Andrew Clavin’s Elite Panic dissects how $1.9T stimulus bills morph into absurdities like a "Cuba-shaped state," exposing media decay and moral panics—from McCarthyism to "wokeness"—as elite tools to centralize power, citing Stanley Cohen’s five stages while mocking figures like Taylor Lorenz and Megan Markle for exploiting victimhood. Charles Kessler’s Crisis of the Two Constitutions frames America’s clash between Founders’ fixed principles and Progressive "living rights," warning a fourth liberal revolution could reshape federalism, abortion laws, and identity politics, despite Trump’s failed counter-revolution. The episode blends personal conversion narratives—rejecting Judaism for Christianity—with pragmatic advice on discussing abortion without judgment, urging conservatives to balance truth with empathy to avoid alienating those in moral distress. Ultimately, it argues that today’s culture wars are less about justice than elite control, where even art and faith become battlegrounds for power. [Automatically generated summary]
The Washington Post, where democracy dies in darkness, gagging on the lies of ignorant journalists, then vomiting up the detritus of left-wing insanity, and finally convulsing on the floor in a pool of undeserved elite self-regard, has written a headline describing the government's so-called coronavirus relief bill.
The Post's headline reads, Biden stimulus showers money on Americans, sharply cutting poverty in defining move of presidency.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, oh, Clavin, you incorrigible purveyor of a veritable hilarity hullabaloo.
Even your incomparable satirical genius sometimes goes too far.
Even the Washington Post would not degrade itself with such transparent partisan toadying that a normal individual would hesitate to use its pages as the lining to a birdcage for fear its journalism would be indistinguishable from the crap that would drop on it.
But no, I did not make this headline up.
That was the actual Washington Post headline describing a bill dispersing $1.9 trillion make-believe dollars to various progressive programs under the deceptive heading of coronavirus relief, which represents only about 7% of the spending.
So, since American journalism has vanished up its own fundament, where democracy really does die in darkness, we at the Andrew Clavin Show have decided to offer you this handy guide to what the bill actually supports.
To make up for lost income during the lockdowns, the bill will disperse $1,400 to each person who is now unemployed and has connections in the Biden administration to a maximum outlay of $1,400 for Hunter Biden.
To bring unity to Americans, the bill provides $17 billion to be stuffed into a big helium balloon and floated into the sky until the balloon pops and all Americans shout in unison, goodbye taxpayer money.
To ensure electoral fairness, the bill provides $400 billion, which will be arranged in the shape of Cuba and then declared the 51st state with 17 congressmen, all of them Democrats.
To provide education for minority children, the bill includes $34 billion to give to teachers' unions so they can weave the dollars into hammocks that they can then lie on while they're not providing education for minority children.
Any money left over will go to beer.
To keep our lawmakers safe, the bill provides $72 billion for security to prevent anyone from entering the Capitol building who believes in representative government or has read the Constitution.
And to provide actual relief from the Chinese virus, congressmen and women will drive down the streets of their districts, hurling dollar bills at the little people.
The bills can then be used as Kleenex for people dying of the virus or as masks at a masquerade party, where people will be allowed to dress up as Washington and Lincoln as long as no one remembers who they were or what they stood for.
Any trillions remaining in the bill will be used for bribes.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boom.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, we are back laughing our way through the fall of the Republic.
Salem Witch Threat00:15:15
And since it is falling and there will be nothing but bloodshed and death and oppression from here on in, this would be an excellent time to subscribe to my YouTube channel where you will get all this good content plus more.
And if you ring that little bell, we will notify you that there's content by kicking down your door and storming your house and then leaving the content there before we leave with the silverware.
Also, if you leave a comment and the comment is sufficiently bigoted and ignorant, we will include it in our program because it'll fit right in.
Today we have a comment from Think, Love, Grow, who writes, one fish, two fish, redfish, blue fish, blackfish, try and be less whitefish.
That's what happens when the Dr. Seuss Foundation teams up with Coca-Cola.
We will get to the mailbag later today, but just to remind you that you have to be a subscriber to be in the mailbag.
So subscribe to dailywire.com.
Go to the podcast page, click the Andrew Clavin podcast, click that little mailbag, and you can ask me about anything you want, your personal life, politics, religion.
All my answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life.
Will they change your life for the better?
Stupid question.
But please do that now.
And something else I would really like you to do if you can afford it.
I would love if you would go out and buy yourself a copy of The Emperor's Sword.
It is the third book in the Another Kingdom trilogy, which unlike other fantasy trilogies, actually will only have three books.
So it is the finale of The Emperor's Sword.
You can get it on Kindle.
You can get it as a real book, or you can get it on audiobook where it's mangled by the lovable Michael Knowles.
This is the last stage in the story of Austin Lively, the screenwriter who is now being chased between two realities.
His enemies are closing in on all sides.
He has wild success in Hollywood suddenly, but he begins to realize that a recurring vision he's having is actually a nightmare and he's about to be caught in the coils of a terrible magic in both the real world and in another kingdom.
This book really was delivered into my brain like the stork delivers babies.
It was just dropped in there.
I was trying to solve the problem of how I could continue writing novels after having come to faith, after having discussed my faith in the great good thing, my memoir of my conversion.
And I thought, what do I have to say that's new?
How can I incorporate this?
And I couldn't figure it out.
And then suddenly, because of faith, I think it was dropped into my head.
I think it is, I really am proud of this book.
I think you will find it exciting.
If you remember the podcast, it will be fun to read.
This is the third book.
So if you haven't got that, you can haven't got the first two.
It's Another Kingdom is the first one.
And The Nightmare Feast is the second one.
And this one is called The Emperor's Sword.
Please buy it if you can.
It really is helpful for you to support these works.
And it makes a big difference to me and to the people who publish books and publish books like this that are going to be under fire if they're not already.
You know, every time I read one of these Life Lock ads, I start, I'm just amazed at the things that people will do to steal your information, you know, because who thinks of these?
What kind of terrible people think of these things?
Now, with the tax deadline approaching, it's important to take steps to avoid being a victim of tax scams.
Cyber criminals have used social security numbers to file fake returns in an attempt to steal refunds.
Who thinks of these things?
So file early and be aware of suspicious activities related to your return and find out if you're eligible to apply for an IRS identity protection PIN.
It's important to understand how cybercrime and identity theft are affecting our lives.
Every day we put our information at risk on the internet.
In an instant, a cyber criminal could harm what's yours, your finances, your credit, your good name.
Good thing, there is Life Lock.
LifeLock helps detect a wide range of identity threats, like, for instance, your social security number for sale on the dark web.
And if they detect your information has potentially been compromised, they will send you an alert.
No one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses, but you can keep what's yours with LifeLock Identity Theft Protection.
Join now and save up to 25% off your first year by going to lifelock.com slash Clavin.
That's lifelock.com slash Clavin to save 25% off and also to learn how to spell Clavin.
Very important.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So this week, I sent out a tweet.
And to me, I just dashed it off.
It seemed like a very simple thought, but it's already had something like 38,000 likes, which is big for me.
I'm not on Twitter all that much.
And the responses have been really interesting.
So here's the tweet.
I said, just remember, during moral panics like the Salem witch trial or McCarthyism or the current wokeness, the accusers think they're the heroes.
Then the panic passes and they're villains forever.
That will happen this time too.
So there have been over 700 responses to this.
And the reason I wanted to address this is I'm talking about a moral panic.
And it was very clear from the responses from both the left and the right that either they didn't understand what a moral panic was or they were in denial about it.
So let's talk about this because I think it's important.
That's what we're in.
We're in a moral panic, just like the Salem witch trials, just like McCarthyism.
That is exactly what's happening.
This happens in America from time to time.
It is happening right now.
Now, from the right, I got a lot of comments.
McCarthy was right.
Or as we say on Twitter, McCarthy was right, you idiot, because it's not like you're talking to an actual human being.
Now, I'm going to talk about this more in a little while, but this is a mistake.
This is simplistic thinking.
I know Ann Coulter and I love Ann Coulter to death, but Ann Coulter is really not right about this.
McCarthy, of course, was right about some things, but that is missing again, what a moral panic is.
But never mind, that we'll get to that in a little while.
Other things that right-wingers said was they said, you know, right-wingers have to be pessimistic and they have to believe it's all over and there's nothing that can be done.
And they said, well, yes, but the Chinese cultural revolution was a moral panic.
And so was Hitler's assault on the Jews.
And think of the millions who were killed.
I never said in my tweet that a moral panic was not destructive and dangerous.
People were killed at the Salem witch trials.
People's careers were ruined under McCarthyism.
This moral panic, too, will have its damage, but nobody thinks Mao's cultural revolutionaries who beat up and killed their teachers, mostly kids, nobody thinks that they're the heroes anymore.
Everybody knows they're the villains as the moral panic passed.
Even the people who slaughter Jews in their millions thought that they were doing a great service to humanity, thought that they were heroes.
And then, of course, when the panic passed and things calmed down, they were most, many of them hanged, but all of them were identified as the villains they were.
And that's all I'm saying.
When the moral panic passes, the people who think they're heroes today and the people who think that other people doing the accusing are heroes will be revealed for the villains that they in fact are.
Now, from the left, I got things that were much more what you expect, which was, no, no, there really are witches in Salem.
We really are the heroes when we cancel people.
You know, and that's obviously, you know, what they're going to feel.
They are the people causing the moral panic.
They are the people canceling people, destroying people's careers, destroying works of art, tearing down statues, tearing things down.
And they are the people who are in the moral panic.
They are the accusers.
They are the villains.
Now, one more subtle comment that I got was that comments from the left saying, well, McCarthy and the witch hunters were in fact conservative in some sense.
McCarthy obviously was a conservative and the witch hunters were Puritans and trying to preserve their power.
And that's true.
And that is what is true of the left today.
The left are the conservatives.
They are trying to conserve their cultural dominance.
They're trying to serve their governmental power.
The progressives are the true regressive force in America.
They represent elite and corporate power structures that are using activists as cover.
BLM, Tanahisi Coates, Bernie Sanders, AOC, they serve the power.
They serve the powers that be.
And that's why all the elite money goes to them.
And that's why all the elite schools are following them.
And that's why all the corporations are following them.
