Jerry Nadler’s emotional collapse during Lewandowski’s testimony exposed Democrats’ futile obsession with debunked Russia collusion, while DOJ Inspector General findings threaten to unravel McCabe’s misconduct. Andrew Clavin critiques media bias—like the New York Times burying Kavanaugh exonerating evidence—while listeners debate Pete Budigé’s twisted biblical justifications for abortion and systemic male porn addiction. A 14-year-old writer seeks dialogue tips, conservatives strategize narrative-building against leftist fiction, and Clavin rejects violent anti-abortion tactics, urging truth over extremism instead. The episode reveals how leftist myths trap their own, while conservatives grapple with storytelling and moral consistency in a culture war. [Automatically generated summary]
A congressional impeachment hearing devolved into silent nothingness yesterday as Democrats suddenly realized they were engaged in a meaningless charade and became paralyzed by existential despair.
The hearing ended after Jerry Nadler, chairman of the House Committee on Meaningless Charades and the resulting existential despair, suddenly fell silent and began to stare glassy-eyed into the distance while a single tear rolled slowly, slowly down his cheek.
Nadler had been interrogating former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski when apparently a revelation came to him.
In a statement to a collection of lawn gnomes he mistook for a Nadler family reunion, the congressman said, quote, I was just sitting there trying to think of some useless collection of non-sequiturs to throw at this guy who couldn't possibly know anything about anything of importance, and all at once I found myself thinking, is this my life?
Is this really my life?
I began to remember how as a child I dreamed of doing heroic deeds and leaving a mark on history.
And here I was now, a fat, ugly little man, wasting the American people's time and money with an elaborate kabuki show that couldn't possibly have any useful outcome.
A pit of darkness seemed to open at my very core as I realized I had squandered the precious time given to me on an exercise in deception and futility.
Unquote.
Nadler then broke out on an off-key rendition of What Kind of Fool Am I until he was carried out of the Capitol building by a pair of security guards because let's face it, he's no Sammy Davis Jr.
As Nadler was taken away, he shouted orders to subpoena a Tibetan monk so he could question him about the meaning of life while several other Democrats began howling at the ceiling, driven mad by the frustrating absurdity of constantly investigating a president who hasn't done anything illegal, even though they hate, hate, hate him.
So basically, it was another average day in the House of Representatives.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Absurd Hearing Madness00:02:49
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.
All right, one of the things we talk about a lot here on the Andrew Clavin Show is the left's control of the machinery of narrative, the news media, Hollywood, and the academy, and the effect that has on the way we perceive the news, history, our country, life in general, even when we already know that a lot of it is just a crock of leftist lies.
But as I always point out, the truth also has a voice, and people who speak the truth do tend to have an advantage over the long run, even if in the short run they get crucified, which can ruin your whole day.
But there's one victim of false narrative-making who never recovers from the damage, and that's the liar himself.
Joseph Campbell, I talk about him a lot.
He wrote about the power of myth.
He was the advisor on Star Wars and so on.
He talked about this, and in his book, The Masks of God, which is like almost an encyclopedia of different mythologies from different parts of the world, he quotes the German ethnologist Leo Frobenius.
A professor, wrote Frobenius in a celebrated paper on the force of the demonic world of childhood.
A professor is writing at his desk, and his four-year-old little daughter is running about the room.
She has nothing to do, and she's disturbing him, so he gives her three burnt matches, and he says, here, play.
And sitting on the rug, she begins to play with the matches and make them Hansel, Gretel, and the witch.
A considerable time elapses during which the professor concentrates on his task undisturbed, but then suddenly the child shrieks in terror.
The father jumps.
What is it?
What has happened?
The little girl comes running to him, showing every sign of great fright.
Daddy, daddy, she cries, take the witch away.
I can't touch the witch anymore.
The girl has become so immersed in her imagination that she reacts to the matchstick as if it were really the witch, even when she knows it's not.
That essentially is what has happened to House Democrats, who have now swallowed their own anti-Trump narrative so completely, they're basically choking on it, or maybe drowning in it, would be a better way to put it.
Surely all Americans, besides the most rabid leftist base dwellers, are sick of watching a do-nothing Congress do nothing but beat the same dead Russia collusion horse again and again.
The horse is dead, folks.
It's not going to pull the cart anymore.
Leave the poor dead horse alone.
They just can't do it.
They're victims of a bad idea, the bad idea that their narrative can somehow turn itself into the truth.
And since bad ideas lead us to hell, the Democrats are now doomed to a hellish sort of repetition of the same useless and unsatisfying action over and over again.
House Democrats Choking On Their Narrative00:02:05
They're like Tantalus in Hades, who was doomed to stand with food and water always just out of reach.
That's where we get the word tantalize.
A fun fact to know and share.
Anyway, like everyone else in hell, the Democrats should have read their Bible more closely.
Remember when Pontius Pilot asked Christ, what is truth?
It turns out truth is that thing that when you kill it, it keeps coming back.
