Ep. 1015 – Unite or Die skewers Biden’s hollow "unity" rhetoric with satirical jabs at his divisive inaugural speech—mocking its exclusionary language and media hype—while framing progressive policies as threats to tradition, from climate mandates to girls’ sports. The episode ties cultural decay to Ross Douthat’s Decadent Society, linking stagnation to lost purpose, then pivots to ghosts, military service, and 2024 GOP hopefuls like Ben Sasse, dismissing riots as "spoiled brat" theatrics. Closing with January 6 blame-shifting, it ends by urging Christians to abandon compromised churches and trust God over politics, all while Biden funds global abortion—proving hypocrisy reigns. [Automatically generated summary]
Once again, this week, Americans were treated to the glorious spectacle of the almost entirely peaceful transition of power with just a minimum loss of human life.
Donald Trump ended his presidency and Joe Biden took office in a manner that brought to mind some of the most famous moments in American history, like the draft riots, the burning of Atlanta, and that time Joe Pesci's character shot the kid in the bar over nothing and then had to bury him in the cellar.
As the inspiring pageantry of democracy unfolded, citizens of this great nation looked on, standing side by side until separated by the police.
In his usual easygoing and graceful fashion, Donald Trump left a humorous note for his successor saying, quote, well, Punk, you got away with it, and I wish you a successful presidency for the next two weeks until Kamala slips the knife in, unquote.
Trump also didn't forget the delightful transition tradition of playing a prank on the new president.
Just as Bill Clinton's staff removed all the W's from the White House keyboards when George W. Bush took office, so Trump's people left a whoopee cushion full of sulfuric acid on the chair in the Oval Office and lit the fuse to the cache of explosives buried under the floorboards by QAnon during their guided tour of the White House basement late Tuesday night.
In a moving farewell address to the nation, Trump promised his supporters he would, quote, return in some form, possibly the form of the state-puffed marshmallow man.
He then flattened the Capitol building as he stomped off into the sunset.
The Biden inauguration took place before an empty mall meant to symbolize all the people who voted for Joe Biden because they really believed in him.
Biden chose to swear the oath of office with his hand on his personal copy of Goodnight Moon and made a stirring speech saying he planned to be the president of all Americans, whether they're easily manipulated women, men who think they're women, self-destructive blacks, or individuals with some hitherto unheard of sexual perversion that we all now have to pretend is not as repellent as everybody secretly knows it is.
Biden went on to say he hoped Americans could forget the past and come together because it would be very expensive to keep 25,000 National Guardsmen on duty to protect him for the next four years.
The media universally agreed that Biden's inaugural speech was the finest since Lincoln's, that Kamala Harris was a historic figure, that Joe Biden was a doctor, and all sorts of other crap like that.
In heaven, God greeted the historic event with a round of applause until he remembered he had the whole world in his hands.
So that's that then.
Dealing with Decency00:15:20
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I go hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped tipsy-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 with the celebrated vast right-wing conspiracy of Clavinon.
I hope you've enjoyed a clavinless week of utter destruction of everything we hold dear.
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We have one today from Art Lover who says, Clavin took one vacation and the entire country fell apart.
The Clavinless Abyss is real.
That's just true.
That fact-check true of the Claytonless Abyss is incredibly real.
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So I'm pretty sure that any conservative worth his salt can draw up a description of the worst version of the soon-to-be Kamala Harris administration.
And I'm sure a lot of what we fear will, in fact, come true.
But to be honest, that would not be what was keeping me up at night if I ever slept at night.
We lost an election, and that means bad leftist stuff will happen.
Democracy be like that.
Sometimes you own the libs, sometimes the libs own you.
If every time the other team scores a goal, you're going to cry about it and call it Armageddon, you're not going to be much use to anyone in the fight ahead.
That's not what bothers me.
What bothers me is not the destructive and even sometimes wicked idiocy of the political left.
What I'm worried about is the stranglehold big tech and the rest of corporate America has now put on the voices and minds of the ordinary Americans, censoring the president on social media, denying access to internet utilities to alternative voices like parlor, enforcing the racist mind slavery of wokeness on employees, and denying services to mainstream conservative thinkers while allowing every violent loudmouth on the left to freely have his say.
This is a massive threat to our First Amendment rights and our two-party system, and it's made all the worse by idiot conservatives who think a small cadre of billionaires should be allowed to gut the Constitution merely because they're private citizens, even though each one of them has more money and power than most of the governments on earth.
Maybe the worst thing about this situation is that it's going to call on all of us to be heroes if we love our freedom, which absolutely sucks because being a hero is actually different from being a thug in a mob or a big mouth on Gab or at the dinner table.
It means retaining your decency while risking some of your comforts and some of your status and maybe even some of your earnings to do the necessary thing.
All of you who have written to me to ask, what do I do when my boss forces me to attend a class in the hateful philosophy of critical race theory?
Or what do I do when my teacher threatens to fail my kid if he doesn't use the wrong pronoun?
Or what do I do when my facebook friends threaten to unfriend me?
Or my professor threatens to drop my grade if I don't pretend to toe the leftist line?
I hate to tell you the truth, but here it is.
If you love your freedom, you're going to have to resist and pay the price.
You don't have to be a fool.
You don't even have to speak the truth if you don't think you can risk it.
But at some point, if ordinary individuals don't at least refuse to lie, then the lies and the tyrants will win.
When we think about how our freedom came to us through Valley Forge and Gettysburg and Normandy, it's really not too much to ask that we say no from time to time to thugs like Jack Dorsey on Twitter and that woke dame in HR who wants you to rout on your coworkers if they make an off-color joke.
Mortal danger couldn't stop the birth of freedom.
The question now is will wealth and comfort smother it in its featherbed as we fear to lose our luxuries more than our forefathers feared to lose their lives.
It's a strange thing to be summoned not to battle, but simply to think and speak freely like true American women and men.
But our enemies are the very people who supply us with the meaningless stuff we love so much.
And we have no choice but to sacrifice even just a little if we want to save the country from the coming trial.
Let me just give you an example of what I'm talking about and why it's so dangerous.
Here is just a Grabian montage of what the media is saying about conservatives now that they finally chased Donald Trump out of office and have their guy installed in the White House.
This is cut 23.
If you voted for Trump, you voted for the person who the Klan supported.
You voted for the person who Nazis support.
You talked about al-Qaeda.
What has he done in terms of incitement, right?
That Osama bin Laden didn't do.
No external terrorists ever did this to us.
We've never worried like this, even after 9-11.
Each of these people should be shamed, and they're going to go back, you know, to the Olive Garden and to the holiday inn that they're staying at.
I wonder if you have thought through kind of how Republicans begin what someone on my team earlier today called debathification.
Look, I think the challenge is that the rot is from the grassroots all the way to the presidency.
So the rot is at every layer.
There are millions of Americans, almost all white, almost all Republicans, who somehow need to be deprogrammed.
They can't even open their mouths about unity.
Shut up about unity.
The way that we in the media speak about this is so important.
Twitter and Facebook aren't banning you because you're a conservative.
They're banning you because you suck.
Of course, you know, you can tell you, Saki, go to Olive Garden.
Like I'm proud.
They don't go to Olive Garden.
Please, please, not the Olive Garden.
It's a giveaway that you're a fascist.
I mean, if you're eating at some, you know, restaurant that people in New York and California don't use.
What I'm afraid of here, I mean, obviously, this is the whole thing that if you voted for Trump, you are now delegitimized.
And you're seeing this happen all over.
I mean, I'm seeing people who can't get personal insurance.
I'm seeing people who are in the midst of negotiating contracts and the contract, the person on the other end just dropped out because, oh my gosh, the conservatives are just beyond the pale.
You're worse than the Shah.
You're worse than whatever tyrant they're thinking of at the moment.
And what I'm afraid of, what I'm afraid is coming down the pike, or at least they're going to try, is the Chinese system.
I don't know if you know about this Chinese social credit system.
It's just this awful thing, basically, where you get points for the good things you do.
Like if you listen to some communist clown give a speech, you get points.
And if you help your neighbor shovel her walk or carry in her groceries, you get some points for that.
But if you let your dog crap on the sidewalk or you don't mow your lawn or you play your music too loud at night, then you start to lose privileges.
Like it makes it harder for you to book a flight or get a train ticket.
It even can keep your kids out of college or make it tough for you to get a job.
So I don't know if you ever saw that black mirror episode.
I think it was called Nosedive.
It had, it was Bryce Dallas Howard played this woman who's living under this social credit system and suddenly her credit starts to go down and so she can't even book a flight.
And here's a scene where Bryce Dallas Howard tries to get a flight and she can't because as she's looking on her phone, her social credit is dropping.
It's cut six.
Can you call the supervisor?
I cannot do that.
Can you just call the supervisor?
I cannot do that.
Call the f ⁇ ing supervisor.
Okay, that's profanity.
We're zero tolerance on profanity.
Sorry, it's just...
Yeah, I have to serve the next customer.
No!
No, Step in the way, ma'am.
Got to fing help me.
I'm so sorry.
I've called security.
Oh, okay.
No, no, no, no, please don't do that.
I'm a five-star, aren't you?
Five-stars?
What's the issue here, Hannah?
Intimidation and profanity.
Oh, no, no, no.
I was not intimidating.
Okay.
So, in order to restore calm, I'm invoking my authority as airport security to dock you one full ranking point as a punitive measure.
This is a temporary measure.
No.
The score reverts to normal in 24 hours.
No, no, no, no, but I need it now.
Period.
All down votes are subject to a times two multiplier.
Times two.
We recommend you avoid negative feedback at this time.
