Andrew Klavan dissects the left’s hypocrisy—from dismissing due process for Kavanaugh vs. Biden to Cuomo’s callous lockdown logic, framing COVID-19 as a health crisis over political theater while mocking AOC’s detachment from real-world struggles. He ties human dignity to freedom and meaning, contrasting it with environmentalist priorities, then pivots to Frankenstein, tracing Mary Shelley’s 1816 monster vision—where physicality becomes morality—as a defense of individual perception against societal reductionism. The episode ends by urging resistance to cancel culture, promoting autonomy as humanity’s defining trait. [Automatically generated summary]
The New York Times, a former newspaper, has issued a pamphlet on how to cover stories about sexual misbehavior.
The pamphlet reads as follows.
When conservative Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was accused of having attacked a woman while in his teens, we covered the story in a very thorough, careful fit of unreasoning hatred and hysteria.
We reported any plausible accusation whether it was that Kavanaugh had murdered a series of teenagers in a 40-year coast-to-coast killspree or that Madame Ospenskaya, the palm reader from Queens, had had a vision in which Kavanaugh boiled and devoured a female child as a college prank.
In the same way, when Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden was accused of sexually assaulting a woman 27 years ago when he was 70, we remained silent for 19 days, then ran an Easter Sunday story on page 20 explaining away the charges.
For some reason, some of our readers have become confused about the standards by which we report on these important stories.
So, to clarify, we are publishing our official guidelines.
First, believe all women.
Then suddenly stop without warning, then make up excuses for why you did before and don't now, then start up again later whenever it's convenient.
Second, the time when men can sexually assault women with impunity has ended.
Then it briefly started up again in approximately 1993, and now it's ended again unless something comes up and then we'll let you know.
Third, from now on, the Me Too movement has been renamed Me Too, but not necessarily you.
This will lend clarity and credibility to our hypocritical double standard, unprincipled bias, and lies.
Fourth, due process demands that accusations of sexual assault be backed up by corroborating evidence, like for instance, proof that the accused believes in God or opposes abortion.
On the other hand, don't report the charges if the accused couldn't find his way around a woman with a flashlight and a map because he's too stupid and senile to even speak a complete sentence.
Don't report that either.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
So you know how you sometimes have to clean useless stuff out of your computer so it doesn't slow down?
Sometimes you have to do that with your brain too, especially in the political world where you can get so angry watching Brian Stelter, a man with a face like a buttock, cry like a biach because he has to go through the same thing every other person has to go through, except with more money.
You forget that he's not really worth the brain cells it takes to insult him.
Though that's kind of fun.
So I'd like to begin today by discussing a few things I think the Chinese flu crisis is not about.
The Chinese flu crisis is not a battle to maintain our sacred American liberties.
I would tell you if it were.
I have a lot of affection for our sacred American liberties and like to think I would fight to defend them.
But Donald Trump has not seized power for the feds, but has acted responsibly to protect health and restart business while defending federalism.
And the odd wannabe local tyrant will be foiled by residents and pushback from the DOJ.
Threats to liberty may yet come out of this.
There may be a depression.
There could be civil unrest.
Democrats could win the next election.
That would be a threat to our liberty, but not yet.
The Chinese flu crisis is not about the media.
It's about the media in the sense that they've shown themselves to be utterly useless, dishonest, and corrupt.
But it's not about what Brian Stelter feels or when Chris Cuomo comes out of lockdown or whether someone had their feelings hurt when the president pointed out that they're dishonest and incompetent.
We don't know these people.
We don't care how they feel.
We don't care what's going on in their minds.
We have families and friends who really matter to us.
Screw them.
It's not about Donald Trump.
It's not about how he talks or some random remark or what he said when.
Just doesn't matter.
By most accounts of the governors he works with and by my own observation, he has done a good job, I would say an excellent job of managing the twin challenges of what is both a public health crisis and an economic crisis.
The results over the next months will tell the story.
Everything else is white noise.
The only things that really matter are your health and your livelihood and the health and livelihood of all our fellow Americans.
That's what this is about.
It's a disease.
Diseases are bad.
China is also bad.
So Chinese diseases are bad twice.
We need to get the economy moving again without endangering so many people that we shut down again.
If you can make your living at home, you probably should.
If you can't, take precautions to stay safe.
We've got nothing to prove.
We've got jobs to do and lives to live.
It's wrong to be cowardly, but it's not wrong to act like a commonsensical adult.
Keep calm, carry on, take care.
And as the old saying goes, don't let the bastards get you down.
And of course, save the Clavin.
All right, we're going to be talking about a lot of important stuff today.
Really interesting show, I hope.
But first, let's talk about Bambi.
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That's month to month, no hidden fees, and you can cancel anytime.
Go to Bambi.com slash Clavin right now to schedule your free HR audit.
