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Nov. 13, 2021 - Andrew Klavan Show
01:38:37
Ep. 1056 - THE FEAR ADMINISTRATION

Andrew Klavan dissects the "Fear Administration," mocking climate summits for their performative activism—from Obama’s Shakespeare gaffes to Greta Thunberg’s unchallenged claims—while framing Biden’s policies as accelerating cultural decay. He ties the Jacob Blake media lies and Kyle Rittenhouse trial to systemic fear-mongering, arguing "woke" Hollywood’s virtue-signaling (e.g., Ghostbusters backlash) signals a broader collapse of truth. Comparing Socrates’ execution to modern cancel culture, Klavan warns that without courage—embracing life’s fleeting beauty over existential dread—society risks spiritual and moral ruin, urging listeners to reject fear-driven policies and reclaim virtue before political solutions fail. [Automatically generated summary]

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Time Text
Obama's Quote Bomb 00:02:42
The COP26 climate summit has come to a conclusion in Glasgow, leaving many people re-watching their compilations of the sex scenes from Game of Thrones in an attempt to keep the excitement alive.
The highlight of the climate summit was a speech by Barack Obama, who used to be somebody or other, and who told the summit, and so help me, this is a real, not made-up quote.
He said, since we're in the Emerald Isle here, let me quote the bard, William Shakespeare.
Of course, the Emerald Isle is Ireland, Glasgow is in Scotland, and Shakespeare was from England, all of which Obama apparently forgot to fact-check because he was too busy rolling around in money and cultural irrelevance.
When told he'd made a complete ass of himself, Obama said he thought the Scottish were the people who sound silly when they talk and who believe there's a magical pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
But that, of course, turns out to be the socialists.
Other than that, the climate summit produced many important accomplishments, such as reviving the art of farce, not to mention the fart of arse, when President and venal houseplant Joe Biden loudly broke wind while speaking with Camilla Parker Bowles, the Duchess of Cornwall, which is in the Emerald Isle of Scotland, where Shakespeare's from.
The British, who were appalled by the uncouthness and ignorance of Donald Trump, are now tremendously impressed that we have a president who can solve the natural gas shortage single-handedly, and a former president who's so rich and irrelevant he has no idea where the hell he is.
In other climate summit highlights, celebrities from Leonardo DiCaprio to Matt Damon had their private jets fly in formation to spell out the words, stop driving so much.
And of course, Greta Thunberg talked complete nonsense without anyone daring to call her a nutty teenager, because after all, she's just a teenager with Asperger's syndrome and an eating disorder and selective mutism and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
So we should listen respectfully while she tells us all how to live.
China, the world's biggest polluter, did not attend the summit, but they did send a note suggesting other countries sharply cut their fossil fuel use so it would be easier to conquer them and rule the world.
The future former world leaders who did attend gathered at the closing ceremony in order to look serious while signing meaningless documents.
And for the kids, Big Bird sang a song called, It's Not Easy Being Green, But It's Better Than Having the Sun Come to Your House and Kill Your Mommy and Daddy.
Also get a vaccine or you'll die a painful and horrible death.
Meanwhile, here at home, gas prices are skyrocketing as President Biden continues to stymie oil exploration and ban pipelines.
Fortunately, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm appeared on Bloomberg TV to address the issue.
What is the Gran Holm plan to increase oil production in America?
Battles With Dice and World Domination 00:08:06
Oh my God, that is hilarious.
I guess that's what it looks like when the administration flips the people the big bird.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a biby-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, we are back laughing our way through the fall of all of Western civilization as far as I can tell.
Today we'll take a different look at the Rittenhouse trial, different from everyone else, and we'll discuss the apocalypse, although you could really just look out your window.
And we've got a great mailbag question on how to deal with the meaninglessness of life, I will tell you.
Don't forget to get your letters into the mailbag for next week, and I will answer all your questions.
And go on YouTube and subscribe to the Andrew Clavin channel.
You'll get all kinds of exclusive material that's not on this show.
It's just actually lying around on the street, and we send it to you because we don't know what to do with it.
If you leave a comment and the comment is sufficiently ugly and hateful, we will read it on the show because that's how we roll.
Today's comment is from Jonathan Bowling.
If Andrew Clavin is the Gandalf of the conservative movement, does that make Ben Shapiro Frodo?
First of all, it's hot, Gandalf.
And second of all, I'm not sure about Ben Shapiro.
I know that I hear Knowles wandering around the halls whispering about his precious.
I don't know, you know, make of that what you will.
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K-N-A-V-A-E N. There are no easing things.
True.
Before I begin, I would really like to thank you all for buying When Christmas Comes.
I'll hold it up so you can see it.
If you haven't bought it yet, you want to buy it.
We got it up to 31 on Amazon, 17 on Audible.
We ran out of books, which was incredibly frustrating because during this time of supply chain problems and so on, very hard to get new books fast, but I think we have fixed the problem.
And Amazon, sometimes it says it's out of stock, but we'll have them.
They get them very fast and they will get them.
I think you'll still get them before Christmas.
Even if you don't drive it up.
We want to drive it back up to, I'd like to drive it up to the top 10 on Amazon.
Please, if you can, do it.
It makes a big difference to me.
I have to say, it was, you know, look at the reviews.
The people love the book.
It was incredibly frustrating to have to run out of books and have to deal with Amazon.
They're very difficult to deal with, especially on the weekend.
This was my week.
I just want to tell you, that happened.
I was going to see Glenn Beck to do his show.
And American Airlines stopped flying planes.
The book ran out.
We ran out of books and people stopped printing books.
On Saturday, I was signing books to send back to the mysterious bookshop in New York where people had ordered them.
And I was bringing these heavy boxes of books upstairs.
And I have an elevator in my house to take them up that stair, like a dumb waiter to take them upstairs.
It broke, so I carried them up myself and re-injured my arm.
Came into my office on Monday, and it was swarming with wasps.
So I had to go around killing all the wasps in my office.
When Knowles and I were doing Another Kingdom, we had stuff like this happening.
My house got overrun by caterpillars.
Every possible technical difficulty that could happen would happen.
And I told Knowles, you know when you're doing the work of God because the devil comes after you.
So we know this is a godly book.
So please go and buy it.
I have to say, it did raise, the whole thing raised the philosophical question, if I'm having a Clavenless week, who's Clavin?
It's like a Twilight Zone episode.
Anyway, this actually brings me to the point of my opening of this show.
I want to start out by talking about a conversation that we had with the God King of the Daily Wire, Jeremy, backstage at Backstage.
I don't think we were on the air when we were discussing this, but we were talking about the perception we sometimes get.
We get emails and comments that the Daily Wire doesn't fight.
And I get this too.
I get people, you don't fight.
You don't fight.
And what that usually means is that I didn't support the latest, most urgent thing that happens to be going through people's minds, the idea that Donald Trump is the only one who can save us or some momentary panic that I have chosen not to participate in.
Or just that I don't indulge, and I think most of us don't indulge here, in the kind of angry rhetoric that makes people feel good but doesn't actually accomplish anything.
My main battlefield is the culture.
And making books and films and discussing books and films and bringing the arts into people's life is part of that fight.
And if you don't think it's a fight, I have the scars to prove it.
I have millions of dollars in lost revenue, and I've told you I've been kicked out of Hollywood, and it's very hard to get my books reviewed and all this stuff.
So we obviously know that this is the battleground.
And I am certainly not a wallflower, either in the things I say, obviously, or in the things I write.
And you can read when Christmas comes and you'll see what I mean.
I want to explain exactly why I think this is the fight.
This is the main fight.
I want to get it very specific.
I've been a gamer all my life.
And hard as it may be for some of you to believe, but way back before there was Final Fantasy 16.
And why is it Final Fantasy if there's always a sequel?
I mean, that's one thing.
But no, before there was Final Fantasy XVI, we used to sit around in the old cave around the fire and we would move these things we called pieces around this kind of primitive pre-screen environment we call the game board.
And one of the games I loved most was called Risk.
And if you have never played Risk, we have a picture of it.
It's, you know, the board game.
The board is a map of the world, and you put your armies, actual plastic and wooden pieces, there it is.
You put on the board and you get a certain number of countries and you try to take over the world.
You have these battles with dice and you try to take over the world.
Now, I got, we used, my wife and I, when we were first together, we would invite people over to the house for dinner and then we would play all night.
We would literally play till dawn because it's a very long-lasting game.
And I got very good at this game and I would win almost all the time.
And because of that, I started to, my attention would wander and I'd start to lose.
And I would wind up with three armies in Australia.
And you can see three armies was like the least number of armies you could actually have.
And I would be in that little corner of the board on Australia and I would wake up and say, oh my gosh, I'm losing the game.
And I would come back and win.
And this happened so often that my wife made a joke out of it.
Whenever we were in trouble, when no publishers would publish my work, or when we ran out of money, or we got thrown out of Hollywood, whatever it was, my wife would say to me, well, we've got three armies in Australia.
You've got them right where you want them.
Right now, if you love America, if you love freedom, if you love the West, if you love Christendom, which I do, the place formerly known as Christendom, we have got three armies in Australia.
Defend Against Sinister Forces 00:08:42
We are down to the last redoubt of sense and common sense and freedom-loving and patriotism.
The left has burned down our cities.
They've turned what's left of our cities into homeless and crime-ridden hellholes.
They're hampering our fuel supplies.
They tear down statues of freedom fighters like Thomas Jefferson and put up statues of drug-taking criminals like George Floyd.
They are censoring our speech using massive stateless corporations with no loyalty to anybody.
They're corrupting young people sexually.
They're teaching them not to be men and women.
They slaughter babies in the womb.
They denigrate free nations and true religion.
And they elevate slave states and violent heresies.
When Isaiah, the prophet Isaiah, said in the Bible, woe unto them that call evil good and good evil, that put darkness for light and light for darkness, that put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.
