Andrew Klavan skewers "woke" self-help’s toxic advice—from pressuring trans individuals into surgery to pushing promiscuity as therapy—before pivoting to the Mueller Report, exposing how the FBI weaponized the Clinton-funded Steele dossier to spy on Trump’s team without warrants, despite four GOP judges rubber-stamping it blindly. He slams mainstream media for ignoring this malfeasance while hyping Obama-era scandals, praising Fox News as the only outlet holding the FBI accountable, and mocks Mueller’s team for claiming investigations matter regardless of findings—a stark contrast to their past spin cycles. The episode also defends raw art over sanitized narratives, warns parents about leftist literary propaganda in universities, and argues overturning Roe should trigger state-level pro-life reforms, not just bans, framing cultural shifts as the real solution to abortion’s legacy. [Automatically generated summary]
Leftist universities are issuing new guidelines to help guidance counselors deal with troubled students.
Among the pieces of advice for woke adults trying to help young people maneuver through the difficult college years are these.
If a young woman who looks slim and fit tells you that in spite of her appearance she is obese and needs to lose 50 pounds, immediately put her in touch with a psychotherapist to cure her body dysmorphic disorder.
If a young man who looks like a young man tells you that in spite of his appearance he is a woman, immediately put him in touch with a surgeon to cut off his private parts.
If a young woman comes to you and says she's depressed because her boyfriend has left her, explain to her that she is a victim of oppressive patriarchal constructs meant to make her believe that women can only be completed in relationship and recommend that she begin to dress like a hag, sleep around like a slut, and then shriek in the faces of people who make her feel so very, very ashamed of herself.
Then she'll have no more problems with men.
If a young man comes to you and says he fears he may be gay, which conflicts with the religious beliefs that have always filled his life with joy and meaning, tell him to stop believing in God.
If a young person of color comes to you and tells you he feels awkward and uncertain of himself, tell him of course he does.
Everyone hates him because of his race.
And if he simply explains to all the white students that they have ruined his life by holding slaves before they were born and must now fork over some sweet, sweet reparations, he will then feel much better about himself.
With these few guidelines, woke advisors will now be able to guide their students to a better life from the moment they enter college to the moment they hang themselves.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped ipsy-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.
Well, I'm sure you can hear it after two weeks of doing nothing but traveling and talking.
I finally broke myself.
Knowles and I had a great event at Texas A ⁇ M yesterday.
It was really wonderful.
So many people showed up, great students.
And tonight, my latest YAF talk brings me to the University of Texas at Arlington.
I hope I have enough voice left to get through it.
The speech starts at 7 p.m., probably ends around 7.05.
It'll be in the science and engineering, innovation, and research building.
Come out, bring a friend, and bring some good questions, hopefully lengthy questions that just drag on and on so I don't have to talk too much.
You know, the new rules of American journalism are a little hard to follow.
To speculate on the causes of the Notre Dame fire is a great and terrible sin, but to speculate that the President of the United States has committed treason is just any given weekday on CNN.
To quote Congresswoman Ilhan Omar's despicable words back to her is to incite violence, but to relentlessly and repeatedly misquote the president to make him sound like a racist is an act of commentary.
To question the likely malfeasance of a powerful federal law agency like the FBI is to undermine America's faith in its institutions, but to denigrate the character of the Attorney General because he called spying spying is to speak truth to power.
It's all so confusing until you remember you're not dealing with a free and fair American press.
You're dealing with Democrats who happen to carry press cards.
And they call themselves journalists while they embarrass the name and the profession.
The Mueller Report is scheduled to be released tomorrow.
The press and the Democrats, but I repeat myself, are already spinning it every which way, but the one way that tells the truth.
The FBI spied on an opposition presidential campaign.
And right now, there's every reason to believe it was a political act without due predicate, a major scandal, which the Democrat press covered up.
All right, we're going to talk about that if I can continue talking.
And if not, we'll find out.
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And I know what you're thinking, sure, sure.
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We got the mailbag coming up.
Yeah!
She had to scream because I can't do it anymore.
But the mailbag, I will try.
Again, I'll try and push through it.
Very hard time talking, but I will push on.
Why Is Christopher Steele's Document Being Used?00:15:25
This thing with the Mueller report is amazing.
The lead up to this report, it comes out tomorrow.
