Spencer Klavan argues Dave Rubin’s Locals platform is a strategic counter to "cancel culture," comparing modern corporate censorship—like Amazon’s removal of When Harry Became Sally—to the Catholic Inquisition’s suppression of the printing press, warning that conservatives must build independent infrastructure (e.g., Urbit OS) to escape centralized control. He rejects liberal individualism and David French’s privatized rights approach, instead framing the "young right" as defending non-negotiable principles like bodily autonomy and opposing gender ideology, while critiquing Douglas Murray’s "Christian atheism." Klavan insists a revival of religious thought—not just secular values—is vital to resisting modernity’s erasure of Christian roots, as explored in his work with The Young Heretics and The American Mind. [Automatically generated summary]
So as you know, I like to interrupt the show every now and again to bring on somebody articulate and intelligent and break things up a little bit.
We couldn't find anybody this week.
I was going to just interview a house plant, but he was in the White House.
And so I brought on my son, Spencer Clavin, no relation, who actually is probably the most brilliant person I know.
He is the host of the Young Heretics podcast.
If you are not listening to the Young Heretics podcast, you are missing the Ivy League education you missed the first time.
You could be getting it this time, but you're missing it.
He's also the associate editor of my single favorite review, the Claremont Review of Books.
It is the one review that I read from cover to cover every time it comes out.
He's also on The American Mind, which is kind of the young person's Claremont review.
And we've never met, but I thought it would be.
Well, I want to thank you for respecting my preferred pronouns, which are no flash relation.
Exactly.
Everybody's been very kind.
I request it now at any event that I go to.
It's very important.
And of course, we do have a contract that I have to say that.
I wouldn't come on the show otherwise.
Right.
So one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you, a specific reason, because this cancel culture thing has me a little crazy, especially as the right keep saying, oh, it's private business.
They can do anything they want.
Not really understanding the situation.
You have this podcast, The Young Heretics, and it's exploding.
And you have a growing Twitter following.
But you, I mean, you are actually starting to out-strategize them and starting to put together a strategy to keep yourself uncanceled.
So you recently joined Dave Rubin's site.
So tell me about that a little bit.
That's right.
Yeah.
Well, this is.
It's like all we can do to keep one step ahead of these like Cretans, these dumb Twitter whatever.
Yeah.
And you know, after what happened on January 6th, there was this big crackdown.
People started draining followers.
And I hate this thing that you build up with sweat and tears.
You build up this connection with people.
You build this community.
And then suddenly it's just drained away from you because what?
Because some like egghead thinks that you're not a nice guy or something.
That's literally what it is.
And so we started thinking about ways to get around this.
And Dave's platform, Dave Rubin's platform, Locals, is what we ended up on.
Because it's, first of all, I know Dave.
I know he's a great guy.
And I know he's committed to free speech.
So you sort of have a certain promissory note there.
You have a promise there that you're not going to get kicked off for something you say and you're very much in control of the content.
Plus, one of the encouraging things about Young Heretics, which is show about the West and the great principles of the West, which are now constantly under assault, right?
One of the really amazing things about it that's been so exciting is that people are responding in a very personal way to it.
It's not just like, oh, this is this fusty academic subject.
It's like, okay, so here's Aristotle, some dude from 200, 2,300 years ago, right?
And he actually has something to say about how to be good at being you, right?
It's now.
And people are connecting with that.
And locals is a place where we basically just, you know, it's like undercover of darkness in this community.
People can talk to one another and actually read it.
But just what you were saying, this is one of the reasons, A, the show is great, but also knowing, it's great for people to know the past a little bit because you know which part of what we're seeing is just human nature and has happened a million times before, which part is new and has to be dealt with in a new way.
And that's why I think we've got so many people who are so ignorant in this country that they think things have never happened before that have, and they think things have happened before that haven't.
So you did a piece on locals, which is a subscription, which I thought was great.
And I talked about it a little bit on the backstage show.
But, you know, I hadn't thought of it, and it's just so amazingly accurate.
It's such a precise comparison.
Well, you talked about the fact that the Declaration of the Catholic Inquisition and the Declaration of Twitter's Terms of Service have so much in common.
People Using New Technology00:12:41
It's wild, right?
Well, so you remembered the Inquisition.
I was there, yeah.
Right, yeah, I agree.
I escaped with my life actually.
