Bennett’s Tragi-Comic President episode skewers Biden’s G7 farce—his sun-doodling, Macron’s "venal mental defective" jab, and Putin’s mockery—while framing his leadership as a "ventriloquist dummy" for progressive policies like CRT. He ties this to the "Great Forgetting," where churches abandoned faith for activism while Europe’s welfare-state decline mirrors Biden’s incompetence, now propped up by media complicity. The show pivots to masculinity, critiquing MGTOW culture and hypergamy as symptoms of a decaying moral order, then contrasts The Godfather’s moral ambiguity with Goodfellas’ brutal honesty, warning society must choose restraint over chaos before closing with a Catholic listener’s dilemma: when to leave a church pushing divisive rhetoric. [Automatically generated summary]
The American news media and other malodorous cesspits of mendacity are celebrating President Joe Biden's first trip overseas.
The president began the trip by attending the G7 summit, which involves a group of world leaders who have pledged to pool their resources so that they'll have enough money for a motel room when China takes their countries away.
Whereas the media had seen President Trump's G7 meetings as divisive because Trump made the other leaders look like weenies, American journalists were absolutely ecstatic about Biden's G7 accomplishments, which included finding his way back to his dinner table after he wandered off for no apparent reason, demonstrating comprehension skills by obediently following the often complex instructions of his wife like, pay attention, Joe, and sit down, and demanding the Russians stop meddling in the civil war in Libya, which is in Syria.
The press also reeled with amazement as the president boldly signed some useless nonsense about the make-believe climate crisis and even managed to draw a picture of the sun with a smiley face before his wife took his crayons away.
The G7 weenies were delighted not to have scary, scary Donald making them very, very frightened anymore and said they were relieved Joe Biden believed in the welfare state, that system of government handouts and controls that has turned Europe into an old-age home for young people.
Emmanuel Macron of France said, quote, America is back, using the French word back, which of course means being governed by a venal mental defective.
President Biden also had some stern words for Russian President Vladimir Putin, wowing reporters with his tough guy style when he said, quote, that Putin character better stop doing whatever it is they told me he's doing, or I don't know what will happen because it's not written down on this paper here, unquote.
Putin responded by issuing an official statement which said, quote, ha ha unquote, which is Russian for America is back in French.
The G7 leaders also united to issue a strong statement against Chinese aggression, but the Chinese have not yet responded because they were too busy building seven more battleships, crushing the rights of the people in Hong Kong, throwing Uyghurs into concentration camps, and making the new Disney movie, Wuhan, a sequel to Mulan.
Whereas Mulan is about a Chinese girl who dresses as a boy in order to join the army, Wuhan is about American boys who dress up as girls while the Chinese army takes over Taiwan.
After the G7 summit, Biden went on to a face-to-face meeting with Vladimir Putin, which Biden declared a great success because Putin allowed him to go home in time for his afternoon snack.
Putin said of the meeting, quote, ha Trigger warning.
Leave a Comment!00:02:48
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I for hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, we are back laughing our way through the fall of the Republic, and I hope you're grateful that I'm here because today is Juneteenth.
It's a federal holiday.
I love federal holidays.
I always love when there's a new federal holiday.
It means one more day when I'm working and my enemies are taking the day off because the government told them to.
I hope you will go on iTunes and subscribe and leave us a five-star review.
I did not know how important this was to our rankings there, but it's very important.
If you can do it, we appreciate it.
Also go on YouTube and subscribe to the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel.
That's not important at all, but it is good because if you press that little bell, someone will come over your house and ring a bell and go away and it won't mean much.
But if you leave a comment, if you leave a comment and the comment is sufficiently ugly and hateful, we will include it on the show because it'll just sound like the rest of the show.
Today's comment is from Kyle Campbell, who says the Andrew Clavin show is like Taco Bell.
It takes me an entire week to digest.
I'm not going to play with that too much because all the jokes are terrible.
So a lot of times when we have a sponsor, they'll give us a free sample of their product so we can endorse it to you.
But, you know, my ExpressVPN free subscription ran out, but I renewed it right away.
Why?
Well, did you ever read the fine print that appears when you start browsing in incognito mode?
It says that your activity might still be visible to your employer, your school, your internet service provider.
How can they even call that incognito?
If you really want to stop people from seeing the sites you visit, you need to do what I do and use ExpressVPN.
It's an app that encrypts all of your network data and reroutes it through a network of secure servers so that your private online activity stays just that private.
ExpressVPN works on all your devices.
It's super easy to use.
The app literally has one button.
You tap it to connect, and your browsing activity is secure from prying eyes.
So stop letting strangers invade your online privacy.
Protect yourself at expressvpn.com slash clavin.
Use my link at expressvpn.com slash clavin to get three extra months free.
That's exppn.com slash clavin to learn more.
And I know you're saying expressvpn.
I can spell that.
The Great Forgetting00:14:48
How do I spell clavin?
It is k-l-a-v-a-n.
There are no ways in favour.
Exactly.
All right.
For the past few weeks, I've been talking about the great forgetting, which is the largely successful progressive attempt to progress back into a past of centralized power by elites while the rest of us wallow in primitivism, emotionalism, vice, and excess.
And you can see this great forgetting in just the casual use of sex, drugs, and foul language, the way people cover their entire bodies with tattoos, the music we have that emphasizes loud, simplistic rhythms and is accompanied often by grotesque examples of female display and male aggression, and in the metal people put in their faces as if they were living in the Amazon instead of in Scarsdale.
All these little things show us that we're regressing back to a kind of primitivism.
And note that I'm not saying whether this is good or bad.
I'm just calling it primitivism because that's what it is.
It's a regression to a previous way of being, a pre-Christian way of being.
Now, the Great Forgetting did not come about naturally or accidentally.
It's the result of a purposeful 70-year project by the left to erase the moral and intellectual legacy of Christian slash European culture, which is, you can picture it as sort of the communion table at which America ate the bread of Greek rationality and the wine of Jewish morality, which is really what constitutes the culture we began with.
The recent pandemic lockdown was, as far as I'm concerned, a mind-numbing display of elite incompetence, authoritarianism, and did-dimension incompetence.
But nothing in the last year was as heartbreakingly revelatory, to me at least, as the willingness of churches to bend to the senseless will of these petty, secular, and did-dimension incompetent authorities.
It was very much as if our religious leaders themselves no longer believed in the worth of our religion and its importance in our lives.
The Great Forgetting has reached them too.
Even the priests have forgotten what they're preaching about.
Churches were told to shut down, and like little children, they obeyed.
And the hatred of materialist, secular powers for the faith of the people, because the faith of the people is a challenge to their values and their power, that hatred was so incredibly evident in the government orders that left Walmarts and liquor stores open, but denied Christians access to the communion, which is the bread and wine of our spiritual life.
The pettiness and the ugliness and the wickedness, and did I mention incompetence, and the official hostility to God, they were all evident in these nasty little orders that kept coming across forbidding singing in church.
I don't know if that happened in your state.
It happened to us in California.
They forbid singing.
They denied parking privileges to churches.
John MacArthur's Grace Church in Los Angeles, when it had the temerity to remain open and say, you know, he came on my show, John MacArthur, and he said, we're not here to protect you from the flu.
We're here to protect you from eternal damnation.
And so we have to remain open, even if there's a risk of your getting sick.
So they tried to cancel his parking privileges.
They were just incredibly petty to any church that stood on their God-given and coincidentally constitutionally protected rights to the free exercise of their religion, all of which serves to remind us that our governing class, governors and mayors and federal officials, they are now largely a bunch of small, power-hungry, and did I mention incompetent people, elevated by a corporate press and corporate culture that despises any spiritual force that leads us away from the materialist,
consumerist, hyper-sexualized apathy that is a sure and certain path to political slavery and therefore consolidates the power of our morally broken and intellectually empty leaders.
This is the great forgetting in action, right?
This is the powers that be making sure to detach us from our Christian and our European cultural roots.
And to me, it's a terrible thing to see our priests and pastors collaborate with these moral buffoons.
Priests, pastors, the church has abandoned the gospel for political fads.
Banners on churches celebrate gay pride, Black Lives Matter, diversity, which again, I'm not talking about whether those are right or wrong.
They're just not the gospel.
They have forgotten the gospel.
Those are the opposite of the gospel.
The gospel abhors pride, gay pride and every other kind of pride.
It denies the importance of race.
It says we are all one in Christ.
It denies that your identity is primarily sexual.
And it is not defined by diversity.
The gospel has nothing to do with diversity.
It is about the way the spirit takes our sacred individuality and brings it together, unifies it as part of one church, the way individual limbs and organs are different parts of one body, or the way dads and moms and children play different roles in one family.
But if the powers that be in both the church and the state are desperate to contribute to the great forgetting, to have us forget who we are, if they are so angry at the past and sick in their own minds to claim that our Western legacy is somehow stained because it comes from people whose epidermises happen to be white,
rather than saying that culture is incredibly elevated by the unfathomable brilliance of Greek, Hebrew, Roman, and European ideas, if they have abandoned us, if they have told us, ordered us, commanded us to forget, we have to ask ourselves, what is our response going to be?
What would it mean?
What would it look like for us to start remembering our legacy?
And how can we reclaim that legacy while proving what was always true, it's not a white legacy.
This is just garbage as far as I'm concerned.
It's a human legacy.
We are all made in the image of God, says so right in the book, and the bread and wine are there for anyone who will come to the table.
So I listen to conservatives a lot, especially young conservatives with big ideas about where things should go.
And I hear a lot of stuff.
You know, I hear conservatives say we have to restore belief in good and evil.
And that sounds good, but you know what?
The left has their idea of good and evil.
They're a bit dishonest about what they think good and evil are, but it's not like it's not true that they don't believe in good and evil.
And I hear right-wingers say we have to restore our faith in God.
And yes, I think that's true.
I think we have wandered far afield from faith in God.
And our churches are, as I say, have abandoned the faith and are emptying out incredibly quickly.
But we also have to understand, and sometimes Christians hate to hear me say this, but we have to understand that there are legitimate challenges to traditional beliefs that come from science and come from technology.
You know, monks used to ring when there would be lightning storms, the monks would run up into the tower because they thought the lightning came from demons and they would ring the church bells to fend off the demonic lightning.
And of course, because they're high up, the lightning would hit the tower and kill the monks, right?
They found out, gee, you know, Benjamin Franklin helped them find out that lightning rods work much better for chasing off the demons.
And that changes our sense of how the world works.
And Christians have to address that.
They cannot just get stuck in the way things used to be.
Jesus Christ is, as they say, he's the same yesterday, today, and forever.
But there are prejudices and superstitions and mistaken traditions that attach themselves to a system of belief over time.