Seth Meyer, the late-night comedian, said he's going to go long on his show, so he'll have a chance to talk about it because we're all just waiting, just with bated breath, our fingernails digging into our palms, waiting to hear what Seth Meyers thinks about the Mueller report.
It is just incredible.
Look, the thing is, there's nothing, not going to be anything in this report that shows that the FBI didn't use Christopher Steele's completely unbacked up document paid for by Hillary Clinton and the DNC.
There's nothing going to show that they didn't use that to get warrants.
It's nothing going to show that they had a real reason to have a special counsel in the first place.
They're going to go and look for obstruction of justice, but that's a completely ridiculous charge because all the president has done is use his power to fire the people he wanted to fire, which is no way an obstruction of justice.
They're going to spin it and spin it and spin it.
And the way you can tell is that they're spinning it already.
And this is truly despicable.
You know, Bill Barr, William Barr, the Attorney General, has had a long career.
It's been completely untouched by scandal.
When he went into office, they said, you know, he's not a political appointment.
Donald Trump did a good job.
Even the left was saying that.
Now, suddenly, because he called spying spying, right?
I mean, the CIA sent, the feds sent a CIA source to go and talk to Carter Page and George Papadopoulos and that other guy, Clovis, to try and draw stuff out about Russia.
The Obama Justice Department, the FBI, used that Christopher Steele document to get warrants to eavesdrop on Page's communications.
That was about three weeks before the 2016 election.
But it's not spying.
When he called it spying, he was absolutely destroyed by the press.
Here is a montage from our friends at Newsbusters of the press just turning on Bill Barr and treating him like garbage because he told the truth.
Democrats in Congress are on guard after today because the top lawyer in our land sounded like he was protecting the boss.
He's acting in bad faith fundamentally, right?
He's acting as an agent of the president as opposed to an independent arbiter.
It's almost impossible now to not see him as a political actor.
He's now looking more partisan.
Concern at all that Barr summary may not be an accurate reflection.
Barr cherry-picking particular words and phrases.
This is the guy that Donald Trump chose.
There's a reason.
Plenty of reason for Democrats to be suspicious.
Definitely suspicious, right?
Barr is going to do Trump's dirty work.
He is doing the president's dirty work here.
It is astonishing how quickly Bill Barr has settled into that role for the president.
He basically made up facts that he didn't know.
He looks like a classic Washington guy at the big desk out in front of the boss who protects the boss.
The Attorney General is trying to tear down law instead of trying to protect it.
He's acting more like a partisan advocate for Trump than he is like the Attorney General of the United States.
There are reasons to worry about Barr's objectivity.
Barr just injecting politics into this.
Nothing that has happened makes me trust Barr.
You ever watch those cop shows like the old one, NYPD Blue, or The Closer that kind of focus on the way cops treat suspects to elicit confessions from them?
And as the guy talks and talks, more and more of his personality comes out, more and more of his guilt comes out.
That's what you're seeing in the press.
Not one of the people you saw there, not one of the voices you heard there, thought to ask Christopher Steele, thought to ask themselves, does this steele document have any backing?
Not one of them thought when they were getting leaks from anonymous intelligence sources, why are they leaking this to me?
Not one of them did what a decent, those are things that a journalist would do.
Any decent person would say, I really hate Donald Trump.
Am I treating him fairly?
Am I doing the right thing here?
I really dislike this guy.
He really triggers me.
Am I treating him?
Am I using my power in a fair way where I'm serving my audience by telling them the truth?
Not one of them has done any of that.
And this nonsense, this absolute blithering, unjournalistic nonsense that we mustn't question the motives of the CIA and the FBI because that undermines the people's confidence.
That's about as the confidence in their institutions.
That's about as plausible as we shouldn't speculate about the cause of the fire in Notre Dame.
I mean, that is the kind of thing where you know exactly what they're thinking.
They're protecting themselves.
You want to hear like a guy who looks like a perp about to confess in one of those cop shows.
Listen to Joe Scarborough discuss the Mueller report and the FBI investigation before he knows anything.
Not only was there not any evidence whatsoever of that, improper spying or surveillance or whatever they want to call it, there's actually a lot of countervailing evidence that everything that was done was proper.
Because again, four, five federal judges approved the warrant.
They were all Republicans.
You had Republicans all around this process that were saying, yeah, this is something we need to look into.