We are going to talk about this absurd hearing and a lot of the ways the narrative have gone mad.
We've got the mailbag coming up.
You'll all be screaming like that.
Every single one of you will be whooping for joy as your problems fall away.
In fact, you should sit down with your problems for a few minutes and speak nicely to them because by the end of the show, they'll all be gone.
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The news this week has really been great.
I mean, really, what we're watching is this narrative, the right wings fight back against this narrative and win.
Mueller Report Controversy00:15:17
And listen, we can't leave Donald Trump out of the mix here.
Donald Trump, I think, has taught the right how to fight back a little bit.
He's taught the right that it's not okay to let the lie go, that whatever the lie is, whether it's a lie about the weather, the hurricane, some stupid lie like that, or whether it's an important lie about something else, you know, you've got to fight back.
And the thing is, just remember, just remember, that even though the Russian collusion thing has now been exposed as an utter hoax, the IG report is coming out that's going to talk about how this thing started.
And we may see people exposed like James Comey and Clapper and John Brennan.
We may see them exposed in bad behavior.
But remember, it's the left that will make the movie because we're stupid, right?
They're smart about this and they'll make the movie Russian Collusion, you know, and it'll be Matt Damon running against the clock to stop the Russians from, you know, screwing up our election system while Donald Trump meets with Vladimir Putin in the bathroom.
And then the next generation will think that's true.
But this week, this week, we're winning because this week they haven't made the movie It's Real Life, right?
So now they've turned their hearings.
This endless, you know, Jerry Nadler really, I mean, I don't know what he sees when he looks in the mirror, but at this point, he is really wasting, just we can burn our own money, Jerry.
You know, we can take our money.
I got a lighter.
I can take my money out of the pocket and just burn it myself, but he's going to do it.
They're not doing anything.
They keep, you know, Nancy Pelosi keeps saying, oh, we legislate and we investigate.
What legislation have they passed that can pass the Senate and get signed by the President Zippo?
None.
They're doing nothing.
So they're doing, it's all show.
It's all show in terms of what they're doing.
Politics is not supposed to be like this.
Politics is where you sit down with the people you utterly disagree with and somehow you work out a compromise, always conceding that the majority is going to get more than the minority.
That is politics.
That's Democrat politics, Democratic politics, not Democrat politics, but it's Democratic politics.
And instead, we're getting these endless, endless, stupid investigations.
So they bring in poor Corey Lewandowski.
You know, he's not a guy I've ever had a lot of feeling for, but they bring him on to talk about the Mueller report, and he has a letter with him from the president, from the White House, saying he shouldn't talk about any private conversations he had with the president because that's protected by executive privilege.
So he starts out by making this opening statement.
Here's the end of his opening statement.
In conclusion, and it's sad to say, this country has spent over three years and $40 million taxpayer dollars on these investigations, and it's now clear that the investigation was populated by many Trump haters who had their own agenda to take down a duly elected president of the United States.
As for actual collusion or conspiracy, there was none.
What there has been, however, is harassment of this president from the day he won the election.
We as a nation would be better served if elected officials like yourself concentrated your efforts to combat the true crises facing our country, as opposed to going down rabbit holes like this hearing.
Instead of focusing on petty and personal politics, the committee focused on solving the challenges of this generation.
Imagine how many people we could help or how many lives we could save.
As I stated earlier, I have voluntarily appeared in front of Congress on three separate occasions and spoken to members of the special counsel's office for multiple hours.
I will continue to be fourth rate, forthright, and cooperative, and I will be as sincere in my answers as this committee is in its questions.
You know, when you look up at the Morrill High Road and you see Corey Lewandowski, your low road is way, way too low.
I mean, he's just sitting there talking, speaking.
Corey Lewandowski is sitting there speaking the truth to these guys, speaking truth to power.
You remember that.
That's a favorite left-wing thing that they never do, but talk about a lot.
And he's just making them crazy.
So what he does is every time, remember, each guy only gets, each congressman only gets five minutes to question them.
So what Lewandowski does is if they mention the Mueller report, he requests a copy of the Mueller report.
So he won't talk until he gets the Mueller report.
And then he keeps referring to this letter from the White House saying he can't talk about anything else.
And you can see Jerry Nadler and the rest of them just start to go insane.
Here's a little excerpt of this back and forth.
This is, yeah, with Nadler.
Mr. Lewandowski, is it correct that it's reported in the Mueller report on June 19, 2017, you met alone in the Oval Office with the President?
Is there a book and page number you can reference me to, please?
I don't have a copy of the report in front of me.
Volume 2, page 90.
Could you read the exact language of the report, sir?
I don't have it available to me.
I don't think I need to do that, and I have limited time.
Did you meet alone with the president on that date?
Congressman, I'd like you to refresh my memory by providing a copy of the report so I can follow along.
Pate, you don't have a copy with you?
I don't have a copy of the report, Congressman.
Mr. Chairman, I request that the clock be stopped while this charade is sorted out.
