Andrew Clavin’s Superman Isn’t Gay episode frames LGBTQ+ depictions in media as a "wicked" ideological attack on tradition, contrasting his personal acceptance of gay individuals with opposition to altering Superman’s heterosexuality. He ties this to broader critiques of progressive policies—from Merrick Garland’s selective law enforcement to the Great Society’s failure to curb poverty—while promoting conspiracy theories about leftist cultural control. The segment also pivots to censorship battles, like Steven Crowder’s demonetization for critiquing transgender policies, and YouTube’s alleged suppression of conservative content, culminating in a defense of "imagination" against what he calls authoritarian "wokeism." [Automatically generated summary]
It's time for another exciting episode of Merrick Garland, federal law guy.
Yes, Merrick Garland seeking out crime and corruption in every corner of America except his bathroom mirror, relentlessly defending the powerful from the weak and making sure the Constitution of the United States is safe and protected from any form of use.
In last week's exciting story, Portland, Oregon was burned to the ground by a group of mass leftist radicals who beat up innocent civilians and journalists.
But never fear, Merrick Garland, federal law guy, was on the job trying to force the state of Texas to allow doctors to crush the heads of unborn babies and sell their body parts for sweet, sweet cash.
Tonight's episode, case number 20, 21, Timmy's mom.
October 1st, 6 a.m., while an innocent suburb sleeps, Timmy's mom sneaks from her bed under cover of mourning to nurse her baby and make breakfast for her husband and her son, Timmy.
But while she may look innocent enough to the ordinary American who can see and comprehend, Merrick Garland, federal law guy, can sense the criminal mastermind hidden behind that face that only looks as pure as the Virgin Mary's because she happens to be doing the sort of stuff the Virgin Mary used to do when Jesus was a child.
But Merrick Garland, federal law guy, knows that in the deepest, darkest light of yesterday afternoon, Timmy's mom was poking her nosy nose into Timmy's homework to discover that his local public school has been diligently teaching him how to correctly judge people by the color of their skin.
These dedicated public teachers have also carefully explained to Timmy that he might not really be a boy, but might in fact be a girl, just like the girl who raped that other girl after being allowed to use the girl's bathroom because that's just how much of a girl that rapist girl was.
And of course, if by some misfortune Timmy should turn out to be a boy, the school has conscientiously provided him with important literature on how he might enjoy breaking the bonds of sexual repression by performing oral sex on older men, not unlike the school principal who likes Timmy very, very much.
Now, in a sinister conspiracy to defend the heterocyst normalcy that is so systemic in this country, it has actually created every single human being who exists here, Timmy's mom has begun to plot to harass and threaten her elected school board officials by going before a public meeting and pointing out that they ought to be teaching Timmy something useful like math instead of, you know, evil things.
But be of good cheer.
Merrick Garland, federal law guy, is on the case, publicly ordering the FBI to determine whether Timmy's mom is a domestic terrorist so that Timmy's mom knows she can't just go around protecting Timmy as if she were Timmy's mom.
Not when public school officials have to be defended from the people they were elected to serve.
So don't worry, America, homicide rates in cities where the Department of Justice has intimidated the police may be rocketing upward as fast as homicide rates in cities where the Department of Justice has intimidated the police.
But Merrick Garland, federal law guy, is on the trail of Timmy's mom.
So there's nothing to fear except for Merrick Garland, federal law guy.
Trigger warning.
Ring Alarm Security Kit Offer00:04:35
I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is ticky-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Ship-shaped topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
We all know what they're saying.
That was rapper Loza Alexander volunteering to without his knowledge to help us out with our opening theme.
Right here, the vast right-wing conspiracy known as Clavinon continues.
We're going to explain today the all-important question, why Superman is not gay no matter what they do to him.
And he'll never be gay.
And it's an atrocity that they tried to make him gay.
And we all know it, but we can't explain it.
I've been listening to right-wingers talk about this, and they can't quite come out and say why it's wrong, but I am going to explain it.
We also have the wonderful writer, Amity Schlays, and a surprise guest, the worst person in America.
This would be a great time to go on and subscribe to the show on Apples podcast.
Give us a five-star review if you like the show.
If you don't like the show, give us a five-star review just to confuse them.
Also, if you want to be in the mailbag, you got to subscribe to dailywire.com.
Then press the watch button.
I think it'll take you to the podcast.
Go to my podcast.
Hit the little paper airplane.
Ask me anything you want.
You can ask me about your personal life.
You can ask me about politics, about religion.
All my answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life.
Will they change it for the better?
Stop asking stupid questions.
Also, subscribe to my YouTube channel, the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel, not the Daily Wire one, my personal channel, and I will send you extra stuff completely exclusively.
We had a really good one this time about the Sopranos movie.
We got all kinds of bonus videos on the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel, so go there.
And if you leave a comment and the comment is sufficiently disgusting and hateful and bigoted and racist, we will put it on the show because it fits right in.
Today's comment is from Lexi.
She says, I guess it's she, she said, if I had a dime for every time Biden coherently gets through a full sentence, I'd have a ball of lint and a couple of paper clips.
That's actually a literal, that's not even a joke.
I think that's a literal statement.
First, let's talk about Ring.
I got my new house.
I have not got my Ring Alarm security system up there, but I got to put it up because I am much more at ease whether I'm on the road or away from home.
The Ring Alarm equals peace of mind.
Protect your home with the Ring Alarm.
I had it in my old house.
Ring Alarm is a powerful, affordable home security system that you can easily install yourself, and it works seamlessly with other Ring products in one simple app.
You know, it's great because no matter where you are, if somebody's out there, if you're even in the house, you don't have to, you know, go look around.
You can look on your app and see them, talk to them if anybody's out there.
For a special offer, go to ring.com slash Clavin.
It's the perfect way to start your Ring experience.
Keep an eye on every corner of your house with indoor and outdoor cams.
See what's happening right from your phone.
Protect your home anytime from anywhere with Ring Alarm.
Go to Ring.com slash Clavin for a special offer on a Ring Alarm security kit today.
You can build a system that's right for your home and have it up running in minutes.
Anyone comes to your house, no matter where you are.
You ask them, how do you spell Clavin?
If they know the answer, call the police.
I enjoyed the Daily Wire backstage live at the historic Ryman Theater.
I thank everybody who came from coming.
It was so nice to get to meet so many of you.
They kept calling it the historic Ryman Theater.
I was thinking, how historic can a theater be?
And then I looked it up.
And in fact, the entire civil war was actually staged in the Ryman Theater, as well as the moon landing and the 9-11 attacks were all done there.
So it is, in fact, very historic.
And we had a lot of great announcements at the show.
A new movie coming out called Shut In.
The Gina Carano movie has started filming.
Adam Carolla is going to do a show on the Daily Wire.
Spirited Victory for the Right00:15:49
All of this, I have to tell you, is tremendously gratifying to me because I've been yelling about the culture and losing the culture for 20 years.
And it's taken a long time for the right-wingers to kind of catch on that this is important, more important than sometimes than the facts that the fact that capitalism works and freedom works and religion works.
More important than that is the culture, as Jeremy the God King said at the Ryman, the historic Ryman theater.
And as I've said before many times, this is going to be a decades-long fight because they took over all our institutions.
We're not going to be able to take them back.
We're going to have to build new institutions ourselves.
But the good news is, I think we have now reached peak woke culture because woke is poison toxic to culture because it's a small-minded, mean-spirited, corrupt, bigoted ideology that just ruins art, sucks the heart out of art, and just turns everything into propaganda and to hectoring and to nastiness.
And the thing that gave this away to me really was Dave Chappelle.
I talked about this a little bit at the historic Ryman Theater.
We had to leave because they were getting ready to film the next world conflict.
But, you know, I talked about Dave Chappelle's show.
He has this show on Netflix.
And there's a part in it where he talks about transgenderism.
Here's a little bit of that.
Gender is a fact.
This is a fact.
Every human being in this room, every human being on earth, had to pass through the legs of a woman to be on earth.
That is a fact.
Now, I am not saying that to say that trans women aren't women.
I am just saying that those that they got.
You know what I mean?
He doesn't even have to finish the sentence, right?
He's talking about the vagina of a trans woman.
He doesn't even have to finish the sentence because we all get it.
This is not real womanhood.
This is not what womanhood is.
And we are so thrilled.
You know, the Netflix CEO came out and he said, we're not going to cancel this.
They're threatening walkouts.
The New York Times is attacking them.
Everybody's attacking the show.
It's called The Closer, but they're not going to take it off.
And we're so thrilled.
We're so thrilled.
The guy is saying something that everybody knows is true, that four-year-olds, four-year-old people know that boys are one way and girls are another and boys have one thing and girls have another and you can't change.
That's who you are.
And just notice what he said there, because this is the part where I'm supposed to say nothing against trans people.
That's the thing I'm supposed to say next.
And he said it, I'm not saying trans women are not women, but.
And then he doesn't even have to finish the sentence because everybody knows.
So this is how bad things are, that we on the right are cheering because somebody can say that girls are girls and boys are boys.
I mean, what a victory.
What a victory.
Soon, soon, we may be able to say the sky is blue or that Dr. Fauci is a liar.
I mean, who knows what wonderful heights of truth-telling we have to say.
But we're always going to have to say before that, we're always going to make an excuse.
I'm not saying this.
I don't, you know, I feel, it's not that I hate black people, but it's not that I hate transgender people, but it's not that I hate gay people, but we're going to have to keep saying this.
Wokeism is a small-minded, racist, wicked, graceless, mean-spirited, ugly point of view.
So why are we the ones apologizing?
That's how bad it is.
That's how far we've lost the culture.
But why?
Why do they keep winning?
Why do they always win the culture?
And why are we always playing defense?
I'm sure you heard like this John Gruden thing.
John Gruden got thrown Off his job as the coach of the Oakland Raiders.
I just wanted you to know exactly what happened, though, because what happened was the NFL was investigating charges against the Washington Redskins.
We're not allowed to call them that anymore, but that's what they are.
There were charges of sexual harassment.
So they're going through emails in the NFL, right?
They're going through all these emails looking for charges of sexual harassment, but instead, they find a private email that John Gruden, who everybody knows is a big mouth and always says, you know, talks off the top of his head.