And those can be changed as time goes on.
We have to be careful not to kowtow to the social and political fads of our corrupt moment, but we should also be careful not to romanticize the certainties of the past that they were themselves innovations, interpretations of Christ's word.
The old-time evangelical religion, you've heard the song, Give Me That Old Time Religion, it's actually one of the most modern forms of Christianity there is.
And the older Catholic forms that get to bragging rights because they've been around since Jesus, they have changed enormously over time.
During the Reformation, the Catholic religion changed tremendously.
So these ideas that we have, these kind of grand or vague ideas, don't really play that much for me.
I want to know more about what exactly I should be doing every day and you should be doing every day.
And there are other ideas, political ideas from the right about how we can restore our culture.
You've heard about Catholic integralism.
They kind of flirt with a theocratic notion where the government is going to enforce the common good, as they call it, which is largely defined by the church.
Some of them actually say we should only allow Catholics to immigrate so that the country becomes more Catholic.
There are conservatives who say, who attack censorship and cancel culture, but they say the censorship and cancel culture aren't wrong.
It's only that the left is censoring and canceling the wrong things.
And there are a few people on the far right.
These people are not really central to the conservative movement.
But there are some who actually agree with the left's racialism from the other side.
They're as obsessed with preserving the whiteness of America as the left is obsessed with destroying the whiteness of America.
Now, the problem with all of these ideas for me is that in the old days when we did to some degree enforce religious morals, there was a consensus in society that these religious ideas were good.
And that consensus has been destroyed, right?
This is part of the great forgetting, is that that consensus has been destroyed.
So the problem is if you force religious ideas on people who do not have a consensus of agreement, that is oppression.
You are seeking to force on people what by definition they have to freely choose.
You have to freely choose your morality or it's not morality at all.
When John Adams said our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people, he said it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
He was making the point that people can't be free unless they have learned through their religion to freely choose to live by the moral laws that keep them free.
You have to freely choose freedom.
It's kind of a paradox.
And that paradox is built into our legacy.
Unlike, say, Patrick Denin, he's one of the kind of Catholic guys who is now saying that liberalism is inherently flawed because it has no moral system.
It simply lets people be free, and ultimately that is going to devour any moral system that comes along.
Unlike Patrick Deneen, I think liberalism is a feature.
it's not a bug.
I think that it's a dangerous, there's a dangerous mistake embedded in American conservatism.
In fact, it's the central mistake in American conservatism in all these ways of trying to address the great forgetting.
And I'll get back to that in a second.
So I've often described the Western legacy as a structure, like a building, standing on the shoulders of two men, Socrates and Jesus.
I don't know if you've ever heard the word telemon.
A telemon is a pillar that looks like a man.
And the same way I think it's a Katie did, I think it's, Katie did is that the, no, that's not the right word.
That's the insect, but it's something like that for a woman.
A pillar is a woman.
But a telemon is a pillar that's a man.
And Socrates and Jesus are the telemons that hold up Western civilization.
And they had a lot in common.
And I've talked about this before, but I'm just going to go through it quickly again.
Socrates and Jesus both lived at a time, about 300 years apart, when popular movements denied objective truth.
Socrates was always in the agora arguing with the sophists who believed it didn't matter what the truth is.
You just had to make a good argument for whatever you were trying to put forward.
And Jesus confronted what you might call Hellenic sophisticates like Pontius Pilate.
Pontius Pilate, when Jesus said, I am the truth, Pontius Pilate kind of shrugged and said, what is truth?
Both Socrates and Jesus were judicially murdered by the authorities for teaching heresy.
That was big-time canceled culture in those days.
Both of their philosophies became dominant in the wake of their deaths, and in fact, they kind of became fused.
The Greek and the Hebrew tradition became fused in the culture of Rome and in the work of such great Christian Catholic intellectual scholars as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
But there's one more fascinating parallel between Jesus and Socrates.
Neither one of them sought to replace the cultural relativism of their day, the moral relativism of their day, with a set of definitive moral rules.
You wouldn't hear this, you wouldn't believe this by talking to some Christians, but neither of them set forward a definite moral philosophy.
They both signed on to what C.S. Lewis called the Tao, the universal moral wisdom.
Don't murder, don't steal, don't commit sexual immorality.
I know the left wants us to forget that system too, but that is a universal moral system.
But beyond that, Jesus and Socrates were kind of difficult to pin down.
Socrates, all he did was he went out and he asked people questions that destroyed the assumptions of the moment.
He questioned, they would get forward, just like, you know, college students today will say, you know, oh, there's systemic racism.
Socrates would ask them questions about systemic racism until it became clear that systemic racism was just a hallucination.
But he never quite said what there was.
He simply destroyed their ideas of what there was.
And Jesus mostly told stories.
And his life is a story.
Like the prophets lived story lives, metaphorical lives.
And those stories, the parables, are left open to interpretation by the minds of man.
So both Socrates and Jesus left a lot of room for interpretation of what they believed morally.
They were fighting moral relativism, but they were fighting it with a deep faith in what the poet Wordsworth called humanity's co-creation with the one great mind.
The interplay between human beings and God's reality and our ability to shape out of God's reality some knowable human moral rules, God as known by man, right?
God, no one has ever seen God, as the Bible says.
God is unknowable.
God's moral universe is infinite and therefore unknowable, but there is a moral universe that applies to us, and we are the instruments.
Our bodies, our minds, our hearts are the instruments for bringing that moral vision into the world.
I've compared this, using Wordsworth's poetry, I've compared this to seeing a rainbow, right?
The colors are created by a collaboration of reality and the human eye, of light and the human eye, and we each see those colors differently, but we see them within a limited range.
If you look at a rainbow and you see a truck or a tree, you're deluded, just like if you look at a woman and see a man, you're deluded.
But we need to learn to see an accurate human interpretation of the infinite and therefore unknowable reality of God.
So that's our job, right?
Fighting Reactionary Temptation00:06:44
The way we do this is by schooling ourselves in the wisdom of the ages and then applying that wisdom to new learning in order to create new wisdom for new ages to come.
We're always moving toward the light.
We never quite get to the light, not in this world.
In order to do this, we have to be educated.
We have to read and learn.
We have to educate our children.
We have to argue with one another in good faith.
We have to debate one another in good faith and freely.
We have to listen to other people debate.
We have to listen to people we despise and listen to people we disagree with.
We have to leave aside personal attacks because personal attacks are always trying to destroy the flawed human vessel instead of examining the ideas that each person contains, the vessel contains.
So the left has taken over our institution in the last 70 years and it's worked within our institutions to destroy our faith, our churches, our traditions, our learning, our academies, and to destroy and even to take away our ability to disagree and to speak freely.
The left is now at work demonizing and defunding and deplatforming anyone who opposes their sick, wicked project of forgetting Western culture.
But while they may be sick and wicked, we have to hand it to the left, right?
They were patient.
They took the time, the 70 years it took, to do the rotten work they wanted to get done.
So if we want to respond, if we respond with theocracy and censorship and leftist government overreach, forcing the common good on people, what we think is the common good, that, to my mind, is an act of panic and desperation.
And it's also, if we also just sit around and sob and whine, oh, all is lost, we need a hero to rescue us, bring back Donald Trump, we need a hero, that is also a recipe for inaction and failure, as well as being disgusting behavior.
We can't undo 70 patient years of cultural destruction with four years of political belligerence.
The left's 70-year project of forgetting is reaching fruition.
This is their height.
This is they have done what they set out to do.
Our 70 years of remembering is just getting started today.
We need protests and school boards.
You see those moms coming into school board meetings?
They are the heroes you're looking for.
It's not some politician.
Those are the heroes, the moms who go in and fight with school boards to make sure their kids aren't taught this filthy critical race theory, which is just bigotry writ large and the sexual sickness that they're selling in schools.
When we vote, we have to vote with some kind of political realism.
We have to get people who will actually accomplish the things they say they're going to accomplish.
But we also have to vote on the local level and take action at the local level.
It's no good voting for the president every four years, but not showing up at your school board, not paying attention to what clown is being elected to your school board or your city council or your governorship.
And, you know, Dennis Prager said this a couple of weeks ago, and I really agree with this.
We have to take our children out of their schools.
We have to take our children out of their schools and school them at home, form coalitions to school them.
We have to form coalitions at work to fight back against HR tyranny in the workplace so they can't force this CRT and sexual perversion down our throats at the corporate level.
We have to fight corporate oppression and censorship because it violates our God-given rights just as much as government oppression does.
We have to read the books that they condemn.
We have to have the debates they censor.
We have to read the Bible, teach the Bible, gather in the name of God and praise God and live out God's will in our homes and offices where our children and our colleagues can see us.
And we have to fight the reactionary temptation.
And instead of trying to match their oppressiveness and hatefulness with our own, we have to sincerely try, and I know you hate to hear this, I hate to hear this, we have to sincerely try to overcome evil with good because that is at the heart of the Christian project.
So I was talking before about the main mistake of the conservative movement.
And that mistake, as far as I'm concerned, is to try to defend the past.
And if we can't defend the past, then try to restore the past.
Instead, I think we should be thinking about a new future that is shaped by our traditions and shaped by the wisdom of the past.
Because in this sense, I'm not really a conservative at all.
I'm actually a revolutionary.
I don't want to destroy the liberal project.
I want to fulfill the liberal project.
I want to be more liberal.
I want to have a world that's even more free than the one the left is destroying.
I want one in which an educated people choose freedom and choose morality and believe in their traditions.
And that means we have to create a defiant culture, a defiant populace, and with God's help, a defiant church that can succinctly explain the concept of hell to petty tyrants like Gavin Newsom in California and Gretchen von Wittmer in Michigan because we ought to let them know where they're going to be spending the rest of eternity.
We need a church that's informed by science and then informs science with moral reason and revealed wisdom.
And the only arguments, and I hear this every time I say these things, the only arguments against this path to American redemption are that it is going to take a long time and it might fail.
It's going to take a long time.
We can't redress 70 years of destruction in four years.
It's going to take just as long for us to reinfiltrate the institutions as it took for them to take them away.
It's going to take the same kind of effort, the same kind of concentration, the same kind of focus, and we might not succeed.
Okay?
Now, if you want to know what I think about that, go look at yourself in the mirror and say to yourself out loud, say, I refuse to make a sustained effort to restore the West for my children because it will take a long time and might fail.
And after you've said that, put on your general patent helmet and slap yourself in the face and then take up your cross and begin the long, painful work of remembering.
So the one thing we try to keep on this show is a lot of dignity, and that's why we like to talk about kitty poo.
Kitty Pooh Club.
Kitty Pooh Club is a convenient, all-in-one monthly litter box solution.
