Ben Shapiro dissects Iran’s missile strike after Soleimani’s killing, mocking media hysteria over an inch of snow while ignoring Trump’s restrained response—no U.S. casualties, minimal damage—yet framing Tehran sympathetically as a "minority" under attack. He ties CNN’s $250M Sandman settlement to liberal bias, exposing how outlets radicalize the left while paralyzing conservatives, then pivots to listener mail: a Christian actor debates artistic nudity, a father-in-law clashes over male protection norms, and a Navy-bound friend rejects traditional marriage for career ambition. The episode ties media corruption to political division, urging conservative pushback while blending geopolitics with personal ethics—all under 40 minutes. [Automatically generated summary]
An inch of snow fell on Washington, D.C. yesterday and the entire government shut down.
Scientists have since been working around the clock to see if they can get the phenomenon to repeat itself.
The scientists have calculated that each inch of snow per day will save Americans approximately $13 billion in federal spending.
And if they can create an inch of snow per day for the entire year, American citizens may finally achieve the founders' dream of becoming a free people.
Unfortunately, if the experiment is unsuccessful, it'll just be the same old crap.
At the Pentagon, generals were just sitting down to discuss the Iranian missile strike against American troops in Iraq when the inch of snow started falling, whereupon the joint chiefs rushed outdoors and began trying to catch the snowflakes on their tongues and build snowmen, before gathering by the fireside over a hot cup of cocoa to order the sinking of the entire Iranian Navy, followed by a sleigh ride and a snowball fight.
In the House of Representatives, the snowfall found Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats meeting to discuss impeachment, which they say is an urgent matter because President Trump has threatened the very future of constitutional governance by doing whatever the hell he was supposed to have done, according to witnesses who heard that other witnesses may have said yet another group of witnesses might have whispered something to Congressman Adam Schiff, who swore it was really, really bad, and why would he lie?
With the fate of the Republic at stake, the Democrats wanted to rush the impeachment process to the Senate, but that dang inch of snow started falling, so instead they all gathered at the window to gaze wistfully at the wintry scene and reminisce about the good old days before the voters found out they were communists.
In the Senate, everyone went home when the snow began to fall, except for Mitch McConnell, who hung around to confirm 726 new federal judges.
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-boo.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
So as of right this moment, President Trump has scored an enormous victory for America in Iran.
It is a brutal defeat for the terrorist Iranians and their allies, the American news media.
And it's the news media I want to talk about first, because the other important story yesterday was CNN's settlement with Covington Catholic school kid Nicholas Sandman in a $250 million defamation lawsuit.
Sandman, you'll remember, was the MAGA hat-wearing student who was accosted by loudmouth bigots who were black and a bullying activist who was Native American at last year's March for Life.
Sandman was then accosted by loudmouth, bigoted, bullying journalists who hadn't the faintest clue what they were talking about, but simply hated the boy because he supported Trump and assumed his tormentors were good guys because they were minorities.
They said awful things about Sandman.
Sandman sued.
CNN settled, and Sandman still has defamation suits outstanding against NBC and the Washington Post, and his lawyers say there'll be more to come.
I hope there will be, and I hope he wins every single one of them.
I'm a First Amendment purist.
I believe in free speech for everybody.
I don't want anyone censored.
I think hate speech laws are an unconstitutional abomination.
I think even truly reprehensible organizations like the Ku Klux Klan or NBC News should be allowed to speak their fetid minds.
But the mainstream media in this country is corrupt.
Its universal pro-liberal Democrat bias is bad for the country.
It makes it impossible to trust the news from major sources.
It makes it difficult to know what's true and what's not on any given day.
It leads to corruption on the left because bad actors like Adam Schiff and James Comey can lie and dissemble without ever being held to account.
And it radicalizes the left because it traps them inside an approving media bubble where they don't even know what the rest of the public believes.
It leads to paralysis on the right as Republicans and conservatives fear to speak even the simplest truths lest they be the target of the ugliest accusations of bigotry.
And on top of everything else, left-wing media bias alienates Americans one from another because it shields Democrat voters from opposing opinions and it enrages Republican voters with a continual downpour of unfair anti-Republican news.
If I had to estimate, I would say that about 30 to 40 percent of the political anger in this country would disappear if we had a fair-minded press or even an equally divided press.
But with one newsman after another delivering only the Democrat side of the story, backed up by one comedian after another making jokes about Republicans and movie after movie supporting only the left's point of view, it is impossible for Democrats to develop fair-mindedness.
And it's impossible for Republicans not to feel that they're under attack by the elite corporate news and entertainment establishment.
And that's not even to mention left-wing Silicon Valley and their skewed Google searches and YouTube and Twitter censorship.
But the news media especially needs to be reformed.
They're disgusting.
Their coverage of the Saran story has been disgusting.
We're going to talk all about it.
If I could have them tarred and feathered, I would.
But because of the First Amendment, in which I deeply believe we can't force reform on them.
And that's as it should be.
I really do believe that.
We shouldn't be able to force them to reform.