I mean, the thing is, in the old days, like in the Soviet Union, they put you in prison, they shot you in the back of the head, they tortured you, they tortured people in the Soviet Union, China, too.
They don't have to do that if you're so soft that you're afraid of losing these luxuries or if they are willing to dock your privileges if you don't toe the line.
And you think about it, the system is kind of already in place.
I don't mean to be paranoid.
I'm just saying that we're dealing with corporate, we're not dealing with government restricted by the Constitution.
We're dealing with corporations who even conservatives are saying, well, they're independent corporations.
But think about the way it works.
Think if you get an Uber, say, or you order something on eBay.
Not only do you rate your Uber driver, but your Uber driver rates you, right?
So he rates whether you tip well or whether you're polite or all these things.
And if you're not, if the driver looks and he says, oh, here's this guy who stiffs people all the time, you know, maybe the driver doesn't show up or maybe the guy on eBay doesn't let you buy the thing you want to buy because you forgot to pay last time.
And so you come out, you get a ranking as a slow payer.
All these things can be put in place to make it difficult for you to get normal services, just the things that you have come to depend on.
And this is the thing that I'm really worried about because the corporate America is all in with this woke garbage.
It is all in with this woke garbage.
It's all in with Black Lives Matter.
I mean, Black Lives Matter is a destructive, violent, Marxist organization with radical views that pumps all the donations it gets to the Democrat Party.
But you see, your church has a Black Lives Matter sign on it.
Your corporation has a Black Lives Matter.
You know, Netflix has the Black Lives Matter collection.
They have just signed on completely.
And once you get to the point where you say, you know, I think Black Lives Matter, I personally, I not only don't think Black Lives Matter, I don't think there's such a thing as a Black Life.
I think that there are only lives.
They're just lives.
So I don't subscribe to the entire thing.
Well, what does that mean?
Does that mean I can't order a book on Amazon?
Does that mean I can't get insurance or a mortgage or all these things that are going to be closed off?
And again, I don't mean to be paranoid about it, but I'm just saying this is the way they think of you.
They think of you as being past, you know, my God.
I mean, not only are you a white supremacist, that's one thing to be a white supremacist Nazi, but you go to the Olive Garden.
I mean, for crying out loud.
You know, I think all of us, all of us could say, you know, oh, some, all right, so a little white supremacy, a little Nazi, a little fascist.
Yeah, but the olive, come on.
You know, this is this is a serious threat, I think, to everything that we've been fighting for.
And while we're paying attention to the Democrats, who are fine with it, they think it's great.
But while we're paying attention to what the stupid stuff that they're doing and that Joe Biden is doing, that stuff can pass.
We just have to win the next elections to make that stuff go away.
But corporate America is going to be here.
Online dealing is going to be here.
Our love of luxury, our love of the comfortable lives we all live, that is going to remain.
And so when I say like ordinary heroism is going to be the order of the day, you better really start thinking about this because it's not going to be, what did you do in the war, Daddy?
It's going to be, what did you do on Netflix, Daddy?
What did you do at HR, Daddy?
What did you do when they called you in to take a class in these stupid philosophies that we're all supposed to subscribe to?
So that's the thing that is worrying me as Joe Biden takes office.
And that's what we're going to look at, Joe Biden's inauguration.
So who was it?
I think it was Knowles.
Only Knowles would stoop to saying something like this.
He said that right-wing commentators are not supposed to wear glasses.
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There are no easy family.
Joe Biden is president.
I don't know about you, but I'm feeling the healing good and hard.
Left vs. Right Divisions00:07:58
I'll say, you know, I resolved in my heart that I was not going to play gotcha games with everything Joe Biden said and did, that I was not going to pick on, you know, the little mistakes that politicians make.
I wasn't going to do to Biden what the left did to Trump.
Well, I mean, the left did, what the left did to Trump was appalling.
But it's a strategy, as I explained to you the moment the Trump administration began.
I told you what they were going to do is they were going to be in a constant panic.
It was constant, you know, Trump wore a red tie.
That was going to be a sign that he was a Nazi.
If he stood on the balcony, that was going to be a sign that he was an authoritarian.
Whatever he did, it was going to be a scandal.
And then when real things happened, because there are always real crises in an administration, then they would say, see, see, it all played out.
It was just part of this incredible picture we were drawing for you.
Or we weren't really hysterical.
It was really that the whole thing was just a crisis.
And that's how they created this atmosphere of crisis.
And Trump helped them.
There's no question about it.
Trump helped them.
But I don't want to do that.
I mean, I made a mistake.
I know it's hard to believe, but I made an error before the election.
I was at Jesse Lee Peterson's place and we were in a debate, kind of discussion with some leftists.
And I said, well, you know, if Trump loses the election, the one thing that won't happen is conservatives won't riot, they won't demonstrate and all this.
And so they took that up and they played it on Twitter a million times because I had made an error.
And of course, they'd never seen that before.
No one has who's not at least 40 or 50 years old.
And so they thought that that was a big deal, that I had made an error.
But in fact, everybody, when you're predicting the future, everybody makes mistakes.
But I made a very specific mistake, which is I failed to listen to the wisest person I know, namely me.
And I made the mistake of forgetting that I always say we are not better people than the left.
We just have less power.
We have less cultural power.
And power corrupts.
And if we get this power, which I hope we will, ultimately, you know, the right right-wingers will get corrupt, like the left has become utterly, utterly corrupt and self-regarding.
And that's the thing.
I forgot that in that moment that, yeah, conservatives can be just as bad as leftists as human beings.
It's just our philosophy is right and their philosophy is wrong.
So when you point out that somebody has done the wrong thing or said the wrong thing or made a flub, you're not really getting at the heart of the matter, which is the philosophy.
It is not that I'm a better person than my counterpart on the left, although, of course, I have no counterparts anywhere.
But I mean, if I had, you know, if there were such a person on the left who was my counterpart, I'm not a better person.
My philosophy is just right and theirs is wrong.
Socialism is enslaving.
Socialism is impoverishing.
And freedom makes everything better, everybody happier, everything more prosperous.
And so that's, I just wanted to sort of focus on that.
But I got to tell you that Biden really made it difficult to cling to my vow.
I mean, my assessment of Joe Biden is that he's a venal empty suit.
I mean, he blows on the wind of current trends.
Wherever the party is going, wherever he thinks the middle of the party is, that's where he goes.
And right now, the middle of the party is far to the left.
So he'll go far to the left.
And there was just something very aggravating about watching his inauguration, especially, of course, with the press singing his praises, Chris Wallace calling it the great.
I mean, it was a bland, stupid, empty inaugural speech.
Chris Wallace called it the best since Kennedy's speech.
It was really just galling.
But let's take a look.
I mean, he started off, for instance, he started off, he had this big unity message.
And I decided right away, I said to myself, you know, I'm not going to jump on him.
Everybody was saying, well, we don't want unity.
How can we have unity with people who are trying to kill us and all this stuff?
But I thought, no, let him make his pitch.
Let's hear what he has to say.
This is what he had to say: his cut eight.
I understand that many of my fellow Americans view the future with fear and trepidation.
I understand they worry about their jobs.
I understand, like my dad, they lay in bed staring at the night, staring at the ceiling, wondering, can I keep my health care?
Can I pay my mortgage?
Thinking about their families, about what comes next.
I promise you, I get it.
But the answer is not to turn inward, to retreat into competing factions, distrusting those who don't look like you, or worship the way you do, or don't get their news from the same sources you do.
We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus url, or rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal.
We can do this if we open our souls instead of hardening our hearts.
So, what bugged me about this is that's not where our divisions are.
We're not divided by religion in this country.
We're not divided by race.
I mean, the only people who are divided by race are the left.
The left wants us all divided by race.
But most of us could care less what our friends look like, where they come from, what our supporters look like.
the right is only too thrilled.
It was only too thrilled when the black vote and the Hispanic vote for Donald Trump went up.
I mean, that's what the right is longing for.
We're longing to get people who are so-called minorities to understand that freedom is good for them as well.
Self-reliance is good for them as well.
We're dying for that.
That's not where our divisions lie.
Our divisions are philosophical.
Our divisions are philosophical.
And if you want unity, real unity, then you got to compromise a little bit.
And Biden's not doing that at all.
He's not doing that at all.
He immediately sat down, put out a record number of executive orders.
And those executive orders are just going to keep coming and keep proliferating until Congress starts to take back its powers and starts to say, oh, you know, legislature, maybe we're supposed to legislate.
Maybe if we make laws, then the president won't be sending out these executive orders and we'll have the power to stand up against them and, you know, and say, we'll have an argument to make that they shouldn't be doing that.
But we can't do that now because basically we're not doing anything.
We're just posturing and sitting around.
So he immediately put out these executive orders.
They were incredibly radical, incredibly assaultive to anybody who disagreed with him.
He had the one that was not that bad was 100 days masking challenge, telling Americans they had to wear masks, requiring asking them to wear a mask for 100 days and after 15 days to slow the spread.
We trust them, right?
But also requiring that masks and physical distancing be enforced in any federal building.
He then proceeded to the Lincoln Memorial, a federal building, and didn't wear a mask.
And when, of course, the one reporter, Fox News's Ducey, is it Doug Ducey or yes, Doug Ducey, right?
He, Steve Ducey, Doug Ducey's his dad.
Steve Ducey went to the press secretary, Jens Saki, and said, why didn't he wear a mask in a federal building?
Here's the exchange, classic Democrat exchanges, CUP 22.
Why weren't President Biden and all members of the Biden family masked at all times on federal lands last night if he signed an executive order that mandates masks on federal lands at all times?
