Andrew Clavin’s Year of Living Stupidly slams Democrats as threats to American values, framing 2020 as a fight for conservative dominance while dismissing systemic racism claims as "delusional." He ties secularism to societal decline—from gender confusion to media bias—and praises Root Insurance’s 52% savings model. Using the Texas church shooting, he defends guns as anti-tyranny tools, then pivots to media’s "bad news" obsession, blaming left-wing narratives for anxiety. Clavin mocks feminism’s career pressures and Gerwig’s Little Women as ideological overreach, ending with a push for Daily Wire memberships to counter "truth-distorting" platforms. [Automatically generated summary]
As we begin a new year and a new decade, it's time to turn our thoughts to ending the nation's great political divide.
We must begin to seek common ground between those of us who believe in the sacred principles of the American founding and the Democrats who are attempting to devour those principles like a swarm of locusts or some sort of toxic green slime that seeps into the fabric of our most cherished traditions and eats away at them like acid and then like in some disgusting horror movie, slowly morphs into the shape of an 80-year-old communist and runs for president.
Surely there must be some way to ease the hostilities between those of us who understand the blessings of free thought and free enterprise and those pimply little craps who never did a damn thing but get themselves into debt and then whine about how the rest of us should pay for it because now they have a degree in race theory and its application to 17th century literature and they can't find a job even after we somehow save the economy from their idiot ideas.
We have to set our anger aside and find areas of agreement between conservative men and women and whatever non-gendered fairy tale creatures the left imagines themselves to be.
Think of the sorts of things that all Americans can enjoy.
Ice cream, for instance.
Maybe we can all sit down together and have some ice cream.
That ought to keep the little scumsuckers quiet for 10 consecutive minutes at least, so we can explain the facts of life to them while they try to learn new ways of thinking, like logically, for instance.
Then hopefully we can get to November and crush the lot of them and drive them before us and hear the lamentations of their women.
Not that their women have stopped lamenting for 10 minutes at a time ever.
So happy new year to all Americans and to the Democrats as well.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped tipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Well, I had just a terrific holiday in New York, and I hope you had a terrific holiday wherever you were, and I hope this new year and the new decade brings you nothing but blessings and peace.
And one of the things that really helped me enjoy my break is that as Christmas approached, I made a resolution to stop tweeting in order to avoid unhelpful political conflicts interfering with my holidays.
I broke this non-tweet resolution only twice, and both times it was in anticipation of my new year's resolution, which is to talk more about the things that matter and less about nonsense.
One of my Twitter violations was I tweeted out my final Christmas column for the Daily Wire.
The column was about how I read some of the sayings of Jesus Christ and what I think he means when he was telling us how to live, how he means for us to live.
The column was important to me because one of the things that matters that I want to talk about more is the role of God in our politics.
To me, the epidemic of despair and suicide in our heartland, the epidemic of socialism among our intellectuals, and the rampant confusion and dishonesty about our sexuality are all evidence that the U.S. is suffering from the same sickness of secularism that destroyed the great civilization of Europe.
But too often, when we speak of the need for God in our public life, I think we get kind of vague about the specifics.
What are we talking about?
Our founders were formed by the Christian ideas that created European culture.
But they also knew from the very start that this country was not going to be a specifically Christian country.
They imagined a new sort of nation in which, as one founding document put it, no person who acts in a peaceable and orderly manner shall ever be molested on account of his mode of worship or religious sentiment.
So that includes Jews, it includes Muslims, it includes anyone who is not disturbing the peace.
They can serve and pray to God any way they want.
So I want to talk about what restoring God to the public square looks like in that kind of country.
And my Christmas column made a very small start at thinking out loud about that.
The other tweet I sent out had to do with my pal Ben.
This squirrely little alt-writer, Nick Fuentes, a guy who has given every indication that he is a racist and an anti-Semite, accosted Shapiro in public.
He was harassing Ben while Ben was with his pregnant wife and his two little kids.
And the video got posted online, and I got annoyed and tweeted out what I thought of Fuentes for what he did.
And in response, a number of alt-writers, or Groypers as they call themselves, they attacked me online, which is fine.
Here's an email, though, I just want to give you as an example.
Here's an email I received from one of them through my website.
Here's what it says, quote, used to be a big fan, now I think you're trash.
I hope you die in a fire swamped by your loved ones, you immoral shill.
Now, I bring this up not only for its comedy value, though I do think a guy who goes in a single tweet from being my big fan to wishing me and my family dead by fire might want to re-examine his life philosophy.
But I also bring it up because I think it's an example of a symptom of our current sickness, something that keeps us from talking about the things that matter.
We are surrounded by a static of nonsense and rage, and we have to waste a tremendous amount of our time addressing and responding to it.