Well, the guy was a prophet and he was prophesying the coming of the modern Democrat Party because that's essentially that's their agenda as far as I can tell.
Now, I'm old enough so that none of this is worse, particularly in terms of action, than other things I've seen in my life.
When I was a kid, they killed the president, they killed the president's brother, they killed Martin Luther King, they shot Andy Worrell, they killed Malcolm X. You know, things were tough.
Jane Fonda was supporting the Chinese communists.
But the thing that's worse now is that the elites and the institutions have signed on to what is essentially a wicked agenda.
The people who do these horrible things dominate every center of power and influence, the universities, the entertainment media, the news media, corporate culture, the government.
And that's new.
That's different than when I was a kid when there was actually an establishment that would try and kind of referee between the radicals and the rest of the establishment.
And so, of course, since they're an empire of lies, since the left basically in their culture is an empire of lies, they call themselves the resistance, even though they have all the power.
They're not resisting anybody except us, except the people.
It's the same as the people who have caused many black Americans to be killed call themselves Black Lives Matter, and the fascists who terrorize Portland and Seattle call themselves anti-fascists, and the filthy racism they want to teach our kids in school is called anti-racism.
All of this is calling evil good and messing with the language.
That's the culture.
That's an attack on the culture.
That's not a political attack, first and foremost.
It's an attack on the culture.
The culture is not just the arts, though the arts are very important because they influence what we put in our head and what we think about and the stories we tell ourselves.
But how we live, what we say, what we believe and don't believe, what we read and don't read, what we feel allowed to believe and allowed to say.
All of that is at the center of the culture.
And at the center of the left's culture, all of the things I'm talking about, they are all about fear.
Fear that you'll be canceled, fear that you'll be hateful, fear that if you live free, the climate will self-destruct.
Fear that you'll be poor if the government doesn't take care of you.
Oh, you know, the minute you don't let the government take care of you, you're going to fall through the cracks.
Fear that you'll get a disease if you don't wear 17 masks.
And in fact, if you're not afraid, you're a bad person.
Fear is their virtue, right?
Now, I'm going to read you something that I think will blow your mind in its prophetic power.
The fact that it was said so many years ago, back in another time when another country, England, was fading from prominence.
C.S. Lewis, you know how much I like C.S. Lewis, the Christian apologist, he wrote a book called The Screwtape Letters that has, it's about a demon teaching another demon how to corrupt humankind.
And here's what he says.
He says, we, the demons, we have made men proud of most of their vices, but not of cowardice.
Whenever we have almost succeeded in making them proud of cowardice, God permits a war or an earthquake or some other calamity, and at once courage becomes so obviously lovely and important, even in human eyes, that all our work is undone.
And there is still at least one vice of which people feel genuinely ashamed.
That's what happened on 9-11, right?
Remember, for a very brief time on 9-11, the left was essentially silenced.
Suddenly, we remembered that men were men.
It was men who charged up into the buildings and saved lives.
Policemen were heroes.
Firemen were heroes.
They walked into the face of death to help people, and many of them didn't come back.
And the beauty of their courage momentarily overwhelmed the left's lies.
And the beauty of our culture, the culture that produces such men, such courage, overwhelmed the left's narrative that we are somehow the worst people on earth, that our beautiful country is a bad country, and all these oppressive countries are somehow deserving of respect.
Lewis says, C.S. Lewis goes on to say, courage is not simply one of the virtues, but it's the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means the point of highest reality.
What he's saying is that without courage, you won't have virtue because virtue is tested.
Virtue is going against, it's going against the tenor of the times.
It's going against the wave of public opinion.
It's going against the opposite army.
It requires courage, and that's when virtue hits the testing point, and that's when you find out if you have virtue.
So if they can make you feel, if they can turn you into a coward, if the devil can do that, if the Democrats can do it, and at this point, what's the difference?
They can stop you from being virtuous and therefore take over politics for their wicked purposes, and they are wicked.
So here's what they do, because they can't make you proud of cowardice, because cowardice is so obviously ugly and courageous so obviously lovely, they trick you by wrapping you, this is still from C.S. Lewis.
They trick you by wrapping you in precautions.
Precautions, says C.S. Lewis, have a tendency to increase fear.
So if you keep telling people, if you do this, the worst won't happen.
If you do this, you'll be safe.
If you do that, they don't realize they've become cowards until the moment comes when they have to have courage and they don't.
So put on a mask, get a vaccine, get a booster, put on another mask, put unmasks on your children, get boosters on your children, give vaccines to your children.
Here's the mayor of New York, de Blasio, saying his ultimate goal is to mask children, get them vaccinated.
Listen to this.
At what point will you ask them to also start checking for vax cards for five to 11 year olds?
That's a very good question, and honestly, one we need to focus on now.
We wanted to get to the day where we actually could vaccinate the youngest New Yorkers and get that rolling.
We know it'll take a while.
I mean, right now, to use the example of the 12 to 17-year-olds, very good news, we're almost at 79% of them.
That's fantastic, but it did take a while.
You go to New York and people are afraid.
I walked into a foyer, foyer, if you prefer, in Washington, D.C. that must have been a little bit bigger than this table.
I'm not exaggerating.
Maybe it's twice as big as this table.
Really narrow little place.
I had to get to a door to go down to the garage to get my car.
Two people came, as I walked through the door, came screaming at me, put on a mask, not in authoritarian oppressiveness, in terror, in terror.
This is what they want.
They want to build up your fear, wrap you in precautions, so that when the moment of courage comes, the moment when you have to speak your mind, the moment when you have to defend your children at the PTA meeting, the moment when you have to say, no, I don't agree with you and I'm not a racist and go pound sand, that moment comes and you think, well, maybe I'll get canceled, maybe I'll lose my job, maybe I won't get a good grade, maybe, you know, because you are so wrapped in precautions,
so used to thinking of how you can avoid the worst that you cannot face the penalty that virtue has to pay in this sinful world, especially when people like this have risen to power, as now and then they do.
It's part of the world.
So the point of the Democrats and the object of the devil, but I repeat myself, is to make you afraid because then you won't have virtue to oppose their wickedness.
When I talked about having three armies in Australia, Australia is you, okay?
Australia is you.
We are in deep trouble.
Our leaders are doing a bad job.
Our elites are liars.
Our institutions are decayed.
Our information outlets especially are clogged with lies.
And so if you think that Donald Trump or the Vatican or the next election is going to save a country when people have no courage, when women have no virtue, when men have no honor, you're out of your minds.
That's not going to happen.
The first thing you have to do if you want to win the game of risk, and I'm an old risk player in every sense of the word, the first thing you have to do is secure Australia.
Secure Australia 00:03:12
Secure yourself.
Make sure that you are defended.
And you do that by taking in good things instead of bad things, by making sure that the art you consume is beautiful and great and not trash, rap music.
I mean, even if you listen to rap music ironically and it's about some woman being abused, some guy strutting around showing off his money and killing people and killing the police and slapping women around.
You know, even if you listen to that ironically, it's poison.
It is poison.
If you're watching porn all the time, it's poison.
It's toxic.
And look, in every time, in every age, women have no virtue and men have no honor.
But I'm not talking about them.
I'm talking about you because this is the fight and we are in the fight and they're not.
They're not going to be a part of the fight.
It's always going to be a minority.
Just like it's a minority who are woke and wicked.
It's going to be a minority who set the stage and set the conditions in which freedom can return.
And that's how I fight.
That is how I fight.
And that's why I fight where I do, because I believe that until we are who we have to be, we cannot expect anyone to come and rescue us.
The people, I mean, to steal the line from Barack Obama, the people we're waiting for are us.
And right now we are being bombarded with fear, and we have to start to reinstall our courage and start to act in that courage if we're going to take the country back.
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So I want to talk about the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, and I know everybody's talking about it, and I don't want to say all the same things you've already heard, but I want to talk about it as a cultural event because that's actually what I think it is.
You know, I hear people saying, you know, Kyle Rittenhouse was a hero.
Obviously, for those of you who haven't been paying attention to anything, you know, Rittenhouse is the guy who went, a 17-year-old kid who went to the riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin last summer with a gun, with a rifle, and ended up killing two men and wounding a third.
He's on trial for homicide.
Bad Guy Hero Narrative 00:11:52
And people are saying, oh, he was a hero for fighting these guys, and he was acting in self-defense.
And I don't actually think, I mean, look, I believe that a 17-year-old who goes to a riot with a gun that he's not supposed to have in the first place, you know, he was kind of a kid from a troubled home.
You know, I don't think he was doing the smartest thing in the world.
And I'm not going to idolize him.
I'm not going to make a hero out of him because then I'm just falling into the left's trap of, you know, reacting, reacting to their point of view.
That's not what I want to talk about.
And I will talk about what I think about the trial.
But I want to talk about the situations that brought this about and the way the whole situation has been dealt with from the very beginning.
Because remember, the real beginning of this is the shooting of a guy named Jacob Blake by a police officer.
He was shot seven times.
And this is a guy who had a warrant out on him.
He had come into his girlfriend's house uninvited.
He and his girlfriend had three children together, but they had never lived together.
And by the way, that's morally wrong.
That's a bad thing to do.
It's a bad way.
You know, I'm going to digress here a couple of times because I think it's important.
I want the whole context of this.
You know, whenever I read some celebrity site and I see, and this happens all the time, they'll be covering some rap star maybe and they say, oh, he's a wonderful father to his children by three different women.
No, he's not.
No, he's not.
And when it's a black guy and they think they have to cover for him, that's racism.
That is racism.
That is calling evil for good.
He's not a wonderful father.
He's a law schmuck with talent who is abusing the women that he sleeps with and abusing the children that he creates.
And I'm not mentioning this to condemn him because we all have our sins.