They are the conservative, regressive force in America.
Conservatives are trying to keep alive and resurrect one of the greatest and most liberating revolutions in history, the American Revolution.
We're the revolutionaries.
They are the reactionaries.
We are the people trying to keep freedom alive.
Okay.
Now, the other comment, and I got this from the right and the left, and it just drives me nuts, was no, no one's being canceled.
These are private entities.
if Amazon doesn't want to cover, carry a book on transgenderism, if Dr. Seuss people don't want to publish six of the books.
That's perfectly legal.
This is not about legality.
It has nothing to do with legality.
I hope there are legal methods by which we can stop this from happening.
I hope there are.
I hope there are legal ways to fight back.
But even if they aren't, it is wicked.
It is wrong.
And there are plenty of things.
There are plenty of things that are legal that are wicked and wrong.
And this is a wicked, wrong thing that they are doing.
Artists like Dr. Seuss, who was in fact a great artist, like Disney, because now they're making it harder to see Dumbo because of the black crows who sing a song, although they're perfectly benevolent people.
They are now canceling things in Disney.
Almost every Disney, of the old Disney films, has some kind of racial stereotype in it.
We are Siamese, if you please, and all this stuff.
These artworks do what art does.
They preserve the experience of being human in their time, okay?
They preserve what's eternal about being human and what's ephemeral about the time.
And that's how we understand and how we progress through works of art.
Just like a mathematics book preserves mathematical information, art preserves internal, the internal experience of being human through time.
We accept those works of art with all their flaws, just like we accept each other with all their flaws.
These are works of art that communicate a soul through time.
It's an amazing thing.
It's a magical thing that art projects the soul of mankind through time and to cancel them is an evil.
It's a barbaric thing to do.
It's a stupid thing to do.
And believe me, believe me, if it isn't illegal, if it's not breaking the First Amendment and destroying our rights now, it will.
People who start out burning books end up burning people every single time.
So we cherish these works.
We do not cancel them.
We don't argue over each one.
We don't argue over the worth of each one.
We keep all of the voices alive because we're not afraid.
We're Americans.
We're courageous in accepting all opinions and believing that the truth will out.
Okay.
So whatever you think about the legal aspect, something evil and destructive is happening in our country, and it is a moral panic.
So what is a moral panic?
And I thought, I want to find like some expert talking on this, so it's just not me.
And I found a website called Thought Co.
And it has a very concise explanation.
And I don't know what their politics are.
They seem kind of liberal in maybe the better sense of that word, but I don't have no idea.
I just knew that this was an excellent description by Ashley Crossman.
Moral panic is a widespread fear, most often an irrational one, that someone or something is a threat to the values, safeties, and interests of a community or society at large.
So during the Salem witch trial, it was the devil.
During the McCarthy era, it was communists.
And now it's white supremacists and other forms of bigotry.
And obviously, the devil's real.
Communists were real.
And there were white supremacists.
But the moral panic is not treating those things in a sane, rational way.
There was a writer named Stanley Cohn who wrote about this, a sociologist.
And again, kind of a liberal guy.
And here's what he says.
There are five stages to a moral panic.
And these are the five.
First, something or someone is perceived and defined as a threat to social norms.
Remember, the left are preserving the social norms and the interests of the community or society at large.
Second, the news media and community members depict the threat in simplistic, symbolic ways.
Now, remember that, simplistic, symbolic ways that quickly become recognizable to the greater public.
Third, widespread public concern is aroused by the way the news media portrays the symbolic representation of the threat.
Fourth, the authorities and policymakers respond to the threat, be it real or perceived, with new laws or policies.
In the final stage, the moral panic and the subsequent actions of those in power lead to social change in the community.
And again, what we said, increased social control.
That's the aim, all right?
So let's take a look at this just for a minute.
The news media plays its role, they write, by breaking the news about the threat and continuing to report on it.
So let's take a look.
The George Floyd trial that's coming up, the Derek Chauvin, the police officer who kneeled on the neck, knelt on the neck of George Floyd is coming up for trial.
Here's how CBS spoke about this as they were talking to a black activist lawyer about another police shooting.
Here's how CBS covered this.
George Floyd was supposed to be the turning point where we saw these killers come down.
According to record, since the day after George Floyd's death back in May, more than 100 black people have been killed by the police.
So again, you know, let's not be boneheaded about this.
Let's not be reactionary.
There is a problem with high crime in black neighborhoods, right?
That means the police are going to engage in black neighbors.
There are more white people, far more white people killed by the police than black people.
And the police do not use deadly force against black people, even percentage-wise, more than they do against white people.
But there is a problem with crime in black communities.
We have essentially 7% of the people, black males, committing 50% of the murders.
However, however, you can understand how the majority of black people who are innocent people, who are good citizens, right, how it is for them that they become suspect because of these crimes.
So you can understand that there is emotion there that we can identify with.
I've seen black kids chased out of stores who are doing absolutely nothing because the store owner had been robbed by other black kids and thought, well, these are the people who look suspicious to me.
I'm going to chase out this innocent kid.
You can understand where the store owner is coming from, but we can also understand what that means to that kid who just wants to go in and look at whatever is in the store.
So, you know, we understand that the emotion is there.
That emotion is there.
What does a responsible politician or commentator do?
He acknowledges the emotion.
He acknowledges the problem.
He's not quick to point fingers.
He's quick to say, well, how are we going to solve this problem of high crime in the Black community?
Because it's obviously not the police's fault, but the police become the enemy, right?
That's not what politicians do, okay?
Here's the way you start a moral panic.
Here is AOC, Alexandria Occasional Cortex, right, talking about police killings and police treatment of black people.
It's Cut 15.
Now, far too much of the discussion around the issue of white supremacist infiltration in policing focuses on whether this problem exists at all.
And we have known for generations that it's not a question about whether this problem is an issue.
It's a matter of how we have allowed it to sustain for so long.
Systemic Racism and War Drugs00:03:24
Congress as well has been complicit and our silence has been allowed, has allowed for more violence and continued generational trauma in our communities.
You know, the question was raised by the ranking member earlier.
Why do we keep talking about this?
We keep talking about this because we have not solved this problem.
And I want to make very clear that when we talk about systemic racism, we aren't litigating the individual attitudes of any one officer.
We can all exist in racist systems and you do not have to be racist or consciously racist in order to participate in these systems.
And I think it's quite evident when you look at the outcome of the war on drugs.
A systemic racism is about the laws that are on the books.
It is about the types of enforcement that happens.
It's about how many officers get designated to some communities more than others that yields racial disparities in their outcomes.
It doesn't have to do with litigating each and every one individual officer.
Simplistic and symbolic, right?
It is simplistic and symbolic.
It doesn't matter whether you're innocent or not.
You are in a racist system.
It doesn't matter that there is high drug use.
You know, it is true that the war on drugs cost black people terribly because there was a lot of problems with drugs in the black community and they were making their communities unlivable.
But we can also understand that having so many of your males arrested is devastating to a community too.
We understand that there are problems.
That's the whole thing.
The problems were real.
But what she is doing, what she is doing, is irresponsible.
What she is doing is causing this kind of massive problem with the country that can never be solved.
You can never purge the devil from yourself because you don't even know it's there.
You don't even, it's not even conscious racism.
This is the way you cause a panic.
Why race?
Why is race the issue?
Well, because it's socialism.
Socialism is the transfer of power from individuals to the state under the theory that the state is a moral entity instead of what we know it to be, which is a bunch of power hungry rat bags.
The founders knew the state is a bunch of power-hungry rat bags.
Karl Marx thought, oh, it's the wonderful state.
It's going to fix everything.
It's the big flaw, the big lie embedded in socialism, okay?
So why race?
Because when socialism was invented, it was invented in Europe where class was the unequal, the de-equalizing factor.
You've all seen my pal Julian Fellows, Downton Abbey, right?
You know, wonderful stories about how class locked people in.
And they're still very bothered and bitter about this.
But we didn't have that problem here.
Here, we don't look at Oprah Winfrey and think, ha, she came from nothing.
We look at Oprah Winfrey and went, wow, she came from nothing.
Look what she accomplished.
That's very different than what it was in Europe.
So they couldn't use class, so they used race because we did have a problem with race and race and racism in this country.
And so they use that to transfer power from the individual to the rat bags in the state.
That is what they're trying to do.
That's what this moral panic is all about.
It's not like there are no problems.
It's not like we have to react and say, oh, everything's fine.
This is great.
Everything's perfect.
That's not the point.
The point is they are using simplistic, symbolic language to make all of us terrified so they can transfer the power that belongs to you to the rat bags who are supposed to be the perfect state.
Moral Panic and Power Transfer00:15:34
So just last night, I was discussing with a good friend the fact that I want to get a hearing aid and she said, actually, I don't know what she said because I couldn't hear a word she was saying, but you know, MD hearing aid is an FDA-approved digital hearing aid that costs a fraction of what typical hearing aids cost.
The average price of a hearing aid in America is over $2,400 a pair, but the Volt Plus model is just $299.99.
So it's $300 each when you buy a pair.
That's nearly 90% less than the average.
MD Hearing Aid was founded by an ENT surgeon who saw how many of his patients needed hearing aids but couldn't afford them.
He made it his mission to develop a quality hearing aid that anyone could afford.
Now I've tried these out and they do work.
It is quite amazing.
And you know, for me, the great thing about them is, you know, how I love to watch action films.
I can't hear the dialogue, but when I turn it up, the explosions are so loud that the SWAT teams show up at my house.
So you want to get a hearing aid and it is time to reclaim your life from hearing loss.
Go to mdhearingaid.com and use promo code Clavin to get their buy one, get one, $299.99 each offer.
Plus, they're adding a free extra charging case, $100 value, just for listeners of the Andrew Clavin show.
So head to mdhearingaid.com and use our promo code Clavin, or you can even call them at 1-800-614-3051.
That's 1-800-614-3051.
And if anybody tells you how to spell Clavin, just hit them, huh?
What?
Then you can use the MD Hearing Aid and you'll find out.
I actually do feel sorry for Megan Markle.
She is married to an emasculated, entitled prince.
So I wasn't going to talk about this at all because my indifference to the British monarchy is almost total.
