Andrew Clavin’s All Your Children Are Belong to Them frames the Build Back Better plan as a delusional wealth grab by Democrats, mocking figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and falsely accusing Rashida Tlaib of advocating Israel’s destruction. He ties media bias—from Baldwin’s shooting coverage to transgender policies—to a broader "information crisis," warning that digital overload and leftist ideology erode individualism, marriage, and bodily autonomy, while promoting his "Klavinism" movement as a counter to hive-mind control. Historian Tom Holland’s interview argues Christianity, not secularism, birthed Western values like compassion and monogamy, but without faith, these risk collapsing into chaos. The episode ends with parenting advice, a listener’s ideological awakening, and a critique of transubstantiation as symbolic transformation, all while weaving in ads for Ring Alarm and attacks on Biden’s policies. [Automatically generated summary]
Democrats and other locust-like destroyers of the good and the beautiful are working hard to figure out how to finance Joe Biden's important new plan to transform America into a socialist economic wasteland.
In the tradition of Black Lives Matter, which has caused the death of thousands of black people, and the anti-fascist movement, which is a fascist movement, the plan is called Build Back Better because it will destroy everything and make it worse.
According to the Biden administration, the Build Back, Better, Destroy Everything plan will cost nothing if they can only raise the $5 trillion needed to pay for it.
So far, however, they haven't been able to agree on where the money would come from.
Congresswoman Alexandria Accasional-Cortex says the stork will bring it, whereas Nancy Pelosi says it will grow in a magic cabbage patch.
And Rashida Talib says the Jews are hiding it all and Israel must be destroyed so that Palestinians can be free to oppress women and grind their populations into merciless poverty without being embarrassed by Israel's freedom and prosperity.
Paul Krugman, meanwhile, the financial columnist for the New York Times, a former newspaper, says the government can simply print the money because that will have no adverse effects on growth or inflation, according to the voices speaking into his brain through the magic hat he made out of a roll of tinfoil.
Krugman was immediately awarded the Nobel Prize for most attractive tinfoil hat worn by a total lunatic.
The Democrats, meanwhile, are continuing to discuss other methods of raising the money to pay for the cost-free destructive plan for betterment.
One suggestion is that Democrat congressmen break into houses in the dead of night and steal silverware and small electronic devices that can then be fenced for thousands of dollars, leaving only $4,999,999,997,000 left to account for in the cost-free plan.
Other Democrats suggested they could enlist Pussy Galore to spray nerve gas over Fort Knox so that Goldfinger's private army can break in and chain James Bond to a bomb that will irradiate the American gold supply, thus causing the gold medals of the American women's soccer team to still be worth absolutely nothing.
But so far, the most popular suggestion among Democrats is for President and venal houseplant Joe Biden to clench his fists for no reason and whisper creepily about non-existent American trillionaires paying their fair share.
That will cause a diversion while Democrats tax the middle class out of existence and wield the power of subservient corporations to cow and silence the remaining poor so that globalist leftist tyrants can seize unbridled control of government in order to slaughter unborn babies, foster riots and crime in American cities, hand our borders over to drug cartels, train our children to be racist catamites, and lay waste to American family and religious life.
Because they're the good guys.
And Black Lives Matter.
Go Rockauto Questions00:05:20
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
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Can Alec Baldwin be stopped before he kills more?
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And we'll answer those questions and talk to historian Tom Holland about the effect of Christianity on the Western world.
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Today it comes from Mal Solong.
It says, I was thinking to myself while listening, if Rush Limbaugh is the grandfather of the conservative movement, what does that make Clavin, the weird uncle who everyone thought was crazy, but 20 years later we realized he was right the whole time.
Actually, if Rush Limbaugh is the grandfather of the conservative movement, I'm probably the great-great-grandfather.
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There are no easing to be that way.
So Alec Baldwin, I just got to mention this quickly, this story about Alec Baldwin.
He's on a low-budget film.
He's practicing.
This is what the police say.
He's practicing.
I'm sure you've heard the story.
He's practicing drawing with what's supposed to be a stunt gun.
He was told that apparently it was a cold gun, meaning it had no bullets in it.
He pulls the trigger and he kills a young woman, Helena Hutchins, 42 years old.
She's a film's DP, what they call the cinematographer, a very important person on a film set, the person who really gives the film its look.
The director can say what he wants it to look like, but it's the DP who really makes the film look like what it looks like.
Apparently a very talented young woman with a nine-year-old son, a husband, and he killed her and wounded the director as well.
And what struck me about this is a lot of people on the conservative side, because we hate Alec Baldwin because he's a horrible human being.
And a lot of conservatives were coming out and saying, well, you know, even though we hate him, we have to feel for the shock and horror he must feel at having killed this woman.
And all the stories are really about him and he's the picture in it.
And I just want to point out the fact that this is an indication of the distortion of our imaginations, which is part of what I'm going to be talking about today, the distortion of our imaginations in part, in part by the internet, but by all kinds of mass media.
Because the story is not about Alec Baldwin.
It's really about this husband and nine-year-old boy who have lost their mom, whose mom is now gone, who is dead in this tragic accident.
Did Alec Baldwin, is Alec Baldwin responsible?
The way I feel about Alec Baldwin, once he is fully investigated and tried and wrongfully convicted and accidentally executed, I will be happy to admit that, you know, it was an accident.
But the point is the story is not about him.
And yet, you have to admit, if you're honest with yourself, you will say that Alec Baldwin is real in your mind in a way this young woman and her family is not because he's a celebrity.
Reality Detached00:12:51
And that skews your imagination.
So you think the story is about him when, of course, it's not.
Now, the other day I said to you that we're fighting over the imagination because the imagination is where the future begins.
What happens in the imagination today happens in the real world tomorrow.
And it matters that our imaginations are working properly.
And when I say that, what it means is that the imagination has to interface with reality.
It can't just go off on its own and create things.
It has to create things in the real world as it is.
Because the future is your imagination.
And the imagination could be Hitler's, it could be Stalin's, or it could be Thomas Jefferson's, it could be Lincoln's.
You can imagine yourself into a Holocaust.
You can imagine yourself into freedom and the broad-hearted Western idea of what it means to be a human being.
You can go either way.
So you really have to make sure that your imagination is being taken care of and is being nursed and is being well.
And as far as I'm concerned right now, the American imagination is out of whack to the point of mental illness.
I think we are going through a nationwide mental illness.
And the more I've been thinking about it, I've been listening to myself every week as I speak to you.
And I've been thinking almost all of this is about the internet.
So many of the things that I've been talking about have been about the internet.
You know, the last great break in human consciousness, and I've talked about this before, was the break between the Middle Ages, what we're called deemed the Middle Ages, and the Enlightenment.
And some people say, well, this was a wonderful thing.
You know, you get Steven Pinker with Enlightenment Now, and Jonah Goldberg called it the great miracle, was the move into the Enlightenment.
And of course, the Enlightenment led to science, it led to freedom, led to so many things that we cherish.
And my point of view is, yes, but we also left something behind.
And every gain you get has a cost, and we have left something behind that we're going to have to find again, which was the kind of healthy imagination of the Middle Ages that actually interacted with things as if they were holy.
And obviously, that wasn't everybody, but it was just the kind of tenor of the time, whereas now we're estranged from reality.
But it was the printing press.
It was the invention of the printing press that changed everything.
Martin Luther was the first bestseller ever mass printed, and that brought about the Protestant Reformation, which just opened up Europe from the Middle Ages into the Enlightenment and all of that change.
And right now we're in the middle of an invention that has swamped our lives.
And I know everybody talks about it.
We all talk about the Internet.
We all talk about its effects and we've considered it.
But it's almost impossible to get your head around the effect it is having on us.
And so much of what I've talked about, I realize, has its roots in the internet in the same way so much of the change from the Middle Ages into the modern world had its root in the printing press.
A year or so ago, I was talking about the fact that we were in the midst of an information crisis and that information crisis has gotten worse and worse, but we don't know who to trust, right?
They lie to us about Russian collusion.
They lie to us.
They hide Hunter Biden's laptop.
They tell us lie after lie about Donald Trump and they never bother to correct it.
You know, did he throw away Martin Luther King's bust from his office?
The minute Trump got in, they started lying.
And now they say, oh, you got to take a vaccine and you got to wear a mask.
And we go like, well, do you?
How do we know?
How do we know?
And people are passing around little pieces of information they find on Twitter.
They're saying, look, here's a tweet that tells us the vaccine is killing you.
And they have no way of knowing.
That is a crisis in information.
And if you remember that Bo Burnham song about the internet that I liked, here's just a little piece of that.
It's cut 35.
Could I interest you in everything all of the time?
A little bit of everything all of the time.
Apathy is a tragedy and boredom is a crime.
Anything and everything all of the time.
The information crisis has its roots in the internet because the internet has swamped us with everything all of the time and we have no way of choosing which pieces of information are real and so we just go with our confirmation bias, whatever we already think becomes proof that what we thought was true.
That also means that the standard modes of getting information, the government, the mainstream press, have all become corrupt.
