Ep. 856 dissects Chuck Schumer’s Supreme Court threats—calling them a "thuggish" escalation—while contrasting media double standards with Trump’s scrutiny, framing left-wing rhetoric as increasingly aggressive. Bloomberg’s exit and Warren’s withdrawal are tied to policy failures, not gender, amid the Louisiana abortion case’s regulatory clash. Matt Walsh’s Church of Cowards exposes Christian complacency, comparing it to Egyptian martyrs’ sacrifice, while Alex Trebek’s cancer battle underscores faith’s role in resilience. The episode ties political polarization to moral decay, from abortion debates to child abuse normalization, ending with a call for conservative media’s unflinching truth-telling. [Automatically generated summary]
In an event some people hailed as a miracle, a voice spoke out of nothingness yesterday endorsing Joe Biden for president.
Then they looked behind the podium and saw it was Michael Bloomberg.
Bloomberg dropped out of the Democratic race for president after spending more than half a billion dollars in advertising, an amount which averages out to a million and a half dollars for each Snicker his staff suppressed behind his back.
Bloomberg, who ran on a platform of not being Bernie Sanders, only shorter, lost every Super Tuesday race except for the one in American Samoa, where the residents offered to proclaim him a god, then sacrifice him in hope of rain.
Although Bloomberg's spending did raise his profile from being a mayor in New York City to being a laughing stock throughout the entire country, his campaign hit a snag when he was forced to emerge from his bathroom where he had been wallowing in a tub full of gold coins and then stand on a debate stage with such political titans as an 80-year-old communist, a doddering old man, a make-believe Indian, an angry little person no one recognized, and a gay guy who really did bear a remarkable resemblance to Alfred E. Newman.
Faced with these formidable competitors, Bloomberg discovered he was actually a non-entity, but was so rich, no one had had the integrity to tell him.
In a concession speech shouted up at the podium microphone, Bloomberg told a crowd gaping in awestruck silence at the spectacle of a voice seemingly coming out of nowhere that while it was true, he couldn't beat the guy who thinks Castro's literacy program was the bomb, and while he also lost to the guy who can't remember the name of God, he was absolutely certain he would have beaten Donald Trump unless there was something his staff wasn't telling him for some reason.
Bloomberg's withdrawal means the race now essentially comes down to two people, Donald Trump and whoever he's going to defeat in November.
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.
Look, ship-shaped, tipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, politics ain't beanbag, as the old saying goes, and no one expects politicians to play nice or be kind.
But the thuggishness of the left has become genuinely disturbing.
You know, I spoke out against Republican violence when candidate Donald Trump encouraged his supporters to punch any heckler who threatened to throw a tomato at him.
I called Trump out then.
I thought it was disgusting.
I'd call him out now if he did it again.
But because Trump has actually stopped that sort of talk, if you listen to him, his rallies at this point seem to be the happiest place on earth.
I now chalk it up to hyperbole and political inexperience.
He got past it.
But the left's violent rhetoric gets worse and worse, and no one really holds them to account.
Yesterday, Chuck Schumer threatened two Supreme Court justices if they decided an abortion case in a way he disagreed with.
He's now walked that back and tried to explain it away, saying he shouldn't have used the words he used.
But I'll play the original clip in a minute, and you'll see it was no accident, and it was ugly stuff.
It was thug stuff.
Bernie Sanders, he has people working for him who talk about putting other people in gulags and forcibly re-educating them.
Project Veritas exposed them and the press just ignored it.
Sanders never fired them as far as I know.
And even other Democrat candidates have called him out for other ones of his supporters for their thuggish and threatening behavior.
We keep hearing about Trump's rough talk and his divisive presence, but Joe Biden and Corey Booker and the actor Robert De Niro have all threatened to punch the president.
Trump has been pretend assassinated on a New York stage and in a Snoop Dogg video.
Kathy Griffin, Johnny Depp, and Madonna have all made remarks about murdering him.
Samantha B used filthy language to describe Ivanka.
Even I don't use that language, even when it isn't lent.
The source of this ugliness is obvious.
It's the left's philosophy.
They conflate their policies with virtue and therefore deem opposing policies as evil rather than, say, misguided or unworkable or wrong, like all of their policies.
All of that becomes even uglier when the government has too much power.
You know, it used to be that we could disagree amicably in this country.
We used to talk about it all the time when I was young about how we would disagree fiercely over politics, but then we would go out and have a beer together.