And while we're responding to it, the real issues, the things that matter, slip away.
For example, I think these alt writers, these Groypers like Nick Fuentes, they have some valid criticisms about some aspects of mainstream conservative thought.
But to address those problems with race hatred and Jew hatred, or with disruptions at public events and with harassing people on the street with their family, I have zero respect for that.
I don't want to respond to that at all.
Just because mainstream conservatives may sometimes be wrong doesn't make hatred and thuggish behavior right.
How can we even discuss the things that matter when we first have to wade through all that crap and dismiss it?
We spend all our time fighting with things like that instead of talking about the actual issues.
In the same vein, I have sympathy for people who feel sexually uncomfortable in their bodies, but I don't think they can change their sex.
I don't think that's reality, and they have no right to tell me what pronouns to use.
I use the pronouns that express my idea of reality, not theirs.
I want gay people to be free and happy in their relationships, but there seems to me no question that when a man and woman create a new family out of their bodies, they stand at the center of human experience, and they deserve special treatment and protection from society.
I respect Muslim people, but I have strong disagreements with the tenets of their religion as I understand them.
And I really suspect that some of those tenets contribute to the violence and inequality that appear almost everywhere.
Islam is in the majority.
Now, I may be wrong in these opinions.
That actually happened to me once.
But the idea that we can't talk about these important issues without spiraling into anti-factual emotionalism and without trying to destroy one another financially and even physically, this is one more symptom of the secular system that is eating us like a cancer.
Because before we can even begin to discuss God, we have to learn to speak to one another like children of God in a spirit of truth-seeking and understanding.
Good Guy With Guns00:12:34
So, let me start 2020 with this.
I'm willing to talk about anything, and I want literally, I literally want no one censored or silenced anywhere.
But while there's no way of avoiding the nonsense altogether, I want as often as possible to cut through it to the real issues.
This year, I want to talk about the things that matter.
We're going to start today, though, and we only have one day before the clavenless weekend begins.
So you want to just seize on to this moment and grab all the claven-y goodness you can, drink it like water, so we can continue laughing our way through the fall of the Republic.
And the first thing we're going to talk about is the all-important question of root insurance.
You know, you've got to have car insurance, right?
You can't get in an accident without car insurance, but you don't want to have anybody else's car insurance.
You just want to have yours.
You don't want to pay for the people who drive badly.
You want to pay for your incredibly great driving because that brings the prices of insurance down.
Insurance works as a pool.
And so if you have to put in just as much as the bad drivers and pay for that, then you are paying for other people's behaviors.
Root Insurance takes care of that.
By removing bad drivers from their equation, Root saved good drivers up to 52% in 2019.
In 2019, Root saved good drivers up to 52% and was the fastest growing direct insurance company in the U.S. Because Root bases their rates primarily on how you drive, not who you are.
Your root insurance card is available right from your phone.
And if you get into an accident, you can file a claim directly in the app.
Download the Root Insurance app.
Drive normally for a few weeks during the root test drive and see how much you can save.
Give Root a try.
Go to the App Store and download the Root Insurance app.
Sign up in less than a minute to start your test drive today.
That's R-O-O-T.
Again, download the Root app today or visit joinroot.com to learn more and see how much you could save.
Root reserves the right to refuse to quote any individual premium rate for the insurance advertised surrender.
Savings based on national reviews reported by actual customers form one not available in all states.
And this product is not available in California because here in California, we're all nuts.
And I hope you're still listening to Another Kingdom.
It is coming down.
It will be over by the end of this month.
It is reaching its climax.
Some of the greatest episodes of the whole season, of the whole series are taking place right now.
So I hope if you haven't listened yet, you will catch up and listen to it as it unfolds.
Speaking about the things that matter and speaking about how we get to those things, there's one important thing that I really want to talk about, which is that as the year was coming to an end, I'm reading the newspaper and I turned to my wife and I said, you know, I've been reading the newspaper all my life, which now has gone on, I think, 172 years.
And it is amazing.
I've never seen this much good news.
I mean, you've got to cut away.
You know, I always talk about this.
Well, when you read the news, one thing you want to cut away from is what terrible thing the experts think is going to happen.
You know, if you edit those out with your mind, just edit out anything where the guy says, oh, my goodness, oh, the invention of this video game is going to destroy our youth.
Just cut all that out and find out what actually is happening because the news is actually things that have happened, not things that somebody thinks are going to happen.
So if you just edit it out, the news has been unbelievably good.
I mean, there are tragedies, but remember, this is a country of 350 million people.
So just because there's a tragedy somewhere, it may raise an issue that is important that you want to talk about.
