Ep. 1024 – The United States vs. God frames Joe Biden’s presidency as a symptom of societal decadence, tracing modern collapse to intellectual movements like Rousseau’s Romanticism and Freud’s sexual liberation, now weaponized in cases like Jack Phillips’ legal battles over religious objections to LGBTQ+ cakes—costing him 40% of his business. The episode ties this to "homofascist" cultural enforcement, critiques Marxist-influenced policies like South Dakota’s weakened sports ban, and contrasts decadence with moral revival, citing Poland’s fall of communism under Pope John Paul II. Philosophical attacks on Christianity—from Marquis de Sade’s nihilism to Foucault’s rejection of divine morality—are dissected as root causes, while Shelby Steele debunks CRT’s racial victimhood narratives. The show ends with a digital art revival in games like Goragoa and a call for resistance against "woke" bullying, framing hope as the antidote to cultural surrender. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, the Biden administration is shaping up to be the most progressive leadership since FDR extended the Great Depression for 10 years.
Everything about Joe Biden is progressive, from his dementia to his national debt to that gormless look on his face that fills you with the confidence that someone else must be running the country or we're just so totally doomed.
In fact, some of you may beginning to say to yourself, whoa, hold the phone.
Just how much of this wonderful progress can we make before we've progressed so far we can no longer even see America in the rearview mirror.
In order to avoid the horrifying answer to that question, let's instead take a look at some of the progress we've made so far.
In the bad old days, patriarchal families trapped their sons and daughters in restrictive gender roles.
Now we've progressed to the point where government schools can teach our children about fluid sexual identities until they're fully prepared for self-mutilation and suicide.
In the old days, creepy perverts were tormented by disgusting and destructive sexual fetishes.
Now they can just call them identities and carry on.
In former times, American blacks and whites could only slowly rise out of the racist hostilities that cause segregation and mutual hatred.
Now we've finally progressed to the point where we've stopped doing that.
Once upon a time, the American military was limited to annoyingly macho, battle-ready men who only knew how to lay waste to our enemies and strike terror into the hearts of murderous regimes.
Today, our military is preparing for the future by including women in our fighting forces and learning to speak Chinese.
It used to be that the value of money was tied to the amount of gold in Fort Knox, a meaningless and nonsensical connection that limited the nation's spending to the arbitrary amount of cash we just happen to actually have.
Today, we've progressed to the point that when the government needs more money, all it has to do is open another box of monopoly, and we can finally distribute wealth to the needy until every single person in America can actually build a hotel on boardwalk while sleeping on Skid Row at the same time.
In the old days, we had to live in fear of fascism and communism.
But today, our government is surrounded by armed guards and barbed wire, and anyone who disagrees with the ruling party will be silenced.
So, hooray, we have nothing worse to fear.
In short, we're all progressing so fast that soon we will have come full circle and be living like savages with our bodies covered in tattoos and our faces pierced with adornments while we listen to primitive rhythmic music and commit sexual outrages and violence at will.
Then at last, we'll know we've reached Los Angeles.
Hoorah For Progress00:03:03
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 ipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, the vast right-wing conspiracy known as Clavinon continues.
If we haven't alienated you yet with my hatred of rock and roll or my disdain for feminism, hold on, we will get to you.
We haven't forgotten you.
So this is a good time right now to subscribe to my YouTube channel.
You'll get extra content.
You'll get this content.
You'll get some kind of content.
Who knows what you'll get?
You'll get something, something.
Press that little bell and I'll show up at your house instantaneously.
I'll just appear in your living room, take the silverware, and be gone.
And if you leave a comment and the comment is sufficiently ignorant and racist, we will include it on the show because it'll fit right in.
Today we have a comment from Wilson Ramos who says, young men come for Knolls, real men stay for Clavin.
I believe that that is the slogan of the Texas Rangers as well.
The mailbag will be at the end of the show.
You want to be in next week's mailbag, you've got to subscribe.
First, you got to do that.
First, you have to scream like that.
And then you have to subscribe to dailywire.com, go to the podcast page, hit the Andrew Clavin podcast.
There's a little mailbag symbol.
Hit that.
You can ask me anything you want.
You can ask me about religion.
You can ask me about politics, your personal life.
Will I answer you?
Yes, I will.
And all my answers will be guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life for the better.
What a stupid question.
Well, if you're like me and you never sleep at night, you probably sometimes wonder what is going on outside.
A good reason to get a Ring security system on your house.
And of course, if you travel or if you just have people who come to your door and you want to know who you are, Ring lets you see them when they ring the Ring doorbell and talk to them.
No matter where you are, you don't have to be at home.
You just look at your phone.
You have an app there and you can talk to anybody who comes to your door.
And again, you don't have to get out of bed.
You can take a look with your Ring security cameras.
You can also get a Ring device that will turn on a spotlight when anybody comes on.
And right now, you can get a special offer on a Ring welcome kit at ring.com slash Clavin.
This comes with the Ring's Video Doorbell 3 and the Chime Pro.
It's a perfect way to upgrade your front door and start your Ring experience, especially now when we're inside a lot and people are delivering stuff.
You want to be able to see what's going on and talk to people.
So go to ring.com slash Clavin.
That's ring.com slash Clavin from now on.
I didn't even get to ask the question.
I didn't even get to ask the question.
Ah, well, now you know.
Now you know the secret.
All right, we're going to talk about a lot of things.
We're going to talk about sadomasochism and God, and maybe we'll put those things together somehow.
It's going to be an interesting, interesting conversation.
Lasting Traces of Lost Civilization00:15:24
But I want to go back to talking about some of the stuff I was talking about last time, which was decadence, because I think we're in a state of decadence.
And, you know, I have seen such states before.
And I remember very specifically on my birthday in 1977, I was living in New York City.
And New York City at that time was a cesspit, as it's becoming again today.
It was just, it was filled with crime.
You couldn't go out at night.
People would write to you and ask if it was safe to visit.
It was filthy.
There were homeless people everywhere.
It was pretty much like it's getting to be again now.
And on my birthday, I was my, the woman who would become my wife, I was living with her at the time.
We were flat broke.
We had absolutely nothing.
She had been chased out of her office repeatedly by FALN bomb threats.
I had been covering the Son of Sam murders for a free, I think for the AP.
I was writing for something for the AP.
And we were both kind of wrought up with the violence that was in the city.
And it was hot all the time.
It had been freezing cold that winter.
On my birthday, we had saved up our little pennies to go to our favorite restaurant, which I think, I'm talking from memory now, but I think it was called The Ginger Man.
And we had this lovely dinner together.
In the middle of this dinner, it's 1977 on my birthday.
The blackout hit.
The city just went absolutely dark.
And I remember looking out the window and seeing the lights kind of cascading out.
And the restaurant was kind of embarrassed that they, you know, that they had gone dark and they couldn't serve anybody.
So they started to give people free wine.
And my wife and I got just a little bit drunk out of our minds.
We were absolutely smashed.
And we left the place feeling really good and we danced home.
We waltzed home.
I remember we danced to, they all laughed at Christopher Columbus, but ha ha ha, who has the last laugh now?
I believe it was me who was singing that at the top of my lungs as we danced back.
We got home and my wife tried to make me a birthday cake and I remember dropped pieces of the mixer in because she was absolutely stoned.
And then we just both passed out.
In the middle of the night, I was awakened by a phone call from California by a reporter there who I knew and who wanted to ask me how the riots were going.
Because in fact, while she and I were dancing home, crazily in love with one another, the city was on fire.
The people in the black neighborhoods had set fire to the city and were looting and rioting all over the place.
It was a city in decay.
It was a city that was full of decadence.
And yet, and yet, not that long later, really 10, 15 years later, let's see, it was 77, really 10 years later, it was one of the greatest cities in the world.
It had started to become one of the greatest cities in the world.
When Rudy Giuliani came in, which I believe was in the 90s, he came in, he turned the city around.
It became as great a city as there was on earth and as great a great city, probably the greatest of great cities.
It was peaceful.
It was beautiful.
Its nasty neighborhoods were transformed.
It was unbelievable.
So that moment of decadence that we danced through actually did turn away.
It was a matter of policy.
It was a matter of policy.
And you never know.
You do not know when you've entered a period of decadence, whether you're in what I'll call small decadence, which can pass away by good policy and a change of approach, or whether you're in big decadence and it's going to take the utter destruction of your society before you can move forward.
So, you know, last week I talked a little bit about rock music, and a lot of people misunderstood me.
Rock music stinks.
I mean, that's the first thing, but that's not what I was saying.
If you like rock music, I can't tell you that your taste is terrible.
Your taste is terrible.
That's just the way it is.
But that's not what I was saying.
I wasn't saying that rock music was inherently decadent.
I was making the point that rock music was a rebellion against the upper orders, against the elite.
And when there is a rebellion against the elite, there's a question of whether that rebellion, which may or may not be justified, stops there and forms a new elite, refashions the elite and refashions the values of the country or the entity, whatever it is, or whether that rebellion becomes a rebellion against nature and creation itself, a rebellion against God, in which case you're in for trouble.
You're going into a period of evil and decadence.
And that, I think, is what has happened to us.
And I was simply saying that, I wasn't saying that the Beatles were bad.
I was saying the Beatles could have progressed in one way, but it actually ended up with Cardi B gyrating around, making a fool of herself.
And the reason I said this happened, this is clavinist psychology.
The reason I think this happens is because I think each of us comes into the world seeking God.
We seek God in our mothers.
We seek God in our fathers.
We seek God in authority figures.
