Ep. 792 dissects Democrats’ weaponized Trump impeachment—Pelosi and Schiff’s leaks, "fairness" hypocrisy—and pivots to Syria’s ISIS-run prison camps where women enforce mutilation as "religious law." California’s leftist policies are blamed for wildfires and homelessness, while Zuckerberg’s congressional grilling exposes Democrats’ double standards on free speech. A listener’s question on Christian doctrine clarifies core beliefs (Nicene Creed) vs. debatable ones (Mary’s virginity), then shifts to a teacher’s grief over infertility, urging her to redirect purpose through teaching. Free-market critiques target cronyism, praising Trump’s deregulation but warning against overreach; Psalm 46:10 is hailed as an antidote to overanalysis. The episode closes with a plea for compassion in a friend’s same-sex divorce, framing moral battles as secondary to children’s well-being—all while mocking the impeachment as a farce. [Automatically generated summary]
Responding to Republican complaints that the so-called impeachment investigation has been a secretive and dishonest process meant to deny the president due process so Democrats can control information in order to manipulate public opinion, House Democrats have introduced a resolution to make the investigation a public and dishonest process meant to deny the president due process so they can control information in order to manipulate public opinion.
Denying that the entire proceeding was a charade, Democrats said it was instead a first word rhymes with hair, second word two syllables, first syllable rhymes with ear, second syllable ring, until reporters guessed they were conveying the phrase fair hearing after the answer was slipped to them by anonymous intelligence committee sources named Schiff.
While up until now, Democrats had said it was perfectly fair to question witnesses in a locked room forbidding Republicans to release information while Democrats continually leaked slanted stories to a collusive press.
Under the new resolution, they said they would use the word public and due process more often while essentially carrying on as before.
Speaking to the lipstick canister she had just accidentally stuck in her forehead, Nancy Pelosi said, quote, I don't know what else Republicans can want.
Before, we weren't even pretending to be fair, and now we are pretending.
Plus, Adam Schiff is in charge, and I trust him so much, I absolutely know he'll return my wristwatch one of these days, and maybe it's even true he's not the one who stole it, though I don't know who else it could have been, unquote.
The Democrats charge that President Trump withheld military aid in order to pressure Ukraine to investigate that perfectly legal time Joe Biden's son did something not dishonest at all that just happened to end up with him getting paid lots of money to do nothing, as might happen to anyone whose father was vice president.
President Trump says the entire process is such a dishonest scam that he's told Ukraine to investigate it if they want any more military aid.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
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Oh, hooray, hurrah.
So yesterday, Fox News featured reports from foreign affairs correspondent Benjamin Hall from inside ISIS prison camps in northern Syria.
The thrust of the reports was that the imprisoned terrorists are still dangerous, poorly guarded, and always trying to escape, all of which is no doubt true.
But I was struck by this bit from a so-called family camp full of women and children.
Here's Hall.
Inside this camp, they have their own laws.
They have the ISIS female morality police called the Al-Hizbah.
They have secret religious courts.
They murder those who have broken the laws.
They mutilate some of the bodies.
They've even found a one-year-old baby beaten to death.
They can't explain why or even what goes on in the heads of these terrorists, but they are living there and able to carry this out.
Now, it seems to me there are two possible things you could say about these camps.
One is that all cultures are deserving of respect, and when these members of the religion of peace beat a one-year-old child to death, they're simply expressing their cultural norms, no better or worse than our own.
The other possible thing you could say is the truth, that these people are evil psychopaths who have formed an evil and psychopathic society within the camp.
Just for a change of pace from the leftist media, I'll go with the truth here and say this is a society of evil psychopaths and point out that what constitutes their evil and their insanity is not the horrible things they do, but the ideas in their head which are expressed by the horrible things they do.
These are not people in the grips of delusions.
They're not hallucinating that the child they killed is an evil demon from Mars or something like that.
These are people who simply believe that wrong things are right, so they have a false notion of moral reality.
And so when they act in what they think is a moral manner, they do evil instead of good.
It's the ideas that make them insane.
Now, on some demented news programs, horrified that their arch nemesis Donald Trump scored a major win in taking out ISIS leader Bakr al-Baghdadi, filth has begun to pour out of some of these commentators' mouths as they stretch to compare our president with Middle Eastern terrorists.
Here's a sample.
He sounded not like a president of the United States.
He actually sounded like Saddam Hussein after torturing people, sounded like Muamar Gaddafi after he would torture people.
Explicit details, some of which sort of echoed, and frankly, the crudeness you would often expect to hear maybe from ISIS about the whimpering, screaming Baghdadi.
Okay, so that's disgusting, right?
