Ep. 1049 dissects America’s decay through Hunter Biden’s laptop scandal, exposing media bias and FBI politicization while contrasting it with ignored cases like the U.S. gymnastics doctor’s crimes. It ties "missing white woman syndrome" to systemic neglect of urban violence, blaming left-wing policies like the Great Society for worsening Black poverty. Big tech censorship—highlighted via Blake Masters’ warnings on Google/Facebook monopolies—merges with Christian critiques of judgmentalism, advocating instead for forgiveness and purpose over wealth obsession. The episode ends by linking corporate power to woke conformity, framing both as threats to democracy. [Automatically generated summary]
Joe Biden attended the United Nations General Assembly this week to deliver his first speech there as president and venal house plan.
The UN speech was an urgently important and deeply essential game changer, and so I wanted to read you the transcript in case you didn't watch it either.
Speaking to cardboard cutouts of many of the world's most important leaders, Biden said, quote, Good afternoon, and where am I?
I come before whoever you are today to deliver an important message about some damn thing or other.
The time for war is over.
War is bad, because when you surrender, everyone starts screaming at you like it's your fault.
So let's have diplomacy instead, because that way nothing happens and no one pays any attention.
And let me say this to our new masters of the Taliban.
Now that I've left you with no constraints on your power, don't forget to be nice to women.
Women should not be forced to cower in silent terror in their homes, but should be appointed to parliament so they can cower in silent terror there where it's more comfortable and you can occasionally send out for Chinese.
Although hopefully not the sort of Chinese who are spreading viruses and trying to take over the world, but maybe something you can wrap in a pancake with that tasty mushu sauce we all love so very much.
The time has come to stop wasting our efforts on restoring world order and to turn our attention to climate change and other meaningless crap we can do nothing about.
And so I say, I hope there'll be world peace or some other non-existent thing, and you will all cooperate with one another, whoever it turns out I'm talking to.
Unquote.
Media reaction to the speech was as enthusiastic and rapturous as it was dishonest and corrupt.
Michael Lasinas of the New York Times, a former newspaper, called the speech consummate and said it, quote, hit all the right notes, and he was sorry he hadn't had a chance to watch it because of the time constraints placed on him by his raging porn addiction.
Joyless Reed of MSNBC reacted to the speech by accusing everyone who doesn't agree with her of racism, declaring that Republicans want everyone to die of COVID, and repeatedly saying Donald Trump's name in a strangled voice, yet with a creepy dissociated smile on her face.
Not necessarily in that order.
Ms. Reed then leapt around the studio astride a broomstrick, screaming, surrender Dorothy, and ordered her winged monkeys into the sky until someone told her they were just the hosts of Morning Joe and therefore had no wings.
At the UN itself, French Ambassador Nicolas Jean-Fou told reporters the UN summit was very important because diplomats can double park in Manhattan without being towed, which made it easier to enjoy New York's superior restaurants and prostitutes.
The summit, and for that matter, the United Nations itself, will continue until these diplomatic privileges are revoked.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I for hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a bibby-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, we are back just in time to laugh our way through the complete collapse of the Republic.
Got a lot to talk about.
We're going to plumb the depths of corruption at the FBI and in the media, which turn out to be a lot of the same people.
We'll talk about missing white woman syndrome in the Gabby Petito murder case.
I have a good story to tell you about that.
And mailbag questions on Christians who like BDSM and whether money can buy you happiness, whether BDSM can buy you happiness.
This is a good time to go on Apple Podcasts and subscribe to the show.
Put a five-star rating up there, even if you're lying.
It helps us out, and we appreciate it.
Also, subscribe to my personal YouTube channel, the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel.
We deliver completely fresh, exclusive content there.
And if you press that little bell, you'll hear a little bell and then nothing will happen.
Also, if you leave a comment, we will, if it's really disgusting, we'll read it on the air.
It really has to be low because otherwise it kind of stands out from the rest of the content.
Today, we have content from Andrew Clavin.
He says, Past Clavin, this is future Clavin here.
I'm writing through time to tell you to keep up the good work.
Thanks to your efforts, cries of rock auto can be heard across the land, and the waning birth rate has been solved as a direct result.
Scientists are now confirming my suspicion that it may also be a cure for baldness.
Many of these new babies have been named Clavin in your honor.
The only point of discontent in your future utopia is that while the spelling of Clavin is now taught at every grade level, people seem to have forgotten the proper spelling of Andrew.
Small irritation in a tickety-boo life.
Keep it up past Clavin.
It's like guys submitting entire novels now.
We appreciate it.
All right, we'll start talking about corruption.
But while we're thinking about corruption, we want to think about the corrupt people who want to steal your information on the internet.
Having your private life exposed for others to see was once something only celebrities worried about, but in an era where everyone is online, everyone is a public figure.
To keep my data private, when I go online, I turn to ExpressVPN.
There are hundreds of data brokers out there whose sole business is to buy and sell your data.
And the worst part is they don't have to tell you who they're selling it to or get your consent.
One of these data points is your IP address.
Data harvesters use your IP to uniquely identify you and your location.
But with Express VPN, my connection gets rerouted through an encrypted server and my IP address is masked.
Every time I turn on ExpressVPN, which is every time I turn on my computer, I'm given a random IP address shared by other ExpressVPN customers that makes it more difficult for third parties to identify me and harvest my data.
If, like me, you believe that your data is your business, secure yourself with the number one rated VPN on the market.
Visit expressvpn.com/slash clavin, get three extra months for free.
That's expn.com slash clavin.
Go to expressvpn.com/slash clavin to learn more like how do you spell clavin?
It's k-l-a-v-a-n.
There are no easing any bad things.
Investigating Corruption00:14:29
All right, let us talk about corruption because one of my least attractive traits, I think I've mentioned this before, is that I find corruption hilarious.
My wife always tells me, never say this out loud.
She says it's not as funny as I think it is.
But there is something about people selling out everything good, true, and noble and beautiful just for money or to win an election or to avoid being embarrassed or caught at something.
It just always makes me laugh.
And I relate this to the fall of man, to original sin.
Man was made to be like the angels, and instead he's like a clown.
And so that just makes me laugh.
It's like watching a guy in a tuxedo fall in a mud puddle.
And that's just inherently funny.
But of course, corruption, now I'm going to look serious so you don't think I'm laughing at corruption.
Corruption is also terribly, terribly serious.
For one thing, it gives good enterprises a bad name when priests rape children and the church covers it up.
When some moralist evangelical who's preaching don't commit adultery commits adultery, usually with some leather-clad male masseuse in a hotel, Motel 6.
It doesn't tell us anything about the truth of the Bible, right?
It doesn't actually besmirch the truth of Jesus or the truth that's throughout the Bible, but it makes the religion look bad, right?
It reflects badly.
That's why when we pray for forgiveness in church, we say we want to behave well to the honor and glory of God, because when God's children misbehave, it reflects badly on him.
And that allows atheists to push an outdated, self-destructive, and false idea that doesn't even stand up to moral logic or scientific scrutiny, but they can always say, look how what hypocrites religious people are.
And the same thing is true with democratic leaders and capitalists.
When democratic leaders and capitalists become corrupt, and because they're human beings, they always do become corrupt once they have enough power.
That allows socialists to criticize them.
This happened in China before the Chinese Revolution, that the government then was so corrupt, Cuba too, the government was so corrupt, that the communists get to come in and push a system that is inherently oppressive and immoral and destroys whatever it touches.
That's why socialists are always talking about critical theory.
Critical theory is where you criticize people and then people think that you must have the solution.
But anything can be criticized, especially when there's corruption.
Corruption makes it easy to criticize the system that you're in, and then that kind of implies what is not true, that socialism is better than the system that you're in, which is never true.
Good things are defamed by the corruption of bad people, and that makes it difficult to distinguish the good ideas from the bad, and corruption is very hard to expose.
Two reasons corruption is hard to expose.
One, people hide it, so the ways to get at it are always very complicated.
They're hard to understand.
They're boring.
And two, corruption is almost always discovered after the fact.
So by the time we get around to talking about the corruption, the issue has gone away.
People have moved on.
If you find the guy who did a bad thing two years ago, that's not going to help me put food on the table or cut down crime in my neighborhood today, which makes it difficult when the corrupt people are the people.
And this makes it even especially more difficult when the corrupt people are the people in charge of exposing corruption.
And that's what we're dealing with now.
So it's very difficult to talk about, but I'm going to make it as clear as I possibly can, because it is really important that we have lost, America has lost, the people who are assigned the task of exposing corruption.
We have lost them to corruption.
We keep hearing these elite creeps in the media and government say to us, why don't you believe us when we tell you the election wasn't rigged, when we tell you you should take the vaccine?
And the reason is you suck and you're corrupt.
This is why we don't believe this.
This is why I talk about an information crisis.
The information crisis is the fact that Dean McKay at the New York Times and George Stephanopoulos and all the rest of these guys are as dirty as the mob, except that less violent.
So this week, the reason this comes to mind is this week a story broke and was then covered up by the press.
And the reason it was covered up by the press is because the story exposed the press.
The press, I have to emphasize this.
We used to talk about the bias of the press.
The press is not biased.
The press is corrupt.
The right word is corrupt.
They're dirty.
They're dishonest.
They lie constantly in order to support their left-wing agenda.
You remember the Hunter Biden laptop story?
The New York Post found Biden's laptop.
There were emails on it which basically showed that Hunter Biden was influence peddling and that suggested that Joe Biden was getting a cut of the money that he was making influence peddling and had helped him along in his influence peddling.
This is the way the media covered that story, this CUT 22.
FBI is now investigating whether those alleged Hunter Biden emails are actually connected to a larger foreign intelligence operation.
They may be related to a foreign intelligence operation.
Foreign intelligence operation.
Foreign intelligence.
Foreign intelligence operation.
Foreign intelligence operation.
For all we know, these emails are made up.
The information found on the laptop may be part of a Russian disinformation campaign.
Part of a Russian disinformation effort.
Described by many intelligence experts as having hallmarks.
All the hallmarks rather.
All the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation.
Russian disinformation.
Disinformation campaign.
This is a classic example of the right-wing media machine.
That's the right-wing media machine.
I love that.
Brian Stelder's got to be the funniest guy on TV if you find corruption funny.
And I certainly would never find corruption funny.
Politico was one of the people who reported it that way as well.
