Ep. 1025 – Satan For Easter skewers the "Wu flu" conspiracy as a satirical farce while Andrew Klavan frames Easter’s crucifixion as a metaphor for truth crushed by media, Hollywood, and politics—mirroring his own blacklisting for opposing anti-war narratives. He exposes "woke capital" (Delta, Coca-Cola) hypocrisy on voting laws and critiques the Derek Chauvin trial’s racialized narrative, dismissing drug-induced resistance as evidence of systemic bias. Carl Truman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self traces Nietzschean hedonism to modern identity politics, while Lil Nas X’s "Montero" is branded a Nietzschean descent into self-destruction. The episode ends by contrasting Christian morality with atheistic nihilism, arguing faith—whether in God or chaos—is unavoidable, and warns that rejecting divine order risks a Sadean world of unchecked cruelty. [Automatically generated summary]
Some people are calling for the WHO to be renamed the WTF after the highly respected UN organization of sleazy international grifters released a report on the Wuhan flu that seemed to have been influenced by China.
The report, which came packaged in small white cardboard containers and included free fortune cookies, declared that the Wu flu, or as it's sometimes called the Kung Flu, or the Flu Man Chu, or the Yellow Peril, or the Disney Plus Communist Party flu, had nothing whatsoever to do with the Chinese except for being named after them and caused by them and spread by them while they lied about it.
Instead, the WHO, which stands for whoa, hey, oh my lord, are we ever dishonest, concluded that the disease got its start after being born on a flower in the form of a glittering sprite, then leaping onto the back of a pig, which accidentally transmitted it to a bat, which then flew in the window of a Chinese lab and escaped from a test tube labeled biological warfare after a totally innocent Communist Party official accidentally sat down on a red button marked, release death onto the Americans and destroy the West forever.
The official was sharply reprimanded before being promoted to the position of chief dealer of disease upon the West through chemical means, or as it's called in the original Chinese, mushu pork.
So you might want to rethink that takeout order.
The director of the WHO, Dr. Tidros, which in Ethiopian means man who takes bribes then lies, said he did not want the report to be too critical about the Chinese because he feared that would cause more black people to beat up Asians for opening stores in their neighborhoods.
When told that explanation made no sense, Dr. Tidros agreed and said that for enough money, he would come up with another one.
American officials criticized the dishonest WHO report for being even more dishonest than the American officials who were criticizing the report, which many had thought would be impossible or at least set a new record for dishonesty.
For instance, the WHO investigators failed to question many important Chinese officials who were involved in the spread of the virus, including Lo Pan, who mixed the virus in his laboratory while laughing maniacally, Sun Locke, who released the virus while crying, fly, fly, you deadly germs, and erase the civilization of the Americans, and of course, Dr. Julius No, who planned to use his mechanical hands to build a radio jammer that would disrupt the Mercury launch from Cape Canaveral,
but was foiled when a much younger Sean Connery blew up his underground lair.
A WHO spokesman said the organization would correct those oversights and would interview all these individuals, or at least ask Congressman Eric Swalwell if he had learned anything about them from the Chinese spy he was sleeping with.
Tickety Boo: Allform Com Comments00:03:19
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
This is the Clavin Show.
Birds they be singing yo.
Also be winging yo.
No ease in Claven though.
This is the Clavin Show.
Tickety boo.
Hunkity Dunkadee.
Tickety boo.
Hunkity Dunkity.
Tickety boop.
It was Lil Nas X singing our opening from hell.
We'll be talking about him later on in the show.
Welcome back to the Andrew Clavin Show, where we are laughing our way through the fall of Western civilization.
I'm getting a lot of absolutely wonderful, wonderful comments celebrating the new show, the new format.
If you can, please subscribe to the show, subscribe to the Daily Wire, or subscribe on YouTube or wherever you're listening to the podcast and leave five-star reviews.
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Today we have a comment from Met Freak.
He says, I let my 18-month-old watch your show with me for a minute.
She is learning body parts, so I asked her where your hair is.
She replied, all gone.
Just smack her.
You know, I mean, really, don't take that kind of disrespect.
No, no, my favorite comment this week, I have to be honest, that's a good one, but my favorite comment came on the All Access show where a lady listener called me Hot Gandalf, which I am now adding to my card under the master of the multiverse.
Other things I want to tell you about, Shock to the System, starring Michael Kane with a script by me, is now playing on HBO this month.
And of course, the mailbag will be here this week, but also next week.
And if you want to be in next week, you have to subscribe at dailywire.com.
Hit the podcast button, hit the Andrew Clavin podcast, hit that little mailbag sign, and you can ask me anything you want about anything you want.
Politics, religion, your personal life, and all my answers are guaranteed 100% correct, will change your life.
You may ask, will they change your life for the better?
And many of us will snicker into our sleeves, but we'll never tell you the truth.
So if you've been listening to the show for a while, you have heard me talk about how comfortable my Helix mattress is, how I love lying awake on it because, of course, I never sleep.
But Helix has now left the bedroom and started making sofas.
They've launched a new company.
It's called All Form, and they are already making the best sofas we have ever seen.
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They've got armchairs, love seats, all the way up to an eight-seat sectional.
So there's something for everyone.
And if getting a sofa without trying it in store sounds a little risky, you don't have to worry.
You get 100 days to decide if you want to keep it.
That's more than three months.
And if you don't love it, they will pick it up for free and give you a full refund.
New Company, Better Sofas00:15:31
They even offer a forever warranty, literally forever.
All form is offering 20% off all orders for our listeners at allform.com slash clavin.
That's allform.com slash clavin.
You can sit on the sofa and go, ah, how do you spell clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So today is Good Friday, which is called Good Friday because it's the day that Christ was crucified.
It's actually good in the old sense of the word, meaning holy.
And I've been thinking a lot about, you know, this is, it's interesting.
This is the day when the truth, Jesus said, I am the truth, and the truth was destroyed by the religious authorities, the people, the political authorities, everybody, everybody gathered together to destroy the truth.
And that is the way the world works.
And one of the things that occurs to me when I hear about that is that the world destroys the truth, but the truth never dies.
The truth always comes back on Easter.
And the interesting thing I think about Christianity, I've thought this for a long time, is the reason Christianity is fading from the world and the reason Christianity is easy to ignore, where other religions, people who are Jewish remain Jewish, people who are Islamic remain Islamic, but people who are Christian fall away.
And the reason for that is that Christianity is simply true.
And so Christianity is easy to ignore in the same way science is easy to ignore.
You know, quantum physicists tell us that light, the particles, smallest particles of light, act bizarrely and that they are sometimes waves and they're sometimes particles and they can basically go back and forth depending on who's looking at them when and how they're being measured.
And yet you don't have to know about that if you just want your refrigerator light to go on when you're looking for food in the middle of the night.
In the same way, so you can forget about science because science is true and things just work.
So you just want things to work.
And the same thing is true of Christianity.
The world militates to murder the truth, but the truth never dies.
And we know that.
But if you forget about it, if you forget about the basis of that and where that wisdom comes from, you find yourself in the crowd calling for the crucifixion of the truth.
And the devil tempts us.
We know that we're tempted to do things that we don't want to do.
But if you forget, you can forget it's the devil.
And then basically you start to think, well, why shouldn't I just do the thing that I'm being tempted to do?
So I want to talk about an experience I had.
It's stuff I've talked about to some degree before.
I don't want to get too personal about it, but it is kind of important.
I had dinner recently with a big-time Hollywood agent, a guy who represents mostly writers and creators as opposed to actors.
And he was telling me that now in Hollywood, you can't get hired if you are a middle-aged white male because they are actually, and this is, I'm sure it's entirely illegal, but they're doing it all the same.
They actually call up and say, I want a script written by a female Latino.
I want a script written by a black person, by a Native American.
They are basically assigning according to race in Hollywood.
That is what they're doing.
And if you happen to be a white male of a certain age, you're out of work.
You simply cannot get work anymore.
And I was thinking about this.
And, you know, I've talked a lot about the fact that I worked in Hollywood and I did quite well in Hollywood for a couple of years.
And then I started to come out as a conservative.
And I came out as a conservative because we were at war in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
And Hollywood was making films while our soldiers were in the field that were basically saying this war is illegitimate and our soldiers are rapists and our soldiers are murderers.
And even though I completely supported people's right to oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I thought it was bad for Hollywood to make propaganda instruments supporting our enemies, which is what they were doing while our soldiers were in the field.
I thought it was Hollywood's lowest moral moment, which is saying a lot, right?
And I can't prove that that ended my Hollywood career.
I can only say that coevil with that, at the same time that was happening, my phone just utterly stopped ringing.
And I went from selling two and sometimes more scripts a year, which is big money.
You're making a very good living when you're doing that, to selling none.
And I've talked about this and I've said repeatedly that I never lost a minute's sleep over it.
And that's true in the sense that I never thought, well, maybe I should have kept my mouth shut because I don't even know what that life would be like to keep my mouth shut so that people would give me money for lying.