Every month, Kitty Pooh Club delivers an affordable, high-quality, recyclable litter box that's pre-filled with the litter of your choice.
I used to have cats, and so I know how inconvenient this can be.
This is a much better way to handle it.
The boxes are leak-proof, eco-friendly, and they have a fun design for every season.
When the month is up, just recycle the box, and Kitty Pooh Club will automatically deliver a new one to you.
You don't have to make that noise, but it does make it a lot more fun.
There's no changing used litter and no more cleaning the box.
Kitty Pooh Club has a satisfaction guarantee.
And you can easily customize or cancel anytime.
Helix of Powerispersia00:13:54
And right now, Kitty Pooh Club is offering you 20% off your first order plus a free dome, free scoop, and free shipping when you set up an auto ship by going to kittypooclub.com slash clavin.
Just go to kittypooclub.com slash clavin to get 20% off your first order plus a free dome scoop and free shipping when you set up an auto ship.
That's kittypooclub.com slash clavin.
I don't often put poo next to clavin, but when I do, it's to send to kittypooclub.com slash clavin.
And I spell it, how do I spell it?
E-O-O, but also K-L-A-V-A-N.
So it's kind of odd, since I celebrate European culture so much, that actually our relationship with Europe has now become part of the great forgetting.
Because, you know, we forget that in order to maintain our European rights and customs, we had to break off from Europe.
And after we did break off from Europe, Europe destroyed itself in the two world wars.
I mean, it was just World War I was one of the great acts of cultural suicide of all time.
There was a continent.
Europe was at that moment, at the moment World War I began, was at the highest point of culture human beings had ever reached anywhere.
It really was.
It was an extraordinary culture from the 1500s right up to 1914.
And then in those two World Wars, which are really just one long war, they wiped themselves out.
And now Europe is culturally dead.
And so the left, because socialism is a kind of death, really socialism is just a form of decay.
It's something that happens to societies over time.
The left wants to attach ourselves to that dead culture and watch us sink down.
So I was amused that Joe Biden's summit with Vladimir Putin the other day was held in a villa on Lake Geneva.
And the reason that amused me is that was where Mary Shelley was when she conceived of the idea of Frankenstein.
She was in the villa, Diodati, it was called, a different villa than Putin and Biden were in.
But she was in a villa called Diodati when she was there with Byron and Shelley and a guy named Dr. Polidori, and they were telling ghost stories.
And Byron, who was kind of a dominant character and always controlling people, said, you know what, let's all write a ghost story.
We're all going to write a ghost story.
And so here are the two greatest, two of the greatest poets of their day, Byron and Shelley, both sat down to write ghost stories and they failed.
They didn't come up with a good one.
And Mary Shelley, who at that point was like 17 years old, 18 years old, she got this idea for Frankenstein.
And the reason that made me laugh is because, you know, Frankenstein is about a bunch of corpses that are sewn together and then falsely reanimated.
And that's kind of what Joe Biden looked like as he was with Europe.
And it's kind of what Europe looks like as well.
So let me just begin with this.
I started by joking about the G7 summit, but none of that, it's all funny, but it's not really a joke.
I mean, sometimes you can't even keep up with satire.
Biden was a laughingstock.
And the terrible thing is, of course, our press, which is now the voice of corporate America, right?
It is no longer an independent bunch of, you know, kind of semi-educated, tough guys going around puncturing, you know, telling truth to power and puncturing the egos of the powerful.
No, it is now part of the power structure.
Our news media is part of the power structure.
And so they're going, oh, Joe Biden, oh boy, you know, Putin is going to be so quaking in his boots.
I mean, Putin kills people for a living, basically, is going to be quaking in his boots.
And I'm just going to show you, I could do the entire show about this, but I got to show you just a couple of clips.
Maybe you've seen some of them already.
Of Biden in this G7 meeting, he's in Cornwall in England.
He's in a restaurant.
This is Cut 12.
He's in a restaurant.
And he wanders around and he basically gets lost.
He can't find his way to the table.
And some reporters start shouting questions at him.
And he's looking around in a daze.
And Jill comes over and she carts him off to his table.
Just take a look at this.
How are your meetings going in Cornwall, Mr. President?
How are your meetings going here in Cornwall?
Very well. Nice evening.
They always do.
And they're all laughing at him.
And, you know, and the way he walks, I mean, he even looks like, you know, he looks like he's had a stroke or something.
I don't know, or maybe it is just dementia, but he barely can walk.
His shoulders are slumped.
He was with Boris Johnson, who was introducing the leaders, and Biden introduced, I think it was the president of South Africa.
And Biden then says to him, oh, and you haven't introduced the president of South Africa.
It was cut 11.
I mean, they're covering for him.
They're laughing at him.
They're covering for him.
This is our country.
The press is going, oh, how wonderful.
Oh, how wonderful.
It's so much better than that Donald Trump who demanded things and wanted, you know, he wanted to include Putin in the G7.
You know, okay, so it's true.
Trump was divisive.
He was not, you know, did not play well with others.
We all know it.
But he wasn't this doddering.
I mean, this is embarrassing.
I want to play just one more because this happened a lot.
He was answering questions from reporters, and this happened again and again.
Here's one reporter asked him about sanctions.
This is cut nine.
You've kept in place some Trump-era steel and aluminum sanctions.
And I wanted to ask you, when you're having these conversations with European allies who are very concerned about these sanctions, how do you justify that?
And what are your plans for?
120 days.
Give me a break.
Need time.
120 days.
Give me a break.
There's a guy who's been in government.
This is like, you know, when they had the Trojan War, they left him behind.
I left Joe Biden behind to take care of empty Greece as they sailed off to Troy.
I mean, this guy's been in government forever.
He yelled at one woman reporter and had to apologize because she was a woman.
And we all know women and men are equal, except when you yell at them and then the women get upset.
So he had to apologize to her.
It's just, I'm sorry, but it's embarrassing.
It is embarrassing.
And I even feel bad for Biden.
I feel bad that he's up there as this toy who's basically a ventriloquist dummy that the left can speak through.
And they won't even admit the fact.
They won't even admit the fact that the reason they're using him is because nobody wants them.
They have to hide behind him because nobody wants what they're selling.
Nobody wants critical race theory.
It's disgusting.
Nobody wants to have their children carted off and their little boys cart turned into girls at the behest of the sick people who work for the state.
Nobody wants this stuff.
So they have Joe Biden as kind of dangling puppet on a string, you know, and they're talking through him.
But he's not capable.
He's not capable of doing this.
They didn't, you know, there were no accomplishments to the G7 meeting.
You know, they make noise about we're going to fix the sun.
They're going to send a rocket to the sun so they can dial it down a little.
But don't worry, they're going to send it at night so they won't get burned up.
You know, it's just a bunch of, it's just a show.
Walter Russell Mead, one of my favorite writers about the international scene, he said, what would winning look like?
He said it would look like getting Russia to withdraw from Syria, or as Biden calls it, Libya.
It would get him to withdraw from the Donbass in Crimea.
A diplomatic victory would be with China agreeing to dismantle military bases on artificial islands in the South China Sea.
Success would involve getting Iran to stop arming and funding armed militias and terrorist groups in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq.
None of that is going to happen.
And then he went off to Switzerland to meet with Putin.
And Putin always makes money.
He's made monkeys out of all our leaders because they cannot believe what a gangster he is.
I don't know.
I hear people on both the left and the right, Glenn Greenwald on the left and Tucker Carlson on the right.
I hear them say, you know, kind of say, you know, we should, why are we picking on Putin?
Why are we picking on this guy?
This is all this neoconservatism.
It's all this belligerence.
And I don't want to be belligerent.
I don't want to go to war with Russia.
The man is a gangster.
He is a gangster.
He reaches out and kills reporters on free soil.
He kills reporters who are in Britain, as well as killing his own people and attacking gay people and basically using religion, which he doesn't believe in, to control people.
So why is everybody so happy to see Joe Biden?
Why is the G7 covering for it?
Well, French President Emmanuel Macron said it best.
This is Cut28.
I think it's great to have the U.S. president part of the club and very willing to cooperate.
The club.
He's part of the club.
What does that mean?
I'll read from Dan Henninger because he said it well in the Wall Street Journal.
He says, the club Mr. Biden is joining is one the U.S. has stayed out of since World War II.
That is the club known as the European Welfare State.
It is the government-directed system of lifetime paternalism built up by the nations of Western Europe after 1945.
Maintaining this welfare infrastructure with taxes and debt occupies virtually every waking moment of its leaders, okay?
Taxes and debt to keep this welfare state going, which, as I said, as I said, turns Europe into an old age home for young people.
They are taken care of from the beginning of their lives to the end of their lives.
If the government says, oh, you know, you have to retire a few years later so you can make enough money to fund the welfare state, they riot.
Because they have no way of voting about these things.
They just riot if that's what happens.
The European post-welfare state is the state of a culture in decline.
This is the thing, this is true of life and it's true of countries, right?
Dying is easy.
Living is hard, right?
To become more than you are at this moment takes effort to be better than you are, to not devolve into vice and to chasing after every pleasure that destroys you and enslaves you.
That takes effort.
That takes willpower.
That takes discipline.
If you let yourself go and you just do whatever you feel like doing, which is what the left constantly wants you to do, you become a slave, right?
You can't take care of yourself.
You can't maintain a family.
You can't maintain a life.
You can't get a job.
And that's why they keep funneling money at you so you can't take care of yourself and they can take care of you.
Why?
Because they love you?
No, not because they love you.
They don't even know your name.
They don't love you.
They want to take care of you because taking care of you means they get to make all the decisions.
They're the powerful people.
Well, as always, I'm awake all night.
But now that I'm homeless and I'm moving from Airbnb to Airbnb, I don't have my Helix mattress to keep me comfortable.
You've got to get one of these.
Helix Sleep has 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, hot sleeper, whether you like a plush or a firm bed with Helix.
There's no more confusion and no more compromising.
I took the quiz and I was matched to the Helix Midnight Lux.
I cannot wait to get this back when I move into my new house.
It's perfect for me.
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'll even pick it up for you for free if you don't love it.
But you will.
Right now, Helix is offering up to $200 off all mattress orders at helixsleep.com slash Clavin.
Get up to $200 off at helixleep.com slash Clavin.
I cannot wait to get my Helix mattress back.
So while I'm lying awake, I can think to myself, well, I'm lying awake, but I am really, really comfortable.
So you want to know, of course, if you want to get this deal, you want to know how do you spell Clavin?
I know you've never heard this before.
It's K-L-A-B-A-D.
So when Europe has this welfare state, it's not because they're more civilized than us.