I lived in England, as you know, for seven years.
I never cared about the monarchy.
I like the willowy one with the long black.
It was a Kate, because she's elegant and sweet and she reminds me of my wife.
And now you have all my opinions about the British monarchy have been laid out.
But I have to because it actually, you know, it was a cultural moment.
And it did point to something about this moral panic.
It pointed to the fact that moral panic always makes the powerful more powerful.
It is always helpful.
It always solidifies power, okay?
Because obviously, look, Megan Markle is obviously, I think, this spoiled attention-seeking actress.
Everybody who knows her says the same thing.
What did one of her co-stars say, no, her sister, I think it was, said she had narcissistic personality disorder, which what does that make her?
It makes her an actress, right?
So it doesn't really, it's not a really strange thing.
But she's latched on to this poor guy who lost his mom.
He lost his crazy mom at an early age and was obviously looking for something that she gave him.
And she, I guess, thought she was going to be Diana.
She thought she was going to be beloved of the people and a kind of a victim, but also beloved of the people.
Instead, the press and the people turned on her.
They thought she was an entitled American who wasn't going to fulfill the duties of the monarchy.
Whatever gave them that idea, I couldn't know.
But here's the important thing, okay?
It's easy on the, you know, we do this on the right where we dismiss, and they do it on the left too, where we dismiss the problems of rich people.
I don't dismiss the problems of rich people because there is no amount of wealth that absents you from the pain of being a human being, okay?
I'm watching this interview.
It's Oprah and the prince and Megan Markle.
And I'm thinking, wow, those are the three richest people I've ever seen together at one time.
But Oprah was born poor.
She was apparently molested.
Again, we admire her for her wealth, and it doesn't take away the pain of being Oprah Winfrey.
She's still going to be a human being with pain.
And Harry, the Prince Harry, lost his mom and was absolutely devoted to his mother.
You know, no money.
You know, to think about that.
As a little boy, lost his mother, nothing, you can't buy that pain away.
And even Megan Markle, her parents were divorced when she was a little girl.
As I say, that's blowing up your planet.
These are people suffering.
They're people in suffering.
My problem is, my problem is that they have no sense of context and know what they call noblesse oblige, okay?
You know, when I hear her say something like this, here's what Megan Markle said about her experience being in the royal family.
It's Cup 13.
Look, I was really ashamed to say it at the time and ashamed to have to admit it to Harry, especially because I know how much loss he suffered.
But I knew that if I didn't say it, that I would do it.
And I just didn't, I just didn't want to be alive anymore.
Now, so she's talking about suicide.
I don't know whether that's true or not, obviously, but I can believe it.
I can believe people have problems.
No amount of money buys you out of the problems and pain of being a human being.
But noblesse oblige, which the dictionary defines as the moral obligation of those of high birth, powerful social position, et cetera, to act with honor, kindliness, generosity.
Here's where I get lost with Megan Markle's Cut 14.
In those months when I was pregnant, all around this same time.
So we have in tandem the conversation of he won't be given security, he's not going to be given a title, and also concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he's born.
What?
Okay, the answer to that is not what, but who said that, of course.
If this is journalism, if we're supposed to believe this, you've got to find out who said it because, and we don't even know how it was said.
It may have been, you know, Harry sitting around with his brother and his brother said, Cool, you know, cool, mate.
You know, if that baby comes out dark, it'll drive the old lady crackers.
What?
You know, it's like, we don't know what people were saying, and we don't know anything about it.
We don't know whether she's making it up.
We don't know whether the butler did it.
We don't know anything about it.
So it's just in terms of passing judgment on it.
The only thing I can think of is that you are not a societal victim.
You have won the societal prize.
You were born and you have married into one of these rich families.
You're going to be rich forever.
You're going to be famous forever.
You're not a societal victim.
Nothing buys you out of the pain of being human.
But there are people in this country and in that country who have been complete, who have completely fallen through the cracks of life, who are completely lost, who are completely poor.
You know, right this minute, I'm trying to sell my house, you know, and it's stressful.
And I've got a lot of projects going on.
It's stressful.
All blessings.
It's all blessings, but it's stressful.
The other day, I was talking to a friend of mine, a guy I really like and admire, and he's got illness in his family.
He's got illness in his family.
What would you think of me?
What would God think of me?
What would I think of me if I said, oh, you think that's a problem?
You know, you think you got problems.
If it's sickness, sickness, illness, death, you know, I got problems.
I got so many projects, I don't know what to, you know.
It's a little bit of context, right?
A little bit of understanding of who you are.
But they don't have it because they know they're in a moral panic.
They know where the power is situated.
The power is situated with the panic.
And they want to be part of that.
They want to include themselves.
And there were people on the left screaming, oh, you're a racist if you don't take this seriously.
Come on, you know, get stuffed.
That is ridiculous.
Again, I don't dismiss their lives.
I don't dismiss their pain.
But the moral panic is always serving the powerful.
And that's why the powerful and the elite are jumping on board.
There's this tech reporter, Taylor Lorenz for the New York Times.
She has, it's International Woman's Day, and she tweets, for International Women's Day, please consider supporting women enduring online harassment because people are criticizing her for the things she writes.
Well, you know, I mean, Ben Shapiro gets hit with more anti-Semitic remarks than anybody I know, but he didn't come in and say, oh, you know, like for National Yom Kippur, let's like leave poor Ben Shapiro alone.
Glenn Greenwald, the last leftist with integrity, I think, he went nuts.
He said, with all the suffering and deprivation and real persecution in the world, it is utterly astonishing how often coddled, well-paid, highly privileged, quaffed, insulated, protected U.S. elites posture as the world's most oppressed class.
It is quite sickening and offensive.
Right, that's right.
But they are buying in to the power flow, right?
The power is flowing in this direction because of the moral panic.
They are getting on the moral panic train and they're saying, I want to be part of that power.
And it always ends up serving the powerful because the weak aren't going to get on that train.
They can't get on the train.
I just have to quote this one tweet from Iowa Hawk, who is just, he's great.
He is one of the funniest people on the internet.
And he raises David Burge's name as he says, I'm no good at being noble from Casablanca.
I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of 7 billion little people don't amount to a hill of beans compared to the troubles of the New York Times social media tattletale wealthy white girl from a $90,000 Swiss boarding school, right?
And again, it's a question of context.
As many as 3 million children in the U.S. haven't received any education since their schools shuttered in March.
3 million children.
Who do you think those are?
You think those are the children of the Megan Markles of the world?
You think those are the children of the Taylor Lorenzas of the world?
No, of course they're not.
And when, and watch this, watch this.
One of the most powerful unions in the country is the Los Angeles Teachers Union, right?
Here is the president of the Los Angeles Teachers Union on the idea of going back to school.
It's cut nine.
If you condition funding on the reopening of schools, that money will only go to white and wealthier schools that do not have the transmission rates that low-income black and brown communities do.
This is a recipe. for propagating structural racism and it is deeply unfair to the students we serve.
Three million poor children.
What she's talking about is the money she's going to get from this coronavirus thing.
It sends money to teachers without demanding they go back to work and she wants that dough.
She wants that cash.
And those 3 million kids who have fallen through the class, through the cracks, who are probably many of them minority kids, all of them, certainly poor kids, they're gone.
It doesn't matter because it's racist.
It's racist.
She is on that power moral panic train.
It always serves the powerful.
And the purpose of it, you want to see the purpose of it writ large?
Here is Gavin Newsom, this croft son of a gun who goes out and dines while he tells everybody else they got to stay at home.
He's dining out without a mask and a thing and then making sure that all the little businesses close.
Here he is playing his hand.
It's an amazing thing.
He's sitting in Dodger.
He's standing in Dodgers Stadium to say, oh, look how many Californians have died.
All these empty seats represent people who have died.
And here's what he tells you about these lockdowns.
This is CUT 22.
You know, when this pandemic ends, and it will end soon, we're not going to go back to normal.
Because I think we all agree, normal was never good enough.
You know, normal accepts inequity.
It's why Latinos are dying from COVID at a higher rate than any other racial or ethnic group.
And while essential workers' wages aren't enough for them to afford the essentials, and why mothers, mothers have been leaving the workforce in staggering numbers.
Look, our eyes are wide open to what's wrong.
And so our journey back must also be a path to close those inequities.
Never let a crisis go to waste, right?
We can't go back to normal.
There's inequalities in our system.
The normal free, there's inequalities.
He's telling you what they're doing.
He is telling you all the panic is about transferring your power to the state on the theory that the state is a moral entity that can do things better than you can and make better moral decisions because you're deplorable.
You're irredeemable.
You're not going to make the great decisions that the state is going to make.
The power-hungry rat bags are the saints of our culture.
You know, I mean, that's just revealing what the whole thing is.
And it's why the powerful are on this train.
Why is always, it's always the powerful.
They use the people that, you know, if you can have a poor guy yelling into a camera, if you can find a poor guy yelling into a camera, you know, about structural racism, you know, you'll use them.
You'll use them.
But they're not the people talking about this.
It is the powerful.
It is the elite who are talking about this because they know what it's doing.
It is causing this flow of energy that is pushing power from the individual to the state.
That's what a moral panic is.
And again, again, right-wingers make this dumb mistake.
Right-wingers make this dumb mistake.
They say, there's no problem.
Black people haven't got any problem.
You know, black, everybody's free.
Everybody's equal.
Everything's fine.
You know, no, no.
When you have a high crime in your community, that is going to affect the innocent.
It affects the innocent.
When you have drugs coming in into your community and we crack down on drugs and all the males get arrested, that's a problem in the black community.
Even the feeling, you know, I know we say facts don't care about your feelings, but if you have this widespread feeling that you are being persecuted, that you are being picked upon, it is a problem.
These are our fellow Americans.
We want them to thrive.
We want them to be happy.
What we don't want, what we don't want, is the powerful using their pain to cause a moral panic in order to transfer power from the individual to the state.
That's what we're protesting.
We are not protesting that there isn't a history of racism here.
We're not saying that.
That has nothing to do with anything.
We are protesting the way they are using the truth.
There is a devil, but those people who are hanged for witchcraft were unfairly treated.
There were communists, but those people who are chased out of Hollywood and lost their jobs because of their associations and their belief were unfairly treated.
