Andrew Clavin dissects the left’s "war on reality," from Hallie Berry’s performative apologies to Hollywood’s rejection of cross-gender casting and Hamilton’s racial exclusivity, linking it to progressive denial of crime spikes in Democrat-run cities like New York (400+ shootings in 2021) and Chicago (336 murders by July 2). He mocks the left’s hypocrisy—firing editors for dissent while demanding censorship of conservatives—and frames J.K. Rowling’s backlash as proof of their intolerance, contrasting it with 150 journalists’ rare but tepid pushback against "cancel culture." Clavin ties Ilhan Omar’s anti-capitalist rhetoric and BLM’s destruction of Minneapolis businesses to a broader rejection of Western values, warning that moral decay stems from scapegoating (e.g., Christianity’s anti-Semitism) rather than self-examination, urging listeners to preserve heritage over symbolic erasure. [Automatically generated summary]
Actress Hallie Berry has backed out of considering a role as a transgender male, which is a woman who thinks she's a man, or a man who thinks she's a woman, or a man who thinks he's a woman and really is a woman, but thinks he's a man, or some sort of crazy crap like that.
I can never get it straight.
In a gruveling apology, Miss Berry said she was very sorry to have ever considered pretending she was someone other than who she actually is, saying that was a terrible thing for an actress to do.
Miss Berry's statement said in part, quote, how could I ever have been so foolish to think that I could play a male when I'm virtually the model of feminine beauty and have such an incredible body with, let's face it, an amazing rack, which I actually exposed in the otherwise forgettable movie Swordfish, thereby changing many men's lives and haunting their dreams forever, unquote.
Actually, it's possible I wrote some of that statement and just pretended Hallie Berry wrote it.
Anyway, Miss Berry becomes the latest denizen of Hollywood to reject the idea that actors and actresses should ever descend to pretending to be anyone other than who they really are.
The Simpsons have already announced that after years of allowing white voice actors to use their white voices to voice characters who are not white, from now on their characters will only be voiced by strangely shaped, bright yellow people with absurdly immobile spiky hair.
Likewise, the female star of Stranger Things will be replaced by someone who can actually move objects with her mind, and the hip-hop play Hamilton will no longer allow America's white founding fathers to be portrayed by black actors, but will only have white actors who will only sing the hip-hop songs sung by the original founders.
And of course, from now on, Hollywood actors will only portray people who are stupid and shallow and make no sense whatsoever.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped hipsy-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, hurrah.
All right, we are back laughing our way through the fall of the Republic.
I hope you will go on and subscribe to the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel.
We're trying to get to 80,000, which I think we're right there if you would just sign on for crying out loud and leave a comment.
That is also helpful.
And if you say something particularly interesting, we will read it on the air.
Here's one from David Fraser.
He says, something particularly interesting.
David was the first of many people to get that in there.
So good for him.
Sometimes these days, our national conversation becomes so insane, we forget how insane it is.
How crazy is it that Democrats should be debating defunding the police when people are being slaughtered in Democrat cities at the highest rates in years?
In part, as reporter Heather McDonald, the great reporter Heather McDonald points out, the notion originates in a leftist academic culture that believes all disparities between blacks and whites must be due to racism.
So since there's a disparity in law enforcement, it can't be due to, say, criminality in black neighborhoods.
It must be the cops' fault.
But there's another idea underlying that one.
We often emphasize police heroism by talking about the danger police face, which they sometimes do.
But the real price police pay for their work is usually not injury, but alienation from mainstream society.
The police live daily with the reality of society's failures and the reality of society's hypocrisy.
We sit around and speak of high-minded ideals like freedom and justice, while they put another beautiful child in a body bag, knowing that Don Lemon and the New York Times and just about everybody else doesn't care about that child unless she makes some kind of political point.
The police confront the harshest reality and the left's war on the police is part of the war on reality that the left is waging in the name of securing power for themselves and their anti-realistic philosophy.
To enlist the mob of the dissatisfied, they deny the reality of high crime in black neighborhoods.
They deny the reality of gender.
They deny the reality of sin, the reality of God, the reality of individual inequality, the reality that Marxism is an oppressive failure, the reality that British people came up with the great ideas that move humanity forward, and we have to adopt those ideas if we want to move forward too, and so on, all kinds of reality that they don't like.
I'm not a facts over feelings guy.
I believe that facts and feelings are in a kind of dance of creation like men and women.
Sometimes they're at odds, but they're always inevitably drawn together to add to God's work on earth.
But a war on the facts, a war on reality, always, always leads to tyranny.
Because in order to win, it's not enough to lie.
You have to silence those who speak the truth.
That's what's happening now, a war on reality.
And a war in police is only one battle in that war.
