Andrew Klavan dissects the CDC’s pandemic satire, exposing elite hypocrisy—from My Little Pony masks to January 6th’s partisan witch hunt—while framing conservative demonization as a tool for power. O. Carter Sneed’s bioethics critique reveals how "expressive individualism" erodes embodied ethics, from abortion law to assisted suicide, warning that autonomy without compassion risks dehumanizing the vulnerable. A listener debate over the N-word exposes racial tensions within conservatism, while Klavan’s blunt advice on pornography addiction ties personal morality to cultural decay, culminating in a call for truth over anger in an era of reinvented identities and institutional betrayal. [Automatically generated summary]
The CDC has issued new COVID guidelines in the hope of brightening our day with the gift of laughter during this difficult time.
The CDC, which is short for C, DC has even corrupted the medical profession, said it was issuing the new guidelines in response to deepening fears that blaming Trump and Fox News for their incompetence was not fooling anybody.
The new guidelines are as follows.
Guideline one, do not panic.
Calmly and quietly, lock yourself inside your apartment and in an orderly manner collect all your furniture and pile it up against the door.
Do not allow anyone to come close to you or touch you or make prolonged eye contact with you or call you by terms of familiarity like bud or bro or mom or dad.
It might just be a trick to get on your good side, then give you the disease once you've let down your guard.
Remember, we're all in this together except for everyone else.
Guideline B, follow the science.
If anyone exhibiting symptoms comes within sight, immediately make the sign of the cross and hold up a clove of garlic, preferably one that has been minced, then simmered in butter with just a soupson of lemon juice and perhaps a sprig of parsley.
Then cleanse your immediate area by uttering an incantation of appeasement to the queen priestess while cutting off the head of a chicken that has been dressed up to look like Dr. Fauci.
In fact, if possible, everyone should dress up like Dr. Fauci.
That way, if they get sick, at least their neighbors will have the satisfaction of saying, ha ha ha, it's about time that lying bastard got his.
Guideline 5, subsection H, Article 12, get vaccinated, but don't act as if you've been vaccinated.
That might encourage others to get vaccinated, and eventually everyone would be walking around happy-go-lucky and feeling fine.
And that is no way to behave in a terrible situation like this one.
The point is to develop herd immunity, which is where you've heard you have immunity, but you don't.
So you still have to cower in your apartment in fear, then die.
Next, and this is guideline J, wear a mask.
Even if you've been vaccinated, even if you're barricaded alone in your apartment, even if you're already dead and have rotted away to a skeleton, your skull should still have a mask on.
And don't just wear one of those boring blue masks.
Put on something festive like a My Little Pony bandana or a Michael Myers head.
Let's try to make this fun.
And finally, guideline 8 or 2, or maybe Y or something.
Wrap your children in plastic and keep them home from school forever.
You might even want to poison them in their sleep like that Nazi woman in the movie Downfall so they can die without ever having suffered from this horrible disease and its attendant cough and runny nose.
The CDC says the new guidelines will remain in place until doctors stop congratulating themselves on their latest hilarious prank or until a Republican is elected president, whichever comes first.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-donkey.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, the vast right-wing conspiracy known as Clavinon continues.
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This comment comes from Christopher Garrett.
He says, you know Clavin is an ancient man when he comes up with a different life story every week and states that this was the moment that changed him.
Either that or he's gone senile.
Well, you know, two things can be true at once.
It is a different life story.
That is my life story because my life story is just so long.
It has many different life stories that changed me and I've also gone senile.
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And if they know, call the police.
I want to start today not by talking about what they, the evildoers, are doing, but talking about us and who we are and who we're going to be in what is obviously a tremendously difficult political moment.
Our elites are a bunch of credentialed idiots.
They're responding to their failures by blaming us and by heaping us with their radicalism, their bullying, and their oppression.
And so I want to talk about us because I don't want to live my life in misery and rage worrying about these people.
There is a famous and hilarious experiment that was performed on Capuchin monkeys by a primatologist named Franz Duval.
Here's what happened.
They took two monkeys who knew each other and they put them in adjacent cages and they gave them a task to do, which is they had to hand the researcher a rock.
And if they do the task right, they have a little plate of stones and if they did the task right, they got a piece of cucumber.
And they're happy to keep doing this.
They did it over and over and over again.
Each time they'd give them a rock and each monkey would get a cucumber.
But then they changed it up and one of the monkeys was given a grape, which is much more tasty and sweet.
And here's a video of what happened when the next monkey got a cucumber after his buddy got a grape.
This is Franz Duval describing the experiment.
So she gives a rock to us, that's the task.
And we give her a piece of cucumber and she eats it.
The other one needs to give a rock to us.
And that's what she does.
And she gets a grape.
And she eats it.
The other one sees that.
She gives a rock to us now, gets again cucumber.
If you're listening and not watching, he throws the cucumber out through the window and he goes, so to speak, ape.
He begins pounding on the table.
He's furious.
He's absolutely furious.
And this experiment works with dogs.
It works with birds and other animals.
They are happy to do the task if they get equal pay for equal work.
But if you jam them, if they get treated unfairly, they become furious.
Fairness is a basic moral premise.
Even animals understand the concept of fairness, which brings to mind, if you've never read C.S. Lewis' wonderful book, Mere Christianity, you should.
This is the opening paragraph of C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, edited a little for space.
He says, everyone has heard people quarreling.
Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant.
But however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say.
They say things like this, how'd you like it if anyone did the same to you?
That's my seat.
I was there first.
Leave him alone.
He isn't doing you any harm.
Why should you shove in first?
Give me a bit of your orange.
I gave you a bit of mine.
Come on, you promised.
People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated and children as well as grown-ups.
Now, says C.S. Lewis, what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behavior does not happen to please him.
He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about.
And the other man very seldom replies to hell with your standard.
Nearly always, he tries to make out that what he's been doing does not really go against the standard or that if it does, there's some special excuse.
I know that some people say the idea of a standard known to all men is unsound because different civilizations and different ages have had quite different moralities, but this is not true.
There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference.
Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real right and wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later.
He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him, he will be complaining it's not fair before you can say, Jack Robinson, it seems then that we are forced to believe in a real right and wrong.
In other words, something in the moral sense, even of animals, has evolved to recognize an absolute morality, an objective morality that includes fairness and right and wrong.
Now, nowadays, and I've read a lot of books by evolutionists, these evolutionary biologists, and some of them say that the evolution of our moral sense is what creates right and wrong.
But if that were true, the moral sense would be the only sense that has evolved that sees something that isn't there.
The sense of sight evolved so we can see what's there.
The sense of hearing evolved so we could hear what's there.
And the moral sense evolved so we could tell the good and bad that is there.
Now, there's another thing, interesting thing about human beings, okay?
And this is true of animals too, a lot of animals.
We have an inner life of fear and love and anger and joy, and nobody knows how this happens and no one knows why it happens.
There's no evolutionary reason why we should see danger coming and run away, you know, in fear.
We could not feel fear.
We're just a machine, right?
We could be just designed to see, you know, fire coming and run away.
But instead, instead, we feel fear, and then we have to decide, given the situation and our values, whether to run.
And this is a mystery of science.
Nobody knows why we have an inner life, all right?
So our reaction to unfairness is anger, just like a man's natural reaction to a pretty girl is desire, just like our natural reaction to danger is fear.
But if we choose to live into our fears, right, we become cowards.
And if we live into our desires, we become abusive to ourself and everybody else around us.
And if we live into our anger, we become defined by the people who hate us.
Because then we're governed by our reactions to them, right?
That defines us.
So the fact that they are mistreating us becomes the definition of who we are.
And then our life is not going to be the life of joy that God wants us to live.
And this is why I've said a lot of times anger is the devil's cocaine, because we feel righteous anger, just like the monkey.
He has every right to be angry.
But then we begin to mistake the anger for righteousness, and we become addicted to the feeling of righteousness.
And that addiction is what is often being fed to you on TV, on cable news, on Twitter, by your friends, by the world in general, sometimes by us here at the Daily Wire.
We all do it.
We make profit by appealing to the angry monkey inside you so you will get addicted to your anger and that sense of righteousness that comes with it by telling you what all the evil people are doing, right?
Now, right now, the evil people are doing a lot of rotten stuff.
We're being treated unfairly and wrongly by the powers that be.
And for the first time in my memory, the powers that be are the government, corporations, media, the academy.
They're all operating in collusion in an attempt, essentially, whether they know it or not, to end our revolutionary liberty and go back or progress, as they call it, because they're progressives, they want to progress into the past where they had a system where the elites ruled unanswerable to the individual common man.
And we're angry.
We're angry about it, right?
We think our rage is our strength.
We think our rage is our strength.
But that is not true.
And there's a reason we think something wrong, right?
We think something incorrect because there is a seductive, powerful evil in the world that's always trying to convince us that what makes us weak and miserable is making us strong.
Whether it's anger, hatred, drugs, unfettered sex, pornography, we always indulge in these things because they give us a feeling in the moment that we're strong and free, we can do whatever we want, and then they always end up shriveling our souls.
Now, our old friend Uncle Jesus said, who you remember from our last conversation, said he wanted us to feel the joy that was in him.
He wanted the joy that was in him to be in us.
And a lot of what he said was telling us what he saw and how we could see the same things and experience the joy that he felt so that his joy would be in us.
And one of those ways was to love our enemies and forgive them.
Let's go back to C.S. Lewis.
C.S. Lewis called loving our enemies and forgiving them our terrible duty.
And here's what he said.