Do you not have an independent recollection of whether you met with the president on that date?
Congressman, I'm just trying to find in the Mueller report where it states that.
Mr. Chairman, is it appropriate for a witness to refuse to answer a question and instead demand that we reference and point him to the, I'd ask that that Mueller report be closed and the witness be directed to answer the question.
So that's obviously driving me absolutely crazy.
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All right.
So finally, you know, this is going nowhere, right?
So they're going crazy.
And this is the whole hearing.
It's like six hours.
Went on for six hours.
And it goes crazy.
So Hakeem Jeffries of New York gets so frustrated.
He just delivers the narrative that they think.
What I love about this is they think if they just say this enough times, they just say it, we're finally going to get it.
So this is Hakeem delivering, you know, this is what we really need to hear.
America needs.
Now, you stated earlier today that President Trump asked you to take down dictation, quote, many times.
Is that correct?
It is.
But on page 91, volume two of the Mueller report, it states, quote, the president then asked Lewandowski to deliver a message to Sessions and said, quote, write this down, close quote.
This was the first time the president had asked Lewandowski to take direct dictation.
The first time.
Those are not my words, Congressman.
Those are the investigators' words.
Right.
Did you lie to Bob Mueller or are you lying to us?
I didn't lie.
Okay.
You're not really here to tell the truth.
You are here to participate in a continuing cover-up.
Russia interfered with this election in sweeping and systematic fashion.
The Trump campaign welcomed that assistance at the highest level.
There were subsequent acts of obstruction of justice with respect to the investigation.
The American people deserve to know the truth.
Are you kidding me?
Really?
This is three years almost into this presidency.
Are you kidding me?
They're still stuck on this thing.
I mean, beating a dead horse doesn't begin to describe it.
You know, it's like it is unbelievable that they think if they just say this the right way, if they just put the words, you know, you guys are just so stupid.
You are so stupid.
And the other thing, of course, they're doing is they're playing to their base.
The base is like shelling out the money.
They're pulling, oh yeah, say that one more.
Give me that Russian collusion thing.
It's like an alcoholic, like an alcoholic at a bar.
Yeah, hit me with that Russian collusion one more time because this time, this time, buddy, it is going to take me straight to heaven.
It really is like addiction.
And it's like, I don't know, somehow the Russian collusion is not giving me the same high it used to.
When I first, you know, when I first smoked the Russian collusion, I just thought, wow, it's like impeachment, man.
It's like impeachment.
And now, you know, I need more and more of it to keep me going, man.
You know, it's like, what on earth? is, is this is what a narrative does to you.
This is when you believe your own narrative, you get caught up in your narrative.
It is like mainlining lies, and they're the victims.
They're their own victims.
I cannot believe, I mean, look, maybe I have too much faith in the American people.
Maybe I have too much faith in people in general, but I cannot believe that people are looking and watching that and thinking, oh, yeah.
You know, when you say it the 50th time, even though the investigation didn't pan out, even though you've been doing this for three years now and nothing's come of it, now suddenly when you say it, you know, suddenly that narrative, it just suddenly becomes true.
So finally, Jim Jordan, he's had it, and he delivers what, you know, I'm not going to pretend to be unbiased, but to me, this sounds like a much more believable narrative.
So you were part of the campaign operation at some level or another from January 2015 to November 8th, 2016.
During that entire time, do you guys ever work with Russia to impact the election?
No.
And you know what's interesting, Mr. Lolandowski?
When Jim Comey was asked that same question sitting at that same table, he gave the same answer.
When Bob Mueller was asked that same question sitting at that same table, he gave the same answer.
Falsely accused.
The president is falsely accused of colluding with a foreign state to impact the election.
Jim Comey, when we deposed him at that very table, said after 10 months of investigation, we didn't have a thing.
Bob Mueller gets named special counsel.
He wastes $30 million of taxpayer money, 22-month investigation.
He sits at that table just a few weeks ago and gives the same darn answer.
But these guys over here, they don't care.
They don't care.
They don't want to get to what Mr. Shavit said.
They don't want to figure out how the false accusation happened.
They just want to drag people in front of this committee and keep trying to find some way they can go after the president.
And this is what he's saying here.
These are the footsteps that the Democrats at this point must hear.
Coming up behind him is this IG report on how this investigation got started.
And there's only one investigation, but here's a guy who's been universally respected, Horowitz.
You know, he's not there.
He's not there to convict the DOJ.
He's not there to make a criminal case.
He's there to see what happened, how this thing functioned.
And so far, he's been kind of pretty straight up.
But now there's news, for instance, that the DOJ has rejected Andrew McCabe, right?
The former acting director of the FBI, who filled in after Comey got booted, that Andrew McCabe's last appeal not to be prosecuted for lying, for perjuring himself, or lying to the FBI, has been rejected.
And he is one step closer to being charged, to actually having a criminal case come out of this, to actually doing a perp walk.
And what this is from the old IG, like two IG reports back, that said that he was, what's the word they used?
