Andrew Clavin dissects Biden’s Iowa speech as a chaotic mix of hyperbole—like calling Trump an "existential threat"—and selective outrage over IRS abuses, while mocking Trump’s insults as ineffective for moderates. Through listener mail, he tackles personal struggles: a woman’s distrust of men rooted in her father’s abandonment, a cop rebuilding trust in St. Louis post-Ferguson, and a Christian’s birth control dilemma, framing solutions through therapy, courage-building, and biblical pragmatism. Clavin rejects term-limit extensions, warning they’d entrench power, and slams polls showing Trump trailing Democrats, tying it to media bias and political polarization. The episode blends sharp critique with raw human stories, exposing how identity, faith, and governance collide in today’s culture wars. [Automatically generated summary]
President Trump and Joe Biden attacked each other yesterday in what could be a preview of either the 2020 election or a tremendous migraine I've felt coming on for weeks.
Speaking in Iowa, a state that is now populated entirely by Democrat presidential candidates, Biden said that Trump was literally an existential threat to America, meaning that America would literally cease to exist if Trump continued to be president, which would make it difficult for Americans to find a place to park, although it would be a lot easier for them to swim to France.
Biden later said he didn't mean Trump was literally an existential threat.
He just liked the way it sounded when he used big words like literally and existential.
Until he found out what literally and existential literally mean, then it just sounded virtually stupid.
Biden went on to declare, quote, President Trump has commitTedros abuses of power, like using the IRS to silence political opponents, making laws through executive action, and unleashing federal agencies to spy on opposition candidates.
Or maybe that was Obama.
But anyway, it was one of those presidents and it's got to stop, unquote.
Biden did spend some time talking about his policies, like his pledge to either support or oppose the Hyde Amendment and his sense that China either was or wasn't a threat to America, whichever you prefer.
Trump responded to Biden's attacks by calling Biden a series of insulting nicknames like Sleepy Joe, Creepy Joe, Sloppy Joe, Cup of Joe, Morning Joe, and Scumpface.
He dropped his pants and wagged his backside in Biden's general direction, which some Trump supporters cheered as a new tone for the presidency, reminiscent of Abraham Lincoln when he mooned Jefferson Davis in this really weird dream they had.
In any case, if this does turn out to be a preview of the 2020 presidential campaign, I think it literally is an existential threat to America, and we should probably all start swimming to France.
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-dunky.
Shipshape, dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Yesterday, we talked about the imaginary world in which Donald Trump is a Hitler-like oppressor, as opposed to the real world in which he's kind of a bore but is doing an excellent job on the economy and in judicial appointments and in the process of trying some interesting stuff on the international front on which the jury is still out.
Now, this fake world of oppression in which nobody is actually oppressed, but everyone goes around wailing about how oppressed they are, is a world promoted by Democrats, which is just politics.
That's fine.
But what bothers me is that the Democrat lie is amplified by the mainstream news media, which is over 90% Democrat, and then hammered home by Hollywood with comedians who only attack one side and film companies who rewrite history for people who were never taught anything but leftist history in college.
And if that's not enough, any opposing opinion is deplatformed, blacklisted, and shouted down.
It's what I call the empire of lies.
So yesterday, Joe Biden, who's been hiding Biden up till now, came out of Haydn to attack Trump.
And it's clear he plans to depend on this empire to carry him to the White House.
Almost everything he said was distorted.
Almost nothing he said was factually true, and some of it was openly false.
And no one in the mainstream took the time to fact check or challenge him on any of it as far as I saw, whereas Trump only has to sneeze to get four Pinocchios for Achu.
So we're facing a test, not Trump against Biden.
I understand that people have different opinions about that.
Of course they do.
That's politics.
But it's a contest between reality and a carefully built, painfully maintained world of the imagination, which matters because freedom requires a hard-boiled, realistic approach to human nature and the facts.
And as we know from our old pal T.S. Eliot, humankind cannot bear very much reality, so we are always in an uphill fight.
We'll talk about who's going to win, but first, let us talk about, well, we'll talk about Lightstream because all of us, every one of us, uses credit cards as if they don't matter.
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Hey, coming up tonight at 7.30 p.m. Eastern Time, 4:30 p.m. in fantasyland, tune in to our next episode of Daily Wire Backstage.
Daily Wire God King Jeremy Boring, myself, Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, and this week's special guest, Dave Rubin, will be talking politics, culture, the censoring of conservatives online, and of course, the answers to fix your life for the better guaranteed.