He said, to mention the subject of forgiveness at all is to be greeted with howls of anger.
It is not that people think this is too high and difficult a virtue.
It is that they think it is hateful and contemptible.
That sort of talk makes them sick, they say.
Now, I get emails like that all the time, and they take a certain form.
Like the form is usually, why did you say Trump was wrong about X when the libs are doing Y and Z, which is so much worse?
Or how can you say we should live in love and peace when fill in the blank, something terrible is happening and we mustn't be complacent.
So here are the questions that I ask in response.
Think about this for a minute.
America's Duality00:02:46
America at the time of its founding, was that a great moment of freedom and honor and courage and wisdom when our founders acted brilliantly?
Or was it a time of chattel slavery when our founders were holding people slaves and oppressing them?
Victorian England, was that a moment of political liberation like there had never been before and scientific advance like there had never been before?
Or was it a time of British colonial atrocities?
Augustine Rome, when Augustus was emperor of Rome, was that a flowering of Latin culture?
Or was it the death of political freedom with the end of the Republic?
1950s America, the early 19 and the early 1960s, was that a pinnacle of peace and prosperity or was it an era of bigotry and repression?
America today.
Is this a country of greater wealth, health, scientific achievement, and even liberty than the world has ever known?
Or is it a time when babies are being torn from their mother's wombs in the thousands every day, when children are butchered and abused to serve the sexual perversions of adults, and when mighty corporations work in tandem with the government to silence the people and demand philosophical conformity?
So obviously what I'm saying is the world at its very best, even at the moments when the world is at its social best, is always, the world is always also full of terrible human buffoonery and evil.
Always, always.
It is always filled with human buffoonery and evil.
And in the midst of that buffoonery and evil, each of us, whether she's a mom or an artist, an activist, an Uber driver, an athlete, a garbage man, doesn't matter, each one of us is a soul at a moment in time being shaped for entry into eternity by how we decide what to do, how to react, and how to behave.
If you think it's weakness and surrender to live in love and joy and morality in the midst of all this unfairness and oppression and buffoonery and evil, here's my last historical question.
Judea at the time of Christ and after Christ.
Was it a fractious country being well administered by Rome?
Or was it a place where Latin tyrants colluded with local officials to crush the freedom of God's chosen people with idiot regulations and an intrusive police presence and high taxes?
Would you have been one of the furious, angry rebels who took on the mightiest empire that ever existed with acts of violence and were then wiped off the face of the earth?
Or would you have been one of the fat and happy supporters of the empire living high off the misery of the ordinary man?
Or, or would you have been one of the followers of Christ who gathered in fellowship and charity and love and tried to become better than the world around them and spoke the truth and lived the truth even when they were crucified, beheaded, and fed to the lions?
Looters and Shots00:15:20
Who were the weak ones?
Who were the strong ones?
Who, in the long run, turned the mightiest empire on earth to dust and built the world of the future?
And I want to look at what that means for what's happening today.
Many of you look at the show and the way it's run and think, it's chaos.
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So let's start by just taking a look at this January 6th commission.
This is Nancy Pelosi's commission to explore the terrible events that drove AOC into therapy when, you know, whatever it was, hundreds of people charged into the Capitol to try and stop the certification of Joe Biden's election, right?
This is obviously a partisan dog and pony show.
Pelosi's made no bones about it.
She pushed people off.
She took more seats for the Democrats than for the Republicans and pushed anyone off who was going to take a partisan view, what she felt was a partisan view, that this was not that important.
And it's painful to watch, right?
It's painful for us to watch because it's so unfair.
It's just so unfair what they're doing.
I mean, Adam Schiff is up there.
This is a guy who is one of the biggest liars in the country.
I mean, this is a guy who went on television during this Russian collusion hoax with Donald Trump and said, I have in my hand, you know, absolute proof and I've seen the proof.
I can't tell you about it, but oh boy, once it comes out.
And of course, he had nothing.
He had nothing.
And he lied and lied and lied.
And we see him on television now today.
And they ask him questions with seriousness instead of asking him the one question.
You were lying then.
Are you lying now?
So he goes into this very, oh, it was very dramatic.
Oh, he was crying.
There were tears.
It was so dramatic.
I was so moved for him.
Here's a little clip of Adam Schiff doing his thing.
And if we're so driven by bigotry and hate that we attack our fellow citizens as traitors, if they're born in another country or they don't look like us, then God help us.
But I have faith because of folks like you.
What the hell is he talking about?
What the hell is he even describing?
He's describing America.
Does he know?
Does he know?
Has he ever been in a country where we attack people because they don't look like us?
I mean, that is unbelievable.
It is unbelievable.
He went on to say, oh, you know, just because they lost an election, we have to accept that.
Here are the Democrats on another January 6th in 2017, when Donald Trump was being, his election was being certified.
They got up again and again and again and demanded that it not be certified.
This is Cut 29.
Mr. President, I object to the certificate from the state of Georgia on the grounds that the electoral vote is.
No debate.
There's no debate.
And I object to a certificate from the state of North Carolina based on violations of the order of the United States.
There is no debate.
And there's no debate by the joint session.
I object because people are horrified by the overwhelming evidence.
Section 18, Title III of the United States Code prohibits debate.
I object.
Objected to the counting of the electoral votes of the state of Ohio.
I object to the certificate from the state of Alabama.
The electors were not lawfully certified.
I object to the 15 votes from the state of North Carolina because of the massive voter suppression and the closing of voting polling booths.
There's no debate.
There's no debate.
16.
There's no debate.
So first, I want to mention that there's Joe Biden, then vice president, doing exactly what Mike Pence did, making sure that the election was certified as the Constitution demands.
That was the right thing for Biden to do.
That was the right thing for Pence to do.
If we're not playing by the rules, we're not playing at all.
I mean, America is the rules.
America is the Constitution.
They are preserving the Constitution.
And I'm giving cred to Biden for that.
And I give cred to Mike Pence for that.
But the America these people are describing, this entire dog and pony show, is not about the actual events that took place.
It's about describing all of us, condemning all of us, condemning this country as somehow being represented by these people, these hundreds of people who came in to the Capitol and smeared dirt on the wall and did all kinds of vandalism and did attack people.
And one of these officers who was defending the Capitol was a guy named Harry Dunn.
And he uses the moment to basically say, this is America.
And this cut, listen, the guy's a police officer.
I think he's a veteran.
I don't want to run him down personally, but the things that he says are diluted.
It's Cut 21.
I mean, if you look at our history of American history, things are countries existed because they beat, they won a war.
Or colonies and state lines and boundaries exist because of violence and wars.
So I guess it sounds silly, but I guess it is American.
And it's so, but it's not the side of America that I like.
It's not the side of that any of us here represent.
What country was not founded in war?
What country hasn't defended its borders in war?
Even the Indian nations were killing each other like crazy before the Europeans came over.
The Europeans were just the strongest tribe, that's all.
I mean, what are they talking about?
What is this picture of America as especially evil instead of a picture of America as trying to rise above the usual history?
And Dunn, you know, this guy is a radical.
I mean, when you remember in Kenosha, Wisconsin, they had that horrible riot after Jacob Blake was shot.
This was a good shooting.
This was a good shooting, meaning I'm using police talk.
I mean, it was an appropriate shooting.
He went in and he molested this woman.
He ran out and the woman said, he's got my child.
He's kidnapping my child.
And Blake reached into a car and they couldn't see what he was doing.
They were shouting at him to stop.
And finally, they shot him.
One guy shot him.
And there was a riot that caused more than $50 million in damage, right?
And Tucker Carlson put out this tweet, basically describing this horrible destruction.
And Dunn, the same guy, Harry Dunn, put out a tweet saying, why, here's Tucker Carlson's tweet.
It says, Kenosha devolved into anarchy because the authorities abandoned the people.
Those in charge from the governor on down refused to enforce the law.
They've stood back and watched Kenosha burn.
Are we really surprised that looting and arson accelerated to murder, says Tucker Carlson?
And Harry Dunn says, why is murder an appropriate response to property damage, but property damage isn't an appropriate response to murder?
Now, this guy did not, it was not property damage.
It's not property damage.
I mean, this Jacob Blake was shot.
And I guess what he's saying, oh, maybe the looters themselves were shot.
Looters get shot because you cannot have a society that works that way.
So this is the same guy, this radical guy.
This guy has been convinced.
And this is the way at the same time, the press was covering all these riots, right?
A year of riots, 2020.
BLM, Black Lives Matter, with their clever title, but they were rioting.
At least 20 people died in these riots.
Police officers were killed.
Federal buildings were burned down.
Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, Midtown Manhattan were left in absolute ruins, businesses destroyed, dreams destroyed, lives destroyed.
This is how the press covered it, cut too.
I want to be clear in how I characterize this.
This is mostly a protest.
It is not, generally speaking, unruly.
That ain't a riot.
What we're seeing right now in Minneapolis, they are strictly principled anti-fascists, and they've taken a principled stand to stand against white supremacists and white nationalists wherever they may show up.
I argue to you tonight, all punches are not equal morally.
It says it right in the name, anti-fascism, which is what they were there fighting.
Listen, there's, you know, no organization is perfect.
There is some violence.
Any reasonable person would say we shouldn't be destroying other people's property, but these are not reasonable times.
Thank goodness for the looters, man.
And please, show me where it says that protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful.
I don't care that much about statues.
Shouldn't that be done by a commission or the city council, not a mob in the middle of the night throwing it into the harbour?
People do what they do.
That's Nancy Pelosi talking.