Those are two separate things, right?
So we're not denying certain realities.
We are denying their use of them, their misuse of them, their abuse of them to do what they are trying to do.
And, you know, it's really interesting.
You know, now I've got my vaccines.
I'm done.
I'm done with this thing.
You know, I might not look, I could catch anything at my age.
I could go like that, folks, in the middle of this sentence.
I may not get to the end of this sentence.
My time may just run out as I'm talking, but I'm not going to live afraid.
You know, I'm not going to live locked down and I'm not going to.
Here's the CDC director, Michelle Walinski, telling people how they should behave.
I just, I have to play this just for the humor of it, really.
Telling people how they should behave once they get a vaccine.
Cut eight.
If you and a friend or you and a family member are both vaccinated, you can have dinner together wearing masks without distancing.
You can visit your grandparents if you have been vaccinated and they have been too.
CDC recommends that fully vaccinated people can visit with unvaccinated people from one other household indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing, as long as the unvaccinated people and any unvaccinated members of their household are not at high risk for severe COVID-19 disease.
I hope you got that.
I'm taking notes.
Oh, no, I'm just writing screw you on this piece of paper because let's face it, you know, we are going back to normal because if the old people get vaccinated, everybody else is going to get the flu.
Everybody else will get a flu.
So what?
You know, that's not the problem.
If the old people get vaccinated, the deaths are going to go down.
They are going down.
They're dropping as we speak.
And, you know, it's funny.
You know, I have this great doctor who's a really, really knowledgeable guy.
I said to him, Am I going to spread this disease anymore?
No, you're not.
And he has no dog in the fight.
Ziprecruiter's Moral Terror00:11:39
He doesn't care.
You know, and he's, my doctor is so far to the left.
I tell him I go to him to have my heart rate raised, my blood pressure raised.
So, you know, these are the things that I just want to emphasize because I want us to be fighting the right fight.
I don't want us to be fighting whether doctor Seuss should be canceled.
I want us to be saying no cancellation, no panic.
We are not in a panic.
Sure, there are problems.
Sure, there are problems.
What would responsible people do?
How would responsible people handle these problems?
Because these guys, today, the accusers think they're the heroes, but the panic will pass and they will be revealed to be the villains they are.
So many people ask me, you know, you're so brilliant and such a good-looking guy.
How is it your show is so full of chaos and incompetence?
It's because we did not hire using ziprecruiter.com.
You know, you can post your job to some job board, but all you can do is hope that the right person comes along.
That is not true if you use ziprecruiter.com/slash Claven.
ZipRecruiter does the work for you.
When you post a job on ZipRecruiter, it gets sent out to over 100 top job sites with one click.
Then, ZipRecruiter's matching technology finds people with the right skills and experience for your job and actively invites them to apply.
You get qualified candidates fast.
Oh, how I wish we had done that.
In fact, ZipRecruiter is so effective that four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate through the site within the first day.
I only say these things about the people who work here to insult them and make their parents unhappy.
Right now, you can try ZipRecruiter for free at ziprecruiter.com slash Claven.
That's ziprecruiter.com/slash Claven.
Just go to ziprecruiter.com/slash Claven.
ZipRecruiter is the smartest way to hire if and only if you know how to spell Clavin.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N-R.
I was going to say.
McCarthyism was very bad, but woke justice is very good and totally not the same thing in any way.
Yeah.
You know, I really want to address this kind of right-wing meme that says that McCarthy was right.
And the reason I want to address it is because it is way, way too simplistic.
And I think it puts conservatism in bad odor.
It makes us look bad when we kind of bloviate like that and sort of throw those things out there.
And I realize it's a problem because the entire history of this period has been a lie perpetrated by the left.
The entire history has been a lie perpetrated by the left, and most people don't know anything about it.
So I want to just talk a little bit about what McCarthyism, what McCarthy and McCarthyism were.
And remember, in my tweet, in my original tweet, I didn't say anything about McCarthy.
I talked about McCarthyism, which is a term that was framed by a communist to make McCarthy look bad, but it now has a meaning, right?
It now means basically causing a moral panic.
And a lot of people, just to say this from the beginning, a lot of people confuse McCarthy with the House on American Activities Committee that hounded people in Hollywood and even sent some artists to jail and questioned them.
But remember, McCarthy was a senator and Huak was the House on American activities.
So they're actually quite different.
McCarthy had nothing to do with the Hollywood blacklists except to be part of that red scare that they got caught up in.
Now, what do right-wingers mean when they say McCarthy was right?
Well, there was during the Roosevelt and Truman eras, there was a lot of suspiciously lax security over the government that allowed communist spies to infiltrate the government at various levels, including the State Department, at very high levels, right?
And these were, remember, these were like Stalinists, right?
These were guys who were supporting Stalin's Soviet Union.
If you've never read Witness, I highly recommend it.
It is a spectacular, even life-changing book.
It's by a guy named Whitaker Chambers, who started out as a Soviet spy and then found God and changed his ways.
And he accused a guy in the State Department, Alger Hiss.
And the press loved Hiss.
He was an upper-class guy.
He was an elegant guy in the State Department.
They demonized Whitaker Chambers.
They demonized Richard Nixon, who helped bring Hiss down.
And they were wrong.
Alger Hiss was a Russian spy high up in the State Department, and he deserved everything he got.
And so this is the kind of thing that like for years afterwards, it was like, oh, that Richard, that red-baiting Richard Nixon.
Richard Nixon was right, and they were wrong.
And the reason they were so eager to destroy Richard Nixon is because they never forgave him for being right.
Just like with Trump sometimes, they just never forgave Richard Nixon for being right.
They loved Alger Hissen.
Alger Hiss was a spy.
The Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were executed for selling, for giving nuclear secrets to the Soviets, and they became a cause celeb on the left.
You know, if you've ever read the book, The Book of Daniel, by E.L. Doctorow, that raised E.L. Doctorow to literary stardom with its sympathetic portrayal of this.
Here's The Guardian writing about this.
The Guardian, obviously, the left-wing newspaper in England.
The Rosenbergs had been accused of handing over materials to the Soviets that helped them develop a nuclear bomb.
The trial judge said in his summation that as a result, they had helped bring about the Korean War.
His judgment paved the way for McCarthyism, for more inquests into un-American activities and for the persecution and humiliation of many innocent people.
It was a catastrophe for the American left and for decency and justice and decency.
Well, after the fall of the Soviet Union, many what they called the Venona cables came out.
There were communications in the Soviet Union that revealed that they were Soviet spies, that they were in fact executed properly for treason.
So all of this history has been rewritten and been pumped in to the culture as this horrible, horrible thing that happened.
And it's just not true.
And so when you get to McCarthy, we immediately have this thing where we say, you know, McCarthy was right.
It's not that simple.
You know, there's an article about this in the Claremont Review of Books.
It's by Arthur Herman, who's very sympathetic to McCarthy, by the way, Arthur Herman.
And I know it's a great article because it was edited by my son, Spencer Clavin, no relation, who works over at the Claremont Review of Books.
If you get a chance to look at it, Arthur Herman on McCarthyism, you know, he says many positive things about McCarthy.
Here's the thing.
The New Deal Democrats had looked away and some 200 Soviet agents had infiltrated the government.
That was true.
And probably the worst of them was Alger Hiss.
But by the time McCarthy was operational, right, by the time he took up the cause, Eisenhower is in office and Truman and Eisenhower, they had exposed and expelled almost all of the Soviet spies.
They were already gone, right?
Okay.
What McCarthy wanted to do was he wanted to get at the Democrats for letting it happen.
He wanted to get at the Democrats by letting it happen.
Now, McCarthy was a drunk.
He was a hyper-ambitious guy.
And he went about this in, how can I put it, a simplistic and symbolic way that destroyed people's lives, destroyed people's trust, spread a moral terror.
He did not do it as a responsible politician might have done it by getting out good information.
He did it by waving lists in the air.
He did it by accusing the military.
There was in the military, even in the military, there was slack security that let some communists get in there.
But most of these people had already been purged.
And so when he was interviewing people and accusing people, even if they were guilty, he was destroying people's lives for their opinion.
And that's the thing and for their political points of view.
And that's the thing that we are basically complaining about now.
And so that he was using Adam Schiffian tactics.
That's how bad he was.
He was as bad as Adam Schiff going after Trump for Russian collusion that never happened.
And it was one thing of accusing for, it's one thing to accuse the Democrats of having been soft on communism.
They were, but then he went after Eisenhower and the Republicans and the army, and people had just had it with him.
And that was what brought him down.
So the fact that he did this stuff caused this, helped cause this moral terror, which is what he meant to do to solidify his power.
He was protecting his power and causing this moral terror.
And the fact that it was based on truth, just like there's some racism in the country, but the race, this systemic race thing is a moral panic.
It's a moral panic, just like there was some truth to it.
That's what McCarthyism was doing.
So McCarthy was doing.
And so McCarthyism is a fair phrase in a lot of ways for using things that are rightly to be feared, rightly to be hated, but for using those to cause a moral panic.
And that's why I don't think the McCarthy is right meme is really the right one.
And when McCarthy's name got attached to this, and I was talking about McCarthyism, really bad things happened in Hollywood.
And what's so infuriating now is the people who have been whining and complaining about the Hollywood blacklist, which was wrong.
The people who have been complaining about that are now blacklisting people like me.
They're blacklisting conservatives and truly blacklisting them.
Eugenia Carano was fired for acting while conservative.
She didn't say anything wrong.
She was fired for being a conservative, just like during the blacklist.
You know, people went to prison.
Doshel Hammett, I think Doshel Hammett served some time in jail.
Dalton Trumbeau, a horrible human being and a total Stalinist sympathizer, but also a terrific writer who wrote the movie Spartacus under a pseudonym.
He was blacklisted.
He shouldn't have been blacklisted.
Zero Mostel, a leftist, probably a communist, a great, great actor.
I saw Zero Mostel create the role of Tevia and Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway.
He was a brilliant, brilliant performer.
You don't destroy a guy for his politics.
This is America, right?
You have a right to have stupid politics.
Zero Mostel.
Artists are nuts.
Artists are really crazy.
