Ep. 1053’s Cold Civil War teases a satirical clash over "woke" ideology, from Rachel Levine’s admiralcy to China’s hypersonic note delivery, framing it as a Texas-vs.-Biden culture war. Andrew Clavin mocks CRT as racist, while critics accuse parents of bullying teachers—yet Garland’s FBI "snitch line" targets them. The show ties this to biblical purgatory debates, C.S. Lewis’s reluctant faith, and Disney’s vaccine mandates, ending with a tragic worldview: love over judgment, even amid chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
Rachel Levine, the Assistant Secretary of Health, has been named a four-star admiral and is being hailed as the first female four-star admiral to not be female or an admiral.
The move came only moments before I was named the first two-legged horse with glasses to win the Kentucky Derby after I ran around my room in a circle shouting, look at me, I'm a horse and I've won the Kentucky Derby.
Now I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, oh, Clavin, you are so funnelicious that if I licked your face, it would taste like laughter.
And yes, that's true.
But I'm not making this up.
I really did win the Kentucky Derby in the same sense that Rachel Levine really is a woman and became an admiral.
President and venal houseplant Joe Biden followed the Levine appointment by issuing an executive order declaring federal employees are not allowed to laugh if they see a man walking around wearing a dress, a string of pearls, and one of those bicorn hats Horatio Nelson used to wear because he was an admiral who defeated the French Navy at sea, where admirals are.
The mandate against laughter forbid not only open guffawing, but also giggling silently into your hand or trying very hard not to laugh, but unintentionally making a snorting noise that sends a gout of mountain dew up into your nose so that you feel like you're drowning in an ocean of pitiable delusions and governmental incompetence.
China celebrated the Levine appointment by sending a hypersonic missile around the world in low orbit and using it to drop a note off on the Resolute desk in the Oval Office.
The note read, Congratulations, America, on appointing a man in a dress who has never served in the Navy as an admiral.
And by the way, this note could have been a nuclear weapon.
The CIA director William Burns reacted to the note from China by saying, quote, wow, cool missile.
We didn't even know China could make one of those because we were too busy leaking information to the New York Times about American politicians we don't like and totally missed the fact that China now has a nuclear missile that can fly into our airspace completely undetected.
It sure was nice of them to send that note, though, unquote.
Mr. Burns then appointed his daughter's pet bunny Flower as a double O agent with a license to kill, hailing the rabbit as the first 00 agent with long ears and fur.
Other recent administration appointments include the blonde girl from Game of Thrones as the official mother of dragons, and of course, Joe Biden as President of the United States.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dee-doo.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is it bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, we are back laughing our way through the fall of the republic.
We're going to be talking about woke thugs and whether they're going to bring us to the brink of civil war.
Plus, we've got an interview with the writer-star of a new movie about C.S. Lewis, and we'll be asking the important questions, should you believe in ghosts?
Plus, in the mailbag, are lustful thoughts sinful?
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I don't know how to pronounce this, a guy de Lombard, Sky Lombard, says, for years my wife and her ex tried to get pregnant and it never happened, but then she married me and all I had to do was look at her and she got pregnant.
The only explanation I can think of is that I shop at Rock Auto.
That is obviously true and will make a good Hallmark movie or maybe something on HBOX.
Before we talk about the thugs out there on the street, I want to warn you about the thugs on the internet.
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So America is quite plainly dividing again into free states and slave states.
This time, a lot of the free states are in the South, like Texas and Florida, and the slavery is a slavery of the mind, which is called wokeism.
And it's being enforced by thugs who call themselves woke.
How did they become thugs?
How did people who care about justice and freedom and equality, how do they turn themselves into thugs?
I mean, you know, there aren't many woke people.
There's one estimate that maybe 8% of people would identify themselves as being woke.
But like all thugs, they use violence and intimidation to get what they want.
And because weak and corrupt power centers think that they can use that thuggery to back up their own bids for power for more power and to consolidate their power, the woke have a lot of power.
And that power is spreading and it's getting worse, except in those states where the authorities and the corporations withstand the pressure to succumb.
So how do the woke become thugs and what gives certain states like Texas and Florida the manliness to stand up and face these people down and remain free?
And can they continue to do that?
And as always, I think the answer to all these questions lies in the ideas.
People like to personalize politics.
And of course, there is a personal element to politics.
They like to say, oh, this one's out for power.
That one's corrupt.
This one's that and that.
All of which may be true.
But basically, people are governed by the ideas that are in their heads.
And when ideas are wrong and when they are misplaced, they lead you down a garden path into a very, very dark place very quickly.
In the free states, like Texas and Florida, the conservative states, the red states, individual freedom is basically the purpose of their politics.
They see politics as a way of preserving individual freedom.
That's their definition of America.
It's what they want.
And the feeling is, and I of course agree with this, that individual freedom allows the fullest expression of the dignity of a human person, right?
If you want to be who you are and express what you do and do everything that you feel is the right thing to do, you need to be free to do it.
Individuals build businesses, they have ideas, they create families, and they improve the lives of everyone.
And we recognize that because man is sinful, individuals, given enough freedom, will do evil things, and we think a certain amount of that evil should be tolerated because the freedom is the purpose of what we do.
The best expression of this philosophy is James Madison in the Federalist Papers, who said if men were angels, no government would be necessary.
If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.
In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this.
You must first enable the government to control the governed and the next place oblige it to control itself.
In other words, we understand there is a balance of power.
We have to play power centers off one another.
And the purpose is to keep men as free as possible.
But in the slave states, freedom is not the first purpose of what they're doing.
That is not what they say.
If you don't think so, I don't know if you got to see Joe Biden CNN town hall the other night.
Was it last night?
Unbelievable.
I could just imagine Jen Pesaki running around the Oval Office going, where is he?
Who let him out?
Oh no, he's on CNN.
Because it was just a train wreck.
And this is invitation only, only easy questions.
You know, only CNN reporters.
So these are toading, you know, lowlifes are going to only ask the easy questions.
And he just kept blowing it.
And one question, and what I want to get to is this is one question where they asked him about vaccine mandates and whether they were objectionable because they compromised freedom.
And here is this clown's reply.
The two things that concern me, one are those who just try to make this a political issue.
Freedom.
I have the freedom to kill you with my COVID.
Oh, I mean, come on.
Freedom.
Freedom.
We don't need no stinking freedom.
The guy's so demented.
He doesn't remember what country he's in.
See, this is not the first thing that the woke thugs think about.
What they think about is goodness.
They think about fairness.
They think life is unfair and they want to make it fair.
And they think all unfairness is due to human evil, right?
It's not just built into the system.
So in order to make things fair, they need power.
They need power from on top to control your freedom and make you good.
And that turns people into thugs.
It turns people into thugs.
You know, the reason for that, the reason it turns people into thugs, you know, there was a hint of this.
There's this clip going on.
Barry Weiss, he just won a big award.
I'm not sure the name of the award, but oh, it was the award for courage and journalism.
So congratulations to Barry.
But there's an exchange she had with Ms. Brian Stelter on CNN, which has now got a million hits.
And if you listen to this exchange, you will see why being woke turns you into a thug, even if you start out as a nice person.
Here, let's just listen to what Barry is saying.
Brian Stelter is reacting to one of her sub-stack pieces.
This is cut seven.
And Barry says, you know, the world has gone mad, and she tells why.
You're right.
There are tens of millions of Americans who aren't on the hard left or the hard right who feel the world has gone mad.
So in what ways has the world gone mad?
Well, you know, when you have the chief reporter on the beat of COVID for the New York Times talking about how questioning or pursuing the question of the lab leak is racist, the world has gone mad.
When you're not able to say out loud and in public that there are differences between men and women, the world has gone mad.
When we're not allowed to acknowledge that rioting is rioting and it is bad, and that silence is not violence, but violence is violence, the world has gone mad.
When we're not able to say that Hunter Biden's laptop is a story worth pursuing, the world has gone mad.
When in the name of progress, young schoolchildren, as young as kindergarten, are being separated in public schools because of their race.
And that is called progress rather than segregation.
The world has gone mad.
Now, listen to Ms. Stelter's reply to this, which is unbelievable.
You say we're not allowed.
We're not able.
Who's the people stopping the conversation?
Who are they?
People that work at networks, frankly, like the one I'm speaking on right now, who try and claim that, you know, it was racist to investigate the lab leak theory.
It was simple.
But I'm just saying, when you say allowed, I just think it's a provocative thing to say.
You say, we're not allowed to talk about these things, but they're all over the internet.
I can Google them.
I can find them everywhere.
I've heard about every story you mentioned.
Of course.
So I'm just suggesting, of course, people are allowed to cover whatever they want to cover.
