Noah Pothoven’s 2019 death—officially ruled euthanasia for "unbearable suffering" after sexual abuse—exposes Dutch laws allowing minors as young as 12 to end their lives with parental consent, sparking outrage over 6,500 annual cases and accusations of state-sanctioned murder. Critics compare it to Brave New World’s "happiness culture," where resilience is replaced by pleasure-driven policies, from unrestricted sex to antidepressants, while Europe’s demographic collapse mirrors moral decay. Meanwhile, listeners debate Democratic overreach, JFK’s 1960 election theft theories, and abortion as "murder," with one caller framing it as a "permanent fix for temporary pain." The episode ties euthanasia’s expansion to broader cultural shifts—where suffering is erased, not endured—and warns of societal collapse when struggle loses meaning. [Automatically generated summary]
Tomorrow is the 75th anniversary of D-Day and thousands of academics are meeting in Vancouver to discuss why dodgeball is oppressive.
Over 2,500 American men died fighting fascism on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944 and the academics are meeting at the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences to present a paper about Dodgeball which says, quote, and this is a real quote,
As we consider the potential of physical education to empower students by engaging them in critical and democratic practices, we conclude that the hidden curriculum offered by Dodgeball is antithetical to this project, unquote.
The presentation of the Dodgeball paper is led by Joy Butler, professor of curriculum and pedagogy at the University of British Columbia and thus otherwise unemployable.
Butler says that Dodgeball reinforces the, quote, five faces of oppression, unquote.
These five faces of oppression are, of course, happy, sneezy, bashful, sleepy and dock.
Dopey and grumpy are excused because they identify as females who are dopey and grumpy.
Actually, I was just making a wildly offensive joke there.
The five faces of oppression are actually marginalization, exploitation, cultural domination, sleepy and dock, which explains why women are always so dopey and grumpy.
On this upcoming anniversary, when men raced up beaches in the face of a murderous hail of machine gun bullets, mortars, bombs, and underinflated red rubber balls that don't even hurt when they hit you, the Vancouver academics will also be discussing other oppressive games like TAG, in which a child is dehumanized by becoming it, Capture the Flag, which is obviously militaristic, and British Bulldog, which has offensive colonialist overtones.
By helping children avoid playing these brutal and competitive games, educators will ensure that never again will our children grow up to be adults who engage in war, but instead will become adults who are simply wiped out by whatever hellbound fascist bastards have been teaching their children to play dodgeball like normal people.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty-zing.
Noah's Euthanized Story00:12:45
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
So all day long yesterday, I was praying this story wasn't true.
The way it was first reported, a 17-year-old girl named Noah Pothoven was legally euthanized in the Netherlands because she couldn't recover emotionally from rape and sexual abuse that happened when she was, I think, around 11.
As someone who struggled with depression myself in my youth and who has worked on hotlines speaking to suicidal people, many of them teenagers, I consider euthanizing a teen a Nazi-level act of barbarism.
I could not believe something like this had happened in a civilized country.
Whenever a story seems to play too neatly into the fears and hostilities of either conservatives or leftists, I always triple-check it because I know fake news is on the march.
And I try to make sure the story doesn't just appear on some junk site like CNN or the New York Times, but I wait till it's made it to responsible outlets like the Wall Street Journal or Fox.
Now, where things stand, as I'm speaking to you right this moment, it's unclear who killed Noah Pothoven.
She was depressed, and under the law in Holland, euthanasia is allowed where suffering has become, quote, hopeless and unbearable in people as young as 12 with a parent's permission.
After 16, the parents' permission is no longer needed.
About 6,500 people were euthanized in the Netherlands last year.
The government says only a few of these were killed for emotional reasons.
Now, we know that Noah asked the government for permission to die and was turned away last year.
We know that a Dutch member of parliament visited her just at the end, and it now seems possible that she starved herself to death without the government's help.
I'm not sure.
But whatever happened, I don't think it's too big a stretch to say that a nation that permits 12-year-olds to be euthanized is operating under certain assumptions that make the suicide of young people more acceptable, that make suicide itself more acceptable.
I think the chief among those assumptions is that life ought to be happy and comfortable, and when it is not, it ceases to be worthwhile.
I think that culture, the culture that embraces happiness and the end of suffering is life's chief goal, is ultimately a culture that embraces death because many of the most important moments of life, the lifelike moments of life, aren't happy and in fact are kind of unbearable.
I also think it's possible that the culture that killed Noah Pothoven, this culture of happiness, is the same culture that is killing Europe itself.
About 80 years ago, a man named Aldous Huxley wrote a great novel about just such a culture.
It was called Brave New World.
And hearing about the death of Noah, I can't help thinking that Huxley was a prophet.
And so my two questions are, can we defend ourselves and our culture against the lure of happiness?
And should we?
We'll talk about it.