At the inaugural memorial, yes.
I think Steve, he was celebrating an evening of a historic day in our country, and certainly he signed the mask mandate because it's a way to send a message to the American public about the importance of wearing masks, how it can save tens of thousands of lives.
We take a number of COVID precautions, as you know here, in terms of testing, social distancing, mask wearing ourselves, as we do every single day.
Ring Com for Peace00:02:12
But I don't know that I have more for you on it than that.
Yesterday was a historic moment in our history.
He was inaugurated as president of the United States.
He was surrounded by his family.
We take a number of precautions, but I don't think, I think we have bigger issues to worry about at this moment in time.
So it's the usual Democrat thing.
You do what we say, we do what we want.
That is the typical Democrat thing.
And we're making a list now.
What's safe?
Where is it safe to take off your mask?
During historic days, if a top Democrat wants to be with his family and friends, race riots are good.
But if you just want to go to a restaurant and get something to eat, forget it.
You've got to put on a mask and actually shove the food through the, squeeze it through the mask.
But if you can just remember those simple rules.
If you're in a race riot, that's good.
If you're burning down a federal building in Portland, that's fine.
But if you are with friends and you're a Democrat, then you can't do it anymore.
So like many of you, I am in my house a lot these days.
I'm having stuff delivered, books, and then some books, and then I have more books.
And I want to be able to know that these books are going to show up there and some literate thief is not going to come and take them away.
That's why I have ring doorbells that help you look around your house.
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You can see who is at your door on your phone, on the app.
If someone is at your door, you can speak to him and say, why are you stealing my collected works of John Keats?
And maybe he'll have a good answer, or maybe he'll just be frightened off.
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Anyone comes to your door wherever you are, you can ask them, How do you spell Clavin?
If he puts an E in there, you'll know he is a fraud.
There are no E's in Claven.
I just make it seem this easy.
Radical Justice Claims00:14:55
Other things he did was he rejoined the Paris Climate Accord.
This is just a pain in the neck.
It's not a treaty.
It was never ratified.
If it were put up for ratification, it would lose even now.
And I think that that's just going to be annoying because it's going to give trial lawyers trial.
Everything is for trial lawyers and unions in the Democrat Party.
Joe Biden fired in an unprecedented move.
He fired the head of the National Labor Relations Board and installed his own guy because they're unhappy.
Because the other thing he did was close down the pipeline, the Keystone pipeline, which is going to cost thousands of union jobs.
So the unions aren't happy about that.
So I guess he was signaling them, yes, but I'm going to give you all kinds of favors.
Cutting down the pipeline, also a big help to Russia, all of this stupid environmental stuff, which is going to do absolutely zero, zero percent to curb carbon emissions.
It's going to do zero percent for the environment, but it will help Russia.
It will cost jobs and it will signal the left that he's going to buy into their crazy green new nonsense.
The other one was no workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, which had in the note of the executive order, children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.
That, if it is enforced in schools, that's the end of girls' sports.
I mean, and so radical.
It's such a radical thing to do.
So all this stuff, I mean, going on and on, you know, allowing, you know, turning back all of Trump's immigration restrictions.
Non-citizens can be included in the census.
Trump's effort to undo protections for undocumented people gone.
Trump administration's restrictions on U.S. entry for passport holders from seven Muslim-majority countries.
What could go wrong there?
You know, it's just the usual stuff.
And it's so left-wing.
And he talks, you know, when he talks about his agenda, he talks about unity, and then he talks about his agenda.
And this is the thing.
We're not divided by religion, and we are not divided by race.
We're really not.
All that stuff is promoted by the left, but that's not where the lack of unity lies.
The lack of unity lies in our premises.
So here he outlines his agenda.
This is cut seven.
We'll press forward with speed and urgency, for we have much to do in this winter of peril and significant possibilities.
Much to repair, much to restore, much to heal, much to build, and much to gain.
Few people in our nation's history have been more challenged or found a time more challenging or difficult than the time we're in now.
Once in a century virus that silently stalks the country has taken as many lives in one year as America lost in all of World War II.
Millions of jobs have been lost.
Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed.
A cry for racial justice, some 400 years in the making, moves us.
The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer.
A cry for survival comes from the planet itself.
A cry that can't be any more desperate or any more clear.
And now, a rise of political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat.
While he's saying this, the left is burning down Portland and Seattle, government buildings, Democrat headquarters saying we don't want Biden, we want revenge.
No coverage for that.
Thousands and thousands of National Guards troops out there protecting us against white supremacists who are nowhere to be seen because there's only about 20 of them in the whole country.
Remember the terror we were supposed to feel at every state capital was going to come under siege from those evil right-wingers that were going to come from the Olive Garden bearing flaming breadsticks and burnt down all the state capitals.
I think there was one protest in the entire country against Joe Biden.
But again, the left was just had Portland and Seattle in flames and saying Biden is not enough, Biden is not what we want.
On top of which, on top of which the true, and I really believe this, the true source of our divisions in this country, the true source of our divisions in this country, the corporate media, have gone insane.
Their coverage of this inauguration was as if it were a movie in which the hero had ridden over the hill.
You know, let me just play this one cut from CBS.
This is their chief national correspondent, Byron Pitts.
This is just an embarrassment, cut 14.
Today's inauguration felt more like a church service, right?
I mean, and we see there that like after a good sermon, the congregation doesn't want to go home, right?
People are still hugging, shaking hands.
And I thought from Joe Biden today, certainly he was commander-in-chief, but it was also papa-in-chief.
He gave a speech to comfort the nation.
He's papa-in-chief.
This is the chief national correspondent of a major, major news network.
Papa-in-chief.
It was like a church service.
You know, that is so divisive, especially when we go back and we remember what the coverage of Trump's inauguration was.
It was dark.
It was dismal.
He sank to the occasion, one writer said.
It was just dark, dark, dark.
You could put together a montage of all of them saying dark.
That's the true source of our division in this country is the idea that we who believe in the Constitution, we who believe in freedom are somehow unacceptable and that the default state is that we're worried about racial justice, social justice, all the things that mean no justice.
Anytime you put anything in front of justice, it means not, not justice.
The climate, the horrible climate panic that hasn't stopped any Democrat from buying oceanfront property.
It's that we don't think those things are real.
We don't think those things are the problems facing us.
We think it's a threat to our liberty, and that makes us unacceptable.
That's where the division lies.
And he's not even addressing.
It's not that I don't believe that we should come together in civility and be unified in our basic values, but he's not even addressing the things that keep us apart.
It's going to be a long, a long two years.
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Oh my gosh, it's so much fun.
How much of the security deposit for the White House do you think Trump got back?
You know, so as Biden comes in, Trump goes out.
And, you know, I have to tell you, we could learn a little bit from Joe Biden and from Barack Obama, because as vicious as they are politically, and they are pretty vicious politically, and Obama, I think, had more of a killer instinct than Biden, but Biden feels that he's got the leftist wind at his back, and he's willing to be more vicious than he has been for most of his career.
But as vicious as they are, they do speak softly and they do speak.
They're hypocritical.
They're hypocritical.
They lie and they pretend to be decent.
They pretend to be reaching out.
They pretend that they are the president of all the people.
Donald Trump never mastered that.
And that is the one and only reason why he lost.
I mean, yeah, did they lie about him endlessly?
Did they suppress stories that hurt Biden?
Definitely.
Did they wait the news in Biden's favor and against Trump?
You know, come on, it's not even worth asking.
But Trump helped them.
He helped them because he just never learned to keep a civil tongue in his head.
And people like that.
You know, I was reflecting on this.
I was thinking to myself, you know, I think he really was a good president in terms of policy.
If you just removed him, his personality, he was a really good president in terms of policy.
I think people would have backed him.
I think people would have backed him even in the crisis of the pandemic and the lockdowns and all that stuff.
Even with the press, he could have made the press look so bad, but he couldn't get control over himself.
And conservatives egg him on because we are so tired.
I mean, listen, I don't blame us.
I don't blame conservatives for feeling like this.
We are so tired of being denigrated.
We're so tired of having our values attacked.
We're so tired of being called unacceptable, of having clowns, I mean, brainless clowns like Don Lemon tell us that we're fascists and we're Nazis.
I mean, Don Lemon wouldn't know a Nazi if it bit him on the face.
You know, I mean, it's like we're so sick of that that to have this, you know, guy breaking stuff and yelling at people kind of was medicinal.
And it felt to me, I actually think this is true, that if he hadn't been that character, he wouldn't have been able to overcome the insults and their lies and all the things that they do to him.
But the tragic side of that was that was the very thing that turned him away.
And so like, you know, he made this speech.
He gave a farewell address, and it was a pretty standard farewell address.
I mean, even the left didn't really have much to say about it.
And at one point, he finally did say, you know, to Biden without naming him, and Biden never named him either, but he left a note for him, which Biden said was a generous note.
He didn't read it in public, but he said it was a generous note.
And he said this in his farewell address as Cut 16.
As I conclude my term as the 45th President of the United States, I stand before you truly proud of what we have achieved together.
We did what we came here to do and so much more.
This week we inaugurate a new administration and pray for its success in keeping America safe and prosperous.
We extend our best wishes and we also want them to have luck.
A very important word.
I mean, all he needed to do was talk like that the whole time.
He can be a very charming guy in his offbeat way.
And all he needed to do was some of that, especially in the last six months of his presidency.
He would be in his second term now.
It really is true.
But he didn't, and he could never keep it down.
And look, we all knew it.
It's not, you know, I didn't, I never met a single Trump supporter, even the people who loved him, who didn't roll their eyes at his tweets and the way he was.