And I don't want to imitate them by seeming in any way to compare the state of California to an ISIS prison camp in northern Syria, except in this one way.
This state that I am in right now is insane.
It is governed by bad ideas, and those ideas are turning what should be paradise into a third world hellhole.
The state is on fire, in part because of poor forest management due to false environmental hysteria.
We're suffering from rolling blackouts because the electric company is forced by government to spend money on loony clean energy schemes instead of on repairing their equipment and because the companies are held liable for fires they didn't cause.
The streets of once beautiful San Francisco are made hideous by drug-taking mentally ill homeless who befoul the pavements because activists and activist courts have decided it's somehow compassionate not to hold them to account for their bad actions or to force them to get help for their mental disabilities.
The same is becoming true of Los Angeles as well.
These are the wages of leftism.
Leftism is a collection of bad ideas that fails everywhere and always whenever and wherever it's tried.
And while this is going on in California, California congresspeople like Nancy Pelosi, whose district is in complete disarray, and Adam Schiff, a proven liar and manipulator, are waging a dishonest and secret war to unseat a president whose good ideas have guided our economy into an historic boom, which helps everyone at every level.
The leftist media, which is nearly all the media, covers this as if it makes some kind of sense, while at the same time covering up, essentially silencing and censoring the news about a rational investigation into what Obama's administration did to the Trump campaign when they had power.
Locking Room Sessions Are Absurd00:14:47
You won't hear about that almost at all.
So this is a test.
It's a test of whether the American people still have enough power to reject the insane fantasies of a power-hungry elite and whether they still have enough sanity, no matter which side they're on, to distinguish those fantasies from reality.
The elite will do everything they can to sell us madness.
We're going to find out who is buying.
We're going to talk about this more.
We've got the mailbag coming up.
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And that's why.
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So I don't want to spend too much time talking about impeachment.
It's just because it's just too crazy.
It is just too crazy.
The whole argument is so insane.
I can't even believe I'm watching it on television.
First of all, I don't care if Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate corruption that included Joe Biden.
You know, the Washington Examiner is reporting the only people really covering this, that Biden privately contacted the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice when he was a senior and influential U.S. Senator, and he discussed with them issues that his son, Hunter's firm, was being paid to lobby on.
This is according to government records gotten by the Washington Examiner and exactly nobody else.
So, I mean, this is a family that has been tarred with a lot of corruption, or at least a lot of rumors of corruption.
And I just don't understand.
I seriously don't understand how they have this locked room session, Adam Schiff controlling all the information, then leaking out the testimony to the New York Times, which is just a Democrat mouthpiece at this point.
I mean, when do they ever attack anybody but Donald Trump?
Seriously, if you read the front page of the New York Times, it's worth it just for the comedy.
If you read the front page of the New York Times, it is genuinely like hate speech.
It's just this kind of relentless, oh, there are fires in, you know, there are fires in California, but here's a picture of Trump laughing.
He's laughing while the fire's laughing, fire.
That's the way the New York Times is now reporting the news.
You know, it's like scientists say an asteroid may hit the Earth in the next million years, Trump to blame.
I mean, that is the way they're reporting the news.
It's absolutely incredible.
So you've got Adam Schiff, a proven liar, a proven manipulator, leaking this information.
The other day, I mean, here's Jim Jordan saying basically, listen to what he says.
The idea that during our hour, our counsel is asking questions and Adam Schiff tells the witness not to answer our questions is completely ridiculous.
And it's why this should be in public.
Because they're cross-examining the witness, right?
We only get their opening statements, so a written statement.
They cross-examine the witness, and then that's leaked to the New York Times.
The New York Times plays it, and they do that whole mounting evidence, yet another smoking gun of what?
Of nothing, of this complete ridiculous story they have drummed up into nothing, which we know is ridiculous.
I hate to keep repeating it, but we have to keep reminding ourselves because you get into the conversation, we say, well, is that evidence important?
Is that evidence dispositive?
And you think, no, we know that they have been looking for reasons to impeach the president since the day he was elected.
And the whole thing about this is that when you think about that, that in and of itself is wrong.
When you see evidence, impeaching the president is a monumental thing to do.
When you are led by evidence to a crime and you say, oh, gosh, you know, why can't we, listen, we don't want to do this, but the crime is just so terrible.
The guy committed perjury.
The guy was, you know, banging his intern in the Oval Office and then committed perjury about all his sex crimes.
We have to really deal with this.
That's one thing.
When you are just looking for a way to impeach a guy and you find any mistake he made, any time he opened his big yap and said something he shouldn't have said, and oh, we're going to impeach this.
You've got to hold these hearings in secret.
You've got to leak manipulative information to the New York Times.
And it's absurd.