I don't know how I would live with that.
But it's one thing I haven't talked about is that it was difficult.
I mean, when you lose your income like that, when your income just goes seriously from being a big income to being zero, it's not that you're going to starve, but I had to sell my house and I had to move my wife out of a place that she loved, away from friends that she loved and work that she loved, to bring her to a place that A, we could afford and B, was closer to work.
So I didn't have to be in the car all the time driving, not being able to produce as much as I had to, as I wanted to, and had to and needed to.
So it was difficult.
And you do lose sleep over that.
You lose sleep over the fact that, you know, how am I going to work this out?
How am I going to keep things going?
I hate doing things that don't make my wife unhappy.
But I had to do all those things because I spoke up.
I'm listening to this agent talk about the fact that people like me, white men, cannot work anymore in Hollywood because they've become so racist.
And I suddenly realized that now, now I'm doing quite well.
I'm having a great, this is the last 10 years have been one of the best parts of my career.
I've been doing stuff that I really enjoy, really love, writing stuff that I'm really committed to, working at the Daily Wire, which I love.
And I love the, you know, exception of obviously Knowles, but I mean, everybody else, I love the people of the Daily Wire.
It has been a great, great job.
And it's been lots and lots of fun.
And it's, you know, I've gained new readers and new people who follow me and all this stuff.
And I suddenly realized that if I hadn't spoken up, if I hadn't lost my job, if I hadn't had to cut back a little bit and live at a different level, I would now be unemployed.
I would now not have had the experience that I've had.
And so I started to reread my past backwards.
I started to realize that I didn't know.
I wasn't acting on some great strategy.
I was just doing what I thought was the next right thing.
I was just telling the truth.
And yet it has worked out, even though I had to go through some difficulty, it has worked out better than it would have worked out had I remained, had I remained in Hollywood, kept my head down, written things that I thought were despicable, written for people I thought were really acting badly.
If I had done all those things, I'd be out of work now.
I would now, my career would be over now.
I wouldn't be able to work anywhere.
And I certainly wouldn't be able to come over and say, well, you know, I didn't say anything for 10 years, but now I want to suddenly become a big mouth, you know, right-wing bloviator.
I couldn't say that because that would have no integrity either.
My point simply being that I just did what I thought at the time and still think today, I have to admit, I still think was the right thing to do.
But the outcome was with God.
The outcome was written by God.
The story was being written by God.
I was just a character in the story.
And if I had looked at it only from my point of view, which at the time, as really I did, at the time, I thought, wow, what have I done?
If I had looked at it only from that point of view, I wouldn't have understood it.
I wouldn't have understood it.
The story of Easter is very similar, although it's not about me at all, and it's much bigger than a story about some Hollywood jerk losing his work.
But it's similar in the fact that Good Friday, this day that we're in, is the day of the greatest despair for the people who were in it.
Think back to when we lost the last election, how you felt then.
It was 10 times worse than that.
They thought that God had come to save their people, and suddenly he was crucified, just like a criminal.
You know, they were absolutely in despair.
And two of them were walking the next day.
Two of Jesus' disciples were walking the next day.
And if you're a Christian and you read the Bible, you know this story.
They were walking to a town that was nearby called either Emmaus or a mouse.
And they were walking along talking about this when they were approached by a third man who came up to them and said, what's the matter?
And they said, you know, we're in despair.
This terrible thing has happened.
We thought this man was going to come and liberate our people and be the Messiah and he was just crucified.
And of course, the man they were talking to was Jesus, but for some reason they didn't recognize him.
They weren't allowed to recognize him.
And he reread the past to them.
He went back over their sacred books, the whole history of the Jewish people, and showed how it had prophesied that he would come and that he would be crucified and that these things would happen and that he would rise again and that the truth being destroyed by the world would nonetheless come back and triumph over the world.
And suddenly they saw that all the things that they believed were not what they had thought they believed.
All the things, their history of their people, were not the history they thought they was, but a prophecy, a prophecy of the things that had happened.
And when they had happened, they hadn't even noticed that they were happening.
That's an amazing fact.
And if you look at your own life, you will find it as an amazing fact about your own life, because it's not just in Hollywood, but in my own life, my whole life, I have found that the things that I hated most about myself, my greatest flaws, my greatest weaknesses, the things that I hid from other people, all of them had conspired to lead me to the truth of God and to lead me to a much more beautiful life than I would ever have constructed for myself.
God was always writing the script, and I was simply trying, trying my best at my best to do the next right thing.
That's an old alcoholics anonymous expression, do the right, next right thing.
And so in order to do the next right thing, you have to be searching for the truth in the moment.
And that's why, that's why we call the devil the father of lies, because he's always trying to confuse you about the truth of the moment.
And that's what I want to talk about today.
I want to talk about the fact that this is Good Friday.
This is the lowest day of the Christian year in some ways.
And right this minute, it does look like the father of lies is large and in charge and that he is striding across the world and the world is conspiring.
The most powerful people in the world, in our country, certainly, are conspiring to create an empire of lies, to build an atmosphere of lies.
And yet if we look around, we can find the truth.
If we learn how to read the truth, we can see the truth.
It's not the opposite of what they're saying.
It's much more complex than that.
But if we learn where the lies are and how the lies work, we can see the truth.
And then we can do the next right thing and let God write the script.
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A lot of guys are embarrassed to ask, how do you spell clavin?
Don't be.
It's k-l-a-v-a-m.
Can you help end racist voting ID laws?
Si say Puadway!
Si se poadway.
Joe Biden, I heard that.
I thought I hear the neon lights are white on Puadway.
You know, the whole thing about the crucifixion story is that there are no real villains in it, except maybe Judas, but that's a little unclear.
But the people who are calling for Christ's crucifixion are not doing it because they think he is the truth.
They're doing it because they've been convinced by the authorities that he's the bad guy.
The religious people are convinced he's a heretic and the ruler of the Roman ruler is convinced he's going to just cause trouble.
He just wants the whole thing to stop.
So it's really the cloud of lies that causes the whole thing to happen.
It's living in a world that promotes dishonesty and that transforms values, makes the good seem the bad and makes the bad seem the good.
And there's a movie called V for Vendetta, which came out in 2005.
It was written by the Wakowski brothers or sisters, whatever they are now.
They're transgender, the guys who made The Matrix.
And people loved this movie when it came out.
And I went and saw it, and I was appalled by it because I thought, oh, this is how lies work.
It's about a guy, a masked man, V, who fights for justice in a futuristic England that has gone bad.
It's based on a comic.
And he comes in and we see him rescuing a lady in distress, Natalie Portman.
And she's being attacked by muggers and he comes and saves her.
So we know he's the good guy and he's fighting for the people.
And so we know he's the good guy.
Here's the famous speech he makes, his opening speech, because everything he says starts with a V. Voila!
In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of fate.
This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant.
Vanished.
However, this valorous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and villain firmen vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of villicism.
So he says this visage, no mere veneer of vanity is a vestige of the box populi now vacant vanish, which is saying that this mask is not just here for fun, it is the voice of the people which has been destroyed.
But so you think, wow, this is a story about freedom, and it ends with them blowing up parliament and everybody wearing a mask and all the people becoming V. But the fact is, all the values in the story have been transformed.
This is 2005, just about when I was getting in trouble with Hollywood for saying what I was saying about the wars on terror.
The villains in the piece are all people who oppose Islam.
And anybody who opposes Islam is shown to be a kind of mindless bigot.
A gay person talks about the Quran.
Stephen Fry plays a gay person who talks about the Quran as I don't have to agree with it, but it's just so beautiful, this book that recommends that gay people be thrown off buildings.
Whereas the Christians are the tyrants, and Parliament is the tyrant.
And V is essentially a terrorist anarchist.
So basically, it's saying, as we were in the midst of a war against terror, it was saying to us, no, the terrorists are right.
Democracy, because Parliament is the mother of all parliaments, parliament is where our present forms of free government come from, the British Parliament.
Parliament was the problem, that Christianity, the basis of our ideas of freedom, was the problem.
And the Quran is a beautiful thing, and terrorism blowing things up is the right way to go.
So by transposing values, it makes you feel that you're supporting freedom when in fact you're supporting terrorism, anarchy, and the opposition to democracy and the opposition to Christianity in favor of a much more oppressive and small-minded and politicized religion.
Voter Suppression in Georgia00:15:06
And, you know, that's how this works.
It's not that people just lie.
It's that they lie about what you're seeing in front of you.
What you're seeing in front of you may be the truth, but they tell you that it's a lie.
Here's the president of the United States lying for one minute and 15 seconds straight about laws in Georgia that have been put in place to keep, or they're trying to be put in place, to try and clean up what happened during the pandemic when voting became so loose that it really became suspect.
And a lot of people suspected that it became so suspect that the outcome of the election, Biden winning over Trump, was a setup.
