Ben Shapiro dissects America’s political theater, exposing the impeachment trial as a farce led by Eric Swalwell—accused of ties to Chinese spy Fang Fang—while dismissing election fraud claims as weaponized. Gina Carano’s firing by Disney is framed as hypocrisy, given its Uyghur labor ties, and Andrew Cuomo’s 13,000+ nursing home cover-up is linked to Trump’s exposure. Lee Smith’s The 30 Tyrants reveals CIA suppression of anti-China intel under Trump, with Bezos hosting CIA data while profiting from China. The episode argues both parties enable authoritarianism—Democrats via dystopian policies, Republicans through nostalgia—urging local resistance to federal overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
The views expressed in the following editorial do not necessarily represent the opinions or policies of the Daily Wire, Jeremy Boring, Ben Shapiro, Ben Affleck, Ben Stiller, or any other Ben currently living or long dead or just hard to get on the phone.
These views do not reflect the opinions of the person speaking or of the writer who, to be perfectly honest, may have had one drink too many before sitting down to compose this when he clearly should have collapsed face first on the keyboard and instead produced 17 pages consisting mainly of the letters G, H, and K.
All that said, let me declare here and now with an almost plausible show of apparent sincerity that I fully recognize the absolute historic importance of the current impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump.
If Trump was right and the election was stolen, then he's still president and must be removed from office for saying the election was stolen, as it must have been, or he'd be gone already and this would be unnecessary.
Whereas if he's wrong and the election was not stolen, then he would no longer be president and we would not be doing this as we clearly must.
Now, I know there are some among you who think the impeachment trial is distracting the Senate from performing other urgent duties, like spending money that doesn't exist, or holding investigations with no results, or passing a law that no one will have time to read before it utterly destroys whatever sector of the economy it was intended to reform.
However, if Donald Trump is allowed to get away with whatever nonsense they're charging him with this time, what is to stop some future president from not doing the things we're pretending he did?
Obviously, it is urgent that the Senate perform this useless duty rather than the usual useless duties it wastes our time with, lest anyone take them seriously, which would be, of course, absurd.
Now, there are others among you who say whatever Trump did, it could not be half as bad as the Democrats kneeling on the Capitol floor to show solidarity with the people burning Portland and Minneapolis to the ground.
But let me say, in the immortal words of Trump prosecutor Eric Swalwell, and I quote, oh, Fang Fang, do that to me one more time, and I'll tell you everything I know as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Unquote.
So, in conclusion, let me just say to those of you who would attack the United States Congress, leave them alone.
They're not doing anything.
Which, considering who they are, is a best case scenario.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is ticky-dee-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-v-doo.
Ship-shaped tipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, we are back with the vast right-wing conspiracy known as Clavin On.
It is good to be here.
I'm so enjoying this new show.
I hope you are too.
It has just given me a chance to really revamp what I'm doing and rethink what's happening in the country, which is hilarious, if not tragic.
Please, if you are enjoying the show, please go on and give us five stars on whatever platform you're listening to.
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We'll slide down your chimney, steal your silverware, but we'll leave something of interest.
Also, if you leave a comment for us and it's bigoted and obnoxious and would be banned from Twitter, we will include it in our commentary here because it'll fit right in.
Today, we have something from Joshua Vandeveld who says, masks are no longer cutting it.
We need to mandate plastic bags.
I think that actually just comes directly from Anthony Fauci, so that should be good.
You know, in my opening, I was joking about the fact that the Senate's meaningless impeachment trial is distracting them from their usual meaningless activities of pretending to spend money that isn't there or of questioning some sinister deep state schnook and then sending him right back to his desk to go on doing whatever he's been doing or raising the debt ceiling from infinity to infinity plus gazillion to make sure they all continue to get paid for doing absolutely nothing.
But as hilarious as the whole kabuki show of Congress now is, it's got a worrying side to it as well.
The fact that the federal government is performing government rather than actually governing tells us something about the state of the nation, namely that the constitutional bodies that were handed down to us are now no longer there.
They're just pretending to be there.
They're just making a show of it.
We're experiencing the chaos and oppression of government by agency, not the least the intelligence and law enforcement agencies who've decided they have the right to manipulate the news and spy on us and criminalize our speech and our candidates.
We've clearly reached the end of something.
I think this is obvious, which means, I hope, that we're waiting for something new to come along.
The left, with their childish gender fantasies and their ugly racial pathology and their weird tick of returning to socialism like a dog returning to its vomit, can't lay any serious claim to forging a truly American future.
I'm actually not as worried about them as I know some of you are.
I think we see that the ridiculous Biden show is just that.
It's just a show.
It's not really accomplishing anything much.
The right, meanwhile, seems to be lost in internecine quarrels and nostalgia for the dualism of Reagan Cold War ideology, a dangerous denial of the debt crisis and an overblown allegiance to what we still call capitalism, but what has in fact evolved into stagnant cronyism that crushes the little guy while it bails out and kowtows to irresponsible and undemocratic giants.
So where can we look to see the new thing we hope is coming and how can we help to build the new thing?
I think the answer is not going to come from philosophizing, but from experimentation, from doing.
That means it's not going to come from Washington, but from individuals, small businesses, and from the states.
These next four years, while our venal houseplant of a president appeases his base with fantastical leftist executive orders, these four years provide an opportunity for local defiance, local action, and hopefully local success.
While the feds spend play money on play investigations and make-believe laws too long for anyone to read or understand, our governors have a chance to show what real leadership looks like.
The goals are freedom, peace, and prosperity, and government that truly operates within limits and is truly responsible to the voters.
If you achieve that, whether it's in Texas, Florida, South Dakota, or anywhere else, the voters may give you a chance to bring that to Washington.
And meanwhile, we have to build businesses and cultural outlets like the Daily Wire.
And yes, like Parlor too, we have to fight to have these businesses treated fairly and given the chance to thrive.
And as always, each one of us has to stand up in our little circle and speak the truth to our bosses, to the authorities, and to our children.
The Democrat version of the future looks more like 1984 than like 1776.
The Republicans are in disarray, but this country was made for and by we the people.
And this is the moment while they are play acting America for the rest of us to bring it back to life.
So a lot of us have been working from home, obviously, and for some of us that has been great, but it also makes you a target.
This is true.
Identity Theft Epidemic00:12:52
The past year saw many cybersecurity attacks, including data breaches, network infiltrations, bulk data theft and sale, identity theft and ransomware outbreaks increase.
The large shift of employees working remotely has coincided with an increase in tax.
A recent study suggests that remote workers have become the source of up to 20% of cybersecurity incidents that occurred in 2020.
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That's lifelock.com slash Claven for 25% off.
And first, you might want to stop off on the dark web and find out what you can only find out there, which is how you spell Clavin.
Well, between you and me, it's K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no easy thing that way.
This also is true.
Which brings me to this amazing story, which is amazing both because it illustrates what I just said about building things on our own, but it also illustrates what I said about the kabuki of American life, the play acting of America.
And that is this story about Gina Carrano, obviously an MMA action fighter and who became an action star.
She was in this Mandalorian, which I have to admit to you right now I've never seen and will now never see.
And she was just canceled.
However, we have had this wonderful announcement where she is going to produce a film for the Daily Wire.
So we have brought her on here.
And that is absolutely terrific.
I wanted her just to come on the Daily Wire and have a cage match with Michael Knowles.
That was just my fantasy, apparently.
That didn't appeal to anybody else.
But I can go on dreaming about it.
But she's going to make a film for us, which is great.
And the reason it's so great is this is not one of these situations.
And I've been through a lot of this, by the way, at other venues where I've worked.
This is not one of these situations where someone has done something dodgy and the left has overreacted and canceled them.
And we have to make excuses for the dodgy thing that she did.
Gina Carano did nothing wrong.
And their canceling of her was as cynical and as hypocritical and as disgusting as anything coming out of Hollywood, including the trash that they've been pumping into our minds and hearts for four years now.
She put out a tweet, and this is what Lucasfilms makes The Mandalorian.
They said, Gina Carrano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm, and there are no plans for her to be in the future.
Her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.
Remember those words.
Her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.
So let's hear what she said.
She's also been dropped by her agency, which is UTA.
She was dropped by her agency, and she apparently had a show she was going to star in for the Disney Plus people, and that's been canceled.
Here's what she said.
All right.
This is apparently denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities in a way that is abhorrent and unacceptable to the people who employ Josh Whedon, who's been accused by everybody and his mother of abusing them.
All right.
She said, Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers, but by their neighbors, even by children.
Because history is edited.
Most people today don't realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews.
How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?
Now you tell me, you tell me where the denigration comes from.
Obviously, none of us like Hitler comparisons.
And of course, the left would never, ever, ever compare anyone to Hitler.
You know, that would never, I mean, even one of the actors, Pedro Pascal, also on The Mandalorian, has been comparing Trump to Hitler and Trump's America to Nazi Germany and all this stuff.
But he doesn't get penalized because, of course, it's hypocrisy.
She was fired for acting while conservative, for acting.
I even think she's a libertarian.
I think basically what she is.
Nothing she said there is wrong.
She's making the point.
She's making the point that in order for the government to kill people with no one protesting, they first have to demonize them to the people.
Let me read you a little bit of an op-ed that was in the LA Times by a journalist named Virginia Heffernan, who said that the Trump supporters next door came out and plowed her driveway without being asked to and did a great job.
And she wrote, how am I going to resist demands for unity in the face of this act of aggressive niceness?
