Andrew Clavin dismantles the myth of equality in No One is Equal, mocking Biden’s 19% poll numbers before arguing equality is a moral fiction, not a natural law, citing Dave Chappelle’s Netflix special to expose leftist hypocrisies—from WNBA vs. NBA disparities to Epstein’s predatory abuses. He rejects the Equality Act as a corrupt imposition of sameness, condemns New York’s dismantling of gifted programs for racial balance, and dismisses Ayn Rand’s objectivism as flawed despite praising her economic insights. Listeners debate Rand’s Judeo-Christian critique, Hollywood’s leftward shift post-1960s studio collapse, and whether monarchy could govern immoral societies, while a grieving listener finds solace in faith amid suffering, framing evil as part of a divinely ordered tragedy. The episode leaves equality’s contradictions exposed and morality’s fragility unshaken. [Automatically generated summary]
A new poll shows that Joe Biden has fallen behind in the Democrat race to find out who will lose the next election to Donald Trump.
The poll, Lester Kaminsky of Krakow, says Biden is now at 19% behind both the communist guy and the pretend Indian woman who are tied at 20%.
Biden reacted to the poll with amazement, saying he was shocked to find out he was running for president, although that might explain what he was doing in New Hampshire, which up to now he had thought was Vermont.
which might explain why he was wearing skis, even though it was August, which he had thought was November, which might explain why it's not Thanksgiving.
In a speech to a broom closet he accidentally wandered into a week ago, Biden said, quote, this latest poll is just another example of how my campaign is being undermined by facts and information.
My opponents say I'm getting old and losing my wits, but when you look back over my long career, I have been absolutely consistent in my blithering idiocy, unquote.
Excited by the new poll, Bernie Sanders delivered a speech to the Association of Former KGB interrogators, saying, quote, I hereby pledge to spend every dollar America has ever produced or ever will produce until we end the scourge of human freedom or global warming or whatever you choose to call it, unquote.
Senator Elizabeth Warren heard about the new poll in Iowa, where she had been standing in front of a cigar store pretending to be made of wood and then suddenly springing to life to startle the customers for a joke.
Warren said, quote, today I string together a series of largely empty but emotional sounding words to accuse rich people of something and promise something else to someone else, none of which I can accomplish or afford.
Have a cigar, unquote.
Another new poll is expected tomorrow with completely different but equally meaningless results.
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-dunkity.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, today I'm going to be talking about equality, which is the secret theme behind a lot of recent news stories.
And equality is a state that exists exactly nowhere in nature except in the human mind.
Equal means the same, and there are no two things that are different from, but also the same as one another.
In fact, when you put it that way, you can see it's a contradiction in terms.
In fact, it's complete nonsense.
Every creature, every object, every place, every idea is different from every other and likely better or worse than every other, depending on what qualities you're judging.
Plus, the pleasant idea that each may have its good and bad qualities, but all of them somehow combine to bring them to some sort of state of equality is simply a pleasant fantasy.
A lion and a gazelle are both swift and beautiful, but if they engage in any overlong social interaction, only the lion is going to walk away in one piece.
One is predator, one is prey.
There's no equality in that.
And yet, the human mind is capable of imagining equality and insists on imposing it on a world where it simply doesn't exist.
Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
There's no justice in life either, yet we seek for justice.
There's no fairness in life, but we believe in fairness.
The human mind is the earthly source of every good and evil because it's the only place on earth, as far as we know, where choice and self-consciousness and moral judgment exist, and you can't have good and evil without those.
We are made in the image of God, so we seek to humanize fallen nature as a way to bring it back in line with God's nature.
So, we declare that all men are created equal.
That's a good thing.
It means we recognize each individual person is equal to every other as a basic moral entity who therefore should be treated equally by society at large.
Each should have the same basic rights to life, liberty, justice, and the pursuit of happiness, whether his name is Smedley or Jones, whether his skin is black or white, whether he's short or tall, etc.
Beyond that, however, beyond that basic moral equality, which is built into the essence of our individual humanity, equality is a nonsense, and any attempt to impose it creates injustice and corruption.
Men and women are not the same and therefore not equal.
Pretty and ugly people are not the same.
Smart and stupid people, gay and straight people, and of course Tom Brady is better than everyone.
This creates some philosophical problems for conservatives.
It means there may be some among us who, through no fault of their own, fall behind so badly that they need help from society at large.
There may be some who don't have the inner qualities required to bust out of the bad circumstances in which they were born.
Cancel Culture's Double Edge00:14:58
Fake conservative tough guy talk about get off your butt and pull yourself up by your bootstraps is just a conservative's way of doing nothing when something actually needs to be done.
But for the left, the fact that equality does not exist except as an individual moral essence renders their entire philosophy nonsensical and corrupt.
Equality is the heart of the leftist idea.
And the more leftists insist on it, the more corrupt and contradictory they become because they're ignoring reality.
And when you do that, you become oppressive to the strong and you destroy the weak and the small and the poor.
Equality is a lie and it's the truth that sets us free.
I will talk about how this applies to the news in just a second.
But first, let us talk about Ring.
Ring is on a mission.
Ring's mission is to make your neighborhood safe.
And they're doing that by protecting millions of people everywhere.
This stuff is great.
You know what this is.
This is the doorbell where you can see people who come to your door anywhere you are.
