Ep. 922 – Democrats vs God dissects Biden’s cognitive decline and Supreme Court’s Montana ruling, exposing liberal hypocrisy over religious funding while mocking their "church-state separation" lies. It slams transgender activism as anti-Christian, contrasts media bias against Trump, and debunks Russian bounty claims as partisan propaganda. Seattle’s CHOP chaos and the McCloskeys’ self-defense clash highlight leftist violence normalization, tied to their rejection of Judeo-Christian morality. Ben Shapiro’s How to Destroy America frames progressives as "disintegrationists," while Klavan blames Christianity’s cultural collapse on churches trading truth for politics—urging reform through small, principled groups over hollow institutions. The episode ends with a call to reclaim Western history and freedom as the foundation of virtue, rejecting leftist indoctrination. [Automatically generated summary]
The following may contain satire that will offend absolutely everyone.
I want to apologize in advance for the fact that I don't care.
Joe Biden has given his first press conference since Hector was a pup.
The former sentient human being stood bravely before a mob of aggressive reporters who hammered him with such probing questions as, do you like puppies?
How great a vice president were you?
Isn't Donald Trump just so evil?
And do you like puppies more than kittens?
Or is it impossible to say since they're both so very cute and cuddly?
Biden said the press conference was the best time he'd had since a bevy of prostitutes had competed to earn their pay by servicing him sexually.
And in fact, the experience was remarkably similar, though he hoped the cold sores wouldn't be as hard to get rid of.
Biden unleashed a furious attack on President Trump, saying the president had shown himself to be a white supremacist by objecting to mostly peaceful violence and the ensuing fires.
Biden said it was important to destroy statues, especially the ones with beards and southern accents, because they were the most offensive.
Biden also criticized Trump's handling of the pandemic, saying, quote, Trump went ahead against my advice and banned travelers coming in from China.
But what he should have done was ban those little black germ balls with the red feelers coming out of them.
They're what's spreading the virus, not Chinese people.
You don't see Chinese people with red feelers coming out of them, although their eyes are kind of funny looking, unquote.
When asked about the debates, Biden said he was proud of his performance and had always known he would be able to beat Donald Trump.
When told the debates hadn't taken place yet, Biden turned pale and asked for a glass of water.
Toward the end of the press conference, one reporter asked Biden about his cognitive abilities.
Biden said, there is nothing wrong with my abilities, unless you mean my cognitive abilities.
Those are completely shot.
In fact, I find this subject very upsetting, so it's lucky I've forgotten what we were talking about.
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Separation of Church and State00:03:20
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There was another important Supreme Court decision yesterday in which John Roberts was the swing vote.
This one refuses to allow the state of Montana to provide a tax credit scholarship program for private schools while excluding religious private schools.
That's called a Blaine exclusion, and they were originally created to stop the spread of Catholicism.
Roberts wrote in his decision, quote, a state need not subsidize private education, but once a state decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they're religious.
Now, in dissent, all the liberal justices oppose this.
And in dissent, Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayer brought out the big leftist lie.
She says the decision weakens this country's long-standing commitment to a separation of church and state.
And the leftist press, of course, echoed this.
Oh, church and state, the separation of church and state.
This is a big leftist lie.
This country has no commitment to a separation of church and state, neither written nor implied.
The Constitution's Establishment Clause, which forbids the formation of a state religion, represents a commitment to ensuring that the government does not favor one religion over another, which is a very different thing.
The founders did not mean for prayer to be banished from public meetings or from schools.
We know this because on their watch, there was prayer in public meetings and in schools, and there was public funding of religious schools too, as Roberts points out in his decision.
So why is the left so hostile toward religion?
Why are they so desperate to tamp religion down?
Well, it's because the founders did not want government to support one religion over another, but they did recognize God and not just any God.
They recognized a God with a very specific nature.
The founder's God was a God who endowed individuals with rights, which it is the purpose of government to secure and which government can't transgress.
The founder's God is inherently at odds with government's natural tendency to grow.
Divine providence, the divine providence mentioned in the declaration, will not condone and will not protect actions against the rights God gave, which include the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
As George Washington said, the propitious smiles of heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which heaven itself has ordained.
The founder's God outranks the government.
That's why the left hates him so much.
The founders weren't trying to protect the government from God.
They were trying to protect our worship of God from the government.
That's the truth, as opposed to the left's lie.
Protecting Our Worship00:04:55
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Let me just go back to this for a minute.
This God that the founders believed in, I mean, this is really important because I'll tell you why it's important in a second.
It doesn't matter whether this founder or that founder was a Christian or a deist or even an unbeliever.
They were shaped by hundreds of years, by centuries of Christian thought.
They were all shaped by centuries of Christian thought.