What I'm saying, I want you to notice that the left has taken our compassion for other people's sin based on the fact that we sin too.
So we're not pointing our finger, we're not passing judgment.
We're all sinful.
And they've twisted that to mean that evil is good and good is evil.
Those are very different things.
It is very different to say, look, maybe this guy came from a background where he didn't learn to do better.
Maybe he has his own problems.
I have my own sins.
I want to deal with my own sins.
It's different than to say, oh, he's a wonderful father to the children he's had by three different women, or the children he has without living with them as their father, or the children he's had by a woman he has never married.
You know, I get, I know this is a digression, but I want to stick with it for a minute because it is the context I I have many times called out Christians.
When they skip over the forgiveness in the Gospels and they get right to Jesus saying go and sin no more, they say well yeah, Jesus said, you know, i'm not going to condemn you for committing adultery.
But then then he got to the real business and he said, go and sin no more.
No, no.
First he said I will not condemn you, and that's an important part and something we all have to learn about.
But the opposite is also wrong to forget that he said go and sin no more.
Passing judgment doesn't mean being ignorant of the differences between good and evil, and what they have done, what the left has done, is they have manipulated the compassionate theme in western civilization to get us to stop calling evil good and they tell us, oh, it's racist if you say this because you know, I don't know why, because maybe it's a black guy who had the kids out of wedlock.
It's still wrong.
Forgiveness and tending to my sin rather than yours is a Christian discipline that brings us joy by making us see the world as god and therefore bringing us closer to god, but it doesn't make sin go away, all right.
So this woman has three kids by this guy.
He's obviously a messed up guy.
She's lived a sinful life by having these children out of wedlock with no husband.
She wakes up and she finds this guy standing over her and he says to her, I want my stuff.
That's not quite what he said, but he wanted his stuff and the complaint she made to the police crying.
While she's saying this, she says suddenly, without and without warning, he reached his hand between her legs, penetrated her vaginally with a finger, pulled it out and sniffed it and said, smells like you've been with other men.
He then stole her truck.
He invaded her bank account, withdrew money.
Now there's a warrant out for the guy's arrest.
Now he comes back later another Time with a warrant out for him, and she calls the police.
And so the police go there knowing a guy who has sexually assaulted a woman is there.
She's in danger.
They get there.
He has a knife.
He admitted this later.
He himself admitted later that he had a knife.
He tried to belittle it.
It was just a little pocket knife, but he had a knife.
He's fighting with the police.
And again, let's think about this for a minute, all right?
A woman's in danger.
A man comes into her home who has already sexually assaulted her, and she calls the police.
And, you know, these domestic disputes are very dangerous because you never know whether the woman's going to turn on the cops.
So these cops are the heroes in this story.
Are the cops sinful people too, living sinful lives too?
Yes.
But in this story, the role they're playing, they are the heroes in this story.
He is, Jacob Blake is, the bad guy, right?
This is the way morality works.
We know that the people who are hurting people, threatening people, endangering people who have mistreated them in the past, we know they're the bad guys.
The people who show up to help the person in trouble, those are the good guys.
That is how morality works, all right?
So the cop, the cop in question is a guy named Rustin Szewski.
He's a hero.
He's come up to selflessly protect a lady, risking his own life against a guy with a knife.
And they attack this guy.
He fights with them.
He throws them to the ground.
They taser him.
He pulls the taser wires out.
Maybe he's on something, perhaps.
He takes the kids.
He takes their kids and puts them into his vehicle.
The cops are screaming at him to halt.
The guy has got, Shesky's holding a gun on him.
The officer is holding a gun on him.
And he's inside the vehicle and he turns with the knife and the cop just says, I'm going to die here.
And he opens fire and he shoots him.
That's the story.
That's what happened.
The heroes came.
The bad guy fought.
The bad guy looked like he was threatening the heroes.
The heroes opened fire and killed him as they should.
That's the moral story.
That's the story if you're calling good and evil evil.
That's the story if you're not the people prophesied who would come by Isaiah who would come called the Democrat Party.
I think that's in the penumbra of the emanations of the text in the Bible.
Several news outlets led with some version of white cop shoots unarmed black man in the back seven times.
Because of the way he's holding him, he shot him in the back, but he was turning with the knife.
Many, like ABC, NBC, big news outlets, included some version of white cop shoes, unarmed black man in the back seven times.
One of the newspapers said unarmed black dad shot in the back several times.
Now, you're saying, what has this got to do with Kyle Rittenhouse?
And I'll get to that.
But this is the context.
It's not just a lie.
Everything they were saying about this incident is not just a moral lie.
It's a factual lie because he wasn't unarmed, but it's also a moral lie because he was the bad guy and the cops were the good guys.
It's also taking place within a big lie because this is happening during the George Floyd hours when people are claiming that the police are gunning down black people, which is a lie.
Statistically, that does not happen.
It is a non-existent event for police to gun down innocent black people who are not doing anything wrong.
That is a non-existent event.
There are 350 million people.
If that happens eight times in a year, and it doesn't, I mean, talking about somebody who's actually innocent and not resisting arrest, it doesn't happen eight times in a year, but still, that's statistically never, right?
So it takes place in this lie, in this lie.
This lie comes out and people start to riot.
I mean, they basically, and the politicians push this lie on the left.
The lieutenant governor of Wisconsin immediately declared that the police were so racist, they were out there gunning for black people.
Worst of all was one of this incredibly idiot clown of a Democrat.
I think his name was Go Brandon or something, who said this.
What I saw in that video makes me sick.
Once again, a black man, Jacob Blake, has been shot by the police in broad daylight with the whole world watching them.
You know, I spoke to Jacob's mom and dad, sister, and other members of the family just a little bit earlier, and I told them justice must and will be done.
You know, our hearts are with his family, especially his children.
It's horrible what they saw, watching their father get shot.
Like Gianna Floyd, they're asking why.
Why daddy?
Put yourself in the shoes of every black father and black mother in this country and ask, is this what we want America to be?
What a schmuck.
I said they killed Jacob Blake.
They didn't.
He was paralyzed by the shooting.
Is that what we want America to be, where heroic police show up to help a woman in trouble and deal with a bad guy, using violence only if necessary?
Yes, that is what.
And when they say, you know what, they saw their daddy.
What about the kids?
Does the officer have kids?
I mean, I'd be, if I were a politician, I'd go visit the officer.
I would go visit the officer.
Even Trump was gulled into saying, oh, I didn't like what was in this video.
It's a moral lie within a moral lie so that before you can get to the point where you say, wait, this didn't happen, you also have to say, wait, the whole context in which you're reacting to this doesn't exist.
It's a lie.
It's all a lie.
And you end up, as always, I mean, intellectual dishonesty, you know, I rant about intellectual dishonesty at the breakfast table sometimes because just a little lie, a little lie is just like a drop of poison, you know, and it just spreads and spreads and spreads.
And this is a big lie.
This is the left with a big lie about the police, about the way the police behave.
It's amazing.
You know, in New York, where they're so sick of the crime rate skyrocketing, just like it did in the 80s, when they had the same kinds of Democrats running the city until Giuliani came along and cleaned up the city.
And every single day, the New York Times called Giuliani a racist, found some way to call him a racist.
Well, Giuliani turned New York into one of the greatest cities on earth.
But with the help of the New York Times, a former newspaper, they got rid of rules that let people frisk guys for guns.
They endangered black people, black people are now being killed again.
The place is a cesspit, just like it was when I lived there many, many, many years ago.
So finally, the New Yorkers got so tired of it, did they elect a Republican?
No.
But they elected a Democrat who said he was going to fight crime.
So they now have a mayor who says he's going to fight crime.
Black Lives Matter said, if you fight crime, we will riot.
There will be blood in the streets.
That's the Black Lives Matter people.
That is the Black Lives Matter people.
Let me tell you something.
If he doesn't fight crime, there'll be a lot more blood in the streets than Black Lives Matter could possibly imagine, or maybe that's what they want.
This is an amazing, amazing collection of lies and of calling good evil and evil good with the point of making you afraid to simply say the truth, to simply say the emperor isn't wearing any clothes.
So of course, they play the killing this way.
Kenosho, Wisconsin goes up in smoke.
They're burning the city to the ground.
I mean, people are at gas stations are catching fire.
Stores are catching fire.
What does the police say?
What does the news media say?
You know, we would make that joke about this is mostly peaceful.
City On Fire 00:02:41
This is the one where they actually kind of jumped the shark.
CNN actually ran a Chiron saying fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting.
Not fiery, like emotions ran high, meaning fiery like the freaking city's on fire.
Here's just a cut.
What you're seeing behind me is one of multiple locations that have been burning in Kenosha, Wisconsin over the course of the night.
A second night since Jacob Blake was seen shot in the back seven times by a police officer.
And what you are seeing now, these images, came and come in stark contrast to what we saw over the course of the daytime hours in Kenosha and into the early evening, which were largely peaceful demonstrations in the face of law enforcement.
I want to be clear in how I characterize this.
This is mostly a protest.
It is not, generally speaking, unruly, but fires have been started.
Standing in front of the city burning down.
I mean, it's a famous clip because it's so amazing that they, you know, it's like, who are you going to believe?
Me or your lying eyes.
It's just, it is just remarkable.
They started this with their lies.
They caused it with their lies.
They instigated it.
They threw the gas on the fire.
And then they told us the fire wasn't there, okay?
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It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no leaves in that way.
So now this kid, Kyle Rittenhouse, he's 17 years old.
Silent Accusations 00:09:50
He's a troubled kid from a troubled home.
He yearns to be a policeman.
We know people like this.
Someone buys him a rifle because he's too young to buy one himself.
He joins some veterans who are patrolling the city and keep it from burning down.
It's vigilante action.
And I'm not in favor of vigilante action per se, except the police have deserted their duty in this town.
In some sense, who can blame them?
