Andrew Clavin’s Ep. 911 exposes how "white guilt" fuels chaos, from Seattle’s CHAZ takeover—backed by BLM and Antifa—to Mayor Jenny Durkan’s police withdrawal amid extortion and armed patrols. He blames progressive policies for worsening Black communities, citing Chicago’s 250% murder spike while leftists exploit Floyd’s death over systemic failures like schools and welfare. Clavin frames Biden as a puppet for defund-the-police agendas, warns Trump is the sole counter to leftist "Matrix" narratives, and ties cultural decline to abandoning Judeo-Christian and classical traditions—arguing resistance requires reclaiming Plato and Scripture from modern distortions. [Automatically generated summary]
Mobs of far-left protesters stormed Seattle's City Hall and demanded that the mayor step down because she is refusing to defund the police who are preventing them from destroying Western civilization.
Protester Dirtbag Moron, not his real name, told reporters, quote, sure, we can rampage violently through the halls of government, but as long as there's still police around, we can't rape and kill with impunity.
How is society supposed to have justice when there are still people with the privilege of not being terrorized, unquote.
The protesters immediately declared the area the communist woketopia paradise of Seattle and began spying on people and randomly beating up anyone who looked like they might one day have a thought that was not in keeping with their philosophy, which is to spy on people and beat up anyone who might one day have a thought that was not in keeping with their philosophy.
The mayhem only stopped when they ran out of food and had to use their iPhones to call Pizza Hut to tell them that capitalist corporations are evil and please send over two dozen large pies with pepperoni and black olives because black olives matter.
The pizza delivery guy showed up and was promptly robbed at gunpoint because money is bad.
The leader of the protesters, Dirtbag Moron, no relation to the other Dirtbag Moron, except being a dirtbag and a moron, told an imaginary gathering of happy comrades in the utopia that exists only in his imagination, but is just like Seattle, except not on fire and filled with homeless people.
He said, quote, when all America looks like Seattle does now, we will at last have justice and possibly scurvy.
I look forward to the day when no one will go hungry because there'll be a cat in every garbage fire and a car in every ash heap where there used to be a garage, unquote.
The protesters say the protests will continue until there is social justice for all or something good is on Netflix.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I go hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
Ship-shaped tipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, welcome and thank you.
If you have been subscribing to the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel, you are actually making black lives better.
I don't know, maybe you're not, but you're subscribing, making my life better.
And that's the important thing.
The important thing, remember, the central idea here is save the Clavin.
And we are looking at your comments.
If they come into the Andrew, they have to be in the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel to get featured on the show.
Here's one from Tom Cruise, K-R-E-W-Z.
So he's disguising the fact that it's the famous actor.
I have officially unsubscribed to the Knowles YouTube channel.
At the same time, I must add that I truly am enjoying listening to all the Clavin-y goodness from the crisp, clear sounds from my Raycon earbuds.
Now feature my comment, please.
I believe I pandered to you most properly.
Yeah, I think that's just about enough.
By the way, Knowles is going to be on Louder with Crowder, Steven Crowder Show, so that you can see on Stephen Crowder's YouTube channel.
And while you're on YouTube, you of course can unsubscribe from Knowles and subscribe to me.
As I feared, Trump is cratering in the polls.
It's really looking not so good for him.
And that makes it possible that an inchoate ventriloquist dummy will be the next president of the United States, and it will be the far left doing the talking.
The left right now is winning, and they are very bad people who hate America and want it to end.
That's not extreme language.
If the New York Times is representative of the left, and I think it is, they've been rewriting the history of both the United States and the Soviet Union for a couple of years now, making the crushing slavery of communism look good and the fractious but wealth and freedom-producing Republic of America look bad.
Which points to the truth.
If the Democrats do win, it will be a triumph of the Matrix, a triumph of narrative over reality.
And it's the lives of black Americans that are being sacrificed by the left to create that narrative.
Everyone, including Fox News, everyone is talking about police reform.
And of course, police have a lot of power, and reform is always a good thing.
And I don't doubt black Americans' experience of the police can be painful and problematic.
But attacking the police isn't going to do a damn thing to help people in poor communities, except maybe get more of them killed by the predators who roam their streets.
It's not going to protect them from the evil Black Lives Matter movement, which openly declares its purpose of dismantling the family, the one institution that might begin to help actual black lives.
Racism exists, but blacks aren't being held back by racism.
They're being held back by leftist policies that have made them dependent, kept them poorly schooled and housed, and yes, weakened their families.
But if you say that at your place of work, you get fired, like the NBA announcer who lost his job because he said all lives matter.
People Let Unelected Governor Come Back00:13:11
Think about that for a second.
