Ben Shapiro dissects the media’s war on truth, mocking Democrats’ half-hearted impeachment push and their rewriting of Iran policy—like CNN’s Clarissa Ward downplaying missile strikes as mere "reach" while ignoring Obama’s nuclear deal failures. He contrasts Trump’s pragmatic sanctions with leftist appeasement, then pivots to Meghan Markle’s royal meltdown, framing her breakdown as Hollywood ego clashing with duty-driven monarchy, and praises Kate Middleton’s grace as proof traditional values still work. The episode ties these threads to a warning: institutions collapse when they ignore human nature, from gender realities to Iran’s aggression, and only unfiltered truth—like The Daily Wire—can save democracy from relativism. [Automatically generated summary]
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has announced he now has enough votes to set the rules for an impeachment trial.
As those of you without anything more important to do may remember, House Democrats impeached President Donald Trump for some damn thing or other, then said the Pledge of Allegiance and made speeches about how urgent everything was, and finally went home for the holidays and put the whole thing out of their minds because really, who cares?
The Democrats have since refused to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate for trial because they're kind of embarrassed.
But McConnell says if they ever get around to whatever it is they're up to instead of governing, he'll be ready with rules.
The rules for the trial will include, When the articles of impeachment are first introduced, there will be no laughing at the fact that they don't even charge Trump with any crimes, although some smirking will be tolerated and senior Republicans will be permitted to roll their eyes and snort quietly.
Every time says the word Ukraine, lawmakers will drink a shot of whiskey until they either pass out or start to talk like Joe Biden, whichever comes first.
If Democrat senators declare that any of this nonsense represents some sort of constitutional crisis, Republican senators will not be permitted to grab their crotches and shout constitutional crisis this.
Although if they drop their trousers and moon the Democrats, Chief Justice John Roberts will pretend he didn't see it and move on.
Before voting to acquit Trump, senators will be required to pretend to have taken the whole process seriously, either by scratching their chins and nodding in a thoughtful manner, or by saying, I take this seriously, or this is very serious, or any other similar phrase they can manage to get through without laughing.
After the acquittal, Democrats will be forced to run through the Republicans' legs while being hit with paddles.
And finally, whenever Democrats start droning on about something during the trial, Republicans will take the opportunity to confirm more federal judges.
Trick warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I go hunky-dunky, life is tickedy-boo.
Birds are winding, also singing hunky-gunkiddy-doo.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, we are coming to the end of a wild week.
It's just been amazing.
We've been watching the left's vast communications machinery, the news networks, the New York Times, the entertainment media, and so on, rewriting reality right in front of us in real time.
Trump gives the terrorist Iranians the smack upside the head they so richly deserve.
The Iranians make a face-saving gesture and stand down.
And the media tries to tell us that the wise terrorists helped crazy evil Trump avoid war, as if.
But this is now standard operating procedure.
Nothing is more controversial to the left than the truth.
Nothing will get you in more trouble with the left than speaking obvious truths like men and women are different or Islam has a problem with violence or climate change is not an existential crisis or whatever little slice of reality interferes with the leftist fantasy they happen to be selling at the moment the hysteria and foul-mouthed rage that follows any statement of plain but unsanctioned truth,
the danger to your college grades or your professional standing or your social media presence or even your livelihood make a lot of people feel it's just not worth speaking aloud what they know to be the case.
That's what the attacks are meant to do.
They're meant to intimidate you because once the simple truth is made unspeakable, then the truth becomes whatever the powers that be wanted to be, which is whatever gives them more power, or at least keeps them from being exposed as the largely incompetent schmucks, knuckleheads, and cowards that they are.
This is what has happened in Europe now, where you can get a visit from the police for saying that transgender women are not women, which, by the way, spoiler alert, they're not.
There in Europe, the police would rather let the local girls get raped en masse by Muslim grooming gangs than seem to be bigoted by exposing the crime.
The danger of speaking plain truth is nothing new, obviously.
If I could reduce the New Testament to a one-sentence moral, it would be, speak the truth, and the powers that be will crucify you.
But of course, there are other messages in the New Testament as well, like the truth never dies, and the truth is the stuff of God.
In fact, God is truth, and the truth is the way and the life.
In fact, the truth is always worth whatever trouble it causes you to speak it.
Why?
Because systems fail when they don't align with reality, especially the reality of human nature.
That's why socialist systems fail.
They expect people to excel without incentive, and they expect governments to monopolize power without becoming tyrannical.
Cannot happen.
People do not work that way.
You've got to say this stuff out loud and keep saying it so everyone knows, otherwise you wake up and you're in Venezuela.
The capitalist system succeeds because it takes people as they are.
It tells the truth about them.