They believe stupid stuff just like they believe it today.
But just like it was wrong what they did to Gina Carano, just like it was wrong what they did to Kevin Hart.
It was wrong.
This is why I don't want to argue about each issue, about each instance of cancel culture.
I want it to stop.
It is McCarthyism.
It is moral panic.
It is there to solidify power with the powerful.
It is there to take your power away and to move it into the hands and to preserve it in the hands of elites.
If you think it's wrong what they did to Gina Carano, then we have to say that it's wrong what they did to Zero Mostel, right?
I mean, we don't like communism.
I don't like communism.
They don't like conservatism.
They don't like Republican.
They don't like freedom.
I understand.
But people are supposed to be able to speak and have different opinions and fight it out.
We are Americans.
We are not going to be afraid of speech.
We are not going to be afraid of speech.
We're not going to let them make us afraid of speech.
We're not going to let them, we're not going to play this game that conservatives fall into all the time of reacting to what they say by saying the polar opposite just because it's, you know, it gets under their skin, right?
We, I am, I will tell you, I am for freedom of speech.
Are there limits on speech?
Of course, I can't threaten your life.
I can't libel you.
I can't slander you.
There are all kinds of limits on speech, but your opinions, your political opinions are not among them.
You are allowed to have whatever political opinions you have.
As long as you keep from stirring up violence, as long as you keep from hurting other people over them, you are allowed to have those opinions.
We have to stay with that principle.
Even when it serves the left, they want to make it stop because they know they've lost the argument.
Limits On Speech00:08:12
They know they have nothing to say but give me, gimme, gimme.
That's why they want to shut us up.
They know they're not dealing with reality anymore, and that's why they want to silence us.
You do not silence people when you're right.
You silence people when they're right.
And that is what's happening right now.
You know, I was talking about the fact that I'm selling my house.
I had to actually move into a hotel for several days.
And it is a wonderful, wonderful thing to have a ring doorbell and ring security cameras.
So wherever you are, whatever you're doing, you can see who is at your door and talk to them.
You can see what's going on at your house.
It's even nice if you're in your house, but you don't want to get out of bed to check what's going on.
You can just look at your phone and see everything with a ring security system.
It is a perfect time to upgrade your doorstep with a ring video doorbell.
You can see and speak to whoever's at your door from anywhere with video doorbells.
You can keep an eye on every corner of your house with easy to install indoor and outdoor cams.
You can even protect your whole home with Ring Alarm, a powerful, affordable, whole home security system that you can easily install yourself.
Right now, get a special offer on the Ring Welcome Kit at ring.com slash Claven.
It comes with Ring's Video Doorbell 3 and Chime Pro, the perfect way to upgrade your front door and start your Ring experience.
So go to ring.com slash Claven.
That's ring.com slash Clavin.
From now on, if anyone comes to your door, no matter where you are, you can say to them, how do you spell Clavin?
If they know, call the police.
So speaking of all this canceling, Charles Blow, the aptly named Charles Blow, because his columns always blow, wrote a column complaining that when he was growing up, everything he saw that was about black people told him that being black was wrong.
He says, it happened for children in the most inconspicuous of ways.
It was relayed through toys and dolls, cartoons and children's shows, fairy tales, and children's books.
What's interesting to me about this is I experienced the same thing when I was growing up.
I wrote about this in the Great Good Thing, my memoir, that the literature that I loved was filled with anti-Semitism.
There's Shylock and Shakespeare.
There was Robert Cohn and The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway, one of my favorite writers when I was a kid, Fagin, The Jew, the Evil Jew, and Charles Dickens.
And so I was completely informed that this culture that I loved, that I felt completely a part of.
I was a totally American kid, had in it this anti-Semitism.
And I didn't want those things silenced.
I wanted to understand them and know them and fight against them and understand where they came from and what they said about the society I was in.
I loved my culture.
I loved the culture I was in.
And I didn't find myself diminished by their opinions.
I just thought, like, wow, you know, how could these guys who I like so much, how could they have had those feelings?
And I started to learn things about it.
And it was really interesting.
I write about the whole thing.
But now, now, because the left has conceived this idea where everything is, there's nothing inside you to fight back or to answer these things.
You're only the creation of a power structure.
Now words of violence and everything that happens is shaping you.
So he went on to attack the Warner Brothers cartoon, Pepe Le Pue, the French seducer of cats because he would mistake, he was a skunk and he would mistake cats for skunks, I guess.
And they were hilarious.
And he wrote that Pepe Le Pue is added to rape culture.
He grabs, kisses a girl, a stranger, repeatedly without consent and against her will.
She struggles to get away from him, but he won't release her.
He locks a door to prevent her from escaping.
It's rape.
It's rape culture.
Now, we should actually play a bit of this.
I think a guy who's complaining about a Warner Brothers cartoon really, really has to get a life.
I really think it's embarrassing for this elite New York Time guy.
But we know why he's doing it now, right?
We know it's to cause, to ride the wave of this moral panic.
That's why they're doing it.
That's why these rich, privileged guys like Charles Blow are doing this stuff.
But Pepe Le Pue was great.
Mel Blank, who did all the voices, every single voice in Warner Brothers was probably the greatest voice talent of all time.
He was one of the true, he was one of those true quirky American geniuses.
Here's a scene of Pepe Le Pue trying to seduce this cat, which I just find absolutely hilarious.
Cut 18.
Don't let the lips with, hey, a lady, feminine, female, girl, skunk.
Ha ha ha.
In the spring, a young man's love lightly turns to thoughts of fancy.
Keep your guard up, Cherry.
Hello, young lover, whoever you are, I am Pepe Le Pue.
Everyone should have a hobby, don't you think?
Man is making love.
You are a girl, I am a boy.
We have all that in common, darling.
May I call you, darling?
You may call me streetcar because of my desire for.
If you're not, if you're not just listening, not watching, she kicks him in the head and takes off.
And she's a cat, you know, so he's made a mistake to begin with.
It is absolutely hilarious.
Let's talk about seduction for a while.
Let's talk about what seduction means and why they're mistaking seduction for rape culture.
You know, a while back, I was writing a story about a private school, and I went to a friend of mine who was running a private school to interview him because it was about young people, and I didn't know what was going on.
And he said, one thing you have to know is that, and he was much, the guy I was talking to, my friend, was much younger than me, but he said it's much different even than when I went to school.
When I went to school, it was conceived that women had something you wanted, and you had to convince them to give it to you.
That was the job.
That was the game that you were in.
Today, the women don't feel that way.
Sex is like buying a pack of cigarettes.
It's nothing.
They just hop into bed together and there's no interplay between them.
Well, that dynamic, that dynamic of men trying to seduce women and women resisting seduction was built into evolution because women have a much higher stake in the outcome.
Here's the way a scientist puts it.
Women incur a substantially larger minimal cost in reproduction, i.e. nine-month gestation, lactation compared with men, e.g. single instance of sperm provision, which necessitates employment of stringent mate selection criteria to offset these costs, right?
That means that women have a lot more at stake.
And so they have evolved to have more emotional sense of modesty, of protecting themselves, of keeping men out.
But at the same time, of course, they also want to have children.
So they want to be in that argument, but ultimately they want to lose that argument with the right man, right?
Now, it's the opinion of this show, of the Andrew Clavin show, that femininity and masculinity are an alignment of the spirit with the spiritual truths that our bodies tell, right?
We perform those truths to some degree.
We act out those truths, even when we don't always feel them, because the truths enrich our lives.
The truths are eternal.
They're part of another level of meaning.
And we act them out because they connect our bodies to the truth that our bodies are conveying.
On the left, it's all just, you know, if you have birth control, what's the problem?
Now you can throw away your modesty.
Now you can throw away all the things that you were evolved to feel.
We believe those things are not just physical.
I believe those things are not just physical.
They are actually indications of higher truths.
Now, you know, they say like women have a larger cost in reproduction, but I say the truth is that that truth tells them about a feminine principle of modesty, restraint, and of basically demanding that lust come along with some kind of commitment, with some kind of love, with some kind of affection for the person that you are making love to.
Okay, so they have an interest in modesty, but they also have an interest in surrendering, and that's why we enjoy watching the game.
Carpe Diem Dance00:09:07
We enjoy watching the game of surrender.
That's why, you know, that song that they're now trying to demonize as rape culture, Baby, it's cold outside.
This came from a movie called, I can't remember what it was called, Neptune's, Neptune's Daughter, something like that.
Anyway, it starred Ricardo Montelbaum and Esther Williams.
And people don't remember Ricardo Montelbaum, but for those of you who remember Billy Crystal, he used to have this joke, darling, you look marvelous.
That was an invitation of Ricardo Montelbaum because he was what they then called a Latin lover.
So here is where the movie scene in which this seduction song was introduced.
Here's a brief clip.
You know, for an evening that started out so badly, it has definite possibilities.
No, no, no, before you drink, you must always say salute.
Salute.
You know?
Salute.
You know, on second thoughts.
Yes?
I really can't stay.
Baby, it's cold outside.
I've got to go away.
Baby, it's cold outside.
This evening has been very nice.
I'll hold your hands.
They're just like ice.
My mother will start to work.
Beautiful.
What's your father will be pacing the floor?
Listen to the fireplace right now.
So really, I'd better skirt.
Beautiful, please don't.
Well, maybe just a half a drink, Marla.
Put some records on while I fall.
And what's funny about it, in the movie, a comic actor of the time named Red Skelton does the song later where he's being seduced by the woman, and the woman is the aggressor and he's the resistor.
And that's comical because it goes against the, now he'd have to have an operation to do that scene.
But then it just was comical because it goes against the standard ideas.
But it also admits that there are variations in people and it's, you know, it's funny because those variations make us laugh.
So you remember the time you went to the car parts store and the guy behind the counter said, is your Odyssey an LX or an EX?
No, you don't remember that because you don't go to a car parts store.
Who goes to a car parts store when you can go to rockauto.com?
Not only is it right there on your computer with great prices and a wide selection of car parts, you get to say rockauto.com.
Trust me, it drives the girls insane.
Rockauto.com always offers the lowest prices possible rather than changing prices based on what the market will bear.
Rockauto.com is a family business serving auto parts customers online for 20 years.