Because they're being told that they're the bad guys.
They're the evildoers.
They go out into this place and somebody gets killed.
But these are radicals out on the street, you know, causing this trouble, setting fire to places.
And, you know, when they call it mostly peaceful, it's a misunderstanding of the nature of violence.
Violence is a, when people say, oh, speech is violence, silence is violence.
Really, you're tempted, obviously, you shouldn't, but you're tempted to just punch them in the nose and say, that's violence.
Can you tell the difference?
Because violence, you know, I have punched people and I have been punched.
And violence is a very, very different thing.
It's a new category of action that has nothing to do with silence or protest or anything.
And when, you know, it's like, it really is like you're married for 20 years and you only beat your wife up maybe five or six times.
It's a mostly peaceful marriage.
No, it's not.
No, it's not.
This is, again, calling evil good and good evil and daring you, daring you to say what I am saying right now, it's a lie.
All of it's a lie.
Every bit of it is a lie.
Not just this incident, not just that incident, but all of it is a lie.
So this kid, Kyle Rittenhouse, is watching this happen.
And of course, you know, the lies make everything worse.
When people are telling you that things are peaceful and they're burning, you sort of get angry.
You know, you sort of start to lose your sense of reality and you have to demand to have reality back.
So he goes and joins a veterans group that is policing the city, trying to keep the city from being burned down.
He's out there with his long gun.
People start to attack him.
They see him.
They start to attack him.
These are all white people.
They're all white people.
One of them is a crazy, he's got bipolar disorder.
He is a homeless person.
He has just gotten out of prison.
He has committed several acts of anal rape on children.
This is not a great guy.
He attacks Rittenhouse.
The other guy has also, you know, he's a harder figure to categorize.
He has, I think, domestic violence charges against him, but he's still a little harder.
But one of them was trying to grab his gun.
They attacked him.
He fires.
He kills two of them.
And, you know, and this is the description of him.
So that's what happened, right?
And again, I'm not making a hero out of him.
I think he should have stayed home.
It was a silly thing to do, but he was under attack.
He was under attack by very bad people, white people.
Here's how the left-wing media, now the normal, the normal mainstream media, let's call it, also was bad, but not as bad as the left-wing media.
There's cut three.
Kenosha shooter, Kyle Rittenhouse.
He murdered two people, by the way.
Rittenhouse is basically what you would have had in a school shooter.
He's a 17-year-old kid.
He shouldn't have had a gun.
He crossed state lines to supposedly protect property.
No, he was going out to shoot people.
Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old vigilante.
Kyle Rittenhouse, a vigilante.
Kyle Rittenhouse, the armed teenage vigilante.
A 17-year-old vigilante, arguably a domestic terrorist, picked up a rifle, drove to a different state to shoot people.
Kyle Rittenhouse, a guy who's deeply racist, went with weapons to a Black Lives Matter protest, looking to get in trouble.
He did.
He murdered a couple of people.
Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old kid, just running around shooting and killing protesters.
You see the 17-year-old who was radicalized by Trumpism, took his AR-15 to Kenosha and became a killer.
A white, Trump-supporting, MAGA-loving, Blue Lives Matter social media partisan, 17 years old, picks up a gun, drives from one state to another with the intent to shoot people.
You know, there's still something naive in me, as ancient as I am, that when I look at this, I do not understand how people can do it.
I don't understand how you can look yourself in the mirror to shave and know that you're looking at a person who said those things.
If nothing else, if nothing else, aside from being utter lies, they have no nuance.
How do you know what his motives were?
Because he supported Trump.
You know he's a white supremacist.
And all the people involved are white.
So they're all troublemakers, right?
All of the people involved are white.
And I'll get to that in just a minute.
But from the very start, social media essentially banned people who defended Rittenhouse.
Even now, according to the Blaze, Facebook has banned users from sharing a crowdfunding link to assist with the legal fees for Kyle Rittenhouse.
But why?
Why can't he be defended?
They've defended, they let all kinds of people get defense funds.
He hasn't been convicted.
He's innocent until proven guilty.
At the very least, at the very least, at this point, the trial has made an absolute monkey out of the prosecutor.
I mean, he looks like an idiot.
It doesn't look like they've got anything on the kid.
So why, you know, why are people, why is this, why the silence?
Well, the silence, obviously.
The obvious reason is the silence is because of the lies.
All right.
So the third man he shot is only wounded.
He's shot in the arm.
His name is Gage Grosskreutz.
And they keep calling him a trained paramedic.
He was a paramedic before he went to college or something like this.
He's a Black Lives Matter activist.
He belongs to revolutionary groups that have attacked the police.
He was arrested a couple of days before this incident for lurking around a police station.
He has been convicted for brandishing a firearm while drunk.
You know, this is not a guy.
So he goes on and they cross-examine him.
And this is what he said.
He's also carrying a firearm at this protest, which he is part of.
And this is what he says on the stand.
It wasn't until you pointed your gun at him, advanced on him with your gun, now your hands down, pointed at him, that he fired, right?
Correct.
So now he goes on the next morning.
They immediately have him in ABC cleanup on aisle four.
They have him on ABC this morning and they interview him.
He says, well, that's that.
No, no, no.
He takes it all back.
Because now he's not under oath, right?
So now he's not going to go to prison for lying.
He takes it all back, but the interviewer never says to him, he says, what were you doing with a gun?
He does ask him that, but he never says to him, why were you there?
Right?
We know because all those guys on MSNBC told us, we know that Kyle Rittenhouse was a MAGA supporting white supremacist killer who went out to shoot people.
We know that because they made it up out of their heads, but we don't know why he was there.
I mean, the guy is a Black Lives Matter activist.
That's what he is.
So he was obviously part of that peaceful demonstration that burned the city to the ground.
So ultimately, the defense decided they're going to put the defendant on the stand.
Now, a lot of people say that you shouldn't put a defendant on the stand.
It's too big a risk.
But that's actually not true in murder trials.
This is something I've learned from covering courts.
And I just read the other day that Andy McCarthy, who was a great, great legal writer over at NRO, Andy McCarthy, said the same thing.
But I knew this before, is that you put the guy on the stand because the people, the jury wants to look at him and say, is that guy a killer?
So they put him on the stand, and Rittenhouse tells his side of the story.
It's cut nine.
People were saying cranium him, get him, kill him.
People were screaming, and I just was trying to get to the police running down Sheridan Road.
And you say I'm trying to get to the police.
Why were you trying to get to the police?
So I didn't do anything wrong.
I defended myself.
And finally, he just breaks down emotionally.
It's cut 10.
Once I take that step back, I look over my shoulder and Mr. Rosenbaum, Mr. Rosenbaum was now running from my right side.
And I was cornered from in front of me with Mr. Zaminsky.
And there were people right there.
Take a deep breath, pal.
That's what I wrote.
So just for a lighter moment, Stephen Crowder, the great Stephen Crowder, our pal, was banned from Facebook because the left started making fun of Kyle Rittenhouse, saying he faked tears and who cares if he's crying and all this stuff.
And Crowder put on Facebook, if you accuse Kyle Rittenhouse of faking tears from being forced to relive the trauma of having to shoot violent armed child rapists and arsonists, but you claim PTSD from being called the wrong pronouns, you may be an aol.
And they banned him.
I thought he said you might be.
He'd only said you might be, which I think was incredibly polite, given it was Crowder.
You see how complete it is, though?
From day one beyond day one, in the context of a big lie, that the police are the enemies of black people instead of the protectors of black people.
A cop is lied about.
A wounded man is lied about.
They start a riot through their lies.
A kid goes into the riot and gets attacked by criminals who are white and he's a white supremacist.
Hollywood's Woke Shift 00:15:26
It's an empire of lies.
And in an empire of lies, fear is king.
The idea is to make you afraid.
Don't speak the moral truth.
Don't call things what they are.
Call evil good, call good evil.
Don't give your opinion.
Don't defend yourself if you're under attack.
Don't stop the criminals.
Don't call the criminals criminals.
Fear your own judgments, your own morality, your gender, your lungs, your health, your truth.
Courage is the virtue without which there is no virtue.
So courage is what's under attack, and it's under attack every step of the way, everywhere we turn, by these liars, by the emperors of the empire of lies.
You have to learn.
Donald Trump is not going to save you.
Vatican's not going to save you.
It has to be us.
You are the culture too.
Everything you say, everything you do, what you teach your children, what you show your fellow workers, what you show your friends, what you do on the street, it is all part of the culture.
You have to stand up.
You have to speak the truth.
You have to, politely, but constantly.
Or you can be afraid because then you'll have no virtue and then the world belongs to them.
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It's just not right.
All right, we're talking about the culture.
So I wanted to bring on Christian Toto, my friend.
He's an award-winning film critic, journalist, and he's the founder of HollywoodintToto.com.
If you have not been on Hollywood in Toto, you should go.
It is a great movie site and it's done from the right-wing point of view.
Heights hosts the Write on Hollywood podcast.
And he's got a book coming out called The Virtue Bombs: How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul.
It's got a forward by some guy named Andrew Clavin.
Pre-order it.
Go on Amazon and pre-order it to build up the demand for it so that the publisher knows it's going to be in demand.
Virtue Bombs by Christian Toto.
Christian, it's great to see you.
How are you doing?
Good to be here.
Thanks so much.
So what does virtue bombs mean?
It sounds like a double entendre there.
You know, it's funny, someone reached out to me recently and said, was it hard writing your first book?
And I thought, no, it wrote itself and that's a cliche.
But, you know, I've been covering all of this information for so long now.
This is all about how Hollywood is bending to the woke community.
It's about how freedom of speech is eroding before our eyes.
It's about how the Hollywood players are scared to death of saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, sharing the wrong social media post, and the consequences of it.
You know, I love movies.
I got into this whole business because I was just enraptured by film.
