Andrew Clavin’s Radio Silence dissects Rush Limbaugh’s legacy as a defender of individualism, mocking leftist hypocrisy—from cancel culture targeting figures like John Wayne to the 1619 Project’s racial narratives—while contrasting it with Hollywood’s "woke" mobs, exemplified by Gina Carano’s defiance. Clavin ties Limbaugh’s free-speech fight to broader battles against postmodernism’s rejection of fixed truths, framing conservative infighting as a flaw in limited-government philosophy. The episode pivots to filmmaking, critiquing rigid screenwriting rules while promoting his Another Kingdom trilogy adaptation, and closes with sharp jabs at Biden’s COVID policies and Cruz’s Texas Freeze stance, all under the Daily Wire’s partisan lens. [Automatically generated summary]
There's exciting news in the ongoing battle against the Chinese virus, or as it's sometimes called, the kung flu, or the flu manchu, or the mulan flu, or the Disney worldwide pandemic.
Dr. Anthony Fauci has been given the coveted Andrew Cuomo Special Emmy Award for best performance as an expert giving advice during a disaster when it would have been nice to have an actual expert giving actual advice.
The lovely trophy consists of a hockey mask crossed with a butcher knife covered in what is either bronze or dried blood.
It's difficult to tell which without getting closer than is considered safe.
Dr. Fauci won the Special Emmy for his role in giving such memorable pieces of advice as don't wear a mask.
No, we only said don't wear a mask because we needed the masks.
So wear a mask.
Wear two masks.
Wear three masks.
Wear as many masks as it takes to get you to shut up and stop saying I'm a babbling idiot.
Then don't wear a mask.
What do I care as long as you continue to shut up?
Fauci also advised those who are concerned about catching the Chinese flu or the regular flu or a cold or warts or an uncomfortable breeze out of the north or any other disease or possible cause of a disease to shelter in place, breathe as little as possible and hop on one foot bobbing your head from side to side so the germs would have a hard time hitting you as they flew by.
Fauci recommended you continue to do this until late spring or until death passes from the earth, whichever comes second.
The Andrew Cuomo Emmy was presented by Cuomo himself in a Zoom call from an undisclosed location where the governor is hiding while police continue their nationwide manhunt for the man believed to be responsible for the deaths of more than 13,000 elderly people in the state of New York.
In his presentation speech, Cuomo said, quote, I just want to say to police officers everywhere that you lousy screws will never take me alive because I'm not going back to prison.
So eat lead, John Law.
Unquote.
Cuomo then climbed to the top of a gas tank and shouted top of the world, Ma, and blew himself to kingdom come rather than confess his crimes.
In accepting the coveted Cuomi, Dr. Fauci said he was thrilled to finally be free of the suffocating presence of Donald Trump so he could now tell America the full truth.
Namely, he borrowed his medical degree from Jill Biden and quote, I don't know nothing about curing diseases.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
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All right, to our amazement, I am back laughing our way through the fall of the Republic.
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Didn't Clavin answer the same set of questions in the same exact way in an earlier episode?
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It was worth listening to again.
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make it look so easy.
All right, today, you know, instead of the usual, what's the big idea opening today, what I want to do really is I want to talk about Rush Limbaugh.
And I'm going to let myself ramble a little bit.
I'm going to let myself go on a little bit because I want to talk about it personally, but I also hope that what I have to say, I think what I have to say will be different from some of the other tributes you've heard.
Of course, as you know, Rush Limbaugh has left the EIB studio to return his talent that was on loan from God to return it to God.
And, you know, when I heard this, I choked up.
I still choke up when I think about it.
I hope I won't embarrass myself.
But this is very unlike me.
I'm the opposite of a sentimental person.
I almost never choke up over celebrities.
And the reason I don't choke up over celebrities, even if I love their work, is because I don't know them.
I didn't know them and I didn't really know Rush.
But this affected me personally, and I know it affected a lot of you personally.
And so I want to talk about my personal experience.
And I also want to deal a little bit with the people who are saying such terrible things about Rush now that he's gone.
I'm sure they were saying it before that he's gone, but they continue to say it now that he's gone.
And I don't want to just do it in terms of shaking my fist at them.
I really want to examine what they're saying and why I think they're saying the things they're saying and why, of course, I disagree with them.
One of the reasons this struck me so personally is I'm a lifelong radio guy.
I was born into a radio family.
My father was a very successful New York DJ, what they call a morning man.
That's the guy who does the morning drive, which is the morning rush hour, which is the biggest, that's the biggest spot you can get.
And in those days, there weren't many national jocks.
There weren't many national disc jockeys.
So he was famous in his locality, but his locality was New York City, which, of course, was the biggest market there was.
And he was great.
My father was great.
You know, if you've read my memoir, The Great Good Thing, you know that we didn't always get along.
We didn't always hit it off, my father and I, but he was a good guy.
And in spite of that, we didn't mix well, but he was a good guy.
And he was an enormously talented broadcaster.
And I learned a lot about it.
You know, I frequently tout the fact that we discover people on my show.
Jenna Ellis and Jordan Peterson was here when he was, before anybody knew who he was.
Michael Knowles, I'm sorry about that.
I apologize for that.
Candace Owens will tell you herself that she started on this show.
And that is because I know good radio, good broadcasting when I hear it, because I grew up with it.
Ben Shapiro, when I first heard him, I think he was about 11 years old.
He was on a morning show in LA and he was on with Alicia and some other guy that I don't know.
And they didn't let him talk enough.
But when I heard him, when I finally heard him, I contacted him.
I think I got in touch with him through a DM and just said, you know, you are a genuine radio talent.
So it's something I can do because of my dad.
And I spoke to Rush once.
He interviewed me.
He had a magazine that he gave away to subscribers and he interviewed me for that.
And it was incredibly moving to me.
It's the only time I got to speak to him, but it was a long conversation.
And we did really have a conversation.
It wasn't just an interview.
And he was a soft-spoken, highly intelligent, very self-effacing person.
So in other words, he was doing a persona on the air, as we all to some degree do, but he was incredibly intelligent.
He was very kind to me.
He read many of my work, my columns and things on his show, which was always a big thrill.
And I was very happy to get to tell him this story, which I've told on the air before, but it's worth telling again, which was the fact my father was a liberal and he hated Rush.
He hated everything Rush stood for.
And I remember one day when he went off on Rush, we were sitting around talking about the radio business after he had really retired.
And he just went after, oh, you know, he hated Rush.
He was a fascist.
And he was Father Coglin.
And he was, you know, Hitler.
I mean, every conservative to my father was Hitler.
My father was an old-fashioned liberal.
He was an actually liberal person.
He was not like today's liberals who are not liberal.
He actually was a liberal person, but he did have that liberal thing where they know that the Republicans and the conservatives are just evil.
And he always thought the Nazis were around the corner.
And so he was going on and on about Rush, and he was a Nazi and all this stuff.
And when he was done, I said to him, well, maybe, but he's the best man with a microphone since you.
And my father kind of sagged and gave a big sigh and he said, I know, I know.
So that's how great Rush Limbaugh was on the radio.
He was so great that even my father, who hated him, had to admit he was the best in the business.
And it was really appealing.
It was really something to me, important to me, to hear this radio guy who was the best broadcaster I'd heard since my father.
And when he was coming up, when Rush was coming up, I was out of the country.
I didn't really hear about him very much.
And I didn't know, because I was living overseas in England, I didn't know that the spectrum, the political spectrum, was shifting under my feet, and I was becoming a right-winger.
I didn't really change all that much.
I did change in some of my opinions, but it was really the spectrum that changed.
And one of the indications I got of that was one day I was reading the Evening Standard, which is the afternoon paper in London, and I saw a friend of mine, a very famous literary agent, a very successful literary agent, was interviewed in the Evening Standard saying that she would never handle a book by Rush Limbaugh because of how evil he was.
And I wrote to her, and I was a liberal.
thought I was a liberal.
I didn't realize the ground had shifted under my feet.
I wrote to her and said, no, that's wrong.
It's.
It's voices like Rush Limbaughs that are being silenced.
You should let them speak so that we can hear what they have to say and so the conversation can continue.
And I thought that that was a liberal thing to say, but I didn't realize that that liberalism was gone.
When I got back, of course, I got back around the turn of the century.
I moved home just around 2000.
And very shortly afterwards, there was September 11th, the Attati Islamist attacks.
And I was shocked at the reaction of the people who were supposed to be our thought leaders, the entertainment community and the journalistic community, where they would say things like, I remember David Letterman specifically saying, why do they hate us?
And I was saying they're theocratic fascists.
You know, they're supposed to hate us.
It's good that they hate us.
We want them to hate us.
We just don't want them to attack us.
We want to fight them.
And I was shocked at the way the culture had changed.
And at that point, I was starting to find out that a lot of my opinions were being echoed by people that I had been told were evil.
So I was on the National Review where Jonah Goldberg and his ilk were talking on the corner and I was reading them.
And I started to listen to Rush Limbaugh.