The deists, the people who didn't believe, the humanists, they were all shaped by Christian thought and Christian ideas.
And the reason this matters is because God in the Christian theology and Judeo-Christian theology was made, man was made in God's image.
And that means something.
That means our internal sense of things, our conscience, our sense of truth and beauty are not disconnected from God's creation, right?
The things that we see and the things that we react to not only can be connected to reality, they have to be connected to reality.
It's an entire concept of what is going on inside you.
Your conscience is responsible to reason.
Your reason is responsible to reality.
Reality makes sense.
Your conscience has to make sense.
But your sense of things being right and wrong is your first guide.
And that's how reason reacts.
Reason is speaking to your conscience.
And the reason this matters, one of the many reasons this matters, is because it means that your internal life, once it's governed by reason and reality, once your internal life is governed by reason and reality, is sacred.
It is you, your version of the image of God, right?
And this is what, when Christianity started to lose its grip on common culture, which was about in the late 18th, early 19th century, this is why the philosophers started to say, well, how are we going to preserve what Christianity has given us, this sense of humankind?
And this is when they started to talk about freedom, about the fact that my inner life can't interfere with your inner life.
My outer life can't interfere with your inner life.
You have a right to say what you want to say.
You have a right to worship God in the manner that you please.
You have a right to do the things that you think are conducive to your happiness without stepping on any of mine.
And if you pay attention to what's happening with the left, you will see that they're not only in opposition to Christianity, they're the opposite of Christianity.
Judgment without forgiveness, cries for the rights of some over others, and cries for benefits of some at the forced expense of others.
They hate God because they're not just trying to get rid of him.
They're in actual opposition to the things, the ideas that God sent to our founders and that they put in our Constitution.
It is not an unreligious document.
The founding documents, especially the Declaration, are not unreligious, and our ideas are not founded in anything except Judeo-Christian and classical thought.
So the point about reality, this is the thing.
We know, I mean, this is my problem with transgender activism, all right?
I'm just using it as an illustration.
My problem is not that there are people who feel like the opposite sex and they shouldn't be bullied.
We know that because Jesus tells us to take care of the people who are outcasts, to take care of the people on the margin.
He tells us to love them and be kind to them.
We know that.
But we also know that the inner life as depicted in Christian and Jewish thought is an inner life responsible to reality.
An inner life responsible to God in conversation with reality.
Wordsworth, the poet, called us co-creators.
We're co-creating with God out of the reality that he made.
And that's why with transgenderism, we can't say that a transgender woman is a woman, which is to say that a man who believes himself to be a woman and a woman who believes herself to be a woman are the same thing.
That makes no sense.
We're responsible to reality.
So let's take a look on the left's complete detachment from reality.
Left's Detachment From Reality00:14:56
Joe Biden gave a press conference yesterday.
I have to talk about this, but I want to talk about the thing I want to talk about with Joe Biden first is how the press treated Joe Biden, because we've been treated to months of these press conferences with Donald Trump during the pandemic where they were just gotcha questions.
Everything was just a gotcha question.
So first of all, Biden has a list of who to call.
They tell him who to call, where the friendly questions are going to be.
And the first thing he does is he finds Mike Mamoli from NBC.
Here's this clip of Biden finding him on his list and then Mike Mamoli of NBC responding with as friendly a question as you can imagine.
I was told by NBC, Mike.
It's my great relief.
He doesn't have to follow me every day around the country.
Well, the last time, Mr. Vice President, a lot of us saw you on the campaign trail.
You were still locked in a very difficult nomination battle.
The polls, though, today show you with a sizable national lead, a lead in a lot of the states that are critical in the Electoral College.
I wonder where do you think the race stands at this moment?
What keeps you up at night as you look ahead?
And can you maintain this advantage without campaigning in a traditional way, especially this fall when voters begin to really tune in?
How far ahead are you?
How far ahead are you?
And what are you worried about in winning?
How much will you win by?
So let me just compare this for a minute to a press conference with Kaylee McInenney, the species girl who rips men's spines out, as she was talked to by Ryan Lisa.
This is Cut 14.
There's a national conversation going on right now about the proper place of symbols of the Confederacy, statues, memorials, names.
And the president has repeatedly inserted himself into this debate.
And I think a lot of people are trying to understand what his view of memorializing the Confederacy is and the proper place for the Confederate flag.
So a couple questions.
One, does he believe, does President Trump believe that it was a good thing that the South lost the Civil War?
And then two, is he interested in following NASCAR's example and banning the Confederate flag at his own events?
Well, your first question is absolutely absurd.
He's proud of the United States of America.
So Biden is just winning, running away with the election.
Donald Trump is sitting in the White House.
Donald Trump, basically a 1990s Democrat from Queens, is sitting in the White House waving a Confederate flag and wearing one of those gray caps, Rufus T. Beaufort, saying, the South will rise again.
