Ben Shapiro’s Ep. 900 frames Joe Biden as a puppet for Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi, citing Cuomo’s COVID-19 nursing home orders (rescinded after 34,000 deaths) and Pelosi’s $3T bailout funneling red-state tax dollars to blue-state pension crises. He mocks media bias—like Trump’s IG firing as a scandal while ignoring Obama-era purges—and contrasts Florida’s DeSantis with union-driven blue-state failures. Meanwhile, son Spencer Clavin launches Young Heretics, a podcast reclaiming Homer and Shakespeare from "queer black feminist liberation" theory, arguing modern conservatives must defend Western culture without apologies, not just react to its critics. The episode ties Biden’s presidency to leftist overreach while positioning classical literature as the antidote to today’s materialistic chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
It's still early in the election year, and at this point, the polls don't really mean anything, so let's take a look at them anyway, because life is just too long, and we've got to do something to kill the time.
The latest polls show that Joe Biden would defeat President Donald Trump if the election were held today in the fairyland of the media's imagination, where lies turn to chocolate bars and melt on the tongue.
Biden is leading in several battlegrounds, including Gettysburg and Antietam, where many veterans of the Civil War remember him fondly and can't understand what the hell happened to him when he used to be such a fun guy and his Abe Lincoln impersonation was second to none.
73% of people who hate Trump so much they can't pry their teeth apart say they would vote for a potted plant before they would vote for the president.
They would also vote for an overturned garbage can, a used toilet brush, a collection of orange rinds, or Joe Biden.
66% of people who wish the lockdown would never end and they could just keep receiving those unemployment checks that are higher than the money they made working say they would vote for Biden if he would give them something for free, preferably a motorbike or maybe one of those drones that you can use to take videos of the girl next door when she's doing yoga.
85% of people who plan to vote by mail say they prefer Biden because he kind of looks a lot like they do, even though they've been dead for three years.
And a full 92% of voters who can't construct an English sentence say they'd vote for Joe Biden because the garage on their hairy legs with a chainsaw, you know the thing.
56% of Trump voters want the pollster to get off their lawn, and the other 44% didn't answer the questions because they couldn't stop laughing.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
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We've got one from Tommy Jacobs who says, my wife has never watched the Clavin show, but has started singing along with the intro every time she hears it.
And Robert Carlson answers, plot twist, your wife secretly is in love with the great bald keeper of knowledge.
And only by her inception do you want to even watch the show?
It's all an elaborate ruse while your wife slowly leaves you for Andrew.
So we're having a very complex fantasy life on YouTube and have your wife call me.
All right, my friend, comedian Evan Sayette, my friend, comedian Evan Sayette likes to say that the left is not just always wrong, but always as wrong as wrong can be.
That is, they're not just incorrect.
They actually get things exactly backwards.
There's a lot of truth to this.
And as the Chinese virus crisis transforms into a reopening story, we can actually take a step back and see that the news coverage has not just been wrong.
It's been exactly the opposite of the truth, which means we have to think about what's the real overall story and what's the hidden narrative.
Left's Narrative Inversion00:14:42
Every day we've heard that there was some scandal in the Trump administration when there wasn't.
And every day the press touted the kung flu response of blue governors in places like New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Michigan.
But actually, Trump's done a good job while the blue state governors were committing acts of politically correct stupidity that left the old and vulnerable dead.
Cuomo in New York, Wolf in Pennsylvania, killer Phil Murphy in New Jersey, and Uber storm Fuhrer Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan.
These non-Asian murder hornets actually instituted policies demanding that nursing homes take in people who were suffering from flu Manchu and thousand died because of that.
And yet, because of the press coverage, their ratings are still very high.
Cuomo is rated somewhere in the 80% positive.
But wait, there's even more than this.
Nancy Pelosi's attempt to bully Congress into sending bailout money to the states is actually an attempt to have working states like Florida and Texas cover up another real scandal, the failing socialism in states like New York and California.
She wants to transfer money from successful red states to failing blues.
And all the while this is happening, the press is instituting another cover-up, another lie, which is that Joe Biden is a realistic candidate.
He's doing a very bad imitation of a normal old-style Democrat politician when really what he is is a wooden dummy being used by socialist ventriloquists like Pelosi and Bernie Sanders to push their leftist policies under cover of normalcy.
So you got bad Trump, good Democrats.
That's the story.
The real story is bad and incompetent socialists trying to sneak their way into the White House behind a make-believe candidate while the rest of us prop up their failures.