It's when somebody says all the other countries have universal health care, that's not because they're more civilized than us.
It's because they're dead.
It's because they're dead.
They don't have armies like we have armies.
Why?
Because they know our army will defend them.
Britain, France, Germany, they can't defend themselves from an invasion by China or Russia.
They know China and Russia don't invade them because they know they'll have to fight with us.
And we pay for that and we pay for it.
We pay for it through our taxes that are high that deliver a lot of money because we have capitalism, because we don't have socialism.
Socialism is decay.
They know they have single-payer health care because we pay so much for drugs.
Why do we pay so much for drugs?
Because they need the money for research and development to develop new drugs.
The insidious thing about universal health care is that you don't feel the fact that 10 years from now there won't be a cure for cancer that they might have been, that 50 years from now your kids might not have to deal with Alzheimer's.
We don't see that not happen, right?
It only happens when you have the kind of capitalist system, the competitive free market system.
Let's call it a free market system, a competitive system, a system that can charge what things are worth that will fund those things.
Those advances only happen that way.
Europe doesn't care because Europe is dead.
A welfare state is a dead state.
A socialist state is a dead state.
It's a state of nature.
This is what happens.
We decay.
We are like conservatives, as I always say, we're like the doctors.
We're trying to hold off that day.
And we know we can't do it forever because everything that's made by mortal men will die, but we can do it today and then we can do it tomorrow and then we can do it the day after that.
So here I want to point you to a little story that maybe you saw, maybe you didn't.
Warren Buffett's Wealth Debate00:07:25
ProPublica, which is a left-leaning website, did a piece where they received the stolen tax returns of very wealthy people.
I think Warren Buffett was one of them, a bunch of wealthy people.
And they put forward, and they said, well, we don't know who gave us these IRS documents, which of course is illegal, right?
It's illegal to tell your IRS documents are supposed to be personal and protected, but somebody, probably within the IRS, leaked these documents to ProPublica, which then published them and did a big story about how the rich were not paying enough taxes, right?
And I'm going to get to that in a minute because it wasn't true.
But I just want you to remember that this is at the moment when Joe Biden wants to raise all the tax rates on the rich and on corporations, right?
So this is a planned tax leak by the IRS to support by someone in the deep state, let's say.
It's by someone in the deep state to support Joe Biden.
Remember all the leaks we got every time Donald Trump got on the phone with a foreign leader and we found out about it through a leak and they even had that stupid impeachment over this harmless conversation he had with the Ukrainian president just because of leaks.
How many leaks have there been about what Biden is saying on the phone?
Zero?
One?
Two?
You know, none, almost none, virtually none.
It was happening every day with Trump.
So we know that this deep state, this power center, wants certain kind of people in power, these leftists, and doesn't want other kind of people in power.
And that's all part of this system that I'm calling the Great Forgetting, because if we remember who we are, if we remember what we stand for, if we remember what the Constitution says, if we remember what Jesus said, we're not going to let these bums, these unelected bums, faceless bums, anonymous bums, hand our private records to newspapers, which then publish them in order to say, oh, taxes should go up.
Are the rich paying no taxes?
No.
What ProPublica did was they said, we're going to reckon their true tax rate.
This tax rate says that the records say, oh, they're paying, you know, I don't know what it was, 35% or something like this.
But yeah, they said they were paying an average of 32% of their income in federal income taxes.
But ProPublica said, no, no, no, we calculated their true tax rate and they're only paying 3.4% in income taxes.
Oh, the outrage.
Oh, the horror.
Why aren't these rich people paying more than 3.4% in income taxes?
Here's why.
When ProPublica figured out their true tax rate, what they took into account was unrealized income.
So what does that mean?
That means you own a house, right?
You bought your house for $50,000.
You've been living in your house for 10 years.
It's now worth $65,000.
You don't get taxed on that.
The IRS doesn't come in and say your house is worth more.
We're taxing you on that.
Why?
Because you're living in the house.
You haven't got any extra money.
They would be taking away money you haven't made.
That money is what you build your life on.
That money is how you save your wealth.
That money is how you create wealth.
And that created wealth goes into the system, right?
When you make money, you go to the restaurant.
The restaurant makes money.
When the restaurant guy makes money, he buys something.
He buys a boat.
That spreads the wealth around.
When these rich guys, guys like Warren Buffett, make money, they invest it.
When that investment goes up, they don't get taxed on that because they're not seeing the money any more than you are on your house, right?
They don't see that money.
That's unrealized income.
So Warren Buffett isn't being taxed on that, but ProPublica is calculating his wealth as if that wealth should be taxed.
Well, what does Warren Buffett do with his investments?
He creates businesses.
He creates jobs.
He gives people their dreams.
You know, I have a dream to build a business.
Oh, there's some investment money.
Now I can do what I dreamed of doing.
Now I can take this idea I had while I was in the shower and turn it into jobs for 100 people.
That's what Warren Buffett does.
You don't have to like him.
You don't have to be glad he's rich.
You don't have to agree with his politics.
But that's what he does for a living.
The guy drives around in a beater, in an old jalopi.
He's not spending his money, like throwing his money away.
He uses it to invest.
And if they take that money away, then who gets to use it?
Guess who?
The government.
So their theory, their thesis that they're putting forward is that a guy who, let's face it, whether you like him or not, again, is a financial genius, Warren Buffett, he can invest that money as well as Alexandria Ecasio-Cortez, who's an ignoramus, right?
Somehow, this Ignoramus knows exactly what to do with that money.
I'm going to invest it in green, in things that are colored green, because in eight years the world is going to die because the sun is so hot.
That's what Alexandria Ecasio-Cortez is going to do.
Warren Buffett goes, that guy wants to build a bookstore has a good idea.
I'm going to give him some money.
That's what Warren Buffett does, and that's how we all get so rich.
And by the way, that, as somebody pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, that is how the bottom 20% of American earners, the poorer people in this country, that's why they receive $45,000 a year in transfer payments.
That doesn't come from socialism, folks.
That comes from capitalism.
That comes from investment.
That comes from not taxing these guys, but letting them do what they want to do.
My point about this is that this reveals this leak by the deep state to corporate newspapers, to news outlets who are also in league with the deep state.
This is part of this massive, massive foe that we are facing.
These guys who believe in the death of Western culture, these guys who believe in the socialist death.
Why?
Because socialism means one thing.
When you have capitalism, you have this kind of step of rich people and poor people.
You have poorer people, slightly richer people, richer, richer, richer, going way up.
And everybody is richer than anyone has ever been before.
Even the poorest person in America is richer than anyone has been before.
I mean, you can walk into a 7-Eleven and buy a meal that Henry VIII never had, basically, in this country, because capitalism has made us all rich.
This never happened before capitalism.
Before capitalism, everybody was poor.
Even the rich were poor before capitalism.
But now all this creation, all this wealth creation has made everybody rich.
And you know, listen, I believe in capitalism with values.
I believe that you can't have capitalism without Christian values.
I do not believe that making money is the end of all life or that making money shows you're a good person or that making money should elevate you above other people in terms of your rights.
I don't believe any of that.
We still have to have rights.
Capitalism, free trade, governed by values, is a great, great system and socialism.
And it's a system that requires effort, it requires risk, it requires daring, it requires loss, it requires pain, it requires getting off your tail and starting again, even though everything you love has been destroyed.
It requires all those things because it's alive.
It's alive.
Whereas socialism is dead.
Socialism, you just sit there and they give you money and go like, this is good.
I have money now.
And I put my child in class and now he's a girl and everything is great.
That's what socialism is.
Socialism, you do the work, they decide how to spend the money.
Capitalism is you take the work, you do the work, you decide how to spend the money, but you also take the risk.
My point, my point here is that Europe and the deep state and the corporate culture that wants all the power and doesn't want you to have any of the power, all of these are the same people.
They are all the same people.
And guess what?
China is the same people too.
So when we say, how are we going to change this?
Men's Challenges in Relationships00:15:54
It's not going to happen overnight.
And it's not going to be Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump or anybody else who changes it.
It's going to be us one day at a time infiltrating and taking back the systems, the institutions, the same way they did for 70 years.
This is a big enemy.
This is a big foe.
This is not some fat idiot who stands up in a school and spouts this racial theory, this such nonsense.
It's not them.
It's not the little people who are doing it.
It's these enormous power structures that we are going to have to bring down brick by brick by brick.
And so that's why there should be no whining.
There should be no waiting for someone to rescue us.
It's something we have to do.
We're the cavalry and we have to show up.
You know, another thing I miss being homeless is not having my ring security system.
There could be anybody outside my house, but I won't know it until I move in and put in my ring security system.
There are a thousand reasons why I want to do this.
Protecting my home matters to me.
And if someone stops by or something's going on outdoors around the house, Ring lets me know.
It's peace of mind anytime, knowing that our home is protected.
It's never been more important to be able to see who's there, what's happening anytime around the house, inside or outside.
I can see it all on one simple app no matter where I am.
With Ring, my family and I can keep an eye on our home no matter where we are right from our phone when we have a home, which is not yet.
How great to know.
You'll never miss a visitor with Ring's hassle-free, easy to install indoor and outdoor cams.
You will know even when your packages are delivered.
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 if you have a home.
That's ring.com slash Clavin.
That's ring.com slash Clavin.
How do you spell Clavin?
You want to know?
Well, just press the ring.
If somebody's there, say, how do you spell Clavin?
And if he knows, call the police.
So a while back, I was talking about MGTOW, and I got this men going their own way, which is kind of an anti-female movement.
And I didn't really, I wasn't as interested in that as I was in some of the philosophy.
It's called more like the red pill.
And so I've invited a guest, Richard Cooper.
He's an entrepreneur.
He's the creator of the YouTube channel Entrepreneurs and Cars, but he is also a men's high-performance coach and the best-selling author of the book, The Unplugged Alpha, The No BS Guide to Winning with Women and Life.
Richard, it's great to see you.
I really appreciate your coming on.
And I'm approaching your, I've been listening to your video, watching your videos and reading part of your book.
And I'm really interested in it, but I have to tell you, it's kind of foreign to me.
It's foreign from the way I look at life.
And so I want to really hear what you have to say.
On your Twitter feed, you say, I unplug men from comforting lies with cold, hard, uncomfortable truths about life and women.
So that's a big statement, but let's break it down a little bit.
What are the comforting lies that men are told or tell themselves?
Well, there's a lot of them, and they're told them throughout most of their life.
And almost all of these are what get them the terrible results that they arrive at in life, where they get frustrated with, for the most part, with women and the results they get with women with relationships, with their financial situation, with their self-care.
There's a lot of things that contribute to what's happening with men today, which isn't too great.
I mean, it's not great for men.
It's not great for women.
