Andrew Clavin’s A Republic of Schmucks frames modern conservatism as a divine underdog fight against "corporate billionaires" and Big Tech, citing Twitter’s suppression of Trump and QAnon while allowing violent hashtags like #KillTrump. He ties societal collapse to boomers’ failures—from Steve Jobs’ gig economy to Helen Andrews’ Boomers thesis—and warns that secularism’s erosion of Christian morality risks cultural chaos. Legal battles against Section 230-backed censorship loom, but Clavin insists on reclaiming the Constitution through debate, not violence, while mocking "girly" opponents and promoting VPNs, LifeLock, and Trump’s legacy as a bulwark against cancel culture. The episode ends with a call to prioritize faith over fleeting political figures, blending apocalyptic rhetoric with self-serving promotions. [Automatically generated summary]
Or if you prefer, you can be afraid first and then get angry.
The order doesn't matter.
Some people like to do it one way, some the other.
Who am I to judge?
And of course, there are those special few who can be afraid and angry at the same time.
And many of them have wonderful podcasts where they're in prison or both.
But the important thing is for each and every one of us to wake up each and every morning determined to squeeze each and every drop of fear and anger out of each and every new situation.
Because if you're not as afraid and angry as it's possible to be, you're just not paying attention to all the opportunities for fear and anger.
Now, I know there are some weaklings out there, some cucks, some rhinos, some panty waste traders who tell you that we're called upon to do the difficult political work that lies before us in joy and peace and love of even those people we disagree with.
Well, let me warn you without mincing words that once we go down that path, it is going to be almost impossible for me to make a living.
And of course, under our great capitalist system, the money I make off your fear and anger lifts all boats.
In my case, hopefully one of those sleek cabin cruisers the chicks dig so very much.
So, for the sake of American prosperity, or at least this American's prosperity, we can't allow ourselves to be turned aside from the righteousness of our self-tormenting rage and terror by a bunch of girly boys or even girly girls.
Although I admit they can be distracting, especially when they wear those soft, fuzzy pink sweaters and ponytails.
I'm going to drive you absolutely insane.
But let's not lose focus.
This country is facing the greatest challenge it has faced since the last great challenge it faced.
And every patriot must take this opportunity to ruin his life while making me rich.
So let's get angry and be afraid.
And also sick and tired and sleepless and despairing.
Maybe even break out in a rash.
Get one of those facial ticks.
Because that's what America means to me.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this at last is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, we are back.
That was the clavinless weekend for the ages.
It was the fall of the Republic without the laughing.
Now, I don't know.
I leave you people alone for a couple of weeks and the country goes entirely down the drain.
But that is no reason not to subscribe to my YouTube channel.
In fact, there's a reason you should subscribe to my YouTube channel.
If you want to hold this country together, you should be watching my personal YouTube channel.
If you subscribe, if you ring that bell, I will show up at your door, probably shelter in place there for several weeks.
Please get in some beefsteak, and I like those bagels with the sesame seeds.
And I will deliver new content to your door personally.
If you leave a comment and your comment is sufficiently ignorant and outrageous, I will read it on the show because it'll just blend in with the rest of the content.
We have something from Zach PB189, which I guess is because of all the 188 other Zach PBs.
He says, I think it's fair to say that we will not survive these clavenless times.
It was close.
It was very close.
Let me say, first of all, while I was gone, thank you so much for all your emails, all the times you contacted me and told me what the show meant to you and that you had enjoyed it and all that.
It really meant a lot to me.
Sorry it took so long to get back.
These things always take longer than usual.
But we're here.
We're here.
And now we will do our best to alienate you and disappoint you with all the power at our command.
So I know many of you are listening to me and you're thinking to yourself, why do I need ExpressVPN?
Or if you're not thinking that, you should be thinking that.
It's not that the left wants to silence and remove voices they don't agree with.
Oh wait, that's exactly what it is.
Twitter and Facebook were supposed to be open platforms that encourage people to express their opinions.
Not so much.
Instead of letting social media sites revoke your practical ability to exercise free speech, how about revoking their access to your data?
I mean, you could just deactivate all your social media accounts, but that would be giving the left what they want in the first place.
Instead, I use Express VPN.
If you've ever wondered how free-to-access social media sites make their billions and billions of dollars, it's by tracking your searches, video history, and everything you click on and then selling ads against your valuable data.
It's a free market.
That's good for them, but it's not good for you.
You're free, too, not to give them your data.
When you use ExpressVPN, you anonymize much of your online presence by hiding your IP address.
That makes your activity more difficult to trace and sell to advertisers.
And ExpressVPN couldn't be easier to set up.
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Express VPN also encrypts 100% of your data to protect you from hackers and internet bad guys.
It's finally time to say no to censorship and take back your online privacy at expressvpn.com slash clavin.
By visiting my special link, you'll get an extra three months of ExpressVPN service for free.
Again, that's expr ESSVPN.com slash clavin.
Expressvpn is in nancy.com slash clavin to protect your data today.
Lincoln's Guerrilla Act00:13:53
And I know, I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking you spelled express VPN.
How do you spell clavin for crying out loud?
It is K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no easy faces.
That's what I was going to say.
This is a new show.
It's going to be once a week.
It's going to be twice as long as the old show.
And so I want to spend at least some of the time today talking about what I want to talk about.
Obviously, I've come back at a dark moment.
This is not the country's finest hour.
To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, who also presided over a fairly divided country, we have to find out where we are and whither we are tending so we can better judge what to do and how to do it.
And that requires us to ditch all the cant and all the rhetoric and all the fist shaking.
We have to look at this situation and at our opponents, but we also have to look at ourselves.
We really have to figure out what we're doing.
We have to answer these three questions at least.
What exactly are we trying to achieve here?
This whole movement, this whole conservative movement all this time, what have we been trying to achieve?
What do we want to achieve going forward?
How can we achieve it, obviously?
And then the most important question, and the one question I feel that we are most likely to forget in a moment like this where it's so stressful and so tense and everything seems to be going against us, who do we want to be while we go about the task at hand?
And who we want to be depends on what we think we are, what we think our relationship is to the world and where we think we came from.
So one of the things I'm going to be talking about more on this show is our old friend, Uncle God, by which I mean the God we know through Jesus Christ, because all the other ones are fake.
So this is not to preach to you, because if you're listening to this show, let's face it, you're already doomed and going to hell.
But I think the fact is, every single thing that you think, if you're a Westerner, every single thing you think about right and wrong and what a human being is, all of it comes from the Bible.
And that's whether you believe in it or not.
So I'm going to be talking more about the Bible and what I think it means, which is a little different than some of the churches think.
I'm not going to be talking about Christianity.
I'm going to be talking about really who God is and what Jesus says and what we should be doing.
Not going to lay it on thick.
I just think it's a subject we have to cover if we're going to understand who we are as we go forward.
Now, Obviously, politically, this is a really tough time, one of the toughest I've seen in my life, which goes back to the Jurassic period.
On the one hand, we've got a handful of corporate billionaires acting with the support of and sometimes under threat from the Democrat Party, and they have embarked now on a scorched earth policy of censorship and canceling and disinformation in order to squelch the voices of those of us who disagree with their oppressive, racist, and destructive woke agenda.
I mean, this has been coming for a long time.
We've all seen it.
We've all warned about it.
But now it's here big time, and it is one of the greatest dangers to the Constitution I have ever seen.
It really is.
It's a tremendous danger to have a few of these billionaire sat-traps essentially deciding what we can talk about.
And we'll talk about that more in a couple of minutes.
We on the right, we've been lied to, we've been lied about, we've been blacklisted and abused while millionaire and billionaire elites nodded their approval, and it has just gotten worse and worse.
On the other hand, on our side, the tragedy of Donald Trump, which I've been telling you was a tragedy for four years, is now playing itself out in its final act.
And the final act of a tragedy is not pretty.
The tragedy of Donald Trump consists of the fact that because our voices and our minds were caged in the prison of political correctness, it took kind of a bad guy to break out and do all the good things that Trump did.
It took a belligerent and graceless man to withstand the absolutely ridiculous charges of fascism and racism that are unleashed against every single conservative who dares to oppose government overreach, racist identity politics, and this globalist utopianism that intellectuals absolutely love, but can only lead to political slavery, inequality, and stagnation.
It took this guy, Trump, a pugilistic and insensitive person, to speak up for Western culture, to defend the rule of law at the borders, to insist that minorities thrive through responsibility and hard work as opposed to dependency and riots and racist favoritism and pueling self-pity, to destroy ISIS, to just open up on them and take them out, to open a path to Middle East peace, and to oppose Chinese capitalism, which is what I call that slave state's philosophy, which is a moral atrocity.
And in philosophical terms, their ideas that you can make profit while giving people no freedom and no possibility to speak out or protest, their philosophy is no different than what petty tyrants like Jack Dorsey and Tim Cook are pushing.
It took Trump, who is a bit of a thug, to speak out for the forgotten people in this country who, let's remember, were committing suicide in droves while the elites sneered at them and called them names.
Our people, our fellow Americans out in the middle of the country were dying deaths of despair until Trump came along and spoke for them and got them their jobs back.
So, we love Donald Trump for accomplishing these things.
And I know a lot of you really love him, and I don't blame you.
I think some of you, maybe, I'll put this in front of you, some of you, I think, also confuse Trump with the principles he helped support.
You think that those principles can't live if Trump is out of the picture.
Here's the thing.
We at the Daily Wire, we need you.
You know, if you were watching the movie Run Hide Fight last night that we released, we talked a lot about how much we need our audience.
You are the source of our income.
You give us the power to speak and defend ourselves from the left.
If you walk away from us when we tell you something that you don't want to hear, which is our honest opinion, you give us a great incentive to lie to you.
That's essentially paying us to lie to you.
And I promise you, I give you my word that if you look around, you will very, very quickly be able to find someone who will do that, who will take your money and lie to you and tell you what you want to hear.
I can't do that.
It is literally against my religion to do that.
