Ep. 1032 – The Great Unmasking blends satire and polemic as Andrew Clavin mocks "follow the science" absolutism, ties mask mandates to feminist critiques of beauty, and frames chivalry as a dismissed male virtue. Jordan Peterson joins to reject systemic racism as a Western betrayal, defend faith as moral action over dogma, and debate Jung’s subjective spirituality. Mailbag letters grapple with domesticity vs. adventure, grief’s clash with faith, and the "unevangelized," while Clavin pivots from pandemic overreach to cultural decay—all undercut by MyPillow ads and a defense of Peterson’s "angry white man" detractors as leftist projections. The episode collapses philosophy, politics, and personal struggle into a chaotic manifesto on truth, power, and human nature. [Automatically generated summary]
Leftist scientists working around the clock have made the amazing discovery that by changing the words people use, they can transform physical reality, making the world utterly just and fair and happy, except for all the people who aren't allowed to say what they mean.
Lead leftist scientist Dr. Otto von Schmuckeru explained this amazing scientific breakthrough in a paper entitled, Follow the Science and Do Whatever We Tell You, which he delivered last year to the Nancy Pelosi Society for the Advanced Study of Shut the Hell Up.
In the paper, Dr. Von Schmuckeru said, quote, In our experiments, we noticed that words changed reality.
So that, for instance, simply by speaking the words, I do, a man and woman can be transformed into a husband and wife, becoming one flesh in the eyes of God, never to be torn asunder by man unless they get bored or see someone hotter or just can't stand the damn nagging anymore.
So, we decided to see what other transformations we could create by speaking the proper words in order to make the world a better place, unquote.
Dr. Von Schmuckeru went on to explain how, in one recent experiment, Demi Lovato said she wanted to become non-binary and so changed her pronouns to they and them, as in the sentences, who the hell is they?
And I never heard of them, and I guess they doesn't know there's no such thing as non-binary.
Instantly, on using these new pronouns, Lovato was transformed from a washed-up pop star desperate for attention into a washed-up pop star with some kind of weird mental disorder.
This made the world more equal and happy by creating an opening in the music business for a person with actual talent.
Dr. Von Schmuckeroo said his team went on from there to transform a man into a woman merely by having him say, I am a woman, and then forcing everyone to agree with him without secretly laughing.
Poof, so to speak.
The man instantly became a woman, and while it was true the woman could not create life or humanize existence with domestic love, she did display other essentially female traits like wearing lipstick and becoming completely irrational over nothing.
Unfortunately, the entire experiment collapsed when one person in Borneo referred to the subject as him on Twitter.
Then the subject instantly ceased to be a woman and became an old Monty Python sketch about a guy in a dress.
Dr. Von Schmuckeru said that after these successful experiments, he believed he could now transform Hamas from genocidal terrorists into militants, transform unborn babies into mere clumps of cells, turn socialism into a moral economic system, and recreate Joe Biden as a sentient human life form.
If he could just get people to stop telling the damn truth.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boom.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dee-dee.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, we are back laughing our way through the fall of the Republic.
Very exciting day for me.
Two days ago, I guess, I left LA for the last time.
I got out, had a wonderful final night in LA.
I went out to dinner with my wife and a friend of mine, a director who's on a project I'm on, and his wife.
And we went to our favorite kind of what we call our local, the restaurant we go to when we're just going to go out and have a very relaxed time.
And that was on, that's on La Cienica and I guess Franklin is the trans Hollywood.
La Cieneca and Melrose, which is about a quarter of a mile away, a group of pro-Palestinian protesters came into a restaurant, called out the Jews, and set about beating them up.
So I thought, like, well, this is a good time to move to somewhere safe like Germany.
Anyway, I couldn't be happier to see that city behind me in the rearview mirror and to actually have my car moving as I look in the rearview mirror, which is also different than LA.
If you, it is a great time for you to go on iTunes and give us a five-star review, subscribe to the show.
All of this is really helpful for us.
It really is.
And if you go on YouTube and subscribe to the Andrew Clavin channel, you get nothing.
I don't know.
We're not going to do anything for you.
But we might send you some fresh content.
Who knows?
And if you send us a comment and the comment is reasonably bigoted and repellent, we will include it on our show as just fitting right in with everything else I'm saying.
Today's comment comes from Will.
How do I join Clavinon?
Now, a lot of people want to know this.
Clavinon, of course, is the true conspiracy behind the false conspiracy.
So QAnon thinks there are people, you know, trading children and abusing children for political power.
And Clavinon is the real story of how people are abusing children for political power.
So he wants to know, how do I join Clavinon or does that automatically happen when I subscribe?
Is it part of the content you deliver to my door?
Please help.
I need to figure this out before the Clavins Week extinguishes my life force.
That's probably already happened after he's left this comment.
But yes, you get a free membership to Clavinon with your subscription if you send your subscription dollars directly to me.
That's the important part.
You just got to find whatever my address is.
Even I don't know anymore.
I'm homeless now.
I have a home for the next six weeks.
So just throw money out the car.
Just drive by and throw money out the car if you see me.
And if you want to be in the mailbag, you should subscribe to Clavinon.
And then subscribe to the Daily Wire at dailywire.com.
There's a button that says watch.
Then you go to the Andrew Clavin podcast.
There's a little airplane that's the mailbag.
Press that.
You can ask me any question you want.
You can ask me about, you got to scream, you have to make that noise.
And then you can ask me any question you want about religion, about politics, about your personal life.
I will answer them.
My answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life.
And some people wonder, will it change my life for the better?
Shut up.
I mean, it's not that expensive of a subscription.
So I know many of you get a warm, comfortable feeling knowing that big tech is telling you what to think and is following all your information searches.
But I don't like that so much for some reason.
And that's why I use ExpressVPN.
If you ever wondered how huge tech sites make money when they're actually free to use, they do it by tracking your searches, your video history, everything you click on, and then they sell your valuable data to third parties.
When you use ExpressVPN, your device's IP address gets masked.
This helps anonymize your online activity, making it much more difficult to trace and sell to advertisers.
ExpressVPN also encrypts 100% of your network data to protect you from cyber criminals and hackers.
What I love most about ExpressVPN is it does all these things with just one tap of a button.
I have it on all of my devices.
It's time to say no to censorship and take back your online privacy at expressvpn.com slash clavin.
Visit my link and you'll get an extra three months of ExpressVPN service for free.
That's expressvpn.com slash clavin to protect your data today, including the secret of how you spell clavin.
You know the thing.
That's it.
That's how you do it.
I forget, actually.
Today, I'm going to talk, I don't know, for about three hours about the beauty of women's faces.
I'm going to talk about the beauty of women's faces because people are taking their masks off.
And that is really the big story.
I think that is the biggest, most emotional thing that's happening, even though people are only talking about it in political terms.
Now, I am a person who derives tremendous pleasure and joy from the beauty of women, namely I am a man.
And during masking with women's faces covered, it kind of had a shocking effect.
I mean, first of all, you're still looking at women, but you're not looking at their faces, which, to be honest with you, I found to humanizing both to me and to them.
And the other day, I went out on a hike, and it's been really strange.
There's no reason to wear a mask.
There was never any reason to wear a mask on a hike.
I never wore masks on hikes.
I always hiked unmasked.
But for most of this period, people have, almost everybody out there was hiking masks except for me.
It was very rare to see anybody without a mask on.
Now in LA, people are still very frightened because it's LA and people are beating people up.
But suddenly out in the hills, people were not wearing masks.
And I'm walking along and hikers are very friendly.
Hikers tend to be the nicest people in town.
And I'm walking along and as you go by people, they're smiling at you.
And women were smiling at me.
And I was having this actual reaction where about 15 seconds later, I would have a flashback.
I thought, what did I just see?
And oh, yeah, I just saw a woman, a woman's smile, which of course is one of the joys that men get to have for being men.
It's one of the things you get in return for being a man, which is hard enough.
I was really struck by the power of women's faces that they have on your mind.
I mean, it was really, to have been deprived of them for so long was really an emotional shock.
And, you know, feminists have cowed men into not talking about their reactions to women's beauty, right?
They say it's sexist, it's offensive, and it can be if you're a boar, if you catcall women, if you treat women derogatorily or condescendingly, if you bring things up at times when it's not, you shouldn't be bringing it up.
But as a force, it is one of the largest forces in human existence.
It is probably the center of human existence, Eros, the life force, which is different for men and women.
And anytime you start talking about this, what feminists do to shut you up is they mock you.
You can see this everywhere.
They'll say, oh, you know, there's some bizarre rant.
This guy started, oh, it's creepy.
It was creepy.
This guy started talking about, you know, with me, that's right, he's a dirty old man.
Well, I am a dirty old man, and screw you.
Call me when I'm dead.
You know, when I'm dead, it's like, Claven, you're dead.
Stop looking at women.
All right, all right.
I return to my grave.
But this is the thing.
One of the things about physicality, incarnation, having a body, is there are reactions to it.
There are things that happen because you have a body.
And one of them, a central one of them, a central part of life, is this life force between specifically men and women.
And one of the biggest themes of this show, one of the things I try to emphasize, and I think we don't talk about enough openly, is that things that are different are different than things that are the same.
And you can almost tell just by looking at the words, like one word is different, and that word different is different from the word same.
And the left is always saying things to you like, oh, love is love.
Love is love.
There's no such thing as an illegal, you know, trans women or women, right?
No, things that are different are not the same.
A trans woman can't be a woman.
That's the same as saying a person born a man who says he's a woman is the same as a person born a woman who says he's a woman.
Things that are different are not the same.
And it's not fair.
It is not fair.
The minute things are different, they might be worse.
They might be less close to the center.
I mean, I think that the relationships between men and women are at the center of human life.
And other relationships, they may not be bad.
They may be fine, but they're not at the center of human life.
Some women's faces are more beautiful than others.
That's an important thing.
And men feel ways about women's beauty that other people don't feel.
Even lesbians, you know, they say, well, a lesbian feels it.
No, they don't.
Because things that are different are different.
So, and men aren't beautiful the way women are beautiful.
I'll talk about that in a minute.
But someone, you know, the whole thing about this is that it emphasizes the limits of being an embodied creature.
And that's what I'm going to talk about.
I'm going to get back to this.
I'm going to do a little detour because I want to talk about the masks themselves and what they meant to everybody, because I think they meant a lot to people.
And I think they really changed things in America and really had an effect on everybody's head.
But I'm going to get back.
Keep this in mind, that one of the central things they did was cover up women's faces, okay?
Now, when the mask mandate was taken off, Rachel Maddow, obviously the liberal commentator of MSNBC, she said this.