And now Politico has a reporter, Ben Schreckinger, who has a new book out that have found evidence that some of the purported Hunter Biden laptop material is genuine, including the two emails that we were talking about.
A person who had independent access to Hunter Biden's emails confirmed he did receive a 2015 email from a Ukrainian businessman thanking him for the chance to meet Joe Biden.
The same goes for a 2017 email in which a proposed equity breakdown of a venture with Chinese energy executives includes the line 10, namely 10 grand, I think it was 10 held by H for the big guy, who was obviously Sleepy Joe.
So you say, all right, the election's over.
We lost.
It's never going to be revoked.
That's the way it is.
You know, there were polls done by our friends at the Media Research Center saying that if people had known about this story, they would have voted differently and Biden would have lost.
But remember, it was knocked off social media.
Twitter banned you if you tried to put it on the media because it was Russian disinformation.
So all of these guys were lying.
They're all corrupt.
They were all dishonest.
They all knew.
They all knew.
They all knew it was at least worth investigating and they all covered it up.
So you say, well, what's the point?
Well, the corruption is ongoing.
And I'll show you what I mean.
John Durham.
Remember John Durham?
He's the guy who was assigned in the Justice Department to investigate the Russian collusion story that really undermined the first two years of the Donald Trump administration.
It now looks like it was an FBI hit.
That's what it looks like, but we don't know yet.
But he's been investigating this, and now he has delivered his first indictment, which is a guy, maybe his second indictment, his first major indictment, a guy named Michael Sussman, a partner at the Perkins Coy law firm who often work for the Clintons.
Okay, here's how it was reported on ABC Nightly News.
The special counsel claims that Sussman lied to the FBI, saying he was not representing any clients and suggesting he was acting as a good citizen.
But the special counsel believes Sussman was representing a tech company and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Attorneys for Sussman say the case is baseless and unprecedented.
And here's how it was reported on NBC and CBS evening news.
Yeah.
Why?
Why are they covering up?
All right.
See, people are trying to play this down.
They're saying, oh, it's another one of these things like Michael Flynn lie to the FBI because when they indict you for perjury, it usually means they can't get you for the crime itself.
But that's not what this is.
That is not true.
And they're saying, oh, is this all you got?
No, he brought in this indictment because the statute of limitations was about to run out.
It may be the first of many indictments, okay?
And this is not like Michael Flynn, who was railroaded with this false charge of lying to the FBI.
Even the FBI agents who interviewed Michael Flynn said they didn't think he was lying.
This is different, right?
Sussman took allegations that Trump was being bankrolled by a Russian bank.
He took those to the FBI, right?
To James Baker, I think, at the FBI.
And he told them he wasn't being paid by Hillary, but he was.
And he did this because the press wouldn't report on these allegations, but they would report on an FBI investigation into the allegation once it was leaked that the FBI was investigating the allegations.
Did the same thing with the famous Russian dossier.
Remember that fake dossier that had Trump with prostitutes and all this stuff?
James, or as we call him, Muggsy Comey, briefed Trump on the investigation, then leaked the briefing to the press because the press would report on the briefing when they wouldn't report on the dossier because everybody knew the dossier was fake.
This sets off two years of reporting that severely hurt the Trump administration, so it's in the past and who cares?
But the press not covering it is not covering their own corruption, committing an act of corruption in real time while we're watching.
And it's not just them, it's also the FBI.
Because if you think the FBI didn't know that Sussman was lying, that's ridiculous.
He was pals with James Baker.
James Baker said this was based, he came to me based on a pre-existing relationship.
And these are the same guys, the same FBI guys who put the Trump hater Peter Strzzok into the Mueller investigation about Russian collusion, right?
This is Peter Strzok, who told his adulterous girlfriend, the girlfriend he was having an adulterous affair with, she said, oh no, I hope Trump doesn't win.
And he said, no, no, we'll stop it, right?
So this was like a hit on the president of the United States by the FBI.
And this is the same FBI we were covering just a couple of weeks ago, who couldn't get out of bed to investigate our young women who were being, our young women athletes who were being serially molested by the U.S. gymnastics doctor, right?
Same FBI.
And who are they investigating?
Who are the FBI investigating when they're not investigating serial rapists and all this?
Here's Christopher Wray, head of the FBI, cut five.
Starting back in June of 2019, I elevated racially and ethically motivated violent extremism to a national threat priority, which is our highest threat priority level.
And I think that has already shown fruits in the fact that we have effectively doubled the number of domestic terrorism investigations and arrests since that time.
We have also created a domestic terrorism hate crimes fusion cell to help increase the level of intelligence and information flow that goes out.
Certainly from a lethality perspective, as you noted, Mr. Chairman, we have seen those kinds of domestic violent extremists responsible for the most lethal activity over recent years.
Although I would add that in 2020, we saw a significant uptick in lethal action and violence by anti-government, anti-authority violent extremists to go along with the racially motivated violent extremists.
He's investigating you.
He's investigating people who think the government is too powerful.
It's all about January 6th.
It's all about the charge into the Capitol, which I have said many times, I thought was a horrible thing.
I thought Trump screwed the pooch on that.
He should have come out much faster and stopped it.
So they had a demonstration because a lot of these people feel these January 6th protesters are being railroaded.
They had a demonstration.
They had to put the fence back up around the Capitol so AOC wouldn't have a nervous breakdown.
They put the fence back up.
You can't get into the people's house because all these protesters were going to show up.
There were more police and undercover feds.
Here's a picture of the undercover feds.
You know, this is like greetings, Trump supporters.
I, too, am a right-wing insurrectionist.
Meanwhile, how many people were watching when they found all these Haitians hiding under the bridge at the borders, which are now completely open?
Thousands of people out there.
No reporters covering that except from Fox News.
Fox News sent a drone up and the Biden administration made sure the drone was made illegal so they weren't exposed, but they were exposed anyway because the law enforcement took reporters up in a chopper instead.
You know, journalism and law enforcement are urgently important things, both of them.
We believe in journalism.
We believe in law enforcement.
They are the ways we expose corruption.
They are dishonest and corrupt.
And that corruption is because they are all the same people.
You know, Eric Felton at the Federalist wrote a piece showing that Sussman and Baker were pals.
We know that they were pals.
But Baker was also pals with David Korn at Mother Jones, and he's the one who brought him part of the steel dossier, which was passed on to the FBI, which was then leaked to the press.
Listen to just this conversation.
I usually don't play other commentators, but this is an important little piece of an interview.
Trey Gowdy, the former U.S. prosecutor now on Fox, and the ACE Wall Street Journal reporter Kim Strossel.
Here's just a little clip about what happened to all these people.
In terms of culpability and accountability, we as society, too.
You know, Andy McCabe leaves the FBI, he resigns, and he's terminated.
you know, terrible handling of both the Russia thing and the Clinton Foundation probe.
He was found to lack candor, approve media calls when he should not have.
And what's the first thing that happened?
CNN hires him as a contributor.
You know, when we as society won't acknowledge that there have been failings and move these people out of positions of power, how can we expect that there's going to be any impetus for the organization to change itself?
You know, to your point, Kim, if I'm not mistaken, Peter Strzok is an adjunct professor at Georgetown.
Now, Mick Mulvaney is a graduate of Georgetown, and he can't get a teaching gig there.
But Peter Strzok, who manifests incredible bias against a presidential candidate while he was investigating that candidate, yeah, let's sign him up.
Wine Access Discount00:02:27
Wow.
The FBI, the press, the academy, they all know each other.
They're all pals with each other.
They collude together and they have gone bad.
So the next time Don Lemonhead or Nora O'Donnell or any of these press goons say to you, why don't you believe us when we tell you the election wasn't rigged?
Why don't you believe us when we tell you the vaccine is good?
And I believe in the vaccine.
I think the numbers show the vaccine is working pretty well.
But the reason we don't believe them is because you stink, you guys, and you're dirty.
You are dirty and you need to be replaced by better people than yourselves.
Coming up, we're going to talk about the ongoing murder case of Gabby Petito.
First, let me talk about something much, much happier, which is wine.
I love wine and I like knowing about wine and I'm loving wine access.
These are the official wine providers of the Michelin Guide.
So whether you're new to wine or a seasoned collector, Wine Access allows you to discover wines from under the radar, winemakers, and iconic producers, all hand-selected by a renowned team of wine experts.
And Wine Access exclusive Michelin Guy subscription is a one-of-a-kind opportunity to experience the world's best wine lists.
The seasonal shipments include wines curated in partnership with sommeliers from Michelin-starred restaurants, including Two-Star Californios, Thomas Keller's Three Star Per Se, and more.
I got one.
I got a bottle of champagne.
Let me see if I can get the name.
It was a 2013 M. Brunion Millesné Brut Champagne.
I don't even know if I'm pronouncing that right, but I'm drinking it right, and it is terrific.
And a Wine Access Michelin Guide subscription is designed to impress, I know you'll love it too, and I have an exclusive offer for my listeners, 25 bucks off your first two Michelin Guide subscription shipments.
This is only available by going to my special URL, wineeaccess.com slash Clavin.
The discount will be applied at checkout.
Don't miss out on this great deal.
Get 50 bucks off at wineaccess.com slash Clavin, if and only if you know how to spell Clavin.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
One of my favorite things that the corrupt press does, just because, you know, some people find corruption funny, not me, of course, but those people who do find it funny, was it especially funny, is when the press does some soul searching.
What they always do is they'll go after President Trump with everything they've got or some guy that they don't like, any Republican that they don't like.
Cops Miss the Mark00:04:26
And then they'll say, once it's over, once they've won, once they've destroyed a career, once they've ruined a guy's life, once they've gotten the political outcome they want, did we go too far?
You know, they start to examine it.
Did they go too far?
And we're seeing this in this Gabby Petito case, which is a murder case.
It's actually pretty interesting, a murder case.
She's engaged to a guy.
She seems to be a kind of a, she seems to have been, I should say, a minor online influencer.
She gets engaged to this guy, Brian Landry, and they go on a road trip together, which is, of course, charted.
Every minute of this charted online.
During the trip, a witness sees them arguing and says that Landry slapped her.
He's on the phone.
You hear the 911 call.
He says, I saw the gentleman slap her.
And the cops then go out and they stop the couple on the road, bring them out, and it's a classic moment.
It is a heartbreakbreaking moment now that we know that Gabby is dead, Gabby was murdered, and Landry is the suspect.
A classic moment when the cops just didn't realize what they were seeing.
