Andrew Clavin dissects the backlash against Critical Race Theory (CRT) in Virginia, where parents like Shamika Michelle exposed divisive teachings—claiming white students were labeled "inherently evil"—while Democrats blamed voter rejection of CRT on racism despite its electoral defeat. He contrasts CRT’s racial division with conservative values, praising Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin victory as a win for parental rights over media gaslighting. Brian Kilmead’s book The President and the Freedom Fighter highlights Lincoln’s moral evolution alongside Frederick Douglass, rejecting CRT’s racial vilification while advocating bipartisan pragmatism. The episode also tackles personal struggles—Vanessa’s abortion shame and Jacob’s career-marriage conflict—framing forgiveness and sacrifice as keys to growth, before warning of an ideological "Clavenless Week" ahead. [Automatically generated summary]
The leftist narrative of a racist America hit a minor snag this week, minor snag being the left's term for reality.
For one thing, master race baiter Ibram X. Kendi interrupted his life's work of making an utter fool of himself to make an utter fool of himself.
The master baiter sent out a tweet mocking white students for pretending to be black in order to improve their chances of getting into college.
Some critics pointed out that this obviously undermines Kendi's entire thesis that systemic racism makes life harder for black people.
Other critics disagreed and said, who's Ibram Kendi?
And still others said, tell that clown to shut up.
I'm trying to watch the Atlanta Braves win the World Series after the MLB screwed Atlanta out of the all-star game for protecting election security.
Ha ha ha, you stupid MLB putzes.
But perhaps those critics digress.
Kendi quickly took down the tweet, but then said, quote, criticism of me is violence.
Or maybe silence is violence.
Or maybe a punch in the face is violence and I'm a grifter winning awards, prestige, and money from rich white people for attacking rich white people and talking absolute crap, unquote.
Some critics felt this statement undermined Mr. Kendi's life work of undermining his life's work.
Other critics disagreed and said, ha ha ha, you stupid MLB putzes.
In another narrative, oopsie-daisy, idiot leftists looked like idiots when they idiotically said that racism was the reason Virginians refused to elect an old white man to replace Governor Ralph Northam, the Democrat who dressed up in blackface.
To be fair, Northam says he might not have dressed up in blackface.
He might have dressed up as a Ku Klux Klansman, as so many Democrats have done in the past.
Leftists also called voters racist for expelling critical race theory from their schools.
CRT is, of course, the theory that racism can only be stopped by judging people according to the color of their skin.
Leftists protested that CRT was not being taught in schools and would continue to be taught in schools because anyone who wouldn't judge people by their skin color was racist.
And by the way, your son should perform oral sex on older men.
Democrat strategists are working around the clock to determine why they lost the election.
And they're torn between two explanations.
Either one, Republicans are white supremacists who elected a black lieutenant governor and Latino attorney general to replace the blackface Democrat Ku Klux Klan guy.
Or two, Democrats are evil and people don't want their children turned into racist perverts.
The strategists are leaning toward the white supremacy explanation because they can't face the fact they're going to burn in hell for all eternity.
The final blow to the left's racist America narrative came in Minnesota, where voters rejected a move to defund the police, turning their backs on Black Lives Matter because Black Lives Actually Matter.
As one Minnesota voter put it, quote, I support the police.
Oh, and by the way, tomahawk chop, you stupid MLB putzes.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, we're back, laughing our way through the fall of the Republic.
We're going to talk about the elections and the Democrats getting shattered in Virginia and how we can be more joyful by shattering our idols.
Complaints About the Deep State00:04:34
And I'm going to answer a mailbag question about the most painful emotion there is.
But first, I don't know if you know this, I hope you do, but the Daily Wire is suing the Brandon administration.
We have filed lawsuit against them because they have put out this incredible, crazy, authoritarian, anti-American mandate that just comes, it's just a regulation.
It's not even a law.
They just said, OSHA order people to require their employees.
If you have more than 100 employees, you have to require them to be vaccinated against COVID-19 or submit to regular testing.
The Daily Wires lawsuit was filed by the Dillon Law Group Inc. and Alliance Defending Freedom in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
The lawsuit alleges that the Biden administration lacks constitutional and statutory authority to issue the employer mandate and that the mandate failed to meet the requirements for issuing a rule taking effect immediately.
All that stuff is technically right, and of course, that's what you got to do in court.
But this is more important than that.
OSHA should not be allowed to force employees to do anything and especially not put medicine into people's arms that they don't want.
The mandate is absolutely unconstitutional.
We're not standing for it here at the Daily Wire, and our employees deserve to keep their medical history private and have autonomy over their own bodies.
How simple is this?
We stand with our employees' rights, as we do with the rights of every single American.
The Biden administration has warned that any companies that do not comply with this federal overreach could be fined as much as $136,000 per violation, which is why we need your help.
And listen, this could be a big lawsuit.
I mean, it's a real, we're trying to strike a real blow here against the deep state.
This is the thing that people complain about when they complain about the deep state.
They complain about not even passing laws and forcing people to do things that they shouldn't be able to force you to do.
So here's what you got to do.
If you're not a member yet, consider joining us today.
If you go to dailywire.com/slash subscribe and enter code do not comply at checkout, you'll receive 25% off your membership and you will be fighting this unconstitutional mandate with us.
We appreciate your help and we won't comply and you shouldn't comply either.
All right.
Also, you want to go on YouTube and subscribe to the Andrew Clavin channel.
We have exclusive content there.
We send it directly to your house.
We actually slide down the chimney and we'll leave it under any tree that's there and we'll go and probably take the tree with us.
When we leave, we might even clean up.
You never know.
But the point is, if you subscribe, you will get good extra content, including my show.
And if you leave a comment and the comment is sufficiently racist and hateful, we'll read it on the show because it'll fit right in with everything else.
Today's comment is from Stelly, it looks like.
She says, it's a reaction to something I said.
She says, with all due respect, you are not the great grandfather of the conservative movement.
You are the hot Gandalf of the conservative movement.
And when you have guided enough young people to the light through Clavinism and successfully save the Republic, your task will be finished and you will sail into the West.
The good news for all of us is based on the current state of affairs, you're going to be around for quite some time.
That is definitely, definitely true.
So the holiday season is coming.
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Ring Alarm is a powerful, affordable home security system that you can easily install yourself.
And if you don't believe me, we got a great story.
This just happened.
Our friend McKenna Waters, you don't get to see McKenna, unfortunately, for you, but she is working behind the scenes.
She runs the clips on the show.
She actually does all the voices of all the politicians.
But her dad was recently working on some rental properties.
And this is in Kansas City and put in a ring doorbell on one of these properties.
And a few nights ago, the ring doorbell caught guys attempting to break into the home that he was renovating because Ring recorded them and alerted McKenna's dad of the activity, the activity.
He could call the cops and the cops were able to actually catch and arrest these guys because they had ring.
So you want to get ring for your house.
The way to do it this holiday season is you go to ring.com/slash clavin to get a great deal on a ring alarm security kit today.
That's ring.com/slash clavin.
And now, if anybody comes to your house or McKenna's house or anybody's house, you ask him, How do you spell Clavin?
And if he knows the answer, that's bad.
call the police.
So in the wake, I got to tell you the two things that really struck me about the election, because in Virginia, where I led the way, I mean, we got some help.
We got some help from Chris Ruffo.
Election Reflections00:15:41
He was great exposing critical race theory.
And of course, the Virginian, as we call him, Matt Walsh, also showed up.
But I was the one who was there.
I voted a couple of days early because I was going to be out of town on election day.
And I just got up and I said, I'm Spartacus.
And everybody just rushed into the booth.
So it was really, I'm like algae.
I brought the red tide to Virginia with me.
But the thing is, you know, Virginia votes one year after the presidential election.
And almost always the opposite party wins.
So it's been 12 years.
I mean, it's a blue state.
It's been 12 years since a Republican has won the governorship in Georgia, in Virginia.
So this is a big, big, big deal.
But he won.
Glenn Youngkin won by a couple of percentage points.
He should have won by 111 percentage points, you know, like he should have won by 111 percent.
And here's the thing that really gets me.
There are two things, two things about our current situation.
The first thing is this.
Democrats now believe the following.
They believe in killing babies in the womb.
They believe in teaching children racism.
They believe that teaching children to accept homosexual pedophilia.
These are things they actually believe in and actually do.
They believe in letting black people get killed by criminals, letting black people off the, letting criminals off the hook so they can go into neighborhoods and kill more black people.
They believe in silencing free speech and using corporations to do that.
And they think they're the good guys.
Now, I mean, I find this amazing.
I don't find it amazing about like a desiccated old witch like Nancy Pelosi, who's been in power so long she's been emptied of everything inside, every value except the love of power and privilege, you know.
But it's the ordinary people, the people who listen to NPR and say, yes, teaching people that whiteness is bad.
I understand why we're doing that.
It's just, it makes no sense.
And here's the second thing that just amazes me.
Democrat policies suck.
They do not work.
They have never worked.
They get black people killed.
They cover the streets with homeless people.
They suppress the economy.
They suppress energy production so that not only are we paying $110 at the gas pump for our gasoline, we're giving power to petrol tyrants like Russia and OPEC to push us around when we could be making our own stuff.
They lose wars we've already won.
They go into Iraq and they surrender a war we've already won.
They just are awful, but people keep voting for them.
They keep, you know, you walk outside a city like San Francisco, once the most beautiful city in the world, the most beautiful city in the country, and it's a hellhole.
And you think like, oh yeah, I'm going to keep voting for the people who do this.
And they do.
It's amazing.
Even in New York, where they elected this guy, Eric Adams, who's a Democrat, but said he was going to be tough on crime because all the crime that Giuliani chased out and Bloomberg kept out has come sweeping back into the city.
They elect this guy, Eric Adams.
But in Manhattan, they elected another one of these stupid progressive DAs.
So Eric Adams is not going to be able to do anything in Manhattan.