And when those figures fail us, as they inevitably do, the question is, can we take that devotion that we have given to them and move on and give it to God and go on happily, realizing that people fail and sometimes they fail in love and sometimes they fail because they're messed up themselves.
Can we then push that devotion and give it to the place, put it in the place where it belongs?
Or do we start to rebel against our own nature, against nature itself, against the meaning of nature and against the moral order?
And that is what I think has happened to America.
Now, what does it mean?
What does decadence mean?
Because this is a period of decadence, but decadence doesn't mean that people are bad.
It doesn't mean that things are falling apart.
It doesn't even necessarily mean that all the arts are bad.
But it does mean that things have kind of played out.
A cycle has played out.
Here's Jacques Barzin from his excellent, excellent book.
If you haven't read it, it's long, but it's really great.
It's called From Dawn to Decadence.
And it traces the history of the West from about Martin Luther, from Martin Luther's beginning of the Reformation to when it was written, I guess, in the 70s or 80s, which he felt was the beginning of decadence, a decadence that I think is being played out now to its nth degree.
Here's what he says.
He says, all that is meant by decadence is falling off.
It implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense.
On the contrary, it is a very active time full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance.
The loss it faces is that of possibility.
The forms of art as of life seem exhausted.
The stages of development have been run through.
Institutions function painfully.
Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result.
Now, again, there's small decadence and there's big decadence, and you never know what you're in.
At the turn of the 20th century, there was a sense in Europe which had reached the height of human civilization.
It was at a height that human civilization had never reached before, and yet there was a sense that things had played out, that people had become spoiled, that they had finished with all the great arts, that there was nowhere to go.
And people started to yearn. for war.
They started to yearn, among other things, they started to yearn for war.
And there was a great rebellion against the Victorian era, a lot of new forms of arts coming along.
And if you read a book, for instance, like The Magic Mountain, which takes place in a tubercular facility, and it just is a symbol of the decadence of the time, because the people in the tubercular facility check in, but they never check out.
It's like the Hotel California.
They cannot leave because they never feel well enough to get back to life.
And it ends, the novel ends with the war coming and a sort of sense of hope that as they charge off into war, this civilization will refresh itself.
In fact, that was the end of European civilization.
The civilization that started with Martin Luther ended with World War I and then World War II, and the energy of the West moved on to America.
But there were other kinds of decadence that I have lived through, smaller decadence, for instance, in the 70s.
And it was because of the rise of leftism then, leftist Supreme Court decisions that filled our cities with crime, leftist economic principles that caused stagnation and malaise.
Jimmy Carter, who was a very bad president, but not the worst president, I think Barack Obama actually outdid him.
He came forward and he made a famous speech, which was really controversial, where he said, America is suffering from malaise.
Now, you have to understand, to get a gallon of gas for your car, you had to wait online.
You could only go on odd and even days because there was a gas shortage.
And you had to wait online, sometimes for hours, just to fill your car with gas.
There was incredible inflation, and yet at the same time, the economy was stagnant.
I was living in a horrible area at that time.
I won't tell you what it was because I don't want to insult it, but there were people fighting in the streets.
Everybody's, the look on everybody's face was grim.
And the president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, got up and told us that we had to buck up because we were suffering from malaise.
It was called his famous Malaise speech.
Here's a cut of it, 29.
The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways.
It is a crisis of confidence.
It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.
We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity, of purpose for our nation.
Our progress has been part of a living history of America, even the world.
We always believed that we were part of a great movement of humanity itself called democracy, involved in the search for freedom.
And that belief has always strengthened us in our purpose.
But just as we're losing our confidence in the future, we're also beginning to close the door on our past.
That's an amazing speech for the president to make to say that the problem is the way Americans feel rather than his own policies.
And that is, of course, the problem with the left in general is it never looks to its own policies.
When the people go out and they elect a man like Donald Trump, who is a real different kind of person, they don't ask themselves why, what is the trouble.
They say, how can we get rid of them and get back to what we were doing before?
Only because Carter was thrown out after one term and Ronald Reagan was elected in five years from that moment, which really, I mean, it really was a gray moment.
Go back and look at some of the videos you can see.
There's a movie about the famous hockey game between the ice hockey game between the Russians and the Americans that kind of details what it was like, what it felt like, but it was a genuinely grim time.
I remember it very, very well.
Five years later, Ronald Reagan ran for re-election, and this was his ad, a famous ad called Morning in America that would not have worked had it not resonated with the people.
This is five years after that speech you just watched.
It's morning again in America.
Today, more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country's history.
With interest rates at about half the record highs of 1980, nearly 2,000 families today will buy new homes.
More than at any time in the past four years.
This afternoon, 6,500 young men and women will be married.
And with inflation at less than half of what it was just four years ago, they can look forward with confidence to the future.
It's morning again in America.
And under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better.
That's an amazing turnaround.
And the turnaround lasted.
It lasted through the 80s.
It lasted through the 80s.
It lasted through the 90s.
It lasted to 2000.
It was really, it really was with Barack Obama after we had that crash in 2008.
And we had all the wars from George W. Bush that really did hurt our economy.
And they were wars that were not paid for and now look like an overreaction to the attacks on us in 9-11.
And then Barack Obama, basically, who did not like the country and said he would transform it.
And he did.
He transformed it into a mess.
We have not really climbed out of that mess.
If you thought that Obama was a rerun of Carter, which for a while I did, yet he was re-elected because he caught the wave of the upswing in the economy and because he was a much better politician than Carter was.
And it was Trump who was thrown out, and he was thrown out because of his personality, a personality without which he would never have become president in the first place.
So we are in a bind right now.
We are in a deep, deep trough of decadence.
And we don't know whether it's going to get out, whether we're going to come out of it, whether it's going to be big decadence, which means there's going to have to be some kind of cataclysmic event before we can climb out of it, or whether it's going to be small decadence and simply a change of policy, a renewal of a new generation coming in, will give us the ideas we need to move forward.
And do not, of course, listen to conservatives, because conservatives always think it's the end of the world.
That's the way they are.
And they say it with great conviction: oh, it's over, forget it, it's done, it's done, we're done.
You know, that's a, to me, a weak way of looking at the world.
I mean, as I continually say, we can win a fight, but we can't.
You can lose a fight, but you can't win a surrender.
So it's always worth fighting, even if you think you're going to lose.
So, what is at the heart of this?
And I want to go back to this.
I've said it before when I was talking about music.
And I want to say it again because Shapiro, Ben, recommended a book to me called The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by a theologian named Carl Truman.
And we're going to try and have him on the show.
I haven't quite finished it yet.
But I was really touched by it because what it is, he traces the ideas that have led us to this moment, specifically the moment of sexual confusion that has caused us to believe that people can snap their fingers and change their gender.
And we have this woman, this guy, really, who was just appointed to the Health and Human Services, who was just confirmed in the Health and Human Services Division, who Levine, Rachel Levine, right?
She was just confirmed.
And this is a person who thinks that children should be butchered in order to change their sex if they have some uncertainty about what their gender is, which is really, that's a person who shouldn't be confirmed to anything except treatment.
That's a person who really needs help.
And how has it happened that we're confirming people like that and calling people phobic if they disagree with somebody like that?
It really is a question how we've gotten to this really lost, lost. place and yet and yet the people saying that it's a lost place, the people crying out against it, don't seem to have the power to make it stop.
And so in this book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, this theologian Carl Truman traces the ideas that have led us to the moment, to this moment, and he traces how the Romantics, including Rousseau, transformed the transform, put forward an idea that it's society that corrupts the authentic self and the authentic self of humanity is basically good.
So this was the opposite of Christianity, where we believe the essential self is broken.
It's good, it's beautiful, it was made beautiful, but it has been broken by sin.
Rousseau said, no, it's society that has transformed this beautiful thing of humanity that if left alone would just be a great person.
Shelley and Blake, and then finally Freud, as he traces this, transformed that authentic nature of the human being so that it's centered on sexuality.
According to Freud, really, who was such a powerful thinker, such a dominant thinker when I was a young man, that the person that you are is all keyed into your sexuality and what you want and how your sexuality has been repressed and how it should be let free and how it can't be let free.
Opposing Christianity00:06:39
And that idea, according to this book, was married to Karl Marx ultimately so that the idea of liberation and revolution was now keyed into sexual revolution.
And in order for us to be free, we didn't need to redistribute wealth so much as we needed to be freed of all our restraints.
And it's an anti-Christian movement because Christianity does not believe that the authentic self is where you're going.
It believes that you are at your best, a branch of the vine of God.
So it's not that you're bad, it is that you're broken and you can heal yourself by turning yourself around.
What touched me so much about reading this book, this book by the guy who's hilariously named True Man, that's his name, what touched me so much about this book is it's the exact reverse of my memoir, The Great Good Thing.
If you read my memoir, my memoir is my intellectual history, which goes back through Sigmund Freud and through the ideas of Rousseau and through the ideas of the Marquis de Sade, who is at the center of all this, and we'll talk about him later in the show, to Christ.
So I was going against the tenor of the times.
I had this friend, he's now dead, but he was a Yale PhD who read a book of mine because I couldn't get this book published.
And I said, this is a beautiful book.
Why can't I get it published?
And my friend said, don't you understand, this is a direct quote, your thinking is going in completely the opposite direction to the intellectual trends of our times.
So I want to put forward two ideas that come from this.
One is this.
The problem is the problem of God.
It's policy, but the policy, we are lost in policy because we are lost in the question of who we are and the purpose of what we're doing.
If your purpose is to make it so that Rachel Levine can wear pearls and butcher children, we're on the right track.