We're going to be talking a lot about that today.
And we will have the mailbag, so all your problems will be solved.
So, Gabby, exactly.
That's what you'll sound like.
Gather your problems around and say goodbye to them, a fond farewell.
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So yesterday, I showed the thoroughly despicable Don Lemon pontificating in that thoroughly despicable, sanctimonious way of his that he uses as a replacement for human intelligence and saying that it's wrong to expect Black Lives Matter to believe Black Lives Matter.
It's only about the agenda of attacking the police.
He spoke the quiet part out loud.
He said, forget about those kids being put in battle.
I don't even care about that.
Yesterday, Don added that anyone who pays attention to the reality of what's happening in Democrat cities is part of a right-wing propaganda machine.
Let's play that cut.
You see the right-wing machine kick in, media machine kick in, when you see Trump's poll numbers go south.
They kick in with a no position on the Confederate flag.
Yeah, Democratic cities are in chaos right now.
Is this what you want from Joe Biden?
And they're going to take your country away and they're taking down the statues.
Crime is rising.
Crime is rising.
Oh my gosh, it's so bad.
and they got defunding police.
It's like, and the people who you saw there for the most part, not them specifically I'm talking about as a whole, fall for it.
They fall for it.
And that's why they do things like what they did.
They want to paint over signs and they think it's our country.
That's tweetled, not just Tweedledum, it's also a Tweedledumber, Chris Cuomo.
New York City surpassed 400 shootings in the first half of the year for the first time since 2016, with 528 by the end of last month.
The 205 shootings in June were the highest for that month since 1996, the police said.
Other cities have seen similar spikes, most notably Chicago, where the current pace of homicides is poised to near the 778 recorded in 2016, its highest total in roughly 20 years.
Chicago had 336 murders as of July 2nd.
See, this is what you have to understand.
Don Lemon is not saying that what the right is saying is not true.
He's saying it's wrong for you to say it's true.
It's wrong for you to believe it's true.
It makes you a racist to believe that the truth is true.
And this is really important.
See, we think we're in an argument.
We think if we point out to them that they're lying, they will say, oh my goodness, my mistake.
We're not in an argument.
We're in a war.
We're in a culture war.
The New York Times, New York Times keeps saying, stop interrupting our racist culture war with your racist culture war.
But that's the war we're in.
It's not about race.
It is about truth and fiction, and it is about lies.
But we have to understand they don't support the truth.
That was, you just saw it, Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo ridiculing what is in fact the truth.
It didn't take me one second to find what I found, those facts that I just read to you.
They're in the New York Times, a former newspaper.
They're in a left-wing pro-Trump, anti-Trump hate sheet, and they're still telling the truth, but not Don Lemon and not Chris Cuomo.
These people are not telling you.
They're not telling you that reality is not reality.
They're telling you to believe in reality is evil in itself and why.
That's what we have to talk about.
All right, let's talk about it, right?
This is yesterday, a letter was released that was signed by 150 journalists, around 150 journalists, people saying, people, prominent journalists.
One of them I should point out, because it's important for me to say this so you know where I stand.
One of them I should point out is my sister, Caitlin Flanagan, who works over at the Atlantic.
And basically, this is a protest against canceled culture.
It is saying that the overtune window is being closed to a little slit where you can't talk about anything anymore.
And these are all mostly, mostly people on the liberal side.
There are some people with some sort of conservative credentials, but not much.
The letter begins, and a lot of conservatives have been mocking it for this.
It begins with this enormous, enormous liberal throat clearing.
Oh, our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial.
Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society.
This goes on and on.
The forces of a liberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump who represents a real threat to democracy.
I love the way this stuff begs the question that these are marches for social justice.
We just have to accept that on the face of it, about, you know, who says they are, and that Donald Trump is a real threat to democracy.
How?
How?
I have asked people this to their face repeatedly.
I've never gotten an answer on what Donald Trump has done to threaten democracy.
It's just they just don't like him.
But they get the, all right, so they get the liberal.
This is them saying, we're the good people.
This is not coming from, you know, Andrew Clavin wasn't asked to sign this.
Don't kid you, Ben Shapiro, he wasn't asked to sign this.
No, no, no.
These are the good people who are signing.
So they get that out of the way.
And then they finally, in the second paragraph, get to what they're really saying, which is the left sucks.
The left is shutting down conversation.
The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society is daily becoming more constricted.
Well, we have come to expect this on the radical right, where everything is allowed to be said.
They've come to expect censorship on the radical right, where everything is allowed to be said.
But censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture, an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.
So they attack cancel culture, basically.
And they say this stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time.
The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation, an argument you've heard on the show many, many times.