But there's, you know, it's a question of how much tragedy there is.
There was an important piece by Matt Ridley, a scientist who talks about how to be a realistic optimist.
And he talked about the fact that the 2010s, this last decade, were humanity's best decade ever.
And a lot of it had to do with capitalism.
A lot of it had to do with property rights.
But 28% of all wealth ever created, that's over a fourth of all wealth ever created, was created in the 2010s.
Extreme poverty around the world was halved.
Child mortality rate reduced by a third.
Life expectancy increased from 69.5 to 72.6 years.
I mean, that's an amazing stat right there.
Countries with laws protecting women went up.
The death rate from pollution went down 19%.
Weather-related deaths decreased 95% since the 1980s.
Consumption of 66 out of 72 resources is declining.
As countries become more sophisticated, they use fewer resources.
A country like China, which is always trying to catch up, is devouring resources.
But once you catch up and once you are doing well, you start to use fewer resources.
You find out that that's when you start to have people say, you know, I'm really glad we have jobs and the economy is thriving, but I can't breathe.
So could you cut down on the use of pollutants?
Okay, we'll cut down the use of pollutants.
That's how the air gets cleaned up.
And not free countries are down from 34%.
It used to be a third of countries were not free, and now it's down to 26%, only a fourth of countries not free.
Too much, but still.
So, you know, we spend all this time talking about nonsense.
And this is the thing, you know, when I had a couple of weeks during Christmas to watch the news, but not have to comment on the news.
I just could watch the mechanisms and the structures by which people talk.
And here's stuff that happens, right?
There'll be an event.
I'll make one up.
Let's not get specific.
I'll make one up.
A fireman charges into a burning building and carries a woman out through the flames and he's a hero.
And somebody will say, well, this just re-emphasizes the patriarchal idea that men have to take care of women.
Somebody says, you know, take, it's just obviously an insane person talking.
And then everybody jumps on this take.
Everybody has to respond to this insanely stupid thing that somebody said.
Instead of saying, oh, here's a heroic act.
There was a shooting in Texas.
Let's talk about this a little bit.
There's a shooting in a Texas church.
And there were armed men.
This is Texas, so everybody's strapped.
But there was people whose job it was to protect the church.
And there was a deacon who was a deacon of the church whose assignment was to protect.
He was the deacon in charge of security.
His name was Jack Wilson.
This guy came in.
He took out a shotgun.
He was wearing a long coat.
And he took out a shotgun and he opened fire and he killed two people.
And Wilson, within six seconds, shot him in the head.
An amazing act of heroism, an amazing example of a good guy with a gun stopping a bad guy with a gun.
A headshot, as Wilson talks about, you're not supposed to shoot the guy in the head because it's a moving target.
So it was an incredibly good shot and an amazing, emotional, tense moment.
Here's Wilson being interviewed talking about what happened.
The only shot I had, which was a headshot, which in my classes I teach not to take headshots, but that was what I felt.
That's the only shot I really had a clear shot, and I was comfortable taking the shot because of my training and my practice.
A lot of people are alive this morning because of you, sir.
What do you feel about it?
I feel confident of that because when an individual is using a 12-gauge short-barrel shotgun with double out buck in it, which is what he had in it, then it could have been a whole lot worse.
Have you had a chance to just process it and reflect at this point?
I'm processing the fact that I lost two good friends.
Yesterday, Richard and I go back our ways and we're fairly close.
Tony is also a deacon at the church, but at the same time, I don't feel like I killed an individual.
I killed evil.
And that's how I'm approaching it.
That's how I'm processing.
Okay, all-American hero.
You recognize him right away.
You know who he is.
This is a guy who does what has to be done.
He was trained.
I think he used to be a deputy sheriff.
He was trained with firearms.
He teaches firearms.
He gives firearms instruction.
Total hero.
Good guy with guns stops bad guy with gun.
And of course, it would have been a disaster if nobody in the church had been carrying a gun, right?
This is a guy with a shotgun.
He'd have left people dead all over the place.
It's a disaster to lose one person, a disaster to lose two people, but obviously much, much worse the more people you lose.
So immediately, of course, the anti-gun lobby, the left, comes out and they start saying things.
One guy on Twitter, I don't even know who it was, one guy on Twitter says, is this the way Jesus wants us to act?
It's like, I mean, you know, like Jesus wants us to sit there while our neighbors are blown away.
And USA Today, Elvia Diaz from the Arizona Republic says, yes, Jack Hero is a Jack Wilson is a hero, all right.
You know, but have we really reached a point when each of us need to carry a firearm anywhere we go?
Gun advocates certainly think so.
I mean, this is at CNN, nothing is ever as simple as good guy versus bad guy, which is not true, by the way.