She says, of course, on some level, I realize I owe them thanks, but how much thanks?
Hezbollah, the Shiite Islamist political party in Lebanon, also gives things away for free.
The favors Hezbollah does for people in the cities, Tyre and Sidon, probably don't involve snowplows.
But like other mafias, Hezbollah tends to its own.
So this guy, her neighbor, shoveled her walk, but he supports Trump, so he is like a terrorist.
The same she says is true with Louis Farakin, who currently helms the nation of Islam.
While the Southern Poverty Law Center, a hate group, classifies him as a dangerous anti-Semite, much of his flock says he's just a little screwy and unfailing failingly magnanimous to them.
In other words, they have demonized Trump supporters and conservatives so much.
I mean, this impeachment trial, we'll talk a little bit about this impeachment trial, but I don't even want to give it the dignity of talking about it.
But what is this impeachment trial doing?
It is meant to show that anybody who supported Donald Trump and all the great things he did during his presidency, which were a lot, all of them, they're just Hitler, they're Hezbollah, they're terrorists.
So Gina Carano is absolutely right.
That is what they're doing.
It's all a lie.
Lucas films lying.
Disney, Disney Plus, lying.
And the hypocrisy goes on because Disney is neck deep in China where they are raping and forcibly sterilizing and putting in prison camps the Uyghur minority, the Uyghur Muslim minority, and Disney made Mulan, which at the end had credits thanking the very people in that province who were doing that to those people.
So, and they have the Shanghai Disneyland.
I think they have the Uyghurs wild ride to the death house.
They have the torture the Uyghurs ride.
I mean, it's great.
It's a great camp.
I'm not running it down.
But Gina Carrano is abhorrent because she points out that conservatives, people who believe in the Constitution of the United States, people who believe in the 1776 founding instead of the make-believe founding of 1619 invented by the New York Times, those people are abhorrent and ridiculous.
And the Hollywood reporter, these skunks, the Hollywood Reporter reported on this.
They said, this was not the first time Carano has been the focus of social media ire for her political comments.
Last November, she issued contentious tweets.
Ooh, contentious tweets.
What did they do?
She mocked mask wearing and she falsely suggested voter fraud.
Here's what she said.
Here's what she said about voter fraud.
This is really interesting.
She said we should wear blindfolds as well as masks so we can't see what's going on, which is actually pretty funny.
But here's what she said about the voter fraud.
She said, we need to clean up the election process so we are not left feeling the way we do today.
Put laws in place that protect us against voter fraud.
Investigate every state.
Film the counting.
Flush out the fake votes.
Require ID.
Make voter fraud end in 2020.
Fix the system.
Now, the idea that the election wasn't stolen is an idea that it is absolutely fair to debate, though you can't debate it on Twitter because you even suggest it, they'll shut you down.
So that's a fair debate, but you can't have that debate.
But to say that there's voter fraud is nothing less than the truth.
It's only in North Korea where there's no voter fraud because it's all fraud.
There is voter fraud in every election.
There always is, there always has been, and there was probably more in this one.
So they're just lying about her, but they don't care.
And by the way, this is the industry, the Hollywood industry, that for 70 years has been telling us, oh, boo-hoo, we were blacklisted for being communists.
They have made film after film after film.
Remember, they made the front.
They made a hero out of Dalton Trumbo, who was a terrible human being, good writer, but a terrible human being, who basically was against fighting Hitler as long as Hitler was in league with Stalin.
That's how much of a communist he was.
But they made him a hero in the movie Trumbo.
They had the front.
They had the way we were, guilty by suspicion.
They've been making movies about, oh, poor Hollywood has been blacklisted.
We're blacklisted for supporting not just communism, not just the Soviets, but the Stalinists.
That's who they supported.
And they're boo-hoo.
They lost their jobs because of that.
And by the way, I don't agree they should have lost their jobs, but they've been complaining about it for 70 years.
But now if you support the Constitution, if you support James Madison, if you support George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, now you are blacklisted.
This is pure, pure blacklisting.
And the reason I call this all kind of a comedy, kind of a show, is because they know all this.
They know they're liars.
Disney Films knows they're neck deep in with China.
They don't care.
They don't care.
You know, a lot of conservatives are very hesitant to actually want to boycott these companies.
But I think this is a case where shutting down your Disney Plus is the right thing to do.
I mean, I think the Daily Wire got me a Disney Plus subscription so I could review Hamilton, but I don't subscribe to it.
But if I did, I'd cut it off right now.
I mean, it is absolutely ridiculous.
You know, I just want to take a look at two other things before I stop, get off the subject.
And again, I want to congratulate the Daily Wire.
I'm really proud of the Daily Wire for bringing Gina on.
I'm really excited about it.
Also, I find her really attractive, so I'm hoping I get to meet her before she beats the crap out of Knowles.
So, but here at the same time, remember Governor Cuomo, the great governor, how he won an Emmy for being such a, or for playing a great governor?
Now, and we kept saying, and Trump kept saying, you know, he killed a lot of people by putting them, by putting sick people who were recovering from the Chinese flu in the nursing homes with old people.
He really caused a lot of deaths.
He was really a terrible governor.
He was really the worst governor in the country.
Now, according to the New York Post, Governor Cuomo's top aide privately apologized to Democratic lawmakers for withholding the state's nursing home death toll from the Chinese flu, telling them we froze out of fear that the true numbers would be used against us by federal prosecutors.
The stunning admission of a cover-up was made by Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa during a video conference call with state Democratic leaders, in which she said the Cuomo administration had rebuffed a legislative request for the tally in August, because right around the same time, Trump turns this into a giant political football.
So they lied, and it's all Donald Trump's fault.
Why?
Because Trump was telling the truth.
Trump was telling the truth.
Instead of giving a mea culpa to the grieving family members of more than 13,000 dead seniors or the critics who say the health department spread COVID-19 in the care facilities with a March 25th State Health Department directive, instead of all that, they blamed it on Trump for being right.
That was Trump's sin, that he was right and he threatened to prosecute them for it.
And so they lied.
They lied.
And yet, Cuomo, in the reality show, in the reality show of America, in the make-believe America we're all living in now, Cuomo was the great governor.
And one more thing, and then I'll get off the subject, but one more thing is this Lincoln project was Bill Crystal's attack Trump as pretending to be a Republican while attacking Trump project.
This now turns out to have been an absolute cesspit of corruption.
One of their founders, John Weaver, has now been accused multiple times of harassing young men sexually.
And apparently, according to the Associated Press, they knew about this.
See, these guys have no protection because they're not Democrats.
The press will go after them now that the election is over.
So they're really in trouble.
The AP also says that huge amounts of their donations went to their friends and consultants and all this stuff.
It was just a funnel basically enriching their friends.
Smith's Comparison of Government to Sparta Tyrants00:15:29
It was a grift.
The whole thing was a grift.
This is what I'm talking about when we have things like, oh, the evil Donald Trump, all we've heard about for four years is the evil Donald Trump.
And Trump is a flawed guy.
I've always said so.
It has nothing to do with that.
The problem, of course, is this huge, huge theater of dishonesty that is created by now Twitter, Facebook, Google, YouTube, NBC, ABC, CBS,
The Washington Post, the New York Times, this great fiction machine that we're surrounded by, that we're bathed in, that we're drowning in, that has created this big fake America in which these creeps and criminals and censors and un-Americans are the good guys.
So you know how rested you feel when the alarm goes off the morning after a deep sleep?
What's it like?
Because I have no idea.
I never sleep.
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And I know you're lying awake at night, you think, gee, I'm comfortable, but I don't know how to spell Clavin.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
China.
Don't you miss that?
I do miss it.
And the reason I miss it is because China is so much of the reality of what's happening today.
And we don't like to talk about it.
Americans don't care what's going on in other countries.
They only care if the country is a threat to us and China is a threat to us.
But also, it's an important philosophical entity because it has invented a new form of oppression that is perfectly fine with our elites and not just leftist elites.
I mean, this is something that actually goes beyond left and right.
It actually just goes to wealth and power and a sort of sense of globalism.
So I talked about this a long time.
A couple of months ago, I talked about this, about the fact that guys like Jack Dorsey and the people running Google and the people running Apple, that they're not opposed to China.
They're not going to fight with China because they are China, because they essentially embody this philosophy in which the rich get rich, but they keep, and they don't stop you from getting rich.
They give you all kinds of good things, except the freedom to express yourself as you wish.
That's essentially what happens in China.
You can get very rich as long as you don't say that there's something wrong with the government, then you vanish.
And that's what happens on Twitter, too, right?
Except they don't kill you, but they just disappear you if you say something that is outside of what they believe to be not the truth.
They don't believe it's the truth.
They just believe it's what you should be saying.
So now Lee Smith, a talented journalist, has written this really good article for Tablet magazine.
It's called The 30 Tyrants, which is an unfortunate title because it kind of doesn't tell you what it's about.
But the reason he calls it the 30 tyrants is that after the Peloponnesian War, when Sparta defeated Athens, they installed an Athenian government of 30 tyrants in Athens.
They were called the tyrants by those who hated them.
Of 30 people in Athens who were Athenians, but who had always hated democracy.
Remember, democracy was new, and so people were saying, well, this is terrible.
Why should you give the rabble a word and a voice in what's happening in the government?
So they installed these Athenians who yet hated Athenian democracy to rule.
It didn't last long, but what Lee Smith is saying in this article was he was comparing our government to the 30 tyrants in Sparta because their allegiance is elsewhere.