They're still going to be letting people out without bail and all this.
And the Democrats just keep voting for this garbage.
So I put these two things together, that they're evil and they think they're the good guys and they convince people that are the good guys.
And their policies suck and people keep voting for them.
And I mean, even the fact that, like I said, even the fact that the Democrat Glenn Young won only by a couple of percentage points in Virginia is amazing to me.
And the thing is, the reason I think this is, is because they have a moral approach.
It's a satanic moral approach, but it is a moral approach.
They tell people that the things they're doing are good.
They tell people it's good to let criminals go free.
This is good Marxist theory.
It's not Marxist theory, but it's Marxist theory that crime is produced by society, so individuals shouldn't be punished for crime.
We have to just fix the society, so we should let criminals go.
They believe women should be as free in their sex lives as men.
That's not the way the world is arranged.
are not as free because women get pregnant.
So babies, so they say, well, that's easy.
We just kill the babies.
That's the good thing.
That's the right thing to do.
And people listen to NPR and they go, oh, yeah, I get it.
You killed a baby.
You got to shout my abortion.
That's a good thing.
They believe that everyone should be equal.
So we should make no distinction between one kind of sexuality and another, even if it erases the lives of women, even if it tells little boys that they're supposed to service old creeps, which they're actually doing.
So the only conclusion I can come to is that people vote for crappy Democrat crappiness because they've been convinced it's moral.
People will follow a moral vision.
I think it's because we know we're fallen creatures.
We know we're not moral creatures.
And we're so desperate to feel moral that we can be talked into voting for things just on the basis of being told that they're moral and will make us moral.
Now, let me compare this to the right.
Last week I went to a party at my son's house.
It was a party celebrating the fact that my son, Spencer Clavin, no relation, who you know is gay, is now engaged to his boyfriend, whom we think Daily Wire called Josh from Legal.
Josh from Legal is the guy who comes in, a note comes in and says, Josh from Legal says, you can't call Nancy Pelosi a desiccated old heck because she'll sue you.
We're all worried about Josh from Legal.
So they are engaged.
So I go to this party, and it's a really wild mix of people, right?
Josh's relatives are there.
They're all kind of down-home Americans from ex-urban and country Indiana around Illinois.
And they come in and they're real salt of the earth Midwestern Americans.
There are these kind of flighty gay guys who are kind of fluttering in and out like it's a theater restaurant.
It's like, darling, hello, hello.
And there are these kind of macho conservative blowhards who are sitting out on the porch smoking cigars and talking about what makes a good woman a good woman.
So of course that included me and the cigars were great because Knowles brought them.
Now, I'm an artist, right?
So I've been going to parties like this all my life.
I have been going since the 1970s.
I've been going to parties that are just full of all kinds of different people.
You know, they look like that scene at the Smuggler's Bar in Star Wars, right?
Just all these different kinds of people.
The only difference about this party is that they were all right-wing conservatives, all of them.
I don't think there was one person there who was not a right-wing Republican conservative, right?
Now, some of these conservatives believe that gay marriage is a bad thing.
One or two of them, I happen to know, believe that gay marriage marks the end of Western civilization as we know it.
And who knows, since Western civilization is obviously coming to an end, maybe that is why.
Who knows?
But they showed up.
They showed up because they love Spencer and Josh.
And Spencer and Josh are incredibly lovable, and they showed up because they love them.
And they think, yeah, you know, this is a bad thing, but it's here.
And so we accept it.
So on the left, they have this evil moral vision, but they believe in it completely.
And on the right, we do things that work, but our moral vision is in conflict with our feelings of love and the best actions that we take.
The people who showed up for love of Spencer and Josh were doing the right thing.
I mean, the Bible says rejoice with those who were rejoicing.
They were doing the right thing.
They were following the love in their hearts.
That's a beautiful thing, you know.
So we do this all the time on the right.
We're confused between our theories.
We have these kind of good feelings, but these theories are very hard line, right?
So we say identity politics is bad, but then we celebrate when a black guy is elected to a Republican position.
We say, yeah, now we have a black guy too, you know.
We say transgenderism is absurd, but then we thump our chest and celebrate when formerly Bruce Jenner runs for governor as a Republican.
We condemn homosexuality, but we love our uncle Fred, who for some strange reason has never gotten married, right?
We have ideas that work and their ideas don't work, but they have a moral vision and we're a little confused about who we are.
And personally, you know, I think that we need to readjust this because we need a moral vision if we're going to continue to win, especially if we're going to win the culture, which I think is where the fight is going to be.
I think it's where it's been for the last 50 years.
I think it's where it still is.
And if we're going to win the culture, we need a solid moral vision that people don't hate, that doesn't make people recoil from us.
Now, here's the thing.
I would like to make a suggestion.
Here's my suggestion.
I would like to suggest that we have a new way of thinking about what we stand for morally.
And instead of a vertical view of good versus evil, which I think the right talks about too much, I think we should have a linear view of centrality versus non-centrality.
Now, there's such a thing as evil in the world.
You don't have to write to me and say, I believe there's no such thing as evil.
I believe there's such a thing as evil.
I think racism, like CRT, like critical race theory, is evil.
I think pedophilia is evil.
I think killing a child in the womb or anywhere else is evil.
I think allowing criminals free to drive by and shoot children in the neighborhood is evil.
And I think evil has to be opposed.
I think there is such a thing as evil.
But most of the things we do in politics are not about that.
They're about ordering priorities.
They're about a linear view of the world.
Individual freedom is our central good.
We think it's the central good because it allows people to choose virtue freely.
And virtue isn't virtue if you don't choose it freely.
If I force you to do the right thing, you're not actually doing the right thing.
You're not choosing the right thing.
You're not becoming virtuous.
You have to be free.
And that means we have to allow people to make a wide range of different decisions, even when we think they're bad.
We can preach against them, but we can't always control them.
So I think we have to start to think about what is central to preserving our freedom, what is central to the American and the Western way.
So for instance, I have absolutely no problem with saying to my son or to anyone else that the mom and dad family is at the center of the freedom Western enterprise because it is how it's how people are created.
It is the natural way for children to be raised.
It means that we govern ourselves in our little family unit and we don't need the government to tell us what to do.
I believe that that should be privileged in law.
I believe you should get tax breaks for being married.
I believe we should celebrate marriage.
I believe we should celebrate homemaking.
I believe we should celebrate the creation of children and the nurturing of children.
I don't think that means we necessarily have to tell be screaming at gay people all the time.
I don't think we can say it's out.
They're out from the center.
They're away from the center.
You know what else is away from the center?
Me.
I'm an artist.
Artists are away from the center.
I live at the mercy and the grace of garbage men and carpenters and homemakers and all the people who build society.
They can get along without me.
If the garbage man disappears, you're going to miss him a lot earlier than you miss the novelist.
But I hope I contribute something and I hope they let me into the house they built.
And I think we should let other kinds of people into the house that mom and dad built, but while preserving the mom and dad family.
I mean, it's the same thing with God.
I mean, God is central to the Western vision.
Our rights are given by our Creator.
There is no other valid argument for your rights, but that they're given for God.
But of course, that doesn't mean that we get rid of people who don't have that exact belief in God.
And it doesn't mean we should get rid of atheists.
But we should privilege.
We should privilege God belief.
And then Scalia said this, just because we can't pick a religion doesn't mean we can't privilege in law religion over non-belief.
You know, there are three principles that we should build our vision on.
The three principles are very, very simple.
They come right out of the gospels.
Love God, love your neighbor, and don't judge your neighbor's sin.
And that way we can think about, instead of thinking about this vertical idea that everything that's not us, that's not central, that is not the absolute necessity is evil.
Instead of saying that, we can say there's something at the center, but we accept with love all the kind of weird clown world that freedom creates because freedom does create that clown world.
We should be asking ourselves what's central to the Western enterprise, freedom and virtue, and how can we move forward in love while preserving that freedom?
Because without freedom, love isn't love at all.
Before I get to the election, and I will get to the election in a minute, there's something else I want to talk about.
I want to pause this part of the show.
This is not a commercial, so don't skip through it, all right?
I want to ask you a personal favor, and it's going to cost you 20 bucks.
I want you to go preferably on Amazon, but you can go on Barnes ⁇ Noble wherever you go, and buy my new novel.
I brought it with me so I could show it to you.
My new novel, When Christmas Comes, which is right here, When Christmas Comes.
It's a Christmas mystery, a Christmas crime story.
And, you know, let me read a comment from Audible.
They've already put up a couple of reviews.
There's a comment from Audible, which says, Clavin is a genius and powerful communicator.
But here's what it says.
He says, Clavin is one of the great communicators of our time.
I highly recommend this as a Christmas gift for a friend or a loved one.
I also recommend that Andrew start promoting himself.
Talk about your damn books on your show.
Do a countdown every week.
My book will be out soon.
Pre-order now.
I don't do that.
I've hardly talked about this book at all when Christmas comes.
And the reason I don't do it is, A, I don't like doing it.
I don't like promoting myself.
But B, it's out of respect for you.
I'm doing the show because I hope it adds value to your life.
That's why I do it.
And I'm not just trying to sell you things.
But I think this is important.
And there are three reasons why I think it is important.
If I can get you to spend 20 bucks to order When Christmas Comes, like while I'm talking, I need you to do it in fairly good time.
And I will explain the three reasons.
One is the book is great.
It's one of the best books I ever wrote.
It is, you will love it.
Brad Thor said it was fabulous.
Dean Kuhn said it was wonderful.
A crime writing website called The Criminal Element called it a masterclass.
Publishers Weekly said it was terrific.
Just before I came into the studio, I got a review from First Things, one of the very few magazines I actually subscribed to, a great religious magazine.
It says the book is infused with unpretentious moral seriousness, but constructed to provide surprise and delight.
So even if you're not into crime stories, someone you know will like When Christmas Comes.
So that's the one reason you should buy it for you.