And I listened to him just to kind of out of curiosity because he was such a big deal.
And I thought, like, what's evil about him?
Why is Rush Limbaugh evil?
You know, he's just talking about freedom.
He's just talking about, you know, constitutional limits on government.
It all sounded like it made a lot of sense to me.
Plus, he was hilarious, hilariously funny.
And there have been all these tributes to him.
And, you know, obviously he started this business that we're all in now.
He really changed the dialogue.
And he made, as the left became censorious and as it became small-minded and provincial and really mean and hateful, he kept that voice alive.
He kept the oppositional voice alive when, as we see now, they would gladly silence all of us and they would gladly make all of us criminals in a way, and make us all outsiders.
And he kept saying, no, no, this is actually a legitimate voice that can be spoken of, that can have humor, that can have joy.
And I, who was just kind of forming these thoughts and didn't even know these thoughts had formed in my mind, got a voice from him.
I suddenly thought, oh, you know, yeah, of course.
Of course, the jokes that I make aren't wicked.
Keeping The Oppositional Voice Alive00:15:35
They're not racist.
They're not sexist.
Of course, it's simply making fun of a damaged and damaging philosophy.
So let me just point out, you know, I wrote this piece for City Journal saying a lot of the things that I just said.
And you can go on cityjournal.org and read it.
It made the rounds.
It got a lot of traffic.
And of course, there was also all these attacks on Rush.
And they came from Hollywood.
Amber Tamblin, I'll read a couple, said, Rot in Purgatory.
Her husband, actor David Cross, said cancer killed the cancer.
Rush died of lung cancer.
John Cusack said, never speak ill of the dead, but the truth demands the recognition of some facts.
Besides Murdoch, there has been no more destructive of a practitioner of the big lie for practice in U.S. history besides Rush Limbaugh.
Rosanna Orquette, it's a real shame when someone wasted their lives spewing hate and lies.
Enjoy hell, says Billy Baldwin.
Borat director Larry Charles called Rush another white man propagating hate and lies.
Here's Sonny Hoston on The View talking about him.
This is cut one.
I've been listening to everyone sort of eulogizing Rush Limbaugh.
And I remember listening to him as a kid growing up.
And for me, he just normalized hatred.
He normalized racism.
And I think he really weaponized white male grievance.
And he sort of hardened these rural white listeners, people sitting in their trucks in the middle of America and in the South and listening to Rush Limbaugh.
And I mean, this is someone who called our president Barack the magic Negro.
This is someone who talked about an NFL football game as a gang match between the bloods and the Crips.
This is someone who made fun of Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's disease.
This is someone who likened a 13-year-old Chelsea Clinton to a dog.
This wasn't someone who was a nice person.
This is someone that spewed racism and hatred.
The same thing came out of the great and good in the universities.
Sarah Parsak, an anthropology professor at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, said she hoped that Limbaugh suffered until his last breath.
She said, when a terrible piece of scum who caused immeasurable harm to millions dies, there is no sympathy, only a desire that they suffered.
James McMaster, an assistant professor in Asian American studies and gender and women's LGBTQ studies, so essentially nothing, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison said he was grateful the world lost Limbaugh.
He said, from today onward, I will live in a world without Rush Limbaugh in it.
Now, a lot of things went around about the terrible, no-good, horrible, racist things that Rush said.
And I wrote an article once for the LA Times, very, very instructive.
It was called the Rush Limbaugh Challenge.
And it basically said, all the people hating on Rush Limbaugh have never listened to his show.
Not once.
They have never listened to his show.
And I said, you know, ask, and the editor of the LA Times, they ran this piece.
And I said, all they do is they hear stuff that is taken out of context from his show, and they repeat that back to show how hateful he is.
And the editor of the piece said, well, we're going to let people answer.
So they went out and they talked to a bunch of big liberals, Norman Lear and so on, to get an answer to the question.
And every single one of them quoted one of the same phrases that has been passed around by the liberals.
In other words, I was right.
They never, ever listened to the show.
And unfortunately, the op-ed editor did not fact check the people who were talking because they basically proved my point.
They didn't disprove it by attacking him.
And I went through some of the lists that went around.
He's supposed to have said, Rush is supposed to have said slavery built the South.
I'm not saying we should bring it back.
I'm just saying it had its merits.
For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.
Rush never said it.
You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor?
James Earl Ray, who killed Martin Luther King.
We miss you, James Gotsby.
Rush never said it.
But the left is absolutely certain these things were said.
But however, you know, Rush did say occasional things that were either insensitive or liable to misinterpretation.
Some of them he said when he started out as a shock jock, an insult jock, and said he regretted some of the things that he said.
But obviously, when you're an insult jock, you're going to make insulting remarks.
But remember this, okay?
Rush talked three hours a day, three hours every day.
That's more than you probably talk to your spouse every day.
That is more words coming out of his mouth than you probably talk to your spouse every day.
So ask yourself, did you ever say anything to your spouse that you didn't mean or that maybe didn't represent your best self?
So, you know, of course, of course, Rush sometimes said things.
I could hear him sometimes go down a road that was a dead end and he would get caught down there.
I could hear him say things like that.
But of course, none of that matters.
None of it matters.
Why doesn't it matter?
Why doesn't it matter?
Because they set the rules and it only cuts one way.
It only cuts one way.
Here's Joe Biden talking about getting vaccinated and why some people just don't have the wherewithal to do it.
This is cut 12.
A lot of people don't know how to register.
Not everybody in the community, in the Hispanic and the African American community, particularly in rural areas that are distant and or inner city districts, know how to use, know how to get online to determine how to get in line for that COVID vaccination at the Walgreens.
So minorities are not smart enough to do the things that the rest of us, you know, that other people can do.
There's Bill and Melinda Gates have their foundation where they try to impose abortion on Africa and things.
They have a new grant for algebra classes, right?
They have resources to help educators rid their classrooms of racist math.
And how do they do that?
In dismantling racism in mathematics instruction, they warn educators that white supremacy culture shows up in the classroom when teachers, quote, treat mistakes as problems by equating them with wrongness.
This is an algebra.
That's white.
That's white supremacy to do that.
It, quote, reinforces the ideas of perfectionism that students shouldn't make mistakes and paternalism that teachers or other experts can and should correct mistakes.
In other words, they're treating black people like idiots.
They're treating them like people who can't learn, which we know is true, damaging, horrifying, philosophical, philosophical racism.
The College Fix has an article today.
A public Connecticut University is running a contest, awarding $15,000 in prize money to students who provide written or video essays describing their personal relationship to Black Lives Matter.
But in order to have this contest, they're lowering the grammatical standards for the contest.
The school notes, submissions will not be judged on traditional literary or grammatical standards.
I mean, obviously, you know, they always say words are violence, and the left is always saying words of violence.
This is, that is a terrible, terrible thing to do to people, to basically say black people can't compete, they can't learn algebra, they can't, you know, meet objective standards of grammar, objective standards of right and wrong in math.
That is true racism, but that never, but it only cuts one way.
And, you know, so the fact that in three, talking three hours a day, Rush may have once or twice have said things untoward doesn't speak to his philosophy.
It doesn't speak to his philosophy, which was never racist.
You know, anybody who listens to the show knows I'm deeply, deeply, religiously opposed to racism.
I think it is an insult to God's image.
But obviously, I don't judge people on little comments they make.
We all have things in our head we don't want there.
We all have instincts we don't want.
We have impulses, desires we don't want there.
And sometimes we say things that are Untoward.
That's not what runs you down.
It's the philosophy.
And you can hear that the left is permeated with racism.
In fact, I would say leftism is racism.
So they can point, oh, Rush said this, or he said that, no, he made a slip there.
But really, really, the philosophy is what matters.
And that's part of what I want to talk about.
For instance, let me just play for a minute, Sean Hannity talking about the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, okay?
And I just want to compare this to all the great and good people, all these Hollywood people, all the wonderful actors, all the wonderful college professors who are celebrating the death of Rush Limbaugh when his family is still grieving, when the people who loved him and celebrated him have lost something, when their fellow Americans have feel a little hurt about this loss and they're dancing on his grave.
Here's what Sean Hannity said when Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who let me point out we disagreed with, we on the right disagreed with just as much as they disagree with Rush.
I mean, we felt about Ruth Bader Ginsburg that she was just as misguided, that her philosophy was bad.
I don't mind there being disagreements, but here's what Sean Hannity, the evil, the horrible, the Trump supporting, Sean Hannity, the lowest of the low when it comes to right-wing, how much more right-wing could you get than Sean Hannity?
Here's the way he spoke about the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Known as one of the most liberal leading judges on the bench, Justice Ginsburg had a distinguished legal career, the first Jewish woman to serve on the highest court in our land.
Our thoughts and prayers, by the way, tonight are with the entire Ginsburg family, her colleagues at the U.S. Supreme Court, and everyone who knew and loved Justice Ginsburg.
Interestingly, why they did have a deep philosophical divide.
Justice Ginsburg was well known to have a great deep friendship with Antonin Scalia, who passed away a short time ago.
