Ep. 935 – Orange Man Back skewers Democrats—Pelosi, Schumer, and Biden—blaming voters for chaos while Andrew Clavin argues Trump’s 49% Rasmussen approval stems from his truth-based policies: COVID-19 action, Houston consulate shutdowns, and Operation Legend’s crackdown on urban crime. Contrasting China’s authoritarian capitalism with U.S. values, Clavin dismisses Biden’s "eat our lunch" remark as clueless, praising Trump’s long-standing China focus. Spencer Clavin then ties free speech to Milton’s Areopagitica, framing modern "cancel culture" as a rejection of absolute truth, while the episode ends with a warning: artists must prioritize truth over profit or risk complicity in cultural decay. [Automatically generated summary]
A new Rasmussen poll shows that Donald Trump is closing the gap with Joe Biden in the presidential race.
Democrats are furious, and they're warning Americans they will not end the violence and hysteria in the country until voters get their minds right and agree to mend their ways.
Speaking to an audience of tiny figurines crafted completely out of spare Botox, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said, quote, voters are going to have to take some responsibility for the chaos and terror we are causing because they refuse to abandon Trump.
We've had three years of insanity over Russian collusion that didn't even happen.
We had near riots over accusations against the Supreme Court nominee that were completely unsubstantiated, and we stopped the business of this country to hold an actual impeachment hearing over a meaningless remark and a phone call to Ukraine.
We wouldn't have done any of these things if voters hadn't elected Donald Trump, so it's inconceivable they would even think of doing it again, unquote.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer agreed.
Speaking from the center of a flaming pentangle while the spirits of the evil dead flew in circles around his head before moving off to vote by mail in the November election, Schumer told a crowd of goats with human faces, quote, just look at the violence in our cities.
That is happening while Democrat mayors and governors stand by doing nothing.
Do voters actually think we're going to bring that chaos to a halt if they go off and vote for Trump again?
This irresponsible behavior on the part of voters had better stop.
This is not what democracy looks like.
It looks like a mob of mass thugs assaulting police officers and defacing property, unquote.
Joe Biden also chimed in and a statement slipped under his basement door that read, quote, can anyone remember the name of that TV show about the small town sheriff and his son Opie?
I always loved that program.
Let me know when I'm president, unquote.
Trigger warning.
Bambi's HR Audit00:04:37
I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety boom.
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.
We are with you again, the end of the Clavin-y week.
We're laughing our way through the fall of the Republic.
Please go on YouTube and subscribe to the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel.
I have no idea what number we now have, but we're trying to get to a higher number than the one we're at.
And that can't happen unless you subscribe.
If you subscribe and leave a comment and the comment is halfway intelligent, that will be halfway higher than what usually goes on on this show.
So we will read it on the air.
Today we have Sarah Reina, who said, I was sitting agog at Mr. Clavin's profound knowledge of world history from ancient Rome to 17th century England and France until I remembered that he was there when it happened.
So it's not that remarkable.
Fact check, true, that is absolutely correct.
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Let me end the week with a final comment on the lost content of Christianity.
That's what I'm calling it.
It's the values that can't be defended without a radical assessment of God's place in our political system.
I've talked about the pre-political nature of our rights, the fact that government's purpose is not to grant them, but to preserve them.
I've talked about the sinfulness of man, which means we shouldn't waste time virtue signaling because we have no virtue, and we shouldn't waste time accusing our founders of sins because we share all their sins.
And I talked about the inherently corrupt nature of the world, the fact that the world can always be relied on to force or coax us away from freedom, truth, and beauty.
But of course, the central premise of Christianity is truth.
Jesus said, I am the truth.
Jesus said, I speak the truth.
And when Pontius Pilate heard that and Pontius Pilate represented Rome, which was the America of its day, Pontius Pilate responded, what is truth?
Pilot represents what is always the default philosophy of power and its poodle intellectuals.
There is no truth, only narrative, only what people believe.
Socrates battled this idea in Athens.
Jesus battled it in Jerusalem.
Both men were murdered by the state for their pains and both accepted death rather than profess the fashionable relativism of the time.
Of course, the powerful love relativism.
Narrative is the source of their power.
The king's divine right to rule over you, the dictator's love of the people, the government's improvement of your life through the free handouts with which they buy your freedom.
These are the stories they tell to keep what they have.
If you believe the narrative, the narrative bolsters their power.
But if you accept that there is a higher truth such that a single man, a Socrates or a Jesus, can be right while all the world is wrong and all the world conspires to murder him, then you can be no friend to silence or to censorship.