And that was because the reach of the federal government was not that great.
Washington could do stupid stuff, and we could still live in a state or town or any locality that shared and enforced our values.
But when the Supreme Court makes federal law, every new appointment becomes a deathmatch.
And when unelected bureaucrats can pass regulations that destroy your business while helping the business of connected friends like Solyndra, every appointment is a crisis.
And when politicians can enlist the entire press corps in a nutty conspiracy theory about Russian collusion that is aimed at overturning an election, while everyone who stands against them is demonized on television as racist and phobic, the election season never ends and neither do its high passions.
Talk About Rockauto.com00:02:31
We didn't choose the thug life.
The thug life chose us.
But it's time to unchoose it.
We won't be able to heal our divisions until we wrangle our government back down to the size the founders intended.
It can be done if we begin by disabling and then dismantling the administrative state.
But we better get started quick before Chuck Schumer and his fellow thugs get somebody killed.
All right, we're going to talk about Schumer some more and we're going to talk about abortion, which was how this came up in the first place.
We've got Matt Walsh coming on to discuss his new book, Church of Cowards, a wake-up call to complacent Christians.
But first, let's talk about rockauto.com.
Why?
Because I love saying rockauto.com.
Rockauto.com is where you go when you need car parts and you don't want to get in your car, which isn't running anyway, and drive all the way down to the car parts store and have some guy look at a computer who doesn't know anything more than you do when you could be at home in the safety of your home looking at your computer yourself.
Rockauto.com always offers the lowest prices possible rather than changing prices based on what the market will bear like airlines do.
Why spend up to twice as much for the same parts when you can go to rockauto.com and even say rockauto.com.
They have everything you need for your car and whether it's an old car, a new car, the car you're driving now, doesn't matter.
Rockauto.com is a family business serving auto parts customers online for 20 years.
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 how do you spell Clavin?
There are no E's in Clavin.
There are no E's in rockauto.com, come to think of it.
Also, now that you know how to spell Clavin, go on Amazon and get the second book in the Another Kingdom trilogy.
It is called The Nightmare Feast.
If you're watching, you can see it.
They just did such a beautiful job with this jacket.
It is an absolutely beautiful addition.
It follows the story of our hero, Austin Lively, who has stepped out of his drab Hollywood life into a weird, fantastical kingdom.
He goes back and forth between LA and this kingdom, and the story just takes him in both places where he is fighting for his life.
It is a very cool story.
And this, you know, a lot of times in a trilogy, the second book is kind of a letdown.
I guarantee you, you will not find that.
Go on Amazon and get the nightmare feast.
Roberts Under Fire00:15:17
So we should say that breaking, as I was driving into work, Liz Warren has withdrawn from the Democrat candidacy.
Hilariously, they are blaming this on the fact that she is a woman.
It is the fact that she is a woman who has no plan that doesn't cost trillions of dollars.
And, you know, I don't like to comment too much on breaking news for the simple reason that I want to think about things.
You know, I want to talk about things.
And I want to, before I talk about them, I want to think them through, give you an opinion that means something.
It's going to be really interesting now to see where Elizabeth Warren throws her votes and throws her support.
We were talking about this on the Daily Wire backstage where Jeremy the God King was saying that he thinks people know that Warren was lying about being a leftist and therefore her votes will go to Biden, not to Bernie.
Possible.
That sounds a little subtle to me.
She seemed to be in the left-wing lane for people who were not quite as crazy as Bernie and didn't find Bernie his shouting and yelling and his elevating Castro and Ortega and the like.
They didn't find that viable, but they found Liz Warren viable.
Liz Warren's career, her campaign collapsed when she talked about the details of her health plan, when people saw how much it would cost, when they saw it would take away their insurance.
That is when her campaign collapsed.
So when you talk about socialism, it's best to keep it bland and general and attack the opposition like Bernie Sanders does, because socialism in reality never ever works.
All right.
Now I want to talk about this abortion case.
The Supreme Court justices have a case from Louisiana.
And the case is basically that Louisiana law requires doctors performing abortions to hold admitting privileges at a hospital no more than 30 miles away.
And if you know Louisiana, you know that it's got a lot of empty spaces in it.
And so the pro-abortion people are saying this will close abortion clinics because we can't reach a hospital.
And that's what it's for.
That's their argument that that's what it's for.
The anti-abortion people are saying, no, this is for safety.