This is signed by several famous people, Martin Amos, Ann Alpebaum, Margaret Atwood, the lady with the handmaid's tail, Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker.
But one of the things you'll notice about these is most of them, Salman Rushdie, J.K. Rowling signed it, most of them are older people.
They're mostly on the other side of 40.
They think that they are talking into a culture that still believes in free speech, but they are not.
They are not.
They are not talking on the left.
Everything they said about the right there is untrue.
On the right, I mean, ask anybody who's come over to the right, ask anybody who's written red-pilled, where do they shut?
The only time they ever shut anybody down on the right is when they get afraid of cancel culture.
When they get cowardly and they get afraid, oh, we'll lose a sponsor, we'll get canceled in some way.
That's when the right silences people.
It never silences people for saying left-wing things.
It never even recommends that people be silenced for saying left-wing things.
Otherwise, I'd be calling for Don Lemon to be boiled in oil.
But I'm not.
I'm happy for him to go on and make a fool of himself in defending his stupid positions.
That's good for me.
Anytime these guys talk, it's good for me.
As we always say, the right loves it when the left talks.
The left hates it when the right talks because the right is defending reality and will defend reality, hopefully, for a long, long time.
So immediately they tried to cancel, for instance, Matthew Iglesias, who works at Vox, the very far left website, and Vox critic at large, Emily Vanderwerf, which sounds like a name that I would make up, but is not.
Emily Vanderworth wrote immediately to Vox saying, as a trans woman who very, and I have no idea what that means, but as a trans woman who very much values her position at Vox and the support, I was deeply saddened to see Matt Iglesias' signature on the Harper's Weekly letter.
Matt is, of course, entitled to his opinion, and I know he's a more nuanced thinker.
He has never been anything but kind to me, but the letter signed it is by several prominent anti-trans voices and containing as many dog whistles towards anti-trans positions as it does.
The anti-trans position she's talking about, first of all, she's talking about J.K. Rowling, of course, who doesn't have to worry about cancel culture because she's so wealthy, she could start her own publishing company.
She could start her own Amazon.com.
They can't cancel her.
So that's the only reason she is free.
But she has been courageous in terms of social penalties, in terms of being shamed.
She's been speaking the truth.
Not that it's evil to be a trans woman.
Not that we have to bully trans people, but simply that a trans woman is not a woman.
To say that a trans woman is a woman is to say that a person born a woman who thinks she's a man is the same as a person born a woman who thinks she's a woman.
That's a nonsense sentence.
Internet Shaming Favors Wealth00:04:47
That's why.
So of course, immediately, people start running for the hills.
Jennifer Finley-Boylan, a lady who writes about dogs, she said, I did not know who else had signed that letter.
I thought I was endorsing a well-meaning, if vague message against internet shaming.
I did know Chomsky, Steinem, and Atwood were in, and I thought that's good company.
The consequences are mine to bear.
I'm so sorry.
Ed Morrissey at Hot Air posted in keeping with that the scene of the ballad of Sir Robin from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Just play this because it is hilarious.
Take it.
Take it.
He's not that brave.
And when he's confronted, he immediately confronted by the bad guys, he immediately runs away.
And the balladeer starts singing, Brave Sir Robin ran away.
He just keeps on singing.
You know, this is the thing.
Suddenly, these guys are going to find out.
They thought they thought this was a vague thing against internet shaming, but they are in favor of internet shaming.
You have to understand this.
The young left, the new left, the left that is on the ascendancy, that is in power, that is coming into power, the left that will be controlling Joe Biden if he gets into office, is not in favor of free speech.
They are not in favor of it.
Anything they say that's in favor of freedom is simply to gull you into voting.
They want that face, that big face of Joe Biden, like an old-fashioned Democrat who supports the, you know, look, look, look, we're, you know, it's like a puppet.
He's a puppet.
That's exactly what he is.
He's almost literally a puppet.
They're holding Joe Biden up in front of themselves so they can say, look, we're still the guys who believe in liberalism and free speech.
But behind that, these young people do not believe in free speech.
They had an editor fired at the New York Times for printing an op-ed that they disagreed with.
And on the opinion page, an opinion they disagreed with, got the editor fired.
And of course, first, not just fired.
First, he has to be shamed.
He has to apologize.
He has to grovel because they think that's going to get him out of it.
But it's not because they don't know who they're arguing with.
You know, we have got an article that I think we broke this article on the Daily Wire by John Bickley, who is our new editor-in-chief, by the way.
Ben has retired from the position of editor-in-chief.
His new role, I think, is Man About Town.
I think that's on his card now.
But I think we cracked this story.
The New York Times has been running a massive campaign to pressure social media giants into restricting freedom of information, particularly dissemination from sources other than mainstream outlets.
