All Episodes
Oct. 2, 2021 - Andrew Klavan Show
01:39:24
Ep. 1050 - Freedomland Becomes Fantasyland

Andrew Clavin’s Freedomland Becomes Fantasyland dissects Hollywood’s "woke" X-Men rebranding as a satire of performative activism, mocking gender-neutral pronouns and corporate hypocrisy while contrasting it with Norm Macdonald’s unfiltered truth-telling. He slams leftist policies—from $3.5T Biden spending to election fraud claims—as immoral fantasies, dismissing Arizona’s audit as incompetent and vaccine hesitancy as distrust of media lies like masks or Wuhan lab origins. The episode ties these themes to horror, framing transgenderism as a "demented" departure from biology via Psycho parallels, then pivots to Stephen Meyer’s God Hypothesis, arguing science now supports intelligent design despite atheist resistance. Clavin concludes by exposing self-deception in custody battles and Hollywood relationships, warning that reality—whether in politics or personal life—demands empirical honesty over ideological delusion. [Automatically generated summary]

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X-Men Relabeled 00:02:43
Marvel is considering changing the name of the X-Men films in order to be more woke and inclusive.
According to reports, the company is currently reviewing other possible titles such as X-Movies No One Wants to Watch Anymore and X-Studio Executive Looking for Job in Real Estate after this completely avoidable debacle.
Marvel began contemplating taking the superhero franchise in a new woke direction after several executives at the company snorted some blow and decided they were making too much money.
They had originally considered just raking all the X-Men profits into a big pile and setting it on fire, but that apparently would have violated anti-pollution laws, and so the company began to look for other ways to be unbearably stupid without damaging the environment.
As one Hollywood insider put it, quote, the movie industry wants very much to make the world a better place.
But to do that, we'd have to stop sexually harassing our interns, diddling underage boys at Encino pool parties, and selling perversion and immorality to the nation's impressionable young.
And of course, that's not going to happen, so we'll do this meaningless language crap instead, unquote.
The central problem with calling X-Men X-Men lies in the fact that according to woke philosophy, X-Men would now be women, unless they were X-Women, in which case they would be men until they decided to become women again, when they would be X-Men and the title could remain the same.
Even so, many members of the X-Men audience have noticed that some of the X-Men have strangely alluring shapes in their skin-tight costumes, though no one is willing to say what these oddly stimulating shapes might mean, since some of these inexplicably arousing and crevaceous superheroes might not want to be referred to as she or her, but might instead prefer to use such pronouns as painfully deluded or wack-a-doodle-doo.
One person who agrees with the X-Men name change is skin-tight costume-wearing actress Lola Vavoom, who plays the role of X-Men superhero Skin Tight, whose superpower is filling out a skin-tight costume.
Ms. Vavoom says, quote, it's about time Hollywood stopped sexualizing women.
That way, I won't have a career anymore and can maybe get married and have some kids.
Who knows?
I might even learn to cook and give up antidepressants, unquote.
As Marvel continued to consider the name change and search for other ways to take away every last ounce of fun and pleasure out of the superhero franchise, screenwriters scrambled to come up with new woke storylines.
One scenario, for instance, has Commissioner Gordon piercing the night sky over Gotham City with his new virtue signal, causing a group of cartoonishly one-dimensional characters in outlandish outfits to come out of their fortresses of solitude and use different words to describe things before returning to Encino to diddle underage boys.
Why Not Super Beats Heart? 00:03:05
And please don't write me emails.
I already know that I'm not describing the Marvel universe.
I'm describing the real one.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Shop.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped C-Topsy, the world is it easing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing!
Oh, hurrah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hoorah!
All right, the vast right-wing conspiracy known as Clavinon continues, and I'm about to explain how we on the right are literally allowing the left to talk us into killing ourselves and how leftist fantasies are killing everything else that's worthwhile.
Plus, Halloween is coming.
I'll tell you the best scary movie you've never seen.
I'll bet you've never seen it.
Plus, the mailbag is full of sexual predators and desperate divorcees, so it sounds like a 1940s detective novel.
This would be the perfect time, the perfect time.
There's no other good time to go on Apple Podcasts and subscribe to the show and give us a five-star rating.
It really is helpful to us.
It really does help the show move forward.
You can also go on YouTube and subscribe to my personal YouTube channel, the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel.
If you press that little bell after you subscribe, you'll hear ringing in your ears.
Probably forever.
A doctor can help with that.
But if you leave a comment and it's sufficiently bigoted and nasty and cruel and really demeans people, they'll read it on the air because it'll fit right in with the rest of the show.
Today's comment is from Alexander Carter, who says, I called the IRS today to handle some business.
They asked how I was doing.
I said, I'm just laughing my way through the fall of the Republic.
They said, wait, do you know how to spell Clavin?
I said, yes.
And now I'm being audited.
Thanks a lot.
All right, we're going to talk about the dangerous lunatic fantasies of the left in just a minute.
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You'll be so alert, it'll occur to you to ask, how do I spell Clavin?
Living in a Fantasy World 00:15:43
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
All right.
You know, I want to start by talking a little bit.
I've talked about him before, but the comedian who recently died, Norm McDonald, I talked about this a little bit, how people were saying all this stuff about him, about how he was the funniest man who ever lived and he was just great.
It was kind of what you might call eulogistic hyperbole.
Somebody dies and you sort of talk about him like this, because of course there are other funny people.
But the reason Norm McDonald inspired such passionate devotion was because he told the truth.
He told the truth as an artist to the point where, because we live in this corporate world where the arts are so expensive, movies, television, video games are all so expensive that they require huge corporations to make them, the corporate mindset has taken over.
So now if you watch the comedians, so-called comedians on late night TV, they all have the exact same opinion.
They all say the exact same thing.
No one can veer anywhere to either side because the corporations rule and the corporations include those corporate thinkers, thinkers, who cancel people when they say things that they don't like.
So Norm McDonald had less of a career than he would have had had he towed the line.
And that is what makes him so special.
And that is what makes his humor so startling.
So I just want to play a couple of clips because they illustrate what I'm going to be talking about, which is that we're living in a fantasy world and it's killing us.
Here's just a couple of brief clips of Norm McDonald.
A down-and-out OJ Simpson, depressed that all of his money-making ideas have failed, has decided to go back to doing what he does best, killing people.
A new book claims that Madonna once smeared peanut butter all over John F. Kennedy Jr.'s body and then licked it up.
Which just goes to show you, Madonna's a whore.
This week at a secret ceremony in Australia, Michael Jackson was married for the second time.
Asked what makes his new bride special.
The king of pop said, quote, she has taught me about the power of imagination, like imagining that a grown woman is a 10-year-old boy.
You know he's a homosexual pedophile, right?
You understand?
I mean, there was a comedian, Patton Oswald, he told me, I think the worst part of the Cosby thing was the hypocrisy.
And I disagree.
You disagree with that?
Yeah.
I thought it was the raping.
What makes us genius is not that it's so incredibly witty or so well-written.
It's just that it's absolutely true, and it's true on two counts.
It's morally true, and it's true about reality.
In other words, it takes away, it strips away the veneer of celebrity and the kind of starry-eyed way that people look at a celebrity.
O.J. is a killer.
He's a killer.
It doesn't matter how fast he runs, how great he is on a football field.
It doesn't matter if the president of NBC West is playing golf with him and doesn't want Norm to make those jokes.
That's what he is.
That's who he is.
Madonna is using her body and sexuality to sell records is not some kind of artistic innovation.
It's the oldest profession there is.
I love that line about Michael Jackson.
You know he's a homosexual pedophile, don't you?
Because we cover this stuff up and we kind of drape it in the tinsel of celebrity and we forget there is a moral universe and that moral universe is intimately connected to reality, to the real world.
And that's one of the reasons I think the joke about Bill Cosby is so important because if you look at what Bill Cosby did, he's charged with, he was convicted of drugging women and then having sex with them while they were unconscious.
Think about that for a minute.
These were probably not virgins.
They were probably women who'd had sex before, so they weren't averse to having sex.
They might have even been willing to have sex with Bill Cosby if he had asked them.
Even if he had said to them, you know what I'd like to do?
I'd like to drug you and have sex with you while you're asleep.
Some of them might have said, okay, if that's what turns you on, they might have done it.
The reason it's a crime, the reason we identify it as evil, the reason we know in our hearts that it's evil is because he took away their free will.
So all the college kids who sit around and say, oh, there's no such thing as free will, and the philosophers and the scientists who tell you there's no such thing as free will, they know in their hearts there is because they understand that this is rape.
They understand that the worst thing about this is not the hypocrisy, as Norm says.
It's the raping.
The thing about morality, real morality, true morality, is that it always touches off the real world.
It always illuminates the real world.
And in fact, the fact is, there is no morality without reality.
And it is amazing that we are living now in a time, at a time when there is more information available at our fingertips than ever before.
I can reach into my phone and I have more knowledge in there than Aristotle ever had in his whole life, than anybody has ever had in his whole life.
And yet, we know less about the real world than we ever have because there's no one in authority left at this moment to tell us the story of our times, to tell us the facts in a way that we can trust because the authorities are corrupt, because the corporations and the government and the academy and Hollywood and the media are all basically in a conspiracy of interest.
They all want the same thing and they're all willing to lie to get what they want.
Now, I blame the left for this in one sense, and really in one sense only.
They've won.
They own the media.
They own the news and entertainment media and the schools, which is a form of media.
And that means that we are all enveloped in their fantasy world.
I saw this cut of Russell Brand, another comedian, who is a leftist.