If your purpose is to find freedom so that each individual reaches fruition, or as many individuals who can reach fruition, and that individual fruition is what lifts the country up, if that's where we're going, we are going to have to turn back to God.
And I'm sorry if you don't believe it's just the way it's going to have to be.
It's not necessarily going to have to be the Christian God, but it's going to have to be that creator who endowed us with our individual rights.
And then we'll start to realize that women and men, it's not that every woman is feminine, it's not that every man is masculine, each woman and man represents a part of that part of God, the feminine or masculine part of God.
And then you start to realize you have a purpose, you are connected to a higher meaning, and that is how you start to turn around.
That this is a war against that, that this is a war against that is obvious in everything these people say.
You know this guy, Ibram Kendi, who has reinvented racism so that you can now say I'm anti-racist and be racist.
Kendi himself has said he is opposed to what he calls savior theology, because savior theology means that some people are sinners and some people are not doing as well as others and that you can head somewhere.
And if you can head somewhere, then if you're headed in a different direction, you're in the wrong.
Here's Kendi talking about the fact that his philosophy is anti-Christianity.
To me, anti-racists fundamentally reject savior theology.
That goes right in line with racist ideas and racist theology in which they say, you know what, black people, other racial groups, the reason why they're struggling on earth is because of what they're behaviorally doing wrong.
And it is my job as the pastor to sort of save these wayward black people or wayward poor people or wayward queer people.
That type of theology breeds bigotry.
And so to me, the type of theology of liberation theology breeds a common humanity, a common humanity against the structures of power that oppress us all.
It's really amazing.
What he's saying is morality, morality, and meaning create bigotry.
Because if there's a meaning to life, if there's a purpose to life, then some people are headed on the wrong path.
If there's morality, then some people are doing what's wrong.
And that becomes bigotry.
And if you see what the left is doing, it's always that.
You know, you shouldn't slut shame people.
You shouldn't fat shame people.
You shouldn't evil shame people.
People aren't evil.
They're just doing things because the society is evil and so on.
And that's how our society has fallen down the rabbit hole.
The thing is, again, I danced through New York while it was burning and I saw New York turn around.
And I've seen other things turn around that nobody thought would turn around, including the fall of the Soviet Union.
And the fall of the Soviet Union really began when John Paul II.
I mean, there were a lot of reasons it happened, but John Paul II visited Poland, a Polish Pope visited Poland.
And people who had been stomped on by the Soviet boot all this time poured out into the street and started singing, We Want God.
And that was the end.
That was the end of the Soviet Union.
They did everything to cover that up.
They did everything not to show people how many people had poured out to see the Pope.
They did everything to make sure that nobody saw how desperate people were to find God again.
And yet, God remained alive.
God doesn't go away.
I lived my life, my intellectual life, in opposition to the tide that has carried us to this point.
So can the country, so can all of us.
I danced through the fires of New York.
I'm dancing now.
I saw New York turn around.
I saw America turn around.
It can turn around again.
It's going to begin with us because clearly there are people at war with the things that make us great.
And we are just going to have to win that war, each one of us.
So as you know, when your car is broken, you do not want to get in your car and drive it to the car parts store.
Why?
Because your car is broken.
It won't go to the car parts store.
All you can do is imagine standing in this stupid store with a guy on a computer who doesn't know anything more about car parts than you do and trying to find stuff out.
And you're not even there because your car doesn't work because it needs a car part.
That's why there's rockauto.com at rockauto.com.
Not only can you go on your own, very own computer and see the parts right there, you will get low prices.
And you will get to say, rockauto.com.
Isn't that what we live for?
It will make you feel more powerful.
Your friends will respect you more.
Women will like you.
rockauto.com.
It's a great way to get car parts at a good price.
It's a family business.
They've been serving auto parts customers online for 20 years.
So go to rockauto.com to shop for auto and body parts from hundreds of manufacturers.
Go to rockauto.com right now and see all the parts available for your car or truck.
Write Clavin.
You got to write Clavin.
It's rock autoin in there.
How did you hear about us box?
So they know we sent you.
Celebrate Or Pay The Price00:12:46
How do you spell it?
K-L-A-V-A-N at rockauto.com.
I think we're going to have to style and form veto this segment.
Yeah.
We're going to talk about, I want to talk about two stories happening this week that show you what it means to follow God in a time of decadence, because it's different than following God in a time of plenty and in a time when a society is working well.
Because when society is working well, it's probably in keeping with its gods.
It's probably in line with its gods.
Jack Phillips, you remember Jack Phillips from the Masterpiece Cake Shop in Colorado.
He is back in court again this week.
He is being sued.
Now, you remember, Phillips refused to bake a cake to celebrate a gay wedding, not because he hated gay people, but because he's a Christian and he didn't believe that there is such a thing as gay marriage.
And he feels that he's an artist and he didn't feel that he should use his art to express approval of something of which he disapproved.
Now, the Supreme Court said that he didn't have to do that, but they ruled in very narrow grounds.
They said that the state commission had displayed clear and impermissible hostility, but they didn't resolve the case of whether the government can compel people to create speech with which they disagree.
And who it was?
It was Bill McGurn who wrote about this in the Wall Street Journal, wrote about it brilliantly.
What happened then was a lawyer, Autumn Scardina, came and started to harass.
It's clearly an act of harassment.
She went and requested that he make a custom cake to celebrate her gender transition, pink on the inside, blue on the outside.
And he refused.
Here is Phillips lawyer, Jeremy Tedesco, saying what he thinks is at stake.
The goal is to silence Jack, to banish him from public life, to financially ruin him, and to send a message of intimidation to people who share Jack's beliefs, that they have no place in public life, have no right to earn a livelihood, and follow the religious convictions simultaneously.
Now, just in case you don't get the point, right, when after Masterpiece and Phillips refused to make this cake, this gender transition cake, Scardina called to ask for another one, which featured Satan smoking a joint.
She didn't want to be subtle, or he didn't, I don't even know if he's a hero.
She didn't want to be subtle about it, wanted Satan smoking a joint.
When asked why she ordered the Satan cake, this is reading from Bill McGurn's article.
When asked why she ordered the Satan cake, she said she wanted to believe Mr. Phillips was a good person and hoped to persuade him to see the errors of his thinking.
In other words, if you don't show the errors of your thinking and agree with me, I will destroy you.
Now, the important thing to realize is we all support, I think, Jack Phillips in doing what he's doing.
In fact, I just am so distressed myself that the reasonable request that gay people be treated with kindness instead of ostracized from society has transformed into what I call homofascism, where these people think these activists, because it's not gay people, it's activists, think that they can hunt this guy down and make him agree, make him celebrate them.
It's not enough that he says, I love you, I will sell you a cake.
He has to celebrate them because otherwise, since their authentic self is their homosexuality, their authentic self is completely connected to their sexuality instead of their ideas, instead of their actual, the actual things they love, they cannot live without this one person.
If one person somewhere is not celebrating them, they fall apart.
And that is a sign, of course, that you're not at peace with yourself.
I mean, a lot of people, a lot of people don't celebrate me, and I don't even lose any sleep about it.
But this person is going to lose sleep if Jack Phillips in Colorado will not celebrate the fact that he was a man and now thinks he's a woman.
Here is Phillips talking about this.
And the thing I just want you to pay attention to is he's hurt.
He has lost a huge portion of his business.
I think it's 40% of his business because he stopped baking wedding cakes altogether.
Now, a guy like this is an artist with a cake, right?
What's his business?
His business is making wedding cakes, but he stopped doing that because he doesn't want to be accused.
He doesn't want to be shut down for discrimination.
So he's lost a huge amount of his business doing this, and he will not bend.
Here's Phillips.
Are you an object lesson for the whole country that if you dare to stand up for your own religious beliefs, you will be tarred, you will be demeaned, and frankly yourself dehumanized.
And they've really hurt you financially, really hurt you.
Yeah, you know, they really have.
The state took away 40% of my business, which was my wedding business the first go-around.
And the thing is, I serve everybody who comes to my shop.
I welcome everybody, and I'd be glad to create cakes for anybody that comes in.
So the reason I play this and emphasize the pain that he's in, the fact that he's lost 40% of his business and he has to go into court all the time.
Now he's being sued by an individual who thinks he can get around the fact that the state can't persecute him by persecuting him personally.
The reason I emphasize this is because of all the people who write to me saying, how can I without?
You know, how can I get, you know, stand up to my leftist college professor without losing my grades?
How can I stand up to my critical race theory HR person without losing my job?
How can I, and the answer is you can't.
In a time of decadence, when you stand up for the things that you believe, you will be crushed.
In a time of bounty, in a time when things are running well, people understand, especially in a free country, we understand the multiplicity of ideas that actually make us go forward, that help individuals to thrive, because we identify an individual with his ideas, not with his crotch.
We identify a person as the person in relationship to his God, his self, in relation to God, instead of the person who the person is sleeping with.
Now compare Phillips to Christy Noam.
Now, Christy Noam, in a single move, has gone from being the future vice president of the United States to being the future former governor of South Dakota.
She had a bill coming on that was going to stop a bill that had been passed by the legislature in South Dakota that was going to stop men from playing in girls' sports by declaring themselves women.
And she was threatened by the NCAA, who said they were going to pull their tournaments away.
She possibly was threatened by Amazon, who was going to build a building in Sioux Falls, Sioux City, whatever the city is in South Dakota, and was threatening that.
And she caved.
She said, I'm going to send it back with a few things changed.
It's a bill with four things in it.
She took out two of them and gutted the bill.
She went on Tucker Carlson to explain her reasoning, and Tucker went after her, as I think she actually deserved.