That's Bambi.com slash Clavin, spelled bam to the B-E-E dot com slash Clavin.
How do you spell Klavan?
If you think HR is complicated, what will you try and spell Klavan?
I'm doing the all-access show tonight, 5 p.m. Pacific, 8 p.m. Eastern.
You do want to be there.
And by the way, you know, usually what we do is you've been asking me questions.
I've been talking.
But if you want to send a brief note to me about what's going on in your life, how this is affecting you, please do.
I got to keep it short because I don't have time to process all the information.
So just send me three sentences.
But just tell me what's going on.
What's important to you?
What you're seeing.
I would love to know.
One more important thing.
I made a speech about the two sea monsters in Homer and Greek mythology.
I called them Scylla and Sharbatus.
It's Scylla and Charybdis.
Scylla and Charybdis.
I never had to pronounce them out loud before because they just don't come up that often.
You don't deal with sea monsters that often aren't.
Why Earth Day Matters00:10:46
You are too smart to be this dumb.
Thank you.
I appreciate your support.
But I double-checked this with my son, a doctor in classics from Oxford.
He said I was wrong.
So of course I slammed the phone down and we'll never speak to him again.
Later on, I'm going to be talking about, you know, I talked about some great books, some big books that you might now have time to read that you hadn't had time to read before.
I don't know if I talked about that last week or the week before since everything blends together.
Today I'm going to talk about some short books that you can read and also you can read them and then watch the movie, which is really kind of an interesting thing to do.
I don't know how many I'll get a chance to talk about, but we will.
So one of the things I think that is making all this so difficult is not just the press, it is also the stupidity of the way our leaders think.
I mean, when we see the way our elites think, the processes by which they think, it's just distressing.
I mean, Andrew Cuomo, I've always had a problem with the Cuomo family.
They always come across as intellectuals, but the stuff they say is not that bright.
I want to play cut one as a reporter asked him about these protests trying to get the economy to open up.
These are regular people who are not getting a paycheck.
Some of them are not getting their unemployment check.
And they're saying that they don't have time to wait for all of this testing and they need to get back to work in order to feed their families.
Their savings is running out.
They don't have another week.
They're not getting answers.
So their point is the cure can't be worse than the illness itself.
What is your response to them?
The illness is death.
What is worse than death?
Well, what if somebody commits suicide because they can't pay their debt?
Yeah, but the illnesses may be my death as opposed to your death.
You said they said the cure is worse than the illness.
The illness is death.
How can the cure be worse than the illness if the illness is potential death?
See, that's just not good thinking.
Now, I'm going to give him a break and say what I think he was trying to say when he said my death, not your death.
He's saying if you commit suicide, that's on you, but you don't have the right to kill me to endanger me.
But the illness is not death.
The illness is not death for younger people, people under 40 who are in good health.
And everything is death.
Crossing the street is death.
Driving a car is really death.
I mean, these are things that we all brave all the time.
Living is death.
Waking up is death.
It's ridiculous.
It's ridiculous if that's the way he's thinking.
And it is the way New York is thinking.
New York City is passing laws that are going to make it harder for small businesses to open.
You know, there's absolutely, right now, right now there is no science.
There is no science that says the lockdown should continue.
There's science that says I should continue in lockdown for a little while, but there's no science that says young people can't start going back to work.
Businesses can't start to reopen.
People will not go back immediately and do all those things, but we can trust people to figure it all out.
You know, this is the thing.
You know, yesterday I was watching some of the Earth Day coverage.
I want to stop talking about the virus for just a minute and come back to it because what I learned at the Earth Day coverage was also important.
You know, when I was a kid, they used to ask the question, if a tree falls in a forest and no one's there to hear it, does it make a sound?
And I always like that riddle because it's not like the riddle of can God create a rock that he can't lift?
Because that's just language being used to actually spew nonsense.
It's just a nonsensical question.
There's no answer to it.
It's silly.
And just because you put the word God in there doesn't make it any less silly than it is.
But the question about the tree falling in a forest is actually a good question because there is an answer and the answer is a tree falling in the forest creates all the necessary qualities to create a sound.
But it doesn't create a sound until we hear it.
Even if an animal hears it, it doesn't create a sound.
And the reason is the animal doesn't have the word sound.
The animal doesn't have the self-consciousness of sound.
Sound is a concept.
Sound is a concept that only human beings have.
All of your life, this is going on.
And I think it is the most important thing about life.
The most important thing about life is the world that you experience.
That's what makes you you.
That's what makes you important.
This is why I was talking about this a couple of days ago.
This is why Jesus said, love your enemies, because when you start to see the world that they live in, your life expands.
It's all part of God's creation that is being continued by you.
Wordsworth said, the mind is an agent of the one, the human mind is an agent of the one great mind.