And more than that, through our contact in the mailbag and on the all-access shows where we speak to you directly and in the emails you send me and the times I get to speak to you in person when I go and speak at campuses and things like that, hard to believe, but I have come to feel a genuine esteem and affection for this audience.
Aside from the fact that you listen to the show, I really have come to like you very much.
I'm not joking about that.
I mean it.
That creates a responsibility in me to do what I would do for any friend, which is tell them the truth as I see it, even when it ticks them off.
We have to know where we are, as Lincoln said, and whither we are attending before we can figure out what to do, and that requires that we tell ourselves the truth.
And the truth, as I see it, is that Donald Trump has screwed the pooch.
He did exactly.
And by the way, I'm not talking about what the left is saying about him.
Forget what the left is saying about him for a minute.
They have no credibility.
Nothing they say matters.
That's not the point.
But Trump did exactly what I feared and told you he was going to do.
You always get tomorrow's news today.
You got it.
He lost Georgia.
It was his fault.
Republicans stayed home because they didn't think their vote mattered because he told them it wouldn't matter.
He lost the Senate.
He lost the fight.
He could have won by fighting a battle he was never going to win ever.
And I warned you that was going to happen and people were screaming at me, but it's just true.
And he was telling you he was going to win.
I was telling you he was going to lose.
You got to admit, I got it right.
Now, a lot of you, and I think maybe the majority of you and a lot of my friends and a lot of people I know who are very intelligent people, think the election was stolen.
I have tracked down myself, I have personally tracked down every charge that I could, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't stolen.
But out of respect for you, I'm going to stipulate in what I say that you're right and I'm wrong.
It's always possible.
We can't get everything right, so maybe you're right.
Maybe the election was stolen.
Seems to me there's not enough IQ points on the other side for them to do that, but never mind.
The thing I want to tell you is that whether or not the election was stolen, Trump and his allies did not have the goods to prove the case in court.
And that's the only thing that matters if you're looking to overturn other people's votes.
Even Democrats have the right to vote.
Why?
I don't know, but that's in the Constitution.
They have the right to vote.
You have got to prove your case in a court of law, and they didn't.
Now, every time I say this to someone, he says, well, you know, he would have won if the court, the courts wouldn't listen to him, or the Republicans wouldn't support him, or the press wouldn't tell the truth.
That's true of a lot of people.
It is true of there's a lot of bad people in those institutions, but not everyone.
You cannot believe that Clarence Thomas has no principles.
You know, when he said when he wouldn't take the case seriously, you can't believe that Clarence Thomas has no principles.
You can't believe that Britt Hume suddenly has no political insight when he says the election wasn't stolen or that he's afraid to say anything.
That just doesn't make any sense.
You can't say Bill Barr, everybody hates him.
The left hates him for his decisions.
The right hates him for his decisions, which he has made very openly.
You can't say Bill Barr has no integrity or that Mike Pence doesn't believe in God when he says, I swear to God to uphold the Constitution, and so I can't overturn the electoral vote.
It can't be, it can't be that every good person, you know, maybe I'm wrong about one of those guys.
Maybe one of them is a bad guy.
Who knows?
But it can't be true that every person that we knew all along was good suddenly is a bad guy because he doesn't support Trump.
Okay, that can't be.
Because that's just rewriting the world into the shape of Trump's imagination.
Now, I know, and you know I know, that the establishment left is trash.
They have betrayed every American principle.
They've lied.
They've cheated.
They've used the instruments of power corruptly.
They've destroyed the lives of the hardworking small business people whom they despise.
And they cheered and approved the violence of fascist punks like Black Lives Matter and Antifa and shame on them.
They're disgusting.
But the riot in the Capitol was also disgusting.
A police officer, an officer of the law, was hit in the head by a fire extinguisher and killed one of five people who died.
It was a scene right out of the Gracchi age that preceded the fall of the Roman Republic.
And I know today they, just today, they busted a leftist who was part of the riot, and I'm sure there are NTFA and BLM guys in there.
But look, let's not kid ourselves.
We know that Trump's more extreme supporters were perfectly capable of doing this.
I bought my first gun because of them, because of the stuff they were saying about me, not because of the left, although the left has threatened me too.
We know that Trump has supporters who were perfectly able to do this, and some of it looks like it was planned.
I mean, Trump didn't incite this.
CNN is now reporting, and a lot of people are saying that this might have been planned way before Trump got there.
And again, I am not talking about anything the left has to say about Trump.
I don't care.
And the left is behaving so badly.
You know, we want to just talk about them.
But forget about Trump for a minute and just think about the American president.
Just think about the perfect American president standing there.
Draw a little stovepipe on him because it's obviously Lincoln.
When the rioting broke out, what should the American president have done in that moment?
And that's what Trump didn't do.
And that hurt our cause and it hurt the Republican Party very badly.
He did not step up and call this for what it was and call for it to stop.
He sought to call for it to stop, but it was a mealy-mouthed speech.
It was not a good speech, and it came too late.
All right.
So that's what I have to say about Trump, that he screwed the pooch.
So where are we?
We now have to stop a rampaging socialist left with a Republican Party that's in complete disarray.
That's what the next two years are going to be about.
We have to break big tech.
You know, this is one thing that the right has been telling me, oh, they're private companies.
They can do what they want.
We have to destroy them.
We cannot let big tech kill the First Amendment.
We have to elevate new leaders, especially in the House and Senate, because Congress does nothing now except posture, which leaves the way open to tyranny.
We need a strongman president because they don't pass any legislature.
They just make any legislation.
They just make speeches and look tough and then raise money off it, but they don't do anything.
We have to create a new culture that gives voice to freedom and morality.
That's what we're trying to do here at the Daily Wire.
And we have to demand our Constitution back and demand they govern us according to the Constitution's rules.
And here's the hard part about this.
If we want the Constitution back, we have to act constitutionally.
I mean, there may come a time for civil war that may happen.
But I'm sorry, you cannot believe that a bunch of feckless gobshites like the Proud Boys or Nick Fuentes or the QAnon people are going to go in and destroy the government and recreate our constitutional system.
That's not going to happen.
They were in there crapping on the Capitol and spreading it over the walls.
That's not James Madison.
That's the act of a guerrilla.
You know, these are not the people who are going to save our system.
Our system is not designed for this.
It's designed for debate and compromise.
And we can fight hard and politically and we can even go low if we have to.
But at some point, constitutional governance is about debate and compromise.
And if you think anyone willing to do that is a weakling or a cuck, you're not fighting for the Constitution.
So then what are you fighting for?
What are we fighting for?
We're not fighting for the Constitution.
So we have to do all these things.
We have to do them all without becoming snarling, angry, frightened, violent, fat-mouthed, bigoted children, unworthy of the liberty that was handed down to us.
I'm utterly convinced we can do that.
I'm utterly convinced we can win this fight in the law courts, in the government, or enough of it to keep the Republic going for another generation at least.
But we can only do it if we know not who we stand for, but what we stand for.
We have to remember the words of the Psalm, do not put your trust in princes, in mortal men who cannot save.
Hateful Jokes and Legal Battles00:14:55
Donald Trump is going to be gone.
We're all going to be gone, but the principles, the principles remain.
So that's what the show is going to be about.
What we have to do, who we want to be when we do it, and what the news means in that sense and what this culture has to tell us.
Right now, our elites are idiots.
Our ruling class has failed.
We, the people, led by God, are going to have to become magnificent.
You say you want a revolution, and we all want to change the world, but as we say here on the Andrew Clavin show, you have to change the world for the better.
So, if you're tempted to coddle yourself with despair, just remember the ancient wisdom of the Beatles.
It's going to be, shooby-doo, all right.
So, you know how New Year's came and you made resolutions like you were going to drink less and lose some weight.
Now you're 250 pounds lying in the gutter?
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Join now and save up to 25% off your first year.
Go to lifelock.com/slash Claven.
That's lifelock.com slash Clavin for 25% off.
You may first have to go on the dark web and find out, how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-N!
Wait, where's the rest of it?
Where's the rest of me?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no easy things.
Let's talk about the news.
I love and value big tech.
Just wanted to go on record before Drew starts talking.
Yeah, so big tech is at war with the First Amendment, and the terrible, terrible thing is that they don't even know they're at war with the First Amendment.
It is the biggest threat to the First Amendment I can ever remember.
It is just, it's absurd.
And the thing about it is, you know, they took Donald Trump, the President of the United States.
They took him off all his social media, YouTube and Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok.
And they even are trying to stop him from having any kind of campaign money raising abilities, everything.
They are just trying to shut him down.
These are billionaire leaders of corporations shutting down the President of the United States, and it's just the beginning.
Here, Project Veritas got this terrific video of Jack Boots Dorsey, who runs Twitter, this is him talking to his staff, and one of the staff recorded him and gave it to Project Veritas, saying, this is just the beginning.
When he says we're focused on one account, he's talking about Donald Trump.
Listen to what he has to say.
We are focused on one account right now, but this is going to be much bigger than just one account.
And it's going to go on for much longer than just this day, this week, the next few weeks.
It's going to go on beyond the inauguration.
We have to expect that.
We have to be ready for that.
So the focus is certainly on this account and how it ties to real-world violence, but also, I think, much longer term around how these dynamics play out over time.
I don't believe this is going away anytime soon.
And the moves that we're making today around QAnon, for instance, is one such example of a much broader approach that we should be looking at and going deeper on.
So, I mean, this has been coming for a long time.
And I tweeted recently that it is spacious reasoning to say that these are private companies and they can service anyone they want.
Our right to free speech comes from God, and the government's job is to protect it.
And if a company, a corporation has become big enough to silence free speech, then the government has the right to stop them by any means necessary, and that's what has to happen.
So, you know, what they always say to you is, well, if you don't like it, you can start another, you can start your own company.
So they started Parlor to compete with Twitter, and they have now shut down Parlor, and they've done it in every possible way.
Parlor is suing, I think they're suing Amazon, aren't they?
They're suing Amazon, but they have just completely denied them.
They've cut them off the internet, essentially.
And so they say, yeah, you can compete, and then we'll destroy you, too.
So it's all totally phony.
