think that his pretense covers up the disturbance of his mind, right?
And I think what Shakespeare is saying is anyone who says that, nothing's either good or bad, but thinking makes it so, is not just insane, but is pretending to be insane because he knows that's not true.
Nobody believes that.
Not one single person who says it believes it, except a psychopath like the Marquis de Sad, who really did believe it.
So I think it's very complicated, and I'm not making a definitive statement about it.
It is one of the big debates of literature.
From Anonymous, please keep me anonymous.
There's a renewed custody battle over my younger stepbrother.
He's eight.
His father was physically abusive to his mother, who's married to my father.
This little boy is a lovely kid, but he went off to visit the father for 10 days, came back suicidal, having night terrors, getting in trouble in school, swearing, writing dark poems.
I'm worried that if the father has continued custody of the boy, the boy will grow up to be really damaged if he hasn't taken his own life.
We have such a happy home, but it's agonizing to see the pain my brother is in.
I don't know if we should move to the U.S. to get away from this man.
We're all U.S. citizens living in the U.K. or any legal strategy we should employ to ensure sole custody.
The situation has been deteriorating for months, but has hit a climax.
Is there any recourse beyond the courts if they don't give his mother full custody?
Maybe I just want some words of advice and comfort from a wise old man, you.
All right.
Yeah, listen, these are terrible situations.
I'm really sorry you're in this situation.
The best thing you can do is get a lawyer and fight this out.
And if the lawyer recommends, I mean, get a good lawyer who knows about this.
If the lawyer recommends you leave the country, leave the country.
You have to protect yourself as well.
You have to make sure that your life is not ruined by this.
But, you know, obviously, if everything you're saying is true and I believe you, then this child needs to be protected from the psychopath.
The courts may well do that.
The courts may well be able to do that.
But you need to get legal advice.
Nothing I can tell you.
I'm not a lawyer.
Nothing I can tell you is going to trump the legal advice that you would get from a good lawyer who really knows about this stuff.
But you've got to do it.
You've got to fight the case because the kid needs defending and really is in a terrible, terrible situation.
This really does sound that from your description of the way he came back after this 10-day trip.
It really does sound like he's being abused and needs help.
So anything you can do to help him, but I think you've got to get legal power in there to do it.
I know a lot of people have been through this and the only way you can do it is through the law.
Because you don't want to live on the run, obviously.
From Jeremy to Mr. Clavin, I recently read an article from artofmanliness.com about etiquette for young men, encouraging the development of little habits to help one step out of themselves and think about other people in social interaction.
Do you have any suggested habits to help develop this attitude?
I'm a big believer in manners, a big believer in chivalry, in treating ladies like ladies.
I think it is incredibly helpful to take that extra time that it takes to open the door for your wife or girlfriend as she gets in the car, to stand up when she comes into a room, especially in a restaurant or something like this.
I just think all that stuff is really important because it, you know, how can you put this?
Everybody always says, oh, this is a way of men treating women like they're lesser creatures.
Completely untrue, completely untrue.
It is a way of declaring peace between the sexes and respect of the more powerful sex for what is often called the weaker sex because it is.
And I think it is a way of saying, you know, I am here.
If you believe as I do that men in the home should have a leadership role, that that leadership is in service.
It's service leadership, not tyrannical leadership.
It's all kinds of things that you should do.
Just take the little extra time.
I'm working really hard over Lent on keeping my mouth clean.
I try not to curse.
I always try not to curse in front of my wife, but I think I was slipping lately and I'm trying to work on that.
I think these rituals are incredibly important and the rituals of good manners for everybody, men and women, are incredibly important.
People ask me, because I've had this, from my end anyway, this blissful marriage, they always say, what's the secret?
One of the things I always say is be nice to each other.
Remember to say thank you for the things people do for you.
Remember to be appreciative of the things that you don't see them do the way that your life goes because of things that people do behind the scenes.
Don't forget those pleases and thank yous.
They mean an awful, awful lot.
Islam and Therapy Insights00:05:07
From Assad, hi, Andrew.
I was listening to your podcast yesterday and I have a question regarding your opinion on Islam.
I agree and in fact have seen myself the intense anti-Semitism that exists within the Muslim community both in the U.S. and in the Middle East.
My understanding though is that this anti-Semitism was deeply rooted within the culture of the Middle East and really had nothing to do with Islam itself.