But you and I both know, and it would be delusional to claim otherwise, that touching your finger to an increasing number of subjects that have been deemed third rail by the mainstream institutions and increasingly by some of the tech companies will lead to reputational damage, perhaps you losing your job, your children sometimes being demonized as well.
And so what happens is a kind of internal self-censorship.
You know, the guy, he says, what are you talking about?
You're not allowed.
What do you mean?
What could this possibly mean?
He's talking to a woman who had to resign.
This is obviously a very talented young lady, right?
I mean, I know Barry.
She's a very smart person.
She's a really good journalist.
She's just making hay and substack.
She's doing a great job.
It's a woman who had to resign her job at the New York Times, a very, very influential, prestigious job that a young woman should be thrilled to have and they should have been thrilled to have her.
She had to resign her job because she was being bullied by people for simply saying basic truths, like the kind of truths she's talking there.
And Brian Stelter is like, what do you mean you're not allowed?
You could say it.
You know, it's an incredible thing.
What is it?
It's a fantasy.
She's talking about reality not being allowed.
Why is reality not being allowed?
Because woke is a fantasy.
The idea of woke, the entire idea that you are woke and you are somehow more awake to injustice than everybody else around you is already a fantasy.
But the key thing, it's just like I was talking about socialism.
Why is socialism is immoral?
And I talked about the fact that socialism posits a good state that will redistribute everything fairly.
But there is no such thing as a good state.
There are only people with power.
And the more power they have, the more corrupt they get.
Well, there is also no such thing as perfectible man.
There's no morality without reality.
And woke is not a real philosophy that actually deals with the things with people as they actually are.
Just like James Madison is the spokesman for our philosophy of freedom and its balances and its compromises and the things we have to deal with, their spokesman is Ibram X. Kendi, the guy who invented sort of Mr. He's the spokesman for anti-racism.
Now, I think Kendi is really a dope.
I think he is dumb as a brick.
And, you know, like when they gave him the National Book Award, I thought, wow, you know, they should have given it to a brick.
Wokeness And Its Critics00:07:46
It would have really been.
But here, let me just read a little bit of what he says.
He says, the only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination.
The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.
The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.
Like, did nobody think that through?
Did no editor say, well, wait a minute, Ibram, then you just have injustice forever.
It's like saying, you know, One of the oldest plays in the Western canon is the trilogy, The Orastaya, which is the story of a series of murders that take place, one murder, and then a murder and revenge of that murder and then a murder and revenge of that murder until Athena comes out and says, whoa, this has got to stop because this will just go on forever.
We are going to turn over the process of justice to the legal authorities and we're going to stop having these feuds.
This is essentially the opposite of that, the opposite of Western culture, the opposite of Christianity, which demands grace and forgiveness.
And the purpose of it is to get perfect equity where everything is just right for everybody, which doesn't exist.
I mean, it's not going to exist.
There are never going to be as many women football players as there are men football players.
Things are naturally unequal.
Things are naturally imbalanced no matter how you do it.
And if you treat each person with respect, you're going to get the best.
That's the best you're going to get.
But he says, because he sees this everywhere and it's always a problem.
Inequity is always due to prejudice, to racism.
Kendi writes, we are surrounded by racial inequity, as visible as the law, as hidden as our private thoughts.
And there it is right there.
Now you've become a thug.
Now you've become a fascist thug because you are woke.
You are woke.
You have a higher moral vision than everybody else.
And even your private thoughts have to be controlled.
If you want to see, there's this New York Times article by Lindsay Krauss.
She's a senior editor at the New York Times.
I'm sure if I met Lindsay Krauss, if you met Lindsay Kraus, she'd be a charming lady.
Her philosophy is the philosophy of a thug, of a brown shirt.
You know, I'm sure if you met her, you wouldn't think that.
But this is what she says.
She writes this.
She's writing a story about John Gruden, which we already covered, right?
He was fired from the Oakland Raiders because they found some racist comments in personal emails that he sent back and forth.
And here's what she said.
Cancel culture isn't the problem.
This is the headline of Lindsay Krauss's piece.
Okay culture is.
And she cites, some guy named podcast host Matt Walsh cites that he complained that Gruden is getting canceled for thought crimes.
The conservative radio host Charlie Kirk echoed that sentiment.
They speak for many Americans who feel that Gruden has become a kind of scapegoat in the rush to sanitize our discourse.
But Gruden and these other powerful men aren't victims of cancel culture.
On the contrary, for their entire careers, they have been beneficiaries of a different phenomenon.
Call it okay culture.
Okay culture is what allows the kind of noxious discourse in Gruden's emails to continue for years.
Here's how it works.
Do you have a sexist, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, or fat-shaming thought?
Are you smart enough to know you shouldn't say it in public?
Are you a powerful and successful person?
Just make your mean remark or crass joke to a select group who holds similar views or at least wouldn't dare challenge yours.
Don't worry, it's okay.
It's time to stop litigating whether these punishments are fair and to start thinking more deeply about why the behavior they punish seemed okay in the first place.
It seemed okay because people, I'll give you three reasons why it seems okay.
It's private, right?
We understand human nature.
It's flawed and you can't perfect it without crushing it.
So people have a right to say certain things and we know that certain things are not so good to say in public so we can say them privately.
Two, life is unfair.
Some unkind statements are true.
Fat people are less healthy.
Black people commit more crime in America.
Men who think they're women are factually incorrect.
So some things that you say that are kind of cruel are also kind of true.
And you might want to say them at their rootest in a private setting where you have the absolute right to say it.
And three, the ability to be honest about our feelings, right, our opinions in private is part of being a complete individual.
I've had friends who've said to me, I don't like black people because they commit so much crime.
Or fat people disgust me.
Or people write this to me all the time, homosexuality, gay people are immoral, inherently immoral.
I may not share those feelings.
I may think those feelings are wrong.
I may think they're shallow.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
I respect the person's individual experience, what the left calls his lived experience.
And so we let people say these things and be these ways in private.
And we govern a little bit more what we say in public because we understand it's going to have an effect on people that we don't know.
And we don't want to give license to people to do things they shouldn't do.
To do otherwise is thuggery.
The opposite of this, what she calls okay culture is thuggery.
It assumes that you have some moral perch, wokeness, that gives you an insight into what people should say and that you should spend your time governing their thoughts and that is going to make the world a better place.
It will not make the world a better place.
It will only crush the souls of your fellow human beings, crush the discourse that makes us free, crush the expression of our personhood, which is the essential act of being free, the expression of our personhood, even when we're wrong, even when we're small, even when we're being nasty, expressing that in the proper place in the proper time is part of our humanity.
The woke have turned themselves into thugs because they've lied about what it means to be a human being and they've lied to themselves thinking that they have some insight that they call woke.
Just call it thuggery because that is what it is.
Speaking of thugs, I'm going to be speaking about our Attorney General, Merrick Garland, in a moment, but there are all kinds of thugs out there and you want to be protected from them.
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If he knows, call the police.
You keep moving closer and closer toward it.
Ideas work themselves out into their natural conclusions no matter how extreme that is.
And it just is amazing how when you take this woke idea, this idea that somehow by controlling people's private thoughts, you can force the world into fairness, that the world is naturally fair and only the evil actions and thoughts and words of people make it unfair.
That idea just poisons everything because you're constantly looking for ways in which to confirm what is just untrue.
White Guilt Complex00:15:08
And it's human nature that you start down this road and you've gone 10 miles down this wrong road.
You don't want to walk back those 10 miles.
So you think, well, you know what?
It's actually, I have a reason why I'm walking down this road.
And you may think it's the wrong road.
It may be getting darker and darker.
I may be doing more and more horrible things.
I may be distributed Americans of their freedom.
I may be bullying comedians to keep them silent.
I may be causing innocent people to lose their jobs.
But, you know, just a few more miles down this road and I am going to get it right.
You know, there's a story recently at MIT, a geophysicist, a star geophysicist named Dorian Abbott was going to give a public lecture on geophysics, right?
That's what the lecture was going to be about.
But it was found out that he opposed affirmative action, which had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Now, in colleges now, if you're not in college or you don't associate with college, you might not know this.
You now have to sign what is essentially a loyalty oath to get the job saying you are committed to diversity.
I'm not committed to diversity.
I don't care what color people are.
I don't care if one profession attracts all white people or all Asian people or all black.
It doesn't matter a damn to me.
It's just whether they're good at what they do and whether they have the talent to do what they do.
But because this guy did not approve of affirmative action, he was canceled from giving a speech about geophysics, right?
And here is a woman, one of the women who complained is named Phoebe Cohen.
She's a geosciences professor and department chair at Williams College.