It is absurd that people should be talking about it.
I don't even like talking about it at all.
And then on top of which, they pulled this stunt where they vote on this resolution that's supposed to somehow give them legitimacy.
But the resolution doesn't really do anything.
The resolution basically means they can still question people in private.
They can still question people in secret.
Adam Schiff can still control who gets to testify.
We don't know whether the president is going to get due process, whether the White House is going to be able to come in there with their lawyers and their witnesses.
They're still keeping control of it.
And it is not an official impeachment hearing, which would require them to establish fair rules of play.
I do not know how anybody, seriously, anybody can look at this and say this is a fair, fair process.
So I want to, because of all of this, because all of this stuff is just so crazy, I want to take a look at this other movement that is a, it really is a big movement on the left to silence people.
Because if you're selling insanity, if you're selling stuff that is just crazy, you've got to silence the voice of reality.
You've got to silence the people who are saying, well, you know, this is just the way things are.
This is the way people are.
People are different.
People, you know, men and women are different.
Well, if you want to silence that reality, you have to shout down the people who are saying, you know, we know men and women are different because they're two different words with two different meanings.
If we didn't need two different words with two different meanings, we wouldn't have them.
So it's ridiculous to say the two different words that mean different things.
But you have to silence that voice or else you can't sell the insanity that you're selling.
And I'm telling you, I'm living in this state that is completely falling apart because of leftist policies.
What is happening in San Francisco is a crime.
What's happening in LA with the homeless is a crime.
That's all, all leftist governance.
It's all the courts saying things like, well, you know, homelessness, this is an actual court decision by the Ninth Circuit.
Homelessness is an involuntary condition.
And so you can't stop people from doing, you can't prosecute people for doing something that's involuntary.
And you can't prosecute them for doing something they have to do, like sleeping or crapping on the streets.
So you can't prosecute them for the things they're doing.
But of course, homelessness is not entirely an involuntary position.
It has to do with choices you make.
It has to do with drugs you use.
It has to do with a lot of things.
And if it's a mental condition, then you should be in an institution.
You shouldn't be sleeping on the streets.
And again, I just want to say, there's a virtually book-length article in City Journal by Heather McDonald exploring what went on in San Francisco, both exploring it on the ground, because Heather is just such a brave, I mean, the woman must be like four foot nine.
And she's out there dealing with, I mean, everybody says this about her.
She's just like fearless.
She's out there dealing with these drug dealers and buying drugs just to show how easy it is.
But it's also a very informative and informed piece about why this is happening.
And it's not.
So you've got to silence people.
So I'm supposed to be talking at Boston University next week.
And Boston University is dragging its heels because I'm, I guess because I'm supposed to be a hateful fascist bigot or something like this.
And they're trying to say, oh, we don't want it broadcast.
And they're putting down all these rules.
And they're trying to make it so I can't go speak at Boston University.
Meanwhile, interestingly enough, the alt-right, which is also crazy.
I mean, they're the fascist guys.
They are not the right.
They are the alternative to the right, hence the alt-right.
They're sending out trolls to all of us.
They're advertising on Twitter.
They're saying, get out there and get Clavin and get Knowles and get Walsh and get Shapiro and get all these guys and come out with all these questions about their racist policies and all this.
Because when you are dealing with a fantasy, you've got to close down the people who are speaking about reality.
And, you know, to give the fascists on the alt-right credit, they seem to actually ask their questions politely.
They don't actually seem to shout people down.
And so if they want to engage me with their bad ideas, I'm happy to talk to them about their bad ideas if they're polite and they address me in a respectful way and let other people speak as well.
So that's not as bad as shouting people down, but you have to shout people down if you are selling dishonesty.
So now there is a movement, and remember, the right is so bad about this.
The right is so bad.
They're always dealing with the crisis.
Conservatives are always dealing with the crisis of the moment, and they don't see this cultural march that the left is on, moving the ball forward.
And so one of the things they're selling, one of the crazy things they're selling, is this idea of hate speech laws, that free speech, free speech, it's just lazy.
I keep saying this.
It's lazy to rely on free speech.
It's like, you know, you can't just let.
So here in the Washington Post, where democracy, the Washington Post, where democracy dies in darkness, imposed by the Washington Post, here's Richard Stengel, a former editor of Time, Why America Needs Hate Crime Laws.
Yes, he says the First Amendment protects the thought that we hate, but it should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another.
But that's anything, right?
I mean, it is anything.
If you're nuts, anything I say could cause you to commit violence.
He says, in an age when everyone has a megaphone, that seems like a design flaw.
It's important to remember that our First Amendment doesn't just protect the good guys.