And he talks about, he traces this back to a 2009 column by Thomas Friedman.
A lot of people, Thomas Friedman writes in the New York Times, a former newspaper, he's on Knucklehead Row.
And Friedman was, this is a famous column where he says, one-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks, but when it's led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages.
That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.
And basically what he says is these errant Republicans, these troglodyte Republicans, the deplorable humans are getting in the way of us experts, our brilliant plans to run the world.
And this is what you're hearing in Davos with the great reset.
We're going to make sure that the economies of the world address our shared concerns.
And if those aren't your shared concerns, you are disappeared.
If you say, you know, this climate emergency is just a computer model, and therefore, just logically, it might be completely wrong.
You're gone.
They don't kill you like in China.
They just silence you.
They take away your TV show.
They take away your friend's ratings on Facebook or whatever.
They make it difficult for you to be heard.
They make it impossible for you to be heard.
If you say, you know, actually every cell of your body is gendered, so you can't actually go from being a man to a woman, you're gone.
They don't kill you.
They just silence you.
But, but you get a lot of money.
You get cheap iPhones.
A little slave labor in China makes those iPhones even cheaper.
Don't worry about it that you're out of work because look at all the money you save on your iPhone.
So Smith talks about this and Tucker Carlson had him on.
And he basically talks about the fact that the elites have left the American building.
This is cut number two.
White people are coming across the border in such profound numbers.
It all looks crazy until you realize there's a reason it's going on.
And the reason is, is because the oligarchy that runs this country now is not primarily loyal to the United States.
They do not care about the amount of damage they do to America.
They don't care about the amount of damage they do to Americans.
That's part of the system.
And their primary loyalty is to their relationship to the Communist Chinese Party.
That is their center of gravity.
It's the source of their wealth, privilege, and prestige.
And I think the important thing to realize here, Smith, I think, has a slightly conspiratorial attitude toward this.
He kind of pictures it more as a conspiracy than I do.
I don't think it's a conspiracy like in the James Bond movies where they sit at a long table and say, you know, how's the extortion going in Poland?
And that kind of thing.
I don't think it's like that.
I think it's a conspiracy of interests.
They may not like the Chinese.
They may think, well, it's awfully nasty what they're doing about the Uyghurs, but think of the money we save on iPhones.
You know, that's kind of more what they're thinking about.
As he says, it's the source of wealth.
It's a big market that Disney can, you know, Disney can make a lot of money being kow-towing to the people who kill the Uyghurs, as long as they get rid of Gina Carano when she speaks about freedom.
Because that's the real problem.
The real problem is the girl on the Mandalorian, not the prison camps in China, because we're thanking them in China in Mulan.
You know, that's the whole thing.
It's just following their interests, following the money, which is why I continually tell you that to worship capitalism instead of realizing that we have to have values that underlie capitalism, that go before capitalism, is a big mistake.
And he goes on to talk about Donald Trump.
Smith goes on to talk about Donald Trump.
This is really important because one of the things he says is that Trump has actually changed, even among establishment politicians.
He has turned the tide a little bit against China.
They're keeping, even the Biden administration is keeping some of the tariffs against China in place.
But one of the things that Trump failed at, and it's really a shame, was he didn't understand, I think, how much, how entrenched the opposition was and how much it mattered that he had a staff, that he staffed his administration and the agencies with people who would support him.
Because basically, he stood alone.
And while he may have felt he could do that, you just can't.
They're just too powerful.
Here's Smith again, cut three.
Now, one of the interesting things that happened during the Donald Trump presidency, because Donald Trump started calling these people out, I think that Donald Trump didn't even have that clear a sense of how tied in, how extensive this network was.
One of the examples I mentioned is, for instance, whoever would have put Apple CEO Tim Cook and LeBron James in the same family album.
But there they are, sure enough, because they both rely, their wealth relies on the two same things, cheap Chinese labor and a growing Chinese consumer market.
If you look across, this is not just, it's not just entertainment.
It's not just tech.
It goes into the corporate worlds.
It goes into finance.
Unfortunately, it affects our government throughout.
And he talks about this.
He elaborates on how it affects our government because it's not just business.
It is government as well.
And this, again, this is on Tucker Carlson, Lee Smith, talking about his article in Tablet magazine, The 30 Tyrants.
Here he is talking about how it infects the government.
It's cut four.
One of the most astonishing revelations was a memo that former DNI John Ratcliffe wrote regarding the CIA, regarding their intelligence analysis.
CIA management was apparently bullying analysts, saying they didn't like their analysis of China because they were worried about the policies it might encourage, meaning Donald Trump's policies, who was hard on China.
Therefore, CIA management was protecting China from solid analysis.
It's astonishing, but take it one step further.
Remember who owns, who owns the cloud on which all of the CIA's information is collected, and that's Jeff Bezos, who is China's number one distributor in the United States.
So, and this is not necessarily a Democrat-Republican thing.
And as we're looking at the Biden administration, the signals so far are mixed.
They've taken some hard lines with China.
Like I said, they kept the tariff on.
On the other hand, they rejoined the World Health Organization and basically abandoned, scuttled any examination on whether China is responsible for the Chinese flu out of Wuhan.
They couldn't possibly be responsible for that.
It's just one of those things.
But, you know, they've canceled that.
They're going easier than Trump did on the investigation into these Confucius Institutes by which China has been spying on our academies and has also been basically telegraphing to Chinese students that they're still under the watchful eye of the Chinese.
But what makes all this part of the kabuki show of government is they're impeaching Donald Trump, no longer the president, but they've got to impeach him so they can remove him from office that he's already been removed from.
But who's prosecuting him?
Eric Swalwell.
Eric Swalwell, who was bang-banging Fang Fang, who was basically dipping it in a Chinese honeypot, a Chinese spy, apparently maybe having, allegedly, let's say, having an affair with her, but he hasn't been removed from the Senate Intelligence Committee.
And he gets up and he makes this speech against Donald Trump, this CUP 19.
I hope the Democrats, and even more importantly, the weak and ineffective rhino section of the Republican Party are looking at the thousands of people pouring into D.C.
They won't stand for a landslide victory to be stolen.
At Senate Majority Leader, at John Cornyn, at Senator John Thune.
So he's reading this tweet that's supposedly inciting this riot.
Turns out he actually put a blue check mark on the tweet to make it sound more important when the woman didn't have a blue check mark.
And he then said that she was calling in the cavalry, but she was calling in the Calvary, meaning she wanted to have a prayer meeting.
So this is a guy who's basically having it on with a Chinese spy still on the Senate Intelligence Committee telling us that Donald Trump is a danger to the nation.
If that is not showtime, if that's not reality TV instead of reality, I don't know what is.
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There are no easy bad things.
The Democrats fight like hell to make sure anyone can be impeached for anything.
You know, what makes the impeachment such a phony reality show pantomime is not so much what Donald Trump did or didn't do, but who the people are prosecuting him.
That's what makes it so absurd.
You know, I'm really kind of upset a little bit with some of us on the right who have taken this attitude that Trump can do no wrong.
First of all, the idea that anyone can do no wrong is absurd.
And the idea that Trump, who's a flawed guy, can do no wrong, is also obviously absurd.
And thirdly, the idea that we have to attach ourselves to an individual as opposed to the principles he may or may not represent is wrong.
And this is different than calling balls and strikes.
I said this before.
I don't call balls and strikes because I believe only one team is ever playing for America.
I don't believe the left is ever playing for the American way.
They themselves say they're not.
They say they hate America.
They say they're against 1776.
They say we're racist in our bloodstream.
So I'm not calling balls and strikes on that.
I'm going to support the guy who is opposing them, no question about it.
But that doesn't mean he's always right.
And it doesn't mean he's always helping the cause.
And with Trump, as I keep saying, I think he had a genuinely great one-term presidency.
And I think he did the wrong thing at the end.
I think he did the wrong thing.
And I don't think he incited the riots, but I think he did the wrong thing.
And I think he was slow to say, let's get out of there to call on the rioters on January 6th to stop.
So, you know, I think they have a case against him, something to say about him and all this.
Teaching Children Supremacy Threatens Democracy00:08:28
He's out of office.
So I think the entire, I mean, does the Senate have nothing to do?
I mean, that's my question.
Do they have absolutely nothing to do but impeach a guy who the people already voted out of office?
Do they literally, I mean, they look at their calendar and say, you know, there's nothing, nothing on my nothing happening in the country.
You know, I'm just the senator.
I'm just the legislator.
I just make the laws.
We don't need any laws.
We don't need any, you know, nothing needs to be reformed.
Nothing needs to be fixed.
We don't need to do anything.
Everything is tickety boo.
So let's impeach the president since we're not doing anything else.
But the fact that the people who let BLM, Black Lives Matter, ha ha ha, and Antifa riot and burn and kill across the country for months on end and told us it was justified, that they are now making a big emotional show about how evil Donald Trump is.
That to me is just pure show.
It's just pure reality TV.
So for instance, I don't believe that the election was stolen, even though I do believe there's fraud and I believe it was rigged by the press.
There's no question about that.
I've talked about that at length.
But I don't believe it was stolen with the Dominion machines.
I don't believe that stuff.
So let's say that these people who invaded the Capitol were being made emotional over something that didn't happen.
That's also true about systemic racism and the narrative that police are killing black people left and right.
That's just not happening.
That's not true.
George Floyd, the idea that George Floyd is all over, there are pictures of him all over with little angel wings.