But first, we will talk about a new app.
Great idea for an app because people are always taking your data, right?
They know everything about you, your interests, your habits.
But Big Token is an app that lets you share that data and get paid for it.
Right now, you're sharing it with everybody.
So you should go to Big Token, which will help you get rewards.
Here's how it works.
You download the app, you sign up for a free Big Token account.
You complete actions to earn points, like answering surveys, checking into locations, connecting your social accounts and more.
And then you can redeem your points for rewards such as cash and gift cards, or you can donate your earnings to charity.
You choose what data you share with Big Token, and then you get paid for it.
And you can also get more points for referring friends and family.
Your data is always secure on Big Token.
And based on the data you choose to share, you will be placed into specific ad groups.
If you want to start earning money for your data, go to the App Store or Google Play.
Search for Big Token.
That's B-I-G-T-O-K-E-N, one word.
Download the app and sign up.
Make sure to use my referral code, Clavin.
Again, search Big Token in the App Store or Google Play.
Download the app and use my referral code Clavin to sign up.
Claim your data and get paid and find out, how do you spell Clavin at last?
They're no ease in Clavin.
I just make it look easy.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
The mailbag is coming up, and I'm really happy to announce it because we can solve your problems here instead of...
Yeah, exactly.
You don't...
You can scream with joy because we can solve them.
Here's the story that I've been kind of obsessed about.
Again, it came out, the story when it came out was that this girl had been euthanized, a 17-year-old girl.
Noah Pothoven had been euthanized in the Netherlands.
And when I saw that, I thought, I'm going to check this.
And I kept checking it and checking it because it kept appearing on these kind of offbeat websites, not saying these websites were wrong or that they're not reliable, just that they were not central, utterly reliable sites like the Wall Street Journal.
Now it's out everywhere.
And here's the story.
Euthanasia has been legal in the Netherlands since 2001, I think.
And there's an end-of-life clinic in Hague.
Noah Pothoven went there and she asked to be killed when she was 16.
And they said no.
They say that they can assist dying if the patient makes a clear and autonomous request, as a quote, and is enduring unbearable and unendurable suffering.
And there must be no other reasonable solution, according to them.
Patients have to demonstrate understanding of the consequences of what they're requesting, and doctors are required to seek counsel from an independent colleague who's not familiar with the patient.
Now, the thing about this is ever since euthanasia became illegal, became legal in the Netherlands, the use of this has spread.
And there are some reports that as many as half of people in the Netherlands are not euthanized, but die by terminal sedation, basically.
They put them out of their misery as they're on the brink of death.
And they also allow harvesting, art organ harvesting to be conjoined with euthanasia, which obviously gives a motivation to maybe hurry people along.
In 2015, Dutch statistics revealed that 431 patients were killed by doctors who never asked for euthanasia.
This is called termination without request or consent.
Now, Noah wrote a book.
She wrote a book called Winning or Learning.
She was, what's the word, anorexic.
She was not eating.
She was obviously depressed.
At the age of 11, she was assaulted at a school party and again at a gathering of teenagers.
A year later, when she was 14, she was raped by two men in the Elder Velde neighborhood of Arnhem.
I would like to know more about that, why she was such an open target for this, what was going on, who was doing the raping.
That might be an interesting thing to find out to preserve the life of a 17-year-old girl.
She kept the violation secret for a long time, but years later, her family learned what she had endured when her mother came across a catch of letters, basically suicide notes saying goodbye.
As I say, she approached the clinic without her parents' knowledge.
She was told that she was too young to act without her parents' knowledge.
She wrote, they think I'm too young to die, she said.
And she's 16 years old now.
She says, I can't wait long enough to be old enough.
She obviously suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anorexia.
I'm reading some of this.
And she said she'd been fighting for years.
She put out an Instagram post that said, maybe this comes as a surprise to some, given my posts about hospitalization, but my plan has been there for a long time.
It's not impulsive.
She said she was drained and she felt she had never been alive, but instead just surviving.
Clearly, a girl in terrible distress.
A lot of questions that need answering.
Chief among them, why was she just being sexually molested all the time in the Netherlands?
You know, I can have my suspicions, but I'm not going to make a guess.
But that would be something that people should be looking into.
They should be very disturbed.
And I'm going to tell you something, okay?
Because again, like, I know what it is to be depressed as a young person.
And I will tell you that anytime, anytime a young person commits suicide, it's a mistake.
Okay, that goes without saying.
I mean, we're talking about a healthy person who's depressed and sad.
And the reason is, is you just don't know what life has in store.
Nobody knows.
Nobody.
Experts, everybody, Sears, people, even some of the commentators in the news do not know what's going to happen 10 minutes from now, let alone, you know, in the future.
So we don't know when we're depressed, and especially a young person who has no perspective, who thinks, I remember thinking I was in the pit of hell.