It knows that people are greedy, ambitious, competitive, eager to improve their own lot in life.
In fact, capitalism is barely a system at all.
It's just people being people with a few cops who patrol the beat to keep anyone from cheating too much or using violence or intimidation for gain.
And what about democracy, democratic systems?
The question of whether democratic systems can survive, whether democracy is in keeping with human nature, is an open question.
Democracy never has survived for very long, and the reasons are pretty obvious.
The Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu pointed out that democracy requires virtue.
All the founders said this too.
But his political philosopher Patrick J. Denin recently noted, virtue has to be cultivated by virtue-forming institutions like schools and churches.
Plato talks about this and Aristotle as well.
And these virtue-forming institutions are exactly the institutions that are called oppressive by people who value their own personal liberty above the liberty of all.
If everyone becomes so dedicated to their own perfect freedom, if no one wants to be slut-shamed or fat-shamed or shamed for any behavior or disabused of any false notion about themselves, no one will develop the self-awareness and honesty and sense of civic responsibility required to maintain the democratic systems that ensure what freedom we have.
It's kind of a paradox.
Freedom requires self-restraint and self-restraint is a kind of unfreedom.
And only if we know ourselves can we ever square that circle.
If no one is honest about how men behave with women and how women behave with men, for example, if no one uses that knowledge to comport themselves with honor and with modesty, then women, the weaker sex, will pay the price in abuse as we've recently seen.
If no one is honest about how the powerful act when they have power, then the deep state, unconstitutional judges, and unrestrained bureaucracies will overrun and override our democratic institutions under the guise of enforcing some moral good or any other guise they can gull you into believing.
And if no one is honest about the fact that some behaviors are better than others, then the bad behaviors will rise because they're more fun and they require less effort of self-governance.
And then the virtue required to maintain democracy will vanish.
At the end of my novel, Empire of Lies, which by the way is a great novel.
You should all read it.
But at the end of Empire of Lies, one of the characters goes on TV and says he agrees with the Islamic terrorists about one thing.
Rockauto: The Truth Sets Us Free00:02:37
He agrees that the West and radical Islam are in a holy war.
We're in a war to decide which vision of God will win out now that the atheist empire of the Soviet Union has collapsed.
Of course, the character is never invited to come on TV again because TV is run by the left and nothing is more controversial to the left than the truth.
But what he said is the truth.
This fight we're in with Iran and other bad actors in the Middle East, it's all about God.
What is God like?
What does he require of us?
Our whole American system is designed for people who either know the answers to those questions or at least are willing to seek them honestly.
The radical Islamists, they know their answers already.
And if we can't ask the big questions here and seek answers to them openly and honestly and fearlessly, democracy can't survive and neither can the West.
It's the truth that sets us free and keeps us free.
We're going to talk more about this incredible effort to just destroy the truth and rewrite it right in front of our eyes.
But first, let's talk about something else that is true, which is you ought to use rockauto.com.
You ought to just say rockauto.com.
It's so much fun.
Rockauto.com.
If you need spare parts for your car, you do not have to get in your car, which is just going to sit there because it needs parts and it's not going anywhere, and try to drive down to the auto parts store and then have someone look on a computer for you and tell you what you need at rockauto.com.
You can do it on your own.
Rockauto.com is a family business serving auto parts customers online for 20 years.
Go to rockauto.com to shop for auto and body parts from hundreds of manufacturers.
Anything you need, brake parts, taillights, motor oil, even new carpet.
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The rockauto.com catalog is unique, remarkably easy to navigate, amazing selection, reliably low prices, all the parts your car will ever need at rockauto.com.
Go to rockauto.com right now and see all the parts available for your car or truck.
Write Clavin in their how did you hear about us box so they know we sent you and we can stay on the air bringing you all this nice information.
But, but, you need to know how do you spell clavin?
I'm so glad I asked.
There are no easing clavin.
I just make it look this easy.
The clavenless weekend is coming up because I'm done on Thursday.
But if you want to continue to have some clavin-y goodness in your life, listen to Another Kingdom.
You can get it today if you subscribe to dailywire.com.
If not, you're going to have to wait till Monday.
Nancy Pelosi's Impeachment Statement00:15:40
The story is reaching its climax, coming to its end.
It'll be over by the end of January, I believe.
So that's not very far away.
So you want to catch up with Another Kingdom.
It is as good as people say it is.
Yesterday, we did a backstage and then we did an after Ask Me Anything thing online and several people, it was two or three people, said that not only had they enjoyed the show, but it had made them better people, which is pretty amazing.
That's an amazing thing to say about a work of fiction.
So Another Kingdom, you want to listen to it.
So here is a wonderful moment from CNN about Iran.