But there's something else, okay?
And it pains me to say this.
I'm going to go back after I do the show, I'm going to go out and have a reaction to having said this.
There is no better American crime writer than me.
I'm not going to say I'm the best.
There are other great crime writers.
I'm one of them.
To put a work of fiction of this quality on the bestseller list, which is what I'm trying to get you to do, to put it on the bestseller list is a big deal.
Since I came out as a conservative, my reviews from mainstream venues have dropped.
I used to get nominated for an award every book.
Every book got nominated for award.
I've won three, four, I can't remember, four or five major, major awards.
They all stopped when I came out as a conservative.
So my books don't get on the list anymore.
It would make a big difference to have writing of this quality, fiction of this quality, because you can always get a book like, you know, I hate the libs, Seven Reasons to Hate the Libs, number five will make your eyeballs roll around.
You can always get those books on the bestseller list.
But to get a work of fiction of this quality on the bestseller list is a big deal.
It is much more important to the culture, believe me, than making the next crappy Ayn Rand movie.
It really is.
And so conservatives always have reasons not to do things.
They always say, well, you know, you didn't say that Trump really won the election or whatever it is you disagree with me about.
I'm one of us.
I am one of the people on the right.
If you wait for somebody who agrees with you about everything, yes, you will get books on the bestseller list, but they won't be like this.
They'll be the usual thumping, Philistine, bad right-wing fiction.
This is great stuff.
Why We Left The Right00:02:55
We want it.
I want it on the bestseller list.
And the third reason is personal, and then I'll stop.
I'll stop talking about it.
It pains me to do this, but I will stop talking about it.
I've been trying all my life to find a character to build a series around because series are fun to write and they're fun to read and people love them.
And I have never found a character who was complex enough or multifaceted enough where one story didn't finish his story.
Sometimes three stories.
I've written a couple of trilogies, but then I just felt the guy is done.
The story is done.
The guy in this, his name is Cameron Winter.
He's a college professor, but he's much more than that.
He is a really multifaceted character.
I would love to build this into a series.
I've already got the sequel, but if the book doesn't really make it, I can't do it.
The company won't do it.
I won't be able to do it.
So I want it to really sell, to really sell.
So take 20 bucks out.
I know you have all kinds of snarky things to say.
I know you've got all kinds of complaints.
Take the 20 bucks out.
Get it on Amazon.
I know you hate Amazon, but if everybody goes on Amazon, it'll move the book up to the Amazon list, and that's good enough.
The New York Times is never going to put me on a list.
I don't know.
Possibly they don't like being called a former newspaper, but if you get me up on the Amazon list, which you can do yourself, that will be enough.
So please, when Christmas comes, it is a great Christmas mystery.
I can't promise you it'll arrive fast because they've already gone into the third printing or something like this because they didn't expect, they don't expect right-wingers to show up for fiction.
So they didn't expect this.
They've already gone into the third printing and we've got all these supply side things, but it will show up eventually and you will love it.
Please go on and get when Christmas comes.
I won't bother you about it anymore.
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So I am thrilled about this Virginia election.
I mean, I just got there.
Parents Gaslighting on CRT00:08:25
I'd obviously turned the entire tide of the state.
I mean, the minute I walked in, everybody just said, oh, okay, let's vote Republican.
I love when I have that effect on people.
Probably if I'd stayed in California, Larry Elder would be governor by now.
Sorry, Larry.
But moving to Virginia was a good move.
Like I said, he didn't win by enough.
But the shocking, shocking thing to me has been the clash between the media and reality.
I always say reality has a voice, and this was reality speaking up.
And I'll tell you why.
But let's just look at this first.
You know, Chris Ruffo, God love him, and Luke Roziak, too, helped parents fight against this critical race theory.
And they are trying to gaslight people.
the Wall Street Journal, shame on them, has been trying to gaslight people into telling parents that their children are not being taught critical race theory.
Here's a montage.
Here is an amazing montage of the media gaslighting parents in Virginia.
There's cut two.
This election has become the latest to weaponize something called critical race theory.
Critical race theory is kind of, it's become the new dog whistle, except you can actually hear it.
So it's not really a dog whistle.
Yeah, let's start there.
Critical race theory not taught in Virginia schools.
But it does show that Republicans are good.
It's dishonest.
It's not a good faith argument, but they are talented at branding.
They're talented at making an election about certain issues, even if they don't have any basis in reality.
One key issue for Youngkin, opposition to the teaching of critical race theory in schools.
The curriculum is not taught in Virginia schools, and McAuliffe has called the tactic a racist dog whistle.
What he calls critical race theory, even though it's not taught in Virginia schools.
And the notion that critical race theory is being taught in Virginia classrooms.
A lot of these voters, Chris, weren't able to exactly articulate what that means.
A lot of them believe that critical race theory is being taught in the schools.
They don't like that, but it's really not on the curriculum in Virginia.
Critical race theory that is not taught in public schools in Virginia.
Okay, so these are guys, I always love the fact that these guys are wearing ties, the guys are wearing ties, the women are dressed really nicely.
They have the authoritative look.
It's like they go to work in the morning and it's like their kids say, what do you do for a living, daddy?
Well, I lie to people, son.
I go on and I lie, hoping that they'll believe me and do what I want them to do instead of what's right to do.
That's my job.
You know, how do you live with yourself like that?
Terry McAuliffe, the other guy running to retake the governorship.
He'd been governor before.
He has been accused of all kinds of corruption, misuse of funds, and all these things.
He actually said the same thing.
It's cut eight.
He talks about critical race theory.
Let's be clear, folks.
Critical race theory has never been taught in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
He says day one, he's going to ban it.
He's going to ban something that doesn't exist.
He's going to.
Here's the problem.
Here's the problem.
COVID-19, the Chinese flu, the Wu flu, the Flu Manchu came along and suddenly parents were home.
They were watching TV.
They saw what their kids were being taught.
Okay.
Here is, let me play a couple of them.
Here's a commentator.
Her name is Shamika Michelle talking about what she saw her children learning.
This is cut six.
Technically, they are not teaching critical race theory, but I don't care what you call it.
What you can't take away from parents is the ones that listened over the Zoom calls for the last year.
You can't take away the experience from them of hearing the foolishness that their children were being taught.
I don't care what name you give it or what you call it.
You are not going to teach my little black kids that because of their black skin, they aren't going to make it.
Because of their black skin, they aren't going to be anything.
And I don't think it's fair that you teach little white kids because of their white skin that they're privileged or they're inherently evil.
You can't take away the experience that parents have had over the last year.
So you can get on TV and you can lie and you can, you know, say, well, technically it's not critical race theory or whatever.
You can say that, but you cannot take away what we experienced during this pandemic and listening to what our children were learning.
Who are you going to believe, Shamika?
The media or your lion eyes?
I mean, it was right in front of them.
And they're moms.
Now, you know what a high opinion I have of the role of motherhood and of women who are actually there watching what their children are doing.
Here's the other thing about moms.
Moms don't just take care of their kid.
They take care of everybody's kids, right?
Because their kids come over for play dates and they have friends, and kids don't care what color you are.
This is what is so disgusting about this, that the Democrats are pushing this on little children because little children don't care.
And so you come home with your friend and your friend, you're a black kid, but your friend is a white kid.
The mom is taking care of both these kids and doesn't want either of them being taught any of it.
She mentions both.
She says, I don't want my black kid being taught that he's a victim.
I don't want your white kid being taught that he's an oppressor.
Here's a lady in Loudoun County, Virginia, again, had the same experience.
She witnessed this.
She saw it while these media guys in ties and jackets with the power, that power that you have when you put a camera in front of somebody, when you put a microphone in somebody in front of somebody, you have this power that they misuse this power to gaslight people.
These are the parents who saw what was happening to their kids.
Play this mom, this cut 10.
First, it was in early spring of 2020 when my six-year-old somberly came to me and asked me if she was born evil because she was a white person.
Something she learned in a history lesson at school.
Then you kept the schools closed for a year and a half, despite the science indicating that it was safe for kids to return.
And now you've covered up a rape, then arrested, humiliated, and falsely accused her parents of being domestic terrorists.
I wish I could return my kids to LCPS.
Private school is expensive, and I want my kids to be able to walk home from school with their friends in their own community.
I refuse to allow you to destroy our schools.
They are not your schools.
They are our schools.
You all should be ashamed, and you should have the moral courage to admit you are wrong and step down.
If I were on the school board and heard that speech, I would be turning to the guy next to me and go, Are we the baddies?
Because that is a pretty damning statement.
So here's, of course, the truth, the trick.
Critical race theory, which is a garbage, it's a garbage theory.
It is a garbage theory, but it is an intellectual theory, right?
Nobody's stupider than intellectuals.
Critical race theory is not on the curriculum in schools.
So that's why they can get up and say that and convince themselves they're not lying and convince you that they're not lying.
It's not on the curriculum in schools.
It's on the curriculum of the teachers' schools.
The teachers are being taught it, and then they infuse it not just into classes about race or history, but into math, into everything.
They infuse it into everything.
In math, they say, well, you know, you're penalizing people on the basis of being wrong because rightness is a white concept.
Here is a guy, Tony Kinnett, his name is.
He is an administrator from one of the biggest school districts in Indiana, and here he is explaining how this works.
This is Cut 14.
When we tell you that schools aren't teaching critical race theory, that it's nowhere in our standards, that's misdirection.
We don't have the quotes and theories as state standards per se.
We do have critical race theory in how we teach.
We tell our teachers to treat students differently based on color.
We tell our students that every problem is a result of white men and that everything Western civilization built is racist.
Capitalism as a tool of white supremacy.
Those are straight out of Kimberly Crenshaw's main points, verbatim in critical race theory, the writings that formed the movement.
This is in math, history, science, English, the arts, and it's not slowing down.
If students of color have lower reading scores, it's because of inequity.