It creates, it's creator and receiver both.
It's working, but in alliance with the works which it beholds.
That's Wordsworth's language, meaning that the things that we experience, the beauty, the truth, the morality, aren't being invented by us.
That's kind of the stupid scientific, scientist idea, you know, scientism idea that we have these morals that we just make up because they're good for us.
No, we have morals because we perceive an order that is God's order, but morality is the way we perceive it, just the way the sound is the way we perceive the falling of the tree.
It's kind of a complicated thought, but not really when you think about it.
The point is, the only important thing about the Earth, sometimes when I say this, I say it every Earth Day, and every Earth Day people kind of look at me like, what are you talking about?
The only important thing about the Earth is us.
Why?
Because we're the only people who have concepts about what the Earth is.
If anything is beautiful on the Earth, it's because we see it.
This is leaving God out of it.
God has his own plan and is living on his own level.
But here on Earth, the only important thing is what we see, the beauty, the morality, the truth.
All of that comes from us.
Even science comes from us.
The mistake of scientism, scientism is science used as a religion, is to think that the ultimate purpose of what they're doing is to see life objectively, right?
But that's not true.
The ultimate purpose of seeing life objectively is that so our inner lives are more realistic, are deeper and more beautiful and closer to God's actual creation.
So we're not reacting, for instance, we don't think, oh, the sky is a big dome, so we can't, you know, take a rocket up there.
No, once we realize, oh, no, the sky is an illusion that we're seeing, then we know we can blast a rocket into outer space and everything has changed.
We're trying to live human life at its highest level.
That's the purpose of science.
The purpose of science is not to reduce us to a bag, a meat puppet just filled with a bag of chemicals.
That's why when I looked at some of this coverage, I saw CBS covering Earth Day.
All right, so here's just a snippet of CBS as they covered Earth Day.
On the first Earth Day, demonstrators filled cities around the world.
Today, those streets are largely empty, but the air, temporarily at least, is cleaner.
There are a whole bunch of people around the world who are seeing blue skies above their cities for the first time.
Technology forecaster Paul Sapph says that may help clear the air in the future.
All of this enforced working at home will have a huge impact.
It is completely culturally acceptable.
So in other words, if we could just get rid of the people, the world would be a better place.
When you hear that, what you should hear is you should hear this scene from The Matrix.
Human beings are a disease, the cancer of this planet.
You are a plague.
And we are the cure.
We are the machines that create this fake reality that pacifies human beings.
And he says in the movie, he says, you're a virus, you're a virus.
You act just like a virus.
You suck up all the materials and then you move on just like a virus does.
When you see the world like that, you're missing everything.
You're missing everything.
I do not know what value these people have.
It's the same way, you know, when I hear non-religious leftists scream and yell about racism.
I think, I don't understand what's wrong with racism to an atheist.
You know, I know why I don't like racism.
I don't like racism because it's offensive to the image of God.
That's why.
Because God says, I created you in my image.
That to me is the end of the conversation.
That is who you are to me.
You are a version of God's image.
Your thoughts, your inner experience, your human life is a version of God's image.
If you don't have that concept in your head, what do you care if people are racist?
Why shouldn't you just defend your race against other races?
Why not just go back to being tribal?
That's the thing about progressivism.
It always progresses back into the past.
Why not just progress back to being tribal?
So it's the same thing.
If it's not the people you're saving the earth for, what are you saving it for?
It's just a rock.
It's just a rock with leaves on it.
It's just a rock with cats that wander around that don't know anything from anything.
We are the things that make all that stuff important.
So, you know, this is the concept that when I look at the current crisis that we're in, I wonder if these people are thinking in a cogent, intelligent way.
And how much of what we're talking about now and what we talk about normally is what they call, what the shrinks call deflection.
It's deflecting from the fact that human beings die, that we die, that this is the life we lead, that none of us, all the fame in the world, all the money in the world, all the iPads in the world, all the iPhones in the world aren't going to stop the fact that we die.
We always have this argument at the Daily Wire because I don't really like these superhero movies.
And one of my problems with superhero movies is they don't really deal with death.
Superheroes can get killed, but they don't die, which is different.
You know, you know that you are finite.
You are a finite thing.
You will not be around forever.
That creates a different kind of life.
And so when Andrew Cuomo says to you, oh no, you can't go back to work because that's death.
It's all death.
It's all death.
And again, you know, the other thing about this is I think I've said this before, if you could suck the noise out of the room, if you could turn off sobbing Brian Stelter, if you could turn off, you know, Jim Acosta.
I said today on Twitter that if Donald Trump attacked Hitler, Jim Acosta would show up with like a little mustache the next day.
If you can just suck all those people out of the room, all the New York Times op-eds about how evil Donald Trump is, whatever they're talking about, this is pretty much what has to happen.