That's what makes him so entertaining.
They found him in the middle of a labor dispute.
He was talking about Demaurie Smith, the executive director of the NFL Players Association.
And this is a private email that he sent, and he called him Dummerus Smith.
And he said he had lips, these black eyes had lips the size of a Michelin tire, made some remarks about gay people and all this.
And it's so terrible that on the NFL talk shows, they're actually bursting into tears.
He's cut seven.
For us to be moving back and not forward in 21st century, like I said, man.
National Football League, this hurts me.
The clock is ticking, man.
I'm sorry.
I can play for you, but I'd rather not.
Okay, I'd rather not do it, but if I have to do it, I will.
And it's just because I have other people that I have to provide for.
But I'd rather not do it.
Now, they're crying.
The guy's crying about John Gruden in private emails 10 years ago, sending this, you know, saying some nasty stuff about this guy's lips.
All right.
This has changed nothing.
This means nothing.
It hasn't changed the NFL.
It hasn't changed the way John Gruden treats his players.
It doesn't change the way the NFL is treating its players.
Changes nothing.
It's meaningless.
It means something.
But you might stop and think: wait a minute, wait a minute.
You were looking for evidence of sexual harassment because you're being fined for sexual harassment.
You went through 10 years of NFL emails.
Where's the rest of it?
Here's the announcement from the NFL.
Based on the material that we have reviewed, we haven't identified anything that needed to be reported to club or league leadership.
We have released no emails during this process.
It's a ruse.
Generally speaking, every charge of racism is covering up some kind of bad action by the left, some kind of seizing of power.
George Floyd, the whole thing about the police killing black people, which almost never happens, never killing innocent black people, just going out.
Remember, they're talking about the streets are littered with the dead black people of the police.
All a ruse.
It's a ruse because the federal government, the left wants the federal government to take over criminal policing in localities.
They don't want localities and states to have the rights to criminally police.
So they harass the police and they come in and they oversee them.
They use these incidents to oversee them.
It's a ruse because crime goes up in leftist cities in places where the left's policies take hold.
And so instead, it's George Floyd has been killed.
This guy was killed.
It's always a ruse.
Generally speaking, any talk about racism, because this is the least racist country on earth, because it is the least racist country on earth, any talk about racism is a ruse.
So wokeism is hypocrisy.
It's a ruse.
It's corrupt.
And it's not just that.
It's mean.
It's vicious.
It's authoritarian.
Why are we the ones apologizing?
You know, they're coming out with CRT.
They're saying, we should be teaching CRT.
You shouldn't be able, this is a critical race theory.
You shouldn't be able.
They're literally investigating, threatening to investigate parents who protest against this.
You know, the UN, the United Nations, the left loves the UN.
They have a universal declaration of human rights.
In that Declaration of Human Rights, I'm getting this from Gerard Baker in the Wall Street Journal.
Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.
So wokeism is authoritarian.
It's bullying.
It's mean.
Why are we apologizing?
Here's the reason.
I will tell you the reason.
Why do we always have to say, oh, I'm for this, but I don't mean anything about gay people.
I don't mean anything about black people.
It's because they have a creative moral vision and we don't.
Their moral vision is wicked.
It's not moral, but it's a moral vision, and we don't have one at all.
We talk about the fact that our ideas work.
Capitalism works.
It makes everybody richer.
Freedom works because the more people have freedom, the more ideas can flow and more good ideas rise to the top.
Free speech works.
We forget to mention that this is right.
This is the moral way for us to treat one another.
I tried to, even with religion, even with religion, listen, listen to the way the right-wing talks about religion.
We say, well, you know, religion is good because it makes people moral and therefore the government doesn't have to come and govern them because they govern themselves.
It works.
We never talk about the fact that it's true.
We never talk about the fact that it is the most meaningful, moral way to live your life, not because it stops you from doing X, Y, or Z, because it shows you the world as it really is, as God made it.
You know, I think the left talks about Jesus more.
They say, well, Jesus, you know, of course, was a transgender Palestinian, but he did say, love your neighbor, and therefore we're taking all your money away, and we're going to distribute it as an act of love.
You know, our Jesus is like, don't be gay.
That's our Jesus.
When was the last time, seriously, you heard a creative and modern, but also scripturally true, take on Christianity that helped your life and you weren't listening to this particular show.
When was the last time that happened?
Without vision, the people perish.
The left has a vision.
It's a wicked vision.
It's a mean-spirited vision.
It's corrupt.
It's authoritarian, but it is creative.
They're constantly coming up with fresh ideas.
And without a creative moral vision, and I emphasize moral, you cannot build a culture, which is what we now have to do.
That is what we have embarked upon.
That is what we have to do.
And this brings me to the question of gay Superman.
All right, we're going to talk about Superman in just a minute, but first we're going to talk about why you can't get a date.
You can't get a date because your car doesn't work.
And when you go to get a part for your car, you sit in your not-working car and make those driving noises like a little kid.
You know, pretend you're driving down to the auto parts star instead of saying rockauto.com.
Rockauto.com is like a mating call.
Women will flock to you because they know you know how to get all the auto parts you need right on your computer from rockauto.com.
They have a great, great catalog.
It's easy to use.
The prices are good.
You can see all the parts available for your vehicle and choose the brands, specifications, and the prices you prefer.
Go to rockauto.com if you want to show that you are smart enough to get your car up and running from your computer at a great price.
And also just because it's cool to say rockauto.com.
And when you get there, right, Clavin in there, how did you hear about us, Box?
So they know we sent you and you got to write it the same way.
Clavin, you got to spell it right too.
K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no easy Claven.
I just make it look this easy.
All right, here's the story from the New York Times, a former newspaper.
Up, up, and out of the closet, the new Superman, Jonathan Kent, who is the son of Clark Kenton Lewis Lane, will soon begin a romantic relationship with a male friend, DC Comics announced Monday.
That same-sex relationship is just one of the ways that Jonathan Kent, who goes by John, is proving to be a different Superman than his famous father.
Since his new series, Superman's Son of Cal El, began in July.
John has combated wildfires caused by climate change, thwarted a high school shooting, and protested the deportation of refugees in metropolis.
Gosh, it's so stunning, so brave.
And here's the writer, Tom Taylor.
He says, the idea of replacing Clark Kent with another straight white savior felt like a missed opportunity, says this clever, inventive Tom Taylor.
So stunning, so brave.
Here's the real Superman, Dean Kane, addressing the issue who cut four.
They said it's bold and a bold new direction.
I say they're bandwagoning.
You know, a Robin of Batman, a Robin, as you mentioned, just came out as bi or gay recently.
And honestly, who's really shocked about that one?
I had some thoughts about that a long time ago.
New Captain America is gay.
My daughter in Supergirl, where I played the father, she was gay.
So I don't think it's bold or brave or some crazy new direction.
If they had done this 20 years ago, perhaps that would have been bold and brave.
But brave would be having him, you know, fighting for the rights of gay people in Iran, or they'll throw you up from a building for the offense of being gay.
They're talking about him fighting real-world problems like climate change, the deportation of refugees, and he'll be dating a hacktivist, whatever a hacktivist is.
I don't know.
But why don't they have him fight the injustices that created the refugees whose deportation he's protesting?
That would be brave.
And that's all right.
But it's all true, what Dean is saying there, but I will go beyond that.
I think what Tom Taylor, the writer, did was small and mean-spirited and disgusting, taking a beloved icon and turning it to his pinched little misguided political purposes that he knows is going to offend people.
And yeah, you know, comic book sales are plummeting.
I think they're like down 20%.
They keep boosting them up with manga sales.
They mix in manga sales, but they're actually plummeting.
They're way down.
And it's just like, you know, we celebrate that.
That's our idea of a victory that they blew their, they destroyed the franchise.
It's like the new James Bond, which apparently isn't very woke in the actual movie, but the promotion of it was woke.
And so it didn't open.
They didn't make as many gazillions of dollars as they usually make.
But apparently the film itself, I mean, here's a scene from the film where the villain confronts Bond.
This is, yeah, play it.
Well, Mr. Bond, soon the United States debt will top $29 trillion.
It's madness.
Economic madness.
How did you pull off this heinous act?
Oh, I had nothing to do with it.
No, it was Congress.
Congress of the Soviet Union tricked us into getting this debt.
But no, the United States Congress of America.
Yes.
How much was it again?
$29 trillion.
Do we pay interest on that?
Yes.
All the time?
Yes.
This is terrifying.
It's a great deal of money.
What do we do?
Honestly, it won't affect me very much because I'm very wealthy.
Will I be okay?
Are you a federal employee?
Yes.
Then you'll be fine.
Oh, thank God.
All right.
That wasn't the real movie.
That was from Reason TV, Meredith and Austin Bragg.
Austin Bragg plays the villain.
And so James Bond is a libertarian.
But however, however, the movie apparently was not that woke.
And, you know, we're all so thrilled that they lost money because of their woke.
But who cares?
It's not about, we think that's a victory.
We think that's a victory when they destroy a franchise.
We think that's a victory when the audience doesn't show up, go woke, go broke, and we celebrate that.
Fine.
But we never point out that it's wrong.
What they're doing is wrong.
It is morally wrong.
And we have to say that and say that something else is right.
Now, this is the place where I'm supposed to say, oh, I have nothing against gay people.
And normally, that's the way we always do this.
Not against gay people, but, but, but.
Normally, I would refuse to say it just to poke the left in the eye because I think they're so small, so mean-spirited, so corrupt, so authoritarian, that there's no reason to do anything they want us to do.
But in this case, in this case, one particular case, I do have to start with this because this is about a value that has followed me my whole life and has followed me from when I was a lefty, I've become a liberal, I guess, to now that I'm a conservative, before I was a believer, to now when I'm a Christian, it has remained the same.
And it's important because I have not condemned gay people at any time in my life.
My father, I remember when I was a kid, explained homosexuality to me because we met a gay couple at one of his friends' house, and he was explaining to me what it was.
And in those days, because of Sigmund Freud, they thought it was a psychological disorder.
That was the liberal take on it.
So he's being liberal and nice about it.
And I remember looking at him and saying, well, they weren't hurting anybody.