And they were corrupt to begin with.
They were always biased.
They were always slanted.
But now they become utterly corrupt because in order to attract an audience, they have to supply that confirmation bias.
CNN hasn't had a viewer who wasn't in an airport since Trump left because when Trump was there, people would go to them for the comfort of hearing that Trump was the worst person on earth because they hated Trump and they wanted to hear that from CNN and all the people like Trump went to Fox.
And so we've got this kind of corrupt mainstream information.
And when we look around for the information we want, we find it's everything all of the time.
Like Bo Burnham said, a couple of years before that, I was talking about the left's war with reality.
And this has now become kind of a meme.
We talk about the war with reality, the reality of gender, the reality of economics, the reality of evil in the form of Islamism and the form of crime.
But it's the internet that separates us from reality by putting certain things in our imagination instead of other things.
Alec Baldwin, instead of this family that has been devastated, putting George Floyd in our mind as if he were an important person, as if that were a meaningful incident when it wasn't.
It's simply fed into a confirmation bias that black people and some white people have about how black people are treated by the police.
But it's not statistically an important event.
What is a statistically important event is the thousands of people, mostly black people, who are being murdered because the police have been chased off by the Black Lives Matter defund the police movement.
And today, you know, this detachment from reality serves certain powerful people.
And today we see that the left is making war on what is the last redoubt of reality and also the last redoubt, the last fortress of individualism, which is your body, which is your body.
They are selling what I think our friend Michael Knowles would call a neo-Gnostic heresy, the idea that the body and the soul are separate, that the body is one thing, but the soul is what really matters.
And they are selling you this idea that your body is in some sense unreal and you can uncreate it and recreate it with your mind.
And this is the thing I'm talking about.
A healthy imagination is in interplay with your reality and your reality starts with your body.
That's where reality starts because that's where all the information is coming in.
All the sense information is coming in.
We now have like boys who masturbate to pornography to the point that they can no longer react to a woman's actual needs and her actual flesh.
We have women whose social anxiety, their kind of natural social anxiety, the natural attentiveness that women have to the opinions of those around them and the social atmosphere around them has been amped up to a point of steady state hysteria where young girls are just absolutely crazy in fear that they won't get likes, that they'll be made fun of, that they'll be bullied off the internet.
Sex is important.
Sex matters because it is the place, we'll call it eros.
It doesn't have to be an act of sex.
There are erotic feelings about the world.
They matter because that's the place where our body's purpose, which is to recreate itself, to procreate, meets with our soul's purpose, which is love.
They speak directly to one another in our erotic feelings.
We can teach ourselves to be hamsters on a wheel kind of looking at pornography and reliving some kind of childhood fetish, some childhood trauma that expresses itself in a fetishism.
We can learn to turn into ourselves, to be afraid, to cease to want to have children, to cease to want to be part of a family, a mother, an actual recreative human being.
Or we can sort of turn outward and start to learn to love someone who is utterly different than ourselves, someone from the opposite sex.
And that begins the great lesson of marriage, which is to love the other is to love God, right?
That is how we find our way to God through beginning with marriage, then children, and then love your neighbor, and then into actual infinity.
God, marriage, family, love, they're all redoubts of free will and individualism.
And there are people who do not want you to have them because it gets in the way of their power and their profits.
You know, Mark Zuckerman just announced that he is changing.
You know, he's been under fire from a lot of leftists who basically are pretending they have moral objections to him, but really are just trying to silence conservative voices online.
So Zuckerman has announced his Facebook is not going to be called Facebook anymore.
It's going to be called Meta.
Why?
Because it's going to have on it a meta-universe where you never have to interact with another person's body.
You can simply interact online.
Here's a little video he put out showing what the metaverse is going to look like on Meta, which used to be Facebook.
Imagine you put on your glasses or headset and you're instantly in your home space.
It has parts of your physical home recreated virtually.
It has things that are only possible virtually.
And it has an incredibly inspiring view of whatever you find most beautiful.
Hey, are you coming?
Yeah, she's got to find something to wear.
All right, perfect.
Good boy.
Oh, hey, Mark.
Hey, what's going on?
Hi.
I call the Mark Zuckerman, obviously, Mark Zuckerberg.
So if that doesn't horrify you, it's because you don't know what life is, truly.
I mean, you should look at that and think, well, it's kind of, you know, technologically cool.
But your friend, your friend is not somebody who befriends you on Facebook or Meta now.
Your friend is somebody who shows up in the flesh.
This is a very important Christian idea.
The Christian idea is not that you die and your soul goes to heaven, is that you are resurrected in a body, that you are, in some sense, your body, that your body is the word that speaks the inner truth of yourself.
It is God's language.
Matter is God's language for speaking his mind.
And so you can't be anything without a body.
Your friend shows up in his body.
Your wife or your husband is there in his body to touch someone, to put your hand on someone else, to look into someone else's eye is what life is literally all about.
When you love your neighbor, you don't love your neighbor that you don't see.
We can all do that.
You got to love that ugly, stupid, annoying person right in front of you.
And when all of us are made of, you know, my daughter Faith said it would be nice once Mark Zuckerberg goes into the metaverse, we could just lock him in there.
But no, we're going to be locked in there.
He's going to be outside because he's going to be gathering the money and the information that he can sell about us that is going to make him richer and richer and more and more free while we become less and less real.
And that is something that all the powerful people want.
They want to give us a guaranteed income so we don't have to seek for meaning in work.
They want us to have relationships online so we don't bother them with the relationships, with real relationships that cause us to make demands.
They don't want us to be, they want us to be free in the metaverse because they don't want us to be free in the real world where we get in the way of their power and their profits.
We need to reclaim reality and reality begins with the body.
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So New York, of course, because it's now governed by leftist policies ever since Giuliani left and Bloomberg left because he was not a leftist, is devolving back into the 1970s when it was the most dangerous city outside of Calcutta.
And it's become a dangerous city again.
And this video went around the other day of a woman being assaulted on the subway.
This crazy guy gets on and he punches her on the subway.
And it's a horrible video.
Jim Banks On Transgender Rights00:11:24
She was saying, you know, get out of my face.
And he just slugged her.
Everybody who saw it said exactly the same thing.
Everybody who saw it said exactly the same thing.
Why didn't any of the men do anything?
I said it, everybody said it.
Why didn't any of the men do anything?
Because we all know that coming with a male body existing in a male body comes along with certain responsibilities.
And if it comes along with certain responsibilities, it also comes along with certain privileges.
The same is true of a woman's body.
It comes along with certain different responsibilities and different privileges.
Gender is a reality.
It's the first reality of your body.
Your body is your first contact with reality, and gender is the first reality about your body.
And imagination to be healthy has to be in an interplay with your body as it exists.
So this is the target of people who want the power over reality that allows them to be free in their profits and their gathering power, but it causes us to be trapped inside the metaverse, inside this imaginary world that they control.
Dave Chappelle, right, he did that show and they're still attacking him.
And he had a funny line where he said, you know, they keep saying that I make transgender people feel unsafe, but the only person who's unsafe is me because it's his followers.
The bullies always do this.
The bullies always pretend that they're the ones who are being bullied.
And they've done this.
They've beaten up Chappelle's supporters.
They've torn apart their signs.
They've made it impossible for him to get his documentary shown, you know, displayed.
They've really tried to hurt his career.
And they keep saying, oh, but we're unsafe.
We're unsafe, which is a lie.
One of Chappelle's best jokes in this stand-up was a joke he made about Bruce Jenner, who is now Caitlin Jenner.
This is cut 33.
Caitlin Jenner, whom I've met, wonderful person.
Caitlin Jenner was voted woman of the year.
Her first year as a woman.
Ain't that something?
Beat everybody in Detroit.
She's better than all of you.
Never even had a period.
Ain't that something?
Because Chappelle wasn't attacking transgender people, as anyone who saw the entire show would know.
He was not attacking transgender people.
He was doing what a man does.
He was protecting women.
He was doing what no one on that subway did.
He was protecting women because transgender people are trying to erase women who have natural rights and responsibilities that are different from men's, but they are no doubt still the first part of the reality of their lives.
So to destroy these natural truths, they have to bully you into saying they're not there.
And we've talked before about the left's idea that if they can silence everybody who speaks the truth, the lie will become the truth.
This works an amazing 0% of the time.
But here's a perfect example of this bullying taking place.
Rachel Levine, this guy who thinks he's a woman character out of Monty Python walking around in pearls and this long hat.
You know, he's appointed, what is he appointed, a four-star admiral from the health department or some, just an entire fantasy.
And Jim Banks, a congressman from Indiana, gets suspended from Twitter because he tweeted the title of first female four-star officer gets taken by a man.
And here's the headline from CBS News, right?
The CBS, which used to be the standard of great news.
Representative Jim Banks suspended from Twitter after misgendering trans health official Dr. Rachel Levine.
And the first sentence, the lead is, U.S. Representative Jim Banks, a Republican from Indiana, has been suspended from Twitter after using the wrong pronouns in a tweet about Assistant Secretary of Health, Dr. Rachel Levine, who is transgender.