This is a tragedy.
This is a really bad thing.
It's a disease.
Diseases, bad.
Disease equals bad.
You always know diseases equal bad because they hurt people and people are what matter.
So it's going to be bad.
Once you suck all the energy all the noise out of the room, what have you got?
What have you got left?
You've got the fact that a bad thing happened.
Leaders had to deal with it.
They shut down the world to make sure the healthcare system wasn't overwhelmed.
Now they see, okay, whether or not it might have had to do with the fact that they shut down the world, that the healthcare system wasn't overwhelmed.
We have no way of proving whether that's true or not.
But let's say it was.
I think the evidence suggests that it was social distancing that helped the healthcare systems not get overwhelmed.
People Matter00:12:05
Now we've got to go back.
We cannot have 20% of the people unemployed.
You cannot have that.
I mean, you cannot have a world in which we're not producing enough wealth to do those things we do.
And some of the things we do are helping other people because this hasn't even hit the third world yet.
It hasn't really gone south.
When it does, there's going to be much more stuff.
Who's going to be there to help them if we're crippled?
So we've got to start creating wealth again.
We've got to start living life again.
We've got to start being human beings again.
The human experience is what this is all about.
And it's what everything is all about.
And if we're not doing that, we're not doing it right.
So again, I have not been a Bolshevik about this.
I haven't said, oh, we should pour back.
The people don't want to pour back.
The people are not going to go back into restaurants right away.
They're not going to go back.
All the polls show this.
They're not going to go back into subways.
They are saying in their area, they think the restrictions have been fairly reasonable.
Most people are saying that.
Now, 60% of the people are saying that, and 60% of the people can work from home.
So we still got to take care of the 40% of the people who can't work from home, who are just going to be unemployed.
Cannot be, cannot be.
We have to go back, and we just have to do it carefully.
There's no noise to make.
There's no noise to make.
Everything is just to deflect from our discomfort at the presence of death.
All right.
Speaking of this, we're going to talk about something else that's uncomfortable.
It's uncomfortable when people come on your computer and steal your stuff.
You're probably online a lot right now.
We're all online a lot.
You're probably not thinking too much about the privacy on your home network.
Even in incognito mode, this is something important.
Your online activity can still be traced.
Even if you clear your browsing history, your internet service provider can still see every single website you've ever visited.
That's why I always, I never go online without using Express VPN.
It's so easy to put on your computer.
It works behind the scenes.
You could download it in a couple, like a minute and a half.
It takes about, and it makes sure your ISP can't see what sites you visit.
Instead, your internet connection is rerouted through ExpressVPN secure servers.
Each ExpressVPN server has an IP address that's shared among thousands of users.
That means everything you do is anonymized and can't be traced back to you.
ExpressVN also encrypts 100% of your data with best-in-class encryption, so your information is always protected.
Protect your online activity today with the VPN that I trust to secure my privacy.
Visit my special link at expressvpn.com slash clavin, and you can get an extra three months free on a one-year package.
That's exprsvpn.com slash clavin, expressvpn.com slash clavin to learn more.
And I know you're thinking, how do you spell VPN?
No, you know, how do you spell clavin?
That's the big question.
There are no ease.
No ease.
There are no ease in Claven.
So let's take a look at some of the stuff about the reopening.
You know, we have to play this because some people are unclear about what the rules are, but there was this rules lady who was on YouTube and she has given, made the instructions much more clear.
Have we got her?
You must not leave the house for any reason unless, of course, you have a reason, and then you may leave the house.
All stores are closed except those that are open.
And all stores must close unless, of course, they need to stay open.
This virus is deadly, but don't be afraid of it.
It can only kill people who are vulnerable and also those who are not vulnerable.
We should stay locked down until the virus stops infecting people.
And it will only stop infecting people if enough of us get infected that we build immunity.
So it is very important that we get infected and also do not get infected.
You should not go to the doctor's office or the hospital unless you have to go there, unless, of course, you are too sick to go there.
This virus has no effect on children except for those children in which it affects.
The virus remains active on different surfaces for two hours or four hours or six hours, but in most cases, it's days and not hours and it needs a damp environment or a cold environment that is warm and dry in the air, unless the air is plastic.
I don't know.
She didn't say what her name is on this video, so I can't give her credit, but that's kind of what all this stuff sounds like, I think, to a lot of us.
This is the thing that's going to end the lockdown, is that it's just time.
About 12% of Americans say the measures, the polls I was talking about, say the measures where they live go too far.
About twice as many people, 26% believe the limits don't go far enough.
So 61% feel the steps taken by government officials to prevent infections in their area are about right.
So that means, like I said, a lot of this noise, a lot of this noise is ridiculous.