This is a cut seven.
I feel like I'm going to have to rewire myself so that when I see somebody out in the world who's not wearing a mask, I don't instantly think, you are a threat, or you are selfish, or you are a COVID denier, and you definitely haven't been vaccinated.
I mean, we're going to have to rewire the way that we look at each other because the CDC's guidance, which she just told me, we are sure, is that if you're vaccinated, you don't need to wear a mask except in very specific circumstances.
And so that means as we change that as a country, we are going to look at each other differently and have to unwire our preconceptions about what a mask or a lack of a mask means.
So everybody made fun of her, and it's fine to make fun of Rachel Maddow.
She can be very silly sometimes, but I actually have a measure of respect for Rachel Maddow because she's not a fake and she has integrity.
She's not a fake because she says, I'm a leftist, giving you the leftist take on the news.
She's not like the clown Don Lemon.
You know, I'm a journalist.
I'm an objective.
Chris Cuomo, I'm an objective.
No, I have no point of view.
No, she's a leftist.
She comes on.
She says she's a leftist.
She seems to have acted with integrity at times as a leftist journalist.
So I have respect for her.
And the thing that she's saying that I agree with is that this has had an effect on people.
Wearing a mask, being told to wear a mask, not wearing a mask.
It has all made a difference in people's lives in a very, very big way.
Now, and you can tell, you know, the way people react to being unmasked tells a lot about them.
Like Republicans, there was a poll out today, I think it was from Rasmussen.
Republicans are happier about taking their masks off than left-wingers are.
And we're going to get into that in a minute.
Now, my attitude toward masking from this the whole time was kind of in the middle.
I was not one of these people who thought like COVID is a hoax, the Chinese flu is a hoax.
It's ridiculous.
It wasn't a hoax.
It was happening all over the world.
And people thought, it's like one of those false flags so they can shut down our economy and do all this stuff.
No, it was not a hoax.
It was an actual real thing.
I didn't think it was unconstitutional for localities like states to pass emergency legislation when they didn't know what was going on or how dangerous it was or how many people were going to die.
I mean, obviously we know the left always jumps on these things and says, you know, well, racism is a health crisis too.
So we can, you know, we know that already.
Masked Immunity Theater00:06:55
I mean, this is the thing.
Our ruling class, our governing class, is third rate.
Our governing class is out of ideas.
Mostly on the left where they have terrible ideas, but the right also has been reinvigorated by Trumpism, but it really has run out, had before that at least, run out of ideas.
So in places where governors had a fascist tendency, like in Michigan where Uber Sturmfuhr and Gretchen von Wittmer is governor, they handled things badly.
California's Gavin Newsom handled things badly.
They put incredible restraints on people and then didn't follow them themselves.
They were absolutely hypocritical.
They were oppressive.
That was bad.
But in states with American governors, like South Dakota's, with Christy Noam in Florida, with Ron DeSantis, things were fine, but people still wore masks.
In a room, in a room with somebody for more than 15 minutes, if both people were wearing masks, it seems to have cut down on the likelihood that you were going to get this.
So I wasn't always offended.
I wasn't absolutely furious at everybody all the time about this like some people on the right were.
What was offensive, what was offensive, well, there were a couple of things that were offensive, but one of them was the manipulation, the false information we were being given so that we would do what the elites, what the governing class wanted us to do.
Here's an exchange between Rand Paul and Fauci.
I guess it's about a month ago, maybe two months ago, as cut six.
You've been vaccinated and you parade around in two masks for show.
No.
You can't get it again.
There's virtually 0% chance you're going to get it.
And yet you're telling people that have had the vaccine, who have immunity.
You're defying everything we know about immunity by telling people to wear a mask to have been vaccinated.
Instead, you should be saying, there is no science to say we're going to have a problem from the large number of people being vaccinated.
You want to get rid of vaccine hesitancy?
Tell them they can quit wearing their mask after they get the vaccine.
You want people to get the vaccine?
Give them a reward instead of telling them that the nanny state's going to be there for three more years and you got to wear a mask forever.
People don't want to hear it.
There's no science behind it.
Well, let me just state for the record that masks are not theater.
Masks are protective.
We have immunity there, theater.
If you already have immunity, you're wearing a mask to give comfort to others.
You're not wearing a mask because of any signs.
I totally disagree with you.
And now, now the CDC changed its recommendation saying if you were vaccinated, you didn't have to wear a mask in virtually all situations, right?
And they did that.
I think they did it because everything Biden touches turns to crap, right?
Everything he touches.
The unemployment gone south.
The economy is going south.
Inflation is bad.
You know, the Middle East is going south.
Only the border.
The border is the one thing that's going south.
It's going north.
It's supposed to be going south.
Suddenly, we can take off our masks.
And now Fauci says, yeah, it was theater.
Let's cut nine.
I'm obviously careful because, I mean, I'm a physician and a health care provider.
I am now much more comfortable in people seeing me indoors without a mask.
I mean, before the CDC made the recommendation change, I didn't want to look like I was giving mixed signals.
But being a fully vaccinated person, the chances of my getting infected in an indoor setting is extremely low.
And that's the reason why, in indoor settings now, I feel comfortable about not wearing a mask because I'm fully vaccinated.
So Rand Paul was utterly right, 100% in the right.
And Fauci was lying.
He was wearing a mask as theater.
So this, and this is the same guy who told us masks don't work because he didn't want us to buy up all the masks so the healthcare workers couldn't get them.
The problem is the reason this is offensive is because the underlying governing philosophy behind it is that wise elites should tell us what they want.
They can lie to us, basically, to manipulate us into doing what they want because they are wise and we are foolish, right?
And the first thing about that is if these elites are wise, wise is just a brand of potato chip because these guys are clowns.
What have they done right?
What have they made better?
What have they helped that gives them the idea that they are wise and we are foolish?
What they should do, of course, is they should say, we are public servants.
We serve the public and we will serve the public by giving them all the information we have and then let them and their local representatives, their governors and their mayors, make the decisions that have to be made.
That's how you do this.
That's how you treat a free people if you are a servant of those people.
They laugh at people on the right for saying, oh, this is a hoax, for saying COVID's a hoax.
We don't know about wearing masks.
But then they lie.
Why should we believe a word they say?
Why should we believe a word they say?
So that was offensive.
It was also offensive to sell us terror, to try and get us to do things through terror.
You do not have to be a vapor to want to hear Wondry's new podcast mini-series, The Vaping Fix.
It's a story of Silicon Valley idealism, blind ambition, and how the now infamous e-cigarette company Jewel hooked a new generation on vaping.
In 2015, the founders of Jewel set out to create the iPod of e-cigarettes, a perfectly designed device that would disrupt the tobacco industry and help traditional smokers quit.
But their fruit-flavored vaping options, high levels of nicotine, and youthful influencer endorsements led to consequences that would put millions at risk.
As plumes of vapes clouds surrounded schools across the nation, parents, politicians, and the government demanded answers.
Was this Jules' plan all along, or did ambition blind them from seeing the pitfalls of their invention?
Hosted by Laura Beale and from the team behind Dr. Death and Bad Batch comes the vaping fix.
Listen to the vaping fix on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, or you can also listen early and ad-free by starting your free trial of Wondery Plus in the Wondery app.
You know, Neil Ferguson, I believe that's how he pronounces his first name.
He's a historian.
He wrote a long piece in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weekends ago about the 1957 pandemic.
And he talked about the fact that, you know, it was a very similar kind of pandemic, but there was just a higher, they didn't shut down the economy at all.
They didn't tell people to come home from school.
And one of the key reasons was they had a higher tolerance for risk.
They'd been in a war, a lot of them.
They'd all had, as I had, all these childhood diseases, which people don't get anymore because of vaccines, right?
So they didn't have this illusion that life was safe.
And one of them said, we said our prayers and we took our chances.
And compare that to that time that Trump got sick.
Remember this?
It was, I don't know, October last year.
He got sick.
He got the COVID and he came back and he sent out a tweet saying, don't let this, he made a video, I think, saying, don't let this govern your life.
Don't let it run your life and don't be afraid of it.
Red Death Risk Tolerance00:15:55
Don't be afraid of it.
Don't let it run your life.
And then he stood up on the balcony and took off his mask dramatically.
It was great.
It was a great moment.
It made you feel like, ah, yes, we can beat this.
This is fine.
Here was the news media reacting to that and cut eight.
President Trump wrote on Twitter, don't be afraid of COVID.
Don't let it dominate your life.
Almost 210,000 Americans are dead.
Speaking of outrageous, this outrageous tweet that he's saying this is so disrespectful.
And the president says it's no big deal.
I mean, it's outrageous.
It is insulting to the people who have lost loved ones.
It is insulting to every American who wears a mask.
I mean, it's disgraceful, Wolf.
It's absurd.
Don't tell your supporters, don't be afraid of COVID.
Everyone should be afraid of COVID.
It's okay to be afraid of COVID, and it's okay that it's dominating your life because it has dominated your life.
This is a country that was made by people who sailed across the ocean blue in wooden ships into the wilderness where there were hostiles, into a wilderness where there was famine and death.
This is a country that was built, forged in war, a civil war, World War II, World War I.
And suddenly, this is our newsman, be afraid, be afraid as a germ, be afraid.
And that is incredibly offensive.
You know, the other day, just before I left LA, I was working out of my wife's office.
So I was walking to her office and I was walking through a part of LA called Larchmont.
I mean, you wonder why Rachel Maddow, you make fun of Rachel Maddow for being afraid, for having to rejigger her whole mind because she's afraid of anyone who's not wearing a mask.
I'm walking through Larchmont, which is one of the nicest areas in L.A.
It's surrounded by Hancock Park, which is one of the oldest, most beautiful, just mansions.
It's just mansions on lawns.
It's just gorgeous.
And you walk into Larchmont, which is kind of this little, you know, store of shops, and there's a famous ice cream store there.
And the ice cream store is populated.
You know, it's used by, it's just fashionable, the inn ice cream store, and everyone goes to it.
And there's a sign in the window.
I took a picture of it.
This is my picture of it.
And I'll read it to you in case you're just listening.
This is a sign in an ice cream store in one of the nicest areas in LA, right?
And it's a fashionable ice cream store.
So it's where the kids and where the young folks go.
It's very hip-to-be.
There's long lines around.
It says, we welcome all races, all religions, all countries of origin, all sexual orientations, all genders.
We stand with you.
You are safe here.
Okay?
Now, in the Sudan, there are children wandering around going, gee, I wonder if I'll be hacked to death with a machete today.