It's not great for relationships.
Is this something, is what's happening something new or is this a tale as old as time?
Are you saying something that is in our time or has it always been this way?
I think it's been more recent.
I think it's since we've seen feminism evolve from something that went from equality and turned into a supremacy movement where we've seen men become this weak and women start to act like terrible men.
You know, this conversation on this show began when I asked a female commentator whether marriage was still worthwhile for men.
I've been in a great marriage for over 40 years, but I look at young men and I think, well, you know, my wife made me a home.
She took care of my children.
She helped me become a success.
She was a complete value added to my life.
And I'm not sure that women offer that.
Is marriage today, is what you're working on with men a way of getting them well married or keeping them from getting married at all?
I'm not opposed to the idea of men and women living in a way that would be called marriage.
The problem is that there's a lot of risk that's involved.
It's mostly high risk and low reward for men, and it's low risk and high reward for women.
I'm in a long-term relationship, very happy with my girlfriend.
She's a compliment to my life.
She's not the focus.
She's, you know, she's a great piece.
So I'm with you on that.
But the problem is, is that things have changed quite a bit.
You know, the fabric of society, the social constructs, the social contracts that we have between men and women are quite difficult.
I mean, I have a chapter in my book, the book that you mentioned at the opening on why smart men don't marry.
And in the West, it's a pretty risky endeavor.
And most guys march into it like they're marching into a slaughterhouse with their eyes closed, not knowing where the landmines are and where all the sharp objects are that can hurt them along the way.
So give me a brief rundown of things that men should be looking for when they walk into dating.
Yeah, well, I mean, there's really a lot of them.
And I talk about this a lot on my channel and in different videos.
And I have a series, like a longer running sort of podcast series on my channel called Before the Train Wreck that I initially started with a clinical psychologist because we really wanted to help guys avoid making a train wreck out of their life.
I mean, I can give you a number of examples.
We could start with something like a woman's notch count.
So promiscuity is rampant today.
It's not that uncommon to see women with a notch count of 50, 100 by the time they hit 30.
And there's no consequences for that anymore.
In fact, it's often celebrated and embraced.
But on the flip side of things, there's a lot of guys that are looking for the opportunity to wife up a fine woman that would compliment him for his life or sickness and health and richer and poorer and all that good stuff.
And it doesn't work out that way.
And one of the problems with a woman's promiscuity is she makes a bad long-term partner for men because they have a hard time basically connecting with a guy in a healthy, monogamous way over a long-term basis.
There's been lots of studies done on this.
So one of the things that I talked about in my book and on my channel often is if you're going to get involved with a woman on a long-term basis and invite her into your life and have children with her, make sure she hasn't lived a promiscuous lifestyle, right?
So that's just one of many, really.
You know, your book is called The Unplugged Alpha.
And I hear people use this all the time.
And it always bothers me a little bit, the idea of the alpha male, because it's a gorilla term.
You know, it's a term we learn from gorillas.
And we're kind of not, we're somewhat different, most of us, from gorillas.
What is an alpha male?
How would you define it?
I wouldn't define it as embodying specific characteristics because I think it's better if you defer to women when it comes to defining what an alpha male is.
because they're the sexual selectors.
Women are typically the gatekeepers to sex and men are the gatekeepers to relationships.
So women have a strange mating strategy where depending on the time of the month, depending on how old they are, you know, the epochs in their life, they make different choice, different mate choices at different times in their life.
So for example, a woman in her 20s today, it's quite common for these to be known as the party years.
And she'll nonchalantly go from guy to guy, generally seeking the higher value alpha type men that have the high testosterone cues, chiseled jaws, broad shoulders, narrow waist, deep voice, like that kind of stuff.
And at some point during that period of time, they'll hit something called the epiphany phase, where they start to realize that they got to cash out their chips because they're getting close to 30.
They see their girlfriend starting to get married, having children, and their internal biological clocks start ticking really loud.
It starts ticking for them in their early 20s, I believe, anyway, but it starts becoming going from a whisper to like a shout.
And they realize that they've got to get wifed up.
So they then pivot their strategy looking for a guy that might be good enough for them, that would have suitable genetic potential and provisioning.
The problem with that, though, is if they spent their earlier years being promiscuous, making some really bad choices, getting some bad results, they can't just cast that aside because typically higher value men, like men that are on the top shelf, they're more concerned with a woman's past.
And a woman that's looking for a higher value guy is more concerned with his future.
Can he preside?
Can he protect?
Does he have good genetic potential?
Is he going to be a good father sort of thing?
So, you know, it's an interesting dynamic and it continues to evolve over time.
And like I said earlier, even the course during the month.
So, I mean, if you want to talk about the micro, the monthly cycle, we know that women have an ovulatory shift.
And during the time when they're ovulating, it's more often when they're looking for the higher testosterone cues, the alpha type of male.
When they're on their period and they're menstruating, they're typically mostly looking for comfort, you know, provisioning, protection.
That's why, you know, your wife, your girlfriend will get all wrapped up in a blanket and want to snuggle up and watch Netflix.
And usually when she's ovulating, that's when she gets stressed up.
You know, all the makeup's on, there's more skin exposed.
That's often when the girls' night outs happen.
That's when the vast majority of infidelity happens with women as well, because they're seeking the higher testosterone cue alpha men.
So when you're counseling men, I mean, they can't go out and get a chisel jaw and they can't go out and get broader shoulders.
What are you counseling them to do exactly?
Well, it really depends on what their objective is.
I mean, if they're looking to get better results with women, yeah, you can get broader shoulders.
Yeah, you can certainly structure your body in such a way where you lift heavy stuff and put it down in a constructive fashion so that you broaden your shoulders and you narrow your waist.
We know through studies that women prefer men with what's called the golden ratio.
So the 1.62 ratio, meaning the shoulder width is 1.62 width of the waist, you know, the torso.
So there are things that you can do physically about the optics of appearance.
You can't change your height.
You know, you can't change genetic discrepancies, you know, but you can shave your head, you know, if you're losing your hair.
So there's certain things you can do to max out on your looks.
There's certain things you can do to max out on your ability to earn money.
That's one of the other problems that we see today with a lot of guys is they're quite lazy and they have this entitlement mentality where things should just come to me.
They were bubble wrapped growing up.
Maybe they were a helicopter parent.
Everybody got a participation trophy when they showed up for a track and field meet.
So they don't have a lot of the tools that they need to deal with society with things like basic things like rejection.
For example, a lot of guys have a difficult time getting rejected by girls, which is why you've seen a large movement with men towards this whole MGTOW sort of community as well, right?
So the MGTOW people are kind of people who've been rejected and they're taking, to coin a phrase, they're taking their balls and going home, basically.
But you're not saying that.
You're saying just up your game.
Yeah.
Well, when I say up your game, it's you want to max out on your looks.
You want to look, max out on your status, meaning if you're insignificant, become significant, right?
Do something of significance with your life.
Find your purpose.
You've got some talent somewhere that you can apply to yourself and the world that will become a gift to you and the world itself as you put a dent in the universe.
Not all men will be able to find that, but the problem is that most men don't really try.
A lot of guys today would rather sit in a corner of the internet and sulk with a bunch of other guys complaining about why women suck and how, why can't I get a good girl?
Because I'm a really great guy.
Well, that's a function of a lot of things.
But more importantly, you're in the driver's seat and there's things that you can do to get better results out of your life.
But they don't want to hear that message because it's stressed in overalls and it looks like work usually.
Yeah, no, that all makes perfect sense.
You're telling people to be their best selves and that's going to help them all the way down the line.
So while we're talking to Richard Cooper about how to become an alpha male, one thing I can tell you don't want to do is you don't want, if your car breaks, you don't want to get in your car and pretend to drive to an auto parts store where some guy can look in a computer who doesn't know any more than you do and then pay top dollar.
No, no, no, my friend.
If you want to be alpha, I mean, but really alpha, you got to say rockauto.com and you got to say it just like that, rockauto.com.
That's how alphas say it.
And that's what makes women swoon because they know that this guy is quality enough, smart enough to just go on his computer to get his auto and body parts.
And he'll get them from hundreds of manufacturers, from a unique catalog that's remarkably easy to navigate and he'll get them for the best prices.
You can quickly see all the parts available and choose the brands you want.
Go to rockauto.com right now and see all the parts available for your car or truck.
And they have a little box that says, how do you hear about us?
You want to write Clavin?
And you want to just say it just the same way.
Say it with that alpha, Clavin right in there.
And also spell it that way, K-L-A-V-A-N.
And don't put in any E's.
That's for losers.
One of the things that I've noticed that I work with a lot of younger guys and I've noticed that guys all notice the same things about women.
Women have certain traits as women that are generally true of them.
They're exceptions, of course.
But I've noticed that older guys like me regard those traits with a great deal of affection.
When an older man says women, he's usually saying it with a great deal of love and respect and affection.
Women drive us crazy, but we love them.
Whereas when these younger guys, and I'm talking about not that young, I'm talking about guys who are like 40 and down.
They say it with a great deal of anger, the same words with a great deal of anger and fear.
And they talk about the traits that women have that have driven men insane since Adam, right?
Since the Garden of Eden, they talk about those same traits with a bitterness and an anger that kind of startles me.
Why is that?
What makes that difference?
Well, these are the cold hard truths that I unplug men from, right?
So, you know, this is what I was talking about in my book earlier.
So a good example of that would be a concept known as hypergamy, which is essentially women are predisposed to select the best value men that they can get.
So a lot of the times guys on the internet, they'll find like a website or a YouTube channel or something like that, and they'll learn about this concept.
And then the closing soundbite will be, there's no point in getting involved with women or wifing them up or spending any time with them on a long-term basis.
Because if Brad Pitt couldn't do it, then what makes you think that you can do it?
Or if Johnny Depp couldn't do it, what makes you think that you can't do it or can do it, sorry.
So they co-miserate together with a bunch of other guys and they sulk over it.
And that's not the solution to your reproductive problems.
The solution is, okay, now that I understand that women are hypergamous and it's in their biological imperative to always select the best male that they can get, how about you be that guy so that every morning that she gets up, she looks at you and says, this is the best that I can do.
I can't do better than this, which means you can't relax in a marriage.
You can't get fat.
You can't get lazy.
You can't sit around all night watching sports with Cheeto dust on your shirt or your beard and really doing nothing with your life.
Chase Excellence, Not Animalism00:06:18
You've got to continue to chase excellence.
That's why I always tell guys, chase excellence, not women.
And everything else will start to fall in line after that, provided that you understand the game of relationships and all that sort of stuff.