As always, only Daily Wire subscribers get to ask the questions, so subscribe today.
All right, so before Biden even spoke yesterday, CNN had a Chiron that said Biden to eviscerate Donald Trump, which sounded a little violent to me.
I don't know, just the idea that he was going to cut open Donald Trump and rip out his guts.
You know, it's not the sort of thing you announce on CNN.
It's the sort of thing, like after it's done, you might say, wow, he really eviscerated it, but to announce that this is what's coming, I don't know.
It just seems a little strange.
But Biden did mention Trump again and again and again.
I don't know how many times I lost count.
But he started.
But what got me about it, what got me about it is he's selling this completely sentimental idea of Barack Obama, which is built up over eight years of press, of supine press worship of Obama, right?
I saw on Twitter the other day this woman said, I went to the National Gallery and saw Biden's, I saw Obama's portrait and I burst into tears.
And I said to the guard, you know, do you get a lot of criers?
And the guard said yes, and I tell him, don't cry, fight back.
And I thought, well, you know, I cried for all eight years of the Obama presidency, so I understand.
But that is the lie that was created, the lie of this civil, statesmanlike man with no, remember, he's scandal-free.
We all know he's scandal-free.
And Biden knows the press, the press will do that for him.
He knows the empire of lies exists.
He knows Stephen Colbert will back him up.
He knows Netflix will make movies about it.
They'll send movies in the theaters about it.
And so he's playing on that and depending on that to carry him through.
So listen to Biden talk about basically Obama versus him as the new Obama, Biden is the new Obama, and Trump as the evildoer who has ended all civility in government.
This is cut number one.
He's setting a standard, a standard of crude language and embarrassing behavior that is burring deep into our culture, for real, into our culture.
And it's going to take some time to get rid of it, but we must.
We must.
It's not who we are.
And folks, thirdly, our democracy.
Our democracy is at risk.
I never thought I'd use those words in my lifetime.
But it's true.
Everywhere you turn, Trump is tearing down the guardrails of democracy, tearing down the things that prevent the abuse of power.
Whether it's a man raising his hand to strike a woman or a child or an employer threatening workers and treating them like dirt or an American president who has no respect for the rule of law.
I can't stand it.
The most American can't stand the abuse of power.
Fake news.
Enemy of the people.
These aren't words to be laughed at or dismissed.
Just look what's happening around the world.
Think of the dictators and tyrants using the exact same language Trump uses to justify their abuses of power in their countries.
Not a joke.
Think about it.
Trump's goal is simple.
Discredit the news, discredit the free press, and run over the American people in terms of their safeguards, roughshot.
So Joe Biden representing himself from the Obama administration.
And first of all, if I have to listen to another four years of that's not who we are, I may actually get in a rowboat and start paddling for France myself.
But he's talking about Trump's attacks on the press.
No question.
Enemy of the people, fake news.
Let's just think about the reality, okay, just for a sec.
I mean, I hate to shatter the glass palace of the Democrats that's the center of the Democrat Empire of Lives.
But think about what Obama actually did.
Let me read this.
This is from Beckett Adams in the Washington Examiner.
It's not even up to date, but it's, well, it is up to date for now.
2009, the Obama White House intentionally excluded Fox News' Chris Wallace from participating in a round of interviews.
The White House initially lied about this, and many in the press went along with it.
It wasn't until 2011 that the public learned the truth.
Sorry, an internal email showed the White House director of broadcast media told Treasury officials specifically, we'd prefer if you skip Fox, please.
In 2010, the Obama administration renewed the bogus Bush-era subpoena against the New York Times James Risen in a prolonged attempt to determine whether the reporter was the recipient of leaked CIA information.
In February 2011, federal investigators were revealed to have spied on Risen.
Federal investigators poured over Risen's credit reports and his personal bank records.
This is a New York Times reporter.
The feds even tracked his phone logs and movements under Obama.
In 2012, Fox was mysteriously excluded from a White House conference call pertaining to the terrorist attacks in Benghazi.
Fox was also excluded from an all-network CIA briefing regarding the attacks.
In 2013, the Obama Justice Department labeled then Fox News reporter James Rosen a criminal co-conspirator under the Espionage Act of 1917, and all because the reporter used a State Department contractor as a source for a story.
Rosen was also labeled a flight risk.
The Justice Department seized the records of at least five phone lines connected to Fox News.