And I'm not going to blame the cops for this.
I'll tell you why in a minute.
But they end up, Landry's completely plausible, and they end up basically apologizing to him.
And she is upset, and she's blaming herself, and she slapped him, so there's a problem there.
Here's just a moment from the, you know, the cam that they're carrying where the cop questions her about whether she intended to hurt him when she slapped him, so he knows whether to charge her or not.
Here's a minute from that.
When you slapped him, Bill's talking, were you attempting to cause him physical pain or physical impairment?
Was that what you were attempting to do to him?
What were you attempting to do?
What was the reason behind the slapping and stuff?
What was it you were attempting to accomplish by slapping him?
I was trying to get him to stop telling me.
Well, it doesn't sound to me like she attempted to injure him.
It's your call.
This is 100% your golf.
I support you either way.
It's just, it's heartbreaking.
I mean, knowing what happens, it's heartbreaking because she's crying.
She's upset.
She's not, you know, making a very good presentation of herself.
The police officer at this point believes that she's the aggressor, all of which is kind of classic from abused women syndromes.
They blame themselves.
They think I did something wrong.
She said, if you couldn't hear it, it's a little hard to hear at the end.
She says, you know, I was slapping him because he kept telling me to calm down.
Anyone who's ever told the woman to calm down knows, you know, you then see, you wake up about 10 minutes later with stars and birdies flying over your head.
So it just sounds like a kind of typical domestic dispute where she got violent.
But of course, the witness said it was him hitting her.
And the reason, you know, you want to reach through that video and you want to shake the cop and say, hey, pay attention.
Like when Elizabeth Smart disappeared and the police kept questioning the guy who kidnapped her with her standing right next to him and they never caught him.
But in fact, you got to remember, police walk into a situation with zero information.
They have zero information.
They don't know what they're looking at.
And they've seen everything.
They've seen situations where the woman is the aggressor.
That happens too.
And, you know, usually she gets the worst of it.
In the end, she hits him and he hits her back and she gets the worst of it.
But she is the aggressor, so they don't know what they're looking at.
In this case, it seemed from other witnesses, this was a very violent, very controlling guy who was not, you know, who was mistreating her.
And she was a young woman who really didn't understand that that was not the way it was supposed to be.
So, okay, they go off on this road trip.
It's followed online.
Landry returns home and he hasn't got her with him.
And nobody seems to say anything for days.
Finally, the parents get concerned because of a message she left on their message machine.
The cops, all the people online are tracking this thing.
The cops find her body in a forest in Wyoming.
Landry disappears.
He's taken off and they're still looking for him.
It's a good story.
I mean, just in terms of being a story, forget about the tragedy of it, but it's a good story, especially because it has this kind of, you know, if you're watching that show on Netflix clickbait, it's very reminiscent of that, where the internet lights up and people are acting as sleuths and people are saying terrible things that are just despicable.
Why They Ignore Black Lives00:10:33
And, you know, it just has that kind of, it seems like a Netflix picture.
It really does.
And that clickbait thing is very much in this kind of genre of story.
So the press now suddenly pauses, and especially on the left, and that means the press, they start to talk about missing white woman syndrome.
Why are we paying so much attention to this story?
So here's just a clip of this from Good Morning America.
There's some names that become household names.
Lacey Peterson, Natalie Holloway, Elizabeth Smart, Gabby Petito.
There are other names, though, like Piera Cole, names like Jelani Day, names like Daniel Robinson.
Why don't you know those names?
Well, those are people of color who've gone missing that didn't get the same media attention.
Well, a lot of people online now are taking advantage of this moment to not just highlight these other cases, but also highlight the disparity in the media's coverage of them.
So first of all, I love when these guys who have the platform to make anything they want into news, they start to sort of blame American racism for the fact that they're not making these stories into news.
So they do this, and then they examine themselves.
And we on the right are such buffoons, we get caught up in the corruption.
We start to say, well, it is true that white women disappearing get more coverage than black.
To me, this is complete, utter nonsense.
Almost any time the left starts talking about racism, it's because they're covering something up.
Almost every single time, it's a mask for corruption.
It's a mask for what they are doing that they shouldn't be doing.
And so they start to accuse you of racism.
Let me tell you a story from my journalism days, right?
Long time ago.
This is back in the 1980s.
I was a newswriter at a very big New York City news station, great station.
I'd come in at like 3 o'clock in the morning, start to write the morning news.
And so we're sitting in rows, just me and maybe two other, three other guys, you know, tapping.
And it was old time days, so the teleprompters are, the teletypes are going, like in the old movies.
And we were kind of old-fashioned reporters at that point, old-fashioned journalists.
And while we're sitting there, maybe three, four o'clock in the morning, we now have these very new things called VDTs, video display terminals.
We had computers.
They were very early computers.
That's where I learned to use a computer was on the VDT at the station, WOR.
And a little ping goes off because we've got the wire on our computer and it's from the AP and it says, a body, a woman has been found dead in Central Park wearing a pink dress.
And me and the writer in back of us, the minute this comes up, me and the writer in back of me, a pal of mine named Rod, we look up at the same moment and out of our mouths comes the same word because the editor is on the desk.
We say to the editor, a girl has been found murdered in a pink dress.
And the editor, who was a good guy, but he was having a lot of problems in those days, and he was a very angry guy.
And he said, so what?
People get murdered in New York all the time because it was back in the bad old days.
And we both said, the pink dress, they're telling us something with the pink dress.
They're telling us she's rich.
They're telling us she's like a debutant or something, and this is going to be a big murder.
You guys don't, he screamed at us.
You don't know what we're talking about.
Don't put that garbage in the newscast.
I don't want it in there.
Don't do it.
We go like, ah, that pink dress, they're telling us this is a big murder.
The two of us are going.
And he wouldn't put it on.
He wouldn't put it on.
Of course, it turned out to be one of the murders of the decade, if not the murder of the decade.
It was called the Preppy murder case.
A guy named Robert Chambers strangled a rich girl named Jennifer Levin.
It became one of the ugliest trials I have ever seen.
He was a preppy.
They were both very rich people.
And they were having sex.
He then claimed in the trial that it was rough sex, and he just strangled her because she was hurting him.
And he was a great big guy, and she was this tiny little nothing of a creature.
And it was garbage.
And the trial was as ugly as it was possible to be.
And because they slimed the victim.
And the guy was a very handsome guy, and the jury loved him, and he got off with like 15 years for manslaughter.
Ruined his life because he was already a weirdo, but still.
So our station got scooped.
Our station got scooped because the editor got angry at me and Rod for knowing exactly what this was a big story.
So the editor was embarrassed.
And instead of admitting that he made a mistake and saying, well, I really blew that, because it was the story of the decade for a New York station.
Instead of saying, I really blew that story, he said, what we should be covering is a homeless woman who was killed and thrown into a garbage bag.
That's the kind of story we should be covering.
And of course, we're just rolling our eyes because we knew he missed the story of the decade.
Nothing to do with race had to do with who gets killed and who doesn't.
Homeless people get killed.
It's not news.
It's news that they get killed, but it's not news when one of them gets killed.
It is news when a wealthy woman is strangled by her preppy lover.
It's news for two big reasons, two big reasons.
One, it doesn't happen.
So it's news.
It's different.
It's something that, you know, that actually is out of the ordinary.
And two, because people care.
People care what happens to pretty girls.
They care what happens to rich people.
They care about celebrity things.
You want to say, oh, that's wrong?
So what?
So what?
You're telling stories.
You want to tell the stories that people want to hear.
That is part of your job as a newspaper.
When a beautiful young Mormon girl is kidnapped from her home, like in the Elizabeth Smart story, that is a riveting story.
The story that's not being covered, the corruption they're covering up here, because remember, notice they say missing white woman syndrome.
It's really about murder.
I mean, it is missing persons, but only because you think those people are already dead.
That's why the Gabby Petito story, that's why when they go missing, it becomes a story because you're waiting to find out, will they be returned, which is the happy ending, or will they be found dead?
Notice they don't say murdered white woman story, because then you would have to say, yeah, we should cover murdered black women, but they don't cover murdered black people.
They don't cover the absolute slaughter of black Americans in Democrat cities going on right now, every weekend, to the tune in cities like Chicago, where it's far, far worse than anything that is happening with Wu flu or the Chinese flu or flu Manchu or Kung Flu or whatever you want to call it.
Children being shot in their homes by gangs going by and just spraying the place with bullets.
Women, men falling down dead with bullet holes, and they don't cover it at all.
And why?
Because they're corrupt, because they're dishonest.
Every damn one of them.
You know, this is the thing.
Some of these guys were good reporters once, but now they're in a corrupt system, and so they've become corrupt.
And that's why you see guys like Jake Tapper with that gormless look on their face.
What do you mean?
Calling me corrupt?
Because he's not a bad person.
He's just in a system that is totally dedicated to making sure left of center policies and left-of-center politicians win.
And so they don't cover this absolute mayhem that's going on in Democrat cities because it's going on because of their policies and of the things that the press had done, has done.
Black Lives Matter, which has caused more people to be killed than COVID.
Well, I'm exaggerating on the grand scale, but you know what I mean in those cities.
Defund the police, AOC, saying when we say defund the police, we mean defund the police.
Barack Obama attacks on the police to cover up the fact that his policies were failing to distract us with charges of racism, just like the left always does.
The left always distracts us with charges of racism when their policies are failing instead of addressing their policies.
This is the corruption.
This is the source, the core of the corruption is distracting us with false issues.
Racism is not the problem in this country.
And I'll talk about that in a second, what the real problem is.
It's not racism, but it is the fact that they use racism to cover these things up.
The racism here is not that we care about a pretty blonde girl who got in trouble.
That's human nature.
We're going to care about pretty blonde girls who've disappeared.
That is just human nature.
Is it the nicest part of human nature?
No, the nicest part of human nature is listening to me sing a happy tune.
You know, who cares?
That doesn't make the news.
What makes the news is stuff.
If it bleeds, it leads.
What makes the stuff the news is a beautiful girl going missing.
Again, human nature.
The racism is not that they cover that.
It's that they don't cover.
They don't cover the mass slaughter of black Americans, our fellow Americans who are black, because of leftist policies.
They say black lives matter.
They have cost us black lives.
They say George Floyd killed by the police by attacking the police.
And remember, something like eight to 13, between eight and 13 unarmed black people are killed by the police every year.