They all said the same thing.
We all knew it.
But, you know, Gerard Baker at the Wall Street Journal, he used to be the editor-in-chief, and now he's like editor-at-large.
I wish he were still the editor-in-chief.
The guy writes brilliant columns.
I know they're brilliant because he always says the things that I said about, you know, two months before, and that's how I know how brilliant he is.
But no, in all seriousness, he wrote this beautiful column about the good things that Trump did, you know, with all his flaws and all this stuff.
And here's what he said.
And I just think this is, I mean, again, I could have written this myself, but he said the best argument for Donald Trump was that he led and gave voice to millions of Americans who had been leaderless and voiceless for decades.
The secret people, as a British poet once described his similarly disdained countrymen, smiled at, paid, passed over the deplorables.
The men and women whom the media, entertainment, and corporate human resources types never meet in their local whole foods, but deride as bigots and brutus Neanderthals.
People who had voted for Republicans and Democrats and had an increasingly hard time telling the difference.
People who had voted for a compassionate conservative who then led the nation into a catastrophic and futile war.
People who had voted for the nation's first African-American president, a man promising hope and change, but delivering hope mostly for those who had plenty of it already and change for few of those who really needed it.
These were Americans left behind by or alarmed by the unforgiving juggernaut of quote-unquote progress hailed by our political, business, and cultural leaders as the glorious arc of history.
Economic progress that saw the logic of global supply chains and free labor movement render millions of American workers too expensive to employ, condemning their communities to despair.
Technological progress that atomized society, turning people into redundant ex-employees, doom-scrolling screen junkies and data sets for clever algorithms to target cultural progress that in the space of a decade told people that beliefs they had held dear all their lives were now immoral and needed to be expunged from schools, workplaces, lives.
Those are the people who are killing themselves.
I keep saying this, that this is, to me, the biggest statistic, the most important statistic, that these people were killing themselves in such numbers, in such numbers, that the life expectancy of Americans was going down.
I mean, that's a lot of people dying of despair.
And Trump spoke for them and continues so far to speak for them.
Here's Cut 18.
No nation can long thrive that loses faith in its own values, history, and heroes.
For these are the very sources of our unity and our vitality.
What has always allowed America to prevail and triumph over the great challenges of the past has been an unyielding and unashamed conviction in the nobility of our country and its unique purpose in history.
We must never lose this conviction.
We must never forsake our belief in America.
You know, if you want one symbolic action that will tell you that Trumpism is not going away, no matter what they try to do to us, no matter how the corporations come after us, no matter how many social demerits we get, it's this.
The 1619 Lie Project00:03:03
As you know, the New York Times, a former newspaper, put out this lying, dishonest, unpatriotic, disgusting 1619 project, where they basically said that this Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery.
A lie, a complete untruth.
It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
It's already been taught in close to 5,000 classrooms.
It'll be taught in more.
This dishonest, lying, disgusting tripe from a former newspaper, all right?
So Trump, and he did so much of this stuff too late.
Trump did so much of this stuff in the last year.
Some of it he should have done in the first year.
He should have done immediately.
But too late.
He tried to counter this with his 1776 commission.
Charles Kessler, one of the smartest guys in America, he's one of the at the Claremont Review.
He was part of this commission and they basically said, here's just a little clip of their report.
And many Americans labor under the illusion that slavery was somehow a uniquely American evil.
It is essential to insist at the outset that the institution be seen in a much broader perspective.
It's very hard for people brought up in the comforts of modern America in a time in which the idea that all human beings have inviolable rights and inherent dignity is almost taken for granted.
It's impossible for them to imagine the cruelties and enormities that were endemic in earlier times.
Basically saying America was not unique in this.
It was part of it.
But America's values helped lead the way out of these things.
And all that is true.
The New York Times has been absolutely attacking, livid, livid at this 1776 project because it's getting in the way of their lies.
It's getting in the way of their 1619 lies.
A little bit of truth.
And they're saying, oh, there's no historians.
This is, you know, there's no real historians on this.
If you've got Charles Kessler on your commission, you've got more IQs than anybody on the 1619 project.
All of them put together.
You've got a higher IQ rating.
So I went on to get a little clip like I just read to you from the 1776 project yesterday, okay, right after the inauguration.
It's been taken down.
It's been taken down off the White House website.
That's how, that is how committed they are to their hatred of this country.
That is how committed they are to undermining and reversing more than 200 years of American values.
And if that's really, if they can't even stand to have 1619 challenged, if they can't even stand to have a debate over whether this is a systemically racist country, which it simply is not, it is the least racist country on earth.
But if they can't even stand to have that voice heard, have it represented, if they took it down that quickly, it's going to be very hard for this country to reach reconciliation.
I think that there is reconciliation to be had.
I think there are plenty of people on the left.
We can work with lots of them, probably the majority of them.
It's these leaders, it's these leftists, it's these activists who are getting in the way and the fact that they have infiltrated the corporations and the corporations are seeing profits from basically bowing down to woke philosophy.
That's where the problem lies.
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That's what I was going to say.
So that brings me back.
This brings me back to culture, talking about Trump supporting the culture that has been so forgotten.
And as you know, we've been trying very hard at the Daily Wire to start to participate in the culture.
And we released this film, Run Hide Fight, which has gotten a lot of press and a lot of interest.
And it's also raised some interesting moral questions.
Some of our audience objected that there was, I think there was a little nudity in it.
There was cursing, obviously violence.
And it's about a school shooting.
So there was that as well.
And some people objected to that.
And, you know, I don't negate or shake off any of those objections.
My son, Spencer Clavin, no relation, wrote a good piece for the Daily Wire, pointing out that these questions of art and morality are as old as art, as Western art itself.
They are the oldest questions in Western critical thinking that people say, well, art is delightful.
Art sucks you in.
Art appeals to your emotions.
But is it bringing us the real values that we need?
And Plato, as you know, wanted to throw artists out of his republic because he just thought they had too much power and that they were not giving people the values he thought that they should have.
And I take these objections seriously.
I really do.
I have a different point of view about this.
I mean, I go to art because it contains within it the human condition.
It is the way we communicate the human experience to one another.
The thing that cannot be communicated in words.
It just has to be communicated by metaphor, by music, by painting, by pictures, by stories.
That is how we communicate what it feels like to be a human being.
You just cannot describe it in words.
And so I want to know what it feels like, even to be a bad person, even to be a killer, or something that you may disapprove of, or a sick, you know, a perverted person in some way.
All of those things are part of the human experience, and it gives me wisdom to experience them through art.
So I don't mind when I'm watching leftist art if the art is good, because I feel I'm still getting a vision that is going to expand my mind.
The question is, the question is, is the art asking you to participate in something immoral itself?
You know, when I was a screenwriter, when I was a Hollywood screenwriter, I was called in once because I'm very good at writing ghost stories.
I think I was called in to do a horror movie and they said, and they pitched me the story.
And they said, here's the plot.
This woman is kidnapped and tortured.
And I said, yeah.
They said, that's the plot.
I just laughed in their faces.
I said, I'm not going to write that.
You know, that's garbage.
I said to him, you know, when I watch a woman being chased by a guy with a butcher knife on screen, I'm rooting for the woman.
And that got me kicked out of the room, you know, because I don't want to write art that makes you participate in evil, but it doesn't bother me to write art that makes you experience evil or experience adultery or experience all the things that happen in real life.
So I want to take a look.
This is a really, this is an amazing story, really.
I want to take a look at what is essentially one murder and how it grew out of art and how it inspired art.
This is a murder.
Well, I mean, there was a murder in the first third of the 19th century.
A guy named Pierre Lassenhair committed a double murder in France, and he was brought up to trial, and he was a very intelligent, very eloquent man, and he turned his trial into theater.
And he basically said, oh, my murders were an expression of the injustices of the world.
And then when he was put in prison, he held salons in prison.
He really captured the imagination of a lot of artists and thinkers and then was guillotined, I believe, as he so well deserved.
And this inspired a lot of art.
There's a film, a very famous film, a French film called Children of Paradise.
But one of the people it inspired was Fyodor Dostoevsky.
And he wrote, he didn't base his story entirely on that, but it seems to have inspired part of his writing of the novel Crime and Punishment.
And for those of you who have followed me or read my memoir, The Great Good Thing, you know that Crime and Punishment was probably the most important novel of my life.
I read it when I was 19 for the first time, and it turned the ship of my soul in the direction of Christ.
It really turned me away from what was rising up in the university at that moment, which was moral relativism, the idea that nothing's either good or bad, but thinking makes it so, that one person, you know, one culture has one morality and another country has another morality, and they're all just as good.
And basically, crime and punishment says, no, there is a moral web.
And it's about a guy who thinks that he is a superior person and therefore has the right to make his own morality and therefore commits a murder and finds that no, in fact, his conscience troubles him so much that he realizes he has walked into the moral web.
He has violated the moral precepts.
And there's a policeman who plays off his guilt in scenes that invented every television show ever made, law and order, every show that has a scene in the interrogation room where they break the criminal by appealing to his conscience or his sense of logic.
All of those things are in crime and punishment.
Why We Need ReadyWise00:02:33
And finally, it ends with Roskolnikov, the guy who's committed the murder, moving toward Christ at the behest of this woman who is a prostitute and has guided him back to Christianity.
And I always make this joke because when you object to art and when you object to things being unpleasant in art, here is a book that basically, like I said, turned my soul toward God, although it took me 30 more years to get there.
But it was still that book that really brought me there.
And I always joke and say, well, what would happen if you went into a Christian bookstore and said, you know, I'd like to get that book about the axe murderer and the prostitute, you know, and they go, yeah, we don't do that.