The federal law enforcement agency even seized the phone records of Rosen's parents.
The FBI also got a warrant to search Rosen's emails from 2010.
In May 2013, the Associated Press revealed that the Justice Department had secretly collected two months worth of personal and work-related phone calls made by AP reporters and editors.
Federal officials secretly obtained records on incoming and outgoing calls made by specific AP journalists, as well as general news staff.
The news group reported potentially compromising many sources totally unrelated to the investigation.
2014, the Obama administration set the record.
They set the record for denying the most Freedom of Information Act requests of any administration, and it topped that in 2015.
So Donald Trump calls the press the enemy of the people, and he calls them fake news.
Obama was spying on him.
No scandal Obama was spying on them.
That's also, you know, again, bringing up the IRS silencing of political opposition and potentially the FBI's FBI's investigation of an opposition political campaign.
The Press As Enemy00:17:29
We're talking about words versus deeds is a great big difference.
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So let's listen to Trump responding to some of this.
This is cut number four, talking about the Democrats.
Nancy is a mess.
The Democratic Party is a mess.
They're doing everything they can to win the election in 2020.
They are guilty of many crimes, many, many crimes, what they've done.
They're guilty of many, many crimes.
And hopefully in a short period of time, that'll be seen.
They should never have done what they've done.
And all they do is waste time on these investigations where there's no obstruction, no collusion, no nothing.
And in the meantime, they can't get a border deal done.
They can't do anything.
We need, in addition to the great deal with Mexico, we need them to work on illegal immigration, on lower drug prices, on infrastructure.
And they're not doing anything.
They've come to a halt.
So Trump is acting alone, right?
He has no Empire of Lies surrounding him.
They keep complaining about Fox News, where Hannity and Laura Ingram support Trump.
But of course, that's two shows on that on Fox News.
And everybody keeps complaining about them because they're the only station where he gets any support at all.
Everybody else, what he just said there, perfectly reasonable political point.
They're not doing anything.
They're wasting their time with these investigations.
But all those investigations are given credence by news media and an entertainment media that are going to say this is reality.
So Biden is operating in this world that simply does not exist.
The world of a wonderful Obama who let the press do anything.
Even at the time, the New York Times was complaining, people at the New York Times were complaining that Obama was the most oppressive, most intrusive president against the press they had ever seen, okay?
Whereas what has Trump done?
Who has he arrested?
He threw, what's his name?
Look at me, I'm Jim Acosta out of the press corps for a little while because he manhandled a woman trying to wrest the mic out of his hands.
But aside from that, really, what has he done?
What has he done to oppress the press?
Virtually nothing, and yet they are sitting there saying, oh my God, here's the Hitler coming after us.
And Biden knows it.
He knows he can do it.
Let's listen to a little bit more of Biden making accusations against Trump that simply are not true.
I believe that the president is literally an existential threat to America for three reasons.
One, he is a genuine threat to our core values.
And if you wondered about that, remember what happened in Charlottesville.
I never thought I'd see that happen in my lifetime again.
And what happened?
When he was asked to comment on it, he said, quote, there were very fine people in both groups.
No president of the United States, Democrat or Republican, has ever, ever, ever said something like that.
Never.
And it was a response heard round the world.
Round the world.
But most importantly, it was a response heard by our children.
Our children were listening.
The idea that we give credit.
Look, folks, America was built in a way we were built of basic core values.
Decency, honor, leaving no one behind, realizing that there are things that are bigger than you in America.
That we have to get together.
We have to cooperate.
So the Trump thing was indeed, as Biden said, heard around the world.
It was a lie.
In that press conference, like a couple of lines down, Trump said, I'm not talking about the white supremacists.
I'm not talking about the Nazis.
They deserve to be universally condemned.
So he was obviously referring to people who were arguing about what the statue was, whether the statue stayed up and what the park was called.
There were good people on both sides, which no doubt was true.
So he can do that because that myth was promulgated by the press.
It was spread by the press, spread by Stephen Colbert, spread by the late night comics, continually put out there.
So now when it's debunked, nobody knows.
Nobody knows it was debunked.
I mean, that is just not going to be repeated anywhere near the number of times.
Biden knows it.
He knows he's living in the empire of lies.
He wants to be emperor of the empire of lies and make it to the White House that way.
And by the way, just to add to this, when he says that America was built on ideas of leaving no one behind and cooperation and dignity and honor, no, it wasn't.