They seemed to like each other and they weren't hurting anybody.
And I've lived my life in the arts, right?
And my colleagues, so many of my colleagues and respected colleagues and beloved friends have been gay, right?
And my son, Spencer Clavin, no relation, but obviously a gay man.
He's getting married soon, gay married.
Who is it who says that?
Dave Rubin.
He's getting gay married to his boyfriend.
And I think I've said this before, and I get angry, angry letters about it.
I think my son is a godly man.
I think he's a manly man.
I think this is really an interesting fact.
More of a Man00:07:59
And I believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God, but I've discussed the way I read it and that different voices in the Bible have different roles to play, like in every narrative ever written.
So I don't feel bound to condemn homosexuals because of Christianity.
None of that.
None of that bothers me.
And by the way, I've been like this since we're talking about the 1970s, the 1970s, when gay people would come to my house and parties, and some of my friends who were Democrats wouldn't come back because they had met gay people at my party.
So I've been ahead of these guys.
These guys who think they're brave because they're doing what everybody is doing, like Dean Kane said, because they're getting on the bandwagon.
They don't mean anything to me.
I was doing this when you actually got attacked for it.
When people would say to you, you must be gay.
And I would think, like, I wish my life would be so much easier.
But, you know, that was the way people treated you back then.
Now, it's not brave at all.
So I don't have anything to apologize for to these guys.
However, however, there's another scripture that St. Augustine talks about.
It's creation itself, the book of nature, is also the word of God.
And creation has a pattern and it has a voice.
And I'll show you what I mean.
Let me see if I can make you understand why what they did to Superman is wicked.
It's wrong.
It's disgusting.
And we all know it, but we can't figure out a way to say it without stepping on the hatingly homophobic trap.
We keep saying it's not about gay, but there's something wrong with it because it's getting on the bandwagon.
That's not what's wrong about it.
It was wrong when they did it to Captain America.
It was wrong back then.
Creation has a pattern and a voice, and it is the voice of God.
It is the way God speaks.
Man is a beautiful animal.
He is the standard of all beauty, the David, of Michelangelo, the Venus of Botticelli.
That's what beauty is.
Beauty is the human form divine, right?
Man is an animal with two legs, right?
He's a featherless biped.
That's what Socrates said.
That was the definition of mankind, a featherless biped.
He has two legs.
But let's say a particular man is born with one leg, right?
He's born with only a single leg.
Man is still a two-legged animal.
Man is still defined as a featherless biped.
He is still a two-legged animal.
But this man is out of order.
There's something disordered about his body.
His body, he's crippled.
He's handicapped, however you want to say it.
Now, let's say this one-legged man says, I praise the God who made me, and I'm going to worship him through excellence.
And he becomes an athlete, right, to show that it can be done.
Now, he's one-legged, so with all the goodwill in the world, he still can't compete on a major league professional level, but he gets so good that he gets into the handicapped Olympics and all kinds of handicapped games, and he wins them all.
He inspires other people.
He inspires other handicapped kids.
He's got humility, joyfulness, praise of God.
He inspires them to praise God.
He inspires them to rethink their situation.
And it's really, you know, he's really a wonderful guy.
You ask yourself, is he less or more of a person, of a soul, than an egotistical punk athlete who was born with all the gifts and who struts around in the end zone when he makes a touchdown and thumps his chest and mocks the other players and all that stuff?
Who is the better man?
Who is the better man?
Obviously, it's the one-legged man, and the one-legged man is more of a man.
But, but the other athlete, who's a schmuck, who's an egotistical schmuck, but who has a perfect body, who has a body that is formed in the pattern of mankind, is still a tremendous inspiration because as a work of the imagination, which is what sports is, sports is like the arts.
It works in your imagination.
He shows you what the human form can do at its pinnacle, right?
It's not about his inner soul.
It's not about his moral life.
It's not about anything.
It is about the fact that as a work of the imagination, which is what an athlete essentially is to us, right, because we're not playing the game, we don't win or lose the game, but we get so wrapped up in it because it's a work of the imagination.
He represents an icon of what the human form can be in terms of excellence, right?
Now, human beings are meant to have sex with the opposite gender because that's how we continue God's work of physical creation.
That is how we're built.
You can see it.
You can see how our bodies fit together.
And it's joyous, it's tons of fun, and it keeps the human race alive, right?
It is what creates all of us.
All of us were created by the same act.
And it's also, I would argue, spiritually illuminating and beautiful that to be brought together with someone who is so different from yourself, because there are only two kinds of people in the world.
There are men and there are women.
All the races don't mean a thing, but men and women are truly, truly different.
And I can tell you, after 40 years of a loving, faithful marriage, I mean, I am devoted to the woman I married, and I hope she actually has some affection for me.
But I can tell you that after 40 years and more of a loving, faithful marriage, I haven't become more feminine.
If I said that, my wife would hit me with a ham hock.
So the hell you have.
But I now can see what she sees.
And it's like wearing 3D glasses or an oculus.
Suddenly the world has become fuller to me over time because I have loved and included in my ego someone who is so different from me.
So the way that we were made is a beautiful thing.
And that is the center of humankind.
A man and a woman creating a child is at the center of the flower of humankind.
But that doesn't mean that the other things, the petals of the flower, aren't also beautiful, right?
Some men, let's talk about men just to make it easy.
Some men are not fashioned for that experience, that experience, that beautiful experience that I just described.
Like I said, even if a man is born with one leg, man is a two-legged creature.
Even if a man is born homosexual, man is a heterosexual creature.
Heteronormativity is right because it is the normal thing that men is and men are, and it is the pattern of humankind and how human beings recreate.
But some men, just like the one-legged man, are not fashioned for that experience.
Sometimes it's physical, sometimes it's mental, sometimes I think it's spiritual.
I think gay people are born gay.
I really do.
I mean, I have experience with this, observing it.
And like I said, they're so different than I am.
There must be some kind of genetic, you know, I mean, if I had every second that I spent thinking about women's bodies back, I would be 26 years old.
And obviously, a gay man is not having those same thoughts.
So we are really, really different.
And what if this man is gay and he says, I praise the Lord who made me, and I'm going to worship him with excellence, and I'm going to inspire other people to worship him through my excellence.
And I'm going to love as I love with integrity and with courage and decency, and I'm going to be manly in that sense, and I'm going to be manly in the sense of pursuing excellence and having integrity and having courage.
So is he better or worse than the straight man who goes through three wives cheating on all of them and who underpays his employees and who's small and greedy, but he happens, you know, it's like the old joke.
It's like the old joke of the two British explorers in the club and one of them says to the other, well, whatever happened to old Henderson, Henderson.
This guy says, well, Henderson, you know, he ran off into the jungle.
He married a gorilla.
He says, married a gorilla?
Yes, he married a gorilla.
He said, well, was it a male or female gorilla?
Oh, it was a female gorilla.
Nothing funny about old Henderson.
You know, the one thing this guy has, cheats on his wife, cheats on his employees, cheats on everybody, but the one thing he has is he's attracted to girls.
There's nothing funny about old Henderson.
And yet, and yet, okay, obviously the gay man is the better man in that case.
And yet, if you were to invent an imaginary character, a character to inhabit the imagination, who represents every excellence of a man, because he's an imaginary figure, and that's his role, to represent every excellence of a man.
Even beyond by overemphasizing those excellences, by giving him super strength, by giving him invulnerability, by giving him the ability to fly, by making him extra honest, giving him extra integrity.
William Shatner's Rocket Ship Date00:15:19
Let's call him Superman.
Okay, that's what, in fact, the name kind of says it all, doesn't it?
He's Superman.
He would have two legs and he would be straight.
And if you were creative, a creative person, a creative artist, an artist who is brave and bold and creative the way artists have to be, you could make a superhero who is gay.
You could make a different superhero who is gay or black or something else to represent something else.
But if you take Superman, who is meant for a certain thing from a certain time to do a certain thing, and you make him gay or make him something different, you haven't created anything.
You've just destroyed something that someone else has created.
And you've done it for a mean, small reason to show people that you are better than they are and more open-minded and more tolerant and all the things that the left thinks it is.
It's a corrupt, ugly, small, mean thing to do.
And to associate that with an American icon like Superman is sick and it's wicked and it's disgusting and it's disgusting.
And again, you now know everything I think about gay people.
You can write me angry letters and tell me I'm not a good Christian, but you now know that gay people have been my friends.
I've loved them.
I know many, many of them, including my own son, who is as close to me as my carotid artery.
That's not the question.
That is not the question.
It's a question of what this imaginary figure, Superman, does.
And it is a question of what we are fighting over, which is, in fact, the imagination.
And that's what I want to talk about next.
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What we are talking about is battleground imagination.
What we are in is a fight for the imagination.
And I want to explain why, because if you don't think the imagination matters, I want you to take a look at the story of William Shatner, 90 years old, right?
The famous star of the original Star Trek and in some of the movies, right?
This is a show, as I'm sure all of you know, the show created by a guy named Gene Roddenberry.
It was based on the wonderful, wonderful hornblower novels.
If you've never read the hornblower novels by C.S. Forrester, they're about a man rising through the ranks of the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars.
They are absolutely terrific adventure novels, some of the best adventure novels ever made.
Wanted to bring that kind of integrity and kind of society, a closed society to the screen.
Now, the show, when it came out in the 60s, it only did so-so in the ratings.
It climbed a little bit in the ratings, but they canceled it.
And the fans loved it so much that they, what was unprecedented at the time, they staged a letter-writing campaign.
And so they put it back on, but they put it on in a bad slot and they kind of took away some of its budget.
And Roddenberry got angry and he quit, and the show got worse and worse, essentially.
And finally, even though the fans still tried to save it, it went off the air.
And while the show was running, William Shatner, as Captain Kirk, made a PR visit to Cape Canaveral, where the rockets went up.
And he was given the red carpet treatment and he signed something for the astronauts saying, see you on the moon.
1969, Shatner's marriage falls apart and the show is canceled.
His wife divorces him and the show is canceled.
And in 1969, we landed on the moon.
And Shatner said, I'm lying on a bed.
His description of watching the moon landing.
He said, I'm lying on a bed in an RV, looking through a window at the moon, watching this on a little four-inch black and white television set on my belly.