So two words there, misgender to mean he used the correct gender and the wrong pronouns to mean he used the right pronouns.
All right.
So the entire language is being rewritten.
The entire meaning is rewritten.
So take a look at these two melonheads from CNN, Ms. Brian Stelter and Jim.
Look at me.
I'm Jim Acosta.
You know, and again, the audience for this is some guy about to catch his noon flight for Santa Fe.
But still, this is them talking about this incident, two absolute bastions of the protection of free speech.
He portrays himself as a bold truth teller when the real truth is that he's transphobic.
That's what he's revealing through this comment about Dr. Rachel Levine.
He says he's been banned.
He's only been temporarily locked.
Twitter does this a lot to different users, including even members of Congress, because he's in violation of Twitter's hateful conduct policy.
By all means, people don't like the policy.
Then let's debate it.
Let's argue about it.
But what he's revealing through his seemingly bold truth-telling tweet is just that he's engaging in transphobia.
Right.
Be a human being.
People are people.
I mean, why tweet stuff like that?
That's the thing I don't understand.
And you're a member of Congress.
I mean, you shouldn't be doing that sort of thing.
Are we the baddies?
Yeah, you are the baddies, Jim and Brian.
You are the baddies.
I'll tell you why.
I'll tell you why.
All through human history, all through human history from the beginning of time from the Garden of Eden to this very moment, men and women have been the central dividing line in human beings, right?
Every single, it's a universal human truth that every single society on earth distinguishes between men and women and gives men and women different roles in their society.
This is universal.
It doesn't happen any, there's no place where it doesn't happen.
Sometimes the New York Times will find like some archaeologist who discovers a grave and there's a woman's body in there and there's a sword and they'll say, see, in that culture, women were the warriors.
No, they weren't.
In every society, women and men have different roles and those are not the way those roles work.
So that's true for all of history.
There is zero new science to disprove that.
There is no new science showing that to be untrue, showing the natural observation of human beings to be untrue.
What there are is there are theories from politically motivated professors.
And if you read their books, they're almost unreadable because the theories are so the language is used to obfuscate rather than to clarify their ideas because their ideas are ridiculous.
Then to enforce those theories which have no scientific backing and yet change all of human history, to enforce that, they make up a propaganda word, transphobia.
And these two morons, Acosta and Stelter, these two knuckleheads, haven't got the simple integrity to say, you know, If all of human history says one thing and there's no new science and they invent a word, maybe we should talk to Jim Banks instead of calling him names.
Maybe instead of using, since we're news people, since we're people who are supposed to give information, maybe we shouldn't use words that are completely devoid of information but are simply slurs.
Transphobia is a slur.
Jim Banks is not phobic about transgender people.
It's a slur used to silence people.
And what's the target?
Why do they want to take your body away?
Why do they want to take the facts of your body away and pollute your imagination and sicken your imagination?
It's because the body is the standard of individuality.
It's the base of individuality.
It's the origin of indundivality.
It's when you die, you die alone, and that is what gives you your life, your individual life.
The individual gets in the way of the hive mind.
The hive mind is what makes Mark Zuckerberg a rich man and Jack Boots Dorsey a rich man.
It's what makes guys like George Soros and the people in Davos think that, oh, you know, I can just organize all these people because they're just in a hive.
And they even make speeches about it.
I'm not just making them, I'm just not just accusing them.
They even say, we've got to get rid of the idea of the individual.
We've got to get rid of the idea of the individual because he just mucks things up.
And what they mean by things is their sweet, sweet cash.
That's what they mean.
So they have to unmoor you from your body where your individual life is centered and felt.
And women are the main victims.
Why?
Because women's bodies are the factory of humanity and their hearts are completely tuned to that occasion and that role.
Obviously, women have all aspects to them.
They're all people.
But this is the central fact of their body is that they create new life.
And it is the central fact of human life that new life needs to be created.
And I've said this before, but it's worth saying again.
People get their individuality from their mother's eyes.
When they are born, when babies are born, they are almost the same as their mother.
They're almost not distinguishable from their mother to themselves.
But by interacting with their mothers and then later their fathers, they start to become individuals.
And we talk about the importance of fathers, and they're incredibly important.
They're essential.
But moms are the center of the beginning human experience, of the centering in your body.
In order to have a healthy imagination in your body, you begin at your mother's breast, in your mother's eyes, in your mother's arms.
And women are now afraid.
They're afraid.
They're afraid and they're miserable.
They don't want to have children anymore because they've been told that this is a bad thing.
It's going to be bad for the climate.
It's going to be bad for you.
It's going to be oppressive.
You're going to be, you know, everything's going to go wrong.
Joe Biden put out this horrible thing.
You know, Barack Obama had this thing, the life.
What was the one?
The life of, it wasn't Rachel.
Joe Biden's one.
The life of Julia.
You can't find the life of Julia online because Obama was ridiculed for it.
Joe Biden, who's too dumb to understand a losing proposition, puts out this thing, oh, the life of Linda.
And Linda's a working mother.
And just you go through the whole thing.
Her children are taken care of by the government so they can teach their children transgenderism.
She has absolutely no human responsibilities.
There's no human interaction, no family interaction.
It's all the government taking care of everything.
They are disassociating you from the basic relationships of human life.
Now, I never sleep, but I don't get tired either.
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You know, there's an article today in the Wall Street Journal by a diagnostic radiologist, a lady named Gracie Pozzo Christie, talking about the fact that the science behind Roe v. Wade, which is about to come up, be challenged before the Supreme Court, the science behind Roe v. Wade is out of date.
With the tools that we now have, we can see that a baby at 15 weeks is a human being.
Why Bodies Matter00:06:49
It's alive, it's kicking, it's scratching itself, and it is in this mother's body being nurtured, being kept alive.
Here's a woman on TikTok, and obviously these are, you can always find crazy people, but this is one.
Here's a crazy woman on TikTok talking about why you should be pro-abortion.
It's cut 13.
At no point ever has it mattered whether it's just a clump of cells or a fully fledged person already accepted to Harvard University.
It has never ever mattered when life begins.
The point is that a person cannot use another person's body without their permission.
By forcing women to share their bodies with fetuses to keep them alive, you are actually suggesting that fetuses should have more rights than any other person in the world.
And that people with uteruses should have less rights.
If you want a fetus to have the same rights as other people, I hate to break it to you, but you be pro-choice.
See, what I want to take apart there is how all human relationships disappear in that poor girl's mind, right?
If you're going to force somebody to have another person's body in their body, well, how do you shove that baby in?
I got that baby.
I'm going to force it.
That's not how babies get there.
I don't want to break it to you.
But also the fact that you are that child's mother, that defines you.
That defines who you are.
You are that child's mother.
You are not just a person with another person in a body.
You're not just a person with a womb.
You are a woman and you happen to be the mother of the person who is in your body.
That's a relationship.
And they want to tell you that that's not true.
You know, there's all this, there's this big fight going on in Virginia, but all around the country, where these insane leftist teachers want to seize the right to teach your children that they can be gay and they can be transgender.
They're taking young boys to gay bars.
They had in Kentucky, they had a fashion show where boys turned up in women's lingerie and gave lap dances.
I mean, this is the stuff that we call a scandal in the Catholic Church, but in a school in Kentucky, it's great.
And people are complaining.
People are showing up and complaining.
This was Barack Obama.
Barack Obama is trying to save Terry McAuliffe's campaign for governor in Virginia.
He shows up campaigning for him, and this is what he says.
We don't have time to be wasting on these phony, trumped-up culture wars, this fake outrage that right-wing media's peddles to juice their ratings.
And the fact that he's willing to go along with it instead of talking about serious problems that actually affect serious people, that's a shame.
That's not what this election's about.
It's fake outrage.
Your child got raped.
It's fake outrage.
Your child was put in lingerie and told to give a lap dance to his male teacher.
That's fake outrage.
Because, you know, who are you?
Who are you to say, well, here's a dad in Loudoun County, Virginia, talking to the school board.
You tell me who sounds more like a real, full human being, Barack Obama, who is a completely manipulative, expert politician, by the way, but a manipulative politician, or this dad is cut four.
I do not trust you to ensure the education or the safety of my daughter in the school system which you represent and are paid $295,000 a year to lead.
I don't care if it's three months or nine months.
You're responsible and you have failed us as parents.
We will not be silent.
We are the protectors of our children and we outright refuse to co-parent with you, with this board, with this county, and this state education system.
You have proven incapable of protecting our children.
As such, I am aggressively calling and funding for the prosecution of you for what has happened to these children in these two different high schools.
Two sexual assaults by the same boy identifying himself as a girl for which we warned you about in June would occur.
So that's the voice of a father talking about the children of his body, right?
Now you start to understand why Merrick Garland, the corrupt attorney general, is investigating these people and calling them terrorists or threatening to call them terrorists.
Now you understand why they have to defend their system against your body.
These are children who came out of these people's bodies.
They would throw themselves in front of a train to protect them because that's how bodies are made.
That's how people are made.