What's not simple is good guys are not simple people.
They're not all good, and bad guys may not all be bad, but in an instant like that, that is a simple instance.
The guy with the bad guy with the gun is bad.
The good guy with the gun is good.
It is as simple.
It's absolutely as simple as that.
So you start to have to spend time arguing with these people.
And the reason you have to spend time with them is they have a lot of cultural power.
The left has almost all the cultural power.
We've been eating away at it in the last several years, and that's great.
But you can get fired for not agreeing with the left.
You can get fired for saying there are only men and women.
You can get fired for saying a transgender man is not a man, which is the simple truth.
A transgender man may be anything you want to describe him as, but he is not a man.
If he was born a woman, he remains a woman.
Every cell of his body remains a woman.
I'm perfectly happy to discuss the state of his mind, the state of his soul, whatever you want to talk about, but we shouldn't have to lie to keep our job.
So we have to respond.
And then when you're responding, you lose track of the issue.
And even the issue isn't even the fact that good guys with guns save a lot of lives.
That's not even the actual issue.
I mean, listen, I'm quoting this from Dan Bungino's great news site, by the way, which is rapidly reporting, replacing Drudge as a conservative news aggregator.
But he lists all these stats.
The National Crime Victimization Survey administers a twice a year survey, and their most conservative estimate is that self-defense with guns account for about 100,000 cases per year.
A survey in 1994 by Bill Clinton's CDC found that people scare intruders away with guns 500,000 times a year.
Obama's CDC conducted a gun control study finding that almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals.
So good guys with guns are equal to bad guys with guns.
But is that even the debate?
Is that even the issue?
I mean the issue as we know on the right, we talk about this on the right all the time, is do you want to be a free people or not?
Do you want to be free?
Do you consider that there is a problem with government and freedom, that the more the government grows, the less freedom there is.
We need government.
We're not angels.
Men need to be governed, but they need to be, but because men are not angels, right, the people in government have to be watched.
And ultimately, your ultimate defense against the government is a gun.
And that's why the Constitution guaranteed you the right to bear arms.
It was because, it was because they wanted you to be able to defend yourself against a growing federal government.
They wanted states to be able to form militias to defend themselves against the federal government.
That's why they gave you the right to bear arms.
And that's the real issue.
And you spend so much time arguing with the nonsense because of the cultural power of the left and because people talk nonsense and we've now democratized information to the extent where everybody has an opinion.
You spend so much time talking about that that you lose track of the things that matter.
Another thing that matters is how beautiful you are.
Now, not everybody can be as incredibly physically attractive as I am, but all of you can have a nice smile if you go to Candid Co.
If you want, you know, you worry about your smile.
I know this, people take pictures of me all the time.
If I don't feel good about my smile, I keep my mouth tight and I have this type smile.
But if you have a nice smile, you feel, you get a lot of confidence and you feel really good.
And braces, you know, they're uncomfortable, they look weird, and CandidCo will help you with clear aligners that will straighten your teeth for 65% less than braces.
Unlike braces, candid clear aligners are comfortable, removable, totally invisible.
You never have to set foot in a doctor's office or waiting room.
Attitude Affects The News00:12:02
Your treatment is prescribed remotely by a licensed orthodontist, and Candid delivers everything you need right to your door.
Unlike other companies, Candid only works with orthodontists, never general dentists.
That means your treatment will be designed by an expert in tooth movement with 20 years of experience on average.
The average treatment length is just six months.
So if you're ready to take your first step towards straighter teeth for a limited time, you can get started with 75 bucks off by using code Clavin at candidco.com slash clavin.
That's candidco.com slash clavin.
Use code clavin for $75 off.
Candidco.com slash clavin, code clavin.
And so you'll look beautiful when you say, how do you spell clavin?
So returning to this idea of bad news and how we get distracted by bad news, this is a very new idea among psychologists and scientists.
You know how scientists are always finding out things after the rest of us?
I remember when I was a kid, scientists discovered that putting this beef steak on a black eye will reduce the swelling.
It's like everybody knew that except the scientists, but then they proved it and so then they believed it.
Well, Vince Scully, the famous Los Angeles Dodgers announcer, once had the great line, losing feels worse than winning feels good.
In other words, we naturally emphasize bad news.
We naturally emphasize bad news.
And this is just, it's a fact that they have found recently.
There was a big story about it in the Wall Street Journal by John Tierney and Roy Baumeister.
Studies show that bad health or bad parenting makes much more difference than good health or good parenting.
A negative image, a photograph of a dead animal, stimulates more electrical activity in the brain than does a positive image, a bowl of chocolate ice cream, for instance.
The pain of criticism is much stronger than the pleasure of praise.