You can see them right on your phone and talk to them and find out what they're doing there and question them and find out what's going on.
Ring also makes the motion-activated floodlight cam.
So if people walk onto your property, a floodlight goes on and they're not creeping around in the dark out there and you will be alerted as well.
Ring helps you stay connected to your home anywhere in the world.
A package delivery surprise, a visitor, you get an alert and you can chat with them and find out what they're doing there.
As a listener, you have a special offer on a Ring starter kit that's available right now with a video doorbell and the motion activated floodlight cam.
The starter kit has everything you need to start building a ring of security around your home.
Just go to ring.com slash clavin.
That's ring.com slash clavin.
You will be able to ask anyone who comes to your house, how do you spell Clavin?
And if they know, tell them to get out of there because they're obviously a suspicious character.
So I was watching Dave Chappelle's show last night, his new Netflix show.
Maybe you've heard about it.
It's causing some controversy with the left because it's this anti, what they now call cancel culture show.
And of course, the left lives off cancel culture.
Cancel culture is what they are here for.
They are here to cancel you if you do or say something they don't like.
And the reason they have to do that is because they can't make arguments.
Their philosophy is oppressive.
Their philosophy makes no sense.
Their philosophy is a philosophy of power.
Masquerading is a philosophy of justice.
So if anybody protests against it or says something that seems out of keeping with it, they've got to blow you out of the water.
They've got to destroy your chance to make a living.
If you say that men and women are different, then you're fired from Google.
If you say that if you made some remark about gays, that you don't want your son to be gay, if you said that 10, 15 years ago, you can't host the Oscars.
You know, that's the way cancel culture works.
So he takes that on and he takes it on individually.
Here's just a clip of this, him saying that he's doing impressions, but you have to guess who they are.
The next one's a little harder.
I want to see if you can guess who it is I'm doing an impression of.
All right, let me get into character.
You got to guess who it is, though.
Okay, here it goes.
Hey, dir, if you do anything wrong in your life, duh, and I find out about it, I'm going to try to take everything away from you.
And I don't care what I find out.
It could be today, tomorrow, 15, 20 years from now.
If I find out, you're f ⁇ ing the finished.
Who's that?
That's you.
That's what the audience sounds like to me.
That's why I don't be coming out doing comedy all the time because y'all is the worst motherfuckers I've ever tried to entertain in my f ⁇ ing life.
He really gets him good, too, because when he asks them who that is, they all say Trump, although Trump has never said anything like that, doesn't do that at all.
He doesn't go back and find your tweets.
I mean, the New York Times is complaining that his allies are now doing that to them.
They deserve it.
But obviously, this drives the left crazy.
And you just can tell by the tone.
Vox had a headline.
Here's Vox's headline.
You can definitely skip Dave Chappelle's new Netflix special, Sticks and Stones.
The comedian doubles down on misogyny and transphobia in both the special and the hidden bonus scene that follows.
You can definitely skip it.
And what I love about this is the arrogance, the arrogance of people who have run the culture so long, who have dominated the communications space so long that they think they can tell you, you know, not, what would I say if I didn't like this or if I were offended by it?
What I would say is, hey, you know, I thought the jokes were mean.
I didn't enjoy it.
It didn't make me laugh.
That was the way I felt.
What they say is you can definitely skip it.
You don't have to make a decision.
You don't have to find out and say, make moral judgments for yourself.
We do that for you.
That's what Vox is here for.
It is an incredible, incredible arrogance.
It is just a sort of, it is just, they have run this culture so long that they don't know we're coming for them, but we are coming for them.
And we're slowly, slowly eating away at their dominance.
Not so slowly.
It's happening a lot faster than they think it is and a lot faster than despairing conservatives think it is.
But the thing is, they're not really against him because of cancel culture.
Cancel culture is a weapon that they use and it's a weapon that the right has learned to use back at them, which I think is a shame, but that's, you know, you can't just sit there and be take punches.
You got to punch back.
But I think it's just a shame that we're doing that.
But it's not that.
It's because the essence of humor, the essence of humor is absurdity, right?
Lies and inequality, the fact that things are different and you can't pretend they're the same.
That's the same thing as lies, right?
And he goes after all this stuff and they just hate it.
He talks about the NBA.
He says, if men and women are equal, why is there a WNBA?
Why can't women just play in the NBA?
And this is what they call transphobic.
He says, why doesn't LeBron James, if LeBron James became a woman, declared he was a woman, would he still play in the NBA or would he play in the WNBA and score 840 points a game?
That's his joke, right?
And the thing is, of course, it makes absolutely no sense.
And he attacks all this stuff.
He has a thing on abortion.
I don't want to give too much of it away, but I mean, I won't give the jokes away.
But he has a thing on abortion where he basically says, if a woman has a right to choose to kill a baby, then a man has a right to choose to abandon a baby, right?
As he says, my money, my choice.
And he says, if that's not true, then maybe the whole system is untrue.
So he really goes after things because they don't make sense.
And it's all based on equality.
You know, there was a funny Twitter thread from a woman named Janice Turner who has run some kind of feminist legal operation.
And she's talking about a transgender rugby player who couldn't play with the men, basically, declared himself a woman, got hormone shots, and has gone out just doing, you know, rugby is a very tough sport.