We talk about, you know, virgins having beautiful friendships and then getting married.
We only talk about happy things or things that are a little bit unpleasant but are resolved by finding Jesus.
If you don't have art that deals with the reality of the human condition, which is sometimes very ugly, you are not going to find God because God is the God of real life.
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All right.
Allen's Philosophical Musings00:13:35
So this book, Crime and Punishment, a guy who thought he was superior and therefore could write his own morality and therefore committed a murder, came out in 1866 before Friedrich Nietzsche, the famous German philosopher, came out with his theories at all.
That was much later in the century, right?
And Nietzsche's theory was that God was dead and therefore there could be no absolute morality because God was the only way we can reason our way to absolute morality, which is true.
And he said, therefore, morality needed to be deconstructed.
It needed to be understood.
He called this finding the gene.
He didn't call it deconstruction.
He called it finding the genealogy of morals because since it was just relative, it was all relative.
There was no God to ensure it.
It needed to be deconstructed.
And what we needed was an Übermensch, a superman, a superior being, a superior being who could refashion morality for us.
A lot of this stuff about superior beings was inspired by Napoleon, who had so transformed Europe and so and defeated so many of the armies of Europe that he became this kind of superior force, even to the people who hated him.
But anyway, Nietzsche then had this idea, which was essentially the idea that Dostoevsky had already refuted.
Okay, so Dostoevsky wrote this murder on the basis of Nietzschean philosophy that didn't exist yet.
And then Nietzsche came along, had the philosophy, and said that a superior person could make his own morality.
Now, I hope you're following this because it's kind of amazing when you think about it.
In 1924, a very weird thing happened.
A pair of wealthy, privileged young men from a suburb of Chicago named Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.
They're usually just referred to as Leopold and Loeb.
Inspired and fascinated by Nietzsche, decided that they were indeed these superior people, and they went out and committed what they thought was going to be the perfect murder, a murder without motive whatsoever.
They captured and killed a 14-year-old boy for no reason.
And of course, they were immediately arrested because they weren't that superior.
And they were, you know, the police found them right away.
But they killed a 14-year-old boy for no reason just because they wanted to show they could.
There was kind of a homosexual element to the whole thing, to their relationship and to everything they did, but they didn't think of it that way.
They were just expressing their superiority.
So Dostoevsky invents a murder from a philosophy that didn't exist yet.
The philosophy comes to exist, and the philosophy inspires a murder.
It is an amazing exchange of art and life.
And then the murder, Leopold and Loeb, has inspired countless, countless novels and movies.
There was one called Compulsion.
That was basically the story just novelized directly.
There was a Sandra Bullock movie called Murder by Numbers in 2019, the last season of the film, of the TV series The Sinner, was based on Leopold and Loeb.
And there was one called Rope, which came out in 1929, about five years after the murder, and then was made after the war.
It was made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock in this kind of crazy experimental film where the camera moves around this one set.
It's just a play, basically, and he never cuts the camera.
He had to exchange cameras because they would run out of film in those days.
But he would just have somebody walk in front of the camera and then have a different camera.
It's very experimental.
It's not that great a movie, but it is very interesting.
Jimmy Stewart plays an arrogant professor who is just talking this fashionable murder stuff about murder and Nietzsche and how wonderful it is not knowing that two of his students have strangled a man based on his philosophy and hidden the body in the trunk that's sitting behind him through the whole story.
Here is a scene from Rope, Jimmy Stewart, putting forward this intellectual, completely detached philosophy of murder that has already, we know, inspired two of his students to commit murders, cut three.
Murder is, or should be, an art.
Not one of the seven lively, perhaps, but an art nevertheless.
And as such, the privilege of committing it should be reserved for those few who are really superior individuals.
And the victims, inferior beings whose lives are unimportant anyway, obviously.
Now, mind you, I don't hold with the extremists who feel that there should be open season for murder all year round.
No.
Personally, I would prefer to have cut-a-throat week or strangulation day.
And so what they're showing you here is the intellectual has now detached his ideas from the actual murder that's committed.
Because of course, when Jimmy Stewart's character finds out that he's inspired this murder, he is horrified.
But that's not always true.
And people, when intellectuals talk about communism, and they do this, they really do, and saying, well, you know, you've got to break some eggs to make an omelette, meaning that you've got to kill hundreds of millions of people to bring about equality in the world.
They are detached from the things that their intellectual ideas are creating.
Which brings me to Woody Allen.
Woody Allen has spent his life arguing in his mind with Dostoevsky and basically saying, no, there is no moral order.
It's all random.
And conscience is just a kind of, you know, a flaw in human events that is not really pointing to an absolute morality.
He made two films explicitly attacking Dostoevsky.
One was called Match Point, which is in 2005, in which Jonathan Reismeyer plays a guy who actually plans a murder inspired by Dostoevsky, which is witty and funny.
But the one that he made that really expressed it has the Dostoevsky name crimes and misdemeanors.
Instead of crime and punishment, it was crimes and misdemeanors.
And this, Martin Landau, arranges for a murder and then at the end tells the story of the murderer, saying, Yes, you know, he was bothered by his conscience for a while, but then one day he woke up and his conscience had absolved him as if by magic.
This is cut four.
One morning, he awakens and the sun is shining and his family is around him.
Mysteriously, the crisis is lifted.
He takes his family on a vacation to Europe, and as the months pass, he finds he's not punished.
In fact, he prospers.
The killing gets attributed to another person, a drifter, who has a number of other murders to his credit, so, I mean, what the hell, one more doesn't even matter.
Now he's scot-free.
His life is completely back to normal.
Back to his protected world of wealth and privilege.
Yes, but can he ever really go back?
Well, people carry sins around with them.
I mean, oh, maybe once in a while he has a bad moment, but it passes.
And with time, it all fades.
Yeah, but so then, you know, then his worst, his worst beliefs are realized.
Well, I said it was a chilling story, didn't I?
So Woody Allen now has essentially, so now you've got Dostoevsky inventing a murder and a philosophy.
Nietzsche coming up with the philosophy, the philosophy inspiring a murder, just like the one that Dostoevsky did, and then the murder, the Leopold Loeb inspiring all this art, and it becoming for Woody Allen this intellectual exercise in saying, well, if your conscience absolves you, if your conscience absolves you, then that moral web in which Raskolnikov and crime and punishment gets tangled may not exist.
Now, obviously, this is one of those things that an intellectual might think, but it's not something that holds water.
We are evolved, we are evolved to see things that are there.
We see light, right?
The light we see is not light as it is, it's the light as we see it.
We see morality, we have a conscience.
It's not the morality of God, God's pure morality.
It is what we experience.
We experience the morality as we experience it, and that's human morality.
It can't be reinvented.
This is the key.
It cannot be reinvented because it is God's morality.
And when we reinvent it, what happens is we step outside the meaning of life.
In other words, life has moral meaning.
The flesh has moral meaning.
When you harm a child, when you torment a child, that has meaning, right?
It has a different meaning than if you give charity to a beggar.
That has different meaning.
And of course, the guy who understood this more than anybody was Shakespeare.
Now, Shakespeare, I've talked about this a lot, that he is often called a non-religious or a non-Christian or a secular writer.
None of that is true.
What he did was he wrote about life as it is lived under Christian rules, the truths that Christianity teaches.
He just removed the religious aspect from it.
He didn't preach religion.
He preached life.
He preached life as a religious exercise.
And his play on murder is, of course, Macbeth.
And Macbeth essentially is drawn by his wife and by his ambition outside of the moral order.
And he starts to commit these murders.
And his wife does suffer the Raskolnikov-type pangs of conscience where she can't wash the blood off her hands and ultimately kills herself.
But when she kills herself and Macbeth gets the word that she has killed herself, he makes the most famous nihilistic speech in dramatic history.
And I'll play it for you in just a second, where he basically says what Woody Allen's character just said, but it's very, very different.
I found this amazing clip of Sean Connery playing Macbeth, and I'll play his version of it because at least he has the real Scottish accent, his cut one.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools away to dusty death.
Out.
Out, breathe, Kindle.
Life's but a walking shadow.
A mere player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.
Tis a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
So that's basically Woody Allen's philosophy, but it's not Shakespeare's philosophy.
And the way we know this is because Shakespeare is always very, very alert to the fact that his characters are on stage.
And there are many, many references in Shakespeare's plays to the fact that the characters are on stage.
There's one reference in one of his plays, I forget which one, about Julius Caesar and where he was murdered.
And he's murdered in the place he's murdered in Shakespeare's play, but not where he was murdered in real life.
He's always very aware of the falsity of the theater.
And Macbeth says life is like a poor player who struts and frets his hours upon the stage and then is heard no more.
It's a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, meaning nothing.
Life is meaningless.
But of course, Macbeth is a player on the stage.
He is telling, he is part of a story that is being told, and the story has a meaning, right?
The story has a meaning, even if it's the meaning that is meaningless.
What Shakespeare is telling you in this moment, I believe, is that meaninglessness makes no sense.
You cannot have a meaningless life.
You can only have a life of meaning.
And you can't entirely choose what that meaning is going to be.
You cannot rewrite the moral order or you have stepped out of life's meaning.
You have a choice.
You have a choice to live in the moral order and live a meaningful life, or you can step out like Macbeth and live a life that's meaningless.
And interestingly, if you read Woody Allen's autobiography, which is, I think it's called apropos of nothing, something like that.
But it's very entertaining.
It's very entertaining, but it's very sad.
It's the story of a broken man who will not admit to how broken he is and will not talk about.
He keeps saying, like, I don't know how I got in this situation, but we can see as we read the book that he's a very broken person.