Then you have to let every voice speak and every conscience move freely, and then centralized power is under threat.
And that's true whether it's the centralized power of a king or a dictator or a theoretically democratic government or the CEO of Google or Twitter or Amazon.
When we accept that there's moral truth, we accept the possibility that all the world may be wrong when one crucified man is right.
And then the powers that be become the powers that were.
And freedom takes center stage.
Let us talk for just a moment before we begin to explore a little bit of how this works in the crazy history we're going through at the moment.
Let's talk about Bambi.
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Federal Influence on Rockauto00:14:20
Your dedicated HR manager is available by phone, email, or real-time chat.
From onboarding to terminations, they customize your policies to fit your business.
Again, all for just $99 a month.
Go to Bambi.com slash Clavin right now to schedule your free HR audit.
That's Bambi.com slash Clavin, spelled B-A-M to the B-E-E.com slash Clavin, which is spelled K-L-A to the V-A-N.
There are no E's.
There are no E's in Clavin.
Tomorrow, backstage, 4 p.m. Pacific, 7 p.m. Eastern, I will be there.
Ben will be there.
We may even let Knowles come in and the God King Jeremy, I assume, will be there.
He's been out of town, but I hope he'll be back by then.
And we will be there.
So tune in.
Rasmussen polls.
The new Rasmussen Mussenpoll has Trump rising in his approval rating.
He's at 49%, which is very high for him.
And that could signal that he's turning the polls around.
And if he is, he deserves it.
This week has been one of his best weeks.
I have no idea where things are going to go in the election, but right this minute, he is doing really well.
And the reason he's doing well is because he is harnessing the truth.
And they're always calling him a liar.
They're always saying he lies about this.
And there's a little bit of, you know, Barnum to Donald Trump, maybe even more than a little bit.
Certainly a lot of positive thinking, a lot of cheerleading for America, a lot of exaggeration, all those things.
But right now, the truth is on his side.
And that's what's making him so powerful and why he looks so much better this week than he has looked up till now.
He spoke of the virus, the Chinese virus, with actual seriousness.
He talked about the fact that it could get worse before it gets better.
This is something that has to happen.
We all knew this from the beginning.
When we opened up, when we came out of lockdown, we knew that things were going to spread.
It was supposed to be 15 days and then we were going to face the music.
Now we're facing the music and they're trying to make us panic.
But in fact, it's younger people are getting it.
They're not dying like they were dying in New York when Andrew Cuomo and de Blasio screwed up so badly.
That's not what's happening.
So he talked about that with seriousness.
He ordered the shutdown of the Chinese consulate in Houston.
We'll talk about that, which obviously was just a spy operation going on.
He ordered the new federal invention intervention to stop the violence in the cities.
We'll talk about that too.
Here's the thing.
Trump is a natural finagler.
He'll flatter dictators because he thinks he can then sit down with them and they'll be charmed by him and he can make a deal.
He will talk things up.
He'll say they're going well before they're going well.
He'll assume the best and he'll say positive things before he's even sure about those things.
But you know, just as when he came into office, if the left had wanted to deal instead of just hold on to their power, if they'd wanted to negotiate, Trump would have dealt with them.
They could have gotten so much out of Trump.
He loves to make deals.
He loves to cut deals.
He would have made deals with Nancy Pelosi.
He would have made deals with Chuck Schumer.
But because they went the Russian collusion lying route, because they went, you're a traitor, you're a Russian spy route, he was forced to the right.
And he did better things, I think, than he might have done had they dealt with him.
In the same way, they have seeded the truth.
They have decided that they can just push the narrative.
They own the narrative structure.
They own the communication structure.
They can push lies and win.
And that has left the truth, one of the most powerful weapons you can have, open to Trump as a campaign tool.
And finally, finally, he's using it.
You know, one of the biggest things, one of the biggest things when you talk about truth is, you know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
And when I look at Black Lives Matter and when I look at all this stuff they're pushing in the New York Times, it's hilarious.
The white guilt that they're pushing.
Just ask yourself this.
They've torn down all these statues.
Has any one of those statues falling down?
Has a child been educated?
Is there a child who's now better off, who's now getting food that he didn't have?
Is there a drug addict who got off drugs that, you know, when you defund the cops, has that saved a black life or has it taken black lives?
This is the truth.
See, they have the slogans.
They have CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, The Washington Post.
They have all those things.
They have Hollywood.
They have all the methodology to set the narrative.