She was angry about it and she said, this is what she said, the idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated.
So the fact that white men dominated meant that this idea of intellectual debate and rigor, which is what the intellectual life is, the intellectual life is debate and rigor.
That is how you get a good intellectual life and good ideas.
That is now a problem because it comes from a world in which white people dominate it.
I mean, I've said before, if another race, probably a black guy who discovered fire, or a black woman probably, who discovered the uses of fire, are you going to live in the dark because you're white?
You're going to say, I'm not going to, I'm sorry, I can't use that.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
The ideas are always what matter.
The merit is what matters.
The ability is what matters.
Honesty and honesty and integrity and all those things matter, not the content of your character, not the color of your skin.
That's the right answer.
It's the only right answer.
Put on the brakes when you reach your destination.
Condoleezza Rice was on the View.
George W. Bush's former Secretary of State, very, very bright woman.
She, in fact, they did a test and she actually doubled the IQ of the View panel and the audience simply by walking into the room.
Pretty amazing.
Here's another thing that has gotten, I think, a million hits.
They were asking her about critical race theory.
Now, here's a, well, she'll tell the story herself.
Here's Condi Rice.
I grew up in segregated Birmingham, Alabama.
I couldn't go to a movie theater or to a restaurant with my parents.
I went to segregated schools till we moved to Denver.
My parents never thought I was going to grow up in a world without prejudice, but they also told me that's somebody else's problem, not yours.
You're going to overcome it, and you are going to be anything you want to be.
And that's the message that I think we ought to be sending to kids.
One of the worries that I have about the way that we're talking about race is that it either seems so big that somehow white people now have to feel guilty for everything that happened in the past.
I don't think that's very productive.
Or black people have to feel disempowered by race.
I would like black kids to be completely empowered, to know that they are beautiful in their blackness, but in order to do that, I don't have to make white kids feel bad for being white.
So somehow, this is a conversation that has gone in the wrong direction.
So the amazing thing about this clip, you might have missed it because it goes by so fast, is she said that her parents taught her that racism is somebody else's problem.
I grew up believing that too.
I mean, I grew up a Jew.
I knew what racism was.
And I always said to myself, well, I'm not going to be defined by the people who hate me.
Compare that to the people who are pretending that they're some different made-up gender on TikTok who do nothing but complain about the fact that no one else will accept their fantasy as their own.
The whole thing, the State Department is issuing, it's gender pronoun day.
You know, we all have to believe in your pronouns.
I don't believe in your pronoun.
If you get to use whatever pronoun you want, I get to use whatever pronoun I want to describe you.
That's the way it goes.
I'm going to give you my version of reality, and you're going to be outvoted because my version of reality is reality.
So, what she is saying is: look, if somebody hates you for the color of your skin, an irrational thing to do, if somebody disminizes your abilities or thinks you're less than you are, that's their problem.
Your problem is to keep your eye on the prize.
Remember, we had Harry Stewart, one of the Tuskegee airmen, the only interview where I actually started to get a little nervous because I was in the presence of greatness.
I was in the presence of a kind of moral greatness that most of us don't have, and I was really unnerved by it.
I said to him, How did you become a fighter pilot in World War II for a country that didn't even think you should be allowed to fly a plane?
He said, I kept my eye on the prize.
I kept my eye on what I was doing, not on what people thought about me.
That's the opposite of woke.
It's the opposite of thuggery.
You don't have to control other people's thoughts to do that.
What you have to do is control what you are doing, what you can do, and know what you can do.
You know, in schools now, this is a huge deal.
In schools, these teachers have put forward this critical race theory, and it's simple racism.
That's all it is.
This anti-racism stuff is racism.
I don't have to say it again and again, but it's they're teaching people that if you're white, you're an oppressor.
You know, that oppression is according to color as opposed to according to philosophy, culture, ideas.
And they're teaching these kids this stuff, and you have to silence people who protest, even if it's the children's parents.
Because when you're lying, when you're lying, one truth dissolves all the work you've done to build up this cathedral of lies.
One little truth.
It's like pulling out that bottom of the Jenga tower.
Your entire cathedral of lies comes down when somebody tells the truth.
That's why you got to silence Dave Chappelle.
That's why you got to silence Steve Crowder.
That's why you got to silence anybody who tells the truth when you are building a structure of lies.
So now they've basically taken these parents.
I mean, what is more sacred in a society than parents defending the rights of their children to learn the values that they think are the right values?
You know, speaking of TikTok, here is a teacher on TikTok reacting to parents who protest against this ugly, thuggish, small-minded, twisted-hearted, poisonous philosophy, sometimes called critical race theory, but let's just generalize all wokeness, all wokeness.
Here's a teacher reacting to parents complaining about this.
Here's your ostinato: terrorists, terrorists, purple for parents are.
Terrorists, terrorists, purple for parents are.
While some had good intentions, they all were misinformed.
Now threatening violence talking teachers has become the narc.
They come to school board meetings with lots of things to say, and they will bully, cuss, or scream if they don't get their way.
Now, the thing is, they should get their way because it's their children, right?
You should not get your way and your stupid ideas.
And that smiling face, that smile of lunacy.
I mean, that is a smile of wickedness and lunacy.
I mean, you only have, if you're watching, you can see it.
That is part of this kind of structure of lies that you're in, that you have to have this complete certainty, this complete certainty, because once you entertain a dissenting view, the whole building comes down, and that's what makes it thuggery.
And what makes the thuggery spread, the stain spreads, when people in power think that they can use your wickedness and your thuggishness to implement and increase their power.
So here's a montage from our friends at Grabian of Democrats on TV reacting to parents who say, no, no, no, you're teaching our children stuff that's not true.
I'm sorry, I know you like this idea, but it's not true.
Here is their reaction.
This is cut 10.
Violent-looking, angry, spewing parents outside of these schools are.
Individuals intent on creating chaos for the sake of creating chaos.
These actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism.
This becomes a security crisis, in a sense, for the nation.
They also mobilize even more law enforcement to be at these meetings.
It is dangerous to our children when the parents themselves are the school bullies.
I think one of the worst things is the actions at the board meetings, you know, the calling of names, you know, tyrant, Marxist, communist.
We've never seen anything like we're seeing at these school boards now.
What on earth has happened in this country?
Sometimes they're not even talking.
They are yelling and creating chaos.
Things have become so scary at these meetings.
I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.
New laws may be necessary.
There's always the possibility that people will face criminal prosecution.
See, I don't know what the name of the guy who was saying we've never seen anything like this.
I was a small town reporter.
I covered school boards.
School board meetings can get highly, highly emotional because people are dealing with their children, the most precious thing in the world to them.
And sometimes these teachers are wrong.
And in this case, they are deeply, deeply wrong.
They are immoral.
What they're teaching the children is immoral, including their ideas about sexuality and their ideas of what kind of sexuality is appropriate to show to children and their idea that they should be in charge.
I mean, teach them to read for crying out loud, teach them to do math.
You know, it's not their job to spread their left-wing lies and their left-wing ideas to these children.
So these parents are absolutely right to be upset.
In Lewdon County, they're absolutely right, where kids have gotten assaulted in the bathroom and they covered it up.
And we now know they knew about it.
We now know that the school board was informed.
The school board lied and said we weren't informed, but they actually did know about it.
We know this from emails from the superintendent.
So they're absolutely, this is actual righteous anger.
So now these people who think that they want to protect their power, they write to our corrupt Attorney General, Merrick Garland, and he takes this on in five days.
I mean, here's an Jim Jordan had him under questioning before one of the House committees.
And here is what Jim Jordan said about the way this investigation into parents protecting their children came about.
This is CUP 35.
Three weeks ago, the National School Board Association writes President Biden asking him to involve the FBI in local school board matters.
Five days later, the Attorney General of the United States does just that.
Does exactly what a political organization asked to be done.
Five days.
We've sent Republicans on this committee have sent the Attorney General 13 letters in the last six months.
Takes weeks and months to get a response.
Eight of the letters, we've got nothing.
They just gave us the finger, said, we're not going to get back to you.
And all our letters were actually sent to the Attorney General.
Here's a letter sent to someone else asking for a specific thing to be done, and in five days, the Attorney General does it.
Here's what the October 4th memo said.
Quote, I'm directing the FBI to convene meetings with local leaders.
These meetings will open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting.
Dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting.
A snitch line on parents.
Jordan is right.
It's a snitch line on parents.
It's meant to chill speech.
You know, how do you think parents feel when they think, oh, the FBI might investigate me if I go in and I say you're not doing the right thing by my child?
And as for these claims of widespread violence, if there were widespread violence at the school board meetings, even in that montage, they showed pictures of people being upset and being voluble, but no violence, nothing like that.