And so this idea that intellectuals are somehow going to reinvent the moral order, that abortion is going to be fine because they have thought their way through it.
That child killing children who are suffering or killing people who feel they're depressed is going to somehow be all right because they have thought they can reason their way through it instead of just bowing to the moral order as we know it to be, always leads to this kind of meaningless existence, which I think a lot of us, a lot of people in this country and in this world and in the West right now are suffering from.
A sense that things are meaningless, a sense that we are drifting, a sense that really we don't have anything to say to one another anymore.
And that's not true.
It's not true, but we feel that way because we have allowed our intellectuals to lead us away from the moral order.
So I just wanted to tell that story.
To me, it's an amazing story of art and life kind of in this dance of understanding.
Art, you can create an entertaining work of art like Woody Allen does that basically says what is untrue.
That is the danger with art.
You can entertain people and say something that is clearly untrue.
But ultimately, ultimately, the dance of art and life enriches both.
Life enriches art when we say it, when we understand it, and art enriches life by helping us to understand it better.
Critics' Reactions Debate00:03:35
Big thing for me, big thing, especially being at home more, is exercise.
I have to exercise because I'm already decrepit and decaying rapidly.
And exercise keeps you young, no question about it.
I love my echelon bike.
I really do.
Echelon is one of those bikes where you can hook it up to your iPad or other device, and you can get instructions on how to do it.
They'll have a class that's very inspiring.
The instructors are terrific.
And they don't just make bikes.
Echelon offers the next generation of all kinds of connected exercise tools like fitness mirrors, rowing machines, and their echelon stride smart treadmill.
No matter what your favorite fitness activity, Echelon gives you a fun and challenging workout from the comfort of home.
They have world-class instructors.
They really are terrific.
And unlike their competitors, Echelon is affordable for everyone.
And one membership lets up to five family members all work out at the same time.
Right now, you can try any echelon fitness equipment at home for 30 days.
Go to echelonfit.com slash clavin.
That's E-C-H-E-L-O-N fit.com slash Clavin.
And I just heard the entire, I could feel, just a sense, the entire audience going, echelon, I know how to spell echelon.
How do you spell Clavin?
It is K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no easy things.
So let's get back to Run Hide Fight.
As you know, Daily Wire is now in the entertainment game, the culture game ourselves.
Last week, we released this film, Run Hide Fight, exclusively for Daily Wire members.
And you can catch it over at DailyWire.com on our mobile app or on our streaming apps at Apple TV and Roku.
If you're not a Daily Wire member yet, use promo code RHF to get 25% off.
That's RHF, like RunHide Fight for 25% off.
Now, you'll notice that the Hollywood critics and the people who actually, the actual human beings who watch the movie have very different reactions.
Let me read to you some of the critics' reactions.
Here's one.
He says, while I found this film considerably less distasteful than I imagined I might going in, it's still being released by some despicable people, and the film's underlying themes are gross.
That said, more entertaining than one might assume.
Here's another fair and balanced critic.
Run Hide Fight is a glib, artless, and reprehensibly stupid thriller that doesn't even have enough on its mind to be provocative.
It's a movie made by someone who's seen too many movies and now made at least one too many movies as well.
Here's what the audience says, a little bit different.
See if you can spot the difference between what the audience says and what the critics say.
Here's one audience member says, exciting movie that kept me on the edge of my seat.
I appreciate the filmmakers taking on a difficult subject without proselytizing.
I thought the protagonists and antagonists did excellent jobs in their respective roles.
Here's another one.
Honestly, I'm shocked.
It was surprisingly good.
It was the kind of intense movie that had you sitting on the edge of your seat the whole time.
I thought the message was something that really needs to be heard.
Why the hell was the Rotten Tomato score so bad?
Honestly, critics just care about the agenda and not about the actual story because it was written and acted amazingly.
Trust me, you will love it.
So which side are you going to be on?
The side of the critics or the side of human beings?
Go watch the film RunHideFight on DailyWire.com and remember to use promo code RHF to get 25% off your subscription.
So as you know, usually here at the Daily Wire, we have security guards making sure that no one from the New York Times gets in.
We have a tase on site order out there.
But we make an exception for Ross Douthat.
He is actually, I think, one of the best and most interesting columnists in America.
Fukuyama's Decadent Society00:07:03
He writes for the New York Times op-ed page.
And he's written a book, which I just finished.
I thought it was really terrific and just fascinating called The Decadent Society, How We Became the Victim of Our Own Success.
Ross, thank you so much for coming on.
I'm glad you made it past security.
Thanks for having me.
I'm glad that my disguise worked.
So I want to talk about this book about the decadent society because I thought there was a lot of truth to it.
First of all, just for those who haven't read it, usually when we talk about decadence, we're thinking about Roman orgies and excess.
And in fact, I was hoping there'd be pictures of Roman orgies.
But you're actually referring to something entirely different.
Can you define decadence for us?
Sure.
I mean, I had a whole photo essay ready to go.
And then, you know, the publishing industry are such prudes that they scotch.
But yeah, so I'm using decadence basically to mean not orgies or not necessarily, but stagnation, drift, and repetition at a high level of wealth and technological development.
So basically, it's a stage that rich, advanced societies can enter into when their economies don't grow as fast, new technologies aren't invented as fast, and people sort of lose faith in the future.
They stop having kids.
They start remaking the same Star Wars movies over and over again.
And their political institutions end up sort of stuck in gridlock and dysfunction.
And I think that's a pretty good description of the U.S. and really, I would argue, the whole Western world over the last 50 years or so.
Yeah, I mean, it does sound familiar, I have to confess.
But it's interesting.
The title, the subtitle of the book is How We Become the Victim of Our Own Success.
And even as you're describing it, you're describing it as a function of wealth and prosperity.
Is that always true?
You think that's always the case?
Well, I think you can't have decadence without having success, right?
So a society that's never built a great empire or become a wealthy republic or done any of the things that we associate with sort of civilizational greatness can't become decadent.
You have to reach some heights in order to be decadent, right?
So Somalia at the moment is not decadent.
You have to hit.
You can't just be sort of unhappy and in political chaos.
You have to have reached something.
And then this kind of stagnation and torpor doesn't have to, but it can set in.
But what's the relationship between the success and the decadence?
In other words, is it just because you've gone as far as you can go?
Or is there a causal relationship?
Yeah, I mean, sometimes there are sort of immediate causal relationships, right?
So I start the book with the moon landing and the Apollo program and argue that, you know, basically not just America, but the whole Western world had for a long time been oriented towards exploration, discovery, and so on.
And, you know, space was rather famously supposed to be the final frontier.
It was supposed to be the next phase of discovery and exploration.
And, you know, we sort of entered into what was described as the space age.
And then it turned out that other planets were too far away.
Our technology was too limited.
There wasn't that much interest in colonizing the moon.
A lot of the confident technological predictions that inform everything from science fiction to even a lot of things that people sort of futurists wrote in the 50s and 60s didn't come to pass.
And so when you took that frontier away, there was, I think, a loss of sort of purpose and ambition that might have continued had Mars been habitable and ready for us to go.
So some of it is contingent, but then some of it is, I think, is actually just a function of being wealthy and advanced in ways, like take the birth rate, for instance, right?
So the whole developed world has a birth rate problem.
We are not, every rich society, with the interesting exception of Israel, has birth rates that are below replacement levels, sometimes way below replacement levels.
And this is something that's, you know, creating and going to create a lot of problems for our society over the next hundred years.
But that's something that happens because of wealth and achievement.
It's sort of the result of breakthroughs, escaping from an agrarian society, right?
So suddenly you don't need seven kids to work on your farm, escaping from high infant mortality rates, giving more opportunities to women, all kinds of things that are successes create a context in which it becomes possible to have that kind of birth rate collapse.
Some of this, I mean, at least the way you describe it, some of it seems almost philosophical.
You talk about Francis Fukuyama's book, The End of History and The Last Man, which most people just attack because of the title.
But really, he wasn't talking about the end of history as we know it.
He was talking about the success of the liberal free trade, free market philosophy.
And you point out that once you've succeeded, once a philosophy has resolved itself, there's kind of nothing to talk about in a way.
I mean, is that, I don't know, how would you describe that?
Did you ring true?
Yeah, he's described, Fukuyama didn't mean that there would never be any events or wars or interesting things again.
He meant that we had entered a period, maybe a temporary period, of sort of liberal democratic capitalist triumph in which most of the plausible alternatives, you know, fascism, communism, and so on, had been defeated or collapsed, and that that kind of period was likely to be characterized by you know, a certain by peace and prosperity, but also a certain kind of boredom and anomy and, you know,
a sort of a sort of waiting, right?
Awaiting for the next challenge, the next conflict, the next chapter in the human drama.
And I think, you know, one of the points I make in the book is that Fukuyama was writing in 1989, 1990 before the internet.
And so the internet is the one big new technology, the big new change that sort of entered into our decadent society.
But what the internet has done so far, it remains to be seen what will happen down the road, but it's become sort of a mechanism for people to retreat into virtual reality, right?
Awaiting The Next Chapter00:13:01
Into, you know, to sort of replace sex with pornography, replace real life friendships with virtual, with sort of Facebook curation.
And also, in some places, it's a means of social, of surveillance and social control, especially in the People's Republic of China, but just, you know, to some extent here in the Western world as well.
So it's the exception to decadence, right?
It's the new thing.
But in certain ways, it's pushed us deeper into decadence, away from sort of reality and away from freedom and into virtual entertainment and social control.
It's funny.
One of the things that I reflected on on the book that I'm not quite sure how I feel about it.