Therefore, we take from the white students and give to the colored students.
That's Richard Delgado, straight out of CRT in introduction.
All teaching is political, with reality and facts taking the back seat.
That's Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings, who outlined how she saw critical race theory flushed out in public schools in 1995.
When schools tell you that we aren't teaching critical race theory, it means one thing.
Go away and look into our affairs no further.
Auto Control Lies00:16:10
Right.
And you know, there's a little grain of truth in this in that education is coercive to some degree, right?
You teach children, you have to teach children some values.
You teach them that the history of America is either a good history or a bad history.
It doesn't mean when I, when I went to school, which was, I think, 1722, you know, they taught us that American history was a good history, but that didn't stop them from teaching us about the evils of slavery.
It didn't stop them from teaching us about racism.
We knew what all those things were.
We understood that, but we understood that we were basically a good country putting forward this new idea of freedom that had spread throughout the world.
And we knew this.
We knew this because every now and again a siren would go off and we would hide under the desks because we thought the Soviet Union, a slave state, was going to drop a nuclear weapon on us.
So we understood that, yes, we were a country full of bad people, just like every other country, but there were countries that were much worse than ours because our idea was better.
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So now the media lies, right?
McAuliffe flies, the Democrat candidate for governor lies.
All these parents are watching with their eyeballs their own children being indoctrinated to this racist idea.
And I don't care how complicated you think it is.
It is racial essentialism to say that whiteness is a thing.
You hear them talk about this.
Well, whiteness is the problem.
And of course, if you said, well, I think blackness is the problem, everybody would reel in shock because, of course, both sides would be wrong.
Just because they're wrong doesn't mean we should be wrong.
It is not some color that's the problem.
It is the broken evil of human beings and situations too.
Of course, poverty is difficult and creates a certain kind of criminal.
Wealth creates a different kind of criminal.
There are plenty of criminals on Wall Street, too.
So the parents show up, and this is a central issue, the CRT.
And Glenn Young, God love him, he wins the election.
He's now the governor-elect of Virginia.
And here's how the liberal media at least reacts to this election.
This is cut three.
Glenn Young played the race card for a reason, because he knows it works on certain white voters.
He did stoke white grievance politics to mobilize the Republican base.
He's laundered Trump's really sort of disgusting, flagrant outracism.
He's wrapped it in education.
Education.
Right.
Which is code for white parents don't like the idea of teaching about race.
That's the fundamental problem for these parents and this anti-CRT movement.
They don't like the way whiteness is being portrayed in these new, more inclusive lessons.
This wasn't about those pocketbook issues.
This was about how white kids feel talking about what black kids go through.
The subtext of all this was: we can't let these black and brown people run the country.
Yunkin running on critical race theory that he knew hit a chord around race.
I think all this CRT stuff is trumped up dog whistling.
Some of it was dog whistle racism.
You know, I have to tell you something.
This is kind of an aside, but it is absolutely true.
The older I get, and I am now Hot Gandalf.
I mean, I am to be an aged old fellow.
The less I understand human beings.
When I was a young person, so help me, I had all these theories about why human beings did what they did, and I was absolutely certain of myself.
And now today, when I say to somebody who's younger than me, when I say, you know, I don't understand how people can do this, they always have an explanation.
But I have reached that age where the wisdom of Socrates is mine, and I know I don't know anything.
I do not know how a person goes to work and does what those people did.
So help me.
You know, every now and again, you come on a show and you make a mistake and you say something that's not true.
You think it's true, but you say something that's not true.
When that has happened to me, and I think it happened once it was 1952, I think was the last time it happened.
I stay up all night.
I am so upset by that.
These guys go in and tell open lies, open lies about the motives of people and the things that are actually happening to people's children, the things that are happening in school, and they go home and they sleep like babies.
And I swear I have no explanation for that except that Eve ate an apple and gave it to Adam and he ate the apple too.
That's the only explanation I have because really, really, no theory covers the twisted hearts of human beings.
So on the other side of this, though, is the fact that anybody with a little bit of common sense can see that the lies didn't work.
I mean, at some point, you got to say, I lied, I lied, I lied, but now the police have got me.
I better start making a deal so I don't go to prison forever.
And you got a little bit of that.
On the Today Show, one of the correspondents started a little glimmer, a little glimmer of truth, sort of, you know, kind of like Tinkerbell in the stage play of Peter Pan, just a flickering light, sort of to glimmer on NBC.
And on the Today Show, the correspondent said this, cut four.
It just seems like the Democrats lost the culture wars in this election cycle, right?
Virginia's new governor-elect, Glenn Yunken, seized on a range of issues that seemed to motivate parents, particularly in those all-important suburbs, which Mr. Trump lost.
Issues from the controversy over mask mandates, what kids are taught in school, like critical race theory.
Democrats, Terry McCullough in particular, tried to downplay those issues, to some extent, ignore them altogether, to say that they weren't relevant.
And the lesson is they may need to find a way to talk about them ahead of the midterms.
You know, this is the New York Times was the same way.
The New York Times has been, oh, there's no critical race theory.
It's all racism, racism, racism.
But when they lost, it was like, maybe we should talk about something.
Maybe we should be more moderate like we promised when we were running.
This is a good moment to just talk, reflect a little bit about Donald Trump.
In a couple of weeks, I'm going to have my pal Sebastian Gorka on.
I love Sebastian, but he and I have an argument about real politic.
And I think that Trump can be a problem.
And even Trump knew.
Trump said he was going to come to Virginia.
And apparently the Youngin team panicked.
And they called up Mar-a-Lago and said, you're not coming to Virginia.
And Trump said, no, I know.
It would not be good for you.
I was just giving the liberals a hard time.
I thought it would be funny because that's Trump.
That is Trump.
But, but, and I think Trump was right.
I think Trump would have hurt Yunkin.
Virginia is a blue or at least a purple state.
And Trump lost it, but I think 10 points.
So I don't think he would have helped Young going down there.
And that's just real politic.
But, but Yunkin would not have known to fight the culture war at this level if it hadn't been for Donald Trump.
And this is what the future of the Republican Party has to look like.
It has to look like kitchen table issues.
You got to talk about price of gas.
You got to talk about crime.
You got to talk about schools.
All those things matter.
But the moral vision comes in on these culture war things.
These are the things that really get people excited, the things that really, where they really feel, especially on the right and center, they feel they've really been screwed for 50 years by these elites sitting in their, you know, their studios in New York and telling them what they should be doing while they're living the high life.
These are the places where the moral vision comes in.
And Trump has taught the Republicans that.
And if they don't learn it, if they run away from that lesson of Trump, they're going to be screwed.
I think Trump can be a difficult character.
We all know this.
He says he broke that barrier by the force, the bull-like force of his crudity and his ruthlessness and his toughness.
And that was what made him beautiful.
But it's also what alienated a lot of voters, a lot of voters in the middle, a lot of voters in the suburbs who didn't like that.
And so we need guys who are statesmen, but who will remember that lesson.
I just want to end this talking about all this, about this incredible fantasy that the left and the media, but I repeat myself, created, that the parents with their own eyes broke through because they saw their children being inculcated with this absolute moral atrocity of critical race theory and racism and sexual perversity.
They saw it with their own eyes.
They heard it from their children's own mouths.
And so it broke through this lie.
But I just want you to look for a minute at Winsom Sears.
Winsom Sears is a Jamaican-born black woman, a U.S. Marine.
She won lieutenant governor.
They run separately in Virginia.
So you vote for the governor and you vote for the lieutenant governor.
She won lieutenant governor.
And so this is the first black woman to win statewide office in Virginia.
So, you know, this would be historic if she weren't a conservative, right?
But I want you to listen to her talking.
Well, let's play it first.
This is cut 11.
There are some who want to divide us and we must not let that happen.
They would like us to believe we are back in 1963 when my father came.
We can live where we want.
We can eat where we want.
We own the water fountains.
We have had a black president elected not once but twice and here I am living proof.
She gives this speech and then she talks about the kitchen table policies.
And it's like this, got this ring, not inspiration, just common sense truth.
Common sense truth.
What other white majority country has elected a black man twice to be president?
None, zero.
This is the least racist country in the world, right?
Our history is our history.
Our history is past.
That's why they call it history.
This common sense voice of reality.
If we can speak like that a little bit more and not fall into echoing them, every time I hear a Republican say, well, yes, black lives matter, I just think, shut your mouth, man.
There is no such thing as a black life in this country.
They're only American lives.
You know, this is what America is.
It's this great idea, this wonderful idea that people should govern themselves as much as humanly possible, keep their own money, live their own way.
Each one attempt to lift himself, and that will lift everybody, right?
But that idea goes against our natures.
Our nature is to be racist.
Our nature is to control one another.
Our nature is to push one another around and not leave one another alone.
All of these American ideas go against our nature, but they are possible.
They are possible things.
And so we stumble toward them.
We stretch toward them.
We say, okay, that's my nature, but this is my American nature.
This is a new thing.
This is a new country.
You know, I've said this before.
I love living in a multi-ethnic country because it's proof the founders were right.
It's proof the ideas can be spread to anybody who wants to join in in the American way.
You're a black guy, you're an Asian guy, you're whatever you are, get on the freedom bus and you can ride with us.
That is a beautiful thing.
That is not a problem.
That is a solution.
And if we can do it, if we can pull it off, because it's still an open question, it will change the world.
It has changed the world.
The left wants to just pull us back into our nature.
It wants to pull us back into our lusts and our hatreds and our division and our desire to control one another.
The American idea is better than we are.
It is better than I am and it's better than you are.
It is a beautiful idea.
It's inspired by an even greater idea, which is Christianity.
It grows right out of Christianity, and it's blending with classical freedom ideas from Greece and Rome.
It is better than the individual, but we can live that life.
We can.
And I think we just have to state it in the moral terms that, in fact, it deserves because it is the most moral philosophy we've yet found.
