Ep. 1038—Do We Still Want Freedom? dissects how woke academia weaponizes Lord of the Rings to push political agendas, from rebranding Gollum as a "disenfranchised other" to equating excellence with oppression. It traces modern censorship—from China’s social credit system to Disney’s complicity—to a global rejection of freedom, while Michael Knowles links cancel culture to Gramsci’s century-long Marxist infiltration. The episode warns that without shared moral frameworks (rooted in religion), liberalism collapses into nihilism, leaving society adrift between authoritarian control and performative chaos. The answer? Reclaim institutions—before they’re lost forever. [Automatically generated summary]
This year's annual J.R.R. Tolkien seminar will be bringing a woke sensibility to its discussions of Lord of the Rings because participating academics are afraid there may still be areas of artistic achievement and audience enjoyment that haven't yet been ruined by their stupid and immoral ideology.
Millions of readers around the world who have been delighted by the intricate fantasy world Tolkien constructed out of a potent mixture of learning, faith, and imagination can now look forward to having their delight crushed to fragments, then ground into the dirt, then crapped on, then mocked, then ground into the dirt again by mirthless politicized hacks who will spend the seminar presenting such academic papers as Gondor in Transition, A Brief Introduction to Transgender Realities in Lord of the Rings,
and Pardoning Sorum, the Queer in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
Yes, I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, oh, Clavin, you Johnny Appleseed-like disseminator of flowering hilarity, what an antic fancy you must harbor within that unnervingly attractive body that you could make up the sort of ridiculous titles for academic papers that highlight the absurd narcissism of today's liberal arts professors as well as their clownish stupidity,
thus making us laugh uproariously at the same time we daydream about what it would be like to be stranded for three days on a desert island with you, a skimpy neglige, and a bottle of Lafitte Rothschild.
Hey, that would certainly be special, but no, in fact, I did not make the names of those papers up.
They are real.
And also, I don't own a neglige.
The director of the Tolkien seminar, Professor Felix Mageghi, explained the reasoning behind the woke approach in an exclusive taped interview with one of the Call Me Girls on Shaggle.com.
Professor Schmage said, quote, for decades, readers of Tolkien's work have been losing themselves in a kind of rapturous wonder that can often distract them from me and my small-minded and unfounded political opinions.
The fact is, there is no conceivable reason I would spend my life studying Lord of the Rings, except to use it as a means to glorify my own unoriginal ideas and obnoxious personality.
We must not remain silent while the novels cast Gollum as a disenfranchised other simply because he's a hairless monstrosity who lives in moral darkness, whispering twisted schemes of evil to his shadow self.
After all, that describes almost every college professor I know.
Unquote.
This year's Tolkien seminar will be held this weekend online so that Tolkien fans around the world will be able to turn the sound off so it doesn't distract them while they're rereading Lord of the Rings.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the 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, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, we are here with the special 4th of July program of the Andrew Clavin Show, in which we will celebrate our independence by having the Republic actually collapse on screen while I'm talking.
ZipRecruiter's Smart Hiring Solution00:02:36
Maybe we won't do that.
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And if you leave a comment and the comment is sufficiently ignorant and racist, we will run it on the show because it'll just fit right in seamlessly.
Today we have from Lul Lilpop, Lul Lipop.
He says, I told my wife to put some pearls and heels on and then make some pies and that she was a nice piece.
But before she found another pan to throw at me, I said, rock auto.
We had pie that night, all night, and then more pie in the morning.
I think she's now pregnant.
That's disgusting.
I'm so sorry.
But that's the kind of, that actually happens.
Those things actually happen when you listen to this show.
So stay tuned.
It's going to just get uglier from here.
You know, I can't do this show alone.
I am backed up by a huge staff of producers and technicians and artists.
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If you're a business owner who's hiring, you probably face a lot of challenges when it comes to finding the right person for your role.
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No Easy Way00:14:56
There are no easy thing that way.
You know, I'm sure that many of you have heard the Yates poem, The Second Coming, which includes the famous over-quoted line, the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.
The best lack all conviction.
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
And we're always complaining about this, right?
We're always complaining the left always wins and they're always on the march and the right never fights back and why don't we learn to fight and Republicans are useless.
And why is an evil ignoramus like Alexandria Ecasio-Cortez so clearly energized while Mitch McConnell talks like this, you know?
So why does that happen?
Why does it happen so often that we feel that the left is on the march and we are kind of just fuddling around trying to play defense all the time?
Now, for one thing, I've talked about this before, but one thing is we are asking politicians to do the difficult thing, which is to build freedom by taking less power from themselves.
That's not what politicians normally do.
It's not what government normally does.
It's the norm for government to grow.
It's the norm for people to lose power, to lose their liberty, and to slowly be taken over by government.
So, you know, conservatives are trying, always trying to climb uphill.
We're fighting an uphill battle while leftists are kind of surfing downstream.
They're in the rapids going downstream.
Oh, rot.
And, you know, government taking over all the power.
That's just perfect.
We'll just float right down to that.
And I've always said this, you know, that socialism, leftism is a form of decay.
And so we are like doctors trying to keep that decay at bay, knowing that everything made by mortal hands will die and everything that lives will die.
And freedom, liberty is a living thing, whereas tyranny is just the norm.
It's just that kind of, you know, when things flatline, when somebody dies and the meter suddenly goes beep, you know, that's what socialism is.
Socialism is the norm of death.
It's life is something that you work for.
Death is something that happens to you, whether you like it or not.
And that's the reason we're always kind of working uphill.
But the mechanism by which decay and death come to a country is almost always connected to the disease of self-deception, a tendency to tell ourselves things that make us feel good about the world or that make us feel that there are more possibilities in the world than there are, but that are just simply not true.
When you're building a society, when you're building a civilization, you're kind of inoculated against self-deception because necessity is everywhere, right?
You can't pretend that all family arrangements are equal when you're struggling for your life.
It's only one family arrangement that actually works when you're doing that.
Or you can't pretend that the world owes you a living.
I have a right to health care.
I have a right to healthcare.
When you're just lucky, you don't have an arrow in your forehead.
I have a right not to have an arrow in my.
It just doesn't work.
When necessity is all around you, you can't tell yourself all these lies.
You can't parade as if the world, like everybody's equal or someone isn't the strongest, or someone isn't the best.
You can't give participation trophies when you're fighting for your life.
But once a civilization becomes rich and happy, it's lying.
Hooray!
It's lying time.
Lying time has come.
And what the left has learned to do is they've learned to hide their positive lies behind negative half-truths.
And what I mean by that is this is the whole basis of critical theory, right?
It's whether it's critical race theory or critical gender theory or critical, whatever theory it is.
It's always critical.
It's always criticizing things.
And of course, you can always criticize everything.
Everything's imperfect.
Everything's unfair.
Everything has flaws and is not what it should be.
So you can criticize everything.
But the minute they start talking about what their actual philosophy is, what their positive assertions are, then the lies come out.
And that's when they get caught.
That's why they're trying to pretend that critical race theory isn't what they say it is, because they actually got caught teaching something that's more than criticism, that's not just criticism, that actually is an attack.
It's racism.
It's just racism.
And so they get caught on that.
But I want to read to you.
So what I want to look at for a couple of minutes is I want to look at the underlying assumptions of the left's criticisms.
What are the underlying assumptions of the left criticisms?
What is the lie that's hidden in those underlying assumptions?
I want to read you something from C.S. Lewis, obviously the great Christian apologist of the last century, a man who really defended the Christian soul of the West during World War II and went on to just really just unpack a lot of Christian, basic Christian theology in just an incredibly clear way, with a clarity that amounted to genius.
And he wrote a famous book called The Screwtape Letters.
For those of you who haven't read it, I recommend it highly.
It takes about 40 minutes to read.
And it's a series of letters from a senior demon, Screwtape, who is trying to educate a junior demon on how to steal people's souls.
And that was written during the height of World War II, around 1942.
But in 1959, during the height of the Cold War, Lewis published a sequel called Screwtape Proposes a Toast.
And this is Screwtape getting up and making a kind of after-dinner speech about how to steal souls en masse, how to ruin societies en masse.
And it's really an attack on the educational system and how C.S. Lewis thought communism was working its way into the West through the educational system.
And so he's talking, this is a demon talking about how to ruin civilization.
And he's teaching younger demons what they want to do.
And this is what he says.
It's a lengthy little passage, but I've condensed it as much as I could.
He says, democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose.
It's a word they venerate.
And of course, it's connected with the political ideal that men should be equally treated.
You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal.
As a result, you can use the word democracy to sanction, in his thought, the most degrading of all human feeling.
The feeling I mean is, of course, that feeling which prompts a man to say, I'm as good as you.
No man who says I'm as good as you believes it.
He would not say it if he did.
The St. Bernard never says it to the toy dog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty woman to the plain.
The claim to equality outside the strictly political field is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior.
Sounds like Pride Month, right?
And when people say they're proud, it's because they're not.
C.S. Lewis goes on.
He says, he therefore resents the man that we're trying to corrupt, therefore resents every kind of superiority in others.
He denigrates it.
He wishes its annihilation.
Presently, he suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority.
Now, this useful phenomenon is by no means new.
Under the name of envy, it has been known to the humans for thousands of years.
Under the influence of envy, those who are in any way or every way inferior can labor more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to pull down everyone else to their own level.
What I want, Screwtape says to the young demons, he says, what I want to fix your attention on is the vast overall movement towards the discrediting and finally the elimination of every kind of human excellence, moral, cultural, social, or intellectual.
And I read this, obviously.