You know, 2018, Tim Cook, the head of Apple, made a speech to the Anti-Defamation League.
So I wanted to bring this up to show you that this has been on these guys' minds for a long time and it's been happening.
I could not find, this was a big speech.
I could not find the speech.
It took me half an hour to track down the one clip I could get from it.
It wasn't even the clip I wanted.
But why do you think that happened?
Because, well, listen to it and you'll see why it happened.
We only have one message for those who seek to push hate, division, and violence.
You have no place on our platform.
You have no home here.
From the earliest days of iTunes to Apple Music today, we have always prohibited music with a message of white supremacy.
Why?
Because it's the right thing to do.
And as we showed this year, we won't give a platform to violent conspiracy theorists on the App Store.
Why?
Because it's the right thing to do.
My friends, if we can't be clear on moral questions like these, then we've got big problems.
So why they take it down?
Because it's the wrong thing to do, because he's this billionaire head of a corporation saying, oh, I decide what hate is.
You know, you're hateful.
It's like Oprah Winfrey with her cars.
You're hateful and you're hateful.
And yes, if you think a man can't become a woman, that's hateful.
And if you think if you're a Catholic and you think that homosexuality is a sin, you're hateful.
I decide because I am a billionaire owner of a corporation, head of a corporation.
And when you're a billionaire, then you can decide what's hateful.
That's the way the First Amendment dies.
This guy sitting like, you know, some kind of French king sitting around just declaring which of us is hateful.
And we know the left.
We know they think everything is hateful.
And we know they play gotcha games with us.
Oh, you said this once.
They don't judge.
It's not like they judge a person by his entire philosophy.
Today is Ben Shapiro's birthday.
Happy birthday, Ben.
They're attacking him and they throw up something he said.
First of all, a lot of stuff he said when he was like 19 years old.
But they throw up something he said here, something he said there.
And they say, oh, well, that's racist and this is racist.
But, you know, I know Ben pretty well.
He's not a racist.
He's just not.
So who is to decide?
They set the rules.
You know, today, one of the, I tweeted saying that Ben is not a racist.
People started, of course, the left started throwing up these examples of things they thought were racist.
And one of them was a video the Daily Wire put up on Columbus Day many years ago.
And it was teasing the people who say it was bad that Columbus discovered America because of the poor Native Americans.
And they were making jokes about Native Americans being primitives while the Europeans brought all this civilization and all this.
It was a funny, you know, satirical video.
Now, neither Ben nor I had anything to do with that video.
Ben was on vacation when it went up.
When he came back when he saw it, he ordered it taken down and he apologized for it because he thought it was racist.
I also had nothing to do with that video and frankly wouldn't have made the video for complicated reasons, but I wouldn't have made the video.
But I disagreed with Ben strongly then and now.
I disagreed with him because I don't think we should let the left set the terms of anything and I think we should be allowed to make stupid sophomoric jokes about even race.
That's what I think.
I think friends make jokes about one another, especially guy friends.
You know, guy friends make jokes about one another.
If we're all going to live in this big country together, we've got to be able to make jokes about one another without being canceled.
And this is a terrible thing the left has done for us.
So they seize on that, an incident they know nothing about, and they say, oh, you're a racist, you're hateful.
And that can get Ben canceled.
That can get people canceled because Tim Cook is in charge.
You're hateful.
I decide, I'm the corporate king.
I decide what's hateful.
And then, you know, they also just lie.
Jack Dorsey is a guy.
I mean, I would never turn my back on this guy.
I tell you, he is just this kind of plausible deadpan.
You know, I'm going to tell you what's what.
And so he puts out a series of tweets saying, I do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban Donald Trump from Twitter or how we got here.
After a clear warning, we take this action.
We made a decision with the best information based on threats to physical safety, both on and off Twitter.
But here's David Marcus writing in the New York Post: Twitter hosts a kill Trump hashtag.
In all of the glorious English language, there's no clearer, plainer, or shorter way to call for violence than the word kill, followed by someone's name.
But there it is.
One of these tweets reads, Arrest Trump, not enough to kill Trump.
And this isn't new.
Back in June, the hashtag assassinate Trump was bouncing around the website with gems like someone take this clown out now.
That tweet is still up.
They are lying.
While Trump's alleged calls for violence, in fact, he explicitly called for peaceful protest, they got him banned.
The Ayatollah Khomeini tweeted this in November.
Palestine will be free while the fake Zionist regime will perish.
There's no doubt about this.
So encouraging a completely legal challenge to election results gets our president banned.
But the leader of Iran's brutal state threatening to wipe out Israel is no problem at all.
So I don't know about you, but one thing that really has helped me when we've been locked down, or at least in the house more, especially when my wife is out of town, are books.
I am having books delivered to my door, one after another after another.
I love them.
So much is happening there, and it's never been more important to be able to see who's there or what's happening because you do not want some literate thief coming and stealing your books.
It's a perfect time to upgrade your doorstep with a ring video doorbell.
Those literate thieves are everywhere.
And with Ring, you can see and speak to whoever is at the door from anywhere right on your phone.
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You can keep those packages and deliveries safe.
With motion detection, you'll get notified even if they don't ring the doorbell.
If someone stops by or something's going on, Ring lets you know.
I really do love having a ring security around the house.
It just helps me to keep an eye on everything.
And right now, you can get a special offer on the Ring Welcome Kit at ring.com/slash Claven.
It comes with Ring's video doorbell free and Chime Pro, the perfect way to upgrade your front door and start your Ring experience.
So go to ring.com/slash Claven.
That's ring.com/slash, how do you spell it?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no E's in Claven.
I just make it look this incredibly easy.
It just goes beyond this.
It's so dishonest.
It's so wrong.
And by the way, it's also dangerous because Donald Trump was elected because people were unheard.
When I say they were committing suicide, they were committing suicide at such rates in the Midwest, a lot of white people doing it too, committing suicide because they were in despair, because Obama didn't even know they were there.
So many dying deaths of despair that the actual life expectancy of Americans, 300, over 300 million Americans, it went down.
That's how many people were dying deaths of despair and they didn't even know it.
They were there.
So they were angry, they were unheard.
They elected Donald Trump to make themselves heard and now they're going to silence Donald Trump.
What the hell do they think the reaction to that is going to be?
Where do they think that anger is going to go?
They think it's just going to disappear like a puff of smoke.
You know, I mean, it's not.
That's not what happens.
When you look back at where real violence and real tyranny arise, they arise when people, when they try to suppress opinions they don't like instead of facing those opinions and reasoning with them and talking and educating people against them.
So here's Jim Jordan in a congressional hearing talking about what social media has been doing, what Twitter has been doing, and it really just exposes the whole idea that these guys, these clowns, these mighty men of valor are going to make the decisions fairly about who can speak and who can't.
I'll just cut to the chase.
Big tech's out to get conservatives.
That's not a suspicion.
That's not a hunch.
That's a fact.
July 20th, 2020, Google removes the homepages of Breitbart in the Daily Caller.
Just last night, we learned Google has censored Breitbart so much traffic has declined 99%.
June 16th, 2020, Google threatens to demonetize and ban the Federalists.
April 19th, 2020, Google and YouTube announce a policy censoring the content that conflicts with recommendations of the World Health Organization.
June 29th, 2020, Amazon bans President Trump's account on Twitch after he raises concerns about defunding the police.
June 4th, 2020, Amazon bans a book critical of the coronavirus lockdowns written by a conservative commentator.
May 27, 2020.
Amazon Smile won't let you give to the Family Research Council and the Alliance Defense Fund, but you can give to Planned Parenthood.
That's pretty good proof of what we're talking about.
And by the way, it's you.
It's not just these outlets.
It's not just the Daily Wire.
It's not just outlets.
It's you.
It's everyone.
Here's an editorial in Forbes magazine saying, don't let the chronic liars cash in on their dishonesty.
There's an editorial in Forbes magazine.
Press secretaries like Joe Lockhart, Ari Fleischer, and Jay Carney, who left the White House with their reputations in various stages of intact, made millions taking their skills and credibilities to corporate America.
Trump's liars don't merit that same golden parachute.
Let it be known to the business world.
Hire any of Trump's fellow fabulous, and Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie.
We're going to scrutinize, double-check, investigate with the same skepticism we'd approach a Trump tweet.
Want to ensure the world's biggest business media brand approaches you as a potential funnel of disinformation, then hire away Forbes magazine, a powerful magazine in the business world, threatening to destroy any company that hires people that worked for Trump.
And what about people who voted for Trump?
What about people who supported Trump?
What about people who have a Trump sign outside their door?
Hiring Trump's Team Risks Disinfo Scrutiny00:10:03
What are they going to do when they hire them?
And that's only part of the way the corporate world is browbeating people and giving them their racist anti-whiteness training and telling them that they have to believe that a man is a woman and what they have to believe about sexuality.
So what are we going to do?
This is the question.
Well, there's an excellent, excellent editorial in the Wall Street Journal called Save the Constitution from Big Tech.
It was by a guy named Vivek Ramaswamy and Jed Rubenfeld.
Ramaswamy is founder and CEO of Roivant Sciences and author of the forthcoming book, Woke Inc.
Mr. Rubenfeld is a constitutional scholar and has advised parties who are litigating or may litigate against Google and Facebook.
And what he says essentially, what they say essentially is this.
The Supreme Court has held that the government may not induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.
So just because you are a private company, if you can be shown to be acting even with the support of the government, you can be accused of violating the Constitution.
Now don't forget, it's government.
It's government that created Big Tech with Section 230 that gave them the right to silence speech and yet not be sued like a publisher, silence speech like a publisher can, but not be sued like a publisher can.
That's the rub.
Government created them.
Government can take it away.
There is absolutely no reason we can't fight these guys in court.
We have to fight these guys in court and win.
It's not really antitrust, although we now see there's no way we can compete with them.
There's no way they will allow us to compete.
They will crush us before we compete.
Parlor has proved that.
They are silencing free speech.
They're damaging the Constitution.
They are taking away the rights that were given to you by Almighty God.
And as big a man as Tim Cook thinks he is, he is not that big.