Go to rockauto.com to shop for auto and body parts from hundreds of manufacturers right there in your home on your computer.
Why?
Because your car is not running because it needs a part that you can get at rockauto.com.
Go to rockauto.com right now and see all the parts available for your car or truck and write Clavin in there.
How did you hear about us box so they know we sent you?
You got to say it the same way.
You got to say Clavin.
How do you spell this?
K-L-A-V-A-N-A.
Rock auto easy.
So the left sees rape culture and we see this kind of dance, this beautiful dance of male and female.
That's what I see.
I see the beautiful dance of male and female, one of them insisting on the life, that the life force be served and the other insisting that the life serves force serve something higher than itself.
It's a really interesting dance.
It's a really interesting and civilizing dance.
It is why we have come as far as we have and it's why the left is reducing us to animalistic behavior that degrades everybody because they've taken out one.
I always tell you, they hate the feminine.
They hate the feminine because it keeps them from being free, utterly free to just redefine reality any way they want because it has demands, because it suffers consequences, right?
And it's still suffering those consequences emotionally, by the way.
It is still suffering those consequences emotionally, even if they don't, even if a woman doesn't get pregnant.
So this leads me to one of the greatest poems in the English language.
And probably offhand, I'm thinking it's probably the greatest seduction poem ever written.
It was by Andrew Marvel.
It's called To His Coy Mistress.
And I'm going to read the entire thing to you because it's not that long.
And it is one of the most beautiful poems ever.
And I suggest that after I read it, you go and look it up.
Andrew Marvel was a friend of John Milton's, we remember, who wrote Paradise Lost.
And he was a Christian man.
He was, I think, an Anglican, basically, in that time.
And the thing to remember about him is that because he believes in another plane of meaning, he believes in an afterlife, he's speaking in the voice of a seducer, but he doesn't necessarily, the voice of the woman is silent, but it's assumed.
He's assuming the voice of the woman and her virtue, right?
He's making the argument that she should sleep with him.
But because we know something about him, we know there's a kind of irony in what he's saying.
And he's almost making fun of the seducer at the same time.
So you don't have to take it, you don't have to take it entirely seriously.
This is what they call a carpe diem poem that sees the day.
And it's the expression of the life force in male desire, but also a suggestion of the reticence and a higher force in female reticence.
Okay.
And what it's saying, and just to trans, because poetry sometimes is hard to understand, what it's saying is if there were no death, we could play the seduction game forever.
But since time will strip away our flesh, we should go at it right now.
Okay.
Let me read this poem to you.
It's a great one.
Had we but worlded enough in time, this coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way to walk and pass our long love's day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges side shouldst rubies find.
I by the tide of Humber would complain.
I would love you ten years before the flood, and you should, if you please, refuse till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow faster than empires and more slow.
A hundred years should go to praise thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze.
200 to adore each breast, but 30,000 to the rest.
An age at least to every part, and the last age should show your heart.
For lady, you deserve this state, nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back, I always hear time's winged chariot hurrying near.
And yonder, all before us lie deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found, nor in thy marble vault shall sound my echoing song.
Then worms shall try that long-preserved virginity, and your quaint honor turn to dust and into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace.
Now, therefore, while the youthful hue sits on thy skin like morning dew, and while thy willing soul transpires at every pore with instant fires, now let us sport us while we may, and now, like amorous birds of prey, rather at once our time devour than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all our sweetness up into one ball and tear our pleasures with rough strife through the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our son stand still, yet we will make him run.
I love that.
Tear our pleasures through the iron gates of life.
It's the play of masculinity and femininity reveals the most essential conflicts and joys of life, the life force in time against the spiritual values of eternity.
We don't want to sacrifice one to the other.
We don't want to sacrifice the life force to eternity, but we don't want to sacrifice eternity to the life force.
We want to bring them into balance, which occurs in the dance between male and female.
People who are horrified by any mention of sex because of religion are missing the point.
We want to bring them into balance in the dance of male and female.
If we do not represent that dance, if we do not represent the dance, we are meat and nothingness, and everything is in play because there are no values to be found.
We are the language of God.
Our flesh is the language of God, and each of us is a day of creation, creating, extending the creation in the creation of our lives, our inner experience of life.
That's what poetry does.
That's what art does.
It records that creation.
It records the creation of being a human being, of being alive.
Only we do it.
Animals don't do it.
No one else does it.
We are.
We are the eighth day of creation every day, every experience you have.
And if you play that out in tandem with God, in tandem with the heavenly reality, you are going to have a much richer, much deeper life.
And just by coincidence, we will also have a much richer, deeper society.
That is not the society we're living in now.
And the left is doing everything to make sure it never becomes that society again.
Let them try.
So some of you may be the kind of weaklings who sleep at night, but for those of us who lie awake, it is especially important to be comfortable because you're awake all the time.
MyPillow Premium Deal00:03:10
And that's why I love my, my pillow.
And you will love it because you're the kind of person who probably sleeps and you want to be comfortable in your bed while you're sleeping.
My pillow products, they don't go flat.
You can wash and dry them as many times as you want.
They maintain their shape.
And they are made right here in the US of A. If you don't have a MyPillow or if you know someone who doesn't have one, now is the time to get one because for a limited time, MyPillow is offering their premium MyPillows for their lowest price ever.
You can get a queen-size premium MyPillow regularly, $69.98.
Now, only $29.98.
That's $40 saving for those of you who can't do the math.
Kings are only $5 more.
Now is the time to buy.
Not only are you getting the lowest price ever, but they are the best gifts ever, $29.98 for a queen-size premium.
MyPillow.
Go to mypillow.com and click on the Radio Listener Square.
There you'll find not only this amazing offer, but also deep discounts on all my pillow products, including the Giza Dream bed sheets, the MyPillow Mattress Topper.
I have one of those, and MyPillow Towel Sets.
Or call 800-651-1148 and use promo code DailyWire.
It is finally happening.
The Daily Wire's highly anticipated new show hosted with Candace Owens is almost here.
You remember Candace, you all know her, remember when she slammed Harry Stiles on Twitter for wearing her dress by saying, Bring back Manly Man.
Or maybe from that time, Kanye said he likes the way she thinks.
I have, I have to say, I take full credit for Candace's entire career.
I had her on, I think, before anybody.
She has actually kind of acknowledged that.
After she came on, I walked down the hall to the God King's office and I said, if you ever want to bring a woman into this place, I just met her.
It took them this long to get her.
Nobody listens to Andrew.
They never listened to me, but now they have.
In 2018, Candace became a founder of the Blexit Foundation, which works to change the narrative that surrounds America's minority communities.
Candace is also the author of the New York Times bestseller, Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation.
Her new show, Candace, will be debuting on March 19th and will cover a variety of topics with authenticity, insight, and humor each and every week.
Candace will be exclusive to Daily Wire members.
So if you're not already a member, make sure to go over to dailywire.com/slash subscribe and use code Candice to get 25% off.
will be well worth it.
As you know, we always like to bring eloquent and elegant intellectuals on in a desperate attempt to raise the tone of the show.
But this week we hit the jackpot.
Charles Kessler is one of the finest writers on the conservative side and one of the wisest.
He's a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, host of Claremont's The American Mind video series, and the Dengler Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College.
Also, he is the employer of my son, Spencer Clavin, no relation.
And the only way we could get him on was by holding Spencer hostage so we can now release him.
Charles, are you there?
The Crisis of Two Constitutions00:15:22
Yes, I am.
Thank you.
And let me say also, you managed to pronounce the distinguished name of my distinguished professorship correctly.
So that's quite a mouthful.
Oh, there you go.
That's good.
It was a random hit.
But, you know, I want to talk to you.
You have a new book out called Crisis of the Two Constitutions: The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of American Greatness.
I've been reading in it, and it's just really incisive, very broad-minded look at what's going on.
Let's begin.
It's called The Crisis of the Two Constitutions.
So let's start there.
What are the two constitutions?
The two constitutions are first, what I call the founders constitution, which was the original written one of 1787 as amended.
And the principles of that constitution that came before it, like the Declaration of Independence contains.
But also the kind of American character that the Constitution and the principles produce.
Because I think if you look at American politics too narrowly, you don't really see the ambitiousness of the American Revolution.
It was really about producing a new kind of human being, an American citizen, with certain virtues and certain energy and adventurousness and so forth.
And the founding is not just about founding the institutions, it's also really about founding Americans and American citizenship.
And that's the first Constitution in the fullest sense.
The second, the competing constitution, is the liberals' constitution, which really comes from the progressives 100 years ago.
And so I call that one the progressive constitution.
They call it the living constitution.
And my point, the point of the book really is that American politics is in such a perilous state because we really are in a kind of pre-revolutionary situation, torn between two constitutions for the same country.
You know, it's not a, you're not in a good position.
You're not in a good place if you have one nation and two constitutions competing for its loyalty, competing to constitute what that nation ought to be.
And but I'm afraid increasingly that's where American politics is going.
It's moving from what political scientists sometimes call normal politics to what they call regime politics, where the point of the latter is that you're really fighting about what is the regime, who rules and what are the purposes for that rule.
So that's a, as I say, an unfortunate, unhappy, and perilous place to be in.
When you talk about the living constitution, I mean, whenever I'm talking to a left-winger and they talk about the, they say the constitution is a living document, I always say yes, but it's not a blank document.
Is there, does the living constitution mean anything besides anything the left wants it to mean?
Well, that's a very astute question.
I think the answer is yes, but practically speaking, it means the living constitution is what the liberals say it is at any given point, because the point of the living constitution is to be Darwinian.
And, you know, the guy who sort of invented it, Woodrow Wilson, talked that way.
He said this was a Darwinian idea, meaning that whatever the Constitution needs to be to survive, whatever the Constitution needs to be to prevail, whatever liberalism needs to prevail in our current politics, that's legal.
That's constitutional.
That's the ethical standard that they're applying.
And so that is open to almost anything because, you know, politics may challenge liberalism in many ways, and they're open to almost every possible response.
But it means substantively one thing, which is the principle of change.
The only principle they really regard as timeless, as enduring, is the principle of change itself.
Everything else in the Constitution, they think of primarily as an 18th century inheritance.