It's like, we're all just completely, it's all a show.
We are basically watching the left-wing election show.
So in keeping with this, I haven't covered the story because I believe it's a total nonsense.
I don't believe it's a nonsense.
There was this question.
You know, there used to be a triple-play combination.
They wrote a song about it.
And the Chicago Cubs, I think it was, Tinkers to Evers to Chance.
It was a famous triple play, a double play combination.
I'm sorry, a famous double play combination.
Tinkers to Evers to Chance.
So now we have CIA to the New York Times to the Democrats, right?
The CIA leaks stuff to the New York Times.
The New York Times prints it as true.
And then the Democrats pick this up as a talking point.
And we have this thing about the Russians paying a bounty in Afghanistan for the Taliban to kill American soldiers.
I have no doubt this is true.
The Iranians do it.
The Pakistani jihadists do it.
They're all after Americans.
And we know the Russians do this stuff.
And so all of a sudden, this becomes, why didn't Trump do anything about it?
which is absurd.
So this is passed from the...
And remember, it's not like the press has ever used intelligence to go after Donald Trump.
I mean, this is the same, you know, Trump is saying it's all a hoax.
I'm sure it's not a hoax that they were paying bounty to the Russians to kill us.
I mean, that's probably not a hoax.
But this idea that he was supposed to react, the NSA says it's not true.
The CIA says it is true.
We did change some of our practices overseas.
I'm sure Trump knew about That.
But remember, this is the New York Times, the same people who brought us the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq from intelligence leaks and then told us it wasn't true and therefore we should abandon the war effort and turned against George W. Bush.
They brought us the Russia hoax.
Now they're bringing us this stupid thing.
So the people in intelligence who want to get rid of Donald Trump and we know they're there are leaking this information, which is really bad news, to the New York Times, which is also bad news, which then takes it to Biden.
And here's Biden's response.
It appears as though from what I have, and I don't have access to classified information anymore, but if what I have heard over the last week and the recent reporting that it was in the PDB, the Presidential Daily Brief, the Presidential Daily Brief is something I read every single day as vice president.
The president read it every day.
I was briefed every morning before I got to the White House and then again.
So the idea that somehow he didn't know or isn't being briefed, it is a dereliction of duty if that's the case.
So first of all, you know, it was probably, it probably was in his briefing somewhere in his briefing, which he doesn't read.
That's the word anyway, that he doesn't read it.
But the thing about this is, it's like the intelligence is not confirmed.
The NSA says it didn't happen.
The CIA said it did.
Apparently, they caught somebody overseas.
They caught somebody in Afghanistan who said this was happening.
And what exactly does Joe Biden think he's going to do with Russia?
See, the idea is that, again, it's this Boris Baden.
When Trump is not waving the Confederate flag and saying the South will rise again, he suddenly Boris Baden off, the Russian spy.
I mean, this is utterly, utterly absurd.
Remember, it was Barack Obama who actually, you know, was where the administration Joe Biden was in.
It was Barack Obama who sent Hillary Clinton to set the reset button with Russia.
It was Barack Obama who told Mitt Romney that he was dreaming if he thought the Russians were still our enemies.
This was the administration that did jack diddly when the Russians invaded Ukraine.
They wouldn't send the missiles to the Ukraine that Trump has sent.
Here, once again, is Kayleigh McEneny essentially responding to this, you know, another one of these absurd stories.
The president has always taken tough, unadulterated action against Russia.
We saw that there's no diplomatic presence on the west coast of our country of Russia because the president closed the consulates, tried to halt Nord Stream, still trying to do that, impose visa sanctions and many other actions.
So make no mistake, this president is prepared to act and will always act in protecting our American troops.
We saw in Syria and the strikes in 2018 that dozens of Russian mercenaries were killed.
He will always act to protect American troops.
That is indeed his track record.
And that is not only true, I mean, first of all, he's the one, again, who sent the missiles to Ukraine, but also he has helped our energy sector become energy independent.
He's let the fracking go.
Remember, all the Democrats.
And Joe Biden has said Joe Biden on his energy council, on his people counseling him on energy, are people like Bernie Sanders and AOC who say they don't want any fossil fuels at all.
So we're all going to be living in caves, basically.
Russia is a petro-tyranny.
It is a petro-tyranny.
It is living off oil money.
The last thing Vladimir Putin wants is for us to be energy independent, which we've become, and have enough energy to start to export it.
That is what Donald Trump has done.
That is the one thing that nobody can talk about.
What does Putin want?
What does Putin want?
Do you think Putin wants Trump in power?
Putin, when Putin was messing with the 2016 election, he couldn't have any more idea that Trump could possibly win than anybody else did.
