Ep. 815 skewers Democrats’ impeachment farce—mocking their "focus group" (a panda and a pineapple) and trivial charges like "mean poo-poo face"—while debating porn censorship, warning both sides risk overreach. Trump’s polling surges despite media bias, with the Horowitz report exposing FBI misconduct, yet conservatives must lead with moral narratives, not just criticism. Listener mailbag tackles military dreams vs. stability, Christian marriage wisdom ("gratitude over romance"), and countering Hitchens’ anti-religion arguments by framing God as the foundation of morality. A listener trapped in a "Groyper" marriage is advised to model love—not debate—while safeguarding her children, framing redemption through faith over confrontation. [Automatically generated summary]
Democrats have now settled on two articles of impeachment.
The first is that the president did something or other in someplace no one's heard of, and the second is that when the Democrats wanted to impeach him for it, he wouldn't leave office.
The Democrats decided on these shattering accusations after testing other possible charges with a focus group scientifically composed of two people who wandered in off the street, a stuffed panda and a pineapple with a face painted on it.
Among the other possible accusations the Democrats tested with the focus group were Trump makes everyone nervous by saying things we disagree with in a loud voice, Trump doesn't back down when we call him names, and Trump is a mean old poo-poo face.
They also tested out the charges that Trump is president when Democrats want someone else to be president, and that Trump has made it harder to make minorities feel bitter and dependent, which just isn't fair since that's the Democrats' entire campaign strategy.
The focus group seemed to agree that Trump was indeed a poo-poo face when Adam Schiff made the stuffed panda nod its head and the two street people raise their hands into the air, although that may have been because Jerry Nadler told them there were invisible fairies flying around a few feet above them.
However, the general consensus was that the Democrats should stick with charges that contained words like abuse and obstruction because that sounded all legal and stuff.
Looking to the future, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi outlined the Democrats' plans, saying they would first shamefacedly vote on the articles of impeachment, trying as hard as they could to look like they believed them.
Then they planned to watch those charges get summarily dismissed by the Senate, after which they would proceed to lose the 2020 election and finally blame Adam Schiff for his whole stupid Ukraine idea.
President Trump, meanwhile, met with the Russian ambassador and told him to stop mucking around with our elections or he'd smack him.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
Russian birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunkity-doo.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Conservative Responsibility00:02:21
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
I'm having a hard time, increasingly hard time, telling you the difference between my opening satires and the actual news.
I'm never sure which I'm reading.
You know, there's a debate going on online about pornography, which seems, as far as I can tell, to have been started by our own Matt Walsh and his evil twin Michael Knowles.
One side, the Walsh side, says that porn is bad and should be restricted by government.
The other side, the libertarians, say that in a free society, government has no right to restrict expression on subjective moral grounds.
Now, there are obvious flaws in both arguments.
The libertarian subjective morality case makes no sense.
All laws are based on morality, and though morality may include areas of gray, its basic laws are not subjective.
They're virtually the same nearly everywhere.
Porn is a form of prostitution for the performers.
It's degrading for the users, and it's dangerous for children who have almost unrestricted access to it online.
Like the use of meth, it is clearly not in keeping with the common good.
But it's also true that the less consensus there is on a specific moral issue, the more power has to be applied to enforce the common interest.
Back in the day when everyone basically agreed that looking at porn was shameful, it was easy to restrict it, especially at the local level.
Now with the internet, it would require a federal law on an issue where consensus is hard to come by, which means you'd be putting a tremendous censorship power in the hands of the government.
How long would it be before Democrats took power and declared that conservative speech was a kind of porn and therefore fell under the law?
Not long.
You can see it happening already on YouTube and Facebook.
This debate and its complications are part of a greater debate taking place on the right.
Should government's first responsibility be preserving our freedom or should it be the common good.
This has become known as the Amari-French debate with Saarab Amari defending the common good and David French putting freedom first.
My own point of view is unfortunately nuanced and complex.
I hate that.
My sympathies are all with Matt Walsh.
The way we treat sex now is destructive.
But after years of left-wing control of our culture and idiotic right-wing absence from our culture, our national consensus is in tatters, as the left intended it to be.
Amari-French Debate00:03:15
Pardon me.
That means it would require giving government tremendous power to enforce sexual morality and would endanger our freedom.
Without freedom, the common good is meaningless.
It's just slavery without the compensation of reckless sex and porn.
Therefore, I think conservatives are taxed with the long-range responsibility of restoring our culture by cultural means.
We let them break it.
We have to fix it.
And instead of focusing endlessly on money and then constantly panicking about the news of the day, conservatives need to start playing the long game of rebuilding a consensus that is A, anchored to the Christian good on which our society was built, and B, flexible enough to include our multi-ethnic population.
The 50s and their consensus were tons of fun for us white folks, but they're over.
If we don't begin to build a moral culture for the present day, calling for censorship and the use of government force will not lead us to the common good, but to silence and oppression.
We're going to be talking a lot about this, not just today, but also in the year to come.
We're also going to be talking about Ring, because I've put these things up on my house and they are terrific.