Or the UCLA professor who got suspended because he refused to schedule an exam in tribute to the rioters.
Police reform is at the margin of the problem.
We're being forced to the margin by censorship meant to increase white guilt and fear so that we cannot help our black fellow citizens by speaking the truth about their real problems.
Let me say this again.
If you care about black lives, Black Lives Matter is evil.
It's only good in the racial matrix.
All right, let's talk about ancestry DNA.
This stuff is really fun.
It really is fun.
There's a lot of stuff you learn.
You can learn about history.
I mean, obviously, we know about the familiar events of World War II, but there are a lot of stories behind the stories.
The skill and bravery of the Tuskegee Airmen, an all-African-American squad of fighter pilots.
We had one of them on the show, one of the very, very few times I've been overawed by meeting somebody.
The incredible women who trained to become pilots and mechanics, the Japanese American Battalion that became one of America's most decorated units despite discrimination.
In honor of the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, Ancestry has just released a U.S. draft card collection from World War II with over 36 million draft cards completed by fighting-age men in the United States across the country during that time, whether they ended up serving or not.
And there's a great chance that you could find your relatives in this collection and it can help you learn more about what their lives were like.
Uncover your ancestors' personal details in our World War II U.S. draft card collection, which shows details like home address, physical description, and more.
Discover all your untold stories and more, head to my URL at ancestry.com slash Clavin to start discovering your story today.
That's ancestry.com/slash Clavin.
And of course, once you get my dog tag, you'll be able to find out how you spell Clavin, which is the essential thing you need to know.
It's K-L-A.
I was going to say that.
I knew that.
Christopher Ruffo is a contributing editor of my colleague at City Journal, and he's a terrific writer and a brave writer.
And he lives in Seattle, and he wrote a description of what happened.
And I want to read some of it to you so you don't just have ideas in your head that you're seeing on Twitter.
He says, Seattle's hard-left secessionist movement has claimed its first territory six blocks in the Capitol Hill neighborhood.
For the past week, Black Lives Matter and Antifa-affiliated activists have engaged in a pitched battle with Seattle police officers and National Guard soldiers in the neighborhood, hoping to break through the barricade.
Protesters attacked officers with bricks, bottles, rocks, and improvised explosive devices, sending some officers to the hospital.
At the same time, activists circulated videos of the conflict and accused the police of brutality, demanding that the city cease using tear gas and other anti-riot techniques.
So it's not just violence, it's the matrix.
It's creating this narrative to make it seem like it's the police doing the bad stuff.
Then, in a stunning turn of events, the city of Seattle made the decision to abandon the East Precinct and surrender the neighborhood to the protesters.
This is an exercise in trust and de-escalation, explained Chief Carmen Best.
Officers and National Guardsmen emptied out the facility, boarded it up, and retreated.
And immediately afterward, Black Lives protesters, Antifa Blackshirts, and armed members of the hard-left John Brown Gun Club seized control of the neighborhood, moved the barricades into a defensive position so that the first thing they did, by the way, was build a wall.
Maybe they can get Mexico to pay for it.
And they declared it the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, Chaz.
They even put up a cardboard sign at the barricades declaring, you are now leaving the USA.
Now, let me just say the city government has not developed a strategic response to the takeover of Capitol Hill.
According to one Seattle police officer, the city's leadership is in chaos and the mayor has made the decision to let a mob of 1,000 people dictate public safety policy for a city of 750,000 people.
And this is going on in Portland, too.
They're now putting up barricades in Portland.
The New York Times, meanwhile, is running op-eds on Knucklehead Row that say things like, what does it mean to defund the police?
What do they mean by that?
This is what they mean.
It's not defunding the police.
It's defunding the real police so that you can have black shirt police.
You can have Nazis who call themselves anti-fascists, which is like hilarious.
And that's what's happening in Seattle.
This is a real thing.
And this is what Joe Biden is the ventriloquist dummy for.
That's a really important point.
And I'll show it to you in just a second.
First, let's go to the Seattle governor.
This is going to be Cut 11.
His name is Jay Inslee.
And he's asked by a reporter about the fact that the most important city in his state has been in part taken over by armed insurgents.
It has been taken over by armed insurgents.
And here is Jay Inslee, governor of the state.
Here's his response.
Governor, I'd like to ask you about what's going on in Seattle.
There's this thing called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
What's your thought on that?
The fact that the protesters have taken that over and not allowing people to come and go freely regarding the Papal Guard.
Well, that's news to me, so I'll have to reserve any comment about it.
I have not heard anything about that from any credible source.
Not that you're not credible.
It's just before I espouse an opinion, I should know of which I speak.
You're a lion dogface pony soldier.