That's the actual story that's being hidden and the story they're telling is the opposite one.
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Not all programs are available in all states.
So listen, we have to start with Brian DeSantis because this is just too delicious.
Governor of Florida.
He came under fire from the media because of the firing of a woman whose job it was to display data obtained by the Department of Health's epidemiology disease people.
She was supposed to publish this information.
And so they basically accused him of hiding information and he went off on the press.
Our data is available.
Our data is transparent.
In fact, Dr. Burks has talked multiple times about how Florida has the absolute best data.
So any insinuation otherwise is just typical partisan narrative trying to be spun.
And part of the reason is that because you got a lot of people in your profession who waxed poetically for weeks and weeks about how Florida was going to be just like New York.
Wait two weeks.
Florida's going to be next.
Just like Italy.
Wait two weeks.
Well, hell, we're eight weeks away from that and it hasn't happened.
Not only do we have a lower death rate, well, we have way lower deaths generally, we have a lower death rate than the Acela Court or DC, everyone up there.
We have a lower death rate than the Midwest, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio.
But even in our region, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida has the lower death rate.
And I was the number one landing spot from tens of thousands of people leaving the number one hot zone in the world to come to my state.
So we've succeeded, and I think that people just don't want to recognize it because it challenges their narrative.
It challenges their assumption.
So they got to try to find a boogeyman.
Maybe it's that they're a black helicopter circling the Department of Health.
If you believe that, I got a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you.
This is what has got to happen.
And this, I believe, is inspired by Donald Trump.
Donald Trump has shown them the way that they've got to go after the narrative.
They've got to go out after the press and they've got to do it with both guns blazing.
They really do.
And this is, I mean, this is just delicious stuff because it's so necessary because the story they're telling is untrue.
You know, every time you hear a reporter say, 90,000, it's more than 90,000 Americans have died.
Well, yeah, that's true, but 30% of those are in New York and New Jersey.
30% of the deaths are in New York and New Jersey.
If we just took the Acela corridor away, our death toll would be much, much different.
So who do you blame?
Do you blame the guy who runs the country, the whole country and overseas and basically is in charge of sending equipment to the states?
Or do you blame the guys in the states?
I mean, part of it is just tragedy.
I get that.
But part of this is malfeasance on the part of these governors that they are covering up.
And it's got to be this way.
You know, Bill McGurn in the Wall Street Journal wrote a great column about Jerry Falwell Jr. at Liberty University, the evangelical university in West Virginia, about the fact that he was accused of when he restarted classes and he did it very carefully with only a small number of students coming back.
They said, oh, the blood, oh, the bloodshed.
You know, they reported the story before it happened.
Of course, it never happened.
They did everything very carefully.
It all worked out very well.
We're waiting.
I'm sure you're holding your breath, waiting for the corrections.
The corrections never come.
So it's this narrative.
They keep hammering.
They just move on to the next narrative.
And it's the opposite of the truth.
And we've got to correct it every step of the way.
All right.
Let us take a look.
Let's start by taking a look at Joe Biden.
I want to start with taking a look at Joe Biden.
And, you know, look, I always like to be fair to Joe Biden and let him state his policies so you can compare them to Trump because that's what an election is.
It's a comparison of policy.
So let's hear from Joe Biden.
And here he is.
He's reading from a script, so he won't have the usual problems.
Cut number eight.
And there's a lot we can do that related to what has already been passed with small businesses that the president just hasn't done.
And look, you know, the combination of failing to move quickly.
You got to be kidding me.
You've got to be kidding me.
I'm telling you, this guy is a ventriloquist dummy.
Whoever is speaking through him is speaking through him.
And the reason, let's not forget why he's there.
He is there because the Democrat establishment said we are never going to win with firebrand socialist Bernie Sanders.
So we'll put this guy, we'll hold him up, we'll prop him up, we'll turn him into a hologram, we'll broadcast him.
And in a way, they got a big break.
They got a big break with all, with this Chinese flu because he doesn't have to come out of his basement.
He just pops up for a couple of minutes a day and he can almost string a sentence together, almost.
And, you know, right now the polls show him leading.
They don't really mean anything.
The battleground states are very close.
But eventually, he's going to have to come out.
I mean, eventually he has to come out.
They can't keep him down there forever, I think.
And so, you know, and look, they know who he is.
They know who he is.
How do I know?
Well, let's take a little trip back in time when Obama was president.