So this battle can definitely be won.
I think these guys have way overstepped, way overstepped.
And I think we have to take it to them and crush them.
And, you know, boycotts may help.
We may have to leave.
I'm certainly getting ready to leave Twitter.
I don't go on that much anyway, but I just feel like they're going to treat people like this.
I don't want to be any part of them.
But we have to take this to court.
We have to support every court case.
And I'm absolutely certain we can destroy them, and we should.
So let's say your car is broken, right?
You need a part for your car.
You can get in your car, pretend to drive to the auto shop, pretend to ask the guy there a question about auto parts that he doesn't know the answer to that he has to look at in a computer and then pretend that your car works.
Or, or you could say, rockauto.com.
Just saying that is so much fun that your car may start instantaneously.
Just the minute you say rockauto.com, the car goes, boom, ah, yes, I can drive again.
Or, or you can go on their computer site and get the part you need.
They always offer the lowest prices possible rather than changing prices based on what the market will bear, like airlines do.
Why spend up to twice as much for the same parts?
Why pretend to drive to a pretend place and pretend to get parts when you can go on rockauto.com and get to say rockauto.com plus get the part you need for a great, great price.
So go to rockauto.com right now and see all the parts available for your car or truck and write clavin in there.
How did you hear about us box so they know we sent you and you want to say it like they want to say clavin and then you want to spell it K-L-A-V-A-N.
The girls love this, by the way.
It'll be great.
Breaking news.
Donald Trump becomes the first cast member of The Apprentice to be impeached twice.
Yeah, I enjoyed, I really enjoyed the biennial impeachment of the president, like every two years.
I think we should make it an annual event.
You know, it should be like a big theater.
We should have like a VW come out and like all the congressmen come out and with big shoes and red wigs and everything and keep pouring out of the Volkswagen into the Capitol Rotunda and start the circus of impeaching the president.
You know, it's all nonsense.
It's total nonsense.
And it was really an unpatriotic thing to do.
And the reason I say it was an unpatriotic, because they were making these speeches.
Oh my gosh, these guys think at this point that impeachment is a historic event when it's really just Tuesday.
You know, it's like, what are we doing today?
Oh, yeah, let's impeach the president, I guess.
So they're making these big patriotic speeches, but it was an incredibly unpatriotic thing to do.
First, I don't even know if it's constitutional because he's going to be out of office before they can try him in the Senate.
Remember, you get impeached in the House and then you get tried in the Senate.
And it says in the Constitution, he can be removed from office by impeachment.
So impeachment is clearly, to me, at least, I'm not a lawyer, but to me, it seems like a vehicle for taking a guy out of office.
He's going to already be out of office.
So what do they accomplish?
They accomplish nothing.
They parade themselves.
You know, the big thing is, is that Nancy Pelosi just won an election on pure hate.
We all know, I mean, this is one of the reasons people think the election was stolen.
We all know 80 million people didn't vote for Joe Biden because they woke up one morning and think, you know, who would make a great president?
That house plant over there, you know?
I think we need, I support that house plant because when he talks, absolute dribble comes out of his mouth.
And that's what we need in the white house.
You know, that's how Joe Biden got elected.
Joe Biden got elected because people hated Donald Trump.
They were angry at him.
They thought he behaved badly.
He often did behave badly.
And Nancy Pelosi stoked that like the master politics.
She's nuts, but she's also a master politician.
She stoked it.
So that, they just keep doing that.
They just keep doing it.
And what do they think they're going to get?
They've already had violence.
These guys are just waiting for the violence, I guess, because they're waiting to crack down on the violence.
They're waiting for more excuses to outlaw constitutional conservatism.
That's obviously the target.
It was an embarrassment.
I thought the entire thing was an embarrassment.
Let's just play a little bit.
We'll play Barbara Jean Lee.
She's the congressman from California.
And of course, they immediately made it about racism.
I don't know what it had to do with racism.
It had to do with the fact that they thought the vote was being stolen.
Here's Barbara Lee.
On January 6th, Donald Trump incited his white nationalist supporters to initiate an attempted coup against the heart of our democracy, the United States Capitol.
This heinous act of domestic terrorism demands that Congress act to remove this president.
Donald Trump has been and remains a threat to our national security and our democracy and wholly unfit to serve as president.
He and his supporters must be held accountable for inciting violence against the government of the United States.
Congress must act immediately to remove this clear and present danger to our country.
It's time to impeach Donald Trump again.
Inciting violence.
The Democrats would never do that.
Play Cut 12.
I just don't even know why there aren't uprisings all over the country and maybe there will be.
People need to start taking to the streets.
This is a dictator.
You know, there needs to be unrest in the streets for as long as there's unrest in our lives.
Enemies of the state.
Show me where it says that protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful.
Do something about your dad's immigration practices, you feckless.
They go low, we kill.
How do you resist the temptation to run up and bring her neck?
Biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right.
I thought he should have punched him in the face.
I said, even if he lost, he insulted your wife.
He came on the escalator and called Mexicans rapists and murders.
He said, well, what do you think I should have done?
I said, I think you should have punched him in the face and then gotten out of the race.
He would have been a hero.
I'd like to punch him in the face.
I said, if we were in high school, I'd take you behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.
Punch some people in the face.
You know, you remember this story?
I think it was a Twilight Zone episode or maybe the New Twilight Zone.
I wish I could remember who wrote it.
But it was the idea that you get a button and they give you a million dollars to press the button and it'll kill someone you don't know.
That was the catch.
That was the trick of the story.
And they bring the lady the button and they need the money.
They're desperate for the money.
And they say, if you press that button, it'll kill someone you don't know, but we'll give you a million dollars.
And ultimately, she succumbs to temptation.
She presses the button.
The door opens.
It's the same guy who brought the button.
He takes it back and she says, well, who will you give it to next?
And he says, don't worry, we're going to give it to someone you don't know.
And obviously, now she's in danger.
That's what this is like.
This is like, you know, oh, they burned down a federal police building in Oregon.
They burned down your business.
They killed people in other states, but it's someone you don't know.
Then when they show up in Washington, suddenly, suddenly, political violence is a big, big problem.
It is just embarrassing.
It is just embarrassing.
So when I'm lying awake at night, not going to sleep, I love to be lying on my pillow, which is a my pillow.
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And best of all, they're made in the USA.
I'm not sure that's best of all.
One of the best things about them is they're made by Mike Lindell and the left hates that guy.
So while I'm lying awake, I get to be filled with the satisfaction of lying on Mike Lindell's My Pillow, which the left hates.
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Bring Me the Person00:04:44
It's not like the left would ever, when these riots were going on in other places besides Washington, it's not like the left would ever, you know, minimize them or pretend they weren't happening like in Cut 6.
I want to be clear in how I characterize this.
This is mostly a protest.
It is not, generally speaking, unrolling.
What you're seeing behind me is one of multiple locations that have been burning in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
That ain't a riot, what we're seeing right now in Minneapolis.
You know, Brooke, I think this is a march, really.
As they're coming off, it's peaceful.
They're saying peaceful protests.
People are risking COVID to explain to this country that we're fed up.
Thank goodness for the looters, man.
Any reasonable person would say we shouldn't be destroying other people's property, but these are not reasonable times.
And please, show me where it says that protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful.
The First Amendment.
Oh, man.
You know, like, the left would never do anything like, for instance, for instance, romanticize a violent Iranian terrorist who had murdered American soldiers simply because it was Trump who killed him instead of Barack Obama.
They would never do that like in Cut Five.
Khazim Suleimani was no ordinary general.
The U.S. officially classified him as a terrorist, but in Iran, he was a national hero.
He was a war hero.
He's regarded as personally incredibly brave.
The troops love him.
I was trying to think of somebody and I was thinking of de Gaulle.
Smart, charismatic, ruthless, strategic, and bold.
His power made Iranians proud.
You know, the left has been romanticizing violence really since the beginning.
In fact, I'll talk about that a little bit later, why they do that and why they feel justified in doing it.
But certainly, you know, later on, we're going to have a very talented writer, Helen Andrews, who's going to come on.
We're going to talk to her about her new book, Boomers.
But she had a piece, just by coincidence, she had a piece, I don't know, a day or two ago in the Wall Street Journal talking about Aaron Sorkin's film about the Chicago 7 that's on Netflix.
And the Chicago 7, I remember this was in 68 when they helped instigate the riots outside the Democratic Convention.
And they were made into these heroes.
They were made into heroes, and they caused all this violence.
They were prosecuted and they were brought to justice, many of them, or some of them.
But this has been, the left has been romanticizing this kind of violence and elevating this kind of violence from the beginning.
And you know, so much of this, so much of what's happened in this country over the past year has to do with the lockdown.
It has to do with the flu and the lockdown.
And that's an important thing to remember when you start to despair and you start to think that everything is unraveling.
Everything is unraveling because people have had their jobs stolen away.
They've been locked away in their apartments.
They've been isolated.
Their friends and relatives have died.
And everybody is incredibly angry.
And this is true of the left too, as well as the right.
The violence has sprung up because of this malfeasance of our feckless government.
Our government is bad.
We have a bad government.
The government does not do anything.
And the state governments are also bad.
So today or yesterday, a new report comes out saying the lockdowns didn't work.
And Andrew Cuomo, Mr. Lockdown, I just got back from New York.
I was in New York for Christmas and the place is locked down.
Andrew Cuomo says, oh, we've got to open these.
You know, this is hurting business.
We've got to open these restaurants.
What is going on, Laurie?
What's her name?
Lightfoot in Chicago?
She's saying the same thing.
Oh, what is happening in my city?
Who has done?
Bring me the person responsible for locking down the economy.
And we're supposed to go like, wow, what a coincidence.
Just before Joe Biden takes office, the economy is going to come back.
That's amazing.
What an amazing coincidence.
That's just, you know, it's so wonderful.
So look, the violence that we see and the bad behavior of Donald Trump, who has also acted badly, as I said, and the bad behavior on the left, this is a failure of the governing class.
This is not your fault or my fault.
The people have acted well.
