Andrew Klavan dissects the left’s moral collapse, from Biden’s ISIS ties to Warren’s heritage lies and Sanders’ Cold War nostalgia, framing Harvey Weinstein’s trial as proof of a culture that erased biological distinctions. He mocks media romanticizing Soleimani while exposing Obama’s Iran deal failure, praising Gervais for calling out Hollywood’s hypocrisy despite leftist backlash. Klavan contrasts American conservatism’s creedal roots with European nationalism, defends traditional masculinity against PC dogma, and argues only moral accountability—not relativism—can restore liberalism’s true values. [Automatically generated summary]
As the Caucasus in Iowa approach, Democrat presidential candidates are seizing on the trouble in Iran to turn their attention to foreign policy.
Joe Biden is touting his experience in the Obama administration of drawing red lines that were completely ignored, allowing ISIS to take over an area the size of Ohio, delivering pallets of cash that Iran could use for terrorist purposes, and creating a failed state in Libya, then abandoning our compound in Benghazi so Americans could be killed.
When a reporter mentioned that such a record of continuous disaster might not sway Iowa voters in his favor, Biden replied, quote, Iowa, I thought I was in New Hampshire.
And where are my teeth?
Uque.
Biden did go on to remind reporters that he was vice president when Obama ordered the killing of Osama bin Laden, and though he did oppose that raid, he later corrected his mistake by lying about it and pretending that never happened.
Elizabeth Warren said she was qualified to deal with foreign policy because of her experience leading retaliatory horseback raids against the U.S. cavalry after their mistreatment of her people, the Lakota, in the movie Dances with Wolves.
Warren says she remembers riding her Palomino through the heavy rifle fire, and while that may not have actually happened to her specifically, she says that any Palomino is a Palomino.
Senator Warren was then escorted back to the facility in time for her medication.
Bernie Sanders is telling people that he's the best man for the foreign policy job.
He says, even though he chose the losing side in the Cold War, next time communism is going to really, really work.
Just wait and see.
Sanders also listed the many accomplishments of his nearly 30 years in Congress, like naming a post office after Thorsten Veblen and talking utter nonsense in a thick New York accent without getting kicked out on his ear.
As for Hillary Clinton, she says she's already doing a great job in the perfect presidency of her imagination.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
All right, we're going to talk a lot more about Iran and our crazy friends, the Democrats.
But first, I got to talk some more about our crazy friend, Harvey Weinstein.
He went on trial in New York yesterday on two counts of rape, one count of criminal sexual act, and two counts of predatory sexual assault, which is a felony that includes committing sex crimes against multiple people.
If convicted on the most serious charge, he could face up to life in prison.
Not only that, but Weinstein was hit with more charges out here in Los Angeles.
He was charged with raping one woman and sexually assaulting another.
Now, I know I talk about this and other cases of sexual abuse a lot.
And for those of you who are listening to my fictional podcast, Another Kingdom, you know Hollywood sexual abuse plays a big role in that story too.
In fact, there are eerie connections between the story and the Jeffrey Epstein case, even though I wrote Another Kingdom long before Epstein's death by make-believe suicide.
But the reason these abuse stories fascinate and concern me is because widespread sexual abuse by powerful people represents the norm in human affairs, which is to say it represents something very natural in human beings, which Christians like myself consider part of our inherent sinfulness and therefore something to be overcome, not something to be indulged.
The historian Tom Holland has a fascinating new book out.
It traces the effects of Christianity on the West and on Western ideas.
He writes that in pre-Christian Rome, quote, to be penetrated, male or female, was to be branded as inferior, to be marked as womanish, barbarian, servile.
While the body of a freeborn Roman was sacrosanct, those of others were fair game, unquote.
In other words, if you had power, it was just accepted that you could sexually use someone who didn't have power.
This is essentially the attitude of some monkeys, like the macaques, who show dominance over one another by assuming the male rather than the female position, even if they don't actually have sex.
They just hold that position for a moment as a sign of which monkey is in charge.
Humans display that sort of monkey mind when we give someone the finger or when we say, screw you.
The monkey mind also survives in the sort of rough sex fantasies that made 50 Shades of Gray one of the best-selling novels of all time.
It's sex seen as an act of aggression and domination.
That's a normal part of the fallen human mind.
It was Christianity with its revolutionary idea that all Christians, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, women and men, were part of the body of Christ that slowly began to move the human mind toward the idea that everyone had rights, that yes, even women had rights, and that being a woman did not make you inferior at all, but in fact gave you a sacred role in sharing God's ongoing work of human creation.
The Virgin Mary, of course, would be the prime example.
