Ep. 695 skewers Venezuela’s socialist collapse—where Maduro, propped up by Russia and Cuba, clings to power amid U.S. threats of sanctions and military intervention—while mocking figures like AOC and Bernie Sanders for ignoring its failures. The episode ties Putin’s disinformation to U.S. media bias, pivots to abortion debates rejecting the "violinist analogy," then shifts to listener questions on faith, parenting, and suicide prevention, all while framing Venezuela as a cautionary tale of socialism’s inevitable chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
Socialist Venezuela is going up in flames, and as socialist tyrant Nicolas Maduro sends his socialist army to run socialist trucks over anti-government protesters, socialist Democrats here in America are saying that socialism has nothing to do with it.
At the Socialist New York Times, a former newspaper, socialist editor-in-chief Blithering Prevarication III, explained Venezuela's collapse to a gathering of socialists over champagne and caviar at the Socialist Yacht Club on Park Avenue and 46th Street, saying, quote, The problem is, lads, they did the wrong socialism, don't you know?
They did the sad socialism with breadlines and all that nasty oppression.
What you want to do is the happy socialism with rainbows that shower chocolate caramels filled with magic money that pays for your health care.
Then everything is just peachy, unquote.
Socialist Alexandria socialist Ecazio Socialist Cortez streamed a video on Instagram during which she prepared socialist carrot rosettes on a bed of socialist marzipan while swigging his socialist Rambauer Chardonnay with enticing aromas of socialist vanilla.
In the video, she explained, quote, what the Venezuelans didn't understand is that socialism only works when you move your hands around a lot and speak very passionately to people who know absolutely nothing about economics or history.
It's only when you start actually doing it in real life that you wind up roasting cats over a trash fire, unquote.
Socialist actor Sean Penn, who supported socialist dictator Hugo Chavez, who helped send socialist Venezuela on its socialist path into socialist bankruptcy and disorder, says he actually meant to support Hugo Boss, who made the great great suit he's wearing.
In a statement released by his sobbing agent, Penn said, quote, at the time I supported Chavez, I was playing that retarded guy and I am Sam, and I guess I got a little too into the part, if you know what I mean, unquote.
Socialist Bernie Sanders said he didn't know what everyone was so upset about, then he and his wife flew to Caracas for their second honeymoon.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey, life is tickety boo.
Andrew Clavin Show: Teeth Examination00:02:57
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-ding.
Ship-shaped hipsy-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, you got to hand it to Vladimir Putin.
He may be a second-rate thug, but he's a first-rate, second-rate thug.
He's turned his crumbling gangsterocracy into a genuine threat to world stability and to our safety.
He's got every member of the media from Joe Scarborough to Joe Scarborough, since basically they're all Joe Scarborough, dancing to his tune on this collusion hoax.
And I personally have seen more than circumstantial evidence that he's running Adam Schiff as an asset.
And while I'm lying, so is Schiff, and Schiff's lies help Putin.
And his meddling in Venezuela, Putin's meddling in Venezuela, is just the sort of colonialism the Monroe Doctrine has forbidden in our hemisphere since the early 19th century.
Putin is a bad guy.
He is a murderer.
He's an imperialist, and he's an oppressive bigot.
He's a world-stage al Capone.
But he's done us one big favor.
Right now in Venezuela, he is putting on a televised exhibition on why socialism is bad, why gun rights are good, and why Donald Trump and his team of foreign policy tough guys may be just the thing the world needs.
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It's Mailbag Day.
going to talk about it.
We're just going to play that for the next 25 minutes until we get to the over and over.
Pompeo's Cuba Threat00:06:50
I don't know.
This is starting to unnerve me.
I'm just going to have a twitch by the end of the show.
So Juan Guedo, right?
He's attempted to oust Nicolas Maduro yesterday.
May Day is coming up.
Today is May Day.
And there'll be probably more demonstration.
But so far, this has not succeeded.
It may already have failed.
We just don't know where it's going to go yet.
And that is bad.
It is bad for Venezuela.
It's bad for us.
Guedo, obviously, is a socialist leader.
He was through the Constitution of Venezuela.
He was legally appointed the leader of the country.
Nicolas Maduro will not let go of his hold on power.
He was elected in a total fraud election.
Maduro, he's just a dictator.
That's all he is.
A Cuba-backed, backed by Cuban thugs who has taught his people how to oppress the people.
And of course, backed, as always, as everything Cuba does, backed by Russia, backed by Putin, which is now starting trouble in our hemisphere.
So Guedo came out, and Guedo is supported by all the good guys, America and Europe, and all the right people support him.