Look, all Christmas long, I got packages coming in and out.
My wife is doing stuff on the internet.
I don't know about these packages keep coming in every day.
The people have to be let in through the gate.
They have to come to my door.
They leave things in my garage.
I want to keep an eye on what's going on around my house and I want my packages to be safe.
I don't want those porch pirates to come and take the gifts away.
Ring does all this.
It helps you stay connected to your home from anywhere.
If there's a package delivery, a surprise visitor, you get an alert on your phone and you're able to see, hear, and speak to them no matter where you are, all right from your phone.
If you're on the go this season and who isn't, whether it's crosstown or across the country, you can check in with your house anytime you need some holiday peace of mind.
As a listener, you have a special holiday offer on a Ring starter kit available right now.
It's got a Ring Video Doorbell 2 and a motion activated floodlight cam, which will alert you to people on your property at night.
The starter kit has everything you need to start building a ring of security around your home.
No matter what this holiday season brings with Ring, you are always home.
Just go to ring.com forward slash clavin.
That's ring.com forward slash clavin.
Additional terms may apply.
Anytime someone comes to your door, you ask them, how do you spell Clavin?
And if they know the answer, do not let them in.
That's a disreputable human being.
You know, I don't like to use the Daily Wire's air to advertise things that are just my own, but I do want to tell you, as Christmas is coming, I put out a book of my writings, a small book, so you could use it as a stocking stuffer.
It's called The Art of Making Sense.
You can get it on Amazon, either as a little paperback or on Kindle.
It makes excellent reading for the holiday season, and it's a small book, so it's inexpensive.
It's called The Art of Making Sense by me.
And how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So Donald Trump and his, basically Trump, is giving a masterclass.
He is giving a masterclass on how to take back the culture.
Trump's Narrative Mastery00:15:36
Here he is about to get impeached by the House of Representatives, about to be impeached by the Democrats.
Here he is like under fire.
Here he is surrounded by a press that has just become so corrupt and dishonest that they are attacking him every day, that they've just been exposed by this Horowitz report out of the DOJ.
It has exposed the press for the liars they are, the distorters they are, the enemies of the founding they are.
And Trump is winning.
He's winning.
There just can be no question about it.
The polls are turning his way.
The passion is all on his side.
The Democrats look utterly, utterly absurd no matter what the press does.
How does he do it?
We need to know how he does it.
We need to learn from how he does it.
It's not just being Trump.
You don't have to just be Trump.
It doesn't have to be that kind of language.
It doesn't have to be that kind of bravado or obstreperousness or any of that.
But he is using techniques of storytelling that are just smarter and based on the truth.
Even though he can be an exaggerated guy, he can be a Carney Barker kind of guy.
Everything he says is based on, has a core of truth, which is not true of the left, and that gives his narrative more power.
I want to show you just this thing, just before we get into the actual news.
Some stuff is happening today.
I'm not going to, you know, Horowitz is actually before the Senate testifying.
I want to be able to actually consider what he said and think about it and not just come in and go off half-cocked and report on it.
But first, Trump's campaign guys, the Trump War Room, put this little meme of Trump as Thanos from Avengers Endgame, right?
Thanos has this power to disintegrate, to particleize people.
So Trump just pasted Trump's head on Thanos.
And here it is on this solemn day.
And I recall that the first order of business members have.
So in the midst of Nancy Pelosi doing this utter garbage about how solemn she is about impeachment.
she's just particleized and she disappears.
You think this doesn't bother the left?
You think it doesn't bother the news media?
Here is Don Lemon at his Don Lemoniest on CNN reacting to this.
What are we in junior high school?
Like, what the hell?
What is this?
Like, what?
What?
I cannot believe that I'm even having to report this on the news.
This is crazy.
This is literally crazy.
Are you people insane?
Are you insane?
Go ahead.
Troll the Democrats on Twitter.
Do this stupid, silly.
You know what?
Play this stupid juvenile meme game.
History won't record this mean, stupid crap.
This could very well be the stupidest person on the face of the earth.
To be fair, to be fair to Don Lemon, to be fair to Don Lemon, he did this in the privacy of CNN where no one could see him.
He could have done it out in public where people were watching.
But still, he goes on to say that history is- How dare you?
How dare you?
The voices in my head keep talking to me.
History, he goes on to say that history won't record this meme, but it will record the impeachment.
I think he's got it exactly wrong.
The reason is what Trump is doing is he's seizing the narrative of the moment.
And as history unfolds, he's been proven right again and again.
Let's look at Trump describing this impeachment, and then we'll talk about how the press has been playing it and what it looks like and why Trump's way of telling the story is working so well.
This is cut four.
While we're delivering historic victories for the American people, the radical left Democrats and the failed Washington establishment are trying to erase your votes, nullify the election, and overthrow our democracy.
It's not going to happen.
Don't worry about it.
I wouldn't lose too much sleep over it.
And I have to say this about the Republicans.
The Republicans, and you have a lot of great ones here tonight, you congressmen.
You have a lot of great ones.