Now, obviously, this is not to say that powerful Christians don't abuse people.
Of course, they do.
They're people, and hypocrisy is universal.
It's simply to say that the idea that we shouldn't abuse the less powerful is part of our spiritual inheritance.
It's not the natural state of mankind.
Now, recently, as a lot of people have noticed, our intellectuals and elites have attempted to create a post-Christian world by replacing Christianity with leftism.
Leftism attempts to make spiritual ideas material.
That was part of Karl Marx's original idea.
He said so himself.
So instead of equal spiritual worth as children of God, which would be a Christian idea, we're supposed to have equal money, equal places in society.
That's the leftist idea.
Instead of confessions of sin that help us rise above our fallen nature, we deny that sin exists and force people instead to confess if they say it does exist.
It's Christian non-judgmentalism stripped of its sense of spiritual evil.
And instead of the apocalypse, we have all the nonsensical hysteria about climate change and so on.
We can't break free of the Christian truth.
We can only transform it into leftist lies.
And so instead of equal respect for men as men and women as women, which is very much a Christian idea, we now have the leftist idea that men and women are supposed to be equal in kind, that they're essentially the same.
They can do the same things, they want the same things, they have the same value priorities, and all the rest.
Because that's not true, because men and women are very different in kind and not the same, leftist feminism has morphed into an anti-female philosophy, an attempt to eliminate the femininity which puts the lie to their philosophy.
Under leftist feminism, women need to be like men in order to be of any worth.
Lean in, be aggressive, be strong, make money, put success above family.
You may have heard the actress Michelle Williams at the Golden Globes, who accepted her award, and she seemed to be saying that her ability to kill a child via abortion had helped her to success.
Is that female empowerment, or is that being erased as a woman so you can compete as a man?
Anyway, back to Harvey Weinstein.
He's been accused of abuse by 80 women, and since I know for a fact he regularly abused men, I know some of those men, I see no reason to disbelieve the women's charges.
When Ronan Farrow tried to expose Weinstein at NBC News, he was easily thwarted because NBC executives were busy scrambling to protect their culture of abusing women, led by accused serial abuser Matt Lauer, their star anchorman.
Over at ABC, the top newsman is George Stephanopoulos, who used to have the job of silencing women who accused Bill Clinton of serial abuse.
And when Stephanopoulos' ABC got the story about Jeffrey Epstein serially abusing underage women and girls, guess what?
They spiked it.
And when it was revealed that they spiked it, CBS showed themselves willing to hunt down and fire the person who made the revelation.
Every single mainstream media network has been complicit in covering up the serial abuse of women, the less powerful.
And yes, so was Fox News because conservative media has signed on to the feminist lie, mostly due to their fear of being attacked as being anti-women and losing sponsors.
All these media folks in Hollywood and in the news are the very people who have been selling women the leftist feminist idea, the post-Christian idea that men and women have the same desires and priorities and abilities.
Harvey Weinstein said it himself.
He said, it's unfair he should be prosecuted because he's been telling the feminist story all these years.
He told the New York Post, quote, I made more movies directed by women and about women than any filmmaker, unquote.
He told feminist stories about women, so he should be forgiven for treating women like trash.
See, I think this is our society in a nutshell.
I think women are being told a story about themselves that's not true, the story that they are equal in kind to men.
I think feminists have insisted that they be told this story, and anyone who doesn't tell it gets shouted down and canceled.
I think feminists have helped create a leftist culture of lies.
And like all lies, they obscure the truth and the obscurity, ability for men to hide behind those lies, has allowed men and women, gays and straits, to return to the idea that the powerful can sexually abuse the powerless at will.
According to Ronan Farrow, when one of Matt Lauer's victims asked him, why are you doing this to me?
Lauer said, because it's fun.
I'm sure it was.
I get attacked for saying all this all the time, but I'll say it anyway.
I think we need to tell women a new story about who they are.
Or really, I think what we need is to tell a very old story, a story that's about 2,000 years old.
We're going to talk more about all of this, all the lies that the leftists have ensnared themselves in.
But first, let us talk about something delightful and true, which is Helix mattresses.
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I didn't even ask how you spell it.
How do you spell it?
There are no easing for me.
There are no ease in Clavin.
I just make it look easy.
Do not forget, tomorrow is the mailbag.
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Historic Understanding with Iran00:15:26
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Now, this whole thing about sexuality, about lying to women, is all part of the big lie, the big lie that there are no differences among people, that there are no differences of morality, that all morals are the same.
And that is what is driving the left into absolute insanity in the death of Qasim Soleimani.
Their reaction to what is happening in Iran is a result of their leftist philosophy.