We were asked to take 15 days to slow the spread.
And a year later, when they realized they could get at Donald Trump if they increased the misery and increase the crisis, people are being violent on both sides.
And the left has romanticized the violence of their leftist pals.
And now we're supposed to reel in shock and censor and destroy the First Amendment because the right can be violent too.
And of course, the right can be violent too.
This calls upon us, the people, to behave well because the governing class has deserted us and failed us at every single turn.
Violence And Misery00:14:46
When it comes to getting or staying in shape, nothing feels as good as that feeling of accomplishment.
That's what the copy says.
But the truth is nothing feels as good as when it stops.
And what I love stopping doing is riding on my echelon bike because actually echelon is lots of fun.
I really, I have one.
It is great.
It hooks up to your device and so you can see trainers there.
You can get them on recording or they'll be there live.
They're all so incredibly cheerful as they're driving your body into the ground.
I don't know what is the matter with this.
Maybe it's a sadist thing.
I don't know.
But they're actually just a lot of fun and they can really keep you going, inspire you.
They do.
They inspire you and keep you going.
Echelon gives you fun and challenging workouts from the comfort of home.
They've got a lot of different devices.
I have the bike, but they have fitness mirrors, rowing machines, the Echelon Stride Smart treadmill.
Doesn't matter what your favorite fitness activity, Echelon gives you a fun and challenging workout.
They have world-class instructors, and they're a lot cheaper, a lot more affordable than the other brand.
So go to echelonfit.com slash Clavin.
You know, we got to talk to the ad agency here because they spell echelon.
They say how to spell echelon.
It's E-C-H-E-L-O-N.
Who doesn't know how to spell echelon?
It's echelonfit.com slash Clavin.
Nobody knows it's Clavin.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no E's in Clavin.
So now that we have a little bit more time to talk on this show, one of the luxuries of it is I want to talk more about the culture.
And I want to talk about the culture in a different way, I think, than conservatives usually talk about the culture.
Obviously, if you were watching, I hope you were watching last night when we premiered Runhide Fight, our first Daily Wire's first foray into film, and we're hoping to do a lot more of that moving forward.
and I'm hoping to be a big part of that because it's just so important to me, to Jeremy, to Ben, to transform the culture.
That is what we started out to do.
And really, in some ways, we all know that politics is, you know, when we say politics is downstream from culture, it doesn't necessarily mean that what happens in the culture changes politics.
It means we have to discuss how culture works.
You know, T.S. Eliot, there's a wonderful line by a great poet, T.S. Eliot, said, the great poet in writing himself writes his time.
In other words, that just by a great poet when he perceives his own experience and when he perceives his own vision of that experience and puts it down on paper, you get the entire age that he's living in.
And when you get the age encapsulated in culture, it helps you to understand the culture, but it also guides the way you think about the culture, all of us, the way we think about the culture.
And just to give you an example, superhero movies have become so exciting, so popular that they really are the movie business at this point.
There is no movie business without superhero stories.
And I really do suspect, and I'll talk about this another time at length, but I really do suspect that superhero movies are a way of imagining a transhuman future that could, in fact, be coming down the pike.
And it's one of the things that I think people are thinking about.
And so it tells us something about our technological culture and the way we envision our humanity in good ways and in bad ways.
And so what I want to do is I want to look at certain works of culture, not as, oh, here's the message that they gave and the message was good or bad.
I always think that that's a tremendously shallow way actually to look at a work of art.
Works of art do have themes and they do have messages of a kind sometimes and some of them are actually just political propaganda.
Even good works of art like 1984 can be political propaganda and all of that is worth talking about.
But one of the things that they really tell us is they tell us about the time that the work of art was made.
They encapsulate a vision of the time in which the work of art was made.
And if the work of art is enough of a work of genius, if it's smart enough, if it's beautiful enough, they also are predictive.
A great poet is not just a cultural explainer, but he's also a seer.
Because when you explain the time brilliantly, you can see everything that's implied in the time and you can start to see the future.
It is a bizarre thing.
My favorite example is always Hamlet.
In Hamlet, I believe that Hamlet is a poem about the Reformation.
Hamlet goes to Wittgenstein, which is where Luther started the Reformation.
And he can't figure out what's real and what's not, what's good and what's bad, what's true and what's not true.
And I believe that what Shakespeare was saying is now that the authority of the church to determine spiritual reality is gone, we are going to run into these problems of who am I?
What is my soul?
What's real?
What's good?
What's bad?
And in the famous mad scene in Hamlet, Hamlet comes out pretending to be mad, but it's a question of whether he's pretending to be what he really is.
That's the question that the scene kind of puts forward.
And he says a lot of things that echo postmodernism.
So Polonius asks him, what are you reading?
And he says, words, words, words, which is a famous postmodern deconstructionist idea that words are devoid of true meaning and they are actually instruments of power.
He says, nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
So that's moral relativism, which is an old and ancient idea, but came back with the death of the church's monopoly on reality.
He says, I could be king of infinite space.
I can't remember the line, but I could be a king of infinite space if I didn't have bad dreams.
So you even get a sense of Freudian psychology coming down the pike.
So Shakespeare was so brilliant that when he described his time, the 17th and 16th century, he was actually describing our time as well.
He was predicting our time.
So I want to look at a couple of things.
The last really great moment in American culture, which now is trash.
Our culture now is absolute trash.
It is broken just like every other aspect of our country right now.
Our music is trash.
Our television show is becoming trash.
Movies are trash.
Books are non-existent.
But the last great film, the last great blow-up of American culture was the Golden Age of Television, which lasted from about 2000 to about 2010.
And before I look at that, I want to look at what I think is the last great American movie.
And when I say the last great American movie, I mean the last American movie that would be listed on a list of 50 great American movies was The Godfather.
Since then, there have been good movies.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a good movie.
But the last truly great work of art film, I think, is The Godfather.
And The Godfather had a really interesting take on what was going to happen to the country.
It was not just examining the moment and not just examining the past moment when it takes place, but it was also predictive of what was coming down the pike.
This story revolves around a kind of old-fashioned Don, Marlon Brando, plays Don Corleone, who refuses to take on drugs because he thinks they're bad for people.
And they have a great meeting of the five families, the five mafia families, and this fellow, I think this is Barzini, is that his name?
He comes in and makes the case that, no, Marlon Brando has to help the other families deal in drugs.
And here's what he says.
Times have changed.
It's not like the old days, where we can do anything we want.
A refusal is not the act of a friend.
If Don Carleone had all the judges and the politicians in New York, then he must share them.
All he loved is youth.
He must let us draw the water from the well.
Certainly he can present a bill for such services.
After all, we are not communists.
That's a wonderful scene because the value there is we're not communists, we are capitalists, so he can pay, he can take money for delivering his corrupt judges.
But the fact is that the world is now a very corrupt place where all the authorities are in the hands of the mobsters.
And remember, he starts by saying this is not the old days.
We can no longer do what we want.
And the end result, of course, is a famous scene where Michael Corleone, the son, is at a baptism while he's killing his enemies.
He'll just play this MOS, play it without sound in the background.
He's killing his enemies while he is agreeing that he is going to be a faithful follower of Christ.
And it ends with a police officer, a mobster dressed as a police officer, killing guys and finally killing, I think it's Barzini himself, on the steps in a scene that is reminiscent of a mobster scene in a Jimmy Cagney movie where Jimmy Cagney is killed by a cop on a flight of steps.
Everything has been turned around.
The Christian agreement to be a follower of Christ has become killing your enemies instead of loving your enemies.
And the cops are now the mobsters and the mobsters are indistinguishable from the cops.
So everything has been turned around.
So the two themes there are things are not what they used to be and the good times are gone, the old times are gone, and that our only value left is money, is capitalism.
And that is reiterated in The Sopranos in The Golden Age of TV, which really was one of the great shows of the golden age of TV, when Tony Soprano, the mobster boss, comes to the psychiatrist and complains that he's having panic attacks.
It's good to be in something from the ground floor.
I came too late for that.
I know.
But lately, I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end.
The best is over.
Many Americans, I think, feel that way.
I think about my father.
He never reached the heights like me.
But in a lot of ways, he had it better.
He had his people.
They had their standards.
They had pride.
Today, what do we got?
So, this idea, this memory of the good old days of being a cowboy, essentially, they're talking about, when he talks about we've missed the best of times, he's talking about something that is more important to men than it is to women.
He's talking about the death of the time when men had a large scope of action in the wilderness.
That's why we love cowboy movies or used to love cowboy movies.
In space, when we went into space, there was an idea that we were still explorers, still going to the next new place.
The space program has virtually ended.
Donald Trump was kind of bringing it back.
And this idea that the best of times is over is one that deeply affects men.
And if you look at the golden age of television, it's all about men becoming corrupt.
Almost all the shows are about men becoming corrupt.
The sopranos, the shield, breaking bad.
And if you remember, breaking bad begins with this little man, Walter White, whose wife occasionally gives him some sexual favor offhandedly, so to speak.
I'm making a pun there.
On his birthday, he is bullied by his boss.
He is a failure in his profession.
He is not a man.
And then, of course, he gets cancer and he's going to die.
And in order to support his family, he becomes a meth dealer.
And he becomes a huge gangster and a killer and a murderer.
He just becomes a terrible, terrible person, but he becomes a man.
And that is one of the reasons I think gangster stories are so appealing to Americans: they bring back an idea of kingship, of knights, of being able to take full action.
It's the idea that when might made right, as it did in the cowboy era, as it did in the Knights in Armor era, and as it does in the imagination of mobsters, but he comes back, and in order to become a man, in order to take the kind of action scope, he has to become evil.
And his excuse in the end is capitalism.
His wife tells him to go to the police and he makes this famous speech.
Who is it you think you see?
Do you know how much I make a year?
I mean, even if I told you, you wouldn't believe it.
Do you know what would happen if I suddenly decided to stop going into work?
A business big enough that it could be listed on the NASDAQ goes belly up, disappears.
It ceases to exist without me.
No, you clearly don't know who you're talking to, so let me clue you in.
I am not in danger, Skylar.