But the truth does get out.
It gets out slowly.
It gets its pants on while a lie is going around the world.
But when you make these theories, oh, the whiteness, oh, your whiteness, you know, oh, my, the whiteness.
Does that help an illegitimate child have a family?
You know, when you talk about the evil whites and how they like those whites, they like hard work and individualism and family.
You know, does that help a single child?
Ask yourself, this is the thing that gets me, because some of these people must be sincere.
I mean, AOC is a dimwit, but she must be sincere in her socialism.
Somebody must be sincere.
Why are the rich supporting you?
Why is Amazon, Google, Twitter?
Why are these billionaires supporting you, right?
It must be because you are doing absolutely jack-diddly squat for the poor.
Because if you were helping the poor, if you were making the poor rise up, if you were getting rid of that socialist barrier between the little guy and the big guys, letting them innovate and work and work their way up into those classes, they wouldn't be supporting you so much.
They're supporting you because you're doing crap.
You're doing nothing.
You're tearing down statues.
You're not helping anybody.
And they love that.
They love it.
They love it.
They're sitting around here and says, yeah, yeah, Black Lives Matter.
I'll send that Clavin fellow white fragility.
He'll love that book.
They don't care.
They don't care because you're doing nothing.
So now Trump is taking action.
And listen, action takes courage.
I think this may be because he got rid of Brad Parscal as his guy who may have been holding him back, telling him to play it safe.
And no, this is not the time to play it safe.
This is the time to seize the opportunity to do what needs to be done.
We don't know if there's a silent majority anymore.
We don't know if there are people saying, you know what, I actually don't want you to burn down my city.
I think this country is a good country.
I think it's still there, but we don't know if the left has used their communications apparatus so well that people are going, yes, I deserve this because I'm a white person, so burned down my city.
It's possible.
It's possible.
In that case, their narrative will win, but it still won't be the truth.
So now Trump has announced that he is surging federal troops into troubled cities with this thing called Operation Legend, which is named after a four-year-old boy, Legend Talaferro, who was shot to death.
And he says he is going to increase the federal presence in cities.
This is cut seven.
Today, I am announcing that the Department of Justice will immediately surge federal law enforcement to the city of Chicago.
The FBI, ATF, DEA, U.S. Marshal Service, and Homeland Security will together be sending hundreds of skilled law enforcement officers to Chicago to help drive down violent crime.
And murderers and violent criminals are breaking a wide range of federal laws.
We have that.
It's as wide as it can be.
We will find them, arrest them, and prosecute them.
They will be in jail for many years to come.
So he had Legend Talafero's mother there, and she was saying she supports this.
Of course she does.
Of course, the real people who are not being heard, who are not being heard over these rioters, the real people who are not activists, who are in fact a majority, they need the police.
They need the help.
They need people to, you know, these guys are doing nothing.
This statue's coming down doesn't feed anybody, doesn't protect anybody.
The people who are attacking whiteness doesn't, they don't do a damn thing.
And of course, if they did a damn thing, Amazon and Google and Twitter wouldn't be in such a big hurry to help them.
If they were actually shifting things, you know, the one thing the powerful don't want is a revolution.
You know, you're not staging a revolution if Google is backing you.
You know, you are not staging a revolution.
Or if you are staging a revolution, it's a revolution that helps the powerful, not the weak.
I mean, it's just logic.
Look at the people who are helping you.
They're serving their interests.
Their interests are not the interests of the poor and the helpless.
So my favorite take on this was Lori Lightfoot, the completely incompetent mayor of Chicago.
She and DeBelasio, two communists, two people who actually are not pro-America, they are the worst mayors in the country.
And here was her reaction to Trump's surge.
The president has been on a campaign now for some time against Democratic mayors across the country.
Whether it's me, whether it's Keisha Lance Bottoms in Atlanta, whether it's Muriel Bowser in Washington, C.C., whether it's Jenny Durkin in Seattle.
Do you see a common theme here?
The president is trying to divert attention from his failed leadership on COVID-19.
By attacking women, that's what she's saying.
She goes on to say he's attacking women mayors.
It's the women mayor.
That's what they have.
They have their identity politics.
They have their grievance politics.
They have their envy politics.
But Trump is actually, I mean, this is different for Trump.
This is new for Trump.
And it's the kind of thing that I've said he should be doing a lot of.
He's talking about the fact that he actually represents something different.
You know, the whole thing about Trump is he's not that articulate, A, and B, he's a fixer guy.