I want to play you some stuff that they would been talking about.
The left's reaction to Soleimani, they were trying to have his funeral yesterday, but vandalism and riots broke out, so they've kind of canceled some of the funeral.
But Grabian put out a montage of the media.
Remember, this guy was the engineer of Iran's, the terrorist regime of Iran, trying to take over the Middle East and trying to force Americans out and try to, and killing Americans constantly, as well as killing everybody else.
It's not like they were just killing Americans.
They were killing anybody who got in their way.
That was the idea.
The idea was to spread the Iranian regime through murder.
And that's what he was doing.
Here is how news people sounded weeping over the death of this man.
He was a war hero, the commander of Iran's feared Quds force.
Qasim Suleimani was no ordinary general.
The U.S. officially classified him as a terrorist, but in Iran, he was a national hero.
He's regarded as personally incredibly brave.
The troops love him.
I was trying to think of somebody, and I was thinking of De Gaulle.
A revered figure in Iran and some other places in the Middle East.
Smart, charismatic, ruthless, strategic, and bold.
His power made Iranians proud.
But even many of Suleimani's enemies admitted he was a military genius.
Qasim Soleimani was an evil genius.
Soimani was in charge of spreading Iranian influence around the world, and he was extremely good at it.
He is the, think of the French Foreign Legion, you know, if you will.
By killing Qasim Soleimani, the U.S. has stripped Iran of an inspirational military leader.
The crowds are massive and emotional.
There are many tears here.
Thousands of mourners on the streets in Iran.
Symbolic caskets aloft, weeping and chanting.
I am Soleimani.
You are fake news.
And yes, you are Soleimani, I'll say.
You know, there's a writer at the Masih Alinijad, who is an Iranian journalist, author, and women's rights campaigner.
And she writes in the Washington Post, she says, over the next few days, it will be hard to escape footage of huge crowds gathering in Iranian cities to mourn the death of Soleimani.
Don't take what you're seeing at face value.
Large numbers of people turned out to mourn Soleimani into the city of Avez.
The government has forced students and officials to attend.
It provided free transport and ordered shops to shut down.
According to videos sent by people inside the country, the authorities are making little kids write essays praising him.
This past November, thousands of Iranians took to the street across the country to protest against the regime, and more than 1,500 people were killed by security forces who were taken by surprise by the ferocity of the protest.
So our ignorant press, they just channeled this stuff.
And we'll talk more about the ignorance of the press in a moment when we're talking about Obama's, what Obama's responsibility for what happened in Iran.
But they just channel this stuff.
If the Iranians say, oh, yes, they're mourning, the press channels it because they are under this lie of this philosophy of multiculturalism, that there can be no difference between cultures, that it's wrong to say some other culture is worse than yours, although almost every other culture is worse than ours.
And that's just the truth.
And ours is kind of suffering.
But if you want to hear, so that's just the tip end of leftism, right?
It's just the edges of leftism that you get from the media.
Let's listen to some real leftism.
Michael Moore, this is an unbelievable cut, and I haven't heard it played anywhere else.
Michael Moore put out, he has a podcast, and he put out an emergency podcast, basically appealing to the leaders of Iran.
And for 20 minutes, he apologizes to Iran for all the evil things we have done to them.
And he appeals to them, saying, you know, please, please, please don't respond to us.
Even though we're evil, please don't respond.
I just want you to listen to a little bit of this so you really know, I mean, because this is really what the left thinks.
Here is Michael Moore begging the leaders of Iran not to retaliate.
I want to suggest a different way.
I want to suggest a different way for you to win.
I want you to consider what would happen if you didn't do what Trump and the U.S. Pentagon is expecting you to do.
What if you didn't?
What if you didn't follow their script?
What if you said, no, we're smarter than you.
We actually believe in the things we say we believe in.
We believe in our God.
And we believe in our book, the Koran.
And we are not going to use violence.
And we are not going to kill because you kill.
We are not going to lower ourselves to you.
He is begging the terrorist leaders of Iran, the oppressors of women, the oppressors of their own people, the killers of their own people.
He is begging them to live up to the Quran and not fall to the level of Americans.
That is what he's doing.
And you sit there and say, well, wait, didn't you become an obese millionaire off the generosity of capitalism, off the brilliance of capitalism that allowed you to tell the absolute lies you told about the Cuban health care system and make a gazillion dollars and have you no gratitude?
But the thing is, the thing is, it is forbidden, it is forbidden by the post-Christian left to make the kinds of moral distinctions that you have to make to be able to tell the difference between Donald Trump with all his flaws, Donald Trump with all his flaws, and the Iranian regime, which is evil.