They have got to basically explain that that is an illegitimate concern.
It is illegitimate that you're a boy.
It is illegitimate that you're a girl.
It is illegitimate to explain that Rachel Levine is a man.
It is illegitimate to say that a father and mother have rights and true outrage over their children.
So this National School Board Association writes a letter with the help, with the help of people in the White House, right?
With the help of people in the White House, they send a letter to the DOJ and within five days, Merrick Garland starts an investigation to see whether these parents are terrorists, right?
So now even the National School Board Association, embarrassed and under fire because they got caught doing this, have withdrawn the letter and apologized for it, but not Merrick Garland.
He's going to keep the terror and the pressure on these parents because he does not want them defending the children of their body.
They had him up in Congress and I have to say the Republicans showed up for this.
I don't know if they're going to do anything about it, but they certainly made a lot of noise.
Tom Cotton ripped this guy apart.
They were asking him about the fact that he has relatives who make money from critical race theory, but he was asking him also about the fact that this letter that they reacted to was a fraud.
It was a political document.
She was raped in a bathroom by a boy wearing girls' clothes and the Loudoun County School Board covered it up because it would have interfered with their transgendered policy during Pride Month.
And that man, Scott Smith, because he went to a school board and tried to defend his daughter's rights, was condemned internationally.
Do you apologize to Scott Smith and his 15-year-old daughter, Judge?
Senator, anyone whose child was raped is the most horrific crime I can imagine and is certainly entitled and protected by the First Amendment to protest to their school board about this.
But he was cited by the School Board Association as a domestic terrorist, which we now know that letter and those reports were the basis for your judgment.
Senator, this is shameful.
Judge, this is shameful.
This testimony, your directive, your performance is shameful.
Thank God you are not on the Supreme Court.
You should resign in disgrace, Judge.
You know, I said it before, but Mitch McConnell will get into heaven simply for keeping this guy off.
All the bad things Mitch McConnell has done, but he kept this guy off the Supreme Court, and that's going to get him points.
The Bond Must Be Destroyed00:10:21
But they're not going to stop.
Merrick Garland's not going to stop this investigation.
They will keep coming because the parent-child bond has to be destroyed, just like the husband-wife bond, and just like the bond of a child to its mother.
Women are sterilizing themselves.
Women are now so beaten up and so cowed and so robbed of their natural identity and the natural privileges and responsibilities that come with the identity that they're sterilizing themselves.
Barry Weiss on her amazing Substack page, which has just produced news almost every week.
She had her sister Susie Weiss, who works, I think, for the New York Post.
She had this story called First Comes Love, Then Comes Sterilization.
She says, last year, the number of deaths exceeded that of births in 25 states, up from five the year before.
The marriage rate is also at an all-time low, 6.5 marriages per thousand people.
Millennials are the first generation where a majority are unmarried, and they also aren't having sex.
The number of young men ages 18 to 30 who admit they have had no sex in the past year tripled between 2008, tripled between 2008 and 2018.
Cities like New York, where young secular Americans flock to build their lives, are increasingly childless.
In San Francisco, there are more dogs than children.
It used to be that people wanted to make babies.
That was a healthy young person's default position.
It is still a healthy young person's default position, but we don't have healthy young people.
According to a new poll, 39% of Gen Zers are hesitant to procreate for fear of the climate apocalypse.
A nationally representative study of adults in Michigan found that over a quarter of adults there are child-free by choice.
And new research by the Institute of Family Studies found that the desire to have a child among adults decreased by 17% since the onset of the pandemic when we are living in Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse, when we're living online and we have lost the connection of bodies.
That, you know, this is the thing.
Again, your friend is not somebody who friends you.
Your friend is somebody who sits with you.
Your friend is somebody who puts his hand on your hand, looks into your eyes with his eyes.
That is what a friend is.
A wife is, and a husband is somebody who is sleeping next to you in bed.
And they're selling this fear.
And there's this woman, this is from Susie Weiss's article.
There's this woman, Rachel Diamond, who had herself sterilized.
And she has a TikTok outlet, which now has over 60,000 followers, 64,000 followers, I think it is.
She makes fun of people with children.
And I think this is the first, I want to make sure.
I think this is the first cut.
Yeah, 29.
She makes fun of people with children.
She has child-free memes.
Let's look at some child-free memes.
Family.
Why would you get tattoos?
They're expensive and painful to get and they are permanent.
Also, family.
Have a baby.
And someone shows me a picture of their kid or of their dog.
Accurate.
Mom, how many kids do you want?
Me.
Just two.
Especially if they are pities in pajamas.
I've decorated my birth control pillcase.
Dogs, welcome inside.
Please tie children to post.front.
Makes sense.
I love these so much.
So if you can't tell, it's like a family here.
And then over here, it's a couple with piles of money.
Mom holding a crying baby.
He just needs to be changed.
Me, yeah, hopefully into a puppy or something quieter.
The only thing I love more than kids is doing anything I want at all times.
When you tell people you don't want kids, so accurate.
That's going to be half the comment section of this video.
So she's making fun of people with kids and she's saying, oh, what I love better than kids, she's quoting a comedian, but I love better than kids, is doing whatever I want all the time.
Women were told by the feminists that they would now be free because they wouldn't have to make a home for anybody.
They wouldn't have to make a home for a husband.
They wouldn't have to take care of a husband.
They wouldn't have to have children who scream and yell.
And I'm not, by the way, minimizing the labor and even sometimes the boredom and mess of motherhood.
I'm not doing it at all.
I'm simply emphasizing the importance and sacredness of it and centrality of it to the human condition.
Now, here's the same woman talking about what her life is like.
This is CUP 30.
So yesterday I forgot to take my medication for depression and anxiety.
And today I was squeezed to get my MRI results and I went to the wrong facility for the neurologist.
She has like three different locations.
And I was just texting Cameron being like, I'm so stupid.
I'm so dumb.
All the while thinking how much I hated myself, how stupid I was.
Having a mild anxiety attack, couldn't stand still, felt like I was going to puke.
It sucked.
And this was my normal state of being before I was medicated.
She's so drugged up because she's so depressed and anxious.
I wonder why.
I wonder why she's so depressed and action.
You know, there's a theme here through all of this.
And the theme is fear.
Fear of climate change, fear of the pandemic, fear of, you know, of the people around you lying to you, fear of the vaccine, fear of the not vaccine, fear of everything.
Everybody is afraid of everything because once you're in the metaverse, you have no body, so there's nothing that can hurt you.
But when you come out into the real world, that anxiety is there.
The left has turned fear into a virtue.
Have you noticed this, that if you're not afraid of the pandemic, there's something wrong with you.
When Donald Trump stood on the balcony of the White House and tore off his mask, do you remember we had a montage of it at the time, Jake Tapper and all the different newsmen going, no, you have to be afraid.
You should be afraid.
What is he?
The evil Trump is telling you not to be afraid.
You should be afraid.
That fear is what basically paralyzes you.
You know, a few years ago, there was actually more than 10 years ago, there was a puppet musical that was kind of like Sesame Street, only dirty.
And they had a song, and it was Avenue Q.
It was called.
They had a song in it called The Internet Was for Porn.
Here's just a little bit.
But, you know, that's a half-truth.
The half-truth is that the Internet gives you porn instead of life.
That's what it gives you to make up for life.
It gives you friends instead of friends.
It gives you the metaverse instead of the universe, instead of the world that you're supposed to be living in, where you learn to love others one by one until suddenly you find that you have seen the face of God in other people.
They keep selling you fear.
And, you know, I would like to start a movement.
I was talking about this on the all-access thing that we do and a little bit on, I think it was on Gorka's show, Seb Gorka's radio show.
I would like to start a movement.
And I want the movement to be called like Klavinism.
And the reason I want it to be called, I want to have my picture.
Yeah, there it is.
I want to have my picture, Clay, you know, and the reason for that is totally about my ego.
It has nothing to do with the movement itself.
It's just totally my ego.
I just want my face on it and I want it to be called Klavinism.
And what the movement is, is this.
The movement is this.
And especially for young people, okay?
Because you need like a 105-year-old guy to tell you what to do at this point because you haven't gotten out of your apartment in three years.
The movement is this.
Once a week, at least once a week, you put all your machines away.
Put all your machines away.
Get them out of the room.
They can't be anywhere near you.
And meet with other people.
One person, two people, maybe three people, not too many people, because you don't want people sneaking in and secretly recording things.
And start to talk about things.
And start to say the things you are not allowed to say, because that's the big fear.
The big fear is if you say something, if you express an idea, if you express yourself, you will be penalized.
That's the big fear, because that's the target.
The target is your individuality.
The target is your mind.
You should get together and talk about things that you're not allowed to say.
Maybe you don't like black people.
Maybe you don't like white people.
Maybe, you know, you'd actually like to get married and have kids and be a homemaker, and you're not allowed to say that.
You've never been allowed to say that.
Maybe, you know, whatever it is.
Talk about things and argue about things, not by calling each other's names, but expressing your own opinion that maybe conflicts with other people's opinion and doing it in love without attacking each other.