And every now and again, every now and again, they could afford to make a joke.
The left could afford to make a joke at their own expense.
Let's take a look at Jon Stewart.
Remember that picture of Joe Biden nuzzling that poor little red-headed girl?
You know, he's got his face just planted in her hair, and she's got this look on her face like, please, God, remove this guy from my body.
So Jon Stewart actually did, you remember the Daily Show, right?
This is back in the day, back in the Obama day.
Jon Stewart on his daily show just put up that picture and this was his reaction, cut five.
I can still see it!
What could you possibly be saying to her?
Be still, my child, while I absorb your precious life source.
It's barely a Senate rite of passage.
You're not officially sworn in until Delaware Joe has felt up one female member of your immediate family.
Immediate family.
So then, who does he have on?
He has one of the many comedians he gave a start to, John Swift, Samantha B.
And Samantha B is playing a reporter who has just had an interview with Biden.
And because some of you are listening to this and can't see it, I'm sorry to give the joke away, but she's got handprints on her body, different color handprints on her breasts.
And when she turns around at the end of the routine, on her rear ends, she's got these big handprints, and she's just come back from an interview with Joe Biden.
Here's that interview.
He swears he's seen the error of his ways.
And for her part, this reporter believes him.
Sam, I'm just curiosity.
What was Biden doing while you spoke with him, Benny?
Well, he had just finished writing, I Will Not Grope Women, 100 Times on a Chalkboard, and then he was eating strawberry preserves without any utensils.
So he's keeping busy with his.
Oh, yes, a whirlwind of activity, John.
And then as he began to change the oil on his motorcycle while also enjoying some Cheetos, you know, I turned to leave, you know, and say goodbye.
But Biden turned to me and he said, come back, come back so I can shake your hand.
And I did.
John, the vice president shook my hand.
Can you believe it?
Bye.
Great interview, Sam.
Thank you so much.
So that was back in the day, right, when they could afford to do that.
So not only is she making fun, not only is Samantha B, who's now just spitting invectives at Donald Trump, not only is she making fun of Joe Biden being a groper, because this is before Me Too, when we had to take that, When we that now we have to take that seriously.
Back then it was a joke.
Not only was she making fun of that, but she was making fun of the press for being so enamored of him that she's actually covering this after he's been all over her, after he's had his hands all over her.
So they know, they know who Joe Biden is and they're not covering it and they're covering up for him.
Why why?
Because they need to get this guy in.
They're not getting him in to be Joe Biden.
He's not Joe Biden anymore.
In the last six months, go back on youtube, go back and watch a year ago.
A year ago he could put together an English sentence.
He's got.
I think it's called aphasia.
He just can't get the words out anymore.
He's deteriorating in front of us and they're covering up for him and they're allowing him to cover up in his basement.
Why?
Well, you know, George Stephanopoulos had Bernie Sanders on and Stephanopoulos asked, Sanders hey, how come?
You know some of your voters, these we remember these radical voters from UH Project Veritas right, we remember them saying the streets are going to burn if we don't get our way and everything's going to come toppling down if we don't get our communist candidate in there and George Stephanopoulos says to Bernie Sanders, well, how come, how are they going to move from you and your open, you know, Stalinist communism, democratically elected, of course, to Joe Biden?
And here's Bernie's answer, cut forward.
At the end of the day, the vast majority of the people who voted for me, who supported me, will understand and do understand that Donald Trump is the most dangerous president in the modern history of this country.
He's a pathological liar.
He's a racist and a sexist, a homophobe, et cetera.
And I think at the end of the day, they will be voting for Joe Biden.
But I think what Joe is going to have to do, and he's beginning to move in that direction, is to say to those working class people, say to those young people, say to those minorities, listen, I understand your situation.
So I think that Joe and his staff understand that.
I think they are going to reach out to our supporters and come up with an agenda that speaks to the needs of working families, of young families, of minority communities.
So don't worry, Joe is going to be a leftist.
And if he's not a leftist, if he himself won't mouth Bernie Sanders' policies, it doesn't matter because Nancy Pelosi will really be the one, the Joe McCarthy working, what is the Bergen, working the ventriloquist dummy and really saying it will really be her words and her policies.
She's saying, he's saying, and what are her policies?
Well, she just introduced a $3 trillion relief bill with $1 trillion that goes to the states.
And the lie that they're telling you is that, oh, these states need to be bailed out because nobody's working because we shut down the economy.