You can't say that.
You simply can't say it because it's a spiritual point.
And once you start making spiritual points, you start to bump into a lot of furniture that the Christians put in the room that they don't want to bump into, like the differences between men and women, like the need to take responsibility for yourself, like the sacrosanct nature of the family, like the fact that men and women have responsibilities to each other, to one another, that they have responsibilities to the babies that they create, not to kill them.
These are all things that you have to accept once you accept the idea that there are spiritual values of morality.
So you got to get rid of all that.
And when you get rid of all that, Iran and America are basically on an equal playing field.
And it's just what's happening today that you can pass judgment on if you can pass judgment on it at all.
And this is why the attacks against Trump are now gearing up again to the kind of thing that you expect to hear from the left.
Here's Chris Matthews talking about Trump in relationship to the killing of Qasim Suleimani.
Here we are in the assassination business again.
I'm sorry.
This is the top general.
We didn't need Dr. Moff.
He wasn't operational.
He was a leader.
We killed this guy.
A president of the United States.
They used to hide from assassination responsibility.
This president is bragging about his assassins.
Pompeo's bragging about it.
Is there a new deviancy in the American culture that we now support murder killing of political leaders?
Is this what we do now?
And I don't think you're an assassin.
Anyway, thank you so much.
This president is.
Anyway, thank you, Senator.
The inability to draw moral lines turns you into a guy who thinks that this is an assassination rather than an act of self-defense.
Now, this goes back to the Obama administration.
Remember, you know, a lot of people used to argue with me.
I got into big arguments with this.
People would say to me that Obama is secretly Muslim and he's out there to build the caliphate.
And I thought, that's ridiculous.
That's ridiculous.
The only reason you think that, the only reason you think that is because you've never heard an academic.
Once you hear an academic speak, once you hear college professors talk, then you start to realize that all Obama was doing was putting forward that academic leftism that your children and you who are being taught in colleges every single day.
That's all Obama was doing, a world in which it was impossible for he was willing to go into the Arab world and apologize for America.
That was what Obama did.
And so for him, it was all, Iran was all about the way we treated them.
If we treated them well, they would reform.
It never occurred.
You know, there's such a colonial mindset behind leftism.
It's the idea they're always protesting against imperialism and colonialism, but in fact, they are the most imperialist and colonial people imaginable because they can't imagine that people in other countries have their own philosophies, their own priorities, and that some of them are evil.
They can't imagine that.
They can't imagine the Iranians are killing us because of their philosophy, that if, in fact, if Michael Moore appeals to them to be true to their God, their God might be a God with a sword.
Their Quran might be a book that condemns the infidel.
He doesn't know.
He's not like he's ever read a book.
So this is the kind of thing that Obama did.
And Obama set up this deal, this amazing deal with Iran, where he thought that they were supposed to dismantle their nuclear program.
PJ Media, Matt Margulis, writes, he says that the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Jafad Zarif, told CNN when the deal was negotiated, we did not agree to dismantle anything.
He said this while the negotiations were in progress.
Zarif also claimed Obama was mischaracterizing the intention of the deal, saying the White House tries to portray it as basically a dismantling of Iran's nuclear program.
That is the word they use time and again.
Zarif said on the deal during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Iranian president Hassan Rouhani bragged that world powers surrendered to Iranian to the Iranian nation's will when they made this deal with Iran.
This is Obama's deal.
Now, Ben Rhodes, remember, who has been protesting and complaining about the killing of Soleimani since it happened.
He was the deputy national security advisor for strategic communications, a guy who was basically a failed novelist.
He had no knowledge of what he was doing.
The New York Times did an interview with him where he basically told them how stupid they were, and they laughed together about it.
Yes, we're idiots.
It's great.
This is what they wrote about Rode.
He said, his innovative campaign to sell the Iran deal is likely to be a model for how future administrations explain foreign policy to Congress and the public.
The way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal presented, that the Obama administration began seriously engaging with Iranian officials in 2013 in order to take advantage of a new political reality in Iran, which came about because of elections that brought moderates to power in that country, was largely manufactured for the purpose of selling the deal.
In other words, Ben Rhodes organized a campaign where they told the press, oh, now they're a moderate, so now we can make a deal.
But in fact, Obama had wanted this deal since 2012.
As far back as 2012, he had been trying to negotiate this deal.
So it had nothing to do with the regime, which of course is no moderate regime at all.
And this is what Ben Rhodes told the New York Times.
He said, most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington.
The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns.
That's a sea change.
They literally know nothing.
So if you want to see a, this is cut number seven.