Remember, the New York Times gave him a 2% versus 98% chance against Hillary Clinton.
So Putin wasn't trying to put Trump in office.
He just wants to sow division in this country.
Who has done that?
Who has done what Putin wants?
Who has sown the division that Putin wants?
Do you think Putin sits and looks at the riots that go under the false name of Black Lives Matter?
Do you think Putin looks at that and thinks, oh, that's too bad.
I want to stop that?
No, that's what he loves.
Do you think he hated the Russia hoax, the Russian collusion hoax?
That's what he was trying to accomplish.
He was trying to accomplish what the Democrats did.
They can say that Trump makes nice talk to Putin.
The Democrats are Putin.
The New York Times is Putin.
They have done everything, every single thing he wants them to do.
So let's go back finally.
We have to keep talking about, I want to keep talking about reality.
Speaking of reality, right?
The Seattle police, as we speak, are converging on the city, the occupied protest zone, the former Chaz, now CHOP, because Chaz got chopped because Chaz was not doing too well and they wanted to make sure they were still getting their welfare checks.
So they got chopped in there.
Now remember, remember Mayor Jenny Durkin?
Like, I don't even know.
Seriously, I do not know how much of liberalism is just stupidity and ignorance.
I really don't.
I really don't know.
You know, these guys go to good schools.
They're, you know, the liberals who actually fund this stuff are all kind of upper class elites.
You know, they look smart.
They talk well, but I just think they're stupid and ignorant.
I cannot believe Jenny Durkin, remember, is the one who said, oh, you know, this Chaz, this CHOP, it's going to be a summer of love.
It's going to be a farmer's market.
It's just going to be a block party.
It's going to be the greatest thing ever.
Then they turned up at her house.
They turned up at her house and they started vandalizing and putting graffiti on her house.
And she said, she issued a statement saying, these people are being irresponsible about my safety.
They're being irresponsible about my safety.
Didn't care about the black guys who were being murdered in the Chaz and the CHOP and the Chop and the Chaz.
She didn't care anything about that.
But when they started to show up at her home.
So who in Seattle, I mean, I really do wonder about this, who in Seattle looks at this and says, Jenny Durkin, boy, I'm voting for, I want to make sure she's re-elected, you know, because this homeless guy who just crapped on my sidewalk in front of my house, I got to make sure that he is still there using my lawn as a toilet.
You know, what is it?
I mean, in San Francisco, people are literally, not figuratively, they are literally dying of overdoses on the street.
Homeless people are dying.
Who goes out and votes for these guys again?
Is it that the Republicans don't show up at all?
Is it that the Republicans have given up so they don't even run a viable candidate?
Are there no liberal Republicans who can go and say, yes, yes, I don't care, you know, that you're gay or how you dress or whatever, but, but the city has to be run with some kind of responsibility.
Is there no one to say that in Seattle?
Is there no one to run against this clown, Jenny Durkin?
It's just amazing to me.
And here is this poor police chief who, you know, we have to say she was chased out of there.
The mayor shut her down.
She was told to abandon that position and give it over to the protesters.
Here she is talking about what's going on, what was going on.
This is a quote that comes before they actually gave the order to clean the place out, but this is what she said.
It's very unfortunate that we have yet another murder in this area identified as the top.
Two African-American men dead at a place where they claim to be working for Black Lives Matter, but they're gone.
They're dead now.
And we've had multiple other incidents.
Assaults, rape, robbery, and shootings.
And so, you know, this is something that's going to need to change.
We're asking that people remove themselves from this area for the safety of the people.
If they care about people, they're going to have to try to help us to make it safe.
So the council woman, Kashama Sawant, is the BLM council member.
She's the one who helped the march on the mayor's house.
Okay, that's how far left she is.
She said the killings in the chop chaz, the chazz chop, the killings in the chazz chop, this is her quote.
This is a direct quote.
It highlights capitalism's brutality and endemic violence.
In the chazz chop, in the choppy chaz, in the chazzy chop, the killings highlights capitalism's brutality and endemic violence.
Is there nobody on the left, is there no Democrat who hears that and goes, wait a minute?
Is there nobody?
That doesn't make any sense.
Is there nobody there who says, oh, oh, oh, reality has a certain way that it works.
And if you remove the police, people get killed.
They're removing a billion dollars from the police budget in New York while the bullets are flying.
Here in L.A., they're telling us that if there's a nonviolent call, they're going to send a social worker to our house to get shot.
You know, that's what they're going to do for us.
I mean, this is really a disaster.
This is a disaster for these cities.
They get worse and worse and worse.
The common life in these cities gets worse and worse and worse.
LA is one big homeless camp.
It gets worse and worse and worse.
Does nobody think, huh, maybe we should change policies.
Maybe this isn't fair.