I mean, when they had actual violence in Portland and actual race riots throughout the country over the summer, they told us that was mostly peaceful, but these people wagging their fingers, that's mostly violent.
So Jordan asks Garland, he has Garland under questioning.
He says, where did you get the idea that there's this widespread violence?
They got a letter from this far-left schools organization.
Where did you get the idea that there was violence?
What's your proof?
This is CUP 37.
Very first sentence.
You said, in recent months, there's been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, threats, and violence.
Yes.
When did you first review the data showing this so-called disturbing uptick?
So I read the letter, and we have been seeing over time threats.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
I didn't ask you.
So you read the letter?
That's your source?
So let me be clear.
This is not a prosecution or an assistant.
Is there some study, some effort, some investigation someone did that said there's been a disturbing uptick or you just take the words of the National School Board Association?
When the National School Board Association, which represents thousands of school boards and school board members, says that there are these kind of threats.
He reacted because the lines of power coming up from this woke thug philosophy, this thuggery that is on the streets, is moving up the line because it serves the powerful.
Thuggery always serves the powerful.
Silencing people always serves the powerful.
Lies always serve the powerful.
The truth is what brings power to its knees.
You know, the woke have learned, because so many of them are communicators, they have learned to justify what they do with ugly language.
So they call you racist, they call you sexist, they call you violent, they call you silences, violence, all this stuff.
They dehumanize the people that they want to attack.
And the one word I keep hearing from them is, you know, it's not canceled culture.
It's just accountability.
Accountable to who?
Accountable to who?
Who are the woke that we should be accountable to them?
These people who burn down cities, who tear down statues of better men than themselves, people like Columbus and Washington and Jefferson, who achieve more for human good in their lifetimes than these people ever would all of their lifetimes put together.
These people who legitimize racial bigotry, who teach sexual perversion to our children, why are we accountable to them?
They are thugs.
We are not accountable to them.
We are accountable to our traditions, to our history, to our religion.
We are accountable to all those things.
We are certainly accountable to our God, but we're not accountable to these thugs.
And so those people who have the courage or simply the interest to stand up against them in Florida, in Texas, in South Dakota, in places where they will stand up against the thugs, they're going to have a different culture.
Why We Aren't Accountable00:13:05
And the question is, what becomes of a country that has two such cultures?
One culture based on an idea that something impossible, perfectible man, will bring about something else impossible, perfect equity.
And the other with the simple idea that, no, you know, there's a balance between freedom and power, and we have to keep that balance intact so that people can be freer than they've ever been before.
What happens when you have those two cultures basically in opposition in the same country?
So many people say to me, wow, I love your show.
It's like going to the circus.
It's such a chaos, such a mess, the sound going out, the picture going crazy.
How did you get to be such a clown car?
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In one of his most famous speeches, sometimes called the House Divided Speech, Abraham Lincoln, he was speaking at the Republican Convention.
He said, if we could first know where we are and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do and how to do it.
And that really is the question that's facing us now on the right.
Those of us who believe in freedom, those of us who are dispirited by what we're seeing, the thuggery that we're seeing and the thuggery moving up through the ranks of government.
Lincoln went on famously, quote, Jesus, he said, the house divided against itself cannot stand.
I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free, as we are now again, half woke and half free.
He said, I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the union to be dissolved.
I do not expect the house to fall, but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
And as we know, his optimism was not really well rewarded.
It was just one of the bloodiest wars in American history where six to 700,000 Americans died and were killing each other, all the more tragic.
In an article in Claremont Review of Books, right after Donald Trump's election, somewhere in 2017, Angelo Cotavilla, a guy just recently died in a car accident, very tragic, he said that we are now in a cold civil war.
And I usually hate language like that.
I hate overblown comparisons, comparing people to Hitler because you don't like the fact that they sneezed the wrong way, whatever, when the left compares Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler as if they had no idea what history actually looked like or when you describe a minor recession as the fall of the Roman Empire.
And when we refer to this as a cold civil war, it really does raise questions about whether or not that language is viable or not.
And I would say this.
It's viable, that language is relevant, if in fact a large number of people share the divided values we have.
Because the woke value is anti-American.
It is the value of slavers.
It is the value of thugs.
And it's not something that can continue and America continue to remain America.
Now, I will tell you from private conversations that a lot of people I know who identify on the left think that this has gone too far, but they're afraid.
They're afraid of the thugs.
They're afraid of the intimidation.
They're afraid of getting canceled.
They're afraid their kids won't be in school.
You know, they're afraid their kids will suffer in school and won't get the good grades or the advancement that they need.
And so they keep their mouths shut, but they are there and they do hear what is being said.
And so it's possible they can be reached.
Now, the question is, on the right, is what are we bringing instead?
And this is a really important point, because on the right, we are having a big, big argument right now.
And it's hopefully a friendly argument, but it is an intense argument.
And it's an argument over the role of morality in our philosophy.
Is our philosophy a philosophy merely of freedom, or is it a philosophy necessarily of morality?
So of course, you have David French, who is saying, basically, you take the drag queen story hour.
He's saying, look, this is part of freedom.
In order to be free, you have to let people do things that they don't, that you don't like, even if you think that they're immoral.
Because if you make an exception, then the question just becomes which one of you has the most power to stop the other.
So if the drag queens have the power to stop the straight person's story hour, then they will do it.
And if the straight people have the power to stop drag queens story hour, they will do it unless you just agree that everyone should be free.
Then you have people, Walsh and Knowles, I would say, are among them, Sora Amari, these are a lot of them Catholics, who say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
No, no, there is a moral basis to freedom.
You can't have freedom alone.
You have to have a moral freedom.
If freedom becomes chaos, if freedom becomes evil, then freedom itself is not worthwhile.
And then you have, and you've heard these arguments on backstage, you've heard us at least get into them a little, then you have someone like Ben Shapiro, who basically is a federalist, a localist, who says, look, you know, you can only enforce morality in a place where people basically agree, right?
You can only enforce, you know, he said, the way Ben put it, he said, if you were in my neighborhood where there are a lot of Orthodox Jews and you wanted to pass a law restricting movement on Saturday when Orthodox Jews take the day off, he said, you know, I would have no problem with that because basically it would be community standards.
And certainly we mostly agree on states' rights.
States' rights is to set their own standards.
And more and more, because the woke thugs believe that they have some higher moral vision that should be imposed even upon our private thoughts, they want that federalist structure to go away.
And they want to impose this from the top.
And they're constantly, constantly, their example is slavery.
But of course, the question is, why was slavery wrong?
Why are you so opposed to slavery?
You're opposed to slavery because it is taking away people's freedom.
So if you're taking away people's freedom in the name of anti-slavery, you really have gone full circle.
Now, I come down on this in a slightly different, from a slightly different place.
I don't think that you can have utter freedom.
I think that James Madison was right.
I think that John Adams was right.
And all the founders who all said, John Adams said, our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.
It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
That's usually interpreted to mean that the religion gives us a sort of moral structure that we will follow.
And so therefore the government doesn't have to make us moral because we already will be moral because we have this brilliant Christian structure, which is what he was talking about.
And I think that there's truth to that.
I simply do not think that you can be utterly free and remain free.
And this is where I really take issue with David French, though I respect some of what he's saying.
I respect the idea that we don't want to get into a place where we are enforcing every moral thought that we have, every moral attitude that we have, on everybody else, right?
I think that we have to get into a place where people basically agree in the broad spectrum of things.
People basically agree, yes, there is a moral order.
It looks kind of like this.
And within that moral order, we can turn a blind eye to certain things, but certain things have to be regulated for the good of freedom so that we can continue to have freedom.
Because once morality falls apart completely, then you haven't got freedom.
You have chaos.
Plato talked about this.
I mean, people have known this from the very beginning of democracy, right?
Plato's right there at the beginning of democracy.
He said, the way democracies fall is that liberty itself becomes an idol, and all people want is the liberty, and therefore chaos comes, and finally people say we need to get out of this chaos, and they appoint a strong man to bring them out of the chaos.
And that's always the fear.
That's how democracy falls.
My problem, of course, is if I enforce morality, how much can I enforce morality before we're not dealing with freedom anymore?
How much can I enforce my sexual mores on somebody before I have taken away his right to live his life as he sees fit?
How much can I enforce my idea of what it means to be a moral nation on somebody before that nation has ceased to be free?
So I believe that a lot of these things are cultural and a lot of our fights are cultural.
And this is why I have been so frustrated with the conservative movement for not getting into the culture.
And by the culture, I don't just mean making money, making movies.
I don't just mean making art.