But really what that means is that the states that are working, Florida and Texas, Georgia, the red states, are going to be bailing out the reckless policies of New York and California.
These guys have been negotiating with these state unions, these government unions, and giving them pension because pension doesn't kick in until the guy giving away the pension is out of office.
So he never has to pay for it.
But ultimately, these pensions come in and California is broke.
They keep saying, oh, well, we balance the budget.
No, because the pension debt is so huge and the Medicaid debt, which just goes on infinitely.
Here is Rick Scott, right, governor, who was governor of Florida, now a senator, pointing out the fact that in New York, taxes go up, the deficit gets bigger, the people are bleeding, they're leaving the state.
Whereas in Florida, people are coming into the state, there are no state taxes, and there's a balanced budget.
And here he talks about how that happened.
There's Rick Scott.
I got elected governor when Cuomo got elected governor.
And what I watched the whole time is people got fed up with New York because the taxes were so high, the regulations were so high.
Cuomo just wasted money year after year.
He would never watch.
He would never make tough choices that you have to make in business.
Families have to make.
Cuomo's Nursing Home Controversy00:11:38
We have to live within our means.
Not Andrew Cuomo.
He'd just borrow more money every year.
And then he'd get mad at me because I would recruit New York companies and New Yorkers to come and say, hey, come to my state.
The weather's better.
The regulations less, and you can keep some of your money or the New York won't let you keep it.
And now he says, oh, now all those people moved to Florida.
Oh, we still want them to pay New York, pay off New York's budget problems.
I mean, we're not doing it.
I'm going to fight this.
It is wrong for Floridians.
The Floridians have to pay for California, Illinois, or New York excesses.
That's wrong.
It's not only wrong, it's the whole point of the exercise.
It's the entire thing that we're seeing now.
Look, we know what socialism does, right?
We've seen Venezuela.
We've seen people frying their cats on garbage fires so they have something to eat.
And we know this is what happens.
And yet what they're saying is this country can hide that by overriding federalism, where the states have to take responsibility for their own policies.
We'll override that by moving the money from states that work like Florida and Texas and Georgia.
And we'll move all that money over to these states that don't work, that have been spending without any responsibility whatsoever.
And we'll do it while we have this hologram, Joe Biden, standing up there pretending to be a 1950s Democrat helping working people.
An amazing, amazing scam being pulled off with the help of the press.
All right, we're going to talk more about our friends Andrew Cuomo and some of the other killer governors.
But first, let's talk about Helix Sleep.
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You want to be comfortable as you're lying awake at night thinking, how do you spell Clavin?
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I just said why did I see it?
I just, everyone's showing repetitive.
All right, so again, remember, every time you hear reporters say to Trump, there are 90,000 dead.
Remember, one-third of those, one-third of those are in New York and in New Jersey.
And many of them are in, are in, were nursing homes where Cuomo insisted they had to take, they had to take people with kung flu into the nursing homes.
And the things spread.
The thing spread in the nursing homes because of those policies.
Happened in Pennsylvania, happened in New Jersey, still happening.
Gretchen Whitmer, Uber Sturmfüber Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan won't take the order off.
She's left it in place.
So we're glad we understand how Donald Trump's necktie and his medicine and his weight is all being covered.
It's very important that we all hear about that.
But don't worry about it because Chris Cuomo is covering Andrew Cuomo.
Here is a video of that coverage.
This is the normal swab I'm holding up here now for everybody at home.
A very valuable object.
There's only one company in the entire country that makes these up in Maine.
All right.
Here's the swap.
Is it true that this was the swab that the nurse was actually using on you?
And that at first it went into your nose and disappeared so that in scale, this was the actual swab that was being used to fit up that double barrel shotgun that you have mounted on the front of your pretty face.
So that's, you know, he's holding up bigger and bigger, gigantic mock swab swabs.
They're just huge that obviously someone at CNN had to construct because they didn't want to be covering the fact that Andrew Cuomo killed all those old people.
Here's a funny swab.
And what about those old people you killed?
They didn't want to do that.
So they just constructed bigger and bigger swabs.
They're going to have to get a swab so big that it actually covers the camera so we can't see the truth of what's happening.
And just to make this even more scurrilous, just to really make this ugly, Cuomo is now blaming Donald Trump.
He's blaming Donald Trump for his policy of sending people in.
I'm reading this from the Daily Caller, but it comes originally from the New York Post.
Democratic New York governor Andrew Cuomo blamed President Donald Trump for mass deaths in nursing homes after forcing long-term care facilities, it should be after he forced long-term care facilities to take in coronavirus positive patients.