He said this, I remember him saying this very early on in his presidency, one of the prayer breakfasts I attended.
He said, I fix things.
That's what I do.
So his thing is like, you know, yeah, I'm going to get black people jobs and then they won't have that problem.
That makes a lot of sense.
But unfortunately, leadership, especially in a democracy, also requires words.
It requires an outlook, a vision that people can hold on to.
Okay, this is what he's doing.
This is where he's moving.
This is how his actions make sense.
And so he actually articulated this.
This is cut number nine.
My vision for America's cities could not be more different from the lawlessness being pushed by the extreme radical left.
While others want to defund, defame, and abolish the police, I want to support and honor our great police.
While the radicals want to abolish charter schools and eliminate school choice, I want to expand school choice, and every family in America should have that option.
That's the thing he should be doing all the time.
Not just taking action, but explaining his action and putting it in the context of a philosophy, because he's right and they're wrong.
This is so important.
He's right and they're wrong.
And if he talks that way, the truth actually will have a power that, you know, it's the exaggeration.
I get it.
I understand that, you know, Scott Adams talking about his kind of convincing people and hypnotizing people.
But if you're doing that with the truth, you've got a double punch.
And that's what he's doing right now.
And the funny thing is, is like they can't help.
They can't hide the images.
They try, but they can't.
The mayor of Portland, who keeps saying, oh, this is terrible.
These horrible, horrible federal troops are coming out and stopping these beautiful riots.
And he goes out to talk to the rioters to show he's one of them.
Just play a little clip of this.
This is hilarious.
Ted Wheeler!
Ted Wheeler!
Hey!
Ted Wheeler!
Hey!
Ted Wheeler!
I don't know, bro.
No, we got to detect this leader.
He's a f ⁇ ing fascist.
All those little blips you heard, you can guess what word that was, F Ted Wheeler.
They hate him.
They call him a fascist.
They say he has no right to.
You know, these guys are not in favor of Ted Wheeler.
They'd carry him off and throw him into the sea if they could.
And the fact that he's out there and then he complained because he got caught up in the riot and he got tear gas and he's complaining about it.
But, but if you don't think, if you don't think Trump has the upper hand, a lot of people, a lot of smart, smart people on the right are saying, no, you should let these cities burn.
Let these cities burn.
That's not right.
That is not right.
You have to be seen to be taking action.
You're the president of the United States.
And the same thing was true with the Chinese flu.
I was really glad he let federalism work, but he should have just been emphasizing, which he's now doing, the action he's taking to help people with the flu.
That's what you've got to do.
That's leadership.
And he's doing it now.
And if you don't think this works, consider this.
After, I don't know what it is, 56 days of riots, finally the Portland police declared it was a riot.
A riot has been declared outside the Justice Center.
This is the federal building.
Disperse to the north and our west.
Disperse immediately.
Failure to adhere to this order may subject you to arrest or citation or riot control agents, including but not limited to tear gas or impact weapons.
Why do you think they're doing that if it's not because of Donald Trump?
And hilariously, what the left is going to do now is they're going to say, well, this is just a right-wing narrative.
They have this media reporter at the New York Times on Knucklehead Row, Michael M. Grinbaum, and he writes a piece called Right-Wing Media Stars Amplify Trump's Law and Order Campaign Message.
You know, he says, right-wing outlets and conservative media stars have seized on the weeks-long protests in Portland as a rallying cry for law and order, instructing their followers to fear for their safety and blaming Democratic leaders for failing to restore peace.
And my favorite line in there is he says, in fact, the scenes broadcast by channels like Fox News and One America News send a misleading portrait of the city where daily life, Portland, where daily life has been relatively calm, outside of a small area downtown.
Rioters have no right to a small area downtown.
They have no right to one square of sidewalk.
None.
Rioters have no right to anything.
Lawlessness has no right anywhere.
It's not democracy.
It's fascism.
And the right is right.
It's not narrative.
We've got the truth on our side.
And that's a very powerful thing.
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So they know you we sent you.
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Duh.
Why Follow Money to Beijing?00:15:58
You know, the other thing that happened yesterday, which was really important, I actually believe that when we step back, you know, obviously over time, you step back and you see history from a distance.
The disorder in the country and the leftist attempt to take away our freedoms and the leftist attempt to override the Constitution with their new wonderful woke philosophy, which is also called racism and fascism.
That is going to be one thing that's going on.
But behind the scenes is the fact, and I've mentioned this only once or twice before, but I've mentioned it before, that what's really happening right now, the real history of this moment, the important history of this moment, and as we get further and further away from it, we'll see it more clearly, is a new Cold War starting with China.