Their campaign has kicked into high gear.
Tech columnist Kevin Roos warned the Times readership earlier this year that they should buckle up for another Facebook election in which the platform will supposedly be overrun with hyper-partisan misinformation.
But meanwhile, meanwhile, they have been pouring money, millions of dollars in advertising into their 1619 project to spread the lie that America was founded to preserve slavery, that the American Revolution was inspired by the preservation of slavery, and this is an endemically, inherently racist country, as opposed to a country which has been in the process of dispelling its racism because of its founding values, which is the truth.
That is literally what's been happening.
You know, there's still black slaves being sold around the world, thousands and thousands and thousands of them by Muslims mostly.
And, you know, nobody talks about that, but they want to talk about 200 years ago because they think that undermines the values that gave us our individual freedom.
It's the individual freedom.
So here is basically the New York Times that got exempted from control on Facebook by saying, oh, we're just a newspaper.
We just make news.
And then sold their propagandistic activist 1619 project.
These people, you have to understand the New York Times, they're not in favor of free speech.
They're in favor of free speech for me and not for thee.
They have convinced themselves of this old leftist lie that speech is violence, that speech that goes against, that there's some speech that just cannot, cannot be tolerated.
And this is the thing about the people who signed these letters, and this is why I praise them, even with all the leftist throat clearing.
I praise them for it because I know they did put themselves on the line.
And those who understood it, like my sister understood it, they knew that they were doing.
They knew they were walking into a buzz software.
So good for them.
Good for them.
I disagree with them, but good for them for standing up for free speech because that's all important.
Praising Free Speech00:02:17
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So the result of this is you've got this kind of a gaslight.
We talk about gaslighting.
Gaslighting comes from an old play called Angel Street, a brilliant mystery play, which was made into a movie called Gaslight with Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman talking off the top of my head, where basically the husband is trying to drive his wife insane.
So he keeps turning down the gaslight and pretending that he doesn't see it.
He keeps turning down the old lights.
It takes place in the 19th century.
He turns down the lights and keeps saying, no, it's not getting dark in here.
It's you.
And he drives people crazy.
So they have to do this because they have to build a world in which reality is always under doubt.
And this is part of Marxism.
People would say to the Marxists, well, bourgeois people seem really happy.
They build businesses.
They live moral lives.
It seems to give them joy.
Marxists say, well, that's false consciousness.
They've been talked into that.
And from that idea of false consciousness comes all this nonsense that we have about, oh, no, you may think you're a man, but no, if you think you're a woman, poof, you're a woman.
This entire idea that somehow our identities are entirely controlled by our mind.
And as I say, our identities are partly our minds, but they're also our minds in relationship to reality.
As you can tell, if you say, oh, I can fly, I'm Superman.
Mount Rushmore Montage00:02:49
And then you jump off a building, right?
A whole joke about that, which I don't have time to tell, but it's very funny.
I mean, the idea that you can now step off a building because you think you can fly is ridiculous.
So is the idea that you're now a woman because you think you're a woman.
It's absolutely foolish.
Not all things are social constructs.
Social constructs are built, are a structure built on top of reality.
Sometimes they become sclerotic and you have to get rid of them, but sometimes they are just a structure of reality that relates reality.
So we played before.
They went after President Trump's speech on July 3rd in front of Mount Rushmore, and they went crazy.
And the Washington Post, Holman Jenkins Jr., who's now one of my favorite columnists, he's in the Wall Street Journal, a very underrated columnist, but they seem to be promoting him now because he's just that good.
He wrote today about the Washington Post description of Trump's speech.
It said, President Trump's unyielding push to preserve Confederate symbols and the legacy of white domination crystallized by his harsh denunciation of the racial justice movement Friday night at Mount Rushmore.
Trump at Mount Rushmore made no references to the Confederate symbols.
The only reference he made to the Civil War was his praise of Abraham Lincoln and, of course, the freeing of the slaves.
We played a little bit of a montage of the way the press covered Mount Rushmore before his speech.
I just want to play, we've shortened it.
I just want to play a little bit of that montage to remember to remind you of how they attacked Mount Rushmore in the run-up to Trump's speech.
President Trump will be at Mount Rushmore, where he'll be standing in front of a monument of two slave owners and on land wrestled away from Native Americans.
We have to acknowledge that Mount Rushmore is sitting on Lakota land.
The place Donald Trump is going to on Friday is stolen land.
He will inevitably and predictably talk about our heritage.
In other words, he will talk about he is the protector of white America.
Here is the Washington Free Beacons montage of how they covered Mount Rushmore when the left visited it.
Visiting Mount Rushmore today, Bernie Sanders taking in the majesty of the moment.
This monument to four great American presidents.