He's a left-winger, but he's a smart guy, and he seems to be an honest guy and a seeker after truth.
And he suddenly realizes, remember we were talking last week, I believe it was, about one of the Durham indictments and how it showed that the Russian collusion attacks on the first years of Donald Trump's presidency that so upset the first years of Donald Trump's presidency was all a hoax, all a setup job by the Democrats.
Russell Brand's never heard this before.
We've been saying it since it started.
We were talking about it from the very beginning.
But because the left has perfected this envelope of lies, he had no idea.
Here's a cut of his discovery.
The world moves so fast there's almost no time for history.
It seems like years ago that we were hearing that Trump was colluding with Russia, that he wouldn't have won the election without Russia, that his whole presidency was a kind of putin plot.
Well, there's now serious evidence that it was the Clinton campaign and Hillary Clinton acolytes that were directly involved in the generation of what has proven to be a conspiracy.
Untrue.
Think about how much media you watched.
Me, a person who I think broadly speaking is from the left, a liberal, certainly not a Trump supporting Republican with respect to those of you that are, I find myself in awe, gobsmacked, flabbergasted and startled by these revelations that Russia Gate was a democratic conspiracy.
See, we were talking about all the time, but their envelope is unpierceable, especially if you tend toward the left, which, as he says, in all honesty, he does.
So he's enveloped in this fantasy.
Why is it a fantasy?
It's a fantasy for the simple reason that what the left wants doesn't work and is immoral.
It doesn't work and it's immoral, and they can't accept that, so they have to fantasize, they have to lie.
Socialism, just to use it as a word, we call it Marxism, call it communism.
It's all the same thing.
Their goal of top-down governance and top-down control of the economy fails everywhere and it's immoral.
It fails because individuals make better choices than experts.
A guy who makes pencils knows how to make pencils.
A guy who's an expert knows how to be an expert.
He don't know nothing about pencils.
And so when each one of us does his best to better his life and works to better his life, all the wealth goes up.
Everybody gets richer as people have under capitalism.
It's virtually eliminated true poverty in the world and it's on track to eliminate true poverty in the world.
But when experts control things from the top down, everything falls to pieces because they have no idea how to make a pencil.
They just don't know.
All they know is how things are supposed to work.
It's immoral, and this is the important point, it's immoral because it does not exist in reality.
Socialism exists in a world where there is such a thing as a beneficial state.
There's this kind of weird entity called the happy, nice, good state that wants your good.
That doesn't exist.
The only thing there is is schmucks with power, the CCP, corrupt clowns with power.
That's the only thing there is.
And when you live in a country that has been controlled as ours has been controlled for a couple of centuries by the Constitution, so their power is limited, they act benignly because they're forced to act benignly.
Now that our Constitution is beginning to fray, beginning to collapse, progressives have eaten it away, they're starting to be what they always were, what all powerful people become, which is corrupt, overbearing, and authoritarian.
So that's why socialism doesn't work and why it's immoral because it operates, it gives all this power to corrupt clowns in power.
And so it's immoral.
It failed in the Soviet Union, failed in Scandinavia.
So to push this socialism, to believe in it, you have to live like Bernie Sanders does in a fantasy world.
I believe we should be more like Norway.
Norway is not socialist.
Oh, well, I don't know anything about Norway.
So why are you telling us we should be like Norway?
Because he's living in a fantasy world.
So let's start with the left and what they're doing.
You know, as we're speaking, Joe Biden has just announced that he's going to go to the Hill and get the negotiations moving.
They're stuck on this, on these, they want this, it's like $5 trillion worth of spending.
It's really much, much more than that.
But there's two bills.
One is an infrastructure bill.
The other is basically a socialism bill.
transforms this country into a European socialist state.
And it's the left who's holding these bills up.
But I don't want to argue about the, you know, Joe Manchin is the guy.
He's the guy, a senator from West Virginia, so he's from a red state.
He can't go that far.
He has a deal that he made with Chuck Schumer.
He produced the paper where they promised him it wouldn't go over $1.5 trillion, but they won't stick to their deals because they don't have to because they're the left, so they're going to force everybody to do it.
And it's the left that's holding things up.
All right.
That's not the point.
I don't want to get into the high weeds about the argument itself.
I just want to get into the high weeds about how they understand this horrible, horrible mess of a bill.
This bill is over 2,500 pages, so nobody knows what's in it, right?
Nobody knows what's in it.
It's full of all kinds of things, immigration amnesty, destroying businesses by fining them for not getting people vaccinated.
It's just an absolute disaster of a bill.
But I want you to listen to what Biden is saying when they say, well, this is going to cost $3.5 trillion.
And as I say, it is going to cost much more than that.
But he, I mean, we're talking about fantasy.
We're talking about reality.
He came out this week and said, no, no, no, it's not going to cost anything at all.
This is cut one.
We talk about price tags.
It is zero price tag on the debt.
We're paying.
We're going to pay for everything we spend.
So they say it's not, you know, people, understandably, well, you know, it started off at $6 trillion, now it's $3.5 trillion, now is it going to be 2.9?
It's going to be zero.
Zero.
Because in that plan that I put forward, and I said from the outset, I said, I'm running to change the dynamic of how the economy grows.
I'm tired of trickle down.
The trillionaires and billionaires are doing very, very well.
You all know, you've all reported it.
And in the middle of this crisis, but hardworking people and middle-class people are getting hurt.
And so I provide for, for example, a tax cut.
If you have a child, you get a refundable tax credit.
It's reduced hunger in America by 40%, literally for children.
You have the whole notion of being able to provide for daycare for your children, getting people back to school, et cetera.
It's all paid for.
It's all paid for.
But a lot of these are flat tax cuts that exist within my proposal.
And they're being calculated as if the cost of the child care tax credit is a cost to the government.
It's not.
It's reducing taxes.
Reducing taxes.
I know that's a long cut, but I have to play the whole thing to get all the juicy goodness of the dishonesty and self-deception.
He says it's going to add nothing to the debt.
And that, of course, is completely untrue.
Nothing the government has ever done has added nothing to the debt.
We're overspending.
We're out of money as it is.
But he's basically saying it's going to cost nothing because the trillionaires, because he can't say millionaires because he is a millionaire.
He says the billionaires and the trillionaires.
There are zero number of trillionaires on Earth.
There are zero numbers of trillionaires on Earth.
Probably the richest man in the world is probably Jeff Bezos.
He's got something like, last time I looked, $120 billion.
A trillion is $1,000 billion.
So he's 10 times less than what he has, more than what he has.
So there are no trillionaires.
He's saying it's all going to be tax cuts.
It's all tax cuts.
But how is it going to be tax cuts and not be paid for?
And why is it not being paid for if you're taxing us?
In other words, when he says it's no cost to the government, that doesn't mean it's no cost to you.
It doesn't mean it's no cost to me.
Of course it's a cost.
But so you see, you know, this is insanity.
I mean, it's just a complete, you know, wandering around in the starry heavens talking nonsense.
This is a complete change.
And he says, I'm going to change the way the economy grows.
I'm going to change the way trees grow.
The economy grows because people say, you know what?
I want to make my life better.
So I'm going to build something and I'm going to need your help.
So I'm going to hire you to help me do it.
That's how the economy grows.
There is no other way for an economy to grow.
There's no way on earth that any economy has ever grown except taking away from people what they've made and saying, well, the economy of Washington has grown, but the rest of the economy is in big trouble.
So you think, okay, so they're living in a fantasy world.
These politicians are corrupt.
They're dishonest.
Maybe they think this is true.
Who knows?
But at least we have a media, right, that's going to come and enlighten us.
At least we have a media that's paging through this 2,500 page document, is finding what's inside it and trying to educate us about the way an economy works.
So for instance, on CNN, they have Washington Post reporter Catherine Rample, who is their economic commentator.
She's their economic commentator.
And she's on with Ms. Brian Stelter.
And I always want to be careful with Ms. Brian Stelter not to misgender him because remember during COVID, Brian Stelter came out and said that he had missed a deadline because he had to go to bed and have a good cry, okay?
And just follow the science.
No one with testicles has ever done that in the entire history of the world.
So we call him, we don't want to misgender him.
We call him Ms. Brian Stelter.
And he's asking the tough questions of economic reporter Catherine Rample.
Cut two.
Why is the number misleading?
Why is that 3.5 trillion figure misleading?
Because it doesn't really represent anything.
It's this weird shorthand that's been used.
But in fact, the bill itself will not cost $3.5 trillion in the sense that it will be entirely or at least partly paid for.
So the actual cost in terms of deficits will be smaller than that, perhaps even zero, although I think that's unlikely.
And it's not even, you know, fully spending.
It's not really right to call it a $3.5 trillion spending bill because there's probably about a trillion dollars of tax cuts in it, too.
So they're going to cut all the taxes, but it's all going to be paid for because there's trillionaires who don't exist.
So that's our press.
That is our press.
Ring Alarm Debate 00:11:47
I mean, I don't know whether that woman is an idiot or a cartoon character or just living in a Disney world where the economy works a different way than it's worked forever everywhere on earth.
I have no idea.
But she's there economically because we can't trust the press.
And then we, you know, the reporters go and they ask Jen Pisaki and they say to Jen Pesaki, you know, Jen Pisaki, when you raise taxes, they keep saying we're not going to raise taxes on anybody who makes under $400,000.
And people say, well, you know, you're going to raise, they're contemplating a huge raise in corporate taxes.
Let me remind you, during the Obama administration, they did that.
All the corporations took their money and left the country.