This guy who held a woman at gunpoint while his friend's home invaded her, this guy who had a level of fentanyl in his body when he died that makes it even questionable whether it was the police, the police were wholly responsible for his death in spite of the fact that they acted badly.
You know, all of this stuff was used emotionally to gin up violence for political reasons.
And the idea that the people who did it on one side are impeaching the guys they say did it on the other side is to me just remarkable and only made possible by this thing we've been complaining about now for 20 years, the complete monopoly of the press by one side of the question, the monopoly of the press, the monopoly of the academy, all of this stuff.
And it's just, you know, and all of the rhetoric is ridiculous.
You know, here's Democrat, California Democrat, I think, Jackie Speyer, during the impeachment.
I just want to have a couple of cuts of this because I don't want to cover it in detail because it's just such a fake.
It's such a fraud that I don't even want to dignify it by covering it.
But I just want to hit a couple of points.
Here's Jackie Speier talking about this, Cut 23.
I intend, like so many of my colleagues, to put into words that every American can hear for decades to come how close we came to losing our democracy.
This is a man that intended to overtake this government.
And it's astonishing to me that so few of my colleagues on the Republican side, even after witnessing that, even after being part of that insurrection, are unwilling to do their jobs and protect the Constitution and protect their democracy.
What makes this so interesting is this phrase, our democracy.
They're defending our democracy.
Dan Henninger writes about this in the Wall Street Journal.
He says, when progressives refer to our democracy, what they mean is their democracy.
To be a member of their democracy, one has to share their beliefs.
If you're not in, you're out.
And if you're out, they may come after you for being a threat to democracy.
Other than carbon emissions, what could be worse?
In the Washington Post recently, Stacey Abrams, the Georgie Democrat, wrote a piece titled, Our Democracy Faced a Near-Death Experience.
Ford paragraphs in, Ms. Abrams places Republicans outside democracy.
Here's what she says.
Our democratic system faces extraordinary threats today because of sustained attacks from Republican leaders who throw up roadblocks to voting and among the worst actors stoke the flames of white supremacy and hypernationalism to cling to power.
Going back to what Gina Carano said, this is demonizing, demonizing ordinary, decent Americans who are Republicans, who are conservatives like me, probably like you, who believe in the things that they believe in.
These guys are white supremacists.
They are a threat to our democracy, which can only be a place where men can become women, where climate change is a threat, and where requiring ID is suppressing the vote.
I mean, this is the incredible thing about the narrative we're getting from the left is that the idea that we require, we want people to identify themselves in order to vote, that's suppressing the vote.
But the idea that they are making it possible for anybody to vote, even if he is an illegal alien, that is not voter fraud.
So if you say it's voter fraud, you're fired.
But if you say you need basically the same kind of identification, you need to buy a bottle of liquor, you are suppressing the vote.
And that's pure narrative.
That is pure kabuki.
Absolutely just framing things in a way where one person who disagrees with the Democrats is evil and is a threat to our democracy.
And the other side of this, I just have to play Ayanna Presley, her comments on this impeachment CUP 24.
As a black woman, to be barricaded in my office using office furniture and water bottles on the ground, in the dark, that terror, those moments of terror, is familiar in a deep and ancestral way for me.
And I want us to do everything to ensure that a breach like this never occurs at the Capitol.
But I want us to address the evil and scourge that is white supremacy in this nation.
Now, I would like to address this as a black woman as well, because I'm just as bald as she is.
And I would like to say that this is absolute garbage.
This white supremacy thing is also absolute garbage.
And the reason I say it's garbage is because Joe Biden has made it clear that Biden administration, because I don't know how much of this is actual Joe Biden, but Biden has made it clear that he is enslaved to the teachers' unions and he is not going to do a damn thing to open up the schools that teach our children, especially our minority children, many of whom are black.
He's not going to do a thing for them.
So everything they say means nothing.
Everything they say is a lie.
When they talk about white supremacy, they're just talking about we're enslaved to the teachers' unions.
We're not going to teach your children anything.
When they talk about reparations, it's because they're enslaved to the teachers' unions.
They're not going to teach your children anything.
When they talk about anti-racism, that just means don't pay attention, don't pay attention to this.
Look over there, look quick, a squirrel, because we are not going to teach your children anything.
We are not going to do anything that makes it possible for your children to thrive in America because the right are white supremacists.
It's like the woman saying that the Cuomo administration hid the fact that they were killing people because Donald Trump said they were killing people.
It's like they are not going to help your children, your black children, because of white supremacy.
Everything they do, every word out of their mouth, every one of their supposed ideals is a dodge.
And this is the thing that is kind of becoming weirdly upsetting on the one hand, but it's weirdly dreamlike on the other.
They do things and you realize it doesn't matter because eventually reality is going to catch up with them.
Eventually it's going to become clear that men can't become women.
Eventually women are going to start to say, you know, I actually want to be able to be a woman and have my values and have my life and have my kind of life and not be told that my kind of life is worthless to people, not be told that I'm less than people, not be told that somebody can just put on a dress and tell my daughter that she can't compete with him on a track field or on a sporting field.
You know, people, eventually reality does have a voice and eventually reality comes back.
We'd just like it to come back now.
But in the meantime, in the meantime, children are not being educated.
Black people are going to suffer terribly from this.
Minorities, poor people of all kinds are going to suffer terribly from this.
And they're talking about, oh, you know, Ayanna Presley had a deep ancestral fear because a couple of clowns ran into the Capitol building.
Again, not justifying the riots, but the way they are phrasing this and the drama they are making of it completely, completely ignores the fact that their people, their rioters, the Black Lives Matter rioters, burned down black neighborhoods, killed a black retired cop, ruined black businesses.
Caesar vs. God00:12:27
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Yeah.
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Just make it look that easy.
So we have the mailbag coming up later, but there's a letter that was in the mailbag, I believe it was last week, from Bryson that I think is just an interesting subject for discussion.
He says, greetings and hallucinations, Lord Clavin, Master of the Multiverse.
My pastor recently preached a sermon online where he said that we should follow government lockdown rules because of Romans 13, 1, which says everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established.
What is your response when Christians use this verse to say that we must follow the insane China virus restrictions?
P.S., I look forward to your show every week.
It's great to have you back.
Well, thank you for that.
But yeah, this is an important thing because the Christian response to politics is not at all what I think either the right or the left says it is, basically assumes that it is.
But to just look at this verse that he's talking about, this is Paul and the Romans, which is the Romans, the letter to the Romans is almost the establishing letter, the establishing epistle of the church kind of gives you the Pauline theology of the church.
And he says, let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established.
The authorities that exist have been established by God.
Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.
For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong.
Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority?
Then do what is right, and you will be commended for the one in authority as God's servant for your good.
But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason.
They are God's servants, agents of wrath, to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.
Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities not only because of possible punishment, but also as a matter of conscience.
This is also why you pay taxes for the authorities of God's servants who give their full time to governing.
Now, a lot of us hear this and we immediately react with horror.
You know, obviously governments can be terrible, and to submit to a government that is telling you to do the wrong thing or is doing the wrong thing is obviously an immoral act, not a moral act.
And to say just that, oh, well, governments are appointed by God, therefore they will do the right thing, is clearly untrue.
But it comes from a moment in the Gospels where Jesus is, the Pharisees try to tempt Jesus into taking on the Roman authorities, which Jesus really never does.
And he says that the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap Jesus in his words, and they sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians, the followers of Herod.
Teacher, they said, we know that you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth.
You aren't swayed by others because you pay no attention to who they are.
Tell us then, what is your opinion?
Is it right to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not?
But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, you hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me?
Show me the coin used for paying the tax.
They brought him a denarius, and he asked them whose image is this and whose inscription.
And of course it was Caesar's.
And he said, give back to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's.
And it says they heard that and they left him alone.
Now, the funny thing about this, of course, is that all of the disciples, at least according to tradition, all of the apostles, were martyred by the government.
They were all killed by the government, including Paul.
So Paul saying, always obey the government, somewhere there's a discrepancy in that Paul was beheaded by the government for following Christ.
And obviously the distinction that Jesus makes, the distinction Jesus makes between what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God is at the heart of this distinction.
The reason, I think, that the people sometimes wanted Jesus to defy the authorities, and many people, some people say that Judas betrayed Jesus because he was disappointed that Jesus was not a rebel, that Jesus was not trying to bring down Roman rule.
Judas, as you know, is called Judas Iscariot.
And some people think that that's a transposition of words.
And really, he was not Iscariot.
He was really Sicarius, an assassin, one of the rebels.
That is just a theory, but there it is.
And so he was disappointed that Jesus would not be a rebel bringing back Jewish rule.
And I think a lot of this, and I think a lot of the idea that the Messiah, the Jewish Messiah, was going to be a political figure, a warrior figure instead of who he turned out to be, stems from a misunderstanding of David's role, King David's role, in Jewish history, that King David, the Messiah, was going to be a descendant of David.
He was going to bring back the kingdom of David, except it was going to be the kingdom that ruled forever.
And as you remember, some of you who know the Bible will remember what happened was that the Jews lived freely.
They lived only under the rule of God.
They were guided by the prophets who spoke for God.
When they needed a military leader, one of the so-called judges like Samson would rise up and lead them and they would follow him.
But then they would go back to tending their own lives and making their own decisions and they were free.
And at one point when the priests, the prophets became corrupt, they went to the head prophet who was Samuel at the time and they said, we want a king like everybody else.