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So in putting forward a conservative moral vision, which I really do believe we have to do, you know, I talk about the culture war.
I talk about winning the culture.
There is no culture without a moral vision.
That's what culture is, essentially.
There's no art without a moral vision.
You know, this is the big mistake that the leftist artists make when they just splash stuff on the wall and think, well, it represents, you know, the way the mind sees reality.
No, art is a moral vision.
It is a moral vision put into stories.
And stories and images and music all convey a certain way of looking at the world.
And putting forward a moral vision, your greatest weapon is joy.
Your greatest weapon is joy.
If people look at conservatives and they see anger and they see despair and they see dissatisfaction and disgruntlement all the time, it's just not that appealing.
I mean, that's one of the reasons the left is starting to lose.
They're angry and hateful and accusatory all the time.
They're judgmental all the time.
They say, oh, you sent out a tweet when you were 15 years old and it wasn't exactly, didn't call gay people gay people.
You know, you lose your job.
That's ugly.
It is ugly.
Grace, joy, these are the things that actually sell.
I mean, they're selling tools.
They're not just wonderful things for life, which they also are, but they are selling tools for a moral vision.
And by joy, I always have to say this because people think I mean happiness, but I don't.
You know, obviously you can't walk around being happy all the time, but you can walk around with gusto.
You can walk around enjoying life even when life is a struggle.
And you've seen people on this.
You've seen people solving problems in a business or solving problems in their life, but doing it with gusto, doing it with a real belief that it is something that can be done and should be done.
Walk Around With Gusto00:05:48
And it's life.
It's vital, vital.
World.
So I've been thinking a lot about a letter I got in the mailbag a while back.
And I think I mentioned it once before because it's been on my mind.
It was a question about lust.
And someone was talking about Matthew, the passage in Matthew where Jesus says, you've heard it said, do not commit adultery, but I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
And he says, if your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away.
Very graphic language from the savior there, essentially saying, you know, if you're going to sin by looking at people, don't do it.
Just get away from it.
And somebody wrote in and said that he hated the fact that he had all these feelings for women who are not his wife.
And he considered it sin that when he saw a woman who was not his wife, he was attracted to her.
And I said, no, that is not what Jesus actually said.
He didn't say, if you look at her with lust.
I mean, lust is a kind of dodgy word, but that's not what he said.
He said, if you covet, if you covet a woman when you look at her, you've already committed adultery in your heart.
And what I said is, look, there's a difference between coveting a woman and taking erotic joy in the beauty of women.
Because erotic joy, the joy that comes from eros, the life force.
I'm not just talking about sexual joy.
When I say eros, I mean the life force that attaches us to the beauty of the world.
That sexual joy is where all of our appreciation of beauty comes from.
I mean, the human form is the kind of central idea of beauty that we have.
And I don't think we're supposed to walk around ignoring and just say, oh, I'm not going to look at all this beautiful stuff.
You know, it's going to kill me.
No.
You know, C.S. Lewis, who I just think is one of the great thinkers of the last century and one of the underrated thinkers, because while you and I know him, he did not have the effect on the culture that somebody like Sigmund Freud, who was wrong about everything, C.S. Lewis was right about everything, didn't have that same effect.
But C.S. Lewis said that all pleasure, all pleasures come from God.
And the screw tape letters, which is about a demon, is a demon as the narrator.
The demon says, never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are in a sense on God's ground.
God made the pleasure.
All our research, all the demonic research so far, has not enabled us to produce a single pleasure.
All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which God has produced and use them in ways or in degrees which God has forbidden.
We are meant to enjoy the beauty of the world, including the beauty of the opposite sex or the appeal of the opposite sex.
However, not that long ago, I was walking in New York City, a year or two ago.
I was walking in New York City when I suddenly noticed that I was edgy, that something was wrong with me.
I was like, there was too much energy going through me.
And I thought, what's going on?
And I looked around and I realized that I was walking through this construction site and there were huge posters of virtually naked women everywhere.
And it was just making me a little bit, you know, it took me over the top.
And that's a very sick thing.
You know, it's like, why are there all these pictures of sexually available naked women just spread out?
And they weren't porno.
They were ads.
They were mainstream ads.
And I thought, you know, that's really not, that shouldn't be what I'm looking at.
That's not actually a good use of this erotic joy that we all feel in life, this joy of eros.
And here's another quote from C.S. Lewis.
He says, you can get a large audience together for a striptease act, that is to watch a girl undress on the stage.
Suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theater by simply bringing a covered plate onto the stage and slowly lifting the cover so as to let everyone see just before the lights went out that the cover contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon.
Wouldn't you think that in that country, something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?
He's saying there's something wrong with our appetite for sex because we're fallen.
Our appetite for sex is not what it should be.
And I think what he's essentially talking about is idolatry.
And idolatry is a worship of idols, obviously.
It's the worship of idols.
But in a broader sense, it's a worship of material things as if they were spiritual things, as if they were the spiritual things they represent.
The basic form of idolatry is you make a statue of a god, and then you think that the statue is the God.
And idolatry was rejected by the Jews right away.
I mean, this was in the Ten Commandments.
One of the things is you shall not make for yourself a graven, a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
You shall not bow down to them or serve them.
Now, a lot of people took this, especially like in the Puritan era, a lot of people took this to mean there shouldn't be any icons at all.
We should dress in black.
There shouldn't be any decorations.
There shouldn't be anything in them.
And the Muslims still feel this way.
Muslim art is all decorative.
There's no pictures of human beings allowed, no pictures of anything, actually.
It's just a design.
But I don't think, I think it's the worship that the Ten Commandments forbid, because a few sentences later, just a few sentences later, God is instructing the Jews on how to make the Ark of the Covenant, the altar for him.
And he tells them to make images of cherubim, of angels to put on the ark.
So I don't think he was forbidding actually making art.
I think he was forbidding the worship of art.
But the ban on idolatry still was central to Jewish thought.
And remember, Jesus was born and died, a Jew.
And this was at the very beginning, like they sort of, they said, this is the distinction between us and the other people.
This is what the Jews said.
There's Psalm 115.
He says, why do the nations say, where is their God?
Where is the God of the Jews?
He says, our God is in heaven.
Why Idols Can't Feel00:03:10
He does whatever he wants.
But their idols are silver and gold made by human hands.
They have mouths, but they can't speak.
They have eyes, but they can't see.
Ears, but they can't hear.
Noses, but they can't smell.
They have hands, but cannot feel.
Feet, but cannot walk, nor can they utter a sound with their throats.
Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them.
There's a legend that Abraham, the father of all the Jews, that his father was an idol maker.
This is not in the Bible.
It's in the commentaries.
But that he went into his father's shop and broke all the idols.
It's a great story, actually.
I was taught this in Hebrew school as if it were part of the Bible, actually, where somebody comes in and says to Abraham, I want to buy an idol, and Abraham says, how old are you?
And the guy says, I'm 50.
And he says, well, then why would you worship something that was made yesterday?
You should be too old to do that.
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Here's the thing, right?
The heart is an idol-making machine.
It's very hard for us to make an object and not imbue that object with the traits of what it represents.
Consider this.
I used to think about this all the time when I lived in LA.
In L.A., if you are a fatuous, handsome Dan who doesn't do anything nice for anybody, doesn't even call his mother on Sunday, you can make $250,000 a week playing a cop.
If you're a cop, you're making about $60,000, $70,000 a year, right?
So in other words, we imbue with value things that represent things instead of the things themselves.
I wear this very plain cross around my neck, right?
It's just to remind me.
It's just something for me to touch it from time to time.
If I think I may be letting my thoughts go in the wrong direction, it's something I can remind myself of.
But even for me, if I drop this, I suddenly, oh my God, I dropped the cross.
It's just a piece of wood.
It is not the thing itself.
We are an idol-making machine.
Now, here's the thing.
Idol-Making Machine00:05:54
As God receded from the Western mind, as people stopped believing in God, all of the truths that Christianity had taught Western people had to be reinvented as non-holy things because they were all true, right?
Like Freud knew that everybody experiences guilt, but he didn't believe in original sin.
So he actually made up a myth of an original murder.
He made up his own original sin just out of his head.
And he thought, well, this is better than the Bible because it doesn't have a God in it.
And this is the way Freud worked.
The guy was a genius, but he was also a quack, which makes him kind of interesting because he had these insights, but they were all so much nonsense in them.
So he had to invent an explanation for our idolatry, our natural idolatry.
And instead of saying, oh, we make an image of God, but because we can't see God, we imbue the image with meaning.
He said, no, God is the idol.
God is the idol.
We are afraid and we're helpless as little children.
So we depend on our fathers to protect us.
And so we grow up and we realize we're still helpless.
We're still before sickness and death and chaos.
We're still helpless.
So we invent a father in the sky.
God himself is an idol.
We imbue this emptiness with the presence.
Marx did the same thing.
It's not surprising.
I've said this before.
It's not surprising these came from secular Jews because the Jews had been so abused that when they lost their religion, when they lost their religion, they couldn't then become Christians because the Christians had abused them so badly.
So they were kind of, they had a motivation to sort of disprove the ideas of the Christian religion.
Religious Jews aren't like that at all, but secular Jews do have that tendency to want to prove everything is just physical, is materialist, secular Jewish thinkers.
Marx was the same way.
He had this theory that he called alienation, which is a very complicated theory.
Marx was like not a slouch.
It's a complicated theory.
But to put it in its simple form, society frustrates our ideals, and so we put those ideals into objects like money.
So we put our ideals into money, and money, which used to be a representative of material, we now sell material to get the money.
We now start to worship the money.
He felt the same way about God, that people are frustrated in their ideal self, so they put their ideal self into the heavens.
And Marx didn't want to destroy religion.
He didn't want to ban religion.
He just thought that once society was perfect, religion would melt away.
We wouldn't need it anymore.
Now, those arguments, Freud's arguments and Marx's arguments don't make sense to me.