They took their money and put it offshore.
They weren't paying any more taxes.
They weren't paying any of that, but they weren't creating jobs either, which is why under Obama, the recovery was so slow.
Trump came in.
He cut taxes.
He cut regulations on corporations.
All the money came flooding back.
Minorities being hired.
We had a booming economy until COVID because of Trump, because Trump did that.
So now people are saying, well, if you raise taxes on a corporation, people, ordinary people, pay those taxes, right?
The company is there to make money.
They're selling an X for $10.
You charge them more in taxes.
They raise the price to $11.
It's a tax on you.
Corporations don't pay corporate taxes.
You pay them.
Listen to what Jen Pisaki says.
She says that shouldn't happen.
I want to ask you about what Republicans are pointing to in the analysis from the Joint Committee on Taxation.
They say, according to, if I've read the chart correctly, more than 16% of taxpayers would see their taxes increase under the bill that's approved by the House Ways and Means Committee.
Will the president sign that bill Is it coming out of that committee or will he insist on the changes so that he will maintain his commitment that taxes won't go up on people making $400,000 a year?
I have not looked at the document or the report that you have put out.
Obviously, the president, or that you have referenced, I should say, that the Republicans put out.
Obviously, the president's commitment remains not raising taxes for anyone making less than $400,000 a year.
There are some, and I'm not sure if this is the case in this report, who argue that in the past, companies have passed on these costs to consumers.
I'm not sure if that's the argument being made in this report.
We feel that that's unfair and absurd, and the American people would not stand for that.
But I will take a closer look at this report and get to a more substantive response.
It's absurd and unfair, and that people won't stand for it.
Where do they think the money comes from?
Where do they think the money comes from?
When they talk about we're going to grow the economy, how does that happen?
You take away the money from the people who created the wealth.
You give it to people who are not creating the wealth.
God love them, you know, but they're working.
They're living off the wealth that other people are creating.
Where does that money come from?
So you tax the corporations who are there to make money.
They raise prices.
It's not like it shouldn't happen.
It's absurd.
It's unfair.
It will happen.
It will definitely, definitely happen unless you put on price controls and then everybody goes broke.
We've seen this.
This is what happens in socialism.
So why are they talking about this?
Nancy Pelosi puts it perfectly.
She tells you exactly what your problem is when you start worrying about the fact that they're spending too much money and they're taking money away from the people who make the money.
That's not going to grow anything.
It's going to drive our country into the kind of bankruptcy that places like the Soviet Union and Greece have seen.
And all throughout Scandinavia, when they went socialist, they went, oh, this isn't working.
They went back in every place but Bernie Sanders' imagination.
She explains why it's wrong of you to talk about facts and figures.
This is Cut 15.
This will be paid for.
So when some say, oh, well, what about inflation?
It will be paid for.
And that's the beauty of it by having those in our economy and society who have not paid their fair share, paying their fair share.
So again, the Senate and the House, those who are not in full agreement with the presidency, right?
Let's see what our value is.
Let's not talk about numbers and dollars.
Let's talk about values.
That's it in a nutshell.
That is exactly what we're talking about.
Let's talk about values.
My values are that companies shouldn't do what they're going to do.
My values are that money should come from where it doesn't come from.
My values are that the economy should run in a way no economy has ever run before.
So what do you do when the company says, you know what, I'm getting out of America because the taxes are too high on movie.
You've got to build a wall to keep them in, right?
What do you do when people say, you know, this isn't working?
I can't get any bread.
I'm standing online to get bread.
You just make them disappear.
You know, this is how you wind up with the Soviet Union, by lying about reality and imposing a morality that will not work in the real world.
There is no morality without reality.
You know, you can take people's money away and spend it on what you want instead of what they want.
You will break the world.
You will break the whole world.
And we've been so rich so long that we haven't seen the fact that we're now not rich at all.
We're plunged in debt.
We're going to go into worse debt.
The great society has been a failure.
It will continue to be a failure.
This is the great society on steroids, and so it will drive us down on steroids because they will not apply values that work in the real world.
They're living in a fantasy.
And this is also killing us on the right.
Coming up, we're going to talk about how the left is talking us into killing ourselves.
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So this brings me to a subject that is going to make you angry at me, right?
Because I'm going to talk about dumb stuff the right is doing.
It's very understandable that conservatives are doing this.
You're swathed in this envelope of lies.
Just like Russell Brand, we all, they own the media.
Even if you're listening to right-wing media, they own the media.
They own Hollywood.
They own the Academy.
They're schooling your children.
You cannot get away from this absolute bubble of lies that the left is creating because their ideas don't work and are immoral and they can't face that, right?
They cannot face the history of socialism, so they're lying, and we are swathed in that envelope of lies.
And being conservative, I think we are naturally reactive.
We react to things.
Conservatives are trying to defend something, so we wait until there's a threat to that something, and then we react.
Conservatism, to some degree, is a defensive position because it's defending our traditions.
And that's why we're always losing.
That's why we're always behind, right?
And that's why I argue that American conservatives should be in favor of progress and change, but progress and change according to our great traditions.
So what the left does is they're the ones who are always choosing where the problems are.
Oh, the problem is race.
The problem is gender.
The problem is this.
And we don't do that.
We don't say, no, no, the problem is this, this, and this, and this is why, and this is our plan to deal with it.
Instead, we wait for them to set the subject, and we are always playing catch-up.
We're always behind.
So we're reactive, and now we're reactive in this world of lies.
So whatever they say, we react.
And we say, well, it must be a lie.
They're always lying.
So this must be a lie.
They say green, we say red.
They say up, we say down.
Whatever it is, we say the opposite.
Now, you know, I got like viciously, I'm still getting attacked.
I'm still getting letters with all of them full of nasty four-letter words.
They attack me for saying that the last election, presidential election, wasn't stolen.
Now, there's two things about this.
One is, I didn't say that.
That's not what I said.
People have these little slots in their head.
They have these yes-no slots in their head.
And if you say something that doesn't fit into the slots, it goes into that slot anyway, and that's what they hear.
What I said, and what I still say is if you want to overturn an election, you've got to prove it was counted wrongly in a court of law.
You can't just declare it.
You can't just say it on Twitter.
You can't just storm into the Capitol building and demand it.
You have got to prove it in a court of law, because if you don't have to do that to overturn an election, then neither do they, right?
So we have to obey the laws of the land if we want to be free.
That is how freedom works.
If you want to prove it, you've got to prove it.
And what I said was, Trump hasn't got the proof.
I can see it.
I'm reading his briefs.
He hasn't got the proof.
He had one case that I thought should have gone higher into court.
The rest of them not.
He was surrounded, with the exception of our friend Jen Ellis.
surrounded by lawyers who were going off on the media and saying all kinds of crazy, crazy stuff.
He didn't have the proof to overturn the election.
And the other thing I said was his behavior, his selfish behavior, his refusal to tone it down and turn it down was going to cost us Georgia, which was going to put us in the position we're in now because it was going to give them 50% of the Senate.
All of that happened, every single one.
And people were writing me with these foul letters saying, you know, no, in August, he's going to be reinstated.
He's going to be reinstated.
Something that doesn't exist.
Oh, and now the newest count is going to come out.
No, that's not, you're not right.
And you're, you know, no one, not one person has written to me and said, you know, everything you said was going to happen happened, so maybe we got it wrong.
And now they're still doing this.
They have this Arizona count.
And the Arizona count was done by a group of people who have no expertise in auditing elections.
What were they called?
I can't remember the name.
Oh, cyber ninjas.
They have no expertise in auditing elections.
They came out and said, we counted the votes, and Biden won by a few more votes than we thought he had, but there are votes that are questionable.
Well, of course, their votes are questionable.
We all know, we all know that the left got away with murder by changing the laws, using COVID as an excuse to change the laws and made it much, much more easy to commit fraud.
But we don't have them on it.
We do not have them on it.
And we don't know.
We don't know whether if we got all the fraud in the world together, the votes would still go the other way because Trump was a divisive character.
He didn't tone it down for people in the suburbs who don't like to hear the kinds of things that he was saying.
So what can I tell you?
What can I tell you?
It all happened the way I told you it was going to happen.
And it doesn't matter, again, it doesn't matter what the numbers are.
It doesn't matter what the numbers are.
What matters is what you can prove in a court of law.
We lost and we lost Georgia because Trump wouldn't admit that he didn't have what he needed.
We're so used to the media lying to us.
We're so used to the media lying to us that when they come and say the election was won by Joe Biden, we immediately think it's not true and we immediately have confirmation bias and we collect all the information on Twitter and from our friends and from this right-wing site and all this that tell us what we want to hear.
Vaccines And The Unvaccinated 00:15:08
We do it all the time.
And we are now doing it with vaccines.
To state my opinion before my words go into a slot in somebody's head, I am very much for vaccines and very much for individual choice on whether you use a vaccine or not.
If you're vaccinated, you're more protected.
You have no reason to be afraid of somebody who is not vaccinated.
You should be able to make the choice.
But I do believe we should make the choice.
I mean, vaccines have been miraculous.
It's been great not having polio.
It's been great not having smallpox.
You know, they were giving smallpox vaccines in the American Revolution on my birthday, 1776, July 13th, 1776.
Abigail Adams wrote to John Adams and says, I just got the kids vaccinated.
This is something that's been going on a long time.
All right.
So they're now declaring, you remember Biden came out and said, every business should fire everybody who doesn't get a vaccine or we're going to fine you.
Something that's probably completely unconstitutional.
This is spreading through the states.