All the bad guys, China, Russia, North Korea, they support Maduro.
Of course, they do because they're thugs as well.
So Guado comes out and he's got some soldiers behind him and he says, the soldiers are with me.
Come and defect.
He's calling out to the soldiers to come and defect.
Some of them seem to have some of his, the security forces that are backing Maduro up seem to not be that loyal.
A prisoner was released and it's all kind of confusing.
And of course, the people took to the streets and Maduro answered by sending out his troops firing rubber bullets, firing real bullets, driving trucks, these armored vehicles over them.
An absolute, absolute disaster.
And, you know, this is Pompeo, the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, who, by the way, is really proving himself a very, very high-level appointment.
So good for Donald Trump for putting Pompeo in there.
He's doing an excellent, excellent job.
Pompeo comes out and he says that Maduro was ready to leave.
He was ready to escape to Cuba.
He told Wolf Blitzer on CNN he was ready to escape to Cuba when the Russians talked him out of it and talked him into staying and keeping his boot heel on the throat of the Venezuelan people.
It's been a long time since anyone has seen Maduro.
He had an airplane on the tarmac.
He was ready to leave this morning, as we understand it.
The Russians indicated he should stay.
We think the situation remains incredibly fluid.
We know that there were senior leaders inside the Maduro government that were prepared to leave.
They told us as much over the past few weeks.
And we're convinced that the Venezuelan people are going to get their democracy back.
So, I mean, this is real, real stuff because this is a communist threat.
Yeah, it's a communist threat, basically, in our hemisphere.
This is Putin moving up the line from Cuba into Venezuela.
It's a genuine danger.
And Trump tweeted out.
He said if Cuban troops and militia do not immediately cease military and other operations for the purpose of causing death and destruction to the Constitution of Venezuela, a full and complete embargo together with the highest level sanctions will be placed on the island of Cuba.
Hopefully all Cuban soldiers will promptly and peacefully return to their island.
So listen, and Cuba, of course, is Putin too.
I mean, basically, I mean, this is like back to the Cold War days, but that's what Putin is looking for.
That's the kind of trouble he is trying to start.
And Pompeo points this out.
I mean, he says this is all about the Russians.
This is cut five.
Maduro is surrounded by Cubans and has been supported by Russians there in Venezuela.
And we've told the Russians and we've told the Cubans that's unacceptable.
It's unacceptable to starve people.
It's unacceptable to allow sick children not to be able to get their medicine.
The nations of the region, the Lima Group, the Organization of American States are all demanding that we get democracy restored and that we get dignity back to this once great nation.
It's a country that has the capacity for great wealth.
And the United States is prepared to stand with the Venezuelan people to support the interim government to help a free and fair election take place and then to build back this country.
And so, of course, the minute this happens, everybody starts worrying about American military intervention.
Trump has said that is on the table.
Of course, it has to stay on the table.
You can't just say, I'm not going to do it because then you lose all your threat power.
And, you know, you hear the usual suspects on this start to complain.
We shouldn't get involved.
I believe Tucker Carlson was complaining about this.
I mean, Tucker is a, I like Tucker.
He's a good guy.
He's an really interesting voice.
But I think that he does get a little bit, you know, overworried about intervention.
I am not a neocon.
I am for as few foreign wars as possible.
I think that George W. Bush, looking back, overreacted, if that's possible, to 9-11, kind of created a plan too big for him to complete, and he ran it badly.
If he had run it a little better, maybe it would have worked better.
I don't know.
But it went on too long.
That's not what I'm looking for.
I'm not looking for an invasion of Venezuela.
But this is something you genuinely have to take seriously.
This is a dick.
You know, Putin, as I keep saying, he's a gangster, and he kills journalists.
He kills the opposition.
He thrives on anti-Semitism.
He thrives on anti-gay, on, you know, if you want to call it homophobia, attacking people, this kind of mock religious attitude that he takes.
He's just the KGB turned into the government of Russia.
And to have him in our hemisphere, he's already expanded his, you know, his hold in his area, but to have him moving on our area is a serious, serious threat.
And so Wolf Blitzer, the thing that Blitzer said as well, you know, he's got missiles in there.
How could we ever invade?
And this is Pompeo's response, his third cut.
The president has made very clear that all options are on the table.
That certainly includes a military option.
We're working to make sure that doesn't need to be the case, that we deliver this outcome for the Venezuelan people in a way that doesn't put life and limit risk and there's not violence.
But I don't think anyone should be fooled that if the president makes that decision, if he chooses a military option, that the United States military has the capacity to execute that option.