Clarissa Ward is in Iraq and she's standing at one of the places.
This is great.
She's standing at one of the places where the Iranian missiles hit the other day.
And here she is talking about what she sees.
I am standing here right at the site of one of those missile hits.
This is the crater.
The damage that was caused by the impact of that strike, you can see it's not a huge amount of damage, but the ground is very soft here.
As you can also see, it's been raining very hard.
There's a lot of shrapnel here on the ground from that impact.
But the question is, what exactly were the Iranians targeting here?
Local security officials telling us there's simply nothing here.
There's a refugee camp just under a mile away in that direction, but no U.S. presence, no U.S. military presence particularly.
This may have been for the Iranians less about showing power and precision, John, than it was about showing reach.
She's got to figure out why they fired their missiles in.
Yeah, exactly.
There is the Iranian army at work.
They've got to figure out why they fired their missiles into the dirt.
So she starts making stuff up.
She makes up a narrative.
It's not about their power and precision, which is the sorry.
It was the only reason to fire missiles at all is to hit something.
But she says, well, they're trying to show their reach, how far their missiles can go.
They're trying to fire missiles and save face because they've got some people in their, first of all, because they have to save face because one day they look out the window and the people will come in there and carry them off as they should be carried off and destroyed because what are the people getting out of their insanity and their warmongering and their terrorism?
Nothing.
The people don't get anything out of that.
But the other thing is, of course, they have to appease the hardliners in the government who are saying, we must strike back about the great Satan.
So they're firing some missiles into the dirt.
And Clarissa just can't figure it out.
So she's got to come up with a narrative.
That's what they've been doing.
And the thing is, the thing, you know, I have a lot of faith in the truth, but there are times when the truth vanishes.
There are, of course.
We know this from history.
We know there are panics that people go into.
There are things like, you know, Nazi Germany where people tell these horrible fine lies and cut off all kinds of all other forms of communication and people buy into the lies.
And we know this does happen, but I keep feeling here in America, people are still kind of commonsensical, still look at things and know the truth.
And one of the things that Trump is unraveling is he's unraveling the lies of the last eight years that Obama was the lightworking great president and the second coming.
Obama was an incompetent.
I don't believe Obama was evil.
I think he had stupid academic ideas and did not change those ideas when reality slapped him upside the head.
We're talking about the fact that if you don't look for the truth honestly, you don't speak the truth honestly, you don't seek the truth, then you're going to come a cropper because the world will not react the way you think it's going to react.
And that was Obama's whole problem.
And the problem is exacerbated for the left by the fact that they are surrounded by all these liars, the liars of the press.
The press echoes their lies back to themselves, and they think those lies are true.
But the rest of us can see.
The rest of us have other forms of information.
The rest of us are all listening to the Daily Wire where we get the truth.
And that's the problem the Democrats are having.
So Trump came out in his speech yesterday, a great speech, where he said, okay, you know, they shot some missiles into the dirt.
We're going to put some more sanctions on them.
But basically, we slapped them where it hurt, and they took it and liked it.
And that's the end of that.
And so, but he said, you know, remember, these missiles were being bought by the money that Obama sent them for his stupid nuclear deal.
So NBC, where they covered up the Harvey Weinstein story, and CBS, where they helped ABC cover up the Jeffrey Epstein story.
I just want to keep reminding you that those are the people who are giving you the news, the people who say, oh, yeah, abusing women, we don't talk about that.
We do it, but we don't talk about it.
Just want to remind you that they cover up for Obama in real time.
They rewrite the story to make sure that nobody believed what the president says.
Here's both first, I think it's CBS and then NBC.
He blamed that behavior on the unfounded claim that the Obama-era nuclear agreement enabled Iran to build up its military arsenal.
The missiles fired last night at us and our allies were paid for with the funds made available by the last administration.
And there is backlash to this comment about his predecessor, former President Barack Obama.
The missiles fired last night at us and our allies were paid for with the funds made available by the last administration.
That's a reference to Iran's money that was unfrozen as a part of the Iran nuclear deal, a deal negotiated by former President Obama and ripped up by President Trump.
Today, a former top Obama official firing back.
This is another series of despicable lies.
You are faking.
President Trump.
It's Susan Rice.
It's Susan Rice, the woman who went on after Benghazi onto every show on Sunday and lied at each show.
It's Susan Rice they're using to call out Donald Trump.
It's like, we need some lies, Susan.
Could you get up?
You know, could you slob in some lies?
Who are we going to get to lie for us and cover up for us for the way we covered Obama and lied about it?
Hey, how about Susan Rice?
Get me Susan Rice on the phone.
It is unbelievable.
It is just one of here's Dan Crenshaw telling the truth of the matter.