And it's important because it really does focus once again on what it is we're defending.
And one of the things, one of the, how can I put it, one of the beneficial things about having the Cold War with Russia is we were able to define ourselves in opposition to Russia.
But one of my objections to the way we defined ourselves, and it was not everybody during the Reagan years, but it did sort of happen during the Reagan years, was we defined ourselves by our capitalism.
And we got this idea, this kind of ridiculous Ayn Rand idea that the most important thing about us was our capitalism.
Instead of capitalism being a way that we could thrive, that people could thrive while living in our system of values.
Part of our system of values is freedom, individual enterprise, rewards.
People say social justice.
Whenever you put a word in front of an important word like justice, whenever you put a modifier in front of an important word like justice, it really means not.
Social justice means not justice.
Justice is when people get what they deserve.
It's not when everybody gets the same thing.
It's when they get what they deserve.
And so capitalism does help people get what they deserve.
But capitalism, as I keep saying, cannot exist without those values that made this country great.
I know it's a cliché, but it's absolutely true.
So yesterday, what happened was that the U.S. ordered China to shut its consulate in Houston.
Officials accused it and other Chinese diplomatic missions of economic espionage and visa fraud.
It's an unprecedented escalation in a rapidly deteriorating relationship with China, according to the Wall Street Journal.
And the U.S. State Department is preparing for Beijing to close one or more U.S. consulates in China.
They're waiting for China basically to strike back.
I loved Trump announcing this, talking about this, because when they did this, suddenly China, it's not a spy operation or anything.
Suddenly fire is coming out of the windows because they're burning the papers.
And here's Trump's rather delightfully bemused expression on this cut five.
As far as closing additional embassies, it's always possible.
You see what's going on.
We thought there was a fire in the one that we did close.
And everybody said there's a fire, there's a fire.
And I guess they were burning documents or burning papers.
I wonder what that's all about.
I wonder what that's all about.
I have to say, this is a little off point, but Biden was on TV complaining about Trump blaming the Chinese for the Chinese flu, saying that the Chinese flu that came from China came from China and that Biden didn't like that.
But I love his reasoning for this.
This is cut number one.
He's blaming everything on China.
He's blaming everything on the Chinese.
He's blaming everything.
And people don't make a distinction.
As you well know, I'm a South Korean and someone from Beijing.
They make no distinction.
It's Asia.
And that's the way he, and he's just using it as a wedge.
Unbelievable, this guy.
He's such a clown.
He is such a clown, and they're still pushing him on you.
Okay.
So here's the thing.
The reason this is the news behind the news, the big news.
First of all, China, you know, remember Napoleon said, let China sleep, for when it wakes, the world shall tremble.
Well, it's awake.
It's awake.
And this is a billion people.
And nobody has the right to stand in front of their desire to thrive.
I mean, and nobody, and we don't have the right to impose our values on them.
But we do have the right.
This is a country openly dedicated to teaming up with terrorist states, gangster states like Russia and terrorist states like Iran, teaming up with them, crushing freedoms, territorial expansion.
This is the genuine communist deal.
Now, Walter Russell Mead, a really terrific foreign policy writer, he's kind of the new Krauthammer, I call him, because he's really got an excellent, excellent view of foreign policy.
And I want to read just a little bit of his column today because it points out something desperately important about this battle with China.
He says, China's rise is more than a problem.
It's a puzzle.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, most Western analysts have assumed that China is a communist country in the way that France is a Catholic one.
There remain Marxist believers in China and practicing Catholics in France, but Beijing is not guided by Marxist theology any more than Emmanuel Macrom is led by the Pope.
Okay, that was the assumption.
But he says, that turns out not to be true.
While Qi Zing Xinping likely spends little time reading Marx's Grundrisse or debating the labor theory of value with his comrades, today's China combines a Leninist party structure with state control of the means of production, a planned economy, an intolerant atheism, and a ruthless determination to hold on to power at all costs.
That Beijing incorporates market mechanisms into its communist system is not new.
Lenin introduced the new economic policy in 1921 to speed recovery from the Russian Civil War, but the Chinese Communist Party, armed with information technology that lets it monitor and control economic activity on a scale Lenin could only dream of, has grafted market mechanisms onto a communist state structure with great success.
This is what I keep trying to explain to the Ayn Randians, right?
The market will not save you.
You can have a free market and keep people enslaved.