That fills you with confidence, doesn't it?
That just fills your heart with like, oh, yeah, this thing is in good control.
The mayor, Jenny Durkin, is one of the ways this started is because she said she wouldn't defund the police.
She says, in an effort to proactively de-escalate interactions between protesters and law enforcement outside the East Precinct, Chief Best and Seattle PD officers have removed barricades surrounding the East Precinct while safely securing the facility.
So this is the leadership.
And you know, Chris Ruffo says, oh, these people weren't elected.
This is now control of a major part of a major city by people who are unelected.
They were elected.
They were elected when you elected people who let them take over.
They were elected when you elected people who let them take over.
And one of them is a woman named Nikita Oliver, a radical activist and a former mayoral candidate.
After night fell, this is Rufo again, after night fell and a light rain began falling, she spoke to the crowd and outlined the ideological commitments behind the occupation.
We need to align ourselves with the global struggle that acknowledges that the United States plays a role in racialized capitalism.
Racialized capitalism is built upon patriarchy, white supremacy, and classism, and of course has made the world richer than it's ever been.
But let's not say anything about that.
And of course, it was also great for black lives until we were convinced to shut down the economy for months and months and months.
There is also this guy, a rapper.
First of all, hooded men spray painted the police station with slogans and anarchist symbols, renamed it the Seattle People's Department East Precinct.
Raz Simone, a local rapper with an AK-47 slung from his shoulder and a pistol attached to his hip, screamed, this is war into a megaphone.
Here is the rapper.
This is quote, this is cut nine.
You don't know the owner of this place?
The owner that's actually being nice and letting us stay here?
We forgot.
We are the police of this community now.
Hey!
What the f ⁇ ?
Hey, hey, hey, hey, what the f ⁇ ?
What the f ⁇ ?
Hey, yo, yo, please, my brother.
Hey, 30.
Oh, you got someone coming in 15 minutes?
I just said 15 minutes.
You're talking about 15 minutes.
What the f you're talking about?
Don't be talking no threats around here.
Don't be saying no threats.
Blow your brain.
Don't do that.
This is a guy.
They're beating people up.
They're questioning people.
They're demanding tribute money to let people get to work.
You know, again, they didn't want to defund the police.
They wanted to be the police.
And when they become the police, they, of course, are Nazis.
These are Nazis.
That's what they are.
They're Nazis.
The fact that they put forward socialism as some kind of weird utopian idea that that's going to work this time doesn't stop them from being Nazis.
They're anti-Semites.
They're racist.
They're incredibly violent.
They're not in favor of democracy or election.
They're not in favor of free.
Remember, capitalism isn't really an ism.
It's just people trading freely.
So they're not in favor of that either.
Meanwhile, opinion among white liberals seems to be shifting toward this evil movement, Black Lives Matter.
And of course, that is what I was talking about before and warning you about before, which is the Stockholm syndrome.
I mean, people feel like they've been held hostages.
And remember, this COVID lockdown, this Chinese flu lockdown, and this happening now is all part of the same thing.
So now, just for a comic relief, I've got to play this, the celebrities who represent, I think, a certain level of white elite opinion, people who are so protected from reality by their position and by their money that they think that, oh, wonderful, Black Lives Matter.
That sounds so nice.
Black lives matter.
I get it.
They're going to check their privilege, and that's really going to help the guy who's being murdered, the child who's being murdered by gang members in LA right now.
The murder rate is up 250%.
And it's gang members spraying bullets around and who gets killed?
Innocent black people, but their lives don't matter.
But celebrities are with them.
Celebrities are with them.
Here is CUT 20, another wonderful montage of celebrities checking their privilege.
I take responsibility.
I take responsibility for every unchecked moment.
For every time it was easier to ignore than to call it out for what it was.
Every not-so-funny joke.
Every unfair stereotype.
Every blatant injustice, no matter how big or small.
Every time I remained silent.
Every time I explained away police brutality or turned a blind eye.
I take responsibility.
Black people are being slaughtered in the streets, killed in their own homes.
That's true, but not by the police.
But the amazing thing is once that video came back, it came out, the 19 black people who were slaughtered in Chicago last weekend, I believe it was 19, it may have been more, came back to life.
They came back to life.
The celebrity power, just sheer star power, brought those people back to life.
So that's a good thing.
We can always look forward to that.
Now, if you doubt that this is going to be ventriloquism through Joe Biden, listen to him.
This may run over a little bit, but this is Biden on the police, says Cut 15.
I don't believe peace should be defunded, but I think the conditions should be placed upon them where departments are having to take significant reforms relating to we should set up a national use of force standard.
If they don't sign on to it, then in fact, they don't get any of the federal money.