I am the danger.
A guy opens his door and gets shot, and you think that of me?
No.
I am the one who knocks.
That is a great piece of writing, by the way.
It's just a terrific piece of writing and a great speech.
But that is the expression of manhood expressed through capitalism.
That's what it is.
If you destroy me, if I go to the police, a business that could be listed in NASDAQ, mainly killing people through putting in sales and being a mobster, goes out of business.
All those people unemployed.
It's clear Ayn Rand language.
It explains to you why socialism is so appealing to young people.
The reason socialism is so appealing to young people is that it comes with a value system packed inside it.
The very economic system has a value system packed inside it that we all should share, that we all should be equal, good values, values we love, that we should all have the, you know, nobody should be so powerful that he's above anyone else.
What's the problem with that value system?
The problem with that value system is that it is enforced by the state.
The state takes the place of God.
And the idea that the state, Marx's idea was that the state would vanish, but of course that's never going to happen.
The idea that the people who have got their greedy fingers on power are going to let that power go is absurd.
So the value system, even though it has good values in it, you know, sharing and equality and all that, never ever works and only becomes an atrocity.
The answer, of course, is a free market, but a free market with values.
And that is what we're going to talk about next.
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False Testimony00:12:03
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So this brings us back to our old friend, Uncle God, who I told you I wanted to talk about more because I think it is at the core of everything.
I think it is the moment, this moment is defined by our unbelief, and I think that is defined by the materialism that follows it.
And the reason I go to Christianity is not just because I'm a Christian.
It is in part because I'm a Christian and after 50 years of thought came to the conclusion that Christianity was the truth and the only truth about God.
It's not the only truth about God.
It is the whole truth about God.
There are other truths in other religions, but the whole truth is that those religions are only right insofar as they agree with Christianity.
But because this is a culture utterly formed by Christianity, everything we think, monogamy, the fact that women have rights, the fact that we look at women as co-human beings in the world, that comes from Christianity.
It did not happen before.
It is only something that the church brought to bear.
The idea of chivalry, the idea that men should use their strength in the service of women, that comes from Christianity.
The idea that both partners in a marriage should be true to one another, should be faithful to one another, not just the woman.
That comes from Christianity.
That comes from the church.
So much of what we think, just, you know, I once saw Bill Maher say, well, right and wrong is just common sense.
It's not just common sense.
We are all shaped in this image, and there's no way to bring it down without becoming evil.
There's no way to bring it down.
See, that's what the left thinks.
The left thinks, oh, yeah, we can get rid of the Jesus stuff, and we'll just invent our own morality.
And I'll talk another time about why that's not going to work.
But the fact is, these are the founding values of the country.
We cannot, of the culture.
We cannot get rid of them without getting rid of the culture.
We cannot get rid of the culture without chaos come again.
And on top of all that, because the values are true and right, we can't get rid of them without destroying ourselves and becoming evil.
And again, you know, I mentioned before that when I tweeted out that our free speech rights come from God, people on Twitter said what I think is the ultimate half-smart thing to say.
They said, well, once you mention God, your argument is illegitimate because now I have to be a believer.
And if I'm not a believer, it's not true.
But that's not true of America, because in America, our founding axiom is we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights.
So that tells us something.
One, we have a creator, and two, the creator has a nature.
He did something.
He endowed us with rights.
When I say an axiom, an axiom is an assertion that doesn't have to be proved, but because it proves everything else that comes after it.
Jefferson called these truths that are self-evident.
That's what an axiom is.
So once the left convinces you that you shouldn't be talking about God, that you're not sophisticated, you're not cool, you're not hip, you're not being fair, you're not being an American, if you start talking about God or making your arguments by God, they've won.
It's over.
The argument's over already.
And it doesn't mean you can cite the Bible to make a political argument.
You can't.
That's not right.
But you can say, no, this is the idea in the Constitution, in the Declaration, and in the Constitution, is that there is a God, that He created us in a certain way, and that that certain way includes our rights.
Once you get rid of that, once you get rid of that idea, you have no defense for your rights.
They knew it when they wrote the Declaration.
They know it now, and that's why they're trying to get rid of it.
That's why they are, it's why they want the default to be you can't speak about God in the public square.
That's why they transformed the idea of the separation of church and state, which is not in any of these documents.
It's just in a letter that Jefferson wrote, that they took the separation of church and state, which was supposed to protect the church from the state, not the state from the church.
It was not supposed to mean that we couldn't talk about God in the public square, that you couldn't teach God, because without God, without that idea of God, the Creator who endows us with rights, you have no argument for your rights.
That's why you hear now people like Yuval Harari saying rights are just a fiction.
They don't exist anywhere.
They're just an idea that we made up, and it's a fiction, like a novel.
But that's not true.
Fictions can be true or false, right?
A fiction either describes the world accurately or it describes the world inaccurately.
And in fact, we do and were made with rights.
So when we turn to the Bible and we ask what does God consider the prerequisite for morality, I always look at this one scene because obviously there are all these rules and regulations in the Old Testament and Leviticus.
And basically, Jesus came to put paid to those rules and to write God's law on your heart.
But that doesn't mean there are no rules.
I'm not an antinomian, you know, where I don't believe the law matters at all.
But there's one scene in the Bible where, and it's in all the synoptic gospels, that's Matthew, Mark, and Luke, not John, all the gospels that kind of hang together very tightly, where a rich man or a ruler comes to Jesus and he says, what must I do to inherit eternal life?
So it's a very direct question.
And Jesus says, you know the commandments.
You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not murder.
You shall not steal.
You shall not give false testimony.
Honor your father and mother.
And in the different versions, he sometimes says different things.
He sometimes says, in one of them, he says, love your neighbor as yourself.
And the scene goes on and there's other important things in it.
I'm not editing it for meaning, just for time.
So I want to talk about this one thing.
So it's really interesting.
The commandments that he doesn't mention are the religious commandments.
Don't take the Lord's name in vain.
You know, the Sabbath, honor the Sabbath day, and keep it holy.
He gives you what C.S. Lewis called the Tao, which is the universal truths, the universal morality.
Don't commit adultery.
Don't murder.
Don't steal.
Don't give false testimony.
Honor your father and mothers.
Essentially, people have the right to life.
They have the right to property, right?
Don't steal means people have the right to property.
If you own something, I can't take it.
And most of the others are about representing yourself as you are.
Adultery, false testimony.
Your word should mean something.
If you pledge to be faithful to your wife or your husband, be faithful.
If you give testimony, make sure that testimony is the truth.
When you open your mouth, your words should speak your heart and your heart should be true.
And honor your father and your mother, of course, is that you didn't come from nowhere, and you should honor the things, the places that you came from, the culture that you come from, and the traditions that you were given.
And the scene goes on, I'll talk about it another time.
So there are these rules, but there's also a lot of stuff in the Gospels that is a lot more amorphous than that.
And one of them is when Jesus is brought children to heal and to talk to, and the people say, well, don't bother, you know, the rabbi with children.
And he says, no, suffer the little children.
Let the little children come to me.
Don't forbid them because such is the kingdom of heaven made.
And later he says, I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
And that's what I want to talk about just for a couple of minutes, all right?
What does it mean to become like a child?
Why do I have to become like a child to enter the kingdom of heaven?
And a lot of people say, well, children are so innocent.
Those people have never met a child.
I mean, that's not children.
Children are ignorant, but they're not innocent.
They are full of all the desires and goals that other people have.
And, you know, they don't have the sexual desire, so there's a certain innocence there.
But obviously, they can be bullying.
They can be mean.
They can be cruel.
They're also annoying.
They are a lot of other things.
And you might say, well, have the faith of a child.
Have faith like a child.
But then what kind of faith is that?
Do you want to have a faith that has no intellectual component, where you never ask questions about your faith, where you never deepen your faith or express your doubts, then you're never going to get anywhere.
And your faith is going to become sclerotic.
It's going to become hardened.
And you won't be able to proceed in your faith.
But I think to understand this, you have to use a little bit of psychology on yourself.
If you look at yourself and you look at the things in yourself that are broken, maybe you drink too much.
Maybe you're a coward.
Maybe you keep going out with guys who abuse you.
Maybe you're addicted to porn.
Maybe, you know, there's just, you don't feel manly or womanly enough, whatever it is that is bothering you about yourself.
Any psychologist will kind of take you back to your childhood.
Why?
Because at your childhood, you are as close to being who you were meant to be as you will ever be again.
If there's one thing we all know, if one Christian truth we all know, whether we're Christians or not, we all know we are not who we're supposed to be, that we are supposed to be something better.
And when we think of who that better person is, we think back to our childhood and we think to the things that happened to us that made us worse, less than what we are.
So just take the example I gave of the girl who keeps going out with abusive men or marrying abusive husbands and probably can go back into her past, that is almost certain can go back into her past and find that the person she, the man she loved first, her father, was abusive to her.
I'm just giving an example, but that is a very typical thing that has happened.
I've seen that happen many, many times in my life.
She wanted love.
She wanted a man to protect her.
She wanted a man to take care of her and look after her.
And instead, she got abused.
And what happens when you suffer those traumas is that the desire for love and the desire for abuse get fused.
And so you find yourself going out with men, even if you don't mean to.
Even if you say, this time I'm going to get it right, you find yourself again and again doing the same thing, repeating the trauma.
If that woman could find in herself the child she originally was, the child that was as close to being who God made her to be as she ever was or will be again, and understand the innocence and beauty of the love that she was looking for, the desire to be cared for and nurtured by a man and have a man protect her and look after her and guide her into becoming herself and make space for her to become herself and be her full and complete self.
She will find a very beautiful person, the person that God made.
The damage that her father did, her earthly father did to her, is something that happened to her.
It's a damage that was taken on.
And her fusing of the abuse with the love just shows you that was a way for her to deal with the situation she was in.
If she can forgive that child, if she can forgive that child the damage and love the child who was made, the person that she was supposed to be, the person that God made her to be, she may find a path of healing, a path out of this pattern of repeating the trauma she has been doing.
Maybe she needs a therapist to help her do it.