In the NBA, some of these players came out and said they don't want to take the vaccine, right?
So one of them was Orlando Magic player, Jonathan Isaac.
I guess he's a forward.
He said, I don't want to take the vaccine.
Here's what the Rolling Stone Magazine wrote about him, all right?
The Orlando Magics 23-year-old, starting forward, is deeply religious, talking about Jonathan Isaac.
He's proudly unvaccinated.
When NBA players started lining up for shots in March, Isaac started studying black history and watching Donald Trump's press conferences.
He learned about anti-body resistance and came to distrust Dr. Anthony Fauci.
He looked out for people who might die from the vaccine and he put faith in God.
So Isaac comes out and he says, no, I wasn't going to Donald Trump rallies.
I wasn't watching Donald Trump press conferences.
I wasn't reading about black history.
I had good and certain reasons for not wanting to take the vaccine.
So this is what he came out and said.
And I want you to listen to it carefully because afterwards I'm going to play something else in comparison to it.
But and I, you know, I don't want to insult athletes.
Some athletes are smart.
Some athletes are not smart.
But being smart is not what they do, right?
You don't have to be smart to be an athlete.
What you have if you're an athlete is athletic excellence.
You have physical excellence and it's inspiring and it's beautiful and it's a wonderful thing, but not all athletes are smart.
We know that not all of them are articulate.
But obviously, this is a young man of sophistication and intelligence and dignity.
And he's asked by the press why he doesn't want to take a vaccine.
And this is what he says is cut eight.
I would start with, I've had COVID in the past.
And so our understanding of antibodies, of natural immunity has changed a great deal from the onset of the pandemic and is still evolving.
I understand that the vaccine would help if you catch COVID and you'll be able to have less symptoms from contracting it.
But with me having COVID in the past and having antibodies with my current age group and fitness, physical fitness level, it's not necessarily a fear of mine.
Taking the vaccine, like I said, it would decrease my chances of having a severe reaction, but it does open me up to the albeit rare chance, but the possibility of having an adverse reaction to the vaccine itself.
All right.
That's Jonathan Isaac of the Orlando Magic basketball team.
Here is the President of the United States, Joe Biden, talking about vaccines as Cut 7.
The question is whether or not we should be in a position where you are, why can't the experts say we know that this virus is in fact going to be, or excuse me, we know why all the drugs approved are not temporarily approved, but permanently approved.
So a guy whose job it is to put a ball through a hoop is a sophisticated, intelligent, well-spoken, and educated man who can put forward an argument of why he personally does not want to take a vaccine, balancing the risks.
The guy whose job it is to run the free world is a freaking idiot.
I mean, the guy is a freaking idiot.
You know, he can't even get a sentence out of his mouth.
So no one could blame you if you look at that and think like, you know, intelligent guy making an argument, idiot, telling me about a vaccine.
You know, I'm going to go without the vaccine.
Plus, on top of this, this is the first thing.
The guys in charge of this country are corrupt, they're stupid, and they're living in the fantasy world.
So when they tell us to take a vaccine and we're naturally reactive people, we're naturally defensive people.
We're tired of being shouted at.
We're tired of being told we're racist.
We're tired of being told we're sexist.
We're tired of being told that the values that made not just this country great, but improved the world, that fought Nazism, that fought communism, we're tired of being told that those values are no good, that they're bad values.
We're tired of these people telling us what to do, and they say take the vaccine.
Why wouldn't we say get stuffed?
Okay, really.
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On top of this is the tyranny, the authoritarianism.
Conservatives are dedicated to liberty.
Leftists are dedicated to the idea that they can run things better than the ordinary human being.
So they're tyrants.
They are natural.
It is a natural tyranny.
Leftism is a tyrannical idea.
The whole idea of it, you know, it's built in.
A right-winger can be a tyrant.
You can have right-wing tyrants, no question about it.
But in America, where we are defending the conservatives are defending and trying to conserve the Constitution, we are naturally in favor of liberty.
They are natural tyrants.
So now you have in New York, you have the governor of New York, Kathy, I think her name is pronounced Huchel or Huchel.
Remember, she's unelected.
Not one person voted for her, okay?
She is there because the hero of the people, the people that the guy that the press told us was the greatest guy on earth, was the next president of the United States, was better than the president who was serving Andrew Cuomo, turned out to be what we were saying he was all along, an incompetent who slaughtered senior citizens through his incompetence during the COVID pandemic.
And they didn't even get him for that because they couldn't even bring themselves to grasp that.
They got him for pinching a couple of girls on the backside.
That's what, you know, basically they got him for being a little bit rude with the ladies.
All right.
So now she declares that everybody has to get vaccinated if they're health care workers.
And since a lot of the health care workers don't want to, they're firing or causing to quit, forcing to quit, hundreds of nurses.
We don't know yet how many there are, but there are a lot of nurses.
So this is a time when there is a pandemic.
The pandemic is real.
We need all our health care workers.
Remember, it was a week ago, I mean, it was a few weeks ago that the health care workers, our first responders, our nurses, these were the heroes of the country.
You fired.
I mean, this is more Trump than Trump.
The governor of New York is being more Trump than Trump.
These are the people who just the other day, we were worshiping them.
We were thanking them.
We were leaning out our windows and making noise, banging pots together to say thank you, thank you, thank you.
You fired.
Get out.
Get out.
You're not going to take that.
Get out.
Let's get out.
And here's what she's going to do to replace them.
This is Cut 12.
We'll be nation leading with our mandate, which strikes at midnight tonight when everyone is expected in a hospital in the state of New York or a health care facility to have been vaccinated.
I will be signing an executive order to give me the emergency powers necessary to address the shortages where they occur.
That's going to allow me to deploy the National Guard who are medically trained, deploy people who've been retired, who may have had a licensed lapse, bring in people from elsewhere.
That is not my first position, though, my friends.
My desire is to have the people who've been out there continue to work in their jobs, work in them safely, and to all the other health care workers who are vaccinated, they also deserve to know that the people they're working with will not get them sick.
So they're firing.
We're in a health crisis.
They're firing the nurses.
They're going to replace them with the military.
That's good because they're not in Afghanistan anymore.
It's got nothing to do.
The guys who brought you to Afghanistan are now going to run your health care system.
They're going to bring back old guys, old guys, retired guys, are going to put a little coal in that x-ray machine and crank her up.
We're going to get her going because we don't want anybody who knows about modern medicine.
That would be a bad idea.
So conservatives are looking at this and they're saying, you know, you're tyrants and we're for liberty.
You lie and we are for reality.
We're not taking your stinking vaccine.
And they're dying.
Conservatives are dying.
You know, we keep comparing red states to blue states, but when you compare red counties to blue counties, the red counties are dying and they're dying at a much, much greater rate.
Now you're getting ticked off at me.
You're saying, no, because I saw on Twitter.
These are the facts as far as I can get them.
I spend all my days trying to collect the facts so I'm not lying to you.
Conservatives are dying because they're not taking the vaccines.
And I get it.
I get why they're not taking the vaccines.
You know, John Nolte over at Breitbart, and you can't get more right-wing than John Nolte.
John Nolte is one of favorite people.
I love John Nolte.
He's a great guy, and he is one of the most honest people I've ever met.
I mean, the guy just says what he thinks and tells you his opinion.
You always know you're getting it straight from John.
He wrote this piece where he says, basically, they're doing this on purpose.
They are trying to psychologically get us to not take the vaccine so we will die.
Nolte makes a point that only the only people I've seen who've made this point are Holman Jenkins Jr. in the Wall Street Journal and me, which is that the case rates don't matter.
The case rates hardly figure as data at all.
The death rates are what matter because you can't really fake them.
You can say somebody died when he had COVID or what, you know, but they're going to be pretty close to the truth.
And the people in red counties are dying.
And Nolte thinks they're doing this on purpose.
Let me just read you a little bit of this piece in Breitbart.
He says, the organized left wants unvaccinated Trump voters to remain unvaccinated.
That's what they want.
They want us dead.
Sorry, it's true.
And everyone knows it's true.
We've already seen the left openly embrace political violence by championing the left-wing domestic terrorists in Black Lives Matter and Antifa.
So the idea the left is using every psychological ploy in the book to convince you to remain unvaccinated is the opposite of far-fetched.
It's the only thing that makes sense.
Why do you think that instead of using a staggering fact like 99% of the people dying are unvaccinated, all we're hearing is the unvaccinated are stupid and haha, Trump people are dying and you diseased pieces of crap should not be allowed in polite society.
That's all we're hearing because people like Don Lemon and Howard Stern and Joe Biden and Joe Scarborough and the Washington Post and MSNBC and the rest of these fascists want you dead, want to back you into a psychological corner where you feel like an ass for caving to people who hate you, who shame you, who dehumanize you if you take a life-saving vaccine.
Now again, I love John.
I think he's overstating it.
I don't think that all the left wants us dead.
I think there are people on the left who want us dead, but I don't think all these people want us dead.
But let me ask you this, in all honesty.
Let me just ask you, if they wanted to convince you not to take the vaccine so you would die, if they did, if John is right, if Nolte is right, and they want you to die and not take the vaccine so that you will die, what would they do differently?
What would they do differently?
This is what they would do, right?
They would just make you so ticked off with their lies and their insults and their authoritarianism that you wouldn't take the vaccine and you would be more likely to die.
You know, over at the American Mind, my son, Spencer Clavin, no relation, he wrote a piece that said he was about ready.
He got the vaccine after a while.
And he said he was almost ready to suck the vaccine out of his arm because he was so ticked off of it.