It's remarkable.
Yeah, if you look in some of those paintings, you can see just in the corner a little bald head, like Pope Leo.
And there's a sort of cloud of dust behind you.
Yeah, no, this is what I've been thinking about, because obviously this stuff vexes me greatly.
And I've been pondering over it and pondering over it.
And it did occur to me, you know, that this stuff, history never repeats.
It always rhymes.
But there are these things that come back up again and again.
And I was thinking about when I did it on the show, an episode about John Milton, who was very pro freedom of expression.
What are we actually going through here?
What can we expect and what can we learn from the past?
And I was thinking about the Inquisition, because Pope, this is, what, 1515 now?
Pope Leo X puts out this message, this papal bull called like Among Our Concerns.
So among the concerns that we have about the state of Europe are the printing press exists, right?
Around 1440, Gutenberg invents the printing press.
This is complete revolution in communications technology.
Now suddenly you get things like newspapers.
Like, whoa, imagine that, that you can just sort of distribute text to people and ideas to people.
And this was very exciting.
And in this message that Leo puts out, he says, well, you know, this is a great boon.
This is wonderful that this technology exists.
It enables Christian learning to be spread across.
But also, some people are using it to say bad things.
Some people are using it to, I don't know, post 95 theses on the wall.
I mean, the Lutheran doctrine, right?
The Reformation and Protestantism was one of the things he was very concerned about spreading.
And so with what seems to me the sincerest goodwill in the world, he says, and so the obvious conclusion here is that we, Rome, have to decide what people can and can't say.
I'm not here to knock on the Catholic Church.
It's really one of the great institutions of the West, right?
And one of the tragedies of the Inquisition is that it really did a number on the credibility of the Catholic Church, in some ways unfairly.
But I am here to compare that.
If you go to Twitter's civic action page, you will find Jack Dorsey or whoever is in charge of writing these little corporate statements on why we have to kick all the conservatives out of the world.
You will hear them say, well, one of the great things about our platform, this new technology, isn't it so exciting that every year is an election year, it's a global platform, we can communicate to one another in real time, but some people are using this technology, right?
This is the same reaction.
This is the same response of people who hold power, right?
Oh, like some people are using this new technology to say bad things.
And so it's our job to decide what the bad things are and stop them, Twitter says, before they happen.
And this is the classic thing that Milton was so upset about, was that they weren't just going in and canceling books that had already been published, but they were also just stopping people from publishing books really at all.
And that's, by the way, that's not the Catholic Church.
That's the Puritans.
So this is a general reaction to this sense that there's a new availability.
People cannot stand the idea that there's new ideas out there and some of them you might not like.
But the interesting thing about that, what you just said, is that the Catholic Church in this situation was the old guard.
Right.
And what it did not get, and the reason it made this, what was a mistake, was it didn't get that the times they were changing and there was no defense against the printing press.
They didn't understand that.
So that means, though, that things that we think of as modern as it's possible to be, Twitter and Facebook, and these are things that happened moments ago, essentially.
But you're saying in this comparison that they represent in some sense the old guard, that they're defending something old.
That's right.
I mean, they've now aligned themselves with all of these power structures in America that are built up around like TV, around just having this control over your image, right?
going on TV and doing these debates and having this kind of very packaged presentation of things that now obtains in Washington, right, this sort of sense of polished.
You've been talking to me about how, like, everything's a grift.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's my whole show today.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, this is part of it, that like, you know, TV makes it possible to grift.
Like, you can kind of pretend.
And just like the printing press, which was not just this new technology, but just a whole new way of life and organizing things, right?
Digital media just pulls the veil off of that.
We see all of these backstage, you know, like you suddenly see officials putting masks on backstage, walking on stage and taking masks off.
You see the open hypocrisy of this because they can't control what you can see.
And all of these little movements that are rising up, what happened in Hong Kong in 2019, what happened in America in 2016, when these kind of like meme lords were helping Trump to get elected, right?
Like this is, not all of it is good, not all of it is bad, but you can't control it.
This is the thing, right?
Leo did a fair bit of damage.
Universities started printing lists of books you can't read.
Amazon is now doing the same thing, essentially, by just vanishing books off of its servers.
When Harry became Sally is now just not there.
This stuff, these reactions, it's not like they can't do a lot of damage.
It's just that the sea change that they're reacting to is so much bigger than them.