I'm wondering if you believe that Islam and Judaism are truly incompatible.
This is referring to the rabbi we had on yesterday, I guess it is.
Or is it possible for Jews and Muslims to coexist and even thrive alongside each other?
Having read the Quran and having knowledge of some jurisprudence within Islam, I haven't seen anything that tells me to hate Jews.
So I was surprised when your guest rabbi made that statement.
Thanks for answering my question.
I love the way you open each segment.
You know, there are, I've read the Quran and there are texts in the Quran that seem anti-Jewish and texts in the Quran that seem to accept Judaism as a fellow brother of the book.
And so my belief with sacred texts is sacred texts, you can believe in a sacred text, but still believe that it has to be translated by the human heart.
God lives in the human heart.
He speaks in the human heart, as well as in sacred texts.
And I think that the human heart is a good way of making sure that stuff that was supposed to be taken in its time or supposed to be taken in a different context gets translated into the context we're in now.
My short way of saying is I don't believe Islam is doomed to be the worst form of Islam we see now.
I think it needs to be reformed.
Catholicism needed to be reformed to move into the modern world.
Some forms of Protestantism needed to be reformed to move into the modern world.
You know, St. Augustine, I think it was, said there's the book of scripture and there's the book of nature.
And when the book of nature contradicts the book of scripture, we need to read the book of nature carefully and see what it's saying.
And I think that it's clear that we need to not kill each other over God, that God does not want us to do that.
And those Muslims who find that out are going to transform Islam.
And that's why, by the way, I don't think we should be reticent to criticize other people's religions.
Sometimes it's when you're called out that you think like, I really don't have a good argument against this.
I'm going to have to make a change.
That's why I don't think we should be cowed and called Islamophobic when we point out the things that are going wrong in the House of Islam.
The House of Islam is in crisis.
The House of Islam is consumed with violence and consumed with hatred and certainly consumed with a hatred of the Jews.
That needs to be cleaned out.
Do I think it's impossible?
No, I don't think it's impossible.
I think it could very, very much happen.
One more.
I'm out of time, but I'll do one more.
From Jacob, dear Clavin the Wise, I am dating a woman who struggles with anxiety between coping strategies and daily medication.
She usually has a handle on it.
My opinion is that ideally medication should be a short-term thing, but I recognize that real life is messy.
I don't know what her position is.
How should I approach this situation?
I'm trying to figure out if I should marry her.
What is my role now?
And how will it change if I marry her?
P.S. I bought your book and look forward to reading it.
Well, thank you.
Boy, a lot of flags go up in this letter.
I got to tell you, she's on medication.
Is she on medication that was prescribed by a doctor?
Or is she just popping pills?
You know, what does that mean exactly?
Is she in therapy?
Has she got therapy?
Women, I have to say, in my experience, tend to be more anxious than men.
And that's why people are, doctors are always drugging them instead of seeing if there's some kind of underlying issue that might be rearranged to help them.
I mean, in my childhood, it was Valium.
Now it's Xanax, I guess.
And antidepressants, they're always filling women full of drugs, and I think it is just terrible.
But it's an important thing for you to find this out.
Is she always going to be drugged?
I have a pal who started taking anti-anxiety medicine.
From his point of view, it made his life better.
From my point of view, it killed him.
From my point of view, I looked in his eyes and I thought he's not in there anymore.
He hasn't got any spirit.
He hasn't got any stubbornness.
He hasn't got any will to fight back.
So I understood that it helped him, but I thought it was a terrible thing to do to himself.
You got to know this because when you're married to somebody who's very anxious, when you want to take the risks that you might want to take just to live a full life or the risks you want to take in business or the travel you might have to go on in business, she may be saying, oh, don't go away, I'm afraid.
She might be saying, don't do that, I can't stand it.
You know, she might really curtail your life.
And so you've got to know what this is.
I mean, you've got to know if there's a way to get to underlying issues and solve them.
If therapy will help, if the medication is really something she should be on, it is very important that you know that before you decide whether you're going to get married and that you discuss it with her, which that's the other red flag.
It doesn't sound like you've really talked to her about it and you really should be talking about it.
I'm out of time.
So I got to say goodbye.
We'll be back tomorrow.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Daily Wire Production Team00:00:31
Senior producer Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Adam Sajovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, Jussie Smollett gets off the hook for an awful race crime and Democrats humiliate themselves again over the Green New Deal.