This is what he said.
This is why he decided to take the vaccine.
He said, left to my own devices.
And in the absence of politics, I probably would have been vaccinated long ago.
But I was held back by this simple fact.
The same smug idiots who lied about the effectiveness of masks, funded research in Wuhan that may have helped create the disease, then lied about that too, then lied about lying, then lied some more, are the people demanding that absolutely everybody get jabbed now, now, now.
As usual, they're not trying to convince us by reasoning with us transparently like adults.
They are instead resorting to their usual tactics of calling us racist, delusional murderers for daring to question their impeccable wisdom and authority.
This kind of behavior does not inspire confidence.
That's the situation we're in.
And it really is a dangerous situation for everybody, right?
Because the left's ideas are wrong.
They have failed and they're wrong morally because morality and reality are linked together.
Because of that, they have taken over those places where you can create a fantasy world.
The media, the news media, Hollywood, the academy, all the places where you can speak ideas without testing those ideas in the real world, right?
That's the whole thing about Hollywood and the whole thing about the news media, the whole thing about the academy.
You can say things.
It's not like being in a lab where if you get it wrong, you blow yourself up.
You can just say stuff.
And if people are convinced, they're convinced and they think that makes it true.
They have left reality because their ideas don't work and are immoral.
And in order to shut us up, to keep us from arguing, they have created an entire system of silencing the opposition.
You are racist.
You're fired.
I mean, that's really what's happening now is people are getting fired for voting for Donald Trump or for going on a website when they're off work and expressing their political opinions.
They're getting fired.
Shut up, shut up, shut up, until we finally say, you know what?
Screw you.
Reality's Moral Cascade 00:07:38
We've had enough.
Whatever you say, I'm doing the opposite.
Whatever you say.
And that's a fantasy world too.
That is a fantasy world too, because reality doesn't care whether the left is honest or not.
Reality is going to be reality whether they happen to hit it like a stopped clock twice a day or whether they're talking about something else.
Reality is going to remain the same.
Listen, I don't think you should take the vaccine because I say you should.
I think you should go to a good doctor and get his advice.
But the numbers are showing that people who are unvaccinated are more likely to die.
And yes, it is not like the Black Death.
It's not the most deadly disease ever, but it's pretty deadly and a lot of people died.
It's not.
It is not a made-up thing.
It's not a hoax.
Just because they're overreacting doesn't mean the pandemic isn't here.
Reality is the key.
There's no morality without reality.
There's no philosophy without reality.
You've got to start with the real world.
And we have lost our way on both sides.
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And you got to say it the same way.
You got to say it with spirit.
You've got to say clavin.
And you got to spell it right too, by the way.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So I guess the theme of today's show seems to be fantasy versus reality or reality versus non-reality in terms of the cosmos, in terms of politics, in terms of just about everything.
And it's October, October, and so Halloween is coming.
So I wanted to start talking about some scary stuff.
And scary stuff is almost always about this at some level.
It's almost always, all scary stories depend to some degree on either reality being something other than we thought it was.
So it's a shocking change in that direction, or it's about somebody sucking us into a false reality, like a crazy person sucking us into a false reality that is terrifying.
And I want to talk about different genres over the next couple of weeks as Halloween approaches.
And I'm going to start with my least favorite scary genre, which is horror.
And the reason I don't like horror is I feel that it's, I don't always dislike it, but the reason I have a harder time liking horror is because it's easy.
It's easy to do.
You can always gut somebody or tear somebody to pieces and horrify somebody.
It's probably the easiest emotion to cause.
It's the same reason I don't like boo scares in movies because anybody can jump out at you and scare you.
It doesn't really tell me anything.
It doesn't really advance my life or feed into my vision of life.
Many, many years ago, I wrote a novel called The Animal Hour, which contains the most horrific scene I've ever written, which involves a head in a toilet.
And after I wrote it, first of all, I had to walk around the room because I was so upset that that had been in my head in the first place.
But secondly, I thought, you know, yeah, it's a good scene.
It's a scary scene.
It's a shocking scene.
It actually says something in the book.
But it's too easy.
It's just too easy to scare someone that way.
And I made a decision from that point on that every time I reached a scene that involved violence or action, I was going to ask myself if I could get to the place I wanted to get to in some more creative way.
And I think it really improved my writing.
Ultimately, I wrote one of my best books, which is True Crime, which has almost no, I don't think it actually has an act of violence in it.
And it's yet, I think it manages to be tremendously suspenseful and interesting.
I felt the same way about this recent movie, Hereditary.
Everybody kept telling me what a great, great movie it was.
And it does have this enormously powerful and ugly scene of a child's head being taken off.
There are going to be some spoilers in this, by the way, because he can't talk about these movies without telling what happens in them.
But it has a terrible scene of a child's head being taken off.
And it's a good scene.
It is a good scene because it takes place in a moral cascade where a young man lies to his mother about where he's going.
He's going to a party.
And she says, and he says, I'm not going to a party.
I'm going to something else.
So she says, well, take your younger sister with you.
He doesn't want to do that because he's at a party who needs his younger sister and he doesn't pay attention to her.
And she eats something she's allergic to and she goes into shock and he's driving her to the hospital and this is when this terrible accident happens.
And so the horror is really in the way that a series of departures from reality, lies and decisions made about lies multiply and cascade into this horrific moment.
It still made me feel at the end of it like, you know what, I don't want that image in my head.
And what I want, what I want like in horror, is when reality, when the horror is moral, when the horror is this disconnect between what we think reality is and what reality turns out to be.
And it can come in either direction.
Either reality is more than what we thought it is, or our idea of reality is demented, or someone's idea of reality is demented.
And this is why one of my favorite horror films, a film I bet that most of you have never seen, is a 2001 film called Frailty.
And it's directed and stars Bill Paxton, the late Bill Paxton, died very young, I think around 50.
And it's his first directed film.
I'm not sure whether he made any other.
And the wonderful thing about Frailty is that it is both stories at once.
You cannot tell whether it's a story about somebody going mad and distorting reality or a story about the fact that reality has more to it than we think it has.
Paxton plays the father of two sons.
He is a completely plausible guy, a completely loving, wonderful farmer, down-to-earth guy.
And then one day he comes into his son's bedroom and he wakes them up and he tells them a wonderful thing has happened.
An angel of the Lord has come and given him a revelation that something is going on and he has to do something about it.
And here's that scene.
The end of the world is coming.
It's near.
The angel showed me.
There are demons among us.
The devil has released them for the final battle.
It's being fought right now.
But nobody knows it except us and others like us.
I'm scared, Dad.
There's nothing to be afraid of, Tiger.
We've been chosen by God.
He will protect us.
He's given us special jobs to do.
We don't fear these demons.
We destroy them.
We pick them up one by one and we pitch them out of this world.
That's God's purpose for us.
The angel called us God's hands.
So we're like superheroes?
That's right.
We're a family of superheroes that are going to help save the world.
But Dad, that doesn't make any sense.
I know it sounds that way, son, but it's the truth.
That's a great, it's a terrific scene.
Violent Realities in Horror 00:09:21
And there's, you know, it's a horrific story, but it's not, the gore is not very overt.
And it's got great performances.
Matthew McConaughey is in it.
Powers Booth is in it.
And the horror is all moral.
In other words, it has to do with the fact of what these guys are doing, how the two sons react, having a father who is shown to us as being a wonderful father and a good man coming in and saying this thing.
And now do you believe him?
Or do you lose your father by opposing him?
And do you transform your idea of the world or what?
It's just a really, it's a tremendous, tremendous film.
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And that absolute break with reality is what makes horror horror.
That's what makes horror good, is that somebody is either crazy and imposing his reality on you through murder or some kind of mayhem, or the world turns out to be much worse than you think.
And that is why, that is why transgenderism is one of the great sources of horror because it's somebody telling you that his body is not who he is.
And our bodies are who we are, and our relationship to our body is who he is.
And this is why so many of the best horror movies in America are based on the murderer, Ed Gein.
Ed Gein was a guy in the early part of the 20th century.
He was in Wisconsin who killed, when his mother died, he killed women and he made trophies out of their bodies and body suits for him to wear because he wanted to feel closer to his mother.
And obviously, this inspired a lot of horror movies.
The most important one, probably, and one of the greatest horror movies ever made being Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.
And the thing about Psycho that is wonderful is that even though there's the famous shower scene in it, it's really not a blood-filled movie.
It really is the horror and the sadness of this guy who is both himself and his mother, has both himself and his mother locked within him, so he doesn't know whether he is a man or a woman.
And probably the eeriest scene, not the scariest scene, but the eeriest scene in Psycho is the scene where the woman overhears Norman Bates having an argument with his mother, who we later find out to be himself.
And here's just that scene that we hear coming from the famous Psycho House.
No, I tell you, no.
I won't have you bringing straight young girls in for supper by candlelight, I suppose, in the cheap, erotic fashion of young men with cheap, erotic minds.
Mother, please.
And then what?
After supper, music?
Whispers?
Mother, she's just a stranger.
She's hungry and it's raining out.
Mother, she's just a stranger.
As if men don't desire strangers.
As if, oh, I refuse to speak of disgusting things because they disgust me.
You understand, boy?
Go on.
Don't tell her if you'll not be appeasing her ugly appetite with my food or my son.
Or do I have to tell her because you don't have the guts?
Cowboy, you have the guts, boy.
Shut up, shut up.
That's a very eerie scene and probably one of the most haunting scenes in the film.
That's a psychological, an example of a psychological faculty, the introject, where the people who raised you, who taught you how to live and how to see the world become part of you.