Everybody else gets a king and their countries are doing great and we're in a mess.
We want a king.
And Samuel didn't want to give them a king.
He wanted them to be ruled by God.
And he went to God and God said to Samuel, don't worry, the people are not rejecting you.
They're rejecting me.
Give them the king.
And Samuel went out and he described to the people what kings were like, what governments were like, how they took things over.
And they got their king.
Their first king was terrible, Saul, and he went mad and was oppressive.
But finally, they got the king David who built them the empire that they were obviously yearning for.
But in doing that, he brought them into the cycle of history so that they had their empire.
And then like all empires, the empire fell and they became the slaves of other empires.
And so they thought, well, when the Messiah comes back, he'll essentially do what David did, but forever.
He'll establish the empire that lasts forever.
What they didn't understand was that God will take even our mistaken desires, in this case the desire for a king, and he will use it to his purposes.
He will use it to the good.
And so what was wonderful about David, who was a warlord and a very flawed, very sinful guy, but what was wonderful about David was his following of God.
He was completely committed to following God.
He did things that could hurt him politically as long as he felt he was following God.
And what they didn't understand is that the king to come was going to be someone like Jesus who was going to bring the kingdom of God, not the kingdom of political victories.
So they made this mistake.
But obviously, it would also be a mistake to say that the government is instituted by God and therefore is always good and should always be obeyed.
And as I say, Paul and Jesus and every one of the disciples and the apostles were killed by the government because they were in rebellion.
So how did that happen?
How did it happen if they weren't going to defy the government, if they weren't going to take up arms against the government, if they weren't going to refuse to pay taxes?
Why did they all get killed?
And the reason is the rule of God threatens the rule of men just by being there.
The rule of God is based on immutable moral truths, and the rule of men is based on politics and convenience and contingency, right?
And because when you become wicked and full of lies, you have to silence the truth.
The truth anywhere is a threat.
That's why they knock people off Twitter for saying men can become women, not because they're good people, but because that threatens the truth, that men can't become women.
And again, you know, nobody wants to be unkind to transgender people.
It has nothing to do with that.
It has to do with basically speaking in truth, for speaking the truth.
But because governments are corrupt, because they depend on lies, they have to say, if you speak the truth, you will be silenced.
If you say, well, you know, climate change may just be a scam to install socialism or a more powerful government, you have to be silenced.
They can't just say, no, we're going to do this.
We're going to beat you in the ballot box.
We're going to out-argue you.
We're going to debate you and win.
They have to crush you.
They have to do it.
And so all you have to do is live in truth and you will be destroyed.
That is enough defiance of the government.
So then you have the question, if governments are corrupt and if they do bad things, why doesn't Jesus take them on?
And this has been a complaint about Christianity for a long time.
Why didn't Christian, you know, some, all of the people who defied, for instance, Southern slavery, all of them were deeply religious people who felt that this was a sin against the image of God to enslave people as blacks were enslaved in the South was a sin against the image of God.
But many people read the Bible and said, no, you're supposed to obey the authorities and these hierarchies of authority are installed by God and therefore the slaves should obey their masters.
That's what the Bible says.
It says so in the scriptures.
And of course, we understand that they were making a mistake.
But what mistake were they making?
If Paul says we're supposed to obey authorities because authorities come from God, what mistake were they making?
And why didn't Jesus stand up against the Romans and say, like so many did, and say, you're enslaving us?
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To answer this question, let me digress or give you my answer to this question.
Tearing Down Unjust Traditions00:10:17
Let me digress for a minute and talk about Edmund Burke, the famous British MP of the 18th century and one of the, he's probably the founder in a lot of ways of modern conservative thought.
And the famous thing about Edmund Burke is that he did not support the French Revolution.
He foresaw the terror.
He foresaw what was going to happen, that it was going to become an oppression, that it was going to lead to war.
He foresaw all that.
But he did support, he did support the rights of the rebels in America.
What was the difference?
The difference was tradition.
The difference was that the French were basically saying, we are going to wipe out all tradition and we are going to establish this new wonderful rule of reason.
You know, all the kings are going to be wiped away.
The last king is going to be strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
We're going to rename the days.
We're going to rename the months.
Everything is going to be new.
Just like we see these guys now who are tearing down our traditions, tearing down the statues of Lincoln, tearing down the statues of George Washington, like the people in San Francisco, the buffoons in San Francisco, who say they're going to take Abraham Lincoln's name off schools because he didn't show that he believed that black lives matter, right?
They want to get rid of traditions because all those traditions are oppressive and we are going to be free.
We're going to have this new kind of freedom.
What's the problem there?
What's the logic of that?
And the logic of that is everything you believe comes from your traditions.
You didn't just, your idea of justice didn't just fall on you like the rain from heaven.
Your idea that racism is wrong.
Racism was not wrong, and it's still not wrong in many countries.
It is wrong here because of the ideas that have come down to us.
They come down to us through Christianity.
They come down to us through Greece and Rome.
But these are the ideas that form us.
So when you tear down those traditions in your ignorance and your stupidity, as the left is doing now, you basically are tearing away the foundations of the very ideas you're trying to establish.
And that is the contradiction of radical politics.
The contradiction of radical politics is when the French revolutionaries said life, liberty, right?
When they said, you know, liberty, fraternity, equality, those ideas came from someplace.
They came from their traditions.
Every moment leading up to the person saying liberty, eternity, liberty, fraternity, equality, every moment created those ideas.
So to say, oh, this evil past, this oppressive past, these evil kings, these evil priests have to be gotten rid of, is to say the very ideas that I'm trying to establish are illegitimate.
It's a paradox, right?
It's a conflict of interest.
And that's why when you see people tearing down statues of Abraham Lincoln, I'm thinking of the statue, I think it's in Philadelphia that showed Lincoln raising a black man to his feet.
And they say, well, the black man is bowing down to Abraham Lincoln.
That's a terrible thing.
Well, in fact, when the slaves were freed and Lincoln came to visit the slaves who were traveling with the army, the slaves did fall at his feet in gratitude.
They did fall at his feet because they knew he was lifting them up.
So when you get rid of the tradition, you're actually getting rid of your own ideas.
That's the paradox of radical politics.
So what did Jesus do that got rid of this radical, the fact that on one hand, governments can be corrupt and they can be unjust and they can have unjust traditions.
And on the other hand, the traditions, the ideas that led to that moment when you see that something your government is doing is wrong created your idea that it was wrong, if you see what I mean.
In other words, we knew that slavery was wrong because somebody had said all men are created equal.
But somebody said all men are created equal because there was a Christian religion to teach him that.
So when the people said, you know, oh, these evil Christians, they didn't stand up against slavery, they helped get rid of slavery because of the ideas.
They created the idea that slavery was wrong.
So how did this happen and how did Jesus deal with it?
Well, here is a story, and it's a really famous story and a very interesting story for a lot of reasons.
Jesus returned to the Mount of Olives, but early the next morning, he was back again at the temple.
He was preaching in the temple, and a crowd soon gathered, and he sat down and taught them.
And as he was speaking, the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery.
They put her in front of the crowd.
Teacher, they said to Jesus, this woman was caught in the act of adultery.
The law of Moses says to stone her.
What do you say?
They were trying to trap him into saying something they could use against him.
But Jesus stooped down and wrote in the dust with his finger, and we don't know what he wrote in the dust with his finger.
And they kept demanding an answer.
So he stood up again and said, all right, let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone.
Then he stooped down again and wrote in the dust.
And when the accusers heard this, they slipped away one by one, beginning with the oldest, right, the people who knew best, until only Jesus was left in the middle of the crowd with the woman.
Then Jesus stood up and said to the woman, where are your accusers?
Didn't even one of them condemn you?
And she said, no, Lord, no one condemned me.
And Jesus said, neither do I condemn you.
Go and sin no more.
Now, what's interesting about this is nobody likes the story.
Leftists don't like it, and conservatives don't like it.
The leftists don't like it because Jesus doesn't stand up against the law.
But conservatives don't like it because they say if you don't stone her, then everyone will commit adultery, right?
If you don't keep the values in place, then everyone will do the bad thing.
And conservatives go to incredible lengths to take the meaning out of the story.
Some of them, there even is a movement to take this story out of the Gospels because it's not in the earliest copies of the Gospels we have.
And so they want to take it out of the Gospel saying it's illegitimate.
It was put in later on by a copyist.
But in fact, there are tales like this very early on about Jesus.
And if that doesn't sound like Jesus to you, I think that sounds exactly like him.
I'm sure the story is precisely true.
So why doesn't he say, why doesn't Jesus say this is a terrible law?
He does say that, you know, he says that about the law on divorce.
He changes the law on divorce.
Why doesn't he say, you can't stone somebody for committing adultery?
That's a savage, terrible thing to do.
And I think the reason is this, that he knows that the tradition, the tradition and the commandment not to commit adultery is an important one.
It is where the rights of women, to a large degree, come from.
The idea that your marriage to a woman should be faithful is an idea that developed over time.
Remember, in Jesus' time, there were people who were married to many women, but the idea that the whole idea that men should also be faithful, should not commit adultery, that develops slowly over time.
The church imposes it on the idea of marriage.
It is where the rights of women come from.
Jesus does not condemn this woman, even though he has spoken against adultery.
He doesn't condemn her.
He forgives her.
And he says to people, let him who is without sin throw the first stone.
And of course, nobody's without sin.
So he lets the law stand, but he makes it impossible.