And let me just show you.
I mean, if you want to see the detachment from reality, I'm sure you saw on Twitter or whatever social media this viral video of this St. Louis couple who came out, the Black Lives Matter mob, this wicked mob broke through their fence, came onto their property, started to shout things at them, and they came out.
They were the McCarthys.
And one of them came out with a, the husband came out with a rifle, I think an automatic rifle, and the wife came out with a pistol.
Liberals, by the way, supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement, because that's how stupid the left is.
But now Chris Cuomo brings them on and scolds them for defending their property with guns, a mob, a mob.
But remember, we like, Chris Cuomo likes the mob.
Chris Cuomo likes the mob.
He told us that there's nothing to say, this is how change comes.
There's nothing to say that these protests should be nonviolent.
That's ridiculous.
Just because it says it in the Constitution, there's nothing to say that.
So let's play this first quote, this first clip of Chris Cuomo bringing this guy McCarthy on and basically accusing him of standing in the way of racial progress.
How do you feel about becoming the face of political resistance to the Black Lives Matter movement?
First of all, that's a completely ridiculous statement.
I'm not the face of anything opposing the Black Lives Matter movement.
Next Day's Survival00:05:54
I was a person scared for my life who was protecting my wife, my home, my hearth, my livelihood.
I was a victim of a mob that came through the gate.
I didn't care what color they were.
I didn't care what their motivation was.
I was frightened.
I was assaulted.
And I was in imminent fear that they would run me over, kill me, burn my house.
And you have to have this in the context of St. Louis, where on June the 2nd of this year, I watched the city burn.
I watched the 7-Eleven get smashed in, polluted, and burned for 40 minutes on live television with nobody showing up to do anything.
I'm smart!
I like everybody's sense!
Chris Cuomo, I mean, I really do wonder about this.
I'm not kidding.
I'm not kidding about this.
I mean, it makes me laugh, but I'm not kidding about it.
I really wonder how much of leftism is stupidity.
Because when you detach from reality, when you're so detached from reality.
I mean, listen to this next question.
Play the next Chris Cuomo cut.
Very revealing.
I understand what you say your rationale was.
To be clear, did anything happen to you or your property?
Did anything happen to?
Yeah, my life has been ruined.
I don't know.
No, we'll get to that, Mr. McCloskey.
I don't mean to cut you off, but I'm saying that night, did anything happen to you, your family, or your property?
Yeah, it's called social intimidation.
It's called terrorism.
Chris, watch the definition of terrorism, to use violence and intimidation to frighten the public.
That's what was happening that night.
That's what happened to me, and that's the damage I suffered.
You know, this guy made Cuomo look really bad, but that's not too hard to do.
But the question that Cuomo asked is, as far as I'm concerned, the question that he asked is really, really revealing because what he was saying to him is, well, you weren't hurt, were you?
So what right did you have to come out on your property with a gun to defend your property and possibly your life with a gun if you don't have the evidence of you being dead?
If you can't present the evidence of you being dead, how can you say it was self-defense?
That's essentially what he's saying.
It is.
Essentially what he's saying is, well, you weren't hurt, were you?
Okay, I pointed a gun at you, but then you shot me.
You know, you shot me.
I hadn't fired first.
If I had shot you and killed you, then you could have shot me.
You know, that's the reasoning that's going on in the guy's head.
I mean, it is classic idiocy, but it's also just this classic detachment from reality.
These guys do believe this guy, you know, just like Jenny, just like Mayor Jenny in Seattle, they think the mob is going to stop with them.
They're like the college professors who showed up to welcome the Nazis into Austria after the Anschloss.
They were like the guys you saw them waving at the Nazi trucks coming in.
The next day, they were gone.
The next day, they didn't exist anymore.
These guys think that the alligator will eat them last, but they think the alligator will never eat them.
That's what they really think.
And Chris Cuomo and Mayor Jenny are fools.
You know, I don't know what else can we possibly call them.
You know, Washington, George Washington was right that heaven will not favor those who disregard the eternal rules of order and right, which heaven itself has ordained.
But Rudyard Kipling was also right in that reality just has gods.
You know, the gods of the copybook heading will come back and get you.
And if you appease violence, if you allow violence, that violence will swallow you and the state that makes you free.
It will do all these things.
And the left, it's really by losing their religion, have lost touch with morality and they've lost touch with reality.
They really have.
And when you see this level of stupidity, when you see their faces change, when reality bites them, you know they are completely out of the reality ballpark.
It is an amazing thing to watch.
All right, we've got to stop, get ready for the mailbag, gather your problems around you, say goodbye to them, pat them on the head, tell them it's not going to be so bad when they have to go off and live somewhere else.