It just seems to me to be a perfect description of what is happening today, what the left is doing now.
If there's inequity, it's because of bigotry.
It can't be because somebody is working harder or because people's lifestyles are bringing them down.
It must be because there's bigotry.
If you criticize my sexual lifestyle, you're a bigot.
It couldn't be because maybe there are some good ways to have sexual relations and some bad ways to have sexual relations.
And if you think that twerking or violent rap or globalism are bad, it must be because of the race of the person pushing them.
If you don't like globalism, it's because George Soros is a Jew.
If you don't like twerking, it's because a black artist is doing that.
Cardi B is doing it.
So you must be racist.
It couldn't possibly be because nation states are better.
It couldn't possibly be because twerking is degrading.
And what's fascinating about this is in order to defend this attack on excellence, and that's what it is, it's an attack on excellence, the left has to come up with this horrifically racist idea, this racist and sexist idea, that the things that aren't working in a culture actually belong to that culture.
So they'll say things like, black communities are in dysfunction because of single parenthood, because fathers don't stay in the home.
And they'll say, well, that's black culture.
You can't criticize, but what are you racist?
But there's nothing black about that culture.
That wasn't always true.
That's a result of policy.
It happens to be the result of Democrat policies that paid people to have children out of wedlock.
Or if you say that you should use good grammar, they say, good grammar, that's racist.
Black people can't use good grammar.
They have their own grammar.
It's absurd, right?
It's absurd.
Grammar is an agreed upon thing in a civilization.
It changes over time.
But a civilization, a society, has a grammar so that we can communicate clearly.
And good grammar is a way of communicating clearly.
They've even said that black people can't learn math because the idea of a right answer is a white concept.
Objectivity is a white concept.
Here's a K through 12 New York teacher, a New York teacher who teaches K through 12, talking about how you have to teach black people.
Let's cut 20.
Black people, we are relational people.
We are people of context.
Like it's very Western and European to dissect and analyze and take apart things.
Whereas Afro-centric schooling or Afro-centric spirituality or African epistemology or ways of knowing, everything is connected.
So this is why education is not working for so many students of color because we are context-driven people.
It couldn't be because the teachers won't go back to work.
It couldn't be because their progressive means of education don't work for anybody, but a wealthy family, never mind a white family, just a wealthy family with parents in the home can correct what the teachers are doing in school.
It couldn't be any of those things.
It must be because it's black culture not to think clearly.
That's absurd.
It is absolutely absurd.
But it's just an attack on excellence.
This is what C.S. Lewis was talking about.
It is an attempt to wear down using the idea of democracy, but not the truth about democracy, to make people feel, hey, anybody who's better than me must be doing something wrong.
You saw this with the rioters after George Floyd's death, the mostly peaceful rioters who destroyed city upon city, who tore down statues of truly great men like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Christopher Columbus, really interesting, exciting men who made the world better and made the world more expansive.
And then they erect statues to who?
To George Floyd, a career criminal.
What does that say to people?
You know, because his skin is black, that makes him a representative of black people.
They don't want to build a statue just, oh, maybe Clarence Thomas or maybe Frederick Douglass or maybe Thomas Saul.
No, you're going to build them to George Floyd because then you don't have that problem of excellence.
And then, of course, the George Floyd statue was desecrated and everybody says, this is horrifying.
Although it wasn't horrifying when they were desecrating the statues of great people like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.
The charge of racism to some degree is really just a manifestation of a way of getting to this place where they are attacking excellence and basically saying that excellence is a white thing.
We're not going to practice excellence.
It's not fair.
It's not fair.
That's your right, white privilege.
But it's wrong.
It's not true.
Anyone can be excellent, but they have to follow certain paths to get to that excellence, the hard path.
It's about behavior.
The underlying assumption to this, right, is that if we take away all these differences, if we take away difference, just like C.S. Lewis said, then we're all going to be wonderful.
We're all going to be wonderful.
It's the idea that we want to have a democracy because we're all so wonderful that we should each have a say.
We should each have an equal say.
But that's not why we believe in democracy.
We believe in democracy because we believe that we're all so corruptible.
Every single one of us is so corruptible that none of us, none of us should have that much power.
That's the true equality that people have.
We're all corruptible.
Just about every one of us is corruptible.
Power corrupts everybody.
So we want to spread the power around.
What they are doing is they're looking for a way to bring the power together.
They want to get those power centers in their hands.
And they do it by saying, look at the unfairness, look at the unfairness.
But the underlying assumption of the criticism is that they know something better.
They can do something better.
And when you start to examine what that better is, it is always consolidating power in their hands.
The same thing is true with sexuality.
It's not just race.
It's not, you know, there was an article in the Washington Post.
Lauren Roello wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post celebrating the fetishism of gay pride parades, right?
And she says, oh, yeah, I want to take my kid, my kids, to see this.
I want them to know.
And she says, she says, a bare-chested man whose black suspenders clipped into a leather thong paused to be spanked playfully by a partner with a flog.
And she wanted her children to see this because they were celebrating who they were.
I should mention, by the way, that Lauren Roello's husband is now her wife.
He transitioned.
I assume he has his genitals removed and was given estrogen.
He must have transitioned from a Republican to a Democrat.
So she's obviously no great defender of sexual sanity, right?
So she's teaching her kids this.
But what is the underlying assumption?
She actually says it, that this is who you are.
If you want to be spanked by your partner, this is who you are.
And I want to address that for a minute, okay?
Because obviously nobody cares what people enjoy in the bedroom.
If you do it behind closed doors, it is absolutely nobody's business.
But the thing about a fetish, right?
A fetish is the inability, the inability to have sex unless you have some totem or some behavior going on.
And almost always, I believe, a fetish is caused by trauma in your life, in your past.
So if you were beaten in your past, you may have now confused love with pain, and you now have a fetish for pain, and you can't have sex unless you have pain.
So what's wrong with that?
Well, it's not like, oh, it's a sin, you're going to hell, God doesn't like it.
Fetish and Trauma00:08:29
That's not the point.
The point is, it actually is, instead of using sex for its purpose, which is the purpose of connection and creation, that's what sex is for.
It is to connect with the opposite, is to create babies, so it's therefore to connect with the opposite sex and develop an intimacy and love that you don't have with anybody else.
And so you say to me, well, I want to connect with my own sex.
Okay, all right.
But if you say you want to have this fetish in your life, what you're doing is instead of doing that, you're just repeating the trauma of the past.
That's what fetish is, I think.
It's a repetitive trauma.
So you're actually going back into the worst part of your past and living it over again.
And I don't think that is the healthiest way to have sex.
I'm not even saying you can cure it.
I'm not saying you shouldn't do it.
I'm simply saying you should understand you have a disorder.
It's a disorder.
It's not who you are.
And who you are may have nothing to do with that.
Who you are may be so much better than that.
And yet, okay, you're pinned with this fetish and that's the only way you can have sex.
Again, it's not a judgment on you.
It's not a judgment on you because that's not who you are.
So the underlying assumption here is that you are just this piece of meat and what that piece of meat wants or doesn't want is what defines you.
And that is utterly ridiculous, that we are defined by our desires.
And our underlying assumption is quite different.
The underlying assumption of the right, the positive assertion of the right, is that we are defined by our relationship with our Creator.
That really is.
Even people on the right who say they're atheists actually believe this, that we are defined with our relationship and with what we are made to be.
And that relationship is always lacking.
We're never quite what we were made to be.
All of us know this.
All of us know that there is a better version of ourselves that we are aspiring to.
And we aspire to that.
And sometimes aspiring to that means setting your desires aside or rising above your desires.
Sometimes it means denying yourself your desires.
And sometimes it means keeping things private that have to be private.
Because if you're parading your fetish around, it means you're ashamed of it.
You're just trying to pretend that you're proud of it.
The point that I'm trying to make about this, though, is these are underlying assumptions.
Our underlying assumptions are difficult.
They are unpleasant.
They're ideas that you are corrupted by power.
They're ideas that power, that there is no system that is going to change you, and therefore the best thing to do is to leave you, let you handle your life alone and be responsible.
That's a hard idea.
That's a difficult idea.
The idea that your desires define you and therefore no one should be able to criticize your desires and you should not criticize your desires.
And yeah, it was great that I wound up in a men's room and then was beaten up and was mugged.
I was just following.
That's who I am, man.
I mean, that's easy.
It is all so easy.
Why?
Because it is heading downward into entropy and death.
So the easy path is always the path of decay.
It always is the path of decay.
Life is always this energetic thing.
So when we look at things and we say, why is it, why is it that the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity?
It's because the worst are doing the easy thing.
Of course they're passionately intense about it, while the best, the best people are striving towards something and it's hard.
And it's hard and it's doubly hard when you live in a society that doesn't appreciate it.
That the culture that created Mozart and Shakespeare and Jefferson and Isaac Newton is not better than a culture that creates blankets and pots, that never gets out of its huts, that never rises above primitivism.
Because that's, you know, because it's undemocratic to say so.
It's undemocratic to say that Mozart and Shakespeare and Jefferson and Newton and the Constitution and science are better, are better than primitivism.
That's undemocratic, that's cruel, that's racist, that's not fair, is an absurdity that means essentially you have to stay in mediocrity and primitivism forever, lest ye be an insult to those who don't have those things.
Instead, instead, to say, oh, let me look at this and aspire to that.
Let me try and be that.
Even if I can't be excellent, let me look at the excellent and become better in myself.
That's an effort.
That's a hard thing to do.
You know, every now and again, I like to play this cartoon that was made right after the war called Make Mind Freedom.