I'm in a pasture on Long Island doing summer stock theater, right?
His career has cratered, basically.
He says, I'm at a very low point watching this high point.
He's got a new album coming out called Bill, and he talks about this.
This is cut two.
Carpet bagging down to town, the summer to the fall.
Sleeping in my pickup, feeling like I'd hit a flow.
My marriage had been canceled, and so had my show.
I'm talking about this to emphasize the difference between this actor and the role he played, which is an act of the imagination.
And we honor him for creating this role.
I mean, it's written by other people.
It was thought up by other people, but he embodied it, just like the athlete embodies the perfections of things.
So Shatner embodies this imaginary character.
And, you know, he had a great career.
He went on to be in Boston Legal, which is a wonderful show, and he's absolutely terrific in it.
But at some point, he kind of became a joke.
His style of acting went out of fashion.
He kind of modernized it later.
But he did this one thing where he sang Elton John's Rocket Man, which is one of the funniest things ever.
If you can find it on YouTube, you can find it on YouTube.
He sits there smoking a cigarette and he says, I'm going to be as a kite by then.
Here's a moment from.
And I think it's going to be a long, long time.
The touchdown brings me back again to find I'm not the man they think I am back home.
Oh, no, no, no, I'm a rocket man.
It's a great moment.
He was a figure of fun in a lot of ways.
But here's the thing, right?
The character he created, the world he helped create, the world Star Trek imagined, inspired a generation of scientists.
This is true.
They will talk about this.
And a lot of the stuff in it became real.
Obviously, the communicators that we're all now carrying around, phasers, tractor beams, computer tablets, translators, universal translators, telepresence, which they had on the show.
This is all stuff that was imagined into being on this show and then became real.
And now, finally, I'm sure you've heard, William Shatner has become a rocket man in real life.
It's going to be a high as a kite by then.
Jeff Bezos sent him up into space in one of his penis-shaped rockets.
Amazing that he's gotten away with this.
I love it, though.
It's his phallic-shaped rockets.
And here was Shatner's reaction when he first heard the news that he was going into space as cut five.
I just love the idea of exploring the unknown.
And then there's other things that we just haven't figured out or discovered yet.
To think about so much that's out there that we still have to learn.
Like, I love that.
I love that.
And so I'm very excited about the Space Council.
We're going to learn so much as we increasingly, I think, are curious and interested in the potential for the discoveries and the work we can do in space.
Okay, that wasn't William Shatner.
That was another figure of our imagination, of our nightmares.
That was Camela Harris putting out this series of videos that may be one of the most vomitous things I've ever seen.
It's just amazing.
They had to hire children to sit there and look on in wonder and awe for the simple reason that they couldn't get real children to go anywhere near her because they were afraid she'd take them into her gingerbread house and devour them.
So anyway, Jeff Bezos has this blue origin thing where he's trying to beat all the other billionaires into space and he's building these rockets that look like a phallus and he sent William Shatner, 90 years old, oldest man ever to go into space.
And somebody made the joke this is to oldly go where no man had gone before.
But he sent him out just over what's called the Karman line, which is the barrier between our atmosphere and space.
And they had pictures of him in the rocket ship looking out at Earth.
This is cut six.
It gives us a sense of the magnitude of it all.
Earth is kind of small, right?
The Earth is like a speck.
Earth is kind of small.
Earth is kind of small.
I love it.
You just really, ah, anyway.
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So Shatner went up and he was absolutely, it was an absolute rocket thing.
You know, the thing about Jeff Bezos doing this, they actually covered this in the James Bond film.
They covered the villain as actually based on Jeff Bezos and talks about going into space.
This is cut 38.
Well, Mr. Bond, it's time I leave you.
I have a date with a rocket ship.
To blow up the moon?
Just to float about for a bit as a tourist.
It sounds really fun.
Using hard-earned taxpayer dollars?
No, I'm using my money.
Money you stole?
No, I provided goods and services on the internet during a pandemic.
I created a great amount of value for many people all across the globe.
How is that even?
I don't know.
I just said I was going to space and everyone on Twitter, they're very angry.
That's the reason TV thing is.
This is really funny.
You ought to watch this on YouTube because it's got one thing where he talks to the girl who was killed by Goldfinger and it is really, really hilarious.
Anyway, anyway, my point, though, in playing that is that this is a capitalist moment when John F. Kennedy panicked when he saw Sputnik, when he saw the Russians put Sputnik up in space and said, we went into the space race, right?
And we were going to beat the Soviet Union to the moon.
And he brought all this talent into NASA, into the government.
And we beat the Russians to the moon.
We outdid them.
And here was supposedly this great example of what government can do that private enterprise can't do.
But that killed, that killed the space program because the government basically decided not to keep going into space, not to keep going to the moon because it was costing money and because they didn't like the image of it and they didn't want to be, you know, compete with the Russians.
They wanted to join with the Russian space race and all this.
Whereas the competitive, angry, penis-shaped world of Jeff Bezos is going to just keep going until they get there and is going to keep going until they figure out how to make money out of it, until they figure out how to do mining on Mars.
And that's what finally made William Shatner just an actor and a guy who was sitting there depressed when they landed on the moon turned him into a rocket man.
Here's Shatner's kind of beautiful reaction when he came back down this cut too.
What you have given me is the most profound experience I can have.
I'm so filled with emotion about what just happened.
It's extraordinary.
Extraordinary.
Sorry, let me buy one again.
I hope I never recover from this.
I hope that I can maintain what I feel now.
I don't want to lose it.
It's so much larger than me of life.
You know, when I was watching this, I couldn't help thinking about a novel I wrote called Empire of Lies.
It's actually, I think, one of my best novels.
And it's the novel that kind of has a conservative hero in it, fighting Islamist terrorists.
And it's the novel that was kind of, when I finished writing Empire of Lies, this is literally true.
I walked into the bathroom and looked in the mirror, and I was a multi-award winning author at that point and nominated every year for some big thriller writing award.
And I looked in the mirror and I said, you realize that if you publish this book, you are never going to win another award ever again.
And are you okay with that?
And I said, yeah, you know, I'm sure I am.
But I miss it.
I do miss it because I knew that once I put forward this character as the hero of the piece, this conservative character, I was done for.
I was going to be canceled, essentially.
But the funny thing about this book is in this book, the book is about a guy, a conservative Christian, who starts to uncover an Islamist terrorist plot that no one else will admit is there, that the press is actively covering up.
It's in the Empire of Lies.
And the funny thing about it is it has a character who is, he's not William Shatner, but he's an obvious takeoff of William Shatner, a guy named Patrick Pearsall, who had a space-track Star Trek-like show where he played a guy named Augustus Kane.
And now he's washed up and he's a drunk and he's sitting around, but he's the one who keeps saying, you know, I think there's a plot, there's an Islamist plot going on.
The Country of Imagination00:03:59
And the plot is being organized by a professor who's attacking the country through his ideas.
And there's a scene where the hero goes in and finds the drunk Patrick Pearsall, this actor, sitting there maundering about this plot.
And here's what Patrick Pearsall says.
He says, the country of the imagination, he's drunk out of his mind.
He says, the country of the imagination.
That's the target.
It's not some towers.
That's just money.
That's just the economy.
The Pentagon too, what's that?
The military, the capital, the White House, the government.
No, no.
None of those is what really matters.
The country of the imagination, the Bible, the Constitution, Jesus Christ, Thomas Jefferson, movies, TV, me, Patrick Pearsall, Augustus Kaine, that's what he's out to destroy.
Now, obviously, this is a takeoff in this egotistical actor who thinks the whole thing, this whole terror threat is all about him.
But beneath that, there's a truth to what he's saying.
We're fighting for the imagination because just like with Star Trek, the imagination is where the future starts.
The imagination is where the future starts.
If we imagine disorder, we will have disorder.
If we have no icons of perfection, we will have nothing to strive for.
If we imagine racism like CRT does, like critical race theory does, tries to put into our minds, tries to make us imagine one another as belonging to racism to nothing else, then we'll have racism in the future.
If we imagine beauty and if we imagine truth, we'll have truth and beauty.
We're going to have to do that.
We're going to have to do that because they are out to destroy it.
The country of the imagination is the territory we're fighting for.
And I'm not picking, please don't think that I'm picking on conservatives.
I love conservatism.
I love American conservatism for what it stands for, for the freedom that it stands for.
I just want to make sure that we understand that what we stand for is the moral thing.
And we have to explain it as the moral thing because people are hurt inside.
We're all fallen.
We all know we're not righteous.
And we're all looking for that imaginary thing, that imaginary perfection that we can move toward.
Now, you can tell it in a story about gangsters.
You can tell it in a horror movie.
You can tell it in all kinds of different ways.
You can do it in all kinds of different pictures that don't look like perfection but still lead us onto perfection.
But you have to have a moral vision, not a practical vision, a moral vision of what mankind is and what God meant it to be.
And then you can begin to take the culture back.
All right, great interview with an important author coming up.
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Great Society Entitlements00:15:33
There are no easy planned.
All right.
I am really delighted to have this lady on as a guest.
Amity Schlese is a terrific writer.
I read her book about the Depression, The Forgotten Man.
It completely reconfigured my understanding of the Depression.
I think a lot of people's understanding of the Depression.
But she has another book that I'm really fascinated by.
I've only just started it called The Great Society: A New History.
Amity Schlase chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, which already speaks very highly of her.
And we just, I just want to talk to her about the Great Society because I think it is actually one of the most important topics not being discussed today.
Amity, are you there?
Glad to be here.
There, I've got you.
Okay, thank you.
Let's begin with this.
I mean, a lot of my audience is not going to even know really what the Great Society is.
So, can you just describe what that means, what those words mean?
Idealistic time, early 60s.
You don't want just a good society.
You want a great society.
So, it was a sort of national experiment.
Beware of the word great, right?
Always.
National experiment to elevate us from pretty darn good to greatness.
And the overarching question, Andrew, was: how do you do that?
Through the public sector or the private sector?
We opted for the public sector.
And the phrase itself comes from President Lyndon Johnson, who launched it on a college campus at Michigan in Ann Arbor in a speech.
We're going to have a great society.