Well, they're obsessed with defending their strategy of appeasement, right?
They thought that the best way to deal with Iran was to pay them off, send over pallets full of cash, unfreeze their assets, lift sanctions, and then hope for change, right?
Remember, President Obama's theme was hope and change, and that was their foreign policy as well.
It didn't work.
And it's time to accept that because what actually happened was the Iranians were enriched and therefore able to fund their Quds force more and destabilize the region, destabilize Syria, Yemen, fund sleeper cells in Bahrain, fund Shia militias in Iraq.
You know, one of the things that this kind of, kind of helps the left a little bit is that Donald Trump is a hard guy to know.
We were talking about this a bit on the Daily Wire backstage show yesterday, where, you know, you always try and fit the president in the narrative of other presidents.
But because Donald Trump is so offbeat and so original, it's very hard to fit him in that narrative.
So it is easier for the Democrats to say everything he does is evil and weak and stupid.
It's just like he's continually bumbling into success, is our Donald.
He's a dope, but somehow the economy's going through the roof.
He's a dope, but somehow the mullahs in Iran for the first time since basically since the Iranian revolution are standing down.
But he's a little hard to fit into the narrative because he is getting rid of all the Obama doctrines, which were so silly, but he has his own way of doing things.
And sometimes that way, you may not like it.
You may like it.
It's his own.
For instance, that he is a guy who depends on individuals and he wants to have relationships with individuals.
He thinks this is the way the world is going to go forward.
So even if it's Kim Jong-un, even if it's this lunatic bad guy, you know, I don't think Donald Trump is fooled by Kim John.
I mean, he can come in and say, we get along.
He's a great guy.
He's a nice guy.
I don't think the guy is fooled by Kim Jonathan.
He just thinks you got to be nice to him.
You got to talk to him.
You got to find a way into him.
Now, sometimes that may work.
Sometimes it may not.
But it is the way that Trump does business.
And the other thing about him, and this has been a real boon to the anti-Trump press because they lie so much, is that he's always making a deal.
He is always in process.
He's always going from somewhere to somewhere else.
He's always thinking about that.
So it's easy for the press to just say, to take a freeze frame photo of him at any moment and say, this is where he is.
Oh, did he just levy tariffs on China?
Oh, this is going to be the tariff president.
Well, no, these are tariffs that he's using to make a deal.
He's always moving somewhere.
And the thing is, other presidents, and look, again, you can see good things about this and bad things about it.
Other presidents make a statement, and that is the policy of the United States.
Trump often makes a statement, and it's just a way of getting to where he wants to go.
And you can say, well, no, we need to trust the words of the president to be a statement.
That's not the way Trump is.
So are we going to stop and say, well, look, he's doing a good job.
He's very, you know, Molly Hemingway overheard somebody yesterday say, you know, he's very good at presidenting.
So are we going to accept Trump the way he is and see how it goes?
Or are we going to just continually say, oh, he's evil, he's stupid, he's incompetent, he's doing a bad job.
And that is something that the press has done because he doesn't fit in, because he doesn't fit in with the usual narrative of the presidency.
They have used that to say, oh, look at this.
This is terrible.
This is evil.
This is awful.
But you know, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and it's just been an incredible, it has been an incredible stretch of good news, not just for this president, but for the country as well.
So now, because they've been selling this narrative for so long, that they are going to move forward with impeachment.
Or are they?
Something is going wrong in the House of Representatives.
A growing number of Senate Democrats are calling for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to send over the articles of impeachment against President Trump, saying the party has little to gain from further delay.
Senator Joe Manchin, he's obviously, he's from West Virginia and he's in a Trump district.
And so he's been a kind of a moderate voice.
And sometimes I think he voted for Kavanaugh.
He's been kind of a, you know, he has to show that he can make peace with the Republicans.
He said, I think it's time to turn the articles over and let's see where the Senate can take it.
But others in the Democratic caucus, including Senators Dianne Feinstein of California, Richard Blumenthal, and Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Angus King of Maine, have also encouraged Mrs. Pelosi to send the articles to the Senate so a trial can begin.
They are really coming after her.
So here is a Republican House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, making a really good point to Laura Ingram about Dianne Feinstein.
She's going to fail at this.
She's already failed.
And now it's not just Republicans, it's Democrat senators.
But what's even worse, it's Dianne Feinstein.
This is her home senator, but it's her hometown senator from San Francisco.
She literally said, if it's so urgent, if you keep it, it loses its urgency.
Either send it over or don't send it at all.
It's crushing her.
So Pelosi came out today.
She came out today to make a statement.
And her first statement was about this war powers bill that they're going to pass in the House to sort of rebuke President Trump.
Maybe we'll get a chance to talk about that a little bit.