He makes it impossible to fulfill.
He makes it impossible to fulfill by rewriting the hearts of the people who have to enforce the law.
And this to me is one of the great political innovations of all time.
Instead of changing the law, even an unjust law, he first establishes in the hearts of the people why that law cannot be enforced as it stands, and the law rewrites itself.
And this is why I feel the church has shot itself in the foot by becoming political.
You know, in C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters, The Screwtape Letters are a wonderful book.
You should read it.
It takes about an hour to read the whole book.
But it's basically about a demon, a chief demon, teaching an apprentice demon how to destroy religion and how to destroy somebody's soul.
And this is what the demon says about destroying religion.
He says, we do want and want very much.
This is a demon speaking.
He says, we want very much to make men treat Christianity as a means, preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but failing that as a means to anything, even to social justice.
The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which God demands, and then work him onto the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice.
For God will not be used as a convenience.
In other words, God will not be used as a means.
God is the end.
He is what you are trying to get toward.
So at any moment, when the hearts, when our heart is transformed by a relationship to God, he is going to come to a point where he says, you know, stoning a woman for adultery is not going to play.
That's not going to work.
Holding another man's a slave is not going to work.
It has to be stopped.
When that happens, one of those people might be a Democrat and one might be a Republican, and they may turn to each other and say, we have to do this in two totally different ways.
But they're both going to agree on the principle that slavery is wrong and on the principle that you cannot stone people to death for their sexual peccadillos.
And so the church has lost the people because it is treating God as a means instead of as an end.
If you treat God as an end, and this is true for all of us, it's not true for any, you know, just for the churches.
If you treat God as an end, your heart is transformed and that transforms your politics.
And then we start to argue over means.
And that's why the left is so destructive right now.
It's so destructive, getting rid of our traditions, getting rid of our religion, getting rid of the thing that will make us move forward in a way that will not be destructive and will not destroy all the good things that have grown up over the centuries.
And that to me is Christian politics.
Christian politics is not left.
It's not right.
Christian politics isn't politics at all.
Christian politics is a relationship with God who will change your heart.
Means Matter00:17:33
So many of you write in and say, Clavin, how do you look so fantastic?
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All right, so as you know, Gina Carano was canceled by Hollywood elites for expressing her political views on social media.
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Let's stand up to woke Hollywood together.
Well, as you know, we occasionally like to bring on someone intelligent and articulate to break up the rhythm of the show, a little change of pace.
Today we have got Douglas Murray.
And if you have not read Douglas' books, The Madness of Crowds and The Strange Death of Europe, I've read them both, and they are absolutely terrific, not just well written and well thought out, but beautifully researched.
Douglas, it's great to see you.
How you doing?
It's very good to be with you, Andrew.
How nice to see you.
You know, when I read The Strange Death of Europe, which basically talks about a sort of cultural suicide that was going on, a sort of, I don't know, surrender to ideas, illiberal ideas coming over with the Islamist immigrants, a sort of self-hatred, an idea, as you put it, that maybe Europe was just over and a new thing had to happen.
I was really moved by that.
It really was such a perfect description of what I was seeing.
It's also been written about in Huillebeck's terrific novel, Submission, and all of his novels, which were basically the same novel.
I'm wondering, since you wrote that book, if you step back, would you say things that that process of decay and death has proceeded apace or has it gotten better or has it changed at all?
I'd say it's continued on the trajectory that I lay out in the book.
I mean, there are peaks and troughs.
You know, there are things that new things that happen that you didn't think could happen and become acceptable again.
Things you would have thought would have made more of an impact that just ride by and glide by in the news agenda.
Occasionally, you know, a politician will say something, Monsieur Macron has done so in the last year, which sort of surprises you in its, you know, sensibleness and relative resilience.
But then, you know, you don't see very much happening as a result of it.
And it turns out to be just more words intended to placate any members of the public who are onto this problem.
So, no, I don't see a big change in direction.
I think that because we've all lived in this very strange last year, the year of COVID, I think that there are inevitably going to be aspects of what I describe in Strange Death of Europe, as elsewhere, that are affected by that.
And the one that strikes me most at the moment is the whole issue of borders.
You know, I think when we last spoke, if either of us had said, you know, I think that at some point in 2020, Justin Trudeau will announce that no foreigners can come into Canada, you'd have thought, what would be the situation in which Mr. Trudeau would say that?
Seems unlike him.
It doesn't even make an awful virtue of being anti-borders.
I think there are a lot of strange things like that that have happened in the last year that will have changed certainly the public feeling about certain issues and what's possible and what isn't, and may even change some politicians' attitudes in relation to that.
I mean, after all, we have lived through an era in immigration terms where consecutive governments of every imaginable stripe have told us there's nothing you can do about immigration.
It's just a fact of the globalized world.
Suck it up, live with it.
And now we are told that although you can control COVID by closing the borders, you couldn't control migration by closing the borders, because you can close borders to do with the virus, but not to do with migration.
I think very basic things like that are unsustainable.
I think that governments have done things that are totally unusual and will have some policy repercussions.
Whether it'll make any major difference, though, to the change of direction, I rather doubt.
Do you think that Brexit will do anything for Britain particularly?
Do you think it will take it out of that decaying European system or not?
I certainly think it can do it, but that depends on the choices we make.
I was very moved at one point when doing the tour, so an international tour in the days one could do that, of translations for Strange Death of Europe, speaking to a Norwegian politician.
I mentioned something I write about in Strange Death, which is this problem that Western Europeans and Americans have these days with luck, as it were.
We don't know what to do with our luck.
We feel guilty about our luck.
We recognize lots of people in the world are born with terrible luck and we don't know what to do other than sort of abolish our luck or sort of dilute it into the whole, you know.
And I mentioned this.
I was rather moved by a Norwegian politician I said was talking about this was saying to me, no, Douglas, it's not luck.
We have the same energy reserves as Venezuela, but there's a reason why we're not Venezuela and Venezuela is.
It's because we made more careful decisions.
And the reason I say that is because I don't like to encourage a sense of fatalism.
And Brexit is a good example of the fact that this is a process by which the British public voted to regain control of the levers of their own governance.
That isn't to say that everything from here on will be better.
It now relies on us making good decisions.
And it's the start of a process by which we can be free to make better decisions, but we are also free in that situation to make bad decisions.
Obviously, I hope that we don't, but it's a process, Brexit.
It isn't a magic wand thing.
It's the beginning of being able to make our own decisions.
And by the way, there is an example already of the benefit of that.
When Britain left the EU, we left all the agencies, including the European Medicines Agency.
We were criticized by a lot of people, particularly, of course, those who wanted us to remain in the EU, for leaving the medicines agency and going our own way with the vaccine.
Well, without wanting to brag, Britain's vaccine scheme has been an incredible success, one of the best in the world, not just for the development of the Oxford vaccine, but for the rolling out of it already across millions and millions of households.
And by contrast, the EU vaccine scheme has been a disaster.
I say this not to brag or to boast or to sort of rub the noses of Romanians or anything else in the dirt on this, but simply to say this was one of the points of Brexit was that we could go our own way.
And we did on the vaccines and it's paid off.
Being limber and nimble and adaptable is a good thing.
It's not a good thing to be stuck with a juggernaut where there are 28 countries trying desperately to come to some kind of agreement.
So there are benefits.
You shouldn't be afraid to boast about that because we don't hear about it at all.
We only hear about what a terrible thing it is, how crazy you were to leave the wonderful EU.
And of course, the powers of globalism, the voice of globalism is so loud and the voice of nationalism nowhere near.
You know, I recently had Ross Douthat.
I don't know if you know him.
Very intelligent columnist for the New York Times.
I don't know him personally, but I reviewed his latest book.
Yeah.
Well, in that book, Decadence, he talks about the fight against Islamism as being kind of a dodge, a sort of an attempt to reinvent the Cold War ideological battle and hopefully bring meaning back to Western life when we're so decadent, we've run out of meaning.
Do you agree with that?
I mean, was the problem never actually Islamism, but only people's agreeing to it?
People's self-was the problem Western self-hatred more than Islamism?
Or was there, in fact, a clash of civilizations that's still going on?
I think there's a I mean, I don't like the clash narrative.
I think he's wrong in that.
And I think that he wouldn't have made, I admired the book in the main, but I think he wouldn't have made that judgment had he lived in France.
I think Doubt is lucky, like you are, to have the virtue of living in America, which doesn't have a very significant Islamist issue.
We wouldn't say that if you lived in Paris.
Left-wingers in Paris don't say that.
Interesting.
So it depends where you are.
It depends where you are.
I'm struck always by the disconnect that's been growing in recent years between America and Europe, including Britain, the failure to understand what we're up to.
The incredibly, I'm not saying that Doubthood is responsible for this, but more the sort of New York Times sort of message that the Europeans are sort of moving rightwards or something like this, you know, or that we're becoming populists, all of this kind of really low-grade analysis that has even seen the American president, President Biden, talk about Boris Johnson as if he's the same as Donald Trump because they both had sort of slightly funny hair.
I mean, I'm amazed by the puerile nature of the American analysis of anything outside America and the rather unbecoming lack of desire to understand us.
You know, it's not a becoming trait that.
You know, Douglas Adams, the science fiction writer, moved here just before he died.
And I got to know him and I said to him, how are you liking America?
And he said, the news blackout is a little hard to deal with.
And, you know, it's very hard to describe to Europeans just how big the country is.