These congressmen are great.
The Republicans have never been so united as they are right now, ever.
The House, the Senate, we've never been this united because it's all a hoax.
And they understand it.
They also understand poll numbers, but I'm sure that had nothing to do with it.
Trump in this brilliantly positions himself as the hero of the story without even saying it when he says, you don't have to worry about it, not going to happen.
He's telling you that he has got you.
He's got this.
He is in charge of the moment and he is in control.
Even when he praises, and you know, we can talk about this as a typical instance of Trump gracelessness.
Even when he praises the Republicans who are standing by him and have stood unified with him, he points out that they're doing it because he is winning.
They're doing it because of the polls.
You can say that's graceless, but it also puts him at the center of the story.
Somebody has got to be the hero of the story.
And what the left is doing, what the press is doing, I repeat myself when I say the press and the left, what they are doing is they're trying to put Nancy Pelosi as the hero of this and that.
And Pelosi is just so false.
Everything she says is so false.
You know, really, the other day I played David Brooks from Knucklehead Row, the New York Times op-ed page.
I played him saying what a wonderful Christian witness it was for Nancy Pelosi to say she was praying for the president.
What a wonderful Christian witness.
And I thought like, you know, David Brooks can't, he can't be that gullible.
I mean, even I, when Donald Trump comes out and talks about God, you don't hear me coming and say, what a wonderful Christian witness.
Politicians, you know, use God.
They don't really talk about God.
That doesn't mean some of them don't have faith.
But obviously, I mean, Pelosi is such a fraud.
And yet listen to the way they talk about her.
Let's talk about ABC.
Let's go to Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein-Pal, George Stephanopoulos.
Now, I'm going to say this again.
I've said it a million times, but I'm going to do a hand-in here and just repeat it.
You know, George Stephanopoulos worked for Bill Clinton, silencing women who said they'd been assaulted and raped.
That was George Stephanopoulos' job.
Now he is the top newsman at ABC, where they not only killed the Jeffrey Epstein story while Hillary Clinton was running for president.
Not only did they kill the Jeffrey Epstein story, but when a whistleblower released that they had killed the Jeffrey Epstein story, they went after the whistleblower, not after the person who killed the story.
Now, I don't have any evidence that George Stephanopoulos was in charge of that.
I'm just saying, okay?
So here's Jeffrey Epstein Powell, George Stephanopoulos, reporting this story and trying to sell the alternative narrative.
Led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, she was reluctant to pursue impeachment during the Mueller investigation and after the Mueller report, but in the wake of the reports on this Ukraine phone call, she did come forward.
And Terry Moran, who's up there on Capitol Hill, was inside the Rayburn room.
Nancy Pelosi didn't say much this morning, but no question, she wanted to be there to show that she is driving and in charge of this process.
In charge of the process and the tone of the process.
She wants this to be not typical partisan politics.
She knows the Democrats, some members have been eager to impeach this president from the moment he got into office.
One of the challenges for Democrats is to persuade people this is the real deal.
This time it's different.
This time it's different, honey.
I know I keep hitting you, but this time, baby, it's different.
I know I sent out the FBI to investigate you for no reason.
I know I kept tied up the country with this Russian hoax for no reason.
But this time, boy, this is Ukraine.
It's Ukraine.
I mean, are you kidding?
How much more important could it be to America that Ukraine, you know, let me just play one more piece of this false narrative, this fake stuff, is CBS Holly Williams selling the Ukraine story.
Now, we talked about this yesterday.
about how the deep state wants to keep Ukraine at the forefront because they are still fighting the Cold War.
They still think that the paper tiger of Russia is the problem because it is getting in the way of Europe, whereas Trump has a new concept of going into, you know, the turning toward the East, turning toward China, making sure that we're fighting Islamic terror, making sure that we are establishing in our own hemisphere that we are safe from the collapse, the socialist collapse of South America and Central America.
Those are the things that he wants to put in the forefront.
That's why, that's why the deep state is angry with them.
They have no idea why a duly elected president should be setting foreign policy just because it happens to say so in the Constitution.
So here is CBS selling the Ukraine story with all its heart.
And please listen.
I mean, at this point, if you've been listening to me at all, you know how to parse these stories.
Listen to the way they sell this.
A scandal over U.S. military aid to Ukraine triggered the impeachment hearings.
But here, American aid isn't about politics.
It's about survival.
Ukraine's been fighting a war against Russian-backed separatists since 2014.
The conflict has claimed more than 13,000 lives.
Admiral Ihor Voronchenko is the commander of the Ukrainian Navy.
If you can't stop Russia in Ukraine, will it use the same tactics in other countries?
Russia's like an octopus, he told us.
It spreads its tentacles everywhere.
American military aid helps Ukraine defend itself against Russia, but it also discourages Russia from using the same tactics in other countries and arguably makes the world a safer place.
Arguably makes the world a safer place.
Arguably, one of those words that they throw in that you don't hear.
You don't hear the word arguably.
What you hear is this is making the world a safer place.