So the other thing that always strikes me, whenever I hear people your age and younger discussing these things, there's a kind of an animalism to it that you discuss, women want to marry a high earner, someone who can take care of them, someone who has strength, things we always knew, but you seem to delete women's personalities.
In other words, you seem to feel that women are more at the mercy of their female nature than men are at the mercy of their male nature.
My wife married a starving poet who she never thought was going to make a dime and was startled when we did a lot better, even though I told her we would.
She was, you know, it surprised her.
So that was her personality.
She liked being around that kind of guy.
You don't seem to take into account the differences between one woman and another.
Yeah, well, the common denominators are the ones that I like to focus on the most.
Like all women are hypergamous, right?
So that's how women operate and have always operated throughout history.
There's lots of evo-psych studies.
There's a lot of science papers and research papers that have all concluded the exact same thing.
So yeah, there's emotional concepts which you could throw into the blender and blend up with all of that.
But I'm not concerned so much with feelings.
I'm more concerned with the facts and what women actually respond to.
Because the narrative between what we've been told women respond to and what they actually respond to are quite often two different things.
You know, that last thing you just said seems to me to be one of the big problems that we have.
I mean, I think that when I was young and you talked to your father or your older brother, they told you a lot of things about women that so you weren't surprised when you saw them.
Whereas now I think the entire culture is based on lying about women, lying about what they are, what they do, what they want.
Even women themselves.
I mean, when I give talks at college, colleges, I frequently say, all the young women I see are miserable.
Please stand up and tell me if I'm wrong.
And no one ever has, not one ever has.
And I feel like people are just being relentlessly lied to.
You know, you say some of the things you said did not actually resonate with me.
And I'll just run a couple of them by.
One, you said, we live in a female first social order.
Well, let me first ask you what you mean by that so I'm sure I'm about what I'm talking about.
Well, the current narrative is that we live in a patriarchy and that the patriarchy oppresses women and blah, blah, blah.
I'm sure you've heard that, right?
Right.
Well, the fact of the matter is we really don't.
We live in a matriarchy.
I mean, if you look at things like family law, everything in family law is written there to preserve and protect women.
And unfortunately, there's a lot of components of family law which encourage women to behave quite badly towards the father, which subsequently does affect the children.
So, despite what the narrative is about how family law is there to protect the interests of the children, it's really written more so to protect the interest, control, and financials availability to financial resources for women.
So, that would be one great example of that component.
Because, I mean, it seems to me that women get that a lot of the things that women like to naturally like to do, like build families and take care of families and take care of children, are kind of denigrated in our society.
That they are looked, that women are looked down upon unless they behave like men, unless they take on male values.
Yeah, and I fully agree with that.
I mean, like, you know, women are encouraged to put off their childbearing years, chase a career, climb the corporate ladder.
I mean, one of the funny things that drives me nuts around here is when I turn on the radio, we have this radio ad running locally here in Toronto where it's from a IVF fertility clinic.
And I don't know if the marketers drop this into the ad as kind of like a ha-ha sort of thing, but it's like, hey, you know, you've chased your career, you know, you're 40 years old, you haven't had kids yet.
Why not use IVF for $20,000?
You two can, you know, have the value of a family.
It speaks nothing of a father.
It speaks nothing of raising children in a two-parent household.
And then at the end of it, it's got the sound of a baby's voice going like this, right?
And it's like, well, you know, if we didn't tell women to act like men, you know, meaning be, you know, promiscuous, chase money, chase excellence, and behave more feminine.
Like the whole thing that I have an issue with when it comes to feminism is it's really a toxic version of feminism that's a supremacy movement that tries to convince women to behave like bad versions of men.
And men don't want to be, I mean, okay, let me correct myself.
A lot of men would be okay to be with a woman like that, but top shelf men don't have time to be with, you know, like a hashtag boss girl.
No, no guy that's worth his salt wants to go to work all day, chase excellence, bring home the bacon, hoping she's going to cook it up, only to be lectured about 15 different things from his boss girl wife.
He wants an agreeable, beautiful woman in his frame that's there to raise his kids and turn his, you know, home, sorry, turn his house into a home sort of thing.
They don't want to deal with disagreeableness and arguments and all that sort of stuff.
It's just a bizarre thing that's that's popped up only recently that didn't exist, even as far back when I was a child, right?
You know, I'm wondering, I can't help wondering as I listen to you.
I mean, you're kind of arguing for traditional values.
You're arguing for, without mentioning that, you're arguing for a world that was kind of like the world in which I grew up.
Is that fair to say?
I think it's reasonable to say, but where I typically would detour from the typical traditional conservative route is I think that if anything's going to change and return to a environment like that, that's better for children, you know, to grow up in and for society in general, is we're going to need women to really lead the charge in that.
They're the ones that need to take off the pink hats and march on Capitol Hill because guys aren't getting married to them because family law is too hostile and they want those laws to change to become more balanced.
Hays Code Controversy00:15:17
So there's lower risk for them.
But I haven't seen that happen.
I mean, I haven't seen any of that change.
In fact, all I keep hearing is the patriarchy is bad.
Women still make 75 cents on the dollar.
We're oppressed.
We're victims, blah, blah, blah.
Wow.
Right.
So I'm waiting to see some signs of that happening.
But until it does, I'm just sitting here on the sidelines.
I talk to as many guys as I can to try to enlighten them and unplug them from the comforting lies so they can at least take control of their own lives.
Because I know that you can't control the universe.
you can only control yourself.
True enough.
Richard Cooper is the author of The Unplugged Alpha, The No BS Guide to Winning with Women and Life.
Your show is called Entrepreneurs and Cars.
Is that what it's called?
That's correct.
Yeah, that's a YouTube channel.
It's really interesting stuff, Richard.
I really appreciate your coming on.
Thank you very much.
It was good talking to you.
You got it.
Thanks.
Now, it's lucky I've already made my will because there's not much time to do it.
But if you want to do it as easily as possible, go to Trust and Will.
Trust and Will documents are designed by estate planning experts and customize for the state you live in.
And with live customer support seven days a week, trustandwill.com's team is available to answer any questions you have while setting up your plan.
Trust and Will is the most trusted name in online estate planning, the category leader on TrustPilot, and they've helped hundreds of thousands of people protect their families, assets, and legacy.
A lot of people don't want to think about this.
They don't want to think about making their will, but you got to do it.
It's the responsible, the right thing to do, and this is the easy way to do it.
You can gain a lot of peace of mind at trustandwill.com slash clavin, and you get 10% off plus free shipping of your customized legal documents.
Don't wait, go right now.
This is really important.
Get 10% off plus free shipping at trustandwill.com slash clavin, trustandwill.com slash clavin.
The one thing you want to leave to those you leave behind is how to spell clavin because they're going to want to know that.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Don't forget.
So this is really exciting news.
The Daily Wire is adding all kinds of new content every day, and today is no different.
After Amazon removed Clarence Thomas's historic documentary, Created Equal, during none other than Black History Month, we decided to give Clarence the audience he deserves right here at The Daily Wire and good for us.
The movie shows Thomas' journey from the segregated South to the highest court in the land and the all-out war that was waged on him by the left during his confirmation.
It's unfortunate that Amazon removed such an excellent and high-performing documentary, but it's Amazon's loss and the Daily Wire's gain.
That's right.
The Daily Wire has acquired the North American streaming rights to Created Equal.
So get ready because it's streaming live tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern, 8 p.m. Central for all Daily Wire members over at DailyWire.com.
If you are not yet a Daily Wire member, you can join with CodeJustice for 20% off your membership and get ready to watch on demand.
Here's a look at the trailer.
I was never going to be white.
The problem is I can never go back completely to the world I came from.
I saw what I had become and I asked God that if you take anger out of my heart, I'll never hate again.
You're not really black because you're not doing what we expect black people to do.
That's when all hack broke loose.
So you'd still like to serve on the Supreme Court?
I'd rather die than withdraw from the process.
An American hero, and you can stream Created Equal live tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern, 8 p.m. Central on DailyWire.com.
If you are not yet a Daily Wire member, why not join with Code Justice for 20% off your membership and get this documentary and all of our other great content like our talk show Candice or our first film, Run, Hide, Fight, On Demand.
The term political correctness may have started as a Soviet joke, but it's not a joking matter now.
That's why none other than Michael Knowles is addressing its increasing influence on American culture in his new book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
I've read it.
It is very good.
I know Knowles wrote it, but still, Knowles masterfully breaks down the history of political correctness and what America's future will look like if we don't stop its growth.
Just head to speechlessbook.com to pre-order your copy today.
Or if you want an extra personal touch, text speechless to 53445 to pre-order a signed copy.
Don't wait.
Pre-order your copy today and understand the PC police better than they understand themselves.
So I want to go back to talking about gangster movies.
I was talking about them last week, and what I really want to talk about is the Hays Code because it kind of fits in with the theme of the show.
I've been talking about the great forgetting and whether we can live in a world in which people choose the good rather than have it imposed on them.
And the films I looked at last week, for those of you who weren't listening or who don't remember, were the great gangster movies that were made before the Hayes Code imposed certain rules on the movie-making industry.
So, you know, it was Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, and Scarface, the original Scarface.
And those would make people upset.
They made people upset until the Hays Code came in, really within the next years, like around 1934.
And the Hayes Code barred, this was by agreement.
It wasn't a government code, but it was by agreement.
They barred pointed profanity, any licentious or suggestive nudity, legal traffic in drugs, any inference of sex perversion, white slavery, miscegenation was also born, marriage between the races.
Any show of childbirth, ridicule of the clergy was banned, and willful offense to any nation, race, or creed.
They also wanted you to be tasteful.
Those are things that you shouldn't do, and things you should be tasteful about were the use of the flag, firearms, theft robbery, and you shouldn't show sympathy for criminals, right?
And this was stuff that bothered some people from the very beginning.
One of the earliest films ever made was called The Great Train Robbery.
It was made by Edison.
It was one of the inventors of movies.
It was made by the Edison film industry.
And it ended, the bad guys robbed the train and they got killed, but it ended with this famous sequence of a man, a cowboy, one of the villains, pointing his gun directly at the camera and firing it at the camera.
And people were just very upset by that and thought it glorified these robbers.
So the thing you have to understand about the Hays Code, and a lot of conservatives love the Hayes Code because it cleaned up the movies, but one of the things you have to understand about it is it was an act of conservative cancel culture, by which I mean it was not something that the majority wanted.
It was not a consensus view.
It was a view by a small number, not a small number, but a number of influential cultural people who forced it on the movie industry by their power and by their economic might.
Hayes hated them.
He hated these people.
If you want to read a wonderful book about this, by the way, I don't want to get off on this too much.
A book named Tinseltown by William Manner, just an excellent, entertaining book about the murders and scandals that were going on in Hollywood that led to the Hayes Code.