There was one cut, one clip that we didn't include where Brett Stevens, now a columnist for the New York Times, formerly of the Wall Street Journal, is sitting with another commentator.
And Stevens says, look, you know, thuggishness is wrong no matter who does it, and we should call it out.
We, the press, should call it out wherever we see it.
And the other commentator says, I disagree.
That's what's driving us crazy.
It's the unfairness.
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That's it.
When the unfairness is coming from not just the Democrat government, but from the corporations, from the media, the media especially, because they pipe their information into our heads constantly, social media silencing people.
None of those Democrats who said the election was unfair, the election of Trump was unfair.
None of them got silenced.
They got media coverage forever.
Whereas anybody who says anything about Trump's election being unfair, Biden's election being unfair, is thrown off social media.
This is what I'm talking about.
It's that unfairness where the monkey in us is just saying, hey, wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
This is wrong.
You know, Harry Dunn, same police officer, and again, not attacking the guy personally, just saying that I think he's deluded.
I think his opinions are incorrect.
He says we need to make sure, he's talking about January 6th.
He says we need to make sure we're prepared and that we continue to shoot down all rhetoric that could possibly lead to violence.
Here are the Democrats during the Trump administration.
Let's cut 28.
I just don't even know why there aren't uprisings all over the country.
Maybe there will be.
There needs to be unrest in the streets for as long as there's unrest in our lives.
You've got to be ready to throw a punch.
Well, you have to be ready to throw a punch.
Donald Trump, I think you need to go back and punch him in the face.
But I thought he should have punched him in the face.
I feel like punching him.
I think I'd like to take him behind the gym if I were in high school.
You're in high school.
I'd take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.
No, I wish you were in high school.
I could take him behind the gym.
I will go and take Trump out tonight.
Take him out now.
When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?
They're still going to have to go out and put a bullet in Donald Trump.
They did that a lot.
A lot of talking about the assassinating the president, assassinating Trump, the violence, the calls for violence, the justification of violence in the street, the mostly peaceful stuff.
You know, the left has their latest trick.
They come up with these kind of talking points that they flood social media with.
They have this trick they call this whataboutism.
When you say, you know, okay, January 6th, but what about the year of rioting?
They say, well, it's what aboutism?
What aboutism was a Soviet Union ploy when the Soviet Union was in operation and an American statesman would get up and say, you know, you guys are oppressing half the world.
You're oppressing people.
You're stomping on your boots, stomping on a human face.
The Soviets would say, well, what about slavery?
The Chinese are doing the same thing now.
What about slavery?
What about the race problem in America?
You know, all the way you mistreat the races.
You know, they're putting Uyghurs in prison by the millions.
It's really genocide against the Uyghurs.
And if we mention it, they say, well, you treat black people badly.
You know, you pull them over, give them traffic tickets.
That's what aboutism.
That's what aboutism, where you're comparing essentially apples and oranges.
You're comparing the past to the present.
This is not what about is.
This is basic fairness, where the values, that standard that C.S. Lewis talked about, is the same for us as it is for them.
You know, I said this on the backstage show.
We were talking about Ben's book and all this stuff.
We're living in a kind of insanity and we don't even know it.
We don't even know it.
A guy like Ben, a smart, moderate right-winger like Ben, who has a lot of interesting ideas, a lot of information packed in his head, brings out a book.
Nobody wants to bring him on TV and say, tell us about your ideas, Ben.
Just tell us.
I may not agree with you, but let me hear your ideas.
You know, Knowles brings out a book and it's a bestseller everywhere, but the New York Times puts their finger in their ears and sort of pretends it's not there.
They pretend it's not a bestseller.
I mean, look, when Knowles is around, we all try to pretend he's not there, but I'm talking about professionally here.
We're living in a kind of madness where one side of the country, the side of the country that believes in the Constitution, that is more traditionalist, that believes that traditions contain the wisdom of our forefathers, is just being demonized.
And the country is being demonized without any reference to any other country.
Oh, our borders were forged in war, as opposed to whom?
Oh, you're racist here, as opposed to where.
Oh, you've done bad things in the past, as opposed to whom.
You know, it just make it absolutely makes no sense.
And because it makes no sense, they have to keep silencing us.
They have to knock us off Twitter.
They have to knock us off everything.
And it's the unfairness.
If we were talking to each other, if occasionally a comedian on late night TV would make a joke about the Democrats, would attack the Democrats just once, just someone, if sometimes a movie would get made by a conservative, there wouldn't be this kind of anger between us.
We would know that we could sit down and talk to one another as Americans of goodwill because some people on the left, of course, are, of course, people of goodwill, just like some people on the right are schmoes.
Why We Must Talk00:02:18
You know, one-third more Americans, according to one poll, one-third more Americans believe Congress should hold investigative hearings about last summer's Black Lives Matter protests rather than January 6th.
One-third more Americans, and they're not doing it.
And so, you know, we're angry.
And look, here's the thing about January 6th, and I'm not saying this to be like, oh, look, I'm a good guy.
I'm saying this because I believe it.
I thought January 6th was a disgrace.
And I think Trump screwed the pooch.
I think Trump did not come out in time and Trump didn't do the right thing.
And, you know, I'll take that hit every day.
I will take that hit every day if we can be fair, if we can be fair.
I am not going to live.
I don't live for Donald Trump.
I'm here for America.
I'm here for freedom.
I'm here for the things that matter, right?
I'm perfectly willing to say sometimes the guys who are on my side do bad things and sometimes the other guys do bad things.
It is the philosophy we're debating.
Let's debate the philosophy.
Let's have people on each other's shows and talk about it without screaming at each other.
Let's just hear what one another thinks.
Because we haven't done that, because we have a corrupt press, because we have a corrupt administration, because we have corrupt and corrupted corporations just trying to figure out the way that they can make money off the going wokeness.
Because of all of that, people are furious.
And we have to, it's up to us.
We're the only one who can do it because they're not going to do it.
It's up to us to live in the truth.
It's up to us not to call things by their false names.
It's up to us not to hate the guys across from us.
It's up to us not to say, oh, you know, that January 6th, that was an FBI thing.
The FBI started that.
Black Lives Matter really dressed up as Trump supporters and started that.
Listen, you know some of these Trump supporters.
Some of those Trump supporters were bad guys because some of every group are bad guys.
And those were the people who went in there.
Fools and schmoes went into the Capitol and did a bad thing.
It was 100 people and all this.
We could possibly say, oh, yeah, that was mostly peaceful.
But it's not mostly peaceful.
We have to tell the truth.
That is our superpower.
Their superpower is oppression, censorship.
Our superpower is telling the truth and the joy of living in the truth and living a moral life in a moral way.
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Vaccinations and Blame00:10:27
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Write Clavin in their How Did You Hear About Us box so they know we sent you.
And you may be saying to yourself, How do you spell Clavin?
You spell it in that same voice, K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no easing, Clay.
I think the same principle applies to what's going on with the Chinese flu, or the Wu flu, or the flu Manchu, or yellow fever, or whatever you want to call it.
I think that we're screaming at each other about vaccinations.
We're screaming at each other about masks.
We're screaming about all this stuff.
But what we're really screaming about is unfairness.
We're screaming about unfairness and oppression and censorship, people being silenced for taking a different opinion.
I mean, there are things that I could say about all this that would just get the whole Daily Wire thrown off social media because they don't want anyone to say anything against the CDC, which is constantly changing its mind and not really making very good judgments or very justifiable judgments.
My personal opinion, I want to put it out there, is that the vaccines seem to work great.
I think people should get vaccinated.
The masks, my opinion, is this.
I think masks must have some efficacy.
Doctors have always worn masks in surgical situations.
They probably have some effect, but it's not worth it.
It is not worth covering our faces.
It is not worth the inconvenience.
It is not worth the annoyance and it's not worth the oppression of having people tell us what to do.
It isn't worth it.
As Americans, we probably should just decide for each of us decide for ourselves whether we want to wear the masks, even though they have some effect in certain situations.
COVID is here to stay, okay?
Thank you, China.
And everyone's going to get it eventually, probably.
I mean, or you're going to get vaccinated and maybe you won't.
But the thing about it is, is that the vaccination works.
And if the vaccination works, people who are vaccinated should stop wearing masks.
And Biden said this in May.
He said, in May, you no longer have to wear a mask.
And now he says we do have to wear a mask if we're vaccinated.
And then when a reporter called him out on it, he lied about it.
And here is interspersed May with the present.
This is cut 31.
Mr. President, you said if you are fully vaccinated, you no longer need to wear a mask.
If you've been fully vaccinated, you no longer need to wear a mask.
Let me repeat: if you are fully vaccinated, you no longer need to wear a mask.
If you're fully vaccinated in an area where we do not have in May, you made it sound like a vaccine was the ticket to losing the mask forever.
That is true at the time, because I thought there were people who were on the stage that getting vaccinated made a gigantic difference.
And what happened was the new burger came along.
They didn't get vaccinated.
It was spread more rapidly.
And people, more people were getting sick.
That's the question.
Let's look at the New York Post put out a chart showing how many people have been vaccinated and how many people who've been vaccinated are getting sick.
They call these breakthroughs.
It's like nobody, nobody's, it's something like 0.01% of people who are vaccinated are getting sick.
There is no reason for vaccinated people to wear a mask.
Now, you know, a lot of people are saying, because everybody's so angry, everybody is so angry about this unfairness and the change-ups and the lies and the demonization of people who haven't been vaccinated.
Everybody is so angry about this that we're screaming, you know, at one another.
And people, we say things like, well, they don't care about the mask.