Okay.
So now they're passing laws in Georgia and in Iowa to try and fix this.
And here's the President of the United States lying without cease for a minute and 15 seconds.
This is cut one, I think.
What I'm worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is.
It's sick.
It's sick.
Deciding in some states that you cannot bring water to people standing in line waiting to vote.
Deciding that you're going to end voting at five o'clock when working people are just getting off work.
Deciding that there will be no absentee ballots under the most rigid circumstances.
It's all designed.
And I'm going to spend my time doing three things.
One, trying to figure out how to pass the legislation passed by the House.
Number one.
Number two, educating the American public.
The Republican voters I know find this despicable.
Republican voters.
The folks outside this White House.
I'm not talking about the elected officials.
I'm talking about voters, voters.
And so I'm convinced that we'll be able to stop this because it is the most pernicious thing.
This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle.
You're a lying dark-faced pony soldier.
Well, aligned hardly.
This is POTUS.
This is the president of the United States.
Every word he says is a lie.
He says that they want to make it so you can't bring water to voters standing online.
What they do is a lot of politically, you're not supposed to campaign next to a voting site.
And a lot of people get around that by bringing food and water to people online so they can get close in order to campaign for their candidate.
And what some of these laws say now is: no, you have to supply water for the voters, but you can't have campaigners coming in and using the water as an excuse.
There's no state that's going to close its polls at 5 p.m.
Iowa's new law moves up the closing time to 8 p.m.
The Georgia's election reform left the state 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. polling hours unchanged, so that's a lie.
He says there's no absentee voting.
The only absentee voting change in Iowa was to say that the ballots have to arrive by 8 p.m. on Election Day.
And Georgia, the only significant change to absentee voting in Georgia was replacing the requirement that counties verify the signatures of mail-in voters.
He said Republicans find it despicable.
A new Gallup research shows that four in five Americans support early voting, but they also support voter ID laws.
So everything the president said there was a lie.
And, you know, again, I'm not comparing this to the crucifixion.
What I'm saying is in just the same way that science explains how the physical world works so that you don't have to think about science to live in the physical world, the Gospels explain how the moral world works, how all these powerful people get together to convince you that you're seeing something that you're not seeing.
And meanwhile, they have this federal initiative, H.R.1, which is called something like the For the People Act or something like this, and basically is a federal takeover of the state's right to run its own election.
It's a federal takeoff.
It compels states to send out absentee or mail-in ballots universally.
It bans state voter ID requirements.
It basically is a way of making sure that the kind of widespread fraud that took place in the last presidential election will remain in place because the Democrats feel they can use that fraud to win elections.
Now, of course, as we were saying about the crucifixion story, it's not just the politicians who are telling you that the truth is a lie.
It's also the mob.
It's also the religious authorities.
In our case, we have a media that works to do the same thing.
Here is Cut 7.
Here's the media basically getting on board this Biden lie train.
Rolling back voter rights, the Republican push in more than 40 states to limit voting access.
These are the kind of people who would pass a law to keep Jesus from beginning a cup of water while he's dying on the cross.
Should we make it harder to vote based on lies or should we make it easier to vote so that more people can participate?
This big lie from last fall, promoted by pro-Trump propaganda networks, is now the cover, is now the excuse for these attempts at voter suppression.
We're watching the big lie turn into voter suppression before our very eyes.
How do you at the DNC plan to contend with the voter suppression efforts that we're now seeing across the country?
States across the country race to enact laws to suppress voting.
Is this all voter suppression in action?
Extraordinary surge of voter suppression laws.
There's a huge wave of new voter suppression efforts.
Republican voter suppression efforts.
Massive voter suppression.
Sweeping new voter suppression law in Georgia.
Georgia's Jim Crow voter suppression law.
The broadest attempt to make it more difficult for Americans to vote since the Jim Crow era before the Voting Rights Act.
What is obviously a racist policy of trying to suppress the votes of non-white voters?
Amazing.
And by the way, black voters who have not been suppressed by ID voter IDs, why should they be?
They can get an ID just like anybody else.
They also support laws for voter ID.
So this is ridiculous, right?
It is a ridiculous attempt.
And of course, it's being echoed by social media, which has banned.
I mean, this is an amazing thing.
An amazing thing is that social media has banned the former, not Twitter, not Facebook, but all social media has banned the former president of the United States from speaking at all, a guy that 75 million people voted for.
And right-wingers are saying, well, they're private enterprises, so they're allowed to do that.
No, when Instagram and Google and YouTube and Twitter and Facebook and Amazon, some of whom are owned by the same people and all of whom are colluding, silence the former president of the United States for whom 75 million people voted, that is gutting our free speech rights.
And the amazing thing about this, the amazing thing about this is the people who whined like little children that Donald Trump by criticizing them was violating their rights, who whine every time they're attacked for lying, which is what they do, they themselves are now the supporters of banning speech.
Here is Lester Holt of NBC winning an Edward R. Murrow Award saying something that Edward R. Murrow would have fallen down dead before he ever said this is CUP 19.
I think it's become clearer that fairness is overrated.
Well, before you run off and tweet that headline, let me explain a bit.
The idea that we should always give two sides equal weight and merit does not reflect the world we find ourselves in.
That the sun sets in the West is a fact.
And a contrary view does not deserve our time or attention.
Providing an open platform for misinformation, for anyone to come say whatever they want, especially when issues of public health and safety are at stake, can be quite dangerous.
We don't want to have that both sides thing going on.
And, you know, what's dangerous, of course, about this is that who decides where the truth lies, especially when you've got things like climate panic.
Now, I'm not going to tell you that there's no climate change.
I'm not going to tell you that men's actions don't affect the climate.
I am going to tell you that the panicky disaster scenarios that people like AOC promote are largely untrue, are largely not science, but that all of it, all of it is a computer model of what will happen in the future.
And there is no science for telling the future of non-patterned events.
In other words, you can tell when an eclipse is going to happen because that's part of a pattern, but you can't tell when random systems that are too big for any person to actually understand, like the climate, you can't tell where those are going.
So the climate models, the computer models, could be totally wrong.
And anybody who wants to say they're totally wrong should be able to speak.
The same thing with vaccines.
If you lie about the fact that some vaccines have bad results because you think that that's going to get the public to take vaccines, you're really doing the wrong thing because what you're doing is you're making public health officials unreliable.
So now these people go and they start to intimidate what they now call woke capital, which is corporations who find that it is easier for them to get on board this train than to stand up to the Democrats and the left and the media and all these powerful enterprises.
They used to, it used to be that corporations thought, well, the best thing we can do is just keep our, you know, keep our heads down.
But now they think, no, we've got to get on this woke train.
So Delta Airlines, I think American Airlines, Coke, Coca-Cola are all saying, oh, yeah, we've got to oppose this.
Now, some of these companies, you know, Tim Cook of Apple says this, Tim Cook had slaves in China building his iPhones so he could sell cheaper phones to unemployed Americans.
But he's saying, oh, we've got to boycott Georgia.
China's fine, but not Georgia.
Here's James Quincy of the CEO of Coke getting on board the woke train.
It's cut for.
Let me be crystal clear and unequivocal.
This legislation is unacceptable.
It is a step backwards and it does not promote principles we have stood for in Georgia around broad access to voting, around voter convenience, about ensuring election integrity.
And this is frankly just a step backwards.
We've spent many decades promoting within Georgia a better society and a better environment for business.
And this is a step backwards.
And we're very clear on that.
And our position remains the same.
This legislation is wrong and needs to be remedied.
And we will continue to advocate for it, both in private and now even more clearly in public.
So I just want to point out here that all the power is on the side of the woke.
All the power is on the side of the woke.
Okay.
You've got corporations being basically attacked by the mob.
You've got politicians, the Democrats who are in charge of the government telling you that this woke stuff is right.
You've got the news media, which are massive, massive corporations telling you this is right.
And yet they call themselves all the centers of power on the side of the woke.
And yet the woke call themselves the resistance.
So you have to ask yourself, who are they resisting?
Well, they're resisting the people.
And that is a clue that you are in an empire of lies.
That is a clue that you're in an atmosphere of lies.
When all the powerful people are telling you that they are the resistance, that they're standing up for freedom.
You can almost bet your bottom dollar that that is an atmosphere of lies when everybody is shouting, crucify him.
That's a good time to stop and think, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, just a minute here.
Just a minute.
If all the powerful people want this guy dead, if all the powerful people want this truth extinguished, what is going on?
And the thing about this, you know, I come down pretty hard on Donald Trump for the way he acted after the election.
And I stand by that because, as I said at the time, I think he screwed the pooch.
And the way I think he screwed the pooch is allowing lawyers who were out of control to make grandiose claims about the kind of conspiracy theory fraud that was going on while making people overlook the obvious things that were happening, right?
The obvious things that were happening, the rule changes in states.
This is what Jenna Ellis was talking about, by the way.