Even I have to admit, even I thought if China loosens its markets, if it makes its markets free, it'll need free people.
And maybe over time, that's true.
Maybe over time, if you don't let people innovate and profit from their innovations, your innovations will lag.
But really, so far, they have been very, very capable of imposing, you call it communism, it's fascism, totalitarianism, totalitarianism, authoritarianism on a free market economy.
And that is very dangerous.
The free market will not save you without your values.
This is really a big deal.
This is the thing, that nothing, no system saves you if your values aren't in place and your values have to be God-given rights, the sinfulness of man and society, understanding that the world is not the truth.
The world is not going to support truth and beauty and good values.
It's going to support profit and power.
That is what the world is here to do.
It's to amplify profit and power.
And that's why, you know, that is why Jesus said you can't serve God and mammon.
It's not that money is bad.
Look, look, I've been around the arts all my life, right?
I've been a novelist.
I've been a guy.
I've been in the movie business.
And the one thing I've seen is that every artist starts out trying to do something.
Most artists start out trying to do something true and beautiful.
But after a while, they think, you know, wow, there's a lot of money to be made writing the next Marvel Comics thing.
There's a lot of money to be made writing garbage.
There's a lot of money to be made by serving this producer or that producer, doing what everybody likes instead of telling the truth.
And they follow that path.
They've got to feed their families.
They want to do the thing.
And ultimately, they tell themselves, well, I'm going to feed my family.
But they never go back.
They never return to doing the true thing.
It's not that money is bad.
I've made good money in my life doing what I've done, but I've always written what I thought was the best thing I could do at that moment.
Always.
I've always tried to write into the meaning of my work.
And when you live into meaning, this is the idea of truth, that when you live into the truth of the world, when you live into the beauty of the world, when you live into God, into your God self, let's say, you don't follow money.
You don't follow money.
You hope the money comes.
You hope that you do good work that people like because you're not working for yourself, but you don't follow the money.
You sometimes say, you know what, I'm going to take less money to tell the truth.
I'm going to take less money to be a little less popular, maybe even a lot less popular, to tell the truth, to serve the thing that a word does, which conveys the truth.
And this is the thing.
Repression has been going on in China forever, but now it is crossed with capitalism and it is doing real damage and making them extremely, extremely powerful.
I just want to remind you, by the way, you know, that thing I played before about Biden and China wasn't totally fair because it was about the flu.
But here's something that Biden did say on China.
Let's cut 20.
China is going to eat our lunch.
Come on, man.
They can't even figure out how to deal with the fact that they have this great division between the China Sea and the mountains in the East.
I mean, in the West, they can't figure out how they're going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system.
I mean, you know, they're not bad folks, folks.
But guess what?
They're not competition for us.
That's your next president, ladies and gentlemen.
I mean, that guy's a moron.
And not only that, just to put it politely, but not only that, Trump has been hitting this for decades.
He has been hitting this subject about China.
He's been hitting it for a long time.
It's something that actually comes from him, and he's right.
And the thing that Trump has on his side now is the truth.
Because he is aligned with the right, because the left is using narrative instead of truth, because the left is relying on gaslighting instead of honesty, Trump has a big, big opening here, and I hope he drives the Orange Man truck right through it.
All right.
You know, we're going to have my Spencer Clavin, no relation.
I have a contract with him.
He says I have to say no relation.
But he's going to come on and talk about the origins of free speech.
And it was really interesting, the connection between Christianity and free speech and why it arises at the time that it does.
He's got a show called The Young Heretics where he talks about Western culture.
It's a really good show.
If you're not listening to it, you really have to listen to it.
But he's going to talk about how free speech arises in Western culture.
But before you listen to that, brush your teeth.
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Get Ben Shapiro's new book.
You know, actually, I haven't read it yet, but I was just, I was on that all-access thing, and people who have read it are just telling me it's absolutely terrific, how to destroy America in three easy steps.
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And don't forget, backstage tomorrow at 4 p.m. California time.
I should say that Spencer is the assistant editor of the excellent, excellent Claremont Review of Books, possibly my favorite magazine and The American Mind.
And his podcast is Young Heretics, which you can get at youngheretics.com or anywhere that podcasts are sold.
How you doing?
Hey, it's great to see you.
I'm doing great.
You know, you're out here telling people that they should follow the truth and not the money.
I don't know how you expect me to support you in the manner.
I didn't mean you.
I didn't mean you.
You just get the damn money.
That's what it's taught me.
And I was a little confused listening to your show before I came out.