So many levels to look at Mount Rushmore.
You can look at it as a bit of grand sculpture, but each of those men sculpted our history.
America's most iconic landmarks, from Mount Rushmore to the Statue of Liberty.
It's representing great American sites like the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore.
You know, you sit here and you think that this is our country at its very best.
And should President Obama be on Mount Rushmore?
Independence, Liberty, the Union, and the preservation of this whole wilderness area itself.
Shadow Self Morality00:14:38
Those four men did that.
Just the accomplishment and the beauty.
It really does make one very proud to be an American.
They don't believe in telling the truth.
See, this is the thing.
It's not like, oh, they're hypocrites.
They forgot what they said or whatever.
And if we just point out their hypocrisy, they'll change their mind.
Don Lemon is right.
They don't care about black lives.
They only care about the one thing, the one thing, which is the power forcing on you this kind of gaslighting that will let you say, well, maybe socialism will work this time and give them the power and take the power.
It's more important to them, I think, to take the power away from individuals that they don't like, namely the ordinary person.
That's who they want to take power away because they think the elites should rule.
That's what it's all about.
And they think they can use the mob to get this.
And this is true of the coverage of Black Lives.
There is a column in the Wall Street Journal today from Michael Tracy, a journalist, about Minneapolis.
Minneapolis is in ruins.
I mean, this is Black Lives Matter has destroyed the minority businesses in Minneapolis.
And it looks like Beirut over there.
And he talks about Flora Westbrook, who had a hair salon, whose store was, whose salon was utterly destroyed.
And he quotes her.
She says, sometimes I'm like, okay, I got to go to work.
I got to go do something at the shop.
And then I forget I don't own anything anymore.
Everything's burned to the ground.
I have nothing no more.
Everything I worked for.
And the column ends, mass-produced Black Lives Matter signs dot the yards of countless leafy homes across the area.
Ms. Westbrook's next door neighbor, a white woman, displays one in her window.
Ms. Westbrook's, who is black, does not.
Bob Woodson of the Woodson Center was on Tucker Crossing last night, and here's what he said about this.
The left has abandoned all pretense of really fighting for social justice.
Low-income blacks are just collateral damage to their efforts to just demean and destroy these civic institutions in this country.
Our children are dying, and low-income blacks are the ones who are suffering the most in this outrage.
And Black Lives Matter, they are not answering the question then, if racism were the single culprit, why are black children and black people being dying and being destroyed in institutions run by their own people?
Yeah, why?
You know, because that's the agenda.
You know, let's just play, let's just go right into playing Ilhan Omar, right?
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who actually at least, like Don Lemon, is willing to say the quiet part out loud, is willing to really talk about her goals.
As long as our economy and political systems prioritize profit without considering who is profiting, who is being shut out, we will perpetuate this inequality.
So we cannot stop at criminal justice system.
We must begin the work of dismantling the whole system of oppression wherever we find it.
This is the oppressed woman who came here from Somalia, was taken in by American mercy, was lifted to power by American tolerance.
This is a woman who may have married her brother to get him into the country.
The latest campaign data has revealed that she has paid her husband's consulting firm a total of more than $878,000 since he began working for her in 2018.
So she is paying her own family.
You give her money for her campaign, and she is paying that money into her own family.
That at least is the real agenda.
I mean, at least she's out there saying we got to destroy this whole agenda.
And there's more.
I mean, you can see them when they come out and say this.
Here is that Seattle councilwoman, Savant.
She's the real radical.
Here's her saying the same thing.
We are fighting for far more than this tax.
We are preparing the ground for a different kind of society.
And if you, Jeff Bezos, want to drive that process forward by lashing out against us in our modest demands, then so be it.
Because we are coming for you and your rotten system.
We are coming to dismantle this deeply oppressive, racist, sexist, violent, utterly bankrupt system of capitalism, this police state.
This is Black Lives Matter.
This is who they are.
This is the truth of them.
And you know, I don't think any liberals probably listen to this show because they've never listened to anybody but themselves.
But the people who are signing letters, begging for free speech, begging to keep it open, you are writing to the wrong people.
Come over here.
You can write over anything you want.
I mean, you can debate me.
You can come on this show and say anything you want.
But they won't do it.
They won't do it because they want the social warmth.
They want the friendliness.
They are afraid of being rejected by their pals.
And so they let the lies spread.
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got the mailbag coming right up.
Mailbag.
No idea.
Don't ask me.
I have no idea.
I don't know.
I think they're just drinking back there.
It's just, all right.
We had a lot of really good questions and a lot of really good video questions today.
So it seems we're a little heavy on the video.
That's why they were just really terrific questions.
Here is one from the Netherlands, Ulika, I think it's pronounced, and her husband, Malcolm, who's an American.