But then she went into the impeachment thing and she is holding her ground.
She is not going to turn.
You know, why isn't she going to turn over this impeachment?
Because it's embarrassing.
It's absurd.
It is a shoddy piece of work done half in secret.
They didn't call any witnesses.
And what she's saying is now, now I need to know what the Senate is going to do, that they're going to call some witnesses.
They want to call witnesses that the House didn't call.
So here's Nancy Pelosi's statement just this morning on impeachment.
We need to see that the arena in which we are sending our managers.
Is that too much to ask?
At some point, we would hope that we would see from them what the terms of engagement will be.
We are ready.
We are proud of our defense of the Constitution of the United States.
We are concerned that the senators will not be able to live up to the oath that they must take to have an impartial trial.
So much for that.
We will not let them say, oh, this is just like Clinton Ferris there.
It's not like the Clinton impeachment because they're afraid of facts and witnesses and truth.
It's the same process.
It's the same.
This woman, you know, the thing that gets me about Nancy Pelosi is the New York Times and CNN and MSVA, they elevate her, but she's such a transparent, you know, and by the way, she's a politician.
Mitch McConnell does this too.
Mitch McConnell will say anything he needs to say.
These guys are who they are.
They twist and turn and they work the political system.
I get that.
But, you know, are we going to elevate them to this, they elevate Nancy Pelosi, I mean, to this level that she's some kind of, she's either the wiliest politician in the world or she's some kind of liberal saint.
Just as a little sidebar, I have to just go off on a little bit of a tangent here for a minute.
Adam Smith, I think he's the chairman of the House, is it Intelligence Committee or the House Defense Committee?
He's anyway, a big Democrat congressman.
And he's on CNN and the guy asks him, well, do you agree with these senators who are calling for Pelosi to put up or shut up?
And here's what he says.
I understand what the Speaker was trying to do, basically trying to use the leverage of that to work with Democratic and Republican senators to try to get a reasonable trial, a trial that would actually show evidence, bring out witnesses.
But at the end of the day, just like we control it in the House, Mitch McConnell controls it in the Senate.
I think it was perfectly advisable for the Speaker to try to leverage that to get a better deal.
At this point, it doesn't look like that's going to happen.
And yes, I think it is time to send the impeachment to the Senate and let Mitch McConnell be responsible for the fairness of the trial.
He ultimately is.
And then this morning, he tweets, or later in the day, he tweets out, I misspoke this morning.
I do believe we should do everything we can to force the Senate to have a fair trial.
If the Speaker believes that holding on to the articles for a longer time will help force a fair trial in the Senate, then I wholeheartedly support that decision.
Please, Mrs. Pelosi, take your hands off my crotch.
I added that part.
I was obviously the unspoken undertone.
So Ruttro, Nancy Pelosi, is not letting her boys stray too far.
She pulls.
How dare you?
How dare you?
How dare you, Mr. Smith.
But she's up against Mitch McConnell.
I mean, Mitch McConnell, listen, these are two old war horses, and I pay Nancy Pelosi respect for being the old war horse she is, for knowing she can lie and lie and lie and twist things, and the press will cover for her.
She knows she's dealing with that world.
Kate Middleton's Dilemma00:14:54
But Mitch McConnell also knows that we will hear from him too.
And the Constitution says that the Senate has sole power to try the president in an impeachment.
They have the sole power to try the impeachment.
And here's what Mitch McConnell said about her leverage.
Supposedly, the explanation for this shameless game playing is that Speaker Pelosi wanted leverage, leverage, to reach into the Senate and dictate our trial proceedings to us.
Now, I've made clear from the beginning that no such leverage exists.
There will be no haggling with the House over Senate procedure.
We will not cede our authority to try this impeachment.
The House Democrats' turn is over.
The Senate has made its decision.
This goes for this war Bowers thing, too.
Nancy Pelosi spoke about that, too.
Play the clip where Pelosi talks about this war powers resolution.
Last week, in our view, the president, the administration conducted a provocative, disproportionate airstrike against Iran, which endangered Americans, and did so without consulting Congress.
We are passing today a war powers resolution to limit the president's military actions.
The administration must de-escalate and must prevent further violence.
America and the world cannot afford war.
Protect and defend, an oath we take, not only of our Constitution, but of the American people.
Pray for peace.
That's what we must do.
And so what happened, in the view of many of us, is not promoting peace, but an escalation.
Not that we have any confidence in the goodness or the good intentions of Iran.
And we certainly do not respect, and I, from my intelligence background, know just how bad Suleimani was.
It's not because we expect good things from them, but we expect great things from us.
God handed to her.
She's shameless.
I mean, you've got to give her that.
She is shameless.