Find a place, a genuine safe place where you can talk to one another.
Again, I want my picture up.
I want that picture of me there, and I want it to be called the Clavinist movement.
But talk to one another.
It's funny.
Jesus, who you remember from our last podcast, said, where there are two or three gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them.
And the reason he said that is God works through matter.
The body is the first organ of matter that makes us who we are.
Our bodies interacting, our bodies interacting is where God begins to speak in our lives.
So when two or three of us are gathered together in his name, he is there in the midst of them.
Take back your bodies and your minds.
And this is, again, I want this to be called the Clavinist movement.
And where two or three of you are gathered in my name, I'll be there, but you'll be buying the drinks.
So here is a tremendously cool idea.
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That's code Clavin.
I know what you're saying.
You're saying 50 cents a gallon back.
How do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-K-N.
Horror Movie Valence00:15:34
There are no using Clay Battle.
All right, Halloween.
It's now just a couple of days away.
I guess it's Sunday here at the Daily Wire.
Everybody's dressed up in a costume, various costumes.
Somebody asked me outside why I wasn't wearing a costume.
And I said, I have a philosophical objection to wearing costumes.
And he said, what's your philosophical objection?
I said, my philosophical objection is that I am a grown-ass man.
I do not wear costumes.
However, many of you will be out.
If you're doing it to get candy, that makes sense to me.
I understand that.
But otherwise, no, I won't do it.
But it is still, I still would like to end this series I've been doing about scary stories with some personal reflections about my relationship to scary stories because I spent a lot of my life writing stories that involved violence, that involved evil, involved murder, and some of them have been supernatural stories.
When I was writing for movies, I mean, most of my professional life has been writing novels.
But when I was in the movie business for several years, I concentrated on writing ghost stories because The Ring had come out.
And I, as you know, as I've talked about, I'm a ghost story aficionado.
I've read almost all of the classic ghost stories.
I can't think of a classic ghost story I haven't read.
But when I saw The Ring, I was living in LA.
I was living in Santa Barbara and working in L.A.
And I went out into the lobby after the movie because I thought the movie was wonderful.
And I went out into the lobby after the movie to hear what people were saying about it.
And I saw a bunch of young girls, like 13 years old, coming out and saying, that was the scariest movie I ever saw.
And I suddenly had this brain flash where I realized the movie was rated PG-13, which was very odd for a horror movie.
Ghost stories and scary movies are rated are or were at that time.
And these people had realized that if you cut out some of the gore and you get a little more subtle, you can get a PG-13 rating and bring in young people who've never seen this kind of story before.
And I thought, oh, gosh, that's just the kind of story I love.
I love ghost stories.
I like doing them without gore.
And that gave me several years of a very successful Hollywood career.
So I've spent a lot of my time writing these kinds of stories.
And I've thought a lot about the morality of writing stories like this, whether it's right to write horror stories, whether it's right to write stories where there's a lot of violence and where the violence is realistic and how realistic can violence get before it becomes exploitative.
And when I started out in my youth, I basically had the idea that all good art is inherently moral because it speaks the truth about the internal life of human beings, and that is a moral thing.
And I still feel pretty much that that's true, but I can't help but noticing that my own personal tolerance for certain forms of art has gotten smaller.
I do not want to see kinds of art that are going to upset me in very specific ways.
Three or four years ago, they took The Exorcist and they made it into a television show.
Now, I saw the original Exorcist, absolutely true story.
I saw the original movie, The Exorcist, 1973.
So I'm 19 years old.
I'm working at a news station, at a radio news station.
I dropped out of college and I was working at a radio news station.
And The Exorcist was a smash.
I mean, it was just, it's just hard to even think about how big it was in the country.
It was huge.
And so one day, a friend of mine who was a DJ at the radio station where I was a newsman came in and said, I'm interviewing a real live exorcist to promote the movie.
And we were going to go out afterwards, the exorcist and his girlfriend and me, we're going to go see the movie.
Do you want to come?
I said, sure, sure, I'll come.
So we get in the car, and this exorcist, the guy says he's an exorcist, and I just thought he was a complete and utter phony.
I mean, I just thought from the minute he started talking, he was a complete utter phony.
And I had no beliefs.
I had no religious beliefs whatsoever.
I was a complete skeptic.
An atheist, I would say, probably, but a total skeptic.
And I was just starting making the usual jokes that, you know, that I like to make.
And he was getting more and more angry at me.
He was furious.
So we go into the movie and we start watching the movie.
And, you know, the movie is this little girl who's being taken over by a demon.
And the DJ was sitting next to me.
And he was a nice guy.
And he had a Catholic background.
And he's sitting next to me.
I'm watching this thing.
And I think, this stinks.
I hate this movie.
I hated the film.
I've never liked it.
I've never liked it.
Didn't enjoy watching the girl get all torn apart.
Didn't find it scary at all.
Just found it kind of gory and disgusting.
Toward the end, as it's reaching its climax, I look over and the DJ is bent double.
And I thought he was laughing.
And I leaned over to say, you know, yeah, this is a pretty dumb movie.
And he grabbed me by the front of the shirt.
Absolutely true story.
Grabs me by the front of the shirt.
He says, I'm hyperventilating.
So he was hyperventilating.
He was so terrified by the movie.
So I picked him up in my arms and I carry him up the aisle out to the lobby.
And it was one of these big, you know, San Francisco movie theaters.
It was a very beautiful, old-fashioned movie theater with a huge lobby.
And I come out in the lobby and it looks like Gettysburg.
It looks like a battle scene all over the floor.
Women are sobbing.
Men are prostrate, just lying there looking up at the ceiling.
I mean, seriously, the whole place was just covered with people who were in shock at the horror and fear that they were experiencing.
And this little theater manager is walking around with smelling salts and putting them under people's nose.
So people are just lying there looking like, oh my God, I'm saying, he just cracks his thing and they kind of sit up with the smelling sauce and it was all over the place.
And I sat my friend down and I said, you know, just take easy breaths, just stay calm, everything's fine.
And the exorcist comes out of the movie theater and he says, step aside.
He's been possessed by a demon.
I'll expel it.
I just said, as I remembered, I put my hands on the guy and just thrust him back toward the theater.
And he said, I guess I'll go watch the end of the movie.
Because I was ready to deck him.
I was really furious.
So the movie had a very powerful effect, but not on me.
Partly because I didn't believe in anything.
I didn't believe in demons, but partly because I didn't have a Catholic background.
I didn't immediately react to it.
However, I did sample this movie many, many years later, this TV show of The Exorcist.
And I found it really good.
I found it really well written.
I found it extremely scary and I found it subtle.
It was not like the movie.
It was not full of gore.
It was subtle.
Here's just a little bit of the trailer where the mother comes in to tell the priest that something terrible is happening in her house.
My daughter, Catherine, she's back from college.
She's different.
The way she talks, the way she looks at me.
It's not depression.
I know depression.
There are things going on in the house.
In my house.
There are voices inside the walls.
I am not a crazy person.
I'm not saying you're crazy.
There is something inside my house.
It's a demon.
A demon.
And it's trying to take my daughter.
Oh, my God.
So it was very spooky.
And there was a portrait of the demon in it who was played at one point.
You kind of saw the demon who was trying to take over her daughter, which was really good.
He was just a shabby kind of evil person who seemed to be sympathetic, but you could just wreak evil.
And it was really frightening.
It was genuinely frightening.
And I stopped watching.
And that would have been something I would never have done.
If I thought something was well done and I thought it was frightening, I just thought, I do not want this evil in my head.
I do not want it in my head.
I know there's evil.
I don't have to school myself in this.
I don't need art to teach me this.
I just don't want it in my head.
I stopped watching it and it went off the air.
I'm not sure why it went off the air because I thought it was really quite good.
But I didn't want it in my head anymore.
And I compare that.
I've said this before, but I compare it to A Quiet Place, which is a horror movie and it's a monster movie.
It's got blood scenes, got tragedy in it and all that.
But I found it, and I was, the suspense of that film had me twisted in a knot as I sat watching it.
But I found it uplifting because of the love of the family and because the central scene in that movie is a woman giving birth with this monster hunting her.
And so you don't just have the evil of the monster, the danger of the monster, the rapaciousness of the monster.
You have this central act of creation going on that is what your heart is attached to.
This is not about message.
This is something I really have a problem with.
People think, well, the message is good, so the film must be good.
The message is good, so it must be all right that there's a lot of violence in it.
And I don't believe that at all.
The other day I was setting, I'm in my new house and I'm setting up my new TV and I had to press a button to put something on so I could see if it was working.
And what came on was a film that I'd never seen before called with the lovely title, I Spit on Your Grave.
It's a musical comic.
No, obviously it's a horror film.
I spit on your grave, it's called, and it's about a woman who gets raped and then has her revenge.
And you can say, well, it's about the empowerment of this movie.
But the first part of it is just this endless rape of this woman, which I eventually just said, I'm not watching this anymore because the titillation is about the rape.
What you're really watching it for is about the rape.
That's what they're showing you.