There was no way out when I was weeks away, weeks away from transforming my life.
I was at the end of a tunnel.
I just didn't see the light there.
And that can happen to a young person so easily.
Anytime, anytime a young person commits suicide, it's a mistake.
Anytime a young person is euthanized for emotional reasons, it is murder.
It is a Hitlerian task.
And I say this, and I'm just going to be real honest about this.
I say this as somebody who is kind of soft on the question of euthanasia in certain kinds of situations, okay?
When death is inevitable, when suffering has become unbearable, when people are old and they don't want to deplete their families' resources and they know the end has come, it stops being my business at some level, right?
And I understand, I understand the slippery slope.
I really do.
And I understand that it may be wrong.
It may in fact be morally wrong.
But let me tell you something.
It happens every single day.
I would guess every single hour.
I have seen it happen with my own eyes.
When doctors have fought and fought and they have lost the battle and there's nothing ahead but death and suffering, they come in and they say to you, you know, we're going to increase the dose of morphine to keep him comfortable.
That's what they say.
And they increase it every hour.
It's euthanasia.
And it happens without anybody saying anything, without anybody talking about it, but everybody knows what's going on and it is allowed to go, you know, to go on all the time.
Some things in a civilized society, some things happen in the shadows.
And, you know, I know conservatives hate this, but conservatives are wrong about this.
You know who are wrong?
Jewish people are wrong about it.
There's not a rule that covers everything.
No matter how much you think, no matter how much you reason, no matter how much you struggle, there's always an exception.
There's not a rule that covers everything.
And that's why I always point to Jesus saying that the woman who committed adultery should essentially be let off the hook, because I know the conservatives will say, well, if you let him off the hook, then everyone will commit adultery.
Let him who is without sin throw the first stone.
Let him who is in the position of suffering, of knowing the suffering is going to destroy their family, going to deplete their resources.
Make those decisions.
They happen every day.
And I'm a little bit soft on this.
What we're talking about in that case is hastening death literally by hours, maybe at the most by months.
And we're not talking about somebody who's feeling bad, you know, who is suffering from depression.
We're talking about the end of life, the body collapsing.
It ceases to be my business.
I feel like when somebody makes that decision who's copacetic and is making it for him or herself.
But again, for people who are young and are just depressed, it is always, always a mistake.
Let me pause here to do my second ad and put that out of the way.
If you can put that, yeah, there you go.
This is 23andMe.
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I always forget Father's Day because, you know, I'm so modest.
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That's the number, 23andMe.com slash Clavin.
Again, that's 23andMe.com slash Clavin.
The offer ends June 17th, so you have a little time left to find out how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So you look at life and you say, you know, what is this thing?
What is this thing life?
Here we are.
We're wandering around.
Genetic Insights and Freedom00:14:43
We don't know what's going on.
Life has a purpose.
The purpose is written into your personality, right?
It's to live out that purpose.
It is to bring that person that you are given to fruition.
I don't know what that fruition is going to be.
I know that God had a plan for you when he made you and it is built in and you start to know yourself.
That's why you start to learn who you are, what you want.
That's why you seek what are your real desires?
What are the desires that people put in you?
What are the important desires, the good desires, and what are just urges that you have that are just part of your body, not part of your soul.
This is the mission of life, right?
And you don't know what that path looks like.
It is not a path that goes from happiness to happiness.
It's not always happiness that leads you forward when you go into the army and you serve your country.
You know you're going to face struggles and trials.
And sometimes those struggles and trials are going to be horrific.
And sometimes they're going to be tragic.
And yet you feel that this is the fruition of your life.
This is who you are supposed to be.
But if what a culture tells you is that you're supposed to be happy or fulfill your dreams or all your ambitions are going to become true or that success, that success is the purpose of your life and anything that gets in the way of that success is an impediment and has to be put aside.
You are living in a culture of death because life, the important parts of life include suffering.
They include failure.
Failure is one of the most, you know, it's one of the most instructive things that can happen to you.
Nobody wants it.
You know, sometimes people mistake the Christian idea that you have to take up your cross and they think that that means you should go look for suffering.
It doesn't mean you should go look for suffering.
It means you should be prepared for suffering if you follow the true path, that if you follow the path, you may meet people who are going to crucify you.
Do you turn away?
Do you fall silent?
Do you say, oh, they're going to throw me off Twitter?
I can't possibly speak the truth.
You know, that's that taking up the cross of being ready to lose sponsors, to get kicked off platforms, to lose friends, is being ready to suffer for the truth and for the real thing that you are meant to do in God's eyes, not in your eyes.
You don't know anything about what you're supposed to do, but God knows.
And when you follow that and when you find what that is, that is your purpose.
That's how you find your way.
All right.
So when they tell you that there can't be any suffering, they are taking away from you your path.