They don't care.
All they want is compliance.
All they want is their boot on our neck.
And all they're trying to do is get us to do whatever the government says.
Now, there are some smug little crap creatures like Gavin Newsom in California and Uber Stermfuhr or Gretchen von Wittmer in whatever Midwestern state she's in.
But there are some of these people who have lost the plot of America.
They like their power.
They got their power.
They don't care about the people.
They don't think the people should be making the decisions.
They don't think the people should be going to church.
They have lost the plot.
But most of these people are just in a panic because they used the pandemic to get at Trump.
And they blame Trump for the pandemic as if things were worse here than they were anywhere else in the world, which wasn't true and isn't true now.
And here's Biden blaming Trump during the elections, cut eight.
Oh, these past few months have been so much pain, so much suffering, so much loss.
Over 225,000 dead Americans because of the negligence and the consequence of COVID.
More than 16,000 here in Florida alone.
Donald Trump has waved the white flag, abandoned our families, and surrendered to the virus.
But the American people don't give up.
We don't give in.
And we surely don't cower and nor will I under any circumstances.
I'm not going to shut down the economy.
I'm not going to shut down the country, but I'm going to shut down the virus.
That's what he's worried about.
That is what he's worried about.
His popularity is tanking.
It is like in a graveyard spin.
And let's face it, they're puffing it up anyway, right?
It's not really as high as they say it is, but it has dropped very, very quickly from fairly high numbers to very moderate numbers.
And I'm sure it's way below those also.
So he blames Trump for this virus.
And they all did this.
And the press did it.
Oh, all Trump's fault.
And isn't Andrew Cuomo, wasn't he the governor?
You know, Andrew Cuomo was virtually like, you know, talk about Michael Myers in Halloween.
He was knocking off the old people of New York State, and they were holding him up as a great, great example, where meanwhile, Trump, for all the goofy stuff he did say, and he shouldn't have said, he did push that vaccine and got it into operation and did a good job with that.
And that's why we've turned things around.
And now that there are setbacks, right, now that there are setbacks and the New York Times is spreading fear again, Biden's in a panic and he's blaming you.
He's blaming the unvaccinated.
This is cut seven.
Will you require all federal employees to get vaccinated?
That's under consideration right now, but if you're not vaccinated, you're not nearly as smart as I thought you were.
Are you concerned that the CEC's remax guidance could sow confusion?
We have a pandemic because the unvaccinated, they're sowing enormous confusion.
And the more we learn, the more we learn about this virus and the building variation, the more we have to be worried and concerned.
And only one thing we know for sure, if those other 100 million people got vaccinated, we'd be in a very different world.
So get vaccinated.
If you haven't, you're not nearly as smart as I said you are.
Thanks, Mr. The press is laughing.
You know, like it's Trump's fault now.
It's the unvaccinated fault, Fox News' fault.
It's everybody's fault, but his.
But, you know, it's not his, but he knows he's going to take the hit for it.
And the thing that is so awful about this, of course, is that is, again, the unfairness.
I mean, in the same time, he's telling us that we're supposed to wear a mask, even though we're vaccinated, even though we're not going to get sick, even though we're not going to get anybody else sick.
And it is, it's disgusting to wear a mask.
It is disgusting for an American to have to walk around with his face covered.
If this were the black plague, I would say maybe every little bit helps, but this is not the black plague.
It's not as deadly as that.
It is disgusting to try and force people to wear a mask while people are pouring through our southern border who are sick.
Here's Ted Cruz talking about that as Cut 11.
I've seen the Biden cages.
I brought 19 senators down to the valley to see the Biden cages of little boys and little girls packed in, one on top of each other.
When we were there, they had a rate of COVID positivity of over 10%.
And like a churning, revolving door, Joe Biden is releasing them.
There was just a report this week that the Biden administration has released over 50,000 illegal aliens without even giving a little court date, just release them.
And you know what?
They're asked to report into ICE.
About 13% of them report into ICE.
It's spreading COVID in our communities.
And I'll tell you right now, the election of Joe Biden, Joe Biden becoming president of this country was a COVID super spreader event because they're releasing illegal aliens in South Texas and all across the country with COVID and they're spreading COVID.
And yet their radical policies, they don't want to do anything to protect us.
See, Ted doesn't understand that only right-wing actions spread COVID.
He doesn't get that.
He doesn't see that about the disease.
He probably hasn't looked through a microscope to see that, you know, these are very, very, very red germs.
They spread COVID only through conservative events.
Somebody put up a tweet of different, comparing different coverage of different events as spreaders.
So here's Vox, right?
The effect of Black Lives Matter protests on coronavirus cases explained.
Coronavirus cases are increasing, but Black Lives Matter protests may not be to blame.
And here it is, the attack on the Capitol may have also been a super spreader event.
Here's CNN.
Black Lives Matter protests have not led to a spike in coronavirus cases.
Research says 30, and also CNN, 38 Capitol police officers test positive for COVID-19 after Capitol Riot.
See, the Capitol Riot is a super spreader event.
Black Lives Matter riots, mostly peaceful riots, they're not spreading anything.
Forbes, research determines protests did not cause spike in coronavirus cases.
Forbes, lawmakers sheltering during Capitol Riot may have been exposed to coronavirus.
Champion's Sacrifice00:04:10
It is that sort of unfairness that is making people crazy.
How can we have a conversation about what works and what doesn't work?
How can we trust the CDC?
How can we trust Joe Biden?
How can we trust any of these people when they lie and when they treat us unfairly?
And so we have to make conscious, clever, intelligent, informed decisions, not getting our medical advice on Twitter, not getting advice from an article in our favorite outlet, but getting advice from our doctor, talking to our doctor, finding out what is going to work, what's the best thing for us to do.
That is the way each of us should be acting.
That is the way that America should be operating.
You know, one more example of this that it's a little bit different, but it's the same principle.
It's the idea of gutting the values of things from the things that we know are good values, from that thing that C.S. Lewis talked about.
We know when things are fair and unfair.
We know when things are good or bad.
We know when things are honorable and dishonorable, and telling us that what we're seeing is not what we see.
And I'm talking, of course, about the Olympics and this young woman, Simone Biles, a very, very talented gymnast who stood down from just, she quit, basically, in the middle of the Olympics.
Here's what she said, cut 26.
Focus on my well-being and, you know, there's more to life than just gymnastics.
And it is very unfortunate that it has to happen at this stage because I definitely want to miss a little bit better.
Put mental health first because if you don't, then you're not going to enjoy your sport and you're not going to succeed as much as you want to.
So it's okay sometimes to even sit out the big competitions to focus on yourself because it shows how strong of a competitor and person that you really are.
Yeah, exactly.
Now, again, again, I'm not going to let myself get angry because of the press, because of the unfair coverage in the press at this young woman, right?
I'm sorry she has her problem.
All I want to say about it is it's not, this is not a heroic championship moment.
That's all I want to say about it.
Her teammate said, you know, Suniza Lee said, we don't owe anyone a gold medal.
Here she said, I've never been prouder to be part of such an amazing team with an amazing group of girls.
We are winners in our hearts.
Well, Suniza Lee was not just a winner in her heart.
She actually won the gold after Simone, you know, stepped down.
The breakdown of values, the misuse of compassion, because I do have compassion for her.
I understand there's a tremendous pressure.
Who could do this except a champion?
But I'm not going to allow them to redefine my values and tell me that failure was a success and surrender is a triumph.
Here's what triumph looks like, right?
The first ever team gymnastics gold medal was won by a woman named Carrie Strugg in 1996.
She stepped up to the last vault.
She had jumped over, done one of her flips and landed, and she heard a crack and she had torn something in her ligaments in her leg.
And she went up to her coach and said, I can't feel my leg.
And her coach said, shake it out, shake it out.
Give me one last good vault.
And everyone, and she says, everyone was telling me I can do it, but I don't think they realized it was in so much pain.
I decided to let the adrenaline take over.
She won the gold.
They had to carry her out.
They had to carry her out onto the stage to take the gold because she couldn't stand up on her leg.
The video, did we have the video of her jumping?
The video of her jumping just shows her making this fantastic jump and then landing and having to hop on her leg because she was so hurt.
That's what a champion looks like.
Again, I'm not criticizing anybody, but this is what a champion looks like.
Here's this moment.
She's running with that hurt leg.
She does the jump.
She does the perfect landing, and then she has to hop because she's in so much pain.
I'm sorry, but that is incredibly inspiring.
It is not incredibly inspiring for someone to stand down.
I understand.
I'm not attacking her.
I understand she had to do it and it was painful.
But don't tell me that I'm not seeing what I see.
That also makes people furious.
We're not really talking all the time about the subject we're talking about.
We're talking about our own anger.
And it's up to us to overcome that anger, even in the face of the unfairness, and to live in joy.
Champion's Pain00:15:34
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Taser is, of course, spelled T-A-S-E-R.
You know that.
But how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no E's in Clavin.
I just make it look this easy.
So I want to return to the question of identity I talked about last week, and especially important, I think, in talking about who we're going to be while we're in this difficult period in American history.
And we don't know if this period is going to last another year or another 50 years.
We have no idea.
There's lots of surprises.
I know a lot of people get paid a lot of money to tell you what's going to happen next, but nobody knows what's going to happen next.
And there are a lot of surprises to come.
And we, the one thing that's not a surprise and we know for sure is that you get this one life on earth and it will end.
And so you do not want to live it in misery and anger.
You want to live it in joy and with gusto, even in difficult times, even when you have to make sacrifices, even when you have to stand up for something at great cost to yourself.