Dignity and honor, of course, are wonderful, wonderful things.
And I'll get to that.
I'll get back to that in a moment.
But that's not what America was built on.
It was built on the idea of a limited government, a government very restrained by a constitution that enumerated its powers and that it had no powers except those that were enumerated in the Constitution.
It has veered from that idea with the help of guys like Joe Biden.
That's the idea that America was built on.
Dignity and honor, always a good thing, but the idea of leaving no one behind, show me that.
Show me in the Constitution where he says we'll leave no one behind.
When you're free, people get left behind.
That's one of the things that happens when you're free.
If you don't like being free, you can have everybody equal.
You know, the two times people are equal is when they're slaves and when they're dead.
That is when people are equal.
But all America promised was equal treatment under the law and equal defense of your rights.
And those are two values that the Democrats have veered from.
So again, just everything he says, he depends on this structure that has been built up.
And by the way, partly the rights fault, right, for allowing that to happen.
It's partly the right.
There's no inherent reason why the news media has to be run by Democrats.
There's no inherent reason why universities have to have been taken over by the left.
There's no inherent reason why the conservatives don't have movie studios, distribution arms, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook.
All of those were built by people who happened to be on the left using tech people who are on the left because they were trained in colleges where they were taught to be on the left.
That is not necessarily the way it has to be.
We let that happen.
We stood by and let that happen while we were arguing over nonsense, like who wins the 130th congressional district in Rhode Island or whatever, and getting tied up on issues that we were never going to win.
So we allowed that to happen because we're always worried about the moment, we're always in a panic, and we don't pay attention to the culture, the bigger things that are taking place.
So here is the thing, the one thing on which Biden and all of the Democrats have a strength, which is the question of dignity and civility.
And I'll get back to this in a minute, but let's hear Biden go after Trump in his, Trump go after Biden, I'm sorry, in his typical Trumpian way, cut one.
When a man has to mention my name 76 times in his speech, that means he's in trouble.
Now, I have to tell you, he's a different guy.
He looks different than he used to.
He acts different than he used to.
He's even slower than he used to be.
So I don't know.
But when he mentions my name that many times, I guess I should be complimented.
You know, I'd rather run against, I think, Biden than anybody.
I think he's the weakest mentally.
And I like running against people that are weak mentally.
I think Joe is the weakest up here.
The other ones have much more energy.
I don't agree with their policies.
But I think Joe is a man who was, I call him 1% Joe, because until Obama came along, he didn't do very well.
Joe Biden thought that China was not a competitor of ours.
Joe Biden is a dummy.
Joe Biden thought China was not a competitor.
China made $500 billion over a short period of time against Obama, Biden, and for many, many years, in all fairness to them.
So we've all gotten used to Trump at this point.
We've gotten used to that tone of voice, that he's a dummy, that he hasn't got anything up here and all this stuff.
And we got used to it, or at least I did.
I accepted it because I knew the alternative was so much worse.
The alternative, the socialism, the slavery, the infanticide.
I mean, there's no, we're not even arguing about abortion anymore.
We're arguing about the killing of babies who have been born or who are about to be born.
I'm not going to like detail how that takes place.
I'm sure some of you, most of you probably have heard it at some point.
It's unbearable.
It's unbearable to be in a country where people are arguing that that should be done to essentially a living child.
I mean, it's absurd.
It's absurd and evil that we're arguing with that.
That is the alternative.
But here's the thing.
Kurt Schlichter, who's a great guy, I like Kurt Kurt a lot.
He's a terrific writer.
He writes very intensely.
But he has only one side.
He is completely on the Trump train all the way and hates the Never Trumpers almost as much, if not more, than he hates the Democrats.
And he writes this column attacking the Never Trump.
They always end up with David French.
Poor David.
I mean, David's a wonderful person.
I disagree with him.
I disagree with him about Donald Trump, but he's a great guy.
I don't know why he has become like the poster boy for never-Trumpism as opposed to other never-Trumpers.
But anyway, Kurt says, Kurt begins this column saying there's a debate going on inside conservatism.
I love the guy.
There's a debate going on inside conservatism between the insufferable sissies who insist that we normals are morally obligated to submit to being crushed by the leftists who hate us and want us enslaved or dead and actual conservatives.
Maybe I'm simplifying this intellectual dispute a bit.
Wait, no, I'm not.
You either want to defeat the liberal elite that despises us or you don't.
It's those of us who seek to win versus the never-Trump losers and there's no middle ground.