They're closing off your path into yourself.
So let's talk about Brave New World.
It's a wonderful, wonderful book.
If you haven't read it, you should.
I think Audible has a version of it read by Michael York, who's a fantastic, fantastic actor.
So if you want to listen to it, Aldous Huxley was George Orwell's French teacher at Eton, okay?
And Brave New World came out in 1932, 1984, I believe, came out in 1948.
I think that's what it was, 1984.
And Huxley wrote to Orwell, basically saying, my Brave New World is more right than your 1984.
And here's why I think he was right.
1984 is essentially an examination of communism and socialism.
It is what happens when you follow those paths, how you have to rewrite history.
I have to change language.
I read today that NPR has a new style book that says a baby is not a baby until it's born.
So they're just denying reality at NPR.
NPR is just lying by changing what a baby is, okay?
Because if it's not a baby five minutes before, I don't know what the hell it is.
So, you know, that's the way that leftism works.
And that's what 1984 was exploring.
And in 1984, one of the oppressors, the communists, says, picture a boot stomping on a human face forever.
And Aldous Huxley said, no, that's not going to last.
And he was obviously right.
The Soviet Union collapsed.
And if we follow that path, we too will collapse.
People don't like it when you stomp on their face.
But Huxley actually developed a world that was built on happiness and what he called stability.
And the book is very funny, by the way.
I mean, funny in this morbid way, but it's still very funny.
This is a book where there's no longer natural birth.
The word mother has become an obscenity.
People are decanted.
They're made in test tubes, test tube babies, right?
And they're formed to fulfill the role that they are needed for in society.
So you're an alpha, then you're going to be at the top.
If you're a beta, you'll be a little bit lower.
It goes all the way down to Epsilon, where you're just a dumb worker.
And they make sure you come out not too smart and not too ambitious and hating books and things like that.
They train you.
They train your mind to be like that, okay?
So that you'll always be happy, right?
People are given jobs they don't need, right?
God has been replaced by Henry Ford.
Everybody says Ford instead of God.
Instead of making the sign of the cross, they make the sign of the T for the model T because everything is done on an assembly line.
Everything is mechanized and everything is based on the economy and keeping the economy stable and keeping civilization stable.
And if you ever get unhappy, they have a drug.
It's called SOMA.
Soma takes care of all your problems.
And sex is unrestricted.
You can have sex anytime you want.
Why?
Because if you don't have sex anytime you want, you might develop a passion for somebody.
You might develop a passionate attachment for somebody, and they don't want that.
Everyone belongs to everybody else is one of the slogans of the society.
And these are the things that make people happy.
People are happy.
If they're not happy, they take Soma, and that makes them happy.
If they're not happy, they have sex, and that makes them happy.
They don't have families where people get twisted, where they get attached to each other, and they have neuroses.
All that stuff has been eliminated.
And when somebody says, somebody comes to one of the leaders and says, you know, you've eliminated suffering, but you've eliminated everything that's important, let me read you a passage from Brave New World, and this is what the leader says.
He says, civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism.
These things are symptoms of political inefficiency.
In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic.
Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise.
Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended, there obviously nobility and heroism have some sense.
But there aren't any wars nowadays.
The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving anyone too much.
There's no such thing as a divided allegiance.
You're so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do.
And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant.
So many of the natural impulses are allowed free play that there really aren't any temptations to resist.
And if ever by some unlucky chance anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why there's always Soma to give you a holiday from the facts.
And there's always Soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering.
In the past, you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort.
And after years of hard moral training, now you swallow two or three half-gram tablets, and there you are.
Anybody can be virtuous now.
You can carry at least half your mortality about in a bottle.
Christianity without tears.
That's what Soma is.
And if you rebel against this, the man says you're claiming the right to be unhappy.
Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent, the right to have syphilis and cancer, the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy, the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow, the right to catch typhoid, the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind, right?
So in other words, he's saying this is happiness.
Like when I complain about antidepressants, not that some people may not need antidepressants, but their widespread use of them to stave off depression, that's Soma, right?
When we talk about marriage and the attachment of marriage and the commitment to fidelity, that's painful.
That costs you something.
You don't have that cost here.
And when I look at Europe especially, but also on the left, I always hear this voice of happiness, of happiness as the prime idea.
I hear them talk about socialism.
They say most of these programs, these socialistic programs, people support these, and I know they do.
People support opiate.
You know, people get addicted to opiates too, right?
People do like free stuff.
They don't understand that that free stuff is making life easy, but it's taking away from them the only thing that matters, which is their freedom, which is the only way to pursue happiness if you are free, right?
So this is, when I look at Europe right now and I see Donald Trump in Europe and everybody protesting and everybody shocked, you know, and they're so shocked by populism.
What I see, what I see is a living culture.