So I want to talk a little bit about what we're watching.
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Guns, Stories, and Principles00:15:42
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The answer will be K-L-A-V-A-N.
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And Clavin, I just make it look this easy, really.
So I want to go back in time a little bit and play some clips that we have played on this show before, because what we're watching is we're watching the collapse of the promise of socialism.
And all these people are saying, well, that's not the real socialism.
It's always not the real socialism.
You know, believe me, when the Soviet Union started, there were a million American intellectuals.
Lenin called them useful idiots who thought, this is it.
This is the wave of the future.
I've seen the future and it works.
The New York Times covered up the starvation, the forced starvation of the Stalin regime.
China was going to be the next big thing, and that went down the drain.
Socialism does this to people.
But I just want to play for you.
Remember, I talked about this yesterday.
The deep state, the media, the entertainment media, the universities.
It's all one thing.
It is all elites who think that they should be the people who control things, who think the wise, the experts.
Life is just too complicated for this democracy business anymore.
Those fat guys out in the mid, those deplorable fat guys with their checkered shirts.
They can't make decisions for themselves.
And this whole thing is about that.
That's what it's about.
But let me just play a couple of clips that we've played before.
Stephen Colbert explaining socialism.
I mean, this is a guy who has a huge, huge platform, and here he is explaining socialism to his audience.
On Halloween, kids literally go door to door to get free candy from the neighbors because the kids don't have it and the neighbors do.
That's socialism.
That's socialism.
Now, that would be true if the kids had guns.
Okay, if the kids showed up at your door and said, trick-or-treat, give me candy, and they took your candy whether you wanted to give it to them or not, that would be socialism.
That, I mean, it's amazing that a comedian goes on TV and says that.
I mean, just, but thank heaven, we're seeing what's happening in Venezuela because that has a big audience too.
That's the truth.
Colbert is full of it.
But here's another line.
This one is from Bill Maher, another line that is very popular on the left.
Republicans have to explain, if socialism is such a one-way ticket to becoming the nightmare of Venezuela, then why do all the happiest countries in the world embrace it?
The UN just came out with their annual World Happiness Rankings, and the top ones are all socialist-friendly places, like Finland and Norway, Denmark and Iceland, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Canada, and of course, Wakanda.
The right has a hard time understanding the concept that we don't want long lines for bread socialism.
We want, you don't have to win the lotto to afford brain surgery socialism.
Socialism as an economic model replacing capitalism is bad, but socialism as a supplement to capitalism.
Good.
So what he's talking about is what is now called socialism and was never really socialism to begin with, which is redistributing the wealth created by capitalism.
But think about it for a minute.
First of all, all the countries that he listed are not socialist.
They do have big redistribution, high taxes and things like that.
But they're also homogenous states with very homogenous countries for the most part, with people who share a culture, who share values.
They're not like our system where anybody can come in basically and abuse a huge welfare state and do abuse a huge welfare state.
I believe in a small welfare state.
I actually do believe in this because I think people are too afraid to be free.
I think people are fearful of being free.
But it's true.
Once you accede to the idea that there should be a small welfare state, every election is going to be, shouldn't it be bigger?
How come this person can't afford college?
This person can't afford a beautiful suit.
This person, you know, how can he get a job without a beautiful suit?
It just goes on and on and on.
And healthcare, of course, is a bottomless pit that will just suck every resource into it because where do you stop?
I mean, what, you know, are hair implants?
Is that something that you should be allowed to have?
Why is birth control on there?
You know, it's ridiculous.
But this is the thing that they are selling.
Let me just play one more.
And by the way, this whole thing about these countries are happy, who cares?
Our country is a stressed out, crazy, revolutionary country producing more inventions, more industry, more wealth, more new ideas than anywhere else.
That's stressful.
You know, you're happy if you're living in this country.
Like I say, Norway invented the paper clip, good for them.
And no wonder they're happy.
We provide the army that protects them.
We provide the new inventions in healthcare that they live on, the phones, the cars, whatever they use that's high-tech tech comes from us.
So they're happy like a kid living in his parents' garage, or really like an old person living in his kid's garage, really.
So they're happy like that.
Who cares?
Who cares if they're happy?
I mean, you know, like the big yellow smiley face is not the purpose of life.
It's creativity, contribution, building things, taking mankind to its next stage.
That's happening here under a more capitalist system, a capitalist system that's definitely under threat.
Let me just play one more, and I don't like making fun of or attacking private citizens, but this is a lady who asked a question of Bernie Sanders at the Fox News town hall that they did.
And listen to her description of socialism.