But that's no reason that we shouldn't bring pressure on them to do the moral thing, which is not to create conservative newscasts.
It's not even to create patriotic newscasts.
It's just to give both sides of every story fairly.
And to do that, they need to hire people who support both sides.
They have to divide the editorial powers in their newsrooms between those who voted for one party and those who voted for the other.
That includes people who voted for Donald J. Trump.
If I had to guess right now, I would say the number of Trump supporters with real editorial power at the news networks is at around, I'd say, zero.
Maybe that's overestimating, but not by much.
We should sue them like Nick Sandman did whenever we can.
We should create organizations that sue them and threaten to sue them, the way the ACLU threatens suits and intimidates anyone who dares to say worship God in public or say something patriotic.
We should boycott the news media and their sponsors wherever it will help, and we should continue to attack them and criticize them and expose them on a regular basis, and we should cheer and support the President of the United States and anyone else when they lambase them as they deserve.
They really, they're really awful.
I mean, I'm not just saying it.
They are just terrible.
We should let them know what it is we want.
We shouldn't just attack them.
We should let them know what it is we want.
We do not want to end the press.
We do not want the press to stop picking on the powerful, let them pick on the powerful.
We just want them to be fair without Democrat hacks like George Stephanopoulos and Chuck Todd and Maggie Haberman at the New York Times, a former newspaper, without those Democrat hacks leading attacks on the opposition under the guise of reporting the news.
The media should make the change because it's the right thing to do, the fair thing to do, and the journalistic thing to do.
But if they won't reform out of conscience, we should make them feel the heat in every way we can until they start to serve the public instead of the big government leftism of the corporate elite.
And we should never ever bow to them and just accept that this is the way things are.
I keep hearing conservatives say that.
It's just the way that it is.
The press is against us.
It doesn't have to be that way.
The settlement of the Covington Kidd lawsuit should only be the beginning.
If Donald Trump is right about anything, he's right about this.
The media has become the enemy of the people.
They're the enemy of the people because they're the friends of only some of the people all of the time.
And I'll show you how this applies to RAN in just a second.
First, let's talk about NetSuite.
You know, you got to know what your business is doing.
And one of the problems, I know I have this problem.
I'm essentially a business.
I sell my services to people.
And it's really hard to keep track of all the numbers that matter to your business because you've got all these different programs doing different things.
And you have to turn and find your numbers in different places.
NetSuite solves that problem.
NetSuite from Oracle is a business management software that handles every aspect of your business in an easy-to-use cloud platform, giving you the visibility and control you need to grow.
With NetSuite, you save time, money, and unneeded headaches by managing sales, finance, and accounting, orders, and HR instantly right from your desktop or your phone.
That's why NetSuite is the world's number one cloud business system.
Right now, NetSuite is offering you valuable insights with a free guide, seven key strategies to grow your profits at netsuite.com/slash claven.
That's netsuite.com slash clavin to download your free guide, seven key strategies to grow your profits, netsuite.com slash claven.
So obviously, the first thing you have to know to grow your profits is how do you spell clavin?
Because if you don't know, it's K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no E's in Claven.
There are no E's in Claven.
I just said that.
I said that.
I could even see it.
It's like, I hear voices.
I hear voices spelling my name over and over again.
The mailbag is coming up.
So all your problems will be solved in just a few moments.
I Hear Voices00:11:32
But first, let us talk about this thing that happened last night in Iran.
Iran launched a missile attack in retaliation for the killing of terrorist leader Qasam Soleimani and his terrorist leader pal and his terrorist leader friends who were all around him.
So, you know, I was talking about Covington.
The problem with Covington was the anti-American bias of the press, but also the racism.
They assume that the kids being harassed by black bigots and an irritating Native American bully must have been in the wrong because they were wearing a MAGA hat and because they were white, okay?
That's why.
And it's the same thing.
They assume that there must be something about the Arab world that is right because they're somehow minorities.
They hate Israel because Israel has defeated the Arabs who are trying to kill them.
And so they assume that the least powerful people must be the good people.
Instead, they do not understand that we are the good guys.
So after all this talk, and you know how these mulahs talk, we will visit on the great Satan the terrible vengeance of the people.
You know, this whole nonsense they pull off.
They fired a bunch of missiles into the dirt.
And then, and then, even as they were doing it, saying, and there should be no retaliation, please don't retaliate.
Because they know we could just, we could, really, with a drone, we could have a 17-year-old kid with an Xbox controller who could destroy their entire Navy in an afternoon.
Their Air Force, which is really, you know, those balsa wood things with rubber band propellers they used to have, that's their Air Force.
We could shut down their ports.
They know this.
They know we could eliminate them economically in a heartbeat.
So they just fired a couple of missiles to the thing is, in the Iranian government, you have the bad guys and then you have the slightly less bad guys.
Okay, that's who's running the government.
And the bad guys want to have a massive retaliation to save face.
And the slightly less bad guys are going, yeah, I don't know.
Those Americans are kind of powerful.