The doctor should be able to first to have admitting privileges and to be able to get his patient to a hospital if it's a problem.
The Supreme Court discussed it.
They asked a lot of questions.
One of the big questions was the fact that the people who brought the case may not have had what they call in law standing to bring the lawsuit in the first place.
So it may get thrown out on that alone.
We don't know.
But they held a rally outside the Supreme Court.
And here is what Schumer said.
It is pretty amazing.
It's cut number one.
The Supreme Court is hearing arguments, as you know, for the first major abortion right cases since Justices Kavanaugh and Justices Gorsuch came to the bench.
We know what's at stake.
Over the last three years, women's reproductive rights have come under attack in a way we haven't seen in modern history.
From Louisiana to Missouri to Texas, Republican legislatures are waging a war on women, all women.
And they're taking away fundamental rights.
I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price.
You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.
That's pretty amazing.
Pretty amazing.
Also, remember that the decision hasn't come in yet, so he doesn't even know what it's going to be.
So you're going to pay the price with these awful decisions that haven't been made.
And now listen, let's just follow this through.
I'm going to get to all the things that followed after that.
But before that, let's follow this through.
It is the left.
It is the left which put judges on the court who made law, who said that abortion is a constitutional right.
First, they decided that privacy was a constitutional right.
And you know what?
A lot of people on the right attack that decision, but I don't.
I think that privacy is implied by the Constitution.
There are rights that are not listed in the Constitution that we still have.
The Constitution is supposed to work the other way around.
It's supposed to enumerate the powers that the federal government has.
And if it doesn't mention those powers, then the government does not have that power.
That's the way the Constitution is supposed to work, right?
It's not supposed to have to eliminate rights that we have.
But we have the right, for instance, to travel between states.
That's not listed in the Constitution.
So I think, yes, it's fair to say that there's a right to privacy.
To then say that that right to privacy protects you if you kill the baby inside you, that makes no sense.
Because the question on offer in abortion is only one thing.
Is that baby a human being?
Is that baby a human being?
That's the question.
If it's a human being, it has a right to life.
If it's not a human being, if it's a cup or a plug or I don't know what the hell else it's supposed to be, but if it's something else, then, okay, you can argue that it doesn't have a right to life.
If it's a human being, it has a right to life.
The Supreme Court has no right to say that the Constitution strips it of that right to life.
That's an absurdity.
And that's the problem.
It is not the right to privacy.
It is not adding positive rights because the right to privacy is actually the right to be left alone.
All right.
So John Roberts offers a rare rebuke.
It is very rare that any Supreme Court justice does this.
The head of the Supreme Court, he says, this morning, Senator Schumer spoke at a rally in front of the Supreme Court while a case was being argued inside.
Senator Schumer referred to two members of the court by name and said he wanted to tell them that you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price.
You will not know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.
Justices, this is Roberts now, justices know that criticism comes with the territory, but threatening statements of this sort from the highest levels of government are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous.
All members of the court will continue to do their job without fear of favor from whatever quarter.
And, you know, this is not the first time they have done this, right?
It is the left that made the court a creator of laws.
And therefore, it is the left that made the court a high-stakes game.
It used to be that the president appointed a justice, and unless he'd done something really terrible, they let him in, whichever side was in power confirmed him because the president had the right to make that appointment.
But now, every Supreme Court justice is a fight to the death because they're making law, and the left put us in that situation, and now the left has upped their thuggery game to deal with that situation.
And remember, they did, they filed a brief.
The Democrats, led by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, filed a brief in which they accused the court of being politicized and calling it not well and threatening it, saying it had to heal itself to be restructured.
This is not the first time they did this.
So at first, Schumer's spokesman tried to use the kind of whataboutism of saying that he said for justice, this is his spokesman, said for Justice Roberts to follow the right wing's deliberate misinterpretation of what Senator Schumer said.
You heard it.
There's no misinterpreting it.
While remaining silent when President Trump attacked Justices Sodomair and Ruth Bader Ginsburg last week, shows Justice Roberts does not just call balls and strikes.
Obvious nonsense.
Trump said that they should recuse themselves because Ginsburg had actually said stuff about Trump being unfit for office, so couldn't make a fair decision.
And he said she should recuse herself.
Trump should shut up.
No question about it.
But he didn't threaten her.
That is a different thing saying she should recuse herself.
I think he shouldn't say those things, but that is not the same thing as you will pay the price.