Now, I was a fan of Christy Noam, and let's not forget, let's not just turn our back on the fact that she behaved in an exemplary fashion during the pandemic.
She didn't shut down.
She didn't order people to wear masks.
She didn't close her economy.
She kept her state going.
She was actually heroic.
But as you hear in this, she is really on the defensive because she seems to have caved in to powerful interests.
We've had to fight hard to get any tournaments to come to South Dakota.
When they took punitive action against us, we would have to litigate.
And legal scholars that I have been consulting with for many, many months say that I would very likely lose those litigation efforts.
And I don't think they're going to be able to do that.
Hold on, just to be clear, it's not the bill.
You're saying many times over and over again.
But wait, wait, wait.
So you're saying the NCAA threatened you and you don't think you can win that fight.
They said, if you sign this, we won't allow girls in South Dakota to play.
And you don't think you can win in court, even though the public overwhelmingly supports you nationally.
And so you're caving to the NCAA.
I think that's what you're saying.
No, that's not right at all, Tucker.
In fact, you're wrong completely.
I've been working on this issue for years.
In fact, several years ago, I fought, I fought USDA to make sure that 4-H rodeo and that the sport of rodeo could keep girls' events, girls' events, and boys' events, boys' events.
So I've been working on this for many, many years.
She says that she's going to form a coalition of states so she has the power to fight back, but it rings hollow.
It rings hollow if you can't stand up.
I mean, what if, you know, Jack Phillips has said, I'm going to form a coalition of bakers?
No, he went to the hill.
He went to the hill himself.
He stood up for himself.
And this is the problem.
You know, the people who are persecuting us, they're persecuting the believers.
And I know that not everybody is a Christian.
I know that not everybody even believes in God, but they actually believe in the things that the things that God means, the meaning of life, the meaning of our bodies, the meaning of not being, you know, of not thinking all of your desires are the right thing.
The people who agree with that, who are the conservatives, understand that you are going to have to pay a price at this point.
And if our politicians won't pay the price, if they're asking just individuals like cake bakers to pay the price, we're in serious trouble.
You know, Glenn Reynolds, a friend of mine, he runs this great blog, Instapundit.
He went on TV and he wrote an article about the fact that these people are in the minority.
The people fighting against Christianity, people fighting against America, are in the minority, but they're bullies and people are caving in.
And here's what he says, cut six.
The woke is, as you said, a tiny minority.
It's maybe three or four percent at most of the population.
Everybody hates woke culture.
The poll show, a vast majority of Americans hate it, a vast majority of blacks hate it.
All minorities, liberal comedians hate it.
Even Barack Obama has spoken out about it.
And they still get their way so often because they're just bullies.
And they bully people and they threaten them and they go after them.
And people just want them all to go away.
And so they give in, especially the people who run a lot of our institutions who tend to not have much in the way of a spine.
They tend to run not have much in the way of a spine.
And that's right.
And the only reason I'm saying this is I'm just trying to situate you in your situation, in your time.
This is your time.
This is the time that you were given to live.
Remember, it's like Frodo.
You don't want to be in this time.
You wish the ring had never come to you, but it has come.
This is the fight you are in.
This is what it's going to take.
And it's going to take it daily.
And as I always say, it's not a question of sticking your head in the cannon's mouth.
It's a question of strategizing.
It's a question of choosing your fights.
It's a question of having a spine and standing up.
And when you see the difference between a Jack Phillips and a Christy Noam, it's written right in front of you what you are called to do in this moment.
There is no way out for any of us.
We're all going to have to pay these prices.
We're all going to have to do these things or it's going to be big decadence instead of small decadence.
You ain't going to like it.
Now, because I never sleep, I like to be particularly comfortable.
When you go to sleep, you may want to sleep on the floor.
But if you want to be comfortable while you're sleeping or while you're falling asleep, you might want to try My Pillow.
My Pillow is a terrific pillow.
It really is.
They don't go flat.
You can wash and dry them as many times as you want.
They maintain their shape.
And best of all, they are made in the US of A. If you don't have a MyPillow or if you know someone who doesn't, 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, which is regularly $69.98 for only $29.98.
It's usually $70.
Now it's $30.
That's $40 in savings.
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 you can think of.
$29.98 for a queen-size premium, MyPillow.
And you buy now, they will extend the 60-day money-back guarantee.
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 MyPillow products, including the Giza Dream bed sheets, the MyPillow Mattress Topper, and MyPillow Towel Sets.
Or you can call 800-651-1148-800-651-1148 and use promo code DAILYWIRE.
Senator Cruz, can you put on a mask?
Yeah, when I'm talking on TV camera, I'm not going to wear a mask.
It make us feel better.
You know, when you're in a time of decadence, you have to understand that everything, there's no escape from that time.
You can live in the past.
You can just go and watch things that were written before in the 1940s.
You can watch movies on Turner Classics.
You can go to the opera.
You can watch ballet and read classic books.
All of those things are good things, but you're still going to be in your time and you're still going to have to look for the flowers that grow and all this.
Joe Biden's Decrepitude00:08:55
And you have to understand that everything, everything we're seeing is part of this.
Joe Biden's decrepitude is part of this.
Joe Biden is a mask on leftism.
Leftism is decay.
Leftism is a form of decay, okay?
Because no leftist ever talks about making anything.
They only talk about pillaging things that were made before.
The money they spend was made before or they believe will be made in the future.
They're always conserving.
They're always dividing.
They're always distributing, but they're never creating.
They never create anything.
Remember, government does not create anything.
You create stuff and the government takes part of that away to fund the government.
So leftism is a form of decay.
So when you look at Joe Biden, you think, how can this guy have become president?
How can this like all, you know, I think Trump is still asking himself, how did I lose this guy?
Well, you lost to him because he represents a time before decadence, but he's demented enough and weak enough to allow this decadence to continue.
So he's a perfect mask for the decadence.
We said it before he was elected.
Tomorrow's news today, I'm saying it still.
He gave his first press conference.
And what was amazing about the press conference was, well, first of all, let's take a look at some of the pieces.
This is cut 32.
Am I giving you too long an answer?
Because if you don't want the detail.
I'm not going to interrupt that.
No, no, but I mean, I don't know how much detail you want about immigration.
Maybe I'll stop there and finish it.
So the best way to get something done, if it holds near and dear to you, that you like to be able to.
Anyway.
We're going to get a lot done.
But folks, I'm going.
Thank you very, very much.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Now, that was made with a briefing book in front of him that he was paging through to look up the details.
Yeah, except I'm not.
He was looking at the details, which I've never seen a president do before.
Of course, you want the president to be the sharpest knife in the drawer, right?
You want the president to have those facts at his fingertips, know what he's talking about.
Nobody cares if the press secretary has to look at the book, but the president should be able to come out.
But that was the way he was talking.
He was blithering.
Here are the questions that the press was asking.
A brief montage, partly from our friends at Newsbusters, but we re-pieced it together.
Can your presidency be a success if you can't make progress on those four challenges, climate change, immigration reform, gun control, voting rights?
You've said over and over again that immigrants shouldn't come to this country right now.
This isn't the time to come.
That message is not being received.
Instead, the perception of you that got you elected as a moral, decent man is the reason why a lot of immigrants are coming to this country and entrusting you with unaccompanied minors.
How do you resolve that tension?
Republican legislatures across the country are working to pass bills that would restrict voting, particularly Democrats fear impacting minority voters and young voters, the very people who helped to get you elected in November.
Are you worried that if you don't manage to pass voting rights legislation, that your party is going to lose seats and possibly lose control of the House and the Senate in 2022?
So that's the press telling Joe Biden he's good and decent, that the Republicans are trying to restrict the vote, which is just simply not true, that if he doesn't fulfill his most left-wing promises, he's going to lose re-election.
He'll never be elected again.
When the press has become what they've become, which is a bunch of fork-tongued eunuchs who simply stand up for one way of the, who stand up for the decadence, that's part of the decadence too.
So we're living in this decadent system, right?
It's not like, oh, this institution is falling apart or that institution is falling apart.
We're living in a decadent system.
And everything creative, everything that is going to be new and good and bring things back is going to come from us.
It's going to come from the people and it's going to come from the people that they elect, that they put forward to bring new ideas.
Because even Trump was, you know, Trump was great in being a loudmouth about defending Western culture, but he was not bringing a new vision of what we should do.
Even Reagan in his day was an old, old man.
We turn to these old men in these moments because we think that they have something that we've lost when really we have to find ways of going forward.
And I'm obviously very fond of old men being one myself, but still, we have to find ways to go forward.
The fact that we cannot let the boomer generation go, we cannot bring in new people because these new people like Barack Obama are bringing in the older, the oldest of ideas, these 19th century nonsense Marxist ideas that they've now regenerated in a new way and repackaged, you know, kind of put a funny nose and a mustache on.
We need people who actually have a vision of how, of how we're going to move forward as Americans into a future world of crazy technology.
And when you look around, you know, this is so much about what this mask controversy is about, this whole idea that we should wear masks.
It is so much about the energy of manhood, the energy, of the virility that a country needs to move forward.
I always say the future is always male when people say the future is female.
And what I mean by that is when you look around at who's doing the new thing, it's always, always going to be young men.
And if that new thing is taking drugs and looking at pornography and hiding in their mother's basement, that's what the future is going to look like.
That is what the future is going to look like.
And when you see people, you know, I went to the doctor.
I said to my doctor, my doctor's a great doctor, but he's a lefty.
I said, I've been vaccinated.
Can I spread the disease?
He said, no.