He was not completely candid, something like that.
What he did was he leaked, apparently, he leaked a story to the press about an investigation into the Clinton Foundation.
Okay, and the reason, reportedly, allegedly, the reason he leaked this is because his wife was running for state senate in Virginia.
And she had received, I believe it was $600,000 in donations from the Democrats as directed by Terry McAuliffe, a Clinton ally, a Clinton crony, let's call him.
So she gets $600,000 from a Clinton crony for a state Senate election.
And her husband is in the FBI investigating Donald Trump.
So what McCabe wanted to do was he wanted to leak information, say, no, no, no, we're also investigating Hillary Clinton.
I'm a fair guy.
And then when he was asked about this by the FBI, he apparently was not completely candid.
I think it was on three different occasions under oath when he was not supposed to be lying.
He is said to have lied about this.
He denies it.
Here is McCabe's side.
I never intentionally misled anyone about anything and I certainly have not committed a crime.
I was asked questions on two separate occasions about an article that had appeared months before.
I was asked questions completely unprompted in the middle of other far more intense and challenging issues that were swirling around me at the time.
When I thought after the fact that those answers may have been inaccurate or mistaken, I reached out to those folks to make sure that they understood exactly what I meant and understood exactly what the situation was.
Now, I actually have some sympathy for this because this is the same technique they used on Michael Flynn.
You know, this is a technique they've used a lot of times where you go and talk, it's a crime to lie to the FBI.
And so they talk to you and you're talking from memory and you say something and then you go back and say, oh, I made a mistake.
If they charge you with lying, even though it's unfair, it can bankrupt you to defend yourself if they really come after you.
If they do that thing that they do with perps and they say, you know, yeah, well, buddy, we're going to prosecute you.
You're kind of screwed.
You know, so like, I have some sympathy with this, but as Rudy Giuliani points out, the whole thing is such a violation of DOJ procedure in the first place if he's leaking information.
Here's Rudy.
I was in the Justice Department for 17 years and I didn't think I had the authority to disclose information to the press.
That's kind of news to me.
I think it violates about 10 different rules of the Justice Department.
It could easily amount to obstruction to justice.
And McCabe makes it easy because he lied about it, which is a false statement.
After all, they prosecuted Martha Stewart for a single false statement to the FBI.
She wasn't an FBI agent.
They're prosecuting Flynn for a single false statement when they knew the answer to it.
If we have equal justice under the law, McCabe has to be prosecuted.
And so does Comey.
You know, it's an interesting point.
I mean, I was always against the Martha Stewart prosecution.
I thought, really?
You know, are the streets of New York going to be safer?
I mean, the sheets in prison are going to be nicer, but are the streets of the city going to be safer because Martha Stewart is in a slammer for one lie?
But listen, they can do this to you.
And especially if you're high profile, it makes them look good.
I'm the guy who nailed Martha Stewart.
You know, she climbed to the top of the building.
She was spraying, you know, the streets with machine gun fire.
You'll never take me alive, coppers.
And we said, Martha, Martha, come down.
You're surrounded.
Kavanaugh Slur Controversy00:06:11
And she was folding her sheets and we had to storm the building.
But I mean, it's just, it's absurd, but they really do do it.
So I have some, you know, some sympathy for McCabe's story, but still, it's part of, it is part of the chickens coming home to roost.
It's part of the fact that when you think that the narrative is the truth and you forget that the truth is the truth, it can come up.
You can bang into the rock of the truth in a big, big, ugly way, especially when it's represented by the Department of Justice or other prosecutors.
I mean, that is the thing that happens to people who lie to themselves and lie to others.
If they cross the line and break the law, you know, it can have a very, very unhappy ending and it's not good for you.
Anyway, it's happening to the New York Times.
We've been following this Kavanaugh slur all week and the Kavanaugh slur where the entire press kind of went all in to try and help the Times out of the fact that they had just printed an ugly, ugly, unsubstantiated rumor about a Supreme Court justice, a disgusting thing to do.
Their whole narrative of this book that's coming out by Kate Kelly and I forget the other woman's name, Robin Pogrebin.
You know, the whole narrative they're selling is disgusting Timesian stuff.
The narrative is the Deborah Ramirez who's ridiculous charges against Kavanaugh where she didn't remember when it happened.
She wasn't sure it was him.
She didn't know.
And that was somehow supposed to be, the FBI was supposed to spend its life's blood investigating that nonsense.
And they tell this whole story, well, the privilege, you know, she wasn't privileged at Yale.
She came from a different background at Yale.
And so she, listen, my son went to Yale.
I've been at Yale.
They had plenty of people from different backgrounds at Yale.
All right, so this is back in the 80s.
Maybe it was a little less egalitarian than it is now.
But come on, you know, I mean, this is just the Times narrative about everything.
It's all about the privilege.
It's all about, you know, bringing in people of different races.
And they're the victims all the time.