Our foremost liberty also protects any bad actors who hide behind it to weaken our society.
He says, but the Russians understood that our free press and its reflex toward balance and fairness would enable Moscow to slip its destructive ideas into our media ecosystem.
Destructive ideas, by the way, that were always being slipped into our media ecosystem, but were never a problem until Donald Trump got elected.
And it's the old thing that the, I mean, this is what I think Woodrow Wilson said.
I think it was Woodrow Wilson, unless it was Franklin Roosevelt.
It was one of these progressives who said the Constitution is a horse and buggy document.
Now things are much too complex to allow freedom to ring, to allow people to rule themselves.
We need experts.
We need an administrative state.
And now we have this deep state trying to stage a coup against the president.
And the New York Times is saying, no, it's a good thing.
It's a good thing we threw your democracy out into the cornfield because the deep state is going to take care of you.
Shut up, okay?
So let us talk for just a minute about emergency services, which I may need if the wind shifts because the fire is not that far away from where I live.
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So let's talk about Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook.
You know, I've talked about him.
I have problems with him sometimes.
I think he's constantly apologizing for selling our private material and then he goes out and does it again and then he apologizes again.
However, just because he sometimes doesn't get things right doesn't mean he's not being used as a whipping boy.
And he is.
The government is using him as a whipping boy for the fact that they don't like free speech.
He has set up a platform.
The platform allows everyone to speak.
That means that if Donald Trump says something and the left feels it's not true, the left has to go out and argue with Donald Trump.
But instead, they want Zuckerberg to silence people.
They want him to edit things.
They want the Facebook to say, yeah, we're not going to allow the right to do this and we're not going to allow Donald Trump to say these things.
And it is just amazing the way they are bullying him.
And don't forget, these are people in Congress who do jack diddly squat.
These are people who do absolutely nothing.
They do nothing.
They pass no laws.
They don't deal with any problems.
They don't deal with infrastructure.
They don't deal with drug prices.
They don't deal with anything at all except impeaching, trying to impeach the President of the United States and tormenting Mark Zuckerberg about us.
And now the left is piling on.
You know, Thomas Friedman has a column on a Knucklehead Row.
Let us go to Knucklehead Row, since Thomas Friedman is a chief knucklehead there.
So Thomas Friedman, who really has become a lazy guy, he phoned some of this stuff in, but he says Trump, Zuckerberg, and pals are breaking America.
Now, the idea that Zuckerberg is a pal with Donald Trump is just absurd.
Disagreeing on Inessential Doctrines00:16:13
I mean, it's just ridiculous.
But they're breaking America.
And he says, not in the Cold War, not during Vietnam, not during Watergate did I ever fear more for my country.
You know, I love the rhetoric about Donald Trump because they never have to say he did anything.
He's Hitler.
He's ISIS.
You heard them compare him to ISIS.
They compare him to Saddam Hussein.
They compare him to Omar Gaddafi.
But what is he doing?
What has he done?
You know, did he say the Ukraine should investigate Joe Biden?
That's why they're comparing him.
I mean, it is just amazing.
The rhetoric, the rhetoric gets higher and higher the less they can nail him on something really corrupt that he's done because I can't think of anything that Donald Trump has done that has lessened my freedom or hurt the Constitution or I can think of plenty of things Obama did.
So Friedman says the internet barons who for too long ignored the weaponization of social media, which is turning our free press into a house of mirrors where citizens can no longer cognitively discern fact from fiction and make informed judgments essential for democracy.
I watch it all and wonder, are you really doing that?
Let me translate that from leftism into truth.
Okay, what he's saying is, why do you get to have a voice when we should be controlling information?
I mean, he is working for a paper that is lies every day.
It is distortion.
It is bias and lies.
And he's wondering why people, these ordinary people, should be allowed to talk.
So let us look.
You know, Zuckerberg was brought up, I think it was last week, he was brought up before Congress.
Here is Alexandria Occasional Cortex questioning him.
It's basically madness.
It's insane.
Do you see a potential problem here with a complete lack of fact-checking on political advertisements?
Well, Congresswoman, I think lying is bad.
And I think if you were to run an ad that had a lie, that would be bad.
That's different from it being, from, in our position, the right thing to do to prevent your constituents or people in an election from seeing that you had lied.
So we can.
So you won't take down lies or you will take down lies?
I think it's just a pretty simple yes or no.
I'm not talking about spin.
I'm talking about actual speech.
In a democracy, I believe that people should be able to see for themselves what politicians that they may or may not vote for.
So you won't take them down.
No matter how big her glasses are, her brain remains tiny, this girl.
So she can't understand that it's not his job.
It's not his job to tell the president of the United States what he can say or Congresswoman occasional cortex.