Trump, in some ways, may be the remnant of the last living culture going to a culture that has committed suicide.
You know, there was an expert on, I think it was on CNN.
His name was Richard Haas, right?
He's the president of Council on Foreign Relations.
And he's worried that Trump is destroying the wonderful society that has existed since World War II.
And here he is talking about that.
Taking a step back, the question is, you know, you think about it.
What came before it was two world wars.
So we know what came before, which was the worst 50 years of human history.
We had 75 years of relative peace, prosperity, democracy made tremendous strides around the world.
And here we are, and Donald Trump is an outlier.
So the real question is what comes after it?
Or to frame it, are the last 75 years the normal now?
Donald Trump's the exception, and then we kind of return, not exactly to where we were, but to something pretty familiar.
Or is Donald Trump the beginning of a new era?
So the last 75 years look like the exception.
We know what came before, two world wars, and now we're potentially entering an era of history which has all sorts of jocking between great powers, the rise of China, these global forces we can't contend with, failed states in the Middle East, populism, nationalism.
And that is the historical question.
So this is exactly how Brave New World comes into being.
People get tired of war.
There's a nine years' war.
I guess, you know, this is before World War II, so he must have seen it coming, and they don't want to have war anymore, so they invent this perfect society.
What he's not taking into account, what he's not taking into account, is that people like their countries.
They like the things that happen.
Countries cause problems.
Countries cause competition, but they like their homes.
They don't like it when you say, here are a million Muslims who are coming to live in your society, and they hate you, but you're not allowed to say anything about that because we have this rule that is for globalization.
The people who argue for globalization, they have a lot of good points.
Globalization makes everybody happier and richer, but it also destroys some of the things that people hold most dear.
When you put happiness first, you lose your country.
When you put happiness first, you might lose your jobs in the Midwest.
Somebody in Nigeria might get those jobs, but your people, the people that you have attachments to, those people are left out in the cold to die by opiate poisoning and addiction and despair.
And so the happy world that he's talking about, the happy world that Trump threatens, the happy world that we conservatives threaten by wanting people to be free and self-reliant and to suffer failure and to suffer their pains, it's a very hard world to argue for.
It is a very hard world to say, you know, if you want to be free, you have to take risks.
If you want to take risks, you can't ask me to pay for them when those risks fail.
If you want to have sex, you might get pregnant.
You can't kill that baby.
You can't kill that baby just because you made a mistake.
I know it keeps you happy to not have that baby in your life, but no, you're violating something of importance, something real, a moral law.
All these questions are questions of happiness and all these questions of whether or not we are going to put happiness first.
And I argue that a culture of happiness is a culture of death.
I think we're seeing that in Europe.
I think we saw it with this poor girl in the Netherlands, that ultimately we have to wonder if there is some other meaning not to be set by the government, not to be set even by the church, but to be found by people and to be found with the help of theologians and thinkers, but to be chosen, each of us, on our own and on our own responsibility.
You know, this revolt against the elites that we're seeing, I know that the elites don't like it very much, but they might have to wonder if maybe in doing so much good and helping everybody be happy, they weren't really having those values for themselves.
The people who are paying for all this happiness for other people suffered and strove and sought the meaning of their lives.
And what they're really saying is that you, the rest of you, in your simplicity, you can't do that.
So we'll just pay you to go away and live a happy life and hear some Soma and relax.
And basically, I think that, you know, that is the society they're selling us.
And we have to think long and hard about what we're offering people instead of happiness because happiness is a beautiful thing and it's a drug and nobody wants to be miserable.
All right, we're going to go to the mailbag.
But first, I got to say goodbye.
Yeah, let's celebrate.
First, we have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come to dailywire.com and subscribe.
It allows you 10 bucks a month, allows you 100 bucks for the year.
For a year, you get the leftist tears tumbler, which I think you may need in the upcoming, in the weeks ahead.
Come on over for the mailbag.
Mailbag.
All right, before I start the mailbag, I want to just start with an update from somebody who wrote to us about a year and a half, two years ago.
He had a terrible problem with addiction, with gambling addiction, and with porn addiction.
And it was kind of ruining his life.
And one of the things I said to him was that it wasn't enough just to break the addiction that he might want to start looking for God.
And he found God, and he wrote to me three months ago to say that he was in a church and was moving toward Christ and it had really made him happier.
And, you know, I, of course, warned him that with addiction, which steals the soul, there's always fights ahead.
But I did tell him this.
I told him that because addiction destroys the soul, God has a stake in helping you.
And if you reach out to him.
So he just wrote to me again and he said it's about three months since I wrote to you last and things have been going miraculously.
I haven't even so much as bought a scratch card since I've been going to church about four months ago.
And I haven't indulged in pornography in roughly two months, both of which are absolute miracles.
I feel God's hand in my life and it's been the greatest and most rewarding season of my life that I can ever remember.