It's a crap narrative because they're still, still launching unsubstantial, no matter what the situation is, they're launching unsubstantiated, disgusting rumors against this guy and destroying a reputation that he clearly worked very, very hard to build by being a decent human being.
And it's a really, really ugly thing to do.
And it's coming back on them.
And still, you know, and remember, again, they're going to make the movie.
Just like they did with Anita Hill.
Her charges against Clarence Thomas were also unsubstantiated.
Even if they had been true, they would have amounted to nothing.
But they got to make the HBO show because they own the means of narrative.
So they think that makes the truth.
Maybe over time they win some adherence, but the truth keeps coming back.
They're going to make the movie about Kavanaugh, what an evil guy is.
You know, in the movie, he's going to be chasing Ruth Bader Ginsburg around the bench and she's going to be help, help.
You know, it's going to be ugly.
Fortunately, most of us will be gone by the time they get around to that.
But if you listen for 30 seconds, for 30 seconds, CBS News, which is the best of the networks in this regard, for 30 seconds, CBS News did drop the real bombshell of the story that comes out.
Make sure we got, yeah, this is it.
CBS tells you the real thing that has come out that really does change the narrative.
Speaking publicly for the first time to the Times reporters, Ford's close friend, Leland Kaiser, who Ford said was at the party, said she didn't believe Ford's account and that it just didn't make any sense.
She also said she told the FBI that Ford's allies pressured her to say otherwise.
Now, all four people that Ford identified as being at that high school party in the summer of 1982 have now said no such party occurred.
And today, both the Republican chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Democratic chair of the House Judiciary Committee said they would not support impeaching Kavanaugh.
So this is Jan Crawford, and she tweeted out, we dropped the real bombshell.
But first of all, that's in the New York Times book.
But first of all, it's buried 30 seconds.
That should have been the lead of the story.
It's buried at the end of the story.
Still, good for CBS.
They put it in there.
And I'm speaking from memory here, so I may have this wrong, but I believe that bombshell is in the Molly Hemingway book, which none of them has covered, which covers this whole thing really, really well.
And so, you know, and if you listen to the reporters, the women who wrote this book, who are, in fact, anti-Trump partisans, if you listen to them, their story just does not make sense.
Remember, the Times originally ran the story without reporting that the woman in question, who is supposed to have been at this party where Kavanaugh exposed himself.
Remember, this is anonymous sources, told them that a guy who won't talk to them said that a woman had something done to her that she apparently does not remember, and she won't talk to them either.
That's what happened.
But they left out the part that the woman herself will not confirm the story.
Now, they claim it was cut out.
But listen to this story for a minute.
Play the one about Robin Pogrebin explaining this to Lawrence O'Donnell.
You tell me, you know, you talk about credible accusations.
You tell me if this is credible.
In your draft of the article, did it include those words that have since been added to the article?
It did.
It did.
So somewhere in the editing process, those words were changed.
Yeah, I mean, I think what happened actually was that, you know, we had her name.
And, you know, the Times doesn't usually include the name of the victim.
And so I think in this case, the editors felt like maybe it was probably better to remove it.
And in removing her name, they removed the other reference to the fact that she didn't remember.
Okay, so the way in your draft for the Times, you used basically the exact words that are in the book that I deliberately left off the name because that passage begins with the name.
Yes.
And so in their removal of the name, they ended up removing what follows it.
Yes, and so I think it was just sort of an editing, you know, done in the haste in the editing process, as you know, for closing.
Were you involved in the decision to amend this and do the correction on the addition online to the piece?
We discussed it.
Yeah, I mean, we think we felt like there was so much heat.
You know, there's so much, everyone has been kind of seizing on various aspects of this that we certainly didn't want this to be an issue anymore.
And we certainly never intended to mislead in any way.
We wanted to give as full a story as possible.
Invoking God's Damn?00:05:57
Ah, come on.
I've been in newspapers.
You know, it's possible sometimes in the newspaper, the editor will change something without telling you.
That's what newspapers are like.
But she says they discussed it.
They discussed taking out the fact that the victim herself doesn't remember the incident.
And then they took that out in the heat of the moment.
Come on.
Come on.
Truth is the thing that when you kill it, it keeps coming back.
And it came back this week with a vengeance.
Like I said, they're going to keep lying.
They own the machinery of narrative, but the truth belongs to all of us.
And it really does.
It's the truth that sets you free.
They're tangled in their own narrative.
And it's kind of a beautiful thing to see.
Good week for the truth.
Got a break here.
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It's uncomfortable.
It's a little scrap.
There's a girl in there screaming all the time.
It'll drive you insane, but you can ask questions and get all your problems solved.
Come on over.
It's coming up.
Mailbag.
He's getting quick.
Austin is getting quick now.
He's got that thumb.
It's just like ready to go.
All right, from Malcolm.
Hello, conductor of the Velvety White Chocolate Orchestra that is your voice and shiny scalp master of the ball diverse.
Greetings from the Netherlands.
I'm curious about your opinion.