It's football without any kind of armor.
And he is playing rugby against women.
He's going out and playing rugby against women.
Of course, the women are just getting mashed.
They're getting killed.
So like Janice Turner puts out this Twitter thread.
She says, and I love the fact that she blames men for this, but listen to what she says.
She says, how little women matter and how little men care.
A quote from an article about this rugby player, she folded a girl like a deck chair during a game.
And Janice Turner says she's going to be a good, good player as long as we can stop her injuring players in training.
I'm sorry, that's still a quote from the article.
She goes on to say, a six-foot male person, nicknamed the beast, who identifies as a woman, has been allowed into women's rugby, a dangerous contact sport, yet women have to beseech prominent men even to acknowledge this might be a bad idea.
It's clearly unfair for those who've gone through male puberty to compete against women, but this is actually dangerous.
What will it take?
The legion of silent men and woke sports bodies to persuade you women's lives matter.
A woman with a broken neck, a dead woman.
And she says, it's hard not to conclude that some men are enjoying this.
They're amused that women are losing places in their own teams, that women get splattered in contact sports, or 40-year-old mediocre ex-men beat young female weightlifters.
If you don't think it's funny, say something.
Well, baby doll, I've been saying something.
All of us on the right have been saying something.
All conservatives are saying something.
You're not listening.
You're only listening to one another, and you're caught up in the corruption of equality, the corruption of the idea of equality, and so nobody can say it.
Nobody can say it.
It is amazing.
It is amazing that you do not hear us talking over here because it's the right.
It's the right who insists on reality, who insists on the facts, and who will speak up for women in this situation.
You just can't hear him.
You can't hear him because you cannot get out of this situation.
And you know, yesterday, there was a hearing in the Jeffrey Epstein case.
So federal prosecutors had to ask to drop the sex trafficking charges against Mr. Epstein.
Why?
Because Epstein is dead.
He hanged himself.
This story is getting weirder and weirder all along because now they're saying that there's video footage that's not usable from outside the cell.
I mean, like, they keep blaming people for having conspiracy theories about this, but how could they not have conspiracy theories about it?
Okay, so the federal prosecutors have to go to court to ask to drop the charges, but the charges have to be dropped because you can't prosecute a dead man.
So they go before Judge Richard Berman, and Berman says, yes, we will have the hearing to ask to drop the charges, but he invites the women, the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, to come in and speak.
So at least they get some kind of day in court.
And some of them were gathered outside, and here's a little montage of what the women are saying.
I was searching for words, but all I could say was a meek, no, please stop.
I cried myself to sleep that night.
I spent the next two weeks in a hospital vomiting until I was almost dead in a Los Angeles hospital.
It's not how Jeffrey died, but it's how he lived.
And we need to get to the bottom of everybody who was involved with that, starting with Geelan Maxwell and going along the lines there.
I was recruited at a very young age from Mar-a-Lago and entrapped in a world that I didn't understand.
And I've been fighting that very world to this day.
And I won't stop fighting.
I will never be silenced until these people are brought to justice.
All I'm going to say is today is a day of power and strength.
You know, I watch this, and I'm sure a lot of, I'm sure a lot of guys watch it because you have this natural protective instinct and you want to bring Epstein back to life and break his neck.
And I can't help watching these things, these powerful men abusing women, the Harvey Weinsteins of the world abusing women.
I know powerful women abuse people too, but it's not the same thing.
And men and women are not the same.
They're not equal.
They're not the same and they're not equal because equal means the same and they're not.
They are just not.
And one of the stories that you keep hearing again and again is not only I said no and he wouldn't listen to me, but also that the women remained with him.
They were awed by his power.
They were awestruck by the celebrities around him.
They were enticed into doing things.
They knew they shouldn't do them and yet they did them and then afterwards they felt bad about them.
These are facts.
These are facts of life.
These are facts of the way men and women interact together and the way bad men interact with women and why they get away with it.
And when they start talking about toxic masculinity, the only people who care are nice people.
It's only nice men who care about the idea of toxic masculinity.
You're only hurting decent men when you say those words because the toxic guys, the guys who are genuinely toxic, who even men would recognize as toxic, they don't give a damn.
They don't care what you think of them.
They're there for what they can get out of you.
That's all they want.
That's all they want to get.
And if they can get it and get away with it, they will.
And so, you know, when you say, oh, women are going to enter the workplace and they're going to be equal to men and everything is going to be just the same.
Yeah, you've got to take down that calendar over there.
And the guy says, well, why?
If you're equal, why do I have to take down my nude calendar?
It's because it's all a lie.
It's all a lie.
The whole thing is a lie.
Men and women are not the same, so they're not equal.
And when you see something like this, what you're seeing is this incredible abuse of power.
It's the same thing you saw when Bill Clinton was abusing, sexually abusing, essentially, a woman young enough to be his daughter.
You weren't seeing him guy breaking the law.
She wasn't underage.
It was just a power differential that was so great that anybody would have recognized that it was abusive.
Anybody should have recognized that it was abusive.
But politics on the left, this is the thing.
Once you are accepting a lie, the lie of equality, once you're accepting it, you're corrupt.
Once you accept a lie as the truth, you are corrupt.
Once you're corrupt, you'll continue to be corrupt.
So that's why you had journalists saying, well, sure, I'd do the same thing.