I've told the story before how a job that I lost in Hollywood, when I was writing ghost stories, they would call me in and everything in Hollywood is like a drain.
Everything gets worse and worse because they go after the lowest common denominator.
So what started as writing ghost stories became writing horror stories and then became this day when I was brought in and they said, we want you to write a movie that's about a woman who gets kidnapped and tortured.
And I went, yeah, that's it.
That's the story.
I said, that's the story.
They said, yeah.
And I said, well, my problem is if a woman is running away and a man with a butcher knife is chasing her, I'm rooting for the woman.
And they said, yeah, we don't want that.
That's not what we want.
And I was gone.
It's not about the message.
It's about what I would call emotional valence.
Valence is a chemistry word.
It means it describes the different ways atoms attach to one another.
And emotional valence is defined, I took it out of the dictionary, the capacity of one person or thing to react with or affect another in some special way as by attraction or the facilitation of a function or activity.
It's the way it attaches to you.
So in this film, I spit on your grave, it's the rape, it's the sexuality, the kind of sick, sadistic sexuality of the rape that attaches to you.
And the vengeance is really kind of not what you're there to see.
Whereas in the quiet place, it's this woman and this family and the love of the family that has all the emotional attachment.
And the monsters don't even matter.
The monsters are just objects, you know.
And you have to watch this because I talked earlier about the way that when I was a kid, I would build monster models.
And you think about that for a minute, and it was really a sign of being slightly disturbed, which I was as a child.
You know, that why are you building Dracula, not building a Van Helsing, you know, model?
Why are you building models?
Why is Jason from Friday the 13th or Michael Myers for Halloween?
Why is he the character that you remember?
Because he has the emotional valence.
And that's the thing that I've stopped being attracted to.
That is this thing that I cannot watch anymore.
More and more, I feel, you know, what I think art is, is I think art is practice for life.
It is rehearsal for life.
It is a way of teaching yourself how to act in life because it takes you to places you can't go.
It communicates, it links your soul to the artist's soul, your inner life to the artist's inner life.
So you know more people than you would ever meet in your life and you've experienced more things than you could ever experience in a single life.
And it teaches you how to react.
And so I'm willing to react with ugliness if it's the ugliness and violence of Medea, you know, a story about a woman who kills her children, or the ugliness of King Lear or MacGabeth, in which children are also killed and violent things happen.
And yet you're getting such a deep insight into the human condition that really the emotional valence is with life itself.
And that really deepens your life and it deepens the way you feel about things.
And art, I think, is practice for life.
And so I want the art that I consume now to give me practice for living life to the full.
About 10 years ago, I noticed I had a very, very weird habit.
I don't have a lot of weird habits, actually.
But I noticed that when I was sitting up late at night and I was channel surfing, I would think to myself, I think I want to watch a horror movie.
I wonder if there's a horror movie.
And the minute I found one, I turned it off.
I would say, I don't want to watch that.
Why would I want to watch it?
It's gory, it's bloody, it's ugly.
I don't want to watch it.
And I thought, this is a repetitive action that must come from some kind of childhood trauma.
I don't know what it was.
Maybe it was that thing I was talking about last week about Horror Hotel, that movie scaring me so badly that I felt compelled to repeat the trauma.
I didn't explore what it was.
I just stopped doing it.
I stopped.
I broke the habit because I want to be free of the past.
You know, I talked about your imagination in relationship with your body.
And if your imagination is subsumed by your body, if it is dominated by your body, it will get stuck. in the past.
It'll get stuck on this path.
And that's why pornography gets you stuck on more and more fetishes and more and more violence because it sticks you in the past because your past is written on your body.
But your imagination goes into the future.
And I think that that is what you're trying to do.
That's why I think the ultimate work of art is the Christian Mass, where your imagination is taught to turn matter, simple matter, bread and wine, into the body and blood of the living God, the word of God.
That is the ultimate work of art.
And I think it's what all art should be teaching us to do.
So all I can say to you on Halloween, enjoy the scary shows, enjoy the movies, but keep an eye out, keep an eye out for what you let into your imagination, because your imagination is the point.
And it's not only where the world's future will be made, it's where your future will be made as well.
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You know, everybody loves Disney, and we love them especially because they're just so stupid.
They keep alienating their people and we keep stealing them.
Their loss is our gain.
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Toward a Different Christian Legacy00:15:47
So last year, I read a book, one of those rare books that actually shifts the way you think about things.
It changes your perspective.
It gives you more depth to ideas you might have already had and also gives you new ideas.
And the book was called Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.
I know I've talked about it half a dozen times on the show.
Dominion, How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.
The author is Tom Holland.
He's the author of a lot of books on ancient and early medieval history.
And he has a podcast called The Rest is History.
I'm really happy that Tom is with us today.
Are you there?
I am.
There you are.
Very much for having me.
And thanks for your very kind words.
No, no, it really made a big difference.
And as I said, I know you did my son's show before mine, you know, and I don't hold that against you.
That's right.
But you did the Young Heretic.
And he and I have discussed this book endlessly.
It is a remarkable book.
I'd like to begin just by asking you personally, what drew you to this subject?
Well, so the thesis of the book basically is that we in the West, Europe and America, we're like goldfish swimming in Christian waters.
And we take Christianity and its inheritance so completely for granted that many of us, particularly those who may feel that they've emancipated themselves from Christianity as a kind of superstition,
don't realize the degree to which what we assume is just kind of human nature or the way that society is just organized or anything, that actually it's incredibly culturally contingent and that it derives from a very, very kind of specific intellectual, spiritual tradition that has utterly shaped us.
And this is a conclusion that I was surprised to find myself coming to because I'd always kind of, to be honest, much preferred the classical world.
And I'd viewed the coming of Christianity kind of like, you know, wintry drizzle descending and replacing the clear blue.
I'd kind of imagine the classical world as gleaming temples and blue skies and then the coming of Christianity as rain and drizzle and everyone, you know, the clear white togas going and everyone starting to wear sackcloth and ashes.
So it's like the kind of depressing development.
But essentially, it was the experience of writing about the classical world, Greeks, the Romans, that just kept bringing home to me how utterly alien actually they were.
And it was really trying to live inside their heads, you know, for the process of time that I was spending writing about these books, writing these books, that kind of made me think, well, these guys are far more alien than I had properly appreciated.
And so what is it that changed?
What is it that explains the chasm of cultural difference between me and say, Julius Caesar or Leonidas or people like that?
And I kind of came to the conclusion that it was Christianity, that Christianity had changed it.
So before we get into the details of that, which I would like to talk about, but before we do that, I lived in England for many years.
And it's a country where people do show up in church for events, for marriages, for weddings and things like that.
But there's a new kind of distance.
I mean, Douglas Murray has written about this.
It's becoming, if it's not already, it's becoming a much more secular country than, for instance, this country is.
So you make that discovery.
Does that have a personal effect on your life?
Well, I was raised in the Church of England.
My mother is a very devout member of the Church of England.
I love her.
So I've never had a kind of byronic rejection of Christianity.
I've always kind of quite admired it.
I just thought it was rather boring.
And to be honest, I think that that's probably the attitude of lots of people in Britain is that it's just faintly boring.
I mean, I'm aware that it's far more a live kind of cultural issue in the United States.
But in a way, I think that one of the reasons why Christianity, people feel that they no longer need Christianity is exactly precisely that it's one.
Its core doctrines, its core assumptions have been so completely internalized that in a sense, we no longer need the church.
I mean, in a way, that was kind of brought home for me very powerfully during the pandemic when people took for granted that sacrifices should be made.
I mean, often very considerable sacrifices to help the sick, particularly to help those who were most vulnerable, the elderly, those who were medically vulnerable.
Never crossed anybody's mind not to do that.
And I think that that's a legacy of a kind of sense of concern for the weak that is not natural.
I mean, it's not a given.
It is something that emerges from a very distinct cultural context.
And I think that that cultural context is the kind of the Christian command that you should care for those who suffer.
And, you know, there was a terrible process of, you know, terrible cycle of plagues, of pandemics throughout the third century AD.
And in a sense, that was the making of Christianity, because suddenly people could see that, you know, even people who weren't Christians, that there were people who were willing to tend them, willing to care for them in a way that simply hadn't been done before.
And you can obviously completely understand the appeal of that.
And that was couched in theological terms.
But now, with certainly on this side of the Atlantic, you have socialized healthcare systems.
The state, in a sense, has taken over the responsibilities for healthcare from the churches.
So in a sense, the churches are no longer needed.
You know, one of the things you write about at length is the attitude towards sexuality, but most importantly, the attitude toward women that has been transformed by Christianity.
And this is something that I think we very much take for granted in the West, but it wasn't like this before Christ.
The way women are thought of now is not the way they were thought of before.
Well, the image of Christianity is among its critics is that it's a patriarchal system with a kind of long-bearded sky daddy wagging his finger and repressing women.
And in a sense, that's another example of the way in which Christianity has become a victim of its own success, because the patriarchal traditions in Christianity, which certainly exist, are judged by standards, I would say, that are themselves Christian.