So I want to keep talking about identity.
Last week I was talking about identity in biblical terms and what the Gospels and the Old Testament have to say about our identity as the image of God that is the essential self but is being acted out in the physical reality of our bodies in the world, the physical reality of our bodies in the world that we are responsible to, right?
And yet we also want to be ourselves, our special, unique selves, and we feel that that is guided by who we want to be, what we want of ourselves.
And I want to turn to this in a particularly American context because I think in America we have specific problems that have now spread to the whole world through us, but that were brought up by us.
And I want to take a look at some American works of art that discuss this.
And as a bonus, you will get to hear about two wonderful, wonderful cult thrillers that you've never seen.
I will bet money that most of you have never seen this.
Not that all of you have never seen it, but most of you have never seen these cult movies.
The reason the American Dilemma is special is because in America, we believe that you have the freedom to be who you want to be.
But again, your identity is also defined by the God who made you.
And it's also defined by the customs and traditions that are the combined wisdom of our forefathers, right?
And by the moment that we're living in time, by your body.
I think men have a responsibility to courage and integrity.
I think women have a responsibility to tenderness and generosity.
But at the same time, I think individual men and women, you know, may have other ways of defining those responsibilities.
So what does it mean to be a free man?
What does it mean to be a free American?
Well, I think the essential text on this is Huckleberry Finn.
Ernest Hemingway famously said, all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
And I know I've talked about Huckleberry Finn, but I think it's an essential work of American art.
And we have this memory of Huck Finn of its being about, first of all, of course, of being about the central relationship between Huck and the escaped slave Jim going down the river on a raft.
But one of the things we forget about Huck Finn is that it's a kind of picaresque novel, which means it's one event following another event without necessarily a connection.
And there's a lot of con men that they meet along the way, a lot of dangerous people, a lot of lies.
And there's a writer, an interesting writer named Paul Cantor who writes about pop culture.
And he has a book called Pop Culture and the Dark Side of the American Dream, in which he specifically addresses the idea of freedom in Huck Finn.
And here's part of what he says.
He says, there is a dark side to the liberation of human desire and ambition that democracy brings about.
Set free from aristocratic restraints, people in a democracy are beset by new fears, uncertainties, and anxieties.
They can no longer be sure of their status in life.
The prospect of rising in status is inevitably accompanied by the possibility of falling.
Now, this class, a class system, gives you a very definitive identity.
I saw this in England.
I saw people of different classes just hated each other, but felt also constrained and defined by their class.
We don't really have that here.
Women and men, the more restrictive the male and female roles are, the more you're also defined.
I've talked about a famous scene in the memoirs of an explorer named Mungo, who is taken in by women after he's beaten senseless and he's naked.
And the women say, oh, the poor white man, he has no mother.
He has no women to take care of him.
They know exactly who they are, but their role is limited.
Once you take those restraints away, suddenly you could want to be more than you are, but you could be less than you are.
And that's why you get this hysteria over me confirming your identity.
You're not just a man who says you're a woman.
I have to say you're a woman, because otherwise the whole thing, the whole charade might fall apart.
Cantor goes on to say this, though.
He says, moreover, the clear aristocratic markers of social status dissolve, leaving people to sort out where they stand in relation to each other.
It becomes difficult to distinguish the genuinely self-made man from the con man.
The respected entrepreneur you meet at a party may be Bill Gates, but he may just as well be Bernie Madoff.
And this is what happens again and again or Madoff.
This is what happens again and again at Huck Finn.
They meet people who are pretending to be a Dauphin or people pretending to be somebody, but they actually are running a scheme or some kind of con.
And that is the picture that we have in Huckleberry Finn of the freedom that America gives you, but the danger that opens to people being fakes, being imposters.
And I've talked about this a lot in terms of assimilation, that in assimilation, we see this in pictures like The Godfather and Get Out, which are both about assimilation.
They're trying to pull free of an old culture to join the new one, but they're also restrained by who they are.
And a Sicilian Italian or a black man that somehow feel is part of their identity.
Can they become the new American man who is free?
Or do they also owe a responsibility to that old culture?
And that can be a tragic story, a frightening story, or a happy story, depending on how it's played out.
And I experienced this conflict when I became a Christian because I was born a Jew.
My father, my community had a lot of ties to their Judaism, although they were not religious ties.
They were social and ethnic ties.
And so when I thought like, oh, gee, you know, it's actually Christianity is true.
This is the truth about God.
I was very torn.
Am I defying?
Am I betraying my natural self?
Or am I leaving a false picture of myself created by society and going into the truth?
And that was something I had to wrestle with.
And that's my book, The Great Good Thing, is my memoir about dealing with that very question.
But assimilation is only part of the bigger American conflict with phoniness.
If I am whoever I want to be, am I actually being a phony?
Do I have to be who I was born to be?
And there are two wonderful little cult movies, like I said, that you have almost surely never seen that are really worth watching.
And I highly recommend them.
One is a movie called Seconds.
It's made in 1966.
It's a psychological horror story.
And it's really interesting about this movie.
It stars Rock Hudson, who, for those of you who don't know him, a lot of young people don't know who Rock Hudson was.
Very handsome.
He had that rock face.
He was in a lot of comedies with Doris Day, these kind of sweet, almost situation comedies of married life and love and romantic comedies, basically.
But he also played a hero and a tough guy.
He was famously gay.
Nobody knew it except everybody in Hollywood knew it.
I knew it.
I mean, I was just somebody whose father was in show business, so I knew he was gay, but nobody else did.
And when the AIDS crisis came up, he was one of the first big celebrities to die of AIDS, and it was a big shock.
So he was a guy who knew what it was to live a false life.
And in the middle of this career of light comedies and heroic portrayals and a TV show, he had a hit TV show at the end of his life.
He played in this little tiny thriller where he plays a guy that his name is Arthur Hamilton, and he's a banking executive, and he's kind of representative of the 50s, early 60s drone.
He's fallen out of love with his wife.
He doesn't like his job.
His only daughter has left him and all this, and he's miserable.
And somebody comes to him and says, Come to the company and we will give you a new life.
And so he's played by a different actor than Rock Hudson.
They take him, this wonderful actor, Will Gere, just a fantastic, fantastic actor, runs this mysterious company.
And they give him plastic surgery and they turn him into handsome Rock Hudson, right?
And he starts his second life.
And before they send him out, they say, well, while we were giving you the surgery, we had you under regression drugs and we asked you what you wanted to be.
And a guy plays a tape for him where he says, I want to be a tennis player.
And the guy says, well, what else do you want to be?
And he says, well, I'd like to be an artist.
I'd like to be a painter if I can't be a tennis player.
And so they declare him an artist.
And they give him all these diplomas and these paintings that he didn't paint.
And they say, you know, this will be your, you have a reputation, you'll be an artist.
And here's just a little bit of a clip of the scene.
What would you like to do most of all?
Of anything in the whole world?
Mm-hmm.
I'd like to be a tennis pro, I guess.
Yes, that's what I'd like best of all.
Uh-huh.
And suppose you couldn't be.
What else would you choose?
I guess I'd like to paint stuff.
Pictures?
Pictures and things.
Well, I think the creative wish pattern is pretty self-evident.
I ought to be a painter.
I...
Exactly.
Exactly.
Of course, he's not going to be a painter at all because he can't paint.
And that's why he can't be a tennis player because a tennis player has an objective standard of scoring points, which a painter doesn't have.
They're just going to give him paint and he'll have a reputation.
He'll give him paintings.
He'll have a reputation.
He'll be a painter.
So in other words, his new life is a complete phony.
And of course, the ramifications of that are what the film plays out.
And I won't give it away, but I will tell you the final scene is maybe the scariest scene I have ever seen in a movie.
It's not a gory film or a horror film in that sense, but it's an absolutely terrifying film that will keep you awake at night.
And it's a brilliant, brilliant movie.
And the other movie that you should take a look at is Pretty Poison, which also stars a gay man, Anthony Perkins, who didn't want to be gay.
He went into reversion therapy, but of course he kept going back.
He also died of AIDS.
And it's interesting that he's another guy in this movie about a fake life that he has to live.
And this is with Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld.
And Tuesday Weld is an absolutely gorgeous actress.
Perkins was defined by Psycho.
You've probably seen Psycho.
And that kind of typecast him.
So he was always playing psychopaths who were kind of all-American boys, but had this terrible mental illness.
But he was actually a fantastic actor who was limited by this.
So he plays a young man who's on parole from a mental institution and he becomes attracted to this absolutely all-American, beautiful girl.
She's just an absolutely beautiful, all-American teenager.
And he starts to draw her into his fantasies.
He's a secret agent.
He's going on missions.
And suddenly things get out of hand and everything goes terribly wrong.
And the question now becomes, whose imagination are they living in?
And I really recommend Pretty Poison.
And by the way, I have to mention this.
I'm always reluctant to plug my own stuff.
But another work that deals with identity and the American mind is my book, Identity Man, which is about very much related to seconds and that it's about a man, a thief, a petty thief who gets involved in a murder and is escaping, and he is given a chance at a second life and given the same kind of thing, plastic surgery, and he is set free.
And the guy, the identity man who gives him this new life, says to him, You know, you think that you're going to have a new life because I've changed your face, but you're not.
He's a foreigner, the identity man.
And he says, because you're an American, you are dumb.
You think this is a big, wide country.
I come to a new place.
No one knows me.
I change.
I have therapy.
I read books.
I take medicine.
I have operation.
I am a new man.