Now, the obvious thing here, of course, is that it was Donald J. Trump who sent lethal aid to the Ukrainians where Obama was sending crossword puzzle collections and some of those nice little candies they leave on your hotel bed at night.
It was Trump who sent them missiles and sniper rifles so they could fight back.
So the whole thing is, the whole story is based on a falsehood.
The whole story is based on a falsehood.
But second to this is the scandal.
The opening line, she said, was a scandal about aid to the Ukraine started the impeachment hearings.
Now, remember, the Washington Post had a story about how the move toward impeachment had begun the day after Donald Trump was elected.
Was it the day after, it was before he took office, I'm almost sure.
But they have been forcing this.
They had the Russia hoax.
We just got a report on what a hoax this was, what a mishandled investigation this was that tied up our country and was badly reported for three years.
We just were told all this, and now we're saying, no, no, it was this scandal about Ukraine, which is making the world a safer place.
You know, I mean, it's just a complete nonsense.
And the problem is it has no emotional resonance, A, and B, it ain't true.
It's none of it true.
And that's why Trump is showing you how to fight.
He's showing you, don't give them, don't just attack their narrative.
Give the people a narrative.
And this is important when we're talking about all this stuff in the future.
When we get around to talking about porn and we get around to talking about sexual malfeasance that's been sold to us by the left, it's not enough to attack them.
It is not enough to complain.
I keep telling this to my conservative friends.
It's not enough to criticize their movies.
You got to make movies.
It's not enough to criticize their position.
You got to have your own position.
It is not enough to criticize their narrative.
You have to have a narrative of your own, hopefully based on the truth.
The narrative will not create the truth.
You have to have a narrative that will stand the observation of truth.
And so far, Trump is winning after struggling in three key battleground states against Democratic presidential frontrunners.
Trump, in the wake of this impeachment thing, has seen a surge in support since Democrats formally moved forward with impeachment.
A report published Sunday, Firehouse Strategies presented their new quarterly battleground polling results, and they were quite grim for Democrats in a survey of 1,759 likely voters, which is very important in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, conducted last week.
The firehouse optimist pollsters found that Trump was surging as an apparent result of the Democrats' impeachment effort.
And if you think the news media isn't looking at MSNBC, they went out to Trump's rally, which was in Pennsylvania yesterday, I think, and they interviewed Trump supporters online.
And here's what they said about impeachment.
There are no facts, no firsthand knowledge of nothing.
They're going by what the so-called expert says happen.
And the expert got us into trouble that the United States has been in for a while.
So I don't buy that.
Nobody's perfect.
And he hasn't been without mistakes.
But he certainly has done more things right than wrong.
And he's done a lot for this country with jobs and everything, supporting the military and everything that he does is just wonderful.
I'm breaking up here because I'm very upset today.
I'm glad I'm here.
But I think it's so hard because, you know, he's done such a great job.
And this is the way that he's being treated.
It's very upsetting to me.
What's really fascinating about this, just from a narrative point of view, is this is MSNBC.
They're very left-wing.
They're openly left-wing, which I always appreciate.
But a lot of times the left tries to hide the fact that Trump is getting burgeoning support among black Americans, right?
But instead, they started opening, they opened with interviewing a guy.
If you couldn't see him, the first guy who was speaking was black.
And in the background of this lady, who's emotional because her hero is under attack, are a group of people actually kind of playing around, laughing, and they're white and they're black.
And it's saying that's sending a message right there that MSNBC is getting, is seeing this.
They are seeing this happening in real time.
And if you don't think the Democrats are seeing it, then you don't have enough respect for Nancy Pelosi's intelligence because she is an intelligent politician.
An hour, an hour after they announced that they were impeaching President Trump, they gave him a major victory by agreeing to his new trade deal with Mexico and Canada that replaces NAFTA.
And obviously, this is something that they know, you know, that Trump's, that's Trump's narrative that these guys are doing nothing.
Remember, at the opening, I played him and he said, while we are accomplishing all these things, what are these clowns doing?
So the Democrats are coming out and saying, well, we can impeach and chew gum at the same time, and we're going to give him NAFTA.
Well, NAFTA is a replace NAFTA is a big deal for him.
The USMCA, it's called.
This is a big deal for Trump because it's going to protect American jobs.
It probably won't add a lot of power to the economy, but it will protect the economy from the fact that there is a global rollback in the economy that's not affecting us here as our jobs continue to explode.
Be Grateful For The Mailbag00:15:40
And, you know, meanwhile, meanwhile, Attorney General Barr is out there talking about this Horowitz report.
You know, Horowitz, I said that I can't really cover the Horowitz testimony in the Senate because it was happening while I was coming in.
But Lindsey Graham just gave a kind of summary of the Horowitz report that is a lot closer to the truth than the summary that the press has been giving.
In January 2017, the person who did all the assembling of the information for the now famous steel dossier tells the FBI, I disavow everything in there.
Now, what should happen?
Time out.
Let's reassess.
Maybe we got this wrong.
What would you hope to happen?
That the FBI would slow down?
Because this is the outcome determined in the document that's just had a hole blown through it.