That is statistically none.
That's nothing in a country of 350 million people with 750,000, 800,000 law officers.
We have enough law officers to populate San Francisco.
If 8 to 13 unarmed blacks are killed a year, that doesn't mean they were innocent.
That doesn't mean they weren't attacking a police officer or putting him in danger.
It just means that they were unarmed at the time they were shot.
When you demonize the police, you jeopardize, sacrifice black lives.
That's the story that's not being covered.
It's not because some black guy is missing and we didn't say anything about it.
That's the story that's not being covered, the mass slaughter of black people.
And it's not being covered.
And really, in some ways, it's not racism at all.
It's simply corruption.
It's simply being dirty.
Being dirty is when you don't do your job and you take benefits to get what you want instead of being an honest broker of whatever it is you're selling.
If you're an FBI agent, you're selling law enforcement.
If you're not doing that for some other reason, that's corrupt.
If you're a newsman, you're selling the truth.
You're selling stories.
If you're not doing that, it's corrupt.
These guys are dirty.
They are dirty.
And that's the problem.
The guys giving us the information, the guys exposing corruption have gone bad.
All right, we're going to get down to the bottom line of all this corruption in a moment.
Taxes and Great Society Programs00:15:23
But first, let me talk about my pillow and more importantly, my slippers.
I love these things.
You know, you get up because I'm awake all night.
I'm lying on my pillow and thinking, wow, this is a really comfortable pillow.
But I get up a lot and I walk around and I don't like to walk around in bare feet because you never know who or what you're going to step on.
So I always put on slippers always.
And these my slippers, you know, slippers are hard to get because like you've got to be able to slip into them, but also they've got to be comfortable and not fall off your feet.
My pillow has taken over two years to develop these my slippers.
They're designed to wear indoor, outdoor, all day long.
They're made with my pillow foam impact gel to help prevent fatigue.
They're made with quality leather suede.
And for a limited time, my pillow is offering 50% off these new my slippers.
The my slippers are so comfortable.
You'll want to get some for the whole family.
Go to mypillow.com and click on the radio listener square.
Use promo code DAILYWIRE at checkout or call 800-651-1148.
You'll also get deep discounts on all my pillow products, including the Giza Dream Sheets, the MyPillow Mattress Topper and MyPillow Towel Sets.
MyPillow.com, enter DailyWire or call 1-800-651-1148 and tell them I sent you.
That's 1-800-651-1148.
So at the bottom of all of this is always money and power, right?
When they're talking about racism, they talk about class, inequality, all these things, they may be problems.
They may be things that we want to address in our country, but they are emotionally charged issues that they use to take you away from the simple desire to have your money and use your money to solidify their power.
Next week, next week, they are scheduled to start talking about this infrastructure bill and vote on, this infrastructure bill and what they call this reconciliation bill, which is trillions of dollars.
They say it's $3.5 trillion, but the Wall Street Journal calls it one of the greatest fiscal cons in history because it's a massive expansion of the welfare state.
And the thing about the welfare state is once you expand it, you never get rid of it because each one of us is being bought off, right?
They give you something for quote unquote free.
There's a word that should be banned from every journalist's vocabulary, free.
Nothing is free.
The stars belong to everyone, you know?
The moon belongs to everyone.
Everything here on earth costs something.
It costs work.
It costs effort.
It costs money.
When they tell you that they are giving you something free, they have taken the money from someone else and given it to you.
And I can understand why that's attractive to the you, but still it's not right.
It's stealing when you do it by hand.
It's stealing when you do it by government fiat.
It doesn't mean that we don't all agree on certain small things that have to be taken care of, like law enforcement, fire departments.
All of these things we understand have to be done together and we all chip in, except we don't chip in anymore, really.
It's just the rich who pay taxes.
But still, we understand that this is something government can pay for.
After they start rearranging who has the money, taking money away from one and giving it to somebody else, it's just plain stealing.
And, you know, it's interesting.
And I have to give credit to Stephen Crowder for this insight because he pointed it out to me once and I'd never thought of it before.
You know, they always say, well, it's taking from the rich to give to the poor like Robin Hood.
And Crowder pointed out that Robin Hood was trying to stop inequality because of too much taxes.
His enemy was the king, evil King John, who was taxing people too much.
And so it's not the business that Robin Hood was out to get.
It was the people who were lowering the taxes.
So Joe Biden's, this is so bad.
And the taxes that are going to follow, they're talking about taxing people.
And they always talk about taxing the rich.
But again, I can't explain this forever because I haven't got that much time.
But when they tax the rich, the middle class pay the taxes.
Socialism always ends with the poor and the powerful and the wealthy, right?
Because the rich can get out of paying taxes.
They don't even make income.
They just borrow off their stocks, right?
They borrow off their stocks.
They pay it back when they've done, gotten more stocks.
There's no profit anywhere along the way for the government to tax.
What they end up taxing is wage earners, people who do well, and they say, well, they make so much money and people who make less money think that's a lot.
But you're never rich if you're working for a living.
The people who are wealthy do not get taxed.
So it's so bad.
The numbers are so bad that Biden has to go out and tell people he's a capitalist.
Here's that cut.
Big corporations and super wealthy have to start paying their fair share of taxes.
It's long overdue.
So I'm not to punish anyone.
I'm a capitalist.
If you can make a million or a billion dollars, that's great.
God bless you.
All I'm asking is you pay your fair share.
I've always found it so creepy when he leans into the mic like that.
But he's lying.
He's not a capitalist.
He is a venal houseplant who goes along with the tide of Democrat politics and Democrat politics have been going to the left, to the far left.
He is now a socialist, whether he likes it or not, whether he would self-identify as that or not, okay?
The question with paying your fair share.
I mean, I know it drives Shapiro crazy because Shapiro always says the rich pay all the taxes.
And when you break it down, that's basically true.
The rich pay all the taxes, certainly the vast majority of it.
The question is, what's your fair share of garbage?
What's your fair share of programs that don't work except to get Democrats re-elected?
We are talking about the programs that are usually termed the Great Society.
increase, the vast increase in these kinds of programs that he's trying to do now, right, in the 60s.
It was the Great Society.
Now they're trying to double down on the Great Society.
The problem with the Great Society is it has failed, and it has failed particularly in the lives of black Americans.
Jason Riley wrote about this in the Wall Street Journal this week, an excellent column from Riley, talking about the fact that the Great Society programs decimated black lives and stalled black progress.
He says, okay, he says entitlement programs were dramatically expanded in the 1960s in the service of the war and poverty, yet poverty fell at a slower rate after the Great Society initiatives were implemented and overall dependency on the government for food, shelter, and other basic necessities increased.
Between 1940 and 1960, and this is important because people don't know this, between 1940 and 1960, before the Great Society, but basically after the war, the percentage of black families living in poverty declined by 40 points as blacks increased their years of education and migrated from poorer rural areas to more prosperous urban environs in the South and North.
No welfare program has ever come close to replicating that rate of advancement, right?
That's before the Great Society.
What we experienced in the wake of the Great Society and society interventions was slower progress or outright retrogression.
Black labor force participation rates fell.
Black unemployment rates rose.
And here's the big one.
The black nuclear family disintegrated as many people warned that it would because they were basically subsidizing having children out of wedlock.
Barry Latzer has noted that black male homicide rates had been falling in the 1940s by 18% and in the 1950s by 22%.
Yet this trend would reverse itself beginning in the late 1960s and to continue to worsen for nearly three decades because when you decimate the family, you cause crime.
It's that simple.
The Democrats keep saying it's the systemic racism.
It's the legacy of Jim Crow.
It's them.
It's the great society.
But the problem with the great society is it funnels trillions of dollars into the government that the government can then dole out to whom it sees fit and buy votes.
When they come into your town and they say, we're going to take care of you, we're going to give you this money.
So the problem we have now, right, is that on the right, when we get a Ronald Reagan or a Donald Trump, and this is true of both of them, they cut regulations and they cut taxes, but they don't cut the Great Society.
They don't cut the welfare program because everybody's getting a little piece of it and nobody wants to give it up.
Remember, Donald Trump promised, I'm not going to cut, you know, Social Security.
I'm not going to cut any of your dole.
I'm just going to cut taxes.
So what happens, our debt goes up, and our debt is now absolutely crushing because after a while, you run out of money.
They now have a new idea, a new theory.
I think it's called modern monetary theory.
You can spend as much as you want, just print new money.
Yeah, that theory is wrong.
Just on a guess.
I'm just guessing.
I'm no expert, but I'm guessing that that theory is wrong.
So both of the Republicans, our big Republican, real true conservative presidents, Trump and Reagan, cut taxes, but they didn't cut the Great Society because they didn't have the political will backing them.
They didn't have the people backing them because everybody wants a piece of it.
Then the Democrats come in and they do what they're doing now, which is they double down on the great society because that's money in their hands.
That is money with which they buy power, right?
So they're just going to double down on that.
But they talk about increasing taxes, but because those taxes fall on the productive, because they fall on the wealthy, they either don't do it at the last minute, they give up and don't raise taxes at the last minute, or they ruin the economy.
So taxes go down anyway.
This is what we've got.
We've got a corrupt governing class that has bought off with this money, that doesn't want to let go of this money.
This has been predicted since America was founded.
Now people can vote to take your money for themselves, so they will, right?
So now we've got this system where the GOP comes in and cuts taxes, but the debt goes up because they don't cut the welfare programs.
And the Democrats come in and they increase the welfare programs and they either destroy the economy by taxing the wealthier middle class or they just dump the tax increases and they leave us with all this debt.
Follow the money.
Every time you hear racism, every time you hear some kind of social issue, transgenderism, whatever they're talking about, follow the money.
It's all about the money.
It's all about the corruption.
It's all about the power.
And this is why I say it's not a question of left and right.
It's a question of the problem we have, which is this.
This is the problem we have, and how to solve it, which is to take the power away from these people to do what they're doing, to get their hands on our dough, okay?
Because it ain't about racism.
This country is great about racism.
We will get along fine if they would just leave us alone.
But they have gotten dirty.
Really interesting talk with Blake Masters about big tech and how to get them under control.
But first, rockauto.com.
Yes, that's right.
If you are sitting around in your car and your car is not moving and you're pretending to drive it to the auto parts store, you look like a jerk.
If you just say rockauto.com, not only will it make you more attractive instantly to the ladies, it will get you where you want to go because you'll be able to go right on your computer and get the kind of part you need for your car.