Our friend Jenna Ellis was constantly harping on this while she was being drowned out by people talking about dominion voting machines and things that couldn't be proved and couldn't be pointed at at all.
But the rules were changed in many states in defiance of the Constitution.
And if they hadn't done that, the mail-in votes, which they're trying to contain and control, they would have played a much smaller role in the election, mail-in votes that the New York Times before this election had often cited as a possible source of fraud.
If it weren't for the fact of the mainstream media and social media, a lot more people would have heard of about the Hunter Biden laptop story, which is being covered now.
NPR just apologized for saying this.
And remember, the Hunter Biden laptop story, 50 retired intelligence officials, right, said that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation.
The intelligence community has been jerking the chain of the media in order to sell their goods, their point of view, and the media has been quoting them without any kind of, you know, guidance or suspicion at all.
You know, they've been going against the old saying that you should check out everything.
Don't trust anybody, not even your mother, if you're a journalist.
And so then you go and you watch the way on, say, CNN, a left-wing, not a left-wing outlet, it's a government outlet.
These are people being run by the power, by the power.
All this resistance, these speaking truth to power, they are the power.
They are the corporations.
They are the government.
They are the media.
They are those people.
They're not speaking truth to power.
They're the power.
That's how you know.
That's how you know that you're surrounded by lies.
I just want to give you one good example of Michael Walsh, a congressman from Florida.
He goes on CNN and listened to the question.
The question is basically trying to corner him into saying, yeah, Trump was, you know, lost the election.
And Walsh just corrects her very quickly.
This is the way you have to handle the media.
It's a great example of how it's done.
So is it fair to say that you accept Joe Biden won the presidency?
Well, I think a number of officials, unelected officials in a number of states, changed the rules just months before the just months before the election that in many ways tilted the election and Democrats' favors.
But at the end of the day, what makes America different than so many places I've fought in around the world is a peaceful transfer of power.
I think those issues still need to be addressed.
Many states are addressing them now.
What I keep asking is if many Democrats say the elections were just fine, no issues, then why do we have HR1?
Wait, hold on, hold on.
Before we get to that, moving through the House.
I just want to get clarity on the question I asked you.
This basic truth that American voters fairly and squarely put Joe Biden in the White House, yes or no?
President Biden is the president of the United States.
He's the commander-in-chief.
We can't.
Look, I think there are real issues with the election, but he won it.
That's an amazing, amazing interview.
Yes or no?
Foucault's Nuance00:11:16
What the hell is she talking about?
The truth is never yes or no.
The truth is always nuanced.
But obviously, what he was talking about was getting the truth past that wall of lies.
This is the thing.
This is the thing.
It's the misattribution of values.
That's why I started with V for Vendetta.
It's telling you that the anarchists are the good guys, the democracy is bad, that the terrorists are the good guys, that peaceful negotiation and change is bad.
It's telling you that Christianity is the bad guy, but a religion that basically wants a theocracy in place is the good guys.
The whole thing is behind the mask of V is not the Vox populi.
It's the voice of the vicious and vengeful victors of an unverifiable vote.
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The other thing you have to watch out for is basically the narrative fallacy, the way people use it.
They basically project motivation onto people and tell you that this explains everything.
It explains why people are behaving the way they are.
It says that bad actions always stain the ideas of the person committing the action, which isn't true.
You also have to watch out about your own reactions to things that just because somebody says up doesn't mean the answer is down.
You have to sometimes have a little nuance.
I've been watching parts of the trial of Derek Chauvin, the guy who knelt on the back on the neck of George Floyd.
And it's been really, it's been very interesting because I have a theory of the case, and that's all it is, is a theory.
I've watched the videos like everybody else.
And I'm not going to say that this is how the case should be decided or anything, but it is my, we all have our theories of what happened since we've all seen the video.
And my theory of the case is that Floyd, who was a huge man, I mean, he was a really, really big guy, obviously, it seems to me, did resist arrest, was under the influence of fentanyl, was under the influence of drugs.
He resisted arrest.
The police used due force to bring him down.
But I think at some point, I think at some point, Chauvin got into an entrenched mentality because people were shouting at him to let the guy go.
And he was thinking, nobody's going to tell me how to do his job.
You can almost see it in his eyes, that he's thinking like, I'm surrounded by an irrational mob, and I've got to handle this guy who was a danger to himself and others.
And so he went on kneeling on him.
And the ME, the medical examiner, says that it wasn't, he wasn't strangled to death, that he died of a fentanyl overdose in the heart, basically a heart problem that he had.
But still, it's an ugly, ugly thing to see.
And some of the testimony has been really upsetting.
I mean, these are some of them ordinary people who were just watching things unfold.
They didn't like what they were seeing.
The guy was, he is crying that I can't breathe and crying for his mama even before the police action started.
So this was something that was going on.
But they had people like there was this woman, Genevieve Hanson, who was a fire department EMT who was off duty.
And she came by and started to talk to the police saying, you know, this is not looking good.
You ought to let me take a look at him.
And they wouldn't let her in.
She wasn't wearing her uniform and they wouldn't let her in.
And they basically chased her away.
And she became one of the people shouting in the crowd.
And so you can really see how someone, she's obviously a person of substance, a trained woman who knew what she was looking at and was afraid for this guy's life.
But you could see how to the police mentality, this woman became part of the crowd.
Here she is giving a little bit of her testimony cut three.
How were you doing that, trying to get the officers to focus on you and get help?
I think in my memory, I tried different tactics of calm and reasoning.
I tried to be assertive.
I pled and was desperate.
Did you also at some point start raising your voice?
Yes, sir.
And maybe used some foul language even?
Yes, sir.
Why?
Because I was desperate to help and I wasn't getting what I needed to do and gaining access.
At some point, the voices of the other people around you, did you feel that sort of interfered with getting the officers' attention?
Yes.
You know, you can see, I mean, here's a woman, you know, you hope would come and help you if you were in trouble, as I say, a trained EMT.
And you can see how from the police, she says she's shouting curses at the people.
You can see how from the police point of view, they just don't want to be interfered with.
They've got a situation on their hands and they've got to deal with it.
You know, it looks to me like at some point this guy should have stopped kneeling on Floyd's neck and that looks bad.
But the one thing I haven't heard any proof of, any evidence about, is that he was a racist, that he was acting in any way in a racist way.
This guy, again, he was over 200 pounds.
You look at his arms.
He was a muscle man.
Floyd, you know, he was like a big guy.
I haven't heard one piece of evidence that this was a question of race.
And of course, that is what we've been told.
That is what this whole panic that has been causing endless riots that Black Lives Matter has been using and using and using and the Democrats have been using and using and using to gin up race hatred among us, among our, you know, our fellow Americans.
But then you get things like this.
Here's a clip from Al Sharpton telling us what this trial means, even though there's no evidence of racism whatsoever.
Shaven is in the courtroom, but America's on trial.
America's on trial to see if we have gotten to the place where we can hold police accountable if they break the law.
The law is for everybody.
Policemen are not above the law.
Policemen are subject to the law.
And that's what's going on in this courtroom.
And that's why we're here.
But it's not.
It's not what's going on in the courtroom at all.
It's the attribution of a motive.
It's an attribution of a narrative to something that doesn't seem to have been that at all.
Now, maybe evidence will come out that says it was more racial than it seems, but it's incredible that this narrative, and remember, this narrative is everywhere.
The government supports it.
The media supports it.
The corporations support it.
All the power supports it.
So you can bet it is in service to power.
Chelsea Handler, one of our wonderful celebrities, she tweets out, so pathetic, that there's a trial to prove that Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd when there's video of him doing.
So we don't need no trial.
I don't need no stinking trial.
This is the way they're talking.
And the use of murder, the use of grief to do this is particularly reprehensible.
I've talked about this before.
I know there was a shooting in, where was it, in Colorado, I believe, and there was a shooting there, and they started in about white supremacy, white supremacy, white supremacy.
Turns out the guy was of Syrian descent, was an anti-Trump left-winger, and suddenly the case just vanished, just disappeared.
It just disappeared.
If it's not going to serve their point of view, if it's not going to serve the point of view of the power, the power, right, the media, the corporations, the government, if it's not going to serve their point of view, it simply ceases to exist.
So you're in this cloud of lies.
But the thing about motivation is it's important to connect motivation with ideas.
You know, recently people were very upset by a story about Ravi Zakarius, a Christian teacher who recently died.
And he was a guy who inspired a lot of people.
And it turns out that he was misusing funds to pay for massage therapists, the usual sexual stuff, really unpleasant stuff.
And people are really hurt by this.
But the thing about Zakarius is when Sakarius did this, he actually was violating the things that he was talking about.
He was violating the things he preached.
He was being, we should say, a hypocrite or at least a failure to fulfill those ideas.
So the ideas aren't tainted by him.
He is tainted by not living up to those ideas.
That's very different, very different than talking about Michel Foucault.