A single bad event can produce lifelong trauma, but there is no psychological term for the opposite of trauma because no good event has such a lasting impact.
And obviously this makes sense because if you think about it in evolutionary terms, the guy who worries is the guy who survives, right?
If you're worried about the big animal coming and eating you, you're going to look out for the big animal coming and eating you, and you're going to survive, while the guy who's sitting around going, life is grand, everything is tickety-boo, is going to be gone in an instant, right?
But in an era of good news, in an era of growing lifespans of safety and all this stuff, in this greatest decade in human history, it distorts the world.
We're distorting the world by focusing on bad news.
And, you know, it's part of the nonsense.
It's constantly feeding into our conversation.
Trump is Hitler.
Trump is never going to leave office.
You know, if that were true, if any of that were true, then Trump would come and arrest you when you said he was Hitler because he's not Hitler.
He doesn't do that.
So, you know, John Fund wrote this piece.
John Fund is a really good journalist, and he writes this piece in Fox News where he says, I'm making a New Year's resolution to only pay attention to good news.
But he makes the point that this is not a good business decision because people want to hear the bad news for lots of reasons.
But one of the reasons is we're evolutionarily tuned to the bad news.
It's not a good business decision to emphasize bad news.
He points out in 2014, the Russian news site City Reporter decided to cover only good news in silver linings for an entire day.
It lost two-thirds of its normal readership that day.
Two-thirds.
Where's the disasters?
Hey, hey, I want my disasters.
Bring me my disasters.
Fund goes on.
When I was growing up in California, a businessman in my hometown launched The Good News, an unrelentingly cheerful weekly paper that found subscribers in 50 states and 10 countries.
It went broke in 16 months.
And that's why it's so easy for the people who are in the resistance, for instance, to emphasize anything Trump does badly.
Lee Siegel has this piece in the New York Times, why are we so depressed?
I think it's a good question.
I think it's fair to ask about depression when we've got so much suicide.
And he says, everyone, Lee Siegel begins, everyone has his or her own definition of a political crisis.
Mine is when our collective mental health starts having a profound effect on our politics and vice versa.
It cannot be a simple coincidence that the two have declined in tandem.
The American Psychiatric Association reported that from 2016 to 2017, the number of adults who describe themselves as more anxious than the previous year rose 36%.
In 2017, more than 17 million American adults had a new diagnosis of a major depressive order, as well as 3 million adolescents ages 12 to 17.
40 million adults now suffer from an anxiety disorder, nearly 20% of the adult population.
The really sorrowful reports concern suicide among all Americans.
The suicide rate increased by 33% between 1999 and 2017.
It'll be interesting to see, by the way, whether that goes down now that the economy is booming and people are at work again.
That'll be an interesting thing to see.
But he goes on to say, all of this mental carnage is occurring at a time when decades of social and political division have set against each other, black and white, men and women, old and young, beyond bitter social antagonisms.
The country is racked by mass shootings, the mind-bending perils of the internet, revelations of widespread sexual predation, the worsening effects of climate change, virulent competition.
My point about this is, does he realize that he's writing for the newspaper that generates most of this stuff?
I mean, does he realize that having the left so much in control of our communications networks, our newspapers, our TV stations, our networks, all these things creates this cloud of anxiety because they see injustice everywhere.
You know, over the weekend on Twitter, there was a trending, you know, those hashtag trends.
There was a trending hashtag, it's okay to be white.
And I thought, okay, I love it.
I love being white.
That's the problem.
I hope you love your color.
You're made in the image of God.
Have a good time, whatever color you are.
I mean, you have to explain this.
So here's a crazy talking about just how information is democratized and therefore any Looney Tune can come on and affect the conversation.
Here is Twitter Looney Tune.
And I don't think this is satire.
Sometimes it's hard to tell with the left what satire and what isn't.
Here is his reaction to people who said, yeah, it's okay to be white.
I just spoke up to hashtag it's okay to be white trending on Twitter.
Clearly, white people are back at it again.
And I apologize for my people because somehow the oppressors are pretending to be the oppressed.
Like they have a chance in hell of ever experiencing oppression because they're white.
And then you criticize, not even white people, but you criticize the system.
You criticize systematic racism.
And you criticize all of these power struggles that have been part of the American landscape for centuries.
And for some reason, the white people take offense to that.
Now, listen, if this were just a guy on Twitter, we could ignore him.
But he represents a mainstream value of the left.
He represents, how dare I exactly.
Well, there she is.
That's the Time magazine person of the year.
It's all a disaster.
Everything is terrible.
White people suck.
And somehow that's not racism.
Let's talk about something happier for just a moment.