I'd give immoral sex as long as he'd keep abortion in there.
Well, no, no.
That entire statement is an admission of a power dynamic and a relationship between men and women that's not the same.
And Chappelle goes off at one point.
Dave Chappelle in the show goes off on the destruction of Louis C.K., the destruction of his career because he masturbated in front of people.
And, you know, I'm listening and he's making fun of this.
He's saying, well, why, you know, the only person who's being ashamed here is Louis C.K., the only person who's doing anything shameful.
He's not hurting anybody.
You can leave the room.
He didn't grab anybody.
He was in his own dressing room or he was on the phone with people.
You know, you can't even report him to the police and yet you can destroy his career.
And we all understand that there's a disconnect there.
We get it.
There's a disconnect there.
Guys shouldn't do that.
They shouldn't behave like that.
It's disgusting.
But if you did it with me, I'd either sock you in the jaw or I'd probably walk out or I'd laugh in your face, right?
If you do it to a woman, it's different.
Why?
Because men and women are different.
Men and women are not equal.
They're not the same.
And so, you know, once you start to say, well, gee, they're not the same.
There should be rules.
Then feminism has a problem.
Then all of leftism has a problem.
Once you say they're different and therefore there should be different rules for different people, men and women, there are only two kinds of people in the world.
They're only men and women.
Everybody else is pretty much on a par.
But men and women are different.
Once you start saying that, then you have to say, well, how do women behave?
What are women's responsibilities in that relationship?
Should women dress differently?
Should they dress more modestly because men are different and have different feelings?
You know, should men behave with a certain honor?
Do we have to rebuild the system of chivalry?
You can't rebuild the system of chivalry on one side.
Chivalry is a way that gentlemen are supposed to behave toward ladies.
You can't have gentlemen if you don't have ladies.
The Gender Divide Debate00:16:14
That's the way it works.
So you've got to ask yourself these questions.
If you've taken apart everything on the basis of a lie, when you get down to the bottom, you're going to find yourself in a corrupt system where who gets abused?
You know, it's always, they're always yelling at the rich.
They're always yelling at the powerful, but who gets abused?
It's always the weak.
It's always the little guy.
You know, this also maintains with this thing that happened with Taylor Swift at the VMAs.
I hate this stuff.
I got to be honest with you.
Taylor Swift is a singer.
At least comedians, you know, of all performers, comedians are usually the most thoughtful and intelligent.
Why?
Because they're secretly writers.
And this is my bias toward writers.
But no, writers have to come up with ideas.
Their ideas have to withstand scrutiny.
The same thing is true of comedians, right?
An actor is just saying lines.
That's all he's doing.
He's just repeating lines.
It's a wonderful craft, acting, but that's what it is.
It's a craft.
It's something you learn to do, like building a cabinet.
And some people build beautiful cabinets and some people maybe not so much, but it's still a craft.
When you're a comedian, you are actually taking ideas and finding absurdities.
And some of these comedians like Chappelle and like, oh, a bunch of them, you know, Bill Burr, these are thoughtful people creating their comedy out of thoughtful observations.
Someone like Taylor Swift, you know, female singers are famous.
I've been around the music business a little bit.
And female singers are famous for two things.
They're divas.
They're impossible to deal with.
They're just absolutely egotistical, hysterical people.
And this sounds like a contradiction, but it's not.
They're easily manipulated by the guy in charge of them.
Almost every female singer, almost every famous female singer, has some guy who is pulling her strings and manipulating her.
And when I watched Taylor Swift, I saw her come along.
I spotted her right off the bat.
I thought, that's a talented girl.
It's very appealing, these teenage angst songs, tears, you know, the teardrops on my guitar.
This is good stuff.
It really does sound like a teenage girl with her heart broken.
It really is good pop music.
Then obviously, somewhere along the line, someone said to her, you got to start dancing around and doing this pop stuff.
So she did it.
And then they just bullied her into being political.
She's basically a country singer.
The audience she brought along is a country audience.
She's moved into the pop field, but she probably has taken some of those country people along.
She probably thought it was best to keep her mouth shut.
She was probably right, but she was just browbeat into the fact, into this idea that the left owns the culture.
If you want to be in the culture, you've got to be in the left or get out.
I'm sure she was.
I could see it.
I could see it happening.
I could see that, you know, why isn't Taylor Swift speaking up?
The articles were coming fast and furious.
So finally, finally, she made this incredibly irritated, irritating video called You Need to Calm Down.
Very, very arrogant.
You know, I mean, what if you said that, you know, aren't women always saying, don't tell me to calm down?
Isn't that one of the feminist things that men are always telling women to calm down?
But this is this arrogant thing.
If you think that you have some moral, some reason to condemn people for performing certain acts of sex, you need to calm down.
Not I'm going to engage with you, not I'm going to debate you, but you need to come down incredibly arrogant.
So of course, of course, she did the thing.
She kow-towed, she bowed down to the leftist powers that be, and she got the video award.
And here she is accepting the video award, and she's got to hit Trump.
You got to make all the rounds if you're going to have your hit video.
She goes after Trump because she sent him a petition and he hasn't responded yet.
Do we have that clip?
I first want to say thank you to the fans because in this video, several points were made.
So you voting for this video means that you want a world where we're all treated equally under the law.