I don't see why we would evolve.
Maybe in the Viennese middle class, your father protected you, but I'm not sure all fathers have been protected.
And I'm not sure if you live in the wild, your father may be that necessarily protective.
And I'm not sure why we would evolve to think our father would be just or would be protective or would be strong and would be courageous.
Why do we know those things or what we expect from our father?
I think that God has to come first.
And I think the same thing is true of Marx, the ideal self.
Why do we think we have an ideal self?
Why do we think there's something we're not that we should be?
It's not because of society.
I think everybody knows this.
Even children know they're not what they should be.
We understand that there's something broken about us.
So I think that the theories just don't hold together to me.
Our innate knowledge of God tells us who our fathers should be and who we should be.
My idea of psychology is different.
I believe our mothers and fathers represent the male and female images of God.
And if we love them as human beings with their flaws and don't mistake them for God, we can then, through our love for them, we can then understand God better.
But if they abuse us, we think that God and we take them for gods, then we lose our faith.
That happens to people all the time who've been abused by their parents.
The same is true for every good thing, okay?
And this is why I'm talking about this, because I think it makes us happier to shatter our idols, right?
There's a famous expression in sports.
They attribute it to Vince Scully.
I'm not sure it is Vince Scully, but they say it's Vince Scully.
He said, losing feels worse than winning feels good.
Okay, and that's true.
I'll tell you something that's even more true.
All good things are disappointing.
All the things you wanted, all the things you think, if I just get this, it'll solve all my problems.
They never do solve all your problems.
They may be good.
You may enjoy them, but they're going to be disappointing.
Losing feels worse than winning feels good because when you lose and you've put your ego into the enterprise, into your ambitions, into your love life, into your sports life, whatever it is, then you feel that your ego has been shattered.
But when you win, you haven't won the thing you're looking for because what you're looking for is God Almighty.
And when you start to love things as representative of God, when you start to understand that the cross around your neck or the flag that flies over you or your wife or your ambitions or your career or your children are not God.
They are a thing that the language that God speaks his love to you in.
Then you start to become happy in the things you have.
You're not going to have a happy life.
Nobody's going to have a happy life, okay?
You know, because life is too much, there's too much sickness and evil and wickedness in life.
But you can have a joyful life, and that joy will communicate your faith and your moral vision to other people.
And that is how you affect the culture in and of yourself, the way you live.
I started with C.S. Lewis.
I'll end with C.S. Lewis.
He said, joy is the yearning for something beyond this world.
And since there's no, I'm not, I'm paraphrasing him, joy is a yearning for something beyond this world.
And since we have no appetites that can't be satisfied, we must be made for another world.
If you live in that world, you can live without judging others.
You can live in joy.
And you can be free to sell your moral vision simply by living and simply by the way people look at you.
Stat Hero: Following Every Play00:15:24
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Get to the Brian Kilmead interview.
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You can help us out by becoming members, by going to Dailywire.com slash, subscribe and enter code.
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That also will help us win back the culture.
So you know my guest today, Brian Kilmeade.
He's the co-host of the FOX News's UH Morning show.
FOX AND Friends host the daily national radio show, the Brian Kilmead show, and he's.
Been writing a really interesting series of books about kind of unknown moments of heroism and excitement in American history.
This new one is called The President and The Freedom Fighter, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglas and their battle to save America's soul.
Brian, thank you for coming on.
It's good to see you again.
I appreciate you having me on.
So, before we get into the, this book, The President And The Freedom Fighter this is a series that you're doing right.
These are actually, this is actually a.
Something you're really interested in is finding these kind of hidden stories?
Oh absolutely, I mean, i'd be, i'd be reading them.
I i'd love the research part of it, the stuff that everyone finds boring.
I find it almost I imagine an archaeologist looking for dinosaurs when you're able to find these quotes and see what these people wrote and Douglas and Lincoln they wrote so much and to see what they thought, instead of what people think they thought.
I find that the whole process amazing uh, especially if I feel as though, instead of just pursuing a hobby, I feel like there's a war in American history now.
It makes me think back.
If i'm going to engage you and tell you uh, things about this country, I got to go deep in backing up my school of thought, because there's a whole bunch of people living their lives on a daily basis trying to blow up the American dream, the American ideal, and I never thought that would be the case.
I think, thought that man, I hope news, I hope people that watch the news love history because if so, I think they'll give George Washington, Secret Six, and Thomas Jefferson, the Tripoli pirates, a chance.
I had no idea that history would be part of breaking news that i'd be talking about.
Why should Thomas Jefferson's statue stay up?
Why should Lincoln's name stay on a school?
I mean, these are the questions I get now uh on tour and I go to the Hermitage with Andrew Jackson.
Well yeah, Slave's a horrible person.
Yeah true, horrible person.
Not really sure he defined a generation.
He was born, uh lost his parents at a young age.
The guy was an orphan and you see what he accomplished uh in America that had no social safety net.
So you've got to appreciate where we've been.
And now I find myself, I go deep beyond the surface to make sure people understand exactly who these men and these women were.
You know, it's interesting you say that because I couldn't help but notice the subtitle of this book, The President and the Freedom Fighter, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and their battle to save America's soul.
This notion of saving the soul is something that our current president likes to talk about a lot, that he was fighting for America's soul.
And that it's frequently involved in race.
Is our soul, is the fight for our soul, a fight about race?
It's the original sin.
I don't think there's any doubt about it.
Nobody's whitewashing it, no pun intended.
No one's spray washing it just to move past that.
And everyone's saying, man, we did a lot right.
We changed the world.
Our founding fathers, America, democracy, freedom, free enterprise, capitalism, all we did and what we've done, the innovation we've brought to this planet, we can go on and on.
However, slavery was existing in every continent, and we brought it to this continent.
People before us, most of people watching right now, even didn't have ancestors in America, the stats say.
So there's only so much blame you could actually carry around, even though people want you to.
How about zero blame?
How about studying what happened, understanding how wrong it was, no one will ever rationalize it, and then see how this group of people grew from John Quincy Adams to his dad, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton.
And then you have people like William Lloyd Garrison and Garrett Smith.
And you have all these abolitionists and John Brown famously, might have been a little crazy, but I understand his intent, who understood how wrong it was, even in their times.
But then how do you get political clout?
You need a guy like Lincoln who thought slavery made no sense to him.
But he didn't believe the races were equal.
He saw the conflict, but he was never signing on to slavery.
Ulysses S. Grant never was onto slavery.
But then you see America continue to evolve and get better.
And what was happening in every continent, America would fought a war to get rid of.
So I thought, who led that war?
Lincoln and Douglas?
Grant?
Ron Chernow just did this incredible thousand-plus-page book.
I didn't close that book and say, well, I could do so much better and I can get deeper.
Not by a chance.
In fact, I feel I lost a family member when I was done with it.
That's how it really made Grant.
But I thought, what if I just talked about these two men and how they came together, they finally met and what they were able to accomplish and where they came from too.
Well, let's talk about this for a little bit.
Let's start with Abraham Lincoln because the guy is practically a myth.
I mean, he is such a powerful figure.
He presides over what you might call the second half of American history in the same way George Washington sort of presides over the first half of American history.
In researching this book, did you find discrepancies between that myth and the person, or did you find, no, in fact, this was a mythic character?
Oh, I mean, what he overcame, if I wrote that in a biography, you'd say, put that in the fiction file.
I mean, abject poverty, mom dies at nine years old.
Dad kind of beat him, licensed him out, would rent him out for other people to work on a farm.
One year of combined formal schooling.
Oh, and that's your best president ever?
Not a chance.
Tell me another story.
I'm not publishing this.
So what he overcame, he wasn't perfect, but man, he was honest.
He was pure.
He was moral.
And I will say this: you know, he was not thinking blacks and whites were equal.
And some of the things he said will make your skin crawl.
You're like, oh, my goodness, how could he say that?
But he was a man of his times.
And yet he was ahead of his time.
And then he began to realize, like Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin's like, yeah, the whites are better than blacks, and we're going to, and slavery exists.
And then when he sees when you educate a child and there's no difference in their intellect and their curiosity, he in Benjamin Franklin's life realizes slavery is wrong.
He becomes an abolitionist.
In Lincoln, he's not really exposed to slavery.
The North had 1% of the African population was in the North.
They were doing their own thing.
There's no Twitter.
There's no satellite vision.
There's no Prime.
There's no satellite dish.
There's no cable.
You're not watching what's happening in South Carolina and Mississippi.
So you hear about it, you read about it, but it's not your life, but you don't think they're equal.
Well, Lincoln, in real time, would understand there's no difference.
And I have in the special that comes out on Sunday, 10 o'clock, November 7th, you'll see on Fox News, I mean, a quote from Lincoln.
He basically understands at the end that Frederick Douglass walks in to his inaugural, not only is he invited on the podium, but he walks into the White House for the ball.
Lincoln sees him, walks over to him, the world shuts down, and Douglas says, he goes, my friend Douglas, what did you think of the speech?
He said, don't worry about me.
He goes, doesn't matter.
You got a room full of people.
He goes, there's nobody's opinion I care more about.
What did you think of the speech?
He said, Mr. President, it was a sacred effort.
Now, how does a racist say that?
You don't, you don't make Douglas, the first time he gets word that Douglass is there to see him, there's a huge line wrapped around the White House.
Douglass waited five minutes before his name was called and Lincoln went to see him.
But residing over a country that did not have the enlightened view of race that we have over a world that didn't.
So what do you want Lincoln to do?
If he rushed too much, he has no political crowd.
He's got no country to hold on to.
And it frustrated Douglas like it frustrates us.
How could you not see there's no difference between color?
How could you not see if you educate a person, they're going to be, it's up to them to see what they can accomplish, that no one's born smarter than anybody else or no race is better than anybody else, ethnic background is.
How do they not know that?
Well, go back in time.
Read what they were exposed to.