I like the provocative and disproportionate thing.
You're like, who are we provoking?
He's been at war with us since, what, 1979?
So how are we provoking them?
And how is it disproportionate when they not only killed this one guy, not only responsible for the death of over 600 American service people, but has killed thousands of other people?
How is it disproportionate to blow him up good?
It is obviously not.
But anyway, again, all of this is show.
None of it is a reality.
They can pass a war powers resolution all they want.
I'm passing a resolution that everyone has to bow down as I walk by.
I'm passing a revolution that I can fly when I flap my arms.
It don't matter a damn thing.
And you know, I was a little disappointed.
Mike Lee came out and they had this briefing, this post-attack briefing, and he didn't like it.
It was apparently dismissive of the Congress and said, you shouldn't be able to debate this and all this.
And Mike Lee came out and he was really ticked off and said, oh, you know, I'm insulted by this.
We have a right to, we have the war declaring possibilities.
And so I'm going to vote for this war powers resolution.
You know, I get it.
I'm sure that if Mike Lee says that the briefing was bad, it was bad.
I believe that.
But, you know, cool your ego, pal, and do the right thing because this is really, there should be no show from the Congress saying that the commander-in-chief does not have the right to do this.
But all of this is show.
And my question is this.
Do the people catch on or not?
We know that the left has this amazing, amazing communications network, the networks, the New York Times, the Washington Post, all of them working for the left.
Will the people catch on or not?
And that's what we're going to have to see.
We're going to have to see what the polls say, although the polls lie as well.
But I believe the truth will out.
I believe Americans still know the truth when they hear it.
Hey, I got to take a break from Facebook and YouTube, but come over to DailyWire.com.
There are so many reasons for you to subscribe.
The most important one, of course, that you get the indispensable leftist tears tumbler.
I make these myself in a little workshop where I bring in, you can tell it's made of the finest obsidian, and this top is pure diamond.
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I'm making all this stuff up.
It's a big tumbler, but it's great.
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It's a good deal.
It is a good deal.
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All right, I got to talk a little bit about the story about the royals in England.
But before I talk about it, I want you to know that I'm talking from a position of almost the purest ignorance.
I mean, my ignorance is like a little serene ray of light.
Ignorance, serene.
It is pure ignorance, serene.
I don't follow the royals at all.
I don't really care about them.
I lived in England for seven years and I didn't follow them then.
Every now and again, I'd see them and I go, oh, look, there's the royals.
But I didn't really follow them then.
And then they had Diana.
She died while I was over there.
So there was stuff going on, but I can never tell one from another.
I can never remember which was Harry.
Now I know which one is Andrew because he's the one who chases the young girls.
But my sister, my beloved sister, who's Caitlin Flanagan over at the Atlantic, she loves this stuff and she's always talking about them and she has deep thoughts about them.
I can never remember who's who.
But I do want to bring this up because it actually feeds into something else I've been talking about a lot this week.
So this is the American one, Megan Markle, right, who's now, she's like the Duchess of Sussex.
That's at least fun to say, the Duchess of Sussex.
And she has been obviously under the gun.
She's not getting along with the other guy who's got Kate Middleton, right?
I'm sorry.
Prince William, right?
She's married to Prince William, right?
Kate Middleton is married to Prince William.
All right, so Prince Harry, thank you very much.
So Prince Harry, she's married to Prince Harry.
And it hasn't been going well.
Obviously, Megan Markle was an actress.
She's got a big ego.
She's suddenly into this system which doesn't care about her ego.
She's just supposed to show up and smile and wave.
That's what they're there for.
And recently, she was in Africa and she started to have a little bit of a breakdown on TV.
They're interviewing them.
You know, the Royals, the job of the Royals is to go along, wave at people, promote a couple of good causes, do the charitable stuff they do.
They're useful and they're attractive and they embody theoretically the spirit of England.
And the English, the British love them.
The British do love them.
I mean, the British intellectuals are constantly complaining about them, but nobody really wants to get rid of them.
Every now and again, they talk about getting rid of them, but nobody really wants to.
They represent England.
They're great for tourism.
You know, everybody loves Buckingham Palace.
Everybody loves this queen.
She's been a great queen.
So she's in Africa and she gives an interview and basically says, you know, she's having a lot of trouble.
The rumors are that she fights with Kate, right?
She fights with the other one.
And Kate is very popular.
And so she gives this interview where she starts to crack up.
Look, any woman, when they're, especially when they're pregnant, you're really vulnerable.
And so that was made really challenging.
And then when you have a newborn, you know, you're a long time ago, but I remember, yeah.
You know, and especially as a woman, it's really, it's a lot.
So you add this on top of just trying to be a new mom or trying to be a newlywed.