Regardless of who we love, regardless of how we identify, at the end of this video, there was a petition, and there still is a petition for the Equality Act, which basically just says we all deserve equal rights under the law.
And I want to thank everyone who signed that petition because it now has half a million signatures, which is five times the amount that it would need to warrant a response from the White House.
I just hate this arrogant mob stuff.
I really do.
I hate it when Bill Maher does it.
I hate it whenever, you know, the fact that people are applauding doesn't make you right.
It doesn't.
The fact that they boo doesn't make you wrong.
In fact, a lot of times when you tell the truth, people boo.
You know, that's the way that works more often than not.
That's why our God is a God on a cross, right?
Because when the truth comes, we crucify it.
That's what we do.
The White House did reply.
This whole thing about the five times the number was some kind of Obama policy where Obama said if you get 100,000 signatures, we'll reply or something like that.
But the White House did reply saying the Trump administration absolutely opposes discrimination of any kind and supports the equal treatment of all.
However, the House passed bill in its current form is filled with poison pills that threaten to undermine parental and conscience rights.
You can be sure that that is the truth.
I mean, obviously, there are religious people who have feelings, religious ideas about homosexuality.
Parents may want some control over their underage children.
Anyway, it's like these things are not all the same.
You know, you hear me talk about, I don't know what to call it.
I don't want to call it tolerance.
I don't believe we need to tolerate one another, but I do think we need to accept one another and accept the way people are.
However, there's no way anybody's going to get me to say that a homosexual relationship and a heterosexual relationship are the same.
They're not the same.
The center of the universe is a man, a woman, and a child.
Every society is built on a man, a woman, and a child.
Why?
Because without a man and a woman and a child, there ain't no society.
You could take away society.
There'd still be a man and a woman and a child.
If there wasn't, there'd be nothing.
You know, there would be no humanity at all.
It's not equal.
It's not the same.
And it needs to be regarded differently.
And sometimes that means different things in law as well.
Once you become corrupt, I just have to end with this because there was a piece by Jason Riley from the Manhattan Institute in the Wall Street Journal talking about the fact that New York has announced that it has said that in order to get racial balance, the racial balance, because people are not learning in New York.
The majority of students in New York can't do basic reading or math according to state standardized tests.
And black and Hispanic students who make up 67% of the public school system, it's even worse for black and Hispanic students, right?
They can't read.
They can't do math.
The system is failing them.
They do much, much better in charter schools.
Charter schools lift people up.
And some of these schools that are just the Success Academy, which is a New York City-based charter school network, where the passage rates for math and English are an astounding 99% and 90% respectively, serves a lot of these kids.
It serves a lot of black and Hispanic kids.
So it's not a question of some kind of race thing.
It's a question of the system.
The system doesn't work, but they're not going to touch it.
Why?
Because they're corrupt, because they do not want to disturb the teachers' unions who cannot get their grubby little hands on these charter schools so they can destroy them the way they destroyed the public schools.
So what's the left's idea?
The left is to achieve racial balance by getting rid of gifted and talented programs.
So in other words, instead of bringing blacks and Hispanics up through charter schools, they want to bring whites down by taking away the gifted programs that serve a lot of white and Asian kids in New York City.
Once you become corrupt, once you accept a lie and become corrupt, everything becomes corrupt.
Any corruption is okay.
Equality is a lie and it leads to corruption.
We treat each other equally.
We treat each other as equal moral entities, but we are not the same.
The Daily Wire has turned four years old.
It has been a great journey and the journey is all made possible by you guys, not all of you, this guy over there on the right, not you, but many of the rest of you.
And as a thank you to our fans, we are giving away one month of our premium monthly subscription to anyone who uses the code BIRTHDAY for all of August.
That gives you about 10 more minutes as we celebrate this milestone.
We've been giving away a free first month for new premium monthly subscribers.
Again, just use the code BIRTHDAY.
Time is quickly running out.
There are only three days left to get this deal.
So subscribe today and join what's coming up, the mailbag.
You could be in the mailbag.
And you could scream.
You could scream just like that.
All you have to do is join and use the code BIRTHDAY.
you get a month for free, and all my answers are guaranteed correct.
Mailbag!
That's just what I was going to say.
I just don't do it as well, that's all.
From Sean, Lord Clavin, destroyer of ease, and master of the multiverse.
Master of the multiverse is the correct way to approach me.
Recently, Ben had Yaron Brook on his Sunday special to discuss Ayn Rand and objectivism.
I can tell already this question is going to get me in big trouble.
As a Catholic, I fundamentally disagree with Rand on certain claims.
Yaron made the claim that Judeo-Christian values are not Western values.
How would you respond?
Additionally, I would love to hear your thoughts on Ayn Rand and objectivism in general.
Thanks.
Okay, well, let me make it, just before I answer this question and step in it, which I'm about to do, let me first say that I did not watch this interview.
I did not see Aaron Brooke on Ben's show, so I'm not responding to what he said.
I'm responding to what you say he said, okay?
That's important, because I don't want to take the guy on if I'm not even talking to him.
I think Ayn Rand sucks, okay?
I think her writing sucks.
I think her books are unreadable.
I think Atlas Shrugged, I mean, look, there's one speech in Atlas Shrugged that is worth reading.