Everything was done by the book and there were procedural safeguards, something that Donald Trump hates.
Everything was done by the book, Joe knows, because all of these judges were lied to.
None of them were told that the steel document was an op-piece of OPPO research that was being used as evidence for wiretapping American citizens.
I mean, nothing to see here at all.
There was not even a crime.
The special counsel is only supposed to be appointed when there's a crime to investigate.
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So the press just covering from themselves, covering their tracks, covering the things that they didn't do that anybody in the press ought to do, the questions they didn't ask.
Joe Scarborough saying, oh, nothing to see here, no malfeasance, nothing at all.
I mean, you only have to turn it around.
I know I've said this before, but you only have to turn it around and think of George W. Bush spying on Barack Obama.
You only have to turn it around to know which way the wind would blow.
And why is it?
Why is it?
They never stop.
They never ask themselves these questions.
They never say, huh, you know, the Christopher Steele document, completely unfounded.
No one's ever come up with proof.
No one's ever come up with the sources.
How can they do it?
How can they, as self-respecting journalists?
I mean, I got to say, I'm a partisan journalist.
I'm not even sure I call myself a journalist, but I'm a partisan.
But if I felt I was being gullible, if Donald Trump came out and said something, then I thought like, nah, I don't think so.
I would look into it.
I definitely would.
I have done.
You've heard me do it.
It's just all you're seeing is this guilt at the fact that they did not cover.
This is one of the biggest scandals in American history.
There's no question about it.
And they did not cover it.
So in order for this story, this narrative to continue, William Barr has to be the worst person in the world.
In order for this thing, we have to completely discredit him.
Why?
Because he said that they weren't going to charge Trump for obstruction.
And now they're going to look at the Mueller report and say, oh, how could he have passed this over?
And because he said, I want to look into the spying on the Trump campaign.
And he never said the spying was illegal because you can spy on somebody legally.
The CIA does it all the time.
He never said it was illegal.
He said that wiretapping people's phones, sending people to talk to them and elicit information from them.
That's spying.
And it's a big deal.
Listen to the way, just so you can hear how the Democrats and the press are one, as always.
Listen to Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland.
Listen to him just ripped this guy's reputation apart for no reason.
I think when he used the obviously political charge expression of spying, he lost whatever credibility he may have had because that was, again, music to President Trump's ears.
Trump immediately tweets it out.
He says that, you know, that a boy, Attorney General Barr.
If he just was referring to the surveillance that we know took place pursuant to the FISA warrant and, by the way, is currently being reviewed by the Inspector General at DOJ.
That's one thing.
But spying in itself has obviously negative connotations and suggests that there was wrongdoing.
So, you know, he later had to try to put the toothpaste back in the tube because he admitted at the hearing he had no evidence of wrongdoing that he was going to present to the committee.
So all he did was float this charge.
The president loved it.
And unfortunately, in the process, the Attorney General further undermined his credibility as an independent arbiter of justice.
This is a full court press that includes both the court and the press.
It's a full court press to basically discredit Barr before this thing comes out.
This is spin, spin, spin before the axe drops.
Now, of course, after it comes out, you're going to get a whole new spin about obstruction of justice and about this evidence of guilt and new trails.
There's never going to be a point, never, ever going to be a point, when anybody from the New York Times, a former newspaper, to any of these guys, turns to the FBI and says, wait just a minute.
Really what we need is a grand jury investigation.
We really need a, Bill McGurren was saying this in the Wall Street Journal yesterday.
We need a grand jury investigation that brings James Comey, all these guys, Andrew McCabe, all the investigators, Brennan, Clapper, all of them, up before a grand jury where they have to testify under oath about how this thing got started and what they did.
Just looking.
I mean, it is amazing Trump's magical power to destroy people.
It's not that he destroys people, is he gets them to destroy themselves.
And he has now decimated the press.
The American press is a shell.
It's dust.
It's nothing.
Because they hated Trump so much, they gave away everything.
They gave away all their integrity.
They gave away all their principles, all their practices they abandoned, and now they look utterly ridiculous.
You know, there's this guy, Jeffrey Toobin.
I've played him before on Fox.
I guess he's their legal analyst.
He's just a complete partisan.
I don't even know why we have to listen to him speak because we always know what he's going to say, the worst, the ugliest thing.
It really is almost distressing to hear this guy's, the hate pouring out of the guy.