So we were talking, I've been talking all the show about the relationship between Christianity and the truth, the idea of Jesus standing for the truth while the Romans kind of say, what is truth?
But also, once you have an idea that there is such a thing as truth that one man can have while all the world is wrong, you really start to get into the idea of free speech.
And you have a podcast coming up, right?
It's coming up next week.
It's not quite out yet on Milton, John Milton, one of my favorite poets and a poet who is much ignored now, the great author of Paradise Lost, the great English epic poem on the fall of man.
How did he become one of the big founders of basically the free speech movement?
Yeah, you know, I started sort of getting interested in this period of English history because of the whole cancel culture thing, right?
This phenomenon that's in the news where people are being shouted down, they're being chased, hammered in many cases out of their jobs, or forced to publicly apologize.
I mean, people know all about this.
They don't need me to go through sort of the threats to free speech that we're facing right now.
sort of thought, you know, as you said, Milton kind of gets neglected, but his Areopagitica, which was a pamphlet that he wrote in the 1640s, is really one of the foundational texts of why we even think speech should be free at all.
It rose out of an extremely turbulent period in English history, the First and Second Civil War.
Again, something people don't talk about a lot, that England had a civil war.
They deposed and eventually executed their king, Charles.
And Milton was an active participant in a lot of that.
He was on the side, basically, of Parliament, and Parliament essentially at this point was becoming Puritan.
So England was Protestant.
They'd had sort of battles over this and bloody fights over whether they were going to be Protestant or Catholic, essentially.
They had become Protestant, but Parliament was concerned about a number of things, including they were concerned that the king was basically going to take away some or was going to impose Catholicism on them.
They had worries that he was imposing unjust taxation.
And they ended up, you know, as they had done in the past, that kind of gentry rose up against the king.
Parliament's Puritan Push00:07:33
And Milton was kind of on the side of, in this, in all of this, he was on the side basically of localism.
He wanted churches to be able to pick their own leaders, which was a big issue at the time.
And he wanted, he wanted people to be able to publish and say and think what they wanted.
And this was, this was, this, this, this thing, this Areopagetica, which is a speech he made, um, it's, it's foundational.
It's a foundational document.
We almost never talk about it.
I almost never hear people talk about this.
First of all, what does that mean, Areopagetica?
Oh, right.
Yeah.
So the Areopagus is a sort of rocky outcropping in Athens, in Greece, which was famous for, of course, Greece is famous for its democracy and for being sort of foundational to our ideas of liberty in the modern West.
And Isocrates, who was another sort of neglected orator, an ancient orator, had written an Areopagitica that he did not actually deliver.
And Milton didn't deliver this speech either.
It's kind of an imagined speech, but it's a reference back to that whole tradition, the Greek tradition of liberty and freedom.
And some people also think it's referencing Paul St. Paul's address at the Areopagus as well.
So it's this idea.
Yeah.
So what's he saying?
Well, it's what you mean.
Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah.
So it's what you mentioned that the kind of one man against the world.
And Milton, the thing about Milton that people have to understand, I think, is that no man knew better the stakes of what he was up against.
This was not a kind of flippant, like dash off a blog post, sort of, you know, don't worry about the consequences sort of thing.
Milton was eventually, he was put in jail because he defended the regicide.
He defended the execution of the king.
These were words that could easily have gotten him imprisoned or worse.
And he was going up against his own guys.
So the parliament, when they had kind of taken control, and the parliament whom he supported, published what's called a, or rather passed what's called the licensing act, which means basically that the government has to read everything before it's published and decide whether it gets to be published.
And they set up this imperial council, as many of our council culture friends these days would love to do in their wildest dreams.
They would love to kind of review everything for purity.
And at one point, Milton says in this speech against the licensing act, he says, one thing you're going to do is you're going to make everything conform to the values of today.
And you're even going to go back into old published works eventually and erase things that don't conform.
So you'll never learn anything new.
Nothing new will ever come of this.
You'll never have any ideas that don't conform to your already preconceived ideas.
It's literally a text about cancel culture.
I mean, obviously, and the thing about cancel culture then was that they didn't cancel you.
They drew and quarter you, which was where they hanged you, cut you down alive, gutted you while you were alive, and then pulled you to pieces.
And that happened to some of Milton's friends after the Restoration.
I mean, he was actually hiding out to avoid that.
So this is the real deal.
So what's his argument?
Why should people be, I mean, before this, or even after this, they put people in prison all through the 1700s during the Napoleonic War, they put people in prison in England for speech.