So they get defunded.
So he is saying because he's got to be that Joe Biden middle-of-the-road face, he's saying he doesn't want them defunded, but if they don't obey, they'll be defunded.
Now, here is Biden on Donald Trump.
This is cut three.
This president's going to try to steal this election.
This is the guy who said that all mail-in ballots are fraudulent, voting by mail, while he sits behind the desk in Oval Office and writes his mail-in ballot to vote in the primary.
This is a guy you have 23, I believe, in his states have passed over 82 pieces of legislation, making it harder for people to vote.
Harder.
That's why we're putting together a major initiative of lawyers to go out and make sure that we're in every single district in the country to patrol this.
So remember when spreading doubt about our electoral system, remember when that was a terrible thing, a horrible, horrible thing that Trump did?
But who monkey with the election last time?
Barack Obama and the Democrat Party.
It's coming out now, but it's being obscured by these riots.
And I think that's part of the reason the press loves this stuff is because it's burying the fact that they buried the fact that Barack Obama really did screw with our elections.
And the Democrats tried to overturn our elections by legal means using what, you know, under cover of law, they try to overturn our elections over absolutely nothing and in an illegal manner under cover of law.
Now, finally, I just want to play Terry McAuliffe, who is a Biden surrogate and former Clinton crony, talking about Biden's campaign strategy, Cut Four.
People say all the time, oh, we got to get the vice president out of the basement.
Falling Into Fascism00:16:05
He's fine in the basement.
Two people see him a day.
He's two body people.
That's that.
And let Trump keep doing what Trump's doing.
It's hard for the vice president to break through.
You've got the COVID crisis.
He's not a governor, doesn't have a National Guard.
He's not the president, doesn't he have the briefing room?
He needs to come out strategically.
And when he says something like he did on race relations two days ago, it needs to have a big impact, thoughtful, and that's what we're preferring that he actually do at the time.
There should be their campaign slogan, keep Biden in the cellar.
You know, the thing is, what's Trump doing?
He's doing what we told him on the show to do.
And, you know, if you don't believe that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, he's meeting with black leaders.
He's meeting with his black business friend leaders.
He's taking care of the police reforms.
He's studying that himself.
He's going to come out eventually.
He's got to come out eventually and make a speech telling people who he actually is as opposed to who the media says he is.
But what they know is the media will fight for them.
They know the media will cover up.
The mainstream news, the networks aren't even covering Seattle.
They're not covering Seattle.
A major American city is being taken over by Nazis and they're not covering it.
It's just not happening.
But Trump, Trump, bad man, bad, orange man, bad, orange man, bad.
All right.
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Because we love saying rockauto.com.
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Write Clavin in their How Did You Hear About Us box so they know we sent you and then write Clavin in their How Do You Spell Clavin box so they know you know how to spell Klavin.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no none.
I really just make it look like this.
It's amazing.
So police reform, right?
There's testimony before Congress about police reform.
And again, you know, any power center can use reform.
And the police are a power center.
The police, as Alfred Hitchcock used to say, the police are the only people who can say, come with me, and you have to go with them.
And so always, always there should be police reform.
Always they should be taught not to abuse their power.
Always they should be taught empathy with the community.
All these things are true.
And so it's not a bad thing.
It's not a bad thing that they're talking about police reform.
It's just a distraction from the fact from what is bothering black Americans in this country.
That is the problem.
It's part of the Matrix.
It's a wonderful thing when you can use something real to become part of the Matrix.
So the brother of George Floyd, Philonese Floyd, made his statement, and it was very moving.
It was very touching.
Of course it is.
His brother's dead.
He watched this horrible, horrible video of this guy pleading for his life as the police knelt on him.
I mean, you know, let's not forget, let's not forget that this was a bad incident.
It was available on video.
We are talking about something that is very narratively powerful.
An individual story is always powerful.
As Mao said, one tragedy is a tragedy.
One death is a tragedy.
Millions of deaths is just a statistic.
And so what we on the right are talking about is statistics.
The left has a narrative advantage.
And so here's Philonese talking about this.
And again, like I said, it's very powerful.
It's cut six.
I'm here to ask you to make it stop.
Stop the pain.
Stop us from being tired.
George called for help and he was ignored.
Please listen to the call I'm making to you now to the cause of our family and the calls ringing out the streets across the world.
People of all backgrounds, genders, and races have come together to demand change.
Honor them.
Honor George and make the necessary changes that make law enforcement the solution and not the problem.
Hold them accountable when they do something wrong.
Teach them what it means to treat people with empathy and respect.
And he goes on and makes perfectly reasonable, you know, train them about the use of force and the deadliest forces.
None of this to fund the police thing.