And what really has brought this up, you know, Barry Weiss, who writes in the New York Times, a former newspaper, she writes on Knucklehead Row, but she's not really a knucklehead.
She's pretty smart.
She wrote a thing about how the culture war has become obsolete during coronavirus.
And she says, politics was always about two things that Twitter never valued, real-life relationships and compromise.
Twitter convinced us it was about drama and turned turned dramatic overreaction to every burp into something like a civic duty.
If smart people are going to make it out of this moment, it's going to be by resisting that nonsense.
If there is one thing that this pandemic has insisted on above all, it is reality.
I've been thinking a lot lately about how some of the smartest minds in my world used to spend their days on laptops trying to cancel baby it's cold outside while many women in this world still don't have access to credit or tampons.
You know, it is a really good point that a lot of the stuff we talk about, and it is entertaining, but we talk about it and we can afford to be entertained because we were rich and safe and happy.
When you're worried about baby it's cold outside, you literally have no problems.
They said baby it's cold outside was me too rapist.
Now it doesn't matter because all you got to do is put Joe Biden in it and then suddenly it's a great song again.
So it doesn't matter about baby it's cold outside.
But people are really talking about that.
And there does need to be this kind of angel on your shoulder that says to you, if you are complaining about baby it's cold outside, you have no problems.
You're rich, you're fat, you're happy, everything is good.
You live in a country where everything is good.
Maybe you shouldn't be doing this.
Maybe you should be doing something else.
Maybe you should be outdoors taking a walk.
Now that you missed that, maybe you should do that instead.
You know, maybe these are not the things we have to complain about.
Even like, you know, even though I pick on the press all the time because they're morons and corrupt, even though I do that, it's not the one, it's not the Jim, look at me, I'm Jim Acosta, that bothers me.
It's that they're all Jim, look at me, I'm Jim Acosta.
And some of them have degrees from Oxford and some of them have degrees from Yale and some of them have degrees from Harvard.
And they're still Jim, look at me, I'm Jim Acosta, who I think has a degree from Twitter University.
I don't know where, you know, the guys are obviously not that bright a guy, but a lot of these people are bright, but they're still not bright.
AOC, Alexandria, Occasional Cortex, she was talking about time to get back.
And here's the friend of the worker.
She's the barkeeper who knows what it's like to be a worker.
You know, she's from Scarsdale, but still she knows what it's like to be a worker.
Here's her talking about when we start to come back.
I think when we talk about this idea of reopening society, you know, only in America does the president, when the president tweets about liberation, does he mean go back to work?
When we have this discussion about going, going back or reopening, I think a lot of people should just say no.
We're not going back to that.
We're not going back to working 70-hour weeks just so that we could put food on the table and not even feel any sort of semblance of security in our lives.
A wonderful young bartender.
So, you know, liberation is not going back to work.
What does she think it is?
What does she think it is?
She thinks it's like Burning Man.
I don't, you know, I don't understand what she thinks liberation is.
Of course, it's like going back to your life.
Your life matters.
Your life is what your life is all about.
Your life is why you are here.
You know, this is something conservatives sometimes don't understand too.
You know, this is, you've heard me arguing with the guys around here about not letting communities collapse because people can't just move on to other communities.
When, you know, no individual, this is something that I've developed over time because I started out because I work so much in isolation as a writer, I developed a sense of individualism that was a little too, that was a little bit beyond reality.
None of us is an island.
We're all connected together.
Our individuality is actually part of a greater individuality, which is all of us together.
And that's something I think that when they, the Christians talk about the body of Christ, that's what they're trying to establish.
So, you know, you have to change the things as reality touches your imagination.
You have to start to change your opinion.
These people, I got to say, they do not know what's going on.
I mean, this has been to me, maybe the biggest revelation.
It's not that I didn't have a clue about this before, but I did not realize it was this bad.
What I've been thinking about when I watch these people is how stupid are they?
They don't care about freedom.
They don't care about America.
They don't realize that their traditions are important and all that stuff is true.
But what this has brought out to me is the idea that they are completely, completely sequestered from the actual lives that people live.
When Barry Weiss says Twitter doesn't understand that life is about relationship and it's about reality, they don't get that at all.
They have no idea what relationship and reality is.
And somebody like that, like AOC, what Cuomo was saying to that woman when he said, you know, the disease is death, so nothing is worse than death.
Then he went on to say this about going back to work.
How can the cure be worse than the illness if the illness is potential death?
But what if the economy failing equals death?
Because mental illness, the people stuck at home.
No, it doesn't.
It doesn't equal death.
Economic hardship.
Yes, very bad.
Not death.
You want to go to work?
Go take the job as an essential worker.
Do it tomorrow.
Right?
You're working.
I am.
You're an essential worker.
So go take a job as an essential worker.
But the people aren't hiring because of the pandemic.