You quote a couple of times people talking about Rome and how it lasted, the Roman Empire lasted for, what was it, 400 years, but really after the Augustan period, it didn't produce anything of note.
It didn't produce any great artists after a while.
It's not the later period of Rome, which was pretty steady for a long time, is not the period we turn to for its great cultural productions.
But I was thinking the one thing Rome did first with the Greeks, with Greek culture, and then with Christian culture, is it spread itself into the people who they called the barbarians.
I mean, it actually did serve as a vehicle for the spread of Greek and Christian culture throughout the world.
And that's, I mean, America does sort of serve that purpose, doesn't it?
We invite people in, we turn people into Americans, we sell, even the people who hate us become us in some ways.
And maybe this, maybe it's a phase of culture that it needs this great big empire to sort of spread the word to everybody else that we have a civil.
Is it possible we have a civilizing influence that we're not really taking account of?
I mean, I think there's, I mean, one, you know, obviously all these analogies are a little bit strained, right?
Like there are lots of ways in which America is not at all like Rome, and those are important to emphasize.
But yeah, I think you can tell a story where, you know, Europe is to ancient Greece as we are to ancient Rome.
And so we're sort of, you know, Europe is the birth of Western culture and so on.
And the United States is sort of the world empire that then turns that culture into a globalized force.
But then, you know, as with Rome, there is a certain point where mediocrity and dysfunction set in.
So, you know, what's happening in the Augustan age with Virgil is this sort of incredibly creative reworking of Greek culture.
And then what's happening in the third century AD is not, you know, is not nearly so impressive.
And I don't know exactly where we are on that continuum, but we're sort of waiting for either our version of the Christian transformation of Rome or our version of the barbarian invasions, which is not an ideal thing to hope for.
But you are basically the point of that analogy is to just say you can have a society that's incredibly dynamic and powerful, and it can remain powerful long after it ceases to be dynamic.
And I think that's the, that's more than like China invading and putting us to the torch.
I think that's the 21st century danger for America, that the 20th century was our great vital century.
And the 21st century is, you know, again, endless remakes of pop culture that was created for the baby boomers long ago.
Nothing against the baby boomers.
I mean, they're not all blue boomers.
Some of my best friends are baby boomers.
Last week we had Helen Andrews on.
She tore me to pieces.
Oh, well, you covered that very well.
We did the boom.
I mean, you mentioned one of the points you make that I really hadn't thought of was the idea that after 9-11, we almost seized on the Islamist threat or the Islam's hatred of us or radical Islam's hatred of us as almost a hopeful thing that would reignite the great kind of Cold War conflict of values.
You have a great poem in there that I had read many, many years ago, but totally forgotten about waiting for the barbarians to come almost as if they would provide a solution.
You know, there is this sense that after the Cold War ended, that it's kind of our job was done and now it was party time.
And maybe that's, we're kind of in this eddy of that experience where we just can't get out and move on to something, something new.
I can't help but feel that some of this is spiritual.
I mean, you're a Catholic.
You wrote another book that I really enjoyed, Bad Religion, which I thought was a really terrific book.
There's always this, I mean, a constant refrain in Western cultures, you know, we need to get back to religion.
We need to get back to Christianity.
First, do you think that that's true?
Do you think that there's an answer there?
And secondly, do you think it's possible?
So, I mean, I am a Christian, so obviously I'm biased in favor of getting back to Christianity.
And I do think that sort of, you know, independent of my own theological convictions, I think religious impulses don't go away.
They get sort of transmuted and changed and sort of absorbed often into politics in ways that I think are worse for culture and society than having robust and serious religious traditions.
So to that extent, you know, I think you can see a lot of what's happening on the American left right now, right?
Sort of the rise of what we call wokeness, like the language of that is itself a language of religion, right?
It's a language of sort of confession, confess your privilege, scrutinize, you know, scrutinize your, you know, your role in systemic oppression.
All of these things are, they're sort of Protestantism without Protestant metaphysics in certain ways, plus maybe a dose of Catholic confession and Jewish guilt mixed in too.
But all of it has religious elements.
And, you know, so too do things on the right.
I mean, if you don't see the religious element of something like QAnon, you're not looking hard enough.
So I think religion doesn't go away.
But if you want a society where religion plays a role that's both sort of that's stabilizing on the one hand and dynamic and creative on the other hand, you want it to be a religious tradition that is connected to institutions, connected to ancient debates about deep truths and connected to truth itself.
And I think the faltering of institutional Christianity in the Western world, its own decadence, right?
Like I'm a Catholic.
The Catholic Church looks decadent right now, this big sprawling church ridden by scandal, divided between liberals and conservatives.
That's a problem, not just for the church itself, but for the society that it is supposed to influence and shape and convert.
You know, it seems to me, it's very hard for me, at least, to escape the idea that there is some kind of spiritual crisis going on before the rise of Donald Trump.
People were killing themselves in such numbers that our life expectancy was going down or dying deaths of despair in such numbers that their life expectancy was going on and nobody knew it.
The elites didn't know.
The elites didn't know it was happening, which is shocking when such little things set the elites off into a crisis.
But at the same time, you talk a lot about one of my favorite books, From Dawn to Decadence, by in the audio book, you call him Jacques Barzun.
I've always called him Jacques Barzin.
I'm not sure which of us is.
But however he pronounces it, one of the truly insightful, brilliant guys in Dawn to Decadence, which he wrote in his 90s is his masterpiece.
One of the points that really struck me in reading that book is he talks about the fact that while for many of us, a crisis in meaning, a decadent moment is a terrible, destructive, I don't know, a cause of despair, that for some people, especially elites, decadence can be kind of a blast.
Do you think that that's happening now?
I don't know.
I would have felt more confident saying that five years ago.
I mean, my perception of American society five years ago was that our elites were pretty comfortable and that there was this sort of social crisis percolating in the heartland, embodied in the opioid epidemic most dramatically, but sort of embodied in the decline of family, the decline of church going.
Meanwhile, the elites were sort of prosperous and self-satisfied and comfortable with their position.
When I look at, I mean, some of this may be the effect of the pandemic, which has driven everybody a little bit crazy.
But when I look at elites, and I don't just mean liberal elites, I include what I would think of as like evangelical and Republican elites, some of the people who've gotten into conspiracy theories in the Trump era.
I see a lot of despair and uncertainty there too.
And I think that's new.
I think, again, five or 10 years ago, I would have said our elites were in better shape.
But I don't think you get things like, you know, what you've seen on college campuses, what you saw in the storming of the Capitol, which was not like, you know, poor, was not poor people, right?
It was like sort of upper middle class Republicans.
I don't think you get that if the elite is just in good shape.
So I think the feeling that you're describing, this sense of sort of, you know, uncertainty about the future, this loss of a sense of meaning and belief, I think it extends into the elite, conservative as well as liberal right now.
When you look to the horizon, aside from an invigorating barbarian sacking of Washington, D.C., as opposed to some kind of rise of crisis, what do you see as a possible solution?
Is there a possible end to decadence?
I mean, at the end of From Dawn to Decadence, Jacques Barzoon adds, that was good.
I was half Barzoon and half Barzin, but I like it.
Jacques Barzoon says, you know, looks forward to the coming renaissance.
He basically has a kind of hopeful final sentence in which he says, you know, after these periods of collapse and dark ages, there can come a renaissance.
I always hate to ask conservatives if they have any hope, but do you see any hope that there is an end to this part of the cycle in the offing?
And what do you think it would be?
I mean, I think if you, it's not, maybe it's an odd thing for a religious conservative to say, but I think, you know, on the evidence of the last year or so, you would say that actually sort of hard science and scientific innovation might be in better shape than we feared.
Like our ability to produce a vaccine for the coronavirus in such multiple vaccines in such a rapid amount of time, that's not decadent, right?
And there really are a bunch of innovations on the horizon now in energy and self-driving cars and medicine and so on that we may not get because of sort of societal and political impediments, but are sort of there and visible that might be sort of a kick, if you will, against decadence.
So that, I mean, that to me seems like the most immediately hopeful thing.
In the long term, you know, I would also say that like, you know, things that can't continue forever don't continue forever, right?
So if you take something like population decline and the birth rate, right, part of that reflects just sort of this failure to figure out how men and women should relate to one another and form families after the sexual revolution, after the internet, after secularization, after everything else.
But people will figure that out.
People do figure that out.
People do get married and have kids.
And at a certain point, the people who figure that out will create models, hopefully, for the healthier, more flourishing society that their kids and grandkids grow up in.
So on a 10-year time horizon, I'd say technology makes me a little more optimistic.
On a 50 to 75-year horizon, I'd say sort of the selection effects of the people who do form families creating these models for the future makes me at least somewhat hopeful.
That's really interesting.
Ross Dauphat, the author of The Decadent Society, How We Became the Victim of Our Own Success.
Ghostly Experiences00:03:54
It's really good.
His column, I don't want to drive you to the New York Times, but his column in The Times is absolutely a bright light.
Ross, it's really nice to meet you and talk to you.
I hope you'll come back again.
Absolutely.
Thanks so much for having me.
This was a pleasure.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
It's time.
Now, we're going to still call this the mailbag because I just want to hear that scream.
So we'll call it the mailbag.
It's almost extensions of Joe Biden's arms embracing America.
Yeah!
Yeah, that's what it is.
But this is different.
We're going to have a live conversation.
So those of you who are subscribers can come on and join the show, and I'll answer your questions in real time and hopefully change your life, but probably not for the better.
But from Brendan, hi, Andrew.
What is your take on ghosts?
A great, great question.
I have been searching for ghosts all my life.