It's not his job to tell her what she can say either.
We deserve to hear from her and to hear from Trump and to judge for ourselves which of them is telling the truth.
There's plenty of false information out there.
I heard a guy at one of my speeches the other day tell me about how Stacey Abrams was now governor, and it was just stolen from her.
That's completely false.
That's completely distorted.
And yet these are the things that people believe.
That stuff comes from the mainstream media.
That stuff comes from the New York Times.
Should Zuckerberg keep the Times down, keep the Times off his site when he doesn't like what they're saying?
I mean, it's basically crazy.
I just want to play, I want to play a couple more cuts of this questioning because some of it is so funny.
Play the one with Al Green.
love this.
How many are positive?
Yeah.
Yeah, what he's asking you about is Facebook is going to put out some that coinage, that internet coinage, and they've got like 21 or 22 companies who are involved in developing this.
And this is what he's asking about.
How many are headed by women?
Congressman, I do not know the answer to that off the top of my head, but I can get it for you.
Well, I believe you can get it, Mr. Zuckerberg, but one would assume that you would know who heads these corporations that are going to be running this global company.
How many of them are minorities, Mr. Zuckerberg?
Congressman, I do not know off the top of my head.
Are there any members of the LGBTQ plus community?
Zuckerberg is supposed to question the heads of companies that he works with about whether they're gay or not.
And who do you sleep with, sir?
Excuse me, I like your ideas, but just who are you banging?
And remember, again, once again, these guys are doing nothing, right?
No infrastructure, no pharmacy bills, not dealing with the trade, new trade deal with Mexico, not dealing with any of that stuff, nothing but secret investigations into the president and badgering this businessman who has built a brilliant business that, you know, maybe it needs some regulation, but it doesn't need regulation to make sure the heads of the companies he works with are sleeping with the right people.
I mean, that's completely none of his business and none of mine and none of Al Green's.
I got to play one more because it's just so wonderful.
This is from the Congresswoman from anti-Semite land, Rashid Talbot.
I know this is going to be really hard in this setting, but try to see me beyond just a congresswoman, but also as a mother that is raising two Muslim boys in this pretty dark time in our world as I ask you these questions as well.
For years, you know, advocacy organizations, as you already know, have been pleading with you and your team to prohibit hate groups from using the events page, which fuel violence against African Americans, Muslims, Jews, immigrants, and the LGBT community.
And you claim you're very serious about addressing it.
And in 2018, even before Congress, you stated, I quote, we do not allow hate groups on Facebook.
If there's a group that their primary purpose or a large part of what they are doing is spreading hate, we will ban them from the platform overall.
So, Mr. Zuckerberg, yes or no, is it still your policy to ban hate groups?
My understanding is yes.
I think her next question was, could you put the anti-Semite ones back?
I'm making that up.
She didn't say it.
But I mean, again, again, you know, he's banning Nazis and things like that.
And I'm even, as far as I'm concerned, I feel like everybody should be allowed to talk.
But I get that.
But when does the gate close?
When does the gate close?
If the gate closes on Nazis, does it also close on Antifa who are Nazis?
Does it also close on leftists who put forward ideas that resulted in the murder of tens of millions of people in history?
Is that a hate thing?
As when you say, when you pitch socialism, is that a hateful idea?
It seems like a hateful idea to me.
Look at what's happening in Venezuela.
But no, you know, of course not.
Of course you don't ban those ideas.
Ideas should get to conflict with one another.
They should get to compete with one another.
And that's the way the truth will out.
But it is the truth willing out is exactly what the left is trying to prevent because their ideas are bad.
So it's always about, it's always about what you did wrong.
Whose butt did you pinch?
How did you cheat on your wife?
It's always about all these things and oh, the hate and all of this.
It's never about the one big idea, preserving your freedom.
And that's what they're trying to distract you from because it's all about the power.
You know, I'm going to end with a voice of wisdom that you don't usually hear played as a voice of wisdom.
Barack Obama talking about cancel culture, about shutting people down, about destroying people's lives by pointing out something they said that you don't like.
This is your former president, Barack Obama.
This idea of purity and you're never compromised and you're always politically woke and all that stuff.
You should get over that quickly.
The world is messy.
There are ambiguities.
People who do really good stuff have flaws.
Like if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn't do something right or used the word wrong verb or then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself because man, you see how awoke I was.
I called you out.
I'm going to get on TV.
Watch my show.
Watch Groanish.
You know, that's not activism.
That's not bringing about change.
You know, the thing about Obama is he was a terrible president, and he was a terrible president because his ideas were bad and because he was never criticized enough to actually have to confront the results of his ideas, so he never changed his mind and he lived in this kind of egotistical bubble.