But he comes on, just listen.
This is a complete sign of guilt.
There is one, one cable station, one cable station up against all the networks, up against all the other cable stations, one cable station where many of the commentators support Donald Trump.
That's the problem for Jeffrey Tooby.
He's got an entire cable news network that is going to elaborate and repeat and guarantee that Trump's message gets out there.
I mean, Fox News will be an incredible asset to the president that Richard Nixon didn't have in the 1970s, that Bill Clinton didn't have in the 1990s.
And that echo chamber is going to announce this as a vindication regardless of what the 400 pages say.
He's damn right Richard Nixon didn't have that.
The one place Fox has been right.
Fox has been right.
The commentators at Fox have been right.
I wouldn't have always said this when this thing began.
I wasn't saying it.
It just became slowly clearer and clearer and clearer that they had nothing on Trump and that the investigation itself was started in a very cheesy, very suspicious way.
Fox has been right.
Fox has been doing the job that the New York Times and the Washington Post and certainly CNN have not done.
They're the ones who ask, why is this source giving me this piece of information?
Why is Christopher Steele's document being used?
What are the connections between Christopher Steele and Bruce Orr and all these people who were in the FBI and in the Justice Department?
Why was Jeff Sessions pressured into recusing himself?
This is a scandal.
You know, it is a weird, weird thing.
I mean, you know Sean Hannity on Fox, very big Trump partisan.
I don't always agree with him.
Sometimes I think he goes too far.
He's right about this.
He's just right about it.
And I think that's an embarrassment.
It's an embarrassment to the mainstream press when a partisan guy like Hannity is right and they're supposedly, you know, mainstream down-the-road objective journalists are not.
Again, just to show you the guilt.
Andrew McCabe, guy fired for lying about leaking information.
So one of the people who was working with the press, hoping against hope that there still might be something in this Mueller report that can be spun to show that he shouldn't go to jail for doing what he did.
The fact that Director Mueller has supposedly concluded that he found no evidence of collusion.
So he didn't find enough evidence to indicate the existence of a conspiracy at the level that you would need to bring some sort of, I guess, a federal charge.
Does that mean we shouldn't have investigated it?
Absolutely not.
We don't start investigations driving at a conclusion.
We don't consider investigations to have been a waste of time or unwarranted simply because they ended up in a place where you didn't expect them to end up.
You start investigations because you have an obligation to do your job.
And our job at that moment, when we have that articulable suspicion, is to conduct the investigation to ensure that we and the Justice Department and maybe in some circumstances the world will know if in fact that threat existed.
And it's just as valuable to be able to say, no, it didn't.
I mean, absurd, right?
We don't start investigations with anything in mind.
We just pick out a guy and we investigate him.
We don't start investigation because we think there's a crime or because we have proof of a crime or because we have, you know, some kind of relevant evidence.
It's just as useful for us to find out that you didn't do anything than it is as it is for us to find out you did do something.
So we just look around, we pick out a guy.
Oh, there's a guy with kind of funny orange hair who just happens to be running for president.
He'd be an interesting guy to investigate.
I mean, the way these guys are talking, you can just see the cop leaning over the desk and saying to him, Pal, this isn't making sense.
You know, this isn't making sense to me.
Why don't you just come clean and get it off your chest?
He Ran Clean00:05:45
You'll feel a lot better.
It really is.
It really is an embarrassment.
Just the way they're behaving.
And this is before the report comes out.
This is before they have stuff to work with and stuff that they can spin.
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You know, this is truly an amazing scandal.
I think I'll let Lindsey Graham have the last word.
Let him sum up what's happened.
They accused Trump of changing all the rules in Washington.
I would suggest that all the rules have been changed to get Trump.
Kavanaugh's nominee was not presumed innocent because he was a conservative.
The way they treated Brett Kavanaugh was to try to destroy his life and drive him out of wanting the job, hoping he would quit.
They're attacking Bill Barr now, one of the most seasoned, highly respected legal minds in the United States.
Nothing's changed about Bill Barr since he was Attorney General under Bush 41.
The only thing has changed is the desire to get Trump, no matter how you have to get him.
That's a very clear statement of exactly what's happened, anything you can do.
And you know, it's really hard to talk about this without remembering Barack Obama's eight years of scandal-free administration, without looking back and saying, you know, fast and furious, no scandal.
IRS, no scandal.