And if those people are crazy or they're violent, now you have this crazy, violent, horrible person inside you who is part of you.
And that's all of our problems with our parents, right?
One of the problems with our parents is the things that they do wrong become part of our guiding light as well as the things that they do right.
The other famous film, there's two other really great horror films that come from the Ed Gein murder.
They're based on the Geen murder.
Of course, Silence of the Lambs, based on the novel, which I think is better than the book by Thomas Harris, but the book, of course, is just made marvelous by Anthony Jody Foster and Anthony Hopkins' great performances and Hopkins performances, just a classic American performance.
But here's another aspect of transgenderism that is, you know, of this kind of demented transgenderism that leads to horror, is that if you reduce sexuality to body outline, or if you reduce it to simply the way you feel, you have detached from reality in one direction or the other.
In one direction, you have detached from reality because you're not relating to your body as it is.
But in the other reaction, where you just think, oh, if I change my body, I will have changed my gender.
That, of course, is dehumanizing because we're Just the shape of our bodies.
A woman is not just the shape of her body, it's the experience of growing up as a girl, knowing that you are capable of creating life, knowing that you are capable of giving a kind of love that a man can't give, knowing that you have going to have all kinds of pain, you're going to have period and cramps every month that are going to cause pain and all this.
Knowing those things is part of what being a woman is.
It's part of what being a woman is, is the entire time that you are a woman.
But the guy, the killer, Buffalo Bill, in the silence of the lambs, doesn't understand that.
And that's why here's this famous scene where he traps this woman and he's trying to soften up her body so he can turn her into a woman's suit for him to wear that he thinks will transform him into someone beautiful.
And if you listen to it, he refers to her repeatedly as it because she's just a body.
She's just an object.
It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.
Yes, you will pressure to look at the hose.
Okay, Mister, if you let me go, I won't.
I won't press charges, I promise.
See, my mom is a real important woman.
I guess you already know that.
Now it places the lotion in the basket.
Please, please, oh my God.
I want to go home, please, please, oh my God.
It places the lotion in the basket.
I want to see my mom.
It's a terrifying and brutal scene.
And of course, it has that ultimate real thing that people who do not see the humanity of people are always super nice to animals.
And you find that in abortion advocates who think that it's all right to have an abortion 10 seconds before the child is born.
They always are very big in saving animals because they cannot see the humanity in another person because then they would have to face what they themselves are.
And the final great movie, and probably, I would say probably the scariest horror movie ever made, at least American horror movie, is also based on the Edgen murders, which is a Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
I'm talking about the original one, 1974, by Tob Hooper, I think you pronounces it.
Maybe Toby, but it's Tobe Hooper.
And that is a terrifically terrifying film.
And the break with reality there is really this horror.
I'm not going to show any of it because it's all disgusting.
It is a violent film, even though it's less violent than the title.
The title sounds like it's going to be a lot more gory than it is, but it actually is gory.
And there's a horrifying scene where this poor woman is forced to have a dinner with this family of lunatics, the family of murderous lunatics, and their body parts lying around.
It's just like utterly disgusting.
But what's so good about it is that the people in the family think it's just a family dinner.
And how many of us have sat down with our family and it's all been kind of everything's been kind of normal, but we sense these horrific, even violent tensions underneath the surface, that reality below reality, which is where I think all horror lies.
Paint Your Life Portrait 00:02:44
So I just wanted to delve.
I obviously can't go through all horror movies.
I'll talk about different genres of scary things coming up in the weeks to come.
But I wanted to talk about that a little bit in keeping with this theme of reality being more than what we think it is, reality being something other than what we think it is, and the reality under reality, which is where horror often lies.
We had a really important interview coming up with Stephen C. Meyer, who has written just a tremendous book called The Return of the God Hypothesis.
But first, let's talk about paint your life.
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They've got a user-friendly platform that makes it easy to order a custom-made hand-painted portrait in less than five minutes.
You don't have to do it of yourself.
Do it of your kids, of your wife, whatever it is.
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And now that we're all getting out more again, you can just have pictures of places you've been that you might like that.
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All right, we're talking today about fantasy and reality and the legacy media has dominated the podcast world with its fantasies until now, because we have a new podcast called Morning Wire, and it's here to bring you the facts to start your day.
It's the only daily news podcast that values both 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.
Subscribe and start listening now to Morning Wire on Apple, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts, and leave a five-star review if you like what you hear.
So I have been really looking forward to today's interview.
Three Discoveries Revive God Hypothesis 00:15:15
I've been arguing for a long time that atheists are basically trapped in the 20th century, that their philosophy has become scientifically obsolete.
And I just read a terrific book called The Return of the God Hypothesis by Stephen C. Meyer.
Stephen Meyer directs the Discovery Institute, the Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture in Seattle.
He's a former geophysicist.
He's written bestsellers, Darwin's Doubt, The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, Signature in the Cell.
And his latest is the USA Today bestseller return of the God Hypothesis, which I read.
I just think it's terrific.
Steve, thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Thank you, Andrew, for having me on.
It's a great privilege.
It's a terrific book.
It really is.
It's rigorous.
It's not tendentious.
You don't just say what you want to be true.
You make your arguments really clearly.
I want to talk, before we get into the argument, the subtitle of the book is The Three Discoveries That Have Brought the God Hypothesis Back into Play.
And before we get to those three discoveries, the fact that you call it the return of the God hypothesis suggests that there was a time when maybe it made more sense not to hypothesize that God had created the world or that God was at work in the world.
Why is that the case?
Yeah, you mentioned that atheism is stuck in the 20th century.
I think it's actually stuck in the late 19th century, which is when the worldview known as scientific materialism was really formulated.
The great scientific materialists were Darwin, who told us where we came from, Marx, who gave us a utopian vision of where we were going, Freud, who a little bit later told us what to do about the human condition, about human guilt.
And between these great materialistic thinkers, all of whom claim to be basing their ideas on science, a kind of comprehensive worldview was formulated that answered all the great questions that Judeo-Christian religion had always addressed.
And this became kind of the default way of thinking through much of the 20th century among elite intellectuals.
And it had, I think, some tragic consequences because it was also the mode of thinking that underlay the great totalitarian regimes of the 20th century as well.
Both Marxism and National Socialism derived a tremendous amount of support from basically materialistic assumptions, in some cases even directly going back to Darwinian thinking.
So the title Return of the God Hypothesis invites a kind of story, obviously, because to say it's returning was to say that the God hypothesis as the framework for doing science was lost.
But that implies that previous to that, it was also the dominant way of thinking about the natural world, as indeed it was during the period that historians call the scientific revolution.
Yeah, I mean, the scientific revolution, you make this argument very clearly in the book, The Return of the God Hypothesis, that it's really inspired in some way by Christian, specifically Christian thought.
Is that a fair way to put it?
Yeah, I think so.
And also Judeo-Christian thought, because during the period of the Scientific Revolution, and that's dated variously by historians of science between, say, 1500 and 1700 or 1750, some go back and see very strong influences that gave rise to modern science in the late medieval period as well, going back as far as 1300 or so in the great universities like University of Paris and Oxford.
But during this period of late medieval Catholic thought and the period of the Reformation, Christian thinkers were rediscovering the Hebrew Bible.
And there were a number of concepts that were implicit in the biblical worldview that were friendly to the rise of science.
The biggest one was the idea of intelligibility, the idea that nature could be understood by the human mind because it expressed a rationality that was the product of the divine mind.
And that that same divine creator who had built rationality and design and order into nature had also designed our minds in a way that allowed us to understand that order and design.
And so there's a principle of correspondence between the reason that was built into nature and the reason within us.
And it kind of goes beyond the Greek idea of reason, too, because there's a certain, I don't know, I don't want to call it randomness, but freedom in God's work.
I mean, he can do whatever he wants, so it's up to us to go out and look at it.
That was a huge concept.
The historians of science call that contingency, the idea that nature has an order that's built into it, but it's an order that's contingent upon the will of the Creator.
It could have been otherwise, just as there are many different ways to make a timepiece or a clock, all of which would require a kind of orderly arrangement of the gears and parts that make timekeeping possible.
There are many different ways that God could have ordered the universe.
And it's up to us not to deduce that order from some first principles or from some intuitions that we have about how nature ought to be, but rather it's important to go out and look and see how nature actually is.
The Greeks were inclined to a kind of armchair philosophizing about nature.
And during the period of the scientific revolution, because of this idea of the radical contingency of nature upon the will of God, this was a consequence of the recovery of the doctrine of creation.
Nature is orderly, but it's orderly because God chose to make it a certain way.
And Robert Boyle put it very succinctly.
He said, it's not the job of the natural philosopher, which was what people called scientists at the time, to deduce what God must have done.
But instead, it's the job of the scientist to go out and look and see what God actually did do.
So in addition to having a confidence that there's an intelligibility in nature, there was also the idea that nature needed to be studied in an empirical way.
We needed to investigate it by looking and seeing and measuring.
And this gave rise to an empirical form of science rather than deductive, as I mentioned, armchair philosophizing, which characterized a lot of Greek thought.
So let's talk about these three discoveries that kind of, I mean, it feels like it might have been natural after Newton to just assume that the clockwork universe was going to unfold that was just very easy to understand.
But in fact, things turned out to be a little weirder than that.
And one of the first things you talk about is the idea of a Big Bang, which really does make things complicated.
Can you describe, first of all, where did that idea come from and why does it make things complicated for scientific materials?