It's 1948.
It's an anti-communist cartoon, and it shows all the different factions in American life, the workers fighting with the bosses and the farmers fighting with the politicians, and everybody's fighting with each other, and it's all chaos.
It's the chaos of freedom.
But along comes a snake oil salesman, and he has something to sell.
This is Cut 15.
Hurry, every step right up, folks.
Here's the answer to your problems.
Dr. Utopia's sensational new discovery, ISM.
ISM will cure any ailment of the body politic.
It's terrific.
It's tremendous.
Once you swallow the contents of this bottle, you'll have the bountiful benefit of higher wages, shorter hours, and security.
Enormous profits.
No strikes.
Remember, you're the big boss.
Government control.
No worry about votes.
Name your own salary.
Bigger crops.
Lower cost.
Why, ISM even makes the weather perfect every day.
So he says, no, right now, this special offer, we're giving this away free.
All you have to do is sign this contract, and here's the contract.
I hereby turn over to ISM Incorporated everything I have, including my freedom and the freedom of my children and my children's children, in return for which said ISM promises to take care of me forever.
So the idea that freedom and all the benefits of equal treatment under the law come arise from a culture of excellence and arise from the excellences of that culture, that those are the things we have to have before we become free, before we become scientific, before we become wise.
The restrictions, what happens is the restrictions on government that we put on government, because we've learned these things, create a government that seems like a good thing and create the ultimate fantasy of the left that there is such a thing as government, this kind of amorphous power that is going to do benevolent things to you.
There is no such thing as the state or government.
There's only people with power.
And if you don't control those people with power, they will just start to convince you that they should have all the power.
It is excellence, it's thought, it's reason, it's objectivity, it's good grammar, it's all those little things that we do that are excellent, that keep people free and give you the things that you want, that you actually want.
And they fade away when you stop practicing excellence only to prove what simply is not true, that you're as good as the next guy.
None of us is that good, but some people are excellent in some things, and those are the people we should hold up and follow so that we can become, if not excellent, at least free.
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China's Rise and Resistance00:10:14
You know, because freedom requires excellence and because excellence requires energy, there is a question of whether we even want to be free, whether we want to take the trouble.
I mean, I think that's what happened to the Roman Republic when the Roman Republic fell.
I think they were just done.
They were just done with being free.
It was just easier to stop getting the government to work, to stop making the Senate come to decisions.
It was easier to have a princeps, as they call them, the emperor, figure things out.
And in fact, for the first, I don't know, 30, 40 years of the empire, things went better than they did before.
And people were actually, in some ways, in some ways, every way, but the political way, in some ways, people were freer under Augustus and Rome because they were ready to give up, as the satirist Juvenile said, they were ready to give up their vote for bread and circuses, for welfare and shows on Netflix, basically.
That was what they were doing.
It seems right now that China and the Communist Party are on the rise.
They are celebrating their, I think it's today or, yeah, I think it's today.
They're celebrating their 100-year anniversary of the party, not of their rule of China, though they're coming up on having ruled China for, I think, 74 years, something like that.
But this is their 100-year anniversary of the party.
And it's really interesting because it has now morphed as socialism always does every single time, as communism always does.
It is now no longer really a communist party.
It is just an absolute party of power.
It's essentially a fascist party because it allows certain free market principles to apply, but it controls everything.
And if you have three party members in your company, then there's got to be a party.
You know, you've got to let the party meet.
And basically, the party controls every aspect of life, including social life.
And they have a system for working your social ranking that is incredibly tyrannical, incredibly intrusive.
And of course, they put people in prison camps and they abort children without the mother's permission and all this stuff.
They're a tyranny state.
They have no tolerance for dissent.
Their social credit system, that's what I was looking for.
The social credit system gives you privileges based on conformity and adherence to the party.
They put people in re-education work camps, and they're trying to export this system to the rest of the world, and they're doing really well.
In Australia, Australia started to call for an independent probe into the origins of COVID-19, or the Chinese virus, as we're not supposed to call it, or the Wu flu or the Kung Flu or the Flu Manchu.
And they called for that.
And so immediately China banned exports from a number of Australian beef facilities and placed an 80% tariff on Australian barley.
Don't you dare call for any investigations over there.
And of course, we know that they have completely taken over some of our companies.
Disney and the NBA, Comcast Universal is Han Han Han Han.
Sorry for saying Taiwan was a country they cannot make a movie that tells the truth about China because China will shut them down.
And the thing about it is just how willing our corporations are to do this.
Google got caught developing a censored search engine for the Chinese market.
I can't remember what it's called Firefly or something like that or Dragonfly, maybe Dragonfly, and they intercept, called them out, and they said, oh, we've shut it down now.
But they're slowly working their way back into the Chinese market.
And we see, you know, there's this guy, you know, what's his name?
Munger.
Warren Buffett and his friend, is it Robert Munger?
I can't remember his name.
But they were interviewed the other day and they said, oh, China is doing great.
Here's two guys, billionaires, right?
Absolute billionaires.
And they said, you know, we made a lot of money, but that's Charlie Munger, Charlie Munger.
We made a lot of money, but that's not why we did it.
We wanted independence.
We wanted to be free.
We wanted to associate with anyone we want.
Oh, but China is doing everything right.
Here's Munger talking about it.
Jack Ma is one of the swangers.
So they just cut his, they said, the hell with you.
He basically gave a speech when he said to a one-party state, well, you guys are a bunch of jerks.
You don't know what you're doing.
And I know what I'm doing, and I'm going to do it better.
And he was going to wade into banking and no rules and just do whatever he pleased.
He also brought up the Chinese communists did the right thing.
They just called in Jack Ma and say, you aren't going to do it, sonny.
And I wish we had a, I don't want all of the Chinese system, but I certainly would like to have the financial part of it in my own country.
So here's Charlie Munger who got rich.
He's talking about Jack Ma.
Jack Ma is the Charlie Ma, he's a big businessman in China.
And China started to clamp down on the banking system, started to clamp down on the financial system.
So Jack Ma made a speech about it.
Jack Ma hasn't been seen since, I don't think.
He's disappeared.
We don't know whether he's been kidnapped or whether he's maybe, they just suggested he disappear.
But they love that.
Munger and Buffett, they think that's great.
They want independence for themselves.
They got rich so they could be independent, but it's independence for them, but not for you.
And so I really wonder, like, you know, just how much, you know, when you have a system where Twitter knocks you off their platform for talking about Hunter Biden's laptop because they want to make sure that Donald Trump doesn't win the election.
Or if you say the election was dishonest and there's plenty of evidence that there was fraud, you get shut down for that.
If you think global warming is not a crisis, which is another way the government gains power by causing panic about global warming, then you're shut down.
You're not allowed to call it global warming because the world is not always getting hotter, so they call it climate change.
If you said the Chinese virus started in the Chinese lab, you get shut down.
If you say men can't become women, he gets shut down.
So if you can't speak, if you can't speak, that's the Chinese system.
That's the system that these guys, these rich guys, want.
And there's a question about half the country thinks, yeah, that's fine.
That's fine.
That's what gives Donald Trump so much power.
That's what gives Donald Trump so much power.
It's because he said, here's Donald Trump.
He had one of his rallies.
Thousands of people show up at these things.
The guy isn't president anymore.
He's nobody anymore.
He shows up at these things and hears something he says, CUP 13.
They planned it out.
Earlier this year, the Biden administration issued new rules pushing twisted critical race theory into classrooms across the nation and also into our military.
Our generals and our admirals are now focused more on this nonsense than they are on our enemies.
You see these generals lately on television?
They are woke.
They're woke.
That's why Trump is powerful.
That's why people show up for Trump, because he speaks.
He says the things that he sees.
Listen, you know, they're talking about him running again.
Friends of mine who know him say he will run again, and I'm not so happy about that.
But now they're moving to stop him by basically investigating his company.
They indicted the Trump organization's finance chief, Alan Weiselberg, and they perp walk this guy.
They handcuff him and perp walk him for basically what they're claiming is that he received perks, you know, hotel rooms and cars and all this stuff, and didn't pay taxes on them.
And they call this, oh, it's a major scheme to avoid taxes.
Well, this happens a lot, and normally the guy isn't arrested.
He's not indicted.
They fine him and all this stuff.
But they're perp walking this guy.
They're going to basically put the squeeze on him, hoping he turns over Trump.
This is third world dictatorship stuff.
Why are they so afraid of him?
Why are they so afraid of him?
Not because he's an authoritarian, because he wasn't.
I don't even think he was a particularly good statesman.
I mean, he was a good politician, but he didn't get a lot accomplished in terms of passing laws because he was so mean to people.
They wouldn't vote for him.
He couldn't form coalitions.
But still, they're so afraid of him simply because he calls them out, simply because he speaks the truth.
So now they have Maggie Haberman.
I love Maggie Haberman.
She works at the New York Times.
She used to be working at Politico, and when they hacked into Hillary Clinton's emails, they found one that said, what did they say?
We feel that it's important to go with what is safe and what has worked in the past.
They're trying to spread news, good news about Hillary Clinton.
We've had a very good relationship with Maggie Haberman at Politico over the last year.
We've had her tee up stories for us before and have never been disappointed.
So the New York Times hired her to cover the White House.
And here's her telling you exactly why they're indicting people in the Trump organization because she thinks they hope, they hope, and she thinks it will stop Trump from running again.
Here she is.
He will be much older.
He is not a young man.
So there's that on its own.