But before you do that, I want you to remember that Ben Shapiro, who you may remember from one of these other podcasts, has a new book coming out called How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
And I know many of you were saying, I knew he was planning to do that, but actually, no, it's a warning.
It's not a guidebook.
And you can pre-order your copy at dailywire.com slash Ben, or you can find it at Amazon or Barnes and Noble, wherever books are sold.
The book covers two fundamentally different visions for America that we're facing right now.
One vision finds unity and shared philosophy, culture, and history.
The other disintegrates our country in the name of fundamental change.
Ben calls them the disintegrationists.
These are the people who use weapons like cancel culture and forced apologies to advance their agenda.
And have you noticed that if you apologize, it's worse than if you don't apologize.
The people who don't apologize survive.
The people who apologize are just devoured.
That's because they don't care.
They don't care.
They're just trying to silence you.
Shapiro covers all of this ground and more in his book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
Again, pre-order your copy at dailywire.com slash Ben, Barnes ⁇ Noble, or Amazon to get the full picture of this strange, strange moment in history.
stay tuned for the mailbag.
Mailbag.
Where's my scream?
Yeah, that's what I was looking for.
All right.
You know, I always say we ask you if you want, you can send in a video mailbag question.
And I always say that we're not going to privilege those questions, to use the left's terminology.
But this one was particularly good and particularly in keeping with the themes of what we're talking about.
So let's go to Cut 16, Jeff's question.
Greetings, Lord Clavin, Supreme Chancellor of the universe, God's Viceroy to the multiverse Clavin.
Churches And Compromise00:14:42
I have a question today for you regarding churches.
I think you would find it a fair characterization to say that the churches haven't really reached my generation, being millennials and even beyond.
And the question that I have is around whether they have any culpability in that, whether the churches are responsible in some way for how they are reaching the generation that they're supposed to serve.
I have been testing a hypothesis and I have listened to messages from something like 50 churches over the past couple months.
And I found a disturbing trend where a lot of the really deep meaning and a lot of the beauty of scripture that you hear in things like the Bible Project is simply not present in churches.
Instead, you get a lot of Christianese and a lot of like hiding behind big Christian words that don't really mean anything to the current generation.
So my question is, do you think that churches are somehow responsible for how little impact Christianity seems to be having on culture today, even though Christianity has left an indelible mark on the culture of the West in and of itself?
So how do we combat that?
Well, I absolutely do think that the churches are to blame for this.
I think that Christianity has become empty of content and sclerotic.
And I think the reason for that is that because it had it good here for a long time, it was kind of the accepted state majority religion, and it was lulled into a sense of security in its relationship with the state and with the majority culture.
And I think that that has really emptied it of anything except the need to be loved.
So that's why you see basically churches simply adopting leftist politics as their theology.
Or, or, which is just as bad, opposing leftist politics with its theology.
The left, the church should always be against all flags because it should always be in favor of your relationship with God, which is a highly individual thing, even though there are certain things that are going to be non-negotiable.
You know, there's a great scene in the Gospel where somebody comes to Jesus and says, what must I do to inherit eternal life?
And it's really an interesting, interesting moment in the Gospels because Jesus could say, he could say, well, here's the book of Leviticus, just do all this stuff.
Or he could say, well, one day there's going to be something called the Catholic Church, so just do this stuff.
He could say, don't be gay.
He could say, you know, whatever it is the church thinks they should be shouting about.
He doesn't say any of those things.
He gives a very basic list of 10 commandments, editing out the religious commandments.
He edits out, you shall have no other gods before me.
He edits out don't make any graven images.
He just says, and he edits out the Sabbath.
He just says, don't steal, don't murder, don't commit adultery, you know, keep your word, don't defraud, a few others.
And in one of the versions, there are several versions of this in the Gospels.
One of them, he says, love your neighbor as yourself.
In other words, there is a moral order.
There is a moral order.
Life is sacred.
Property is to be respected.
Your word must be good.
This is very big with Jesus.
You don't commit adultery because you said you wouldn't.
I mean, that's why.
It's not because, oh, this dingus shouldn't go into that dongus.
You know, it's because you gave your word.
And Jesus says, do not defraud in one of the versions of this story.
There is a moral order.
That is true.
That is non-negotiable.
C.S. Lewis called it the Tao.
But outside of that, after the guy says, well, I do all those things, he says, then give away all your money and follow me.
And Jesus doesn't say that because he thinks the poor are going to go away.
He's going to help the poor.
He says, the poor you'll have always with you.
He never says the world is going to be a better place.
He never says, if you follow me, the world will be a better place.
He says the world is going to suck and the world is going to oppose you.
It's going to persecute you in my name.
In other words, if you do what's right, if you do the things I tell you to do, the world will persecute you.
Now, for a little period of time, that seemed not to be true in America, and the church lost its way.