So now the Senate is threatening to vote to censure Schumer.
McConnell said this.
This is cut 21.
First, he prompted a crowd of left-wing activists to boo two of the associate justices, as though Supreme Court justices were professional athletes.
And Senator Schumer were jeering.
from the stands.
And then the senior senator from New York said this.
I want to tell you, Gorsuch.
I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you've released the whirlwind, and you, you, will pay the price.
You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.
The Benard leader of the United States Senate threatens two associate justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, period.
There's no other way to interpret that.
So finally, Schumer cracked and he made this statement.
I should not have used the words I used yesterday.
They didn't come out the way I intended to.
My point was that there would be political consequences, political consequences for President Trump and Senate Republicans if the Supreme Court, with the newly confirmed justices, stripped away a woman's right to choose.
Of course, I didn't intend to suggest anything other than political and public opinion consequences for the Supreme Court.
And it is a gross distortion to imply otherwise.
I'm from Brooklyn.
We speak in strong language.
I shouldn't have used the words I did, but in no way was I making a threat.
I never, never would do such a thing.
And Leader McConnell knows that.
And Republicans who are busy manufacturing outrage over these comments know that too.
So that's barely an apology.
They're manufacturing outrage.
He knows he can get away with this manufacturing outrage stuff because he knows, you know, when you're a thug, you got to have your gang behind you, right?
Once you're a Dem, you're a Dem all the way from your first cigarette to your last dying day.
And he knows the press is going to back him up.
The press is going to back him up when it comes to saying things like this.
So he knows he can get away with this.
He knows he can say, I'm from Brooklyn, so we talk tough.
Well, Trump is from Queens, but that's not, no one but me has ever let him off the hook.
Me and Knowles let him off the hook from that because we're New Yorkers.
But if the press has never let him off the hook, you can bet that the press is going to let Schumer off the hook.
It already has.
It already has.
I'll show you in a second.
The Washington Post went for Republicans seize on Schumer's comments, right?
Republicans are always pouncing.
The Democrats are never doing anything wrong.
It's always the Republicans are pouncing and seizing on their comments.
He can do that because, like every thug, he is part of a gang, and the gang includes the press.
And that is a genuine problem for discourse in this country.
As I've said a million times, Trump was elected because he speaks back for the people.
The people don't have microphones.
They don't have cameras.
They can't say what they want.
And when they get demonized, they need a powerful voice to speak back.
And it's because Schumer is protected and we're not that they elected Trump.
All right, let us talk about Ashford University.
You know, yesterday I was talking to one of the security guards here, and he was telling me he's going to school in his spare time.
And I said, that's the difference.
That is the difference between a guy who's going to be in one position all his life and a guy who's going to move up.
Ashford University can help you with this.
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That's ashford.edu slash Andrew to start your degree today, ashford.edu slash Andrew.
So let's go on and take a look at the way the press handled this.
First, you know, let's go on CNN, where they have this hyper-liberal legal commentator, Jeffrey Toobin.
This is cut to, but even Toobin hit Chuck Schumer for this, but listen to what he said.
If you parse what Chuck Schumer said, it was wrong.
It was inappropriate.
It was not the way you should talk about the Supreme Court.
Frankly, no one noticed what he said until Roberts intervened.
I mean, it was political hyperbole of a sort that politicians shouldn't engage in.
What's really unusual here is Roberts getting involved.
And actually, you don't really have to parse what Chuck Schumer said.
You just have to listen to it.
I mean, he said, he said, you will pay the price.
You won't know what hit you.
And he said this specifically to Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh.
I mean, I'm certainly not going to defend what Chuck Schumer said.
It was wrong.
It was inappropriate.
It did sound like a physical threat.
I think if you look at Chuck Schumer's entire record, if you look at how he behaves, he does not threaten people physically.
It was certainly a bad choice of words.
So what's important there, of course, is the making excuses for Chuck Schumer.
So even as they're calling him out for it, and they are calling him out for it, that's fair.
They are making excuses for him.
But the point that Toobin made was nobody paid attention to this.
Nobody paid attention to this until Justice Roberts said something about it.
When he says nobody paid attention to this, who does he mean?
Who does he mean?
He means him.
He means CNN.
He means the press.
The press would have let it go if Roberts hadn't called him out, which is why Roberts did what he did, right?
He called him out because he knows that Schumer can get away with it.