It's made maybe 15 times.
The book is thousands of pages long.
You know, I skimmed it.
The fountainhead is more readable, more exciting, but none of her characters are real.
They all have those Nazi names like Rourke and Galt and other and all the bad guys are named Mooch.
She's not trying to write reality.
She's trying to write her philosophy into fiction.
And largely, I hate that.
There are a few successful books that do that.
1984 is one of them.
But even 1984 is a great work of art so that it can, even though it's about the left, even though 1984 is a condemnation of the left, it becomes a condemnation of tyranny because it's art.
So it's above politics and higher than politics.
And it actually goes beyond politics.
Her books, like once you get her philosophy, her books, I just find them so boring and so stiff and so hard to read.
Some of her nonfiction is a little bit more interesting, but no more true.
Everything she says that's true, everything she says that is true, she really understands money.
She really understands money.
She had that clip of dollar bill.
She really gets money.
Everything she says about money is in a book by Frederick Bastiat, who was Reagan's favorite economist.
He wrote a book, I think it's called The Laws, and it's 70 pages long.
It's very readable.
It's very simple.
And everything Ayn Rand knows, I don't know if she just took it right out of that or it came to her through some other path, but everything she knows she gets from Frederic Bastiat.
And all you need is those 70 pages instead of her thousand-page, unreadable diatribes.
That is what I think.
Secondly, obviously, while she does know about money and the economy and capitalism, her moral and artistic judgments are insane.
They are insane.
And I hear she was like she fell in love with some like serial killer at one point from a distance because, and I don't, that's not surprising to me.
I wouldn't just pick on her for it personally, but her moral stances are insane.
The idea that you put your happiness above all and that capitalism solves all problems is ridiculous.
She claims, she claims that the only proper system for an objectivist is capitalism, as if capitalism were an outgrowth of objectivism.
But I believe that objectivism is actually an outgrowth of capitalism.
She thinks that this system is the bee's knees.
This is her religion, and it's going to solve every problem.
And of course it doesn't.
The morals decisions that people make in the fountainhead are absurd.
Blowing up an orphanage because you can't get it the way you like it is an absurd moral choice.
Putting your happiness first, putting profits above everything.
She says you should seek your own self-interest, putting profits above everything.
I mean, look at it.
Look, all you have to do is you look, you know, they're suing, they just got a judgment against Johnson and Johnson for selling opiates.
And this is a complicated case, and lawyers are vultures and sharks, and they go after these companies because that's where the money is.
But somewhere along the line, someone peddled these opiates to people, knowing that they were addictive.
This did happen at some point.
Now, maybe it's the government's fault.
I don't know why the government passed on these things, and then Johnson and Johnson gets blamed.
But somewhere along the line, there was a conversation where they said, well, you know, tough.
We've got to sell these things to make our money back.
So let's do it and let's never mind the addiction and the trouble it's going to cause.
That's good objectivism.
That's profit.
That's making yourself happy.
So what?
So our cars explode when people drive them.
It'll cost us less to get sued by the people whose parents have died than it will to recall the cars so we won't recall the cars.
I mean, that's the kind of thing that would happen in an Ayn Rand world.
Her artistic judgments, like against Shakespeare, make no sense because her view of humanity is stilted and wrong, and her idea of morality is stilted and wrong.
Now, if Yaren Brook said that Judeo-Christian values are not Western values, that's just historically ridiculous.
That is historically ridiculous.
Western values, even classical values that predate Judeo-Christian values come to us through the filter of Judeo-Christian values.
And you cannot think that a civilization that was called Christendom when it started is not a Christian civilization.
It is.
It's formed by it.
Everything we think is formed by it.
All the philosophers from Kant to Nietzsche who rejected it were dealing with the Christian inheritance.
They all were.
So it's ridiculous to say that those are not our values and that objectivism somehow are.
You know, capitalism is a system.
It's a great system.
It's the best economic system, but it needs to be hemmed in by morals.
It needs to be hemmed in by altruism and by love of neighbor.
And without that, Ayn Rand, believe me, would get nowhere in life.
All right, from Edward.
And she just has such an unreadable novel.
From Edward, do you think it's possible that the left is pushing the squad as a way of making someone like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders seem less radical to the voting public?
The left does this sort of thing all the time with legislation, proposing something insane, and then pretending to settle for what they really wanted to do in the first place.
No, I don't think this.
I think that the squad is kind of out of control.
I think they're a thorne and Nancy Pelosi side.
They've moved the entire party to the left.
Everybody who's running in the Democrat primaries is touting leftist ideas that wouldn't work, that are absurd.
Bernie Sanders' ideas are simply lunacy.
Elizabeth Warren's ideas make no sense and are unaffordable.
And some of this is coming from the squad.
The squad is taking advantage of this energy.
I think Ilhan Omar is a moral disaster.
I think Rashida Tlaib is a moral disaster.
I think AOC is a mental disaster.
I think she's a dope.
And no, I don't think that this is something they planned because it makes them look better.
Hollywood's Liberal Artists00:04:20
From Leonid, Dear Mr. Clavin, I've heard many times that Hollywood did not become left-wing right away and that there was a time when films were made in the United States based on patriotic conservative values.
When did Hollywood go bad?
Could you name the year, years before which decent films were made in Hollywood?
Sure.