Rockauto.com has the best prices.
They have an incredible catalog.
It's so easy to use.
Plus, just saying rockauto.com will make you smarter and make you sound, let's face it, a lot more virile than you're sounding now, just sitting in your unmoving car.
So go to rockauto.com right now, see all the parts available for your car or truck, write clavin like that.
Clavin, yeah, same into their how did you hear about us box so they know we sent you rockauto.com.
And how do you spell clavin, you say?
I'm glad you asked.
It's K-L-S.
I just make it look this easy.
So if there is one issue that I get beaten up over more than any other, it is my approach to big tech and my feeling that big tech needs to be stopped from censoring our ideas and from threatening our free speech.
And the libertarians especially climb down my throat whenever I say anything about this because they are supposedly independent actors, not government actors.
And for some reason, independent actors are allowed to take away the rights with which our creator endowed us.
Blake Masters, who is currently running for Senate in Arizona, wrote a terrific piece about this in the Wall Street Journal.
Blake Masters is the president of the Thiel Foundation to promote science and innovation.
He is the author of the number one New York Times bestseller, the co-author with Peter Thiel of Zero to One Notes on Startups or How to Build the Future.
Blake, thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Thanks, Andrew.
Great to be here with you.
So I just want to read a little bit of your op-ed in the journal.
It's called Reclaiming Our Independence from Big Tech.
And the subhead was companies that censor political speech, harm competition, and ruin our brains need regulation.
The first paragraph is, Google can swing an election.
Facebook knows more about you than your spouse does.
Amazon's Alexa can record your living room conversations.
Yet for all the talk about the big tech threat, these companies keep getting bigger, more powerful, and more abusive.
Can you describe these abuses a little more detail?
Sure.
Yeah.
I think conservatives rightly focus on censorship, right?
But it's obvious that's a problem.
I don't think Facebook or Twitter should be allowed to, say, kick off a sitting United States president while he's in office.
And they do that obviously because they don't like Donald Trump's politics.
Meanwhile, you've got Taliban commanders with verified accounts on Twitter.
So the censorship, the political censorship is a real problem.
I think we should treat these companies more like the phone company, common carriers, right?
Can't discriminate against users based on the content of their speech.
But I also just think censorship is one of the kind of harms from big tech.
I also worry a lot about just their sheer bigness and their ability to squash competitors.
You know, Google buys one company every week and they've been doing that for about a dozen years, not because they care about that new technology that they're acquiring, but they just care that that technology can't get so big that it competes with Google someday.
So they buy these companies to squash them.
I think that's bad for the market.
I think that's bad for competition.
And then I also worry about something like addictiveness, right?
These products are intentionally engineered to addict people to them, especially children.
Just a study last week came out that showed how bad Instagram is for the mental health of teenagers, particularly teenage women.
And so I think, you know, just like cigarettes or gambling, we should recognize sort of unlimited social media use can actually be intentionally addictive.
Maybe we should do something about that.
So I want to get back to the addictive thing because that's an argument I hadn't actually heard before, even though obviously it's true.
But whenever I talk about this, and I think it's urgently important, I mean, the censorship thing especially drives me crazy because I think free speech is essential.
But the attacks, there are several attacks.
Regulating Social Media Giants00:15:07
Let me give them to you in order.
We'll talk about them one at a time.
One is, well, you have no, there's no God-given right to have a Twitter account.
This is a company that you can build your own Twitter.
You know, why should you have a right to be on Twitter?
That's absurd.
You know, God didn't invent you with a create you and endow you with the right to be on Twitter.
And these guys have their free speech rights because they are not government actors, and you're essentially declaring what they have to allow on their platform.
What's the answer to that?
Well, we do that for the phone company.
You know, all I'm saying is maybe at a certain point, Facebook and Twitter look more like the phone company than your local bakery or something like that, right?
And, you know, you hear a lot, go build your own Google.
Go build your own Twitter.
Well, it's like some people tried to build their own conservative social networking site with Parlor.
Right.
And you saw AWS and you saw Amazon ripped Parlor off.
Right.
They denied Parlor the critical infrastructure you needed to exist.
And you can't just go build your own internet.
You know, go build your own Google.
Well, that's naive.
You can't actually do it.
It misunderstands what Google is.
Google has a monopoly on search because of its first mover advantage and because of its massive network effects.
So you can't go build your own.
And at a certain point, these companies, they get so big that they're bigger and more powerful than many governments around the world.
And I think when that happens, conservatives and people who actually care about the free market can say, these companies are so big, they're actually throwing this market out of whack.
There is no free market here.
And you may have to regulate them differently than a local small business.
You know, one of the things where I do believe there's a gray area here, and it does disturb me, but when I saw, for instance, Amazon, knock, was it Ryan Anderson?
Is that the guy, the author I'm thinking of?
He had a book about transgenderism when Harry Becomes Sally.
Now, listen, I love Amazon.
They bring books to my house.
Anybody who brings books to my house is welcome.
It's a great, great system.
All that Bezos had to do to get me to build a statue to him was not become a censorious tyrant.
And yet, when he knocks a book off, that means not only is that book harder to get, but it means publishers will not, he's selling something like 90% of new books in America.
And it sends a message.
Like Ryan Anderson is a serious person.
He's a serious academic.
That book is a serious book.
It is not some hate-filled invective or some screed.
It's a real book.
And so that sends a message to every young and enterprising thinker.
Like, no, stay within the lines.
If you ever want to have a commercially successful book, if you ever want to have a good career, stay within the lines.
Don't try to move or change the Overton window.
That really stifles speech.
I mean, it just does.
I think it's a huge problem.
So what do you do with a guy like Bezos with Amazon?
How do you regulate that?
You can't call that, that's not the phone company.
That's an actual store of some sort.
Yeah, I think you take a look at Amazon's market sales.
I bet they have a pretty big monopoly on sort of online book sales.
And past a certain point, I think you can say you're a platform and you have to be facially neutral with respect to your content.
Like you don't get to kick all conservative books off.
And if you want to be a smaller niche liberal bookstore, you can do that.
But that's not what Amazon.com is.
And so I think what people need to reacquaint themselves with here is a sense of scale.
Like when Amazon becomes more dominant than any other company in the whole world, again, you can treat it differently than your local bookstore.
Otherwise, you're just going to bury your head in the sand and get crushed by your political opposition.
Amazon doesn't share our values.
And so if we don't make sure that they play by, I think, commonsensical notions of fair play, they'll just crush us.
You won't be able to buy conservative books in five years.
It is.
It's so dated to me.
You know, it seems to me that, but their argument is, is the First Amendment only stops the government from censoring us.
And that's true, but it stops us from censoring us because we have a God-given right to free speech.
And the government is instituted among men to preserve those rights.
So if the threat comes from a private entity, I don't see why that shouldn't be resistant.
I agree with you.
And I'd also point out at a certain point, these companies are so big that they are inextricably linked with the government in all sorts of ways.
And so in only a nominal sense is Facebook truly a private company.
You know, I mean, the White House and Gensaki, they send communications bulletins to Facebook saying that's COVID misinformation.
You have to rip that piece of information off your platform.
And, you know, the ellipsis is, or else, or else we'll come at you and make life hell.
And so Facebook, of course, complies.
And you see this fusion of the state and extreme concentration of corporate power.
And I think that should scare all of us.
At a certain point, these companies are so big they're not even private.
You know, another argument that I get a lot of is that this is an attack on capitalism.
And unlike Joe Biden, I actually am a capitalist.
I believe it's a wonderful system.
But all systems, all human relationships are regulated.
There's, you know, you and I can have a conversation, but if you start to strangle me, the police come in.
There are certain limits to every human interaction.
But you write in your piece, Amazon controls more than half of all online retail sales in America.
Google is 92% of search.
Apple's annual profit is larger than the gross domestic product of seven U.S. states.
Why is that bad?
I think it's bad because at a certain point, this market dominance, you know, it keeps other competitors out.
Like I said, Google buys people just to shut them down.
You know, I think a healthy version of capitalism is one in America where you have 60 or 70 million capitalists, right?
But not just six or seven.
And so this, if you just get big tech and you let these handful of multinational corporations control the flow of information in our society, again, especially at the direction of a left-wing White House, I think this is really bad.
I think it's just clear, like Barry Goldwater understood this, right?
He said that the enemy of freedom is unrestrained power.
And conservatives are good at understanding this when it's power in governmental hands, right?
We don't want an unlimited, arbitrarily powerful government.
But Barry Goldwater also went further and he said, this is true, whether it's government or in corporate concentration of power.
And we know that Facebook, we know that Google, we know that these super powerful big tech companies, we know that they're very eager to quash our individual liberties.
They just are.
And so the question is, are we going to get serious about that threat?
Or are we just going to plug our ears and say, no, no, it's a private company.
Anything they do to us is fine.
I just think that's naive.
It's so dated.
It's people really talking like, you know, Amazon is the corner bookstore and Facebook is this place.
Yeah.
All right.
We'll get back to that talk with Blake Masters in just a moment.
But first, let me talk about Ring Alarm Security Systems.
When I am lying awake in bed at night, I want to know what is going on around the house.
And with Ring Alarm Security System, you can do just that whether you're lying awake at night like me or whether you're away from home.
Ring alarm equals peace of mind.
You can protect your home with the ring alarm and ring alarm is a powerful, affordable home security system.
You can easily install it yourself.
It really is simple.
And you can talk to anybody who comes to your house, no matter where you are, on the simple app.
Go to ring.com slash clavin.
It's a perfect way to start your ring experience with a special offer.
Keep an eye on every corner of your house with indoor and outdoor cams.
See what's happening right from your phone.
I did not realize how easy the ring alarm was to install until I did it.
Protect your home anytime from anywhere with ring alarm.
Go to ring.com slash clavin for a special offer on a ring alarm security kit today.
You can build a system that's right for your home and have it up and running in minutes.
I mean, they have an army of people making arguments in defense of themselves.
I'm sure this, I'm absolutely positive.
Some of the people who attack me on Twitter whenever I talk about this stuff are like in their own payroll.
Yeah.
Their argument is, and they've actually said this in so many words, that government is too slow to regulate tech, which moves at the speed of light.
And I think it's Facebook that says move quickly and break things.
And, you know, the government simply can't understand it.
And I have to, you know, to be honest with you, Blake, when I watch some of these hearings, I look at these senators and I think these guys do not know how the internet works.