A question comes from Kathy Harrington.
Kathy, what's your question?
Hi, Senator Sanders.
Welcome to the Lehigh Valley.
So my question is, the definition of socialism is just a society agreeing to work together and combining their resources to make sure everyone is protected and taken care of.
How can you challenge the idea that socialism is bad in the minds of the public?
So everybody's taken care of and it's the group of, it's the community getting together to help everybody.
Again, just not true, only true if it's done with guns.
Because the whole thing, we're talking about a principle.
We're talking about a principle.
Who owns your life?
Who owns your time?
Your money is not just money.
It's not, you know, that paper doesn't have any real value in itself except insofar as it represents your work, your investment, your risks, your responsibility.
That's what that money is a symbol of, okay?
The government should not own that.
If the government owns your money, it owns your time.
It owns your work.
If I have a right to health care, then I have the right to, if you're a doctor, I have a right to use your service.
I have a right to your service.
I have no right to your service.
Nobody has a right to anybody else's service.
It's just not true.
And it's the principle.
Let me read you a story, brief story, from the BBC from 2011, okay?
2011, so we're talking eight years ago, still under Chavez.
Venezuela has brought a new gun law into effect which bans the commercial sale of firearms and ammunition.
Until now, anyone with a gun permit could buy arms from a private company.
Under the new law, only the army, the police, and certain groups like security companies will be able to buy arms from the state-owned weapons manufacturer and importer.
The ban is the latest attempt by the government to improve security and cut crime ahead of elections in October.
Okay, so as Chavez's plans, supported by Sean Penn and Oliver Stone and Michael Moore and all the rest, as they were leading the country into disorder, they said, well, you know, we've got so much disorder, so much crime, we've got to ban guns because guns are causing the crime.
You've never heard that before, right?
Yeah, you hear it on MSNBC.
But what do you hear on MSNBC now as they are reporting on Venezuela?
Listen to this.
I think it has been surprising to a lot of people in Washington, in the administration at least, that this is taking longer than they thought, despite the sanctions, despite the pressure.
With the help of Russia and other outside forces, Maduro is hanging on.
And not only hanging on, but he appears to still control the military.
You have to understand in Venezuela, gun ownership is not something that is open to everybody.
So if the military have the guns, they have the power.
And as long as Nicolas Maduro controls the military, he controls the country.
And his supporters have tried to peacefully protest.
They have gathered in large numbers.
What we saw today when he met early this morning and stood there in front of those wearing uniforms appear to be rank and file members who may have switched their allegiance.
We have seen over the recent months those who have switched their allegiance, but not en masse.
We have not seen large numbers of the troops in Venezuela switching their allegiance from Nicolas Maduro to Juan Guaido.
MSNBC just reported that because the people have no guns, they have no power.
Quoting him directly, right, since Maduro has all the guns, he has all the power.
And you think to yourself, gee, if only they had a constitution that said people had a right to bear arms so they could form militias in case, you know, the government goes bad.
But of course, that would never happen here because our government is filled with such wise, you know, just, freedom-loving people as Alexandria Casional Cortex.
Vladimir Putin, God bless the devil, is basically giving us a course on freedom.
He is showing us in front of the TV, he's showing us on TV why you need guns, why it is not.
It is not.
There's nothing benign about the attempts to take guns away because it's, again, it's the principle.
You can have socialism without, you can have socialism without trucks running people over.
If, for instance, you introduce it to countries like Europe where people basically have aged out of freedom, they basically have gotten tired of being free.
They just want to be taken care of.
They want to be taken care of by the United States that protects them.
It gives them the medicines that they want.
And they don't understand.
You never understand with socialism that you are selling your future.
You're selling your future.
You know, you hear Bernie Sanders talking about the corporations this and the corporations that.
Well, the corporations give you your iPhones.
The corporations give you your computers, your cars, all those things that you love come from the corporations.
Corporations can get too powerful.
Any power center needs to be controlled.
That's true.
But it's corporations that give you all these good things.
And when you take their profits away, when you say that, no, your profits are ours to redistribute, you take away the inspiration and the desire and motivation to keep creating things.
And so you don't know.
You don't know what you won't have.
You don't know about the health care, the pills for your dementia that won't be there when you get old.
You won't know about that because they just won't be there.
It won't occur to you that, oh, if we hadn't had socialism, somebody would have invented that to make some money, to make money.
You know, you won't know about the invisible computer that would have gone in your ear and given you all the information in the world right to your brain.
You won't know about that because it simply won't exist.
Socialism takes your future away and you need guns to keep it from happening because if the government can get more power, it will.