They don't slow down.
They use the document they now know to be a bunch of garbage twice more to get a warrant against Carter Page.
I hope Carter Page gets a lawyer and sues the hell out of the Department of Justice and the FBI.
Two more warrants were obtained by the Department of Justice and the FBI after being told in January by the Russian guys all a bunch of bull.
Everybody wants to know, was there any bias here?
What motivated these people?
Why do you think they kept going?
Maybe because they were on a mission, not to protect Trump, but to protect us from Trump.
That's what they were trying to do.
Protect all of us smelly people from Donald Trump.
That's what this is about.
All of us smelly people from Donald Trump.
It's a great line.
Trump goes off on the FBI as well.
Remember, the press has been caught by this Horowitz report.
Remember when Devin Nunes, Nunu, Nuni Nuna, whatever his name is, when he came out with his memo about what was going on at the FBI, the press went after him like a ton.
They fell on him like a ton of bricks.
And Adam Schiff brought out his memo saying, no, they didn't use the steel dossier.
That wasn't the thing.
They weren't spying.
They just had people investigating him and wiretapping him and all.
And they backed Schiff.
When are they going to learn about Schiff?
When are they going to say, you know, you make us look bad by coming on here and lying all the time?
When are they going to stop this McCarthyite abuser of his power?
When is the press going to say, you were on my show and you lied?
And then you came back and you lied again.
And then you came back and you lied three times and I backed you every time.
And now I look like an idiot.
When are they going to say it?
They're never going to say it.
They're never going to say it because he does the thing they want him to do.
He says the thing and they think they can win the narrative of the moment.
And this is why they can't.
Here is Trump on the FBI cut three.
They spied on our campaign, okay?
They spied.
Never happened before in the history of our country.
And we're really wise to it.
We're wise to it.
The Inspector General found that the FBI's spying application contained 17 errors and omissions commonly known as lies and deceit.
When the FBI, and you have great people in the FBI, but not in leadership, you have not good people in leadership, you haven't had.
When the FBI uncovered evidence showing that we did absolutely nothing wrong, which was right at the beginning, they hid that exonerating, you know that.
They hid it.
They hid it so nobody could see it.
So they could keep this hoax going on for two years.
They knew right at the beginning that it was all a frame-up, a setup.
But they hid it so that nobody could see it, so they could keep it going on, thinking they were going to hurt us politically, but now we're stronger politically than we were ever before.
And the FBI also sent multiple undercover human spies to surveil and record people associated with our campaign.
Look how they've hurt people.
They've destroyed the lives of people that were great people, that are still great people.
Their lives have been destroyed by scum, okay, by scum.
See, this is the thing.
Trump is a storyteller.
He knows how to tell a story politically, and he knows how to, you know, he was a television star for 10 years.
He knows how to tell a story on TV.
The left knows how to tell stories.
That's why they own Hollywood.
That's why they own the news media.
They know how to tell stories.
But, but they have this stupid theory that the story makes the truth.
And that's not true.
The story sells the truth.
The story tells the truth, but it doesn't make the truth.
And you cannot create a world in which what Donald Trump has done is impeachable.
You cannot make the argument, as I've been saying from the beginning, that what the Obama administration spying on Trump was fine.
And Trump saying to the president of Ukraine, you know, the one thing you could do us a favor about is look into some of this corruption that includes Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, and that's impeachable.
You can't make that argument, but they just keep selling it.
And what have they got?
They've got ours.
What have they had all these years?
Why have they won so much of the culture all these years?
They don't just have their lies.
They've had our silence.
They've had our fear.
They have learned how to shut us up by calling us names.
They call us racist.
We run away.
They go after our sponsors.
We shut down.
They call us sexist.
We shut up.
It's not just their lies.
It's our silence.
And Trump, that's what Trump has changed.
That is what Trump has changed.
And all the things, all the criticisms you can have about him, some of them true.
It doesn't matter.
That's what he's changed, and that's everything.
And Bill Barr was out there today.
You know, he was interviewed on NBC by Peter Williams, who's not, you know, I think he's a fairly conservative guy.
But Peter Williams says to him, he says to him, well, maybe we should investigate presidential campaigns.
It's so important.
Shouldn't we make sure that they're clean?
And I mean, I can't imagine anybody asking that if they had investigated the Obama campaign.
But this is cut number two from Barr, his response.
From a civil liberties standpoint, the greatest danger to our free system is that the incumbent government use the apparatus of the state, principally the law enforcement agencies and the intelligence agencies, both to spy on political opponents, but also to use them in a way that could affect the outcome of the election.
As far as I'm aware, this is the first time in history that this has been done to a presidential campaign, the use of these counterintelligence techniques against a presidential campaign.
And we have to remember that in today's world, presidential campaigns are frequently in contact with foreign persons.
And indeed, in most campaigns, there are signs of illegal foreign money coming in.
And we don't automatically assume that the campaigns are nefarious and traitors and acting in league with foreign powers.
There has to be some basis before we use these very potent powers in our core First Amendment activity.
See, that's a left-wing talking point.