Well, there's a Princeton physicist from the 1960s, Robert Dickey, who said that an infinitely old universe would relieve us of the necessity of understanding the origin of matter at any finite time in the past.
And coming out of the late 19th century, physicists assumed that the universe was infinitely old, that it was essentially eternal and self-existent and self-organizing.
And so that made possible this great materialistic synthesis at the end of the 19th century.
We could explain the origin of everything all the way back to the elementary particles, and the elementary particles and energy had been here from eternity past.
And so matter and energy were essentially had godlike powers.
They were the eternal, self-existent thing that replaced the idea of an eternal, self-existent creator in Christianity and Judaism.
So the surprising, shocking discovery of the early 20th century was that in fact, the material universe, the physical universe of matter, space, time, and energy, seems, as best we can tell, to have had a beginning.
And this was first, the first inklings of this came in the 1920s in observational astronomy as figures like Edwin Hubble were able to establish that the light coming from distant galaxies was being stretched out as if the distant galaxies were receding away from us.
And Hubble's graduate student, Alan Sandage and others, were able to verify that this was the case in all quadrants of the night sky.
And the picture that emerged from this was of an expanding universe outward from a kind of starting point, a beginning.
And this was a kind of shocking discovery because everyone expected that the universe was eternal and self-existent.
Einstein didn't like it at first, though his own theory of gravity called general relativity implied the same thing.
He later did come around, though, when confronted with the evidence.
And then you have this idea, I think you call it the Goldilocks universe.
Is that your term for it?
That it's not just that it starts, but it starts with some really amazing coincidences wrapped into its very organization.
Yeah, physicists call this the fine-tuning, and some physicists refer to our universe now as a Goldilocks universe.
The basic parameters of the universe, the force that drives the expansion, the force of gravity, the force of electromagnetism, the underlying strong and weak nuclear forces, the masses of the elementary particles, the speed of light, many, many basic physical parameters fall within very narrow tolerances, such that if they were a little bit different, a little bit stronger, weaker, heavier, or lighter, the universe would not be conducive to life.
And the probabilities associated with these individual parameters, let alone the whole ensemble, are incredibly tiny.
And yet there's no underlying physical reason, theoretical or physical reason, as to why these parameters should have the precise values that they do.
And this is known to physicists now as the problem of the fine-tuning.
And many physicists, including Sir Fred Hoyle, who was initially a big skeptic of the Big Bang because of his atheism, came around to theism himself because of fine-tuning parameters that he discovered associated with the necessary abundance of carbon in the universe, which is necessary to life.
And he was later quoted as saying that a common sense interpretation of the evidence suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics as well as chemistry and biology, in order to make life possible.
So this fine-tuning suggested a fine-tuner.
There have been contrary hypotheses such as the multiverse that's being floated now and sometimes makes it into popular movies.
But one thing that's not commonly known about the multiverse, that's just the idea that there are gabillions of other universes out there such that somewhere some universe would get lucky and have those improbable parameters.
Problem is all the mechanisms that physicists have proposed to explain where these other universes have come from have themselves required prior unexplained fine-tuning, taking us right back to where we started.
So the multiverse actually doesn't explain the fine-tuning.
And fine-tuning in our experience, whether we're talking about Swiss watches or internal combustion engines or sections of digital code, is always an indicator of intelligence or the activity of mind.
It's funny, these guys who are constantly citing Occam's razor to say that things should be simple make this argument of the multiverse, which is kind of like saying this just happens to be the card game in which I drew four aces seven times in a row.
I mean, it just seems a very complex way of thinking about things as opposed to just saying, well, maybe there's a creator.
It's very convoluted and more convoluted than I can describe in a short interview because there are two different systems of theoretical physics that have to be invoked to explain the phenomena that a single postulate of a transcendent intelligence can explain.
You have to posit all these different universes as well as all these different theoretical entities like multi-dimensions of space, strings, inflaton fields, in order to explain the one thing that a single hypothesis of a transcendent creator explains very simply.
So it's not a parsimonious or simple explanation of the multiverse.
The other, the final of the three discoveries is this idea.
It's kind of interesting because one of the guys who's supposed to be the four horsemen of the apocalypse with the new atheist is Richard Dawkins, an excellent writer, obviously a brilliant man.
And it's all about evolution for him, and evolution explains so much of where life comes from.
But the idea of a code, of a genetic code that creates intelligence, has caused some computer scientists to say that Darwinian, absolute Darwinian evolution can't be right.
Is that a fair way to get it?
Well, absolutely.
Absolutely.
I mean, this is the huge discovery of late 20th century science and biology, and that is that at the foundation of life and even the simplest living cells, we find an exquisite realm of digital nanotechnology.
This started with Watson and Crick in 1953 when they elucidated the double helix structure of the DNA.
Five years later, Crick formulated something he called the sequence hypothesis, in which he suggested that the chemical subunits along the interior of the DNA molecule are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written language or the zeros and ones in a machine code or digital software that we would work with today.
Richard Dawkins himself has acknowledged that DNA functions like a machine code.
Bill Gates says it's like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever created.
And that's a highly suggestive remark because we know from experience that software comes from programmers and that information, especially in a digital or alphabetic form, always comes from an intelligent source, whether we're talking about a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book or information embedded in a radio signal or in a computer code.
Information is the product of mind.
And so the discovery of information at the foundation of life in even the simplest living cell, I've argued, is a powerful indicator of a designing intelligence playing a role in the origin and history of life.
We're talking about a remarkable book called The Return of the God Hypothesis by Stephen C. Meyer, a really well-argued scientific book, not a theological book, a scientific book.
I have a question that I'd like to ask about quantum physics.
I'm glad since I have you here, I'll take advantage of the walk on the wild.
You touch on this in the later chapters of the book, but it's not one of your three discoveries.
But the idea in quantum, there is this idea in quantum physics that things are defined by our perception of them to some degree, so that we can't tell the location and velocity of something before it is observed, and once it's observed, it maintains that position.
We can't tell whether light is a wave or a particle until it's observed, and then once it's observed, it remains a wave or a particle, it seems.
That sort of implies to me that consciousness comes before matter.
That the words in the Bible that the Earth was without form or void was void and without form, and God said, let there be light, could almost be literally true, that there has to be some consciousness before there can be some element there.
Is that completely different?
Many philosophers have actually.
You know, I think it's a very profound insight.
My colleague George Gilder says at the heart of matter lies a mystery.
We don't perceive matter without perception, with a perceiver.
Quantum Cosmology's Cognitive Leap 00:05:43
And one of the reasons I brought up the quantum mechanics in this book was that there is a model of the origin of the universe known as quantum cosmology, which attempts to appropriate the mathematics of quantum physics to explain how you can get a universe from literally nothing physical.
But the problem with the appropriation of that mathematics is that it presupposes a mathematical structure to the universe before there's any matter.
But mathematics is something, as one of the proponents of this idea has acknowledged, mathematics is conceptual.
It only exists in minds.
So the attempt to explain the origin of the universe apart from the mind of God using quantum mechanics has actually brought people back full circle to the need for a pre-existing mind, the very insight that you've just shared.
Good.
I'm glad I wasn't just making that up because obviously I do not understand.
I don't pretend to understand quantum mechanics, but it seems like that to me.
You know, you quote a quote from Thomas.
Oh, yeah, I was just interrupting a little bit, but there's a terrific quote from Hawking about this very problem.
He was one of the inventors of this quantum cosmology idea.
But in a moment of candor, he says, what puts fire in the equations that gives them a universe to describe?
Math by itself is causally inert.
It's only something that exists in a mind.
We use math to structure things, to design things.
But the whole attempt, it's really an ironic story because the evidence we have for the beginning of the universe seems to imply a cause that transcends matter, space, time, and energy.
Before the beginning of matter, there is no matter to do the causing.
And in virtue of that, scientists have looked for some alternative to the God hypothesis.
They've come up with this quantum cosmological model, but it too implies a prior, unexplained, mental reality that is not material in order to explain the origin of the universe.
So they come right back, I think, to the God hypothesis and the attempt to avoid it.
Yeah, this brings me back to this really remarkable quote from Thomas Nagel, who is a philosopher who wrote a book called Mind and Cosmos and made a big splash called Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.
Got attacked by all kinds of people.
But you quote Nagel.
Nagel does not believe in God, and he came up with an alternative hypothesis to that.
But he said, I want atheism to be true, and I'm made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers.
It isn't just that I don't believe in God and naturally hope that I'm right.
It's that I hope there is no God.
I don't want there to be a God.
I don't want the universe to be like that.
I was really struck by that because I felt that way about some of the things that Stephen Hawking used to say, that he was committed to this idea that there wasn't a God, that he was as committed as some religious people who know nothing but just what they believe.
Why is that?
Why aren't scientists open to what seems to me such a simple explanation of the world as we actually know it scientifically?
There's so many different things to say about that, Andrew.
First of all, Nagel's candor is just so refreshing.
And he went out on a limb to write some very nice things about some of the books advancing the theory of intelligent design, though he couldn't quite go that far himself.
He was an atheist who was sort of experiencing cognitive dissonance, understanding that neo-Darwinism and materialistic ideas did not account for the really fundamental, one of the fundamental things about our existence, which is the reality of consciousness, the reality of minds.
We have them.
So we know mind exists.
And if you can't account for that, you have a worldview that is inadequate.
I think that part of the answer to the why can't science, or why are scientists so wedded, or many scientists so wedded to atheism, I think it's partly a kind of default way of thinking that we've inherited from the 19th century.
And there's a sort of groupthink phenomenon that is involved in any community of scholars or thinkers.