Listen to the way, NBC, where they killed the Harvey Weinstein story because they were too busy protecting the predator Matt Lauer.
Just remember, just remember who they are.
They don't mention this story at all.
Don't mention it at all in the evening news.
ABC and CBS, and this is from our friends at Newsbusters, ABC and CBS, this is how they led into it.
This is cut six.
Fireworks at the Supreme Court today.
The justices today hearing a key case on abortion rights.
It's a big test for President Trump's picks, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
Outside the court, Senate Majority leader, minority leader, I should point out, Chuck Schumer, with a heated warning.
But in 2018, Justice Brett Kavanaugh replaced Kennedy, joining on the court President Trump's other nominee, Neil Gorsuch.
On the steps of the court today, Senator Chuck Schumer leveled a warning to them both.
It's a warning.
NBC just doesn't cover it.
And they say it's a warning.
It's a warning like, you know, if you don't give me the hundred bucks every week, somebody may throw a gasoline can through your window.
That's a warning, you know?
That's also a warning, which we call in English a threat.
Abortion Rights Hearing00:06:51
So, you know, that's why he can do it.
That's why he gets away with it.
That's why they know they can amp up the rhetoric all the time.
And they will never pay the price that Trump pays if he sneezes.
Okay, so now, but let's think more about why, why they have become such thugs.
Why do people sit around and talk about putting people in gulags?
Why do people think, oh, it's okay, I hate Donald Trump so much, I want him assassinated, and nobody says a thing.
Talking to a liberal friend yesterday, way, way liberal friend, and he was saying, oh, the division, the divisiveness.
And I said, well, you know, it's possible that you just don't see how divisive you guys are.
Yeah, that's just irrational.
That is irrational.
He doesn't see the constant, constant barrage of hate that pours out of his outlets because he doesn't see that they're his outlets, right?
He thinks they're being fair because that's the world that he's living in.
But, you know, underneath this, too, is this philosophy.
It is the philosophy of they are virtuous and we're evil.
But it's that underlying philosophy, too, that has taken over the left, that maybe is leftism at some level, which is the philosophy of materialism.
It is not an accident.
It is not an accident that Schumer was making these comments at an abortion rally.
It's not an accident that he was making these comments at a rally where they conflate their rights with the right to extinguish another human life.
Why shouldn't he threaten Gorsuch and Kavanaugh?
Why shouldn't he if they're already talking about their right to take a human life?
Here at this rally, here's Jackie Spear of Speyer, who is a California congresswoman.
This is cut three.
Here she's talking about abortion.
Most of the, it has nothing to do with healthcare.
It has everything to do with politics because abortions are one of the safest procedures you can do on an outpatient basis.
Safer than doing an endoscopy or doing a wisdom teeth extraction.
It is safer to have an abortion than having your wisdom teeth extracted, which is exactly right if your wisdom teeth happen to be innocent human beings.
It's just exactly as safe as that if your wisdom teeth happen to be unprotected human beings without a vote or a voice that you can kill.
Then it's safe.
You know, I mean, it's safe if there's only one person involved.
But of course it's not safe.
And after Schumer speaks, just to show you how thoroughly the left is infested by this materialist philosophy, this philosophy that we are not human beings, we are not whole things with a spiritual element, no matter how you want to say it.
I'm not preaching a religion.
I'm simply preaching the very fact that we are spirits, that we are whole things.
We're not bits and pieces that can be taken off and removed at will as is convenient for somebody who shouldn't have gotten pregnant and now wants to get rid of it.
After Schumer speaks, right after he speaks, an activist gets up and this is what she says.
This is cut five.
Let's hear for Senator Schumer.
Let's hear for all the people who have abortions.
Let's hear for our trans folks who have abortions.
That's wonderful.
Let's hear it for people of abortions.
Hey, hooray.
Remember safe, legal, and rare?
Remember that one?
Yeah, that's gone.
That's gone.
Of course it's gone.
Once you go down the road, once you go down the road, you are traveling to the end of the road.
Once you go down any road, you are traveling.
You know, today, the New York Times, a former newspaper, ran one of those columns they run from time to time that they think elevate women.
And I don't have it right in front of me, but it was basically if American women were paid for the unpaid work they do around the house and taking care of relatives, they'd earn, I think it was $1.5 billion a year.
Now, they think that elevates women.
They think saying how much it would cost to pay women to do the work they do elevates women.
Let's think about that for a minute.
Does it?