But Hayes hated the people who were constantly complaining, the religious people, the church ladies who were constantly complaining about the scandalous movies.
He called them the Anvil Chorus, which is a chorus in Verdi's opera Carmen, where the gypsies bang on anvils.
He just felt that they were just banging on these anvils.
But they basically, there were a lot of scandals at that time.
There was a famous scandal, a beloved comic actor named Fatty Arbuckle.
I think his first name was Roscoe, Roscoe Arbuckle.
They called him Fatty Arbuckle.
He was accused of raping and accidentally killing an actress, and he didn't do it.
Apparently, he didn't do it.
He was tried maybe three times.
And the Anvil chorus, the church ladies, and all the religious people were screaming and yelling, this was Hollywood.
They were having orgies.
They were killing women and all this stuff.
But ultimately, he was acquitted.
And the jury gave him a formal written statement of apology.
And the people never stopped going to his movies, never stopped loving him.
But because of the church ladies and the Anvil chorus, his career was over.
He was ruined by cancel culture, conservative cancel culture, as opposed to the leftist cancel culture we have now.
So this Hayes Code was forced on Hayes and on the movie industry and it changed things.
And so you saw a, just take two gangster movies, a movie that was made before the code, another one called Manhattan Melodrama.
And this is a really fun film.
This is the movie that John Dillinger was watching when he came out of the Biograph Theater in Chicago and was killed by Melvin Purvis and the FBI.
This is the movie he was watching.
And you can see about that in a movie called Public Enemies, which just brings everything kind of back together.
But in Manhattan Melodrama, these two guys grow up in New York together.
One goes bad.
That's Clark Gable.
He becomes a gangster.
And the other, played by William Powell, the great William Powell, becomes a lawyer.
And as a prosecutor, he convicts his friend, Clark Gable, and sends him to death row.
And then, because he does that, he becomes the governor, and he has a chance to commute Clark Gable's sentence.
And this is his best buddy from the childhood days.
And so he goes to him and visits him on death row and tells him he wants to commute his sentences, cut 24.
I can't help it, Blackie.
I'm not going to let you die.
I can't do it.
Hey, do you think you're doing me a favor by keeping me locked up in this filthy trap for the rest of my life?
You're going to make a great sacrifice, ruin your career for what?
So that I can rot in this hole.
Would you do that to me?
No, thanks.
Don't commute me.
I don't want it.
Hey, look, Jim.
If I can't live the way I want, then at least let me die when I want.
Come on, Martin, let's go.
So, about four years later, after the code, he's brave, right?
He goes out and he just gets electrocuted, and he doesn't, I just want to die the way I want.
Let me die when I want, if I can't live the way I want.
So, he's a romantic gangster.
He's a romantic figure.
A few years later, in 1938, when the code was in place, they made a very similar movie called Angels with Dirty Faces, which is a wonderfully entertaining movie with James Cagney and Pat O'Brien.
And very similar story.
They're kids, they're committing petty crimes.
They're street kids, they're committing petty crimes, and one of them gets caught, and the other one gets away.
They're running away from the police, and one of them gets nabbed, and the other one vaults over the fence and gets away.
And the one who vaults over the fence becomes a priest, played by Pat O'Brien, and the one who gets caught goes into the system, as we say today, and he becomes a gangster, Jimmy Cagney.
Now, Jimmy Cagney comes back to the old neighborhood, and he wins the love of the street kids there.
They admire him.
He's a gangster.
He's romantic.
So it's really a film about romanticizing gangsters.
It's a film that romanticizes gangsters because of Jimmy Cagney, but it also is a film about romanticizing gangsters.
And while the priest is trying to win these kids back toward a good life and back toward God, they want to emulate Jimmy Cagney and become just like him.
So again, Jimmy Cagney goes to death row.
He is awaiting execution.
And Pat O'Brien, and this is one of the most famous scenes in movies, Pat O'Brien goes and asks him a favor.
The priest comes to the gangster and asks him a favor.
We haven't got a lot of time.
I want to ask you one last favor.
There's not much else that I can do, kid.
Yes, there is, Rocky.
Perhaps more than you could do under any other circumstances.
If you have the courage for it, and I know you have.
Meanwhile walking in there?
That's not going to take much.
I know that, Rocky.
And I sit in a barber chair.
They're going to ask me if you got anything to say, and I say, sure.
Give me a haircut, a shaven, a massage.
One of those nice new electric massages.
But you're not afraid, Rocky?
They already like me to be, wouldn't they?
But I'm afraid I can't abide you, kid.
You know, Jerry, I think in order to be afraid to, you gotta have a heart.
I don't think I got one.
I got cut out of me a long time ago.
Suppose I asked you to have the heart, hmm?
To be scared.
What do you mean?
Suppose at the last minute the guards dragged you out here screaming for mercy.
Suppose he went to the chair yellow.
Yellow?
Say, what's the matter with you, Jerry?
He's been worrying about my courage.
I know that.
This is a different kind of courage, Rocky.
The kind that's, well, it's born in heaven.
So what he asked him to do is to pretend that he's afraid so the kids won't admire him.
And in one of the most famous scenes in motion pictures, they come and he, Cagney refuses.
He says, no way, I'm not going out yellow.
There's just no way.
I'm not afraid.
I'm not afraid he's going to go out like Clark Gable does in Manhattan Melodrama.
But at the last minute, they come and take him away, and he starts screaming for mercy.
Please don't kill me.
Please don't kill me.
I don't want to die.
Please don't do it.
And they take him away, screaming and yelling for mercy.
And there's a very famous scene.
It's done in shadow.
You don't see Cagney do it, but it's done in shadow where they take him by a radiator and he starts to grab hold of the radiator to keep from being dragged to the electric chair.
And of course, the thing is, he can't hold on to the radiator because the radiator is hot.
And you think to yourself, you don't know whether he's acting or not.
Because if he has the will to grab hold of a steaming hot radiator, maybe he's not faking it.
Maybe he really is yellow.
And so that's how they get around the Hays Code.
They don't romanticize him because you think like, no, no, he actually is yellow, but you never know.
And so the Hayes Code actually brings a certain amount of subtlety to the movie and a certain amount of ambiguity that makes the movie interesting.
Now, that is one of the things about any code.
Artists are always better with restrictions.
Artists are always better when you give them restrictions, even if it's the restriction of the sonnet form, the restriction of the three-act structure.
It excites our creativity.
It excites our cleverness.
How am I going to get this poem into 14 lines?
How am I going to get this epic story into three acts and 120 screenwriting pages, right?
And so the Hayes Code always did have, it always did have that wonderful effect on people to make them clever.
How am I going to tell the story of adultery in Casablanca without making it really a story about adultery by making a story about something else?
So they really got around the Hays Code, but in doing so, they made a lot of better pictures.
And their pictures didn't include nudity and cursing, which I know a lot of conservatives like.
And yet, when the Hays Code was removed, they did make, that was in the 60s, about 68, they started to make the revolutionary movies of the 70s, which was the last great period in American movie making.
And of course, the greatest movie I think of that time was The Godfather, Godfather One.
And what's interesting about The Godfather, there's a debate.
A lot of people debate whether Godfather I is a better movie than Godfather II.
And I'll tell you the answer.
No.
Yes, Godfather I is a better movie than Godfather II.
Why?
It's because of the endings.
At the end of Godfather I, Diane Keaton, the innocent, loving wife, goes in and asks Al Pacino basically, has he done this horrible thing?
Is he a horrible murderer?
And he says no.
And she's so relieved and she walks out to make herself a drink.
And then she looks through the door and she sees all the mobsters celebrating him as the new godfather and realizes she's been lied to.
And the famous last scene of The Godfather is we see Diane Keaton, this lovely, innocent American girl, and they slam the door in her face.
And the last thing you see in The Godfather is the door being slammed in Diane Keaton's face.
And this is a throwback to another scene in the movie The Searchers, right?
This is one of the greatest Westerns ever made, and it ends with John Wayne, the rough and ready cowboy who goes out to rescue a girl who's been kidnapped by the Indians.
Ray Liota's Betrayal00:03:52
He actually goes out to kill her, but he winds up rescuing her and he brings her back and unites the family together and the family goes into the house and another one of the most famous scenes in the movies, John Wayne stands outside and the door slams in his face.
And the difference between these two scenes, right, this is the difference in a way between when this movie was made, which is 1956, and the 60s.
Here's John Wayne, if you're watching, you can actually see the door blow closed and just a very, very famous moment just ends the movie right there.
Is John Wayne is the rough, tough killer who unites the family, but he can't go in and join the family.
He can't become part of the new domestic life that is being built in the West.
He remains the outlaw, the outsider, and so the door closes on him.
In The Godfather, in The Godfather, it elevates the gangsters.
It basically says, there's something noble about these gangsters because even though they're violent, they are just in an America that is unjust and also violent.
And so the door is closing on the family person.
It's the opposite, right?
The outlaws, the gangsters, are now inside the house and the door is closing in the face of the domestic wife.
It is closing in the face of the family.
And so as Coppola does through most of The Godfather, he reverses the positions that we take as the moral position.
Now, what's interesting to me, and the reason this is greater than the end of Godfather 2 is that Godfather 2, he goes out and he sends out, Michael, the son of the Godfather, goes out and sends his brother off to have him killed.
And the last scene is just a close-up of Al Pacino playing this mobster as the camera moves in on him and watches how dead he is, what a dead person he is.
And the reason this is different and lesser to me is now the filmmaker has become fascinated with the evil guy, which is what happens with evil.
First you start to try and understand it, then you become fascinated by it, and then you become it.
And what happens is now, Coppola's talking about what happens, how the effect that evil has on evil people, but he's not talking about the effect that evil people has on good people like Diane Keaton, right?
So he's become fascinated with evil.
And as he makes the third movie, the Godfather, Pacino, becomes a stone hero, the heroic mobster saving the pope, and it's one of the worst movies.
It's just a terrible, terrible movie.
And I think he's sorry he made it.
I certainly am.
And that is why I am going to end today, as I ended last time, by talking about Goodfellas, because it's just an honest movie about how much fun it is to be a gangster.
And I'll show the last scene where Ray Liota has ratted out his friends and they're all being sent away.
But this means that now Ray Liota can no longer live the gangster life and he remembers what that gangster life was like.
Anything I wanted was a phone call away.
Free cars, the keys to a dozen hideout flats all over the city.
I'd bet 20, 30 grand over a weekend.
And then I'd either blow the winnings in a week or go to the sharks to pay back the bookies.
Didn't matter.
Didn't mean anything.
When I was broke, I would go out and rob some more.
We ran everything.
We paid off cops.