I got baptized on Easter Sunday.
I've been living life for Christ ever since and it's the best decision I've ever made.
Just saying, folks, good medicine is good medicine.
Thought I would point it out.
From Tammy, Andrew, I love your show, especially your tongue-in-cheek opening monologues.
Hope And Punishment00:03:55
One of these days, I'm going to get chased out for I believe that the Democrats are running scared as A.G. Barr opens investigations into their actions, which appear from almost any angle to be blatantly nefarious.
It's often said that the best defense is a good offense.
Do you think that the Democrats remain on attack with threats to impeach in order to distract from the real news, which has and will continue to come to us as these new investigations uncover uncomfortable truths?
I think two things about this.
A, yes.
I think that obviously they're panicked, they're terrified.
Adam Schiff, who has just been absolutely despicable in my view, it just looks like he's caught in a trap.
I think guys like James Comey and John Brennan with their high falute and high talk about honor and decency absolutely violated every, I shouldn't say absolutely, seem and may have violated every tenet of American life and spied on their political opponents using the organs of the government.
If so, I hope they get punished.
I hope they get caught.
And so, yes, I think there are people who are attacking because they know they did the wrong thing and they hope that they can keep, you know, with the help of the press, which has now become just an organ of the Democrat Party, they hope that they can avoid taking responsibility for their bad actions.
I also think there are people who have worked themselves up into such a panic over Donald Trump that they have lost their senses.
Really, I do.
I mean, I think that they really do believe that Trump is a horrible, horrible danger.
You see them come on TV and say, oh, it's the end of the world, the Nazi, you know, this terrible.
You even see, I mean, I've now played two different cuts of intelligent black commentators saying, well, yes, he's been helpful to black people, but the things he says, the things he says, without it ever occurring to them that it's what they hear.
It's not what he says.
It's what they hear.
It must be what they hear because he's doing so well for Americans who are minorities.
And so I think there are a lot of people who have just talked themselves into hysteria as well.
And those are the useful idiots of the people who are trying to mask the Obama administration, which I think was truly an unconstitutional and oppressive administration moving toward really, really bad abuse of powers while the press sat and twiddled its thumbs and said, hail Obama.
So I think it's two things at once.
From Ben, dear bald-headed king of all things known and unknown, on Monday you had Knowles on your show.
You discussed Spygate, Watergate, and the 1960 election.
You two agreed that JFK potentially stole the 1960 election from Nixon.
Being a young person myself, I was never taught about this.
What happened in the 1960 election?
Well, he won two states, Illinois and Texas.
Kennedy won two states, Illinois and Texas, which gave him the electoral, the victory in the Electoral College he needed.
Texas, of course, was where Lyndon Johnson, his vice president, came from, and Lyndon Johnson was a notorious stealer of votes, a notorious manipulator of elections.
And some very, very good historians, including Robert Caro, have accepted the idea that it's possible.
It's never been proved.
I should say it's never been proved.
That's important.
The idea that Johnson delivered Texas, which Kennedy did not win by very many votes comparatively, comparative to the population.
Chicago was, as it is today, a corrupt Democrat machine.
And it delivered the votes that Kennedy needed in Illinois.
There are rumors, very strong rumors, that Sam Giancana, the gangster who shared a mistress with John F. Kennedy and who sometimes has been blamed for Kennedy's assassination, helped rig the voting booths and voting machines.
Again, some of the stuff, it has never been proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, but the suspicions are high.
If you Google it, immediately all these things come up denying it ever happened, so you know that those algorithms have been messed with.
But there are substantial historians who say that this is a distinct possibility.
Just the fact that it isn't explored more often tells you that it is.
Abortion And Its Consequences00:11:37
From Patty, regarding abortion, I have several friends that argue that when you see crack babies and abused and neglected children, that an abortion would be preferable to all that suffering.
I know it's wrong, but I cannot come up with any good analogy that would be comparable and make the issue crystal clear.
That argument seems the only one with merit.
Can you help me out with this?
Well, sure, it's really just what we've been talking about through the whole show, is suffering.
Our moments of despair, our moments of pain, worth dying over.
I mean, it's what they call a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
Ask the person that you're talking to if they have ever been in suffering, if they have ever had problems, if they have ever felt despair, and would they have wanted to be killed, right?
Because these, remember, abortion isn't even suicide.
Abortion isn't even suicide.
It's somebody killing somebody else.
How can you say, how can you say that these people, even though some of them will never become anything more than the suffering that they're experiencing in that moment, how can you say that, make the guess which one it's going to be and kill that person in advance?
And would you kill every person who's suffering?
Would you kill every person who's addicted?
Who would make the decision when people should be killed?
It makes no sense.
That argument, I'm sorry, makes no sense.