Does it?
I mean, when a waitress puts food in front of you, you can pay her for that.
That is a job that she is doing.
When a mother puts food in front of her children, that's a very different thing.
But see, they don't have that category because they are materialists.
You know, it's really interesting.
William Wordsworth, in one of his great poems, The Prelude, talks about a mother infusing a baby as she nurses the baby, infusing it with love and infusing it, giving it an ability to see the love in the world.
This turns out to be physically true as well as spiritually true.
Now that scientists can measure the brain and all this, they see that when babies are nursing, when babies interact with their mothers, they start to align themselves with the mother and they start to understand the love between the mother and the child.
This happens in the brain.
They can chart this in the brain and they then can see the world and find themselves connected to the world and connected to other people.
The thing that a mother does when she nurses her baby and when she plays with the baby and when she reacts to the baby, how do you pay for that?
How do you pay for that?
See, in the New York Times, that's childcare.
You can pay for childcare.
You can pay for somebody to come in and sit with your baby.
You can't pay for someone to create in your baby humanity, which is what a mother does.
You know, I feel sometimes when I talk about this, people think, oh, he's an old guy who wants to bring back the 1950s.
No, I like it better now.
I want women to have all the choices in the world.
I simply want them to know what their choices are, right?
It is not a choice.
It is not a choice between unpaid childcare labor and going to work where somebody will give you a check for answering phones, which is what most people do, right?
Most people have jobs that are taking care of business.
It's not that choice.
It's a choice between getting a paycheck for reading the news, say, reading the news off a teleprompter and everybody saying how beautiful you are, but not being allowed to say it out loud or they have to quit.
That's one choice.
And the other choice is creating a human being, not just in the flesh, but creating the spiritual ability for that person to connect with the world in a way of love, or as Wordsworth said, sharing the act of creation with the one great mind.
That to me is, you can't pay somebody for that.
You can't pay somebody for creating a home, for serving meals that are actually not meals, but are gestures of love.
You can't pay people for that, man.
And so like the fact that they have, that the left has turned everything into materiality, into material, is one of the reasons they have become such thugs because they no longer understand the world as it is.
They no longer see the world as it is.
The world is a place that has several levels.
One of them is physical, but that's not the only level.
Multiple Levels Exist00:03:25
It is also a place of spirit.
It is also the place that God has made.
All right, let us, we're going to go from there to talking about underwear.
It's a natural segue to go from God to underwear.
Sometimes you don't see these things coming.
However, it is the most comfortable underwear.
So there is something spiritual about that.
Tommy John is incredible underwear.
I've said this before.
I put this stuff on.
When they were telling me about it, they were telling me, you don't even have to try this on.
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All right.
I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
We've got Matt Walsh with us.
We had him on the backstage show, and we didn't get to talk to him enough about some of the stuff he was saying.
He's got a new book, which I have read, called Church of Cowards: A Wake-Up Call to Complacent Christians.
Go out and pick up a copy.
And of course, he's here at the Daily Wire with the show.
Matt, how are you doing?
Good.
Thanks for having me, Drew.
It's great.
First of all, I really like this book.
You really write well, and it's not that many writers can get their voices onto the page, and you do, and it's really riveting stuff.
We started talking on backstage, and I felt there were so many of us there.
Faith Teetering: Christian Suffering00:12:40
I felt the actual core of the conversation got lost.
So let's start with the book, Church of Cowards.
You start out, you tell a story about some Christians in Egypt who are martyred.
Can you tell a little talk a little bit about that?
Because I thought it was central to your point.
Yeah, yeah, well, I'm trying to draw a comparison between what Christians in this country and in the West generally face versus Christians in other parts of the world.
And one example of what Christians in other parts of the world face is this story out of Egypt.
There are so many you could point to, but this one in particular from just a few years ago, these Christians were on a bus on the way to a monastery in the desert to pray, and the bus was stopped by Islamic militants, and they were all pulled off of the bus.
And they were asked if they're Christian.
And of course, they all said yes.
And then they were asked if they would renounce their faith.
And of course, they all said no.
And I don't know, I don't remember the exact number, but several dozen were murdered there on the spot, including children.
And you just, if you think about what that requires, especially when there's, you know, two, you basically have to choose martyrdom twice because first you're saying, yes, I'm a Christian, probably think you'll be killed there on the spot.
You're not.
You're given another chance.
Will you renounce?
And then you have to say it again.