And then if he is dealing with, and this is an if, but if he is dealing with the reality of a trial in, say, 18 months, and the New York court system moves pretty slowly, it's hard to see somebody running for president with a trial playing out about how their company did business with potentially damaging testimony.
I think this, I understand that there are some people who want to argue this provides rocket fuel.
And yes, this will make him run again.
I've heard that from a number of Trump aides.
I'm not convinced that that's the case.
You know, the attack on excellence, the encouragement of dysfunction, all of this are symptoms of a society, certainly a failed elite that doesn't want to lose its elite power, but that is so accepted by so many people in the populace is also evidence of a country that may not wish to do the work that it takes to be free anymore.
That's what we're going to have to see.
And on our side, listen, when I say I don't want Trump to run again, it's because I don't think Trump will win if he runs again.
I could be wrong.
But I do want Trumpism to remain around.
And I think the best thing Trump could do is to basically select somebody to represent his philosophy in the world who's a little bit better at the inside politics of governing.
That would be good because it's not about Trump.
It's not about anything except freedom.
It's not even about right or left anymore.
It really is about, do we believe that human beings, individuals, the ordinary man and woman, should be free.
Coming up later in the mailbag, we have a really interesting question about alpha males.
And the answer is simple.
Speech Control and Freedom00:02:37
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Write Klavin in their how did you hear about us box so they know we sent you and say clavin that way.
So you got to stick to it, clavin.
And then you got to spell it, K-L-A-V-A-N.
So as you know, we like to elevate the show or class up the show a little bit by bringing on excellent guests.
But today, just for a change of pace, we thought we'd go in the opposite direction and bring on Michael Knowles, the author of the best-selling, the number one bestseller in nonfiction in the country, whether the New York Times will admit it or not.
Speechless, controlling words, controlling minds.
Now, not everybody knows this, but the pinnacle of Knowles' career before this was imitating me on Twitter.
This is absolutely true.
This is how Knowles became part of the Daily Wire is I needed somebody to pretend to be me on social media because I didn't want to do it myself.
I asked my son, Spencer Clavin, no relation, if he knew anybody, he said I have my fellow Yaley, Michael Knowles.
And Knowles was so brilliant imitating me on Twitter that seriously, I used to look at his tweets to see how I was supposed to sound.
And how far you've fallen since you've been talking about it.
I know.
That was the best job I ever had.
I do think of all the jobs I've ever had, from Subway Sandwich Artist when I was 14, to today doing the show, the job I was best suited for was being you on Twitter.
It was a masterpiece.
But it actually, in all seriousness, it actually made me think like, that's a talented guy, because that really sounds like me.
So before we get started, talking about speechless and other things, I have two things I want to say about it.
One is I was genuinely, I know I'm not allowed to say nice things to you, but I was genuinely impressed with the way you wrote this book.
You actually put your back into it.
No, it's so easy.
You know, you have a popular show.
You could have just put your face out there with, you know, the left sucks.
Defense Of Free Speech00:15:06
101 ways to own the left.
Number 72 will shock you.
And instead, you actually wrote a book.
I've now finished it.
It's like you wrote a serious book about a serious issue, the control of speech and what it means.
And it's terrific.
And I seriously recommend it.
Having said that, you and I have a fundamental, and have had for a long time, a fundamental disagreement about the way to proceed.
And the thing that's interesting to me about that, I mean, obviously two people are going to disagree about things, but the way that what's interesting to me about this is that it kind of represents a division in the conservative world that's not just a division between old people and young people, in which case I would just say, well, you're on your own because I'll be with Jesus.
But it's not just that.
It's an actual philosophical break on the right.
So I want to get to that.
But first, let's talk about the book because it's not just ranting at the left about political correctness.
You actually have a theory, a thesis about political correctness.
Yeah, it's not just ranting at the left about political.
It's also ranting at the right about political correct correctness.
Yes.
My thesis is that we have misunderstood what political correctness is.
We think it's been around for about 30 years.
It's actually been around for about 100 years.
And we think that political correctness represents a debate between free speech and censorship.
I don't think that's what it is.
I think that political correctness aims at the destruction of traditional standards.
That is what it is after.
And so it lays a trap for conservatives because conservatives react in one of two ways.
Either you've got the squishes who just go along with it, right, who just will use whatever the pronouns are, use whatever the new jargon is.
acquiesce.
Obviously, that helps the left win.
But then you have the more stalwart conservatives, the ones who say they're free speech purists or free speech absolutists, the ones who say, I will not go along with this new standard.
But in so doing, they tend to eschew standards entirely.
They will say, you know, say whatever you want, do whatever you want.
Either way, I think this permits the left to advance, because what the left is aiming at is the abandonment of traditional standards, and that happens in either case.
And because nature abhors a vacuum, the left's new woke codes fill their place.
And I don't think this was always the way it was, but I do think for the past, at least the past 30 years, conservatives actually took on a lot of the left's slogans and premises to fall into this trap.
And it's a subtle trap, and I don't blame people for falling into it, but it is the reason why, no matter how hard we fought against PC, I mean, Trump launched his campaign that said PC is the greatest threat to the country.
And many people have been talking about it for longer.
But it seems almost that the harder we fight against it, the more ground we lose.
And so the reason you feel for that is because what some on the right are saying is there should be no censorship.
There should be no limits on speech, and therefore they're abandoning standards, which is what the left is after.
Yes, that the debate between free speech and censorship, there's something to it, obviously.
We do want to have a somewhat broad defense of free speech.
We don't like being censored.
But it's sort of an illusory situation.
It's a false dichotomy, I think.
I think all speech regimes necessarily limit some things, in part because language is limited.
Language discriminates one thing from another.
If Bruce Jenner is he, he isn't she.
I suppose that's imposing a limit, a sort of censorship on people.
But society will always have some things that are settled, that are beyond debate.
Bill Buckley talked about this in 1966.
He was debating the future of McCarthyism with Leo Chern, and a lot of people were shocked to hear about the future of it.
I thought that was in the past, you know.
And Leo Chern said, surely what is most important to both of us is the open society.
The open society is so crucial.
By the way, open society is the name of George Soros' foundation.
This is a left-wing idea.
And Bill Buckley said, well, he was actually sitting in chairs like this.
And so he said, no, I don't want society to be more open.
No, I would like the society to be closed.
I am an epistemological optimist, to use the unfortunate phrase, by which he meant we can know things, some things are settled, and he sees no reason to rehash the rights of the Nazi to go speak in the public school or the rights of the communists to do that for that matter either.
Some things will be settled, and that will, in those limits, you will have the flourishing.
Yeah, I mean, you know, when they talk about banning critical race theory from schools, the left says, well, we should teach it.
And I think, should we teach white supremacy?
No.
You know, it says racism is racism.
Why do it?
So fair enough.
Now, just before we get to where you start to lose me a little bit on the theory, you say this has been around for 100 years.
Give me the can, the brief history of it so that people can, because this is important.
It's important to know where this comes from.
This is not one day somebody woke up and said we should control speech.
Give me a quick run then.
The really condensed version goes back to Marx.
I know it's become cliché for conservatives to blame Marx for everything.
He's responding for everything.
He history is.
Yes.
He's responsible for a lot of bad things.
He has a line that he writes to Arnold Ruga, which is, he calls for the ruthless criticism of all that exists.
And so he just wants to tear down everything, right?
Marx fails.
The revolution doesn't materialize.
Turns out the oppressed masses don't really like his kooky theories.
And so his intellectual heirs, men like Antonio Gramsci, communist in Italy, he realizes the revolution can't succeed unless the revolutionaries have some grip on the common sense.
It won't succeed unless the radicals have cultural hegemony.
He calls for a war of position.
Not a war of maneuver, you advance and retreat, but a war of position where you take positions of power and then wield that power once you've got it.
Even if your numbers are smaller, you can still wield disproportionate power.
The Frankfurt School develops some of these ideas.
Critical theory comes out of this.
Critical race theory is a derivation of that.
You see one Frankfurt School theorist in particular, Herbert Marcusa, rises up in the 1960s as the father of the new left, the student radicals.
He has an infamous essay, Repressive Tolerance, which says that you can't tolerate intolerance, and so what we've got to do is basically censor all the conservatives and encourage speech from the left.
The student radicals read Gramsci through the lens of Mao.
Mao becomes very important at this time with the translation of the Little Red Book.
They come up with this phrase, Rudy Dutchke in particular comes up with this phrase, the long march through the institutions, and they start to march.
The feminists in the 1970s really developed this, particularly the Marxist idea of false consciousness, the idea that the reason you're so happy, poor oppressed masses, is that you don't know how oppressed you are.
So the radical women groups in New York would hold what I call wine and cheese soirees, W-H-I-N-E.
And so these happy bourgeois housewives would come in and they'd leave miserable because they would be awakened to their misery.
And it comes from this idea in an essay by Carol Hanish that the personal is political.
All the settled things in our private life, they actually ought to be open to public and political scrutiny.
Now we say, why is everything so political?
Why is the NFL political?
Why are running shoes political?
Well, they used to be settled because we all agreed on it.
It just wasn't up for debate.
Then what these radicals did in the 70s was they opened everything up to debate.
The personal became the political.
And now we're trying to win that political battle so they can be personal again and no longer debated over.
It really explodes on campus in the 80s.
Obviously, the university has always been an incubator of these ideas.
You had the campus battles.
Hey, hey, ho ho, Western civ has got to go, as Jesse Jackson said at Stanford.
Then PC really explodes on the public stage in the 1990s, a little bit of backlash in the 2000s.
Then you have the advent of big tech.
Big tech starts to exert real censorship.