And the foundational ideas that govern Christian attitudes towards sex and towards gender are kind of rooted in the idea that men and women are created equally in the image of God, which you get in Genesis.
And then it gets a further refinement with the New Testament, and particularly Paul, who says that in Christ there is no man or woman.
But what you get also get in Paul is a kind of nervousness at the radical implications of that.
The idea that men and women may ultimately be indistinguishable in terms of their status.
And there's a kind of constant tension in Paul's letters between that radicalism and a kind of feeling, well, actually, I think that men should have a kind of responsibility for women and so on.
But having said that, this understanding that every human being, female as well as male, is created equally in the image of God, is so foundational to Paul's understanding of how people should relate to each other.
But he argues essentially that the only real way that a man and a woman can have a sexual relationship is if they map that relationship on the relationship between Christ and his church.
So again, you have that kind of idea that Christ is the head of the church.
So there is that kind of idea of the man as the head of the relationship.
But in the context of the age, this is unbelievably transformative.
And I think you could almost say kind of progressive, if you want to put it in those terms, because the context of the world in which Paul is framing these doctrines, so Corinth, the Roman colony, Rome itself, this is a society in which the binary is not, as it is for us, men and women, the two sexes.
It's about do you have power or do you not?
And the person who has power is the male citizen, the male Roman citizen.
And he has an absolute authority over everybody in his household.
And essentially, he has a license to use those who are his subordinates any way that he likes.
Absolutely any way.
I mean, he can rape them any way that he wants.
And that is a given.
So when Paul is writing to householders in Rome and saying that you have to, you know, you, the Roman male citizen, in your relationship with women, you can only have one wife.
You can only have a wife.
That's the only person that you can sleep with.
And that relationship has to be for life because that is how Christ is with his church.
You know, Christ is not going around sexually assaulting the page boy or the scullery maid or whatever.
You have to be strictly monogamous as Christ is monogamous with his church.
And this sets in train an absolutely kind of radical recalibration of the way that people understand sexuality.
And it's a long, long, convulsive process because essentially it involves training men to rein in their sexual instincts and to basically to treat a woman's body as though that body is the church.
And it's that idea that a woman's body, or indeed a man's body, all human bodies are sacrosanct, that we take so for granted now.
And yet it's not a given at all.
And this was really brought home to me.
I was writing the book and the Harvey Weinstein affair broke.
And I'd been writing a lot about how Christian morality had changed Roman sexual standards.
And of course, to a Roman householder, what Harvey Weinstein did was absolutely natural.
I mean, of course, why wouldn't he sexually abuse his subordinates?
I mean, that's why not?
I mean, everybody does that.
In fact, you're a bit odd if you don't do that.
And I thought that what was striking about the reaction to that wasn't just that women got together and set and trained the Me Too movement, but that so many men accepted the justice of what they were saying.
And that reflected the fact that this kind of cultural weathering has been around for a very, very long time.
But the complexity of it is, of course, that it's become snarled up with, I think particularly since the 60s, with a sense that Christianity is repressive, uptight, that, you know, St. Paul was a kind of blue meanie turning up and ruining the pepper land of ancient Rome.
But it wasn't like that at all.
And the measure of that, I think, the complexity of our present day cultural attitude towards Christianity is that when the women's marches happened in the United States just after Trump had been elected, they went through all the major states in the US.
And one of the most popular costumes that women wore on those marches were the red robes and the white bonnets of handmaids from the dramatization of Margaret Atwood's novel, The Handmaid's Tale.
And that was written as a parody of Puritanism, of New England Puritanism.
But the paradox was that the women on those demonstrations effectively were demanding that men behave like Puritans.
In other words, that they show sexual continence and that they respect the bodily integrity of women, that they don't just kind of harass them, jump them, grope them, molest them, as people back in Roman age.
You know, this brings me back to what you were saying before.
We're talking about the book Dominion, How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland.
You said before that Christianity was a victim of its own success and that essentially its values have disappeared into our ordinary consciousness and into our lives, so that we don't even see where they come from.
The other day, there was a tragic comic moment when the State Department in America complained that the Taliban was forming a government that wasn't diverse enough, as if the Taliban would suddenly slap its head and say, oh, gee, you know, we forgot that diversity is one of our values when obviously it's not one of their values.
You mentioned after 9-11, George W. Bush saying Islam is a religion of peace, which aside from being meaningless in and of itself is also simply not true.
It does not emphasize peace and love the way Christianity does.
Is the fact that it's disappeared, does that leave us kind of exposed to losing the values that were given to us?
In other words, are they now permanent or do they stand on this rock?
Well, this is the great question.
And it was famously posed by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who said God is dead, but we haven't, you know, people haven't kind of woken up to this fact.
And Nietzsche's further argument was that you can't have Christian values without Christian belief.
And he was addressing socialists, liberals, communists, basically anyone who was kind of parasitic on the fundamentals of Christian teaching and saying that in the long run,
you know, your convictions say that the last shall be first and the first shall be last, or that all human beings have an inherent dignity, that these are unsustainable without the theology, without the sense of mystery that gave them birth.
And he further predicted that there would be a terrible age of convulsion when the implications of that were thought through and put into practice.
And of course, what we know that Nietzsche didn't was what form that terrible convulsion would take.
And basically, it was fascism.
Fascism was a conscious attempt to fuse a pre-Christian world in which the strong and the mighty, you know, in the best tradition of Achilles or Julius Caesar, have the power, and a kind of modernity in which there's no place for kind of squeamish compassion for the weak, which Nietzsche saw as kind of enfeebling slave morality.
And fascism, particularly in its Nazi form, was the most radical subversion of Christian assumptions since the time of Constantine, far more radical than the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution, both of which absolutely thought that the last should be first and the first should be last, that at the end of days, sheep and goat will be divided up, that a new Jerusalem will descend to the earth.
It was just that this had been secularized, but the Christian impulse for these teachings was absolutely clear.
And the reason that both the French and the Russian revolutionaries targeted the church was for deeply Christian reasons.
In other words, that the church was identified with oppression and well, you know, that the church had become first and therefore it had to become last.
Christian Assumptions Revisited00:05:22
Nazism was far more comprehensive in its rejection of Christianity because it rejected the fundamental doctrines.
The two key ones, I guess, being the idea that the strong have a kind of debt to the weak.
Christ is crucified.
The cross becomes an emblem of the power of the weak over the strong.
Whereas previously for the Romans, it had been an emblem of the power of the strong over the weak.
The Nazis utterly rejected that.
They were all in favor of strength and they regarded the weak as people who had to be disposed of.
And of course, the Nazis rejected the idea that there was a fundamental human dignity and equality.
And Paul had said that there's no man or woman, he also said there is no Jew or Greek.
The Nazis absolutely thought there were Jews and Greeks.
And the shock and the horror of that, when it kind of percolated out, and when the understanding of what it had done with news of the kind of Holocaust kind of entering public understanding really in the 60s, that oddly is, but I think, I mean, it may seem counterintuitively, but I think it's not entirely strange.
That is when Christianity in Europe, institutional Christianity, started to really go into decline.
And I think that one of the reasons for that is that the Nazis provide us in the West, and I would include the United States in this, with a kind of new mythology that is actually far more dramatic, far more vivid, and far more, it seems to many people, rooted in reality than the traditional Christian mythology.
So it's a mythology in which Hitler is the devil, in which Auschwitz is hell, in which temptation consists of being drawn to the doctrines that the Nazis had upheld, and that virtue is to be defined as standing proof against Nazism.
But I think that that mythology and the power that it has for us is itself still rooted in Christian assumptions, because we condemn the Nazis as evil because we're judging them by Christian standards.
But the effect of that is that whereas maybe before Hitler, we would say, you know, what would Jesus do and do it?
Now increasingly we say, what would Hitler do?
And we do the opposite.
Now the question is, is that sufficient to maintain Christian ideals and values and teachings without Christianity?
And I think I'm not a prophet.
I don't know what the answer to that is.
My hunch is, based on the past few years, is that the hold of Christian theology on the imagination of the West, and particularly perhaps on Americans, is as strong as it's ever been.
But that although those values are kind of rooted in Christianity, they're no longer anchored to them.
And so they're starting to drift off in all kinds of strange ways.
And we're getting all kinds of bizarre, mutant, straight, chiefly because people don't recognize that they're Christian anymore.
I've only got a minute or two left.
I have to ask you this, though.
I've talked to so many people and read so many people.
Douglas Murray comes to mind.
Marcello Perra, the Italian philosopher who says we must call ourselves Christians or else our freedoms will fall apart.
Douglas Murray, who says, you know, we can't invent a new form of morality.
So we really have to have some kind of relationship with Christianity.
But they can't believe themselves.
They cannot bring themselves to have faith.
Do you have that problem?
Well, I'm a liberal who's lost his faith.
I wrote Dominion in part because I wanted to stress test my fundamental values and to find out where they come from.
And essentially, I'd always kind of vaguely assume they came from the Enlightenment.
And the discovery that they didn't and that ultimately they come, they're deeply theological.