They use words like algorithm.
They don't know what an algorithm is.
So is there some truth to this argument that a democratic government, democracies move slowly because we're all arguing with each other?
Is there some truth to the argument that a democratic government cannot intelligently regulate tech?
Well, I'm somewhat sympathetic to this line of argument just because none of these companies are right.
Like the government has not successfully regulated tech.
They've shown themselves to be incompetent.
I agree.
You watch these hearings and some of these older senators, God bless them, some of the nicest people you ever meet.
It's just they can't even get a grip on Mark Zuckerberg, right?
He's running circles around them.
And Zuckerberg is smart.
He's saying like, regulate me.
Come on.
Like this content, censorship, editorialization stuff, like this is tough.
Tell me what the rules are.
Regulate me, right?
So he invites and he calls their bluff.
And that doesn't mean that we shouldn't do anything, though.
It means we should get a new generation of leadership in Congress, younger, smarter people who actually understand the way that these companies work.
You know, I spent the first part of my career in Silicon Valley.
I know the people who run these companies and the rank and file engineers and their business models.
And I think I have a pretty good sense of the acute harms that these companies are perpetrating on people.
So, and it's still going to be hard.
It's still going to be hard to actually come up with the right solutions, but like we're not going to have a prayer of doing it unless we recognize it's a problem and get people in office who are serious about taking it on.
So it doesn't mean it's easy, but fair enough, the government has blown it so far.
Like data privacy in the United States doesn't exist.
We have no comprehensive set of laws that governs how giant multinational corporations can manage and use our data.
And so it's just laissez-faire.
So they take our data and they use it against us every which way, and then they hide behind the complexity and no one does anything about it.
I think that's just a bad, that's a bad equilibrium we've found.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, I wish I had a supercut of Mark Zuckerberg apologizing for abuses, taking full responsibility for them, and then going back and doing exactly.
Nothing happens.
Facebook's stock price goes up after these hearings because Wall Street looks at this and they say, like, wow, God bless those senators.
Like, they're never going to do anything about this.
So I think it's time to do something about it.
So let's talk about this addictive part of it because this is, as I say, something I never thought of before.
I mean, I knew that these things were fashioned to be addictive.
But how is it possible to fight against that?
First, could you describe how they're created to be addictive?
Yeah, I mean, I tell this anecdote when I go and give a stump speech on the campaign trail.
I say, like, how many times have you gone to a family restaurant and you look at another table, a family who ought to be having a dinner table conversation, and they're not because every kid is just glued down looking at an iPad.
And like, that's really disgusting in some sense, but it doesn't happen by accident.
It's not just bad parenting.
It's not just laziness.
The product there is engineered to be addictive.
The software running on that iPad, it's engineered, you know, with clever loops of algorithms designed to sort of capture people's attention.
They employ psychologists on staff at many of these companies to keep people going.
They serve teenagers advertising to keep them hooked in and interested in what they're seeing.
And I just think that's a big problem.
The first step is to talk about it and acknowledge it.
It's a really big problem, I think, especially with kids.
It changes the way brains, you know, developing brains are wired.
And so like, we got to get out in front of this because if we're just laissez-faire about five or 10 years, like that's going to really make a lasting mark.
It's going to be ugly.
The people who build that iPad, the Apple executives and the Silicon Valley CEOs, they don't let their own kids play with those products.
Is that true?
Yeah, absolutely.
No screen time.
My cohort does not let our kids do screen time.
We do not do that.
No, you give your kids wooden toys, you know, handcrafted in Amish country or something.
That's what kids should be playing with.
They should be getting outside.
They shouldn't be looking at these damn devices.
Like it's really unhealthy.
It doesn't mean we should ban them.
Maybe that's too stark, obviously.
But it does mean we should get people in office who know that this is a problem, who are willing to talk about it and figure out what the solution should be.
But I'm pretty sure it's not nothing.
You know, a couple of times during this conversation, you have said that their values are not our values.
Now, you're obviously speaking from experience.
You're not just throwing that out there.
Can you expand on that, exactly what you mean?
Yeah, I mean, I think Google has a Google as an entity, right?
And it's maybe just the aggregation of all the individual preferences because it's a left-leaning sort of staff.
But even Google as a corporate entity distinct from its people, it has a view on U.S. politics.
It did not want Donald Trump to be elected.
I'm not saying they changed their search algorithms to suppress Trump information and pump the Biden information, but I'm also not saying they didn't, right?
And one problem is we don't know.
Google with its monopoly and search has the power, I think, to swing a U.S. election.
They've got the power.
I think they've got the motive.
They clearly have a view, you know, just like Xi Jinping in China.
They clearly have a view.
They wanted Biden.
I'm not saying they did anything to get it, but like when giant powerful interests clearly have a view, they wanted Trump out of office.
Who's to say that Google is going to behave?
Who's to say that Google is not going to try to interfere?
And I think it's crazy that we let any company with that sort of market dominance just have a complete black box in terms of their search engine algorithms.
But when you say visibility into that, it's different to say that their values are Democratic, more leaned more toward the Democrat Party than toward the Republican Party, than to say that their values are not our values, meaning their values are not American values.
Is that true?
I think it's both.
I think as the Democratic Party, or I'd say the left-wing activists, you know, sort of ideologically in charge of the Democratic Party, as they sort of embrace this political philosophy of globalism, right?
To me, it looks a lot like globalism and not looking out for the interests of Americans.
I think those can shade into the same thing.
You know, I think most Democrats are good people, but I think this ideology, the far left, globalist, open borders, open capital, let every, you know, there's no distinct American identity.
I think that ideology is really bad.
And I think that is the ideology of Silicon Valley.
You know, I don't know if you've read this Shoshona Zuboff book about surveillance capitalism.
Globalism vs. American Identity00:04:05
She's a Harvard professor.
Yeah, I think she's probably a Marxist, and yet she attacks Google as violating our privacy, stealing essentially our information about us as if it belonged to them instead of to us.
But at the same time, you hear laced in her prose is she wants them to censor more of our ideas.
MRC Newsbusters great site did a study saying big tech overwhelmingly censors Republican members of Congress by a rate of 53 to one compared to congressional Democrats.
What motivation do Democrats have to get involved in this fight?
I mean, is this essentially going to just be another one of these things where we divide down left-right lines?
Maybe.
I mean, I was a little bit optimistic with like, I think most of Joe Biden's appointees are horrible, but I was at least a little bit interested in the Lena Kahn nomination to the FTC, because I do think there are intelligent sort of left-of-center critiques of big tech, of corporate concentration of power, right?
The old left used to really worry a lot about this.
Could corporate concentrations of power squash out individual liberals?
I think there's still some of them, but they're not in charge.
The new left, I think, is only too happy to facilitate the rise of corporate power as long as it's going to serve that sort of left-wing globalist agenda, the woke.
This is why you see every Fortune 500 company is basically woke.
They're basically in ideological conformity with the left-wing ruling elite in our country.
And that's very interesting.
I think it would make old leftists roll in their graves, the people who started the sort of labor, labor movement in the 20th century.
But it's just a new Democratic Party.
It's a new hyper-progressive globalist left.
And I think they're only too happy to work with Facebook to suppress their political competition.
Yeah.
Unfortunately.
Blake Masters, the president of the Thiel Foundation that promotes science and innovation, the co-author with Peter Thiel of Zero to One and running for Senate in Arizona.
You have a chance?
I've got more than a chance.
We're doing great.
I started the race 11 weeks ago with basically 0, 1% name ID and Poland in the mid-teens.
So I'm running against an established attorney general.
He's just one of these politicians, not the worst, but certainly not the best.
And I'm catching up.
So I think I'll win.
Great, great.
Blake, it's really good talking to you.
I appreciate your coming on.
I hope you'll come back.
I will.
This is fun.
Thank you so much.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
If you're having trouble falling asleep, I have no sympathy with you because I haven't slept in 50 years.
But if you want to sleep, one thing you might try doing is getting enough magnesium.
Do not run to the store to buy the first magnesium supplement.
You find most magnesium supplements use only the two cheapest synthetic forms.
And since they're not full spectrum, they won't fix your magnesium deficiency or help you sleep better.
There are actually seven unique forms of magnesium, and you must get all of them if you want to experience its calming sleep-enhancing effects.
So you want to get magnesium breakthrough by BioOptimizers.
Take two capsules before you go to bed.
You will be amazed at how much better you sleep and how much more rested you feel when you wake up.
And please write to me after you try these and tell me what it is like to sleep because I'm just curious.
For an exclusive offer for my listeners, go to www.magbreakthrough.com slash Clavin and code Clavin10 to save 10% when you try magnesium breakthrough.
One more thing, for a limited time, BioOptimizers is also giving away free bottles of their best-selling products, P30M and Mazimes with select purchases.
So go to www.magbreakthrough.com slash Claven now to get your exclusive 10% discount, plus the chance to get more than 50 bucks worth of supplements for free.
And I know what you're wondering.
You're wondering, how do you spell 10?
Or Claven, maybe.
It's K-L-A-P-A-N.
A Way of Seeing That Transforms00:15:49
All right, we're going to get to our final segment about the meaning of judge not lest you be judged.
But first, you deserve to wake up to the facts, which is why we started our newest podcast, Morning Wire, which has been topping the Apple and Spotify charts since its recent release.
It's the only daily news podcast that values your time and the truth.
And while we're working overtime to bring you the news you need to know, we need your help to keep the facts trending towards number one.
So subscribe, start listening now to Morning Wire on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and leave a five-star review if you like what you hear.
And now we're going to talk about the gospel.
All right, it's time to step out of the world of corruption a little bit and talk about the things that matter, the good stuff.
I want to do my final segment on my series about seeing the world through God's eyes.
We'll call this Judge Not 3, The Return of Michael Myers.
No, I'm making that up.
This has nothing to do with Michael Myers.
But just to refresh the first part we were talking about, this was all keyed off of a mailbag question about how we approach the idea of judging not.
Judge not lest you be judged.
And I pointed out that I believe that we judge not and we forgive and love our enemies because it helps us to see the world through God's eyes.
And Jesus says this.
He judge not, so you will be like your Father in heaven because he brings the rain and sunshine on the good and the bad alike.
So he wants us to see the world as God sees it.
And we talked about the fact that one of the ways that we start to do this, you know, Christians a lot of times talk about Christianity as if it were like one of an old-fashioned, like one-room schoolhouse where Jesus says, be like God.