But he'd have made a perfectly good high school teacher.
You know, I mean, I've never hated the guy.
You know, he'd have made a perfectly kind of illuminating high school teacher.
You might have thought, well, I don't agree with that, but it kind of makes you think.
Anyway, it's madness.
It is absolute madness that they are selling this whole impeachment story is madness.
This whole idea that Donald Trump is a monster is madness.
It is all madness madness.
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It all kind of comes together.
It was just a random screen before, but now we understand.
From Shalom, I guess is the name, unless they're just saying Shalom.
My question to you is regarding a statement you made last week stating that doctrine is not important in Christianity, just go and live, or something along those lines.
Is that really true?
I mean, look at your own show.
You defend traditional marriage, traditional sexes, traditional values, and aren't all of them based on Christian doctrine, like God making man and woman in his image, sanctioning sex and marriage, so on and so on.
Don't you think that if we chuck doctrines, then we don't have anything to defend our principles by?
At the end of the day, isn't our physical self just a reflection of spiritual reality?
Anyways, love you, love your show, keep it up.
And by the way, you're right, Werewolf Cop is a killer book.
Werewolf cop is a great book.
If you have not read Werewolf Cop because of the title or have not read it just because you haven't read it, read Werewolf Cop.
It is a terrific book.
He's absolutely right.
I love this question.
I love this question.
I know exactly what he was referring to, an answer I gave in the mailbag.
And let me explain it.
Maybe I don't remember exactly what I said, so maybe I didn't say it clearly enough.
There is such a thing, remember C.S. Lewis wrote this famous book.
I referred to it yesterday, Mere Christianity.
There is such a thing as mere Christianity, doctrines that constitute a Christianity that all of us, Catholics, Protestants, everybody, pretty much agrees on.
I usually locate it in the Nicene Creed, but there are other things about it and other ideas that come out of it that I would say are mere Christianity.
What I was talking about or trying to talk about, and maybe I was unclear, but what I was trying to talk about, are other doctrines that are not necessary to get at that core belief, okay?
And I'm going to give you an example, and don't write in and argue with me about this, because we can just, let's just agree to disagree on this.
One of the things I disagree with in Catholicism, and you know I have a great affection for Catholic theology and feel a lot of the great theology of our day has been done in the Catholic Church, especially by Benedict, the last Pope.
However, here's a doctrine in Catholicism I disagree with.
The perpetual virginity of Jesus' mother, Mary.
Now, I think there are actual ramifications of that doctrine that I think are wrong.
I think that when you have a doctrine that is wrong, it will have ramifications that are wrong.
So for instance, I don't actually think someone who is somebody's wife being a perpetual virgin would make her a very good wife.
I think that is elevating virginity beyond its actual worth in the life story of Jesus and in human life.
And I feel that there is a lot of that in the Catholic Church about sex that I disagree with.
Fine, but I don't think that doctrine is going to keep you from Jesus Christ.
And I think the purpose of religion, Jesus is not the, religion is not the purpose of Jesus.
Jesus is the purpose of religion.
And any way you get to Christ is okay with me.
So that's what I'm saying.
I'm not saying that every doctrine can be tossed out.
I'm not saying that the ramifications of doctrine can be tossed out.
I'm not saying any of that.
I'm just saying there are some doctrines that are essential and some that are inessential, and you shouldn't allow doctrines that are inessential to really get in the way of your having a personal relationship with Jesus.
So that's what I was trying to say.
Of course, you're right.
Of course, there are essential doctrines to Christianity.
Of course, you can't go around hating your neighbor, despising the poor, despising other people.
You know, obviously, these are things that are core to the Christian philosophy.
But whether Mary was perpetually a virgin or not, again, I disagree.
I think it's a mistaken doctrine.
But, you know, I don't think it's going to, I would not take away your relationship with Jesus Christ because I happen to disagree with that doctrine.
That's what I was trying to express to the guy who was going to a church where he wasn't entirely comfortable, but did get a lot of joy and did get the feeling that the Spirit was present.
And I thought that that was more important than the particular doctrines that he was disagreeing with.
Good question though.
From Jen, as a teacher, I've always been drawn to great motivational quotes like, you are never too old to become what you might have been.
And while that's true about a lot of things, it's not true about everything.
Being a mother is something I always thought I would be.
I expected that I would teach for a few years, get married, stay home, raise my kids with my husband, and then I would go back to my career.
However, 20 years have gone by, I haven't met a man, this is not happening.
And her question is, how do I find purpose in life when I feel like my opportunities for a family have passed by?
I expected that to be my purpose, and now it's improbable.
It's difficult for me to watch families and not feel jealous or hurt.