Maybe she can do it just by the grace of God.
But it doesn't matter.
The point is she can recover the person that she was made to be and love the person that she was made to be and forgive the damage that was done to that person, forgive the effects of the damage, forgive the mistakes that that person made because of the damage.
If you can love yourself that way, if you can become a child again and love that child that you were made to be, then you start to understand what it means to love other people as yourself.
Then you start to understand what it means to forgive people the things that have happened to them and the damage they've taken on and the way they've handled with that damage and try to get back to the person as they were made.
And frequently, not all the time, but sometimes you find that if you can do that, you start to find that they will start to become a little bit more like the person they were made to be.
Forgiving Damaged Souls00:11:18
And the reason I bring that up right now is because it's almost impossible for us to talk to one another in this country now.
I mean, we just hate each other and we've got to stop.
You know, I told you, talked to you before about Ben Shapiro's birthday and all these people screaming at him and all these people saying, oh my God, he wrote an article in Politico, this is corruption and politico.
If you can't deal with a guy like Ben, you can't talk to anybody.
If you can't talk to people who are disagreeing with you, and this goes for us too, you can't talk to anybody.
And so there is this path forward, but it's a very difficult thing to do.
But it's a way of remembering where, how we can find, again, the values that we were given when we were made.
All right, let's move on.
All right, now and then for a change of pace, we like to bring on somebody intelligent and talented.
And so we're going to bring on Helen Andrews.
She is a senior editor at the American Conservative and the author of a new book, Boomers, The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster.
Helen, thank you for coming on.
Thanks for having me.
So, Helen, how can you look at a beautiful, grandfatherly, gentle face like mine and tell me that my generation destroyed the country?
Give me the thesis of your book.
I've only read the beginning of it, so I want to hear more.
Yeah, and I should say that this is not a boomer attacking book.
My own parents are boomers, and I love them to bitch.
They're wonderful.
So this doesn't mean that there are no good boomers.
But in many ways, millennials and boomers are natural enemies.
And how could we not be since the germ of the book began when I noticed how much harder things are today for my generation than they were for you guys?
I mean, gosh, I would have loved to have been able to graduate college without a mountain of college debt, to work off a semester's tuition, you know, a couple nights a week sweeping floors at the chemistry lab.
I would love to live in a family where you could achieve a middle-class standard of living on a one-inc-income household.
Whereas millennials feel like they're trapped in two-earner households and they both have to go into the workforce just to make ends meet.
All of the institutions that were functioning when you were growing up, when the boomers were growing up, the churches, the family, political parties, the education system, just did not get passed down to my generation in a state of good repair.
So the boomers across the board have been institution destroyers.
That's the germ of my case against them.
Oh, sure, sure.
So we destroyed a couple of institutions.
Come on.
You know, it's interesting.
You start out by saying you've modeled this book on The Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey, which was this attack on several Victorians.
One of the things that always has bothered me about that book, that book, not your book, but that book, was that Strachey was this kind of loosh, gay guy who like resisted, you know, going into the army and then went out and attacked like Florence Nightingale and Khartoum Gordon, who actually had performed great feats.
Now, the Boomer generation did produce this incredible moment of culture in the 60s and 70s while we were, you know, all right, destroying the institutions, fine.
But we did create the last great works of American art, you know, movies like The Godfather, this kind of, you know, Ken Kesey's work, the one flew over the cuckoo's nest.
This moment of real creativity.
And since then, it seems to me, the arts have died.
There is really nothing very interesting happening in the culture.
And there is a way in which I wonder when you attack the boomers, are you attacking them for destroying things or are you attacking them also because you have not managed to bring to the table the kind of insane creativity they brought?
I mean, to give them their due.
We have to give them their due.
And the genuine excellence of so much boomer culture has really been brought home to me recently.
I just had my first child.
And as anyone who's had a newborn in the house knows, you got to play them music.
Music is what soothes a little baby.
And when I go on Spotify to see what I'm going to play to soothe my little three-month-old, it's not pavement or indie bands like I was.
I'm not going to play him the dismemberment plan.
I'm going to play him Cat Stevens.
I'm going to throw on a little James Taylor, maybe a little Beatles.
That's what the music that I go to that I want to pass on.
So I got to admit, that is certainly true.
The Boomers created some great culture.
And that's what I discovered as I was writing this book.
I picked six baby boomers who I thought were especially representative of their generation.
And it wasn't the buffoons or the clowns or the villains even that I fastened on as being the most suitable subjects for this book.
It was the people whose very genius, whose very accomplishments led them to cause so much damage.
So the boomers have a lot to their credit, but in many ways, it's the fact that they were so accomplished that caused them to harm society as much as they did.
A less influential, a less genius generation would not have left as much of an imprint.
Well, okay, so give me an example.
You go after Camille Paglia.
Now, I remember Camille Paglia in the 80s, I guess it was, bringing out that book, Sexual Personae, and it just gripped the world.
And the left hated it.
The establishment left just hated that book.
And it was delightful.
It was delightful to watch some of their precious, especially feminist assumptions, which we all knew were wrong.
We knew they were wrong at the time, just get disassembled by this very brilliant woman.
Why is she so evil?
Oh, I remember reading Sexual Personae in college, and it was electrifying.
It's a brilliant book.
She's a brilliant mind.
And she's another case where it's a tragic and almost ironic harm that she's done.
Camille Paglia's number one accomplishment in her career in the 90s had nothing to do with her quite entertaining sallies against the PC scolds.
It was her elevation of pop culture.
Before she came along, you would never have seen, say, a university press publish a biography of a pop culture figure or somebody with a PhD in English and a professorship at a university write a paper on Madonna.
And it was Camille Paglia who said, no, pop culture and Hollywood is just as worthy a subject of academic inquiry as Milton or Shakespeare.
And in her case, that worked out very well because she had that grounding in the great books.
However, the consequence of Camille Paglia's elevation of pop culture as a worthy subject of academic inquiry has been a subsequent generation that does not have her grounding in the great books.
And pop culture is all that they know.
I see so many millennial academics of whom that is true.
They just do not have Paglia's erudition and education.
And that's a decline in standards that now the rest of us have to live with.
It really, it really is terrible.
I speak to English majors now who do not read Shakespeare.
And I think like if you haven't read Shakespeare and they give you a degree in English, they've really cheated you.
They've lied to you, essentially.
And you've read some obscure black or Puerto Rican author who may be very good.
It has nothing to do with that, but is not foundational to the culture that you're actually living in and the thoughts you actually think.
And that was a real mistake my generation made.
I saw it in action.
I saw it while it was happening.
And it really did deprive you of an education.
Obviously not you, but you probably worked very hard.
I mean, an education can still be hunted down if you try very hard, but they don't give you an education.
You know, just before we came on the air, we were chatting about Aaron Sorkin, and I was reminiscing that I saw Sorkin's first play.
I think it's called A Few Good Men.
Is that the one that became the Tom Cruise movie?
And it was a play.
Yeah, and he was unknown, but it was a hit play.
And I went to the play and I remember thinking, sitting in the theater about this unknown writer.
This is a very talented writer who is incredibly shallow.
This is an incredibly shallow man with an amazing gift for writing dialogue.
And he has played that into, made that into a fortune.
It's amazing.
So what's his, what evil deed has he committed?
What does he represent in the boomer generation's path of destruction?
Well, he brought that shallowness to a show called The West Wing, which is all well and good as entertainment, but it's a little bit troubling that people watched that show and then decided to go into politics.
A lot of people my age who are millennials decided to move to Washington, where I live, because they wanted to be West Wing characters.
So the shallowness of that show has sort of infected the entire city and our ruling class.
It's very disturbing the way that they see themselves as West Wing characters.
The irony is that there is one subject on which Aaron Sorkin is not at all shallow, on which he has deep, sincere, very thoughtful beliefs.
And that subject is the entertainment industry, the influence of television.
You'll notice that Aaron Sorkin has made four TV shows in his career.
Only one of them is about politics.
All of the other three, Sports Night, Studio 60, and the newsroom, are behind the scenes dramas about a TV show.
Because Aaron Sorkin has an almost grandiose sense of the moral heft of the dilemmas faced by TV show producers and actors and directors and writers, because that's the industry he knows best.
And he knows where its faults and vices and responsibilities lie.
And it's almost his tragedy that his audience keeps wanting him to write about politics.
You know, when he made Studio 60, everybody said, that's dumb.
Give us another political show.
And so he had to make the newsroom when really politics is not what gets Aaron Sorkin's blood moving.
It's TV.
And that's something where he actually does have something serious to say.
But what is the problem?
You know, if you said to me, oh, you wrote this TV show and it encouraged young people to go into politics, why would that be a bad thing?
Because in the West Wing, things always work out for the best.
And the characters are brilliant and technocratic and omnicompetent, and they have no faults, and situations always work out just as they're supposed to in a way that's not true to life.
And you can see it in individual plot lines.
Anyone who remembers the Clinton administration watching the first four seasons of the West Wing will be able to pick out plot lines that are ripped from the headlines, as they say on Law and Order.
But the difference is that the West Wing version of any plot always has a happier ending than the real one of the Clinton years.
And I think that's a distorting view of reality, if that's how you think things are in the real world.
Yeah, it is interesting how leftism thrives in places that don't have to test their ideas against reality like Hollywood and the Academy.
Brilliant But Flawless Characters00:06:11
It always seems like it's the people who actually have to go and build a business who suddenly think, you know, this doesn't really work so well.
One more, Steve Jobs, because Steve Jobs is a hero to many on the right and certainly a weirdly iconic figure because he took the place that used to be held by artists.
Steve Jobs replaced people like Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway, guys who used to be iconic artists just by making things.
What's the negative side of Steve Jobs?
It's funny comparison.
He's almost the last masculine hero Steve Jobs was.
Now, that's a very good way of thinking about him.
I wanted, actually, when I wrote the chapter, I set out not with the intention of attacking Steve Jobs, but with the intention of defending him against a charge that's often leveled against him that I thought was unfair.
And that charge is that his hippie persona was just an act.