No, there are people hiring.
You can get a job as an essential worker.
So now you can go to work and you can be an essential worker and you're not going to kill anyone.
Oh, my God.
I mean, really, it's just a complete dissociation.
You know, I have to say, it's like the second time this week, I think I told the story about my old man, which I don't usually do.
But, you know, he had to go to work.
He was a radio DJ, right?
So he had to go to work at 3 o'clock in the morning.
He would wake up at 3 o'clock and he'd be out the door at least by 4 o'clock.
And if it snowed, if it was a blizzard, he would wake me and my brothers up and we would push his car at 3, 4 o'clock in the morning down to the place where the shoveling began because it wasn't on our street.
So we push his car to where the shoveling began so he could drive to work.
And he used to go on the air and say, you know, they tell you if you're not an essential worker, don't come to work.
Who's not essential and to whom is his work not essential?
Everybody's essential to himself and everybody is doing essential stuff because what he's doing is feeding his family.
The disconnect, the disconnect between that man, between Andrew Cuomo, the words coming out of his mouth, the disconnect between AOC and the people and the lives that people live, the disconnect between the environmentalists and the lives that people live.
You know, I know it's a little bit obscure and philosophical when I talk about your internal life and the fact that you create the sounds and you create the beauty and you create the morality in tandem with God, that you create the world that matters.
You know, beauty is truth and truth is beauty because you create the world that matters.
I understand that that's a little obscure, but that's the whole point of everything we do.
It's the reason I want you to be free.
I don't want you to be free because it's some, you know, freedom is, because freedom is good.
I want you to be free because you matter, because you matter.
Your world that exists, this unique world that has never existed before and will never exist on earth again, is all that matters.
You know, it's this stuff.
Ebb Sleep Matters00:03:20
These are the things that philosophers thought about.
It may not be what Thomas Jefferson thought about, but it is what Plato and Aristotle and the philosophers through the years thought about, and Jesus maybe especially, that filtered in to the reasons they started to talk about the rights of man.
Why do men have rights?
Why do human beings have rights?
It's because we are what matters about the world.
All right, ebb sleep.
Now, you know, when I talk about this, I'm talking theoretically because I never sleep.
But the thing is, especially in times like this when everybody is tense, and even I have experienced this somewhat, you know, you can wake up and your mind starts going clickety clickety click.
You can't get back to sleep.
Now, with me, that's no loss, but still, I don't want to lie there and have my mind go clickety click because it's annoying.
Ebb sleep is a way without pills, without taking anything, sticking anything in your body, that you can maybe slow your brain down.
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I tried it, and again, I never go to sleep, so I didn't go to sleep, but it did.
It did give me this chill sense that everything was fine and that the world was a little bit more distant, and I was kind of cooled down and calmed down.
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I was going to say that there are, I make it look this easy, but believe me, it's not.
Again, subscribe dailywire.com.
If you subscribe now with a daily Insider Plus membership or all-access member, we will send you two of the solid gold diamond encrusted Leftist Tears Tumblr, which actually do really keep your stuff heated and are different from all other solid gold diamond encrusted tumblers in the sense that they're not solid gold and diamond encrusted.
Also, tonight I am doing an all-access, another all-access ask me anything that's 5 p.m. Pacific, 8 p.m.
I'm trying to figure it out.
What is it?
It's 5 p.m. 8 p.m. Eastern.
And again, if you want to send me just a couple of sentences, you know, obviously you can't do it until I'm there, but when you do it, if you want to send me a couple of sentences of what's going on in your life, I'd like to know.
If not, you can just ask me questions and I will answer them all.
And all my answers, as always, guaranteed correct.
But you've got to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
Shelley's Monster Story00:12:20
All right.
Like I said, I talked a while back, things were to entertain, to entertain you while you're locked down or as much as you are locked down.
I told you I like Tiger King, but last time I was talking about some big novels that you might not have had a chance to read and you might want to take the chance to read.
Then I was thinking, though, there are a lot of great short novels that have been made into movies.
And I don't know how many of these I'll get to.
Maybe I'll only get to one.
But I want to talk about them because when you read a novel and watch a movie, it's really instructive.
It really tells you stuff about the story, what's essential in the story, what's not essential, and also what's different between examining things internally, as you can do as a novelist, and only examining them through pictures, which is really essentially all you can do when you write movies.
So I was going to start with Frankenstein.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is an actual great novel.
It is probably, people debate whether it's the first science fiction novel or the first gothic novel.
It can't be the first gothic novel, but whether it's the first science fiction novel or not, it doesn't matter.
Who cares?
It really is interesting the way it came to pass.
In 1816, 1816 was called the Year Without a Summer because I think there had been a volcanic eruption.
And so there was just rain.
It was like now.
There were terrible famines.