Benghazi and lying about Benghazi, no scandal.
Clinton meeting with Loretta Lynch on the runway, no scandal.
Hillary Clinton letting her emails just go floating back, her classified emails go floating around, no scandal.
This is the press during Barack Obama, at the end of Barack Obama's administration.
We've played this at least a dozen times.
It's worth hearing again.
And he's been scandal-free, frankly, in the White House.
We haven't had that for a while.
He ran an administration that was largely scandal-free.
There's a White House that takes pride in being scandal-free.
That in the Obama years, which are remarkably scandal-free.
A lot of people were talking about how he's going to be remembered for the scandal-free administration that he ran.
The president has been very rightfully proud of the lack of scandal in his administration so far.
There's been no major scandals of brown top aides.
But President Obama has run an amazingly scandal-free administration, not only he himself, but the people around him, these chosen people who have been pretty scandal-free.
This has been a scandal-free administration for the last eight years.
And oftentimes people don't even talk about that fact.
Yeah, because it's not true.
You know, that's your press at work.
That's your press that's going to go to work tomorrow as this report comes out to try and spin it yet again into a new scandal.
Listen, you know, you've heard me say things about Trump and how he bothers me at times, but it is amazing to me.
It is amazing to me the way they have treated this guy and the way essentially they've treated themselves, what they have done to themselves.
I mean, that is really the kind of embarrassing scandal of the press in the Trump administration is what the American journalists have done to themselves after eight years of lying on their bellies, waiting to be lying on their backs, waiting to have their bellies scratched by Barack Obama.
It really, it's truly an embarrassment.
And you'll notice, by the way, that Obama has kind of disappeared from all conversations of where the country is, of what its problems are.
We don't hear about the fact that Trump destroyed ISIS, but we don't hear about the fact that it's Obama who let ISIS spread.
You know, we hear about, there's a piece in the New York Times today, a former newspaper, about how red states, the states that voted for Trump, are doing quite well now.
They're doing a little bit better.
They're clawing back from an Obama administration, an Obama administration in which they did much, much worse than the blue states did.
But there's no mention of Obama.
He calls them Clinton states versus Trump states, but there's no mention of Obama.
It is like this guy has vanished.
So we don't remember, we do not remember what his policies did, no matter how much you like him personally.
We don't remember what his policies did to this country and why Donald Trump was summoned by the middle of this country to come and basically bring them back online on economic line because they've been forgotten.
He's done his job.
You know, he's not the nicest person in the world.
He has a kind of a sleazy, a lot of sleazy stuff in his past, but he's doing a good job as president.
He does not deserve, he does not deserve to have this deep state come after him while the press covers it up.
We got the mailbag coming up.
Abortion Debates & Cultural Shifts00:15:51
Got to say goodbye.
Like I said, we got to say goodbye to wherever we're saying goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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Then you too can be in the mailbag.
It's a little stuffy and uncomfortable, but you get to answer, ask me any question you want about anything in your life, your religious ideas, political beliefs, your personal life.
All my answers are guaranteed correct, as you will see, 100% guaranteed correct and will change your life sometimes for the better.
Stay tuned for the mailbag.
All right, first, the mailbag.
That's just what I was going to say.
Oh, here's one from Jake.
Jake wrote in last time, maybe two weeks ago, I'm not sure.
He said he was hesitating about asking his girlfriend to marry him because he didn't have a job yet.
And I guess I kind of went off on him a little bit.
And he writes back today saying, thanks for the tough love in the mailbag.
I proposed to my girlfriend last night and she said yes.
So well done.
Good job.
And it shows she has faith in you, right?
She doesn't need to see that you have your job lined up.
You're still in school.
She doesn't need to see that.
She believes that you will do it, that you will do well.
Do well.
Make her justify her faith.
From Sarah, hi, Andrew Clavin with no ease.
Long time listener.
I'm struggling to raise my children to be Christians in a very fallen world.
And your willingness to embrace expressions of the most vile sin while creating Christian movies with pornography struck me dumb.
A little bit of kidding around there, Sarah, but still, I did say that.
I'm not saying that Christian movies are terrific in their acting, direction, and production, which, by the way, is what makes movies terrific, plus the writing.
But how do you square your perspective with Philippians 4, 8, Colossians, a number of Bible verses?
I'll get to those in a minute.