You are never a new man, says the identity man.
I am an identity man who tells you this.
You have identity like stain in flesh.
It never leaves you.
You have history like stain in mind.
And the question that the book, The Identity Man, which I also highly recommend, it is one of my better books and also a book that was kind of ignored.
I've always felt that it was one of my least appreciated novels.
But the question of the identity man is, is your identity a stain?
How much control do you have?
And it comes up with, I think, an original answer, an answer to that question I've never seen anywhere else.
But the answer I want to go back to since I started with it is Huck Finn's.
And I've read this passage before, and I'll go through it briefly.
But remember, the essential scene, the scene that makes Huck Finn the all-American novel, is the scene where Huck realizes he is doing a terrible thing by society standards.
He is helping this slave escape.
And he writes to the slave's owner, Jim's owner, and tells her that he is going, that he's, you know, where Jim is going to be so she can take him back.
And he has the letter and he says, I felt so good.
He felt so good when he finishes writing this letter, turning his friend Jim in, the slave in.
He says, I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life.
And I know it I could pray now, but I didn't do it straight off.
I didn't pray right away, but I laid the paper down, this letter that he wrote, and I sat there thinking how good it was that all this happened and how near I come to being lost and going to hell by helping this slave escape.
And I went on thinking and I got to thinking over our trip down the river, and I see Jim before me all the time in the day and in the nighttime, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we have floating along, talking and singing and laughing.
And I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind.
And he starts to think about how much he loves Jim and how much, how good Jim has been to him.
And he takes up the piece of paper and he holds it in his hand.
And he says, I was trembling because I got to decide forever between betwixt two things.
And I knowed it.
And I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself, all right then, I'll go to hell and tore it up.
And this is one of the mightiest scenes in American literature, one of the greatest scenes in American literature, because it's a young boy, a little boy, who knows he's going to go to hell for doing the wrong thing.
But we know that all the norms are wrong.
The church is wrong.
The law is wrong.
The society is wrong.
The traditions are wrong.
The love is right.
And Huckleberry Finn discovers in this moment that he's willing to face hell.
He is willing to go to hell for love of his friend.
And that, I think, is the path to our identity.
And that is the defining thing.
ExpressVPN and Identity00:16:02
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So the CDC is now recommending that vaccinated individuals wear masks indoors.
It's nuts.
People who gave medical experts their trust are now being told that they have to mask up in order to fight Joe Biden's so-called pandemic of the unvaccinated.
While this is all incredibly distressing, it couldn't be a timelier moment because Ben Shapiro wrote a book about this very thing, the creeping of government control into our lives.
The book is called The Authoritarian Moment and it's available everywhere you buy books.
When you pick up Ben's book, you'll learn how to stand strong against the authoritarians who are trying to make you submit to their cause.
The authoritarian moment is now available at Amazon, Barnes ⁇ Noble, or any other major bookseller.
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And coming right up, we're going to be talking about a fantastic new book about what it means to be a human being with its author, Carter Sneed.
So a descriptor that is too often used is thought-provoking.
People say a book is thought-provoking, but actually when something is thought-provoking, it's very powerful.
I just finished a book called What It Means to Be Human, The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics by O. Carter Sneed.
It is a genuinely good book, a book that is changing the way I think about things.
Carter Sneed is professor of law and director of the De Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame.
This book was called one of the 10 best books of 2020 by the Wall Street Journal, What It Means to Be Human.
Carter Sneed, are you there?
I'm here.
Thanks for having me.
There you are.
First of all, it's terrific to meet you.
I just cannot tell you how much I enjoyed this book.
It really is a deep and interesting book.
And the Wall Street Journal is right.
It's one of the 10 best books of last year, if not more than that.
Let's talk first of all.
Can you explain what bioethics is?
What are we talking about?
Yeah.
Well, bioethics is a field of intellectual inquiry that emerged in the United States in the late 60s and early 70s that relates to the ethical questions that arise from advances in biomedical science and biotechnology and also in the clinical practice of medicine.
The field that I'm dealing with in the book is what I call public bioethics, which is the governance of science, medicine, and biotechnology in the name of ethical good.
So it's the point at which the law and public policy come into contact with these very deep and vexing questions.
So you have this term that you use, expressive individualism.
And you say that our laws governing bioethics, the kind of what doctors should do and can do, is governed right now by expressive individualism.
What does that mean?
Yeah, it sounds highfalutin, but it really is pretty, should be familiar, I think, to anybody who is an American in the year 2021.
It's a vision of the human person and human flourishing that grows out of, well, you could read the book.
There's an entire intellectual genealogy that stretches back to Rousseau to figure out where this comes from.
But what the ultimate sort of conclusion is, it's a vision of ourselves and what our thriving is that conceives of us really fundamentally as disembodied, atomized, individual wills.
The thing that's most important and essential and defining about you and me is the fact that we are a will or a mind that can formulate future-directed plans, formulate desires, and then configure our life plans accordingly to express them and configure our lives in pursuit of those goals.
Those goals and those truths come from inside.
That's where the sort of expressivism conception comes from.
It's from interrogating the depths of the interior of the self to find what's unique in there.
And it's not surprising that this really became popular with literary figures in the 18th century.
And there actually is something very deep and important about interrogating the depths of the self to find authentic and original truths.
But the concept of expressive individualism holds that that's all that we are.
Everything else in the world, our relationships with other people, our bodies, the natural world are purely instrumental to be bent and harnessed in service of the projects of the will that come from inside.
Robert Bella, famous sociologist, wrote a book in 1985 called Habits of the Heart, in which he surveyed hundreds of Americans and asked them sort of how they thought of themselves and their life plans.
And he's the one that coined this phrase.
And he found this kind of very self-centered vision that strips away and abstracts the person from all his or her attachments to family or community or anything.
And that's basically, it's an anthropology.
I mean, it's not in the sort of academic sense, but in the old sense of what it means to be and flourish as a human being.
So can you describe, given like a concrete example, maybe abortion, whatever you want, of how that operates in law?
How does the law use expressive individualism to decide how we should do things?
Yeah, and abortion is sort of the best example.
And it's a topical example because the court just granted Ser Sharari in the Dobbs case, which is really the most important abortion case of our lifetimes.
I mean, since 1973, this is the point at which the court is really going to grapple squarely with the question of whether or not the Constitution forbids states from providing even minimal protections to unborn human beings and their mothers for that matter.
So in the context of abortion, abortion law in the United States is made by the Supreme Court.
1973, the court in Roe v. Wade took upon itself the responsibility, really claimed for itself the sole authority to be the arbiter of abortion policies and laws in the United States, which distinguishes us, by the way, from almost every other developed nation in the world where they resolve these questions through the legislative process.
They basically prevented us from doing that in 1973 under a very specious reading of the 14th Amendment, which we can talk about if you want to.
But the more important piece for your question is, how did they invent a right to abortion in 1973?
And the way the court does it, and it's amazing because it really is completely detached from the text, history, or tradition of the Constitution, or even the common law on which it rests.
It's completely made up.
And you don't have to take my word for that.
I mean, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said as much.
Lawrence Tribe has said as much.
It's basically made up, but because it's such a positive development from their perspective, they're going to defend it to the death.
But essentially what Justice Blackmun did in Roe v. Wade was to say, I'm going to think about what the context of abortion is and kind of frame it in a very particular way.
And he framed the question in the human context in which abortion arises as a struggle between two strangers, two individuated strangers, a mother who's clearly a person under the law, and something less than a person under the law, but clearly another individual, namely the unborn child, atomizes them that is. abstracts them from their natural context, their natural interrelationship, and says, okay, what we have here is a conflict between two individuals, one's a person, one's not,
over scarce resources, the body and future of the mother.
How do we resolve this problem?
And they said, well, there must be a right to abortion somewhere in the Constitution.
They had this kind of concept of a right to privacy, which they created in 1965 in the context of Griswold v. Connecticut, a case about abortion, or sorry, about contraception used by married couples.
And they said, the burdens on a woman to her pursuing her open future are so significant, not just from the pregnancy, but from unwanted parenthood itself, that we have to derive this right.
This right must be present in the Constitution.
And what does that right look like?
Well, when you frame the question as a struggle between two strangers fighting over scarce resources, including the body of one of the two parties, the answer you get is a right to lethal violence, a right to use lethal self-defense against the intruder that has no right to use your body and to imperil your future in that way.
And that is directly, I mean, that grows out of a conception of human personhood and human flourishing that is expressive individualism.
Again, radical individuated wills in struggle with one another to pursue their open futures, as opposed to the reality of the situation, which is a very complex and messy intertwining of two lives, but not any two lives, the lives of mother and child.
And if we reframe the question that way and say abortion is the human context in which abortion arises is in fact a very complex scenario involving a mother and her child, sometimes a tragic scenario, well, what you and I do in that situation or what the law does is not grant one of them a right to use lethal violence against the other one, but rather we drop what we're doing and we rush to the aid of that mother and child in crisis, right?
Any decent person, any decent community, any decent government is going to seek to help a mother and child in crisis.
Whereas if all we're talking about are two strangers fighting over something that really belongs to one of them, we're talking about violence.
So I want to get back to that concept of the decent society in a minute.
But before that, how is the idea of the body involved in this?
The fact that we are not floating wills, we are in fact flesh and blood and we're incarnated.
How is that involved in this decision?
So expressive individualism as a theory of what a person is, it fails.
I mean, as I said a moment ago, there are some truths in it, right?
We are individuated.
We do have free will.
It is valuable to interrogate the depths of ourself and to be original and so on.