Let's talk about ExpressVPN, which I use on my computer every single day because it protects my information, my address, where I'm going, what I'm looking at, who I am.
ExpressVPN doesn't log your data, and lots of really cheaper free VPNs make money by actually selling your data to ad companies, which is exactly one of the things you're trying to protect yourself from.
Other VPNs are slower.
And they slow down your computer, but I've been using ExpressVPN for years now, and my internet speeds remain exactly as they were, which is fast.
It's easy to use.
It takes a couple of clicks to download the thing, and then it's on, and it's just in the background, and you never have to think about it.
You just fire up the app, click one button to connect.
It's so easy.
Even your grandparents could use it, not my grandparents, because they are using much more divine instruments at this point.
But it's not just me saying this.
Tech radar, The Verge, CNET, and many other tech experts rate ExpressVPN the number one VPN in the world.
So protect yourself with the VPN that I use and trust.
Use my link, expressvpn.com slash clavin today and get an extra three months free on a one-year package.
That's expressvpn.com slash clavin.
Visit expressvpn.com slash clavin to learn more, especially how to spell clavin.
There are no easing federats.
There are no easing favorites.
There are no easing clavin.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
I just make it look easy.
I just, I bring the ease to it.
If that guy who was just accusing whites of everything in the world were not the mainstream of the left, it would be fine.
But the fact is that attitude affects the news we get.
Let's just remember, this is from Grabian, but let's just remember some of the things that they promoted last year, like the Jussie Smollett hoax.
Here's a little Grabian montage of how they covered the Jussie Smollett hoax.
Fire star Jussie Smollett was the victim of a vicious, racist, and homophobic attack.
His attackers hurled racial and homophobic slurs.
Not only homophobia, we're talking about racism.
We're talking about hate with steroids.
They are looking for two suspects who are apparently wearing make America great again hats.
The offenders uttered, this is MAGA country.
This is stomach-turning, mind-boggling information.
Ellie, this is a horrible story.
Yeah, horrendous and unacceptable.
And this is America.
This is America, she says.
I think she, the whole quote is, this is America in 2019.
But it's not.
It's not.
I mean, it's not the way people treat each other, and it's not what happened to Jussie Smollett.
They believed it because they are infected by this crazy idea that they're living in bad news.
They're living in this racist country.
And they're not.
If they ever traveled, if they went anywhere at all, they would learn this is the least racist country in the world.
And it is not being delusional to know that and understand that with any problems we may have.
Listen, this year, as you are probably well aware, is going to be insane because the Democrats keep trying one way or another to get Trump out of office.
Plus, we're going to have an election.
The best way to stay informed on all things 2020 is to become a Daily Wire member and get comprehensive news and opinion from us on demand.
And as a 2020 kickoff, all memberships are 20% off until January 6th.
Now, what is this?
It's the 2nd, right?
So you got four days, 20% off all memberships when you use the promo code DW2020.
You can remember that as Daily Wire 2020.
Members get our articles ad-free, access to all of our live broadcasts and show library, the full three hours of the Ben Shapiro show, select bonus content, access to the mailbag, and more.
Plus, our new all access tier gets you into live online Q ⁇ A discussions with me, with Ben, with Matt Walsh, and Michael Knowles, plus our sites, writers, and special guests.
With everything going on, you can turn to us for answers, and we, as always, will deliver.
Again, that's promo code DW2020 for 20% off until Monday, January 6th.
Join today.
Stay informed on all things 2020.
Get the truth.
Educated Women's Paths00:04:01
It lives here.
All right, we've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come on over to dailywire.com.
And while you're there, subscribe so you can have the full Daily Wire experience in 2020.
You know, if there is, I know I harp on this a lot, but I'm going to harp on it anyway because it's worthwhile.
If there is one force in America that keeps people, not only keeps people from learning about the things that matter, but actually draws them away from it, draws them away from the things that are important in the world, it's feminists.
And I'm going to talk about feminism and I'm going to talk about the witcher because these are two subjects that are amazingly intertwined, okay?
There's an advice column in the New York Times, a former newspaper.
And in this, it's called T's Advice Column, Culture Therapist.
Either Ligaya Mishon or Megan O'Grady, I'm reading this off the paper, solves your problems using art.
And a woman writes in who has loved the arts, and she says, I'm nearly 40, and I find myself at a crossroads that feels more like a dead end.
I've spent much of my life and thought and income in pursuit of beauty in one form or another, design, fashion, the beauty of wellness industries.
This is very much a professional hazard.
My career in glossy magazines and advertising as a photo editor is all about making beautiful images of beautiful things that I've selected and make them look even more beautiful.
Often when I think how much of my time I've devoted to my own appearance or to matters of aesthetics, I cringe, though I've often been the person in any given room defending things like style and design from accusations of superficiality and frivolity, frivolity.