It was a very rational speech and again, very emotional.
Why is it very emotional?
Because we care about our fellow citizens, because we're not racist, because it's not a racist country.
There's not racism.
You know, somebody said, who was it?
They said that racism was like corn syrup.
It was in everything.
I think it was one of the talk show hosts, something like that.
But if that's true, you can't do anything about it.
You can't pluck the bones out of a fish, right?
It's just not going to happen.
And so that's why they do it.
That's why they do it.
They attack things that can't be changed in order to keep the drumbeat going.
It's got to keep going because this is an industry.
It's a combination of two things.
It's just like when Hitler came to power, there were people who thought, oh, we can use Hitler.
See, we're going to put him in power because he's going to help us, like businessmen would think this.
And then once we have what we want, we just get rid of him.
We'll just get rid of him.
This is the same thing that's happening.
It's exactly the same thing that's happening now.
There are people kowtowing to this violent left, these violent left-wing extremists, because they're trying to preserve an infrastructure and bureaucracy of welfare and patronage and all these billions of dollars that are poured into neighborhoods through government jobs.
So this gives the Democrats enormous power.
It gives the bureaucracy enormous power.
It keeps black people enslaved to these handouts.
It keeps them dependent.
It keeps them mediocre.
It keeps them in their neighborhoods.
And meanwhile, their schools are terrible.
Their public schools are just awful.
That too, that too is the teachers' union that is such a big backer of the Democrat Party.
So it's all like an illusion, but it's not created out of nothing.
It's created out of real problems that the Democrats have fostered and maintained all these 55 years since the great society began.
And so when this man gets up and he talks, we all, I feel it, I feel his pain.
I feel his suffering.
Why?
Because I'm an American.
He's an American and I understand that this is a bad thing.
But it's still using narrative, an emotional narrative, to drive us away from the center of the problem, which is families, which is education, which is jobs, which is faith and morality and the things that make lives work for white people.
They make things work for white people, but we don't want to tell black people about them because we've got this big system of keeping them in place called the Democrat Party.
It's been doing it since this country began.
It's been doing it since the Democrat Party began, keeping black people down and is doing it still.
And this is a matrix created by this enormous industry of communications that they own.
They just own it.
And, you know, I'm sorry, but it is on us.
You know, we know this is the problem.
And again, I've talked about this a million times.
I'm going to say it one more time.
Trump is the only guy who understands that this is the issue.
Everybody else is saying, oh, well, don't say that.
Don't say that, because they're afraid of getting sued.
They're afraid of losing sponsors.
They're afraid of all the things that happen to you when you tell the truth about black people in America.
When you say that Black Lives Matter is evil, you lose your sponsors.
When you say that Black Lives Matter is evil, you lose your sponsors.
So you are rewarded for calling good evil and evil good.
And the only guy who gets this is Donald Trump.
And the very traits that make him able to stand up to it are the very traits that make him a very unappealing guy to a lot of people.
And yes, are his words taken out of context?
And yes, do they lie about him every day?
They sure do.
They lie about it.
It's insane.
I mean, I don't know how they live with themselves, the way they misrepresent what he does and who he is.
But still, his character, his personality, the way he speaks is very, very off-putting to a lot of people.
And he plays in the very fact that he fights back against them the way he does, that he has that character is also the same thing that makes him so unappealing.
That is a tragic fact.
I'm not blaming him.
I'm just telling you that is the truth.
And you can see it in the polls.
Now, he's changing his ways.
He's taking some of the advice from Clavin.
And since we know I'm always 100% correct, he can still turn this around.
Remember, we're dealing partly, we're dealing in part with the madness that comes at the end of a crisis, the madness that comes at the end of the lockdown and the hysteria about the Chinese flu.
That's coming to an end.
When things come to an end, there is craziness, and that's this craziness.
The left is going to be doing everything it can with all the power of its narrative to keep that craziness alive until the elections.
They are going to be working and working and working on it.
If we sent him there to be the voice that talks back, he can't hide in the White House.
He's got to come out and talk.
He's got to be visible all the time.
He's going to start doing his rallies again, and that's a good thing.
And of course, it's going to be hilarious.
The whiplash are going to get as suddenly a Chinese flu becomes dangerous again is going to be hilarious.
That's just, you know, wear one of those neck braces.
But look, look, every now and again, somebody else speaks.
There was a lady named Angela Underwood Davis whose brother is a police officer who was murdered, which happens about twice as much as unarmed people being murdered and about five times as much as black unarmed people being killed by the police, right?
That happens a lot more.
And she went before Congress, and this is what she had to say about her brother, a dead police officer.
The heartbreak and the grief is inexplainable because it's very, very hard to articulate when your entire world has been turned upside down.