It's really smart to bring it up.
The ACLU themselves, you know, which I call the un-American, not very civil, not in favor of liberties union.
Even they came out and said, yeah, it's disturbing.
You know, it's disturbing from a civil rights perspective to have people being bugged, Americans being bugged by intelligence agencies without due process.
It really is.
Again, I want to just go back to the beginning and then we'll get to the mailbag.
Just go back to the beginning and point out when we talk about porn, when we talk about sexual promiscuity, when we talk about the things that we feel are going wrong in our culture and have damaged our kids and all that stuff, it's not enough.
It's not enough to complain.
It's not enough to say it's bad, and it's surely not enough to say, let's let the government control those things.
Let's let the government give the government more censor power, more force to use to bring to the common good.
You've got to have a narrative.
You've got to say what's good in the world.
They always, the left has been really good in maneuvering us into this position.
You come on and you talk about the joy of Christ.
They'll say, how much do you hate gays?
And then you wind up, that's what you're talking about.
Instead of answering and saying, look, you know, there is a moral life to live.
There is a way to live a moral life.
We have the secret.
We have the way to live into that joy of morality, that joy of a moral life.
It's not that love and marriage are without struggles.
That's not the point.
It's that they are the path to joy.
They are the path to greater joy.
And porn is a path.
It truly is a path to misery and addiction and idolatry of replacing the real thing with the image of the thing.
We've got to learn how to tell these stories.
And Trump is giving a masterclass.
He's giving a masterclass.
All right, we've got the mailbag coming up.
That's the kind of joy I'm talking about that you will experience in a moment, but you can't be in the mailbag.
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All right, mailbag.
Mail call.
What the hell was that?
A mail call.
I feel like I'm in the military now.
All right, from DK, I am a 26-year-old Pennsylvania man and have lost 60 pounds in one year.
That's great.
Push-ups used to scare me and now I can easily pump them out.
Like the media can pump out lies.
Serving in the military has been a dream of mine ever since I was a teenager and since I've started praying again, this call keeps rising to me.
However, I'm at a job that I truly enjoy working.
This company is one of the best gyms money can buy, great benefits, good people, a lot of room for me to grow.
I'm not making a lot of money right now, but I'm single and doing well.
I don't like my CEO's politics, but that's it.
My father told me to stick to it because you love your job and you can see yourself being in your boss's job.
He's right in this regard.
My family is proud of me.
I thank God every day for these blessings I've been given, but I'm still plagued with thoughts of joining and serving something bigger than myself.
They would support me, but I know deep down my family wouldn't be happy.
I don't think I have much time left before the opportunity to serve passes me by.
Your bald wisdom and insight would be greatly appreciated.
Well, obviously, I can't tell you what to do.
I can tell you what I would do if I were you and I would join the military.
If it's a dream, if it's truly the dream of your life to do that and not just a whim, you know, I mean, like I'd like to, you know, walk across the country or something like that, but I don't do it because I have other things more important to do.
If it's just a whim like that, it would be nice.
I kind of have a daydream of doing this.
That's one thing.
But if it is truly the dream of your life, then nothing is worth giving it up for.
You don't have a wife and kids.
You will one day have a wife and kids, and that will make it much, much more difficult to have that dream.
There are other jobs.
You know, this is something that you can do that you really want to do that will be fulfilling, that will fulfill what you talked about, being part of something bigger than yourself.
Look, I'm glad your family is supportive.
I'm glad they're loving, but it's not their life.
It's your life.
They have shot that arrow into the air, and it is now your journey and your place to go.
And if it were I and it were truly my dream, not just a whim, if it were truly my dream, nothing would stop me.
From Harry, hello, Sir Clavin, master of the multiverse and fruitful giver of leftist tears.
I took your advice about a year ago from the mailbag and gave online dating a try to try to meet people in search of a lovely Christian woman to marry.
Turns out your advice is 100% correct.
It's changed my life for the better as within a few months I found the girl of my dreams to whom I'm getting married next week.
And that's great.
Congratulations.
My favorite piece of marriage advice I've heard is something you have also said, and that is always to be kind to one another.
Could you expand on this?
And I was wondering whether you had any other pearls of wisdom to help me along the road to happy and loving marriage.
Thanks in advance for guaranteeing me a great marriage.
Came for Clavin, stayed for Clavin.
Yeah, you know, I've thought about this a lot over the years because my marriage has been such a blessing to me.
I don't know about to my wife, but to me, it's been a great blessing.
It has been a marriage of great harmony and love and passion.
And it has really been a wonderful thing.
So people have said to me, what's the secret?
And a lot of times I've said what you heard me say, which was, don't forget to be polite to one another, be nice to one another.
But over the years, I've thought about that advice and I realized that I was actually saying more than I had realized.
What I was really saying was be grateful.
Be grateful every day because your spouse does a million things for you.
And this is true in both directions, husband and wife, that become invisible.
They become invisible very quickly.
You know, if your wife is a homemaker, which I think is like the highest calling, and my wife was a homemaker for many years, and I was incredibly grateful to have a home.