Now, I was talking about Michel Foucault last week, I think it was, and talking about his commitment to the Marquis de Sade.
We got a good letter today in the mailbag about the Marquis de Sade.
I'll get to that.
But we're talking about that, about his commitment to the Marquis de Sade.
And he has now been accused of having raped a little Arab children.
There's a fellow French intellectual who says they were eight, nine, 10 years old.
He was throwing money at them.
And he would say, let's meet at 10 p.m. at the usual place.
And he would make love to them on gravestones, got in his gait gee sormand.
And he says he regrets not reporting it.
And I tweeted about this and I said it's kind of strange that Foucault, who believed in the Marquis de Sade, would end up abusing people.
And somebody said, well, that's unfair.
This is unsubstantiated.
We don't know if this is true.
And fair enough, fair enough.
But Foucault openly declared that sex between adults and children should be decriminalized.
He openly declared, some feminists have real trouble with Foucault because he openly declared that rapists should not be punished by the law because it established rape as their identity when in the old days, when in the old days, in the medieval days, for instance, nobody was ever accused of rape because it was considered just a thing that you did.
It wasn't considered a big deal.
Now it's considered all traumatizing.
What's that about, right?
So Foucault, if indeed he did those things, and if indeed he didn't do those things, still exemplified those were his ideas.
His ideas were that it was okay, that the abuse of people for sexual means, for sexual pleasure was okay, that being abused for sexual pleasure was okay, that abusing children, that using children for your own sexual pleasure was okay.
So the thing is, it really is not, it is not necessarily just your actions or just your ideas, but the context in which you act in keeping with your ideas.
So a Christian who abuses people is acting against his Christianity, whereas a Foucaultian, this Vassadian who abuses people is acting right in keeping with his ideas and shows you where those ideas lead.
This is the reprehensible use of murder to basically denigrate all the things that the power doesn't like, namely freedom, namely constitutionalism, namely states' rights and local rights, all those things that the power wants to get its hands on and squeeze.
Shelley's Inner Ring Theory00:12:12
If you commit a murder that can be used to attack those things, they will use it.
If you attack a murder in favor of those things, you'll just be vanished.
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There are no easy things.
So last week, I was talking about a book that I read recently that I loved.
And one of the things that was very touching to me about the book was that it was an intellectual history of the West to some degree from the early 19th century to the present moment of madness.
And one of the things that was kind of touching to me was that it was my intellectual history backwards.
If you read my memoir, The Great Good Thing, it was me rejecting all the writers that this book talks about.
My editor said it was like reading me as Benjamin Button, basically.
So I wanted to talk to the author for that reason and also just because he explains, I think, where we are so well.
His name is Carl Truman.
He is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College.
And the book is called The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution.
It is out now.
I highly recommend it.
Professor Truman, thank you for coming on, Carl.
It's good to see you.
It's great to be here, Andrew.
Thanks for inviting me to speak with you.
Well, you know, I just, I was so moved by your book.
I really was.
You managed to take very, very complex ideas and explain them in a way I thought that any intelligent reader could understand.
And I'd like to take you through the argument, if I can, before asking you more questions about the argument itself.
The book is a study.
You begin by saying it's a study about how we got to the point where the statement, I'm a woman in a man's body, seems to make sense.
And you begin with Rousseau.
And I think Rousseau is frequently a target on the right, but I think quite legitimately, can you explain what it is that Rousseau taught us that is still so much in operation today?
Well, when you think of that sentence, Andrew, I'm a woman trapped in a man's body.
In order for that to make sense in the wider society, we really have to have reached a point where psychology, feelings, we might say, the inner voice has come to be decisive for who we are.
And that's taken a long time.
And Rousseau is one of the key figures in that.
A number of people have written to me to say, why didn't you start with Descartes?
Why didn't you start with late medieval Catholicism?
Somebody wrote to me and said, Why didn't you start in the Garden of Eden where it all kind of happened?
Well, got to start somewhere.
I don't want the book to be 100,000 pages long.
So I started with Rousseau because he, more than anybody else, I think, articulates the power of inner emotions for making us authentic human beings.
It's that notion of authenticity that's so important.
And also, he's incredibly influential because his theories have shaped educational philosophies down to the present day.
So the choice of Rousseau, I could have chosen a number of figures, but Rousseau, I think, is peculiarly influential because of his emphasis upon, we might say, the psychological emotions of us all in defining, determining, shaping how we think of ourselves.
And you take us through some of the Romantic poets, Shelley and Blake very specifically, as starting to move the idea of the authentic self in a distinctly sexual direction.
I mean, people think the idea of free love is a new idea or idea that started in the 60s, but Shelley was practicing it.
And Blake, though he wasn't practicing it, sort of wrote about the restrictions of sexuality as a key thing.
I mean, is that something that you feel led us toward the idea, the ideas we have now?
Certainly, it's a stage on the way.
There's a long way between ourselves and William Blake and Percy Bishop Shelley, of course.
But I think what they do is they come to identify human freedom with the ability to act on our inner desires.
And they rightly pinpoint, I think, sexual desires as being among some of the strongest that human beings experience.
And so you find in Shelley's work and in Blake this polemic, particularly against lifelong monogamous marriage, and particularly against the institutions that reinforce or police that, i.e., religious institutions in the West, that's primarily the church, of course.
So you see emerging in those writers the kind of polemics that we still live with today.
They're cast in a different form today.
As I say, there's a long intellectual history between the Romantic movement and the current administration of Joe Biden, for example.
There's a lot of water that flows under the bridge between those two things.
But the essential emphasis upon freedom as equaling or being largely constituted by sexual freedom, and therefore anything that inhibits that as being oppressive, that's a constant.
That's really a constant in radical political polemic over the last 200 years.
And you mentioned that a lot of this is in open opposition to the church, that the church kind of plays the villain of the piece.
And you talk, you write a terrific chapter, I think, on Nietzsche, taking him seriously, but really showing that he's a guy who's quite honest about the effect of the death of God.
Yes.
I mean, one of the things, one of the saving graces, if you like, of the Romantics and Rousseau is, well, they're pressing human beings to get back to that inner voice of nature.
They believe that the inner voice of nature for Andrew is going to be much the same as the inner voice of nature for Carl.
We're going to be sympathetic, empathetic, moral human beings.
Nietzsche, I think, correctly spots the idea that the idea that that inner voice of nature has a kind of moral stability to it is really parasitic on a belief in some kind of transcendent sacred order in the West, the order of Christianity.
And he's the man who caused the bluff on that and essentially says, you know, if you got rid of God, if you deliberately and intentionally got rid of God, you killed him, you've marginalized him, you can't have your cake and eat it.
You need to follow through and realize that actually human nature, that inner voice of nature, has no moral shape.
It comes down to your will and your desires.
And in some ways, the struggle of all against all at that particular point.
So Nietzsche, I think, is a critical figure, critical figure.
It is really interesting.
You make a point repeatedly in the book about the fact that you don't have to have read these people to be affected by them.
I think this is something that people really don't understand.
You call it, I'm not sure if you were quoting someone else, you call it the social imaginary.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's a term I drew from Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher.
And he talks about the social imaginary, and he's essentially making the point that the way most of us think about the world is actually intuitive.
Most of the moral values I have are not things that I've thought back to first principles, but they're things that I've absorbed from my upbringing, from the culture around me, from the television programs I watch.
I used to use this example in class when students would say to me, you know, can you provide us with an argument against gay marriage?
And I would say, well, I can, but there's not a lot of points because actually gay marriage did not become acceptable because an argument was won.
It became acceptable because people's intuitions were shaped by pop culture.
So thinking about it as first of all, plausible and then highly desirable phenomenon.
So I think you're absolutely right, Andrew.
We need to realize that most people, we might say, imagine the world.
They don't think about the world in terms of going back to first principles.
We all, to some extent, have these intuitions that are imbibed by osmosis from the culture in which we find ourselves.
Yes, this is why I feel that people with more traditionalist or honest or conservative points of view have really ignored the culture far too long.
You also write extremely honestly and well about Sigmund Freud.
And it's very hard for people of a younger generation to understand just how pervasive the ideas of Sigmund Freud were in the 50s, 60s, 70s.
And he is the man who basically boiled almost everything down to the erotic.
Can you talk a little bit about the disparity between the truth of his ideas and the power of his ideas?
Yeah, well, in terms of his psychoanalytic ideas, many of them are now routinely dismissed by psychologists.
I teach at Grove humanities classes.
I often have kids who are doing psychology as their major.
And I'll ask them, you know, do you learn about Freud on your degree?
And they'll say, yeah, but only in the history section.
We don't use him as a positive source.
So Freud's ideas, such as the Oedipus complex, things like that, have been roundly dismissed.
But there's one idea of his that grips the imagination, and that is the idea that sex is identity.
I said earlier on there's a lot of water flows under the bridge between Shelley and where we are today.
And one of the watershed moments would really be that for Shelley, sex was activity, it was behavior, it was something you did.