I also mean the way we live, that when we live, when we start to celebrate freedom as a means of living a wild, crazy life, of having the kind of fun that the left has promoted as being the pinnacle of life, I don't think we're going to remain free.
Cultures before have moved from the kind of license and the kind of immorality we are going through now and the kind of craziness we're going through now to a better place.
They have moved to a better culture.
It happened just before the Victorian era when they came through a revolutionary time when everybody was calling for sexual freedom, feminism, the end to marriage.
There was a lot of that going around.
That congealed into the Victorian society, which I believe was one of the pinnacles of human civilization for all its flaws.
It happened again in the 1950s because of the war that reminded people that, yes, there is such a thing as evil.
You cannot be free to do anything you want.
I think it can happen now.
I think we have to push forward with convincing people on the moral sphere before we can push forward with moral laws.
I also believe, I do believe, that we are going to have to act as states in conflict with the federal government.
Will that lead us to a hot civil war?
If we have these two completely different cultures, one of two things is going to happen.
Either the culture that we create will be so appealing that the slave cultures will start to come around, or we will really get into trouble into trying to keep the country together when it no longer wants to stay together.
We can but try.
We do not know what is going to happen.
Lincoln didn't know what was going to happen, and we don't know.
And being in despair is no help because it doesn't necessarily mean you're on to the truth.
I think we have to begin with the conviction that people can be convinced of the right if they see the right in action, and then we have to start acting in our localities according to the right.
And that means in your personal life as well as in your governmental life.
We can but try.
I do believe that we can actually reform the country before we tear it apart.
And I think we're going to have to try.
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Supernatural Fears and Ghosts00:15:20
So in the run-up to Halloween, we've been talking about all kinds of different kinds of scary stories and talking about monster movies and, you know, ghost stories and werewolf stories and all kinds of different scary stories.
And one of the things that's really interesting about scary stories, supernatural scary stories, is that they can get into your mind and imbue real situations with, through fear, with a sense of the supernatural.
When I was a child, maybe seven years old, I had a genuinely traumatic experience.
I used this experience in one of the trilogy of Another Kingdom.
I think it's in the second book of the Another Kingdom trilogy, where I badgered my father into taking me to a horror movie called Horror Hotel.
It's called City of the Dead in England.
And I was scared stiff.
It's a story of the first 20 minutes of this picture are great.
It is a great horror movie for 20 minutes and then it falls off the table.
It's not very good the rest of the way.
But what's interesting is it made at the same time as Psycho and uses a technique that in Psycho became famous, which is that it introduces this heroine, it gets you involved in her story, and then she goes to investigate this hotel she's in.
She goes downstairs and she is kidnapped by a group of witches and she's sacrificed.
And the sacrifice, just like the killing of Janet Lee in Psycho, is very sexualized.
And for a kid of six or seven, it was just an absolutely terrifying experience.
And the fact that they actually killed this woman who you thought was the star of the movie was really unnerving to me.
And I was awake for nights afterwards and just absolutely distraught.
And for years afterwards, I could not go down into the cellar of my house because I could go down, but I was always nervous about going down into the cellar of my house because I was terrified of that I would be kidnapped and killed by witches until finally, of course, I grew up a little bit and started to realize, oh, yeah, I forgot there's no such thing as witches.
And that was an important thing that actually liberated me from this world that had been infested with a supernatural presence through the fear created and the trauma of the fear created in this film.
But, you know, when I grew up, I spent a lot of time in the woods.
I love being in the woods and I'm a fisherman, or at least I was for a long time.
And I have no sense of direction.
When I say that, people laugh.
They think it's kind of cute or something like that, but it's an actual deficit.
I literally have no sense of direction.
It can get very badly lost very easily if I don't pay close attention to landmarks.
I can get lost in a hotel if the corridors are a little bit mixed up.
I can't find my room.
And certainly when you go into the woods, and as a fisherman, I would go into the woods in the evening and I would fish and I would get wrapped up in fishing and I would forget to pay attention and the dark would come in and I've been lost in the woods at night many, many, many times.
And one of the things that can happen is it's very spooky in the woods and you lose all sense of direction because you can't have landmarks.
And I have had moments as a grown man where I would start to think like, you know, what if there were a werewolf and you have to remind yourself, oh, there are no werewolves.
And that kind of brings you back, right?
Because through fear, the world has been infested with the supernatural.
Your mind can perceive the supernatural, but you have to remind yourself there's no such thing as witches.
There's no such thing as werewolves.
But ghosts are different.
And one of the things, one of the reasons I love ghost stories and have talked about the subtlety of ghost stories is that whether or not they're ghosts is an open question.
I would bet that more people have seen a ghost than have visited South Dakota through history, right?
But we all believe South Dakota exists, and whether we've been there or not, people tell us it exists.
It's on the map.
We can read about it.
But we often do not believe that ghosts exist.
And yet so many people have experienced ghosts that it's kind of like God.
I wrote somewhere about God, I think in my memoir, The Great Good Thing, I wrote that if we believe in God, there is more evidence than we need.
But if we don't believe, no evidence can be enough.
And the same thing can be said of ghosts.
I frequently, whenever I have been in a group of more than 10 people, not whenever, but frequently when I'm in a group of 10 people or thereabouts, I will say, has anyone ever seen a ghost?
And almost always someone has.
And very often, it is not who you'd expect, the person who believes in astrology or the person who believes in whatever crazy cult is going through the culture at the time.
It is oftentimes a very, very sane, very down-to-earth person who says, yes, I had this experience and I don't know what to make of it, but this is what happened.
And sometimes it's that they heard an argument going on in the next room and went in and found the room was empty.
And in the morning, they went down and the innkeeper said to them, oh, yes, we have that argument.
There's these man who killed this woman.
And sometimes you hear that argument.
I've heard that story.
I've heard many, many stories like that.
And I have to say that it impresses me.
It impresses me that so many people have heard it.
Now, I have gone searching for ghosts my whole life and I have never come anywhere near.
My daughter Faith and I, when we lived in England, we would look up the most haunted hotel in a town.
We would stay in the haunted hotel.
We would wake up at midnight and go searching through the haunted hotel.
We would go to haunted venues, places where a phantom coach was supposed to appear on October 19th at midnight or whatever it was.
Never saw a damn thing.
I mean, not one, not one even strange weirdness ever, ever, ever.
And I'm such a cynic and such a down-to-earth person.
I'm not a cynic, but I'm a very basic down-to-earth person that really I'd have to see a transparent guy in chains going, you know, repent, repent, before I believe that I was looking at a ghost.
The one experience that I have had, I've told this story before, but when my dog died, I loved my dog very deeply.
I miss my dog to this day.
She's lived a great life and she lived till 15 and then we had to put her down.
She was just on the verge of dying.
And I went home and I was very sad and I decided I was going to go on my elliptical machine in this little patio, which was right near the place where that she used as a restroom.
We had a little piece of lawn that she used as a bathroom.
And I was on the elliptical and the door swung open.
The door to this little patio I was in, an enclosed patio, swung open.
And I looked around and I thought, oh, it's my dog, Dash, has come to say goodbye.
And there was about five seconds went by and then the door swung closed again.
And that's the only eerie experience I've ever had.
Most ghost stories have been, most public ghost stories have been debunked.
Frequently, mediums are usually exposed.
During, we were talking about World War I, or we'll be talking about World War I with C.S. Lewis.
With World War I, with the vast extent of the death, people became very involved in spiritualism and that became a fad.
Arthur Conan Doyle, the inventor of Sherlock Holmes, very famously became a spiritualist.
And he had a very funny relationship with Houdini, the magician, because they became good friends.
And Houdini would perform tricks.
And Arthur Conan Doyle would say, yes, that's magic.
And Houdini would say, no, it's a trick.
I'm a magician.
I do this for a living.
And he couldn't convince Conan Doyle that it was just a trick.
And when someone that Houdini loved died, he lost all his faith and he got very angry at mediums and spiritualists.
And he and Conan Doyle had a falling out because Conan Doyle would never stop believing.
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In the old days, it was easier.
Like so many people saw ghosts.
And of course, there was a belief in the Bible, and there's a ghost in the Bible.
In the first book of Samuel, King Saul is trying, you know, he wants to get rid of the necromancers, and he declared it was blasphemy for sorcerers to speak with the dead.
So the king began to have them all executed.
But then the Philistines started to gather a massive army with which to attack Israel.
And King Saul got upset, and he decided he needed to talk to the dead prophet Samuel.
He went to a woman who was a medium and said, the witch of Endor, she's usually called, and said, you know, find me, raise the ghost of Samuel.
And she said, no, I can't because King Saul, you know, would have me killed for doing this.
He's outlawed this.
And he said, no, you know, I'm King Saul and you won't be punished.