You know, I just want to end this by talking about the fact that you haven't heard a word from Bernie about Bernie Sanders about Venezuela, and you haven't heard a word from AOC because they know, they know the principle is at stake.
They know what the principles are that are at stake.
And the New York Times is playing this story way down for riots and demonstrations like that going on in our hemisphere.
But I'll tell you what is happening, all right?
Bill Barr, the Attorney General, as we speak, is before Congress, and the Washington Post put out this completely fraudulent story.
Well, not completely fraudulent, skewed story, because at the Washington Post, Democracy Dies in Journalistic Malfeasance.
They put out this story that Mueller complained to Barr about his statement about the Mueller report.
Remember, Barr came out with a statement saying Trump had basically been cleared of Russia collusion, but not exonerated of obstruction of justice.
And what Mueller basically said was, yeah, all that was true.
You know, what you said was true, but you didn't get the flavor of my report.
And especially the media took it out of context.
In other words, Mueller meant his report to make Trump look bad.
Mueller is a steaming anti-Trumper.
All his people were anti-Trumpers.
He couldn't get, he knew there was no real story here.
It would have been absurd to actually indict Trump, but he didn't like the fact that he cleared him and it looked like he cleared him.
So he complained about that.
You know, there's an article in the Wall Street Journal today by a guy named David Satter, who used to be a Russian-based newspaper correspondent.
And he points out that Russian disinformation works like this.
When they want to slander an American politician, they pretend to like him, right?
Because we don't like the Russians.
So they pretend to like him.
When they want to support a politician, they pretend to hate him.
That makes perfect sense.
I mean, obviously, if Putin says, oh, I love this politician, we're going to all get suspicion of him, suspicious of him.
He knows that.
He's not an idiot.
He's a KGB guy.
He knows how to manipulate people's minds.
And it puts a new twist on the fact that Mueller's a different twist on the fact that Mueller, on Mueller's assertion that Putin was supporting Trump.
And you have to remember this.
Nobody ever brings this up except right here on this show.
Nobody ever brings it up.
Putin had no way of knowing that Trump had a chance of winning because nobody knew.
He wasn't trying to get Trump to win the election.
He was trying to make Hillary look bad.
Because if Putin likes Hillary, who was going to be the next president, as far as he knew, as far as anybody knew, if Putin likes Hillary, Hillary must be bad.
He was trying to sow dissent, okay?
And here's what Satter writes.
He says, the Trump-Russia affair did lasting damage to the U.S. For the first time, it became acceptable, even common, to accuse political opponents of treason.
The media, Congress, and the intelligence services have all undermined themselves by repeating wild and unsubstantiated charges provided for them by Russian intelligence.
It's the media who served Putin.
It's the Democrats who served Putin.
It's guys like John Brennan, because John Brennan was CIA.
He knew the Russians did stuff like this, and he called Trump treasonous anyway.
He served Putin.
They all have.
Media's Role in Putin's Plot00:03:12
They all have.
You know, I don't know if you remember, probably you don't, or if you've ever seen one of the Twilight Zone episodes about the mon, it's called something like the monsters have come to Main Street.
And it's like there's a power outage and everybody turns on each other and starts, you know, attacking each other on grounds of bigotry and all kinds of different grounds.
At the end, you realize that Martians have come from outer space and caused this as an experiment on how they can turn Americans against each other.
That is essentially what this Russian plot was.
It was not a plot to get Trump elected.
It was not a plot to get Trump elected.
It was a plot to get the media to call each other, get politicians to call the president treasonous, to get the media to continually attack the president of the United States.
Can anybody, anybody doubt that Vladimir Putin is thrilled with what the Democrats are doing?
Can anybody doubt that Vladimir Putin is watching CNN and thinking, I did it.
I really succeeded with this this time.
You know, let's just go back for a minute, because Joe Biden is now the frontrunner on the Democrat side.
Let's go back in time to when Joe Biden and Barack Obama were running against Mitt Romney on what Joe Biden thought about Russia.
Governor Romney's answer I thought was incredibly revealing.
He acts like he thinks the Cold War is still on.
Russia is still our major adversary.
I don't know where he's been.
I mean, we have disagreements with Russia, but they're united with us on Iran.
The only way we're getting, one of only two ways we're getting material into Afghanistan to our troops is through Russia.
They are working closely with us.
They've just said to Europe, if there is an oil shutdown in any way in the Gulf, they'll consider increasing oil supplies to Europe.
This is not 1956.
What an idiot.
What a stupid thing to say, even then.
Of course, Russia supplies the oil.