They were close friends.
By the way, my own father died from pancreatic cancer in a very short period of time.
It is an insidious cancer.
She battled this cancer with incredible inspiring courage, beyond heroic.
She will be missed by many.
Now, I'm pointing this out just to show you the difference in what philosophies do to you, what philosophies turn you into.
It's not the things that slip out of your mouth.
It's not the little glitches of sin that we all have in our heads.
Those are not the things that twist you and turn you into people who dance on the grave of your opponents, as opposed to Sean Hannity, who had the grace and dignity to treat Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her death, and the people who were mourning her death as well, with the kindness and respect that they deserved as human beings.
And, you know, I've said this to a couple of people when we've talked about it personally.
People get very angry when they hear people dancing on Rush's grave or saying foul things about him.
I always tell them, you know, there's not a lot of justice in the world.
There's not a lot of justice in the world.
Bad people win sometimes.
Good people get hurt.
Good people die young.
All kinds of unjust things happen.
But here's an area where there's justice.
When you have that kind of hate in your heart, believe me, believe me, it saps your joy.
There is instantaneous justice for that.
So I don't bother with this at all.
I mean, it doesn't bother me at all, but I'm talking about philosophies and what philosophies do to you.
So what twists the left into those people and why is there, I feel, a lot more grace.
And I'm not talking about, you know, we've got bad guys on the right and there are bad guys on the left, but I'm talking about mainstream people, the mainstream hate that was on TV, the mainstream hate that came out of Hollywood, the mainstream hate that came out of the academy for Rush Limbaugh, a guy who really did change an industry, I think, and I think changed the country by adding a voice, a side, giving a voice to most of the people, maybe a majority of people in the country.
Here is Rush Limbaugh in a famous 2009 CPAC speech where he tried to define what it is that conservatives believe.
This is cut 24.
We love people.
When we look out over the United States of America, when we are anywhere, when we see a group of people such as this or anywhere, we see Americans.
We see human beings.
We don't see groups.
We don't see victims.
We don't see people we want to exploit.
What we see, what we see is potential.
We do not look out across the country and see the average American, the person that makes this country work.
We do not see that person with contempt.
We don't think that person doesn't have what it takes.
We believe that person can be the best he or she wants to be if certain things are just removed from their path, like onerous taxes, regulations, and too much government.
That, to me, is at the heart of conservatism.
We look at people as individuals.
When you look at people as individuals, you can make all the jokes in the world about blacks, about gay people, about women, because you know when a person walks in, you're going to treat that person with respect as an individual.
Now, I say this, you know, you know my son, Spencer, no relation, is a gay guy.
The guy is as close to me as my own heart.
I mean, Spencer, as is my daughter, Faith.
They are parts of my, they are like parts of my body, essential parts of my body.
I couldn't love them anymore.
I couldn't be any prouder of both of them.
Just talking about Spencer.
Now, some of Spencer's best friends, some of the people who love him most, believe that homosexuality is a sin, believe that homosexuality is at least a disorder in the way that we're supposed to relate to each other sexually.
They would give their lives.
They would stand up for him in any place, help him out any way they could.
They love him to death.
I mean, I know this for a fact.
I see it with my own eyes.
The only people who treat my son badly are people who are not worthy to lift his jackstrap, all of them on the left, and they treat him because he will not fit into their group categories.
And you can ask him about this.
I don't mean to speak for him.
He can speak for himself.
But this is true.
This is true.
When you group people into categories, when you look at people in groups, whether it's the color of their skin or their sexuality, which I believe is inborn, or whether it's whether, even whether it's male or female.
And I strongly believe that men and women are very different, speaking generally.
Men and women are very different kinds of people.
And yet, and yet, as each person comes in, you accept them on their terms.
I get hit all the time on my comments about feminism, even from the right.
I get real, real heat for it because I believe that femininity is a good thing.
I believe that the femininity, which is an alignment of a woman with her kind of female tasks of nurturing and creating and building homes and humanizing life, I think femininity is a good thing that feminism derides and basically tells women that they're not successful unless they're like men.
However, however, ask any woman how I deal with her, if she has a different path in her life.
Why Media Is Divisive00:09:12
If she comes up and says, that's not what I do.
You know, what I do is I want to be in a middle evil sword fight.
All right, I might talk her out of that.
But in other things, if she doesn't want that life, it's nothing to me because I take her as an individual.
It's why I don't believe black lives matter.
I don't believe black lives matter.
Black lives don't matter because there are no black lives.
There's no such thing as a black life.
There's only a life.
There's only the life of individual individuals.
And when you look at people that way, you're happier.
You're happier.
You're more loving.
I mean, I think it's a big, big deal to look at people, to take each person as they come.
And that was what Rush was preaching.
And that's why phrases that he said or a slip of the tongue that he may have made, which may have exposed some darkness in his heart, like everybody has, like every single person has, that's why they don't matter because his philosophy was right and their philosophy is wrong.
You know, we fall into this hypocrisy trap with the left.
They say, well, you said X. Ha ha.
So you're racist.
You have to be canceled.
You should lose your job.
When you were 15, you sent a tweet out that said this and you should be canceled.
You should lose your job.
And our response is, you're a hypocrite because you said this or you said that.
But that's wrong.
That's accepting their terms.
Their terms are wrong.
Their terms are wrong.
You can say anything.
You can have any belief you want.
You can have any belief you want as long as you believe in the individual person as an image of God.
And if you believe in that, everything else is going to fall into place and you're not going to become this hateful person.
I cannot believe there are people who sit around dreaming up ways to rip you off and steal your identity.
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Why they spend their life like that?
I don't know.
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The first thing you want to do is go on the dark net and find out how you spell Klavin.
And I'll tell you, it's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Dennis Prager has a great piece in the Wall Street Journal today because the other thing they kept saying about Russian, and I love this part, is they keep saying that Rush was divisive or divisive, however you want to pronounce it.
And Prager says, it's amazing, it is amazing that the left cannot see themselves in these terms.
Prager writes, calling America systemically racist, calling every white American racist and separating college dorms and graduating exercises by race, that's not divisive.
Using the New York Times demonstrably false 1619 project to teach America's school children that our country wasn't founded in 1776, but in 1619, when the first black slaves arrived in North America and that the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery, that's not divisive.
Forcing high school girls to race against biological males who identify as females, that's not divisive.
The Supreme Court's ruling that non-denominational prayer in public schools is unconstitutional wasn't that divisive.
Yet, according to the left, says Dennis, only when conservatives respond to such attacks on America and Americans does divisiveness enter national life.
And that was so true.
You know, it's a really good piece.
You should read it.
But it's also true of civility.
And this is one of the things when I returned from England that cracked me up.
For decades, for decades, feminists were calling men pigs.
You're a pig.
You're a male chauvinist pig.
They're calling people racist, which in America is one of the worst things you can say about somebody.
They call you racist.
Oh, you're a racist.
You're a pig.
You're a homophobe.
Words that now don't even mean it.
Are you homophobic and transphobic?
Those words have no meaning.
They're just insults.
And then Rush started to make fun of them, started to give it back to them.
They're feminazis, their environmental crazies, all this stuff that he would make up, you know, all these words that he would make up.
Suddenly, there was no civility.
Where was the civility?
And this is a hilarious fact about the left is that they're so surrounded by their news media that they don't see themselves.
It's like they are elites without mirrors, I call them.
Elites without mirrors because they have no way of seeing who they really are because the media protects them from themselves.
And that's why this is the other thing that Rush said, another part of his philosophy.
This is cut four.
Have you seen the country this divided?
Not in my lifetime, no.
Obviously, it was greatly divided during the Civil War.
But I think one of the reasons why the country is divided the way it is now, Brett, is I think the media is a central figure.
The media used to at least pretend that they were not a participant in the ongoing events of the country, that they were casual observers that were fair and objective.
But they're not anymore.
They've chosen sides and they have become political activists.
And as such, there isn't any news anymore.
You know, it's funny.
Andrew Breitbart once said to me that if there were no mainstream media, what they call the mainstream media is really the leftist corporate media, but if there were no mainstream media, Rush wouldn't have a job because what did he say?
He said the mainstream media is rocket fuel to Rush.
That was what Andrew Breitbart said.
It's rocket fuel to Rush.
And this is true.
You know, Breitbart, one of the things that Breitbart said to me, used to say to me, was if there were no internet, he used to say, he would be flipping burgers.
Andrew said that.
And I used to say, yeah, but if Fred Astaire were born today, he'd be running a dance studio in Syracuse.
And the thing is, all people who are successful and who have the kind of success that Rush had, they're born in the right time, all of them.
There's always luck.
There's always luck to all success, all of it.
Nobody succeeds on pure hard work.
There's always an element of luck.
And this was the thing that Rush did.
He came along at a moment when the left was closing their minds, when the left had dominated the media, when they had purposely gone about dominating the media, and he broke through and he broke through and gave a voice to all these voiceless people, all these people that the left was working not to give a voice to.