Win or lose.
Pick one.
Now, I have attacked, or at least argued with, the Never Trumpers who say it's not a binary system.
Of course, it's a binary system.
There are two parties.
And the people who sit around say, yes, well, if Hillary Clinton had won, then four years later we'd have done this, four years later.
I mean, the same people didn't even know Trump was going to win that night.
How the hell do they know what's going to happen over four years?
It's a binary system.
If you don't vote for one person, you're voting for the other person.
But it's not a binary system, win or lose.
It's not a binary system, win or lose, because Trump, with his lack of dignity, with his insult, his boorishness, his insulting, loses votes.
He's losing votes.
He loses women.
He loses people who don't want to see the president behave that way.
He doesn't have to behave that way to fight with everything he's got.
I don't think Trump can stop himself.
I think that's who Trump is.
Character in this sense is fate.
I mean, that's not what it means, but in this sense, I think it does.
Look, again, the idea that Obama was a scandal-free, dignified president is crap.
He was oppressive.
He was offensive to the Constitution.
He was much worse in terms of violating our constitutional rights than Donald Trump has been ever.
Those are the facts.
But Trump plays into the image of himself that the Empire of Lies has created by behaving that way.
And I know that it gins up his base, and I know they love it.
But it is a problem.
There's no question about that.
It's a problem in terms of winning and losing.
And it's also a problem of what it is the price we are paying to fight back this tide of socialism, incompetence, and also just the hatred of freedom, the hatred of individuals, and as Kurt says, of normal people that the Democrat Party has now come to represent.
But this is the problem when you have a structure built on creating anti-Republican lies.
It is a problem when Trump plays into that image by the way he sometimes behaves.
All right, we got the mailbag coming up.
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All right, we got the mailbag coming up.
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Could you wait for a second?
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Yeah!
The mailbag is coming up.
We have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
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The mailbag.
All right, this is from Anonymous.
Dear Andrew, I'm assumed to be 32-year-old, wrapping up a PhD program.
This is from a woman.
I'm wondering about my future.
I was raised in a typical conservative Christian family.
I was raised, I think it was unladylike for girls to ask boys out.
I'm not and have never identified as a feminist, but flash forward two, almost three degrees later, and I've turned into a sort of stereotype that is popular for other conservatives to describe.
Educated but unmarried, and unfortunately, wanting what now it looks like I won't have.
I've struggled with depression all my life, but it's gotten significantly worse since I turned 30.
I've gone to church all my life and watched other girls find good men in Bible studies, but have been unable to replicate the process.
Should I just make peace with being single, celibate, obviously, because of her Christian convictions, and do the best I can?
Or is there a strategy I'm missing?
I realize too late that I want a family despite always being deeply suspicious of men and assuming that they're untrustworthy and eventually leave as my dad did.
Obviously, this isn't something that all girls experience, so it's just something to do with me.
I don't know how to reconcile this desire for a family with my reality and still identify as a Christian with conservative principles as any Daily Wire backstage podcast forces me to confront.
Okay, so you're asking this question of me, so all I can do is give you my impressions, and I'm going to give you my impression of that letter, which is that it is saturated.
The letter is saturated with anger.
It is imbued with anger on every level.
Anger against your father, anger against men, anger against God as well for forcing you into this kind of state where not only, you know, do you not have a family, you can't even have sex, or use sex as a way of getting a man to like you even though you find them untrustworthy.
Saturated With Anger00:15:45
Obviously, it seems to me, this anger stems from your father deserting the family.
And yeah, your father walking out of the family.
And the thing about a father, look, a father, a father is a symbol that works both upward and downward, right?
He's there to represent God.
He is there to represent God.
Obviously, he's not going to be perfect like God.
He's not going to be all-powerful like God.
He's not going to be all-wise and omniscient like God, but he can be just.
He can be loving.
He can be fierce and imposing righteousness and discipline.
He can bring both justice and mercy, and he can be unswerving that he never leaves.
He's dependable.
He's there insofar as that is within his power.
Your dad failed in doing that.
And so that makes you angry at God.
I can hear it.
I can hear that you feel constrained in this Christian world where other girls are somehow gaming the system and finding good men, but you can't for reasons you can't understand because they don't have anything to do with the Christianity.
They have to do with your anger.
I mean, men, just like women, they can sense when something is going on that hostility.
They know that's there.
Your father also failed you going downward because your father is your first representation of men, of maleness.