Here is how the deal, this disastrous deal, which did nothing to stop Iran from gaining nuclear weapons.
And even Obama said he believed it would stop them for 10, 12 years.
But even he said after that, they'll get the nuclear weapons.
So why he was channeling all these billions of dollars to them that they used that Secretary of State, then Secretary of State John Kerry said, yes, they'll probably use some of that money for terrorism.
But that's the way it goes, because we have this fantastic deal that'll last 10 years.
This is the way the media reported it.
We are following the breaking news here of this historic understanding with Iran.
It is definitely an historic moment.
It is a historic agreement, frankly.
A historic understanding and, quote, good deal, but there is, of course, still much work to be done.
A lot of what happened today does not happen every day.
This was a historic deal on a historic day, even though it's not done yet.
This historic day in international relations and this potentially historic deal.
So it is a very historic deal, and it changes.
It has the potential, if we do the deal on June 30th, of changing the way global gravity works.
CNN sucks.
Jim Acosta weighing in there with CNN socks.
So did you get the feeling that the deal was historic?
And did you get the feeling, because I love the way the press uses the term historic, because they can't trace it back to you.
It's like got full deniability.
If you go back and said, oh, you touted this horrible deal, they said, well, we just said it was historic.
That doesn't say it's good, right?
But they use the word, and you know what they are doing is praising it.
You could see, if you were watching this, not just listening to you, you could see the smiles on their faces, the little smug smiles of victory that we had made this deal with Iran.
So now, now, when Trump fights back, when Trump says no, you know, we're not going to let you bust into our, we're not going to let you kill our people.
We're not going to let you bust into our Baghdad compound.
We're going to fight back and it's going to make you hurt.
And the top people are going to have to worry about that.
This then the left sees as absolute chaos.
If we are not appeasing our enemies, who after all are no worse than ourselves, right?
It's multiculturalism.
There's no moral boundaries.
So they're no worse than ourselves.
But if we're not appeasing them, then we are starting war.
And here is Bernie Sanders reacting to this Cut 12.
Once you start this business of a major country saying, hey, we have the right to assassinate, then you're unleashing international anarchy.
And I think all that Trump.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
No, no, no.
I'll let you finish.
Sorry.
No.
I mean, and all that Trump seems to be doing now is trying to break all kinds of international protocol, denying the foreign minister of Iran to speak before the United Nations, and really basically trying to lead us into another war, which I believe will be a disaster.
So this is the other thing.
There's no line drawn between taking military action, punishing wrongdoing, and starting another war.
Everything has to be another war.
Everything's Vietnam.
Everything is Vietnam.
No matter what happens, if we exert strength, if we make the terrorists afraid, instead of us being afraid, it's another Vietnam.
This is especially for Bernie Sanders, who hasn't had a fresh idea since 1962.
I mean, this is definitely the quagmire.
We're always going into the quagmire.
Afraid of Satire?00:15:38
Walter Russell Mead, who is now my current favorite writer on international affairs, he has a column, weekly column in the Wall Street Journal, and I've called him the new Charles Krauthammer, if there can be such a thing.
He got an interview with Mike Pompeo and is trying to understand President Trump.
And he says, last year's conventional wisdom was that when it came to Iran, President Trump was all bark and no bite.
His aversion to war, especially in the Middle East, was so great that his bluster and threats could be disregarded.
But last week's U.S. drone strike destroyed the theory, along with Major General Kaslam Soleimani.
And as always, media analysis shifted immediately from Mr. Trump as cowardly ditherer to Mr. Trump as implacable warmonger and either way a clueless toddler acting at random.
He says both take, and by the way, he's no big Trump fan.
I should point this out.
He looks at Trump warily.
He says both takes on Mr. Trump's Iran policy miss some critical factors.
The first is that Trump never forgets his foreign policy must make sense to his base.
These voters reject endless war, but they also believe the U.S. should respond to attacks on Americans.
From the standpoint of his base, Mr. Trump's refusal to be drawn into premature responses to the drone and refinery attacks demonstrated patience and restraint by responding with military force to planned attacks on American personnel and diplomats.
He demonstrated courage and resolve.
And then he has an interview with Mike Pompeo, and he says, this is Mead writing, he says, with respect to Iran, the administration is confident that the combination of America's fracking revolution, which allows the U.S. to exclude Iranian oil from world markets without risking a devastating rise in prices, the dramatic infotech-enabled increase in the effectiveness of American sanctions and continuing U.S. military superiority has given America the advantage over Iran.
Iran is in a box.
The policy of extreme economic pressure through sanctions continues to weaken their economy.
From Washington's perspective, Iran only has three choices.