And then she goes on to talk about the fact that she's now entering middle age and she says, I'm nearly 40.
She says, I've lost my sense of meaning to myself.
I feel like the culture has moved on without me and I don't know what to do.
Now she's in print medium and so she feels that print is becoming less and less important.
But then she adds, part of it might have to do with the fact that I feel alone in many ways and unsuccessful by most measures.
I don't own a home and no one needs me.
I am nobody's mother and now I am nobody's child as my parents are no longer living.
My friends and peers have gone on to have families, to marry and stop working or have moved to other parts of the country or even foreign countries.
She says it's another issue.
This is, she puts in parenthesis, it's another issue, but I'm kind of astonished when I see how many of my peers, educated, once ambitious women friends, don't work professionally anymore and have either moved to another country or married a rich partner or both.
It's like they've given up.
I found this letter heartbreaking.
I actually did.
I was actually moved by it.
And the answer goes on and just rattles on some New York Timesian nonsense.
But she feels that these women who have given up on their professional ambitions to marry, she says a rich man, but let's say a man who can take care of her and let her do the things that maybe women want to do more than be ambitious.
Maybe many women want to do more than lean in and have careers and they've moved to another country.
And it's like they've given up.
But maybe what they have not, maybe what they've done is they've given up on stuff that's meaningless to them and embraced things that matter to them because feminism has told them that what should matter to them is the same things that matter to men.
That's what feminists tell you.
That's my opposition to feminism is not that I want women to be constrained in their choices.
My opposition to feminism is that they tell you that only the way men naturally and instinctively want to live is the right way, and the way women naturally and instinctively want to live, and obviously I'm generalizing, but the way women instinctively want to live is the wrong way.
And therefore, as a woman, you should be doing what men do.
And, you know, here you see this so much in the arts.
The Arts Reflect Life00:07:27
And I find this all the time.
You know, the arts are supposed to represent something about life, something universal and enduring about life.
The arts are supposed to bring you life as it's lived.
And of course, there's room for fantasy and imagination and magic and all the things, the wonderful things with which the arts delight us.
But underneath that, there should be a truth.
And feminism and political correctness, just like they've made the news dishonest because they will not tell you the truth about things, just like they've made the news dishonest, they've also made the arts dishonest because you cannot say, you cannot speak about things in a real way.
And this is why this show The Witcher, which is on Netflix, it's like eight episodes, blew me away.
I was really, really surprised by it.
And, you know, I want to talk about it both as a work, but also as what it has to say about feminism.
The Witcher was a series of novels by a Polish writer whose name I can't pronounce, Andrzezej Sabkowski.
And I've read only the first one, which was a series of short stories, and I enjoyed it.
It was like a tough guy writer.
It's like a kind of Raymond Chandler writing, but about this guy who is a monster hunter.
He goes through this medieval type world hunting down monsters and you pay him for it.
He's a tough guy and he sounds like a tough guy hero.
And you say, I've got a Striga haunting my lake and he goes out and kills it.
And so this stars Henry Cavill and he does a great job as Geralt of Rivia, The Witcher, right?
But because it was the showrunner's female, she announced she was going to pay more attention to the female characters.
Now, Cavill is hilarious in it.
He's great.
And the show, look, the show is not good.
You know, people were comparing it to Game of Thrones, but it was very shallow in its world building, and it was just kind of telling these stories.
You could hardly tell what people's motivations were, but it was intensely watchable.
It was lots and lots of fun.
So it wasn't great art, but it was lots and lots of fun.
And the monster fights were great.
And Cavill was absolutely hilarious.
He really got the part and he really delivered it with a lot of humor.
But one of the main characters is a sorceress named Jenever of Wingerberg.
And her name, she's played by Anja Shalotra.
So let's start and play the trailer, a little bit of the trailer from The Witcher.
They say witches can't feel human emotion.
What do you believe in?
Break the side.
Evil is evil.
Break the side.
Bless her.
So it's lots of fun, like I said.
And I forgot to mention, I think I forgot to mention it.
It's based on the novels, but the novels gave rise to an incredibly popular series of games.
They're role-playing games.
I can't play role-playing games because I always get stuck in the tavern.
I can never figure out which questions to ask the tavern keeper, so I never get to the fighting, so I don't enjoy them.
But it's an incredibly popular series of games.
People just love it.
They say the latest one is just great.
I think it's number three.
And so it's based on all that.
It's very popular.
And so the lady who made the show, the showrunner, Lauren Schmidt Hisrich, announced she was going to pay attention to the women.
And immediately I was put off by the fact that there's a queen in this who fights like a man.