And as a radio guy, I can tell you too, my father lived his whole life complaining that radio was a second-rate field, that he was a first-rate talent in a second-rate field.
It was true, he was a first-rate talent, and radio was second-rate.
But what Rush did was he made it first-rate again.
He totally transformed it.
He transformed it with the force of his talent.
He transformed it with the force of his vision.
He transformed it with the force of his personality and his ideas.
And so that, in and of itself, in and of itself, is an amazing, amazing accomplishment.
One more piece of Rush wisdom that I just want to throw in there because it's so important in this moment.
It is probably one of the most important things he said toward the end of his life.
He said this, I think, on Fox News.
This is cut five.
People call here announcement.
Rush, you always told us, you told us when it could be time to panic.
Well, is it time to panic?
Well, let me just tell you folks, it's never going to be time to panic because we're never going to give up.
We're not going to give up on America.
I'm not.
I don't think most of you are either.
America's worth it.
America is worth fighting for.
America's worth not giving up.
That, to me, is the thing that conservatives need to hear most, need to remember most.
You know, somebody asked me the other day on our all access program, is Canada freer than America now?
And I said, what difference does it make?
America is the place where the fight for freedom is going on.
This has been, for the last 50 years or so, the freest country that has ever existed on the planet.
It has ever existed on the planet.
That means, now, why is that?
Why is that?
Because there are people, powerful people, don't want you to be free.
They think you're deplorable.
They think you're deplorable, irredeemable.
They think your opinions, your ideas are not worth considering.
think they have the ideas that are going to save the world.
They're going to have the great reset.
It's going to save the world.
Your ideas, you want to build a business, that doesn't matter.
Your business is closed, you know, so you don't catch the cold.
You know, we can just close your business.
Your business doesn't matter.
Only our big businesses, only Amazon, only Google, only Apple.
Those are the only things that matter.
You're nothing.
They're always those people.
There are always those people.
They call them Caesar.
They call them Pharaoh.
They call them kings.
This is the country.
This is the country where we threw them out.
And this is the country where every generation, every single generation, we have to fight again.
And if you don't like that fight, if you don't want to be a part of that fight, this isn't the place for you.
You know, yeah, go to Canada.
Powerful People's Reset00:02:56
Sure.
Healthcare is free.
You got to wait six months to get your knee replaced, but that's okay.
You know, it's like, this is the place where we fight for freedom.
And that's what Rush was doing.
Rush said he had talent on loan from God.
This is where I choke up a little bit because I think that's literally true.
I think we all have talent on loan from God.
And you know, the parable of the talents is the parable of the, each guy was given a talent.
It was a weight of silver.
And when he returned it to his master, he had to have invested it.
And the master said, did you invest it?
And the wise servant said, yes, I doubled your money.
And the master said, well done, thou good and faithful servant.
Rush's investment, you know, somebody asked me this too.
How is his death going to affect the future of the conservative movement?
And I said, it's not, because his work is done.
His work is done.
His investment paid off in Dennis Prager.
It paid off in Mark Levin.
It paid off in Glenn Beck.
It paid off in Ben Shapiro.
It paid off in the Daily Wire.
His investment has paid all the dividends because now they would not be trying so hard to silence us if we did not have the voice Rush gave us.
That is an amazing legacy.
So that's my personal take on losing Rush, on radio silence that will follow the death of Rush.
Well done, Rush.
Well done, thou good and faithful servant.
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Russia's Passing00:12:14
So this, Russia's passing brought back the passing of another great American that I loved and the left did not love.
And this was back in the days when I was a liberal.
I was certainly a Democrat.
I don't know how left-wing I was, but I'm certainly a liberal, as I consider myself today a liberal.
I'm a conservative because I'm a liberal, because conservatism is now where liberalism resides.
But I want to talk about John Wayne.
John Wayne, very similar reputation to Rush Limbaugh.
John Wayne and Clint Eastwood are probably the two most enduring movie stars of all time.
And that's very telling, is very telling what the audience is looking for when they go to the movies.
They want to tell us that it's the latest left-winger.
They want to tell us that the biggest star is the latest guy who makes the nastiest anti-Trump speech when we give him an award for being a genetic jackpot.
But no, it's really John Wayne and Clint Eastwood are the two guys, both of them kind of representative of conservative values, the two guys who really endure.
And, you know, when John Wayne died, I had a kind of a similar situation.
I was a small town newspaperman when Wayne died.
This is back in the 70s, the 1970s.
And I didn't even think about it.
I didn't even think about it.
I was a liberal.
You know, there were times when my newspaper scolded me for putting liberal bias in my newspaper, which is kind of the old days.
But I thought like, wow, this was one of the greatest movie stars of all time.
He helped shape my youth watching him.
I learned a lot about what it meant to be a man, what it meant to, you know, saddle up even when you were afraid, as John Wayne would say.
And so I wrote a column about him.
And it was a, you know, a comical column.
It wasn't funny, but it was wry, I guess.
Rye is the word that I would say.
And I was a court reporter.
I was a guy who covered crime.
And I was covering a big murder case at the time, I think.
And I walked into the courthouse the next morning.
And from every corner of the lobby, prosecutors, politicians, assemblymen came and shook my hand and said, thank you for saying what you said about John Wayne.
You know, we were afraid to say it.
And the idea that anybody, first of all, that anybody would be afraid to say anything was completely foreign to me because I wasn't really paying that much attention to the culture.
But it was the beginning.
It was the beginning of that cancel culture.
And if you said good things about John Wayne, you were a bad person because he was the 60s had happened and we were all supposed to be in line with the 60s.
And he was supposed to be a bad guy.
And the same thing, he was a racist.
And there was a famous interview, I believe it was in Playboy magazine, where he said, you know, he made untoward remarks.
He made remarks that I don't agree with, but they were from his time.
And remember, at that point, he was already 60, 70 years old.
He was already getting up there and he was kind of talking out of the past.
And he said something like, I mean, the famous line was something like, I'll believe in white supremacy until blacks are ready to take over.
You know, they're not ready yet, but they will be and they'll go forward.
And he said he would cast black people, but he wouldn't go out of his way to cast black people.
He said he would cast a character if that character should be black.
That's what he said.
And one of the things he talked about was Indians, because he was a cowboy actor.
And so there was a famous take that Hollywood had been wicked to Indians, to Native Americans.
And here's the quote.
He said, I don't feel we did wrong.
I think this is from the Playboy interview.
This is John Wayne.
He said, I don't think we feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them, the Native Americans, if that's what you're asking.
Our so-called stealing of this country for them was just a matter of survival.
There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.
Now, you know, Charlton Heston, also another great Hollywood conservative, also used to talk about the fact that the Indians never invented the wheel.
The Native Americans never invented the wheel.
And how can you hold on to a continent if you don't invent the wheel?
Haven't we progressed more because Europeans came over?
Now, I see this as a little bit more nuanced.
Obviously, there were atrocities in the Indian Wars by both sides.
You know, there were plenty of atrocities by both sides.
But history is complex.
And history, none of the people who complain about the Indians are giving their homes back.
None of them are leaving to go back to Europe.
So it's all kind of talk.
It's all kind of virtue signaling.
And the fact is, difficult, difficult things happen in the course of history, movements over time.
It's strange to me that the same people who think our borders should be open so anybody can come in and move across our country feel it was somehow wrong for the Europeans to come to America and North America and move across that country and make it their own.
Anybody who was to say, oh, we don't want people, illegal aliens coming in and making this country their own, would be accused of being a bigot by the same people who say Europeans should not have come into North America and made it their own.
And again, in terms of atrocities, there were atrocities on both sides of the fence during the Indian wars.
So the point about John Wayne, of course, is that he was an actor.
He had a persona.
And the question is not really what his personal ideas were.
The same kind of thing with Rush.
You know, people might say anything at a given moment, or they might think anything at a given moment, but what ideas did he represent?
Did his films represent?
And he was in some great, great movies that had really complicated ideas about the Indians, the Native Americans.
And I think that those ideas are really his legacy.
And I wanted to take a look at some of them because they have really affected my way of looking at history.
And I think they are so much more interesting and nuanced and complex than anything the left has to say about subjects like this.
One movie is a film called Hondo, which was, if you've never seen Hondo, it's one of Wayne's best movies.
It's 1953.
And the amazing thing about it is it's 70 minutes long.
I'm saying that off the top of my head.
It may not be exactly right, but it's about 70 minutes long.
It's based on a Louis Lemour story.
Louis Lemour was one of the great and most prolific Western writers in America.
He wrote so many Westerns, and many of them, many, many of them have been made into films and TV shows.
But Hondo, I think, was his best.
And Hondo is kind of a ripoff on Shane.
Shane, the wanderer, comes in, the writer comes in to the people who are settled.
And the drifter affects the lives of the family who has settled.
And in this, Wayne plays Hondo, who comes, I think he's a Civil War veteran or something like this, and he comes on.