And then if you're not, he's like, I told you to be like, you know, he's hitting you overhead with a stick.
You know, I told you to be like God and you're not.
But no, it's obviously, it's not something you can do overnight.
That's a process.
This is a way that we, it's a way.
That's why Jesus says, I am the way.
I am the way and the truth and the life, because it's a way we're trying to get somewhere.
And I'm just trying to talk about what, where we're trying to get and how we do it.
And that's why I believe that a lot of the things that Jesus says are part of that way, that we treat people with forgiveness.
We give charity, we treat people with love, we love our enemies.
It helps us see them as they truly are, and that actually moves us into what Jesus calls the kingdom of heaven, which is this little thing inside us, right?
It's this little thing inside us, but it grows and becomes bigger.
It's like the mustard seed that grows into a great big tree.
So it raises the question.
I mean, obviously people are the most important part of this process, and that is why we love our neighbor, and that is why we treat people like the Good Samaritan treats people, and that is why we give charity to the poor, and we let go of things.
It's all about helping us see, because our neighbor is made in God's image, and when we see him truly, we're seeing a little piece of God.
But of course, everything is the signature of God.
This is the whole idea when we say the word is made flesh.
We mean that it also means that everything, all of matter, is speaking about God's nature.
In the same way, if I write a novel, it speaks about my nature.
It tells you my vision.
It gives you a piece of my mind.
The same way the world, the God's creation, gives us a piece of his mind.
The Bible says, beautiful Psalm 19, one of the best.
The heavens declare the glory of God.
The skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day, they pour forth speech.
Night after night, they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech.
They use no words.
No sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.
Matter is language.
Matter is the language with which God speaks about his nature, and we hear it.
And it's just like words, because words, every word that I speak comes from a physical process.
My brain makes a spark, air comes up through my lungs, moves my vocal cords, the words, the air moves, you hits your ear, it's translated by your brain into speech.
But the things that I'm communicating with you are immaterial.
If I say 2 plus 2 equals 4, that has no material existence.
Unless I have two pieces of things, I can incarnate those things by having two things and two other things make four that incarnates that idea and communicates the idea, but the idea remains immaterial.
And the same with God.
Everything we see, the heavens, this wonderful leftist tears tumbler, maybe especially this leftist tears tumbler, all of it speaks of the handiwork of God, right?
So we are trying to learn how to see the world like this, to walk around.
And I mean, think about it.
Think about it.
If you saw the world like that, if you saw the world like that all the time, would you be happier or sadder?
Would you be more joyful or less?
I think the answer is obvious.
You'd be much more joyful than you are.
And this is why, by the way, this is why I don't care whether the guy next to me is gay or not, or mean or not, or greedy or not.
I don't care what he is, whether it's good or bad, whether it's sinful or not.
It's not about him because it's about the way I'm trying to see the world.
And I am trying to see the world in a way that will transform me.
Christianity changes the world as a side effect.
Its purpose is to change you, right?
Jesus did not come to change the world.
He says so.
He says, give to the poor, but the poor you'll always have with you.
The world will always be a problem, but I have overcome the world.
He is trying to change you.
And yes, that has a side effect of making the world a better place and has made the world a better place over time.
So how do we see matter itself?
What are we trying to find in matter itself that tells us this thing?
I want to talk for a minute, for a couple of minutes, about this writer, Owen Barfield.
And Owen Barfield is one of the Inklings.
He's probably the most brilliant of the Inklings.
J.R. Tolkien, who wrote Lord of the Rings, and C.S. Lewis were the Inklings, and they got together with Owen Barfield as well.
And Barfield was the most brilliant of them, the most creative of them, the most original of them, but he was the worst writer.
And you read him, and I read him.
I have to read him one sentence at a laborious time, really hard.
But one of the things that's really funny is sometimes I'll come on the show and say something to you, and then I'll pick up a copy of Barfield that I haven't read, a book of Barfield, and he'll say the same thing.
Maybe that's why I think he's so brilliant.
But no, it's because he actually shares with me a philosophy which is called romanticism.
I am essentially in a romantic, and that doesn't mean that I bring my wife flowers, although of course I do.
It means that the inner experience of human beings seems to me to be the most important thing about life on earth.
So Barfield makes this argument.
He talks about the way people saw the world before the Enlightenment, before the end of the Middle Ages.
And he talks about the way language worked back then.
So for instance, there's a word in Greece, and I'm sure I've talked about this before, a word in Greece, pneuma, which is translated as breath or as spirit.
And a lot of people who study language have said, well, what must have happened is they needed a word for breath because you could see breath.
And they said, well, it's just like the spirit because it's invisible, but it gives you life.
And therefore, breath becomes a metaphor for spirit.
And Barfield makes a very solid argument saying, no, that's not the way it works.
The way it works is that originally people saw breath and spirit as the same thing at once.
A very hard idea to get in your head.
They saw it as the same thing at once.
And then over time, as a civilization advances and as human consciousness evolves, the two things break apart.
The way we see things and what we think is an objective fact about the way we see things become separate pieces.
So it becomes breath and spirit instead of one thing, breath-spirit.
So we have this big debate about the Enlightenment.
You hear this all the time, that a lot of people, especially on the left, but also on the right, Jonah Goldberg wrote a book about it.
Steven Pinker has written a book about it, say everything was bad before the Enlightenment.
Before that, it was the Dark Ages.
So you can even tell in the language, which was invented at the time, it is propaganda language.
It was the Dark Ages, and then we had the Enlightenment.
Everything got lighter.
But people like me, Romantics, believe that, yes, things got better after the Enlightenment.
We invented science.
It was wonderful.
We invented a world that could change and all this stuff.
But also, everything comes at a price and we lost something.
Now, I've talked about the rainbow.
I'm going to try and bring all this together if I can.
When we talk about something that is both breath and spirit at the same time, I've talked about the rainbow.
And I just recently read this in Barfield, even though I've said it before on the air.
The rainbow is caused by the sun hitting the prism, water, and by the human eye perceiving the rainbow.
There is no rainbow without the human eye.
There is no rainbow without the human eye.
Now, each of us may see the colors in the rainbow a little bit different, but we all see the rainbow.
We have a limited ability to create the rainbow.
We create the rainbow by seeing it, but it's a limited ability because we can't see a MAC truck because then we're just nuts or a leftist.
So rainbows exist when we see them, but that's also true of a tree, right?
A tree doesn't look like a tree until a human being sees it, right?
When we see it, it becomes a tree.
The same is true of light.
Light can be either a wave or a particle.
It's not until it is perceived that it becomes one or the other.
Quantum, the smallest particles there are, they don't have a location.
They don't have a velocity until we decide what that is.
A tree falls.
You know, the old expression, when a tree falls in a forest, if there's no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?
The answer is no, it makes the makings of a sound.
It gives you the makings of a sound, but not until we hear it.
The way we perceive the creation is part of creation.
We are creating the world all the time, right?
It's a limited part of creation.
We can only create out of the materials we have.
If I call you by a different pronoun, it will not change your sex.
If you feel like a different sex, it does not change your sex.
But if I love you, that changes the way I see you and it changes the way you are in my life, right?
So we have a certain amount of ability to create the world all the time.
So before the Enlightenment, people saw spirit and matter as one thing.
And because of that, it led them to say, oh, this person is mentally ill, therefore he must be possessed by demons.
Or there's lightning, and that must mean that demons are sending the lightning.
And this led to a lot of problems.
When they would have lightning, they would send some poor monk up into the church tower to ring bells and scare off the demons.
And of course, the lightning would hit the highest point and kill the poor monk, right?
So that didn't work out so well, right?
And so when you see the world imbued with spirit, it can lead to superstition because you're not sure what you're seeing.
And with the Enlightenment, one of the reasons we celebrate the Enlightenment, the rise of science and the rise of objective thinking, came the idea that there was an objective truth beyond our perception.
And no, lightning was caused by electrical charges, right?
And a better thing to do than sending the poor monk into the tower would be to put a lightning rod.
And that is a great advantage over dead monks.
Better to have a lightning rod than a dead monk, right?
So that makes you feel like, yeah, this is a great thing.
We have now moved forward from the dark ages into a period of light.
But the thing is, all those things that we're seeing, right?
The electricity, the germs that cause disease, the brain misfunction that might cause mental illness, those things only exist when we see them.
There is no such thing as a disease unless you're experiencing it.
It's not a disease.
It's not a disease to the bacteria.
It's only a disease because of your experience of that.
And because we, who are romantics, believe in the human experience, believe that this is the important thing about life, that this is what God has created.
And there's a lot of scientific reason.
We'll talk about that next week with Stephen Myers.
There's a lot of scientific reason to believe this to be the case.
Because all of the universe has moved to create life and conscious life and conscious life that can understand the world, we believe it's important that what it's important how we see things.
So the people who thrive on the Enlightenment say, oh, wow, that was really dark before they saw it as, you know, mental illness was a demon.
Now we know that mental illness is a brain malfunction.
So now we know something objective and those other things were superstition.
And that is why you hear someone, for instance, like Ben Shapiro will say, facts don't care about your feelings.
When Ben says that, what Ben is doing is he is defending modernism, post-Enlightenment, against postmodernism, which says, since all those things were just feelings, we're in complete control of them.
Since everything that was not objective truth was an emotional truth, then we can just change anything we want.
We can say, I can say I'm a woman, poof, I'm a woman.
I can just say that abortion is right and abortion will be morally right.
After all, what is morality but something that exists in the human mind?
And Ben is saying, no, modernism had it right.
There was a truth, but we're just searching for truth.
Ben is right about this.
What I'm talking about is something beyond modernism that is not postmodernism.
I'm talking about returning to seeing the world as the creation of God, but not seeing it with the superstitions of the Middle Ages and before and the ancients, right?
A new way of seeing the world the way Jesus wants us to see the world.
And how do we do that?
Well, we practice it, just like seeing human beings differently.
And the way we practice it is through communion.
We take communion, we participate in a ceremony that transforms bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.
It's not an accident that it was at the end of the Middle Ages that Protestants started to say, well, it's not really changing into the body and blood of Christ.
It's just a symbol.
And what I'm arguing is that those two things are the same thing, that we have the capacity to see, to taste, to feel the body and blood of Jesus Christ in bread and wine.
And we have the capacity to see it everywhere, to see God's handiwork everywhere.