I mean, they just censored the duly elected sitting president on January 7th and 8th.
Handful of oligarchs controlling speech in a republic.
It's a really dangerous situation.
And then you have the advent of cancel culture, which is just a form of ostracism and censorship along leftist ideological lines.
I'm not saying no one has ever been ostracized.
I'm not saying no one's ever been censored.
In the 50s, you got censored and ostracized if you were a communist.
Today you get censored and ostracized if you're not a communist.
The fact of it hasn't changed.
It's just the standards by which you are ostracized or censored.
That is what has changed.
And that takes us to today.
Yeah, as I was talking about this on the show today, that to criticize everything that exists is to secretly suggest that you have something better.
And the thing is, their better idea is based on an illusion that there's such a thing as a state that is going to act benevolently instead of a group of powerful people who are going to act to secure more power, which is always the case.
So here's where our disagreement, I think, lies.
Quoting from speechless, controlling words, controlling minds.
In a self-governing republic, speech is politics and politics is speech.
As the realm of politics requires limits, so too must the realm of speech.
By failing to acknowledge this practical reality, the so-called free speech purists give the game away to politically correct censors.
Now, I'm not a free speech purist in the sense that I think that there are, for instance, that Supreme Court decision that allowed a girl to curse without being punished online, a high school girl.
I thought there was some sense to it, but I don't necessarily think foul language is part of free speech or burning a flag is part of free speech.
But the expression of ideas is part of free speech, I believe.
And it seems to me that you're drifting toward the leftist habit.
The left does this all the time.
They start out by saying, you know, racism is wrong.
Whites should not be hating black people because racism is wrong.
And they end up saying white people are terrible.
They essentially, because they want the power that they see being done by the wrong, they essentially adopt the wrong.
What you are essentially saying is the censorship is fine.
They're just censoring the wrong things.
Yes, I am.
But I'll defend it, which is Chesterton has this great line.
He says, there is a thought that stops thought.
And this is where we kind of agree.
This is where the Venn diagram works.
Yes.
There is a thought that stops thought, and that is the only thought that ought to be stopped.
There have been obviously many exceptions to free speech in America.
Fraud, threats, fighting words, obscenity.
List goes on and on.
Why those exceptions?
Because those exceptions undermine, they are speech in a certain sense, but they undermine speech.
If you have a protection for fraud, for instance, then you can no longer rely on speech.
If there is a First Amendment protection for deceit through your speech, then speech loses so much of its effect in the body politic.
If you have an exception for threats, you are really encouraging people to silence other people.
If I can threaten you, then I am shutting you up.
I'm using my speech to overwhelm your speech.
Obscenity is an even dicier one, or it's a subtler one, but I think it's equally important.
The reason there's no, well, the reason there didn't used to be a First Amendment protection for obscenity, increasingly it seems we're drifting in that direction, is because obscenity actually compromises your freedom.
We now today seem to conflate liberty and licentiousness.
Our founding fathers did not, certainly from the time of the founding.
You see all sorts of documents saying liberty must not be abused to licentially.
You know, I think you're actually ducking something here, if I may, okay.
Because I don't think those things are censored because they stop thought.
I think they're censored because they're speech acts and they're wrongful acts.
A speech act, as you know, is when the words you say actually perform a duty beyond just expressing an idea.
So if I promise you I will pay you Thursday for the, if you give me a hamburger today, I am actually committing an act which is making a promise.
And if that promise turns out to be a lie, you have a right to come back to me and act against that.
So fire in a crowded theater, threatening people, committing fraud, those are all speech acts.
They're a special category.
That's fair enough.
What about speech that advocates for the Communist Party?
I, in fact, I'm not afraid of speech that advocates for the Communist Party because even though, even though I think that if you get in an argument, if you allow arguments between communists and non-communists, the communists might win.
One of the things about freedom is it's very, very dangerous because the bad guys might win.
I know in the past we have actually made communism illegal at certain moments.
I can almost understand it if you are advocating for the overthrow, for the violent overthrow of which I think by definition you are.
If you're saying I'm a communist and I want to pursue a communist program, that entails overthrowing the government of the United States and virtually every other government too.
Well, it depends.
If you can make the argument that you are advocating for socialism as controlled by the Constitution, if you can make that argument, you should be allowed to make that argument.
Sure, but I mean, even Whitaker Chambers, one of our favorite writers.
Yes, great work.
He makes a big distinction between those weak, silly socialists and the communists.
And I'm not actually arguing that we ought to even censor socialists or those, but I'm talking about this narrow exception, which on the books, plenty of people were prosecuted for being communists.
But I'm using it to make the broader point.
The communist is using his speech to undermine the entire free speech regime.
It seems that there are certain...
So are you.
No, I think I'm using it in accordance with the broader history of the American speech.
So that you want to protect free speech.
You're censoring speech to protect free speech.
Yes, I'm censoring.
I'm putting certain limits on speech in order to protect free speech.
I mean, this is why, for instance, John Locke famously says free speech for everybody, except for atheists and maybe Catholics.
And I say this is a mackerel-snapping papist.
John Milton said the same thing.
Most famous defense of free speech in the English language.
Everyone gets free speech, but not those papists.
Why did he say it?
Is it just because he was stupid?
Is it just because he didn't get it?
No, I think he did get it.
I think what he realized is there must be a bare minimum of understanding and shared thought to keep a stable regime that will permit the free expression of ideas.
So to ask the Thomas Sowell question, who decides?
I mean, if you look at the people who have power in America today, can you name one of them to decide which speech is harmful?
Well, so this is my, I think the practical or the hypothetical objection that people very often make is if we permit there to be limitations on free speech, why they might threaten our free speech.
And my answer is we've already permitted that, and it's already happening, and we're already the victims of that.
They can kick the duly elected president off Twitter.
They can do anything.
No, no, you're absolutely right.
But the question, that's still avoiding the question.
Religious Freedoms and Government00:15:18
Well, no, but then I'll take it even further.
So yes, I agree.
Right now we're in this terrible position where the left is controlling our speech and controlling our minds and controlling our country.
And I want to fight back against that.
So I can either fight back against that by saying, hey, guys, stop it.
We shouldn't have any limitations on speech.
Or I can fight back against that by reasserting the traditional American limitations, the traditional American standards, and wielding political power to actually force them to stop using their political power against me.
And my answer to it as well is there is the left right now, which is saying, we're going to censor you, and we're going to have hate speech laws and whatever.
Then I think there is the, call it the libertarian answer, although, you know, this would have been a foreign idea to people like Locke or Milton, but call it the classical liberal libertarian answer of no limits at all.
And then I think there is the very far sort of Catholic integralist answer, which is, how do we determine the limits?
Submit to Pontifex.
There you go, now we've determined the limits.
But I'm actually offering a different suggestion, which is a very naughty word that you're not allowed to say.
Talk about censored words.
Prudence.
I think prudence is not only a virtue, I think it's the conservative virtue.
And it's something that Edmund Burke talks about at great length.
How do we decide what the necessary and inevitable limits are?
Because also part of my argument is not we don't have limits, but we should.
Part of my argument is we always will have limits.
The question just is, what are those limits?
So my prudential argument is, why don't we just look to the past?
Why don't we look to what our forebears thought was reasonable?
Why don't we look to what has worked and led to flourishing in America?
I don't think anybody believes that today's speech regime is the best we've ever had in America.
Because by the way, some people say we have way more free speech than we used to.
Some people say we have way less free speech than we used to.
It's kind of a little bit of both.
I think we just have different standards.
And so I can say any of those George Carlin words on TV, and I'd be applauded for it.
But I can't say that a man is a man.
And I could actually face many repercussions from the society.
Soon enough, I might face legal repercussions for it.
Well, first of all, going back, one of the reasons we can't go back to the past is because we don't live there.
And one of the things you had in the past, I mean, when John Adams said our constitution is for religious people, the reason he said that is because you have to oppress people if they will not control themselves, right?
I mean, if they are not responsible to a moral order, you have to oppress them, right?
That's how free regimes fall, because chaos ensues, and as Plato said, then you need the strong man.
But once that, when people have stopped believing, when people have stopped holding themselves to a moral order, then I don't understand how you impose the ideas of the past without oppressing them.
One of the things that strikes me is I think we're suffering from too much censorship even before this.
And the most important way I think we've allowed them to censor us is by taking religion out of the public square and God out of the schools.
So there's an area where the censorship, to me, paved the way for everything else.
So if our answer had been, no, no, wait a minute.
This is one of the key aspects of human life.
We should be able to teach it and put forward.
Yes, but I don't think taking religion out of the schools was, you know, I guess this is kind of my central view of the whole thing, is I don't think it's just along this scale of free speech to censorship.
I think when they took religion out of the schools, you had some free speech, free speech for Christians to pray, and you had some censorship.
You were not permitted to espouse atheism in the schools or frankly anywhere else.
When the Supreme Court decided to invent the constitutional prohibition on prayer, you just switched the standard.
Now you were perfectly free to espouse atheism.
Now it's effectively mandatory.
But you were not permitted to espouse Christianity.
So I don't, it was freer for some people.
There was greater censorship for other people.
And I think the religion point is very good, because I totally agree with your point on John Adams.
One way, I mean, there is a little bit of a paradox here, because in order for people to be free, they need to be educated.
That's what liberal education is, to make sense of your freedom and to tamp down all your base passions.
But in order to educate people, you kind of have to coerce them.
Well, that's true.
But there are some things that you can do in a school, and especially in a public school, that you can't do anywhere else.
And when you bring children into things, everything becomes a lot more complicated.