You have often said that anger is the devil.
It's cocaine.
I have always thought that guilty laughter is the devil's cocaine.
If the devil can get you to laugh at sin, he's got you comfortable with it, and you're moved incrementally away from God and towards sin.
So basically, she's saying, I can't watch many shows or movies without a deep sense of disturbance.
I have to wonder at the wisdom in allowing myself to grow accustomed to depravity.
How can you immerse yourself in filth and stay clean in Christ's love, soon-to-be, Dr. Sarah?
Well, first of all, this Philippians quote, I won't quote all the verses, but the Philippians quote, people are always throwing this at me when they see that my characters curse, when they see that I watch Game of Thrones, when they see that I have sex scenes in my books.
They always throw Philippians at me, and it is whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable.
If anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things.
So, what would a work of art be like that only had people doing noble, lovely, admirable, excellent, or praiseworthy things?
It would not be a work of art.
It would be a work of trash and dishonesty.
Philippians begins with, whatever is true, I think all those things, nobility, loveliness, admirableness in the arts, are about representing the truth.
That is what the arts do.
They tell the truth.
And if you can't tell the truth, if you don't want to hear the truth, if you think that somehow your life is better by reading, you know, Nambi-Pamby Christian stuff where everybody does the right thing and all the bad people are punished and all the good people win praise, if that's what you want, don't go to the arts.
Go to that.
I mean, that's what you do, but that's not what I do.
I'm an artist.
The fact that you have children doesn't enter into this because we can't live in a world where everything is geared toward children, where every movie is made so that only children can watch it.
I do not think I've written books for children.
They're squeaky clean.
They have no bad words in them.
They have no sex in them.
Those are books for younger people.
When I write for adults, I write about adult things.
I write about the world as it is because I believe you can only find God in the world as it is.
You can't find God in Nambi-Pamby silliness.
And as for laughing, I gave a whole speech about this at Hillsdale.
As for laughing at sin, it really depends why you're laughing.
If you're laughing because you don't understand the pain that sin causes or the twistedness that it causes or the physical destruction that it causes, well, yeah, then you're being depraved.
But if you're laughing, as I laugh at sin, and I do laugh at sin, there's no question about it.
I find some sin very funny.
If you are laughing at corruption and sin because it's absurd, It's because you have an understanding of human nature in keeping with original sin.
You understand that humans are made to be better than they are, and that's funny.
It's funny when a guy in a tuxedo falls in a mud puddle.
It's funny when a society woman is hit in the face with a pie.
It is funny when a group of people who were made to walk with God in the garden of paradise instead spend their time cheating and lying and hurting each other.
There's something absurd and funny about that.
Obviously, when people start to suffer physical destruction, it stops being funny.
But until then, when you're dealing with things like the parents who cheated their kids' ways into school, there is something absurd and funny about it if you understand that they were supposed to be something so much better than they are.
So again, don't come, the arts do a thing, just like a car does a thing, right?
A car takes you someplace.
The arts take you someplace.
You cannot take people to those places without telling the truth.
Not all truth has to be in every art.
Some good art, like Game of Thrones, can also be exploitive.
In the opening episode of this new season, there was a nude scene in it that had absolutely no point and purpose.
It was just to put naked ladies on screen.
I enjoyed it very much, but it was absolutely nothing to do with advancing the story.
But some scenes that show horrible, horrible things can, in fact, be part of getting at the truth.
I always reference The Sopranos, one of my favorite TV shows, which was filled with depravity and yet was uplifting because it showed the moral world.
That's the way the arts work.
If you don't like the arts, don't use them.
But if you do like them, be prepared for uncomfortable truths.
All right, from Cassie.
My son is a junior in high school this year and we're starting to do some college visits.
After reading Crime and Punishment early in their year, which is a favorite of yours also, it certainly is.
He set his heart on being an English major.
While listening to your interview with Professor Paul Ray from Hisdale, Hillsdale, I felt very disheartened.
Should I be concerned letting my son go into this major?
What should we be looking for on these college visits?
Of course, Shakespeare in the curriculum is a must, but what else?
Thanks for any advice.
Great question.
Yes, you should be concerned.
Yes, you should talk to people about whether or not they are going to let the artist speak or whether they're going to drown out the artist with their own left-wing theories.
Are they going to teach kids what Shakespeare was trying to say or are they going to teach them what they have to say about sexism, racism, this and that, colonialism, or whatever?