There are a whole series of life events from which I've been excluded.
Since you promised that your answers to mailbag questions will solve all my problems, I decided to reach out for advice.
Okay.
I can solve your problem, but I can't end your pain.
It's painful when something we thought was the meaning of our life or we thought was an ambition doesn't pan out.
I'm not saying it'll never pan out, by the way.
You know, you may have given up too soon.
It may come and surprise you.
I don't know.
But let's say it doesn't.
Let's take it for an argument.
Let's stipulate that it doesn't.
The thing is, it's not for you to determine the meaning of your life.
It's for God to determine the meaning of your life.
I cannot tell you how many people I have seen wreck their lives on this exact rock, okay?
Because they are going to tell God what they are supposed to be doing instead of listening to what God is telling them that they're supposed to be doing.
So one of the beautiful things about knowing God is when you're in a situation like this, which is truly disappointing and grief-inducing and makes you feel very bad.
And I sympathize with all that.
And maybe you're going to have to grieve this before you can put it aside.
And maybe you're just going to have to live, as we all do, with a certain amount of sadness in life.
But the question you should be asking yourself, and you don't mention whether you're a religious person or not, but you should be.
So I'm going to address you as if you are.
The question you should be asking yourself is, what does God want me to do with this situation, this actual situation that I'm in right now?
Not, God, this was my purpose and you didn't let me have it, because it's for God to determine what your purpose is, but what is the thing that you can do with this love that you have that you wanted to give to a family, with this ability to nurture that you wanted to give to a family?
Crony Capitalism's Grip00:03:48
What are the things that you can do with those gifts that will give them to other people?
You work with children, you're a teacher, so that's, of course, one place, but maybe there are other places you can give them.
If you start to work out, what do you want me to do with this situation, God?
What do you want me to do with this?
You will find the meaning that he has in your life, and who knows, you may find other things besides.
It says in the Gospels, seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these other things will be added onto you.
So this is what you should be doing in obedience, in humility.
You should be saying, all right, so the meaning of my life was not what I determined it to be.
What do you determine it to be?
And you will find that that is the way forward, and that will solve your problem.
It won't necessarily ease all your pain, because there's a certain amount of pain when things don't work out.
From Daniel, thank you for your show.
You've helped me in many areas of my life over the last couple of years, and I appreciate your wisdom and humor.
My question is about free market capitalism.
You've often said that freedom, like all human things, ultimately dies.
I've been wondering if the same principle applies in economics.
My reasonable left-leaning friends have pointed out that most free markets eventually collapse into corporatism or crony capitalism.
My question is, do you think this is an inevitable process but can be slowed down?
Or do you think it's a fair point at all?
Or do you think it isn't a foregone conclusion and can be prevented?
If so, how?
Okay, everything dies.
And I always say conservatives are like doctors.
They're going to lose the fight, but you don't want to lose it today.
You want to keep things alive today.
Capitalism does have a tendency to foster cronyism.
And the thing is, cronyism is not capitalism.
I always hate the term crony capitalism because that's not capitalism.
It's not capitalism where your business, you go out of business and then you say to the government, bail me out, that the taxpayers now have to pay me.
That's just, that's the same.
I always love these corporations, these rich cats who make fun of people on welfare or talk about people cheating welfare and then they go out of business and they go, give us money.
I'll have to sell my Rolls-Royce.
I mean, you're the same person.
You're just a welfare cheat yourself, okay?
So that is kind of crony capitalism.
Crony capitalism is essentially a step on the way to socialism.
It's not what you do.
It's who you know.
So yeah, of course you can stop that.
Of course you can stop that.
I think monopolies, it is right to break up monopolies.
I think it is right to prosecute people when they trade in unfair ways.
It's right to prosecute people.
It is right to pair back regulations.
Donald Trump is doing this.
He's dialing back regulations.
The more regulations you have, the more power your lawyers have, the more power your money has, and the more power your contacts have.
That's why free markets should be as free as they can possibly be.
Agencies should be torn apart.
Regulations should be torn up.
All of those things help.
Donald Trump has helped.
He has made the market more free.
Yeah, should we say there are some environmental regulations that businesses shouldn't take care of themselves and the government can pass those?
Of course.
But when you pass too many of them, when you start to do what Obama, the Obama administration did, where they just made up the mileage that a car should get, then you're just crushing business.
And the more you sound like you're doing good, the more you're actually creating crony capitalism.
So all of these things can be reversed for a day, for now, and eventually all systems collapse because all things are made by people, all people are mortal, and everything that people make is going to be mortal as well.
But of course, these are steps that you can take, deregulation, making sure that markets are free, making sure that monopolies are broken up eventually, and making sure that the little guy always has a chance to break in and bring down the big guy.