The church began to think that somehow America and God were the same thing, gods and guns and gays and all this.
It's not true.
You should be against all flags if you're a Christian.
There should be things that come out of your mouth that offend everybody because they're simply the truth of God.
I mean, Jesus was crucified by everybody, the crowd, the religious people, the government, all of them.
They were all against him, and it would be again if they came back today.
our churches have become empty of content.
And those churches that aren't empty of content, because the Catholic Church does have a very solid history of philosophy, I don't agree with everything that they've philosophized, but they've become corrupt.
You know, I talk to my Catholic friends about this all the time.
They do not understand the depth of damage the sexual scandal has done and the unwillingness to clean it out and the weird stepping down of Pope Benedict XVI.
They do not understand how much damage this has done to the Christian church in general, because I still think that the Catholic Church is kind of the mother of all churches.
So yeah, the churches are in a bad way.
They were suckered in to thinking that the government and they could get along and be friends and they can't.
As I said at the beginning, there's open animosity for government against the church.
They'll go along with you until you won't let the king get divorced.
They'll go along with you until you stand up for the marriage of a man and woman as being sacred, whereas other forms of so-called marriage are not marriage at all.
They will go against you whenever you get in the way of their having more power.
If the power comes from the left, it comes from the left.
If it comes from the right, the right will oppose the churches.
Believe me.
So yes, the churches are empty.
And what I really have coming to believe, and I say this a little bit, I'm out a little bit ahead of myself on this because I haven't really formulated this, but I'm coming to believe that the churches have to reform in small groups, that we have to start gathering together and discussing the gospels among ourselves as they did at the beginning, celebrating Mass among ourselves as we did at the beginning, and staying away from any church that basically thinks that social justice is the word of God or thinks that some kind of conservative,
you know, pro-American agenda is the word of God.
Neither of those things is the word of God.
And I think we have to start gathering in small groups.
And when we do, and if that becomes a powerful movement, believe me, they will come after us from both sides.
All right, a really good question.
So I wanted to start with that.
From Patrick, Dear Lord Clavin, supreme destroyer of all ease and wisest of bald sages.
Not just of bald sages.
You spoke this week a lot about the need for those on the right to offer an alternative to the left's false narrative about this country.
A good place to start would be the education system.
The left obviously owns the education system with their stuff like the 1619 project.
What would a more conservative school curriculum look like, especially when it comes to literature and history?
You know, a really good question, too.
And what I feel is that we should concentrate on freedom.
We should teach the history of freedom.
Where did freedom come from?
What are the alternatives to freedom?
Why did people try to stop freedom?
Why did the Persians invade the Greeks?
How did the Greeks think of this?
I actually, I mean, I've studied Greek history a lot.
I don't really know why the Greeks suddenly thought, like, hey, democracy, good idea.
Maybe it was just because democracy is a Greek word.
Ha ha ha ha.
But you know, where did it come from?
How did it get passed on?
How did the philosophy of the Jews through Jesus Christ, how did that feed into it?
Follow the philosophy of free, follow the history of freedom.
The history of freedom is only Western history.
This is the only place where freedom became the thing, right?
And I think that that should be our curriculum and that should be what we teach because freedom is the first good.
I mean, obviously, courage is the first virtue because you can't have freedom without courage.
But freedom is the first good because you can't choose God unless you're free to choose him or not to choose him.
You can't love unless you're free.
You can't have charity unless you're free to give charity or not to give it.
Things have to be chosen to be what they are.
If they take your money and taxes and give it to the poor, not only does that destroy the poor, it takes away your right to commit an act of charity.
So freedom is the first good, which is why I believe in my theology, that's why God permits evil.
He permits evil because he permits freedom, because freedom is necessary for all the other virtues.
So that's what I would teach.
And of course, in literature, I would just teach those great books which have formed these ideas, which is Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, all the great writers that we know, the Greek tragedians, the European writers.
And I would concentrate first on Western history.
I mean, you should always learn about your home first.
So let's see.
We got a bunch of other stuff.
You know, I got a couple of questions like this one.
This is a very, very long letter, and I'm just, I can't read the whole thing.
But he says, first off, came for Ben State for You, which is why I'm asking you this question.
He says, recently the Army announced they are eliminating photos for promotions in order to eliminate unconscious bias.
And basically, he says, I went to a military college after 9-11, have served on active duty in the United States Reserves for over 12 years, and now I'm at the breaking point of resigning my commission as an officer in the United States Army because he's sick of this political correctness.
And this unconscious bias, he's right about everything he says.
I can't read the whole thing, but he's right about everything he says.
This unconscious bias thing is garbage.
The idea that we need diversity in and of itself is garbage.
Everything about the diversity movement, garbage.