You know, the thing is, Hollywood always had a lot of artists in it.
Artists tend toward the liberal, right?
I'm a liberal.
I mean, I'm a liberal.
I want everybody to do what he wants.
I have a lot of tolerance for eccentricity and off-beatness and what the left calls otherness.
You know, I want everybody included in the American way.
But it was started by, Hollywood was built by immigrants and the sons of immigrants, many of whom were Jews, many of whom knew this was the greatest country on earth because they had seen and experienced what it was like to be elsewhere.
And a lot of the great directors were émigrés coming from elsewhere.
And so they celebrated America, even though they might have had a liberal vision of it, right?
They had a liberal vision of inclusivity, things that we would consider that even conservatives would accept now as part of the American vision.
But they loved America.
They thought America was the solution, not the problem.
They thought that American values could save things.
There were discussions that went on, for instance, between films like High Noon, which was made by a leftist, even though it has very conservative values in it.
And I think it was Howard Hawks who made an answering western in which people offered John Wayne help and John Wayne says, I don't need any help because he believes in the individual.
So there were definitely points of view.
There were guys like Jimmy Stewart who were outspoken conservatives and increasingly outspoken as time went on and his best friend, Henry Fonda, who was a left-winger.
There were friendships between guys like Charlton Heston and guys like Gregory Peck.
Charlton Heston, a great conservative.
Gregory Peck, a great liberal.
And these people were friends because the debate was much more centered, was much more centered.
Things went bluey in the 60s, and they went bluey for a lot of reasons.
One of the reasons was the studio system broke down, allowing the lunatics to take over the asylum.
Once the studio system broke down, and the studio system was kind of unfair in the same way the old league system was unfair before the unions came, before free agency came in baseball.
Once free agency came, baseball players got paid these enormous sums of money and they developed a lot of power.
The same thing happened in Hollywood as artists developed a lot of power.
And artists, and especially actors, are not necessarily the greatest thinkers, but they had tremendous power before they were controlled by the businessmen.
The businessmen wanted to appeal to America.
Many of the businessmen loved America.
Even if they didn't love America, they wanted their movies to make money.
They would never have allowed a film about a gay black guy, you know, transsexual, because nobody wants to see it.
Whereas now that's the movie they make.
Everybody praises it.
Everybody sings its song.
They give it an Oscar.
Nobody cares.
Nobody's watching it.
So once the studio system broke down and the artists took over the asylum and once the 60s came and leftism became the hip new thing, Hollywood went left.
And it went far left and it's now basically a closed shop to anyone with differing opinions.
It's a wonderful thing when Dave Chappelle, who I'm sure is a liberal, can at least get his anti-leftist ideas onto Netflix.
I think things are going to break up, but they're not going to break up from within.
It's going to have to be conservatives creating new venues for conservatives to speak.
Then it'll fall apart pretty quickly because it all doesn't make any sense and it's annoying and humorless.
I hope that answers that question.
From John, what's the best government for an immoral and unreligious people?
Playing off John Adams saying that the Constitution is for a moral and religious people.
Monarchy.
Monarchy is the best system before democracy, before a republic, I think.
Because at least there you have noblesse oblige, you have a royalty and a surrounding nobility that develops the habits that train the nation into behavior.
And they can be bad, they can be bad at it, and then it's very hard to get rid of them without a revolution.
That's the problem with monarchy.
But still, if you're immoral and unreligious, you can't be free.
Is It Too Late?00:02:03
You will not be free.
You'll soon be enslaved.
From Matt.
Dear Ms. Clavin, I'm a 28-year-old accountant that struggled to find my passion throughout my college years and early career.
I chose accounting because it seemed safe and interesting at the time.
Lately, however, I find the nine-to-five life is not for me, but I'm really passionate about his writing.
I love reading and telling stories.
My question is, is it too late for a 28-year-old accountant with no literature or writing background whatsoever to make his mark writing novels or comics or short stories?
To word it differently, what sort of challenge does having no writing background or degree associated with literature present in trying to be taken seriously as a writer?
What steps would you suggest I take to fine-tune my skills?
Love your show, especially the satire.
Please keep up all the great work.
Okay, writing is not, for the most part, a credentialed occupation.
There has been some attempt to make it credentialed, and it certainly helps to have mentors and come out of writing programs like the Iowa program that have prestige, and that's how you meet people, and you get involved with agents and things like that.
But writing is still not a credentialed program because anything that works works.
If it sells, if you write a bestseller, it's a bestseller.
If you write a book that people like, it's a book that people like.
So you don't necessarily need credentials to write.
So you're asking two different questions.
I mean, it's very hard to make a living as a writer.
It is very difficult.
The fiction market is very bad right now because of all the different other ways that people can put out content.
So it's a very difficult way to make a living, but it can be done.
You don't want to quit your day job and start to do it.
The preparation that you need is you need to read all the time.
Read especially the kind of stuff you want to write, but also read all the great books so that you know what that looks like, what a great book looks like, even if that's not what you're trying to do.
You should be reading constantly.
You should be writing constantly.
If you're working a full-time job, Elmore Leonard used to say, wake up an hour early and write for an hour, but certainly write sometime during every day.
Understanding Tragedy00:05:21
If it's only an hour, that's fine.
If it's more, that's even better.
But you write until you get good at it.