We're going to be better in the classroom, better in the cities, better in the countryside.
3C is a great society.
We're going to do it.
And we're going to eradicate poverty.
Cure poverty was the verb President Johnson used.
He didn't say reduce poverty.
There was nothing modest about the Great Society.
It was all the way we can do this.
So this is one of the things that fascinates me about it.
Here it is, it's the 1960s.
People are rebelling.
Johnson couldn't even win a second term.
I mean, he was thrown into the presidency by the assassination of Kennedy.
He couldn't even win a second term.
He was not that popular.
What made people feel that the public sector was the way to go?
I mean, we were all supposed to be so anti-establishment then.
What made people feel that we were going to become great through the public sector instead of the private sector?
Just the impulse towards the collective and towards control is the short answer.
In the book, I have a character who really lived and was very interesting named Michael Harrington.
And he was just like a young progressive today, very bright, very funny, very likable, and wrote a book that was a version of Hillbilliology, right?
He wrote a book about the other America, the impoverished America in Appalachia.
Nothing is new.
It's just repeated, right?
So he writes this book, and someone in the Kennedy circle reads it.
He comes into the White House and says, we have to do something for all the poor, not just a few poor, and nothing incremental.
It's a temperament thing too.
Let's do, let's have a revolution.
Let's mount a revolution.
And this idea kind of excited some people.
And President Kennedy was assassinated, but the Harrington impulse to do something grand stayed.
And Johnson then turned that into a bunch of laws to eradicate poverty.
Why did Michael Harrington think you couldn't do that locally?
He was a socialist.
He said that.
Socialists think collective and big.
So I think the error, in my view, is this assumption that doing work for the collective is better than doing work for individuals or that change can't come from below.
But there it was.
And Harrington was disillusioned.
I trace him through the story in a nervous breakdown.
He was a very interesting, lovable guy, but he was totally wrong on this.
And we've got laws that we still live with long after he kind of veered out of there.
So, can you detail a couple of those laws?
I mean, just to give an idea of what these programs were?
Well, one of the most important, which I never mentioned in the book, shame on me, Great Society, was the laws that created public radio.
Because they created a modern consensus, which tends in a certain direction now.
We love public radio.
We're on it.
But because I think in good measure, because public radio comes from government, supported by government, even if viewers and listeners send in money, it tends to favor government.
Another thing that happened, a law that was very important, began a culture of law, we should say, that began with Kennedy and an executive order he didn't really even pay attention to when he was signing 10988.
That was public sector unionism.
So that made teacher unions, we used to have teacher associations, but unions in a powerful way.
And again, school teachers, we love them, we love our schools.
They tend progressive too, because they're a union and they work for the government.
And they're hard to change because of the power of those teachers' unions.
So those are two unmentioned laws or undermentioned.
Others would be the expansion of what we might call welfare.
And a very much key one was there was, you know, there were big laws, but a key sub-law, let's call it that, was the creation of federal funding for public interest lawyers.
It used to be you had a pro bono lawyer, and he was somebody who did it out of the good of his heart.
Or maybe, possibly, he worked for the ACLU.
But there weren't federally funded public interest lawyers.
And in the war on poverty, which is what the Great Society also came to be called, we began to fund thousands of public interest lawyers working in states.
John F. Kennedy's brother, Bob, called for it in a famous University of Chicago speech.
We need to have public sector and public interest lawyers everywhere.
And those lawyers tended to make cases, guess what, that said, let's make government bigger.
They weren't small government public interest lawyers.
So these are the cultural parts.
But the overarching act for some of this was the Economic Opportunity Act.
That doesn't sound so terrible.
Conservatives are for opportunity, right?
Well, progressives are for entitlement.
It was carefully worded, but it fostered entitlement, that law.
And I think another factor here that matters to this day, when you think about entitlements and entitlement spending, that is things you get from the government to which you're entitled, was a Supreme Court case called Goldberg v. Kelly, which said welfare is property, basically.
Before that, welfare was something you got if the social worker liked you.
That was pretty offensive, right?
The social worker could take the money away if she didn't like your family structure, your shoes, what all.
But after that, it was an entitlement as property, and that cemented the entitlement culture that we have.
So, you know, and that's very important too.
So those are a few of the things.
In the book, I go through a number of them relating to housing, for example, giant housing law.
So the book is Great Society, A New History by Amity Schlaze.
They were going to cure poverty.
Has poverty been cured?
Poverty has not been cured.
The poor are always with us, right?
Poverty is poverty, you know, one of the perverse things about in recent administrations that government economists have done and say, look, we cured poverty, by which they meant let's count all the benefits that poor people get.
Look, it's cured.
We spend enough.
Poor people do often get food stamps or housing subsidy or college subsidy.
That, okay, that's wonderful.
Nobody wants anyone to starve.
We want to help people, but the poverty is there.
What do I mean by that?
I'll give you an example.
When I was speaking in a high school in Arizona, I was talking about how Richard Nixon was actually the devil when it came to expansion of food stamps.
Johnson had food stamps.
Nixon had mega food stamps.
Why?
Because Richard Nixon liked the agriculture lobby.
He wanted people to be calm.
He wanted to worry about the Vietnam War, not about peace at home.
Food stamps expanded.
And I explained about that.
And a young lady got up and said, How dare you shame people on food stamps?
And I said, No one is shaming people on food stamps, but you even can agree that it would be a shame if not only your parent, but also your child needed food stamps.
That would be something to regret.
And what we created was a sort of habit of receiving money and entitlement that helped no one.
And I think if you interview anywhere, you'll find no one who thinks it's great for every generation to need food stamps.
Opportunity is a better solution for most people, you know.
And what about the idea that so you get people who have become dependent on government aid and they don't, they're not inspired to move upward.
What about the idea that this has been destructive to families?
I mean, I know when I was a kid, there was about a 25% rate of fatherlessness among black, poor black families.
It is now, I think, over 75%, which is worse than it was when in slavery days.
I mean, when people were actually selling families into different places, did the great society have anything to do with that?
Absolutely.
But you want to assign some of that blame to the 50s, because we had welfare and welfare rules in the 50s.
And if you go back and read the interviews in that period, it's heartbreaking in public housing from the early urban renewal structures, new then splendid seeming projects.
The social worker would come and say, is there a dad here?
If there's a dad here, you're evicted.
And the mom would lie and say, there is no dad.
The dad might be under the bed.
Children were forced to lie.
And that annedates Lyndon Johnson's great society and goes back to state welfare laws, which had an interesting premise.
If dad is there, he should work and they should pay for their own apartment.
It's just an example of how perverse well-meaning rules, what perverse outcomes they could have.
This was strengthened with some edits in the 60s.
To qualify for this or that, you had to have a low income and often that meant no dad.
And what welfare also did, frankly, was make people feel they didn't need a dad or another parent because they were getting a check.
The primary source became the check.
And why do you need a family if you want to be independent?
But then you realize later as a parent, well, maybe you need that other parent and it's too late.
So there it is.
Long ago, I worked, I observed, writing a journalism article in college.
I went to look at a home for unwed mothers and they were unfortunately trained to the check.
You're going to get a check.
Your mother's going to take care of you.
The dad was not in the picture of these young mothers' situations.
They were having babies somewhere in high school or caught, you know, or over high school age, but not in school.
And the goal was to keep them in high school, but to get them a check.
And we never, the people in the situation never talked about the debt because that would hurt the feelings of the girl because the dad was not helping out.
But the whole culture, well-meaning as it was, perpetuated the idea that welfare gives you independence.
Look, you can finally leave your mom because you get a check.
Every high school girl, whatever age, wants to leave her mom, right?
So we did that.
And we even get, you know, we did that.
And we set this all up.
We set this all up.
We taught people that entitlements are more important than opportunity.
So I have a theory I want to run by you, and you're allowed to tell me it's completely ridiculous, but it seems to me we've elected a black president twice.
You know, it seems to me this is a country that has gotten past its racial history, which was indeed shameful.
And yet we are continually being ginned up to hate each other and to look at each other according to the color of our skin.
And I've begun to believe that what the politicians are trying to protect and obscure is the failure of the great society.
Because after all, this is in order to spend this money, this money has to be flooded into government.
It gives government tremendous power.
It gives them tremendous power of patronage.
It gives them tremendous power to buy votes through government largesse.
And it's failed.
It has failed to do what it was supposed to do.
And in fact, it has had negative consequences.
Is that plausible?
Is it plausible that a lot of what we're seeing today?
It's entirely plausible that the great society, I won't say elephant, is it the elephant in the room or the donkey in the room?
But anyway, the force in the room we are not going to acknowledge.
And you can see that actually with the enormous emotional references to Franklin Roosevelt.
Franklin Roosevelt had the New Deal.
It was a big social program.
Let's be like him.
President Biden put a big picture of Franklin Roosevelt up.
He has, I think he has a bust of Eleanor too, of the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt.
He didn't put Lyndon Johnson front and center.
He put the New Deal, the preceding big social program, not the Great Society, in his showcase.
Because you know what?
If you examine the Great Society, you don't like the result, whatever party you're in.
So, but that is kind of what President Biden wants to do and what many, even many Republicans want to do resembles more the Great Society than it does the New Deal.
And in fact, dollar for dollar, when you look at federal spending, Andrew, we spend more on great society commitments than we do on New Deal commitments.
The New Deal commitment was Social Security, basically.
The Great Society was welfare and, and we spent all kinds of projects, including education and housing projects.
And that amount, those lines crossed in the early 2000s.
So the Great Society, we live in the Great Society.
We're living in Lyndon Johnson's great society today.
We walk in it.
And actually, Joe Califano, who was in that administration, wrote that sentence.
So let me attribute it, but I liked it so much.
We're living in it.
We're created by it less than by the New Deal.
The New Deal set the precedent, but the Great Society was the big follow-on.
And it wasn't great.
Can't Wait for Jordan's Show00:05:47
You know, this is something everyone should know about.
The book is The Great Society: A New History by Amity Schlays, S-H-L-A-E-S.
Amity, thank you so much.
It's wonderful to meet you.
I'm such an admirer.
I hope you'll come back and talk again.
I appreciate it.
All right, we got a different kind of sponsor for this episode, the Jordan Harbinger Show, a podcast you should check out.