It can continue to resist while its domestic economy crashes.
It can launch a large-scale attack on Americans and then justify a large-scale attack back.
Or it can enter into serious negotiations over ending its nuclear program, its missile program, and its scheme of terror and subversion in neighboring states.
Any of those choices that it makes, we win.
And so that's basically he's saying that Trump does have a plan.
And Trump's plan is partly gut, is partly gut reaction to his base, but it's also guided by Mike Pompeo, who is a cautious thinker and a guy with a lot of foreign policy experience.
It is much, much different.
You have to remember that the press is not just leftist.
The press is not just leftist.
They're also ignorant.
Ben Rhodes is right.
They know nothing.
And the reports that you're seeing are just as much propaganda as they are anything else.
All right, we got to take a break and say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, but come on over to dailywire.com and subscribe because, why?
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All right.
So meanwhile, while the left is mourning the death of dear, dear Solomoni, oh, the way the wind tickled his hair, the smile that wrinkled his nose, the poetry that he read before he murdered us, it's just to be missed.
The left is also mourning the destruction of the poor, poor people in Hollywood by Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes.
And there is an amazing, amazing reaction to what happened.
Now, I played the clips yesterday.
I'm not going to play them again.
But if you haven't heard or you haven't seen it going around, Gervais got up at this thing and basically said, you know, you work for Apple, you work for Amazon, you work for Disney, and these are people who basically abuse their workers.
Apple has used slave workers in China.
Amazon is not treating its workers well.
Disney is kowtowing to the Chinese tyrants and basically editing its material, even at ABC News, which Disney owns.
And so don't get up and make speeches about politics because you're hypocrites.
Don't get up and make speeches to people about politics.
You can't tell people anything about politics.
Get your prize.
Thank your agent.
Thank your gods.
Sit down.
That's what he said.
And then he went on to make fun of them.
And it was really quite, quite amazing.
Now, my friend Alfonso Rachel, whom I love, Zoe, he put out a video saying, conservatives are going nuts for Ricky Gervais, but why should we suddenly care what Hollywood people are saying?
We don't usually care.
We always say we don't care what the Hollywood people think.
But look, we feel that they use their influence unfairly.
We feel that the speeches that they make at the award shows are just the naked expression of the leftism that infests all their entertainments, that infests every single thing that you see, almost.
I mean, there are very few right-wing entertainments, very few pro-freedom entertainments, because this is the thing.
This is what I really want to talk about, is the fact that this is not about right or left.
Ricky Gervais is certainly, certainly not a conservative.
He hates conservatives.
He's not a religious person.
I happen to like him because he actually owns property near me and he allows me to clip off the tops of his trees so I can have a better view of LA, which I've always appreciated.
So he's a good neighbor.
He's a good neighbor, but he's not a conservative.
And he is baffled why everybody's attacking him.
The LA Times reporter Lorraine Ali gave him a good scolding.
She said the Golden Globe's mood was already sober thanks to an impeachment, threat of war with Iran, and Australian bushfires.
The last thing anyone needed was Ricky Gervais there telling them they sucked.
Well, first of all, that's the first thing they needed.
That is what Hollywood has needed for a long time and needs every single day, needs to be slapped in the kisser every single day.
These are pompous people who are absolutely privileged, who have a talent for reading lines that other people wrote and pretending to be people that they're not, pretending to be heroic police officers that they're not, pretending to be heroic soldiers that they're not.
That's their talent.
That's their skill.
God love them.
I love watching a good actor work.
But they have no business lecturing to us.
It used to be when actors came to town, you locked up your daughters because they were known to be rapscallions.
Today, actors come to town and we give them limousines and put them up in big hotels and listen to their political views.
We should still be locking up our daughters, as Harvey Weinstein proved.
So he's being attacked.
And Gervais goes on and tweets how the F can teasing huge corporations and the richest, most privileged people in the world be considered right-wing.
And the reason he says this is because, like all liberal people, left-wing people, he never hears from conservatives except through left-wing venues.
Okay, this is an article I wrote a long time ago for the Los Angeles Times.
It was called the Rush Limbaugh Challenge.
I'm sure you can find it online.
I said, you people who hate Rush Limbaugh have never listened to Rush Limbaugh.
What you've listened to is excerpts from Rush Limbaugh sent to you by the left to make you hate him.
This happens to me all the time.
Media Matters does this.
They pluck out things.
They pluck them out of context.
They take jokes and make them sound serious.
They do all these things to make people angry.
Because when you get angry, they can use you as a tool for the political philosophy that will enslave you.
So I put forward a challenge.
I said, go ahead and just listen to three hours of Rush and see if he makes sense.