You write and you read and you see how people get, how people achieve the effects they achieve.
You can take classes.
There are classes for writing the people.
I've never taken one, but people say that they're useful.
I have taught them.
And usually I find, well, not to go off on a tangent, but I mean, I find that a lot of classes are torn between the teacher who is trying to teach people how to do the thing well and the students who just want to learn how to sell stuff and get to be famous and get their faces in the paper.
So if you can find a class that's worthwhile, you can do that.
But basically, I mean, I think this is something that you're going to have to build.
Your age means nothing.
I mean, if you're 60, you can start a writing career.
And certainly your credentials don't mean much, I think.
But listen, get a writer's market, study how submissions are made, try to go to conferences where you can make some contacts, make some friends, but first and foremost, learn how to write.
And you learn how to write by reading and writing.
And that's how you do that.
From Isaiah or Isaiah, depending on where you're from.
I'm 27 years old.
I was raised in church and brought up in a very Christian house.
But many life events, through many life events, I've found it harder and harder to truly believe in God.
Not to get too personal, but to give an insight into the life, he then goes on to talk about the tragedies in his life.
An aunt, a grandmother, and a seven-year-old sister killed in a car accident.
Grandfather died.
They've been chased out of church because they were changing too many things.
We joined another church, but also had to leave.
There was a rape, just a cavalcade of tragedies and crimes.
These are some of the things myself and my family have faced, and it makes me really deny that there could be some sort of God out there.
I don't know what to do to try and get my faith back.
All right.
Well, let's start with this.
God is not dependent on your belief.
There is a God whether you believe in him or not.
There's an Argentina whether you believe in it or not.
You know, you can sit there all you want and say there's no such thing as Argentina.
Argentina is still there.
People live there.
It exists.
It has an effect on the world.
God is the same way.
God is there whether you believe in him or not.
So you can believe in him or even pretend to believe in him and find yourself in a more realistic world than the world you inhabit when you don't believe.
What you're talking about is not the loss of faith.
You're talking about the loss of a feeling of God's presence, right?
Faith is based on reason.
You understand that God is there and then you believe in him in the same way you understand that Argentina is there and you believe in Argentina.
What you're talking about is tragedy is you've been hit by so much tragedy and seen so much evil and so much cruelty that it has separated you from your sense that God is protecting you and that God is there to make things good for you.
So start here.
Here's where you start.
This is the world as it is.
You've gotten a particularly bad bite of it.
You've gotten a particularly bad look at it.
But the world is full of injustice.
If injustice is not happening to you, it's happening somewhere to someone.
If you're not ill, someone somewhere is ill.
The world is a sad place.
The world is a tragic place.
It is just a very, very difficult place.
It is wonderful if you have a good life.
You shouldn't feel guilty about it.
You should enjoy it.
You shouldn't consider it a privilege.
You should consider it a gift.
It is a wonderful thing if your life is going well, but you always understand that people have a hard time and there are hard, terrible things that happen.
Now try to understand God.
Now go to the scriptures and try to understand God.
Now try to understand who God is because a fake God, a God who makes things right for you if you only pray for him, a God who protects you, a God who makes everything go great, who makes life good, is not the God that's there, obviously, because the world is what it is.
So start with the evil of life.
Start with the sadness of life.
Start with the understanding that God is good, that God is loving, that God loves you, and then try to understand God.
And I guarantee you, you will end up very close to the God who is taught in the scriptures.
God is there.
The world is tough.
The world is very tragic.
I'm really sorry for all these things that have happened to you, by the way.
I mean, I think it's just you've hit a terrible patch of tragic luck.
And that is a terrible thing and does break your heart and does make it hard to have faith.
So it's nothing wrong with you.
I'm not blaming you for not believing.
I'm simply saying that the facts are the facts.
God is there.
And you have to understand God in the light of this tragic world.
And that's why there's all this talk about the fallen world, the fall of man, the evil that comes upon the world.
Christians, Christians, we all live in a system that doesn't work.
We all live in a tragic system.
The Christian faith is that that system is contained within a bigger system in which all things work for the good to those who love God.
That is our faith.
I believe that that's the only faith that actually makes sense.
I believe it makes more sense than not believing it.
And I think that if you start to follow that sense that it makes, but in some way, you've been given a terrible, terrible gift, a horrible gift, the gift of seeing life as it is, as tragic as it is.
Now believe in God and you will find the true God.
You'll find God as he truly is.
I got to stop, but I'll be back tomorrow and you better be here because it's a three-day weekend.
So the Clavenless weekend will be even longer than it usually is.
So you've got to suck up.
all the clavy-y goodness you can get like a camel and keep it in your hump for the four-day clavenless weekend that is coming.
Clavenless Weekend Prep00:01:09
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
Oh, hooray, hurry.
Hey, if you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe.
And if you want to help spread the word, give us a five-star review and also tell your friends to subscribe too.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show, the Matt Walsh Show, and the Michael Knoll Show.
Thanks for listening.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Austin Stevens and directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring, senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
And our supervising producers are Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
Edited by Adam Sayovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
Animations are by Cynthia Ngulo.
And our production assistant is Nick Sheehan.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
On the Matt Walsh Show, we're not just discussing politics.
We're talking culture, faith, family, all of the things that are really important to you.