I used to watch Abner Costello movies with my dad, and that was sort of the spark that set things going.
And I'm just kind of aghast at what's happening in the culture.
You know, the funny thing about this is that it actually is the left eating its own to some degree.
I mean, people, you know, attack me for saying politically incorrect things.
I don't care.
I'm not appealing to them.
I'm not trying to reach them.
But most of the people in Hollywood are already kind of woke.
They're kind of at least kind of lefty.
And it's kind of the left eating its own.
I mean, you tell some of these stories.
You tell a story about Lena Dunham that I'd never heard before.
It's actually kind of amazing what they're doing to each other.
Yeah, you know, listen, it used to be, let's pick on Kirk Cameron because he's a Christian.
Right.
And he was fair game.
But, you know, Tina Faye, you know, she's a liberal writer and a very talented personality.
We're not going to really go near her because she's one of us.
Those protections really don't exist.
Now, there are layers of security you can build up based on your politics.
Alec Baldwin is a perfect example.
He's done enough to get canceled two, three, four times.
And this is even before the recent shooting tragedy.
But, you know, now everyone is fair game.
If you don't do exactly what you want to do, say what you want to do, you'll get trouble.
You get in trouble.
And I think the actors are just really terrified of this new reality.
So they're trying to bend to the whims as much as possible, but it's never quite enough.
I mean, the Lena Dunnathan was hilarious to me because she came on and it was, you weren't allowed to say, oh, she's a dumpy, unattractive dame.
You know, that was not something that you was allowed to come out of your mouth.
So she starts a clothesline for overweight women and they attacked her because the clothes weren't big enough.
There wasn't overweight enough.
It just seems like you cannot possibly, you can't possibly win.
I mean, you're not even allowed to act.
This really bothers me because I love actors and I love watching them work.
And I remember watching Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot.
He played a guy with cerebral palsy.
And there's something magic about watching a guy not afflicted with that transform himself into somebody who is afflicted with it.
But now they would say, well, you got to get an actor with cerebral palsy.
Did actors fight back against this at all?
You know, some do.
It's a small percentage of the overall community.
You think they'd be louder and prouder about this.
But when they do, they say, listen, I understand I need to be an ally.
I understand these communities are not represented well enough, but I am an actor.
I need to kind of apply my craft.
So there are some voices saying that, but not enough for sure.
And others are afraid to say anything.
And often an actor will say, you're right.
I'm sorry.
I quit.
It's amazing when an actor, you know, all actors, the biggest to the smallest, they want the next role.
So when they quit a role, it's not inconsequential.
It means something.
I mean, who has done that?
Who have quit roles because whoever, the woke, says that they're not the right person to do it?
Scarlett Johansson did.
Hallie Berry did.
I think Mandy Patinkin may have done so as well.
It was a Broadway situation that he stepped back.
But again, you know, Hallie Berry is an Oscar winner.
Scarlett Johansson, maybe the most powerful woman in Hollywood.
She's beautiful.
She, you know, she guarantees fannies in the seats in theaters, which is a rare thing these days.
She's really good at what she does.
And you would think any project that has Scarlett Johansson on board is a winner right off the bat.
But when she was going to play a trans person, it went awry.
What did she do?
Did she basically just stand down right away?
No.
So at first, she stood her ground very briefly.
You can actually probably you can do time-lapse photography was so quick.
But she said, listen, I'm an actress.
This is what I do.
And she pointed to other stars who have done trans performances, including Dallas Buyers Club, Geraldito, who won an Oscar for that, for that kind of a role.
And so she kind of pushed that, you know, as her defense, which in theory was smart because it wasn't like this was 20, 30 years ago.
This is like maybe two, three, four years ago.
Well, the wave of outrage hit, and we don't even know how big it is, so just enough that she heard it.
And then she said, oh, you know, she did a speech.
There's a whole chapter in a book.
The kind of the speech, the hostage apology.
I'm so sorry.
I'll be an ally.
I'll never do it again.
I've learned that kind of thing.
So it is a question I wonder all the time.
How big do you like?
How big is the threat to her really?
If she just said, get stuffed, pound sand, and she made the movie, do you think that they could shut her down, shut the movie down?
You know, I think it's complicated.
I think the way that the Dave Chappelle situation is playing out now is a great example because he's arguably the biggest comedian of our time right now, maybe the most talented of our time.
And he's not officially canceled because the media always says, well, he can still speak.
You know, like, oh, that's, oh, good for him.
He's still allowed to be in the public arena.
But at the same time, you know, film festivals basically threw his new movie aside.
He says that he can't find a distributor for his new film.
So I think there are layers to everything here.
So Scarlett Johansson would probably be fine.
She'd probably survive.
But there certainly are chances that she would not get a sponsorship.
She would not get a commercial deal.
Maybe some, you know, some directors may say, you know, I want to pick someone else for this role.
So it's a case-by-case thing, but I don't think you get away unscathed.
It's just a matter of if you stand up and other people stand up, then this kind of goes away.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, comedy, you mentioned Dave Chappelle, and comedy is kind of hardest hit because how can you be funny without being able to be a little bit risque and a little bit naughty and all this stuff?
And you would think, I mean, some guys talk about it.
Bill Burr talks about it.
You know, I think Louis Suke, who was canceled for bad sexual behavior, as if like no other comedian or celebrity has bad sexual behavior, all of which, all of his bad sexual behavior, consensual, by the way, he was canceled.
But I noticed that he's been playing across the country to packed houses.
He's just kind of doing it under the radar.
Is comedy a redoubt?
Is comedy a place where people can stand up a little bit more because we expect them to be so out there?
Well, yes and no.
I'm in contact with a lot of different comedians who have basically said, you know, the heck with cancel culture.
I'll do what I want to do.
But they have to reinvent their careers.
It can't be business as usual.
They have to go to podcasting.
They have to kind of go on alternative media websites.
They have to go hit the road hard and build their fan base because the traditional outlets, the avenues, the distribution channels, they shut down if you're canceled enough.
So you can't go to A, B, and C. You've got to go to D ⁇ E.
And that's part of the problem here.
Now, I've met some comedians who say that they're bigger now than they were prior to being canceled.
Tyler Fisher comes to mind, a very funny fellow, happens to be in a daily wire motion picture.
You know, so he's been able to kind of, because he's smart and he's funny and he's creative, he kind of just kind of zigzagged around what's going on in the culture.
But that's not easy.
It's not for everyone.
And, you know, not everyone is an entrepreneur who can make these changes.
It's a really delicate situation right now.
You know, it's interesting.
Jean Cleese, I think it was just today, he was invited somewhere to speak and they had canceled a guy for doing a Hitler imitation during a debate on good taste.
And he was showing what bad taste looked like.
And he did a Hitler imitation and he got in trouble.
And Clee said, hey, I've done Hitler imitations.
I'm not coming.
You know, I'm canceling myself.
So I guess if more people would do that, you just think these apologies are just blood in the water and they devour you for them.
The book is Virtue Bombs, How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul by Christian Toto.
I contributed a forward because I think this is important stuff.
You know, it's interesting.
I read today that women are not going back to the movies.
The movies are reopening up, but women are not showing up.
And I wonder, do you think that that has anything to do with woke or is that something else?
I mean, women seem in some ways hardest hit.
You're supposed to pretend that a man can magically become a woman.
You're supposed to pretend that women don't want the things that they want, the love and security and home and children that most women actually still do want, though they're sometimes afraid to say so.
You're supposed to think all women are strong in the movies.
They all walk around with their fists on their hips, you know, and I always think like, ah, God, you know, I would never live with a woman like that.
Do you think women are hardest hit by this?
And do you think that they're a way that maybe the unwoke can speak back?
You know, I think when it comes to going to the movies right now, I suspect that there's a fear of COVID that persists within this.
I mean, this is anecdotal.
This is just an observation.
When I go to the store, when I go shopping, when I'm in a restaurant, I think generally speaking, I see more women than men who are wearing masks, which sort of denotes a greater sense of fear and worry about the pandemic.
So I think that's what's going on.
It's also interesting that there have been a lot of kids' films, which are usually just catnip at the box office that have really struggled to find purchase.
And I think maybe it's mom saying, I don't want to drag my kids to the movies this weekend.
So I think that's part of it.
So, you know, bigger picture, culturally wise, I think it's too soon to tell, but that's my sense.
I think it's a little bit of just wariness of going back in public.
So to play the devil's advocate for a minute, I mean, I detest these woke people.
I got to say, I think their philosophy is actually wicked in and of itself.
But what I really detest is this shutting people down.
But what about the argument that, oh, we put on shows like Will and Grace and they increase tolerance for gay people.
So why can't we increase tolerance for pansexual black men from the planet Socorro, you know, by having Land or whatever his name is Landrau called Driesian or whatever his name is, become pansexual?
You know, what is there some argument for kind of pushing Hollywood to include people so that they become normalized?
You know, one of the problems going on in Hollywood now is a collective guilt that they've done badly, that they haven't been inclusive, that they've been kind of pushing aside people for the wrong reasons.
Anna Haiti is telling an older story when she first started courting Alan DeGeneres.
The movie students are like, oh, no, you can't be an out lesbian dating another out lesbian.
Like that was just, that was just unacceptable.
And that's in the like early to mid-90s, I think.
So, you know, I think that there's a sense that we have done poorly by minority groups and we want to do better.
And that's a good thing.
I mean, I want everyone, every artist, no matter who they are, what they believe, to say, I've got a script.
It's a killer script.
I want you to make a movie out of it.
And I want to see that movie.
So I think that's what's really partly to blame here as far as the current woke situation.
But the bottom line is if you want to make a movie and it has a trans figure and the character is noble and interesting, well, then the market will decide.
Is it a good movie?
Do people rallying to it?
And if not, then maybe you don't make movies of that quality anymore.