We paid off lawyers.
We paid off judges.
Everybody had their hands out.
Everything was for the taking.
And now it's all over.
And that's the hardest part.
Today, everything is different.
There's no action.
I have to wait around like everyone else.
Can't even get decent food.
Right after I got here, I ordered some spaghetti with marinara sauce and I got egg noodles and ketchup.
I'm an average nobody.
Get to live the rest of my life like a snook.
And how does it end?
It ends with Joe Pesci pointing his gun at the camera and firing.
It's the great train robbery.
We're right back where we started with the Edison movie that everybody was so upset about before the Hayes office.
Confronting Pain And Finding Joy00:11:02
And so the point is, when you remove the restraints, you go backwards, right?
It is life.
It is life to push forward into something decent.
It is death when you recede back into decadence and violence and decay.
So the question that we face today is the question the movie faces, the movie industry faces, and all industries and all arts face.
Will we choose not to have these things imposed upon us, but to choose them ourselves, to choose to do better ourselves, to choose life instead of death, to choose morality instead of immorality?
And that is the fight we're in, and that's the question that we're all facing.
All right, today is, I think, the day we celebrate Juneteenth.
It's really Juneteenth is tomorrow, but today is the new federal holiday of Juneteenth.
And I know many of you are gathered around your Juneteenth trees singing Juneteenth carols.
And you're thinking, what is the best way to celebrate Juneteenth?
Wow, of course.
It's by getting rid of all your problems with the mailbag.
Shout out to our favorite MDA, Anthony Fauci.
I heard that song.
All right, let's start.
We have a video question.
We love video questions.
Keep them under a minute if you send them in.
This is a good one.
All hail, ruler of the Iron Dome.
Dr. Clavin, my question concerns the Catholic Church and homilies.
I am a faithful Catholic.
I go every Sunday.
And I know my family and I have changed churches once, at least once, because some members of my family felt that they were very uncomfortable with some of the homilies given.
And I always tell them, well, I'm not really there for the guy giving a homily.
I'm there for the guy in the cross behind him.
So my question concerns: I've seen stories of some Catholic priests who have given homilies promoting Black Lives Matter and asking members of the congregation to basically call out themselves if they were white.
And I don't know how comfortable I would feel in a church like that.
Would I be able to say, just, you know, I'm not there for that priest.
I'm there for the guy behind him.
And I was just wondering what your advice would be if I were to find myself in a situation like that.
Thank you and have a wonderful weekend.
I know you won't be Clavenless.
That's right.
That's why my weekends are so much better.
Great question.
And, you know, I think your idea that you're not there for the priest, you're there for the guy on the cross behind him is indeed the right idea and the original idea.
You know, the idea of the importance of sermons, they only became important in the Reformation, not because of the Catholics, but because the Protestants believed in only the text, right?
They only believed in reading the Bible, not in the interpretations of the church and not in the apostolic descent from Peter.
They believed that each person should read the church, and that's why sermons became so much more important.
In the old days, you'd write one sermon and pass around.
Everybody would give the same sermon, so it would come really from official sources.
But now they had to train priests to write and deliver their own sermons, and that became a form of entertainment almost when they didn't have movies or anything like that.
So you're absolutely right.
The sermon is less important than the liturgy.
And this is especially true in the Catholic Church, but it's also true in the Episcopal Church and Anglo-Catholic Church, which I'm a part of.
That in other words, you're there for the liturgy because the liturgy is the transformation through ritual of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.
And that's why you are there.
You are there to confess your sins, to cleanse yourself so that you're ready to take in the body and blood of Christ and do that.
And really, some buffoon gets up and gives some stupid anti-white sermon has nothing to do with the case.
You're there to hear scripture read.
That also purifies you and prepares your mind for what is happening.
I know that there are disagreements, obviously, sometimes bloody, have been bloody disagreements between Protestants and Catholics about the meaning of the bread and wine, but I stand right in between those.
I believe that the human mind and co-creation with God is in fact transforming the bread and wine into the body and blood.
And so that's why you're there.
Now, having said all that, having said all that, what you were talking about, a guy giving a racist speech, and it's racist, whether it's against whites or blacks, is incredibly offensive.
And if you feel comfortable approaching the priest, as I would, and I have done, and said, you know, that's wrong.
That's not the gospel, and you shouldn't be saying that.
And I really disagree with that.
I think you should.
I think you have every right to say that.
And I think you have every responsibility to do it.
I know guys who have done that.
I know guys who have done it who were big donors, but I've done it myself without being a big donor and just said, look, you know, that's just not true.
That's not in the gospel.
And, you know, you do it as politely and respectfully as you can.
But at some point, yeah, I think if I had to listen to some blowhard spew that garbage, it might ruin my church experience.
It might get in the way of my—I mean, I left one church after a guy got up and said Jesus died for the non-binary child who can't use the girl's bathroom or something like that.
And, you know, I thought somebody said to me, well, yes, but also no.
So, yeah, I think it's a question of degree.
If he's ruining your church experience, I think you have to say something, and if he doesn't respond to that, you have to move on.
But you are absolutely right theologically that you're there.
You're not there for the priest.
You're there for the man on the cross behind them.
Here's a question from Anonymous.
And I'm really glad this question came up because I got a lot of mail about this.
And I think people did misunderstand what I said.
He says, Andrew, in one of your most recent episodes, a woman shared how she was nauseated by the sex fantasies and positions her husband was asking her to do.
And you suggested this was wrong of the husband, which I agreed with.
You also mentioned almost in passing that the husband may solve this issue with pornography.
And this caught me off guard because I myself am not too proud of my weekly pornography viewing.
I don't think my sexual fantasies and aggressive desires can nor should be solved by pornography, but that I should lean away from pornography and develop a sexual fantasy and relationship only with my wife and pornography out of the picture.
If you could expound on what you meant by that, I would really appreciate it.
Yeah, I'm glad to have the opportunity to do it because I don't think people actually heard what I said.
What I started by saying, the first thing I said in answer to her letter, and this is a wife who was disgusted by what her husband had been basically requiring her to do in the bedroom.
She didn't specify what it was, but she said, I'm not a prude, and this is not something that most women would agree to.
And I said at the very outset, I see it's a very hard path to a good outcome here.
And the reason I said that was not necessarily because of the situation.
It was because when the wife brought to her husband the fact that this was making her nauseated, they got into arguments.
And so in other words, he was pushing back against what she was saying in a not understanding and not open way.
She was saying, you know, when you take me to bed, I am being humiliated and feel nauseated.
And he was arguing with her.
And that's not the way you respond to that.
I'm sorry.
Your wife comes to you and says, you know, you're hurting me every time we go to bed, you know, say, never mind, never mind, be quiet.
You know, that's not the way that goes.
So I saw him as being, maybe I was misreading this, but this is what I saw.
I saw him as being very selfish.
And I thought that this was not going to have the best possible outcome because of that.
Now, maybe I'm wrong, and I hope I'm wrong, and I'm hoping he can see the light.
But as I was talking about that, I said, maybe he's just going to have to deal with this on his own, and including by just dealing with it by pornography.
And what I was thinking was, if this guy is so selfish that he is not going to relieve his wife's suffering at his hands, if he's that selfish, then I would rather he degrade himself than that he degrade her.
And so that's what I was saying.
I was not endorsing pornography.
Some people said that pornography probably causes fetish, which is just, that's unlikely.
His fetish was probably caused by a childhood trauma.
But still, I was not endorsing pornography.
I was just saying, in the bad outcomes that I foresee in this situation because of his selfishness, that's one bad outcome where at least he's degrading himself instead of degrading this lady.
And so that's what I was saying.
And again, I was admitting that these were bad outcomes.
From it says Baranby, maybe it means Barnaby.
I have a question about pursuing joy.
This is from a lady.
I'm a Christian stay-at-home wife and mother.
I have five young boys, and I homeschool them as well.
I have recently, first of all, you're my hero already, but I have recently realized that the acne I've been trying to manage over the past six years is a rare skin disorder that is incurable.
No matter what I do, the scars and flare-ups will always be part of my life.
I'm so self-conscious and unhappy in my skin.
My husband and children say I'm beautiful and I'm trying to focus my energy on having a beautiful heart, but I need tips on how to be joyful in my life.
I feel alone in coming to terms with my condition because it feels like no one really understands that this is depressing and painful for me.
Well, first of all, of course it is.
I mean, of course it's depressing and painful.
It is especially depressing and painful for a lady to have a skin problem like that.
And you shouldn't feel that it's wrong for you to be in pain about it.
Remember, joy is not happiness.
Joy is not the same thing as happiness.
Joy is a feeling that life is worthwhile, that you're in the fight, that you are doing something that God wants you to do and meaningful, that is meaningful and meaningful to you and meaningful to God, meaningful to the people around you, all of which you are doing.
And so if you can focus on that, you will have more joy.
I think that one thing you should do is sit with your pain a little bit.
Maybe even just for 10 minutes, 15 minutes a day, sit and just say, yeah, this really bothers me, and then get back in the fight and ask yourself, what does God want me to make of this?
What does he want me to make of this?
What am I supposed to do with this thing he's given me?
And how can I start to use this in some way to live a more compassionate and a deeper life?
And that will be helpful.
You might want to read a book called Bleak House by Charles Dickens because it includes a sort of storyline that involves this.
And it's really an interesting, it's a wonderful, wonderful, entertaining book.
But the one thing I just want to make sure of, because you don't mention it, I want to make sure you've actually been to a doctor, that you're not diagnosing yourself off the internet, because there are treatments for this, and they may not help exactly, you know, totally, but they might alleviate things.
So I do suggest if you haven't been to an actual dermatologist that you go to a dermatologist.
But meanwhile, you shouldn't feel bad about feeling bad.
This is something that's painful, but you shouldn't let yourself feel bad all the time.
Give yourself a period during the day when you confront your feelings about this and then realize that God wants you to do something and go back to work and you will find your joy increases even in your suffering.
I got to stop there, but I'll be gone for a week.
This Juneteenth will just now bleed into the rest of the week.
You will be destroyed, but I will be back again with the Andrew Klavan show because I am 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.
Andrew Klavan Show Production00:00:43
Thanks for listening.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Our technical director is Austin Stevens.
Supervising producer, Mathis Glover.
Production Manager, Pavel Vidowski.
Edited by Danny D'AMico.
Lead audio mixer, Mike Cormina.
Animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Production coordinator, McKenna Waters.
And our production assistant is Jacob Falage.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production, Copyright Daily Wire, 2021.
Conservatives celebrate a religious liberty win at the Supreme Court.
Our scientific experts discover death.
And a new report shows how thoroughly the lockdowns gutted the middle class.