I mean, obviously, I am, as he himself states, he is anti-racist.
We should treat everybody equally.
But we shouldn't be tasked with appointing people who are not competent to do the job simply because they're the right color or the right gender.
And the reason I bring this up is because I got a bunch of letters this week from people who are also in business, who are sick of having to take bias courses, who are sick of having to take sexual, you know, sexual care courses and all this stuff, and are fearful, they're fearful that they will lose their jobs and not be able to support their families if they stand up and speak for what they believe.
And here's a man, you know, thank you for your service.
Thank you for serving in the United States Army, now thinking of resigning his commission.
So here's what I have to say about this just in general.
First of all, I'm not the person, no person can tell you when your integrity has been violated.
No person can tell you what the draw the line is that you won't cross.
That's something you have to think out, and you really have to think it out before the crisis comes.
You can't make the decision all along the way because you'll always make the decision in favor of your interest and you won't know, hey, this is a line I drew in the sand.
I'm not crossing this line.
I mean, this is why I sometimes think, what would I sacrifice my job for?
Where am I going to stand on not having something I love published get published?
When am I going to say, you know, and I've done it.
I've done the work.
I've said to people, no, I will not take that money because you want something of me.
So you should make those decisions for yourself.
But you should also know that there's a lot of stupidity in the world.
Businesses don't have these classes because they believe in Black Lives Matter, and they don't have these classes because they believe in treating women well.
They have these classes because they're afraid of being sued.
So it's a thing they do for their lawyers.
It's absolute nonsense.
The people who do it are absolute idiots most of the time.
Sometimes a lawyer will just come in and guide you on what the law is, and that's fine.
But most of the time, these people who teach diversity thinking and unconscious races, they're scam artists.
They're the same as people who come on and tell you that they will heal your television and tell you they'll heal your disease if you send them 20 bucks.
It's a scam.
It's a con.
It's an insult to ordinary people.
It shouldn't be happening.
The reason it happens is because they're afraid of being sued and because people have been appointed in the Army bureaucracy who should not be there and are willing to turn.
Our Army and our military is so powerful, so competent, so good at what they do that they think they can afford to dabble in this garbage.
Now, the thing about the military is that it is a massive, massive bureaucracy.
I have never met, I have never met a military person who did not think the military was the stupidest organization on earth, except for its fighting forces.
I'm talking about the bureaucracy.
I mean, the bureaucracy is stupid.
So the question becomes, in each case, in each individual case, how much stupid bureaucracy and virtue signaling can you stand before you feel you are personally compromised?
I mean, I feel that I should never let an untruth come out of my mouth simply to appease the crazy people.
You know, I should never pretend to be who I'm not.
I should never pretend that I believe something I don't believe.
But we all have to put up with a certain amount.
We all have to put up with a certain amount of stupidity.
I mean, I certainly put up with a lot of stupidity in Hollywood.
I lost jobs in Hollywood because I would not tow certain lines and I would not do and say certain things.
I really lost my Hollywood career because of that.
But along the way, there were times when people said things to me and I just, you know, I just rolled my eyes because it was just that stupid.
So you have to make that personal decision.
If you feel that you are doing good by serving your country in the United States Army, it would be a shame to walk away because of some stupid bureaucratic nonsense.
You can make your opinion known and see if they throw you out.
You can say what you have to say.
You can write what you have to write.
But this is something that should be purged from the Army.
It should be purged from business.
It should be purged from law.
It should really, it should be thrown out completely because people should not be afraid for their jobs if they don't sign on to the left.
And guess who I feel I hold responsible for this?
I hold responsible every Republican in Congress, every Republican in Congress who lets this happen, who sits there and just said, who is afraid to come out and talk about this.
They do nothing.
They do nothing.
They sit around.
You know, Tucker Carlson had a speech about this that's worth actually listening to where he said, you know, they give us porn, basically.
He didn't use these terms, but he said they give us, you know, right-wing porn like Benghazi hearings, but they don't deal with the things they have to deal with.
You're right to be offended.
You're right it's a con.
You're right it's stupid.
But you have to decide at what point does it actually compromise your integrity and at what point is it just the kind of stupid annoyance that we all have to deal with somewhere in life.
You can't get through life without being annoyed.
You know, hell as other people.
You can't get through life without being annoyed.
So that's something I can't say.
Oh, this is your line.
You have to decide when your integrity is compromised.
But work and the military give you something of value, not just pay.
They give you a chance to do something worthwhile.
So you want to do the worthwhile thing until they make it absolutely impossible.
And you're also willing, you also have to be willing to speak the truth when the truth comes down the pike.
That, to me, is non-negotiable.
Do Something Worthwhile00:01:11
I got to stop there, but I'll be back again tomorrow with the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm Andrew Klavan.
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The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
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