And eventually, one way or another, you're going to get these renegade movements of people who are using this technology to go around in all these different ways.
Well, this is the thing that I think worries so many people.
I mean, you're obviously right that you have John F. Kennedy banging everything that moves in a skirt in the White House.
And we never knew a thing about it.
And then you have now all a guy has to do, apologizing has to do is whistle at a girl and his career can be ended.
But when they found out that it was going to be that way, if the accusation was against the Democrat, it just vanished.
They just suppressed it.
So it worries me.
It worries me that this technology, I mean, the church did a fair bit of damage suppressing this stuff.
It worries me that this technology may be so big and so unified in some way that, I mean, for instance, you were talking about Hong Kong.
Hong Kong is now suppressed.
They have won.
They have basically destroyed every objector has been arrested.
Every protester is gone.
The radio shows that attacked them were off the air.
They did it.
And it happened like that and it was over.
What's to keep that from happening here?
Well, this is a great example of the kind of thing you can learn from studying history, right?
Because you get these comparisons, but they're not quite exact because the printing press was everywhere.
And now we have this old guard that just holds so much control.
It's as if the Pope and a few other guys in the universities owned all the printing presses and there were only five.
And so the comparison here is with servers, right?
This is what the right hasn't been thinking about.
And I'm excited to see that people are starting to think about it.
So remember when Parlor got zapped?
That was because they didn't have their own servers.
And my friend James Poulas of The American Mind, who thinks about this stuff all the time, he's fond of saying, the cloud is just somebody else's computer.
All you're doing is you're downloading onto some other space.
We don't have control of it.
We keep making these new apps.
But then we saw with Parler that if they don't like the app, they can just cancel the app.
And this is the big fight for conservatives right now.
It's like building our own infrastructure, finding ways.
Urbit is a good example in the OS department, the operating system department.
And I think that conservatives need to get really proactive about just finding ways to get around that centralization.
So assuming we do this, and assuming that you're right, they are the old guard.
And of course, it's always, it's as old as Pharaoh that they're going to collect the grain and distribute it as they will, and then a generation later you're a slave.
That's as old as the Bible.
So there only is one new idea in politics, which is that individuals should be free and they should make their own choices and spend their own money.
But that means that the right has got to have.
One of the things about the right is this has played defense almost all the time.
The reason it plays defense is kind of built into the system that we're always trying to conserve what's there and it's always under attack.
But what we were trying to conserve is pretty much gone.
I think that the Bill of Rights, when you have Amazon and Google and Twitter shutting people down and David French, a champion, once a champion of rights, is saying, well, they're private entities.
The old thing that we were trying to conserve is gone.
What does the new right look like?
And this is one of the things that I have a problem with is being from the old, like, you know, from the old 1776 right, that too many young people have not really formulated their ideas about this.
So what are you seeing?
There's got to be at least a discussion going on.
Yeah, there's something so dynamic going on, and it gets obscured because of all the screaming and the screeching, right?
Like these people are Nazis.
I mean, of course, like you want to avoid crazy conspiracy theories, you want to disavow Nazism, all of these things, right?
But so much of this is noise, is sort of like mainstream press noise.
And there is something, a really important debate going on.
I'm glad you, I was going to mention that you're kind of back and forth with David French about, well, look, these are private entities.
But that doesn't mean they have the power to strip us of our God-given rights.
And what I see when I see a conversation like that is I see an idea that makes sense in a certain context that has been just turned into our only idea.
This idea of private enterprise is now the only principle according to which we operate.
And you are actually being a little bit more like the young right when you're pointing to ideas that are behind those ideas, right?
Principles that are actually deeper than and always were meant to precede the American regime.
We are endowed by our Creator with certain inevitable rights.
That is a kind of tacit agreement.
There's just questions that are already answered in that, which are, for example, that these rights are not the fruit of government.
You don't get them because government says so.
Government protects them and it's their job to protect you against new things like Amazon coming up.
This is something we've never faced a threat like this before.
When has it ever been the case that if the president, the sitting president of the United States, wanted to get his message out to the American people in the most sort of immediate and current mode of communication, there existed one guy or like three guys that could just be like, no.
That's right.
That's right.
When has that ever existed?
Never.
And so you're saying that's a threat to something deeper than liberalism.