There were protests and all kinds of things throughout Europe.
And Percy Byce Shelley had run off with the daughter of his mentor.
His mentor was a guy who was, the guy himself was a radical anarchist philosopher.
And he had been married to Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the very first feminists.
And Mary Wollstonecraft died giving birth to her daughter Mary because she died a couple days after giving birth to Mary.
And so Mary grew up essentially without a mother.
Her father remarried because he wanted a woman to take care of the child, but the woman who he married was kind of the evil stepmother and didn't really like Mary Shelley.
And so at 16, at 16 years old, she ran off with Percy Shelley, who left his wife behind.
Percy was not a believer in marriage.
Mary Shelley's father was not a believer in marriage.
They were a believer in free love.
And so he dumped his wife who had kids.
She wound up killing herself.
She threw herself into the serpentine, which is part of the park in London, and she drowned, bearing the child of another man and leaving the two children she had by Shelley behind.
So this free love stuff was really a mess.
And they went over and they started traveling through Europe, which remember had just been absolutely destroyed by the Napoleonic War.
So they're traveling through this terrible wreckage of Europe.
And it was not a very fun time.
They were kind of depressed.
And they wound up in Geneva because Shelley wanted to meet Byron.
Byron was a very, very famous poet.
Shelley was not famous at all.
This is one of the things people get wrong about Shelley.
He was not a famous man.
He couldn't even get published a lot of times during his lifetime.
He became famous after his lifetime.
There's a movie now called Mary Shelley, which has her being jealous of Shelley's fame, but that would have been absurd.
She adored Shelley.
She dedicated her entire life to Shelley, even after he died.
She thought he was a great, great genius.
She worshipped him like he was a god.
So they got together.
Shelley and Byron met, and they hit it off.
They loved each other.
Byron, of course, was an absolute lunatic who would sleep with anything, male or female, and just cut a swath through anything that he could put himself into.
And Shelley and Byron hit it off.
And they started to, because it was the year without a summer, it was raining.
They were forced into Byron's massive manor, the Villa Vietati, I think it's called the Annatti.
I can't remember.
Anyway, they went into this big manor, and they would have these incredible conversations.
And one of the things they would have conversations about was all this new science was coming along.
And some of the new science was about electricity.
They called it galvanism sometimes.
And there had been experiments.
A guy named Aldini, I'm saying this from memory, so I'm pretty sure it was Aldini, had actually tried to bring a dead, an executed prisoner back to life with electricity.
And this was all stuff Mary knew.
Mary was a very, very intelligent woman.
She was a very girly girl.
She was 16.
She had just lost a baby, and she had just had a baby as well.
Her baby had died, and then she had another child who was about, I think, six months old.
Anyway, they're in this big villa, and they're having these conversations.
There's also a guy named Dr. Paulidori there, and they're having these very philosophical conversations, mostly dominated by Shelley and Byron.
They're really talking and talking.
And one day they decided that they were going to read some ghost stories.
They had a book of German ghost stories translated into French called Phantasmagoriana.
And there's actually a scene in the Bride of Frankenstein, the sequel to Frankenstein, where they try to recreate this moment in the villa, and there would be lightning storms outside, and it was very dramatic.
I just want to show you, this is the second Bride of Frankenstein thing.
I think it's down to cut 16.
They try to recreate this in the second movie.
How beautifully dramatic.
The crudest, savage exhibition of nature at her worst without.
And we three.
We elegant three within.
I should like to think that an irate Jehovah was pointing those arrows of lightning directly at my head.
The unbowed head of George Gordon Lord Byron, England's greatest sinner.
I cannot flatter myself to that extent.
Possibly those thunders of our dear Shelley.
Heaven's applause for England's greatest poet.
What of my Mary?
She is an angel.
You think so.
I love the rolling R's.
That's the way poets are.
Byron would never have called Shelley England's greatest living poet.
He thought he was England's greatest living poet, and so did everybody else.
Shelley was kind of a hanger-on by the time they were finished.
But Mary Shelley, you know, it's really, she was just a tremendously imaginative girl.
Both her parents were famous, had been famous writers, so she had a sense that she would be a famous writer.
And they started reading these ghost stories, and famously, Byron said, let's all write a ghost story.
And they all started writing ghost stories.
One of them, Dr. Polidari's, was called Vampire, V-A-A-M-P-Y-R-E, and it's credited as being the first vampire novel.
It's very sexy.
I've read it.
It's about 50 pages long.
It's a novella, really.
He published it under Byron's name because he didn't think he could get published under his own name, but it's been in print ever since.
It was tremendously popular.
Mary Shelley, Byron and Shelley didn't finish what they were writing.
They threw it away.
They started something and it didn't work, so they didn't finish it.
So really, Mary Shelley was the only one, and she could not come up with an idea.