Here, where they're sitting around wondering if they should have fudgripple with their Carmel Praline parfait, they're sitting, oh, I'm safe here.
I'm safe because they won't attack my gender.
As opposed to my ice cream store where you come in and I first condemn you for your sexual sin.
I say, you are living in sin and you will go to hell.
Would you like sprinkles on that or whipped cream?
You know, it's just people living in the lap of luxury eating at the fashionable ice cream beds, but they're afraid they want to be safe.
There is a story by Edgar Allan Poe that you can read in about five minutes, but I'm going to tell you the end of it.
So I'm going to give it away.
So that's a warning that I'm going to reveal the end.
But it's called The Mask of the Red Death.
And it's a mask, M-A-S-Q-U-E, meaning a masked ball, a costume ball.
I forget what we call them in America, but they call it a costume ball.
And the Red Death is the plague is running through the country.
And it opens up, the first sentence says, The Red Death had long devastated the country.
No pestilence had ever been so fatal or so hideous.
Blood was its avatar and its seal, the madness and the horror of blood.
You can tell you're reading Edgar Allan Poe.
But there's a prince, and he is doing great.
Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious.
When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hail and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his crenellated abbeys.
So they were living high.
They were safe.
Everything was fine.
They were rich.
They were happy.
People were dying outside the abbey, but not inside the abbey.
And so after about six months, they held a masquerade, a masquerade ball, and they were all partying and all wearing masks.
And one guy showed up dressed as the Red Death.
And everybody was horrendously offended.
How could you bring the Red Death in here?
How could you remind us of what's going on outside?
How could you dare?
How dare you?
And so the prince shouted, seize him and unmask him.
And they went and grabbed the guy who was dressed as the Red Death and pulled his mask off.
And there was nothing behind it because he was the Red Death, right?
And it says the last line of the story is, he had come like a thief in the night and one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel and died each in the despairing posture of his fall.
And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay and the flames of the tripods expired and darkness and decay and the red death held illimitable dominion over all.
See, the thing is, the thing they were trying to escape was ultimately inescapable.
And if you think you're safe and if you think you're so rich, nothing can touch you and you think you're so healthy, everything's going to be fine.
You couldn't be hit by a car.
You can get a sudden disease and be knocked over, when you see death, you are twice 10 times as frightened as those people who know that it's always, always right within the corner.
The Red Death can always get in.
When you live in the illusion that you're free to do whatever you want.
See, the reason people abandoned their sense of spirituality is because they don't like the rules.
They want to be free, right?
So they think, well, I'm just a body.
It's nothing.
I'm just a body.
I can be anything I want, but the body is limited.
This is the thing.
The body makes you who you are.
And that is why the other people who really offended me were the people who said that masks didn't matter, that they were nothing.
You know, so put on a mask.
Why are you getting so upset?
Put on a mask.
Not to see women's faces is a tremendous blow.
And for women not to be able to show their faces was in fact dehumanizing and a blow.
You know, we become people by looking at our mother's faces.
We have these things called mirror neurons that are set on fire by the fact that our eyes meet our mother's eyes when we're babies.
You know, that's how we fall in love.
We see a face, that fabulous face, like from the Cole Porter song.
And to pretend that the way women look is not important is a dodge.
It is something they tell you, so you will not realize what you are.
I have a deep memory from when I was a kid.
And this is, I'm talking about 50 years ago.
I read a book by Nathaniel Hawthorne called The House of the Seven Gables.
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter.
He was writing in the mid-1800s.
And I remembered this paragraph so well that when I went to look it up for this, all I had to do was bring up the book and search one word in it, and I found it instantly.
And I don't remember passages.
I have a very bad memory for passages.
Here is just an observation, a writerly observation, in the House of the Seven Gables.
The heroine steps off a bus and a gentleman gets out of the bus first and helps her down.
Here's the description.
A gentleman alighted, but it was only to offer his hand to a young girl whose slender figure, nowise needing such assistance, now lightly descended the steps and made an airy little jump from the final one to the sidewalk.
She rewarded her cavalier with a smile, the cheery glow of which was seen reflected on his own face as he re-entered the vehicle.
And I remember just being absolutely bowled over by that paragraph for so many reasons.
The word that I searched when I went back for it was rewarded because I remembered she rewarded him with a smile and it changed his life.
And Nathaniel Hawthorne goes out of his way to tell you this woman doesn't need help coming down.
She's in no wise needs such assistance.
She jumps off the last step.
She's a healthy young girl with a slender figure.
She doesn't need help.
But this guy gets off the bus, helps, gives her a hand, takes her hand as she comes down the bus, and is rewarded with this smile, which transforms his day, right?
So he gives her something, which is a kind of ritual, a kind of rite that he performs that has nothing to do with her needs.
It has nothing to do with her.
I want just a lady.
I can't walk down the bus.
Nothing to do with that.
That's what the feminists tell you.
It had nothing to do with it.
And she rewards him with a smile, which changes his day.
You know, there is a paragraph in Douglas Murray's book, The Madness of Crowds, which I just love.
Douglas is a really smart guy, great observer, and he can say things because he's gay that I think straight guys feel like they can't say.
And he's talking about the fact that the left reduces everything to power relationships.
They learned this from Michel Foucault.
They think everything is about power.
And he says they don't talk about the fact that there's a power that women wield almost exclusively.
This is reading from his book.
And the most obvious power they have exclusively is this.
Women, not all women, but many women, have an ability that men do not.
This is the ability to drive members of the opposite sex mad, to derange them, not just to destroy them, but to make them destroy themselves.
It is a type of power which allows a young woman in her late teens or 20s to take a man with everything in the world at the height of his achievements, torment him, make him behave like a fool, and wreck his life utterly for just a few minutes of almost nothing.
Women's faces are celebrated in poetry, all the great poetry, of course.
And we all know the phrase from Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus.
Dr. Faustus sold the soul to the devil.
He wanted all knowledge.
And one of the things he wanted was to look into the face of Helen of Troy.
And he sees her.
He sees her like in a crystal ball.
And he says, was this the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
You can think of the most handsome man you want, Brad Pitt, whoever you find attractive.
He never launched a thousand ships and never will, or burned the topless.
The topless means they're so high you can't see the top of them.
The topless towers of Ilium.
Women's faces are celebrated in poem after poem.
And the beauty of women's faces is not always classically beautiful.
I've said before, I fell in love with a very plain woman once, and the more I got to know her, the more beautiful she became.
The more I fell in love with her, the more beautiful she became.
Shakespeare writes one of his greatest sonnets, My Mistress's Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun.
He talks about the fact that she doesn't look classically beautiful, but she is beautiful to him.
The sheer power of beauty is something that only women possess, which implies that the sheer power to appreciate beauty as it should be appreciated, at least that beauty, belongs to men.
You know, again, feminists hate this.
It implies a mutual responsibility.
They're always complaining about, oh, you know, men will come and say, why don't you smile?
Why don't you smile?
That's a disgusting, you know, that's a stupid thing to say.
It's a borish thing to say.
But it implies that there's something going on between body and body all the time.
You are always defined by your body.
And this is the thing.
They do not want this.
And so it doesn't surprise you.
When I read this article in the Daily Wire, listen to this.
A number of women have come forth asserting they would prefer to keep wearing masks, even after the general public has discarded them.
With some of the women offering explanations such as a mask functions as an invisibility cloak or acts almost like taking away the male gaze, that male gaze, they hate that.
The women who preferred keeping masks were interviewed by The Guardian.
Here's what some of them said.
I don't want to feel the pressure of smiling at people to make sure everyone knows I'm friendly and likable.
It's almost like taking away the male gaze.
There's freedom in taking that power back.
So the greatest power she has, she has stripped herself of in order to take away from men the pleasure that they get out of it.
I appreciated that I felt, here's someone else says, I appreciated that I felt a bit more anonymous in a mask and more gender ambiguous.
After lockdown ended, it was confronting to go out and be exposed to all that offhand racism, sexism, and misgendering from strangers again.
You know what she should have done?
She should have moved to Saudi Arabia and worn one of those black costumes.
That's what they're there for.
They're there to keep women from exciting men.
They do not, they are afraid.
They're afraid of the pleasure of men because they think the pleasure of men is a power they don't have, which is probably true in some sense.
And they don't want to have the generosity to give what they have to men who enjoy it.
And there's an article in Inside Hook which says a mere face covering isn't going to deter the more dedicated cat callers and unwanted attention givers among us.
The lips may be the vagina of the face, but suffice to say, cat callers still have plenty of other material to work with.
Again, so they could just dress up in the Muslim black Muslim sack.
All of this stuff, all of this stuff is the wages of materialism.
It is the wages of thinking you can set yourself free by not believing in God, by not believing in the rules that God has set, by not being bound by what God wants you to do, by the moral universe that God has created.
They think they're going to be free, but instead they become fearful, they become bound up, they become afraid of their own bodies because their bodies present limitations.
There is a girl who went viral on TikTok with this TikTok videos, Cut 18.
I'm not body positive.
I'm not body neutral.
I'm body negative.
I want to be vapor.
Or like a plume of blue smoke.
Or mist.
Or a rumor.
Might be a rumor.
Maybe a miasma, even.
Because like gender, humiliating.
An ache, a pain, needing to sit down.
Spatial awareness?
The vulgarity.
There's bones.
There's bones in my face.
There's bones in your face.
Aren't you embarrassed?
Every day I wake up and am subject to the burden of embodiment.
How dare I be a shape?
Disgusting.
My son, Spencer Clavin, no relation, wrote a wonderful piece.
I'm not sure it's up yet, at the American Mind.
He's going to post to the American Mind called Body Positivity.
And he points to Genesis.
He makes this point.
He talks about Genesis, the words in Genesis, then the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.
And Spencer says, no matter how many times we hear this creation story, we tend to overlook a central part of it, which is the words living soul describe not the disembodied breath of life, nor the clay figurine into whose nostrils God breathes, but the whole complex of united body and breath.
Breath, which was called pneumo, which also means spirit.
When we lose that wholeness, we become disgusted by ourselves.
We become disgusted by what we are.
And this is what has happened to so many on the left.
They have lost the fact that they, you know, the body is a language.
Matter is language.
Matter is a language for speaking of immaterial things, right?
Matter is a way your body speaks your soul.
Your body speaks your soul, just like your actions speak immaterial things.
If you do something kind, if you do something cruel, that speaks the immaterial ideas of cruelty and kindness, good and evil.
And women represent part of the beauty of creation and men's reaction to that.
Yeah, I know there's such a thing as sex.