What's interesting about this, by the way, is it was not directed by John Ford, but at the end, the director, John Farrow, had to leave, and John Ford directed the last parts of it.
And Wayne finds a widow living with her son.
The widow is played by a very young Geraldine Page.
Some of you may know Geraldine Page as an older, much older actress, but she was the young Angenu in this.
And she's got a son.
And it turns out, and this is a bit of a spoiler, but it's worth talking about.
It turns out that Wayne has killed her husband, who is a thief.
Her husband is a bad guy, even a murderer, I believe.
And Wayne has killed her husband.
And at one point, Wayne wants to tell the boy, he becomes like a father to the boy.
And the woman falls in love with him.
The widow falls in love with him.
And he says, and Wayne says, if I'm going to be part of this family, I've got to tell this boy the truth.
And the mother stops him.
And here's the scene.
This is cut 11.
A man can afford his noble sentiments and poses, but a woman only has the man she married.
That's her truth.
And if he's no good, that's still her truth.
I married a man who was a liar, a thief, and a coward.
He was a drunkard and unbaked.
He only married me to get this ranch, and then he deserted Johnny and he for good.
And that's your fine truth for you.
Could I bring Johnny up on that?
Oh, I guess you could.
And then you come along, and you're good and fine, and everything that Ed could never hope to be.
And all is your vanity.
You want to spoil Johnny's chances and mine.
That attitude, her attitude, that sometimes you have to lie to do the right thing, the noble lie, as Plato called it, is a civilizational adaptation.
To some degree, you build your civilizations on lies.
To some degree, the myths you have, the people, you know, George Washington cutting down the cherry tree or honest Abe Lincoln, those things can always be debunked, but they are lies that tell a truth.
And the lie that tells a truth here is that Wayne is the better man.
And Wayne can give this boy a good life, and that's the truth that matters here.
And he, why alienate him by telling him the ugly truth about his father?
This is compared with the life of the Apaches who are surrounding this little farm, who only tell the truth, who have no version of lies in this film.
And at the end of the movie, the Indians are being forced off their land.
And Wayne looks and says, their way of life is over.
Too bad it was a good way.
And that's a really profound idea about civilization and the primitive.
You know, there's always a kind of longing for the primitive, especially among the French Romantic thinkers like Rousseau, who thought that there was a noble savage.
I don't believe that was Rousseau's term, but the noble savage, the idea that man was born free, but now civilization has him in chains.
And that too is a myth.
That too is a lie.
But there is something about the primitive life that is appealing.
And when you see these movies, they're all the same movie, like Dances with Wolves and Pocahontas, and what's the other?
The one Avatar is another one.
They're all the same story.
Guy goes among the nature people and learns that his civilization is evil and nature is a good way to live.
And that was really in some ways hondo, except with a little more intelligence showing that there was something really good about civilization, even with its lies, and it had to come.
And this thing, this is the thing, this sort of energy of history, the sort of energy of history, which is almost inevitable.
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Write Claven, and you got to write it.
He's got to say, like, Clavin in your, how, in their, how did you hear about us box so they know we sent you.
Lucy and Preparedness00:07:16
And I know what you're saying.
You say, how do you smell Clavin?
Because now you're just talking like that all the time.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no E's in Clavin.
There is a series of novels.
And if you haven't read these novels and you love novels, you should read these novels.
They're called the Flashman novels.
They're by George MacDonald Fraser, and they're about a coward, Flashman, who was, there's a famous school novel called Tom Brown's School Days, and he was the bad guy, the bully in Tom Brown's School Days, Flashman, and he gets expelled in Tom Brown's School Days.
So George McDonnell Fraser used him, this guy from another novel, and made him the hero of his books.
And what he is, is a coward.
He's a terrible coward with no morals whatsoever who somehow manages to get involved with every famous battle during the Victorian era and come out of it looking like a hero even though he's not, even though he's a Poltroon.
And he uses Flashman to speak the difficult truths of history.
And that's why it's such a good, I keep trying to get Ben to read these.
I don't think he has, but he really should.
He would love them.
And I think you would love them as well.
And Flashman at one point is in a club and he's drunk and he's just a horrible person, but he's hilarious.
And he's in a London club and he's drunk and he starts listening to some pompous kind of left-wing guy go off on the treatment of the Indians.
And he starts to shout in his drunken way.
And this is what he says.
He says, if you think the whites were a whit more guilty than your darling Redskins, you're an even bigger bloody fool than you look.
He says, what bleeding breastbeaters like you can't comprehend is that when selfish, frightened men, in other words, any men, red or white, civilized or savage, when any men come face to face in the middle of a wilderness that both of them want, then war breaks out and the weaker goes under.
He says, politics don't matter a damn.
It's the men in fear and rage and uncertainty watching the woods and skyline.
Do you see you purblind bookworm you?
Flashman is immediately thrown out of the club for saying what is obviously the truth, that history, you know, the people acting in history are sometimes small, almost always small people acting against and forces that were put in place without their approval and without their knowledge and without their understanding.
They are just trying to build a home in the wilderness and maybe the Indians are saying, well, this is my home and they're coming, this is my land, and they're going to chase you off and kill you and steal your women and the men are fighting back and ultimately it's the weaker tribe goes under.
And that's really what happens in history.
And to pass this kind of lofty judgment on it that the left always wants to pass is like simplistic and stupid.
And Wayne made films that, especially with John Ford, that represented that simplicity and that stupidity and tried to find a moral avenue through them.
The greatest of them all is The Searchers, 1956.
This is now looked upon as one of the great masterpieces.
I find half of it to be one of the great masterpieces, and then there's a kind of comical love story in it that I just hate.
I've never been able to convince myself that it's any good.
But the story is really remarkable.
John Wayne is a guy, this is in Texas during the Texas Indian Wars.
A family is raided.
A white family is raided by the Indians and the women are carried off.
And John Wayne goes off especially to get one of these women and to kill her, to kill her because she's been raped.
He knows, he assumes she's been raped by the Indians and turned into a squaw.
And so he is going to kill her because he hates the Indians that much.
He hates the Indians that much because of what he's seen.
And at one point, one of the guys who's traveling with him to rescue a woman named Lucy, I think it's his girl.
I don't think it's his daughter.
I think it's his wife.
He thinks he's seen Lucy, and Wayne tells him, no, no, I've seen Lucy.
I know what really happened to Lucy.
This is cut seven.
I saw Lucy, all right.
She was wearing that blue dress.
What you saw wasn't Lucy.
Oh, but it was, I tell you.
What you saw was a buck wearing Lucy's dress.
I found Lucy back in the canyon.
Wrapped her in my coat.
Buried her with my own hands.
Thought it best to keep it from you.
Did they?
What do you want me to do?
Draw your picture?
Spell it out!
Don't ever ask me.
Long as you live, don't ever ask me more.
And at the end of the film, he finds Natalie Wood in one of the most famous scenes of all movies.
He chases her down to kill her and then picks her up and says, let's go home.
And Wayne hates the Indians, and he hates the fact that she is now essentially an Indian.
And the scene we've talked before about Jesus' parable about the woman taken in adultery, and essentially it's that scene replayed in a Western film.
And I think what the movie shows you is that everybody is basically a savage.
Everybody is basically a savage.
They're all out to hate and kill and rape and destroy one another.
But there is another way and that this civilization that is coming has the opportunity to bring that way in.
Obviously, it doesn't always survive.
It doesn't always do it.
But the replacement of primitive life with civilized life is usually a replacement for the better.
And I would say especially with Christian life.
You know, the left is making fun of Texas because they've had some blackouts because they've had a once-in-a-century storm.
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And the final thing that really was in Wayne's movies was a genuine respect.
I mean, this is nothing to do with John Wayne the Man.
It has to do with his persona.
The Dark Road Ahead00:02:49
A genuine respect for the people that they met, because like the British fighting, the Imperial British, fighting in Africa, they always attack Rudyard Kipling for his jingoism and for supporting the imperial endeavor.
But like Kipling, Kipling had a lot of respect for the people they were fighting.
You know, here's to you, fuzzy Wuzzy in your home in the Sudan.
You're a first-class fighting man or Gungadin, you're a better man than I am, Gungadin.
There was a sense of like, yes, these were people.
These were noble people.
These were even great people, but history had brought them into a clash, and the weaker was going to go under.
You see this in Fort Apache, another great John Ford film.
This is an earlier film, 1948, where Henry Fonda plays a disappointed cavalry officer who has been sent out to what he thinks to Fort Apache, which he thinks is just a backwater.
He's bitter and he's a martinette, and he talks about the fact that, oh, you know, other people are fighting the great nations, but we're just fighting these Apaches.
And Wayne, who is a scout, puts him straight.
This is cut nine.
We here have little chance for glory or advancement.
While some of our brother officers are leading their well-publicized campaigns against the great Indian nations, the Sioux and the Cheyenne, we are asked to ward off the gnat stings and flea bites of a few cowardly digger Indians.
Your pardon, Colonel.
You'd hardly call Apaches digger Indians, sir.
You'd scarcely compare them with a Sioux, Captain.