I mean, I don't mind more voices, more content, more information.
But we're seeing is the opposite.
Like you can tell that story.
You can say that joke.
That's where it gets dangerous.
You know, it is interesting to me.
Like, I can honestly say, like, I never cared what group a story was about.
I've watched movies about all kinds of Americans.
You know, I always would go to a Denzel Washington movie or whatever.
He's one of my favorite stars.
But now I feel like I'm being preached at.
When I turn on Netflix and it says the Black Lives Matter collection, I think get stuffed.
You know, I move on to the next thing.
And I wonder if they're not actually, as they so often do, achieving the opposite of what they're trying to achieve.
One thing I've noticed is that for a few weeks, maybe even months after the George Floyd riots and things like that, Netflix was pushing a lot of black content.
And you turn it on, there'd just be one film after another about black lives, as they would say.
And I've noticed that's kind of stopped, because especially when you look at what's most popular on these sites, they're almost always, you know, just movies.
I mean, movies that tell good stories.
And frequently, it's a majority white country.
Frequently, these have white people, more white people in them than blacks.
Netflix's Black Content Drought 00:06:06
And I wonder, will the market correct for this or are they going to go down?
Is Hollywood going to go down?
I mean, you call your book virtue bombs.
And a lot of times I think virtue does bomb.
And I'm wondering if the market will force them to correct.
Two notes.
One is when all that empowerment was going on, which again, in principle, it's just fine.
I noticed that certain empowering films weren't included, like Uncle Tom, a documentary from Hilaria Elder, and created equal Clarence Thomas in his own words.
They didn't crack that list, by the way.
So hmm, that's interesting.
But I think that Hollywood is going to really need to be punished severely.
I'm not saying I'm not rooting it on, but I just, I think as an observer, they don't get the situation that they're facing right now.
This whole go, you know, get woke, go broke.
They don't see it.
They don't understand it.
They don't respect it.
They don't process it.
And it's going to take a few more mega bombs before they do.
And just a quick note, you know, when Ghostbusters came out, the all-female Ghostbusters, the press was just enraptured.
You know, you can't not like this movie.
Otherwise, you're a misogynist.
And then I think a year later, Wonder Woman came out, which was wonderful and charming and interesting.
And Gal Gadot was just spectacular.
They didn't do any of this woke stuff.
They just said, here's our movie.
Hope you like it.
And everyone did.
And that's the real message there.
And, you know, it was funny in Wonder Woman.
One of the things that was charming about Wonder Woman was that she was so girly that, you know, when she first saw a baby, she was like, ooh, a baby.
You know, she was like, actually, adorable.
And it made a big difference.
Yeah.
You know, this is interesting.
I mean, you talk at one point in Virtue Bombs in the book, you talk about the cultural revolution in China.
And I guess I wonder, like in your imagination, do you see this going so far that it actually becomes impossible for people to speak their minds?
It's something that keeps me up at night.
And it's something that scares me.
And I think we see flickers of it.
We also see pushback.
But when you think about what's going on in big tech and the suppression of ideas and thoughts and arguments and consequences, that it's not just the Hollywood stuff I cover and that you and I talk about and enjoy.
It's far deeper, far more frightening than that.
And that's my big fear.
Listen, I think part of that would be Hollywood will continue to kind of clamp down on the stories we can tell.
That's certainly, that's a side effect, you know, a collateral damage here.
But that's the bigger worry is that, you know, does it matter that what we told, what we're told were conspiracy theories a year ago are now likely and very possible?
Yeah.
And that that stuff was hidden from us.
I think the Kyle Rittenhouse situation, I think there were forces that were preventing him from raising money, from telling his story.
Well, we didn't see the trial yet.
Why did big tech sort of clamp down?
It really scares me.
And the consequences are all across the culture, not just Hollywood.
One thing I think they're not seeing quite yet is that ultimately the internet is uncontrollable.
Ultimately, unless you're actually going to become an oppressive China-style government, the internet is something that people can use.
We at the Daily Wire have started making films and we're going to keep going.
And I know it takes a while.
People don't understand that you don't just suddenly make a plate of terrific films.
It really takes a while to get going.
But once we're making films with our values and people show up and watch those, it's going to be pretty ugly for Hollywood if they're making woke films that bomb and we're making not woke films that make money.
That's going to be a very tough situation for them to be in.
And I'm really hoping that, you know, I'm hoping that that'll change things.
You know, I have an agent, a really talented agent who loves his work, who quit because he couldn't, he retired because his white stable of writers could no longer get hired.
They simply would not hire white writers.
He said to me that I am the only white writer he knows who's getting hired because I'm hired by conservatives, you know, which I thought was good payback for my experiences in Hollywood.
But, you know, that's illegal.
That is probably illegal to do that.
Is there some point, again, you know, I just keep wondering, is there any pocket?
When you look at the field, is there any pocket of resistance, true resistance, not the resistance, which is not the resistance, but is there any pockets where you turn and think like, am I hearing any rumble here?
Or is this just Hollywood-wide?
They're just not going to, no one's going to stand up for this.
I don't think we're there yet.
You know, I thought we were getting close when Dave Chappelle's last special hit, Sticks and Stones, and then Bill Burr put out Pay for Tiger.
That one-two punch, really kind of savaging what we're talking about.
I thought, wow, maybe this is the moment.
This is the time.
And then the George Floyd situation happened, and we went multiple steps back.
I don't know.
I do think there is a sort of a tipping point where the comedians like Tyler Fisher and Ryan Long and JP Sears and Tim Dylan and Joe Rogan, if they keep making gobs of money, if they keep drawing throngs of fans, I think that's where we really have the hope is that people will keep using their dollars and their support and their loyalty to these figures who are just counterculture heroes in the very best sense of the word.
So I think that's when it's going to change.
And I also think if we just had one knockout comedy, indie, bare budget, no stars, that was funny and outrageous and crazy and harkening back to Animal House and the hangover.
And it was so uproarious that it couldn't be denied.
I'm waiting for that movie.
And I think that might be another cultural moment.
And they'll try to fight that one tooth and nail.
But I think that's, those are two possible paths out of this situation.
Interesting.
The book is Virtue Bombs, How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul by Christian Toto.
It goes on sale in January, but pre-order it now so they know to order enough copies.
Christian, it's always great to see you and I appreciate it.
I hope you come back and talk again.
I'd love to.
Battle for Dollars 00:02:36
Thanks so much.
Thanks.
All right.
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So talking about fighting and fighting for the culture, last week, the Daily Wire filed a lawsuit against the federal government for the unconstitutional mandates that the Biden administration is forcing on large employers and their employees.
While this isn't something we enjoy doing, we're happy to see that applying pressure is already creating change.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a temporary stay preventing Biden's mandate from going into effect, citing grave statutory and constitutional issues.
This does not mean the battle is over, rather, that the battle has just begun.
Biden is determined to pass these mandates, and we cannot let our guard down even for a second.
We're not just fighting for the Daily Wire employees.
We're fighting for the medical freedom of every single brave American who is facing termination based on this unconstitutional and tyrannical mandate.
It's extremely important that everyone's voice is loud right now.
This is what I'm talking about.
This is an urgent matter, and your medical freedom depends on it.
If you want to support the fight, to make your personal medical decisions without government interference, sign our petition against Biden's authoritarian mandate.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans have already signed the petition in just a few days, but we need many more people to stand with us to reach our goal.
Please head to dailywire.com/slash do not comply to sign the petition today.
And let me remind you, in this culture war, I have my new book.
The Battle Has Just Begun 00:16:13
It's my 36th novel.
They tell me that.
I didn't know that, but it's when Christmas comes.
It's available everywhere.
You buy books.
It has been described as wonderful, gripping, a pure delight by the great Dean Kuntz himself.
The book centers around the story of a sleuthing English professor who will need a Christmas miracle to prove a condemned man innocent.
This story was in my mind for 25 years before the great Otto Penzler, the greatest editor, mystery editor in the country, for many, many years he has been.
He called me up and he said, Would you write a Christmas book?
And I said, gee, I've had this story in my head for 25 years and I haven't been able to solve it.
Let me see if I can.
And I did.
I'm incredibly proud of it.
It's a seasonal tale of tradition, family, and, of course, murder.
Its chilling twists, our best experience, curled up beside a burning Euro log.
Please go pick up a copy for yourself or for your thrill-seeking loved ones at Amazon, anywhere you buy books today, just in time for Christmas.
So while we're laughing our way through the fall of the Republic, and while we're talking about fear, I wanted to talk about the apocalypse.
We want to laugh our way through the fall of the entire universe.
And I'll show you what I mean by fear in a moment.
But first, let's approach it from this way.
One of the founding stories of Western civilization is the story of how Socrates, the Greek philosopher, got in trouble with the law and was finally executed with the law.
And he got up in court.
It's usually called the Apologia written by Plato, tells this story.
It's a wonderful, wonderful story, and it's a wonderful piece of literature.
If you've never read it, it's sometimes just called the Apology.
But Socrates says that a friend of his named Carol Fon, I think is how it's pronounced, went to the Oracle at Delphi and asked if anyone was wiser than Socrates.
And the Oracle said, no, no man is wiser.
No one is wiser.
And Socrates says he got curious about that because he knew he wasn't wise, that he had no wisdom whatsoever.
It's sometimes quoted as, I know, I know nothing.
So I wanted to find out how the oracle, which is always right, could say that I was the wisest man alive.
So he went and started talking to powerful people in Athens.
So he talked to politicians, he talked to artists, he talked to all kinds of different people who were considered to be wise people, thinking someone must be wiser than I am because I am not wise at all.
And what he realized was, is that they were all a bunch of frauds.
Not only were they not wise, but they thought they were wise.
And he realized he was wiser than them because he knew he knew nothing while they thought they knew something.