I said, so I don't have to wear a mask.
He said, oh, you should wear a mask.
I said, why?
He said, as a political statement.
He said, that's not my politics.
That is the politics of submission, the politics of fear.
We don't want to see it.
You know, there's a group of kind of Facebook comedians who did called the Holderness Family.
And they did a song about being vaccinated that came from the, it was a takeoff on the movie Frozen, a song from the movie Frozen.
And it was just cringe-inducing.
Now, I don't know whether they meant it to be cringe-inducing, whether they were making fun of people, but this idea that somehow now we were suddenly free and it has this man, the husband of the family, singing like a little girl and making all these little girlish gestures.
Here's a little bit of it cut forward.
It's vaccination day.
It's vaccination day.
It's vaccination day!
Appointments are open, I'm group four.
I don't have to stay here anymore.
I'm sick of eating take out on these plates.
The time endors has got me in stress, but I just checked on CVS.
Finally, they're giving me some tastes.
I'll see actual real life people.
It'll be totally strange.
I might even get to go see again.
So today he might even get to go and see a game.
And if you watch his gestures, there are all these kind of girlish gestures.
I think the real question came from the actual movie, Frozen's Cut 5.
For years I've roamed these empty halls.
Why have a ballroom with no balls?
Yeah, that is the question.
Why have a ballroom with no balls?
Why have a country?
Why have a country if we haven't got the courage to defend it?
If we haven't got the courage, like Christine Ohm, did not have the courage to stand by our guns, if we don't have the courage like John Jack Phillips has to stand by his God.
You know, why have a country at all?
Because it's just not going to stand.
We've had it really good for a long time.
I was born into America's greatest moment.
I had it really easy.
I didn't have to go to war.
I didn't suffer real depression.
I didn't have any of that stuff.
It makes you soft.
That is what happens.
After a while, you think, like, how can I just keep my comforts?
How can I keep my gizmos?
How can I keep all the things that I have?
You can't.
You cannot keep the things that you have without giving away the things that are most important to you, your integrity, your faith, and the progress of your life toward God.
And so this is the time we're in.
This is the time we're in.
We have to keep it in mind every moment.
We have to keep it in mind every day because we're going to be called upon suddenly, suddenly to make sacrifices, suddenly to have courage.
We cannot let each other down.
So all my life, I've loved underdog podcasts.
I'm the guy when I play risk.
I like to get like one country.
I like to get forced into one country and then come back and win because I like being the underdog and coming from behind.
That's why I enjoy the True Underdog podcast.
Raised in a trailer park with no clear path to success, kicked out of high school multiple times and faced with becoming a father in his teens, Jason Waller is the definition of a true underdog.
After hearing the words no or you can't so many times, he unleash the power within to start three successful companies with his most recent venture, Power Home Solar, skyrocketing on a path to becoming a billion-dollar enterprise.
Marquis De Sade's Philosophy00:07:50
Join Waller, a four-time Entrepreneur of the Year winner, as he shares motivational tips and inspiring stories and business building lessons from the ground up.
As Waller will tell you, there is no elevator to success.
That climb only happens one step at a time.
Let every true underdog podcast be that step that elevates you.
Check out TrueUnderdog podcast at trueunderdog.com or anywhere you get your podcasts.
So in keeping with the theme of decadence, I want to talk about the Marquis de Saud because a day without talking about torturing people for sexual pleasure is a day without sunshine.
The Marquis de Sade, of course, is where we get the word sadism from.
And in the intellectual history that I was talking about earlier, that takes us from the romantic notion of authenticity, that the individual's authenticity is the most important thing as opposed to society, which destroys his authenticity, then that authenticity becomes sexual.
The Marquis de Saud holds a very powerful philosophical place.
He was a man who spent something like 10 years in prison.
They thought he was a madman.
It's a little unclear how much of his sexual depravity he actually carried out, but he was accused of torturing his servants, which wasn't, it's weird.
You were kind of allowed to beat your servants at the time.
He is a figure of the French Revolution.
There is a mythological story that he was in the Bastille and cried out to the people since I started on my birthday, the storming of the Bastille was the day before my birthday, that it was the Marquis de Sad who cried out, said, Come and help us.
They're killing us in here.
And the mob came and stormed the Bastille, starting the French Revolution.
I think that sort of is not true.
I think he had been removed from the Bastille before that.
But his philosophy is often depicted as a kind of naughty sense of, you know, what the British call slap and tickle, like you're chasing your girlfriend around with a snapping a towel at her.
It is not that at all.
It is vicious, ugly, sickening pornography mixed in with the philosophy that since there is no God, our God is nature.
Since nature is cruel and destructive, we can be cruel and destructive.
And it is scene after scene of mostly men torturing women, but sometimes women torturing women and sometimes women torturing men.
Not in a way, not in like 50 shades of gray, where it's all kind of piquant and sort of underlying fun, but brutally and sometimes homicidally.
And originally, the Marquis de Sade was considered just awful.
His own family tried to hide the fact that they were related to him.
But over time, he became what they call the divine marquee and became a staple of leftist philosophy for his belief in freedom from sexual restraint.
Now, I have a personal history with the Marquis de Sade, which is that when in my progress toward Christianity, I went into a period where I was an atheist.
And I'd never been an atheist because I felt, well, if you don't know, you don't know.
So I'm an agnostic, someone who does not know.
But there came a point when a psychiatrist saved my life, operating under a system that was largely invented by Freud, who was an intense atheist.
And I started to feel that in order just to have integrity, I should become an atheist.
And I started to read a lot of atheist writing.
And when I read atheist writing, whether it was Nietzsche or anybody like that, I always thought, you know, there's something fake about this.
There's something they're not really actually reasoning their atheism to its nth degree until I got to the Marquis de Sade.
And when I saw the Marquis de Sade and he said, this is what our nature is.
This is how we should behave.
I thought, yes, that is, he is right.
This is the only guy who is logically following atheism to its conclusion in his pictures of the strong absolutely terrorizing the weak for pleasure, right?
The strong terrorizing the weak for pleasure.
That I thought, this is hell.
This is hell.
And in my journey toward God, the only leap of faith I ever made, the only thing that actually took me away from logic was when I looked at this and I thought, no, my whole heart rebels against this vision of humanity.
I am going to just believe that if you torture somebody for your personal pleasure, you are doing something wrong.
And whenever anybody tells me, I sometimes have this argument with the God King, you heard us having it on the backstage, and everybody says there's no objective morality.
I always think you're coming at this from the wrong direction.
If somebody curb stomps a toddler for pleasure, that is going to be immoral every single day of the week, twice on Sunday.
If everybody on earth believes it to be right, it will still be wrong.
There is such a thing as objective morality.
So I turned away from the Marquis de Sade, and that began, that was the turning point of my life where I started to make a journey back toward belief in God.
But what I just want to point out is that the Marquis in our culture always exists as this kind of witty, interesting, you know, naughty philosopher.
And if you ever play, if you're a gamer and you play Assassin's Creed, there is an Assassin's Creed that takes place during the French Revolution.
He appears there as a voice for freedom.
This is cut 19.
I feel it my sovereign duty to aid all those who suffered in cruelest bondage with me at the Bastille.
And I have a vested interest in seeing the King of Rats caught in a trap.
As to my name, I have the pleasure of being Donacien Alphonse François, Marquis de Salle.
So we see him as a voice against the king.
He wants vengeance for being in the Bastille, the Bastille, and as a voice for justice, which is what he becomes.
He becomes in the Assassin's Creed a heroic figure.
But let's listen to what some of the philosophy that actually comes from one of his books.
I think I took this from Philosophy in the Bedroom.
Again, his books, it's very hard to recommend his books because they are filled with nauseating pornography.
And it is not pornography that you will sit there and go like, wow, that really turns me on.
Or if it does turn you on, you should call a psychiatrist directly because it is truly brutal.
I can't even describe it.
It's so brutal in its cruelties.
But here is what the philosopher says in Philosophy in the Bedroom.
He says, in order that what serves one by harming another be a crime, one should first have to demonstrate that the injured person is more important, more precious to nature than the person who performs the injury and serves her.
Now, all individuals being of uniform importance in her eyes, in nature's eyes, it's impossible that nature should have a predilection for someone among them.
Hence, the deed that serves one person by causing suffering to another is of perfect indifference to nature, which is no doubt true.
Nature is indifferent.
Nature is not our friend.
Nature isn't different to the suffering of the weak.
It's indifferent to the cruelties that people commit to one another.
But here he's saying, if people are equal, if all men are created equal, then one who is stronger than another naturally has the right to hurt the other person.
So he's not actually putting forward the idea of freedom.
He's putting forward the idea of equality and twisting it to mean that because nature doesn't care one whit more for a king than nature cares for a beggar, if the king can torment the beggar, he is perfectly within his rights to do so.
Why ReadyWise Meals Matter00:08:24
So, you know, it's just fascinating to me to hear intellectuals defend this guy as basically a voice for freedom.
So if you're a crazy, paranoid right-winger, and that's the only people who listen to this show, you may have this terrifying fear that one day the government will lock everything down and tell you you can't go out without a mask and tell you everything you're going to be crazy.
Listen, it's nuts, but you want to be prepared in case such a crazy thing happens.
That's why you want ReadyWise meals.
They make emergency meals.
They also make freeze-dried fruits and vegetables for convenient on-the-go nutrition.
And they have new adventure meals for hiking, camping, and other outdoor activities.
ReadyWise makes being prepared simple and affordable.
You can order online and have nutritious meals shipped directly to your doorstep.