What was his argument?
So this is crucial.
And you're absolutely right to bring up Christianity here because the history of the Protestant Reformation is central to Milton's idea.
The first thing he says actually to these parliamentarians who are, again, they're Protestants, they're Puritans.
He says, the tradition that I am in is the tradition of Athens and the Areopagus and Rome at its height and the greatness of all the great civilizations of the West.
And the tradition that you are in is the tradition of the Inquisition.
And the church really started shutting down speech, he says, when Wycliffe and Zwinglius started to become, he says, terrible, meaning they started to get afraid that these Protestant, these reformers, these precursors to the big Reformation, were going to get too powerful and were going to break up the unity of the church.
And Milton acknowledges that that's concerning.
He acknowledges that you can have the Catholic, the sort of Catholic vision at the time of this one unified church with one doctrine.
He recognizes that there's a lot that's appealing in that.
But he says the problem with it is that you just, you know, you crush everything, including the truth, including sort of new ideas.
And so for him, and he's appealing to people who agree with him about this, basically.
He basically says you can't have conformity of opinion without falsehood.
And he actually ultimately calls it heresy.
He says, if you're forcing people to believe even something true, even if you're forcing people to believe Christianity, which is true, they are heretics because it's not actually their belief in their heart.
He's very radical about that.
And to me, I think one of the central things that I pull away from this, right, is we have all this rhetoric about free speech now, but I don't know that we really understand the context in which free speech has to exist, right?
Milton can argue for free speech because everybody around him knows that there is such a thing as absolute truth.
And they're arguing about how to get to it.
They're saying basically all these different voices have to come up.
And other people are saying, no, we know the truth and we're imposing it.
Our problem, our opponents in cancel culture actually know how powerful speech is.
That's not their problem.
They understand, as Milton did, the stakes of speech, but they don't believe in truth.
So they believe that the power of speech is all there is to it.
And Milton is actually saying, no, the power is secondary.
It comes from the wellspring of it is truth.
And until the second coming, you will not know the truth unless you let everybody speak.
That's great.
That's an amazing, amazing argument.
It's amazing to me that this thing has been forgotten because every time you go back to it, it's got fresh stuff in it.
We're running out of time.
I got like a minute and a half.
Milton's great work, which he wrote much later, he wrote after the Restoration, was Paradise Lost, this beautiful, beautiful description of the fall of man and the temptation of Adam and Eve.
Can you say quickly, did any of these ideas make it into that vision of the fall?
I'm so glad you asked.
This is a hugely underappreciated part of this speech.
Milton wrote his great poem, Paradise Lost, very late.
He thought about it for a long time and then he didn't get around to it basically until much like the 1660s.
But in this central part of Area Pagetica, his main argument is some people say that God shouldn't have left Adam free to sin.
But I say, this is in the Area Pagitica, I say there could have been no obedience and no true love unless man was free to fall.
And that's the, I mean, it's called the Felix Kulpa, the happy fall.
That's the sort of central idea of Paradise Lost, really, that even though this is a terrible tragedy, out of it, we draw not only our own any meaning for ourselves, right?
Faith means nothing unless you choose it, but also, of course, the magnificence of the incarnation, which is sort of a transcendent thing beyond anything that could have happened if we had just been sort of forced automaton puppets loving God sort of by force.
Yeah, yeah.
It's brilliant stuff.
He is such a great.
Listen, The Young Heretics is great.
It really is.
I'm incredibly proud of the Young Heretics.
Why We Left Google00:01:48
I love listening to it, and I listen to it on my hikes, and it's just great.
It's a great show.
I hope everybody will check it out.
It's good to see you.
You're much smarter than you look.
I'm absolutely shocked, but it's good.
It's good to talk.
I can't work for my mother, but yeah.
Yeah, of course.
Well, and naturally, Ashley.
All right.
I'll talk to you soon.
Thanks very much.
We got to end there, and that is the end of the Clavin week, I'm afraid.
I hope you've got all the Claven-y goodness, except for backstage.
Backstage is tomorrow, so that will tide you over a little bit, but then you're doomed.
After that, there will be great wailing.
There'll be gnashing of teeth, wailing, gnashing of teeth, and exterior darkness.
That's the Clavenless weekend.
It's here.
Survivors gather here on Monday.
We'll be back with the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm Andrew Clayton.
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The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Technical producer, Austin Stevens.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Assistant Director is Pavel Wadowski.
Edited by Danny D'Amico.
Audio mixed by Robin Fenderson.
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The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.