Yeah.
But it strikes me sometimes that what you're trying to do is you're trying to the left took 70 years to march through our institutions, and they took them over.
And they took over our cultural institutions.
They melted people's minds.
They taught people ignorance and all this.
And what you're trying to do is let's pass a law against that.
In other words, you're trying to solve, you're trying to solve by the heavy hand of government what the left accomplished by the hard work of taking over the culture.
I think we need to do both.
The left also accomplished it through the heavy hand of government, like when they banned prayer in the public schools.
Well, but they did that through argument, right?
They did that through winning in the Supreme Court.
I mean, some rogued lawyers did.
Yeah, I agree.
I don't know if the arguments were.
No, fair enough.
Fair enough.
I just think, yeah, of course I agree.
And I do not in any way advocate ignoring the culture.
I think very much we need to infiltrate these institutions and retake them or demolish them in the case of those that have been so hollowed out.
But Andrew Breitbart's slogan that politics is downstream of culture is true in as much as it's true.
But like all slogans, it's also not true.
And by that I mean, you know, all bumper stickers are wrong.
They're too simple.
So yes, culture influences politics, but politics influences culture.
And the example I use on this is Germany.
West Germany is religious today.
East Germany is atheist.
It's 10% religious.
Is that because of cultural variations in Bratwurst or something?
No, I think it's because of the political regime that dominated, that was officially atheist.
You're now seeing cultural effects of that downstream.
And I also think the line between politics and culture is a little blurry.
Is Facebook, Google, and Twitter, are they private institutions?
Kind of.
You know, they also kind of work with the government.
And the universities, are they private?
Well, they kind of work with the government, too.
Well, here's a place where I think we have a lot in common because I do believe our philosophy, our national philosophy, is that our freedoms come from God and that the government is, the governments are instituted among men to preserve those freedoms.
If they're being taken away by Amazon, it's the same as if they're being taken away by the government.
The government still has to preserve our freedoms in some way.
Cocaine Mitch McConnell made this point.
He said that these corporations are acting like a parallel government.
They are.
And the left used to know this, by the way, when the government was, when the corporations tended to be on our side, when we had a manufacturing instead of an information economy, the corporations were on our side, and the left, even the word corporation, sent them really.
I want to talk about the religious aspect about this, because you've mentioned Catholics a number of times, and much of this essential criticism of liberalism or even libertarianism.
I'm not a libertarian, but I am a liberal.
I am somebody who believes in the free flow of information, the free exchange of ideas.
I'm willing to risk my freedom on allowing people to have the freedom to debate even bad ideas.
And I have frequently said, there are some people who say, you know, liberalism has failed.
Freedom has failed.
And I say, like, if freedom sinks into the tar pit of history, the last thing you're going to see is my fist.
Because I'm going to say this is a good thing worth defending.
It seems this movement is a Catholic movement.
I mean, Patrick Denise, Ourobamari, you, you know, people saying that we have too much liberalism.
And I can't help but wonder if you're trying to solve a Protestant problem with a Catholic solution.
That in other words, that I am.
Yeah, you are.
You are.
This is the problem.
I mean, you're going to solve the Protestant problem.
I mean, yeah, because one of the reasons we have so many great Catholics on the Supreme Court is because that's the kind of papal institution we have in this country.
But the country is a Protestant idea.
There's no getting around that, I think.
Yeah, I suppose.
I mean, except in as much as Protestantism is just a derivation of Catholicism.
Well, yeah.
You know, there are 30,000 different denominations and all of them.
But a derivation that Catholics used to burn people for.
Yes, yeah, yeah.
I mean, I don't know, we lost all of our kindling or something.
Yes, I mean, the idea of the natural law was not something that was discovered in 1776, right?
This is an idea, and it wasn't discovered by Martin Luther.
That's right.
You know, the civilization was built by the Catholic Church.
Not to put too fine a point on it.
The basis of the civilization was definitely the Catholicism.
And so while, of course, America has some opposition to that.
I mean, I think it was Schlesinger said, anti-Catholicism is the deepest bias in America.
Some of my ancestors who are currently turning in their grave, the pilgrims, I mean, they were rather anti-Catholic, anti-Anglican, too.
But beneath all of that, we are, that is the fundament that we're arguing from.
And so the question of liberalism then, liberalism certainly does come out of Protestantism, and there are some problems with liberalism.
And John Locke, the father of liberalism, would probably not recognize what passes for liberalism today.
And he'd probably be shocked and appalled by it, I think.
Just read his letter concerning toleration, which you can read in Speechless, or parts of it in Speechless.
The question that I think you have to ask is, what is liberty?
Because there's the modern liberal view that liberty is being able to do whatever you want when you want to do it.
And there is the classical view, which is not just Catholic.
It's not just Christian more broadly.
It's pagan.
And it's the great statesmen in history have recognized that liberty is not the ability to do whatever you want to do, but the right to do what you ought to do.
This is Lord Acton's distinction.
Lord Acton, who libertarians I think still like.
But that is a shocking definition to the modern liberal sensibility on the left and on the right.
But I think it's the only one that makes sense.
And the example I keep going back to is the heroin addict.
The heroin addict, especially in, say, Oregon or one of these states with liberal drug laws, as long as he's got a couple bucks in his pocket that he can shoot up, he is the freest man in the world, right?
He wants to shoot up.
He gets to shoot up.
He satisfies that appetite.
Good.
But he's not free.
He's not free at all.
He's a slave.
The free man is the one who tamps, the man who sins is a slave to sin.
Who said that?
The man who tamps down his base passions, the man who controls his appetite and brings those baser desires into discipline underneath his rational will, and the rational will mediates between the divine will and the appetite.
That man is free in the classical understanding of it, in the Christian understanding of it, in the understanding of our founding fathers.
And that just went away sometime in the 1960s.
So when we say, you know, freedom is bad or something, liberalism is bad, we're not really saying freedom is bad or liberty is bad.
We're saying this perversion of liberty is bad.
And actually, it's not even liberty.
It's the opposite of liberty.
Well, listen, this is where we agree, obviously, and this is the conversation we've had numerous times.
The difference, I think, for me is that I'm not a libertarian.
I'm a structuralist.
And by that, I mean what I feel we should be defending is the structures by which people are free.
If people cannot live in those structures because they no longer have faith, to destroy those structures is not to win them back.
And so what I feel is we should be on the mission of teaching people why we think the things we think and why we think the structures should be there and let them argue back.
I'm willing to let communists talk.
I'm willing to let Nazis talk.
I'm a real free speech.
I'm kind of a free speech fanatic.
I'm not a purist about it, but I am a free speech fanatic when it comes to ideas.
I'd rather have somebody attack my ideas with their bad ideas and hope that my good ideas win than silence them.
Sure.
And I think I love debate.
I love going to a debating society, have a nice glass of some whiskey or something.
The issue is that this very often focuses on the schools.
And a third grade classroom is not a free marketplace of ideas.
No.
And education, getting back to that earlier point, because education is coercive, this does require the heavy hand of censorship.
I'll use the C word, censorship.
We need to be able to go in.
When the left says we need to expand the curricula, you can't expand the curricula.
There are only so many weeks.
There are only so many books.
When the left says we need to, or even parts of the right say, we need to educate, not indoctrinate, the words mean the same damn thing.
It's just one of them is good and one of them is bad.
You need to teach somebody.
If 2 plus 2 equals 4 and the student writes 2 plus 2 equals 5, he needs to get a bad grade.
He needs to be punished for that.
But this is true in philosophy.
This is true in ethics.
This is true in history.
This is true in literature, for goodness sakes.
We actually can know true and false and right and wrong.
And I guess this is my real argument is with our pal David French.
David made this point.
He said Drag Queen Story Hour is a blessing of liberty, one of the blessings of liberty.
James Madison is just rolling in his grave hearing that.
It's not.
It's not.
It's simply not.
But his point is, if we say that these perverts can't twerk for little kids, they'll tell us we can't go to church.
First of all, they're already doing that.
But second of all, if we really have adopted such a radical skepticism and we've bought into this canard that there is a neutral playing ground in secular liberalism where we can debate things.
If we really can't decide between drag queen story hour and going to church, then we can't govern ourselves because the ability to say some things are true, some things are false, some things are right, some things are wrong, the ability to have what Buckley called epistemological optimism, to just know some basic things and have them settled.
That is required for self-government.
And if you lose that, even though it feels like a limit, I think you lose freedom too.
Yeah, well, I think, listen, it's a strong argument.
I think that there is a difference between somebody running a private Drag Queen story hour and having it in a library.
And one of the things about David French is he can't tell the difference.
You know, I mean, if parents choose to take their kids to that, I'm not sure whether stopping that is actually the right way to go.
I do think, though, I do think the question, what we're really arguing about is the means, because we agree on what is the right and the good.
But it's how you bring that back into the world.
And I really think the left did it by taking over the cultural institutions.
And I think we have to take them back.
I totally agree.
I guess my only, I don't think the disagreement is you think it ought to be culture and I think it ought to be politics or government or something.
I think the disagreement is you think it ought to be culture and I think it ought to be culture and government.
I just can't think of anybody in the government I want to make those decisions.
We've got to elect me.
I would vote for you.
We've got to stop there.
Read the book because it's a fascinating argument, speechless, controlling words, controlling minds, and it's well done.
And it would be on the New York Times bestseller list if they weren't a bunch of lying scump.
Michael Knowles, it's great to see you.
It's always good to talk to you.
Great to see you.
Let's do it.