ReadyWise uses the finest ingredients and latest food preparation technology to ensure optimal taste and freshness.
And each recipe is crafted by a team of chefs to provide delicious, nutritional meals, especially during critical times.
With a 99% satisfaction rate and millions of products sold, ReadyWise has quickly become the leader in emergency preparedness.
This week, my listeners can get 10% off at ReadyWise.com when entering Claven at checkout or by calling 855-474-4084.
ReadyWise has a 30-day no-questions asked return policy, so there's no risk in taking the initiative to get you and your family prepared today.
That's ReadyWise, R-E-A-D-Y, W-I-S-E dot com, promo code Clavin to get 10% off.
I know what you're thinking.
Clavin, I can spell ReadyWise.
Anybody can spell Readywise, but how or how?
Please tell me how.
Do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
No easy.
I just make it look easy.
Here's Kamal Paglia, an intellectual I often respect, not always, but often respect, defending the Marquis de Saud against those feminists who include him in the pornographic and hate him for being a pornographer and hate him for his depictions of abusive women.
Camille Pagli says, no, they are missing, and I think in some ways she's right about this, they're missing the whole history of the modern world.
Just cut 20.
Feminists who are hostile to Saad are hostile to the entire modern experience.
Because in dismissing Saad, you are dismissing everything that Darwin and Freud also said.
That is the idea that we are innately aggressive beings, that we are born not necessarily bad, but with an impulse toward egotistical dominance.
Well, it is true that both Freud and well, I don't know about Darwin.
Yeah, well, I guess Darwin, you could extrapolate that from Darwin, that they said those things.
What I think Pagli is missing there is that Saad says, these are good things.
These are positive things, and this is the way we should go.
Freud wouldn't have said that at all.
He would have thought that that was psychotic.
And Darwin wasn't making moral judgments at all.
He was simply describing how nature works.
The problem is the missing piece.
The missing piece is God.
The missing piece is God.
You cannot have a moral universe without an absolute morality.
You can't have something be morally better than something else unless there is something that is morally good.
And there is none of us who is good, not one.
But our idea of God is that goodness toward which we move and toward which we are built.
Our nature, our nature alone is not our guide.
Our nature, when we guide that nature in a certain direction, becomes our guide.
And what Camille Pagli is saying is right, that feminists who oppose pornography are in fact opposing the entire panoply of modern thought.
That is what I did when I turned away from Saad.
I turned away from that path, which I believe is the path to decadence.
You see this again.
I mean, it's really interesting.
There's a play called Quills.
It was made into a movie in 2000 with the Marquis de Saad in prison, smuggling out his books.
And the Marquis was played by Jeffrey Rush.
Joaquin Phoenix played a priest who is running this insane asylum and helps him get his books out and then is shocked to find out what he is saying.
And here is the scene between the two of them.
And I want to say that while the Marquis comes off very well in Quills, Quills does have a certain, is a somewhat more complex depiction of him than you get in other places.
So I'm not completely knocking the play, but this is this scene where he is lording it over this priest who, like all priests in all movies all the time, is shown to be small-minded, neurotic, and kind of pinched in his beliefs.
Nothing but the very worst in man's nature.
I write of the great eternal truths that bind together all mankind, the whole world over.
We eat, we sh, we f ⁇ , we kill, and we die.
But we also fall in love.
We build cities, we compose symphonies, and we endure.
Why not put that in your books as well?
It's a fiction, not a moral treatise.
But isn't that the duty of art?
To elevate us above the beast.
I'd have thought that was your duty, Abbe, not mine.
Now, that's an interesting exchange because it actually is completely off the point that his works of fiction are not works of fiction.
They are works of philosophy.
They put forward a way of looking at the world that is, in my view, psychotic.
And the one thing that the scene does get right, though, is it gets right that the war that Saad is waging is against God.
The war that Saad is waging is against God.
Same thing was true of Freud.
Darwin, not so much.
Darwin lost his faith not because of his science.
He lost his faith because of his personal life.
But Freud and many of the French theorists and much of the Enlightenment were actually waging a war with God.
And here's what Saad says about God.
He said, God, that abominable phantom, is of no use to the terrestrial scheme and would infallibly be injurious to it, since the will of God would have to be just and should never be able to ally itself to the essential injustices decreed by nature, since he would constantly have to will the good while nature must desire it only as compensation.
And this, the French philosophers and the philosophers of deconstruction and the philosophers of critical theory have adopted this point of view.
I just reread a book by Foucault, his famous book, The Order of Things.
And he says, here's what he says.
He says, the animal appears as the bearer of death to which it is at the same time subjected.
It contains a perpetual devouring of life by love.
It kills because it lives.
Animals kill because they live.
Nature can no longer be good, that life can no longer be separated from murder, nature from evil, or desires from anti-nature.
Saad proclaimed to the 18th century, whose language he drained dry into the modern age, which has for so long attempted to stifle his voice.
So he's saying that nature is what we have to follow.
And in Foucault, who is probably the ruling philosopher of our day, the man whose ideas underlie so much of the critical theory you're hearing, Foucault believed that everything was a construct of power, that everything is just this amorphous idea, but we, the powerful, use power to impose their moral systems.
And those moral systems have to be destroyed because they're put in place to create the slavery that you and I are in under the power.
And it's interesting to me that Foucault was in fact a masochist.
He was in fact somebody who liked to be tormented sexually.
And he was a homosexual.
And he was living the life in some ways that Saad recommended and said the ultimate pleasure for him would be death.
And so the idea that things are natural, I've never liked this idea.
I hear conservatives say it sometimes, that we're not defending the male and the female because it's natural.
I'm not defending things in our lives because they're natural.
And in fact, if science at some point, since we are part of nature, if science at some point came along and could actually transform a man into a woman, I would have to recalibrate where we're doing.
Why Natural Is Not Always Good00:03:27
I would say, well, now you have a choice at least to make, which you didn't have before.
Now my problem is with the dishonesty of it, not with the idea of it.
I can understand that somebody might prefer to be of the other sex.
But as we are now, as we are now, this idea that there's something essential inside us that is our nature, and that nature needs to come out and be on its own, be what it is, is to me the path to the decadence that we're in.
In fact, if we do not have a North Star toward which we're moving, toward which that nature is moving, if we do not have a vine of which we are a branch, we are lost souls.
And I'm looking at the world right now, and I am not in despair in the least.
I think this may be another small time of decadence that can turn around, just like the time when New York burned down, just like the time when America was waiting on lines forever.
Just like so many times in history when things have gone wrong, I think America can turn around right now.
But I'm telling you, I'm telling you that it is a question of taking up your cross and following the one thing that will take you to who you really are, which is the light of God and the courage it takes to walk in his way.
You know, you have to diversify your portfolio.
And one way you want to diversify it is with gold.
Gold is predicted to hit $3,000 in the next year.
Under the last Democratic president, it went from 700 to 1,900 in two years.
That is almost 300% growth.
That is hard to find.
What better way to protect yourself from the imminent tax heights under our new president than with a gold investment?
Monetary Gold is a precious metals company whose biggest focus is helping savers protect their portfolio by setting up self-directed IRAs.
They only offer precious metal products that are IRS approved.
Call 888-201-7717 to get your free gold guide from the folks at Monetary Gold.
Monetary Gold is here to help you take advantage of a sound investment strategy that will help you diversify your portfolio.
Call 888-201-7717 to get your free gold guide.
They've been in business for over 20 years.
They've got an A-plus rating from the Better Business Bureau.
Monetary Gold is accredited with both the Better Business Bureau and Consumer Affairs.
Monetary Gold, 888-201-7717 to get your free gold guide.
Well, I hope you're excited because tonight is the premiere of episode two for Candace, Daily Wire's new talk show hosted by Candace Owens.
The show will live stream over at DailyWire.com at 9 p.m. Eastern, 8 p.m. Central, featuring special guests, John Rich, Bryson Gray, Brandon Tatum, and Daily Wire's own Michael Vanoles.
So tune in at 9 p.m. Eastern, 8 p.m. Central to catch an all-new episode of Candace's new show.
If you're not a member, go to dailywire.com/slash subscribe and you can get 25% off a new membership with code Candace.
That's dailywire.com slash subscribe and get 25% off with code Candace.
And if you missed tonight's episode, there's always the podcast version, which drops Saturday mornings.
The podcast is so good, in fact, that it reached number two on the Apple podcast chart just after the first episode.
So if you need some Candace Owens in your podcast feed, look no further.
Head over to Apple Podcasts or Spotify and subscribe today.
sure to leave a five-star review if you like what you hear.
Moralizing Identity00:15:26
So I am just delighted to have this man on as a guest.
There's obviously no such thing as the best political writer alive, but if anybody asked me to name the four or five best political writers alive, the first words out of my mouth would be Shelby Steele.
He is the Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Fellow at the Hoover Institute.
He has won the Bradley Prize for his contributions to the study of race in America.
His books, if you've never read one of his books, they're short and they are absolutely beautiful.
Shelby Steele, thank you so much for coming on.
Well, thank you so much for that introduction.
Thanks for having me.
So I've been watching what's going on in our country, and it seems to me, I've been kind of describing it as a moment of moral panic.
And it seems to be a moral panic that centers, among other things, on race.
And it reminds me of things I've read about the McCarthy era, the witch hunts.
I'm wondering if you think there is truth in that description.
And if you think there's truth in that description, why is it happening now?
Easy, easy question.
No, I think it, I think that if you look at the span of American history, In the 60s, that racial tension that had always been really at the heart of American life and culture came to a head and it transformed,
it introduced, along with the principles of democracy, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, it introduced morality as a source of entitlement, power, rights.