I mean, this is what's so ridiculous about all this stuff they talk about where you get to choose your gender and all this.
You don't.
You are a gender, and the people that you meet in that gender at the beginning represent that gender for you and establish an idea that you have.
So now you have the idea that all men are going to desert you.
And certainly there are plenty of men who will desert you, who are untrustworthy, but also plenty of men who are virtuous, trustworthy, protective, loving, and will stick around and uphold their words.
So, so the problem that you have, you know, you have a problem.
Obviously, you sense that as you get to be 30, you know, obviously girls, you know, what is it?
They have this value of youth and a beauty that men like, but that doesn't mean that it's too late.
That doesn't mean that the clock just runs out and a bell goes off and you're done.
That's ridiculous.
So the problem that you have is not meeting men.
The problem that you have is your anger.
The problem that you have is you're angry at men, you're angry at God, and it's making it hard for you to maneuver.
You think it's about your degrees, you think, oh, I'm so educated, no men are intimidated by me.
You think it's about the confines of Christian belief.
It's about none of those things.
It's about your anger and the way that those things are playing off the other things.
So fix it.
You got to go.
I would say you're going to have to go into therapy probably.
It's very hard to go back into that world of your youth when these terrible wounds are suffered alone.
It's hard to go back and understand it alone.
And it's something that you need to expunge.
You need to face it, confront it.
Understand that your father failed.
He failed to represent God.
That's not God's failure.
That's his.
He failed to represent good men.
That's not men's failure.
That's his.
And so you're going to have to deal with that if you want to move forward.
And I think you can.
It's not impossible.
You know, I want to pause there before going on to the next letter.
There was a wonderful video making the rounds of a dad talking to his little boy.
They're sitting on the couch.
The baby is pre-verbal.
He can't talk.
But he's carrying on this complete conversation.
If you haven't seen it, here's just a little bit of it.
That's what I was wondering.
I don't know when they're going to do next season because they did some stuff this time.
Exactly what I was thinking.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Don't bring that in.
You know what I'm saying?
Don't do the same stuff.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, that's like that.
I love you too, yeah.
Like, go somewhere else with that, but don't break here.
You know what I'm saying?
It's got to be clean.
It's got to be clean.
That's what I said.
You know what I'm saying?
I was like, what in the world?
Don't do it here.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
I love that video, but it is, it shows you, right, the kid is looking at his dad and learning how to be a man and learning how to be a human being.
And babies do that.
Both sexes do it.
They both look at their fathers and they learn from seeing.
The thing about being a dad, they got to be able to smell you.
They got to be able to sniff you.
You know, like it's not good enough to be far away and say, oh, yeah, I still see them on weekends.
You got to be there, pal.
And like, when they fail you, that's what you lose.
You lose all that representation of both God and men.
From Jimmy, dear semi-omnipotent arch.
What do you mean, semi?
What the?
Oh, Archheum Clavin, I've been listening to you for a very long time, but the recent attacks on Stephen Crowder have finally convinced me to put my money where my mouth doesn't subscribe.
He's one of several people who said that.
Crowder, is it really good that you see Crowder being hounded off YouTube and you subscribe to the Daily Wire?
That's the way it should be because you don't want to subscribe to his stuff.
All right.
I've recently been struggling with what I consider to be a major defect in my personality.
When letting my dog out the other day, she escaped from my grasp and started attacking a small dog that she has spotted.
What concerns me is that I had an opportunity to pull her away before she killed the dog, but I couldn't bring myself to do it because I was afraid of getting bit.
I know this seems like a relatively minor event, but it weighs heavily on me because it has revealed a trait that I've always feared I have.
I freeze up when facing a difficult on the spot decision.
I'm deeply troubled by this and I'm concerned that this may cost human lives one day.
Do you have any recommendations on how to change behavior that's so deeply embedded in my subconscious or am I forever stuck with cowardice?
Well, look, it's a little more complicated than cowardice.
You know, I don't know if you're a reader or if you're a sophisticated reader because there's a novel, a wonderful novel on this subject called Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad, but it is a Victorian novel, a little difficult, so it's a little, you know, the language is a little thick and old-fashioned.
But in the book, In Lord Jim, what he talks about is how there's a certain randomness to acts of courage at one moment.
You may find that you panic in another moment.
You may find that everything slows down and you act with bravery and courage.
It's not necessarily an embedded trait.