Are they going to teach what Jane Austen wrote or are they going to teach their ideas about what Jane Austen wrote?
Are they going to diss the great literature of the time and throw it overboard just because they want to find some guy whose skin was a different color, who didn't write half as well as Jane Austen?
Is that what they're going to do?
You've got to ask these questions.
Last night, after our presentation, Knowles and I met with some of the donors and others at Texas A ⁇ M, and we were discussing the ways the right has left the culture slip.
And they were saying Texas A ⁇ M is a very conservative school, great school, huge, like 65,000 students.
And they were saying, you know, there are a lot of departments where the ideas have to work.
And of course, all those departments are conservative because conservative ideas work.
So the agriculture department, the engineering department, science departments, those people are conservatives.
But in the arts, where ideas don't have to prove themselves, leftists are coming in.
And I said, you know, I know that seems harmless, but it's really not.
And we started talking, and among us, we came up with the idea that really there should be as a federalist society for liberal arts teachers.
They have a federalist society for judges, and Trump is appointing justices to the Supreme Court from the lists, from the Federalist Society.
It trains judges in constitutional law and not imposing leftist ideas on the country.
I think that there should be a federalist society that trains people on how to teach the art that was being written, how to teach the literature that was being written.
What did Chaucer mean?
Why do we teach Virgil and Homer?
What were they trying to say?
Instead, what you have are these great minds crying out to us with the truth from generations past, and they're drowned out by this latest theory about sexism or feminism or whatever, or race or whatever the hell it is.
And that is incredibly, incredibly destructive.
It is not teaching literature.
It's not teaching literature.
It is propaganda.
It's child abuse.
It is abusing young people by depriving them of their literary heritage and the heritage of ideas that made them who they are.
It is a true abuse.
So, yeah, be worried.
Go to Hillsdale.
You know, if you're going to go to someplace like this, go to places where the professors are trying to teach the good, the true, and the beautiful, and this legacy that's been handed down to us of literature and ideas.
From Nicholas, desiring your thoughts, O shiny-headed bearded one.
Just finished watching the combative debate between Bernie Sanders and Martha McCallum and Brett Baer.
There are parts where I thought he was outright rude.
I thought his ideas were insane, but I also find him likable, if not lovable.
Liberals usually incite me.
Bernie was entertaining.
Any explanation?
Is this his appeal, crazy, old, yet lovable crank?
Bernie's appeal is that he's a true believer.
Bernie has believed in communism.
He never saw the Soviet Union fall.
He never saw the dead of Cuba.
He's never seen the people eating roasted cats in Venezuela.
It just, he is so blind, so entirely immersed in his own world that his hypocrisy and not paying taxes, his hypocrisy and not giving a lot of money to charity, his hypocrisy and wanting to make a million dollars for himself, but not wanting you to make a million dollars without being taxed to death.
It's all kind of charming because he's like an old crazy man.
He's like an old crazy man.
He has never had that moment that so many intellectuals had after Stalin when they said, oh, I get it.
This communism, socialism sounds like a good idea, but it collects power too completely in the government and it leads to abuses.
He's never had that moment.
So he lives in this fog of fantasy in which his own hypocrisy, his own sins in vacationing in the honeymooning in the Soviet Union while it was a slave state, in praising the mass murderer Castro and Shea, those sins have never occurred to him.
And there is something charming about that because it's kind of like a delightful, crazy old uncle who keeps spouting the same thing.
You get kind of used to it after a while.
And I think that it's different than people like Ekasio-Cortez who are ignorant and obstreperous and unkind and attack people when they're attacked because they don't want to come out of their ignorance and their stupidity.
Sanders isn't like that.
Sanders is a true believer.
I think he actually has that much integrity, though not enough integrity to notice his own past malfeasance, his own past bad acts, and his own hypocrisy.
All right, from Jeremiah.
Almighty and powerful Lord Clavin, knower of the unknown and seer of the unseen, I am on my way out of the military and on my way into law enforcement.
I've taken the time to think through this decision, but didn't make it known to my family for quite some time because I did not want their views influencing what is ultimately my decision.
I broke the news three, four months ago.
A few family members have been so disapproving of the decision that they'll barely speak to me.
I feel a responsibility to protect and serve, but I'm not sure how to deal with the family's views of this decision.