See, Freud said that we repress our sexual urge and therefore we create art.
But that's not right.
Our sexual urge is in itself.
Our bodies are themselves a metaphor for things that we also try to express through art.
There is more to life than flesh, but we are only flesh.
We're only flesh, but the flesh is speaking the body.
Democrats and the Ring of Power00:12:19
And what would it be?
How would we treat each other if we thought of each other like that?
How would we treat women if we thought of them as representing some yin of God, some beauty in the universe that is beyond even their ability to express?
How would we treat men if we thought that they were thinking of women that way?
What I think we would do is I think we would get off the bus and help women come down to honor them.
And I think women would smile at us to reward us.
So I would like to tell you that I have ring alarm and ring doorbells on my home, but I don't have a home anymore.
So I can't tell you that.
But when I have a home, you can believe that I am going to surround it with a ring of security with ring products.
There are a thousand reasons why protecting our home matters.
If someone stops by or something's going on outdoors around the house, ring will let you know.
It's peace of mind anytime, knowing that your home is protected.
I would like to say that at my house, I can keep an eye on every corner of our house, but I can't because my house is gone.
But still, I will have a house and there will be rings, easy to install, indoor and outdoor cams on it.
And it's never been more important to be able to see who's there or what's happening anytime around the house, inside or outside.
You can see it all on a simple app.
Start protecting your home today with Ring Alarm.
Go to ring.com/slash Clavin to get your Ring Alarm security kit today.
You can build the system that's right for your home and have it up and running in minutes.
Anyone comes to your home, say, where does Clavin live?
They won't know, but they may know how to spell it.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no easy things.
Orange Man Bad.
January 6th, Commission.
Good.
Liz Cheney.
Thursday, May 20th, 2021.
Poor Liz Cheney.
You know, speaking of masks and speaking of looking at things rightly, it really disturbs me the way people talk about politics as if it were a matter of angels and devils fighting in the sky, you know, instead of being about winning and trying to get as much of you can get done and compromise, the kinds of things that politics used to be about and should be about in a democracy.
It should be about compromise.
should be about arguing and not about trying to silence people.
But we're now fighting this kind of scorched earth.
And I'm watching this.
You know, there was a vote in the House that may not make it through the Senate, but 35 stupid Republicans joined with the Democrats in voting to form a January 6th commission to investigate the riot that took place in the Capitol building.
And I want to say up front, I know a lot of people on the right don't want to hear this, but January 6th was disgusting.
It was disgusting.
It was disgusting to have people charge into the Capitol building, the place where our government takes place.
And I know we don't like the government very much.
Still, it was disgusting.
And Trump didn't act well.
He didn't end it fast enough.
But, you know, it was also disgusting.
I mean, I don't like that people make excuses about it, or the cops invited them in, you know, or only one person was killed, and that was the girl who was shot by the police.
You know, still, still, this is not what you want going on.
You know, in 1933, there was a fire in the Reichstag building in Germany.
You've all probably heard of the Reichstag fire.
A communist, this is what they think happened.
There's a lone communist named Marinus van der Lube set fire to it.
And Hitler used that to basically strip the people of any power whatsoever.
He basically became a dictator using the fear that communists were attacking the parliament, right?
Now, I can see some people on the right being fooled by that.
Look, a communist did this.
A communist.
But the people on the left are being fooled by this as well.
And it really is painful to watch, because there are good people on the left, but they don't realize that the Democrats have left the building.
So yes, I think we should just admit a 1-6 was disgusting.
January 6th was disgusting.
People shouldn't have done it.
There are no two sides to it.
They just shouldn't have done it.
It was wrong.
Trump should have acted faster, should have spoken out more forcefully to bring them to heel.
I'll go with that.
But that doesn't mean, it doesn't mean, I mean, the communists shouldn't have set fire to the Reichstag, too.
It doesn't mean the left isn't using this to gain more power.
And this left, the current left, is fascist.
They're not Nazis.
They're not trying to going out to exterminate people.
They're not that kind of, there's not that kind of violence inherent in them, but they're still, they're allowing people to commit violence all over.
They're allowing BLM and Antifa to burn places down and riot and defy the law.
They're not saying very much about these people who are now attacking Jews.
It didn't just happen where I was in LA.
It happened in New York.
They were throwing fireworks.
Pro-Palestinian marchers were throwing fireworks at Jewish people.
It's been going on on campuses for a long time.
The attacks on Jewish people.
Jewish people are attacked in this country vastly more than any other minority group, vastly, vastly more than any other minority group.
So while they're talking about Japanese, Japanese, about Asians who are getting attacked mostly by black people who get angry at them for doing so well for being kind of the favored minority, while they're passing laws about that, it's Jews who are getting attacked more than anything.
The left is using January 6th to criminalize and silence people on the right.
Okay?
I mean, listen to the rhetoric.
Here's Chuck Schumer talking about this.
Cut three.
What the Republicans are doing, the House Republicans, is beyond crazy to be so far under the thumb of Donald J. Trump.
Letting the most dishonest president in American history dictate the prerogatives of the Republican Party will be its demise.
Mark my words.
Whatever that means for Democrats, it's bad for America.
We know, we all know, there needs to be a thorough and honest accounting of what took place on January 6th, the greatest attempted insurrection since the Civil War.
Give me a break.
You know, a couple of guys in Viking hats went into the play.
And again, it was disgusting.
I'm not supporting it in any way, shape, or form.
That's the civil war in Chuck Schumer's mind.
It's not.
I mean, he's lying.
He's just making stuff up, trying to gin up this kind of panic, the same kind of panic that Hitler ginned up over the Reichstag fire.
It's the same kind of thing.
Again, they're not Nazis.
The Democrats aren't Nazis, but they are fascists.
They do want big corporations to control people's speech and to control people's behaviors.
They want the schools to spread propaganda about their crazy sexual ideas and their crazy racial ideas, their racist ideas.
They are fascist in that regard, and they are using this terror of a couple of people who did the wrong thing to basically demonize an entire party.
There are already investigations going on.
The Justice Department has arrested 445 people from this thing.
I'd like to know how many people are still in prison from the riots in Portland, the ongoing riots in Portland, the riots that took place in New York, the riots that took place in Minneapolis.
How many of those people are actually going to be punished as badly as these people do?
There are other investigations already going on.
And this thing, when they first put this forward, it was so weighted to Democrats that they finally had to cave in and say it was going to be five Democrats and five Republicans.
But they still have some sneaky little things in there where the Democrats have more power to get information and to subpoena information and the Republicans have less.
So it's not going to be, it's not going to be a fair and honest examination.
And all these people, the 35 Republicans, this is what I mean by people who don't understand politics.
The 35 Republicans who signed on for this, they think that they're displaying virtue and displaying how fair they are.
They're just being fools.
And Liz Cheney, this is the other thing about Liz Cheney.
And I don't question Liz Cheney's integrity, by the way.
You know, Liz Cheney was stripped of her power.
She was stripped.
She was the third highest ranking person in the House, and she was stripped of her power.
That's a genuine thing of worth that she was willing to sacrifice to say what she had to say.
It is not her integrity that I'm attacking, but listen to what she said.
I will do everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office.
We have seen the danger that he continues to provoke with his language.
We have seen his lack of commitment and dedication to the Constitution.
And I think it's very important that we make sure whomever we elect is somebody who will be faithful to the Constitution.
So stop flopping your mouth.
You know, that's the answer.
Stop flapping your mouth.
You can have your opinions, but the point of politics, the point of politics, this is going to kill you because a lot of you don't know this.
The point of politics is to get more votes instead of less votes so that you win instead of lose.
People always write to me and they say, well, the Democrats stole the election.
If they did, they got away with it.
So they did a good job.
And they could have been stopped.
If they did steal it, they could have been stopped if people had been paying attention before the election took place.
The idea is to come out at the end with more votes instead of less votes so that you win instead of lose.
Is what Liz Cheney doing, is that going to help the Republican Party get more votes?
No.
The thing is, Donald Trump is gone as a person.
He's not going to run.
I don't believe he's going to run again.
But Trumpism is a big part of the future of the Republican Party.
Dan Crenshaw gets it just right.
He's an ex-president.
You can't just excommunicate him, right?
He's an ex-leader of our party.
And trying to excommunicate him in an aggressive fashion will never work.
He does have a large base of support within our party.
But what also won't work is this belief that he will continue to be the leader of our party in the future.
That's also unrealistic.
And I think he deserves an amount of respect from our party.
And I think that's what people were reacting to this week.
We don't need him.
I think a large majority of Republicans are looking towards that, what the next leadership looks like, but they also don't want this disrespect of our former leader either.
He was attacked, of course, by the left for wanting it both ways, but he was telling the exact right truth.
That is the exact truth.
The way Republicans could change to get more votes instead of less votes is to start talking in moral terms.
This is a problem, a serious problem that conservatives have that the left doesn't have.
The left comes forward and says, we want things to be fair.
Pay your fair share.
We want things to be nice.
You know, we don't want racism.
And we talk about people making money.
We talk about people having freedom.
We have to make people understand why freedom, why freedom is a moral thing, why capitalism is a moral force.
And we don't talk about that enough.
And it was one of the things that Trump was pretty good at.
He was pretty good.
What he was really good at was shouting down their lies.
And that was a terrific thing.
And it was just so much fun.
It was hard to take your eyes away from it.
But if we can put forward a moral vision that freedom is a moral vision, which it is, we can start to take back the House and eventually the White House.
There's no question about it in my mind.
We don't have to ditch Trump.
We don't have to follow Trump.
We just have to remember that Trumpism, the idea that the culture is important, the moral tone of the culture is important, which is what Trumpism really was.
If we remember that, I think we can take back the power.
So as you know, I'm not like you mortals who have to sleep at night and want a comfortable Helix sleep mattress to sleep on.
I want a comfortable Helix sleep mattress to lie awake on.
And I can actually appreciate how comfortable Helix sleep mattresses are.
They have a quiz that takes just two minutes to complete and matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you.
Whether you're a side sleeper, a hot sleeper, or like me, a non-sleeper, you can find the bed you want.
Helix mattresses have a 10-year warranty.
They're made right in America, and you get to try it out for 100 nights, risk-free, and they will even pick it up for you for free if you don't love it, but you will.
Perpetual Virginity Debate00:08:11
Right now, Helix is offering up to 200 bucks off all mattress orders at helixleep.com slash clavin.
Get up to $200 off at helixsleep.com slash clavin.
You want to be as comfortable as possible, whether you're sleeping like a wuss or lying awake all night contemplating the big questions like, how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
I was just going to say that.