Isn't Pete Budige's misreading and manipulative weaponization of the Bible a true example of a violation of the fourth commandment?
Saying, well, God damn it, however, may be misused by society, but it seems that the purpose of the commandment, this is the third commandment, it's not the fourth commandment, it seems that the purpose of the commandment is to avoid a false invocation of the Lord and his word more than forbidding a colloquially requested curse.
Invoking God to damn something may be more warranted than we realize.
I'm curious as to your opinion on this and thank you for your work.
Again, I think it's the third commandment, you said, don't take the Lord's name in vain.
It's an excellent point, though.
Other than that, it's an excellent point that taking the Lord's name in vain may not just be, you know, shouting out the Lord's name when you stub your toe.
It actually is using the Bible and using the Lord to prove a point that the Lord himself actually wasn't making.
You know, I have nothing to say to this except, yes, I agree.
It's a really good point.
Buddigez does use the Bible dishonestly.
He used it dishonestly to support abortion.
God said, before you were formed in the womb, I knew you.
That does not sound like you should be killing people once they are in the womb.
So Budigez's reading of the Bible is really, really twisted and misguided.
And that could be a violation of the Third Amendment, Third Amendment, Third Commandment.
It just reminds me of Chalton Heston, Planet of the Apes.
At the end of the first one, he famously falls on his knees before the broken Statue of Liberty and he shouts, God damn you to hell.
You destroyed the earth.
And the censors wanted to cut it out.
And Heston said, no, I'm not cursing.
I'm actually calling on God to damn the people who destroyed the world.
And so they actually let him say it.
And that was his argument.
And it was a good one.
And I think you're right.
It's a really good point.
From Anonymous, I recently discovered that my husband, whom I adore, has been struggling with a pornography addiction since he was 12.
And he even cheated on me once, not as far as intercourse, but still, several years ago.
In hindsight, I cannot see how I missed it.
I'm not angry at him.
I see a victimized little boy who was ensnared into something when he was so young, it broke something in him.
I had zero suspicions and did not find him out.
He confessed to me with tears, and we have spent so much time before the throne of grace in prayer in the past several weeks.
In some ways, our relationship has never felt more intimate.
He's beginning counseling soon, but I am struggling with deep insecurities of not being enough for him since porn makes you crave variety.
While not angry, I'm deeply wounded and have lost trust.
What are my next steps?
How can I ever trust him again?
How do I battle the insecurity that breaks across me in waves unexpected throughout the day?
Thank you from Anonymous.
First of all, I have to tell you, I'm deeply moved by your grace, by your kindness, by your forgiveness, by your willingness to allow your husband to try and find his way.
And nothing that you're feeling is unnormal, is abnormal.
Nothing that you're feeling is abnormal.
It's unreasonable, but that doesn't mean it's not normal.
In other words, men crave variety.
Men crave variety as much as women crave children.
That is built into the system.
It's the way nature has of trying to get as many babies into the world as possible.
Porn, of course, exacerbates that craving.
It has nothing to do with you being enough for him or not enough for him.
I mean, men are true to their wives on principle and out of dedication and out of putting those feelings away.
But all men have these feelings.
And again, a porn addiction is going to make it worse.
So it has nothing whatsoever to do with you or how appealing you are or how satisfying you are.
It has nothing to do with it.
But it's very normal for you to feel that way.
It is incredibly, as I say, graceful and forgiving of you to wait and see if he can do this.
This is a crushingly hard addiction to beat.
It can be done with God's help, but it's a hard addiction to beat.
So you guys are going to have a real journey.
Don't let him put off therapy forever.
He should probably be in a 12-step program.
There are sex addiction programs as well.
And you should find some help for you to deal with this.
You know, I don't think that there's a, what is it called?
The alcohol, the Al-Anon is for families of alcoholics.
That may be helpful.
It's not specifically porn addiction, but it does teach you how to deal with an addict spouse.
And it's important you should take, you should look for counseling on how to deal with this.
It's a tough, tough addiction to break, and especially with it everywhere on the internet and all this stuff.
But listen, I hope God walks with you and you break this thing.
Jesus And The Death Penalty00:02:46
You're right.
This is something that got into him when he was a kid, and he's broken, and it's a terrible thing for him as well.
I'm sure, I'm sure he feels how degrading it is.
But that doesn't mean that you can just stand for it.
He's got to work on it.
He's got to work on it every day.
And you should work on making sure that you take care of yourself.
And God bless you for being willing to try and being willing to put love in front of hurt.
That's a beautiful thing to do.
And I hope God rewards you for it.
And I think he will.
From Michael.
I, Andrew, love the show.
I'm a Christian conservative and base all my political views on God's word and I'm anti-death penalty.
I've noticed most conservatives are pro-death penalty.
My view on it is that criminals should be allowed to live as they still have the possibility to come to know Jesus.
Do they deserve this chance, as I believe, or are they truly getting what they deserve?
From my reading of the Bible, and I'm not a theologian, I'm not a preacher, my reading of the Bible, the Bible is not against the death penalty.