And I think that anybody, you know, I've said to people, would you want me to decide for you when your despair is such that I can kill you?
And even if you were saying, no, I think I can handle it.
I would say, no, I'm sorry.
You're in despair.
You have to go.
So, I mean, that's just not an argument that you can maintain.
From Taylor to the omniscient one, I am a 25-year-old woman.
I recently started seeing a guy about a month and a half ago.
The other day he told me he likes me, but he doesn't know if he wants a relationship because he may be deploying in September.
I, on the other hand, really like him and want to keep seeing him, and I've told him as much.
Do you have any advice on how I can approach this situation?
Is there a measured way to try and convince him to give this a shot?
Or do I just have to let whatever happens happen?
Does it sound like his mind is already made up?
Thanks so much for your advice and everything else you do.
Taylor, listen, Taylor, look, there's a possibility.
I'm not saying this is the truth, but a possibility that he's just not that into you.
And this is his way of telling you that.
He doesn't want to hurt you.
What I would do myself is I would go to him and say, you know, I really like you.
I respect what you've said.
I would like to know if you're telling me this because you just want to play the field and you don't want to be committed to this relationship.
I wish you would just come out and tell me that.
If you do like this relationship, well, you know, go and have your deployment or whatever you have.
And, you know, hopefully I'll see you when you return.
In other words, you can't put the pressure on him to do what he doesn't want to do.
It's bad for your future relationship.
It's not a good foundation for a relationship.
You might want to clarify what he's saying.
I kind of suspect that if you were the love of his life and he wanted to be with you always, he would not be saying, talking about deployment.
He would be saying, you know, here's a ring.
I'll see you when I get back.
That's what I suspect.
But you can ask him to clarify that.
But what you can't do is put pressure on him to have a relationship he doesn't want to have.
It's not going to be good for you in the end.
I mean, it may be hurtful to you that he doesn't want to do that, but it's not going to be good for you to force him to do what he doesn't want to or try.
From Linda, thank you for your daily dose of sanity and humor.
My 26-year-old son has been addicted to opioids.
I got him into rehab.
Then he was addicted to alcohol.
He started attending meetings.
He's very smart, but in a low-paying job, not living up to his potential.
The problem is that he is always borrowing money from me.
I stopped giving him cash directly when I discovered his addictions.
I would pay his rent to his landlord directly, for instance.
The last time this happened, I said it would be the last, and he did not pay me back by the deadline, so I'm not talking to him until he does.
Is this the right course of action?
I feel like a terrible mom, but I don't want to enable bad behavior.
What should I do?
Thanks in advance.
Yeah, this is not right.
This is not the way to handle this.
First of all, I'm really sorry.
I know this is so painful and so tragic.
And the hardest thing about someone else's addiction is accepting what you can't do.
You know, that old saying about the wisdom to know the difference between what you can change and what you can't.
This is a, you know, his addiction is tragic and out of your hands.
He's 26 years old, that is old enough to be responsible for himself, and he's going to have to be responsible for himself.
The reason I think you're doing the wrong thing is I don't think you should stop talking to him.
I think you should stop paying for him.
I think you should stop giving him money.
You can invite him over your house once a week for dinner.
He can bring his laundry if he likes.
And you can feed him once a week and see him and talk to him.
But you can't pay for him.
He has got to find that way by himself.
You, meanwhile, should really get into Al-Anon.
I always hate to recommend these groups and everything because I don't know how people feel about joining things.
But Al-Anon is important.
It's a place where you go to discuss how to deal with loved ones who are addicted.
And the reason I approve of it so strongly is because it is something that a lot of people have been through and they know what works and what doesn't work.
And they teach you a system of loving detachment where you continue to love people and you don't blackmail them saying, I'm not talking to you until you pay me back, because that's just never going to work and it just makes his life more miserable and your life more miserable.
But you have to be able to love them and support them without supporting them financially, giving money, which is only going to go into their addiction no matter how you pay it.
Money is fungible.
You pay his rent.
He uses the money he would have used for rent to feed his addiction.
So don't chase him out of your life, but learn through Al-Anon, I would say, learn how to deal with an addict.
Look, this could end tragically.
I'm not telling you that this is the answer to bring about a happy ending.
I can't do that.
But I think that you want to say, no matter how it ends, you want to say that you were there for your son in the best way that was possible, no matter what choices he makes going forward.
So I recommend Alanon.
I recommend you talk to your son, invite him over once a week, but do not give him money because that's where it's going to go.
It's going to go right to his addictions.
This one's from an anonymous writer.
It says, Hi, Mr. Claven.
I moved away from my family almost a year ago, and since then, all hell has broken loose.
Not because I moved, there's just nothing I can do to help.
My older cousin and his wife have been hooked on meth, and their three children are in danger.
One of the three children is a baby and has a serious heart condition and needs meds daily.