And finally, one night, they were having this talk about galvanism and bringing people back to life and whether human beings had souls or whether there was a life force that came from without.
And these were questions that were being asked at the time, this is 1816, whether there was a life force that came from without or whether all life was just electricity.
And she went to bed and she was famous for having daydreams.
You know, she loved her daydreams.
And she didn't have a dream.
She had a vision, essentially, of this monster being brought to life.
And she woke up and she said, I've got my story.
It was horrific.
And that's the story she wanted to tell.
And the story, the book didn't sell very well when it came out.
Shelley helped her with it.
Shelley was very supportive of her writing.
He helped her with it.
And the book didn't sell very well.
But then, right after Shelley died in the 1820s, they started to put it out as a play.
And Mary didn't know anything about it.
She didn't get any money for it.
She didn't have any copyrights, but she loved the plays.
She went and saw them.
And the plays are what the movie is based on.
So I just want to get to the difference because the book is truly, truly worth reading.
But if you read it thinking you're going to see the monster that you see in the movies, you'll be very disappointed.
Because in the book, Frankenstein goes off to create this monster, and he's horrified when he creates this monster.
And so he abandons the monster and the monster runs off on his own.
And the monster becomes civilized.
The monster finds that he is ugly, that everybody hates him, but he hides out with some French émigrés and he listens to their talk.
He gets a hold of some books.
He finds Milton's Paradise Lost, which is about the creation of Adam and Adam's fall from grace and being thrown out of paradise, and it reminds him of him.
And when Frankenstein finds him again, the Dr. Frankenstein finds his creature again, Frankenstein is very, very articulate and really talks about what the experience he has.
I'm just going to read a little thing about how he first starts to experience life, right?
Because he's like a newborn baby, but he's fully grown.
And this is his description of a moonrise in the forest, okay?
This is this creature who is now a very educated, very articulate creature speaking about this moonrise in the forest.
He says, soon a gentle light stole over the heavens and gave me a sensation of pleasure.
I started up and beheld a radiant form rise among the trees.
That's the moon, this radiant form.
I gazed with a kind of wonder.
It moved slowly, but it enlightened my path, and I again went out in search of berries.
I was still cold when under one of the trees I found a huge cloak with which I covered myself and sat down upon the ground.
No distinct ideas occupied my mind.
All was confused.
I felt light and hunger and thirst and darkness.
Innumerable sounds rang in my ears and on all sides various scents saluted me.
The only object that I could distinguish was the bright moon and I fixed my eyes on that with pleasure.
And if you've ever seen any of the Frankenstein movies, you know that's not the way Frankenstein talks.
The way Frankenstein talks, which comes directly from the plays that were based on the novel, is shown here in this, another scene from Bride of Frankenstein.
The reason I use Bride of Frankenstein is because it has more of the novel in it than the first movie.
And here is the famous scene where the creature, Frankenstein's creature, discovers a villager who starts to teach him about life.
And the reason the villager doesn't reject him is because he's blind and doesn't see how ugly he is.
And now for our lesson.
Remember, this is bread.
Bread.
Bread.
And this is wine.
To drink.
Drink. Drink.
Good.
We are friends, you and I. Frame of.
Bread.
Good, good.
That's Boris Karloff, obviously, as the monster.
I just want to point out, now, obviously, that's a very different monster than the monster in Mary Shelley, who's very articulate.
But in both cases, they are both doing the same thing.
They are translating the sensation, the human sensations of life into values.
Okay, they're both doing the same thing.
They're translating the human sensations of life into values.
And one is the rising of the moon.
In the other, he takes bread and wine and he shows them that it's good.
You can taste bread.
You can taste wine.
It's good.
And then he says, we are friends, and that's good.
So he's taking bread and wine, physical material things, and transforming them into spiritual things, friendship, and connecting them with the concept of good.
And if you think about it, you can think of another place where you go to take bread and wine that is transformed from a physical object into a spiritual object.
This is the very basis of Christianity, that the logos becomes incarnate, that the word becomes flesh, that the order of human life become, that the order of life, God's order of life, becomes incarnate in us, perfectly incarnate in Jesus, but incarnate in all of us and individually incarnate in all of us.
That's what this story is about.
It is a story of when does flesh become soul, okay?
Everything we're talking about, everything we're defending, freedom, the freedom to go back to work, our work, the things that we do, all of it, all of it is about those perceptions that are going on in your head.
Sounds, sights, the rainbow, morality, beauty, truth.
They're all in your head.
That's what makes you worthwhile.
Defend it.
Don't let anybody take it away from you.
I'll be back tonight at 5 Pacific, 8 p.m. Eastern.
Be there.
The Andrew Klavan Show00:01:11
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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Thanks for listening.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Robert Sterling and directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
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.
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