Russia is a petroleum dictatorship.
They want Europe dependent on the oil.
The worst thing that has happened to Vladimir Putin, the worst thing, is Trump taking the shackles off our energy industry, taking the shackles off the frackers, taking the regulatory shackles off energy.
We are producing energy at a rate that is finally, finally making us the energy-producing country we should be.
That's the worst thing that can happen to Vladimir Putin.
His help with Iran, his help letting Obama take this incredible terrorist state and support it and dump money into the country.
I mean, are you kidding me?
These guys, this gangster, has played the Obama administration like a piano and has played the media like a violin and is still playing the Democrats.
You know, it's really only Trump who's standing up against them.
And let's hope he has the wherewithal to do it.
I would love to see, I would love to see him turn this around and get Maduro out of there and give, you know, put Guado.
I mean, look, Guedo is just a stepping stone to free elections.
We can't ultimately have the say in how the Venezuelans govern themselves.
They're going to have all kinds of problems in the wake of this failed state.
But let us see if Trump can do what has to be done and force these clowns, these thugs, these Russian and Cuban thugs out of our hemisphere.
They do not belong here.
Argument About Influence00:15:11
We got the mailbag coming up.
We got the mailbag coming up.
Oh, stop.
But first, I have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
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Yeah!
Yeah.
All right, from Bill.
I will say these quietly because this is always a test of my voice, the mailbag.
From Bill.
Supreme Lord of the Multiverse and knower of all things good and pure.
That is on my business card, in fact.
I was recently at a medical school panel debating the issue of abortion.
Surprisingly, all the pro-choice students admitted that life starts at conception because it does.
But they said abortion is a right because you can't force someone to donate an organ, even if the person who needs it will die otherwise.
Other than the fact that you're not giving up your uterus when carrying a pregnancy to term, what would be a good response to this argument?
If you want to hear my full response to this argument, I was talking about the speech I gave at Hillsdale, which is now on YouTube, almost has 100,000 views, so please go on and bring it up there.
But I talk about an argument just like this.
There's a famous argument that if you woke up next to a famous violinist and he had a kidney disease and you were hooked up to his kidney and had to keep him alive for nine months, you would have a right to unhook yourself and therefore you have a right to have an abortion.
This is a completely loony argument, same as the argument that you're talking about here.
It's a completely loony argument.
It is the looniness of materialism, the idea that we are just bags of flesh and chemicals and flesh bags full of chemicals and that having a baby inside you is the same as being hooked up to somebody on a dialysis machine.
So in order to believe this, you have to believe that there is no such thing as motherhood.
There's no such thing as responsibility for having sex with somebody and getting pregnant because you don't just wake up next to somebody.
You don't just, you're not being forced to give an organ.
You took an action that got you pregnant.
Now, if you want to focus in on the something like 0.1% of people who have abortions because they were raped, it's a very small number of people that do it.
Most of them just do it because they don't want the baby.
Even so, you are in the position of being a mother of a child.
If you don't think a mother is a unique thing, go up to somebody who's bigger than you and insult his mother and see how that works out for you.
We are not flesh bags full of chemicals.
We are human beings.
Our relationships have a nature.
They have a purpose.
They are a thing.
When you are a mother, you are responsible for the child inside you, even, even if you didn't want that child there and you didn't have a choice in its getting there.
You are now in that position.
It's not fair.
It's sad, but the baby shouldn't die for it.
A lot of problems in life can be solved by killing people.
You know, you don't like your wife, you can solve that problem.
You don't like the president, you can solve that problem.
You can't kill people.
Killing people is bad.
I shouldn't have to explain that.
It's one of the Ten Commandments.
Murdering people is bad.
If the baby is alive, you don't have a right to kill it.
And the idea that your womb is a dialysis machine, if your womb is a dialysis machine, then you are just a machine, right?
But it's not.
You're a person.
You're a mom.
You have a responsibility to keep that kid alive.
And, you know, I believe in adoption.
I believe that we need to have better systems for getting babies to people who care about them and want them.
But the idea of reducing people, this oh so clever idea that you're just a dialysis machine, think about that because it means that you have no rights either.
Your right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, those are human rights.
Those are not dialysis machine rights.
Everything that you like, everything that you want, everything that you think is a right that you have comes to you because you are a human being.
And as a human being, you can have relationships.
Those relationships matter.
You can be a sister.
You can be a brother.
You can be a husband.
You are a wife.
All of those have perks and responsibilities being a mom the same way.
That's what you are, not a dialysis machine.
All right, next question from Andrew.
Hello, Mr. Clavin.