One of the things I've loved about doing this longer show is I get to talk more about culture and religion, which I believe are really the underlying issues that are being acted out in terms of politics.
Everybody thinks we're going to solve things in the Capitol and in the White House, but I don't.
I think we're going to solve things in our culture and in our spiritual lives if we solve them at all.
And I did a segment two weeks ago called How I Read the Bible, where I talked about reading the way I look at the Bible, the way the Bible plays in my life and what I think of it as I'm reading it.
And it made people so angry and alienated so many people.
And I got so many angry letters, I thought I'd do it again because that's what I'm here for.
I'm here to offend each and every single person that I can, within the sound of my voice.
If you can hear me, I want you to be offended and alienated.
You know, I think the thing is that we have learned, it's a human trait, but we've kind of amped it up a little bit.
We've learned to listen to be offended.
We listen to be offended.
We listen to hear, does he say something that's offensive to, you know, I didn't, and you know, I don't know.
I called the segment how I read the Bible, not how to read the Bible.
What I am looking for in the Bible and how I see it when I read it.
And, you know, I don't want to claim authority.
I don't have authority at all, but I'm a highly read, deeply read literary critic.
I mean, it's something I know how to do.
And so I read it.
I approach the Bible in that way.
And it means some things to me that I know people disagree with.
I know people disagree with.
But does that mean you have to be offended?
My religious beliefs are different from other people because I came to Christ differently.
It took me 45 years just to believe in God and 49 years before I was baptized.
I was a secular Jew and I come to it from a different point of view and I see things differently.
And I think for some people, that may actually be refreshing and actually give you a new way of seeing it after listening to things, especially if you're a cradle Catholic or a cradle Methodist, cradle whatever Presbyterian, you know, you may have heard the same things over and over again and maybe it just gives you a different way of seeing it.
You have to remember that people have been talking about this religion for over 2,000 years and not every one of them has said the same thing.
And many of them have very different ways of looking at them.
Obviously, Catholics and Protestants have very, very different ways of looking.
But do we necessarily need to be offended by the ways that people disagree?
Not all the time.
There may be some things that are offensive, but not all the time.
I mean, in the Reformation, right, people said all kinds of things.
They said that Christ wasn't divine.
They said there was no Trinity.
They said all sorts of things.
You can only be saved by faith alone and your actions don't matter.
They said that as well.
Antinomianism, I guess it was called.
And people burned each other at the stake for that and fought one of the bloodiest, ugliest wars in history, the 30-year war.
And after those wars were over was when people started to say, you know, let's not talk about religion anymore.
Let's not have state religions and let's have a separation of church and state and ultimately started squeezing religion out of the public square.
And I don't think that that's, I think that's a very bad thing.
I think it's a very ugly thing.
I think it's the reason everybody's so scared.
I think it's the reason people feel bad about their bodies.
We had Alan Dershowitz on the other day and he was, it was a great conversation, but at one point he said something which I was running out of time.
I really wanted to challenge.
He said, our rights can't come from God because there are just too many gods.
And I thought, yeah, there are a lot of answers to two plus two also, but only one of them is correct.
And we should be talking about that.
And we should all talk about it.
And we should be able to argue and disagree.
And so, how do you judge?
There's so many different versions of Christianity.
Why do people write to me with such certainty that theirs is the right one?
It doesn't mean there isn't a right one.
It doesn't mean that they may not have hit upon the right one.
But why are they so self-certain that they can't even hear someone else's point of view with how I read the Bible?
And what I just do when I listen to what people are saying is I ask myself the question, does this bring you closer to Christ or not?
Does it bring you closer to thinking and seeing through the eyes of Jesus and having Jesus be alive in you, or does it not?
So let me give you an example, an example of something where I and my Catholic friends, I have many, many Catholic friends, and Knowles, who is a Catholic that I know.
I don't want to call him a friend, obviously, for obvious reasons.
But here's something we argue about from time to time, which is the perpetual virginity of Mary.
Catholics believe that Mary was a virgin her whole life when you see pictures painted by Catholics and they say, Joseph, he's always an old man.
And that's how they explain that she remained a virgin even after her marriage.
Now, I read the Bible, and I don't think that's true.
They were married for 12 years.
We know they were married for at least 12 years.
We know that Joseph was alive for at least 12 years because the Catholic idea is he died very quickly after they were married.
But we know he was alive for at least 12 years.
We know that Jesus had people he called his brothers and sisters.
James was frequently called the brother of Christ.
And, you know, there are all these explanations, ways that Catholics explain these things away.
But I don't think it's true.
And I don't think they basically have sort of semi-deified Mary.
She had magic power.
She gave birth without being in pain.
She was assumed bodily into heaven.
I don't believe in those things.
However, I don't think they necessarily move you further away from Christ because I think that they express something profound about who Mary was.
Giving birth to the incarnate God is the ultimate feminine act.
It is the ultimate act of femininity.
Feminists complain that God is always represented as male in the Bible.
He's the father.
He's the bridegroom to our bride.
But because they say he contains both masculine and feminine, and we know that to be true, right?
We know that God contains both masculine and feminine because it says he created man and woman in his image, male and female, he created in his image.
So we know that he contains both masculine and feminine, but he's always masculine to us.
We are made by him, but we don't come out of him.
So he's always the father.
And whatever we give birth to, he has put into us.
Whatever comes out of us, he has put into us.
So we are always the bride to his bridegroom.
And that's why I think he's always called male, not because he's male, but because we are always in that relationship to him.
And Mary, in that regard, in giving birth to God, is performing the ultimate human act.
She's performing the ultimate human act.
Since everything we bring forward is from God, and what she brings forward is God.
She is performing the ultimate human act.
So Mary is the ultimate representative of humanity in her femininity in relationship to God.
And that is a major, major role to have played in human history.
And so when the Catholics virtually worship Mary, I think they are doing something that has an essential truth to it.
And I think it can very easily bring them closer to Christ.
So it doesn't bother me.
You know, it's not something, you know, I don't get into vicious fights about it.
I'm not offended by it.
I've heard Protestants go off on it like it was a tremendous sin.
I think there are bad sides to it.
I think Catholics have views of sex that I don't agree with because of the perpetual virginity of Mary.
I don't think virginity is necessarily a good thing in a wife.
I would like to think that the mother of God was a great wife, and I don't think a wife should be a perpetual virgin.
But still, I don't think any of us is going to get to the pearly gates and they're going to give us a quiz on this.
And if we get the answer wrong, we're doomed.
I don't think that that's the way it works.
I think it is a beautiful idea that does express something true.
And so, you know, it's fine with me.
And I don't know that I'm right.
I think I'm right, but I don't know that I'm right.
I don't have that kind of self-certainty because so many things, so many wise men have believed in this.
You know, if Thomas Aquinas believed in it, if St. Augustine believed in it, you know, if I say it's not true, I could well be right, but I shouldn't be right with too much self-certainty.
Plank And Speck00:06:39
Oh, now I get to talk about the new product from my pillow, my slippers.
I love slippers because I'm up a lot at night and I'm walking around and I don't want to step on anything, so I've always got slippers on.
These my slippers are so comfortable.
I had to pack them because I'm moving.
I didn't want, my wife was pulling them out of my hands.
These slippers took over two years to develop.
They're designed to wear indoors and outdoors all day long.
My slippers are made with my pillow foam and impact gel to help prevent fatigue and are made with quality leather suede.
I didn't know that about the impact foam.
No wonder they're so comfortable.
They really feel good.
You are going to love them.
The whole family is going to want them.
I now have the sheets, the pillows, the slippers from my pillow.
And like all of their products, comfort is key.
Go to mypillow.com and click on the Radio Listener Square and use promo code DAILYWIRE.
You'll also get deep discounts on all my pillow products, including the Giza Dream bed sheets, the MyPillow Mattress Topper and MyPillow towel sets.
Or you can call 800-951-7163 and use promo code DAILYWIRE with them.
Visit mypillow.com now or call 800-951-7163.
The question that always gets people crazy when I talk about it is the question of judgment.
It is a huge, huge thing because it is, because Jesus says, judge not lest you be judged.
So there's a lot at stake, right?
And I frequently talk about the fact that Jesus didn't say, judge not hypocritically.
And all these ways of reading these things are just a way of getting away from the fact that he said, judge not.
He said, let him who is without sin throw the first stone, right?
He said, why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?
How can you say to your brother, let me take the speck out of your eye when all the time there's a plank in your own eye, you hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.
And a lot of Christians write to me and they say, well, see, he said, take the plank out of your own eye.
Yeah, he also said, let him who is without sin throw the first stone, knowing that nobody was without sin in the same way he knows that nobody ever gets the plank out of his own eye because we're always blinded by our pride.
We're always blinded by our selfishness and our sin.
And we never have cleansed ourselves or cleansed our vision or our hearts well enough to judge anybody else.
So a lot of people who complained about my feelings about this, the way I read this, sent me a quote from 1 Corinthians, or as we now call it now, 1 Corinthians 5, 12.
And this is Paul writing, obviously, to the Corinthians, and he says, I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people.
I did not at all mean with the immoral people of this world or with the covetous and swindlers or with idolaters, for then you would have to go out of the world.
But actually, I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person or covetous or an idolater or a reviler or a drunkard or a swindler, not even to eat with such a one.
For what have I to do with judging outsiders?
Do you not judge those who are within the church, but those who are outside, God judges.
Remove the wicked man from among yourself.
Now, I find this a problematic verse because Jesus sat down with sinners.
He said, I came not for the well, I came for the sick.
And I think we should be there for people as well.
And I think being sinners, all the more so should we withhold our judgments of sinners.
And again, as I said in my previous how I read the Bible, I elevate the words of Jesus above the words of Paul, above the words of anybody, because Paul, what I read in Paul is the story of a man forming a church and trying to figure out the rules of finding a church, a true story.
It's an absolutely true story.
And trying to figure out what these events meant.
And he was such a brilliant man that he said brilliant things about what these events meant.
But when Jesus speaks, I hear somebody who is holy telling me how to live.
And that's my chief interest in the Bible.
I am not interested in, well, I am interested, but I'm not interested in the big theology.
When will the world end?
We don't know.
Is God three persons, you know, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?
I believe that with all my heart.
But if I get to heaven and it turns out he's five guys named Mo, I'll be satisfied.
You know, that's not the thing that I'm trying to figure out.
I have a small role.
I am not God.
My role is to figure out how to live.
So what does it look like to live without judgment?
Well, one thing that it doesn't look like, it doesn't look like not taking care of business, right?
We have to take care of business.
We all know this.