When you look at some of the heroes of Nazi Germany, the people who were and also the surrounding countries who protected people during the Holocaust, a lot of them had to experience not doing anything first, seeing somebody oppressed, seeing a Jewish person beat up or knocked around and standing by and doing nothing before they resolved, before they went home and resolved, oh, you know, no, I can't live with that.
I actually have to do something, and then became great heroes hiding people in their houses and their cellars and risking their lives to save lives.
So courage is not quite as much of a, it's not like an embedded trait that you can never change, that will never change.
It sometimes depends on incidents.
It sometimes depends on seeing what you are first and how you feel first.
But there's certainly things that you can do to remind yourself that you don't die just because you get hit.
You know, when I grew up, I was in a lot of fights, and, you know, especially when I was young, and I got hit and I hit people, and it's really unpleasant.
Nobody likes to get hit.
Nobody likes to get hurt, and it really does affect you.
Later on, I studied martial arts, and I did it mostly, I became a black belt in karate.
I did it mostly just to be with my son, who was also studying it, but I really enjoyed it.
And when I first started to spar, I noticed I really didn't want to get hit.
And one time when I actually did get tagged, I actually hurt the guy because I got so angry about it in the sparring match.
And it took a little while, but I realized, you know, you get punched, you get slapped around, you get kicked.
You know, you live.
You're a little sore, but you will live.
And so doing something like that, taking up martial arts and grappling with people and realizing that you're not made of paper, that you can get hit and survive, can increase your self-confidence and your reflexes and your ability to respond in situations of danger.
I highly recommend it.
I think it really can help and it's worth doing in and of itself.
It's nice to know how to defend yourself and how to fight if you need to.
I hope you never do.
I hope never to have to lift my hand in anger ever again.
But, you know, still, those are things that build up confidence.
And really what you're talking about is confidence because moments of courage come and go.
But if you have confidence, you're much more likely to react in a way that you'll be happy with.
From JC.
Dear Mr. Clavin, I was wanting to know your thoughts on a specific question.
It's on my heart.
I'm an evangelical Christian woman who was 23 years old.
I was on birth control from age 20 to 21.
On a request of my mother, I was having sex during a time in my life where I was very lost.
I ended up getting off the pill because I realized it was the thing that was causing my depression and suicidal thoughts, which were not there prior to taking the birth control.
On the past two years, I've been saved by the grace of God.
My boyfriend and I both committed ourselves to celibacy until marriage.
Recently, he asked me if I would be getting back on birth control when we got married, and I said no instinctively because of the emotional distress it caused me the first time.
But he asked me if it included condoms.
And my gut reaction was to say no again.
This is my question.
What are your views on birth control?
And if Christians should ever take them, use them.
I heard a sermon recently that was discussing how children are a gift from God.
That seems a contradiction.
Why would you use birth control and not trust God fully to give you his gift?
And do you have any opinion?
And do you have a biblical reference to back up your opinion?
You're asking my opinion, so I'm giving you my opinion.
I don't think that birth control is ungodly or irreligious at all.
I think there's a big, big difference.
Even to the Catholics who don't believe in birth control, I think there's a big difference between, say, birth control and abortion.
Once a child is conceived, it is a living human being, which, if not interfered with, will become a human life.
stop that being from coming into existence, to stop that new DNA from coming into existence, using birth control does not seem to be, to me, to be a sin at all.
There's no biblical line about birth control, but there isn't no biblical scripture about birth control, but there's not any biblical scripture as far as I'm concerned preventing birth control either.
So I think it is something that you have to decide for yourself.
Clearly, if it makes you depressed, you shouldn't use it.
You shouldn't use chemical birth control.
But there are other things like diaphragms and condoms that can be used with relatively little discomfort.
It's something you have to decide for yourself, obviously, but if you're asking me, I don't think that there's anything violating God's law in using it.
So obviously the Pope would disagree, and he can write to the mailbag if he subscribes first.
From Adam, I currently am listening to your podcast in my Leftist Tears Tumblr.
I'm a police officer in the St. Louis area.
I worked during the Ferguson riots and saw so much division in the community during that time.
I've worked hard in my profession to bridge the gap between the black community and the police.
Any advice to make sure my work is not in vain?
Well, first of all, praise to you for working on this and also for being a cop, which is a difficult, really difficult profession.
And I appreciate police.
I think they do so much for our society by the way they behave and the way they present themselves and the way they present the law to people and the way they treat people.