The governor of New York told reporters to ask President Trump about the nursing home deaths, the New York Post reported, arguing that his state was merely following the federal government's lead in sending coronavirus positive patients to nursing homes.
Anyone who wants to ask, this is Cuomo speaking, anyone who wants to ask why did the state do that with COVID patients in nursing homes?
It's because the state followed President Trump's CDC guidance.
Cuomo told reporters when asked whether he regretted the directive.
Okay.
Republican New York rep Elise Stefanik criticized Cuomo for blaming Trump.
Governor Cuomo continues to point fingers at the federal governments, but here are the facts regarding CDC guidance.
The governor's decisions to mandate that nursing homes accept COVID-19 patients completely disregards the case-by-case approach recommended by CDC.
In other words, the CDC was saying, if you can do it safely, do it.
But they just made it a sweeping politically correct, you've got to take these people in.
She continued to extend, she extended the protections for all employees and residents in long-term facilities.
It's critical that employees at long-term care facilities have access to the resources they need.
This is what it says.
But what it means is they've got to keep taking sick people into nursing homes.
And then there's Killer Phil, Killer Phil Murphy in New Jersey.
Now, I have to just pause for a minute here.
He was interviewed by MSNBC's Willie Geist.
And obviously, MSNBC left-wing stations, so they're touting fear, they're touting Democrats and all this stuff.
But Willie Geist, we got to give him credit.
He asked this question twice.
He says, are you sorry that you didn't pull, rescind this order the way Cuomo did?
Are you sorry you didn't pull this order the way Cuomo did?
And listen to Killer Phil as he basically dodges the, I mean, it's amazing.
He dodges the question.
Was that a mistake?
And are you looking at overturning that in the same way that Governor Cuomo did in New York?
Yeah, so Willie, the tragedy within the tragedy, you've said it, is in long-term care facilities.
That's not just in New Jersey, it's in the country, but it certainly is in New Jersey.
And a big percentage of the lost lives come from there, including, as you said, from our veterans' homes.
It's been an incredibly uneven performance by the operators.
We started long before March 31st.
Our Department of Health started on this with directives for long-term care.
We put the National Guard in.
The VA is in these homes.
The Attorney General is actually doing an investigation.
We hired a national firm, not just to tell us when this is over, what we could have done differently.
We want them to tell us now what we could do differently or could have done differently.
They're actually working on that right now.
I don't want to jump the gun.
He's actually blaming the nursing homes for the results of his directive.
That is what the guy is doing.
He is looking straight into a camera.
And a Geist, I got to say, Willie Geist at MSNBC, he was very polite.
He said, yes, some of the nursing homes have performed badly, but, and he asks the question again.
And of course, Murphy dodges the question again.
This is amazing stuff.
These are actual scandals, actual malfeasance.
You know, in fact, if Andrew Cuomo came out and said, yeah, that was a terrible mistake, he's never taken, he did rescind the order, which is good, the directive, but he's never taken responsibility for what happened.
And none of these guys is taking responsibility.
And now Cuomo is blaming Trump, which is amazing, right?
If they came out and said, yeah, we made a tragic error.
These things, we never saw this before.
This is a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic and we make mistakes.
The problem with that is it would ruin the narrative that Donald Trump is doing something wrong.
Just amazing stuff.
And meanwhile, they're trying to make a scandal out of the fact that Trump has fired the Inspector General in the State Department.
They're trying to say that he's covering up for Mike Pompeo, that Mike Pompeo was being investigated by the Inspector General.
Pompeo says that's not true.
We have a clip of that.
There are claims that this was for retaliation, for some investigation that the Inspector General's office here was engaged in.
It's patently false.
I have no sense of what investigations were taking place inside the Inspector General's office.
Couldn't possibly have retaliated for all the things.
I've seen the various stories that someone was walking my dog to sell arms to my dry cleaner.
I mean, it's all just crazy.
It's all crazy stuff.
So I didn't have access to that information, so I couldn't possibly have retaliated.
It would have been impossible.
So the right conservatives have said, you know, Barack Obama fired IGs as well, right?
And he fired this guy, Gerald Walpin, who had discovered that money that was going to AmeriCorps, this left-wing organization, was being misused.
And so Obama fired him.
And so one of those fact-checks, I think it was factcheck.org or whatever it was, says, no, because Trump has fired four IGs and Obama only fired one.