And there's a couple of scenes where women fight with swords.
And I just hate these scenes because no woman can fight with a sword.
Zero women can fight with a sword.
And what I mean by that is in a situation where you are fighting men who are used to fighting with swords, you are going to get killed if you were a woman fighting with a sword 100% of the time, right?
Now, a woman with a sword could kill somebody.
A woman with a sword could kill somebody who doesn't know how to fight with a sword.
But in a war situation where you are swinging this five to 10 pound sword again and again and again against much, much, much stronger men, they are going to kill you.
So when you write a woman who fights with a sword and this queen is, she's a man.
They should have made the character a man.
She's a man.
She's gross and she swaggers around and she rips into the meat and tears it with her teeth and then curses people out.
She's a man.
So it was this feminist statement.
I just thought, please, give me a break.
And I don't know if that's in the book, in the books, but it just, I just thought, give me a break.
This is not the way any woman behaves.
But in the meantime, there is a main character, this character Jennifer, who is an ugly humpback who finds that she has magical powers and is trained to be a wizard, a mage, and she becomes powerful through her magic, with which I have absolutely no problem because magic is part of the story, right?
However, in doing this, and this is a little bit of a spoiler, but not too bad, she has to give up her ability to have children in order to become beautiful and powerful.
So she trades her womb to become beautiful and powerful, and she soon finds that power is nothing, that beauty is overrated, and that what she's lost, the only important thing she has.
And I was amazed.
I was amazed that they started to talk about this, that she wanted a baby.
And in one of the final scenes, there's a housewife, and the housewife says, I have everything.
I have a roof over my head.
I have food to eat.
I have a son whom I love.
And I have a husband.
And there are pains in the neck because they're men, but I love them.
And I have everything.
And that was an amazing, amazing message that I thought, because it's true.
It is true.
You know, life is not about getting what somebody tells you you're supposed to want.
It's about getting the things you want because those are the things that matter.
And feminism talks people out of that.
And to go on to yet another piece of this puzzle, because feminist and politically correct art is selling nonsense, they get angry at you when you won't see it.
A film came out of Little Women, this famous book, and it was by Greta Gerwig, who made a girly movie called Ladybird, which I actually enjoyed.
So here's, let's play this.
This is from, of course, the classic, the adaptation of the 1868 novel by Louisa May Alcott.
Here's a trailer of little women.
We can leave right now.
I'll sell stories.
And you, you should be an actress and you should have a life on the stage.
Just because my dreams are different than yours doesn't mean they're unimportant.
I have holding you ever since I've known you, Joe.
I couldn't help it.
It would be a disaster if we didn't.
It wouldn't be a disaster.
We'd be miserable.
She would be a perfect saint.
I can't.
A new play written by Mr. Marsh.
Women, they have minds and they have souls as well as just hearts.
I want to be great or nothing.
And they've got ambition and they've got talent as well as just beauty.
I'm so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for.
I'm so sick of it.
So, yeah, I'm not going to see it either.
And the reason is I don't want to be lectured.
I don't want to be lectured about what women are.
I want to see a story.
I want to see stories that matter to me, that delight me.
And so the New York Times is angry.
Men are dismissing little women.
What a surprise, writes Christy Eldritch.
Unconscious bias has seemed to trickle down to the casual male viewer as well.
If Twitter is any indication, the New York Times critic Janet Maslin recently tweeted her surprise at the active hostility about little women from men I know, love, and respect.
And she described the movie's problem with men as very real.
Someone tweeted in response, it's not a problem.
We just don't care.
If you are not telling the truth, if you're not telling stories that matter to me, if you're not telling stories that delight me, I don't have to show up.
It's a chick flick.
Don't Lecture Me00:01:54
It lectures me about what women are.
I ain't coming.
That's just the way it is.
It's on you.
You cannot browbeat us into it.
You can't hammer us, lecture us, shame us into it.
We're not coming to your stupid movies until you start to talk about the things that matter.
And that's what we're going to be doing here.
And we will be doing it here again Monday.
But meanwhile, you've got the Clavenless weekend to face.
You probably won't survive, so all of this has been a waste of my breath.
But those of you who managed to crawl through the chaos to make it back here, I will be here on Monday.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
And if you want to help spread the word, give us a five-star review and also tell your friends to subscribe too.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show, the Matt Walsh Show, and the Michael Knoll Show.
Thanks for listening.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Austin Stevens and directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring, senior producer, Jonathan Hay, and our supervising producers are Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
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.
If you prefer facts over feelings, aren't offended by the brutal truth, but you can still laugh at the insanity filling our national news cycle, well, tune in to the Ben Shapiro Show, where you'll get a whole lot of that and much more.