Obviously, in the Old Testament, it prescribes the death penalty for many crimes.
But it is possible in reading the words of Jesus and following the path of Jesus that it would lead you to be opposed to the death penalty.
So I think that the Bible itself says can be used to prove, to well prove either point of view.
My own point of view is I can see where the death penalty could be useful in two ways.
One is a deterrent and the other as just writing the way justice, injustice bends the fabric of society.
And I could see where the death penalty might bend it back and give people the relief from that injustice, that evil that they need.
However, I thoroughly oppose the way the death penalty is practiced in America today.
I believe that there should be a special death penalty panel that dedicates itself to your case, to disproving the case against you, or to proving that something else should be done.
And after a year, on the 366th day, that sentence should be carried out.
Because to put somebody in prison for 20 years, you're right.
After 20 years, it's not the same guy.
You're not killing the guy who did the crime.
And I think that the way we do it, it's cruel and unusual punishment on the face of it.
And I simply do not think that leaving a guy in prison for 15 years, even five years, while he appeals his verdict is kind.
And I think it's not kind to the families or anything like that.
But if there were a death penalty that operated justly and was over within a year, I would support it because I believe there are some crimes that are deserving of death.
But the Bible itself, I think, can be read either way fairly.
From Leslie, hello, Mr. Claveland, Supreme Master of Hair and Logic.
I am a 14-year-old kid who is currently attending Oaks Christian School in Westlake Village, California.
Fiction as Truth00:09:31
I am working on writing a fantasy book of my own, and I'm having trouble making my characters' conversation sound smooth.
Do you have any advice, your fan, Zach?
Yeah, Zach.
I mean, look, this is one of the key things of writing fiction is writing dialogue.
It's a hard thing to learn.
You learn it just like you learn everything else from doing it, from reading the people who do it well, and from listening to what it is you're trying to imitate, which is the way people speak.
Not just the way they speak in public, but by the way they speak in public.
Do they stutter in private?
Do they stutter all the time?
Do they mumble?
Do they say things in full sentences?
How do different people speak?
What is it like if you read Shakespeare, for instance?
He has people who are stupid speak in one way and people who are smart and usually upper class speak in another way.
He copies the way that he's heard people speaking in Elizabethan England.
You have to listen.
You have to listen and observe to be a good writer.
But also, the way people read things is different than the way they hear things.
So when you write dialogue, you have to be thinking about how it's going to sound in the reader's mind or even in the audible.com listener's mind.
You have to be paying attention to that.
So you do this by observing the way people talk and the way different people talk, observing the way good writers write dialogue, and of course by doing it over and over again until you're happy with the way you do it and working on it all the time.
It's a tough thing to learn.
From Robin, the left has a narrative and they're very good at influencing the world.
Is narrative a wrong thing to push?
Is it aligned with fiction?
If not, how can conservatives capture the hearts and minds and make us proud to be conservative?
Yeah, see, the thing is, it's just a misunderstanding of what fiction is, to think that because it's fiction, it's not true.
This is the mistake that Ural Harari makes in his book, Sapiens, that I am always attacking.
He says, there are no human rights.
It's just a fiction.
There is no God.
It's just a fiction.
A fiction is a way of saying something that is true that cannot be expressed factually.
And what is that?
It's the human experience of life.
The human experience of life cannot be described factually.
If I say, well, a brain, you know, the brain fires here and the adrenaline rushes here, and all that, that doesn't describe to you what human life is like.
What describes it to you is a passage of music, a work of art, a novel.
That is the way fiction communicates the imaginative world.
Now, look, the imagination, as I always say, it's an organ of perception.
And just like every organ of perception, it doesn't see absolute reality.
Sees human reality.
This desk, I see this desk.
A scientist might say, well, it's really just an energy field that is collecting here and there, but to me, it's a desk.
It will always be a desk.
It will never be an energy field.
And so that's what the eye perceives.
And the same thing is true with the imagination.
It perceives things the way humans perceive them.
And maybe there are some things that we will never know beyond that until we stand before the throne of God and see things face to face.
That is what St. Paul meant when he said we are looking through a glass darkly, but soon one day we will see face to face.
And so, you know, to tell, to put the truth, the deep truths into fiction is to tell the truth.
The mistake that the left makes is they think because it's fiction, like Harare thinks, because it's fiction, you can just tell another fiction and that will be the truth then, right?
And that simply isn't so.
If your fiction is not describing the truth, the fiction won't work ultimately.
It will ultimately fall apart, as we saw this week, with the Democrats.
Now, what talented leftist artists do is they tell a truth and then they plug in leftist ideas that actually are not true.
So if you watch, you know, Avatar, the movie Avatar, it appeals to you because it's a story of a guy entering a native culture and finding out the truth.
And it's a story about how the powerful sometimes oppress the weak.
But in fact, it's an attack on the American military, which historically has not been oppressive of the weak.
Historically, it has actually been a force for liberation.