And their attitude is: the Constitution was a great document for the 18th century, but now, in the first and the 20th, now in the 21st century, we really need something much more modern, much more with it, much more open to growth, to experimentation, and to remaking the citizen body itself in the image of liberalism.
So, how do we get to the point where the Constitution, as presented by the founders, and this living constitution, how historically did we get to the point where they are actually in such tension that we don't know which is going to triumph over the other?
In the beginning, 100 years ago, when Woodrow Wilson and other progressives began to talk about the living constitution, they did present it as a kind of evolutionary extension of the old constitution.
And so, for about 50 years or more, liberals talk that line.
They took that line, which was that the two are actually not opposed to each other.
They're going to converge.
Just like they used to talk about the Soviet Union, you know, socialism and communism on the one hand converging with capitalism.
That was the way they regarded the two constitutions for two generations, let's say.
But beginning in the 1960s, that's the historical period where it became obvious both to conservatives and to liberals, that they weren't really talking about how to interpret the same constitution.
They were talking about which constitution they ought to interpret.
The living constitution, the one that was open to a constant parade of new rights and new programs designed to achieve those rights, and thus no permanent limits on government power really were conceivable.
Is it that constitution we're interpreting, or is it the constitution of the founders, which assume that human nature is more or less fixed, and that human rights are not constantly evolving and changing things, but pertain to what is permanent in human nature?
And that a constitution that attempts to protect permanent rights has to be relatively unchanging.
Not completely unchanging.
I mean, we have had, you know, 27 amendments and we may have more.
And that the provision for amendment was built right into the Constitution to begin with.
But when we amend the Constitution, we are in a way following its rules and so still acknowledging its authority.
And what the living Constitution does is it doesn't really need the formal mode of amendment anymore.
It amends things through Supreme Court opinions or more often through simple regulatory creation of rules.
And most of our laws, as you know, these days, don't come from our elected representatives in Congress, but from the unelected deep state or administrative state, which is a creation of the living Constitution, a growth out of the living Constitution.
So you have these two constitutions, these two visions really of America struggling with one another.
And you talk about the different ways this could work itself out.
And one thing you mentioned is federalism.
And I think We're sort of noticing this real struggle going on between the states and DC that has a different tone than it's had before in this COVID bill that Joe Biden just signed into law.
It basically says the states can't use the money to lower taxes.
Kind of an interesting constitutional question, where they got the power to say that.
And meanwhile, you've got states both on the left and the right saying we're going to be a sanctuary city for immigrants or we're going to be a sanctuary city for guns.
Do you see a new birth of federalism coming, or do you think that that's just too problematical to continue?
Well, Drew, I think you're right.
I mean, one way we could work ourselves out of this pitfall we find ourselves in might be to a renaissance of federalism.
But that's very unlikely.
I mean, liberalism has spent 100 years basically creating a national political community with a national government of almost limitless powers at the top of it.
And it has created a whole series of rights, welfare rights, and now identity rights, and sort of sexual identity and gender identity rights and so forth.
The point of which is these rights cannot be vindicated except from the top down, except from the federal government down.
And so federalizing our political community, nationalizing it more and more.
So now, you know, it beggars belief that the left would agree that the way out of this is to agree to disagree.
And let's just return things to the states, you know, so that Utah can have its kind of abortion law and New York can have a very different kind of abortion law and live and let live.
I don't see how liberalism can do that with a straight face.
And conservatism would be interested in it, I think.
But because it's so improbable, I'm afraid it's not really a viable solution, and we're going to have to fight this out.
Well, you mentioned the other ways forward that you can see actual secession, possibly instead of a cold civil war that we're having now, a hot civil war.
Those both seem unlikely to me.
Am I wrong about that?
No, I think they are unlikely, and I hope they remain unlikely.
But at the same time, you know, this is a different kind of, I spoke in the beginning about this being a sort of pre-revolutionary situation.
It doesn't, in a way, it doesn't seem like so dire a condition because when we think of revolution, we think of a sort of huge social uprising like the French Revolution, you know, an eruption of mass violence and with it, you know, enormous amounts of carnage and social change coming quickly.
But this is a different kind of revolution.
This is a rolling revolution that really has been going on for 100 years.
And it advances and then there's a kind of generational watermark that it reaches.
But 10 or 20 years later, it resumes the advance again and rolls forward to the next one.
So I think there have been like three major waves of the liberal revolution already in the 20th century.
And we're now on the verge, it looks like, of a fourth one.
However, the result is no less revolutionary, even though It arrives peacefully or relatively peacefully and in stages.
And so, this is the problem, getting it through our head: just how much change there has been to American politics and to the American political order in the last hundred years already.
So, that America is in many ways a very different country than it was even 30 years ago, much less 50 or 100 years ago.
And I think the Trump phenomenon, in a way, is a kind of recognition by vast numbers of people, at least the 74 million who voted for him, but I think many more beyond that, probably, that the country is changing right in front of our eyes.
And normal conservative politics has been unable to either certainly arrest that change, but even to admit it and to discern the dimensions of it, to be honest with the American people about what has actually happened to their country over the past, especially the past 20 years, but really going back for a long time even before that.
So, the book is called The Crisis of the Two Constitutions by Charles Kessler.
We talked about the two constitutions.
What do you see as the crisis?
I mean, if there's not going to be a hot civil war, if there's going to be this rolling revolution and the rebellion that was kind of symbolized by the Trump voters, what kind of crisis do you foresee resolving this problem?
I think it's hard to foresee.
I mean, it's not nothing is, my view is that nothing really is inevitable in politics.
And we could find ourselves in a very different political situation if something happens.
You know, events do matter.
And if we suddenly find ourselves in a major war, I mean, a major war, if the Chinese think a U.S. carrier duke in the course of invading, in the course of the Chinese invading Taiwan, let's say, okay, all bets are off.
And the nature of American politics might change very quickly.
But COVID-19 looked like it might be such an extraneous shock to the system, you know, an event, an unanticipated event that could rewrite or rebraw the lines of politics, but it didn't.
It turned out that COVID was almost, you know, in a month or two, assimilated into the existing crisis, assimilated into the existing debate between the two constitutions.
Assimilating Crisis00:07:49
Only now we had more things to argue about.
We could argue about masks and unmasking and about the vaccine and about shutdowns and reopening.
And we've done that.
So I don't know.
I can't predict exactly what the crisis is going to be, but it could easily, it may not be one single thing, but a series of things.
But one can see a close election, a disputed election could trigger it.
A Supreme Court decision that a large part of the country refuses to accept, that many states, in effect, nullify and refuse to have enforced in their own domain could be the precipitating cause for a crisis.
You know, I don't think a civil war, a shooting civil war, is immediately likely after such a precipitating event, just because America is a very messy country now.
You know, red states and blue states span the country.
It's not like there's a southern confederacy that is sort of territorially distinct and that could secede easily and dramatically from the country.
It's messier than that now.
So it's hard to see.
But what happened in both of the elections, 2015 and 2020, in which Trump was involved, gives you some idea of how easily there could be a turn to drastic political action, including collapse, perhaps even violence.
I've only got a couple of minutes left, but I just want to point out the book, Crisis of the Two Constitutions, in the subtitles, The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of American Greatness.
That sounds kind of hopeful.
Do you foresee a recovery of American greatness?
Well, the recovery part is really, the book has three parts.
The first part is on the founders' Constitution.
The second on the liberals or the progressives' Constitution.
And the third is about the conservative response to this impending crisis, so this growing disaffection between the two constitutions, this distancing and this divide between the two constitutions.
And I talk mostly about Reagan and Trump because Reagan is the most successful conservative statesman.
Trump was, might have been, you know, if things had worked out differently, a very successful, he remains, of course, a very important example of right-wing political activity and possibilities.
But the right has not succeeded in restoring the founders' constitution.
That's in a way what they've been trying to do since Reagan, at least, and even before Reagan.
And the odd thing is that by the end of his term, Reagan realized that, and by the end of his term, Trump also realized it.
They're sort of connected by the fact that in Reagan's farewell address, this would have been 1989, he said that he took credit for what he called the Reagan Revolution.
It wasn't his term.
He modestly accepted the term, but others had used it.
But the Cold War was about to be won.
The economy had been revived and would continue for two more decades in an amazing upward ascent.
But he said he had failed at the most important thing, which had been to institutionalize a new American patriotism, what he called an unambivalent American patriotism.
And in the most poignant paragraph in his farewell address, he said, you know, America is, this is a different country than it was when I was a child, when I grew up.
Reagan said, when I grew up, you could learn your patriotism on the streets.
You would get it in the schools from your teachers.
You get it on television or in radio, in popular media, in the newspapers, from your parents and everyone around you.
But now, speaking in the 1980s, even he says that the media, the Hollywood, the television networks don't teach patriotism in the way that they used to do.
And young American parents just aren't sure what they're supposed to teach their kids anymore.
Is America a good, a force for good in the world, or is it not?
And that unambivalent patriotism, he said, was essentially lost.
He had tried to bring it back.
He succeeded a little bit in bringing back a patriotic revivalism, but it was not institutionalized.
And at the end of his term, his one term, Trump created the 1776 Commission, which precisely the same to figure out how to institutionalize a patriotic culture again.
in America, beginning with the schools, the K-12 schools.
I was a member of Examissim, which was, I like to say, the most efficient government commission in the history of government commissions because it did its work in about two weeks and produced its report.
But the report was a lament, in a way, for the damage that had been done, but also a call for action.
And I think there is some hope that reasonable people on the left, and there still are some, will join reasonable people on the right in believing that we really do have to fill up the empty center of our politics with a new kind of patriotism, and that there are some signs that it's possible that that's not a crazy project.
I mean, I'll leave you with this, I guess.
In California, you know, the same very Democratic, very liberal electorate that voted for Biden by more than 70% in California also at the same time voted to refuse the left's invitation to repeal Prop 209.
In effect, the left was saying, let's bring back overt racial quotas and racial discrimination in college admissions and in state contracting and so forth.
And that was voted down by more than 11% by a very large margin by the same voters who voted for Biden.
So maybe even liberal voters now are beginning to think they need to draw some lines and that they're not prepared to go all the way with identity politics and with the far left of the party.