No, I don't.
The Sioux once raided into Apache territory.
Old-timers told me you could follow their line of retreat by the bones of their dead.
I suggest the Apache has deteriorated since then, judging by a few of the specimens I've seen on my way out here.
Well, if you saw them, sir, they weren't Apaches.
We'll discuss the Apache some other time, Captain.
And at the end, there's another brilliant scene, one of the most beautiful.
It's just the visuals on these Westerns are unbelievably spectacular, just great, where Wayne goes out to talk to the Indians, and the Indians have scored a major kind of custer-like victory, but they leave Wayne alone because they know he respects them and they respect him as well.
And so, you know, these things, these things are so much more complicated.
They're so much more complicated than the left wants to have us believe.
And their dislike of, you know, it's funny.
My problem with the left is not about their lack of patriotism.
It's not about their disdain for ordinary people.
It's about the ideas that fuel those things because their ideas are simplistic and stupid and wrong.
And that is the problem.
Credit Score Mastery00:02:18
You know, if you don't believe in the individual, if you don't believe in the freedom of the guy next to you, you really have nothing to say after that.
Everything you have to say after that is going to take you down a bad road, a dark road, a hateful road.
And we see this with their reaction to Rush Limbaugh's death.
We see it with their dismissal of John Wayne, one of the truly great movie stars, and of the ideas that filtered through, which are not at all, not at all ideas of hatefulness against the Indians, but a sort of tragic sadness and appreciation of something that happened in history that was ugly on every side, that was really ugly all the way through in many ways, and somehow was just what history had in mind at that moment.
It really is the simplicity, the simplicity of the left's ideas that leads them down that dark road into the hatred and misery that we can see basically in every word they speak.
So this is important.
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Last Friday, the Daily Wire announced a movie deal with Gina Carano, former actress on The Mandalorian, who was canceled after criticizing the tyranny of the woke Hollywood mob.
Stories Telling About Something Else00:15:46
Ironic that.
So we decided to team up with Gina, and within hours of us making the announcement, the news went viral.
From USA Today to the LA Times, whether it was shock or outrage, there was a massive show of coverage.
Headline after headline documented Gina's rejection of canceled culture and ours, because that's exactly what this is.
This is canceled culture.
It's more than a statement.
We are fighting back against the totalitarian mob and the leftist narrative that has dominated our culture for so long.
Gina's own words, they can't cancel us if we don't let them.
We won't.
That's why we've entered the entertainment space, and that's why we want you to be part of this fight to reclaim our culture.
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So why is it that I'm always talking about the culture?
Why does the culture matter?
You know, this is the thing about conservatives, political people in general, actually, that they think that stories matter because of the messages that they convey.
Whereas I think stories matter because of the way stories work.
And this is one of the key messages of the Bible, in my opinion, and one of the really fascinating ways that the Bible teaches us to look at human life, the humanity of life.
Because, you know, there's a big philosophy, a very powerful philosophy going around.
And I've talked about this before.
I'm not going to go on and on about it.
But the philosophy basically that human nature is empty, that it's either a blank slate or that it's wholly affected, created by powers outside itself.
And that's why, you know, a lot of this comes from postmodern thought, but that's why you get these what we call snowflakes complaining that, oh, you did violence to them because you won't admit that when a man says he's a woman, he is magically transformed into a woman.
It's because they think that they are being wholly created from the outside.
Whereas if you are a person who knows who he is or she is, if you are a person who is confident in yourself or at least confident in your identity, then nothing that anybody says can really transform you or hurt you or damage you.
But they have been taught that, no, they are empty vessels wholly created by power structures outside themselves.
And so until those power structures are corrected, until those power structures are corrected, they cannot be themselves at peace.
And that is a very damaging philosophy, but on top of everything else, it's untrue.
And, you know, there's a painting, a great illustration of this.
Around here, there's a museum.
What is it called?
It's in Pasadena, the Norton Simon Museum.
Great museum, really tiny little museum, but really a beautiful collection.
And there's a painting there called The Birth of John the Baptist by Murillo, a Spanish artist.
And I love this painting.
I go sometimes just sit and stare at this painting.
And there's so much I love about it.
One of the things I really love about it is the handmaid who's helping the nurse with the baby has a look on her face that I've seen on so many women's faces where she's looking at that baby and she just loves that baby and she wants a baby of her own.
And you can just tell everything she's thinking just by looking at her face.
It's a masterpiece of the painter's art.
But what strikes me about this painting also, and this is very, very common in paintings of a certain era, is the little angels, the cherubs, watching the scene.
And I'm sure you've seen this if you've ever been to a museum and seen any painting from before the 18th century back into the start of the Renaissance.
You see this beautiful scene and then you see the cherubs kind of watching over the scene, a guy dying is being lifted up by the cherubs.
And what it tells you is that there is a level of life, a level of life above this level.
The things that are happening here are reflective of things that are happening there, that we don't just live in this kind of physical universe where all that matters is our flesh, but in fact, there is an entire level of meaning that is going on at the heavenly level, in the mind of God.
And that, of course, is the thing that these sort of postmodern leftist philosophies don't have, is they don't have that.
All meaning is being created by us and therefore is infinitely malleable and infinitely flexible.
And again, if you won't confess to the meaning that the left believes in, then you're a danger.
You're a danger because in order for that meaning to exist, the society has to have all, we all have to sign on in that meeting.
And anybody who raises his hand says, you know, men really can't turn into women.
Or, you know, cops really aren't racist, but there's a lot of crime in black communities.
And you have to take that into account when you're thinking of that.
Anybody who does that shatters the narrative.
And without the narrative, the truth, since the narrative is creating the truth, if you shatter the narrative, you shatter the truth.
And so what we believe instead is that we are reflective of other meanings.
So there is no way, the example I like to use is that if you give a beggar bread or if you are cruel to a child, those have meanings.
One is good and one is bad.
That's the meaning.
You can't change that.
You cannot change that and say, oh, if I kill this child in its mother's womb, it's a woman's health.
You can try, you can pretend, you can lie, but there will be a cost for telling that lie.
And there is a cost for telling that lie.
It is an atrocity and it is reflective of the baseness of our society that we allow those things happening.
And eventually people will wake up to it, I do believe.
So how do you get from this meaning to that meaning?
And how do you make sure that people know those meanings exist?
Well, Jesus does it by telling parables.
And, you know, this is a prophecy in Psalms.
It says, it's read, the Christians read it as a prophecy in Psalms.
He says, I will open my mouth in parables and utter the dark sayings of old.
And this is quoted in Matthew, I think, maybe Matthew, as I will open up my mouth in parables and utter things kept secret since the world was made.
And Jesus is asked, why does he speak in parables?
And he says, because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them.
Whoever has will be given more.
This is also the parable of the talents.
He says, whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance.
Whoever does not have, even what they have, will be taken from them.
This is why I speak to them in parables.
And this is one of the hardest sayings of the gospels, that those who have will get more, and those who have not will lose even what they have.
But what is it that they have?
It's not money.
No matter what Billy Holiday said, that wonderful song, them what's got shall get, them what's not shall lose.
So the Bible says, and it still is news.
But no, he's not talking about money.
He's talking about this insight, this insight, or this willingness to embrace the insight that the world has meaning, that the world has fixed meanings.
They may be vague meanings.
They may not be perfect meanings, but it has meanings that can't be, that aren't infinitely malleable.
And we see this.
You know, Jesus keeps saying, those who have ears to hear, let them hear.
You know, those who have eyes to see, let them see.
In other words, if you don't have those things, if you haven't got those, you will lose even what you have.
And it's a very difficult thing.
You know, C.S. Lewis has a wonderful line in, I think, The Horse and His Boy, one of the Narnia stories, where he says, nobody hears any story.
No one is told any story but his own.
I use that as a frontpiece in Another Kingdom.
No one is told any story but his own.
We don't know.
We don't know whether everybody has the chance to hear.
We don't know whether everybody is given the ears and maybe just refuses to use them.
We just don't know.
We have no way of knowing what other people's lives are like.
We see people who are taken down very, very dark roads, obviously, who do terrible evil to themselves and to others.
And we don't know.
You know, is that written?
Did they have to live that life or did they have a choice?
I always believe that they have a choice.
I believe that, but we don't know.
We don't know those things.
And there's the hard saying that, you know, those who have will get more.
And what is it?
It is the power to hear a story and understand that it's not just a story.
So Jesus tells parables because the secret to a parable is not the meaning of the parable.
See, I don't believe this.
I don't believe that parables are so difficult to understand.
I mean, they have many, many different meanings and many layers of meaning and all that, but I don't think that's what's hidden.
What's hidden is the fact that the story has meaning.
So Jesus says, there was a man who had two sons, right?
Now, you could say, well, which two sons?
What were their names?
Where did they live?
But you don't, do you?
You immediately say, okay, he's telling me a story.
What's the story mean, right?
And the very fact that you say that, the very fact that you say, what does the story mean, is the fact that life has meaning, because life is a story, right?