We live in the world.
We can't let criminals run free.
We still have to put criminals in prison, not just for protection, but so there's a sense of justice in the world.
You know, our justice is imperfect.
If we put a guy in prison, we may have deprived a child of a father, so there's more likelihood that he'll go to prison.
Everything we try to do has a place where it goes wrong.
Everything, everything, because we live in a broken, sinful world.
But we still have to do it.
We have to do it understanding that we're doing something in a broken, sinful world, a machine that doesn't work, that is set into a bigger universe that does work.
We may have to go to war.
We may have to kill our enemies.
We can't just say, oh, I'm not going to do that, because if we don't do it, someone's going to have to do it for us.
So that's not actually a moral thing to do.
We have to take hypocrites out of leadership in the church.
I know that.
When a church, for instance, believes that divorce is wrong, which I think in most cases it is, and their leadership gets divorced, I think they have to take him out of leadership.
I think if they are preaching against homosexuality and it turns out their leadership is gay, they got to take him out of leadership.
These are things, all things that we have to do if we're going to run our organizations, which is essentially what Paul was trying to do.
But you know, when people say to me, oh, if you love somebody, you will tell him not to sin.
My answer to that is, does that work?
I mean, if it works, go right ahead.
I can think of times when I've said to somebody, you're doing the wrong thing, when I knew it would work, when I knew I had that authority in their lives or that respect in their lives and the moment had come when they were questioning themselves.
Other times, I've heard people tell me they were doing terrible things and I've kept my mouth shut, right?
Something happened to me last night that it almost sounds like I'm making it up because it fits in with this so well, but I'm not making it up.
I got in early and I had the pleasure of seeing my son Spencer Clavin, a no-relation, and Knowles was with him, which, you know, less of a pleasure, but still he was there.
And my pal, James Polos, who I like and James's girlfriend.
And we just had a wonderful conversation, but everybody had to go somewhere after that.
So I had a lovely hour or so with them.
A Moment of Beauty00:02:51
And then they all had to go somewhere.
And I went alone and had a drink, a kind of nightcap and a cigar.
And while I was sitting there, one of these moments came over me, which happens from time to time.
That is an incredibly joyful moment when suddenly the judgment of things left me.
And suddenly I saw what I think God sees, which is people are incredibly beautiful and the world is incredibly beautiful.
And each one of these persons that was passing by on the street, that was sitting around me in the cigar bar, each one of them was creating a world, was continuing God's work of creation in their own experience by experiencing the world in this unique way.
Their love, their hate, their sins, their faults, their imagination, their daydreams, all of it, all of it was a little part of creation that was going on in front of me.
And I suddenly could see it.
I was thinking, I got to find out the name of the cigar so I can order it again the next time I'm here.
The more moments you have like that, the more moments you have like that, the more just you will be, the more you will know when it is right to speak in love and when it's right to keep your mouth shut, even though you know so very well that somebody else is committing a sin, the more moments you have like that, the more you will be able to obey the words of Psalm 37, which is, do not fret because of those who are evil or be envious of those who do wrong, for like the grass, they will soon wither like green plants.
They will soon die away.
Refrain from anger and turn from wrath.
Do not fret.
It leads only to evil.
For those who are evil will be destroyed, but those who hope in the Lord will inherit the land.
We don't have to do this job.
We do not have to do the job of judgment.
It is God's job, and we are not God.
So as you know, I love the good things in life, and one of the good things I love is a really good whiskey.
And if you believe in standing for the national anthem or supporting our military and first responders, or you just want to celebrate a job well done, then Redneck Riviera Whiskey is your whiskey.
It's sourced from America's heartland, blended and bottled in Kentucky.
Redneck Riviera Whiskey is the smoothest whiskey available from the glass to the cork and whiskey inside.
It's 100% made in the USA.
The Redneck Riviera brand is also 100% owned by John Rich.
This isn't just another celebrity endorsed brand.
He owns it.
He loves it.
Redneck Riviera whiskey can be found in 48 states and over 11,000 retail stores like Walmart, Winn-Dixie, Publix, Safeway, Albertson's, Specs, and others.
I love a good whiskey.
This is a good whiskey.
For more information or to find a store near you, visit redneckriviera.com.
That's redneckriera.com.
Drink American.
Redneck Riviera Whiskey is a distilled spirit with 40% ABV.
Redneck Spirits Group is responsible for this ad and is located at 10917 Old Harrods Woods Circle, Louisville, Kentucky, 40223.
Striving Toward Central Tendency00:14:43
Hey, don't forget we have a backstage next week on Wednesday, which is good for me because I'll be here.
At least I have someplace to be, which is great.
But I will be here with all the gang and we will be talking about the news of the day.
Well, some bow to political correctness and some write entire books revealing its insidious roots badly.
Michael Knowles is the latter.
In his new book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, Knowles masterfully breaks down the history of political correctness and what America's future will look like if we don't stop its growth.
I cannot tell a lie.
I read this book.
It is actually really, really good.
Head to speechlessbook.com to pre-order your copy today.
Or if you want an extra personal touch, now most people get an extra personal touch from Knowles, call HR, but you can text speechless to 53445 to pre-order a signed copy.
Pre-order your copy today and understand the PC Police better than they understand themselves.
If you're interested in winning a trip to the Daily Wire headquarters to walk the very same halls as myself, now is your chance.
You won't meet me, of course, because I'm not going to be here, but you will meet Candace Owens.
If you sign up as a Daily Wire member with code VIP, you'll get 20% off your new membership and be automatically entered for a chance to win a trip to the Daily Wire studios to see Candace live.
Not only will you be meeting Candace, you'll be getting an inside look at her studio, our office, and front row seats to watch her live and in action on her talk show, Candace.
So don't wait.
Go enter to win a Candace VIP pass now at dailywire.com slash subscribe using code VIP for 20% off and for an experience that only Joe Biden could forget.
I am so delighted to have Jordan Peterson back on the show.
I had him on originally when he had about 600 views on YouTube.
Our mutual friend, the thrill writer Greg Hurwitz, told me about him and I watched him and I thought, oh boy, this guy has really got something.
He has since become the man the New York Times calls the most influential public intellectual in the Western world.
Right now, he is a Canadian clinical psychologist, a cultural critic, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, and of course, the author of 12 Rules for Life, an Antidote for Chaos, and a new book, Beyond Order, 12 More Rules for Life.
Jordan, welcome back.
Thanks, Andrew.
It's really good to see you.
I think I had more than 600 subscribers.
Maybe not many more.
The first time I looked at you, the first time Greg told me about you, I looked at you and you were just, it was really the clicker was just starting.
And had I had hair, it would have stood on end.
But I was just, I was really taken with what you were saying and you were making a courageous stance.
And it was great.
It was great.
You know, one of the things that has become a genuine mystery to me, you wrote this book, 12 Rules for Life.
And obviously, it's a deeply philosophical book, but at its core are rules for life, like make your bed, stand up straight.
And you have become one of the most hated men in America for telling people that.
My sister, Caitlin, she's really my sister-in-law, but at this point she's graduated to my sister.
Caitlin Flanagan wrote this about you.
She said, there are many legitimate reasons to disagree with him on a number of subjects, and many people of goodwill do, but there's no coherent reason for the left's obliterating an irrational hatred of Jordan Peterson.
What accounts for it?
And being my sister Katie, she then answers her own question.
She says, it is because the left, while it currently seems ascendant in our houses of culture and art, has in fact entered its decadent late phase and it is deeply vulnerable.
Is that why people, do you agree with that?
Is that why people hate you?
Fortunately, most people don't hate me.
And that is, I really mean that fortunately, because I don't know how it would be possible to live really as someone who was, you know, reviled.
When I'm in public, people are very kind to me always, or virtually without exception.
I think I've had two negative encounters with people publicly, which was plenty, but it's out of thousands and thousands.
And why I raise the ire of a certain proportion of people, well, some of that's political confusion, I suppose, and some of it's something deeper.
I mean, Nellie Bowles in the New York Times called me sort of ironically defender of the patriarchy, you know, and that's actually true.
And I think that's why, at the core of it, I think that's why I attract the negative attention I do when I attract it.
Because, and I've thought about too, well, why me specifically?
And God only knows the reason for that.
I mean, but I have some provisional reasons.
And one of them is that I'm an admirer of Enlightenment values and scientific thinking, but I also have deep regard and respect for religious thinking simultaneously.
And I think that makes me somewhat unique because I speak for both sides of the patriarchy, let's say, the spiritual and even traditional side, as well as the scientific side.
And I mean, I understand that there's tensions in holding those views simultaneously, but there's tension in life.
And we're never in a position where we can solve all the mysteries that are presented to us.
You know, I see that the scientific endeavor, the technological endeavor, has dramatically improved people's lives on a material basis.
And I see that the religious and traditional side provides us with meaning and structure.
And we can't throw those things away lightly.
We don't want to throw away progress and we don't want to throw away our higher purpose and or we'll just search for it elsewhere.
And well, and I think that's, I think those are the, are at least part of the reason why, you know, people like to not be very happy with me.
They're always, they're always saying, though.
It really is odd.
I mean, they're always accusing you that you're talking to angry young men.
Is that true?
Oh, no, it's angry young white men because everything has to be about race in our post-race society.
Yeah, well, and you know, I've every time I've been attacked, I've thought about it, let's say, to begin with.
But, you know, then I'm also willing to give the devil his due.
And one of the things I've come to realize about the latter accusation, which the latter accusation, which is, you know, is true within a limited scope.
Some of the people that listen to me are angry.
Some of them are young.
Some of them are white, and some of them are men.
And there's overlap between all four of those groups, an intersectional overlap, you might say.
But even if I was only talking to those people, it's like, is that such a problem?
It's not like I'm trying to marshal them into some sort of marauding horde.
I'm suggesting that, you know, that they have some intrinsic dignity and some worth, and that if they attended to their own affairs diligently and with a certain amount of truth, that that's their best hope.
Not that that'll work, because nothing is as certain, that's for sure.
But we don't have a better alternative than that.
And I'm quite tired of the global assault on, I'm tired of the global assault on human values.
It's not just Western values.
I've been thinking about that too.
That's a very parochial view.
There's something remarkable about the central tendency of Western culture.
But what that remarkable thing is, is the central tendency of humanity.
And I stand beside that, let's say, or try, I suppose, to whatever degree I can to embody and support and transmit it, which is what a university professor is supposed to do.
And so, and I've been trying to puzzle through why it is that those ideas are under such assault.
It's very difficult to understand.
This emphasis on systemic racism, for example, I've been trying to take that apart.