I've gotten all this information from my mother, who says that her sister, the mother of the meth head cousin, says that God told her to stay out of it and to not talk about it.
I've suggested that my mother make an intervention or maybe she take the children herself.
I've even offered to take one of the children myself because that's one is all I'd be able to handle.
My cousin's mother just won't seem to do anything.
And being young and away from home, I feel like I can't do anything.
I've never dealt with CPS, child protective services, but I was wondering if maybe I should call them.
I'm conflicted by that option.
I've heard CPS a lot of time makes matters worse.
Do you have any advice on what I could do to help my family?
Yeah, CPS is, first of all, you can't tell your mother to take on children.
That's ridiculous.
I mean, you don't know whether she has that capacity, and you don't have the capacity to do it.
So that's, again, you have to realize when things are tragic.
When things are tragic, they're tragic and you can't do anything to help.
But CPS, look, child protective services, it's not a happy thing.
It's not going to be, you know, if those kids have to go into the system, that's not going to be happy.
But it's better than living with methadictive parents who can't deliver the medicine that's needed to stay alive.
I would definitely, if you feel those children are in physical danger, and it sounds like they are, I would definitely call CPS.
And I would not only call them once, I would call them a couple of times to make sure they get the message.
I mean, I would wait a month or so and then call them again because, you know, they're bureaucrats.
They're sitting there.
They get a message.
They get a million messages.
And then if they hear that message again and again, they start to think, well, maybe we'll take care of this.
I think it does sound like a case for child protective services.
This is not, your mom is basically right.
This is not a situation that you can physically help.
But you can bring in the authorities and have them look.
If parents are meth-addicted, if a child is sick, that child's in danger.
And I think CPS is the right way to go and probably all you can do for them.
From Samuel, Mr. Andrew Clavin, Doctor of Love and Cultivator of Healthy Marriages.
Last year, my wife left me and moved straight in with another man.
Shocking and devastating to me.
I struggled with alcohol and suicidal ideation.
I felt like my life had ended.
Thank God we did not have children.
I've been officially divorced for six months now.
I've made some great progress emotionally and mentally through counseling over the last year, and I now feel ready to begin to share my new self with another.
I love listening to your mailbag segments and truly value your insight and wisdom.
Can you give me some tips on how I can reclaim some of my self-confidence and get back out in the dating world?
The bachelor life isn't appealing to me at 31 and I'm having a real hard time finding and trusting someone new.
Yeah.
First of all, terrible pain, painful situation.
Good for you for getting help.
Good for you for coming through it.
It's just an enormous blow to your sense of ego, your sense of trust, your sense of attachment, everything.
It's just like, you know, when somebody cheats on you, it is just like having being run over by a backhoe.
I mean, it is bad.
You know, it's like bad.
And so good for you for coming back out of it.
Take your time.
Back off a little bit, okay?
Back off and take it easy a little bit.
Don't say, I got to go out there and find me another wife, okay?
It's not seven brides or seven brothers.
Take your time.
Start to date again.
You know, they have that phrase now, date to marry.
Don't do that.
Date to meet people.
Join things instead of dating so that you can meet people.
If you've got a church, go in the church and start to be part of the church, part of the church groups and things they do so you can meet people, meet women, and get to know them and become friendly with them.
Think back over your marriage.
I'm sure in counseling you've done this.
Think back over your marriage.
If there were warning signs, if there was something that appealed to you in your wife, which later turned out to be a sign of what kind of person she is, and learn to look for that in new people.
You will meet somebody that way and learn to trust that person and then move forward into marriage.
In other words, if you make marriage the goal, you might miss the goal, but if you make just kind of meeting people, meeting women that you can like and be friendly with, then you can get to that point where you say, hey, you know, this is somebody I do trust, somebody I do like, somebody so different from the person who hurt me that I'm not going to have to live in fear but can build a real life and a real family with.
So all I would say to you, I think you're doing great.
I think you've done a great thing.
I'm so thrilled to hear that you got help and that you stayed away from, you know, you beat the alcohol, the different ways that the devil comes to get at you with alcohol and with suicide.
You know, you beat that.
And now just take it slow and don't put any targets on anything.
Don't say, I've got to do this and I've got to do that.
Just go out and meet people.
Use all the systems that we have for meeting people.
I like people, you know, I like people who meet online because online dating, if you use the right kind of service that is based on not on sex, but on humanity and partnership, I think that that works out a lot.
I think that that is actually a good innovation in meeting people.
So just take it easy and trust yourself to heal and trust yourself to meet somebody that God has planned for you who's not going to hurt you again.
You're doing good.
I got to stop there.
I'm traveling, but I will be on tomorrow.
So I'll be on from St. Louis where I'm going to speak to the Vitae people about abortion.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
Andrew Klavan Show00:00:56
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Adam Sayovitz.
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.
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