And one of the things, you know, they talk about community policing, which, you know, the thing about Ferguson, let me say a couple of things about Ferguson.
Anytime there's a riot in a black neighborhood, it really, really strains relations between the community and the police.
It sometimes starts because those relationships are strained to begin with.
Ferguson was, it's hard to remember all the different cases that Obama brought to light in that time, but that was the Michael Brown case, Hands Up, Don't Shoot, I think.
So there was a situation in which the cop really didn't do anything wrong, but the policing had been so, the police had been so alienated from the people that when the word spread, this story spread that this gentle giant had thrown up his hands and said, hands up, don't shoot, that when that word spread, there was no one to say it nay.
There was nobody to deny it.
So the Ferguson police system had really broken down and had not paid attention to building relationships with the community.
After a riot like that, you know, sometimes the police just say, what do we have to do to reach these people?
We're protecting them.
We're risking our lives to protect people in this neighborhood.
And now the neighborhood hates us and burns down their own neighborhood.
And it causes a lot of animosity among the police.
Community policing is sometimes depicted as like being a pal, showing up in schools and making speeches, but that's not really what it's supposed to be about.
Community policing, which William Bratton, as the police chief of New York, and I think later LA, instituted, is a way of listening to people so that you're reacting to the things that are affecting them.
You know, if there are a lot of burglaries, like stores being robbed in a neighborhood, that may not affect people as much as litter.
It may not affect people as much as drunks lying on the street.
Those are the things that people run into every day.
And so when the police show up and they start to say, what do we need to do to help you and your community and start to deal with those things and start to say, hey, you know, you're not allowed to urinate in public anymore in this neighborhood.
You're not allowed to throw bricks through windows.
You're not allowed to write graffiti on things.
Sometimes that really starts to build trust with the community because they understand that you're taking care of the things that bother them.
You're not just chasing a guy off a stoop because he's drinking beer in a bag, which maybe doesn't bother anybody.
Maybe that's just a way that people relate to each other in that neighborhood.
But people throwing stones and breaking windows, even in abandoned buildings, that does.
That's why they call it broken window policing.
And so I think it's really important.
Foot patrols are important.
People to show that you're out in the neighborhood, that you're part of the neighborhood, that you can be stopped, that some people can stop you and ask for directions, that people can stop you and vent a little bit about the things that are bothering them in the neighborhoods.
Those are the things I think really build relationships between the cops and the community.
And I think if your force isn't doing that, I realize you have bosses who have to implement that stuff.
But if your force isn't doing that, maybe that's stuff you can suggest and study and find out about.
They write about a lot in City Journal where I sometimes write.
And those are things that you can find out about and maybe help your force implement.
Because one of the problems in Ferguson was that the distrust was there before the incident took place.
So a lot of conservatives say, well, Michael Brown was a thug who rushed the cop.
That may have been true, but there was nobody to stand up for the cop in the community because the policing had not been community policing up till that point.
Should I do one more?
I'm kind of running out of time, but I'll do one more.
From Iggy, how do you feel about presidential term limits?
I have the opinion that they should be removed or at least extended to 16 years.
I can understand why we have them.
It seems geopolitically to be a potential risk if countries like China and Russia do not effectively have those rules which allow them to plan way beyond the eight years our presidents have to set an agenda.
I'm a big fan of term limits.
The big argument against them is if politicians don't stay in power, then the deep state, the administrative state, gets more power because they're the only people who really know what's going on.
I would like term limits to be like a week.
No, I'm kidding.
But I think two terms as president is plenty.
I think we benefit from having new leadership.
I think we benefit from four years in which the president knows he doesn't have to run again and can do what he actually intends to do.
And we can find out how that works.
Term Limits Debate00:01:41
I think that we should have it for senators.
I think we should have it for the House of Representatives, some kind of system where you either move up or you move out.
I just think it is not a good thing to have a permanent governing class.
We were not supposed to have that.
That was not the idea of the founding.
We have it now.
We have people who are in office forever.
I do not believe that's a good thing.
And I believe whatever institutional memory it gives them, whatever break it gives them against the administrative state can be taken care of legislatively.
But I think people should feel they have a certain amount of time to operate, then they can move up.
And if they don't move up, they get out of government and do something for a living, get an honest living.
I got to stop there.
I'll see you tomorrow.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
is The Andrew Klavan Show.
Hurrah!
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring, senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Adam Sayovitz.
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Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production, Copyright Daily Wire, 2019.
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