It's a very interesting phrase.
It's a very cunning and manipulative phrase, because the racism part of it leaps out at you and yells and stuns you into kind of an ethical silence.
And then the systemic is just sort of whispered in there.
And systemic is a very serious accusation.
It's not the statement that some of our systems, our social institutions, sometimes tilt in a prejudicial direction in a manner that's harmful to everyone, especially those who are suffering from the prejudice.
It's the claim that the central tendency is racist.
And to me, that's not only wrong.
It's the antithesis of the truth.
And then I have to puzzle out, well, why is this claim being made when the central tendency is what enlightens and frees all of us, unless we're doomed, unless we're in unfathomably corrupt with no hope of redemption, you know, bar the revolution and its hypothetical utopia.
And you have to be a complete bloody fool to believe that that's even hypothetically possible.
Well, you know, one of my favorite pieces of advice in the new book, Beyond Order, 12 More Rules for Life, is abandon ideology.
And just to read a very brief section of it, it says, have some humility, clean up your bedroom, take care of your family, follow your conscience, straighten up your life.
And when you can do all that, find a bigger problem and try to solve that if you dare.
And when I read that, Bill Gates came to mind, a guy trying to change the world who can't keep his marriage together.
But is ideology an escape from personal failure?
Is that what we're dealing with?
Or is something bigger going on?
Because the world, the Western world certainly seems to be in the grips of ideology beyond all.
Well, there's like, as is always the case, there's probably a multitude of reasons.
I mean, we all want to explain as much of the world as we can because we want to be able to predict the world and to control it to some degree.
And so if we're offered up an explanatory theory that conveniently explains virtually everything, and we don't have to test it rigorously in all of its applications, we can just assume that it's correct without rigorously testing it.
Well, there's a certain comfort in that.
Then there's the attraction of being able to band together with like-minded others.
And that's not all reprehensible.
Then there's the social critique element of it.
And God knows that there are problems with our systems and our culture.
And so it's reasonable to want to be on the side that's improving them.
But mostly I see it as a substitute for genuine religious endeavor.
I've thought for a long time, I wrote about this extensively in my first book, Maps of Meaning, that ideology is a parasite on religion, essentially, cognitively speaking, is that we need a domain that addresses the most fundamental issues in life.
This is regardless of your belief in God in some sense.
It's a separate issue.
Psychologically speaking, there's a unifying tendency in our ethical striving that promotes a kind of monotheistic thinking.
And that needs to be parsed out into genuine religious endeavor.
And if it isn't, then it contaminates other domains of endeavor.
They become inevitably, they expand to take that place.
And I think this is a truth, a psychological truth that the new atheists, for example, have failed entirely to recognize or grapple with.
It's like, well, what if we are religious by nature?
And I mean, what does that imply metaphysically?
That's a very, very deep question and a separate question.
But if we are religious by nature, and I do believe the evidence supports that view, then what happens if that instinct isn't being fulfilled?
And the answer for me is that, well, it just finds its satisfaction in secondary sources.
So instead of worshiping Christ, let's say, and we could imagine Christ momentarily as our imaginative representative, representation of the ideal human being, which and his figure is at least that, even technically speaking, we admire Sheikh Wuevara or some subsidiary substitute who has some of the attributes of the mythological hero of the central mythological era, but is lacking many of them.
And we mistake the political for the religious.
And then the totalizing tendency there is, well, we know what that is.
It's unbelievably dangerous because now you're an agent of God.
You know, and I think when you're an agent of God in the real, in the true sense, a horrible thing to contemplate, let's say, is that, well, that's when you're concerned more with your own sins, your own shortcomings, your own transgressions, and your inability to speak the truth.
You know, that's the proper way to focus.
This is, I think, a subject of fascination to everybody who listens to you and certainly to me.
Whenever I've talked to you, I've always, I can't help but ask you if you believe in God.
And I've always felt that I was being kind of cruel, like a guy shooting at somebody's feet, you know, to make them dance around.
But even as you were talking just now, I was thinking, you know, I know you're a Jungian and I'm not as big a fan of Jung as you are.
And I've always thought that Jung didn't actually understand what faith was when he talked about the fact that we don't know whether God is just our experience of the totality of things.
I think people of faith know they don't know.
That's why it's called faith and not knowledge.
Have you changed?
I mean, recently I've watched interviews with you where you seem like you've gotten a more personal, you're having a more personal interaction with this idea.
Is that fair?
Well, when I did, I did a biblical lecture series on Genesis, which has proved to be quite popular, I suppose, if that's the right word for it.
And I discovered while doing that that the word Israel meant those who struggle with God.
Well, that's fair enough.
And so then I'm a member of the camp of Israel.
And is that faith?
Faith and Perception00:08:58
Well, I don't know.
I mean, I've been accused of, you know, wiggling out of this answer continually.
And I mean, I have to take refuge in some sense in my own ignorance.
I'm striving towards what I perceive as the ideal.
I attempt to be truthful in my speech and in my approach to life and to embody the classic virtues to the degree that I'm capable.
And I believe that that is faith because that's what you stake your life on.
Faith is what you stake your life on.
It isn't your agreement with a set of propositions.
I believe that to be an improper interpretation of the word faith because faith is expressed in action.
You have to make assumptions to proceed in life.
You do that in a marriage.
Your marriage is held together by faith.
Well, what does that mean?
Does it mean you believe your wife exists?
No, that isn't what it means.
It means that you've decided that you're going to bet your life on your marriage.
And did I have I bet my life on God?
Well, yes.
Does that mean that I know that God exists?
Well, how would I know?
I can't know, and neither can anyone else.
That's the thing.
You can't know.
And I also do understand that there are experiences that transcend the normative human.
There are experiences that transcend our normal realm, obviously, that they can be induced chemically, for example.
There's a domain of spiritual experience.
But I can't say that I know I understand what that means.
I can just stand outside it in some sense and say, well, I do believe, for example, that what's central to Christianity, at least in part, is a centuries-long discussion about the nature of what's ideal.
That seems to me to be perfectly obvious, and that a society has to do that because we want our young people and our old people, for that matter, to embody the ideal.
I don't know what that ideal means metaphysically, right?
Right, in relationship to reality, because I don't understand, for example, the relationship between the objective and the subjective at all.
And I don't understand consciousness at all.
And I don't know what its metaphysical role in being is.
I mean, from the objective perspective, it's nothing.
But there isn't an objective perspective on consciousness, really.
Right?
It doesn't fit in there.
It's the antithesis of the objective, but there it is.
So I struggle along and I share that with the people that are reading me and listening to me.
And I think that's better.
It works better that way as well.
Well, I can certainly see that, that last point that you made, but I still think there's something missing from that explanation.
It's absolutely certain that everything we experience is what we is a human experience.
Everything takes place in our consciousness.
But when I sit at this on this chair, I'm essentially believing in my own sanity.
I mean, when I have the experience of a moral universe, which I think you have to agree can't exist without a moral ideal, when you have the experience of a moral universe and when you have, when reason has taken you to the point where you can see that that ideal is something that you should follow, isn't it just believing in your own sanity to say, yes, God is there?
That's what I believe in.
I believe my, you know, I don't believe my wife is there.
I know my wife is there.
I believe in my own sanity.
I understand what you're saying, that sharing your struggle is helpful and useful.
But at some point, don't you have to grasp that your perceptions are actually real if you were sane?
That's a good question, Andrew.
I don't know the answer to that to grant under the conditions under which my perceptions are real.
I mean, are dreams real?
No.
Well, but they are my perceptions.
They're really dreams.
They are real in that they're dreams and they are representations of reality.
And but I mean, but if you if you dream that it rains or if somebody chemically induces in you the experience that it rains, the crops still die because the rain hasn't fallen on the crops.
If you see rain and the crops grow, then rain has fallen, right?
There is a difference between our perceptions and our perceptions that are real.
That's the difference between being real.
Well, but that's exactly the issue.
Is you know, you said that you stake your sanity to some degree on your belief that your perceptions are real, but you don't because some of your perceptions fall into the realm of the subjective and some of them fall into the realm of the objective.
And there aren't any of us wise enough to bridge the gap between those two realities.
And I guess this is part of the reason that you also have a problem with Jung.
I mean, I would say Jung certainly acted as if God existed.
And when he was pressed, he said, I don't believe I know.
It isn't obvious what he meant by that.
But when he was pushed as a scientist or a scientifically minded thinker, he said, well, I can't be sure that our perception of the transcendent totality matches an external reality.
Now, but that it may not even have to, because I see, this is something else I don't know.
I mean, to what degree is sublime religious experience subjective?
Let's say it's not a manifestation of, it's not something you experience in the objective world.
It's something you experience in the subjective world.
But then people experience it across the subjective world because religious experience is a human universal and it has patterns and structures that make it non-idiosyncratic.
So it's transpersonal, but it's subjective.
Well, we don't have a category in Western thought for transpersonal subjective, right?
We think of transpersonal as objective.
But there are experiences that are transpersonal and subjective.
Well, what did we do with those?
And are they real?
Well, but then it does, then that also does depend on what do you mean by real?
Because we ask these questions and we don't notice that the questions themselves, especially when they're deep questions, what is real?
Well, when you're asked a question like that, you have to ask the question, well, exactly what role does the word what in that sentence play and is and real.
All of those are equally mysterious questions that are embedded within the question itself.
And so those have to be taken apart.
And that annoys people when I do that, but it doesn't matter because when you ask about what's fundamental, you have to make sure that the tools that you're using to ask about what is fundamental are as fundamental as the question that you're trying to answer.
And that's very, very difficult.
I mean, because we are all split about what we mean by real too, like, because we certainly all believe, at least to the degree that we are rational and scientific, which isn't that much, by the way.
We certainly believe that, insofar as we're capable, that the objective and the scientific is real.
But we act as if the subjective is real as well.
So we certainly act as if other people are conscious, for example, and that that matters and that they have free will, even though we can't make a completely coherent case for that.
I mean, you can't make a coherent case for that that can't be matched by an equally coherent case for the opposite, perhaps.
At least it's debatable.
But we certainly act as if other people are responsible for their actions and so are we and deserve to be rewarded when they're good and deserve to be punished when they're not good.
And so we seem to accept those ethical propositions and an ethical landscape as real.
So, well, so suffice it to say that all these things are very complex.
I mean, and I, in some sense, I feel when I'm asked that question is that I'm asked for a final answer.
And like, man, I'd be pretty happy if I had a final answer, but I don't have a final answer.
I know, because you're looking for knowledge instead of faith.
Well, I'm just not bright enough.