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But if you are, this show covers such a wide range of topics through weekly interviews with heavy-hitting guests.
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There's an episode for everyone, no matter what you're into.
The show covers stories like how a professional art forger somehow made millions of dollars while being chased by the feds and the mafia.
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The podcast covers a lot, but one constant is Jordan's ability to pull useful pieces of advice from his guests.
You'll find something useful that you can apply to your own life, whether that's an actionable routine change that boosts your productivity or just a slight mindset tweak that changes how you see the world.
We really enjoy the show.
We think you will as well.
There's just so much here.
Check out jordanharbinger.com/slash start for some episode recommendations or search for the Jordan Harbinger Show.
That's H-A-R-B as in boy, I-N, as in Nancy, G-E-R on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
All right, coming up, we're going to talk about my favorite kind of scary stories, ghost stories.
But first, we had a lot of exciting announcements to make at our show of backstage at the Ryman this past Tuesday because the Daily Wire is fulfilling its promise to bring you even more non-mo content that you literally will not find anywhere else.
A very special guest helped us deliver one of those announcements, our good friend Adam Carolla, comedian and host of the Adam Carolla Show.
Carolla is joining the Daily Wire for a comedy series that'll deliver the laughs you need with the truth you deserve.
And we can't wait to share the final product with you.
We've also officially dropped the trailer for Shut-In, our first original production.
The film is centered around a mother who is barricaded inside a closet by her violent ex-husband as she uses nothing but her voice to keep her children who are on the outside safe.
Here is a teaser.
Laney!
I told you I need to see you at all times.
Do you understand me?
Well, I'm going to take off tonight so the kids can sleep most of the way.
Well, I'm mostly done.
I just need to finish cleaning out the pantry.
Mommy, someone's here.
Get away from him!
Please let me out.
Mommy!
You like the baby?
I won't give a bunch.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
Smell the weakness from here.
All right, that's terrifying.
We also want to share a message with you from the fearless Gina Carano about her new Daily Wire movie, Terror on the Prairie, which just started production this week.
Take a look at that.
Hi, Daily Wire members.
This is Gina Carano.
I'm coming to you from the set of Terror on the Prairie.
We came up to Montana and it is absolutely God's country.
We're making new friends.
We've attracted the most incredible custom crew.
I'm a hell of a director.
We're going to make a great, great movie.
I'm in love with the script.
I'm in love with the character.
I'm living fantasy right now.
So I can't wait for you guys to see it.
We're going to work hard.
After we announced our first project this summer, the Hollywood unions started debating vaccine mandates for cast and crew.
And I wasn't into that.
I don't believe anybody gets to make your medical choices for you, and I'm not willing to force masks and vaccines on anyone else.
Thank you to all the Daily Wire members.
You guys have been an extended family.
Thank you to everybody for making this possible.
Without you, I don't know where I'd be right now.
And right now, there's no other place I'd rather be.
So I hope everybody is doing well.
Keep fighting.
Stick together.
We got this.
Never give up.
This is great.
This is great stuff.
It's terrific.
We're doing it.
It's all coming to the Daily Wire in 2022.
There's no better time to join us than now.
We need your help.
Head to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Enter code 2022 for 25% off your membership.
That's dailywire.com slash subscribe, code 2022 for 25% off a new Daily Wire membership.
And stay tuned for more updates and new content.
It has been an exciting week for the Daily Wire, and this weekend's Sunday special only adds to the excitement.
Ben will be joined by none other than Barry Weiss, a brilliant writer, journalist, and now the voice of her own excellent podcast called Honestly.
They sit down to make sense of all that's going on today, and it is truly worth a listen.
Go check it out this Sunday at DailyWire.com or on Ben's YouTube channel, Ben Shapiro.
Daily Wire members get access to special bonus content from Sunday special episodes, so don't miss out.
join Daily Wire today.
So Halloween keeps approaching and we keep doing our series on scary stuff.
Ghost Stories Uncertainty00:15:53
And today I want to talk about my favorite kind of scary story, which is the ghost story.
When I first moved to England in the 90s, I fell in love with it instantly.
I mean, I had always liked England, but I fell in love with living there, and I was just having a wonderful time.
And we got there, I guess, in the summer to get the kids into school.
And as Christmas approached, you know, we got into the see the beautiful London Christmas and it was lots of fun.
And one night, Christmas Eve, it was Christmas Eve.
I put the kids to bed.
My wife was asleep.
And I poured myself a drink and I turned on the TV and it was just midnight.
It was just at midnight.
And a show came on called Ghost Stories for Christmas.
And I thought, I have died and gone to heaven.
It was like, I thought how wonderful it was that they were telling me English ghost stories on Christmas Eve.
I can't account for why I love ghost stories so much.
I've thought about it and thought about it.
What is it in my psychology that just makes them appeal to me?
And I just can't entirely account for it, but the British love them.
The British have more ghosts and more ghost stories than anybody else, and they're better at telling them than anything else.
One thing I love about them is that they're subtle.
The point of a ghost story is not to scare you or to horrify you, but to give you a sort of eerie feeling.
You know, there's a book called Creeps by Night, an old, old collection of scary stories that's written by, that's collected by Doshel Hammett.
And in it, he says something that the stories are just meant to cause a momentary shudder when what can't possibly happen happens.
And he said, because of this, the ghost story is usually short because it's just this one subtle moment when something changes, right?
It's when you see, you think you see something out of the corner of your eye that changes your entire sense of reality.
And that's a very subtle thing.
And it has to be, and it's usually a short story.
Sometimes movies, very few good ghost novels, though there are some.
Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, Stephen King's The Shining, The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, also made into an excellent play.
The movie was terrible.
There was a recent novel by Sarah Waters called The Little Stranger, also made into, I thought a mediocre film, but the book is very, very good.
The Haunting of Hill House did have a great movie made of it in 1963.
It's also had bad versions of it.
The most recent one was a Netflix version.
I think it was called The Haunting of Bly Manor.
But The Haunting of Hill House was made in 1960.
No, I'm sorry, that was different.
But The Haunting of Hill House was made in 1963.
And what makes it so good is a scene like this.
It's about a group of people brought together in a haunted house.
And one of them is played by Julie Harris, and she's a repressed, sexually repressed woman.
And Claire Bloom is another one, and she is a flirtatious lesbian.
And Julie Harris and Claire Bloom are in two separate beds, but lying together, and it's dark, and they hear voices in this haunted house, this evil house, and they start to clutch, hold on to each other's hands.
And here's that scene from 1963.
I will take a lot from this filthy house for his sake, but I will not go along with hurting a child.
No, I will not.
I will get my mouth to open right now, and I will yell, I will yell, I will yell.
Stop it!
What?
What, now what?
Hand was I holding.
She wakes up, if you couldn't see it, she wakes up and there's the two beds have been separated wide apart, and she couldn't possibly have been holding Claire Bloom's hand.
Whose hand was I holding?
And that's the moment when what can't have happened happens, and you don't even know.
You know, you don't even know if it's in her mind or what it is, but it just totally changes everything.
And some critics have said that the ghost story reached its peak during World War I or before World War I or after World War I, when this kind of sea of death washed over Europe, Europe was beginning to crumble as a culture, and people got very interested in mediums and spiritualism and contacting the dead.
But that's just obviously not true.
The great age of the English ghost story started before that with the Victorians.
And the master of the forum and the guy who was sort of seen as the center of the British ghost story was a guy named Montague Rhodes James, H.P. Lovecraft, pointed him out as the great practitioner of the ghost story.
He was a Cambridge medievalist scholar, and he used to gather his lads about him on Christmas Eve after the service and read them his latest story, which is wonderful.
And that was the ghost story for Christmas when I saw the show in England.
The ghost story for Christmas was in fact an M.R. James story.
Then they were mostly, I think, M.R. James stories.
And like most ghost story writers, this is true of all the great ghost story writers.
They only only have about five stories to tell.
So if you read M.R. James, you only want to read a few of his stories at a time.
After that, they start to get repetitive.
But a typical one has a kind of academic, a non-believing academic who stumbles on some ancient curse and finds out that there's more to it than he thought.
One of them was made into a wonderful, wonderful TV show, which is available, I think, on YouTube.
It's called Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad.
And it was made in 1968 by the great Jonathan Miller, made it.
And it has Michael Hodern in it as the professor.
Michael Hodern, you may know if you've ever seen the greatest version of a Christmas carol with Alastair Sim.
Michael Hodern plays Jacob Marley.
He plays the ghost of Jacob Marley.
And he's a professor and he finds a whistle.
And the whistle has an inscription, an ancient whistle has an inscription on it.
It says, who is this who is coming?
And he blows the whistle and he finds out.
And there's this wonderful scene where this kind of distracted, kind of pompous college professor, whatever he is, an academic, is confronted in the breakfast room of his hotel.
And here's Michael Hodern delivering an absolutely spectacular performance.
Do you believe in ghosts, Professor?
Ghosts?
That's a rather sticky one, isn't it?
I'm not quite certain what you mean.
I mean, I'm never quite certain what I'm being invited to believe when anybody asks me a question like that.
I'm not even quite certain what I'm being invited to disbelieve when it comes to that.
Quite with you, old chap.
Well, well, I mean, you ask me, do I believe in, say, Australia?
Well, now I know perfectly well what sort of thing I'm being asked to judge.
I mean, you all agree what we mean by Australia.
Large continent, southern hemisphere, discovered by Captain Cook, four or five large cities, kangaroos, and so on and so on.
And given that, given that, one can perfectly well imagine the sort of procedure that one might put in hand to confirm, or on the other hand, to disconfirm its existence.
The same thing with ghosts.
That's great.
It's a great performance.
But this, I think, captures one of the essences of the ghost story and why it became popular when it did in the Victorian age.
This is when the idea of scientific materialism, the idea that science had completely disproved any spiritual aspect to humankind, begins to make its conquest of the human mind.
We've talked about this before.
We had that wonderful interview with Stephen Meyer, where we talked about the fact that really that's obsolete, but at this time in the Victorian era, it had really become the great idea that was now moving in that science was going to disprove all spiritual activity.
And yet, and yet, and yet, we have the sneaking suspicion that there's something else right beyond our ability to perceive.