I'm somebody who, by nature alone, would not have a home.
My wife is out of town now, and I'm already reverting to a feral state.
Soon I'll be, you know, not only am I watching Roadhouse over and over again, but soon I'll be bringing down deer with my teeth.
I was grateful for a home.
I was grateful to have children who had a mom.
Pardon me.
I was grateful to have someone who backed me in my work and who supported me in my work and ran a home for me while I was working.
I would not have had that gratitude is everything.
That gratitude is everything.
It means that when somebody puts food in front of you, you don't just say, oh, thanks.
You realize that somebody has made you dinner.
And that's a beautiful, that's an act of love.
You know, it's not just dinner, obviously.
It's an act of love.
In the same way, I think my wife was grateful that the lights went on, that the electricity was paid for, that there was roof when it rained.
I always tell the story of the feminist who came over my house.
Absolutely true story of a feminist who started griping at my dinner table about me to my wife, saying, you raise his kids, you keep his house, you serve him dinner.
What does he do for you?
And my wife just lifted her hands.
She just lifted her hands as if to say, all this, all this, the roof over my head, the children who are disciplined and have a father in their life, the fact that we have the money to pay for things that we need, all of this is what he does.
For me, gratitude.
Gratitude.
It is the whole thing.
And this is true also.
I'm a great believer that sex is a deeply important part of marriage, but that too should be approached, not just with like, oh, let's get this done, baby.
Or it should never be a game.
It should never be used as a weapon.
It should never be withheld.
It should always be done with gratitude and blessing and with obvious concern for the fact that you're doing it with an actual other person.
So gratitude, I think, really comes first.
And it is the reason you're kind to people.
And I just, I don't know.
I think that that is something that is missing from a lot of marriages.
Gratitude First00:08:40
It is easy.
Listen, I imagine that somebody like me is as annoying to live with as it's possible to be.
You know, I completely live in my head.
I'm always distant.
I'm always around.
To be grateful for me is actually a work, something that you have to do.
But my wife has managed to do it.
And for me, it's a lot easier to be grateful for her.
But still, it matters that I do do that.
And I do think about it and think about what it means to what I say and what I do.
And all this stuff that they put on TV, I just hate this kind of, you know, faux romanticism that you've got to propose to people by having a plane write out, will you marry me in the sky?
And that every kiss begins with jewelry and, you know, that you have to have a great Valentine's Day or boy, oh boy, you're in trouble.
I hate all that stuff.
It is a spiritual matter to be grateful for the person who makes your, who is the center of your new life, your new family.
So that's my advice.
From Michael, hello, Andrew Lord of the Clavin.
I've listened to you for a while now as a man coming into the faith.
I've read some popular detractors to inform myself of the opposing arguments, specifically Christopher Hitchens.
Can you give a quick rebuttal of Hitchens and any of his conventions?
Thanks in advance.
I'm always fascinated how guys, Hitchens was such a great prose writer.
He was also a drunk, so a lot of his stuff makes sense for the first half and not for the second half.
It's really true.
But he was a wonderful, wonderful prose writer, an incredibly informed person, a wonderfully cultured person.
And then every time he would talk about God, he just gets stupid.
I never thought his arguments were even interesting.
And I find this true of Steven Pinker, too.
He writes wonderful stuff.
I'm fascinated by his research.
And then he talks about God, and his arguments are childish and foolish.
Hitchens, now, you know, I've only read certain pieces of Hitchens on faith, and they always seem to center on the fact that people have done terrible things for religious reasons, and that's absolutely true, and that people who are religious have been terrible, and that's absolutely true, and that religious institutions have been corrupt, and that's absolutely true.
The problem with it is, of course, people have done terrible things simply to pass the time.
You know, they've done terrible things because of science.
They have scientific ideas.
They do terrible, people do terrible things.
Institutions become corrupt.
God protects us from none of these things unless we follow God, right?
The question you always have to ask with people like that, that just seems like a bad argument.
It just seems like a dumb argument.
The only question you want to know about God is, is he there?
Is he there?
And then you want to ask all the other questions.
What's he like?
What's he want?
What does he mean in my life?
But first you got to say, is he there?
Because there's no point in having faith in something that doesn't exist.
It's ridiculous.
There was an article in the New York, the Wall Street Journal and the Houses of Worship column by a lady I respect, and I understood what she was saying, but she said, if you don't believe in God, lie to your children, because it will make them much happier to believe in God.
And I don't believe that.
No, I think if you don't believe in God, rethink yourself because you're wrong.
And I think the thing is when Hitchens says these people behave badly, how does he know they behave badly?
How does he know it's wrong?
What makes him think that it's wrong for them to kill people in the name of God?
Why is it particularly offensive when people kill people in the name of God, even more offensive than when people kill people for money?
It's more offensive to have a Catholic priest rape a child than it is to have somebody else rape a child, even though the crime is just as abhorrent in both cases.
It's even more offensive when somebody trusted to be a conduit to God instead betrays you and hurts you.
So how do we know these things?
How do we know that these things are wrong?