Hi, Andrew.
This is Yulika from the Netherlands.
And this is my husband, Malcolm from America.
He's a big fan of your show.
So your voice is often heard in this house.
He gave me your book, The Great Good Thing, as a present, since I was struggling a bit with finding my own path.
And yeah, thank you so much for sharing your personal story and for giving a lot of great insights.
Anyways, the current racism debate made me think of what you wrote in your book about having difficulty accepting Western culture since it is so intertwined with anti-Semitism.
And I was wondering if you could, if you recognize your own struggle or part of your own struggle in the questions that some people now raise within the anti-racism debate, and what advice could you give them, you know, instead of tearing down statues?
Thank you.
It's a great question.
What she's referring to is as a person who came to believe in Christ, but as a Jew, even though I was a secular Jew, I'm a racial Jew who came to believe in Christ, I had to confront the fact that there has been a huge history of anti-Semitism in the Christian faith, the idea that the Jews killed Christ, which still goes around in some evangelical sects.
And was I buying into something that hated me?
And this is the same question that I think a lot of blacks ask themselves as they think, oh, this is a great society.
It's a great culture.
I'm going to make a lot of money.
I'm going to be free.
I'm going to be able to do whatever I want.
But am I buying into a series of ideas, the same series of ideas that held me slave?
And that's what, you know, that's the difficulty of black assimilation is it was the difficulty for me in accepting the faith that was my faith.
And the answer I found is this.
The human heart is a broken instrument.
We know this.
We know that we are not what we're supposed to be.
Everybody knows it.
And all morality is a check on our desires, right?
We forget this, right?
You don't need morality for things you don't want.
We have sexual morality because we know we want to screw everything.
We want to treat our bodies like trash, like meat, right?
So every moral rule is a rule against something that we naturally want.
That's why we love morality that doesn't concern us.
Straight people love to condemn homosexuality because we don't have that desire.
So we can say, oh, yeah, that's a bad one, you know, but we're fine with divorce.
We're fine with adultery or whatever.
So these things are, morality is a check against our own desires.
And if you handle that wrong, those desires go elsewhere.
Those desires go into what I call a shadow self.
That your shadow self becomes the receptacle of all those desires that are X'd out by morality.
So the doctrine that we had sinned and God had to come and be sacrificed for us and that we, the human race, was responsible for the death of God.
In order to keep from facing that, the human heart, which is a broken instrument, created this pool of anti-Semitism.
It wasn't us.
It wasn't us.
It was the Jews.
It was the Jews.
The Jews.
Not me.
Not me.
I'm fine.
It was the Jews.
And that became the shadow self of Europe and of Christendom, which became Europe.
And that's why when Europe fell, when it died, when its great culture died, it died in a flame of destruction of Jews because the shadow came out instead of the person themselves.
It was like a glove being turned inside out.
The thing about Christianity is it's supposed to have a break on that shadow.
It's supposed to say, no, it's you.
It's you.
You know, the first thing you have to do is repent.
Repent.
That's the first thing you have to do.
Turn away from your desires.
Turn away from the flesh and turn toward the spirit.
Don't blame it on somebody.
Oh, not the Jews.
You, you.
That's the way it's supposed to be.
And of course, because the human hearts is evil and because we've all fallen short of the glory of God, that became a shadow self.
When you adopt a great idea like Christianity, obviously you want to leave the shadow behind by acknowledging that broken people brought this idea into being and hold this idea forth, right?
It's broken people who become Christians, not whole perfect people.
Christ came to heal the sick.
So don't be fooled.
You shouldn't be fooled by the people who denigrate the idea by pointing at the shadow.
The shadow is always going to be there, no matter what good idea there is.
Freedom, that was the kind of freedom invented and brought into politics by the founding fathers and by the British ideas that came with them, is a wonderful new idea.
And so, yes, were there people who used that idea hypocritically and held slaves?
Yes.
Is there a shadow self in operation in every human endeavor?
Yes.
But you have to trust to the ideas and turn to the shadow, notice the shadow in yourself and try to expel the shadow in yourself.
So it's always about the ideas.
The shadow is simply a function of the human heart.
The human heart is broken and evil.
And that's my answer.
Don't tear down the statues.
Don't attack others.
Turn to yourself and make sure that shadow self is being expunged.
Because if you're judging someone else, if you're judging the moat in someone else's eye, you're not judging that plank in your own eye.
And that's what I came to.
I thought, I embrace Christ.
I don't embrace the shadow of anti-Semitism.
And I don't embrace the idea that the Jews killed Christ.
An English sentence that makes no sense anyway.
So I hope that was clear.