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Jimmy Doolittle's Legacy00:14:39
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One of the things people say to me a lot, one of the complaints I get about this show is that I talk about God so much.
Stop harping on God.
Why do you have to talk about God all the time?
You know, I can be a good person and I can be a good conservative without God.
Nothing's so great.
I totally get it.
And yes, you can be a good person, a wonderful person, and there are many awful people who believe in God, many good people who don't believe in God, many good conservatives who don't believe in God, and many people who are not very good conservatives who do.
My only point about this is your philosophy doesn't make sense.
If you're a good person who doesn't believe in God, your philosophy doesn't make sense.
And the problem with having a philosophy that doesn't make sense is that under pressure, it collapses.
And that's some of the stuff we're seeing in our culture today is people who can't defend their positions because they don't know why they hold them.
One of the things about God is that there is no objective good, moral good, without God.
And we do believe, no matter how we talk ourselves out of it when we're in philosophy class in school or on CNN, we believe in an objective good.
And you have to look at it from the negative point of view.
You have to think, can it ever be good to torture a child for your own personal enjoyment?
Is there any series of systems, series of circumstances, where to torture a child for your own personal enjoyment can be a good thing and not an evil thing?
If every single human being on earth, except presumably the child, thought it was a good thing, still the child would be in the right and every single other person would be in the wrong.
Morality is not actually relative.
It's simply that we cannot approach it completely.
We approach it by half measures.
And in order for there to be something good, it has to be closer to an ultimate good, right?
There has to be a direction leading to good and a direction leading away from good.
And that ultimate good just can't be a thing.
It's not a big statue saying, I am the good.
It has to be a consciousness because good is a conscious choice.
It has to be a living consciousness that can choose, that is free to choose, because good is always something free, is always the free conscious choice.
A tornado may destroy a million things, but it's not evil.
So good is always a conscious choice.
And that's why I think if you believe that something, that there is such a thing as objective good, you believe in God whether you know it or not.
And knowing it gives you more power because you can make the arguments you have to make when the pressure is on.
Without God, you know, man is in relationship with nothing but himself.
There's nothing to choose.
He has nothing to choose.
His desires are sovereign.
He's just a piece of clay.
You know, so it's whatever the clay wants.
That's the object of the exercise.
And that's kind of the underlying assumption of the left.
Leftism is a materialist philosophy.
We believe that we are in relationship with something.
And the reason our culture is stagnant right now, it's terribly, terribly stagnant because we've already done all the bad guy stories we can tell.
We've told the sopranos.
We've told Breaking Bad.
We've got all the bad guys that we can possibly do.
And that's kind of interesting in the world.
But we no longer know what the good is because we no longer know who God is.
And the thing about having no belief in God is that you only can tell one story.
You can only tell the story of how absurd everything is.
And that story can be told well.
Waiting for Godot is a wonderful play about that story, but it's still the same story every single time.
The diversity of storytelling comes from individuals, unique individuals, striving toward this good that they see in themselves, but they either can't reach or can start to reach.
And that's what makes story stories.
And that's why there's a million stories, a million endless stories to tell, because there are a million kinds of people, endless, infinite numbers of people.
But if all those people are just pieces of clay, the only story you can tell about them is how absurd there is.
So I was watching the show, Bo Burnham's Inside on Netflix, and it's very popular.
And Bo Burnham is a very, very talented comedy writer and satirist, really talented.
And the show is very entertaining.
He was a comedian.
Burn was a comedian who has so many anxiety attacks, he couldn't perform anymore.
So he stopped performing, went away for five years.
And at the end of five years, he thought, you know, I think I'm saner than I was.
I think I've kind of come around to being stronger mentally than I was.
I'll go back into performing.
And then the pandemic hit, and he was forced to stay in his room for a year.
And so he wrote over the course of a year alone inside this room.
He did this really quite creative performance of his songs and his comedy called Inside because he's spending the year inside.
And he's really talented and it's an impressive and entertaining show, especially the satirical parts of it.
And I'm going to criticize the show.
He's very woke and he's very left-wing in his politics, but so what?
That's his politics.
You can make a good show with that.
But still, there is something about the show that is that one story that we hear over and over again.
Now, the satire is excellent.
He has a song which is the masterpiece of the show called Welcome to the Internet.
The whole show is, of course, he's living online because he's stuck inside.
And here is his depiction of the internet.
So us pictures of your children.
Tell us every thought you think.
Start a rumor by a bloomer.
Send a death threat to a boomer.
Or DM a girl and groomer to a zoomer.
Find a tumor in your here's a healthy breakfast option.
You should kill your mom.
Here's why women never you.
Here's how you can build a bomb.
Which Power Ranger are you?
Take this quirky quiz.
Obama sent the immigrants to vaccinate your kids.
Could I interest you in everything all of the time?
Now that's a great line.
Can I interest you in everything all of the time?
Because everything all of the time is nothing.
And without God, without a moral framework, and you cannot have a moral framework without God.
I know you think you can, but you can't.
Believe me.
Without a moral framework, there's no distinction.
There's no distinction between a quirky Power Ranger's quiz and instructions on how to make a bomb.
It's all about what he take your choice.
Take your choice.
You're interested in everything all of the time.
It really is good.
That's really good satire and really funny.
And his music is not the most original.
It's a little bit repetitive, but still, the writing is good.
It's strong.
And I just found it interesting.
He did another song.
The other really good song is called The White Woman's Instagram, where he describes all the beautiful things that are on a white woman's Instagram page.
Here's a little bit of that.
An avocado.
A poem written in the sand.
Fresh fallen snow on the ground.
A golden retriever in a flower pound.
Is this heaven?
Or is it just a white woman?
A white woman's Instagram?
That's really good stuff, very observant, you know.
And again, but the thing about satire, and I do satire on the show, I open the show with satire, is it's essentially negative.
In satire, you are making fun of a system that isn't working or a person who's doing something stupid.
It's like critical theory, right?
It's like critical theory.
You can always criticize, but underneath that criticism, there is a positive assumption that you have something better to offer.
And if you don't start to offer that system, that something better, then really your satire is kind of complaining.
It's complaining.
If you have nothing better to offer, your satire is just complaining.
It's just fetching.
And the problem with this show, with this show inside, is once that the satire is excellent.
Every time he describes the internet, it's just terrific.
But once he starts to get into his own self-reflection, it becomes the same old, same old thing.
So he does one thing where he talks about the fact that he does a song and then he comments on the song and then he comments on himself commenting on the song and it just becomes this infinite regress, a house of mirrors.
Here's a little bit of that.
It's pretty unlikable that I feel this need, this desperate need to be seen as intelligent.
And the video's ending here.
Everybody, it's starting to cut right on.
Look, I'm very confused.
I'm very, very confused because I'm staring at myself.
I don't know what I'm looking at.
And I'm starting to catch up now and realize what's going on.
And yeah, now I'm deciding to react to the reaction.
Without God, you're in a dialogue with yourself all the time, constantly in a dialogue with yourself, constantly in that infinite regress hall of mirrors.
And one of the things about this show that really moved me is he reminded me, he's about 30, he reminded me of myself at that age when I was suicidal.
And I think that I worry about the kid.
I actually do.
You can't be in a dialogue without God.
You can't be in a dialogue with anything but yourself.
You can't ever know what reality is.
You can't ever say, oh, yes, I will now stop.
Everything is analysis.
Everything is breaking things down.
And like criticism, like critical theory, everything can always be broken down into smaller and smaller parts.
You know, intelligent people, intellectual people, have the same reaction to their intellects that a lot of guys have to their penis.
Basically, it is a source of self-esteem and pleasure to them, so they begin to think it's a lot more important than it is, okay?
Your intellect is a wonderful thing, and hopefully your penis is a wonderful thing, but it is not the center of the universe.
There is a wholeness to be had when you let analysis go, when you stop analyzing things, and when you start to experience them as a whole human being because you are in contact with the image of yourself, which is on the big screen, which is God, the creation of yourself and the purpose that you were created for.
You know, this idea that when you have nothing, when you're not in dialogue with anything, that other people start to define you.
Not only are you in this infinite regress, that you are defined by what other people think of you.
And he makes this point.
Bo Berner makes this point inside that he's living for the laughter of others, for the reactions that he gets from others, because they kind of define him.
They give him life.
And he has no, you know, he worries, oh, am I making the world a better place with my comedy?
But it doesn't really matter because as he says, I want all eyes on me.
So he's constantly criticizing himself, but he has nothing else to offer.
You know, there was a story in the New York Times, just New York Times, a former newspaper, and there was a story in it about people who don't want the pandemic to end because they don't want to go out again.
And there was one guy in it who was a, he's a black gay guy, and he is married to a white gay guy, and he doesn't want to go out again, and here he explains why.
My husband is white, and we often have conversations with folks that we meet on the street, and I become invisible.
I go into a market and I'm either ignored, totally, or followed and watched.
That's a microaggression.
It's a grown man.
It's a grown man worrying about a microaggression, you know?
It's like there are people in this world.
Seriously, there are people in this world hoping that they don't get macheteed by a raving racist mob tomorrow.
And he's worried that when he goes to this supermarket, people talk to his husband.
You know, because he has nothing with which to define himself but other people.
And Burnham has this stuff too.
And it's interesting that it's interesting to me that, for instance, Bo Burnham never questions.
He never questions whether he should be locked inside, whether he should maybe go out and defy the lockdown orders.
He never questions global warming.
He never questions systemic racism.
He never questions anything except his own purpose for being, because that's the thing he can't understand.
So all of his self-reflection, well, all of his satire is excellent.
His music is excellent.