You had to be somehow on the side of the good.
And one of the things we've done is make that a source of power in society.
You can't, when I was coming along, you grew up, your identity became your identity.
Today, growing up, you have to somehow moralize your identity.
You have to define yourself in a way in which you are on the side of virtue, on the side of the good.
And it's, I think the polarization or much of the polarization that we see today in America is between the sort of traditional way of growing up, maturing, being a member of a free democratic society on the one hand.
And on the other hand, this search for moral, for a virtuous identity, a virtuous way of being in the world that is above race.
And race sort of is the issue that all of this, it seems to me, pivots on.
But why, I mean, it does seem, I'm not saying that everything's great between the races.
I've never heard of any place where everything was great between the race, but it seems that I'm old enough to remember, as you are, things being much, much worse than they are.
If things have gotten this much better, why should there suddenly be this upsurge of panic now?
I don't think it's a real panic.
You're right.
I remember when it was.
I grew up in the 50s and the 60s on the south side of Chicago and when race was a ferocious, you know, every aspect of your life was determined by what your race was and so forth, where you could live, where you could eat, on and on.
And the protest movement started slowly, built, and finally, I think, achieved a great success.
Today, you know, we're sort of, we don't know quite what to do.
We don't know how to really define ourselves, how to put ourselves, plant ourselves in the world.
And so we're, at least at this moment, I think we're a little bit lost.
Not sure I answered that question, but.
Well, I mean, it's a question then of not knowing where your identity lies, I guess, and seizing on something to try and establish it.
You've talked about critical race theory.
You've said it's a currency with which whites can buy innocence in the marketplace and a currency which blacks and other minorities can exercise power in the political arena.
What struck me about that description is it doesn't describe it as something that can help anybody.
Do you believe that there's anything positive in critical race theory?
I believe it's an absolute 100% negative.
It's an illness.
It's a sad, tragic leftover of the ugliest part of our history.
It duplicates.
Believe me, no slave owner, no southern segregationist could articulate white supremacy better than the critical race theorists do.
They're far better at it, far more nuanced and elaborate in their definition, their sense of black entitlement this time around.
They duplicate, long to be like the white supremacists of the past.
And they're exercising that kind of power within our institutions as we speak.
I mean, the corporations, universities, the entire education establishment are enthralled to these people and to this blatant retreat, this collapse into racism as a sort of means by which we attack racism.
I mean, you had this film, What Killed Michael Brown, which I have to admit, I have not had a chance to watch yet, though I will.
And at first, Amazon wouldn't show it.
Why are corporations so bought into this?
I mean, does this help them thrive in some way?
Is it good for corporations to have this race theory and to basically shut down?
I mean, all you were doing was taking an honest look with your son Eli, who made the film with you.
You were taking an honest look at the Michael Brown killing.
Why is that anathema to a corporate entity like Amazon?
Because Amazon and other corporate corporations want to dissociate themselves from America's past.
And in doing that, in condemning America and separating themselves from it, they gain power.
They gain, they establish their innocence.
They establish racial innocence to their brand.
They're trying to make Amazon not just a huge, vast corporation, but a vast corporation working for the good.
And all the more reason why you should deal, buy products from them and so forth and so on.
So it is a cynical, cynical business move in a larger sense.
Universities started this and now, again, one institution after another, Black Lives Matter basically offers this sort of imprimatur of innocence too.
They sort of sell it to middle class white America, support us, support all of the critical race ideas we have as a way of showing that you are not racist.
And the tragedy is that whites buy this and this becomes white guilt, where they're terrified of being seen as a racist.
And so they go along with things that destroy the great principles that made America, that made America great in the first place, and that also ended up freeing slaves and giving blacks their freedom.
So it undermines the great achievements of the civil rights era and so forth.
Sad, sad moment in racial history.
It really seems, I'm glad to hear you say it because it really has seemed like this to me.
And sometimes I feel like I'm talking into, I'm talking to myself.
But, you know, I've read, I think I've read all your books.
I think it's in the book Shame.
You tell this absolutely devastating story.
You were the captain of the swim team in high school and suddenly found out almost by accident that everybody in the swim team, you were the only black member of the swim team and all the white players had been invited to spend weeks with your coach at his lake house and you had just been left out.
And it's an especially devastating story knowing who you are now, knowing you're one of the premier intellectuals in the country.
And you just kind of read this story and think like, wow, that's such a terrible way for us to treat one another.
When you hear people now complaining, you know, I mean, I feel for this, a basketball player, say, who is pulled over and mistreated by the police and feels like, you know, how wealthy do I have to become?
How famous do I have to become before people leave me alone?
Do you feel that this is still a problem, this kind of offhanded treatment of people when people complain about the police?
Is there something that a white guy doesn't understand when he hears about this?
Not at all.
It is bogus.
Again, I've lived all my life as a black male in the United States of America and many parts of the country, and it's bogus.
I've been stopped.
I had my share of police stops and tickets and so forth.
I've never been in any way accosted because of my race by a white police officer in the United States of America.
The thing that is most fascinating that people forget today is that since the 1960s, white America has made a greater moral leap forward in its racial sensibilities, its commitment to racial fairness and open-mindedness than any society in human history.
This is simply not the America I grew up in.
It is vastly better.
I can do anything I want to do.
I can become anything I want to become.
I have never, the problem that we as blacks have today is what I call the shock of freedom.
Watch out that you, but that you get what you ask for.
We got freedom.
We got freedom.
Now it is upon us to take it, to use it, to make it a part of our lives, to take advantage of it, to be thankful for it.
But freedom scares you if you come from a group that's been oppressed for four centuries and doesn't really have in many ways developed the principles, the cultural norms you need in order to succeed in freedom.
So that is our problem.
Our problem is not racist cops.
Our problem is that we don't yet know fully, we haven't organized ourselves culturally to take advantage of the incredible freedom we now enjoy in this society.
Most Americans today, if my experience is any indication, actually root for Black people, wish us well in overcoming what was obviously a horrific past.
Most people I run into and have in my adult life, again, have goodwill and wish the best.
We, on the other hand, as Blacks, wham, freedom makes you responsible for yourself.
Freedom puts a burden on you.
It is, as Sartre said, the great French philosopher, it is an anguish.
You have to choose.
You have to make decisions.
You have to prepare yourself.
You have to try to anticipate the future.
You're responsible for your fate.
That is entirely responsible.
Well, when we were under the thumb of segregation and slavery, we weren't responsible.
That's the definition of oppression, to take that away from you.
We have it now, but it scares us.
It scares anybody who would come from that background where we have a kind of deprivation.
We have to overcome that, become effective in a free society.
Wow.
You know, you wrote recently, I think I'm pretty sure it was in the Wall Street Journal.
You wrote, you said, who are we without the malice of racism?
Can we be Black without being victims, which struck me as a deeply profound question.
In some ways, it's the question of any persecuted group that wants to assimilate.
It seemed to me that that assimilation was actually well underway.
I mean, you looked at, I've looked at the musical Hamilton, and I thought, here's somebody embracing the history of a country that didn't always embrace him.
And yet, there's now this incredible reaction.
Is it this fear of losing Blackness without victims?
Can you be Black without being a victim?
I mean, I'd like to ask you the question.
Yes.
My focus on being Black is on overcoming.
I'm proud of being Black because my people overcame four centuries of oppression to get here.
No mean achievement.
I'm very proud of that.
Many of the Black leaders today, on the other hand, cling to the idea of us as victims because we can use that against the larger society.
We can say, you're still racist.
See, you were always racist, and you continue to be.
And therefore, my victimization is also my entitlement.
You owe me.
And so we feel as blacks, that's really our only source of power in American life is our victimization.
And so here we have this terrible irony.
We embrace our victimization as though it's the essence of blackness.
And you couldn't have a worse thing to identify, to build your identity out of than the idea of yourself as a victim.
And you pass this on to your children as though you're proud.
We don't pass on an idea of blackness as overcoming, as the taking responsibility, as assuming, taking one's fate in one's own hands.
I like people like Duke Ellington, so many jazz, who made himself out of nothing into one of the greatest composers of the 20th century.
Take Responsibility for Our Freedom00:02:09
Ralph Ellison, the greatest, wrote the greatest American novel of the 20th century, Invisible Man.
These are people who for nothing stopped them.
They prevailed.
That's the Black identity to me.
But what we hear about all the time again is that we're behind in every walk of life and we continue to be victimized by a now systemic racism that's supposed to be like a cloud around everywhere.
No, we've got to meet the challenge history has given us.
Take responsibility for our freedom and do something with it.
I have to say, one of the most shocking scenes I have ever read is the scene in Tanahizi Coates' book where he says that to his son.
He passes his victimhood on to his son.
I thought I would put a bullet in my foot before I said that to my kid.
Why did the election, well, I should put it this way.
It seems to me that the election of Barack Obama set us back in some way.
Do you think that's true?
And if so, why?
Because he was elected only because he was black.
He wasn't elected because he was presidential material, because he had some sterling resume that would lift him at his young age into the White House.
None of that was in play.
His achievements were virtually nothing.
He was articulate, but he never said anything of substance.
He was an empty suit in the classic sense, but he was an opportunity for white America, this white America so riddled with shame over its history that any black who could sort of halfway plat string three words together is fine.
And so America was, I had people, I wrote a book on Obama.
I had people on the book tour would come up and sell to me that, well, I agree, he's got problems, but I don't want my grandson to think I did not vote for the first black president.
Career Compromises00:11:09
Wow.
Well, that's white guilt.