I mean, I know it's philosophical, but I mean, it is clearly what's happening now is they point at the shadow as a way of negating the idea, but that's just a political trick.
It's not the truth.
All right, from Kelsen, I need somewhat fatherly advice.
Well, you came to the right place.
I'm 26 and just got married on May 26th.
This last Saturday, I discovered my wife sleeping with a guy from work.
She's now completely moved out and we're in the middle of a divorce.
Obviously, this is a crushing blow to my self-esteem, confidence, and overall mental health.
What is some advice you would give us as to how to handle the feelings of pain, loss, and anger that I'm having with the whole situation?
Well, first of all, you're going to have these feelings.
This is a tremendous blow, and it's a tremendous ego blow.
And it's just, I'm so sorry it happened, but it's just a painful, painful blow.
You have to suffer the pain to get through the pain.
It's, you know, it's, as I always say about grief, grief is a desert that has to be crossed on foot.
This is a kind of grief.
It's an ego blow.
You're just going to have to get through it.
As you get through it, what you might remind yourself is that when your spouse, a trusted spouse, cheats on you, you feel that you may have done something wrong.
Were you not worthy?
Were you not satisfactory?
Were you not enough for her and all this stuff?
And obviously, that's not your situation.
You did not fail.
What you did was you chose poorly.
Obviously, somebody who cheats on her husband after a month is not the person you thought you were marrying.
And that was a mistake.
And what you want to do as you go forward is you want to examine why did you make that mistake, why, what was wrong with your perceptions, how are you going to correct that perception next time.
Suffer the pain, go through the grief, understand that there's no escaping the grief, just go through it and get it done, but also get done some work on yourself, right?
Be walking as you walk through the desert, make sure you're walking in the right direction.
Walking in the Right Direction00:07:54
In the right direction, it's not hating yourself.
It's not belittling yourself.
It's finding out, we all have these kinks in our psyches.
Finding out what kink in your psyche made you choose somebody, get somebody so wrong.
Because that's what you did.
You chose a bad person, a person who's not trustworthy and not good.
And you want to make sure you don't do that again.
So suffer the grief, live out the pain, but also move as you're moving through the pain toward a better version of yourself that won't make that mistake again.
Let's look at the video from Jess.
Hi, Claven, great man of letters other than E.
This past spring, I gave my mother the first two Another Kingdom books.
I was a bit worried about the gift at first because she's an old school hippie liberal, but as a conservative and a fan of yours, I thought that I could see some of your conservatism shining through in your work.
And I was worried that she would see that too, and that for her, it would be off-putting.
Well, it turned out that I needn't have worried.
She loved the books.
She flew through them.
Now, my only problem is that I cannot mention you to her without her asking me, when is he releasing his damn book?
So, Claven, on her behalf, I have to ask you, when are you releasing your damn book?
Please solve all my problems by answering my mother's question.
And thank you for creating art that both liberals and conservatives can enjoy.
Thanks, Claven.
Bye.
Thanks, Jess.
I love hearing that story.
I'm really happy to hear it.
It comes out in March of next year.
We brought them out one a year, each year in March.
So the next one will come out in next March, and that'll be the end of the trilogy.
From Sabrina, on your show today, I guess it's yesterday you brought up assimilation in Canada.
One of the more prominent topics taught in social studies in almost every grade is how awful the white man was for forcing the natives to assimilate to our Christian culture in residential schools.
The teachers that I had specifically taught us this history using the word assimilate.
So that word has a serious racist connotation in Canada.
It seems more than America.
How would you work around this when talking about immigration?
I completely agree with your take on it.
Calling assimilation racist is racist.
Okay.
The fact is, when you assimilate, you are accepting that an idea from another culture is better than the ideas from your culture.
An overarching idea, a big idea.
Obviously, bring your food, bring your spaghetti, bring your Chinese food, whatever it is.
That's great.
Bring your costumes, anything you want.
Bring your funny way of talking.
All the stuff that enhances a culture and that adds to a culture through the wonderful operation of cultural appropriation, which the left hates so much.
But no, you have to set aside the revenge culture of Sicily.
You have to set aside the anti-Christian leanings in a Jewish community.
You have to set that aside and embrace the overall culture with the idea that, oh, somebody came up with a better idea.
If the guy next to me invents the light bulb, I'm going to use the light bulb.
And if somebody says to me, well, that's accepting white culture, my feeling is, I just want that light bulb.
Freedom the same way.
If the people who invent freedom happen to be not my religion, happen to be not from the place I'm from, I don't care.
I want that freedom.
Give me the freedom.
Give me the light bulb.
And so that's the thing.
It's about the idea to say, wait a minute, you turned on a light bulb.
Edison was a white man.
Edison, what's wrong with you?