It's yeah, well, I guess, and also thank you for asking, because not many people have asked if I'm okay.
But it's a very real thing to be going through behind the scenes.
And the answer is, would it be fair to say not really?
Okay, since it's really been a struggle.
Yes.
But Megan Markle, nobody feels sorry for you.
You knew what you were signing up for, girl.
It's classic.
It's classic Americanism, right?
You're not supposed to care.
Your emotions don't matter if you're in the royal family, right?
That's the whole point.
Isn't that the whole show?
The queen that everybody's watching, that she doesn't show her emotions.
She does her duty, right?
The crown, the crown, sorry.
You can tell how deeply involved I am in the politics of the British monarchy.
But it's such an American thing to say, you know, no one's asked me whether I'm okay.
You know, you're a princess.
We don't care whether you're okay, right?
You're just supposed to do your job.
So now they come out on Instagram and they, Megan and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, I can just call them, so I don't have to remember their names.
They put out this thing, says, after many months, this is like me talking about astrophysics.
It's like I'm talking about something I do not understand at all.
After many months of reflection and internal discussions, we have chosen to make a transition this year in starting to carve out a progressive new role within this institution, which I take it is not the institution she's going to be put in if she keeps talking like that.
I think that's the institution of the royal family.
We intend to step back as senior members of the royal family and work to become financially independent while continuing to fully support Her Majesty the Queen.
Now, the one thing I do know, because I did live in England, is all this is this verbiage is meaningless.
It's like you can't carve out a new role within this institution.
And if they're going to become financially independent, they're going to have to make a load of dough because they live very, very.
She's working as an actress, an actress.
She's an actress, exactly.
There you go, Blue Sherlock.
She's an actress.
So they say it is with your encouragement, particularly over the last few years, that we feel prepared to make the adjustment.
We now plan to balance our time between the United Kingdom and North America.
So maybe they're coming here, though maybe I guess they go to Canada, which is at least in the Commonwealth, continuing to honor our duty to the Queen, the Commonwealth, and our patronages.
And you know, things are bad because they misspelled honor.
They put a U in it.
I know, I know they spell it that way.
This geographic balance will enable us to raise our son with an appreciation for the royal tradition into which he was born, while also providing our family with the space to focus in the next.
You know, in the opening, when I was talking about telling the truth, I was talking about the fact that people don't like institutions if they want to, if they're committed to freedom.
This is ancient classic philosophy: that the reason democracies fall is because they elevate freedom above everything else.
And when you elevate freedom above everything else, your own personal freedom above everything else, you don't have the institutions that inculcate civic virtue, right?
So here is this American who is an actress.
So you know that she is pure ego, right?
Somebody once said that an actress is a little more than a woman and an actor is a little less than a man.
So you know that an actress is actually absolute, pure, undistilled self-regard.
And here suddenly she is in an institution, the royal family, that is dedicated to duty, to selfless duty.
No, that is not happening to an American.
And so they're leaving town and they're going to make up this thing.
And by the way, the royal family reacted to this by saying, huh?
What is this?
What all this means?
What means?
What means?
You know, they had no idea what the guys were talking about, how they're going to make a living or anything like this.
And meanwhile, the one member of the royal family that I really like is Kate Middleton because I find her incredibly beautiful and incredibly gracious.
And she is the one, I think this is the problem.
I think Megan Markle thought she was going to be the big princess, but Kate Middleton is just too good at her job.
She is absolutely beautiful.
She's kind.
She's lovable.
She's got that lovely smile.
She dresses.
Even I, who don't know anything about dressing, even I look at her and think like, wow, she really knows how to dress.
She's riveting.
I'm clearly madly in love with her.
I write her letters.
I badger her.
You know, she just keeps saying, Claven, leave me alone.
I'm a princess.
Go away.
Come on.
She said, come on, man.
But here is the thing.
Here is the thing.
Yesterday on the Daily Wire backstage, we were talking about this fact that I've been under attack all week.
And I got to admit, I don't pay a lot of attention to this, but I couldn't help but see when I would go on Twitter that I was under attack for saying women could not fight in medieval sword fights.
And this was turned, twisted into me saying that women couldn't be sportswomen and all this, you know, what they always do.
They lie or they come find some exception to the rule and say that this is the rule.
They do all this stuff.
But they're yelling at me.
And Ben yesterday, Ben Shapiro yesterday on backstage said, what do they want?
Why do they have to parody in every way with men?
After all, a majority of women, a majority of doctors now are women.
And I immediately said, jokingly or half jokingly, never mind that.
A majority of women are women, which I think is a really good thing.
Now, that was the difference between Ben, who I guess is a millennial, and me, who is an okay boomer, right?