And if that's true, then I think, again, there may be some possibility of a sort of raffle-small between left and right in this country.
Well, I have to stop you there, but that's at least some hope, and I appreciate it.
The book is called The Crisis of the Two Constitutions, The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of American Greatness by Charles R. Kessler.
Developing a Personal Relationship with God00:10:43
Charles, thanks so much for coming on.
I hope you come back again.
That was really incisive, and I appreciate it.
Thanks, Drew.
I appreciate the invitation.
Well, I know all this time you've been listening, but you've really been saying, where is the mailbag?
Here it is, the mailbag.
The little mermaid came on.
She falls in love with the prince.
And because of that, she has to lose her voice.
Yeah!
What the hell?
People like the drug use in this establishment is just getting out of hand.
All right, from Morty.
Hi, Andrew, omnipotent master of the Folickly Challenged.
I have been thinking of ways that I can help you get your audience down to the desired number of four to five listeners.
So I figured I would ask you the following question, which is guaranteed to turn off all of your Jewish listeners.
I think, Morty, you may be my Jewish listener.
I am an Orthodox Jew, and I wonder in your quest for truth, what made you choose Christianity over Judaism?
Well, that is a good question.
I could try and alienate some people with that.
You know, I think ultimately it was the relationship with Jesus Christ.
I think ultimately that's what it boils down to.
You know, Judaism is a beautiful religion in many, many ways, but it's a religion.
And the entire premise of a religion is that you can do certain things to please God.
You can do certain rituals.
You can wear your hat.
You can eat certain things.
You can pray in a certain way, and that will make you more righteous.
Now, Judaism's ethical tradition and ethical thought is unbelievably deep and rich.
If you meet somebody who really has studied the Talmud, like Dennis Prager, for instance, and you talk to him on ethical issues, his wisdom is just very deep.
And I think that Judaism has perfected in many ways the Edmund Burkean idea of developing through tradition, like keeping your tradition, but still moving forward through discussion and debate.
And there's so much in Jewish lore and in the Jewish Bible that I love.
I love the kind of wrestling with God aspect of it, the kind of arguing with God.
I always joke about the scene where Abraham is trying to save, I think, I guess it's Sodom and Gomorrah.
And he says to God, well, if I can find 50 good people, will you save the city?
If I can find 25, if I can find 10, I always want God to say, I only made you a Jew two pages ago, and already you're bargaining with me.
But I love that intimacy and that interplay.
But ultimately, ultimately, I came to God from an entirely different direction, which was not through religion, but through an first reasoning to the point where I realized there was a God, where I realized that I could not maintain the things that I believe to be the case without believing in God.
Developing a relationship with that God that was utterly personal.
It was just prayer.
It was experimenting with prayer.
I mean, I do talk about this at length in The Great Good Thing, but it was experimenting with prayer.
It was in this dialogue.
And then finding that this relationship had, you know, talk about changed my life for the better.
It had transformed my life for the better.
And one day I went to God and I said, look, you know, this is five years I've been talking to you, and you have completely transformed every aspect of my life and made it incalculably more beautiful and more joyful.
What can I do for you?
And I basically immediately had the certainty that I should become a Christian.
And my reaction to that was, what?
Why?
Why would I do that?
Why would I become a Christian?
I don't have no interest in that whatsoever.
But then I went back and started to read the book because when God tells you to do something, you got to listen because the guy can turn you off like that and you don't want to mess around with him.
So I went back to this to the gospels and I thought, yes, this is who I'm having a relationship with.
And I could only have a relationship with him through the vehicle of a person.
Only a person can speak a God that I can understand.
And this obviously is the person that I'm talking to.
So I came from an entirely different direction.
As I always say, my conversion to Christianity was actually not a rejection of Judaism because I'd never been a Jew.
I'd never been a practicing Jew.
And I grew up in a family that taught us about Judaism without basically any belief in God, which made the whole thing empty and ridiculous.
And obviously, if you grow up in a family that teaches you about Judaism with God, it's going to be a very different experience.
Still, however, still it's going to be a religion.
And I believe that one of the things that the gospels teach us is that any religion would kill Christ if they saw him.
Anyone would kill him because he is a liberating force.
And he liberates you from virtually everything by not making you afraid because you know that the world is enemy territory and you know that the world is going to react before the world even reacts, before it tries to cancel you.
You know they're coming.
You know they're coming.
Every time you build a country, you know the country will fall.
Every time you build a beautiful institution, you know it'll be taken over by bad people.
always know that because of what happened to Jesus, because that he was crucified.
I don't believe this stuff.
Oh, he was killed by the Jews.
I believe he was killed by everybody and he would be killed by everybody again tomorrow if he arrived except those people possibly who have a true, real personal relationship with him, who would recognize him.
Oh yeah, I've been talking to you for a while.
I know who you are.
And so it was really that personal relationship that cemented for me the reality of God and the reality of what was happening in my life.
So it was really, it was part reason and part experiential, but it has been confirmed dramatically in my increase in joy and serenity.
And it was like two weeks after I was baptized.
My wife, who knows me better than anybody, turned to me and she said, wow, you have totally changed.
You have become a totally different person.
And she meant I was more peaceful.
I was more joyful.
I was done trying to engage the world on its terms and was engaging the world in what I could understand of God's terms.
So it's been a beautiful thing for me, and I recommend to you, but don't tell your parents.
All right.
From Peter, dear doctorate of shiny baldness and even shinier wisdom, Claven, I must first extend my deepest thanks for your words of wisdom in troubled times.
May they yet continue so we can keep on laughing, crying.
I suspect my sister had an abortion in college.
We were speaking on the topic.
She became very upset and asked if I would hold it against her.
I didn't respond fast enough, and she hung up on me.
In a later phone call, I said, there's nothing you could do in your good conscience that I or God couldn't forgive you for, and we've since made up, but I haven't broached the topic since.
My question is this.
How do I have a conversation on the evil that is the abortion industry while simultaneously making it clear that I don't judge or disdain anybody for doing what they thought at the time was right?
I'll be misguided.
And I have said this many, many times that we are all in the intellectual atmosphere of our time.
We are all, it takes so much energy, so much, it's so difficult to break through.
I frequently reference Washington, a man of true virtue, a man who believed in liberty, and how it took him his whole life to understand just how wrong slavery was.
Even Lincoln had to develop the idea of the evil of slavery.
When you are in your time, it is very hard to see past your time and out of your time.
And that's why we have to not judge people because they're going to judge us the same way.
You know, you judge not lest you be judged.
When you're talking about this, maybe it's good to lead with that.
It's really good to lead with the difficulty that some women experience in pregnancy, that if you're pregnant out of wedlock, if you're pregnant and you don't have money, if you're pregnant and you already have two kids or three or four kids and you don't know what you're going to do, if you're pregnant and it makes you depressed, all these things, or the one they always bring up, although this is very few of the cases, but if like you've been attacked by somebody and gotten pregnant, these can be tragic things.
It can be really, really tough, difficult things to deal with.
And we should understand that to begin with.
But you can't solve your problems by killing somebody, right?
In every other case, we understand that you can't solve your problems by killing somebody.
So maybe, you know, maybe there is some throat clearing that needs to be done.
It's kind of like when you talk about divorce.
This has happened to me.
I've been going off about divorce, which I think is a grave evil in many, many, many cases.
And I was rattling on about that.
And of course, the woman sitting next to me was divorced.
And like then, I felt like an idiot.
And I felt like I'd been cruel, even though I felt that everything I said had been true.
So, you know, it's good to think about the way you talk about things.
What the left does is they use manners.
I wrote about this in a city journal piece called The Great White Lie, the Big White Lie, I think it was called.
And they use our manners to try and silence us.
What a terrible thing to say, that a man in a skirt is not a woman.
Oh my goodness, what a rude thing to say.
But that always, as always, the left takes a kernel of truth and turns it into a lie.
And the lie there, the kernel of truth there, is that we should be kind to one another.
We should watch the way we speak.
We shouldn't stop us from speaking the truth.
But you can speak the, you know, what is it, Paul?
I think it's a Paul Simon song.
You know, you don't have to lie to me, but give me some tenderness with your honesty.
You know, and I think that that's something we should all be thinking about.
And I think that what happens again with conservatives is they react to the left's manipulation of our manners and become mannerless.
And, you know, when I would say of Donald Trump, he has bad manners and people say, well, he's right.
You know, yeah, but give me some tenderness with your honesty.
You know, that's the thing.
And I don't think it's wrong to think about that.
And I think this is what's happening with your sister.
And good for you for knowing it.
Good for you for recognizing it.
You know, that like, yeah, you said the right thing, but yeah, you also hurt her feelings and made a difficult thing more difficult for her to grasp because you don't want her to say, well, I don't want to feel that pain.
I don't want to feel that shame.
So I'm never going to face the reality of what I did.
That's not what you want.
You want her to come to the reality of what she did in the knowledge of God's forgiveness and in his vast forgiveness and your forgiveness and your understanding.
You know, this is a big thing conservatives need to learn.
You know, we need to be able to speak the truth with kindness and we need to be able to speak it politely because when we don't, when we don't, we give the truth a bad name.
All right, I got to stop there, which means you are plunged, plummeting desperately like Satan out of heaven.
You are plummeting into the Clavenless Week.
If you are an all-access subscriber, and you should be, I'll probably be on this week doing all, next week doing all-access.
But if not, you've got to wait till next Friday.
Will you make it?
There's almost no chance of it.
However, if you do, I will be here.
Plummeting Into Clavenless Week00:01:16
I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, basically wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also, remember to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show, the Matt Walsh Show, and the Michael Knoll Show.
Thanks for listening.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Our technical director is Austin Stevens.
Supervising producer, Mathis Glover.
Production Manager, Pavel Vidowski.
Edited by Danny D'AMico.
Lead audio mixer, Mike Cormina.
Animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Production coordinator, McKenna Waters.
And our production assistant is Jacob Falash.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production, Copyright Daily Wire, 2021.
Amazon declares that it's not going to sell any books which categorize transgenderism as a mental illness.
Joe Biden decides what sort of July 4th celebration you're allowed to have.
Former conservative actress goes on an apology tour.
And we'll discuss the renewed controversy over women in the military.