Maybe we shouldn't do it.
Today, this morning, just before I came to work, President Trump came out and announced the results of this missile attack.
Let's play the first cut of Trump this morning.
It's Cut 11.
As long as I'm President of the United States, Iran will never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.
Good morning.
I'm pleased to inform you the American people should be extremely grateful and happy.
No Americans were harmed in last night's attack by the Iranian regime.
We suffered no casualties.
All of our soldiers are safe and only minimal damage was sustained at our military bases.
Our great American forces are prepared for anything.
Iran appears to be standing down, which is a good thing for all parties concerned and a very good thing for the world.
So he's basically taking a victory lap and he's not escalating the conflict.
He's saying he understands they saved FACE, they shot some missiles at the dirt.
He gets it, and he's going to let them off the hook.
But he's also going to impose more sanctions on them, and we'll get to that in a second.
But the thing is, let's just go over this for a minute.
Let's go over this for a minute.
Let's go over what happened.
Iran has been attacking our targets for a long time, right?
And one of the things is, sometimes, I say this as a novelist, sometimes when you want to understand things, it's best to take people at their word.
It's best to not psychoanalyze them or impose your idea of what they're saying.
Just take them at their word.
So we had the Iranians shot down, I think, two of our drones, right?
They've shot down two of our drones.
They've attacked foreign oil tankers.
They attacked oil plants in Saudi Arabia.
And each time Trump stood down, and one time he even sent the planes ready to launch when they destroyed one of our drones.
He sent an attack and then called it back.
And again and again, the press says, oh, he doesn't know what he's doing.
He's weak.
He's sending signals of weakness.
And Trump said, no, the red line is if they kill an American.
December 27th, they were shooting, lobbying missiles into a work site in Kirkuk, Iraq, and they blew up an ordnance dump and they killed an American contractor, right?
Not good.
New Year comes, and so we responded with missile attacks, and people were killed.
They sent in some missile attacks, airstrikes on five sites controlled by the Iranian militia in Syria and Iraq, and the airstrikes killed maybe two dozen people.
Then the Iranian militia attacked our embassy in Baghdad, okay?
And remember the New York Times saying mourners and protesters.
But no, it was Iranian-backed people attacking our embassy in Baghdad to stave off another Benghazi.
Trump defended the site, sent Marines in, told them that we were going to protect the site.
Nobody was hurt.
And then he went after Soleimani.
That's what happened, right?
That's the series of events.
Totally decent, good strategic response to what was actually happening in the region.
Let me just play you a little bit, a montage, this I think is from our friend at Newsbusters, a montage of a media reaction to this completely reasonable and strategic action that has made America safer.
Is there a new deviancy in the American culture that we now support murder killing of political leaders?
Millions of Iranians mourn the death of Qasim Soleimani today.
A stunning show of solidarity.
The supreme leader of Iran weeping and praying over a coffin draped in the Iraqi flag.
He was such a legendary figure, raised not only in terms of what he actually did, but mythologically.
Suggesting the world is a safer place this morning.
You would be hard-pressed to find people in this region who buy this, who assassinate him.
Do they think that's going to make us safer?
One reckless act by the American president.
Did the president make a major mistake?
Do you believe there was an imminent threat from Iran?
Do we have reason to trust what this administration says?
Prove it.
Donald Trump still has no idea how much this is going to dial up conflict in the Middle East.
Did he just make a decision to keep himself alive politically that put us and our families at moral risk?
Our troops will be put in danger because of the vanity of Donald Trump.
This is a massive escalation.
irreversible path to all out war with Iran.
Blood will be spilled.
American blood because of it.
Alright, that last guy we just threw in there.
But still, you know, they can't treat Republicans and Democrats fairly.
They can't show both sides of Republicans and Democrats.
But when the Iranians, a terrorist regime, are fighting with the Americans, they take the Iranian side.
They can give full measure to the Iranian point of view, but not to the.
And that thing from Chris Cuomo, where he looks at the camera and says, prove it.
I mean, bite me.
That is absurd.
What is he going to say?
That Soleimani was not killing American soldiers, that he was not plotting more terrorist attacks.
It is incredible.
And the sense of history, none.
There's no sense of history at all.
That the reason Donald Trump has to deal with this is because of Barack Obama's strategy to appease Iran.
The idea was, this is racism.
It's the idea that if somehow we're nice to Iran, Iran is suddenly going to abandon its philosophy, its ideas, its goals.
Not going to happen.
They're adults.
They're grown-up people.
They have a philosophy of murder.
They have a philosophy of power.
They have a philosophy of radical Islam that they are living by.
That's what they're going to do.
So Trump made this point in his speech this morning.
He reminded people of where this happened, and he seized the moment of his victory to actually push forward a narrative that is the truth.
This is cut 13.
Iran's hostilities substantially increased after the foolish Iran nuclear deal was signed in 2013 and they were given $150 billion, not to mention $1.8 billion in cash.
Instead of saying thank you to the United States, they chanted death to America.