Yeah, not only that, I mean, I think it's so amazing that we have lost the ability to imagine people in their time, because certainly our children and children's children, they're going to look back at us and think, how could you do this?
How could you do that?
I mean, I frequently think abortion is going to be like that.
You know, they're just going to think like, what on earth were you thinking?
How could you not be enlightened?
But we are just like them.
We are wrapped in our time.
We are wrapped in a certain number of assumptions.
It'll disappear.
And it's a failure of imagination, really, to do that.
Look at same-sex marriage.
In 2008, Barack Obama says, right, marriage between a man and a woman.
2012, he feels same-sex marriage is something he's got to run on.
Was he a horrible person in 2008?
Is he a great person in 2012?
Or is he like all of us evolving in a situation and a life and a society in which we're born?
We got to think we're getting better.
Yeah.
You've got to hope.
Yeah.
So let's talk about Frederick Douglass.
Now, Frederick Douglass, I read his autobiography.
I think every school kid, at least when my age, we read his autobiography.
But there's now some talk that his autobiography is kind of a sort of a little bit of a PR job.
Did you find that he is different than the things that you, when you started out your research, did you have assumptions about Douglas that changed over time?
I was all ears and eyes.
And, you know, I've seen the videos, the documentaries, but I read David White's book.
And anytime you think that he is making him seem too good or too great, all I ask you to do is, all I ask you to do is look at his quotes.
You know exactly what he thought.
If you say, I don't want an author's opinion, fine.
Read his newspaper.
Read the North Star.
The guy wrote almost every day.
So he's not blown out of proportion.
He's so ahead of his time.
His intellect is so great.
And he's a self-made, self-taught guy that never stopped learning.
My goodness, when he was learning to be a caulker on the docks, he would nail different articles to the post so we could read and work at the same time.
So I don't know.
I mean, my biggest question to me is, why did he need a comeback in 1950?
Why do they have to write about him again to bring his historical persona back?
Like, why did he dip in time?
He died in 1890s.
You know, why did he, why wasn't he, why did he need a reboot?
So I don't really think that, I don't think, I don't think you could say enough about him.
Do you have an answer to that?
Why did he kind of fall out of favor?
No, I don't have an answer.
I mean, we could look at the times.
It just so happens when, which is crazy too, because as soon as he got a black men to vote, his focus was on women.
So he worked with Susan B. Anthony, other great historical female figures to give them equality, give them the rights that he had.
So he never stopped.
The day he died when he had a heart attack in his house.
I was at his house where he lived.
Couldn't go inside because of the pandemic.
But they said that he had plans that night to go to another rally for women's right to vote.
So I have no idea why he went away.
His house still stands.
It's still extremely well visited.
This guy that, you know, obviously born a slave could not be in a more negative situation, ended up knowing six presidents quite well and serving in the government and having the most beautiful house on the most beautiful plot overlooking Washington, D.C.
So to me, he should never have dip.
But they say that if you can bet on any historical figure, they've got to go up and down through time.
They say Grant is somebody that continued to grow these days.
When he died, they thought he was a corrupt guy and a bad president who lost all his money.
But upon further review, we wouldn't be the same country without him.
But I digress.
So how does Douglas get from being a slave to being a guy that the president comes out to get a review of his speech?
How does he make that transition?
Well, I mean, he was lucky in this sense, that he had one master's wife in particular, slave owner's wife in particular, Sopha Old, who, A-U-L-D, who thought he was this cute kid, a very respectful kid, and he was working with her son.
And he's like, hey, could I learn to read?
Can I learn the ABCs?
Can you teach me to write?
And then once he got the fundamentals, he would run errands for people to learn how to read and write and get magazines and study their Bible.
And he became this sponge.
So when he was, the more he knew what world he was missing, as he found out the world he was missing, the more restless he became and the more determined he was to escape to freedom, which was the key.
If he did not have the knowledge of what the world was like and what your potential life could be and the inequities that were surrounding him and the slave life in which he lived, he probably wouldn't have tried to escape the first time and wouldn't have been successful the second time.
And when he did that, when he escapes to freedom, he knows how to read.
He knows how to write.
He knows how to think and he knows how to work.
He's got a trade.
He's a caulker.
And man, does he have a work ethic?
So when he gets to the north, maybe things are unequal, but he's got able to keep his own money.
And he starts working his way up and he starts teaching other African Americans about the Bible.
And he starts speaking and preaching in his own informal way.
Then he goes to a rally, an abolitionist rally.
He ends up getting the courage to go up there because someone said seen him speak.
And he's so good.
He impresses William Lloyd Garrison.
Douglas At The Rally00:14:40
Garrison's got this newspaper and he's got this group of abolitionists who thought the Constitution was wrong and the country's got to be restarted.
And he wanted Douglass and his slave background to be part of that engine.
And then Douglas would write his own biography, publish and become a best-selling author, and then would go over to Europe and tour and would be treated almost like an equal back in Europe and become famous in Ireland and England and Scotland and through Germany and France.
They would know this guy who seven years prior was a slave.
So, I mean, that's the short course of what he did.
But if anyone says, well, they're overhyping him, really?
So these two guys come together, both of them from poverty, both of them from very tough upbringings, and both of them are self-made men in some way.
Do they like each other?
Well, they don't really know each other until they meet face to face.
But Douglas is constantly prodding at Lincoln because he sees the potential and how much room he has to grow, but believes he will.
And when Lincoln comes up and he starts the Douglas debates, he goes to a couple of them.
And, you know, one time his name comes up and they say, you're, you're a friend of Frederick Douglass, the, you know, the black man.
He's like, no, I'm not a friend of Douglas.
I don't think the races are equal, but I think people should be free.
But I'm not demanding they're free.
I'm telling you that that's where I would go.
We've got to get there somehow.
So that's frustrating.
And Douglas writes about that.
Really?
We're not equal.
Come on.
We are equal.
You've got to free us up.
America can't exist like this.
We're heading towards a big reckoning.
And he'd be upset, but he was prodding because he saw the potential, my view, saw the potential in Lincoln, what he would eventually become.
So he'd be frustrated with the pace in which he did.
And he was frustrated after his first inaugural that Lincoln was too willing to cut a deal with the South, not to come back into the Union.
And when he said, you can keep your slaves, you can come back, Lincoln, put an amendment in that allows you to keep them.
They still said they're going to stay out.
But Douglas said, how could you possibly make that offer?
We can't exist like this.
So that was the refrain.
But when they finally met, I guess Lincoln really never talked to others about what he thought of Douglas, but he certainly knew of him.
Yeah, yeah.
So, you know, you look at the country today and we're in a pretty confusing state.
I lived overseas for about seven years.
I feel that America may be the least racist country I've ever been in.
And I know we have this history and I know slavery, as you say, nobody's trying to minimize what that is and what the history of that is.
Do you feel that the left has a case to make?
Is there something that people like me are missing?
That when I see, you know, for instance, a George Floyd, which set off so much trouble in the country, I think, you know, I understand that it's different to be a black man being stopped by the police than a white man.
I do understand that.
But at the same time, I know police are risking their lives in dangerous neighborhoods.
And you see people turning, as you say, turning over statues.
If you were turning to your black friend, would you say, what would you say to him?
Would you say to him, you know, you're selling the country short?
Number one, I always say this.
Number one, I'm never going to put, I've not majored in black studies.
I haven't studied cultures.
I just know one of the best things we could do is do what you just did, travel, compare it to other societies.
Also, look in the fact that a million African Americans, Africans have come to America and many more are online to come here.
If we're such a racist country, why is everyone coming?
Number two is if we could do things to plow the ground, to level the playing field for everyone, but not rig the game, because you never appreciate the win if you feel as though people are compensating for you because of things that happened 200 plus years ago.
I'm all for it.
Level the playing field, wipe out the pockets of racism as they exist at institutions that need to be reexamined.
Let's do it.
But as Condoleezza Rice says, you're never going to get anywhere with race relations if you vilify one race, really for the most part, who had nothing to do with things that happened 200 plus years ago.
And that's what CRT is doing.
So I really believe that we're at a point now in America where if there is racism, let's get rid of it.
But I believe that if you read this book, you'll understand where we were, how far we've come, how bad Reconstruction was, and why we should appreciate what we have now.
And I believe that America, from my perspective, has gone the furthest of any country on the planet to eliminate racist policies, judgments, and society.
But if there's things that we could do to work on, let's do it.
But the minute you start vilifying and protesting and say, apologize because you're a certain skin color, I don't have anything more to add to that conversation.
I'm running out of time, but I just want to ask you, are you hopeful?
I mean, there's a pretty dark.
Absolutely.
You are.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
I think that America, what you see with Andrew Jackson, what you see with George Washington, what you see with our founding fathers as a whole, what you see with Lincoln and Douglas, America always gets the right person at the right time.
If you look at FDR, if you look at Reagan, we always get the right person at the right time.
And the next person, I think Joe Manchin's giving you an idea that when you come out and say, yeah, I'm a moderate and I've never been a liberal, I'm a Democrat, but I don't hate Republicans.
I thought to myself, that might be the type of person, not Joe Manchin specifically.
That's the type of person that'll bring us together.
Someone who just won't engage with the hatred and the vitriol and sees that, well, when inflation is overrunning the country, you probably shouldn't spend $1.7 trillion you don't have.
Doesn't mean I don't like black people, or it doesn't mean that the other side is bad.
It means this is a mistake.
So I don't want to destroy oil and gas because it helps my number one enemy flourish and it jeopardizes our security.
It doesn't mean you want to poison the planet.
When we get people like that that could see both sides, and they're out there, I think it'll be very hard to hate.
You'll be back to disagreeing and less hating.
Interesting.
Brian Kilmead, the author of The President and the Freedom Fighter, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and their battle to save America's soul.
Brian, good to talk to you again.
Thanks so much for coming on.
Thanks so much, man.
Appreciate it.
Thanks.
All right.
The time has come.