You know, there are a lot of people who just don't have a lot of patience with his vegan diet and his John Lennon glasses and his pilgrimage to India, whatever that was all about, because those things genuinely did shape how Steve Jobs approached his company.
When he came on the scene, IBM was the typical computer company.
And it was, you know, any given computer in an office would be supervised by a priest-like cast of technicians.
And it was Steve Jobs who said, that's not right.
My vision for technology is one person, one computer.
I want computers to be in individual hands.
And I want it to be so easy to use that anybody could do it without reading a manual.
Because he believed that computers could liberate human creativity.
And it's a testament to his genius that the computer industry today looks the way it does because he succeeded.
One person, one computer is the model we still follow.
The problem came from his very success.
If you're a millennial, the fact that everyone's got a computer in their pocket doesn't or hasn't meant for you the liberation of human creativity.
What it's meant is an uberized economy and being trapped in a gig economy job rather than something more stable and long-term.
It means ubiquitous pornography.
It means addiction to video games.
So I think the ubiquity of smartphones from the millennial perspective has been very much a double-edged sword and maybe on net more bad than good.
I have to ask this last question.
You made a comparison that is very dear to my heart.
I made the exact same comparison a long time ago in a City Journal of my generation to the romantic generation, the English, really the English Romantic generation.
The comparison is almost uncanny if you take one as tragedy and one is farce maybe.
But they had the French Revolution and bliss was it in this time to be alive and to be young was very heaven.
We had the 60s and we were, you know, it was the age of Aquarius.
It was followed by in England by a conservative reaction in America by the Reagan generation.
And then even though they had that conservative reaction, the unfolding of rebellious and revolutionary thoughts continued.
And guys like Wordsworth, who said, you know, we kind of made a mistake following this French Revolution, a lot of people getting beheaded, they were excoriated.
I mean, Wordsworth was absolutely pummeled.
There are famous poems written about what a terrible guy he was when really he was obviously in the right.
However, however, at the end, and this is one of the reasons I never lose hope, at the end of the Romantic generation, which was a generation of radicalism and rebellion, you had the Victorian era, which I'm a big fan of.
I mean, it was a time, obviously, it was a troubled time, but it was a time of real reform, of genuine liberalization, and of England, the best of the European countries, becoming the master of the world.
Do you think there is an ending to this boomer, a happy ending possible, to this boomer destruction that we've brought upon you, where you can now use some of the stuff that we destroyed and some of the stuff that we created to build a better America and a new American century?
I wish I could hold out hope, but unfortunately, I'm pessimistic.
And I'll tell you why.
It's true that millennials have learned some lessons from the baby boomers.
We are in a perfect position to see the mistakes that the boomers have made and to realize that we need to make better choices than they did.
The problem is that the damage the boomers have done has been systemic.
Young millennials, we know, based on the boomers' example, that religion is not some dispensable thing as they treated it, but something vitally important in a culture and for an individual life.
But the boomers took over the Protestant mainline churches and have left them in a current state of terminal disrepair.
I mean, I'm not sure that some of the mainline churches are going to even make it out of the disrepair that the boomers have left them in.
So even young millennials who want to become more religious, turning to the churches, find them still in boomer hands and wrecked by the boomers in a way that's maybe not that easy to repair.
So even when we know we need to make better choices, sometimes those better choices are just no longer available thanks to the damage the boomers have done.
Wow.
Yeah, never ask a conservative if she has hope.
Helen, you're an excellent writer and obviously a very smart lady.
I hope you'll come back.
It's really interesting talking to you.
The book is called Boomers, The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster.
Helen Andrews, thank you very much.
I hope to see you again.
Thanks for having me.
All right.
We get to do this every week now, the mailbag.
Woo!
Yeah!
That's good.
I like that screen.
That's a good scream.
All right, from Isaac, dear master of baldness.
Marriage Rituals Conflict00:02:59
My girlfriend and I have been dating for two years.
The issue of marriage has come up.
I'm Christian.
She's Hindu.
Her parents suggested we have a Hindu wedding and a Christian wedding, but this poses serious issues.
In Hindu wedding, the groom and bride are married in front of idols.
My girlfriend and her family have not partaken in or recognized Gandharva marriage.
As a Christian, I do not want to perform rituals or engage in any form of idolatry that would violate the first two biblical commandments.
But when he went to the girl's parents, they asked a difficult question: how does this matter if my heart and intentions lie with Jesus?
The Bible is not only clear about not participating with a God who's not my God, but it can affect your children to the third and fourth generations.
Undoubtedly, God declared such a punishment to convey the magnitude of such an action.
No, this is a major problem.
You've got a major problem on your hands and you've got to solve it before you get married.
Obviously, you cannot participate in a ceremony that violates your personal beliefs.
So you have two, and it doesn't matter, your heart and your intentions are not at issue.
This is ceremonies and rituals have meaning.
You are expressing the meaning with your actions.
You cannot have a marriage in which that begins on those terms, especially because you may find that if you get married, you may find that you actually want to have sex with this woman.
You may find if you have sex with her, she suddenly gets pregnant, and then you will have children, and you're going to need to bring those children up in one religion or the other, or decide that you're going to bring them up in both, and you're going to have to be comfortable with that.
So you have to decide this issue now.
You have to decide it before you get married.
If it were I, I would tell my wife, I would say, look, I need you to become a Christian with me.
We need to be one thing.
That is what I would do.
And if she couldn't do it, I would have to really think about what's, if I were in your situation, that's what I would do.
That's not what you have to do.
There are other things you could do.
You could, for instance, have a long discussion about how you're going to raise your children, and then you can get married in a civil ceremony that violates neither one of your beliefs.
You haven't mentioned how your girlfriend feels about having a Christian wedding and whether that bothers her.
If it doesn't bother her, then maybe you should just do that.
Never mind.
Her parents aren't getting married.
You're getting married.
So I think that this is an issue you definitely need to solve now.
And personally, I think it would be the best thing would be if you were of the same religion.
And if she would, since you're so devoted to your religion, if she would join you in that religion, I think that would be the best thing.
Or, as I say, have a civil marriage and arrange some kind of patchwork way you're going to raise your children.
Whatever it is, you both have to be totally satisfied with it before you get married because this will tear you apart later on.
So you've got to decide it is a big deal.
Let's see.
Greetings, Lord Clavin, from Bryson.
The Question of Trump's Legacy00:03:33
Do you think Donald Trump's legacy is destroyed?
I've been a Michael Knowles-level Trump fan, but between his treatment of Mike Pence, not his, not Knowles' treatment, Trump's treatment of Mike Prince, his suppression of Republican support in Georgia, and his inflammatory rhetoric to his supporters, I'm very upset with his behavior over the last two months.
I know that I will not support him in the primaries in 2024 should he choose to run.
He's not going to run in 2024.
He'll be 78.
That's not going to happen.
So first of all, you've been listening to Michael Knowles.
You've got to deal with that.
That's the first thing you have to deal with.
Your life is not going to go right until you stop doing that.
But also, the question of Trump's legacy being destroyed.
Trump's legacy has been destroyed insofar as it's Trump, Trump's for now.
Trump really had a great presidency.
A friend of mine described him that he almost got out with his great presidency, but when he turned around, his dragon tail turned and destroyed everything behind him.
Trump really had a terrific presidency until COVID hit.
And even with COVID, he did spur on the development of a vaccine in miraculous record times.
Although he did make mistakes with COVID, everybody made mistakes with COVID.
He did do that.
So he really had a triumphant presidency.
The way all the things that you mentioned are indeed bad.
He behaved badly.
So his legacy is twofold.
One, because of his belligerence, because of the ugliness of his personality in some ways, the thuggishness of his personality, he actually broke the chains that bind us.
That's why they're coming back with this big shutdown in big tech.
That's why they're censoring us.
That's why they're panicking.
That's why they're trying to tag all of us with the violence that took place in the Capitol, because he did break the politically correct chains that bound us.
He broke that cage.
And as I've been telling you for four years, The very parts of him, the very parts of his nature that gave him the strength to do that, his belligerence, his pugilism, his crudeness, his sluggishness, all that stuff, which served its turn, in fact, made it so that he didn't get re-elected.
I told you it was going to happen.
It did happen.
But his legacy in time, his legacy will return.
In time, as he's forgotten, in time as history considers what he did, it is going to become very clear that he did a lot of really, really good things.
What he has done is he shamed himself.
And we have to stop the left from, you know, he behaved badly.
He does that.
He always did it.
He behaved badly.
And he behaved badly at a crucial moment.
And the results were tragic.
And that, you know, that's something you have to carry with you.
You have to carry that with you.
But he really had a wonderful one-term presidency.
And I think the things that he stood for and the things that he broke have to stood for and have to stay broken.
And I think this politically correct thing that he burst through was a gift to all of us.
I think we have to hold on to it as satraps like Tim Cook and Jack Boots Dorsey try to force them down our throats.
If America is going to stand, they have to fall.
If America is going to stand, those restrictions have to fall.
And if they do fall, that will be a legacy that was not destroyed.
And that will be the main, main victory of Donald Trump.
So it's a very complicated question.
It's a very interesting question.
But we have to remember, stand with the principles, not the man.
Put not your trust in princes or in any mortal man who cannot save.
Put your trust in the principles and put your trust in God.
And then, then we can win this fight.
We can.
And if we do, Donald Trump will get some of the credit and that'll be a good thing.
That's it.
Stand With Principles00:01:25
Long show.
Hey, that's really a long time to talk.
I hope you had a good time.
And I hope you will come back next Friday as we continue laughing our way through the fall of the Republic.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
is The Andrew Claven Show.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, basically wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also, remember to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show, the Matt Walsh Show, and the Michael Knoll Show.
Thanks for listening.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Our technical director is Austin Stevens.
Supervising producer, Mathis Glover.
Production Manager, Pavel Vidowski.
Edited by Danny D'AMico.
Lead audio mixer, Mike Cormina.
Animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Production coordinator, McKenna Waters.
And our production assistant is Jacob Falash.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production, Copyright Daily Wire, 2021.
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