His self-reflection is adolescent and second rate.
He has one thing about suicide, and he's written a song about suicide.
Why don't you just kill yourself, basically?
And he starts the second half of the show by saying, don't kill yourself.
And this is what he says.
And if you're out there and you're struggling with, you know, suicidal thoughts and you want to kill yourself, I just want to tell you, don't.
Okay?
Can you not, please?
Just don't, all right?
Quit it with the.
But really, don't kill yourself.
You don't want to, because there are people that love you.
That's not true necessarily, but there could be people that love you in the future.
And just don't.
I've had people close to me kill themselves.
And I'll be honest with you, didn't love it.
Didn't love that.
So just don't.
He can't even come up with a reason to live.
And he's showing his picture of himself on a t-shirt worn by himself looking incredibly bored and depressed by this monologue.
You know, it obviously reminds you of Hamlet asking himself to be or not to be.
And Hamlet's only reason to live is because he fears that something after death might be worse than what he's in.
And that's why he doesn't kill himself.
But the whole point about Hamlet, the whole point about Hamlet is he's one character in this panoply of characters that Shakespeare has created, each one of them in a different relationship with the moral universe.
Hamlet in the Bo Burnham relationship.
That's, as Shakespeare knew, without God, that's the only story.
Hamlet is the only story you can tell, and you have to tell it over and over and over again.
And that was my problem with Inside.
I enjoyed it.
I think it's worth watching.
I recommend it.
The guy is tremendously talented, and his satire is really, really good.
But because he is of this generation that has a default atheism, that really hasn't thought it through, that's his default atheism, he has nothing to say about himself because he has no self.
And that's the other thing about there being no God.
There's not only no moral world without God, there's no inner world, no true inner world without God.
And you have nowhere to go except deeper and deeper into your empty self.
Normally, I don't mind the fact that I'm losing my hearing because I don't care what anybody else has to say.
But when I'm watching movies, it's a little tough.
I like action movies and you can't hear the dialogue.
I turn the dialogue up loud enough to hear it.
The explosions blow me out of my chair.
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All right, all good things must come to an end.
That includes your trouble and pain and anxiety because it's time for the mailbag.
I'm concerned that you guys are asking me questions.
Yeah!
Joe Biden's like the gift that keeps on giving.
From Patrick, hello, Andrew.
Great interview with Richard Cooper.
All right, we're still getting a lot of letters about Richard Cooper.
An interesting interview with a man's coach, guy who tells you how to handle those tricky women.
He says, The letter says, Thank you for taking him to account for his portrayal of women as mechanical and interchangeable.
Obviously, there are many different types of unique women with unique talents and personalities.
I disagree with how you premised your question to Mr. Cooper when you said that your wife chose to marry you when you were a starving, worthless artist.
He says, I've read your book, The Great Good Thing.
You may have been a poor artist, but you were still an alpha male.
You were obviously a dynamic, assertive, aggressive, intense, and intelligent person.
I like this letter.
And your wife surely saw that.
You may have been artistic, but you were not a passive, submissive beta male.
You said yourself that as a young man you were difficult, headstrong, and argumentative, regularly getting into fist fights.
I think you give Cooper's angle short shrift when you say it doesn't resonate that women do in fact want alpha males.
All right, let me answer this.
I want to give my point of view on this.
And I don't want to, I'm not attacking Richard Cooper, but I do.
It's my show.
I get to give my point of view about it all.
First of all, the question that I asked in that case was about money.
Richard was saying that women want money.
And I said, my wife married me when I didn't have any money.
And in fact, I thought I would never make any money.
I remember saying to her once, you know, looking at a very nice house and saying, well, I'd like to live in a place like that someday.
And she said, we'll never have a place like that.
You're an artist.
And I actually turned to her and I said, oh, yeah, we will.
No, that's ridiculous.
And so only I thought I would ever make money.
But my real attitude toward this, my true feeling about this, is that thinking about alpha males is for beta males.
Alpha male is a category of, and beta male are categories of gorillas.
There are so many different kinds of people.
And they are obviously women in general like strong men and men in general like gentle, tender women.
I mean, that is in the male-female divide.
That's what we're looking for, I think, from each other, something to answer, to fulfill us and complete us.
And I think those are the things that people like.
Strong males, that's fine.
But take, if you remember the movie Apollo 13, where they have to save these astronauts in a damaged ship, and they call in these little dweebs, these guys who obviously got beat up and bullied in high school.
And they're little guys, bald guys, you know, with glasses and their stooped shoulders.
And they give them this impossible task to do to save these guys' lives.
And they go out and they put together all these crazy jerry-rigged contraptions and they save their lives.
Is that an alpha male or a beta male?
How do you know?
Because gorillas don't have that category of men, you know?
And or people like me who don't want to tell other people what to do, but don't want to be told by anybody what to do.
I mean, that's a different category.
I don't think they have those in gorillas, too.
They have the guy who takes all the women and the people who don't get any of the women.
That's the way that works.
So I just think this kind of cat, I think what is happening in things like this is that people are trying to systematize romantic life to allay their fears of the risks that you take in a romantic life.
And I thought Richard made some absolutely good points about the ways the laws may sometimes favor women to the point where they up the risks of looking for romance beyond what is tolerable to many men.
And I think that's a perfectly fair point of view.
But this kind of mechanistic, animalistic view of human beings is not my view.
And I think that what you're dealing with is individuals and taking your chances in life no matter what the odds, because I think love is worth taking a risk for.
So that's my ultimate statement on it.
I mean, that's my point of view and the point of view about me is that I am what I am, basically, and my wife liked it.
And I'm incredibly grateful that she did, though I think she must be, there must be something wrong with her.
From Brandon, my question is in regard to Christianity.
I became a Christian roughly three years ago and have worked hard to strengthen my faith.
I am by nature a very skeptical person, which has presented many obstacles for me along the way with being confident in my beliefs.
The biggest hurdle that I can't seem to quite get around is the idea that there are people who practice other religions, Islam, to be specific, that feel just as confident in their religion as we do in ours.
Understanding that both of these cannot be true.
How do you gain confidence in the gospels and in your faith more specifically, knowing that others out there feel just as convicted?
I've never understood this argument.
I've heard it a lot, but I've never actually understood why the fact that other people think that God is other than I think he is should damage my faith unless, unless they have a spectacular argument for why they think what they think.
And I have never come across that at all.
They're wrong.
They believe some.
This is what I think.
I think they believe something that is incorrect.
Plenty of people believe plenty of things that are incorrect.
Socialists believe that socialism will make life better.
Communists and fascists believe that their ideas will make life better.
Why do I believe in a democratic republic when they believe in their ideas so strongly?
Because their arguments are bad.
Their arguments are bad and they do not conform to history and what we've learned about human life and what makes human life thrive and what makes human life good.
And the same is true of Christianity.
And since you're being specific about Islam, I would say, you know, where do you see an Islamic culture that has reached the heights of success, beauty, truth, even freedom, and even happiness that Christian culture has reached?
I mean, Christianity has proved itself over the years.
If it hadn't, maybe it would not still be here in a country where people are free to choose.
Because remember, in a lot of Muslim countries, you're not free to become an apostate.
So I don't understand why the mistaken beliefs of other people should bother me at all.
You know, I think that's just part of life, that people believe different things.
But if it troubles you, then I guess the thing is to engage with their arguments and then engage with the arguments of wise Christians, why they believe what they believe.
From Jacob, I was watching the latest episode of Backstage and was moved by your answer about the left infecting video games.
You perfectly described how video games instilled values in me before I was even interested in politics.
Gamers are definitely aware of the left trying to push their woke nonsense into our games, but it's kind of like Hollywood where you fail upwards.
Game journalists love the wokeness, and the people who make the games get promoted despite the backlash from fans.
The Daily Wire is pushing back in entertainment with movies like Run Hide Fight and the Clarence Thomas documentary.
Do you think a similar strategy needs to be applied to game ground in video games?
Yeah, look, you cannot oppose the left without opposing them.
I mean, this is the thing.
They are aggressive.
They mean it.
They're serious.
They want to destroy everything that we hold dear.
You have to assert what we hold dear.
It is not good enough.
It is not good enough to say, you know, we are going to complain about their creating video games.
Video games, science fiction, some of the genres are places where people still occasionally can speak without being woke.
It's getting very, very hard.
Every time I get a book copy edited now, some copy editor will say, Well, you described this person as coffee-colored and slaves used to pick coffee.
So, you know, and I just stat, you know, which is editorial speak for leave it the way it is.
We have to fight back against that, and that means taking risks, and that means taking chances, that means taking hits from the journalist, and putting your faith in the people and putting your faith in the audience.
And you're definitely right that we have to do that, or else we're going to lose even this last bastion of culture where we still have some kind of voice.
And I think we should be pushing back like the Daily Wire is doing, and we should do it in video games for sure.
All right, I'm going to stop there.
I'm out of time, but I will be back.
You not so sure.
You're entering the Claven this week.
There'll be darkness, wailing, and gnashing of teeth.
Oh my God, I can't even begin.
Even if I described it, you would be so debilitated by simply my description of what is coming that you would be heartbroken to think that it's not until next Friday when I will be back, but I will.
And hopefully, some of you, one or two of you, will make it and crawl through that darkness to the light.
Entering the Claven00:00:56
And I will be here with the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm Andrew Klavan.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Our technical director is Austin Stevens.
Supervising producer, Mathis Glover.
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Edited by Danny D'Amico.
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And our production assistant is Jacob Falash.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production, Copyright Daily Wire 2021.
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