Who comes from another place and is an anti-feminist.
I am an open anti-feminist.
When I say that, I do not mean that women shouldn't make their own choices and do whatever it is they want to do.
Believe me, I have no investment whatsoever in what individual people, what choices individual people make.
I'm talking about ideas.
That's all I'm talking about.
Live your life.
It's nothing.
It's truly, it's nothing to me.
But women just being women is value added to the world.
And Kate Middleton is a good example of that.
And another good example of it is Melania Trump.
What do they do?
All they do is go around being women, paying attention to children, paying attention to charity, paying attention to the social customs and the social graces and the things that make the world better.
Men don't do that.
They pay attention to ambition, they pay attention to money, they pay attention to placement, status, all the things that men are involved with and all the things that feminists want women to lean into.
But women simply by not being that, by being something else, by representing another set of values, the yin set of values, the female set of values, add incredibly to the world.
And that, I think, is the point that I'm trying to get at, is that if the only thing we do is respect women for how much they can be like men, we are not respecting women at all.
So it doesn't surprise me that an American couldn't fit into that system, but Kate Middleton does a great job, and so does Melania Trump.
And all they are is women.
All right, we're going to have a final reflection.
Clinging to Ideal00:03:41
You know, I started out by talking about the fact that systems break down when they don't adhere to human nature.
And this is a constant subject in modern literature.
If you look at one of the first modern works of literature is Don Quixote.
Next week, I think I'm going to go on with Michael Knowles and talk about Hamlet.
That is one of the other first works of literature.
But there are certain things that you look at.
Hamlet is one of them.
If you're watching Hamlet, you immediately recognize the modern voice.
But if you look at Don Quixote, you also recognize the modern voice.
And what makes Don Quixote modern?
Don Quixote Hoti is about a man who reads a lot of stories about chivalry and then begins to feel that he's a knight.
And he is known as a crazy man.
And all this funny stuff happens to him because he thinks he's a knight and he thinks windmills are giants and he thinks a common scullery maid is a lady who needs to be treated with respect.
But as the novel goes on, you start to question whether it's Don Quixote who's insane or the world that's insane.
What has happened is a system has broken down.
The system of chivalry, which was the main kind of social system, social idea, it has broken down because that's not who people are.
And what Don Quixote is doing is he is clinging to the ideal in the face of reality.
And reality keeps, you know, beating him up and throwing him off his horse and he's constantly getting drubbed and all this stuff.
But Don Quixote is sticking to that ideal.
And you can call that crazy or you can call it noble.
You know, you can call it one or the other.
And I too am sticking to the ideal that the truth is worth defending.
That ideal has also come under question.
It has come under question for a long time, ever since Machiavelli, who didn't support the truth, who said, basically, do what you got to do to keep your power.
It is the original conflict between the Judeo-Christian side of the West and the classical side of the West.
It's the original conflict when Jesus says to Pontius Pilate, I speak the truth, and whoever loves the truth hears my voice.
And Pontius Pilate says, what is truth?
The classic, sophisticated, relativistic idea that has been with us since ancient Greece and probably before, that there is no truth, that nothing's good or bad, but thinking makes it so, as Hamlet says.
But I do think, I do think, that our particular system, our system of freedom, our system of, if you want to call it in a bigger way, liberalism, classical liberalism, depends upon knowing the truth about people.
It depends upon knowing how women behave.
It depends upon knowing how men behave and being able to say it, say it out loud.
It depends on being able to identify problems that exist within racial cultures, saying there's high crime in black neighborhoods or that there's a lot of violence in the Muslim world.
It depends on us being able to say those things.
I know that when you speak the truth, you get penalized.
I know you got to pick your fights.
I know we're not Jesus.
All the rest of us aren't Jesus and we're not willing to go to the cross necessarily just to speak the truth.
But if we don't try, if we don't try at all, we are done for.
If we let them bully us every step of the way out of speaking the simplest truths, if we let our professors and employers and sponsors and Twitter shut us down and shut us up, we are done for.
That is the fight we're in.
That is the fight we're in.
It's not the fight about this bill or that bill.
It's not the fight about this tax rate or that tax rate.
It is the fight about whether we can speak the truth as we go forward to form the system that keeps us free.
That really is the fight we're in.
Willing to Pay Penalties?00:01:38
So again, I know there's penalties.
I know not all of us are willing to pay all the penalties.
Maybe none of us are willing to pay the big penalty, but we have to be able to take some flack to say what we have to say.
Hey, the Clavin List weekend is here.
You're doomed.
You're done for.
Very few of you will make it back to Monday, but do your best.
Make your way as you can through the darkness and the flames and the chaos.
Survivors will gather here on Monday.
I'll be here.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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