Freud, by making sexual desire fundamental to who we are, actually turns us into essentially sexual beings.
So sex becomes identity.
When you think about how we routinely talk now, somebody could be a lesbian or gay who's never had a sexual experience in their life.
We're referring to their sexual orientation.
We're referring to their desires.
That's the legacy of Freud making sexual desire foundational.
Now, why has that idea come to grip the modern imagination?
Well, if we're honest, sexual desires are a powerful part of who we are.
They shape who we marry.
They really do have a huge impact on how we think of ourselves.
And I think it's a classic example of where an idea grabs hold of an aspect of the truth, makes it central and exhaustive, and it's plausible precisely because it does actually capture something of the truth.
The problem is we have made it a kind of exhaustive category and reduced people in many ways to their sexual ideas.
So Freud is, he's onto something.
The problem is how we've taken him as an exhaustive account of who we are.
Sexual Desires Shaping Identity00:11:20
All right, we'll come back to that interview with Carl Truman in just a minute.
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Do you think when there's such a disparity between the actual truth of what somebody's saying and the power of these ideas, because there's always the question of why these ideas and not other ideas triumphed, why the church was in recession and these ideas are progressing all the time.
Do you think that there's a sort of that there's a kind of materialism that is on the march simply because we have lost our real idea of God, or maybe it is in the train of the power of science, that materialism simply has gripped the imagination in the way religion has lost its grip on the imagination?
I think there's a lot of truth in that.
And when you think about, again, to go back to Nietzsche, Nietzsche is wrestling with this idea of how do we live once God is dead?
And many people think of Nietzsche as a nihilist.
And I think that's a simplistic view of Nietzsche, because Nietzsche has this, what he calls the eternal return.
And Nietzsche says, you know, if God does not exist, how do we live?
Well, live every moment as if it would come back for all eternity.
Live for the here, live for the now.
And what that really reduces to ultimately is a kind of hedonism where my pleasure and my happiness become the central thing in my life.
And I do think that is where we are today.
And as a Christian, I would say it also correlates with my understanding of a fallen human nature.
We have turned in on ourselves.
We have a desire to make ourselves gods.
Thinking like Nietzsche's appeals to us.
Pleasure of the moment appeals to us.
Not taking responsibility appeals to us.
So all of these things play in.
And you mentioned technology.
I would say, where does technology play a part in this?
It feeds our feeling that we have godlike powers.
And it also enables us to do stuff that would have been impossible 100, 150, 200 years ago.
So all of these things come together in a kind of technologically enabled hedonism, I could put it that way.
You know, the other, the final part of this puzzle is Karl Marx and the politicization of sexuality.
How does that happen?
How do we get from the point where we're looking for our individual self in our sex lives, and then suddenly it becomes the key to world liberation?
Yeah, again, that's an interesting story.
And I think there are two dimensions to that.
One, there's the historical dimension.
What happens in the early 20th century is Marxists are trying to work out how do we revolutionize the working classes?
They're all chasing after these far-right, Nazi fascist ideologues.
How do we revolutionize them?
And the answer is we need to get onto psychology.
We need to find ways of shaping their psychology.
And Freud becomes a useful resource at that point.
Philosophically, it's almost inevitable that freedom will come to be conceptualized in sexual terms once you make human identity sexual.
If you and I are at root sexual beings determined by our sexual desires, then anybody who's attempting to shape or corral or restrict those sexual desires is engaged in a political act, an act of oppression.
So it was sort of inevitable that sex would rise to the surface in the 20th century after Freud as a key area for political struggle, I think.
And that's where we are today.
If you look at America in the 21st century, racial issues and sexual issues, those are the two big contentious areas of public debate at the moment.
One of the things I love about this book, the book is called The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Truman.
Cultural Amnesia, the subtitle is Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism and the Road to Sexual Revolution.
One of the things I loved about this book is that unlike many religious writers, many conservative writers, many traditionalist writers, you don't talk about the past in glowing terms.
You acknowledge the terrible things that have happened in the past.
And this is something that genuinely troubles me as I look at what's happening.
I'm an artist.
I'm a novelist.
I've spent most of my life working with lots and lots of gay people.
They have been my close, close friends, my terrific collaborators, people of enormous integrity.
And I am in favor, of course, of not, you know, I'm old enough to remember that they could be arrested simply for being gay, basically, simply for living their lives as gay people.
And yet at the same time, I'm deeply troubled by what I call the homo fascism of persecuting a baker to make sure that he will celebrate your sexual decisions rather than simply allowing you to have them without bothering you.
Is there no way, I mean, it seems to me an improvement that Oscar Wilde doesn't have to go to prison or that Alan Turing doesn't have to be chemically castrated.
That seems to be an improvement in life.
Is there no way for us to treat each other with respect in spite of our sexual decisions without falling into this kind of madness that we seem to have fallen into, where people are supposed to be able to think themselves into a new sex or their feelings are supposed to overcome their incarnate bodies?
Is there no way to separate these things?
Is it all one great spectrum?
That's a great question.
And on one level, it's easy to be very pessimistic on this point.
And I think, you know, well, the forces seem overwhelming and the demands seem to be, you know, give me everything or give me nothing.
There doesn't seem to be any room for compromise.
Where I see hope, and ironically, I've actually been helped by this in reading the very left-wing cultural critic Edward Said many years ago on culture.
And Saeed made the point that cultures at a sort of grand national level tend to be very black and white.
But on the ground, it's much more complicated.
And you've already alluded in the way you set up the question to the friendships you have with gay people.
When we have to live lives in our local communities, life is always more complicated than the black and white politics, I think, that we see playing out on the national stage.
And my hope is that what we will see emerging over time is a local community engagement, friendships, one-on-one engagements that will ultimately shape or even overpower what we see being driven at the national level.
Am I confident that's going to happen?
Not at all.
But I think if there is going to be a solution to this issue where everybody's dignity as a human being, regardless of how they identify themselves, where everybody's dignity as a human being is respected,
I think it has to start at the local level, where people really know each other and not at the level of national policy when you're dealing with rather abstract concepts and very blunt instrument kind of legislation.
I've only got about a minute or so left.
And I started this interview by talking about the fact that my life is almost your book in reverse, that my life is a story of rejecting Rousseau and Nietzsche and Marx and Freud ultimately and coming to Christ.
I'm wondering where you see the church in all of this.
The church seems, a lot of churches seem to have just gotten on the bandwagon.
You go to an Episcopal church and there'll be a rainbow flag up with the sign Pride on it, which, as I once told a preacher, I don't complain about that because of the gay people, but Pride, it does seem to me a sin.
Is there some way for the church to find its footing in this world without becoming A, irrelevant, and B, the world itself?
Again, it's a tough question, and it may look different in different places.
Different churches in different cultures, different communities may have to respond differently.
I think the important thing for the church is to certainly keep hold of the basic truths of the gospel.
They're not changed by the political to and fro in which we find ourselves.
Secondly, I think there is a place for the church to engage in some serious heart-searching and repenting of its collaboration with the culture.
And I wouldn't say that simply in terms of liberal churches buying into the gay agenda or whatever.
I think there are ways in which materialism, the ways in which expressive individualism have made unfortunate inroads into the church, the cult of personal happiness.
Compromise is no monopoly of the liberal left of the church.
I think we all have to engage in some heartfelt soul searching at this point.
And thirdly, I think, again, to go back to my previous answer, rebuilding the church community at a local level, having a vision for the church as more than a place that you go to on a Sunday just to hear some guy preach and sing a few hymns, seeing the church as a place that is a tight-knit community where people love each other and welcome outsiders.
I think that has to be part of the solution.
May look different, may look different in the city than it does in Western Pennsylvania.
But that, I think, is the basic principle that the church has to operate with at this point.
Well, thank you very much.
The book is, again, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.
Ben Shapiro recommended it to me, said he thought it was one of the most important books of the last 20 years.
The author is Carl Truman.
Carl, thank you so much for coming on.
I hope you'll come back so we can talk about this more.
Thanks very much.
I would love to, Andrew.
Satanic Values Transformation00:15:30
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The show streams on dailywire.com Fridays at 9 p.m. Eastern, 8 p.m. Central.
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So you may have noticed most of the time I keep the interview till the end or before the mailbag, and I do a cultural segment before, but I wanted to let Carl Truman speak first because I wanted you to be able to see what I'm going to say about Lil Nas X in the context of that.
I thought, incredible, incredibly concise intellectual history that brought us to the point that we're at.
Now, you know, if you haven't been paying attention, Little Nas X is this gay rapper who brought out a video and rap song called Call Me by Your Name, and that is kind of a tribute to Satan and also brought out these Satan sneakers.
He brought out 666 pairs of Satan sneakers, as you probably know, 666 in the book of Revelations is the number of the beast.
It's thought to be Satan, the satanic number.
And he put out these sneakers with the human blood contained in them, and they sold out in about under a minute.