So they plug in the American military as the bad guys, and by doing that, they can get their lie in embedded in a bigger truth.
It's very clever.
We have to learn to tell the truth with powerful narratives, especially the imaginative truth that can't be expressed in any other way.
And we just don't do it because most conservatives have in their heart somewhere the Ben Shapiro thing: the facts don't care about your feelings, and the facts are important, and yes, they are, but the way you experience the world is also extremely, extremely important.
This one, I'm not sure if this is from Robert or from Jonah.
It came from an email that said, Robert, but it was signed Jonah at one point.
Has it occurred to you and your colleagues, Ben, Michael, and Matt, that together you are serving a messianic purpose, not simply a conservative political purpose?
In other words, could the success of the Daily Wire be Providence?
Well, I want to answer this seriously, but first I have to, the idea of Michael Knowles serving a messianic purpose actually made my brain explode.
And so now I'm just going to pour out my ears and I'm not sure I'll be able to continue speaking in a cogent way.
But listen, you know, every single day, every single day without fail, I pray to God that the words that come out of my mouth will be his words.
That somehow I will be expressing the will, the word, the idea of God.
That is one thing.
To put that in your prayers, to make that your goal, to make it the way you judge your own speech and your own writing, that's all of that is very important.
To assume that you got it right is where people go wrong, okay?
Because we still are broken vessels.
We're still broken people who don't always get it right.
As I wrote, I think in my memoir somewhere, an angel could whisper in your ear and you could still turn it into a lie.
That's how corrupt the human mind is and the human heart is.
You can still be delivered the word of God direct and still turn it into a lie.
So every day I pray for this, but to assume that I am actually succeeding is way, way beyond where I'm willing to go.
So that, you know, that's what that's what I'm saying, what I'm saying.
Nothing happens, but it's God's will.
I think God has blessed the Daily Wire and I'm thrilled to be part of it.
I truly am, but that we are doing the right thing.
You know, we can only hope and we can only try and we can only pray to be doing that.
We can never be sure that we're doing it, but we try.
From John, Dear Lord Clavin Battershur East, I recently faced a question that I don't think I've been able to convincingly answer.
Given that we believe abortion is murder, why is it unacceptable to defend the lives of the unborn with force, with violence?
For example, why is blowing up a Planned Parenthood immoral?
It is obvious that such violence is wrong, but I can't quite put my finger on the reason, thanks, John.
This is the John Brown question.
You know, John Brown was kind of a loon who went out and killed people in protest against slavery.
And later, when people started to realize, oh, wait, slavery is as bad as we thought it was, it's even worse.
John Brown kind of became a culture hero.
Remember, John Brown's body lies moldering in the grave, but his truth goes marching on.
But I believe that it is frankly wrong.
And it's wrong because the same reason John Brown was wrong, that when the society is in the grip of a false narrative, even an evil narrative, even good people are doing the wrong thing.
So even good people like George Washington owned slaves.
And it took him his lifetime to realize, to start to realize that no, this was wrong.
This was a terrible, terrible wrong that violated all his own principles.
If a man of virtue like George Washington takes a lifetime to really come around and understand something, that tells you how powerful a false narrative can be.
This is why the left loves them.
It tells you how long a false narrative can wrap you up and strangle you in its lies, okay?
And this is why the left loves false narratives because it looks back in history and says, oh, wow, for a while, that slavery false narrative worked.
Maybe the false narrative of socialism will work for a few hundred years.
So that is why when you commit an act of violence against a society so wrapped in a false narrative that good people are doing it, you're committing acts of violence against people who are essentially innocent.
They're not innocent in action, but they're innocent in intent and in their own hearts because they're so carried away by this narrative.
So you are essentially committing an act of violence against the innocent.
And that is just a terrible, terrible thing to do.
The thing, cultural problems, and this is a cultural problem, even though it ends with the death of an innocent, it's a cultural problem.
They have to be addressed by cultural means.
They have to be addressed by cultural means.
You have to tell the truth and break the false narrative.
Otherwise, otherwise, eventually, it could come to violence like the Civil War did, like the fact that they had to end slavery in this massive, massive war where so many people died.
That is not what we want.
We have to fight day by day to peacefully bring people's mind around.
And look, the truth is on our side, and thank heavens, science is on our side, because every day it becomes clearer and clearer and clearer that that baby is a human being from day one.
And many, many, some people on the left have been forced to admit, yeah, we're killing a human being, but we still support doing that.
If we lose that argument, we're doomed.
So I'm willing to have that argument with anybody because then the question is, well, why should it be the baby who dies and not you?
You know, I mean, then we can make that argument.
But listen, you have to fight cultural problems by cultural means or else you yourself step into evil.
I got to stop there.
Good mailbag.
I'll be back tomorrow.
Give Us a Review!00:01:04
I'm Andrew Clavin.
is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Austin Stevens and directed by Mike Joyner.
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And our supervising producers are Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
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Edited by Adam Sayovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
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