It is something we work on.
That's why when I go, that's why the liturgy is so important to me.
That's why the Mass is so important to me.
When I go into the Mass, I don't just sit there and mutter the words.
I focus.
I put myself out of my head.
A very difficult thing to do.
You really have to get an eviction notice to put myself out of my head because it's a big self.
It's a big head.
You got to get out of there, clear your mind, and start to participate in the ceremony.
Ceremonies are the way we act out knowledge.
We act out the knowledge of God.
When you're charitable people, when you love people, when you forgive people, you might say, well, I'm really a hypocrite because deep down I don't love this person.
I'm not forgiving this person.
I don't feel like giving charity.
It's not hypocrisy.
It's practice.
You practice something until you become it.
And the same is true with seeing the body and blood of Jesus Christ in bread and wine and seeing the glory of God in the heavens and seeing the living spirit in everything that's made, the language of God in matter.
All of that takes practice.
And that's what we're trying to do.
And that's what I believe Christianity is.
Christianity is, you know, when it first started, Christianity was called the way.
It is a way of seeing.
It is a way of seeing that transforms you.
And yes, that will transform the world.
But the first thing is for you to start walking in the way and practicing the way.
I hope some of this has been helpful.
We will come back and talk about communion another time.
But I think next week we'll get back more to modern culture.
All right.
I know that many of you out there have problems.
Way of Seeing00:09:06
You write to me.
You tell me that you have problems.
You say, why don't I care about your problems?
It is because I know they're about to go away.
We're about to solve them all because it's time for the mailbag.
I got a big truck just in case I need to round up criminal illegals and take them home myself.
Yep, I just said that.
Yeah!
I told Knowles to keep that truck in his garage.
All right, from Alex, my question is a little risque.
My fiancé and I are both Christians.
However, our sex life is different.
My question is, is kink, such as BDSM, okay in a relationship between two consenting, God-fearing adults?
Well, first of all, is it okay with me?
You know, obviously it's none of my business, but you asked me my opinion, so I'm going to give you my opinion.
And BDSM, for those of you who are not paying attention, is bondage and sadomasochism.
So what two married people, let's say, you're not married, but you're engaged, but what two married people do in the privacy of their bedroom, they want to dress up, they want to play games, they want to play fantasy games and delight one another that way.
Again, it's nobody's business if it doesn't make them feel degraded, if it doesn't make them feel separated from themselves and from each other, if it brings them closer together, it really is nobody's business what they do.
And I don't think that that's going to be the problem you face when you stand before the throne of God, although I'm not God, so you're taking this on faith.
But that's the way I see it.
Now, here's the other part of this, all right?
First of all, I want to make clear when I talk about this.
BDSM, I can be a little bit innocent about this stuff.
When I say this, you know, I picture dressing up and using, you know, fur-covered handcuffs and snapping towels at one another, you know, giving each other a playful smack.
If you're putting out cigarettes in each other's flesh or leaving true bruises that remain, if you're causing injury, if you're injuring your partner, no, that's not all right.
It's not all right at all.
It's a sickness.
You're doing something wrong.
It's not the way you should be behaving with one another.
If you're playing, if you're role-playing, that is a different thing.
But I just want to be clear about that.
I think that if you're hurting one another, you really need to get help.
That's actually a bad thing to do.
But if you're playing and you're goofing off and you're doing fantasy stuff, I think it's largely harmless.
The only thing that I would add is that if you have a true fetish, which means that you really can't make love without doing these things, you really have no sex life except this.
It's probably related to something in your past.
It's probably related to some trauma in your past.
And insofar as that's true, it is essentially imprisoning you in that traumatic past.
And it is separating you from the person that you're with.
Because one of the things about making love is you should be present while you're making love.
You should be focused on the person you're with.
You should be focused on the experience that you're having.
And if you're locked in some past trauma, that's not going on.
So those are things that you might want to think about.
You might want to think about even while you're playing and fantasizing, you might want to think about along the way, making sure you branch out, making sure you move forward, making sure you move out of the past, making sure you're present with each other, and making sure that what you're doing is loving and advances your love and is not just there to lock you in to something that you learned in a bad moment long ago.
You know, while I'm talking about sex, I just want to take this.
I know I answered this question once before, but it keeps coming up.
So I want to say this is from Candace.
She talks about several months ago I got a letter in the mailbag from a woman whose husband had some sort of sexual perversion.
He was humiliating her and she said it was really bad.
And she said in your answer, you nonchalantly recommended porn as a potential solution for avoiding that perversion in the bedroom.
And she says, I haven't been able to listen to you since as a Christian.
How can you recommend porn as a solution to spiritual bondage?
A saving knowledge of Jesus Christ and the accompanying power of the Holy Spirit is enough to free us from sexual perversion.
You are selling our Lord short in this case.
I'd love some clarification.
I clarified this before, but because people keep writing to me about it, I want to just mention at the time, go back and listen to it, because of the nature of her husband as she described him, he was not willing to listen to her when she said, you are hurting and humiliating me.
He would not listen to her.
I said that I thought that this was a tragic situation that was not going to have a good outcome.
And I thought that the important thing was that she stopped being humiliated and stop being hurt.
And I did not care if he had to use porn to get rid of whatever fetish he had as long as she was safe and she was not being degraded and humiliated.
And I stand by that.
Obviously, I agree with you.
Obviously, it would be far, far better if he would embrace Jesus Christ.
But just because I say it and just because it makes me feel good to say it, and just because it makes you feel good to say it, doesn't mean it's going to happen in a tragic situation.
The whole thing about tragedy is that it's tragic.
That's why they call it tragedy, okay?
And so that was, I was responding in a tragic way, hoping, and said so, hoping to get her out of a situation in which she was being humiliated and degraded when having read her letter, I did not believe her husband was going to be responsive to any other plea.
So that's what that was about.
From Danielle, what is your opinion on the saying money can't buy you happiness?
How do you go about measuring your life successes with the outside world and your career?
Well, first of all, you know, the question about money can't buy happiness, it's very different to say that money can alleviate the pain of not having money and saying money can buy happiness.
I mean, every study shows that money can't buy happiness.
When you have enough money, you stop feeling the pain of not having money.
And that's a happy thing, and that's really important.
But if you have become addicted to money, you're going to ultimately not have the things that you want in life.
And you see people, they get obsessed with it.
They get obsessed with being on the top of the list in the Fortune 500 or whatever.
And that is, it's a wasted life.
In my opinion, that's a wasted life.
I would feel that I was wasting my life.
The day when I realized that I had broken through and was no longer a struggling writer, but was a writer who could depend that I would have enough money to put my kids into the schools I wanted them to have and give my wife the things that I wanted her to have.
You know, that was a happy moment for me.
So there's certainly happiness to that when you get above the level of struggle to a level of ease.
But after that, it has been shown that, no, that doesn't really increase your happiness to have more and more money.
Your second question, which is a really interesting question, how do you go about measuring your life successes with the outside world and your career?
And I think it's just the same way as measuring anything.
It's teleology.
You have to know why you're doing what you're doing, what you're trying to achieve.
So there have been many, many moments in my life doing what I do, and the only thing that I was trying to achieve was to create something beautiful and get it into the world where people could find it.
And I might have known, many times I have known, that a beautiful, a truly beautiful thing, in my estimation, that I had created was not going to attract a lot of people and was not going to make a lot of money because its beauty was of a kind that was not immediately appealing and was, it might have been more intellectual.
It might have just been more off the beaten path, whatever it was.
I wanted to create that thing and I wanted to create it and I wanted to get it out there.
I didn't want to create it for myself.
I wasn't creating it for myself.
I was creating it because that is who I am and what I do.
And then I wanted to get it out there where people could see it.
And when I succeeded at that, I was happy.
And I didn't think, dang, you know, I wish they had given me more money for that because I knew that wasn't going to happen.
I knew I had done it.
And I felt really happy and could measure that as a success.
Other times, I've done things for money.
I needed money just like everybody else, as David Mammet said.
That's why they call it money.
If I did something, you know, that made me a lot of money and wasn't dishonest and was a fair, honest piece of work, then that was a success in that regard.
So you should know why you're doing what you're doing and what you expect to get out of it and what you want to do with what you get out of it.
And I think that that is going to make you a lot happier than worrying about racking up your money.
You're not in competition with anybody.
You're not in competition with anybody.
I mean, you're in competition with, your business may be in competition with somebody.
You may have to do something better than the guy next to you to have a successful business.
But you don't have to sit around and say, well, I have more money than that guy.
I'm better than he is.
Because if you've ever seen people who have a lot of money, they're not better than you are, right?
People who understand what they're doing and are doing it with passion and love and are doing it out of passion and out of love are going to be the happiest people you ever meet.
It really is an amazing thing, what it is like to love your work and to love what you're doing and to know why you're doing it.
That will make you happier than just about anything else.
I think that's it.
I think that's all that I have time for.
Yeah, everything else is too complicated, so I'm going to stop right there.
However, however, there are rumors that I will be back.
It's not going to matter to you because you are entering the Clavenless Week.
Passion And Love Make Happiness00:01:55
There'll be wailing, there'll be gnashing of teeth.
If you're an all-access member, you'll get to see me then.
If you subscribe to the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel, you get some exclusive content there.
For the rest of you, you're doomed.
You know, this is the end.
And so I want you to just tell your children, tell anybody who might be left behind, who might survive the Clavenless League Week, that we will be back on Friday.
And I will be Andrew Clavin at that time, as I am right this moment.
And this will be as it is today, The Andrew Klavan Show.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, basically wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also, remember to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show, the Matt Walsh Show, and the Michael Knoll Show.
Thank you for listening.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Lisa Bacon.
Supervising Producer, Mathis Glover.
Executive Producer, Jeremy Boring.
Our technical director is Austin Stevens.
Production Manager, Pavel Wadowski.
Editor and Associate Producer, Danny D'Amico.
Lead audio mixer, Mike Kormina.
Animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Hair and makeup, Cherokee Hart.
Production coordinator, McKenna Waters.
And our production assistant is Jacob Falash.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2021.
Two white students are kicked out of a study hall at Arizona State University for the crime of being white.
A mother at a school board meeting confronts the school board over the heinous and pornographic books that are being distributed to students in the district.
Australian police are now firing rubber bullets indiscriminately into crowds of protesters.
And finally, a woman on the subway is offended by pornographic OKCupid ads.