And I just think that that's, I mean, the courage there is hard to wrap your head around.
And yet I've seen numerous times, and of course, you can't blame them because you don't know what you would do in the situation, but we've seen American soldiers who've been kidnapped and they come on and they pretend they're now Islamic in order to save their lives.
Compare, what is it you see in American Christians when you compare them to that?
Well, what I see, and I very much include myself in this, I think that's an important thing I want to emphasize.
I'm not looking to be self-righteous or put myself forward as some sort of moral example because I definitely am not.
So what I see in myself and others is that we are oftentimes, not only are we not willing to give up our lives, that opportunity doesn't arise, thank goodness for us, but we're not really willing to give up anything at all.
And I think if we were to ask ourselves as Christians, it's a very difficult thing to face about yourself, but really ask yourself, if you're a Christian, what have you actually given up for faith?
Christ says, pick up your cross and follow me.
He says we have to be willing to give up everything, all of our possessions, if that's what's called of us.
Have we given up anything at all?
Have we made any sacrifice, any real sacrifice that we can think of?
You know, I notice sometimes I talk sometimes about, you know, even things like entertainment, the choices we make and the entertainment we consume.
And I am of the maybe apparently radical opinion that we should be a little bit discerning.
There are probably some things that we shouldn't be indulging in in the realm of entertainment if we're Christians.
And even that suggestion, I've noticed, provokes harsh reactions from Christians who would just will say, I will not give this up.
And so I sort of think, you know, if the terrorists put a gun to our head and say, give up your faith, I think we would probably break.
But even if they put a gun to our TV and said, give up your faith of the TV goes, we'd probably break then.
Is the problem that we're just too comfortable or is there something else?
I think that there are a lot of problems mixed into this.
And I try to get into that in the book, but I do think that comfort is a big issue, is a big problem, that it allows us to, we're just so comfortable.
We live in such luxury.
It's hard for us to really appreciate how much luxury we live in in comparison to not just people in other places in the world, but especially all throughout history.
We live such incredibly comfortable lives.
The average middle-class American these days would be absurdly wealthy in comparison to most of the people who've ever lived on earth.
So I think the problem is that we get used to that comfort.
It makes us complacent.
We start to believe that these things are necessities, even things like a phone and a TV.
We start to see them as necessary to our lives.
It also allows us, I think, to block out thoughts of death and mortality.
And there's a guy that wrote a book, Ernest Becker, back a few decades ago called The Denial of Death.
And he believes that, yeah, his theory is that culture, modern culture is set up basically with the sole purpose of avoiding thoughts of death.
I think there's something to that.
And I think that's the issue we face.
Do you think also, I mean, has science made it more difficult to believe?
Is the idea that we can look at the brain and see emotions going through it and all this, does that put a crimp in people's faith at all?
I mean, do people really have faith, I guess is what I'm asking?
I think the first question, yes, I do think it can pose a challenge.
Now, I don't think in reality, I don't think that science disproves God.
Of course, if I thought that, then I wouldn't be Christian.
But I do think it presents challenges.
People can ask questions.
And I do think as Christians, we should be a lot better at addressing those questions.
I think sometimes we're quite bad at it when you have a secular person or even a Christian, a younger Christian goes to college, learns a lot of stuff about science.
They're learning it in a biased way, of course.
And questions arise and their faith is kind of teetering.
And they go and they pursue answers.
They talk to their pastors.
They talk to other Christians.
I think sometimes they get hostility because Christians don't.
We don't like for those questions to be brought to us.
We feel threatened.
I think we need to be better at addressing those questions.
And yeah, so I do think that that all plays into it.
And some of it is just the shallowness of modern Christians that we're not able to address basic challenges to our faith.
And that's part of the problem as well.
You know, you write toward the end of the book, you write really beautifully about the Christian ideas about suffering.
But I think that there is a lot of confusion about this.
You know, Christ said, pick up your cross and follow me.
And, you know, everyone who has been through true suffering knows that you can find meaning in suffering.
Are we supposed to choose suffering?
Are we supposed to look for, you know, there are people who've whipped themselves through the years, all kinds of things.
What is our relationship to suffering supposed to be?
Well, I don't think we're supposed to pursue suffering for its own sake.
And I think that that becomes gratuitous and self-indulgent in a sort of weird way.
So I don't think that that's, I don't think that's what Christ's point was.
I think it was just that the nature of life is that suffering is part of it.