And a lot of people were saying this is a very terrible thing.
And of course, the left was saying, oh, silly, silly right-wingers shouting about Satan.
And what do they know?
And of course, also that there is no Satan, so why is anybody worrying about this?
And once again, this is an example.
The thing that I'm talking about is the fact that Christianity explains the moral world in the same way science explains the physical world so that you don't have to think about science because the physical world just works and you don't have to think about Christianity because the moral world is what it is.
But the problem is, if you forget science, you no longer can manipulate and work in the physical world.
And if you forget Christianity, you actually forget the moral truths it teaches and you become part of the broken system.
And that's what I think has happened with Little Nas X.
Now, the thing about this video is it is quite beautiful.
It is visually beautiful, really visually well done.
I'm not a rap fan, and I don't think the music is all that good or the lyrics all that intelligent.
But what they are is they are honest.
And last week, I was talking about the Marquis de Sade and how I felt he was honest about what the world was like without God, and that he was the only writer who was honest about what the world was like without God, and that it was hellish without God.
And we'll talk about this more in the mailbag.
As I said, there's a question about that.
It's really important.
And I think the interesting thing about that is that even though the Marquis de Sade was a reprehensible writer, a disgusting, pornographic, vicious writer, and I think a vicious thinker as well, because he was honest, his writing was very helpful to me in my search for God because it actually showed me, oh, this is what the world would be like without God and what the human soul would be like without God.
And in the same way, I thought Little Nas X deserves some credit for actually telling his honest story.
And for instance, and remember, let's keep in mind Carl Truman's book about the rise and triumph of the modern self as we look at the opening of this, which takes us into this very beautiful kind of paradisical world called Montero, which is, I believe, Lil Nas X's real name.
So this is the opening of this video.
I can't play too much of it because, of course, it's filled with foul language, but this isn't, and this is the opening of the video, cut nine.
In life, we hide the parts of ourselves we don't want the world to see.
We lock them away.
We tell them no.
We banish them.
But here, we don't.
Welcome to Montero.
So then the snake is coming through it and he's sitting under the tree and the snake comes and tempts him into Satanism.
And the thing is, right there, you got what Carl Truman was talking about, the Rousseauian, what I call the Rousseauian fallacy, which is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's philosophy that we are essentially good, but that society corrupts us.
He never used the term noble savage, but it's often attributed to Rousseau, that as savages, we're good.
And one of the brilliant things that Truman talks about in his book is that Rousseau never believed that there was a time when savage people were actually these good people.
It was kind of an imaginary thing.
It was kind of reimagining the fall of man story, except the villain was not Satan.
The villain was society.
Now, of course, this doesn't make any sense because men build society.
And if man is essentially good, why doesn't he build a good society?
The fact is in order for society as an outgrowth of man to be corrupting, man must be corrupt to begin with.
And that's why the left is always so wrong about these things, is they think, well, it's just, if we could just fix society, people would be better.
But the people fixing society are the same people who made it, right?
And so again, you hear that Rousseauian idea, the whole idea is to bring out the self.
It's to bring out the self, to be authentic, that all those things you're hiding, those ugly things, those sadistic ideas or those masochistic ideas, those ideas of yourself as breaking free of your created nature.
All those things are just being held back.
And there we say no.
We tell them we hide them away.
Society tells them to hide them away.
But here in Montero, they are free.
And then the devil comes in and starts to tempt them away.
And the idea that this is partly sexual is on a tree.
There is some Greek language, which I know because my son Spencer, no relation, told me, and he is a scholar of these things, that this is a quote from the symposium of Plato, one of the greatest works of literature in all of Western culture.
This is Plato's symposium in which a group of people, including Socrates, get together to discuss the nature of love.
And the quote comes from a myth told by the playwright Aristophanes, who tells the myth that we were once all, there were only three genders.
There was male and female and androgynous.
And each person was twice what they were now.
They had four hands, four legs, two heads, two sets of genitals, and then they were torn apart, right?
They were taken to pieces, and now they spend their time searching for their other half.
And if you were a, if you were androgynous, if you were male and female, then you were a male who searches for a female.
If you were just male, then you are a male who searches for a male and falls in love with men.
And if you were a female, then you are now a lesbian and you are a woman who seeks to fall in love with a woman.
And that is how we came to be sexual creatures.
This is the myth that Aristophanesophanes tells.
And it's the myth that's printed on the tree in this video about Montero, about this guy falling into Satanism.
I should describe the rest of the video.
Satan tempts him.
He then travels down into hell.
He's there in chains.
It ends with Satan sodomizing little X, little Nas X, and then Little Nas X goes behind Satan and kills him, steals his horns, and becomes satanic.
So it's very, like I said, it's a very honest video.
If you look for the self, if you look for the self, if you want to bring out the self, ultimately you will find yourself a slave to Satan, and then you will find yourself becoming satanic.
And that is exactly, I think, what happens.
And it's exactly what the story tells it.
The thing is, it transforms the values.
It tells you that this is a good thing, an authentic thing.
Now, the thing about this Aristophanes legend that we are broken up from two people and we're searching for the other half of ourselves is it makes love into self-love, right?
It makes love into self-love.
And there's reference to this in the video, in this little Nas X video, that he wants to sleep with people that he envies so that he can become them.
And that is the way he falls in love with the devil.
But the fact is, the symposium is actually thought to be an answer by Socrates to Aristophanes.
And Socrates' definition of love is very, very different.
Socrates says that love is a mediator between man and God.
Love is not a thing in and of itself.
It mediates between man and God.
And it basically brings us through the love of beauty and through the love of what is beautiful in eternal nature, not beautiful in nature as we see it, but beautiful in eternal nature.
It brings us through that love to unite with God and to become the friend of God and to become immortal.
And this, of course, is why Plato is often looked upon as one of the prophets of Christ.
Even though he wasn't a Jew, he's looked upon as the Gentile prophet of Christ, because that's very much a Christian idea, that Jesus is the mediator between man and God.
And that Jesus says to us, now you are my friend because you know what I'm doing.
Before you didn't know what God was doing, but now you know, and now you are my friend.
And that is the path to immortality, to immortality.
I'm sorry, it's the path to immortality.
But the quest for the self leads to hell, where little Nas is sodomized by Satan and then essentially kills him and becomes Satan.
He becomes one with Satan.
And so the conservatives immediately said, oh, this is a terrible and it's a terrible thing that he's selling these sneakers with human blood in them and people are buying them up.
And they complained that he had done a previous video that children had liked and he had marketed it to children and the children were now looking at this satanic video.
And it's really interesting that here was little Nas' response to that.
He says, as a gay person, he says, I spent my entire teenage years hating myself because of this crap you all preached would happen to me because I was gay.
In other words, people told him he would go to hell because I was gay.
He says, so I hope you are mad and stay mad and feel the same anger you teach us to have towards ourselves.
And this is a perfect example of clavinist psychology that I've been talking about for the last two episodes, right?
This idea that you rebel against the oppressive people because they fail to represent God.
But if you don't have a right idea of God, you can't then transfer your devotion to God.
You then rebel against creation itself.
And that, I think, is what little Nas X has done.
He has become satanic by carrying his rebellion beyond the rebellion against oppressive people into a rebellion against nature and against God.
So the left jumps on this.
They love it when right-wings complain, oh my goodness, the right-wing prigs, now they're going to complain about Satan.
What could possibly be wrong with Satan?
And again, the thing about Christianity is that it is so true that even if you take out the supernatural parts of it, it still describes the natural world.
This is still what happens when you search for self.
When you search for happiness in self, you are going to end up in exactly this situation.
You're going to end up enslaved.
If you search for your authenticity in self instead of what God made yourself to be, you are going to end up enslaved.
So it's a depiction of the evil that will come to you if you follow this path.
It's just telling you that that evil is good.
And if you remember what I was talking about, that is the way that lies work.
They don't tell you that lies don't work by telling you that the truth is untrue.
They work by telling you that the truth itself is evil and you should rebel against the truth.
So here is Joy Reed telling people why right-wingers are so, so silly.
How silly could they possibly be to speak out against this satanic video?
This is cut eight.
Who run the world?
Well, obviously, Lil Nas X.
This week he broke Twitter again, plus the internets and right-wing brains with his new video, Montero, Call Me by Your Name, in which he perfects certain pole dance moves, including one in which he's like upside down.
Impressive.
And also torts on the devil before killing him.
Natch.
The song, which is a bop, is an obvious and artistic play on the conservative Christian idea that people who are gay will go to hell, which Nas does literally in the video.
And he amplified the meme by releasing these Satan-themed custom sneakers, 666 of them, which sold out in less than a minute.
The right-wing outrage was entirely predictable and proof that little Nas X knows his enemies better than they know him.
Tweeting, y'all love saying we're going to hell, but get upset when I actually go there.
So it's a perfect example of this confusion that the left is in, that if they can find something in society that is oppressive or that they want to change, then it is not just society, but creation itself that ultimately is to blame.