I do want to know, though, when I think about all of this, is that my brother wore a uniform and he wore that uniform proudly.
I'm wondering, where is the outrage for a fallen officer that also happens to be African-American?
Where is the outrage for a fallen officer who's African-American?
Where's the outrage for the children who get shot in these drive-by shootings by the stray bullets sitting in their little yards and the bullet comes in and just takes out a two-year-old in Chicago?
I mean, where's the outrage and the feeling and the heart for the old ladies in those communities who can only go outside when the police are there?
They can only go outside when the police are there.
You want to know what defunding the police looks like.
It looks like that rapper with an AK-47 being a bull.
He's a bully.
He's a fascist bully.
These guys are all fascist bullies, every single one of them.
And then he got Don Lemon on TV going, but they say they're anti-fascist.
I mean, if they say you're anti-fascist, they must be anti-fascist.
I mean, it's an amazing thing we're seeing.
It is an amazing triumph of narrative.
And, you know, we let it happen.
We let it happen because we're always in a panic.
We're in a panic now.
I can tell.
I mean, I'm getting the letters.
I hear what you're saying.
I hear what you're talking about.
We are in a panic now.
And we think, oh, we've got to deal with this right now.
And maybe we do.
I mean, this is a pretty bad situation.
But if we pull this out, if Trump comes back and he pulls this out, the next day, the very next day, we will forget.
We will forget that we need to build a narrative.
We will forget that we need to build a narrative machine.
We will forget that we need to go into black communities and speak to them from the right and say, you're being gamed.
Only Trump has the guts to do that.
He's the only person who has the guts to do it.
If he wins, we will forget the next day that that's what all of us should be doing.
All the anti-Trumpers, all the never-Trumpers, you don't want to support Trump?
Fine.
Build a narrative that will work.
Build a narrative that will speak for us when he's gone.
Because otherwise, man, these guys will run the country with Joe Biden as their dummy.
All right.
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And they don't have a place where you can put my name in.
So just do it, you know, do what Black Lives Matter do and just scrawl my name on the walls of some building that you're walking by.
My son, Spencer Clavin, is going to come on.
We're going to talk about culture because everybody panics and they forget the culture, but the culture is everything.
coming right up.
All right.
Who is Spencer Clavin?
You know, they give me a little thing that I can read off so I know who Spencer Clavin is.
So you talk about the dissolution of the American family.
You're watching it right here.
I have to read his introduction off a sheet.
He's assistant editor of the Claremont Review of Books, which is a fat.
I'm not kidding.
This was before he worked there.
I was telling you about the Claremont Review of Books.
It is the best.
It is a great, great magazine.
The American Mind is the younger version that's kind of on that's on the internet.
And he's got a great podcast.
I just listened to the latest episode yesterday, The Young Heretics, which you can get at youngheretics.com.
I get it off Apple because I just can't handle all these different places.
But Spence, how you doing?
Hey, it's good to see you.
Can I bring that introduction sheet over next time I come to have a drink so that you remember who I am?
So I know who you are.
Exactly.
Just wear it.
Just wear it on your shirt.
It's like, oh, it's the assistant editor from the Claremont Review of Books.
So I'm bringing you on at a moment when Seattle is, Seattle has fallen.
People are in a panic.
Trump's poll numbers have dropped.
And you're sitting around talking about the Bible and Plato.
Your last thing was about Plato's Symposium, one of the greatest pieces of work ever written.
What can we tell people?
Like, what do we tell people?
Why does this matter?
I know.
You know, I go on Twitter and I look out at this, what feels to me like just this vast landscape of despair and anger, you know, and I feel it too.
They're defacing statues of Winston Churchill, one of the greatest men ever to live, without whom there would be no concept of freedom or liberty or equality to currently exist in the world.
I'm watching that and I get angry.
I feel like the only thing to do is just sort of go out and scream and yell about the culture.
And I think that obviously it's incredibly important to be having those fights.
But C.S. Lewis, about whom I will do a podcast episode next week, C.S. Lewis said once during World War II, so a cataclysm, a big cataclysm, said, you know, the war creates no absolutely new situation.
All it does is aggravate the situation that we're constantly in.
People forget in times of prosperity that this is the West.
The West is this tiny light of reason and truth and goodness.
And people carry it along.
They pass it off.
It's been done before, right?
Why Christians Struggle With Wisdom00:10:26
Boethius writes in prison before being killed.
My personal favorite, Cicero, the great Roman statesman, composes his greatest works of political philosophy basically before he's executed as the Republic crumbles and the empire falls.
And who picks up Cicero but John Adams, right?
America is the next in this line.