But that's not the whole truth about who we are.
In fact, the whole truth of who we are is that we are a dynamic union of mind and body, that our bodies are essential to our identity.
And there are essential entailments about our lived reality because we're embodied beings.
We're fragile, embodied beings in time.
And in fact, our embodiment, I argue, situates us into a kind of relationship to one another because we are bodies, not just have bodies that are instrumental, but we are bodies.
It's essential to our identity.
We're vulnerable, which means we're mutually dependent upon one another, which means we're subject to natural limits, which means that there are certain that we are situated in these relationships that require, first for our survival as new babies, but also to learn the thing that we're supposed to be, which is to become the kind of person who can make the good of another our own good.
We depend on what Alistair McIntyre calls networks of uncalculated giving and graceful receiving.
Networks of people who are willing to make the good of others their own good, not expecting anything in return, but because that's what it means to be and flourish as a human being.
And the most pristine and obvious example of this is the parent-child relationship.
A parent doesn't take care of her child because she has a contract to do it or she has some prior obligation that she signed and gave her consent.
It enheres in the relationship itself that parents take care of children.
And similarly, children don't have to earn the right to be cared for by their parents or even to make it more dramatic, not to be killed by their parents because what it means to be a child to be in that kind of relationship is to have unchosen obligations and unearned privileges.
And those are entirely invisible to a theory of what it means to be a person, namely expressive individualism that only thinks of us as individuated wills out to seek our own future.
You know, one of the things that bothered me while reading the book, it didn't bother me about the book.
It bothers me about the world.
But I didn't feel it was addressed in the book.
You talk about this Alastair McIntyre, and we're both enormous fans of McIntyre.
His book, After Virtue, is a life-changing, brilliant piece of work.
You talk about his idea of this generosity that we sort of learn as parents that we expect from parents, and that we need a society that has that kind of generosity in a moment when, for instance, a woman finds herself pregnant and doesn't want to be pregnant.
We need to rush to the aid of both the mother and the children.
What do you say to someone who says, we don't live in that world?
If we live in a small community of like-minded people, you know, of people who share the same religion like the Mormons in Utah or the Jews in various places, they will turn to each other for help and receive that help.
But in this kind of big, sprawling, multi-ethnic, untrusting society, how can we make laws as if we live in this better world?
How do you, as a bioethicist, as a public bioethicist, how do you make a law for that moment?
It's a great question.
And I would say, as a lawyer and a law professor, I think that law bends and shapes culture and law bends and shapes understandings of people.
And the fact since 1990, abortion is not the only problem.
It's not the only reason we don't take care of each other the way that we should take care of each other.
But it does, in fact, shape behavior in the sense that if a woman, by virtue of the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution, says, you're the sole arbiter of this situation, that creates a kind of momentum in the direction to isolate and leave that, and to abandon that woman.
I mean, how many times have you heard, I mean, you know, Dave Chappelle saying, you know, women should have total right to abortion, but a man shouldn't have to pay for anything.
That was an unbelievably interesting, subversive joke that he made in that recent comedy special that he did.
And it was a hush sort of fell over the room because people were cheering for the robust, unfettered freedom of abortion.
And then he said, but men should have not any responsibility at all.
It's good because it's her choice.
The law bends people's understanding.
The law shapes people's understanding.
And I think the law can do, has a pedagogical function that we need to attend to.
The law can't make people love each other, obviously, right?
But what the law can do is to sort of condition and shape our understanding of what we owe to each other in different ways.
And in fact, I think the law can create private spaces for private ordering and can incentivize certain forms of private ordering through, I mean, there's a whole, this would require a whole lot of thought to go into it to sort of articulate a comprehensive vision.
Law's Pedagogical Role00:06:59
But the law can create spaces where organizations like the Little Sisters of the Poor can actually take care of the elderly poor.
We can have, you know, we can have the revise the tax code.
We can do all kinds of stuff.
What I'm arguing for in the book doesn't necessarily commit us to an interventionist governmental solution to like make people be friends with each other, right?
Because as I say, the fundamental point of the book is by virtue of our embodiment, we're made for love and friendship.
And I think I'm making a claim about human nature that it's unnatural for us to retreat into these kind of private spheres, you know, augmented and made even more toxic by social media and virtual reality in a pandemic where we're not supposed to touch each other or look at each other, be within six feet of each other.
I think that the law has a role to play in shaping hearts and minds.
And it already has in a negative way in the context of abortion by telling people that you have a constitutional right and not just do you have a constitutional right, but in fact it's sort of normatively good to exercise that right.
And we see this in the branding, shout your abortion, unapologetic.
I mean, there's not even any kind of sense that abortion is bad in those in those elite quarters.
I think people still have a sense that it's bad.
I mean, it's still a big deal when there's an abortion on television, right?
And Maude was a big deal when they had the abortion.
I mean, you can see in popular culture, we're still a little bit skittish about the idea of killing an unborn child.
I mean, getting more so, you know, we're talking about the book, What It Means to Be Human, The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics by O. Carter Sneed.
Really interesting.
Very well written too, by the way, very clear in talking about some very complex ideas.
The law can be pedagogic, but the law is also a blunt instrument.
You talk about decisions about death, about assisted suicide.
And I've been in hospitals and have seen with my own eyes that the doctors will come in or the nurses will come in and say, you know, we're going to up the, every hour, we're going to up the amount of morphine to make sure he's comfortable.
And what they're really saying is we're going to kill him.
We've run out of hope.
We can't do anything.
We're going to put him out of his misery.
And I've always feel that there's this kind of gray area that the human heart can go into that the law can't reach.
How do you feel that your idea of the embodiment of embodied ethics deals with end-of-life decisions?
Where do you come out on this?
Yeah.
So the fundamental point that I make in the book across all three areas, abortion, assisted reproduction, and end-of-life decision-making, is that the law in assuming that we are simply disembodied wills who are seeking to pursue our open future that we discover inside ourselves through introspection and abstracts us and isolates us from all connections and is actually false, right?
Like even people who seek abortions, even people who pursue various forms of assisted reproductive technologies, or even people who want to seek assisted suicide, I'm not talking about them, right?
I'm not talking about their impulses, their views of themselves.
I'm talking about the law's assumptions about who they are, what the threats to them are, and what they need.
And in the context of end-of-life decision-making, the law, unfortunately, especially in assisted suicide, but it seems to be true also in simple questions of declining life-sustaining measures.
The law assumes what a person needs in that setting is to maximize their autonomy, right?
But as you've seen in hospitals, a person who's sick, a person who's dependent upon life-sustaining measures, generally is not hoping to maximize their autonomy and assert their unencumbered self.
They want help, right?
They're vulnerable.
They want help.
They want someone to take care of them who either loves them or who has their best interest at heart, who's trained as a professional to do it.
And so the one size fits all momentum in the favor of binding yourself to some set of preferences that you articulate in a document that are applied after you've lost consciousness or the capacity to participate in your own decision making is insufficient, right?
I mean, that's important.
It's important to honor people's wishes, but it's also important to have a person who accompanies them in those moments to try to make decisions that benefit the patient that this person is.
And the most sort of dramatic example of this, it was a fictional example in the book, but I've seen real examples of it coming out of the Netherlands.
You have a case where people sign an advance directive when they're legally competent to do so, saying, if I ever get dementia, I don't want any life-sustaining measures.
I don't want antibiotics if I get pneumonia, right?
Something very easy, non-invasive, non-burdensome, not expensive.
And then they get dementia.
They fall into advanced stages of dementia.
And they are, you know, living a life which we would recognize as diminished.
They can't recognize people, but they seem happy, right?
They're talking to people.
They draw the same picture.
They listen to the same song, but they seem happy.
Then they get pneumonia and they say, you know, I need something.
Can you please make me more comfortable?
And you say, okay, what do I do?
Do I honor the patient this particular individual is, or do I just bind them unreflectively to this prior memorialized expression of their intention?
And the argument is, if all we care about is autonomy and the expressive individualism and the unencumbered self, we simply bind them to that prior statement.
But if we're more nuanced and we say, okay, by virtue of this person's defects of the body, they can't participate in their decision-making anymore.
What's the right way to help this person?
Is it simply to unreflectively apply this statement, or is it to actually take into consideration the person they now are, what their needs are, what their wants are, et cetera, et cetera.
And that requires a living person.
And so that's why, as a practical matter, I argue for durable powers of attorney who will be informed, of course, by prior statements like that, to try to make those kinds of complicated decisions.
But I also say it's really important to restrain ourselves from the temptation in those settings when we're making a decision for another person to project our lives as a healthy person into their particular state because we're very bad at predicting how we will find meaning in diminished phases of our lives.
There have been all kinds of very interesting social science studies showing that we were bad at predicting how we'll react, or even worse at predicting how someone else should react, which is why disability rights organizations are very nervous about and generally oppose assisted suicide, because they worry that able-bodied people are going to make decisions for them to try to hasten their death in a way to try to end a life that they deem not to be worth living.
And that is too dangerous, in my judgment, to go down that pathway, which is not to say that the law should scrutinize and there should be a cop in every room asking why, how much morphine you've given them, why are you discontinuing life-sustaining measures?
The law is pretty granular.
And we've made the decision to allow decision makers and families to have the freedom to make choices about how to make these kinds of decisions about their loved ones and their end-of-life decision making.
And I think that that's a good thing.
I think it's good that we're not so invasive and we don't have the district attorney in the room with you when you say, well, why are you pulling the plug?
Is it because you want his inheritance or because it's a feudal or burdensome thing?