And it's not something like witches, it's not aliens, it's not something horrific, it's not any, it's just that faint thing of something that goes on beyond life that goes on after death.
And so, the trick of writing a ghost story, I think, is capturing that uncertainty.
Did this really happen?
If you just, you know, there's a story by A.S. Byatt, a novelist wrote a good novel called Possession.
She has a story called The July Ghost, where the ghost is clearly an emanation of a psychological grief that this person is experiencing.
It's just not scary.
It's not interesting when the ghost is totally psychological.
But when the ghost is too solid, when it's too real, then it just becomes a monster story.
There is this wonderful, wonderful netherworld between the psychology of something and our ability to perceive it.
Because as we've talked about before, everything that we see is partly our creation.
Everything that we see is only as we see it, is perceived by the human mind.
And that's why I think possibly the greatest ghost story is Henry James's The Turn of the Screw.
Henry James, one of the greatest novelists.
I can call him an American because he was born in an American, but he actually became an English subject later in life, and he really is a British writer in so many ways.
This is the one that they filmed on Netflix.
This is the one where I said The Haunting of Blind Manor, I think, was based on The Turn of the Screw.
But The Turn of the Screw is also the inspiration for what I think is the greatest ghost movie ever made.
And whenever I've talked to directors who specialize in horror, they all say, oh, yes, if only I could make a ghost story like this, but they can't because it's too subtle.
This is the movie The Innocence, made in 1961, also in black and white, like the picture of the haunting.
It stars the wonderful actress Deborah Carr.
But the most important thing about it is the screenplay is from William Archibald's play of The Turn of the Screw.
It's called The Innocence.
But it was also written by Truman Capote, the great writer, and I think Capote probably had a lot more to do with it.
I think he doctored the script.
It's so brilliantly written, and it also has some extra scenes and dialogue by John Mortimer, who writes the wonderful Rumpel of the Bailey mysteries, and also is the father of the actress Emily Mortimer, a wonderful actress.
And it's so well written.
And so the turn of the screw is about this governess, sexually repressed governess, probably comes to take care of these two children in a country house.
And they're two of the butter wouldn't melt in their mouth, the two most innocent, sweet little boy and girl in the world.
And yet somehow she begins to think that they are seeing something that nobody else can see, seeing somebody that nobody else can see.
And here's this one scene, and you have to listen to it really carefully.
Every line is so beautifully written to just suggest the fact that this entity that is haunting this house is psychological, but it's real as well.
It's both.
It's both things, and you cannot separate the psychology from the reality.
It is a wonderfully written scene.
Listen to it because it's very subtle.
She's putting the girl to bed and telling her to finish her prayers.
Finish your prayers, dear.
If I should wake before.
If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Amen.
Miss Kittens, where would the Lord take my soul to?
To heaven.
Are you certain?
Yes, of course, because you're a very, very good girl.
But I might not be.
And if I weren't, wouldn't the Lord just leave me here to walk around?
Isn't that what happens to some people?
Whatever was that?
I'm sure something's been hurt.
An animal.
We must pretend we didn't hear it.
That's what Mrs. Gross always says.
Pretend?
Then we won't imagine things.
Sometimes one can't help imagining things.
Such a brilliantly written scene because, you know, even the little mistake she makes in praying, if I should wake instead of if I should die before I wake, if I should wake, and then, you know, don't people just walk around and don't you're not supposed to hear things our babysitter, our the maid says, because then you won't imagine things.
So we're getting the sense that this little girl with her absolutely sweet face sees something, and this poor governess starts to think sometimes you can't help but imagine things.
But the question is, is what she is imagining, is it really there?
And there's no way, there's no way to separate the psychological from the real in either the great novella Turn of the Screw or that wonderful movie version of it, The Innocence, best ghost movie ever made, bar none, and there's nothing even close.
The last truly great ghost story writer was a guy of the M.R. James School, the British ghost story.
He was a guy named Robert Aikman, writes wonderful, weird, weird stories.
And the thing is, what he does at some point is he takes things beyond the psychological and just sort of says they're so real.
They're so real that they, and yet they also represent the psychological.
He has this great, great classic story, which you should read, called Ringing the Changes, Robert Aikman Ringing the Changes.
And it is about this older man who's married a younger wife.
He comes to a little town, a seaside town, where they're going a honeymoon, and all the bells in the church towers are ringing, ringing, ringing, ringing until it drives you absolutely insane.
And everybody around them is starting to get very, very nervous and starting to get drunk and they don't know why.
And finally, this is a radio BBC adaptation.
Somebody explains to him why they're ringing the bells.
My wife doesn't mind the bells.
In fact, she rather likes them.
Take her away, ma'am.
In a day or two, perhaps.
I admit that we're disappointed with Hollyhaven.
No!
While there's still time, this instant!
They can hardly go on practicing all night.
Practicing.
What else?
They're ringing to wake the dead.
No, they are.
It's a figure of speech.
Not in Hollyhaven.
I beg your pardon.
No one can tell you how long they have to go on ringing.
It varies from year to year.
I don't know why.
You should be all right up to midnight.
In the end, the dead awake, first one or two, then all of them.
Tonight, even the sea draws back.
In a place like this, there are always several drowned each year.
Most of them come not from the water, but the earth.
It is not a pretty sight.
It's a great story, Ringing the Changes by Robert Aikman.
And the great moment in the story is when the ringing stops, because that's the moment when you shudder because you realize that what can't be is and what can happen is about to happen.
And that's what the ghost story is all about, that our sure and certain sense that has been, that they've tried to beat out of us, the materialists have tried to beat it out of us, but our sure and certain sense that there is something there behind the scrim, the screen of reality that is just out of sight and sometimes slips into our view and causes us to shudder.
We know not why.
Ghost stories are just wonderful.
These are some of my favorites, but there are so many, so many more.
And we'll talk more about more scary stuff next time.
All right, now this is the point in the show when I usually do the mailbag and solve all your problems, but you're screwed because we had a late-breaking story.
And I have to bring on the worst person in America.
You know that, you know, Ed Gein died in a mental hospital and Ted Bundy was executed.
So that just leaves Steven Crowder.
I'm ashamed to say that I am his only friend and the only friend he could ever could have.
And I only keep him around because he makes me laugh uproariously.
Kevin Spacey Parody Sketch00:15:20
And now he's gotten thrown off YouTube.
Crowder, you insufferable schmuck, what have you done?
Why do you besmirch the good name of Gain and Bundy?
I mean, the guy could paint who's a hell of a painter.
So, you know, it's just, whatever.
No, I appreciate you having me.
And hopefully you don't have the worst of me because this is, for me, you know, it's a little, and they still have me on some pain pills.
Not the fun pills, like the opiates.
They have me on this thing Gabapentin, which just makes me, you know, stupid and sloppy.
So, you know, like the B team at Daily Wire.
Yeah, so it's a usual day.
All right.
Yes.
No, I'm really, I appreciate you having me.
And I am glad to be here.
And honestly, for people out there who don't know, you know, screw you, because it was, we've gotten in trouble because of, you know, the Loudoun County story and it ties all back in.
You can explain it to them, but how are you at Daily Wire?
I watched the routine you did, which made me put my head down on my computer and laugh until I wept.
Could you just describe what this is a story about.
Is this the Alex Jones sketch?
Yes.
Okay.
Well, I don't know what I can say.
So for, okay, for people who don't know, and to get a little serious for a second, are we Friday?
Yes.
It's one of those things where I'm like, I can't believe it's still today.
So it was on Thursday.
We did a whole segment on the Loudoun County story, which you guys broke there at Daily Wire.
And really, by the way, tremendous work.
And people know that the show is silly, but I really am just meticulous about referencing and sources.
I think this is the only show where we will have 50 to 70 references every show publicly available.
And I made sure to check out with Daily Wire.
I know because of the age restrictions, I said, look, I need to know if the rape kit was verified.
And all I can say is that I felt confident that you guys had done your due diligence.
So we did about an hour on that segment on Thursday.
And immediately after that show, we get hit with a strike on YouTube.
Now, the strike was for a previous show for the previous week, but it was the same subject matter.
And in this one, we were talking about how in California prisons, there have been a record number of men who claim to be women and are then sent to female facilities.
And now they have pregnancy protocols.
And there was a female inmate who was complaining about treatment and got pregnant.
And so the joke was working around YouTube and not addressing it and saying, so I suppose Immaculate Conception cut to a sketch where the angel of the Lord, who was portrayed very well by Alex Jones, said, Be not afraid, for I bring you tidings of great joy.
For shall we assign unto you a son.
And she said, In a virgin birth.
And the joke was in here.
I think it's the image.
He said, No, you'll be raped by your cellmate repeatedly.
And people, so I can't say, but we show the cellmate.
You can imagine who it is.
Now, here's the thing: you're, you know, all kidding aside, you're a mediocre comedy writer.
So, but you do write comedy.
And no, everyone knows Andrew's one of the best out there.
And the whole point was tiptoeing around it and never actually saying what was going on, just covering the facts.
And then this was the joke.
And now here's the concern.
And we didn't even talk about the transgender issue beyond that story.
So to be clear, YouTube has not given us specifics, but what they did say was, you know, the hate speech policy in targeting the transgender community.
They said inciting violence.
And then this is from their, in the SALAS, I do find that their very expensive hourly attorney from YouTube beyond the strike said, or indicating that transgender people could pose a rape threat to women.
So they said, that is what's not allowed.
Right.
Well, no, never.
Gosh, I go, I tiptoe around the sketch and you're like, well, what can you say?
And then you're just like, ah, break all the rules.
Look, you're not, you believe in Christ.
You don't have the cover of being a Jew anymore, Andrew.
They're going to come for you.
Okay.
So immediately, I would argue that it is no coincidence that this show had been up for a while.
And the language, of course, applies to how we covered the Loudoun County story.
So we had to take those down right away.
And we're dealing with this legally.
And we've been streaming still to Rumble.
And people can subscribe, you know, Mug Club, Apple, Spotify, just not on YouTube.
But what's so scary about that is: look, we were covering specific instances, okay, that have been documented that have occurred.
But I would also argue, of course, one must be allowed to broadly suggest that a certain group of individuals could pose a rape threat to women.