So look, do I think this is like the end?
No, I do not.
But even if it is, this is our whole job.
Our whole job, even if we're about to get taken out, is to be enriching ourselves and others with the tremendous wealth that it is our responsibility to pass on.
And we'll be better for it.
And in the end, our enemies, even if they triumph in this world, are going to be worse off in the long run.
And we are going to be on the winning side.
You know, I always tell people the story of calling you up when you were in England.
I'd just been reading some Plato and I said, geez, it's really depressing.
It makes me nostalgic for the days when Socrates could walk about the Agora discussing philosophy and there's this long pause.
And then you said, Dad, they killed Socrates.
And so we have to remember that this is not a unique, a unique moment.
Well, I was listening to your thing on Isaiah, and you have this wonderful on the website, Rejoy Evermore.
You have this wonderful translation of Isaiah.
And you started talking about the Bible and why the Bible matters, even if you don't feel that you're religious.
Give me a little of that.
Yeah, no, sure.
I mean, look, people are in all sorts of different places right now when it comes to belief in God.
Obviously, I'm a Christian.
I believe that the Bible is the true source of divine truth, that it tells you about, you know, everything that is true about the world.
But people are on all sorts of stages in the journey toward thinking about that.
And they tend, I think, we have this atmosphere, this sort of fashionable atmosphere that nobody's smart believes in God anymore.
And so all of that stuff is just kind of, you know, just superstition.
It's old-fashioned superstition.
I call this chronological chauvinism, the idea that everybody smart was born after 1950, you know?
And of course, that's preposterous if you sit down and think about it for five seconds, right?
The great intellects of all time, Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, all of them have believed in some form of deity, you know, Aristotle, even the Greeks who were not Christians.
And so the Bible is not only scripture for Christians and Jews, it is also the vast cultural repository of at least 50% of the wisdom of the West, right?
Athens and Jerusalem are the two great pillars of this civilization that we build across generations.
So to shrug off the Bible as if it's just old superstition is cutting your left foot off, basically.
You know, and I'm always talking about narrative and the way they build narrative.
And they do exactly what you say.
They kind of make you feel like you're a dope if you believe in this stuff.
And science has done, you know, they have that word science, which now means absolutely nothing.
And they say, well, science has proved it.
Guys have been writing to me and saying, we've now proved that there was no Exodus of the Jews.
There was no Moses.
I mean, this is the kind of thing, you know, they used to make, they made fun of that guy, Schliemann, when he said there was really a Trojan war.
And then he discovered Troy.
So, I mean, this kind of dismissive attitude they take is really a narrative building.
It's a way of making you feel like you shouldn't open your mouth.
So you were talking about the Greeks, talking about things coming from Athens and Jerusalem.
And you did this show.
I thought it was unbelievable.
This is, again, your show, YoungHeretics at youngheretics.com.
And you did a thing on the symposium, which is just a beautiful, beautiful book.
My son, by the way, began translating it for me, but he never sent me the rest of his translation.
I just want to just want to bring that up just to either of us is dead yet.
It's going to happen.
You don't want to cut it too close, though.
But the thing is, you talked about this as a story about love.
It's about people making speeches about love.
And you talked about it in relationship to Sigmund Freud, which I thought was a really interesting point.
Yeah.
You know, people always think that, or we tend to assume that Socrates in Plato's dialogue is basically just Freud before there was Freud, because Freud has so obsessed us that it's all we can think about.
And Freud's idea is basically that everything just boils down to sex, right?
Everything boils down to your animal urges and all of the other stuff that you do, all of the romantic love that you profess and all of the institutions and the civilizations that we build.
It's all just kind of a substitute for our sexual desires called sublimation.
And Plato talks about sexual desire as if it were part of this bigger thing.
So people think that he's talking about sublimation.
Well, everything is just sex.
But in fact, it's the opposite.
It's a much deeper view in Plato, which is that your sexual drive and your romantic love is just the first part, the tip of the iceberg, to this enormous force that animates the entire universe.
And so, you know, people, Freud makes us stupid.
Freud makes us think that everything that we do is just disguise for some animal impulse, which totally erases all of the color out of the world.
And Plato says, no, that color is real and your romantic love is the first step to it.
It's the first step on the road to this sort of vast, immortal, eternal love that animates the whole world.
So when you talk about Athens and Jerusalem, these are not like two separate streams.
I mean, because that doesn't sound quite like Christianity, but it sounds like it has a relationship with Christianity.
And I've heard Plato called one of the prophets, one of the prophets before the prophets, one of the prophets before Jesus.
What is the relationship between Plato and Christianity?
Yeah, this is really important because Christians can get a little bit antsy about listening to the Greeks, right?