Defining Respect00:09:38
And there's a great Simpsons episode where Mr. Burns comes in and says, Homer's in the bed.
He's like, this man is costing me $5,000 a day.
I insist he die with dignity.
And so that's what we want to avoid.
Now, assisted suicide is different, right?
You can simply not authorize the direct self-killing of people and prescriptions.
I'm more comfortable with the government saying no to that than I would be with the district attorney in every room making decisions and scrutinizing the decisions of families.
I got a million more questions, but I'm out of time.
Unfortunately, the book is What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics.
I recommend it highly.
It is a tremendously thought-provoking book.
Oh, Carter Sneed.
Carter, thank you for coming on.
I hope you'll come back and we can talk again.
I would love it.
Thank you for having me, Andrew.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
This is always a sad moment in the show because I know you've gotten to love your problems, but you have to gather them around you and say goodbye to them because it's time for the mailbag.
You are such a pain to next when I'm going to answer your question.
Yeah!
Cranky old demented president.
From Veronica, I'm a black female conservative, and I've noticed a disturbing trend among white conservative males who insist on using the N-word.
I've noticed this too.
Their reasons for using it are that the word doesn't bother them.
Black people use it with each other.
So to say a white person can't say it is racist.
These are usually ignorant guys who, for example, see black colleges as racist, completely ignorant of history and why those colleges exist.
The entitlement and arrogance is frustrating.
And the fact that these white men have made the right to say the N-word their free speech hill to die on makes me feel that they really are racist deep down.
I feel very alone, especially when fellow conservatives don't help and speak up for me and other blacks.
I don't want to be wary of interacting with non-blacks, but honestly, I've been called the N-word more in the past two years than I have all my life, and I'm 30.
This is also why I haven't left California, because at least leftist crazies won't justify calling me a racial slur.
Veronica, I'm really glad you wrote in on this because I've noticed this too.
And I have to say, I've experienced it in my youth.
It's a long time ago now, where I twice made a joke using the N-word in the presence of a black friend and meaning to include them in my life because I would make jokes about my Irish friends and my Italian friends and meaning to include them as one of the gang, not quite realizing the pain that was suffering.
And it is one of the things, we all have things in our lives that we wake up in the middle of the night and regret and wish we could take back, and that is one of them.
But this isn't in keeping with the theme of the show that I've been talking about today, is our reactionary anger and allowing our enemies to define us by making us angry.
And here's what I think is happening here.
And I don't actually think it is racism, although it has a racist undercurrent to it.
But let me explain what I think is happening.
The left has taken this word and made it the only dirty word in the world.
You can now go on CNN and curse, and that shows how strong and solid you are.
But even a New York Times reporter who is even discussing the use of the N-word and whether it was ethical to use the word and then used the word in the course of that discussion without any racist connotation at all, lost his job because of it.
And so they have demonized this word and given it a kind of magic power of evil that makes free men, especially men, because men are especially concerned with their liberty and their rights.
It makes them feel like, well, damn it, if that's the thing that I can't do, that you who have lied to me about everything, who mistreat me, who abuse me, who give me mask mandates, who are trying to take away my freedom, if you are telling me that this is the one word I can't use, well, by God, I'm going to use it just to show you that I'm free and after all, black people use it.
And that is allowing you're right, Veronica.
That is allowing anger to define you.
It is allowing other people to make the rules for you.
You think you're being free, but in fact, you're being enslaved by your anger by saying something that is hurtful to another person.
And it is hurtful and the history of it is different.
You know, I mean, I think the thing we all have to understand, and I think as conservatives, we should understand this more than anybody, is that most people came to this country from the place that they were being abused.
But for black people, this is the place they were being abused.
And the only thing that's going to set them free of that abuse is their grace.
They have to do it.
We can't do it for them.
We can't apologize enough.
We can't give them money enough.
We can't do anything.
We cannot fix the past.
Black people are just going to have to let it go in love and in grace.
And I understand, and I think a lot of thoughtful people understand, that that is a little extra step that black people have to take into assimilation.
And so a little bit of respect, a little bit of restraint, a little bit of understanding goes a long way.
And you're right.
It's just that the left has made people so angry with their hyper-restrictiveness, specifically about this word, that it has become a sign of freedom among white males especially to use the word and they're wrong.
And they think it means they're being free, but it really means they're letting their anger at the left define them and turn them into something that they shouldn't be.
And I think that I hope we wake up from that delusion because you're right, Veronica, it's wrong.
I don't know what to say to you except I'm sorry it's happening.
But you shouldn't understand it as actual necessary racism.
I think it's more frustration with the left's complete hammering about racism over and over and over again.
It gives the people, especially young men, a sense of rebellion.
And I think it has more to do with the rebellion than it has to do with your race.
This is from F in Korea.
It says, for several years now, I've been a fan of your show, and due to your truly towering intellect, I feel that you are uniquely qualified to answer a difficult question.
I'm a Christian, 29-year-old man.
I grew up with godly parents who faithfully taught me biblical values.
But since leaving home and joining the military, I've been exposed to many instances of sin and depravity, which I wasn't prepared to face.
Due to my weakness, I became addicted to pornography.
God has opened my eyes to this sin, and I've encountered many victories in the battle to rid my life of this filth since then.
Despite this, I find that my views and thoughts about women have been irretrievably damaged due to pornography.
I feel that I have unrealistic expectations of real women's appearances and attitudes.
This is very common among porn addicts that they stop being attracted to actual women because they're not as perfect and as willing as the women in pornography, and they have their own problems and their own needs and desires, and that is a problem for them.
And he says, I fear that in order to avoid inflicting any psychological or emotional harm on women, I should refrain from any intimate relationships with them for the foreseeable future.
But he believes that he should find a wife.
But his question is, do you have any advice for me on how to rid my mind of these unrealistic and poisonous pornographic ideas and be able to see real women for the unique and beautiful souls that they are?
Yes, I do have advice, and it will work, and it's simple, but that doesn't mean it's easy, okay?
It's a difficult thing.
You know, you got us.
First of all, let me congratulate you on fighting this addiction.
It's a hard addiction to face because there's so much porn in the world that is so easy to get.
And let me congratulate you also on realizing the problem.
You know, this is a big, it's a big deal.
You know, you're not shrugging it off.
You're not saying, I got to find a woman who acts like a porn star.
You understand exactly where you are and exactly how this, you know, it's toxic, this stuff, and how it has damaged you psychologically.
And it has, and it has done this to many, many men.
Here's the thing.
If you can, first of all, stay off the porn, obviously, but if you can, set aside for a little while the idea of finding a wife.
Set aside that idea and make yourself some female friends.
Relate to women without the hope of sleeping with them.
That's a very hard thing to do.
You have to turn off that part of your brain a little bit.
But relate to women without the hope of sleeping with them and just get to know them as women.
And just get to know them as people, you know, as people who are women.
It will solve your problem.
It will take some time, but just get to know women and think to myself, and think to yourself, I'm not going to sleep with this woman.
I'm just going to get to know her and we're just going to, you know, hang out.
And I'm going to find out who she is, what she thinks about, what she's like, what her traits are, and get to know her and like her.
If there should come a time in that period when you start to find that you have actually fallen in love with somebody, then you can start a relationship in that love that ultimately becomes hopefully a married sexual relationship.
The funny thing is, in spite of everything they've told us, in spite of everything they've told us, sex actually is about love.
And I know that when you're a young man, the drive is so insanely powerful.
Believe me, I have not forgotten.
I have not forgotten what this feels like.
And women know nothing about it.
Women talk about it.
They don't know anything about it.
It's like being tied to a rocket ship.
And it's like, I understand that that physical need is so powerful that it can take you over.
But in the end, sex actually is about love.
And so if you find yourself falling for somebody, if you find yourself falling for the person that that person is, follow that lead.
Follow that lead.
It's not that you'll never have problems.
It's not that you'll never, you know, you might have to work those problems through in the bedroom with that woman, but follow the love and you will find that the pornography can be defeated even though it's poisoned you.
Obviously, it's poisoned you, but you will find that there is an anecdote to that poison if you can get to know a person as a person first.
is a wonderful secret that I'll tell you the advice my father gave me when I was at the just really rocketing into that period.
He said, I can't stop you from doing what you're going to do, but just remember that every vagina comes with a person attached to it.
And I think if you can remember that and put that first for just a little while, just part of your life, you will find that you will get away, you will cure this poison that is taking you over.
Access the Clavin Show00:01:56
I got to stop there, and that means that you are going to plummet into the Clavin this week.
It is going to be an absolute disaster.
The darkness, the wailing, the gnashing of teeth, it's just, I know, it's terrible.
You probably don't even remember it from last week because there were so few survivors.
I will be popping up from time to time.
I'm sitting in for Knowles on his show, I think on his radio show on Wednesday maybe.
So look around and I will be there.
And if you're an all-access person, you can all access subscriber.
You can find me on the all-access show.
Otherwise, you're doomed.
But if you make it into the next week on Friday, I will be back with the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm Andrew Klavan.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, basically wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also, remember to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show, the Matt Walsh Show, and the Michael Knoll Show.
Thanks for listening.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Mathis Glover.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Our technical director is Austin Stevens.
Production manager, Pavel Vidowski.
Edited by Danny D'Amico.
Lead audio mixer, Mike Cormina.
Animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Production coordinator, McKenna Waters.
And our production assistant is Jacob Falash.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production, Copyright Daily Wire, 2021.
John Bickley here, editor-in-chief of Daily Wire.
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