Otherwise, you can't oppose the policy.
Think of this for a second.
And you guys covered this: over 100 parents, right, lined up to speak at a municipal meeting in Loudoun County, namely because two young girls had been raped.
But they were going to voice their opposition against the trans bathroom, the new policy, the new rules, I guess.
And I don't know what they would call it.
But their opposition was going to be, hey, because we think this poses a rape threat to our young daughters.
Boom.
If they said that online, the digital town square, banned.
That's what's so terrifying about it.
This is the first time they've used this language, and they specifically sent it in a private email to me, broadening that language more than ever before, indicating that transgender people could pose a rape threat to women.
Now, they may not enforce it consistently, but they can.
They can strike you and ding you if you do that.
And that is, I mean, look, look behind you.
That's the Orwellian line.
So, so what do you do?
Do you have any response to this?
Well, look, we're responding legally.
My half Asian lawyer, Bill Richmond, has been responding.
There are certain things I can't discuss because there are ongoing legal issues with YouTube, Autonomous from this.
So, yeah, we're fighting this and we're continuing to stream.
I mean, look, I was talking about this with, I don't know who it's a blur.
You know, I've been doing a lot of shows.
You know, of course, so it's not like I saved my A material for this.
But I just want to make sure this half Asian lawyer, the other half is Jewish, right?
I mean, because otherwise you're screwed.
Otherwise, YouTube's getting everything.
No, no, no, no.
I mean, I assume he's been beaten enough by his parents that he should be adequate.
Oh, okay.
I hope I have no idea, but he plays one hell of a violin.
I mean, it's no nine-year-old Ben Shapiro playing Schindler's List at, was it Carnegie Delly or Hall?
That was the pinnacle of his musical career.
So, like, it's he looks the exact same.
He looks the, you know, some people age.
Like, okay, can I just say this before?
To me, one of the funniest things we've ever done on this show, on this program, is still we did the House of Cards parody sketch where Kevin Spacey was trying to rape Ben Shapiro because he thought he was 14.
And I made sure to clear it with Ben first.
I was like, look, it's actually a testament to the elasticity in your skin.
You look young.
And so, of course, Kevin Spacey would want to bang you.
He was like, well, yeah, okay, I understand it.
That's pretty funny.
I was like, good.
So the issue here, there was something else I was talking about before the legal issues.
Look, I never want to be the person who talks about, but this has gone out in the press release.
So the cat's out of the bag and people have talked about this.
This show is the number one show in that 18 to 49 demographic.
Just the one-hour show, that file, not only far and away number one in that demographic with conservatives, but number one of any late night, of any network comedy show as well.
The next closest is Tucker Carlson, and we do more than two times his numbers in the demo.
And they watch for like an average of 40 minutes.
We do more than Colbert and Fallon combined.
And I don't mean with the clips and the bits that are cut on YouTube five minutes here.
I mean that one hour show well into these seven figures of people aged 18 to 49.
Average viewers a 28 year old male.
This is YouTube saying, doesn't matter how the market has spoken.
We are saying you chose wrong.
This is unacceptable.
And keep in mind, those numbers come from, look, we don't show up in search.
We don't show up in browse.
We've watched since we've been demonetized.
We were gaining 130,000 subscribers a month and they've demonetized us twice.
The throttle went from over 100,000 a month in all of my years on YouTube to nothing.
Remonetized us back to over 100,000.
Demonetized us down to nothing.
So these numbers come from conservatives and non-conservatives choosing to bookmark and tune into this show.
They're not stumbling across it.
And YouTube's out of options.
YouTube is really out of options to make it so that people don't find us.
They changed the way the whole live page on YouTube exists because four of the top five would just be our streams.
They're like, I can't have that.
Let's put up Seth Meyers.
Oh my God, Seth Meyers, the guy's comedy cancer.
So we're fighting this legally.
And, you know, I'm so grateful to people.
When we streamed the show yesterday, we had more live viewers.
We had 65,000 live viewers at any given second without YouTube.
So I think it's grown to a level that they really feel the need to contain.
That's why they did this.
I think your story at Daily Wire, you've done actual investigative journalism.
And I really do believe this is just to be clear.
This is just me making an inference.
They don't want that catching on.
And we just happen to be the biggest show in the space, amplifying the great work that you guys did.
So yeah, it's one of the things that I keep wondering, and I wonder about it here too, is it impossible for us to make, I mean, listen, when you were building your show, you used to call me up and talk for an hour about how to use YouTube to monetize your show.
And I used to think, this is the most boring conversation I've ever had in my life.
And I hope he knows what he's talking about.
But then I would go, ha, nugget, and capture your attention again.
And I was grateful.
I felt seen.
I felt seen.
So My question is, is it impossible for us to build a platform where you can show your videos without worrying about these tyrannical videos?
No, and this is the thing.
People say, well, why don't you go build your own YouTube?
Why don't you go build your own Twitter?
Look, I understand the argument, but it's no longer a free market argument.
First off, YouTube, Google, Alphabet, right?
They own both of them.
They're more powerful than the Roman Empire.
They're more powerful than any world government.
And by the way, their growth has only occurred at the cost of the taxpayer through tax incentives, also through a reduction in liability under 230.
The issue here is, right, for example, we know this.
Section 230 says you're part of the digital town square.
They're treated like utilities, Verizon, AT ⁇ T. Look, Verizon, AT ⁇ T, or T-Mobile, they can't remove us for discussing something that may be offensive.
That's illegal.
But YouTube does.
And that's very clearly in the territory of publisher.
And in this instance, it's very clear what's where they've screwed the pooch is there is a carve-out even for comedy.
And they went after a sketch, but I think they went after a sketch because what they're actually concerned about is the non-sketches that we cover.
So what we do is this.
Look, I'll always be on YouTube and I try and play by their rules.
If we don't think it's YouTube friendly, we do it exclusively on Mug Club because I want to reach the unreached.
It has been a very valuable tool in growing.
But we also are available on Mug Club for people who support us.
Look, that's the only way we generate revenue.
We have a few sponsors here and there.
We don't have 1,900 per show like Ben Shapiro.
I don't know when it's show versus when it's an ad at a certain point.
We're very limited with that.
So we own, unlike PBS, when they say funded by viewers like you, oh, you mean from tax dollars?
They didn't call you up with the Jerry Lewis telethon to give you money.
You stole it from them.
We don't have that.
So we can broadcast on these other platforms.
But of course, the people who are a part of those platforms, the people who are already members on those platforms, already agree with us.
YouTube sees this and they're looking to try and make sure that we don't reach other people.
The only correction I would make, and this is in all seriousness, when I spoke with you, I never spoke about monetizing.
I spoke about growing.
I've never really cared about, I mean, you know, I have a reputation in this industry a little bit as, you know, a recluse, intense maniac, but also that I don't really care about money.
And that's true.
My wife and I have one car.
I don't have even Christmas or birthday lists.
I told YouTube, I said, fine, demonetize us.
That's fine.
You guys have your community guidelines.
You guys have your advertiser-friendly guidelines, which are separate.
Then, unfortunately, they created what some in the industry refer to as the crowder rule, and that's the borderline content, which is non-defined.
So sorry, that's on me, but that's because we didn't violate anything.
I mean, there were people at Senate hearings who said, what can we do?
And I said, well, he didn't violate anything.
And of course, this sketch, which is silly and offensive, absolutely, and hilarious.
And PG-13 rated is not a violation.
It's the violation of the truth.
Well, thank you very much.
Listen, I have to go, but come back.
You're welcome on my show anytime.
No, you don't.
You don't have to go.
What are you talking about?
I'm going to talk to you right now.
Yes.
I'm out of time.
And if I want to out of time, I just have to go because I can't stand talking to you this long.
Well, that's fair.
I mean, I get, I understand it.
It's like, look, it's like if you asked Miramir on the wall, who's the most gorgeous of them all and it just placed a toupee on you, you'd see this.
So I get the envy.
But also, also, I was only told until the last minute, two minutes before my show began that, you know, they said to me, you got to bring this guy on because he's pitiful.
He's standing outside.
He's crying.
It's embarrassing.
Give me a little time and I will have you on any day because I always like seeing you because I'm a low, disgusting human being.
That's bullshit.
You know it.
You won't have me on ever.
You're a liar.
You're a compulsive liar.
And I will tell you this.
Look, for as envious as you are of my hair, I am actually envious as I get older.
And I woke up from my surgery.
My chest hair was completely white, by the way.
Completely white.
Wow.
But as I get gray and as it starts receding.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, but yeah.
Oh, come on.
There's a delay here.
Get your head out of the, you're better than that.
Get your head out of the gutter there.
I bet you it fits because you could just, you know, put on some crisp colour.
I can't wedge into those places.
You're probably, you can probably get your head into the apartment of the clown from it.
Like, oh, look.
You got a junior suite.
That's Shapiro's secret to youth, by the way, is that hat, it covers up the bald spot.
That's the whole thing right there.
Oh, I have a story about that that involves him and my wife and me in a bathrobe and nothing else.
And I'll tell you off air.
But I will say this.
I am genuinely envious of the fact that you pull off the shaved head look.
I have a head that looks like a bean that was left on a stove too long.
And so I know once it's gone, so is whatever charm I have.
You can do it well.
You know, you just, and if you put on a bomber jacket, you look like a skinhead.
And that would make for fun family.
No, I know, I know.
All right.
Don't go away.
I want to talk to you for one second after the show.
I got to say to everybody else, the Clavenless week is upon you.
You're finished.
It's going to be a good thing.
Can you pull out my thing really quickly?
Just go to a lot of credit.com slash mug clubber.
They can watch and rumble.
You need to give me a plug.
Oh, yeah, sorry.
I'm sorry.
Plug it.
And those mugs make great ashtrays.
The Clavenless Week is upon you.
There will be wailing.
There'll be gnashing of teeth.
You're doomed.
If you make it back, next Friday, I will be here.
Clavenless Week Approaches00:01:28
I'm Andrew Clavin.
So embarrassed to have done this interview, to even be associated with this man.
But here it is.
What can I do?
I'll see you next week.
Hey, if you enjoyed this episode and want to spread the word, give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe too.
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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