I just don't have it within.
I have it in me.
Jordan, I think.
The issue with Christianity, sorry.
No.
Well, you know, I see Christianity from the historical perspective as an extension of a discussion about the ideal that stretches back tens of thousands of years before the establishment of Christianity.
There are precursors to what Christ represents in Mesopotamian thought and in Greek thought and powerful, profound precursors.
But the idea changed, right?
It transformed.
And I don't know why it transformed.
I don't know what the meaning of that is.
It's not nothing.
I have no idea why Christianity sprang out of nowhere and dominated the world in the mere span of 2,000 years.
It's a great mystery.
Psychologically, I see it as part of the extended conversation about the nature of the ideal.
Metaphysically, I'm at a loss.
Worries and Grief00:10:17
I don't know what to make of it.
And so I keep trying to sort it out and to straighten it out in my own head.
And I share that with people, but it's the best that I can do.
Well, it is very useful.
Jordan, I wish I could continue this conversation with you for another hour and a half, but I'm out of time.
It's great to see you, and you're looking great.
And I hope you'll come back and continue talking about this.
Yeah, well, it would be nice to see you in L.A. if this bloody pandemic ever disappears.
Well, I've left L.A.
I moved out of L.A., so I'm going east.
But I will see you there.
All right.
Well, it was very nice to see you, Andrew.
Great to see you.
Thank you very much.
Thanks a lot.
Okay.
Bye-bye.
All right.
You asked for it.
You begged for it.
You humiliated yourself.
Pleading for it is here.
The mailbag.
The only party now that is operating in reality is the Democratic Party.
I'm a person who lives in reality.
I'm a journalist.
Yeah!
Don Lemon, the most self-deceived human being in America.
First letters from Tom.
Dear Andrew, last week, you said something on your show that rang very true.
Oh, that must have been that show.
I do once a year.
I say, I try to do it just to throw you off.
I try to say something true.
You said that there was a time for war and a time for love.
As a 30-year-old man, I found that all my past relationships have failed in large part because I'm unable to commit to that time of love because I long for the time of war.
I've never had, to be clear, I've lived an adventurous life, served in the Army, moving abroad, setting up a business.
It still feels like watered-down masculinity.
So my question is: how do I get over this longing so I can settle down with someone and sort of family?
I worry that unless I can solve this problem, I'll end up going through life, losing out on both fronts, pun intended.
Yeah, no, this is a big problem for men.
Men are not as domestic animals as women are, and they feel that they have lost something when they settle down.
They feel that they have become domesticated and they want to be wild and free, right?
And so you have to deal with that.
There are several ways you can deal with it.
One is don't get married.
Don't do it.
Just say, this is the life I want.
I want to be a soldier of fortune.
I want to run around the world with a machine gun.
That's the life I want.
And I'm going to commit to it.
I'm going to understand that I'm going to be a lonely old guy.
That's something you can actually do.
I dealt with it by having adventures.
I have a taste for adventure.
It's not a major thing.
I don't want to parachute into a war zone.
But I learned how to fly a plane.
I went paragliding.
I got a black belt in karate.
I learned, I played competitive sports, things that got me out every now and again.
And just, you know, I went into Afghanistan, was embedded with the troops there.
I did things that would just keep me from feeling locked down so I wouldn't become cranky and angry and feel that I was being deprived of something.
If that will work for you, that is a good thing to do.
The other problem we have now is that when you have women who are not committed to making a home for you, there's a little less draw.
There's a lot less draw, I think, to getting married.
What are you getting for turning off that desire in men to run free, especially with other women?
What are you getting for that?
What are you getting in return for that?
Well, you can say you're getting love and that's a wonderful thing, but there used to be a kind of a deal, too, that you got a home, but you also got something that sustained you and humanized you and made you a better person.
I mean, that's kind of my marriage has been like that.
And there's no question that has made me only, obviously, only a slightly better person because I'm still me.
But still, so those are all strategies you can have, but these are things that all men face.
Most men face, most men feel.
You seem to be feeling a little more than others, but you have to acknowledge to yourself that becoming part of a domestic arrangement is going to make you more domestic and take away some of that adventure.
And if you don't want to lose that, don't get married.
And if you're willing to, then you can still do things that will satisfy at least your masculine urges for competition, for a little danger, for exciting things that you want to do.
From Grace, Lord Clavin.
All right, this is a very sad letter.
My husband passed away just under three weeks ago.
It was an aggressive disease that progressed swiftly over six weeks or so, ending his life at 49.
Oh, my Lord.
I know, she quotes me, grief is a desert that can only be crossed on foot.
I also know that God knew this would happen and has taken care of us.
I've seen his hand of mercy and heard his voice of cheer all through this.
I have a supernatural peace and calm that only God can give.
My greatest concerns and fears are for my two children, an eight-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter.
My daughter does not understand.
She's constantly asking for her father.
My son grieves with me.
One of my greatest fears is that my children will turn from or blame God because they lost their father.
I cannot control them.
Though I cannot control them, I can guide their minds and show them God's goodness despite our deep loss.
Before bed, my husband used to lay in bed with our son and teach him the Bible.
That's now my job.
What can I say to an eight-year-old who lost his earthly father?
How should I approach our biblical studies together?
How should I guide my daughter?
My father-in-law and father are both godly men that are in my children's lives, but how can I guide a young man into manhood?
How can I give my daughter the things a father would be better teaching her?
I crave your claven advice.
All right.
This is a tragedy.
And right, you've suffered a terrible tragedy.
I'm so sorry for your loss.
I really am.
It's just a heartbreaking story.
It is a tragedy.
And the thing about a tragedy is that they're tragic.
They are bad.
They deprive you of things that you wanted to have.
They take away things that maybe you should have.
You are doing everything you need to do right now.
You are doing everything.
You're doing great.
You're doing a great job.
Your worries, your worries about this are part of your grief.
You are grieving that you lost this man, this wonderful husband and father that you had, and that he's now going to be out of your children's lives.
That's true.
You're not going to be a father to them.
You're not going to be able to do the things that he did.
That's why it's a tragedy.
I can't cheer you up about that.
It is a tragedy.
You have to grieve this tragedy.
Be sad.
Be sad for what you've lost.
You have lost something.
But you are doing everything right.
You are there.
You are loving them.
You are giving them male presences in their lives.
Children are amazingly adaptable.
They know when, for instance, their mom goes out to work because she needs to work or when she goes out to work because she wants a bigger car.
They know the difference, even the little ones.
I don't know how they know, but they know.
They know that you are giving them the love that you have to give them.
And that is going to be enough.
It is going to be enough.
It's going to be enough because God is there.
He's going to help you out.
And because your father and father-in-law are there.
But don't be afraid to say that this is sad.
This is tragic.
This is heartbreaking.
And don't be afraid to be angry at God.
He will talk to you in your anger too.
But it's a sad story.
And I think the thing is, the thing is that you are just doing the exact right thing.
And it's beautiful what you're doing.
And it's going to be fine.
It's going to be fine, but not right away.
And it's always going to be painful, but it's going to be fine.
But it's going to take time.
Grief is a desert that has to be crossed on foot.
From Sean.
Dear Andrew, I have a question for you relating to Christian apologetics.
Oh, good, because I'm not in enough trouble already.
The so-called problem of the unevangelized.
How can a religion be true if it would condemn so many billions of souls seemingly by virtue of the historical accident of where and when they were born?
Right.
So if they've never heard the good news, how can they be condemned?
He says, I haven't done a lot of research on this, but he says, call me crazy, but I find your personal come to faith story and general perspectives on religion highly compelling.
So I'm curious, how did you tackle this problem on your road to faith in Christ?
By the way, I really like the long format.
I hope you keep doing it, the show for years to come.
Here's the thing.
This is the sort of thing I do not worry about, okay?
Because these are ideas that people have about what happens to people after they die.
And there is not a lot in the Bible about what happens to people after they die.
We know that there is justice.
We know that God is good.
If it's not good, it won't happen.
Because it's just true.
If it's God's work and it's not good, that we got it wrong, right?
So if this is unfair, it won't happen.
It may be that we get there and say, oh, that's what makes it fair because eternity is so big that we can't even begin to comprehend it.
We may get there and say, oh, wait, I didn't see it how before when you're living in timelessness, it all works out.
But if it's not good, it's not going to happen.
So don't worry about it.
These are not the things you have to worry about.
What you have to worry about is what is your path to God and what is your path to the joy that God wants to give you, to the life of an abundance.
He said, you know, Jesus said, I want the joy that is in me, Jesus, to be in you, human beings.
Answering questions like this, is that going to give you joy?
Is that going to get you closer to Christ?
It's not even going to, you're not even going to know whether you're right or not until the time comes when we see not through a glass darkly, but face to face.
Then we'll know.
Then we'll figure it out.
It's just, I'm sorry, I don't need to, I'm not making fun of you.
It's just a silly thing to think about when you're trying to think about Jesus.
I remember a friend of mine said to me, you know, I want to believe, but I just can't believe in the Trinity.
And I thought, that's your problem?
You know, why don't you find out what God wants you to do?
You know, God will take care of the Trinity.
God will take care of judgment.
God will take care of the end of the world.
All those things are in his hands, not in your hands.
And yeah, is it interesting to think about?
Does it make for some great conversations?
I've had great conversations about theology.
What is the meaning of the Trinity?
It's vast.
You know, it's vastly meaningful.
It is a vastly meaningful thing.
But again, it's not my business.
My business is what am I supposed to do right now, right here?
What am I supposed to say?
What are the words out of my mouth?
Someone at my church said to me, what do you want me to pray for you?
And I said, pray that I'm doing what God wants me to do.
Pray that I'm saying what God wants me to say, that I'm writing what God wants me to write.
That's what I want to be doing because there's so much joy in it.
When I hit the button, when I stand on the spotlight and I get it right, there is so much joy in it.
That's what you should be looking for, and that's what you should be thinking about.
I got to stop there, but my God, I was going to say, we'll be back next week, and that's true.
I'll be back next week, but you, you are now plunged into the Clavenless Week.
There'll be wailing, there'll be gnashing of teeth, darkness sharks, there'll be like little creatures crawling.
Oh my God, I can't even think about it.
But I'll be here.
So I don't have a Clavenless Week because I am Clavin.
So come back next week if you survive.
Come Back Next Week00:01:11
We will be here on The Andrew Klavan Show, and I will still be Andrew Klavan.
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 Vydowski.
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.
The 1619 Project founder gets denied tenure at UNC.
Politicians start paying people to get the COVID vaccine, and the government pushes UFOs.