But also, I think there's a natural human resistance to the God hypothesis.
On the one hand, we would like God to exist because we want to think about the possibility of a life after this life, about significance.
We don't want to think of ourselves as cosmic accidents.
So we have a motivation to consider the God hypothesis.
But none of us also, I think, instinctively like the accountability that comes with thinking about a transcendent intelligence who made us to function best in a certain way and that therefore there's a moral law and we may not be on the right side of that all the time.
So there's a push-pull, I think, in every human being about whether we want or don't want God to exist.
What I tried to do in the book was to extricate ourselves from those motivational questions and issues and just look at what the evidence says.
And Dawkins is so helpful because he has this tremendous quote.
He's great at forming, framing issues, even though I disagree with his atheism.
But he says, the universe has exactly the properties we should expect.
If at bottom, there's no purpose, no design, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
In other words, materialism.
And what I tried to show in the book is that there have been three major discoveries about biological, physical, and cosmological origins.
They're precisely what you wouldn't expect if scientific materialism or scientific atheism were true.
The universe had a beginning.
It's been finely tuned from the beginning for life.
And since the beginning, there have been big infusions or bursts of digital information technology in our living, in our biosphere that suggests a master programmer has been at work in life.
None of these things were expected on the scientific atheist view of the late 19th century.
And that's the view that we've inherited that's dominated the 20th.
If you like science books, this is a terrific one, The Return of the God hypothesis by Stephen C. Meyer.
Steve, thanks so much for coming on.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Andrew, and thanks for great questions.
All right.
I know you love your problems.
Everybody loves his problems.
Difficult Spots and Toxic Exes 00:08:49
Everybody wants to keep his troubles close, but it's time to let them go because it's time for the mailbag.
Woo!
Oh my gosh.
I love Stephen Colbert.
I just hope Stephen Colbert is watching Greg Gutfeld like everybody else, so he's at least getting some entertainment in his life.
From Chris, your mailbag is why I subscribe to the Daily Wire.
I find myself in a difficult spot.
I'm wondering if you have any wisdom or advice.
I'm divorced about eight years ago.
I'm now remarried.
I have three wonderful boys from my first marriage.
That divorce was a tragedy for them that I try my best to mitigate.
Not surprisingly, my relationship with their mom is strained and difficult.
I have a wonderful relationship with my second wife, and we have two beautiful children together.
My first wife has put active effort into preventing my second wife and my three boys from my first marriage from bonding in a meaningful way.
We're in therapy.
When my first wife has pressed, what my first wife has pressed for since our divorce is for our three sons to live primarily with her and for them to see me quite infrequently.
It'll be easier, she says.
She's now trying to persuade our 15-year-old to go to the court and tell him that he wants to live with her and not see his father.
His 15-year-old son came to him in tears and told him this.
My question is this.
How do I determine what is the most selfless path for me to take?
I feel a growing responsibility to my second wife to provide a stable life for her and our children and give her the gift of peace that we would enjoy if there was less day-to-day stuff with my ex.
Basically, I'm feeling torn apart by my responsibilities.
All right.
So the situation you have gotten yourself into is so bad at this point that there are no good answers.
There's nothing good you can do.
You cannot abandon your sons, but you have to pay attention to your new children well.
So I can't give you, like, that's, you know, all I can tell you is you're just going to have to do the best you can.
But I can give you a piece of advice that you're really not going to like.
And that is this.
Reading your letter, and this letter is much longer.
I was editing it as I went.
I can tell you that you are incredibly self-deceived about who you are in this situation.
You are depicting your ex-wife as utterly toxic.
She's getting between your sons and your new wife.
She's trying to take them away.
She's trying to convince them away.
You depict her as a classic, toxic ex-wife, and you are selfless.
You just want to find the most selfless way.
Let me ask you a question.
When in this process have you been selfless for 15 seconds in a row?
You marry a girl, you give her three children, you get her pregnant three times, and then suddenly it occurs to you, and this isn't working out, you know, and you dump the three kids, and you're gone, right?
You're gone.
Listen, a million things could have gone into that.
A million things could have played into that.
But now you marry another woman and you start to have more children, guaranteeing that this situation will occur.
You guaranteed this situation will occur.
So this is an inevitable situation because of your actions.
So if you want to make this situation better, if you mean you want to make the situation better, stop depicting yourself to yourself as selfless.
Stop manipulating people because you're even manipulating me in this letter, trying to manipulate me.
Even when you say I subscribe to the Daily Wire because of the mailbag, it's kind of telling me like you better keep me as a faithful mailbag.
Listen, pal, you know, you did this.
You created the situation.
And I don't know.
I don't know whether you left your first wife for your second wife.
In other words, if you had an affair and left, in which case that would explain why she's kind of ticked off.
But this is the moment for you to look in the mirror and say, what part am I playing to make this situation as bad as it is?
And how can I stop playing that part to make it better?
That's the question you should be asking.
Why is your wife, ex-wife, or as Jesus would call her, your wife, but why is your ex-wife taking you to court to try and get those kids away from you?
What is it that you're doing with those kids that she doesn't like?
Is it maybe that you're whispering in their ear things about her or subtly depicting her as being toxic, so their own mother is trying to estrange them from their own mother?
I don't know.
I'm just guessing here, but I do know from reading your letter that you are completely self-deceived in your role.
You have a role here.
You are making the situation worse.
And I'm not depicting your ex-wife as an innocent, but she's angry about something, and maybe you can stop doing some of those things and bring her down the notch so that she stops being as angry as she is and adding so much rage into the situation.
The one thing I know is wrong here is your depiction of yourself, because this idea that you're looking for the selfless way, you're not a selfless guy.
You're a manipulative guy, and you're a guy who's gotten what you want, and now it's kind of piled up on you, and you're kind of looking for an excuse to leave those boys behind and let your ex-wife take them away.
That's not a good thing for them.
They're teenagers now, and they need you.
And so you've got to figure it out, and you've got to figure out what you can do to make the situation better.
I bet that's not what you want to hear.
From T, greeting to the infinitely wise, shiny-headed sage.
I work at a Christian school.
I love it there.
Recently, however, a student told me that she was sexually assaulted by a teacher.
I could tell months before she told me that she was acting differently and was dealing with a terrible pain.
She's not the only one who has a similar story about that teacher.
I don't know where else to seek advice.
All my mentors are at the school.
This girl brought it to the school's attention when it all started, and they called her a liar and stuck up for the teacher.
My biggest question is, in what ways can I help her?
She's losing her faith because it was a professed Christian who did this.
She's clearly hurting.
I've known the girl's family for a long time, and they're great people who would back up whatever decision she made.
This is a secret you cannot keep.
You cannot keep this secret.
In fact, in most states, it's the law that you have to report sexual abuse on minors.
I'm assuming this is not a college.
I'm assuming that she's a minor.
If two young ladies have said this guy assaulted them, I'm not saying he doesn't deserve due process, but I am saying this needs to be reported.
It needs to be looked at.
And if the school won't do it, then you should go to the law.
You have to do it.
You have to.
You can't let this guy run free in a school with young women in it continuing to prey on them.
I mean, if he's a predator, that's what he will do.
He will prey on them.
You have got to take control.
And if the parents don't know, maybe you should start there with the parents.
This is not a secret you can keep.
You can't do it.
And I hope you can bring the girl on board.
But even if you can't, somebody has to find out what this guy is doing.
From Nico, my girlfriend and I are both in our early 20s.
She's pursuing a career as an actress.
She's been a ballet dancer and model prior.
She's taking acting classes.
I'm super happy for her, as I know she's always strived to be an actress.
We've lately been in a bit of a disagreement over her being in romantic scenes.
I understand that love is a common part of storytelling, but I struggle with the thought of her in an intimate situation with another man.
We've talked about it multiple times.
We haven't really gotten anywhere.
She understands why it bothers me, but only says it's part of the job.
I can't shake the thought that being intimate with someone can force the feelings of romance even if they weren't there in the first place.
I also truly believe that intimacy should only be between us.
I worry that it'll lead to more problems down the road for us.
I have very mixed feelings about this situation, and it's constantly on my mind.
I know you're an art movie lover, so I greatly appreciate your input.
My input is, that's the situation.
It's not going to get any better, and it's not going to get any easier on you.
In fact, it might get worse.
You're right.
I mean, people do have affairs on movie sets all the time.
In fact, there's a saying in Hollywood, it doesn't count when you're on location, but it does count, obviously.
Being in intimate scenes can spark intimate feelings.
All those things are true.
It might not be true with this young lady, with your girlfriend.
It might be true that she has enough integrity to stay faithful while she's doing love scenes with other men.
I'm not accusing her of anything.
I'm just saying that if you're worried about it, you're worried about something that is real, that's really there.
It is a possibility, and it's not going to get any better.
She's not going to change unless she gives up her career.
And it doesn't sound like she wants to do that.
If she wants to give up her career, she can, and then you don't have the problem anymore.
But as long as she's in the business, she's right.
It's going to be part of what she does.
And if it's going to torment you, if it torments you now, it's going to torment you even worse down the road.
So that's not happy news, but that's the truth.
And so you got to make your decision in light of those facts because that's the way acting is.
I got to stop there.
But here's the good news: you're being plunged into a clavenless week of utter blackness, weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth.
You probably won't survive.
That's the good news.
The bad news is you won't be here when I'm back next Friday with the Andrew Clavin Show.
Andrew Clavin Show Production Team 00:01:21
I'm Andrew Clayton.
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 Cormina.
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.
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