And they thought the Greek courts thought that it was so funny, they put him to death because he had made fun, really, of all these people.
He had belittled all the powerful people.
He was canceled, really.
It really is true.
He was canceled because he belittled the cultural powers in the town.
Now, 400 years later, Jesus got in trouble for much the same thing, for making the authorities look bad, and he also was executed.
But one of the things he talked about was he said that the world was going to come to an end, and after his death, he would return to judge the living and the dead.
And he told people what that was going to look like.
He said the sun will go dark, the moon will not give its light, the stars will fall from the sky, the heavenly bodies will be shaken, people will see the Son of Man, and he is usually identified as the Son of Man.
People will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory, and he will send his angels and gather his elect from the four winds from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens.
So a very dramatic moment when the world ends and Jesus comes back to judge us all and gather his faithful around him.
So they would say to him, well, when's that going to happen, right?
Because at one point the disciples were kind of looking around, waiting, thinking this was going to happen at any minute.
And he said, no one knows.
He says, about that day or hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven knows, not even the Son of God, but only the Father knows when that will come.
So many people read those words and interpret them to mean, I know, I know exactly when it's going to be 8 o'clock on December 3rd.
And it's like, I mean, this is a very telling fact about people in lots of ways.
First, it means that no matter what is written in the Gospels, no matter what's right there in red in the Gospels, they will interpret it to mean what they want it to mean.
They will tell you what it means.
And the other thing it tells you is people hate the fact that they don't know.
And that's what makes them fools.
What made Socrates wise was that he knew that he didn't know.
But people want to pretend they know.
They want to think they know.
And I will tell you, as you get older and you keep your eyes open, you know less and less.
The more you see, the more experience you have, the more you know you know less and less.
So there are all these predictions.
And all through time, from the beginning of Christianity, there have been all these predictions, not only about when the apocalypse would come, when Jesus would return, but also what exactly it was going to look like, which is actually not in the Bible.
By the time you got to American evangelicalism, which calls itself that old-time religion, but really has only been around for a very short period of time, maybe a century, maybe a century and a half.
It's not an old-fashioned form of religion.
It's quite new.
They have this detailed agenda, what's going to happen.
And you've read those, some of you have read those books, Left Behind, which were massive bestsellers.
And they have the rapture, and there's going to be the tribulation, and they all have big, you know, capital letters as they discuss them.
The rapture, which is where everybody, all the good people are kind of swept up into heaven, comes from a verse in Thessalonians that says, this is Paul writing.
He says, the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.
After that, we are still alive and our left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will be with the Lord forever.
Now, that seems pretty obvious to me to be colorful, figurative language to describe a spiritual thing.
We all use physical metaphors to describe spiritual things for the simple reason we experience the spiritual through our bodies.
We have no other way to do it.
And so it has a physical, we feel physically, we feel spiritual things physically, and people take it literally.
You know, there's a famous memoir by Saint Teresa, who was a 16th century nun.
She talks about an experience of ecstasy.
There's a famous statue of it.
I think we have a picture by Bernini.
And even at the time, it was criticized as being very sexual.
It's this nun kind of splayed back with this ecstatic look on her face, an angel with an arrow.
And this is what Teresa says.
She says she saw an angel piercing her with an arrow, even into her entrails.
And now a Freudian, because we're all materialists now, a Freudian would say, well, that's obviously a sexual symbol, but it's really the other way around.
It really is a spiritual symbol with sexual imagery, right?
because we experience ecstasy in a kind of erotic way, meaning through our bodies, but we're actually experiencing something spiritual.
And I think the same is true here.
No one's going to be snatched up into the air.
Heaven isn't up and hell is down.
Those are physical descriptions of spiritual things.
And some people don't even feel.
I mean, this is the thing.
People are so certain about this.
People, especially who grew up in an evangelical setting, are so certain that this is the truth.
They don't realize there are many, many ways that people interpret the predictions in the Bible.
For instance, the book of Revelation, which is often seen as the description of the apocalypse, has been interpreted in many different ways, including that he was describing something that had already happened.
These are people who are called praetorists, I think, that he was describing something already happened, or he was predicting the fall of Rome, something that has already now happened.
And there are some people who think, no, this is the way the apocalypse is, but it's interpretations.
And the important thing is we don't know.
To know that you don't know is a kind of wisdom.
And by the way, I find it sometimes very upsetting because many lovely Christian people don't invest money and don't tell their kids to go to college because they think the world is going to end.
So what's the point?
And the thing is, they don't know.
Jesus said they don't know.
Invest your money, go to college, live your life with the feeling that it could be any moment, so you live a good and beautiful life.
I do think, though, that there is a Christian view of the end of the world that differs from the materialist view of the end of the world.
And those are two different kinds of view.
And one of the points about a Christian view is there are going to be, in a sense, two ends of the world.
There's going to be an end for people who had faith and who believed.
And there's going to be an end for people who did not have faith and did not believe and lived out the meaning of that creed.
I mean, I don't think the thing is, the thing about belief is it's not saying, oh, yes, I believe in Jesus and I'm on the Jesus team.
It's a way of living your life, right?
I mean, if you believe in gravity, you don't step off a roof.
And if you believe in Jesus, you don't pay as much attention to other sins as you pay to your own.
And if you've ever seen the Sistine Chapel, and if you haven't, you should.
In the Sistine Chapel, there is a picture of the beautiful, beautiful picture of the Last Judgment, with Jesus with one arm up and one arm down, and one set of people are being sent down into a figuration of hell and are joining the demons in hell and the others are lifting up into heaven with the saints.
And that's the idea of the sort of two different ends.
And, you know, it is interesting, and it's interesting, but not really that strange, that when we look at the difference between Christian people and how Christian people think the future will be, and materialists and what they think the future will be, we do get to get a sort of whiff of brimstone.
We get to see a sort of the ways this could work out.
And I am not pretending, this is all, what I'm saying now is pure speculation, and I'm certainly not saying that the end of the world is nigh or that this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper.
I'm saying that when you look at the way materialists picture the future and you look at the way Christians picture the future, you can sort of see a hellish and heavenly difference between the two.
The material view of the future is that everything scientific, everything material is progress and we're going to get more and more progress.
I think I've talked about this before.
I call this the Enlightenment narrative.
You can read about it in Steven Pinker's book, Enlightenment Now, and Jonah Goldberg's book, which is more conservative, The Suicide of the West.
And the idea of these books is that we had this dark Middle Ages, and then we burst forth into a scientific world, the Renaissance.
All these words were invented at the time, by the way, as propaganda for the people who believed in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
The idea was there was a dark ages.
Like the people in the dark ages didn't walk around saying, like, oh, it's dark, you know?
And these were the Middle Ages.
They came between the wonderful classical world and the wonderful world of the Renaissance, the rebirth of classicism.
The Renaissance means rebirth.
And in between, there were the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages.
The people, the Middle Ages, weren't going like, ah, this is the Middle Ages.
I wish this was end and we could get to the next phase.
We could have the rebirth and the Enlightenment after the Dark Ages.
They thought that they were living in the modern world.
They thought that they were living at the time when things, at the cutting edge of modernity.
So the Enlightenment narrative is pretty simplistic.
The idea of the future of just going forward is simplistic, but it does have this going for it, is science has made the world better.
I think we all agree with that.
Cures have made the world better.
And the idea is that that's just going to continue, that science is going to continue, that materialism is going to save us.
Now, they don't even call it science anymore.
They call it the science, like the Wizard of Oz, you know, come into the presence of the science.
Follow the science, you know.
And so the idea is now we used to, in the Middle Ages, we used to have this sense that we were trying to live a good life in keeping with creation, but now it's we are going to control creation.
Everything's material.
Material can be controlled.
Even our bodies are going to be controlled.
Here's a little excerpt from Yuval Harari, the historian.
He's a very materialist guy.
I think he's wrong about everything, but he's a wonderful writer.
And he says, science says that nobody is ever made happy by getting a promotion, winning the lottery, or even finding true love.
People are made happy by one thing and one thing only, pleasant sensations in their bodies, which of course are created by chemicals.
So if we put those chemicals into you and you are happy, then you are in fact happy.
And like it's a real interesting question.
Like if you take a love potion and you fall in love, are you in fact in love?
And we'll talk about that another day.
But the prophets of this materialist future, guys like Nietzsche, Freud and Marx, see everything in terms of power, because what is there but the power to control the world?
And the interesting thing is we've kind of seen that future in, we've seen it in the French Revolution, the terror after the French Revolution when everything was going to be perfect.
And we're seeing it now in this idea of Mark Zuckerberg in his metaverse.
We're just going to be in control of our environment.
We're not even going to be human anymore.
We're just going to be in control of our environment.
Some people, I think, are already living in the metaverse.
It's called basically watching porn.
But religious people have a different view of the future, which is the view that in going forward, you return to the place from which you came, which is Eden, which is paradise.
We're thrown out of paradise.
We have to go forward through experience to get back to our innocence.
T.S. Eliot, the great Christian poet, wrote a poem called Four Quartets, and he said, we shall not cease from exploration.
We're not going back.
We're going forward.
He says, but the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time.
And that, I think, is what Jesus meant when he said you must become as a child to enter the kingdom of heaven.
He didn't mean you should regress to being a snot-nosed, ignorant, helpless little kid.
He meant you should go forward until you've become so wise that you see what children see, but you see it with knowledge.
So the child thinks the teddy bear can talk.
He thinks everything is alive with spirit.
He thinks his teddy bear can talk, but you see that the heavens speak the glory of God.
And that's a very different future.
And you can sort of see how one is going to end up with this kind of hellish.
It is hellish.
It promises you power.
It promises you immortality.
It promises you joy.
But you see people who live this material life and they really wind up miserable and they wind up enslaved and a few people have power and everybody else is just living in the metaverse getting their guaranteed income and sort of sitting in their chair pretending they're out in the world.