Because a lot of times, I mean, that's what changed Andrew Breitbart brought him over to the right was simply listening to Rush and thinking, hey, this guy actually is making sense.
So I challenged them.
So the LA Times went out and interviewed a bunch of left-wingers, left-wing, big, big Hollywood players, and got them to respond to my article.
And every single one of them quoted excerpts that had been given to them by the left.
They actually proved my point.
And I had neighbors coming up to me saying, boy, they sure showed you, didn't they?
And I said, no, they proved my point.
All they did was quote a thing.
So all Ricky Gervais knows about conservatives is what he hears from leftists.
And he doesn't understand that American conservatism is actually different than European conservatism.
It does not have to do with blood and soil or not only with blood and soil.
We're proud of our country.
We love our country.
But it is a creedal philosophy.
That doesn't mean that it is disembodied in space.
It is manifested by the avatar of America.
America is the incarnation of our ideals, and we can't separate.
You couldn't lift out our population and put another population in here and have them suddenly become America.
We're formed by our history.
We're formed by our landmass.
reformed by our presence in our population, but we are also able to accept more people into our country than other places.
And we're able to spread our philosophy without conquest because we are governed by ideas.
And those ideas grow out of the Bible.
They grow out of the idea that all men are created and women are created in the image of God.
And therefore, that is why we started to think over the centuries that they have equal rights, that all people are born endowed by God, endowed by their creator, with equal rights and are to be treated equally before the law.
They're not going to be equal.
They're not going to be equal.
I can't play basketball like Michael Jordan.
I'm not going to be a basketball player.
I could stand out and practice for 10,000 hours.
I would never have a shot.
I have a terrible, terrible basketball shot.
I will never have that skill.
I'll never have that talent.
We're not going to be equal.
We're going to be treated equally.
That is the idea.
And so what Gervais and all of these guys don't understand is they don't understand that we are actually, the conservatives are actually the liberals.
When you talk about class, that's why we talk about classical liberalism.
But what they do understand is that they're under attack.
And that is why you're having comedians coming out and fighting and leading the fight, okay?
Because as Saul Alinsky pointed out, the kind of leftist radical, he pointed out that mockery is a tremendous, tremendous tool.
So guys like Dave Chappelle and Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher and Bill Burr, these aren't conservative people necessarily.
These are all people who want to shatter political correctness.
Why?
Because it is a tool of pomposity and slavery.
It is a tool of the establishment.
It is a tool of the deep state.
If you can't say things, if you can't mock the people who are over you, you can't point out their hypocrisy.
You can't do what I did in the opening segment when I was talking about Harvey Weinstein and point out that these guys are hypocrites.
That maybe, maybe, you know, it's not always true that hypocrites have bad ideas.
A person can be a serial adulterer, but if he preaches against adultery, he's still preaching the right thing.
But I believe that the feminism that these guys preach and their abuse of women are connected.
That's what I believe.
But you can't do that if you have to be politically correct, if you're going to be shouted down, if people are going to scream, if people are going to demand that you lose sponsors, that you'll be taken off social media.
You can't do that.
These comedians, whose job it is, their job, it is their job to prick pomposity, they can't do it if they can't speak.
You know, it's really interesting.
The Babylon Bee, which has become the second funniest conservative satire on the internet.
I mean, obviously it's not as funny as our satires here, but the Babylon Bee has become hilarious.
They really have.
Recently, they basically moved from just doing pure evangelical comedy to doing more broad-based political comedy, and it has been hilarious.
And they put out a thing saying that the DNC called for the flag to be waved at half mast because of the death of Solmani.
And this got like 500,000, it got shared like 500,000 times.
And a guy at CNN, let me see if I can find his name.
Oh, yeah, he started complaining.
A CNN commentator started to complain that to put this in perspective, this is the same number of engagements the top New York Times and CNN stories on Facebook had over the past week.
A lot of people sharing the satirical story on Facebook don't know it's satire.
That's not what he's worried about.
What he's worried about is they do know it's satire.
What he's worried about is he himself, CNN, the CNN perspective, the leftist perspective, is being laughed at.
That's what he's worried about.
They do not, when they take me seriously, when they take my jokes and put them out there as if they're serious, when they take the Babylon B and fact check it, and they said Snopes goes out and says, well, is this satire true?
They don't think it's true.
They don't think anybody believes it's true.
It's well-marked as satire.
Everyone reading the B knows it's satire.
They are afraid that it's satire.
That's what they're afraid of.
They are afraid they're being laughed at.
To not be laughed at is the protection of tyrants.
It is.
It is the protection of tyrants.