And there's all this kind of game theory that says, oh, you know, like it's all genetic evolution and all this.
But we don't evolve to deal with non-reality.
We evolve to perceive reality.
We evolve to perceive light because there's such a thing that can be perceived as light.
We evolve to perceive morality because there's such a thing that can be perceived as morality.
So how does Hitchens know these things?
He knows because there's a moral web and things are good and things are bad.
And in order for something to be good, it must be closer to an ultimate good.
And in order for something to be ultimately good, it must have will and consciousness because you can't have good without will and consciousness.
A hurricane isn't evil.
It's just bad.
A hurricane is just a thing, right?
Will and consciousness are what make good and evil.
So the idea of God kind of exists within a Hitchens argument.
And that's why I've never taken Hitchens' argument very seriously.
It doesn't seem to make any sense to me.
It's from Anonymous.
Help, my husband is becoming a Groyper.
This letter is incredibly long, and I can't read a lot of it.
But she says, my husband has spent countless hours on bulletin boards, some of which purport to debunk the Holocaust numbers with quote-unquote logic and then blame Jews for the problems they've had because of their bad behavior.
He says things like, I've never questioned before, only believed what I was indoctrinated with at school.
He's also completely against interracial marriage and adoption, but only because of the problems the kids will face in other people.
Yeah, because these guys can never come out and just say they're motivated by hate.
My question is, is this just part of his personality?
I never saw a Midwestern generational thing I missed in our hurried courtship and extended honeymoon.
I grew up with divorced and remarried parents.
Now that we have kids, I'm committed to trying to make this work.
But the last 10 years of arguments or cutting off discussions to avoid them, especially in front of the kids, is getting old and instances are more frequent.
I do love him, but it's getting harder as he falls harder into the spiral of disinformation.
I feel like I'm stuck between a marriage and a very racist Groyper place.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
I don't know how to approach this man I'm married to.
It's a really hard question because he is going, this is a bad place that he's going into.
What you've got to start doing, you know, is kind of like what I was talking today.
You've got to stop arguing with him and start building an alternative narrative, especially for your children.
Not to defy him, not in defiance of him.
You don't have to say, you're wrong, this is right.
But you have to start building an alternative, positive narrative of good, of love, of love.
Because that's what we're talking about.
Racists aren't wrong about other people.
They stink.
They're just wrong about themselves.
They stink too.
See, that's always the problem.
Anything you say about another race, about how evil another race is, probably has some truth in it.
The thing that you're leaving out is the evil that your race has in it, because all people are sinful and broken and evil.
And that's the problem that you have.
To blame Jews is simply to blame them for being successful because some of their evil people are going to be more important than the evil people of the less successful minority.
But then some of their good people are going to be more important as well.
We all have good and evil people among us.
It's just absurd.
The whole argument, the whole Groyper argument is absurd.
It's pseudo-intellectual.
However, what I'm concerned about for you is how do you live in this situation and when do you have to get out?
Obviously, you have to get out if he isolates you, if he hurts you, if he does cruel things to you, you know, if he actually abuses you or abuses the children or takes you to a place where you can't get away, you know, where you're isolated from other people, then you've got to go because you have a right to defend yourself and a right.
That's not a marriage anymore.
That's an actual danger.
In the meantime, in the meantime, see if you can do this.
See if you can demonstrate and talk about the love of God.
You don't mention here if you have God in your life, but it might be a very, very good thing if you were going to a loving church that didn't support these beliefs.
It would be a very, very good thing if you could be talking about our responsibility to love one another as we love ourselves.
The fact that without that love, we won't receive the treatment that we want and that we'll become small, pinched, evil people.
Do not do it in defiance.
Do not do it as a form of argument.
Do it as a form of positive positive creation, of creating a world where your children can see which of you is doing the right thing and show him that love too.
Show him that healing love.
Don't engage him in argument.
He's gone down this dark place, but show him the kind of love that he demonstrates to him the kind of love that he should be showing to you and to his children and to the world, including the Jews and including black people and including everybody else.
That's the best advice I can give you because he's going into a dark place.
Hopefully, he'll turn around.
But you have got to be a demonstration of the love of God and his life.
And if you can bring church into it and if you can bring preaching into it from more authoritative sources, that's a good thing.
And again, if you are in danger, if you're in danger of abuse or isolation, then you're going to have to get out and take the kids with you.
All right, I got to stop.
Creating Healing Love00:01:19
We'll be back tomorrow for the last day before the Clavinless weekend.
Don't miss it, or else you will go into that chaos and maelstrom unarmed.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Oh, hooray, hurry!
Hey, if you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe.
And if you want to help spread the word, give us a five-star review and also tell your friends to subscribe too.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show, the Matt Wall Show, and the Michael Knoll Show.
Thanks for listening.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Austin Stevens and directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring, senior producer, Jonathan Hay, and our supervising producers are Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
Assistant Director, Pavel Wydowski, edited by Adam Sayovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Kormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
Animations are by Cynthia Ngulo.
And our production assistant is Nick Sheehan.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
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