In fact, they chanted death to America the day the agreement was signed.
Then Iran went on a terror spree, funded by the money from the deal, and created hell in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
The missiles fired last night at us and our allies were paid for with the funds made available by the last administration.
I mean, that is the truth.
That's the truth that is not being reported.
It's like it never happened.
All that time, all that time that the media was telling us that Barack Obama was the light worker.
He was an obsidian wall that we couldn't even make jokes about.
He was the second coming.
Barbara Walter said we thought he was the second coming of the Messiah.
Some of us maybe thought that.
All that time, the guy was a screw-up.
He was a massive, massive, incompetent screw-up.
Not because, I don't think he was an evil guy.
I think he basically had an academic philosophy that had never been tested.
He had never had to deal with the real world.
And he was such a narcissist.
He was such a narcissist that when the real world said, no, your philosophy is wrong, he wouldn't change his mind.
Even Jimmy Carter, the second worst president of my lifetime, changed his mind when he saw, he thought, he thought we were being too mean to the Soviets.
When he saw the Soviets invade Afghanistan, he went, hmm, you know, I was wrong.
And he changed his mind.
Obama never changed his mind.
Come on.
Come on, man.
He thought, I don't know.
Is it me?
Am I the only one hearing these voices?
I hope that's not true.
He just went on with his idea that somehow Iran was going to be brought in to the loving community of nations.
He did not give them the respect that they deserve to know that they have a philosophy.
They're hateful murderers.
And that's how they behave.
Let us talk about Zuvio, Ashford University.
You know, it's the new year, and I've made some New Year's resolutions.
I make New Year's resolutions about work.
I also would like to learn new things.
And if you want to learn new things, Ashford University is a great way to go.
It's convenient and flexible.
Ashford University's online master's degree program allows you to learn at your own pace.
You can study wherever you're the most comfortable studying.
You can take one course at a time or you can enroll in one class at Ashford, and that means you are considered a full-time student.
The enrollment is easy.
The GRE, GMAT, and other standardized test scores are not required for enrolling at Ashford University.
And Ashford University is fully accredited by WASC Senior College and University Commission.
This is a great way to move your education forward.
So get ready to grab new opportunities.
Start your master's degree today.
Enroll now by going to ashford.edu slash Andrew.
That's ashford.edu slash Andrew to start your master's degree today, ashford.edu slash Andrew.
So this brings us back to Covington.
Why We Stand Firm00:15:45
Now, let's just, you remember how they covered that montage we played of how they covered Trump's behavior.
Let's now play a month.
We're going to play a montage of the way they covered the Covington incident.
But let's go back and just remind you of what happened.
Now, again, the new story here is that CNN has settled a $250 million defamation lawsuit against Nick Sandman.
I mean that Nick Sandman brought against CNN.
So Sandman was part of a group of these Catholic school kids who had gone to the March for Life, the anti-abortion March for Life.
And they were standing outside the Lincoln Memorial and there was another march going on, the Indigenous Peoples March.
And they started to be verbally assaulted by those, what are they called?
The Hebrew, I can't remember now what they're called.
They're black Hebrew Israelites, right?
And they started shouting anti-gay slurs and all kinds of insults at them.
And the kids, there was some back and forth going on.
And finally, this activist, we'll call him, this Native American activist, got in Sandsman's face and started beating a drum in his face.
It was really aggressive and really bullying.
And Sandman, the guy's a kid.
He's trying to be polite and respectful.
So he smiled at him.
And all this was recorded as a smirk.
Let's play this montage of the way the press treated this kid before they had any idea what was going on.
By the way, this thing went viral.
This piece of video went viral before anybody really knew what had happened.
But that didn't stop our press.
No, sorry.
A crowd of teenagers surrounding a Native American elder and other activists as one smirking high school student blocks the elder's path.
We feel that President Trump is giving license to some of this behavior.
Another man of peace stands face to face with bigotry.
The elder says the encounter with the group, an intense stare down with the one teen in particular, leaves him fearful of the future.
This kid in the front thinks it's somehow acceptable to stand in the face of this Native American man.
It's not just him that disturbs me.
It's the others.
It's his schoolmates there that are having fun with it.
They think it's funny.
It interests me that we're at a day and age where we see things like this occur.
Those protesters who were on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the Native American man who was beating the drum, Nathan Phillips, and those kids in the Make America Great Again hats that were kind of smirking at him and kind of looking down their noses at him.
We'd only hope that they're in the minority, hopefully, that kind of action.
And things got really ugly.
I mean, Bill Maher called the kid a dirty name that I won't repeat.
One of the CNN contributors went on Twitter and said he'd like to punch the kid in the face.
Now, compare this, by the way, to Greta Thunberg, right, who is an actual political activist, not just somebody standing around.
This is Greta Thunberg, an actual political activist.
If you go out and say anything about her, oh my goodness, what a terrible, terrible human.
I got a letter this morning.
I got a letter this morning, just a string of like Tourette-style curses because I was on the radio and I insulted Greta.