The rest of us, we have a sense of humor about ourselves and we have a sense of humor about them.
And that is what destroys the leftist philosophy because the leftist philosophy makes no moral sense.
Let me, as a final reflection, let me go back to talking about something else that I was massively attacked.
I'm being massively attacked now for saying the simple truth that women couldn't win a medieval sword fight or be in a medieval war battle with swords.
And now people are challenging me to a sword fight as if what you would be doing in a medieval battle is battling a 65-year-old scribe.
But that's not what would be happening.
You'd be battling somebody who was equal to yourself, except a man, so stronger and bigger.
He'd be as well trained and as young as you and as good shape, except you'd be a man stronger and bigger.
And all you have to do to prove that I'm wrong is mention a single contact sport that women, in which women can compete with men.
They can't.
The only sport that women can compete with men in is horse riding, maybe dressage, I think.
Maybe being a jockey, that would be one, because you're actually competing with the horse, not your bodies.
Anyway, the other thing that I was attacked for was my comments about Mr. Rogers, who, by the way, I'm not hostile toward Mr. Rogers.
I really kind of, I liked what he did for four-year-old kids.
I thought it was a good show for four-year-old kids.
What I was protesting about was the idea in Christianity and a lot of mainstream Christianity that manhood was somehow wrong, that you had to put forward this kind of metro-sexual idea.
And you see this in a lot of churches, that the pastor has to be a softly spoken guy like this.
He has to talk like this, no talk, and kind of have these feminine values.
And that's what I was protesting, because Jesus wasn't like that at all.
He was beating people up in the temple.
He was constantly yelling at people.
He was tough enough to withstand crucifixion when people threatened him.
So anyway, I was commenting about this because when this movie, It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood with Tom Hanks came out, all the left-wing critics were saying, oh, those were such beautiful days because we had civility and all this.
Anyway, I got to see the movie because I got sent the screener.
And it was good.
It was good.
Especially good was Tom Hanks.
Here he is singing the Mr. Rogers theme song and doing a performance that only Tom Hanks could have done.
It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor.
Would you be mine?
Could you be mine?
Please won't you be my neighbor?
What I love about Tom Hanks is he's like Jimmy Stewart.
He's always Tom Hanks.
At his best, he's always Tom Hanks, but he can put that persona into all these different people.
He's got a range.
Tom Hanks' Versatility00:02:26
He can't do anything.
Neither could Jimmy Stewart.
But what he does, he does brilliantly.
And I so prefer him to actors like Joaquin Phoenix, who is a great actor in his way, but has no connection to the audience whatsoever.
You can't tell who Joaquin Phoenix is.
You don't care about his characters.
You know, you might like the story he's in, The Joker, I thought was a pretty good movie, but you just don't care about that.
It's that kind of complete immersion in the part that takes you out of the character.
So Hanks plays Mr. Rogers, and they try to convey the fact that he's imperfect, certainly, and that he's a troubled guy.
In the article, the Esquire article that the picture is based on, they change it, they fictionalize it, but the Esquire article is based on, there is a suggestion that perhaps his sexuality is dubious, that we don't know what it is.
But in the movie, there is a wonderful scene where his wife says, the reporter says, how can he be like this?
How can he be so nice to everybody?
And the wife says, it's a practice.
It's a practice.
This is not the way he is.
This is the way he trains himself to be.
And that is suggestive of what is troubling our society.
And what we started with when we were talking about Harvey Weinstein is that you cannot just be who you are.
You must practice to be what you are meant to be.
You have to practice.
You have to practice to become the person that God made you to be.
And when we talk about the need for God in our politics, because I always think this is a very vague thing, we're talking about not necessarily obeying what this church says or that religion says.
We're talking about looking at the person that you're supposed to be, because each and every one of us knows that he is not who he is supposed to be.
Every single one of us.
Every single one, 100% of people, unless you happen to be a psychopath, we all know that we're not the person that we were meant to be, that we're flawed, that we're scarred, that we're broken, that something is wrong with us.
And we want to move toward that person.
And that doesn't happen naturally because the natural man, the natural woman, is a mess, is full of sin.
And that's the thing.
So that's the thing I really liked about this movie is it just shows you that this is a control he exercises on himself.
And it is a specifically Christian control.
He is shown on his knees with a Bible, praying for his friends.
And he was a Christian pastor.
And so this is an idea that we need to restore, I think, if we're going to restore real liberalism, is the idea that the natural man is a sinful man.
The natural order is a sinful order.
You have to move toward the spiritual, move toward the person you were meant to be.
I will be talking about this more tomorrow.
Natural Order Is Sinful00:01:12
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