And when New York is covering, Oregon is covering something so far away that that is almost more than we can deal with.
It's almost more than we can deal with to actually deal with other countries which are not on our news at all.
Unless they're a threat to us or affect us in some way, we have no idea what's going on.
I have to watch this.
I think this is the BBC, basically.
Yeah, I think that is a big problem in America.
I mean, I do think, I mean, I don't want to go abashing, but I mean, I do think young people in America are the most ignorant in the world, perhaps now.
It's pretty fast.
There should be an embarrassment about that and a desire to rectify it.
And I don't see a desire to rectify it.
I just see more of the same, you know, and the dogmatism that I hear coming, particularly from young America, the dogmatism that seems to think it knows how to run everything in the world and can't point to most of the world on a map.
Yes, that is a perfectly fair description.
It's absolutely true.
And we're talking about, I mean, a lot of my friends are talking about it, the level of ignorance of people coming up and the certainty, which I think naturally comes with ignorance.
It's only when you get to know things that you get a little uncertain and start to see.
Ignorance and dogmatism is the big danger as a cocktail.
Speaking of uncertainty, and I'm, you know, in the madness of crowds, you have one of the best descriptions, the best discussions of transgenderism Transgenderism I've ever read.
Nuanced, intelligent, insightful, compassionate, but not dogmatic.
It really was illuminating.
I'm not sure I would ask, I'm not sure I'd have the nerve to ask you this question if you weren't an openly gay person, but I think I have to.
I've lived my entire life taking basically the Ebenezer Scrooge attitude toward other people's sexuality, which is that a man should attend to his own business.
Mine occupies me constantly.
And I have never cared about, you know, I've always believed in the rights of other people to do whatever they wanted to do.
When I was arguing with conservatives, my fellow conservatives, for gay rights and gay marriage, they would constantly say to me, no, no, no, you don't want to open that door because once you do, it's going to be a threat to religious rights and it's going to bring in this entire parade of gender insanity.
Well, they've been kind of right about that.
I mean, gay activists in this country have been incredibly oppressive, incredibly small-minded, going out of their way to find businesses that have religious objections to homosexuality and attacking them in the courts.
And their attitude towards transgenderism, which can now get you fired, it can get you fired for saying simple facts like a man actually can't become a woman in any real sense of that word.
Was I wrong to support the rights of people?
Is there something about a society that needs to have firm sexual borders in order to keep from going insane?
I guess that's the question I'd like to ask.
Well, I mean, there is no definitive answer on this.
And I suspect that ages swing, or they do swing rather clearly between two different extremes on this.
One is to not know where any borders are, and another is to draw them badly.
And obviously, you know, I mean, the famous example everyone knows is with Victorian puritanical views about sex, where there were more brothels in London than at any other time.
I regard sex as being like a geyser-like force.
You know, it'll come out somehow, and the more you keep it down, the more it'll spring out in a particularly, you know, virulent form somewhere.
So I don't see it as being, I don't see it as being containable, as it were, in that way.
I think that there is a fear that the conservatives always have to do with sex sexuality, which is precisely that if you don't have the very firm lines, you know, anything will happen.
It's been a critique for all time, pretty much.
If we allow X, then Y will follow.
I don't quite think that that conservative analysis has been vindicated because all we have done is to come to what I regard as being a more reasonable attitude towards sexual difference.
I think, by the way, even in particularly perhaps in the trans debate, this is ignored.
Very, very few people desire anything but an expression of compassion and understanding towards people who say they're trans.
I've never met anyone in all of my researches on this who has ever wanted, wished any ill will to anyone who says that they think they're in the wrong body.
Very far from it.
They're deserving of a lot of sympathy and get it.
There is, however, a very reasonable question that follows, which is, can everyone else change their understanding of, for instance, biology in order to fit around your self-designation?
Why Compassion Matters00:14:15
And the answer to that is, I think, no.
And as I say, I think in the Madden Crowds, if the gay rights movement had said, we're here, we're queer, and as a result, penises and vaginas don't exist, the gay rights movement wouldn't have made as much headway as it did.
It was, we're here, we're queer, and we'd like just to get on with our lives, and you can get on with yours.
The trans one is different because it says we would like to get on with our lives and we would like you to fundamentally reorient your understanding of sex.
And I think that's why it's provoking a lot of problems, a lot of problems, particularly for women, I think, who have been noticing that they are being effectively biologically erased by this movement.
But I don't like the idea that, as it were, this madness vindicates, let's say, sexual Puritanism.
What I think is necessary is that there is a reigning in of the extremists on the so-called LGBT, which doesn't really exist, side, and pointing out to them that, as I say in the book, that this boot on the other footism is very ugly.
You know, the boot on the other foot principle, you know, if you now have the power that the religious once did over you, and you now have it over the religious, you're not behaving very well, are you?
What you talked about, what you talked about in terms of, you know, people being allowed to do things in private that didn't infringe upon your liberties, you don't seem to be very good at that.
Now the boots on your foot.
These are basic principles, which I would simply say need to be reasserted.
And I think they can be reasserted without returning to some kind of puritanical view on sex, which I think almost always goes badly wrong.
You know, this and the question of Islamism come back to this idea of religion and religious rights.
And you make a point.
I think it's in The Death of Europe, The Strange Death of Europe.
You make the point how many of our ideas and our values come essentially from our founding religion, which is Christianity.
I don't know if you've read Tom Holland's Dominion, but he goes on quite at length about that.
Excellent book, really good book.
And you have put forward an idea.
This is where you were when I last talked to you anyway.
You've kind of put forward this idea of Christian atheism, the idea that we want to keep the values but lose the religion.
A sort of Marcello Pera in Italy had that book, Why We Should Call Ourselves Christians.
This seems to me unsustainable, just being blunt about it.
I'm not trying to, obviously you can't believe if you don't believe, but it seems to me unsustainable to have values that are propped on something and pull the prop away.
How can you sell a certain series of values that are based on certain theological assumptions without those theological assumptions?
Isn't that basically bound for disaster?
It's not bound for disaster.
I think I say in Strange Death, I think that it's a temporary measure.
It's a temporary solution, at least for now.
I try to explain in Strange Death of Europe what I regard as being the metaphysical religious situation which we find ourselves in in the modern West.
Obviously, what I describe annoys some of the religious who say, well, if you recognize where these values came from, why don't you believe?
And I say in Strange Death, I think this is a facile counter to the challenge I say, which is that large numbers of people cannot because of what has happened in the discoveries of recent centuries.
But we cannot unlearn what we know, although, as I say, a lot of people in America are trying.
We cannot unlearn what we know.
And therefore, how do we deal with this?
I say that I basically came to the same conclusion that my late friend Roger Scruton came to, which was, at the very least, don't war on it.
At the very least, don't try to pull out the branches on which you sit and see what happens.
However, we do live in a very strange period of change in this regard.
And very few people of right and left, or right or left, or religious or non-religious, are really willing to admit this.
The fact is that we do live in a metaphysical system, which is divorced from the thing that gave that system its origins.
And it has come away from it.
And that is causing much of the deep pain of our time.
It's why, as I say, I think in Strange Death, it's why we have this oddity where we say human rights.
Human rights are obviously, again, as Tom Holland points out in Dominion, human rights are a secular derivative of a set of Judeo-Christian principles.
They're by no means shared across history, and they're by no means shared across the planet as we speak.
The Communist Party of China does not regard this system as being in any way dominant, or indeed particularly impressive, clearly.
Certainly not something that we'd like to follow.
So this system exists.
It's got all sorts of benefits and virtues.
But the religious don't like to hear it talked about as if this is some success of Christianity.
And the people who believe in human rights don't like to believe that they haven't come dropped from the sky and are there for all time.
I mean, there's just a sort of ignorance and blindness on all sides in our day and a refusal to recognize what I regard as being the extraordinarily profound situation that we find ourselves in, the profound conundrum we find ourselves in.
I think it's incumbent on all people of good faith, whether they're people of faith or not, to engage themselves in these deep discussions to any extent that they can and to try to find a reasonable attitude in their own lives towards problems which are eternal.
Douglas, I wish I could continue this conversation.
I would go on with you for hours.
It is great to see you and great talking to you.
Again, if you haven't read The Madness of Crowds or The Strange Death of Europe, they are terrific.
Again, I hope you come back, Douglas.
It's always good to talk to you.
Thanks very much.
I love that, Andrew.
All the very best.
You too.
All right, mailbag.
Some people think this trial is a contest of lawyers or even worse, a competition between political parties.
I don't even understand that.
What are you people doing?
This place is falling apart.
Clearly, we've just gone off the road.
All right, never mind.
Here is from Wade.
Dear Mr. Clavin, I enjoy your show.
This is a question I'm getting a lot.
I'm getting a lot of emails about this too.
He says, I enjoy your show and respect your opinion greatly.
I do believe you're wrong on the Liz Cheney situation.
She should have been removed from her leadership position.
You said it was okay for her to do what she did because it was a vote of conscience.
I disagree.
There is no way a rational person could claim that President Trump called for the sacking of the Capitol building.
You're right that we need to be a big tent party.
However, part of that is that while we may disagree on some issues, you have to stick together when a person is being wrongly attacked.
Cheney didn't do that, not because of her conscience, but because she holds grudges.
She needs to be removed from leadership.
Now, I want to make it very clear that I disagreed with what Liz Cheney did.
I thought she was wrong, and I thought it was politically stupid.
Okay, I said that.