Life is a parable.
You know, and so those parables, the fact that those parables have meaning and you can't get away from looking at those meanings is what Jesus is telling you about life.
He's telling you what's ever in that individual parable, whichever parable it is, but it's the fact of the parable, the fact that he speaks in stories.
And he's not doing it to make the medicine go down.
He says, he doesn't say that.
He's not making it as propaganda.
He's not doing it because it's more emotional.
He's doing it because it tells you something about life itself.
This is why the prophets, the prophets did this too.
They acted things out, right?
Hosea married a prostitute to demonstrate how Israel was prostituting itself.
Jeremiah smashed a jar to show what God was going to do to Israel in his wrath.
Ezekiel lay on his side, one side and then the other for more than a year, eating bread cooked on crap, basically, to prophesy about the coming siege of Jerusalem.
And John the Baptist did this too.
John the Baptist was a voice crying, a literal voice, crying in the wilderness to show figuratively that the messianic prophecies of the Bible were true.
And in my opinion, Jesus did this with his entire life.
His entire life was both a life.
He actually did the miracles that he did.
He actually said the things that he said, but his life was also a parable of salvation.
Now, compare this to a man I frequently cite, and I cite him not because I don't like them, but because I actually admire his writing and his work and just strongly disagree with it.
He's a guy named Yuval Noah Harari.
He wrote a bestseller named Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind.
And what he says is that, quote, the ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of sapien language, of human language, that we create fictions.
And these fictions create an intersubjective reality.
It says intersubjective order existing in the shared imagination of millions of people.
And these include religion, a fiction that we tell, but then we all believe in it.
And so it becomes a sort of intersubjective reality.
Nationhood, that America is a country.
It's not just a hunk of ground.
That Britain is a country.
It's not just an island.
That these are fictions that we tell.
Money is a fiction.
There's no purpose value to a dollar, but we say it has value and that's a fiction.
And laws and human rights are all fictions.
He says, quote, none of these things exist outside the stories that people invent and tell one another.
There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.
Why is this wrong?
It is wrong.
And why is it going to shock you that Jesus was right and Harare is wrong?
Why?
Well, let's say I have a pair of sneakers.
And let's say you come to me for that pair of sneakers and I say, how much, and you say, how much is it?
And I say, it's $7,000.
And you say, as if, right, you're not going to buy the pair of sneakers.
Unless, unless, of course, you have to walk across broken glass and there's no other sneakers around, then you might pay a lot more for it.
In other words, the sneakers have a value that we express in the fiction of money.
We tell a story.
The story is the story of money.
He's right.
That's a fiction.
That's a story.
But the story relates to something real.
That between us, in the human mind, in the human heart, those sneakers have a value that we can compute without really knowing how we compute it.
We don't fully understand how we compute it, so we use a story instead.
Would we really say, would we really say that it's an entirely a made-up fiction, that 17th century England was a country, in 17th century Britain was a country?
Is that really a made-up fiction?
No, of course it's not.
Of course it's not.
It's a country, it's a plot of land inhabited by a race with common values, common ideas, common laws, and that is a fiction.
The fact that it's separated from other countries, aside from its geographical separation, is separated from other countries, is a story we tell, that it's separated from those other countries as an idea.
It's a story we tell about a truth.
It relates to a truth.
If I said to you, oh, Russia and England are one country called Rus England, that would be a story that wasn't true, right?
Because there's no relationship between those two countries.
They're not one country.
They don't operate the same way.
So stories, fictional stories, these are fictions.
They are fictions, but they have a meaning, and that meaning is either true or false.
And that is the big, big difference between the postmodern ideas and the Christian ideas, that we are trying to tell a story.
And what do we learn from this?
The thing that we learn is that everything we do has meaning.
Our lives have meaning.
Our actions have meaning.
They have moral meaning.
They have all kinds of meaning.
And once you start to understand that, you start to understand that everything you want in life, everything you want in life, is not itself.
It's actually something else.
And that is the beginning of wisdom.
That's the beginning of wisdom.
When you find out that the money you hunger for, the sex you hunger for, the love you hunger for, the fame you hunger for, whatever it is you hunger for is actually you hungering for something else.
And that doesn't make those things worthless.
It makes them stories that are telling about something else.
They're telling about your desire, your need for God.
That's what they're telling you about.
Now, that doesn't mean you can turn away from them or should turn away from them.
Maybe you have a talent that will make you famous.
Maybe you want to work hard and get rich.
Maybe you want those things.
But if you make those things, if you treat those things as themselves, they become idols.
If you let money become an idol, your life will be ruined.
If you let sex become an idol, your life will be ruined.
If you understand that what you're looking for, what you're looking for, is the life that God meant for you to have, and those things represent that life, then you treat them as they should be treated, and your life is entirely different.
And that's why culture matters.
That's why I'm always talking about culture, because we cannot understand the world without stories.
We cannot understand the world without transforming stories into meaning because it teaches us how to transform our lives into meaning.
Politicians And Power00:14:59
All right, it is time for the mailbag.
Where is she?
Where is she?
Now I'm traumatized.
Come on.
All right, we're just kidding.
We're not going to do the same mailbag again, but we are going to do the mailbag.
And because we're operating under battle conditions today, I can't hear Lindsay screaming, but somewhere I know Lindsay is screaming.
From Anonymous, hi, Mr. Claven.
Recently, my law school emailed students asking for their vote on renaming common areas, awards, and buildings that are currently named after the founding fathers.
Someone who's against the idea of renaming the buildings, I thought this was very fair and diplomatic of them to ask the question until I read the ridiculously loaded questions.
So here's a question: The following quote is by an alumnus who is prominently represented on campus.
The blacks, whether originally a distinct race or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.
And then the question is: do you think the person who wrote the above quote contributes to a hostile environment for black, indigenous, and people of color on campus?
That is amazing.
That's amazing.
So Anonymous says there's no space on this survey for comments or other answers, and it leaves me feeling frustrated.
How can I advocate for what I believe in when the institution controlling the questions is determined to make us out to look like bad people in something as simple as a survey?
I'm getting this question almost every day.
I think I am getting it every day.
People ask me, how can I?
How can I?
How can I fight back?
And what I always say is the second half of that sentence goes unspoken, which is, how can I fight back without consequences?
And you can't.
You can't.
You know, I mean, I tell my Hollywood friends this all the time.
They're saying, you know, like, people will say to me, maybe I could write something for the Daily Wire under a pseudonym.
And I tell them, you know, take a hike.
You know, that's not the way it works.
This is it.
This is the fight.
This is the fight we're in.
This is the fight we're in.
And the fight is taking place is not just taking place in Hollywood.
It's not just taking place at the Academy.
It's not just taking place at HR.
It's taking place everywhere.
It's taking place everywhere.
And our forefathers were asked to storm Normandy Beach.
Our forefathers were asked to blow each other's heads off in Gettysburg and to fight at Bunker Hill.
We're just being asked to politely say, you know, this survey is unfair.
This survey is unfair.
Is that going to cost you nothing?
No, it's going to cost you.
It's going to cost you.
Now, I feel bad when I feel bad when I get these questions because I've lived my life a certain way.
I've lived my life speaking my piece.
I've spoken my piece.
And I have to say this.
I don't say it like as self-aggrandizement, but it's part of my story.
It has cost me a lot.
It has cost me millions of dollars.
It's cost me some of the work that I love doing.
It has made it very difficult for me to do the work that I love doing at the level that I love doing it.
And that's just true.
Would I do it again?
In a heartbeat, in a heartbeat.
Why?
Because they can take away everything from me but one thing.
They can't take that one thing away, and that's the thing that matters to me.
How can I tell you what risk you're willing to take?
How can I tell you what price you're willing to pay?
I can't.
I can't do that.
That's something you have to determine between you and God.
But the thing I can tell you is this is the fight we're in.
There's no fight where you write me a letter under the name anonymous, and that scores a point.
You have to put your name to what you believe if you're going to be in this fight, if you're going to be in this fight.
And, you know, this is the thing.
You know, when I talked about Rush earlier and talked about all the people he spawned, the Ben Shapiros and the Glenn Becks and the Dennis Pragers and all those people who kind of come out of his overcoat, that includes you.
It includes you every time you speak.
And I think that you have to get before you make your decision.
I can't make the decision for you, but before you make your decision, you have to look in the mirror and say, this is the fight we're in.
This is the fight my generation was given.
It wasn't given the fight of I have to have my head blown off at Gettysburg.
It was given the fight of I have to get knocked off Twitter or I have to maybe get a worse grade or I have to maybe get demoted or even fired from my job.
You know, I have to lose the career that I wanted in order to say the things that I think should be said.
You know, all of us, all of us who do things like this get letters from friends saying, you should say this and you should say that.
And I always write back and say, no, you should say it.
I say what I have to say.
You should say what you want said.
And so I can't, you know, again, I can't guide you in what you think is important or what you think is worth losing or what you think is worth fighting for.
I can only tell you, this is the battle we're in.