And she raised the ghost of Samuel.
And this caused a lot of problems for Christians because where did the ghost of Samuel come from?
Where was he?
If he was damned, he couldn't get out of hell.
If he was in heaven, he wouldn't come down from heaven.
Most Christians believe that there will come a time when the dead awake and have new bodies and have perfected bodies.
But there was really no place for the ghost to be.
And so they would explain it away.
They would say, well, the witch of Endor was a ventriloquist, which she may have been, but that's not what it says in the Bible.
Or they would say that it was a demon.
It was a demon.
And that may be true, but that's not what it says in the Bible.
So it was a very difficult thing.
So the Catholics came up with the idea of purgatory, and purgatory made a lot of sense.
Purgatory made a lot of sense because most of us aren't really evil enough to go to hell and not really good enough to go to heaven.
So purgatory was kind of a way station where you could be purified of your sins and then you could pass on to heaven.
And maybe, maybe, maybe something could come out of purgatory and haunt us and warn us, like the ghost of Jacob Marley in the Christmas Carol.
He comes out of a purgatory that he's going through and he says, avoid my fate if you can, Ebenezer, Scrooge.
And Ebenezer is warned by that and he sends him spirits to talk to him.
So that purgatory kind of solved this problem.
However, purgatory also created a line of corruption in the Catholic Church, which was that if you donated money to the Catholic Church, you could get one of your friends or relations out of purgatory.
You could lessen the time that they spent in purgatory.
It was called indulgences.
And this became, you know, the church didn't support raising money on those grounds.
But of course, it happened anyway.
And especially when they were trying to build the great cathedral, they needed the money, and this became a kind of bad practice that spread around.
And Martin Luther finally said, you know, this is a bad thing.
And he hammered up his 95 theses, chief among them being stop selling indulgences.
And that started the Protestant Revolution.
Now, when the Protestants became a loud voice, when they became an authoritative voice, they said all this stuff, including purgatory, is complete nonsense.
Transubstantiation is nonsense.
All the power of priests nonsense.
We don't need priests.
We can talk to God directly.
We do not need the church to interpret the Bible.
We can read the Bible.
That's why the Bible started to be translated into the local languages because they said we want to take the power of translating the Bible away from the priests and give it to the people.
And, you know, this is why the scene in Hamlet with Hamlet's father's ghost is so powerful, and why I've always argued that Hamlet is really about this moment in time when the church falls apart.
Because when he sees the ghost, he sees the ghost of his father.
We'll show a little clip of this.
And the ghost of his father is obviously in purgatory, but Shakespeare is in Protestant Elizabethan England.
And if he puts forward a Catholic worldview, it could get him cancelled, like real cancelled, where you don't come back from.
Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt writes that Hamlet is a young man from Wittenberg with a distinctly Protestant, which is where the Protestant Revolution began.
He's a young man from Wittenberg with a distinctly Protestant temperament, but he's haunted by a distinctly Catholic ghost.
Here's the scene: I am thy father's spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night, and for the day confined to fasting fires, till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purged away.
But that I am forbid to tell the secrets of my prison house, I could a tale unfold, whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres, thy knotted and combined locks to part, and each particular hair to stand on end like quills upon the frightful porcupine.
But this eternal blazon must not be to ears of flesh and blood.
So Hamlet is stuck with the fact that this guy is in purgatory, but does he believe in purgatory?
And that's why I think he, you know, I think that Hamlet is so frozen in his decision-making powers because he can no longer establish the truth because the vehicle of truth, the Catholic Church, has fallen apart.
So this is why one of the reasons I think, maybe the central reason why I love ghost stories and why scary stories are so powerful in general.
Through fear, they cause us to see the supernatural in the natural world.
And while that may be absurd when you're talking about werewolves or aliens who eat you or witches, it's not absurd when it comes to ghosts, because at their least, the ghost is the presence of a spirit of the spirit of the dead, which we do believe, many of us do believe, that people have spirits and the spirit goes on after life, although we have many different ways of believing in that.
Imbuing the Natural with Supernatural00:04:12
Whether or not spirits walk the earth or not, I don't know.
I don't think really anybody really does know.
But to imbue the natural world with a sense of the supernatural that may, in fact, have a profound truth to it is no small thing.
And a ghost story, even if it only does it for one moment, even if it only does it when after you close the book, you sort of look around and feel the world is a little bit more eerie than it was, is telling us, or at least helping us to see a great truth in the world that hides that truth.
And that to me is what great stories do all around and why ghost stories are oftentimes great stories.
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All right, we're going to talk to the star and writer of a terrific movie about C.S. Lewis that I just watched coming right up.
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Again, the Entertainment Goliath has ousted one of their talented sports reporters from ESPN named Allison Williams.
Allison is a college football and basketball reporter who had been with ESPN for 10 years until she announced her resignation this week because Disney, ESPN's parent company, is forcing its employees to receive the COVID-19 vaccine or face termination.
Allison chose to wait while she tries to have a child.
The CDC claims the vaccines are safe for pregnant women, but is it the CDC's choice to make her Allison's?
It's wrong to force Americans to choose between their livelihoods and their freedom to make personal medical decisions.
We started the Daily Wire to fight the left and protect our rights.
So we are excited and thrilled to announce that we have signed Allison Williams to lead a very special sports series exclusively for our members.
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C.S. Lewis's Conversion Connection00:14:59
My guest today is Max McClain, a very talented actor, producer, writer.
We met at the prayer breakfast in Washington, D.C.
We both made speeches about God to journalists, which actually caused the journals to burst into flame.
It was a very dramatic event.
Max runs the Fellowship for Performing Arts in New York City, which does Christian material.
And he's done a lot of work on C.S. Lewis.
I saw his wonderful version of the screw tape letters on stage.
And now I've watched a movie he's made of a stage performance about C.S. Lewis's conversion experience.
It's called C.S. Lewis, the Most Reluctant Convert.
We have just a little bit of it right here over the trailer.
I never cared for my name, Clive Staples.
The world came to know me as C.S. Lewis.
Perhaps you've read my books.
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is the most famous.
But there's one story that's not so well known.
It's my story.
And who better to tell it than me?
She is.
Hey, Jack, stop.
Don't disturb your father.
Boys!
Your mother loves you very much.
At 14, I ceased to be a Christian.
She was the first woman to speak to my blood.
I love the smell of Bunting.
And I was undone.
That's great stuff.
Max, thank you for coming on.
The movie is terrific.
It's really moving.
It's really involving.
You sent me a preview code and I got to watch the whole thing.
I was really taken with the way you slipped into this part of C.S. Lewis as if you lived there.
You actually show us on screen.
You're kind of slipping into the part.
Do you feel some special connection with this guy?
I mean, is there something personal here between you and him?
Yeah, well, I've been playing his work or dealing with his material, his language, the way he articulates for a long time, first with screw tape.
Then we did a stage adaptation of The Great Divorce.
And as a result of those two pieces, I wanted to take a look because they both hint at his own conversion.
And so that prompted me to go to his memoirs, Surprise by Joy.
And what I did to try to understand how Lewis thinks, I actually transcribed the book to follow his thoughts after him.
You know, why did he go this way as opposed to that way in a particular thought?
And that really got me inside his huge personality, his self-deprecating sense of humor, his intense rationality.
You know, he just digs really deep there and follows it as far as he can go.
So I would say that I know him pretty well.
Is there a connection?
I don't want to get too personal, but is there a connection between, are you a cradle Christian or did you also have a child?
No, I'm an adult convert as well.
And I was first given his book, Surprise by Joy, his memoir, right after my conversion.
And I read every word of it, but I don't remember.
I was in my 20s.
But I don't remember tracking with it.
I thought he was way over my head.
And so the person said, well, then try this one.
It was screw tape letters.
And I said, oh, I get this one.
I know this guy really, really well.
But, no, I really tracked with, I think he's become a spiritual guide to me because, you know, I had a lot of skepticism going in and Lewis helps work through that.
Yeah, I mean, his intellectual journey is so fascinating.
It's really hard to tell an intellectual story.
You do it with great humanity.
And it was really, I was deeply moved throughout the movie, but it really is a story of a guy's mind embracing a truth he doesn't want to face.
And that's a, you know, that is a powerful tale, but it's hard to catch it on film.
And you do.
I couldn't help wondering, you're in New York City, the heart of darkness.
You're running this Christian theater.
Is that hard to do?
I mean, is it difficult to bring this kind of material to the theater?
Well, if you're the producer, then you put up all the resources.
So we pay our bills just like everyone else.
And that makes it a little bit easier.
However, if I was trying to convince somebody to produce it for me, I think it would be impossible.
We do get a pretty, you know, we've gotten really good press in New York.