And every great philosopher from any school of philosophy has come to that conclusion that life is suffering and there's suffering in life.
It's unavoidable.
So what we find is if you try, first of all, if you live your whole life trying to avoid suffering, then you're avoiding life itself.
You're hiding from everything that makes life real and substantive.
And also, real joy is found in suffering, and you have to plunge into it and go through it to find real joy.
We know that that's the case from an eternal perspective.
But even someone who's not Christian or not religious, I think we see this in our own lives, something like the joy we find as parents or as spouses.
We know that we have to embrace sacrifice and self-denial to really experience that joy.
If we try to be parents who are selfish and we're concerned most about our own comfort, we're just going to be miserable, we discover.
So I think that there's obviously a reality there that Christianity speaks to.
We're talking about Matt Walsh's book, Church of Cowards, A Wake Up Call to Complacent Christians.
I haven't got a lot of time, but I do want to bring back, I wish we could actually talk about this a lot, but I want to bring back this idea that we are at this moment when maybe our libertarianism has devolved into complete chaos, when people are twerking in front of children and selling porn all over the place.
Where do you stand on this?
What is our reaction supposed to be politically to a world in which children are being abused while politicians applaud?
Well, I just, I don't think that our human rights, I don't think rights are this thing that gives us a license to do whatever we want.
And I think everyone agrees with that because obviously we agree that there are limits.
You can't do anything you want.
And certainly when you're harming another person, I think most people agree that that's where the line is drawn.
The only problem, I guess, I guess we all sort of agree in theory with that.
It's just, how do you define harm?
What exactly is harming another person?
And I would say that the stuff that we're doing to children, the normalization of sexual abuse, you said in the backstage, child abuse is number one health crisis in America, right?
I think it's a great way of putting it.
I absolutely agree.
Because it's being so normalized and it's harming children.
So as Americans, as people, as decent people, we need to rise up to protect our children.
And we can't be squeamish as conservatives about calling for the arm of the state to be used for good to protect children.
I think conservatives have become way too scared of advocating government involvement in anything.
And obviously the government needs to be involved in some things.
I got to stop you there, Matt, but the book is Church of Cowards, A Wake Up Call to Complacent Christians.
Thanks a lot for coming on.
A really good book.
Thanks a lot.
Appreciate it.
All right.
In keeping with this, a final reflection about Alex Trebek.
I was looking at him and I was thinking, you know, he's the host of Jeopardy all these years.
And I was thinking, what is courage?
And courage is certainly Alex Trebek as he came on and talked about the fact that he has lived with late-stage pancreatic cancer, which is statistically a death sentence, and he has managed to live with it for a year.
And he talks about the fact that beating the odds and not just beating the odds of the disease, but beating the depression that comes along with it.
Now, this is cut 16 where he talks about this.
Now, I'd be lying if I said the journey had been an easy one.
There were some good days, but a lot of not-so-good days.
I joked with friends that the cancer won't kill me.
The chemo treatments will.
There were moments of great pain, days when certain bodily functions no longer functioned, and sudden massive attacks of great depression that made me wonder if it really was worth fighting on.
But I brushed that aside quickly because that would have been a massive betrayal, a betrayal of my wife and soulmate Jean, who has given her all to help me survive.
It would have been a betrayal of other cancer patients who have looked to me as an inspiration and a cheerleader of sorts of the value of living and hope.
And it would certainly have been a betrayal of my faith in God and the millions of prayers that have been said on my behalf.
Now, it was a very, very moving statement, and the guy is obviously a, you know, a beloved figure and a household name.
And here is how ABC reported this.
This is cut 17.
The 79-year-old talking openly about the grueling treatments, the side effects, the depression.
I brushed that aside quickly because that would have been a massive betrayal.
A betrayal of my wife and soulmate Jean, who has given her all to help me survive.
It would have been a betrayal of other cancer patients who have looked to me as an inspiration and a cheerleader of sorts of the value of living and hope.
So many rooting for Alex, including contestants.
So you got to cut him off somewhere, obviously.
They chose to cut him off before he spoke about the betrayal to God and what God and his prayers have meant to him.
You know, I'm not going to accuse them of doing that on purpose.
I think they do it instinctively.
I think they do it instinctively because they are leftists, because they are materialists, because they don't know God is there.
And I think that that contributes to the fact that they have chosen the thug life and will continue to choose the thug life until they get their minds right.
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