I have a daughter who's six years old.
She has a liberal loony as a mom who has a boyfriend and a girlfriend.
As far as I know, my daughter is constantly surrounded by other single mothers with kids who are her main friends.
This is basically the foundation of my daughter's family.
I live in another state hours away.
I see my daughter twice a month and speak to her three times a week.
I'm a conservative, but I'm an atheist, which makes teaching religious values really hard.
So my question is, how do I go about teaching my daughter conservative and religious values while her mother is simultaneously teaching her the opposite full-time?
Thanks, love all you do, let wisdom reign.
That's from Another Kingdom and from Andrew 2.
Listen, Andrew, I got some real problems with this letter.
You never mentioned whether you married the girl's mother.
You're not living in the same state with this child, so you're not dedicating your life to the child that you created.
And then you say, well, how can I have my influence on this child?
You can have all the influence that somebody living in another state who sees her twice a month can have, right?
If you care about this child that you created, if you want to take actual responsibility, you've got to find another job and move closer to her.
You've got to see her more often.
You don't have to lecture her.
You don't have to teach her anything.
You simply have to live the kind of life that you want to show her and demonstrate to her that life and let her see it on a basis.
She can see her mother's life.
You don't have to tell her her mother's evil.
You don't have to speak against her mother at all.
Let her live that life and let her see your life and let her choose ultimately, which she will, between the two.
But as long as you are sort of out in some other state dropping in from time to time, you will have only exactly that amount of influence.
What you want is the influence without the responsibility.
You can't have that.
I don't know how you got into this situation, but you need to take stock here because it doesn't sound like you married the girl.
It doesn't sound like you, you know, I don't know how much you're paying in support.
I don't know what you're doing, but it doesn't sound like you're dedicating your life to the raising of this child, which is what you would be doing if you were in the home married to her mother.
So, you know, you want influence.
You got to do the deed.
You've got to move close.
You've got to be there.
You've got to take care of her.
You've got to have her over.
And like I said, you don't have to lecture her.
You just have to live and love her and be yourself and act as you are.
And if you don't have religious faith, you can't really spread religious faith.
I mean, that's something that you show people.
You don't tell it to them.
So, I mean, you're just looking for a lot of good stuff without doing the work that that good stuff requires.
I don't mean to be hard on you, but I don't know how this situation happened.
But you need to take stock of your role in the situation.
Her mother may be a loony, but her mother has got her in the house and has taken care of her.
And so, you know, and you're not.
So you have as much influence as, you have as much influence as the responsibility you take.
Okay, from Luke.
Hello, I love the show.
Yesterday, my family and I were discussing what happens to people who have never heard about Jesus or the Christian faith when they die.
My dad claimed that deep down everyone knows there's a God, so if they don't believe, they have no excuse.
I agree, they know there's a God, but they don't know about Jesus without being told.
I pointed this out to my dad, and he said, the Bible says those that seek me will find me, but they can't seek Jesus if they don't know him.
I'm a devout Christian, but this is one issue that I can't really wrap my head around because it seems unfair to send people hell if they never hear about Jesus.
But the Bible states that the only way to heaven is through Jesus.
What are your views?
All right, well, my view is this.
Like, the only way to heaven is through Jesus, but we don't know what that means.
We don't know how.
I mean, Jesus can get you into heaven.
That's, and, you know, hopefully will.
But it doesn't say that it doesn't say what you have to do.
It's what he has to do.
I mean, clearly, Jesus is the human incarnation of the living God.
And if you've never heard of him, that doesn't mean you can't know him.
And it doesn't mean that he can't know you, more importantly.
So my view is your father is right, that you come built with a God-shaped hole, that Jesus is aware of your situation, and Jesus is in charge of who goes to heaven, not you.
And so it's not something you have to worry about.
Because if you've got a gracious and good God, as we have, and he is wholly and entirely in charge of who goes to heaven, you actually don't have to worry about it.
It's not in your pay grade.
But you can trust and believe that whatever it is, when you see it, you're going to understand that it was righteous and good.
I mean, it's just not something worth worrying about.
And I agree with your father on this.
From, I believe it's pronounced Dylan.
I grew up very conservative and very Christian.
I was told that if I was a good girl, let me just double check this.
Yeah.
I was told if I was a good girl, saved myself from marriage, married a Christian man, and sought to spread the gospel through our marriage, our marriage would be blessed.
I did all these things.
And the last five years have been a nightmare.
We're currently separated, heading for divorce.
My biggest struggle now is trusting God.
I feel I was let down.
I followed his will and have had nothing but sorrow.