Live in the dark.
You should live in darkness if you want to be authentic.
That's racist.
That's racist because the least important thing about Thomas Edison, whether he knew it or not, is that he's a white man.
The most important thing, the light bulb.
The ideas always come first.
Assimilation is a matter of ideas.
It comes with a price of getting rid of your tribalism and getting rid of your racism since the left is living off racism, since that's the only thing they have to defend their philosophy.
That's attacking people for racism and their own racism.
That's why they don't want you to assimilate.
They don't want you to get rid of it.
But no, assimilation is a good thing, just like cultural appropriation.
These are higher things.
Of course, they can be done badly.
They can be enforced.
They can be enforced by force of arms.
That's not a good thing.
But obviously spreading ideas and accepting ideas that are better than the ideas of your culture is a positive thing, and we should all be doing it.
Let's play Darren's video.
Hello, Mr. Claven.
This is Darren from the Bay Area.
The reason I'm making a video today is to get your thoughts on racism.
My understanding of the definition of a racist is someone who considers their race superior to others.
Throughout my life, I've had the ability to work with people with much more life experience, much older than myself, who have opinions about certain groups and people that would be considered nowadays far less than PC and maybe even borderline prejudice.
But I wouldn't consider any of them racist by any stretch of the imagination.
Do you think the term racist is used too broadly nowadays?
And do you think this is a natural thing for older people to have ossified opinions about certain groups?
And is that always a bad thing?
All right.
Thank you, Mr. Claven.
You have a good one now.
Really interesting question.
The first thing is I like your definition of racism.
I think it is made, now it's turned into everything is racist.
You said that and that's racist.
You did this and that's racist.
That's ridiculous.
Racism is a philosophy.
And we should be insisting on this on the right.
Racism is a philosophy.
It's just what he said it is, just what Darren said it is.
It is the belief that your race is superior in some essential moral way to other races.
And that's the mistake.
The mistake racists make is not that the other race is crappy.
We're all crappy.
We all stink.
The idea is that the mistake they make is thinking that they're any better, that their race is somehow better.
And that's ridiculous.
And the thing is, it's used much too broadly.
And when we see it's an idea, then you can say, I don't support that idea, or I do support that idea.
That's it.
That's it.
That's all we have to say.
That you have tribalistic instincts in you.
And sometimes you may say something awkward or stupid.
That's going to happen to all of us.
That's not to be condemned.
That's to be forgiven.
And we pass on and move on.
The question about old people is a really important question.
Yes, old people get ossified in their ideas.
And I always try to follow Clint Eastwood's advice.
He said, don't let the old man in.
And I try to do that.
I try to ask myself all the time, am I wrong?
Did I take a wrong turn?
Should I change my mind here?
I think I have been banned from Fox News.
I believe I've been banned from Fox News.
I make appearances on Fox News and the producer calls me up and says, that was great.
I hope you'll come back again and again.
And then I never hear from them again.
And I believe I've been banned from Fox News because of my opinions on feminism, because I reject the ideas of feminism.
And people think I do that.
I'm an old, I'm old, I'm an old guy, and all that, but that's not true.
I've thought this through a lot, and I know what I'm rejecting.
I'm not rejecting, obviously, freedom and equal rights for women.
I'm not rejecting that at all.
I'm rejecting the idea that maleness, male values, are the values that women should live up to.
And that women should model their life on that.
So you have to be careful when you listen to old people to distinguish between somebody saying something that is so out of keeping with the time that it's actually radical, like when I say that about feminism, and people who do get ossified in their beliefs.
I grew up around, you know, somebody who says, oh, I grew up around black people.
I never liked those people.
And they did this and they did that.
And, you know, you have a right to your life.
You have a right to the things in your life.
What the left calls lived experience.
They always think lived experience gives minorities some kind of superiority.
Everybody has lived experience, including racists.
And racists say, well, my lived experience is I got mugged by blacks.
Now I don't like black people, right?
So you've got to be careful.
So you've got to be able to distinguish.
You've got to hear people.
They're usually telling you something about their life.
They're usually telling you something about their experience.
It's always worth listening to.
It's always mind expanding.
And you have to listen.
Are they thinking something new?
Are they just so honest in their old age that they're saying something fresh and original?
Or are they just sinking back to the ideas that were in their youth and they miss them?
It really is something you have to feel your way forward.
And I think it's wonderful, Darren, by the way, that you are open and forgiving of old people who say things that may actually hurt your feelings sometimes.
You know, you want their wisdom, you want their life experience, but you don't have to take the sclerotic and foolish ideas that are limiting them as they grow older.
I got to stop there, but I will be back again tomorrow.
Feel Your Way Forward00:01:11
I'm Andrew Clavin.
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