And this is the way you go forward if you are trying to find the self instead of trying to find the creator of the self.
Instead of trying to say, in the gospels, it teaches us that we are nothing but branches on a vine.
And if we put that branch on the vine, it becomes fruitful.
If the branch is not attached to the vine, it's a good agricultural idea, right?
If the branch is not attached to the vine, it's dead.
It is dead.
You know, in the LA Times, they did this too, and they just said, oh, Michael Wood, Mikhail Wood, possibly.
He says, pop fans with long memories will recognize all this outrage from earlier controversies involving the likes of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Judith Priest, and Slayer.
In 1985, the Parents Music Resource Center compiled a list of songs famously referred to as the Filthy 15 that posed a grave threat to susceptible listeners.
Act of Faith00:09:11
Among them were Merciful Fates into the Covenant Venoms Possessed, both included because of their occult content.
And he just goes on to dismiss all this.
But what's fascinating to me about this is these are people who think that if I won't admit that they can think themselves into another gender, that I have done violence against them.
If I won't bake a cake to celebrate their wedding, then somehow their wedding has been dismissed.
You know, so that in other words, the opinions that people have are destructive.
The ideas that people have are destructive.
But here, a guy telling you that if you follow yourself, you too can be sodomized by Satan and become satanic.
That's not a problem.
The idea that the right would then rebel against this is not a problem.
And it's an example of the fact that we on the right make the false argument sometimes that there is no power in speech and that all speech is permissible because it is all harmless.
That's not true.
What we are saying is that they are wrong and we are right.
And the power of the self is the power of slavery.
To become yourself is to become a slave.
To become yourself is to become a slave.
To become yourself as you were made by God and therefore attached to God as a vine, as a branch of the vine is freedom.
That's why it says in the Bible, if you lose your life, you'll find your life.
If you search for your life, you're going to lose your life.
So I'm going to give the last word here to a demon, namely Screwtape, who is the demon in C.S. Lewis's great work, The Screwtape Letters.
And the demon explains why God wants you to give up yourself.
Why would he want you to give up yourself?
And Screwtape, of course, being a demon, calls God the enemy.
And he says, the enemy wants to bring man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world and know it to be the best and rejoice in the fact without being any more or less or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another.
In other words, he wants you to be as glad of your creativity and your successes and the beautiful things that come out of you as you are glad of the beautiful things that come out of other people.
That is not easy thing to do, but it is a possible thing to do.
He goes on, Screwtape says, the enemy wants man in the end to be so free from any bias in his own favor that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbor's talents or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall.
In other words, he wants you to see yourself as part of a beautiful creation.
He wants you to not be in rebellion against creation.
He wants you to be in sync with creation.
Screwtape goes on.
He says, he wants each man in the long run to be able to recognize all creatures, even himself, as glorious and excellent things.
He wants to kill their animal self-love as soon as possible.
But it is his long-term policy to restore to them a new kind of self-love, a charity and gratitude for all selves, including their own.
When they have really learned to love their neighbors as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbors.
We must never forget what is the most repellent and inexplicable trait in our enemy.
He's talking about God.
He says God really loves the hairless bipeds he has created and always gives back to them with his right hand what he has taken away with his left.
That, that is the truth.
And even though we are living in this moment where lies seem to be taking over the world, where the father of lies seems to be large and in charge, just remember, it is Good Friday.
Good Friday is the moment of most despair.
But when we look back at it from the point of Easter, we understand it entirely differently.
We can rewrite the entire history, not just of ourselves, not just of our moment, but of the world when we begin to see that the story is not about us.
It is about the one who created us.
All right.
And with that, we enter the wonderful world of the mailbag.
Woo!
Say it with me.
Ci se pois.
Yeah.
Ci se poadway.
All right.
I don't know why that's so funny.
It just is.
The first letter is from Chris.
This is an absolutely great question.
He says, in episode 1024, the U.S. versus God, you talked about the Marquis de Sad.
And if I understood you right, you said Desad took atheism to its logical end, and you didn't like his conclusion, so you chose to believe something else.
Well, it seems to me that's not how reality works.
It's not multiple choice.
Or to borrow a phrase, reality doesn't care about your feelings.
To me, it seems highly improbable that God exists, and I don't like that idea either.
But so what?
When has life ever cared about what we want?
If it makes me happier to believe I'm a woman, therefore I am not how it works, hoping to have my mind changed about God, but I need reality, a preponderance of evidence.
Excellent question.
And it's possible that I didn't explain myself well enough in how I felt about this.
First, I feel that the world, to some degree, and certainly as we walk along our daily lives, the world can be explained in two completely different ways, both of which make logical sense.
It can be explained as a creation with a moral order, or it can be explained as an accident without a moral order.
What it can't be done is it can't be explained as a creation with a moral order that has no moral order, or vice versa, an accident with no moral order that somehow has a moral order.
That's the only two things that can't be.
In other words, you can explain it in different ways because we don't know its ultimate reality for certain.
We weren't there at the creation.
That's why it's called faith and not knowledge.
But it's a faith.
Either way, there's going to be an act of faith, either accepting the world as this accident, this amazing, weird thing that came into being where life can exist.
And even scientists cannot explain the absolute precise balance of the universe that allows life to exist.
And so they've postulated on faith that there are multiverses.
There are so many universes that this one just happens to be the one in which life can exist.
They have to do that in order to explain it, but it's an act of faith because there's no communication between those multiverses.
Others of us say, well, no, this creation looks very, very intentional and it looks intentional and it looks as if there is a moral order and the morality of my heart refers to something in another level of existence.
The morality of my heart is not just a random evolutionary thing.
It's not just random evolution that I think that I should love my neighbor as myself.
It is in fact something that the heart knows in the same way the eye perceives light.
Now, the eye perceives light not as light is in the eye of God.
It perceives light as the eye perceives light, and the conscience perceives morality as people perceive morality, not as God perceives it.
But still, there is something there that we perceive, or it's all an accident.
Either of those explanations can be put forward, but somewhere along the line, there's going to be an act of faith.
And so my point about the Marquis de Saad was that in being honest about what the world looks like without God, he showed a world in which men could abuse women, in which the strong could abuse the weak.
And it was a good thing.
It was part of nature.
Nature is full of death and pain and suffering.
Nature is full of the strong dominating the weak.
Why then should there be a moral order that says that that is wrong?
That was Marquis de Saud's philosophy.
And I thought, yes, if I choose to take the act of faith that this is an accident with no moral order, that is the world that I should live in.
And I thought, no, that's not the world I'm going to live in.
I will therefore see if I can take the opposite act of faith, which is to embrace a creator with a moral order.
Either one of those makes sense.
Either one of them is an act of faith.
Either one of them includes that leap of faith.
One saying, oh, there's like multiverses or something, or it's a computer simulation run by a gigantic bearded guy that we don't see.
Or the other saying, no, there is an immaterial conscious creator who has a nature that is a good nature that creates the moral order that our conscience perceives.
Either one of those can be worked out logically.
Both of them are built on an axiom, an unprovable truth.
Looking at the one that I thought was honestly portrayed in Saad's writing, I thought, you know what?
I'm going to choose the one where I don't kill people.
I'm going to choose the one where my conscience is a God to something real.
And so that's the difference.
Either way, you may not think there's a God, but you may think that that's not taking an act of faith, but it is.
It is the world to explain the world down to the ground.
You are taking the act of faith that this is an accident, that this accident could happen, that it had no beginning.
I mean, so many discoveries of science, you know, I believe that atheism is actually outdated, that when Newton came along and showed that there was a clockwork to the universe, to the world, it made people think like, oh, everything is just this big clockwork.
But as we got further and further and deeper and deeper into the world and beyond Newtonian science, we started to think, no, we started to see that, no, things are a lot weirder than they look.
And it really does start to seem now, I think, that science actually supports the idea of creation rather than an accident.
Science Supports Creation00:01:43
And that, I think, I'm going to, you know, I know I'm leaving a little less time for the mailbag this time, but we'll come back and answer more questions next week.
If you're here, the chances of your surviving, very, very slim.
The Clavenless Week is almost endless at this point.
People just, you know, spin off into it into a kind of eternal darkness from which there is no return.
But for those few of you who managed to roll back the rock and step back out into the Clavenless Week, we will be back on Friday.
I will still be Andrew Clavin.
Have a wonderful, wonderful Easter, and I will see you again next week on The Andrew Klavan Show.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, basically wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also, remember to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show, the Matt Walsh Show, and the Michael Knoll Show.
Thanks for listening.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Our technical director is Austin Stevens.
Supervising producer, Mathis Glover.
Production Manager, Pavel Vidowski.
Edited by Danny D'AMICO.
Lead audio mixer, Mike Cormina.
Animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Production coordinator McKenna Waters.
And our production assistant is Jacob Falash.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production, Copyright Daily Wire, 2021.
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