And so this guy wrote to me just this, you know, spewing curses and four-letter words and insults at me.
And, you know, I thought, well, no wonder he likes a hysterical 16-year-old girl because he obviously is an hysterical 16-year-old girl.
But I mean, you know, suddenly, if you've got a child who will defend a left-wing policy, then he's sacrosanct.
Oh, it's the children.
How could you possibly say anything bad about the children, right?
But, but if a kid is just standing there and he's wearing a MAGA hat, all bets are off.
So here are the two elements that are the same as the Iran reporting.
Trump, who will stand in for all conservatives and all Republicans.
Because remember, I know I say this a lot, but it's always good to remember, they called George W. Bush Hitler, right?
They said about George W. Bush all the same things they say about Donald Trump.
Now, Donald Trump is more aggressive, and he's got that big mouth, and he says all the things that he says, you know, so that maybe that maybe stirs the pot a little bit.
But George W. Bush stood there and took it, and he never fought back.
And until the very end, he never even raised his voice against them.
And what did they do?
They treated him like crap.
He was a genuine gentleman, and they treated him like garbage.
The only difference between George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump in their relationship to the press is that Trump fights back.
So that's the one element that was the same.
The kids are wearing the MAGA hats.
So they stood in for Trump, who stands in for all conservatives, all people who believe in the Constitution and don't believe that we need to be governed by experts, that we need to be governed by the deep state, that we need to be governed, that we need to keep our mouths shut and do what they tell us to do, that we need to give up our Second Amendment rights, that we need to give up our First Amendment rights if we violate some holy dictum of the left.
You know, I mean, it has gotten to the point.
I mean, this is, this isn't, I wish this were an exaggeration.
But if I say that, oh, by the way, women don't have penises, you can get fired.
You can get fired from your venue for doing that.
You can lose sponsors for saying that.
It's the simplest truth in the world.
It's like going on saying the sky is blue, but some left-winger somewhere decides the sky is not blue, that blue is a color too close to white, you know, so you're being a bigot when you say the sky is blue, or when you say that a dark sky is bad, and they take your job away.
I mean, that really is the place that we're at, right?
So they basically represent, the Covington kids represented conservatives by supporting Trump.
And the other thing is the racism and the intersectionality.
And this plays into the Iran coverage as well.
The idea that there is some kind of mysterious chart of who suffers most, of who is persecuted most.
And of course, at the bottom of the chart is the white man, and the white man is responsible so that you can actually say anything you want about the white man.
You can spew any bigotry you want, any hate that you want against a white man, which is just, you know, to me, I'm going to say it straight.
To me, a toothless Klansman in a pool hall going off against black people is only just as despicable as a female black Harvard graduate writing in the New York Times about the evil of whiteness.
To me, they are on the same train going to the same flaming hell.
Okay, they're doing exactly the same thing.
That's an offense to the image of God.
It is racism, pure and simple.
How dare you?
How dare I?
I know.
And now I'm just hearing her in my head.
It's my other personality.
A lot of people don't know that Greta and I, you never see us in the same place.
But you know, so this is the thing.
It's the bigotry, the intersectionality, which is only bigotry.
That's all it is.
All intersectionality is, is racism.
So that means that the Iranians have something to say.
Do the Iranians have anything to say?
I don't think so.
I don't think they have anything to say.
I don't think they have anything that we need to respect as a philosophy.
I haven't heard it at any rate.
If they have something to say that can be respected, I'm willing to listen.
So Donald Trump is evil because he's Donald Trump, because he's a Republican, because he's a conservative, because he stands against the deep state.
And of course, the Iranians are good because they're brown and because they are against the West.
They're basically against freedom in the West.
And when we talk about the West, that's what we're talking about.
We're talking about individual freedom and the fact that ordinary people, not experts, can have an opinion.
That's what we're talking about.
So, you know, there was an interview on NBC.
They took time off from covering up for Harvey Weinstein, and they interviewed Nick Sandman.
And just the very tenor of the questions.
I mean, at least they gave him a chance to respond, and that's a good thing.
But the tenor of the questions, listen to the tenor of the question.
Do you feel from this experience that you owe anybody an apology?
Do you see your own fault in any way?
As far as standing there, I had every right to do so.
I don't, my position is that I was not disrespectful to Mr. Phillips.
I respect him.
I'd like to talk to him.
I mean, in hindsight, I wish we could have walked away and avoided the whole thing.
But I can't say that I'm sorry for listening to him and standing there.
This morning, 16-year-old Nick Sandman standing by his actions in this moment gone viral.
The junior at Kentucky's Covington Catholic High School, now the face of this Lincoln Memorial confrontation with Native American elder Nathan Phillips.
And what's it been like to be at the center of the storm?
Well, I've been, it's weird to see your face on television.
I've been reading a lot.
And, you know, I've also been getting a lot of messages from people both support and a lot of hateful things.
So, I mean, you turn this kid's life into a circus, and then he has a right to sue you, and he should.
He's not a public figure.