They're rooted in a kind of sense of mystery was an eye-opener for me.
And I feel, let's say, that I'm on a journey because I don't want to abandon my belief in those.
So I, because a kind of abyss awaits, essentially, I think if you, you know, I don't want to abandon my belief in that.
And I slightly feel that I might as well hang for a sheep as a lamb.
So there's one side of me that's saying this is all nonsense.
There is no human dignity.
There are no human rights.
We're all just animals.
We're all just kind of bundles of atoms.
Who cares?
We can do anything we like.
And the other half is saying, no, of course you believe.
You know, these are so much a part of you.
And there are times where I can believe that.
And there are times where I can't.
And my skepticism and my belief are in the constant sense of dialogue.
And that may sound like a kind of weasel question, but I think that I'm not unusual in that.
I think that in a sense, our entire society, whether it recognizes it or not, is in a process of discussing this, whether our values are sufficiently believable that we can continue to believe in them.
And I like to think that we can.
But I was going to say I've been there, so I'm not surprised at all.
Believing in Ourselves00:09:47
I've got to stop you there.
Absolutely terrific conversation.
I'm so happy you came on.
The book is Dominion, How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland.
Tom, I hope you'll come back again.
We can talk some more.
Thank you very much for having me.
Thanks a lot.
All right, the time has come.
You've been waiting for it all week.
You've been sitting around saying, what am I going to do with all my problems?
How can I get rid of them?
This is how.
is through the vehicle of the mailbag.
What on earth was that?
I'm sure.
I'm sure I should know what that was, but I have no idea.
All right.
From next, after the show, someone will explain to me what that was.
From Nick, in a little over a month, my wife is due to give birth to our firstborn.
Do you have any advice for new parents which will change our lives possibly for the better?
I think Nick was on the all-access show.
Maybe, maybe somebody else just asking the same question.
Yeah, what you do, Nick, is say to your wife, honey, I'm just going to go out and get a pack of cigarettes.
And I just keep walking.
No.
What a terrible thing to say.
That was not my real advice.
Sure, sure.
What's good advice for a new parent?
The first piece of advice, the major piece of advice is tend to your marriage.
Your marriage is the world in which your child will live, just like your wife's body is now the world in which your child is living.
When he or she emerges, your marriage is going to be the world that shapes her, him or her, shapes her mind, shapes his imagination, shapes his idea of how secure he feels in the world.
Take time.
Babies are a tremendous draw on your time, but take time, get some help.
Make sure that you have time to be with your wife, to make love to your wife, to talk to your wife, to have time away with your wife.
It is a completely consuming chore raising a child, but remember that part of raising the child is the marriage, that is keeping that marriage alive and vital and not just okay, but alive and vital and romantic and exciting and interesting.
And the other thing that you should know is that if you picture your personality like a piano keyboard, at some point in the course of that child's life, that child is going to play every single note on that piano.
There is no hidden notes.
There ain't going to be no hidden notes.
That child will at some point touch every part of you and get a reaction and sound every part of you.
So while you're keeping your marriage healthy, you've got to keep yourself healthy as well.
If there are sour notes, if there are bad notes, if there are notes that set off anger, if there are notes that make you irrational, if there are notes that make you small-minded, unforgiving, those notes are going to be played.
So work on yourself.
Don't just live life.
I mean, life is actually a mission.
Life is a mission.
It is the mission to become the person God made you to be.
You are not that person now.
I don't have to tell you that.
We all know it.
That's why I make the joke whether this will change your life because everybody wants to change his life.
If I said to Tom Cruise, or the richest man on earth, if I said to the most successful, best-looking person on earth, if I said, read this book, it'll change your life.
They say, oh, good, because I really want to change my life.
And you think, why?
You're rich.
You're famous.
You're handsome.
Why do you want to change your life?
It's because we all know we are not that person God made us to be.
Always be moving in that direction.
You're not going to make it in this transitory life.
But if you're moving in that direction, then even when your child plays that sour note in you, you will get through it because you'll be able to say, yeah, that's a sour note I have.
I'm working on it.
It won't be just something that is there that that child has to live with all the time and say, oh, my dad, whenever you brought up, you know, Pokemon, that guy just hit the roof for some reason, whatever it is that makes you crazy.
And yeah, and the only, you know, just in terms of parenting advice, this was something my wife and I always felt very strongly about is that if your discipline is constant and steady and sure, it doesn't have to be violent or mean.
Like in other words, if you say to your child, if you do A, B will happen.
And he does A and B happens, you hopefully never get to the point where you take a clawhammer, just like say, all right, I'm going to hit you with a clawhammer.
No, you know, like whatever the punishment is, whatever the consequences, it should happen.
And you see this, you know, if you pay attention, if you're ever in stores and drugstores and toy stores and you see parents with their children, you will see them say, if you don't stop that right now, you know, there's not going to be any TV.
And they don't stop and nothing happens.
No second warnings, nothing.
If you say it's going to happen, it should happen.
That's why the threats that you make should be doable threats and not, you know, I'm going to kill you if you do this.
It should be something very specific that you do.
And if they know that's going to happen, their behavior will be good.
You will never have to escalate.
And that is an important thing.
So those are my pieces of advice.
Brittany says, I've been a liberal for most of my life, but about six years ago, I moved in with my best friends who was conservative.
She was converted to being what a friend of mine calls politically mature.
I've gone back to school.
I've just tried to keep my head down and not say anything so I can get my degree.
I realized a couple of weeks ago that I've been prioritizing my comfort over my freedom, and I'm not proud of that.
But now I'm struggling with something different for which I would like your advice.
After graduation, I was planning to get my PhD in child psychology and become a child psychologist because I believe I can make a difference.
I grew up in a very dysfunctional home.
I was abused, molested, neglected, and I want to be able to take care of people.
people have been through the same things.
I look at society now and I see how so many children are being exploited.
They're being psychologically damaged by the government, the LGBTQ community, the criminal justice system, Hollywood, and even the psychological community.
I don't believe that science should be political.
And if we give up academia, as we have for decades now, we'll never get back.
So in other words, she wants to know, should she fight the fight in academia, which might mean not getting her degree, or should she keep her head down and get her degree so she can help children?
Well, this is a case where I would say you have to be canny.
I believe in speaking the truth.
I believe in not being afraid.
But that doesn't mean, as I have said repeatedly, that doesn't mean you shouldn't be strategic.
What did Jesus say?
Be as wise as serpents, but as harmless as doves.
So in this case, you do want to get your degree and you do want to help children.
And that is something that you can do that is really worthwhile and really will also put you in a position where you can write books and make speeches and say the things that you want to say about the society that maybe you won't be able to say without that degree.
So I would say be canny, you know, fight the fights that you can fight, but don't tear yourself up if you come to a point where you say, you know what, this is a situation where I got to keep my mouth shut and do this thing.
I do not believe in keeping my head down all the time.
You know, I believe that you have to speak the truth and I don't believe you should ever be forced to lie, but you do pick your fights.
I pick my fights.
Everybody picks his fights.
Being a brave soldier for truth does not mean sticking your head into the mouth of a cannon.
It means picking your fights and doing what has to be done when it has to be done.
Get your degree, because I think you sound like a compassionate person who's been through a lot and can bring a lot of interest, bring a lot of power and interest to being a child psychologist.
Get that degree.
From Brian, Master of the Multiverse, yet student of the scripture, what is your view on the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, which is the idea that the bread and wine in the Mass is not a symbol of the body and blood of Christ.
Its substance actually transforms into the body and blood of Christ.
Obviously not the material, but the substance of it.
I believe that those two things are not unreconcilable.
I believe that the imagination is part of the creation, that part of the way the world is created is by the way it exists in your imagination.
And as I've said all throughout the show, your imagination is not free to transform reality out of being itself, but it does have the power to transform reality within certain limits.
And a perfect example would be the marriage ceremony.
You start out as two people, you end up as one flesh, and you can feel it.
When I got married, I thought, I don't care why I get married.
I'm already in love with this woman.
I'm living with her.
Why should we get married?
The minute the marriage was over, I realized, oh no, I had actually done something.
It's an act of imagination that transforms the relationship that you're in.
And the Mass is, I believe, the same way.
It is a rite that is there to help you transform ordinary things into holy things.
And I now go to the liturgy, which is the most important part of my worship of the week.
I go with a completely, I try to keep a completely blank, open mind and let that ritual transform me so that the bread and wine will in fact transform.
And that's what I think it means to transform the substance of it.
It's not magic.
It's simply the imagination's creative interchange with the world.
I'm going to stop right there.
The Clavenless Week is upon you.
It will be interrupted by Halloween, where all of the horror in the world comes rising.
Oh, that is the Clavenless Week.
It's the same thing.
So never mind, just forget the whole thing.
You're not going to survive it.
But if you do, or if your descendants do, if someone you know does, I will be here next Friday with the Andrew Clavin Show.
Andrew Clavin Show Production00:01:17
I'm Andrew Klavan.
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The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Lisa Bacon.
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Copyright Daily Wire 2021.
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