However, I have no evidence that she had some other, she had some grudge or some ulterior motive.
And I do think Trump acted badly there at the end, especially in not calling immediately for the end of the violence.
And so I think she was, you know, I have to assume that she was legitimately appalled.
I don't see why I would say that she had some ulterior motive.
I don't know why I know that.
I mean, we had this issue with when I had Jonah Goldberg on.
I really strongly disagreed and continue to disagree with Jonah Goldberg's never Trumpism, if I can call it that.
But I know Jonah, and I know he's not dishonest.
I know it's how he really felt.
On top of which, I know it cost Jonah big time in terms of audience.
And I think it's costing Liz Cheney big time.
I mean, now in her state, they're trying to, they're rebuking her there too.
So I don't see what she had to gain by this.
And, you know, people write to me and say, oh, you just are trying to, you know, somebody, what did somebody say the other day that I was trying not to get knocked off my social platform?
I said, I've been knocked off everywhere.
I mean, they've done everything they can.
Everything they can do, they have done, except for that I'm still alive.
I'm still walking.
So why on earth would I suddenly be worried about that?
I mean, who can you find?
Find me someone who'll tell you that I lied to them or said what I did not believe in order to preserve something of mine.
You can't do it.
So you might disagree with me, but you shouldn't say, because it's not true, that I'm not acting out of conscience.
It is a hard, hard thing when people say things that you seriously disagree with out of a legitimate, in a legitimate act of conscience.
It is a very, very difficult thing to accept.
But I even accept this with some people on the left.
I mean, you know, take AOC.
I think AOC is an ignoramus.
I think she is dishonest, but I think she's sincere.
You know, I think she's dishonest and what she says happened and she tells lies about herself.
But I think she is a sincere leftist.
I don't think she's not acting out of conscience.
That's a much more difficult, much more nuanced, much more complex attitude to take toward human life.
And it is a way of looking at human life that in the end, I think, leads to better results because it's more true, because it's actual real.
So listen, I disagree with Liz Cheney.
I understand that you're angry, and I understand, too, that Trump has been treated so unfairly.
Trump has been treated so insanely unfairly that it is easy to say anyone who goes up against him must be doing it out of some plot.
I just don't, that just doesn't comply with the facts as far as I can tell.
And so again, I'm not supporting, you have to understand, I'm not supporting what Liz Cheney did.
I'm saying that we need people of conscience in the Republican Party or we will lose.
We will lose.
And I'm sorry, but that's what will happen if we lose, if we just say you have to have allegiance to Trump instead of allegiance to your conscience.
Mike Pence, another good example.
People were shouting, hang Mike Pence, one of the most loyal, most constructive vice presidents we've ever had, a guy who stuck by Trump through thick and thin, who defended him all the time, but in the end said, no, I have to obey the Constitution before I obey Trump when Trump did the wrong thing.
Are you going to tell me that Pence suddenly forgot that he believes in God?
Oh, yeah, I knew I believed in something, but I forgot what it is.
It's ridiculous.
The guy acted out of conscience, and I think he did the right thing.
And so if we don't understand that, our ideas about each other and about politics and about the world become narrow and false.
And that's my only point about this.
Not that I agree with Liz Cheney, but that I believe, I have no reason not to believe, that she acted in good conscience and that we have to be able to accept some of that, or we're going to have a party that is purely focused on Trump, and it will be a very small, increasingly small party, and will never win anything again.
We need, you know, to just curse the rhinos and say, well, I don't care if we lose, is a good way to lose.
From Alec, I was hoping you could give some advice regarding living in the freedom that Christ grants us, as you are one of the most joyful people I've ever seen.
I spent years in an aggressively legalistic church that deemed virtually everything a sin, from occasional off-color jokes to enjoying any art that was secular.
And while I've finally gotten out of that situation and am attending a much more sound church, it is so hard to fight back against those old ideas.
Thank you for everything you do.
God has used you tremendously in my life, and I know in the lives of many others.
Well, thank you for that.
That's wonderful to hear.
And this is not unrelated to the other thing.
I think when we start to understand people that we disagree with and start to have compassion for them, it becomes easier to have compassion on ourselves and vice versa.
Obviously, you were raised in a church and the things that you learn as a little person, as a young person, stick with you.
You know, they become part of the furniture of your mind.
And sometimes you have to move that furniture around and move it aside and even break it into little bits in order to move forward.
You know, when you understand, when you truly listen to what Jesus says, When you truly listen to what Jesus says, so much of this stuff becomes difficult.
So much of this small-minded, censorious, you know, pinched Christianity becomes difficult to believe in.
You know, when Jesus said, you know, judge not lest you be judged, I talk about this all the time.
It doesn't mean that nobody does anything wrong.
It means that you don't understand the state of their soul and you should be paying attention to the state of your soul.
When you're paying attention to the state of your soul and you hear that Jesus died for you while you are who you are and loves you as you are, that should be informative to how you treat yourself.
And as you begin to treat yourself that way, as you begin to treat yourself as a child of God and as the beloved of God, and start to think that you're supposed to love others as you love yourself and start to think of others as the beloved of God, the sins become less important.
The sins that people commit become less important as sins.
Obviously, when people do wrong things, they have to be stopped.
Obviously, when people do wrong things and self-destructive things, they need to be talked to and talked out of it.
But you start to think, like, is it really important that I need to condemn this and rail against this and hate this person for doing this when instead I can treat them the way I treat myself, which is with a little bit of respect and a little bit of compassion.
It makes you so much happier.
This thing about, you know, I was talking before about Jesus and the woman taken at adultery, and people always say, well, he wasn't not judging her.
But he actually says, I do not condemn you.
I, the Son of God, the incarnation of God, do not condemn you for doing something which is against the commandments of God.
The Power of Compassion00:03:35
That's what he says.
Why is that a path to joy?
Well, I think it's obvious.
You only have to do it.
You only have to try it to see.
You'll become happier on the instant.
You will become happier on the instant because it just takes the burden of judgment off your shoulders.
Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.
I will repay.
It's not your job.
You don't have to do it.
It's kind of like when people ask me if I think this is the end of days.
And I always say, well, what difference does it make to me?
I don't have to do anything.
I have to do the same thing every day.
Only God will take care of the end of days.
I don't even have to turn out the lights.
All of that will be taken care of.
Do what you have to do, which is live into God and stop judging other people and stop even really being so harsh on yourself.
And you will find it much easier to move forward to God and get closer to God because he feels that way about you.
He loves you already.
He loves you as you are.
And by the way, I'm not saying that like, oh, it's really easy for me to love myself.
It's a very, very difficult thing to do.
It's a practice, but it's a good thing to practice all the time.
And if you practice it enough, you get better at it.
From Luke, I'm running out of time.
He says, I was wondering what you thought of the book Dune as a more general question.
What separates a good story from a good piece of literature?
I have never finished Dune.
I've only read the first, I don't know, 100 pages or so, so I'm not going to comment on that.
Some people love it.
I couldn't get into it.
Maybe I'll try again sometime.
But what separates a good story from a good piece of literature, man?
That is such a good question.
You know, there are these books, I've talked about them before, the Horatio Hornblower books by C.S. Forster, which follows, there are about 10 of them or so, and they follow the career of a sailor in the Napoleonic, the British Army during the Napoleonic Wars, and they follow his rise through the ranks, and each one is a wonderful adventure story.
And they're some of the greatest adventure stories ever written.
They are like eating cake.
I could not put them down.
They're terrific.
Patrick O'Brien wrote the Aubrey Matron books, which are almost the same story.
It just follows a guy, a sailor, through his rise through the ranks during the Napoleonic Wars and great adventure stories.
The Aubrey Matron books are art in a way that the hornblower books aren't.
And it's indefinable.
It's impossible to put your finger on, but there is a depth of human understanding and human insight in one that is not in the other.
Now, listen, a story as great as the Hornblower stories, it's kind of small-minded to say it's not art, but because they're such great stories.
But there is this difference, this difference of depth that you see in the Patrick O'Brien books that you don't see in the Hornblower books.
So it's a question, I guess, of quality, of beauty, and depth.
And those are things people, you know, the left likes to say those are subjective things, so they don't exist.
That's not true.
They're subjective things in that they are experienced subjectively, but some things are more beautiful than other things.
The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is more beautiful than a garbage can.
It just is.
And so we, while it's hard to define these things on the edges, they are objective.
Beauty is not purely in the eye of the beholder.
It is experienced in the eye of the beholder, but it actually is a real thing.
And while it's hard to put your finger on exactly, there is a sort of middle ground where you can see it and it spreads out into very foggy places.
So your question is one that's impossible to answer exactly, but there is a difference and you know it when you hit it.
There is something almost cold about art.
There's something just pristine and beautiful about it.
When you hit it, you know it.
And it has changed you and it's marked you in a way that mere entertainment never quite does.
Andrew Clavinless Wilderness00:01:33
I got to stop there, but I will be back on Friday.
You won't be here because the chance of surviving that long through the Clavinless wilderness is just, this is almost nil.
But for those of you who crawl your way through, make it through the darkness, if you're all access, you might stop off on Wednesday and we'll do the all-access.
That will keep you going a little bit.
But basically, you're doomed.
Send your kids to next week and I'll be back.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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Thanks for listening.
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The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production, Copyright Daily Wire, 2021.
Monday on the Ben Shapiro Show, we'll tell you all about the movie deal we just got here at Daily Wire with Gina Carano, who just got canceled by Hollywood.