You waited for it.
You begged for it.
You wrote me letters.
You prayed and wept and hoped it would come.
No, you didn't.
But here it is anyway.
It's time for the mailbag.
I'm not responsible for this.
All right.
This is from Vanessa.
She says, a few years ago, my fiancé and I of about seven years at the time had a failure of birth control and made the tragic decision to abort the baby.
We're at the time fooled by the leftist propaganda that an unborn baby isn't human.
But now, two years later, we're married and we have a beautiful six-month-old and we're unwaveringly pro-life and we're trying to find God.
I've been struggling with shame and anguish over the tragic and terrible decision we made and have been in need of advice on how to move on past this pain, I feel.
Terrible situation, Vanessa.
I'm really sorry.
I understand how this happens.
We are all victims of the narrative.
I've talked a lot about George Washington holding slaves because he lived in this champion of freedom, holding slaves and not really understanding that his slaves wanted to be free because he was so wrapped up in the narrative of the time.
The narrative of our time has been for a very long time.
The guiding narrative has been that the baby in your womb is just a clump of cells.
That narrative makes no sense.
Now we start to see that as the science puts it in front of our eyes.
But unfortunately, people, if they don't see it, they don't believe it.
So here you are.
You're in this situation.
And shame, I think shame may be the most painful emotion we experience.
I think shame is the worst emotion we experience.
And I think about 90% of human beings spend their lives running away from the shame they feel because all of us, I think, feel shame because all of us know how broken we are.
We all know.
We all know our own fears, our own cowardice, our own dishonesty.
We all know this about ourselves, but we're always pretending to the person across from us that we're really good people.
Oh, we're such, oh, we're such good people.
We're such good people.
That's why all those accusations, that's why Jesus doesn't want you to make accusations, because his accusations are turning you away from your own shame and your own sin.
And because people don't have a process for dealing with shame, they get, you see this in neurotics all the time.
It is almost the definition of neurosis, is they go along like a train on a circular track.
They keep coming back and you tell them a new fact doesn't change their opinions.
You change their mind.
Their mind changes for 10 minutes.
Then they go back on that track because they cannot stop and process their shame.
And that, I think, is one of the reasons they call Satan the accuser, because he understands that you may have good reason to be ashamed, but if he mires you in that shame, you'll never get off that track.
You'll never start to grow.
Whereas God wants you to move into the future.
God does not want you to stay back in the flesh, which is in the body, which is in the past, and is scarred and has all the trauma and all that stuff.
He wants you to move in to follow your spirit into the future.
So how do you do that?
You're feeling the shame.
You think you've done a terrible thing.
You have done a terrible thing.
And you've done it in this kind of innocence.
You were carried along in the narrative.
God knows all about it.
And God's forgiveness is bigger than your sin.
You have to believe this.
You have to understand it.
God's forgiveness is bigger than your sin.
Your sin is what it is.
My sin is what, listen, there are things that I'm ashamed of that I did in my crazy youth that keep me up at night, that I wake up in a sweat.
I always try to remember God's forgiveness is bigger than your sin.
And once you understand that, once you understand that, you're obligated, you're obligated to let, to pray to God for forgiveness, to say that you know what you did was wrong, to say you're sorry you got caught up in the narrative, and let it go and move on.
You are obligated to God to do that, but you're obligated to God to move on in his name and in his image and in his path, right?
You want to live into his love and the love you give your husband now and the love you give this beautiful new baby who needs you on point, who doesn't need you mired in the past, doesn't need you mired in the shame.
The baby who is gone is also with God, and that baby doesn't need you mired in shame either.
That baby also is safe now and well and wants you to move on for your new child.
And so if you move on in love for your husband, for your baby, for your neighbor, if you can muster it, if you can muster some love for your neighbor, for your friends, if you move on in God's love, you will love until you feel his forgiveness bleeding out of reality.
I feel this all the time.
I understand what I am.
I know what I am.
I don't live in some ideal world where I'm a nice guy or a good person or anything like that.
I understand it all.
I am just a branch on the vine.
You have to live like that.
You're obligated to do it because God has forgiven you.
God has, you know, I think I said this last week, but it's just a great point.
I'm not sure if I said it on the air or said it on the all-access show.
The priest at my church said, everybody has been ransomed.
God has ransomed everybody, but not everybody takes the ransom and breaks free.
And so now you have to take the ransom and break free.
God has forgiven you.
He has died for to release you from the sin.
Let it go and move on in that love, in the love.
And as you move on in the love and as you get better at loving, as you learn to love through human beings into God, you'll feel that forgiveness and it will let you go.
You are obligated to do this.
God has forgiven you, so you are obligated to take that forgiveness and move on.
And I hope you do.
From Jacob, Clavin, dear, dear Clavin, you were not that hard.
I want to drop everything and become a cop.
Am I thinking selfishly or am I justified?
I'm 25 years old.
I'm getting married in a few months, expecting to start pumping out children soon after.
I have a job at a small company with a ton of potential for growth.
My fiancé and I are both Christians and pretty involved with our church.
These are the things I'm told I need to be satisfied with life.
I'm not.
As a man, I feel useless working at my current job.
I want to be a cop.
He says my fiancé disagrees.
Her reasons are selfish, but they're completely valid.
This isn't what she signed up for when she agreed to marry me.
She simply doesn't want to make the sacrifices required to be the wife of a police officer, the late nights, the long hours, and the danger of the position.
I hope that you understand where I'm coming from and could possibly give me some words of wisdom to change my life for the better if you don't mind.
Yeah, this is one of those simple but hard, right?
It's simple.
You're going to have to choose.
Once you marry this girl, you're not going to be a cop.
And if you're going to marry her and live in anger that your vocation, which is obviously what being a police officer is, it's obviously what you're supposed to do, that you've given up your vocation for this woman, you're not going to be, you're going to be angry at her all the time.
You're not going to be able to love her.
If you can give up your vocation for her, saying, I want the girl more than I want the vocation, then maybe you can have that life.
But you're going to have to choose because she doesn't want to do this.
That's not the life she wants to live.
She has a right not to live that life.
If you decide to become a cop, let her go.
And the temptation here is because you've agreed to marry her and because everybody's expecting you to marry her, the temptation is to just marry her and give up your vocation.
But I think you should think long and hard about that.
I think you should think long and hard about that.
I love my wife with every fiber of my being.
I am her love slave, but I would not have given up my vocation for her because my vocation is who I am.
She would not have been marrying me if she said, look, I don't want to live with a writer and lived with that insecurity and lived with the fact that your career is going to have ups and downs.
I don't want to do any of that.
I would have left.
I would have broken my heart, but I would have left because that's who I am.
And she wouldn't have been marrying me.
She would have been marrying somebody that she wanted to be me.
So it's very tough.
It's a hard saying, my friend, but you got to decide.
You got to decide.
And you cannot try and do both because it'll just make everybody miserable.
And once you, to use your phrase, start pumping out those kids, those kids will be miserable too if your marriage falls apart.
Living Overseas Is Very Liberating00:04:08
From Matt says, over the past decade or so, my family and I have spent most of our time living outside the U.S. as a military family.
I joined the military nearly two decades ago out of a sense of patriotism and pride in our country and a desire to serve after the attacks on 9-11.
However, the far left has become increasingly more powerful.
I've gotten disillusioned with the U.S.
I love our nation and what I believe we fundamentally stand for, but I cannot see myself living there.
We've spent most of our time living in Germany.
We love it there, but have never been involved in their political and cultural conflicts.
Having been an expatriate yourself for a period, why did you return to the U.S.?
What would your advice be for a conservative considering moving overseas?
Okay, well, what you should remember is living overseas is very liberating.
But the reason it's liberating is because you don't care.
You don't care about their politics.
You don't care about their culture.
You're interested in their culture.
You like it.
It's kind of a beautiful, kind of strange thing.
But what happened to me is as I became more immersed in British culture and I loved British culture and I loved the British and I loved Britain.
I really did.
I thought it was wonderful.
But as it became more familiar to me, I started to miss America because I am an American.
And I thought, you know what?
I got to go home.
It just was a feeling.
It was a very powerful feeling that came over me.
One day, I had British friends.
My kids were in British schools.
I read the British newspapers.
I thought about Britain as where I was living.
And one day like that, seriously, I woke up and I started listening to what was then primitive internet radio so I could hear baseball games.
And I started reading USA Today and I started going out to expatriate bars.
It just happened overnight.
And I think the reason was after seven years, which is kind of the biblical timeframe, after seven years, I started to think, is this my culture?
Will I let this become my culture?
And I wouldn't.
So if you want to take a vacation from America, go ahead, live in Germany.
If after seven years you find, okay, I'm German, I'm going to be German, just remember their culture is going to give you the same problems that our culture does.
So go ahead and do it and try it, but keep an open mind because you're going on vacation for a while, but that vacation will catch up with you as you get immersed in German culture.
And with that, I have to say a fond farewell because you are heading into a darkness that is so dark and horrifying that I can't even begin to describe it to you.
We just call it the Clavenless Week because we have no words that will tell you how awful it's going to be and how small your chances of surviving till next Friday are.
But, but if somehow you crawl across the broken glass that is the Clavenless Week, the flaming broken glass, the screaming flaming broken glass that is the Clavenless Week and you make it to next Friday, we will be here and I will be here with the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm Andrew Klavan.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, basically wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also, remember to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show, the Matt Walsh Show, and the Michael Knoll Show.
Thank you for listening.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Lisa Bacon.
Supervising producer, Mathis Glover.
Executive Producer, Jeremy Boring.
Our technical director is Austin Stevens.
Production Manager, Pavel Wadowski.
Editor and Associate Producer, Danny D'AMico.
Lead audio mixer, Mike Cormina.
Animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Hair and makeup, Cherokee Hart.
Production coordinator, McKenna Waters.
And our production assistant is Jacob Falash.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2021.
John Bickley here, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief.
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