Absolutely true.
I love ghost stories.
I love ghost stories.
I wrote a book called a novel called The Uncanny, one of my favorite novels, but not one of my most popular, about a guy who was looking for ghosts to prove that there is such a thing as a soul, that there's such a thing as immortality.
My daughter, Faith, and I, when we lived in England, used to go and stay in haunted hotels.
And at midnight, we would go out and kind of search with flashlights through the hotels.
We would go to every haunted venue.
We've got books and all this stuff and found them.
I've never seen anything.
The only time I ever had any kind of an experience that hinted at a ghost was the day my beloved dog, Dash, died.
And we came back afterwards.
I've told the story before, but it's a good story.
We came back afterwards.
And after mourning and feeling sad, I thought, well, I'm going to go and work out and just not sit around and mope.
And I went into this little porch we have that was right outside of the, right next to the place where the dog used to use as her bathroom, basically, a little patch of grass.
And I was on my elliptical machine, and slowly, without anything to make it happen, the door came open from the place where she would, you know, where she would go on the lawn.
And I thought, oh, that's Dash coming to say goodbye.
The door was open for a few seconds, maybe 20 seconds, and then slowly it closed again.
It was quite kind of an amazing expression, an amazing experience.
Here is my take on this.
So many people have seen ghosts through history.
You cannot get 10 people.
You literally cannot get 10 people in a room.
And I've tried.
You cannot get 10 people in a room without someone having had an experience with a ghost.
Some of those experiences are dubious.
Some of them are amazing.
I mean, sane people, sane, rational people who have just seen things that you would not believe.
So my feeling is this.
If we believed in ghosts, I said this once about God.
If we believed in ghosts, there would be plenty of proof.
But because we don't believe in ghosts, no proof can be enough.
Because scientists have declared there are no ghosts, there are no ghosts.
It's a really, really vexed question because if they are ghosts, what are they?
Where do they come from?
Do people come back from paradise?
Really in the Christian religion, we don't believe people just pass into paradise.
We believe there will come a time when the dead are resurrected into a renewed earth.
So it's very hard to figure it out theologically.
It's very hard to figure it out scientifically.
But let me just put it this way.
So many people have seen them.
So many rational, sane people have experienced things.
But I think there must be something there.
And I would love to have that experience and be able to see it.
But I never have.
I've never had an experience that I could say, yes, this is definitely a ghost.
So I have an open mind.
That's my answer to the question.
From Drew, hi, Mr. Andrew.
I just want to say thank you for all you do.
I love your work and your show.
Thanks so much.
I appreciate it.
Text in the Wild says, no questions, just thanks for your honest and ironical takes on life.
Gathering Across Divides00:09:03
Corpus says, hey, I'm in the process of joining the Air Force, but with the funding getting cut, I don't know if I should join now and possibly not get a good job.
I know people who were in, for instance, the Clinton military and said it was quite a drab, but I don't know.
You know, it's like you'd still be serving your country.
The Air Force is usually the most flashy of the forces.
They always get the best uniforms, and the people who are in it tend to be the snazziest.
So I wouldn't want to discourage you from that at all.
From Mike, do you think riots are the new normal?
We've spent the past nine months signaling that you can riot without consequence.
So I wonder if it will be difficult to pull back or if now that Trump is out, this will become unacceptable again.
Yeah, I think that's the most, look, you can't predict the future.
We don't know what will happen.
But I think the most likely thing is the Democrats do not want this happening on their watch.
So it will suddenly become unacceptable.
It is not hard to discourage these people from rioting.
The thing about them is, is they're not committed revolutionaries.
They're spoiled brats who have been locked down stupidly and have nothing better to do.
All you got to do is arrest some of them and it's over.
I mean, arrest some of them and really charge them and it will be over.
You know, I frequently point out, and I don't want to see this happen, I'm not recommending this, but when Kent State happened back in the 60s, I think maybe that was the 70s by then, four students were killed by National Guardsmen in just a cock-up.
It was just a terrible mistake.
People were, the press and the media and the left were up in arms, but the people said, hey, you riot, you know, you might get killed.
That's what the poll said.
That was basically the end of the riots of the 60s.
So if you get tough, these people who are really not committed revolutionaries, they're really just spoiled brats, I think they will go away in a big, big hurry.
And I think that's going to be in the Democrats' interest, which means it'll be in the television, in the news's interests, in the media's interests, in the New York Times' interests.
And I think it might very easily, again, you can never really predict the future, but it might very easily turn things around.
From Brian, we hear constantly who will be the Republican frontrunner for 24 thoughts on anyone you say on the ones you say no chance of running or making it far.
The one that I'm looking at is Ben Sass, senator from Nebraska, moderate, but capable of reaching out to both sides, but a moderate conservative, a guy who actually believes in conservative values.
He actually is an honorable guy, a guy, I think, from what I've seen of him.
I need to hear more about it.
More about him.
It's hard to know whether these guys can translate what they're doing onto the big screen.
Obviously, governor of Florida, governor of South Dakota, you know, the people who are out there.
But it's really hard to know until they stand on the big debate stage whether these guys can make it.
You know, Marco Rubio was somebody everybody thought was going to be great.
He stood on the debate stage and Trump just blew him into the next room.
And he will never, I don't think he'll ever recover from that.
I don't think he'll come back.
But you don't know.
From best K, something like that.
What should our path forward be, especially as Christians?
These are discouraging times.
Thank you for your wisdom and humor through it all.
Hey, you know, one of the things I think Christians have got to do, and this is something that I've been really, I have really neglected, and I'm sorry about it now because my life is a little bit on flux.
I want to move.
I want to get closer to the Daily War.
I don't want to do it now.
But I think one of the things that Christians have to start to do is start gathering together in small groups.
And the reason I say this is because I think our churches have failed us.
I think our churches, even the evangelical churches, are beginning to promote critical race theory.
They're jumping on board.
They want to be relevant.
They want to be part of what they think is the solution.
And they're forgetting their one job.
They have one job, preach the gospel.
And the gospel is good for all time.
It's not about this time.
It's not about the solutions to the problem.
It's not about making a better world.
Jesus never said this was going to be a better world.
He said, you know, the world is going to give you troubles.
He said, follow me, you'll get crucified.
Follow me, you'll be tormented.
Follow me, you'll be persecuted.
He said, quote, the world hated me first.
Remember when you're hated for me, the world hated me first.
But instead, we suddenly see it's Gay Pride Day at your church.
It's Black Lives Matter Day at your church.
And without commenting on the merit of gay pride or Black Lives Matter, without even saying whether you're for it or against it, it's not the gospel.
It is not the gospel.
I think we have to start to gather together in small groups of people who maybe disagree politically and start to talk about the gospel.
And I think we have to do this without the church polluting it.
We have to do it without the church guiding it, but consulting the documents, consulting the traditions, consulting the words of great thinkers, the C.S. Lewis's, the Pope Benedict XVI, depending on where you're coming from, we have to consult those things and consult the Bible.
But I really think we have to start gathering in small groups and do this.
And I think it's really important.
And I think it's especially important if you can get some Democrats to join you.
I think it would be a beautiful, beautiful thing.
I do not think God is a Republican.
I don't think God is a Democrat.
I mean, I think he should be, obviously, but he's not.
I think God understands that people have different approaches to different problems.
And in this imperfect world, this fallen world, no system, no system can solve every problem.
And so I think it would be a good thing if we could just get together in the name of Christ and start talking to one another without these corrupted churches getting in the way.
Do we have time for one more?
Let me see.
From Junica Ban.
Hi, Andrew.
Do you think the violence that occurred at the Capitol on January 6th will be taught at school?
And if so, will it be taught that President Trump caused it?
Well, yeah, I'm sure leftists will say that.
You know, the thing about Trump is Trump did not incite the riot, but he acted badly, I think, at the end after the elections.
And I think that the riots came from that.
But look, the violence is on both sides.
And that means either both sides are unjustified or both sides are justified and we're really at a war.
I believe that both sides are unjustified.
I believe that what happened was terrible.
I do believe it is a stain on Trump's otherwise terrific administration.
I think he was foolish.
I told you he was foolish before it happened.
I didn't think it would go this far, but it did.
So look, you know, we have to take our lumps.
We have to take our lumps.
You know, nobody's perfect.
Nobody is perfect.
Trump is far from perfect.
He was always a very flawed individual.
He did great, great things.
He was a man called to his moment.
He was a man picked by God for the moment.
We needed him.
He did a lot of what he did a lot of what he was called on to do, more than what he was called on to do, but his flaws caught up with him in the end, I think.
And so, look, we got to take our lumps, and we have to make sure that we are the people that we think we should be as we go forward.
Trust not in princes.
Put not your faith in princes or in mortal men who cannot save.
Those will be saved who follow God.
That's just, we have to remember this.
And I know people are angry, and I know they think I'm a moralist and I should get with the program.
We can fight hard.
We can fight tough.
We can do real politics, but we have to win for something.
It doesn't matter if we just win for nothing.
And that's the way I feel.
And I think that Trump heard us in that moment.
And sure, will the left play on that?
Absolutely.
One last question.
Tabby says, can Daily Wire make another kingdom into a movie?
They damn well should.
All right, I'm out of time.
The Clavenless Week is upon you.
So nothing really matters because very few of you will survive.
But if you do survive, I will be on All Access for All Access subscribers on Wednesday.
And I will be back next Friday with more of The Andrew Klavan Show.
Hey, if you enjoyed this episode and want to spread the word, give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe, too.
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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.
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Edited by Danny D'AMICO.
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The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production, Copyright Daily Wire, 2021.
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