I know the Bible basically promises suffering, but I don't know if I want to suffer like this.
Nobody wants to suffer, and the Bible only promises suffering because suffering is a sure thing.
You were misinformed, and the problem is not God.
God didn't misinform you.
God never says if you do everything right, everything will go well.
That is just not what God says at all.
I mean, Jesus does everything right, and things don't go well at all.
And nobody wants to, when Jesus says take up the cross, what he means is not crucify yourself.
He doesn't mean suffer, go out and look for suffering.
What he means is that you take up the risk that if you tell the truth, that if you behave in the right way, if you treat yourself well, things can still go wrong.
Your responsibility is to the person God made to make sure the person God made is the person God wants that person to be.
That's your responsibility.
Your responsibility.
And your task and all your joy is in directing your soul toward God.
Things happen.
Bad things happen.
People betray you.
People do terrible things.
And I'm sorry, I really feel bad, but it's not, but God did not say, it wasn't God who said to you, do this, this, and this, and everything will work out.
God never says that.
He never says it.
So the people you should lose your trust in are the people who told you that that's the way it works.
Now, obviously, if you treat yourself with respect, if you look for love, and if you act with your body in love, you have a far better chance of moving on from this disaster that you were in into a better situation.
The idea is not now, oh, well, now I'm just going to go out and pick up men and use Tinder or whatever they're using now to hook up with people.
That obviously is a stupid response.
You got into a bad situation.
What can you learn from it?
What does God want you to do now?
What does God want you to do?
Not your preacher, not your mom, not the people who tell you what God wants you to do.
Go into prayer.
Read the Bible and find out what God wants for your life.
If you do that, you will find joy even in times of sorrow.
And so you're losing trust in the wrong person here.
You were misinformed.
We were told that this kind of prosperity idea, that if you just do the right thing, everything's going to be tickety-boo.
And that's just not the way it works.
There is suffering, even for people who do well, do right.
Look at Jesus.
I mean, he is the prime example.
From Micah, I love your podcast.
It's the highlight of my morning.
I have a tough situation I would like your wisdom on.
Over the past few months, I've had two of my friends reach out to me basically saying something like, I lost my job.
Life is difficult.
I'm contemplating suicide.
I don't really know what to say besides Jesus loves you, man, don't do it, which I feel is sort of a cop-out answer to their tough situations.
I know they both have difficult family upbringings and some actually unfortunate things happen in their lives.
What would you say to them to bring them home?
Okay, well, I have a lot of experience with this.
I've spoken to a lot of suicidal people.
You can't, the ultimate decision on whether to commit suicide is not yours, it's theirs, okay?
So you're not saving anybody.
Forget that.
What you can do and what you should do and what I would say you must do is listen to them, not just once, but again and again.
Hear them out.
Talk to them.
Let them work out in front of you, in your hearing, what it is that how they want to proceed forward.
And I don't mean suicide or not suicide, because suicide is a bad, you know, as a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
They have temporary problems.
So what you do is you listen and with sympathy and you sort of guide them to find what they want.
What would be a good outcome?
You know, echo back to them the things they're telling them so they can hear what they're thinking.
So if they say, you know, I feel like I'm in a dead end, you say to them, okay, so you're experiencing despair.
You know, I get that.
What does that feel like?
Explore with them where they are.
Just having someone to listen to you is an incredible bridge to life.
It is an incredible bridge to life.
Just having someone listen to you, you don't have to advise them.
You don't have to say rah-rah.
Just listen to them.
Listen to them, their pain.
Let them be in pain.
Okay.
It's a terrible thing to tell people to cheer up because they're in pain, you know.
But listen to them.
Be there for them.
If you do that, you will be a true friend.
And if in the end they make the terrible, stupid, and wrong decision to kill themselves, that's not on you.
Okay, that's something, again, they are free people.
They can make that choice.
But what you want to do is you want to listen, you want to sympathize, you want to see if they can find a way forward with your help.
And if you can do that, and you can go online and look up ways to do this, because I can't give you all the techniques and all this stuff, but it's not even a matter of technique.
Listening Is Loving00:01:27
It's a matter of loving, listening.
It's a matter of listening and loving them.
That will give them so much.
It gives them so much, and they'll know that they can turn to you.
It's work.
It's work being a friend to someone who's in trouble.
But if you do that, you're showing them Jesus' love a lot more than telling them that Jesus loves you.
I got to stop.
I'm glad my voice is still working, but I will be back tomorrow.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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Edited by Adam Sayovitz.
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The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
I'm Michael Knowles, host of the Michael Knowles Show.
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