And so you got to decide.
You got to decide.
There's nothing, you told me how unfair you thought this was.
Tell them or don't.
You have to decide.
From Jesus, unless it's from Jesus.
Mr. Clavin, I hope you and yours are doing well.
I love your show and appreciate the work you do.
Simple question, focused around the seven GOP senators who voted guilty on Trump's second impeachment, really dealing with a larger and long-running problem within the GOP.
Mainly, why do we have so many fifth columns in our ranks and what can we do about it?
Democrats seem to suffer from this issue to a far smaller degree.
While I understand that ideological lockstep can be dangerous, voting against Trump on an issue like this isn't some minor disagreement on tactics or policy issue.
A vote like this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the times we're in and the threats facing us as a nation.
Thanks for your time.
Keep up the great work and may God bless you in the Daily Wire.
Well, thank you for that.
Okay, there are a couple answers to this question.
Why do we have more of a problem with this?
Well, first of all, it's built into our philosophy, right?
We believe in the individual and we believe in the individual's conscience.
We do not believe that we have to walk in lockstep.
We believe that if we're walking in lockstep, we're doing something wrong.
I am going to believe, I'm just going to stipulate that some of these seven GOP senators who voted against Trump in what I clearly think was political nonsense were voting their conscience.
Mitch McConnell came out and denounced Trump.
He voted for Trump because he said it was an unconstitutional proceeding, which it clearly was, it seemed to me.
I'm not a lawyer, but it seemed to me clearly unconstitutional to vote a guy who was no, vote on an impeachment on a guy who was no longer president.
But Mitch McConnell came out and denounced Trump.
I'm going to assume that that had political motivations, but I'm also going to assume he wouldn't have used those political motivations if it wasn't in accord with his conscience.
So we have to put up with more disagreement.
We have to put up with more disagreement.
And it's one of the things that I try so hard to get conservatives to understand is that sometimes you compromise so that you can get to the votes you need.
You know, politics is not talk radio.
Politics is where things have to get done.
And sometimes we have to not crucify a guy who didn't believe in 100% of what we believed in, but believed in 80%.
And that's why I'm not a purity guy.
I'm a guy who believes in get as close to your goals as you possibly can.
So that's one reason.
And that's just something we have to tolerate if we're going to tolerate, if we're going to believe in individualism.
But the other thing is this.
We are asking our politicians to do something unnatural.
We are asking them to swim upstream, where the left is asking them to float downstream.
Very important difference.
Powerful people want power.
People who run for office want power.
People who have power want more power.
Power corrupts.
Absolute power corrupts.
Absolutely.
People who have power want absolute power.
People who want power have something in their nature that wants power, okay?
We are asking our politicians to stand for less power.
We're asking them to stand for small, limited government.
I shouldn't say small government.
It's a big country.
It's going to have a big government, but it should be limited government.
We're asking our politicians to take less power.
So you have a guy who's a politician, so you know he wants power.
You know he gets off in power.
I would never run for office.
I don't want power over anybody.
I would just want power to create.
That's all I want is the power to create the beautiful things I was given to create.
I don't want to tell you what to do.
That's why, you know, I tell college students all this, you know, this all the time.
I'm not there to tell them how to live their lives.
I'm there to tell them what I see, what I believe, why I believe the things I believe, but not to tell them what choices to make.
I don't want power.
A politician wants power.
Nobody is doing it purely out of self-sacrifice.
And we're saying to them, take less power.
Pass laws that give you less power.
That goes against people's nature.
It goes against people's nature.
So we're going to have people, we're going to have actual fifth columnists in the party, people who think they can get power by telling us one thing and doing another thing.
That is inherent in conservative politics because it's just like in the Christian world, there are plenty of people who go, brother, it's so good to see you, brother, and in Christ, I see, I preach you in Christ, and then we'll pick your pocket, you know, because they know that you are going to be immediately sympathetic to a fellow believer, and they know they can get your hands in your pocket.
There are people like that.
There are going to be politicians like that.
These are politicians who can say limited government, constitution, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and then they're going to get in and say like, yeah, you know, open up the floodgates and, you know, spend a gazillion dollars and what do we care?
And so that's why.
I mean, our philosophy is the hard philosophy.
Their philosophy is the easy philosophy.
And, you know, that's part of, if that weren't true, if that weren't true, everybody would be free.
If that weren't true, every country in all history would be free, right?
It is hard to be free.
It is not the natural way.
And who was it?
James Madison, I think, who said it is in the nature of government to expand and freedom to contract.
It's Madison or Jefferson, but it was one of them, who said that.
It is in the nature of them to do this.
We are asking our politicians to fight against their nature and against the nature of power.
And so that's why you see these things.
It's very frustrating, but it's better than being on the left.
From Ron, R.A.N. to Lord Claven the Mighty, given the increased efforts the Daily Wire et al. are making to take back the culture, and congratulations for finding getting these folks to listen to you.
Thank you for that.
I wanted to probe your experienced, not to say Methuselahian mind on the subject of adapting books into screenplays.
Interesting, really interesting question if you're into this stuff.
Specifically, I'm wondering how you adapt a story told largely or entirely in the first person, like the Another Kingdom trilogy, into a screenplay where the narrator voice might not even exist.
Well, this is really interesting and very interesting to me because I've both adapted books.
If you've ever seen Shock to the System, I adapted Simon Brett's books.
Funny story.
Simon and I did a kind of promotional tour together and we're asked a question.
And the movie, A Shock to the System, is adapted from Simon's brilliant book.
His book is wonderful, and I adapted it, and I Americanized it, and I put other things in it.
But it's his story.
And somebody asked me about this, and I immediately started speaking philosophically.
I was very inexperienced at the time, and I said, You know, I believe that you owe nothing to the book.
And Simon's sitting right next to me, I believe you owe nothing to the book.
I believe you have to tell the story as a movie.
And if that means butchering everything in the book, then you just have to do it because the movie is worth counting.
I looked over at Simon and he's got this look on his face, and the audience is laughing.
And I said, Oh, but in this case, of course, I stuck very close to the book.
So kind of made a goon of myself there.
But here's the thing: I do believe that philosophically.
Philosophically, the book may have one sentence of inspiration that makes the movie work, but a movie is a very different thing.
It has different timing, it has different structures, it has different purposes, and it has different vehicles to express its meaning.
And the most important difference, of course, is exactly what you say: is that a book can be entirely internal.
I have a book called The Scarred Man, for which I have made a ton of money in movie deals, but nobody will ever make the movie, as I well knew when I sold it for many, many dollars.
I knew they were never going to make it because it's really an internal story.
It looks like a big action story, but really, when you get into it, it is about the mind of the person.
It's very hard to adapt.
Another kingdom, not so much.
Another kingdom does, as a novel, is about the mind of the person, but a lot of what is expressed in the book is expressed through action, and there's plenty of action with which to fill the screen.
The biggest, that's the biggest problem: the internal and external version of a movie is going to speak almost entirely externally, even though even if it has a narration, even if it has somebody talking, you know, voiceovering the story, it's really going to be an external experience.
That is one thing, and the other is time.
I mean, you can just meander in a novel, you can go down various roads, but a movie is an incredibly tight structure, very tight.
And they talk about the three-act structure.
I'm not very impressed with all those kinds of theories about this.
I read a book once called, I think it's called Save the Cat, where he tells you on page 42, this should happen.
And on page 45, and people love that.
It's helpful to them.
And I don't deny them the help.
If it's helpful to you, great.
But I don't believe in any of that.
I believe that this story tells itself.
But in a movie, the constraints are very tight.
It's like a sonnet.
It's very much like the sonnet form.
Having written both sonnets and movies, I can tell you that it's very close to the sonnet form.
You have to get your ideas to fit into this certain space.
And I've had people, you know, I get people asking me to read their scripts all the time, and I never do.
I can't for legal reasons, but also I just don't have time.
But sometimes they'll say, you know, a script is a little long.
It'll be like 250 pages long, where a script is really like 100 to 120 pages tops.
You know, so you have a very small field to work in, and that's a big difference.
And, you know, you just have to do everything very quickly and do it all through action.
And that's the big difference.
And so you can't have loyalty to the book that ruins the movie.
You have to make the movie a thing unto itself.
I'm going to stop there.
I hope we get this through.
As I say, we've been working under battlefield conditions.
And of course, with my staff, who I don't want to throw them under the bus just because they're a bunch of louts, but I mean, we should have used Zip Recruiter.
But anyway, we will be back.
Hopefully, I think next week I'll be in Nashville.
So I'll be in the studio and we'll be able to do it live there.
That will be a lot of fun.
I look forward actually to seeing all my Laut friends.
I miss them terribly.
And I look forward to seeing you again as well.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
Looking Forward To Laut Friends00:01:16
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
The Klavenless Week is upon you.
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Also, remember to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show, the Matt Walsh Show, and the Michael Knoll Show.
Thanks for listening.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
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And our production assistant is Jacob Falash.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production, Copyright Daily Wire, 2021.
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