We're probably the only ones doing this with any regularity.
And what we try to do is produce New York, and then we export it around the country.
We do tours around the country.
The key thing with our work is we want to find, our mission is to produce theater from a Christian worldview meant to engage a diverse audience.
That's pretty hard to do.
So we've got to stick with kind of material that we feel would appeal to someone who's open, certainly skeptical, but open-minded enough to listen.
The language has to be good.
We have to articulate it at the highest levels that our budgets will allow so that we can play the venues we want to play here in New York and around the country.
And then thankfully, we ask people to support us, and people do.
And so I think that the key to our work is picking the right material, executing at the highest levels that we can.
You know, you hit in this story, the film is called The Most Reluctant Convert, The Untold Story of C.S. Lewis.
And you hit, it's very condensed.
You hit certain high points or low points, depending on your point of view.
And one of the points that you saw in the trailer is the death of Lewis's mother.
I mean, this is a devastating, a devastating event in any child's life, but it basically puts him at odds with the idea of Christianity.
He says they stopped being a Christian.
And he had a lot of integrity about that, didn't he?
I mean, he kind of stuck to that.
Yeah, well, he, you know, he was raised in at least a nominally Christian home.
He said that, you know, he was taking the church.
He didn't find much interest in it.
But when his mother came down with cancer when he was nine, he prayed and he expected God to answer his prayer.
He didn't come, but he came to the conclusion God didn't work or prayer doesn't work.
And so he left that.
And that was the first step towards moving beyond the sort of traditional approach to Christianity in his home.
He said that the way Christianity was taught in school, that there were a thousand false religions, but the thousand and first was completely true, meaning his own.
And he said, on what grounds?
And he said, if Adonis can be explained away, then why not Christ?
So then he, you know, he little by little, he became an apostate, he said, and he disregarded his faith with no sense of loss and with a great sense of relief.
And that was where he was early on.
He had a bad relation with his dad.
He saw the butchery of World War I.
And he came to the conclusion after that that either there's no God behind the universe, a God indifferent to good and evil, or worse, excuse me, or worse, an evil God.
And it's from that low point that the journey heads upward.
And most of it was rational.
But with Lewis, rational was tied to his emotions very, very closely.
If something was true, he believed it.
And he went with it as far as he could.
And probably the biggest issue was rationality.
Someone asked him if logic and reason brings forth indisputable truth.
He said he thinks it does.
And he's asked if his moral and aesthetic values were meaningful.
He said it was.
And so the person said, well, then his materialism had to be abandoned because materialism is all atoms colliding in skulls.
It's all physics and biochemistry.
There's nothing beyond that.
And Lewis came to the conclusion that life at its ultimate reality had to be at some level intelligent.
And that was the first step.
You know, you mentioned World War I. I've always been fascinated with World War I.
It seems to me that it's the complete death of the greatest culture that has existed on earth so far, just the complete collapse for no apparent reason except that it's time.
Right this minute, I'm reading a book I'm shocked to find I'd never read before, A Testament of Youth by Vera Britton, which is a classic memoir of World War I.
And one of the things that happens is with so much destruction, so much loss, so much grief, she loses her faith.
She comes out of it basically an unbeliever.
C.S. Lewis was in World War I. People forget this, as you say, and he was badly wounded.
And the description of it in the film is kind of remarkable.
Can you kind of convey some of that?
Because that really took me aback what happened.
Well, he, yeah, it's, I mean, he was wounded, and the first thing he said, as soon as I was hit, he said, I thought this was death.
He felt no fear, no courage, just the thought, here lies a man dying.
Then he makes this extraordinary parenthetical phrase.
It wasn't even interesting.
But it was, you know, he did talk about it was an abandonment of rationality.
It was the sheer imbecility of it.
There was nothing, you know, there was nothing redeeming about it.
And then when he, and when he got home, everybody just tried to forget about it.
Yeah.
You know, it was over.
And he did too.
But ultimately, he never could.
He suffered from terrible dreams most of his life.
And he actually has some shrapnel in his body to the day of his death.
Yeah, it's very impressive that you forget, because he's such an intellectual, such an elevated thinker and an elevated writer.
You forget that he was in this absolute cataclysm, blood-drenched cataclysm, lost a friend in it, and saw the worst that human beings can do.
You then, you show, again, it's really concise the way you did this.
I was really impressed with the way you got very, very complicated ideas into a very short amount of space.
But he became part of this group, the Inklings, where he was friends with Tolkien, who was obviously another great fantasy writer, and this guy, Owen Barfield, who's probably the least well-known of the Inklings.
He's one of my favorites.
He's a brilliant, brilliant man, a terrible writer.
You have to read every sentence he wrote three times to even get any kind of sense out of it.
Once you get the sense, it's really brilliant.
This relationship that they had, was that all the Inklings?
Were there three of them or were there more?
No, there were several more.
His brother was involved.
A fellow by the name of Dyson was involved and many people, Charles Williams was involved.
It was a pretty impressive group.
And what they essentially did was review each other's writings.
And out of that, you know, came probably the two greatest fantasy writers of the 20th century, and Lewis and Tolkien.
But it was definitely an iron-sharpening iron group.
And we owe a lot to them.
What was it that Tolkien said to Lewis that so affected him?
You have this, I took this walk when I was visiting my son in Oxford, and there's this road that they walked along, and they had this famous conversation.
What is that conversation?
Well, you know, Lewis had two very powerful conversion experiences.
One was to God, to theism, to, as he describes it, is the God of the Jews.
Or he says, my training was like that of the Jews because he realized that he admitted that God was God, knelt and prayed.
And he said his religion was like that of the Jews.
But he had no understanding.
He had no idea what the incarnation was.
The God to whom he surrendered was not human.
He made a big point of that, not human.
But he came to the conclusion that if I have a, you know, his argument against God was that the universe was so cruel and unjust.
And well, how did I get this notion of cruel and unjust?
He says, if I call a line crooked, it's because I have some idea of a straight line.
What was I comparing the universe with when I called it cruel and unjust?
And that notion led him to the ultimate moral lawgiver, God.
But he couldn't come to terms with Jesus.
He said, you know, he told Tolkien in his famous walk, Addison's walk, a couple of years after his conversion to God, that, you know, under great resistance and reluctance, I've come to believe in God, but not Jesus.
I can't understand how the life and death of someone else, whoever he was 2,000 years ago, could help us here and now.
And Tolkien did something really interesting.
He captured Lewis's interest in fantasy, interest in myth.
And he said to Lewis that when you meet a God sacrificing himself in a pagan story, dying God myths like Baldur, Osiris, Dionysius, all those dying God myths, he says, you like it very much.
Tolkien's Mythic Influence00:03:41
And you're mysteriously moved by it, provided you meet it anywhere except in the gospels.
And so he says, and then he says this, he says, the story of Christ is a myth working on us.
And I love this idea working on us in the same way as other myths, with one tremendous difference.
It really happened.
And something happened mysterious at that moment.
There was a rush of wind that Lewis captures in his memoirs.
But what that did, it made Lewis begin to read the gospel differently.
He started reading it like a hero story, like a myth, because here was the true myth in which all other myths point.
And so that got him to the conclusion, what do I do with this person and Jesus?
And of course, he came up with his very famous trilemma.
Either this man was a liar, a lunatic on the level of someone who claims to be a poached egg because he claims to be God, or else he is who he said he was.
And he said there's really no other real alternative if you take the gospel story seriously.
So that was the key moment, which of course he said later, I know very well when, but hardly how I made the final step, which is when he was on the motorcycle ride to Whipsnade Zoo, he says, when we set out, I did not believe that Jesus Christ is a son of God.
When we reached the zoo, I did.
Talking to Max McClain, the actor and writer of the most reluctant convert, the untold story of C.S. Lewis.
I want to make sure I get this in.
How do people see this?
You gave me a code, but how do they get to see it?
Well, there's a website, cslewismovie.com, cslewismovie.com.
They can see a trailer.
I think we're on about 600 theaters around the country.
I think they've actually added, we just added Canada.
It's selling very well, I'm happy to say.
Advanced sales are.
It premieres November 3rd.
Okay.
November 3rd, which is a week and a half away.
Now, they told me originally that it was only going to be available on November 3rd.
Is that still true?
That's right.
That was the original, you know, we were on a kind of approve-it deal with the movie Chase, the AMCs, the Regals, the Cinemarks, and all those.
And so far, though, they've added other days.
And will it be available after that at some point?
Well, you know, what's interesting is that contractually, I'm not allowed to talk about what happens after.
Okay.
But the answer is yes.
Well, really, again, Max, it's a great performance.
It's a genuinely terrific performance and a very, very simple performance as great performances always are.