You can't just say he was a public figure, and so we had the right to say anything we want.
I keep hearing from conservatives, it's always been this way, or this is the way it is in Europe, or the press has never been objective.
All of those things are true.
I don't think we have to stand for it.
I don't think we should stand for it.
I don't think we should accept the way things are.
The press is one of the most damaging institutions in our country.
It divides us from one another.
It keeps us from finding out the truth.
It makes it really difficult to find out the truth.
It's anti-patriotic.
It's anti-American.
It is anti-freedom.
And I think it's time we fought back.
And I think we all have to fight back against it.
I don't think we can just sit here and let it happen.
And conservatives are, if there were no leftists, conservatives would be the stupidest people in the country because we don't build institutions to compete.
We don't build institutions to beat them.
And we need to start.
All right, I got a break from Facebook and YouTube, but come over to DailyWire.com and subscribe.
You can get the fabulous leftist tears tumbler.
I make these myself.
I carve them out of obsidian in my home.
I'm lying, but still, you get that.
And you can be in the mailbag.
And when you're in the mailbag, you get to ask me any question, and all my answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life.
For the better?
Let's find out.
It is time now for the mailbag coming up.
Woo!
Mailbag.
Where's my scream?
Give me my scream.
Thank you.
Because otherwise, I just have Greta Thunberg in my head saying, how dare you over and over again.
See, I can't stand it anymore.
Give me my medications.
Okay, from Meraki.
Hi, Mr. Clavin.
I'm an actor, writer, and director pursuing a career in the entertainment industry.
I'm also a Christian.
I've heard you talk about the importance of truth in storytelling.
Topics like sex, violence, and other sin should not be avoided altogether because God is the God of the real world.
I completely agree with this analysis, but is there a line?
For instance, is it sinful for a Christian actor to do a sex scene?
Really good question.
First of all, of course, there's a line that depends upon your intention and what you're trying to create with the scene.
If you are creating pornography, I think pornography is really bad for people.
I'm not going to talk about sinfulness.
I just think, you know, I'm not the judge of sin.
I know some people think I am because me and God, you never see us in the same place at the same time.
But there may be other reasons for that.
But I'm not going to talk about the sin of it.
I'm just going to talk about right and wrong.
You know, I think pornography is destructive.
I think it is bad for people.
I think it's degrading to people.
And I don't think you should write it or create it.
I think that using violence to titillate is a bad thing to do.
And I never, you know, one of the resolutions I made very early on in my career after writing a very, very violent scene is I made the resolution that wherever I could, instead of having violence, I could do something else.
I would do it.
And if I used violence, it would always have meaning.
It would always be imbued with some kind of characterological or thematic meaning.
And I would never just do a violent scene just to have the thrill of it.
But I tried to make my violence scenes very real.
And sometimes I've had a hard time getting blurbs from my colleagues, my fellow thriller writers, because they would say, oh, that violence scene is too ugly.
And I would say, well, violence is not supposed to be exciting.
It's supposed to be ugly.
It's supposed to really look like suffering.
So yeah, I think your purposes matter.
What you're trying to create matters.
The specific question you asked, though, about doing a sex scene is really interesting because while I think some sex scenes are valid, I think there are too many of them.
I think it's really, I mean, I could go on about this subject for a long time, but I won't.
That I think that it is really interesting that if, for instance, a couple has a baby, you know they have sex.
You know they had sex.
You don't really have to see it.
The sex is already there.
But I think a sex scene can communicate things and can be worthwhile and can be really interesting.
And there's always been sex in art.
It has always powered art.
And it should because it powers life as well.
But, but when they ask you to take off your clothes, and I get this question from young women all the time who want to get into the business, am I going to have to take off my shirt?
And I don't see why an actress, in order to have a career, has to expose herself.
I think that, you know, I think it's really wrong.
We do that to women.
Women, I love a nude scene as much as anyone.
I'll be perfectly blunt and honest.
But I have to tell you, I don't think I have ever seen, I don't think I have ever seen a nude scene that needed to be there.
I don't think I have ever seen an essential nude scene.
So look, these are questions you have to decide for yourself.
You have to decide what kind of career you want to have, how you're going to represent yourself.
But I seriously think that we abuse actresses specifically by making them undress in order to do their jobs.
I mean, I love actors and actresses, not personally, but I love watching them work.
I love what they do.
I can't do what they do, and it's really interesting to me.
But I don't see why you should have to expose yourself to do that job.
And I've never seen a sex scene that needed to be there, even though I enjoy them all.
From TH, my son hit his sister on Christmas Day in front of my father-in-law.
I told my son that he should never hit girls.
My father-in-law piped in with the statement, what if they hit him first?
My point of view is that it's my son's job to always protect women, and he should do his best to diffuse and restrain rather than hit them back.
He made the statement that I was in the army, and I should know that girls can stand up for themselves.
I told him that, yes, with a gun against a man, I could, but without a gun or a knife, I don't stand a chance.