But in fact, when Obama was president, 47, that's more than half of the inspector generals in the country, 47 of them, signed an open letter decrying the Obama administration's stonewalling of their investigations.
The White House, they said, had placed serious limitations, as a quote, serious limitations on access to records that have recently impeded the work.
So it's this whole scandal, you know, follow the scandal that is really a cover-up.
The scandals of the Trump administration are cover-ups of the scandals, A, of the Obama administration, B, of the incompetent states like New York and California that are ruining their states by overspending, by kowtowing to public sector unions, and the scandal, obviously, of the Obama administration, which is the scandal of the press.
That is the scandal of the press.
It is the press that is the Nixonian cover-up organization, which is an amazing fact, really, when you think about it, that the people, you know, I started out by saying not only does the left get it wrong, they get it backwards.
So the people who are supposed to be spreading information are actually covering information and spreading false information.
That's the situation that we're in, which is why that DeSantis cut is so, so beautiful.
Talking Stamps.com00:09:38
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That's stamps.com.
Enter Clavin and write to the President of the United States and say, Mr. President, how do you spell Clavin?
And he will tell you it's K-L-A.
There are no easy payments.
Why do I have to say it?
If you're going to say it, why don't you just play this?
Anyway, and don't forget, we did a great all-access meet last night, and I will probably do another one next week, I assume.
But so you want to be an all-access member by the time that happens so you can ask me all the questions and have all your problems solved.
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You're going to need two of them.
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Speaking of Clavin, we have Spencer Clavin, no relation.
He asked me to say that.
He's coming up to talk about his new Young Heretics podcast.
All right, we are back.
Spencer Clavin, no relation.
Again, he asked me to say that is the assistant editor of the Claremont Review of Books, one of the best think tank productions anywhere.
It really is.
The Claremont Review of Books is terrific.
And the American Mind, which is kind of the young person's Claremont Review of Books.
And he's got a new podcast, Young Heretics.
You can get at youngheretics.com.
Spence, how you doing?
Oh, hey, Dad.
Good to see you.
Longtime listener, first time caller.
I'm doing great.
I thought that when I moved to LA, I would get to talk to you.
I used to hang out with you all the time, but now you're locked up in your little Rapunzel Tower, and I never get to see you.
So it's nice to see your face.
I know, because I have to stay alive because obviously I'm holding the entire world in my imagination.
So it's important for me to show you.
If you disappear, you disintegrate like Thanos or Thanos.
If I go, we all go.
That is the Google.
As goes the Claven, so goes the world.
So mom says hello.
Hi, Mom.
What is the Young Heretics?
You've got a new podcast that I have not heard yet, but I'm going to go on my walk after this and listen to it.
You haven't listened to my show yet.
Dad.
I listen to your show all the time.
Okay.
No.
So, right, Young Heretics is a show that I've just launched.
It launched on Tuesday, I guess it was.
After a long lead up, coronavirus kind of threw a wrench into everything.
We finally got it out there.
But the point of the show is it's Western culture without the culture wars.
So it just occurred to me that we were spending so much time arguing with basically stupid liberals, right?
With people who think that Shakespeare is racist and reading Homer encourages inequality and that we're not reading enough, whatever, queer black feminist liberation.
And so we need to, you know, that's all incredibly stupid.
And we can all agree that that's a ridiculous thing to say.
But we spend conservatives spend so much time arguing about why that's stupid and trying to defend Western culture, go on the defensive, that we actually get caught in this trap, right?
We just get distracted by these, by arguing with idiots.
And arguing with idiots is almost never good for the soul, right?
It's almost never productive.
Obviously, everybody knows where I stand on the culture wars.
I'm in favor of taking back the Academy and doing all of that good work.
But it occurred to me that it would be good to have a place that we can just set that aside for a second and actually enrich ourselves with just all of this stuff that we spend all this time defending.
We spend all this time arguing about why it's okay to read Homer, that we forget sometimes to actually read Homer.
And that's what Young Heretics is about.
It's just sort of every episode, pick some great work of Western culture and dig into it.
It is kind of amazing when you think about it, that instead of actually talking about Shakespeare, which there's so much to say about Shakespeare and Homer and Plato and all these, instead of talking about that, we're actually talking about the fact that we're not supposed to talk about it.
And this kind of this new thing that's called theory, where instead of reading Homer to see about Homer, we read Homer so that some feminist or race identitarian can go off on it and talk about that.
So what do you, so what's your first show?