And people like David French get very antsy because there's a lot of that energy on the young right right now.
And a lot of it is just kind of like angry and like, rightly so.
Yeah.
We've been so suppressed.
And this kind of dissident right is sometimes what you call it.
You get a lot of like gym bros on Twitter and everything.
But what they're basically all saying is there are certain things that are non-negotiable, like that men aren't women, right?
Or that we don't want our children to, in public places, be confronted with this totally dehumanizing ideology of gender and that they can just mutilate their bodies, all this terrible stuff.
These are kind of like very basic, they're even almost primal concerns that the new right has.
Now, in that, they've basically just said like liberalism sucks, like all of this individual liberalism.
Even classical liberalism.
Exactly.
Even like John Stuart Mill, all of this, you know, individual liberty, that was a terrible mistake.
Look where it got us.
And my feeling is that there's a really important, you know, the new right is now, the young right is now like having this conversation about how to take Trumpism forward, right?
Like Trump did this thing, he basically was the voice of that cry, right?
Like we will not allow these like final bedrock principles to be taken away.
Now we have to decide how to do that in a civilized and politically viable way.
And so I think there has to be some meeting where you inject that energy, that sort of new vitalism that is part of the young right into the American systems that we all know and love.
Fetters And Vitalism00:03:21
It can be done.
It's happening everywhere.
This is the other thing about digital technology.
It's happening on Clubhouse.
You know about Clubhouse?
Yeah, yeah.
And so all of these sort of platforms that the New York Times is saying, well, unfettered conversations.
Unfettered conversations.
Yeah, exactly.
Which is like, what's the opposite of an unfettered conversation?
Taylor Lawrence of the New York Times.
It's a conversation in fetters.
That's an admission that you want Americans in fetters.
And so like, which is a chain, you know, like you want them tied down.
Anyway, I digress a little bit, but only to say that that conversation that I just described, like how do we recover these deep old humanities?
Well, let me ask you this.
Before we run out of time, I've got to ask you this last question.
I had Douglas Murray on the show, and I'm really fond of Douglas, and I really admire him, and he's very, very bright guy.
And he has put forward this idea of Christian atheism, that in other words, because one of the things when I said we are endowed by our creator with rights, a lot of people on Twitter, and there were a lot of them, said, there's no creator.
How can we be, you know?
And I thought, well, then you're in a different country than you thought you were in, right?
Yeah.
And Douglas says this Christian atheism, we should retain the values of Christianity, but I myself, I, Douglas Murray, cannot believe.
That seems to me like looking at footprints in the snow and saying nobody walked there.
So what is the answer to that?
I mean, have we, do you agree?
Well, you don't.
I know you're a devout Christian, but do you agree, though, that Douglas has a point that has become more difficult to believe in some sense?
Yeah, well, you know, you and I both admire Douglas tremendously.
And, you know, my, I have taken this point up in print, right?
Like Tom Holland is another person who's, you know, this wonderful book, Dominion about the history of Christianity, kind of ends by gesturing toward this idea that maybe these values can survive even if we don't, if we can't believe in God anymore.
I don't think that works, right?
Like, I don't think that we can move forward.
But I do think that when somebody of Douglas Murray's intellectual caliber and honesty is saying in the truest sincerity of his heart that these ideas don't look plausible to me, I can't bite the bullet on them.
That's a genuine crisis because without them, as you say, we can't survive.
And we can't browbeat people about that.
You're not going to get anywhere by saying, you know.
Instead, I think what we need to do is boldly and rightly make the case that the resistance to Christianity is outdated.
That the idea that God has been disproven, right?
That's an old idea.
Science is actually, like, first of all, it was never, science never suggested that that was the case.
It only bracketed God, right?
Francis Bacon says, I'm going to leave certain things that are bounded by religion outside.
And Newton is some form of Christian and Kepler is a Christian.
Yeah, they were all cool.
They do this in service to God.
But then we forget, just like liberalism forgets that you have to answer the basic questions first, right?
Science and modernity forgets where they came from.
All right, we got to stop there.
Spencer Clavin, my son, no relation, is the host of The Young Heretics.
You should be listening to The Young Heretics.
You really should.
And you should also be reading the Claremont Review of Books and the American Mind, where he's an associate editor.
Claremont Review, just a great, great journal.
And the American Mind, a lot of energy and interesting new ideas coming up.