That's how you keep competition alive.
Be Still and Know00:05:09
From Gerald, Dear Andrew, the omnipotent wonder of the universe, or omnipotent less wonder of the universe, I'm not sure what it says.
And Anakio's question, do you have a favorite psalm?
If so, which and why and in what version?
You know, I'm often asked this, oddly enough.
I'm often asked for a favorite Bible verse.
And what I've discovered over time, because it was not even something I thought about until somebody asked me about it, what I've discovered over time is I don't actually have favorite Bible verses.
I have Bible verses that stick in my head at various different times because they obviously are what God wants me to be thinking about at that time.
And it just so happens, it just so happens that right now in my life and for the past several months or so, a line from one of the Psalms, I think it is Psalm 46, I wrote it down, has been ringing in my head, which is, be still and know that I am God.
You know how in the Psalms, sometimes the voice will shift to God's voice.
There is, in 46, there was a shift, and God says, be still and know that I am God.
And this is something that has been really important to me for the last several months because one of my spiritual flaws, if you will, one of my spiritual mistakes that I frequently make is I want to know what is going on before I have to know.
I want God to tell me what I'm supposed to be doing down the road when I've noticed that God basically illuminates the next few steps ahead of you and gives you a big plan, but you just don't know what's going to happen two weeks, three weeks down the line.
That's what makes it the future.
And so every time I feel my brain start to scurl off, you know, start to spiral off into these thoughts about what might happen here, what might happen there, I've been thinking, be still and know that God is God.
And that has been incredibly helpful to me.
It has quieted those voices and it has reminded me, you know, one of the things that happens in life is sometimes, especially if you're like me, a guy who has ambitions to do certain things, and you're always wondering, am I doing it?
Am I accomplishing what I'm supposed to accomplish?
It is a good thing to remember that you're not really in charge, first of all, and God is in control.
You know, just remember to let it go and let God do it.
And so that has been the line from 46, be still and know that I am God.
And it has really been helpful to me.
I'll do one more from Anonymous.
My friend recently revealed to me that she is planning on leaving her husband of many years after admitting to him that she no longer feels physically attracted to him and has been struggling with same-sex attraction for years and has tried to hide it.
This couple is heavily involved with my church.
And for many years, they've been an inspiration to me is what a Christian marriage should look like.
This happened to me once where a marriage I thought was perfect collapsed.
And it's very upsetting.
This news has hit me like a bereavement and it seems so surreal and unfathomable.
I desperately want to convince her that she is making the biggest mistake of her life and how she will be devastating the lives of her children, amongst others.
This person has suffered trauma and mental health issues in her life.
And I can't help thinking this is a mental health issue or Satan trying to tear down a godly family.
My dilemma is how to try to speak wisdom into the situation and convey the disastrous consequences without it feeling like an attack.
Yeah, this is the wrong approach.
You do not have power.
You do not have the power to stop this marriage from unraveling if that is what's going to happen.
You do not have the power if this woman is gay and feels that she's attracted to other people.
You don't have the power to change that.
You don't have the power to change anything.
And so what you have the power to do is to love this person and listen to this person.
And insofar as you have a statement to make, it is maybe to direct her attention to her children and what is best for her children.
Because it's so much more important, obviously, that these children have a mother than that she gets to sleep with the person she wants to sleep with.
I mean, that is just on a moral level, on a moral level, the children which she created and is wholly and completely responsible for, if they're still little and still at home, those children that she created and is wholly and completely responsible for, they need a mother more than she needs to get laid.
And that is just something that, listen, you may not be able to make that argument to her.
It is not up to you to make that argument to her.
But as you listen to her and as you hear her out with love and with acceptance for who she is, don't try and tell her what she feels.
Don't try and tell her what she should do.
It ain't going to work.
I mean, it's just not going to work.
If I thought it would work, I might have different advice.
It is not going to work for you to tell her what she should do.
But it is all right as you're listening to her to ask her about her feelings for the children and what she thinks would be best for the children.
And I think that, you know, this doesn't sound like a good situation.
It doesn't sound like it's going to have a happy ending.
It's not on you.
You don't have the power to make it have a happy ending.
You really only have the power to bring the love, to bring the listening, and to hear this person out.
And maybe that in itself will lead her to some of the right answers.
Maybe not.
You don't have that power.
I got to stop.
I'll be back again tomorrow.
Tomorrow's Halloween, and I never wear a costume, so it's not going to make any damn difference what day it is.
But I'll have some recommendations for good ghost stories, good ghost movies you can watch on Halloween, and I will talk about that then.
Tomorrow's Show00:01:18
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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