Your first show is Homer?
Yeah, first show is Homer, the Iliad.
I figured go back to the beginning of Greek literary tradition.
There's recently been this kerfuffle back in Oxford where I loved doing my grad degrees and had a great time, but they've been arguing about whether it's maybe encourages inequality to require Homer for their classics degree.
And it's like saying, does it encourage inequality to require that you use like butter to cook, right?
It's just, it's essential.
Like you just have to, you can't even understand classical literature without Homer.
Aeschylus, who's one of the sort of later Greek tragedians, said that, you know, all of his plays were like slices from the banquet of Homer.
And so this idea that you can kind of dispense with this stuff if it offends your sensibilities or it doesn't quite match up with all of the things that you think should be going on in the academy that's sort of inessential.
You don't need Homer is actually doing a tremendous disservice.
These are pinnacles of the Western imagination, of the human imagination.
They're phenomenal poems, songs, really, as I talked about in the episode.
And yeah, I just think it's such a crime to deprive people of the opportunity to be told that this is so essential.
So that's what the first show is, and then we move on to the Bible.
This is the second episode.
Cool.
One of the things that always bugs me about these conversations is that conservatives, I think, conservatives defend the idea of culture.
But when they get to culture, they want to know how is Homer going to help win the 32nd congressional district in Ohio?
I mean, they don't really know.
I feel like a lot of political people, a lot of people with political orientation don't really know what culture is for.
What is it for?
Why do we have to know this?
Why can't I just know that Republican governors are good and Democrat governors are bad?
Why do I have to know Homer as opposed to Barton?
Yeah, so this is a rant that I've been going on a lot recently, and it's probably your fault.
It's probably because I've got it for you.
But like that, the thing that people don't understand about culture is, or about literature especially, but art more generally, is that, first of all, it doesn't work like politics, like political arguments do, where you sort of lay out the facts and you prove what you're trying to say.
It's much more of an expressive way of getting truth across, right?
I can't make you an argument about why a sunset is beautiful, but I can paint you a painting that puts that experience that is in my heart into your heart.
And people think that that's some sort of squishy, subjective whatever, but no, that's like all of the important truth about the world lives there.
And we can't communicate it except through art.
And there's no like backing out of that, right?
You can't just be like, well, it's not, you know, I'm just going to focus on politics because you live in culture, whether you like it or not.
You step out the street every moment of your day.
You're listening to songs, you're seeing billboards, you know, and you're being told truths or falsehoods about the world.
And those, you know, those shape you, whether you like it or not.
You know, it is amazing.
I mean, we don't understand that this actually is the argument we're in.
We're in the idea of this inner person, this inner experience that they have.
People talk about reductively as feelings, but it's not feelings.
It's everything.
It's your joy.
It's your love.
It's all the things that you experience.
And what we have is we really have a group of materialists saying, oh, we'll give you a pill for that.
Young Conservatives' Perspective00:06:55
You're unhappy.
I'll give you a pill and then you'll be happier.
And we basically have taken away the experience of being human, which is what freedom is really all about.
And what all these works of poetry and great works of philosophy are all about is about the experience of being a human being, which I think is what we're sort of being sold is not that important.
Here's a universal income and an antidepressant and go your way and everything will be fine.
Have fun.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, have fun.
So you were in England.
How long were you?
And obviously we raised you the first, you were eight from two to 10, I think in England.
But then you went back to Oxford.
You may recall that I was a child once.
I know, I remember you were like that kid in the omen.
You got that English accent and you were terrifying.
Hello, Daddy.
I used to think like you were going to come and steal.
I used to think I was going to wake up and find you like with a ceremonial dagger above my head.
I'm just glad you remember.
I thought I was going to have to be like, I'm your son.
I'm David Spencer.
No, they actually prepped me in my ear.
I don't remember who this was.
Oh, good.
Right.
Somebody told you.
When you came back, so you were there for five years in graduate school, right?
Is that right?
Yeah, that's.
I couldn't figure out where you were.
I kept saying we haven't seen that guy lately.
But when you came back, what was the biggest culture shock?
Or was there a big culture shock?
Well, what's funny about that is, you know, one of the experiences of being, I guess, what they call an expatriate, so living outside your home country, is if you come back at all, then you get these sudden snapshots where you've forgotten a little bit about what it's like to be at home, to be in America.
And you just get this concentrated hit of like, I would come back for Christmas or I would come back for the summer.
And it's like taking the temperature of the country.