Because they're pagans.
They're before Jesus.
And people sort of feel like, oh, well, and also their ways are very different from ours.
I mean, I talk about this in the symposium episode.
So Christians who are very rightly defensive of their Christian orthodoxy are worried about learning from anything outside of the Bible.
But in the Bible, Isaiah, my favorite prophet whom I'm translating, Isaiah says that one day through the Messiah, all of the different nations, not just God's chosen people, the Jews, but all of the different nations are going to come flocking to God's mountain, bringing all of the stuff that they've made, all of their gifts and their talents and the works of their hands.
And I think that is this tremendous image for the fact that God created the entire universe and everybody who sees wisdom is getting this kind of like half inkling of God.
And that's what I love about the Greeks.
They haven't got Jesus, so they haven't sort of seen what I think is the full picture, but they're so profound in their wisdom that they're like tapping up against the glass, you know?
And so, right, so Plato has this thing that you kind of transcend your body.
You move beyond your body to eternity, that once you get past your sexual desires, then that leads you into this deeper, higher, more profound love.
And you can kind of forget about your body.
It doesn't really matter what you do, what sex is, how you do sex or whatever.
And I think that the Christian genius is to take that, because of course, Plato was a tremendous influence on people like Augustine and the Christians.
The Christians took that profound insight that your sexual drive and your romantic love is one step up the ladder toward eternal love.
And it says, but you can't leave your body behind because you're in your body.
This is the incarnation, right?
You are, you transcend your physical desires to understand the deeper and the higher love.
But then it matters very much what you do with your body.
This is why we care about sexual ethics is because then in your body, you have to embody all of that stuff that you've learned from the transcendent love.
So you don't leave your body behind.
You sort of take from the wisdom of God and live it out in this physical jar of clay, we call it.
And they knew this.
I mean, they knew that they were in dialogue with the Greeks.
It wasn't like an accident.
They didn't bump into each other.
They knew that these were two cultures coming together.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And this is just, you know, the Christians.
So Augustine, for example, right, basically just converts almost through Plato.
He almost sort of learns, you know, to reach God and to come to Christianity by reading certain books of Plato, he says at a certain point.
And this is, you know, tremendously important because there have been some, like Tertullian is a good example of somebody who says, what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?
Sort of why does it matter, you know, that we should listen to these kind of stupid old Greeks who didn't have the Bible.
But many of the other Christians throughout history, Augustine and Aquinas, have known that the Greeks have wisdom that they are basically fulfilling, that Christ fulfills the wisdom of even the Gentiles.
You know, I noticed that you in your latest in the symposium one, I think it was, you quoted me describing your show as we're reading Homer and screw you, because one of the things about the young heretics is that you don't really engage with leftist idiocy at all.
You just basically deal with the works.
That's a revolutionary act, isn't it?
Well, right.
I mean, people have accused me of just engaging in the culture wars kind of sneakily by another route.
And that's kind of true.
You know, like, I think that the people that we are fighting with, the identity politicians, the people tearing down statues, the people telling us we shouldn't read Shakespeare because he's racist, those people have no new ideas, no good ideas.
And so when we get caught in this trap that we have to engage with and we have to take account of their ideas, you know, even so that we can refute them.
But that leads us down this rabbit hole of just trying to argue with idiots who are not arguing in good faith, right?
They're not arguing to sort of learn from us and we learn from them.
We sort of have a discussion.
They are arguing to tear our civilization apart.
That is why they are doing what they are doing.
This is why they say everything they say.
Even if they point out something true, they're saying it so that you'll get distracted and they can punch you in the jaw.
That's what we're dealing with.
So the point of young heretics is kind of, look, I mean, we have to fight that fight.
We have to figure out a way to win that fight, but we also have to not let it be our whole world because these fights are going to be over one day and our lives, our lives on this earth are going to be over.
They will be as the life of a gnat compared to our infinite lives in heaven and in the world to come.
So we better be talking also about the stuff that is going to endure.
Destructive Heretics00:01:56
Spencer Clavin, I don't know how you spell that, but he is the assistant editor of the Claremont Review of Books.
He is the host of the young heretics at youngheretics.com.
He's the financial support of his elderly parents.
He doesn't know that yet, but he actually is.
Spence, it's great to see you.
Come by and have a drink, and I will talk to you soon.
Awesome.
All right.
We lost camera there for a minute, but at least you could hear what he was saying.
I got to stop there.
It is the Clavenless weekend.
The Clavenless weekend is upon you.
I don't know how to comfort you in your distress.
It's going to be dreadful.
It's going to be dreadful.
But survivors, those few of you who make it through, can gather here on Monday.
I'll be here.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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