I feel that we're teaching young men that they don't need to protect women, and it's leaving men without a purpose, role, or drive.
It also puts too much pressure on women.
Am I wrong in the way I'm teaching my son?
Well, first of all, let me say that I agree with your general point.
I agree with your general point that men should protect women and women should be, honor the fact that men do that when they do it.
It is the thing all the week long I've been attacked for two weeks now.
I've been attacked for talking about the witcher and saying it was unrealistic that a woman could be in a battle, in a medieval battle, fighting with a sword and go, oh, yes, they could.
Yes, they could.
No, they couldn't.
I mean, that there's an exception somewhere, that there might be a woman or a tribe of women.
Fine, but it wouldn't happen.
It's not, you couldn't, women can't compete in contact sports, which is essentially what that kind of battle would be with a man who is equally trained and equally young and equally fit.
And if you lie about it, men feel they don't have to stand up for women.
If you lie about it, if you lie about what women are, men feel they don't have to stand up for women, and they should feel that they should stand up for women.
They should feel it's their responsibility, and women should feel it's their responsibility to respect men and honor them that they would take that risk and do that thing that they do.
Marrying a Way of Life00:08:18
I mean, it happens in shooting sites that the men throw themselves in front of the women.
It happens again and again, and women should respect them that they do that.
Now, in this particular situation, it is true that a man has a right to defend himself even from a woman, right?
Because, you know, a woman can hurt you.
A woman can attack you in such a way that she hurts you.
And your son does not have to be bullied by his sister.
He does not have to just sit there and take it from his sister.
And that's important.
It's an important distinction.
And you have to be the cop.
You have to police it and make sure that he's not being bullied by his sister.
The other element to this is your father-in-law ought to keep his mouth shut.
I'm not saying you shouldn't yell at him.
Don't make an issue of it.
But, you know, I am a father-in-law.
You know, your kids, I love the way my daughter and her husband raised my grandson.
But every now and again, you will have to bite your tongue because nobody is exactly the same and nobody does it the same way.
And in-laws should keep their mouths shut.
And so should parents, by the way.
I mean, I think this is something, unless you see some abuse or something that's really, really wrong or they ask for your advice, you should just keep out of it.
And sometimes it's hard to do.
Sometimes you have to bite your tongue, but he ought to bite his tongue.
Anyway, so there it is.
It's a little more complicated than what you say.
You can't tell him that he can never hit his sister back or defend himself.
He should be able to defend himself and he shouldn't be bullied by his sister because that just will make him bitter and angry and violent later on.
All right, from Alistair, dear spherical sorcerer of the multiverse, Supreme.
I love your show and credit it for playing a huge role in my conversion to the Catholic faith, which is how I met my new fiancé.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
That's great.
We're going to be married at the end of the year.
And while I have no doubts about her, I'm a little nervous about marriage in general.
Both of our parents were divorced, so that worries me.
I'm also a naval officer scheduled to deploy a few months after we get married.
So statistically, we're on the lower side of likelihood to be happily married.
More important to us than anything is to be good spouses to each other and raise kids to be good people.
But with so many obstacles with deployments and our own family issues, I'm feeling rather discouraged and unsure about how to divorce proof our marriage.
Any help or advice you have to offer is much appreciated.
Well, first, it's great that you're thinking about this.
It is great that you recognize that it's an issue and it's great that you see that it's something you guys are going to have to deal with and something that may haunt you.
But of course, you should go forward and you shouldn't be, you know, why be discouraged at all, right?
I think the first thing you should do is sit down with your wife, if you have your fiancé, if you haven't told her this already, tell her about your worries and your anxieties and pledge to her that this is not going to happen.
It is not going to happen.
If you run into trouble, you are going to move heaven and earth to fix it.
You are never going to turn away from one another and say, I can't talk to you.
This can't be done.
It's over.
You are going to fix it, especially once you have kids when you have a responsibility not to blow up their planet with a divorce.
So you should make that commitment to one another at the outset.
Then you have to follow through.
You can't cheat on one another.
You cannot cheat.
have to be faithful.
That is core.
Don't listen to any of the magazines, especially the New York Times is trying to sell infidelity.
It is poison, toxic to a relationship.
It's the best advice you can give somebody who's going to get married.
Don't sleep with anybody else.
Make sure you guys have a sex life that's satisfying and do not sleep around.
Finally, if you're going to deploy just psychologically, it's very easy when you're far away, because I travel a lot.
It's very easy when you're far away to sort of get into that world that you're in and forget about keeping in touch with the home front.
Don't do that.
You've got to be in constant touch.
And nowadays, even overseas, even on ships, you can use Skype.
You can see one another.
You can talk to one another.
Do it.
Make sure you're in constant touch.
If you dedicate yourself to this, you don't have to worry.
If you guys are in love, if you face the challenges in front of you realistically, you can beat this.
And then once you beat it, then you've raised children who don't have the problems you have.
So the stakes are high.
You have a lot to offer and a lot to give, and you can give it.
You know, it really, it's a beautiful thing that you're thinking about it.