Like you sort of leave, you forget what's going on in America.
You focus on the country you're in.
And then suddenly you return, you get this really strong vibe that, oh, such and such a thing is happening in America.
And one of the things that I noticed over that time, so while I was in the UK coming back to the US, is Trump got elected and everybody started tearing their hair out.
And in the UK, all we heard was about how terrible this was and how everybody was, everything was going to die.
The Constitution was over.
The Constitution was crying.
The Statue of Liberty was torn in half.
But I would come back to the US during those first early Trump years and just be like, wow, everything is going great.
Like I'm in these boroughs of like, you know, I would visit Faith, your daughter, my sister, you may recall.
I would visit Faith and she's living in this kind of, you know, hyper-liberal New York area where everybody thinks the world is falling.
And it's like everybody, you know, all the stores are opening.
The economy is doing great.
Like people are so peaceful and happy.
They're raising their kids.
Like we don't even know.
That's the first thing that was surprising to me.
It's like we don't even know how good things are going until, of course, this coronavirus thing hit, which I think, you know, we're on the outs.
We're on our way out of this thing.
But, you know, coming back, the thing, now that I live here again, I moved back to LA in July, I guess.
Now that I live here, the thing that has really impressed itself upon me is that Americans are actually a very sincere people.
And that's something that, you know, we live in this age of irony and of the internet.
And, you know, on Twitter, basically everyone's constantly snarky.
But the people you go out on the street and you talk to just sort of randomly, like politics aside, whatever, you know, they're actually being earnest about trying to live the good life.
Like people, people want joy.
They want to be happy and fulfilled, and they also want meaning and a philosophy that's coherent.
Unfortunately, they live in an era and in a culture that just like doesn't offer them anything that looks like that.
So, I mean, a lot of our, I think, a lot of our neuroses right now aren't that the people are somehow, you know, wrong or degraded or flawed.
It's the people are trying really sincerely.
And just they're in a cultural wasteland.
We live in this time of cultural wasteland.
You know, you call your podcast the young heretics.
It's at youngheretics.com.
You hang out at the Claremont Review of Books and the American Mind, and there are a lot of young folks over there who are young conservatives, brilliant guys, like James Paulos, a pal.
He's a really smart guy.
What are the young conservatives seeing from old codgers like me that they would like to change?
What makes them young conservatives as opposed to old conservatives?
This is really interesting because, you know, if you had asked me that maybe a year ago, I think my standard response would have been, you know, conservatives, or young conservatives are down on, or, you know, they're into the small government stuff.
They're into being allowed to live their lives.
They're not so into this social conservatism stuff.
They don't want the kind of prudery and the scolding and all of this old-fashioned, you know, morality that goes along with some of the older models of conservatism.
But now that I've spent some time working for Claremont and kind of getting in on the young conservative scene here in the U.S., I actually don't think that's right.
I don't think that the difference between young and old conservatives is that young conservatives just sort of don't care about social conservatism.
I think it's that they want a conservatism that acknowledges the world as it is, but still acknowledges that part of that world is the moral universe.
So, you know, it might not look like the 1950s when we finally, you know, take back the culture and reshape it in the way that we want.
And I think that young conservatives tend probably to be a little bit more open-minded to some of the things, some of the social changes that have happened over the last few decades.
But they're not into this kind of libertarian shift that happened, I think, in a lot of mainstream conservatism.
They're not into just like take your hands off.
Yeah, they're not into, you know, take your hands off the government.
The government should like the whole state should just absent itself from questions of right and wrong.
A lot of conservatives are trying to say, you know, all law is about right and wrong.
And you may believe that personal liberty, I believe that personal liberty is a very important good that the state should be involved in protecting.
But that's not the end of the story.
And I think young conservatives are so starved for that stuff.
They're so starved for teaching on the good and the moral and the beautiful.
I have to stop you there.
I am actually out of time.
Drop by the house.
We can go to this conversation.
Bring liquor.
Yeah, bring liquor.
And also now that you're making money, remember to support your parents.
It's good to see you.
Space Claven.
Just fine.
Thank you very much.
The youngheretics at youngheretics.com.
I'll talk to you later.
Yeah, it's great to see you.
Thank you.
All right, folks, I'm out of time, but that means the Clavenless weekend is about to begin.
You're doomed.
But if anybody survives, I will be here on Monday.
The Andrew Clavin Show00:01:11
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The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Robert Sterling and directed by Mike Joyner.
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