And just a very moving story, well told.
The most reluctant convert, the untold story of C.S. Lewis.
Max McClain, it's good to see you.
If you're ever around town, let me know and we'll get together.
Love to see you again, Andrew.
Thanks.
Delighted.
Thank you so much.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
So last week, we missed the mailbag, which means your problems have had a chance to grow larger, to cling to you, to grow on you like moss.
And now it's time to get rid of them because the mailbag is back.
And here it is, the mailbag.
40% of all products coming into the United States of America on the West Coast go through Los Angeles and what am I doing here?
Yeah!
That's great.
All right.
Why We Can't Judge Others00:09:55
Now I don't know what I'm doing here.
From Justin.
I have a question that is as hard for me to ask as it may be for you to hear.
Nothing's hard for me to hear, pal.
I'm like I've heard everything.
In your last show, you said that if all the time you spent thinking about the female body in your life was taken away from you, you'd be 26 years old.
This is the case.
It seemed to me that you then use this to support the conclusion that straight people and gay people are wildly different in their desires.
But I think it supports the opposite idea that we're all the same because everyone lusts after someone.
That is also a legitimate way to look at it.
He says, for me, it's women.
And when it's not my wife, it's sin.
I hate it.
I wrestle with it.
I ask God to take it from me, yet I persist in it.
I have a gay brother I dearly love.
And when he lusts after a man, this is also a sin.
We both have spent an inordinate amount of time lusting after people who are not our wives.
I don't believe that God lets either of us off the hook for this sin.
The only difference is he's not married, and I have a legitimate God-glorifying place to express the sexuality he has given me in an uncorrupted way.
My question, do you think what Jesus says about marriage, married people becoming one flesh, applies to homosexual relationships?
If so, why?
If not, then how is it not a sin, a corruption of what our holy God who made us intended?
I ask this as a genuine fan of both you and Spencer, no Clavin, no relation, and as someone who loves his gay brother and wishes the best for him as well.
Well, I have to start, I mean, early on in this, you know, we both read the scripture, we both read the same words, we both regard it with reverence as the word of God.
I read it completely differently than you do, okay?
When you say, I lust after women, when it's not my wife, it's sin, I hate it, I wrestle with it, I ask God to take it from me, that doesn't sound like life in abundance to me.
That sounds like kind of miserable.
And I don't think it's what Jesus says.
I don't think it is how Jesus commands us to live.
I mean, it really does get me, just speaking generally, that Jesus says, you know, my burden is light.
Come to me and, you know, all you are heavy laden and I will give you rest.
He says, I want you to feel the joy that's in me.
I want to give you life in abundance.
And people translate that to me, I should sit around and hate myself for every thought I have of lustfulness.
What Jesus says, and this is obviously a very difficult passage, he says, you have heard it, you've been told, do not commit adultery, but I say to you, if you lust after a woman, you have already committed adultery with her in your heart.
Now, Jesus has a way of talking.
You can almost recognize it the minute you hear it.
He says, if you pray, if you have faith, you can take a mountain and move it into the sea.
Now, I doubt that you've ever gone out and said, let me try that.
I'm going to move.
Oh, Jesus, you were wrong.
No, you don't do that because you understand that it's a way of talking.
Of course, you have not committed adultery if you lust after a woman.
And the word for lust in the Greek is not a sexual word.
I know you're going to hate me for this, but it's the same word that is to covet when they say, do not covet your neighbor's property, do not cover your neighbor's house.
It's the same word.
It's the same word.
So it's when you look at a woman as so to possess her and to want her in that way that you're committing adultery in your heart.
Now, does that mean, you know, every man on earth, every straight man on earth, every man on earth, you know, has lustful thoughts, has sexual thoughts all the time, frequently, a lot.
Is that a sin every time that's happening?
Are you doing something wrong every time that's happening?
I hardly think so.
I think what Jesus is telling you is that there is a way of regarding people that is part of the sinfulness of human beings.
It's not saying that, you know, oh, don't ever let that happen.
It is saying this is part of what you are.
You are a broken instrument, and you have to learn to govern your desires in such a way that that broken instrument starts to heal.
And I do not think that that means telling yourself that every time you have a lustful thought that you have committed some terrible sin, you should hate yourself for that because I'd be hating myself all the time.
I don't want to be doing that.
That's not what I think.
That's not the life in abundance that Jesus offered me.
So that's the first thing.
The first thing is, I don't think that that statement that Jesus makes is a condemnation of the way people are.
I think all people are to some degree, but men, I think maybe especially.
I think it is information that you need to know about how you deal with your desires and what they mean.
In other words, your desires very rapidly can become covetousness.
They can become idolatry, I think especially, and they can separate you from the point of the exercise, which is the finding of God.
We find God in the love we bear for one another.
We find God in the love we bear for our work.
We find God in the love we bear for the world around us.
But all of those things, the world, your work, sex, your friends, can become idols and then they separate you from God.
And that's what I think he's talking about.
Now, you ask me whether I think that homosexuals become one flesh in the same way men and women do.
And my answer is, I have no idea.
How would I know?
How could I possibly know?
I can theorize that they don't.
I can theorize that they don't.
But who am I to say?
You know, really.
I mean, really, how on earth would I know?
All I do know is that I believe that we are not meant to judge another person's trajectory toward God.
Obviously, we can judge good and evil.
We can judge harm and not harm, but we cannot judge what God sees, whether that person is traveling in the direction of God or away from him.
We just can't do it.
And we have no vote.
And so what are you commanded to do?
Where are you commanded to judge your brother and his gayness?
Where are you commanded to judge whether he's going to be saved or damned?
Nowhere.
Where are you commanded to love him?
Again and again and again, you're commanded to love him as the face of God, as the image of God.
That's your job.
Do your job.
I mean, it's like there are lots of questions I can't answer, lots of things I don't know.
Lots of great theologians I read and sometimes agree with them and sometimes disagree with them.
But I know what my job is.
My job is to love God with all my heart and to love my neighbor as myself.
That's my job.
If I'm not doing that job, if I get distracted by judgment, that also, that also is a form of idolatry.
And I think it's a mistake.
And I think it's a mistake to tear yourself apart for the natural workings of the body and mind.
What you want to do is learn how to direct those things into the good, which is the God who exists in all of nature, who communicates with us through nature and through the language of nature, as well as through scripture.
So I just read that passage very differently than you do.
And I certainly don't think, I don't think that that is a life in abundance to sit around and hate yourself for those thoughts that are put there for a reason.
I'll do one more short question.
I went long on that, but from Anonymous, first question since I became a subscriber.
How do you avoid being a cynic?
You are making fun of a lot of things, but you are clearly not a cynic.
How do you do it?
I'm not a cynic.
Well, let me put it another way.
I am a tragedian.
I have a tragic point of view.
My point of view is that this world that we're in is a mortal world, a sinful world, a broken world, that every good thing in it will die.
All of life will die.
Everything mortal men make will die.
All of us will make mistakes.
All of us will be sinful.
That actually cheers me up because I'm never shocked and I never think that there was some other time that we can get back to that will then be perfect because I understand that if I were there, it would all depend on who I was and what state I was in.
And there would also be this kind of sinfulness and destruction going on.
So I make fun.
I try to make fun of corruption, basically, of corrupt ideas, of corrupt behaviors, of the things that people do that are obviously wrong and that they do with great panache and with great self-righteousness.
And the reason I make fun of those is because I think they're funny, but I think we all partake of them.
So in other words, I'm not really making fun of everybody else but me.
I'm making fun of the human condition.
I grew up with a father who was a comedian.
I've known a lot of comedians.
I've never met a comedian who was not a very, very angry person.
I am not a very angry person.
The reason I know this is because I was, in my youth, a very angry person.
I'm not an angry person anymore, and I don't want to become one.
And so I just take the world as it was given to me.
And, you know, again, Jesus didn't say love your neighbor once he gets his mind right.
He didn't say, you know, love God once creation is perfect.
Do it now.
And it is a token of God's love for us that he came now when we are as we are and saved us now as we are.
And that's the way I truly regard people that way.
I regard them as broken, sinful, include myself.
And that keeps me from becoming cynical because I know that it is a tragic world we're living in.
And I have a hope and a faith of a world that is not tragic, that we have not yet seen.
And with that note, I will leave you to plunge into a world of darkness and despair, unlike anything you could imagine, namely the Clavenless Week.
The chances of your surviving are just really almost minuscule.
But if you do, we'll be back again next Friday with the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm Andrew Clayton.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, basically wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also, remember to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show, the Matt Walsh Show, and the Michael Knoll Show.
Thank you for listening.
An Entire Generation Suffers00:01:01
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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