It's not a beautiful thing to let it worry you.
It's always, you know, it's always a balance with this stuff that you have to pay attention to the problem, but you do not want to let it defeat you before you get going.
All right.
From Nicholas, dear Mr. Clavin spells it with an E. Very, very funny.
I'm a 21-year-old who's just finished all my university courses.
I'm currently working towards getting into med school.
Just two short years ago, I was nihilistic and depressed, and then I found Jordan Peterson and you, and I became a born-again Christian, and it's been great.
And he says, growing up, my father was mean and sometimes abusive.
My parents divorced a few months ago, and since then, everyone else in my family has had almost no contact with him.
Recently, I asked God to help my family, and God responded by instructing me to reach out to my father and be an active presence in my father's life again.
I'm willing to do this, although I have no doubt it will be difficult, and I'm not sure exactly where to start.
I have the best relationship with my dad, so that won't be a problem.
Do you have any advice on how I can get him and even the rest of my family to start going to church?
My mom and dad are Christian light, so to speak, and my siblings are numblings.
Yeah, that's not what God said.
He told you to be in touch with your father, and the way you should do that is this.
Meet with your father maybe once a week in a coffee shop somewhere and talk to him and listen to him and communicate with him.
You're not there to send him to church.
You're not there to send your family to church.
You're not there to convert him.
And you're not there to let him get too involved in your life in an abusive way.
If he can't not be abusive, break off the connection.
But if you can establish connection with him, listen to him, talk to him, do not preach to him, do not try to change him.
You have to want nothing from this relationship except to give your presence.
That's what you have to give, and that's what you should give.
So, you know, people always say this to me, like, how can I get people to go to church?
How can I get people?
Don't get people to do anything.
Just love them, be there for them, and be that presence if you can.
Do not let him get involved in your life if he remains abusive.
From Nicholas, dear Clavin Master of the Multiverse, I have an issue.
Over the course of last year, I've fallen madly in love with a fantastic young woman.
Dating and marriage.
The issue is the dating and marriage isn't in her life plan of joining the Navy and working for the CIA or some such thing over my head.
My grand plan is trucking.
She is one of my best friends, and I don't want to ruin that friendship by telling her how I feel.
Should I remain content in having an amazing friend and go for broken lay it on the table?
Well, this is one of those where I can't tell you what you should do, but I can tell you the way I personally feel about it.
When you marry somebody, you are marrying a way of life.
That's true both for men and for women.
You got to know what way of life you want.
Do you want a way of life where your wife is in the Navy and traveling?
I wanted a way of life where I had a wife who would make a home for me and a home for my children.
That was important to me.
It mattered to me.
I would not have married somebody who was not going to live that way of life, even if I loved her, right?
I wouldn't have done it because I would not have wanted that for my kids, and I wouldn't have wanted that for me.
And I'm a kind of person who without a home would really probably really be lost, you know?
So you should consider that first, not just to your love, but do you want to live the sort of life that she apparently wants to live?
You know, it's important because it's more important.
The love will fade or you may love her forever, but still, still, you don't want to live a life that you hate and then have kids and then divorce and all that stuff that will happen if you don't.
If you want to go for it, go for it.
My guess is it's not going to work out that well.
So you might want to just keep the friendship.
I personally, because I would not want to marry a girl who was in the Navy, I wouldn't want to marry a girl who was traveling all the time.
I wouldn't really actually want to marry a girl who had very high career goals because I'm so ambitious.
I wanted to spend so much time into my work.
I wanted somebody there who would pay attention to the home front.
So I wouldn't do it.
I just wouldn't do it and I would let my heart break.
That's what I would do.
In your case, you got to make the decision for yourself.
But know that if this is what she truly wants, if she's not secretly thinking, I hope this guy talks me out of my plans, if that's what she truly wants, then it's not going to go well for you.
And you can go for it, but it's going to blow up in your face.
So you got to decide.
It's a big risk.
It is a big chance to take.
I got to stop there.
I could answer so many more questions, solve so many more problems.
Well, you'll have to wait till next week.
And if you want to be in the mailbag, which is a little uncomfortable, but you do get all your problems solved, you've got to subscribe.
So come on over to thedailywire.com and subscribe and come back tomorrow for more me.
Big Risk, Big Chance00:01:27
I'm Andrew Klavan, and 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 Wall Show, and the Michael Knoll Show.
Thanks for listening.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Robert Sterling and directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Technical producer, Austin Stevens.
And our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Assistant Director, Pavel Wydowski.
Edited by Adam Sayovitz.
Audio, mixed by Robin Fenderson.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
Animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Production assistants, McKenna Waters and Ryan Love.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2020.
Iran launches an attack on a U.S. air base in Iraq.
The missiles flopped and no Americans were killed as of now.
But the question remains, are we at war with Iran?
We will examine what the strike means as well as the broader Trump doctrine.
Then, Covington Kid Nicola Sandman wins a big payout from CNN as the fake news company settles a $250 million defamation lawsuit.