That's when your motivation is not black people or their development, your motivation is your own innocence of racism.
Whites today long for an innocence of racism more than anything else.
They feel compromised by a lack of it.
And so the tragedy is they need to exploit Blacks all over again, but this time as victims that they can save, that they can redeem, that can bring them out of their long tunnel of darkness and be all the better for it and win back that moral authority that they lost back in the 60s.
Shelby Seale, I got to stop there.
I love talking to you.
I hope you will come back.
I also hope my one complaint about your career is that you don't write enough.
I hope you'll write more.
But if you're not going to write more, just come back and talk some more.
It was great talking to you, and I appreciate your coming on.
Well, thank you very much.
I appreciate coming on.
Thanks a lot.
All right, to begin our climb out of decadence, it is time now for the mailbag.
If it holds near and dear to you, that you like to be able to.
Anyway.
We're ready to get a lot done.
Yeah.
We should have Joe on to do the mailbag, you know, to answer all your questions with like a rambling thing that just trails off into nothingness.
All right.
From Chandler, dear Clavin, keeper of the realm of old ball guys, I just turned 18 and I am a Christian.
I was recently thinking about God's nature and logic.
I know that omnipotence is usually defined by Christians as anything that can be logically done.
With this in mind, why can't God sin?
I know the response would be because it's logically impossible for a morally perfect and unchangeable being to sin.
I understand that, but doesn't the fact that he even has this nature contradict with his omnipotence?
How can one be able to logically do anything but have his own nature keep him from doing certain things?
This has been bothering me for months and has truly made me worried that God might not exist, but I keep getting the same answers online that don't quite answer my question.
Chandler, you're 18 years old, so I don't want to give you too hard a time, but I just want you to note before I even talk about the actual substance of your question, that your premise is that God may not exist because you can't understand it.
And that's that premise is not going to, you know, that's not going to, that's almost like an, it's almost like you're trying too hard to prove to yourself that God doesn't exist.
Because A, God does exist.
That's the one thing.
And the other thing is you can't understand him.
You're right.
You cannot understand him.
It is one thing.
It's one thing to question God's existence because the world is a hard place.
And to say, this is a hard place.
And now I'm angry with God, so I'm casting him out of his existence, you know, because you have the power to do that.
But to say, I can't understand something about this being who is the basis of your life and is above even time.
I mean, how do you even understand that even time?
This is why, by the way, these questions never bother me.
They don't bother me because my question of God is, what am I supposed to do?
What am I supposed to do?
Not what he's supposed to do.
He is going to take care of what he's supposed to do.
That's why I never worry about the end of days.
You know, people say, Do you think it's the end of days?
It's actually in the Bible that I don't know.
The reason I don't worry about it is because I understand that he is in control of those things.
That's where this is, it's pride to worry about it.
It's pride to worry about the things that are his job.
He hasn't called you and asked for your opinion.
He hasn't called me and asked for my opinion.
He's got that under control.
But I don't understand why it is a logical difficulty to say that someone can do something, but has a nature such that he won't do something.
I mean, we've talked about curb-stomping toddlers.
I could do that.
I have the power to do that.
I might even get away with doing it and not be punished for it, but I don't do it because it's not my nature.
What you are talking about, the God you're talking about, is a nothing, is a nothing with no nature.
And what you are chafing, the logical bit you're chafing against is that if he has a nature and therefore wouldn't do something, then is he not omnipotent?
A, it's a misuse of the word omnipotent, but B, it's also a misuse of logic itself because you are basically talking nonsense.
It's like the question: can God make a rock too heavy, so heavy that he can't lift it?
It's just a nonsense question.
And just because language is capable of forming nonsense sentences, that doesn't make them any less nonsense.
And as C.S. Lewis said, just because you put the word God into a sentence that's nonsense, doesn't stop it from being nonsense.
So that's really what you're dealing with.
You're saying, well, is he omnipotent if he has a nature such that he wouldn't do something?
Yes.
Yes, he is.
And, you know, that our words can't fully describe him, that our logic can't fully comprehend him.
You're just going to have to live with that, buddy, because that is the actual fact on the ground.
You probably can't understand quantum physics either, but that doesn't mean that quantum physics isn't true.
And so, you know, I get it.
I get that you want to understand what's going on, but really what you should be trying a lot harder to understand is what your role is in a world with a God in it because he is there.
From Alex, dear Clavin, I watched an AOSIP C clip a few days ago, so I'm hoping the few brain cells I have left will survive.
He says, I'm in a very amazing spot early in my career, but I want to earn an MBA from a top university so I can grow and have doors.
It's really exciting because I crave adventure and challenge, but at the same time, I like stability.
I'm single in my mid-20s, and most of all, I want to start a family.
In your life, as Holy American Emperor, how did you balance chasing your dream, family, and all the other joys in life?
Thanks in advance.
Peace of Christ be with you, Alex.
Well, there is no perfect balance, but I've made sure.
I mean, I was obsessively ambitious, obsessively, hard worker.
I am an obsessively hard worker to this very day.
I have to force myself to take time off.
But I never, I always had time for my wife and my children.
You know, the one thing that you will find in life is that the deadlines of work are more difficult, more inflexible than the deadlines of family.
Your family, you can always call your wife and say, hey, you know, I can't get home for dinner, but you can't always call your boss and say, I can't hit that deadline.
So you have to make those deadlines.
You have to make sure that those deadlines are as inflexible as your work deadlines because family requires time.
It is not something you can do in your spare time.
It is something you have to commit yourself to as you commit yourself to your work.
And then, you know, then you have to make the balance that's right for you.
There are all kinds of things that happen.
You know, you might have fewer kids than you would have had, which you regret later, you know, because you say, well, I'm working or I don't want to be distracted.
And then you'll regret that later.
There are all kinds of payoffs.
Nothing is free.
Nothing is free at all.
And, you know, even I've always had a sort of taste for adventure and I've always taken time off to do the things that fed that, like, you know, going to exciting places overseas, you know, learning to fly a plane, getting a karate black belt, doing all those things that gave me adventure.
But, you know, it does when you're married.
It is more difficult to do that because, you know, your wife actually wants you to come home without a bullet in you.
You know, I always tell the story about my wife when I went to Afghanistan.
She just went into denial.
She just didn't think about it.
And then I came home and the night I came home, I had a glass of wine while watching a basketball game, fell asleep on the couch, and I woke up and she was screaming, shaking me and screaming at me because she thought that I had died because, of course, the denial had backed up on her and all of those worries came to the fore.
I was like, why are you shaking me?
I thought you were dead.
So, you know, anything you commit yourself to, anything you commit yourself to comes at a price.
So your work is going to come at a price and your family is going to come at a price and all those things are going to come at a price.
You do have time for a good career, a great career, a fantastic career, and your family, but you've got to make sure it happens.
You have got to make sure it happens.
You've got to put those deadlines on there.
I'm going to stop a little early on the mailbag because I want to do a quick stuff I like segment about a game I played at the suggestion of my son Spencer Claven, no relation.
There is a game that has been, it's been around for a while, but I just never saw it before.
It's called Goragoa.
It is an award-winning puzzle video game.
And the reason I bring it up, first of all, it's a fantastically beautiful game.
Spencer and I both agreed.
It was a little too mysterious.
It's very hard to follow the plot or understand the plot, but it is just absolutely beautiful.
I hope they're playing a little bit of it.
So if you're watching, you can see the kind of trailer playing in the background.
It's just an absolutely gorgeous game, a puzzle game where you move around the four panels and you move them around and try and fit them together in the right way to get the story such as it is to unfold.
The reason I bring this up, though, is so important.
First of all, you should get it.
I played it on an iPad.
It cost five bucks.
And it's short.
So even though it's really, really addictive, it's like opium.
It's incredibly addictive.
It only takes about two, three hours to get through.
So it won't destroy your life utterly.
But the reason I brought it up is because it is, no kidding, a work of art.
And I was thinking, wow, one day when they get these in the 3D Oculus things and you're playing a game like this, instead of just a Twitch game, you're playing a game like this on an Oculus game.
This is going to be an actual new form of art.
The reason I bring it up is this.
The art of painting, the art of painting is dead, right?
I mean, when you look at modern art, it is bad.
You know, Jackson Pollock, all these blank things, it's still abstraction.
It does not feed the soul.
It does not feed the spirit.
And yet, and yet, if someone were to say to you, oh, but art, that art will come back in the form of video games, in the form of puzzle video games that one day may become 3D and actually surround you and suck you into this incredible, luscious world.
You might not have believed that if you hadn't ever seen a video game before or you hadn't heard that or you didn't believe the technology was possible.
Painting became a decadent art form really with the invention of the camera, but it is coming back.
It is coming back in this computerized form.
You never know.
You never know whether something is going to die or whether it has just been buried in the ground for a few days before it is resurrected.
We live in the hope of resurrection as we are entering the Holy Week.
We find that we have that hope again before us.
I think we should have that hope for our country as well.
But I think we have to understand the situation we're in and the role we have to play in it and the courage it's going to take.
And having said all that, you're doomed anyway, because the Clavenless Week is upon you.
I have to stop here.
The chances of your surviving until we meet again are minimal.
But if you do, I will be here because I don't have a Clavins Week because I'm Clavin.
I am Andrew Clavin.
Andrew Clayton Show Production Team00:01:15
This is The Andrew Clayton 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.
Joe Biden continues to fall apart mentally and physically.
The city of Oakland plans to give $500 monthly checks to poor families, except the white ones.
Sesame Street gets racially woke, plus a new mask that you can wear while you eat, unless you have self-respect and dignity, that is.