I understand why they feel how they feel, but I'm at a loss for how to help them cope.
What should I do?
Well, you don't mention what their objections are, so I don't know.
I assume they object to the risk.
I mean, I guess that's the only thing I can think of their objecting to the danger that you face or maybe the hours.
I don't know.
This is your decision.
This is something that you have to decide.
And what you do with relatives, if their objections are objections of love, like they're worried about you, just be very kind, be very reassuring, and go about in your quiet way doing what you have to do.
People like you are invaluable.
It is a great thing you're doing.
You've already served your country.
You're going to serve your neighborhood.
You're going to serve the people around you.
You are, in fact, a hero.
You will be, continue to be a hero.
Heroes sometimes get shouted at even by the people who love them.
As Rudyard Kipling said, you have to arrange your life so that neither friends, neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you.
So listen to them, be nice to them, try to soothe their fears, but do what you have to do.
From Kyle, Dear Mr. Clavin, Lord of the Multiverse, I was recently having a conversation with a friend of mine about abortion.
We both agree that it's murder, but we're afraid that his friend brought up an interesting point that if abortion were made illegal, there's a high chance that dangerous black markets would form for abortions because lots of people think there's nothing wrong with it.
This could lead to deaths of women.
This is the classic abortion argument that there'll be back alley abortions with coat hangers.
There weren't actually that many before it was legalized, but you might be right.
There might be more now.
So do we have to take back the culture first before abortion is made illegal to ensure that this doesn't happen?
Thank you and love the show.
What I imagine would happen if we can repeal Roe v. Wade, which is truly bad law, very bad decision.
It overrides people's right to make their laws in their neighborhoods, but it should be sent back to the states.
And when it's sent back, I mean, even murder is a state crime.
It's not a federal crime in most cases.
And so if abortion law goes back to the states, what I imagine there will be is there will be what they're supposed to be in our federal system, which is experimentation with different rules in different states.
Some states will have no abortion.
Some states will have easy access abortion.
And of course, people can travel between states.
But what would be interesting is if some of the states that have no abortion also have enhanced facilities for adoption and counseling and rescue, because it's no good just to say you can't have an abortion.
Abortion Law Experimentation00:02:03
You also have to say this baby is wanted by society even if you don't want it.
Even if it's painful to you to bring this baby into the world, your culture wants this baby.
And we will make sure that there is a place for this child to go.
And so when you have states that do that, I think that can be very infectious.
When you have healthy states, I mean, when you have healthy places, people want to be part of it and sign on to that system and that culture.
So that's how I think you win that argument over time.
A lot of children are going to die between now and then.
But I think that we really do, it's not enough to build a culture of no abortion.
We really do have to build a culture of life, and that's going to happen one state at a time in our federal system.
I hope it does happen.
I hope that Roe v. Wade goes down.
It's bad law.
It's bad for the culture.
It's part of why we're so divided because we haven't had a chance to argue this out ourselves.
And I think the states, I trust the states to come up with different rules that can be tested in the flow of time.
And I think that's the only answer.
And it was the answer that we were moving toward when the Supreme Court mucked it up, as they did with gay marriage.
I mean, they just imposed a rule instead of letting us work it out for ourselves.
I got to stop.
I'm really sorry for my voice sounding the way it does, but hopefully I'll rest it up.
I don't think I'm, my plane got canceled, so I'm not sure I'm going to be back until Friday.
Hopefully, I'll be able to rest up my voice, maybe get some antibiotics, and come back full steam.
Although I am, I do think I do the conversation tomorrow.
I do think I do a conversation tomorrow.
So maybe, yeah, so I'll see you for that and hopefully be able to speak a little better.
I hope you'll be there.
I'll be signing books.
I'll be signing Another Kingdom.
Go buy Another Kingdom.
Would you go on Amazon.com and get yourself a copy of Another Kingdom?
Get five, get some for your friends.
You really will like it.
Even if you heard the podcast and enjoyed the podcast, here you can read it without Michael Knowles getting in the way, and you really get to see some of the inner workings of the book.
Another Kingdom, it's on Amazon by me.
You will like it, I promise.
Another Kingdom Signing Event00:00:50
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring, senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Adam Sajovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, The Washington Post prints an op-ed going after me.
Media Matters rushes to join in and Rolling Stone celebrates Notre Dame Burning.