And in the Christian idea, we move forward until we return to the garden.
We return in love and to a kind of innocence through experience.
And that makes a lot of sense to me.
I mean, as I said, the older I get, the more I know I know nothing.
The older I get, the more I see that the world is infused with spirit, which is what I saw when I was a child.
When I saw it as a child, just like when people saw it in the Middle Ages, it was almost a superstition.
It was almost an instinct propped up by superstition.
Now when I see it, it's in fact very clear-eyed and very awake to all the evil in life and to all the material pain in life, but it just sees, it sees spirit in that world.
It sees the world as the voice of God, almost the language of God.
I think the difference as we go forward to which way our society goes, not maybe the apocalypse, not maybe the end, although maybe it will be since nobody knows, but I think the difference is going to be what happens to women.
And it's going to involve the choices that women make, because I think women are at the center of the problem we're having now, of the fight we're having now, and they are the dividing line between the materialists who want to go in one direction and the spiritualists or the theists who want to go in another direction.
I'll talk about that next week.
All right, if you are buried under your problems, you're about to dig your way out because it is time for the mailbag.
Here's the deal, guys.
I'll get the vaccine.
Purpose and Passion 00:09:03
You f ⁇ ing leave me alone.
Yeah!
Yeah.
All right, a great question from Joseph who says, Dear Mr. Spencer's dad, no relation.
The Clavenless Week nearly killed me, but the possibility of you bestowing your wisdom upon me was enough to keep me going.
I want to know how you deal with the Hevel of life.
And I'll explain what that means in just a minute.
He says, I love painting and playing music.
I enjoy writing and photography.
I have a blast baking and gardening and, of course, reading and listening to podcasts.
He says, I like politics, philosophy, psychology, religion, history, science.
The list goes on and on, and I'm trying to be a good man, reading my Bible, staying fit, working hard, and loving my wife.
Despite all this passion and all this effort, it still seems, like it or not, I am not enough.
In Ecclesiastes, the teacher labels all things as hevel.
Some translate this as meaningless, in vain, or my favorite incongruent.
My hope and faith is in the Lord, but every now and again, there is this sense that my life and my choices are nothing but vapor, which can lead me to the real issue of ignoring my passions and losing motivation.
Is this a feeling you are familiar with?
And if so, what is the best way to counter it?
Now, the meaning of hevel, I'm sure you've all heard the line from Ecclesiastes, vanity, vanity, all is vanity.
And that's hevel.
It's vain.
It's meaningless.
There's nothing to it.
Some translate it as vapor as smoke.
It's all just smoke and disappears.
And of course, all thinking people have experienced that and have kind of faced that.
And it's like facing an abyss.
It's like standing on the edge of an abyss and seeing the darkness that life is grass.
You come, you go, you disappear in a moment.
Anything that you make will soon disappear.
Anything that you achieve will disappear.
Your children, your bloodline will disappear.
Then the world will disappear.
Then the universe will disappear.
What is the point of it all?
It no longer troubles me.
It really doesn't.
It's not something I think about, but it has, because I know life is meaningless in the same way that beauty is meaningless because it's a good in itself with no reference to anything else.
Secondary goods have immediate meaning.
You know, because it rests on another good.
So you know why it's there, right?
Work is good because it supplies sustenance.
Sustenance is good because it supports life.
But life is just a good in and of itself.
So what could the meaning possibly be?
It's just like beauty.
Beauty is just there.
It is just there.
It is a good in itself.
So your real question is not, It's not how can I deal with the vanity of life.
It's why am I not fully experiencing the good of life?
Why does it all feel like hell when it just should feel good in and of itself?
I mean, nobody ever looks at a beautiful sunset and says, yeah, well, what's it for?
What do you do with it?
You just think, wow, that's great.
And that should be, that's the joy that I talk about in life.
That should be the way you look at your life.
Not that it's painless, not that it's happy, because God knows there's so much grief and pain in life, but that it's good.
It is essentially good.
And you are here and totally wiped, totally invested in.
So it's possible, it is possible that you are living your life without purpose, even though you're doing all the right things, you're reading your Bible, you're loving your wife, you're working hard, you enjoy what you enjoy, but you don't see the purpose of doing all that.
And people think that purpose is always doing good or loving your wife or composing music or giving charity.
Those are means to the purpose.
Those are ways you reach the purpose, which is the purpose of your life.
I'm going to tell you the purpose of your life.
It's becoming the beautiful thing that God made you to be.
God is the artist.
You are the work.
God is making you.
And He's making you through the things you love and through the pains that you suffer and through the things that you are compelled to do by your individual personality, the beautiful things that you're compelled to do, not the ugly things that your flesh sometimes desires.
And one day, if you are a great enough work of art, you will become an active part of the artist, which is what happens to works of art, right?
They become part of us.
And you will become a part of the artist, a branch, an actual living branch of the vine that is God, right?
And because we're part of our own creation, right?
Our all in our own creation is to give ourselves into the hands of the artist.
And we do that by acting in love, by acting in forgiveness, by not doing the stupid things that our body wants to do, but doing the beautiful things that our soul knows to do and what we know, and by moving toward who we are.
So when you're making love to your wife, when you are composing your music, when you're exercising and staying fit, if you can focus on what is happening, on the good that is happening to you in that moment, as they say nowadays, in the moment of that good, you will find that this question stops bothering you.
Now, I will tell you something.
You can only do this for a few minutes at a time.
It is very hard to do, but as you do it for a few minutes every year, it's a practice.
It is an actual thing you practice doing, what they call in religion a praxis.
It is a way of doing it.
I think it's the meaning of the Mass.
When you go into the Mass, you say, I am now going to clear my mind and focus only on this.
And it's hard.
It's hard to keep your mind focused.
It's hard to keep nonsense from coming in.
It's hard to keep yourself, your ego, from coming in.
It's only when you lose yourself that you find yourself.
And when you lose yourself and find yourself, then suddenly this question of the vaporousness of life will not bother you because life becomes a good in itself.
And when you practice it, of course, if you can do it for a minute a day, if you can do it for 10 seconds a day, the next day you can do it for 20 seconds and you can do it more and more.
And this question will stop bothering you.
You will find, because you will find that life is, in fact, a good in itself.
From Colton, hello, ruler.
You know, I have just solved all your problems.
Hello, ruler of all that is bald, whose wisdom is only challenged by King Solomon.
Meh.
My wife and I are in our mid-20s.
We've been trying to have a baby for about 16 months now and nothing has worked.
We're in the process of finding a fertility doctor and pray it can be solved.
My question is, how can we find happiness together if having our own children isn't possible?
My wife is the exact woman you describe on the show.
All she's ever wanted is to be a stay-at-home mom, raising and loving our children.
I'm scared if we don't have children, our relationship will deteriorate.
Please bless us with your internal and balding wisdom.
Well, your problem is actually not infertility yet.
Your problem is fear.
You know, this is the kind of thing we're talking about.
I mean, this is why Jesus says, don't worry about what will happen tomorrow.
The evils of today are sufficient unto themselves.
Listen, I hope, I pray, your problem will be solved and you will find that you can have babies.
It is a great joy.
It is a wonderful joy.
But your problem right now is fearing what will happen if you don't.
And here is what will happen if you don't.
You will find another way to have joy, another way to have children.
And you may have grief, you may have regret, and that will become part of the formation of your life if you are attentive to it.
If you keep your eye on God, who is your North Star, and move through that grief to the place that you have to get to, you will find new ways of having joy, and so will your wife.
And maybe that will include adoption.
I don't know what it'll include.
I hope it includes bringing children into your life.
There's a movement now of people going around saying we shouldn't have children.
You should have lots and lots of children.
Every child you don't have is a loss.
You should just keep having them, keep popping them out until you've got as many as you can possibly afford or stand because they are a central joy of life.
So look, I hope it's going to work out.
You know, I really do, and I feel it probably will.
You're young, and there's all kinds of things that doctors can do nowadays.
But your problem is the fear.
You're afraid that your relationship will deteriorate.
Don't be afraid of that.
If this comes to pass, and I hope it won't, but if it comes to pass, then you move through that grief and through that pain and through that loss into a world where you find a way to have the joy that you are made to have.
If you are made to have that joy, you will have it.
And so stop worrying.
Stop worrying about tomorrow.
Deal with the problem that you have right now and see where you end up.
And hopefully it'll be fine.
And a lot of times, you know, a lot of times it is.
All right, I'm going to stop there because I'm just about out of time.
Please go by when Christmas comes.
I'll hold it up again if I have it.
Do I have it?
Yeah, it's right here.
Please go by when Christmas comes.
Don't listen if they tell you it's out of stock.
It's not out of stock.
You can get it.
Order it on Amazon.
I believe, I can't guarantee it, but I believe you'll get it when Christmas comes or before Christmas comes.
You will love it.
And it is important.
It's important to me personally to get it up there again on the Amazon, as high on the Amazon list as we can get it.
Important Book Quality 00:02:03
But I think it's also important that a book of this quality written by one of us makes it.
So please go and buy when Christmas comes.
And then after that, you won't even have a Clavinless week.
You'll have my book to read.
If you don't buy it, so long.
You're about to be cast into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.
If you survive, chance if there is an outbut, but just to sound hopeful, if you survive, I will be here next week with the Andrew Clavin Show.
I am 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'Mico.
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.
Today on the Matt Wall Show, we will expose the people who are openly trying to normalize and destigmatize pedophilia.
It's shocking and you need to hear about it.
Also, Dave Portnoy goes on the offense after the media smears him with a Me Too Hitpiece.
Plus, the media runs cover for Biden after he uses some very unpiecey language during a speech.
And a male rapper wears a dress to an award show.
And we're still supposed to be shocked and impressed by this kind of thing, I guess.
Finally, in our deal of cancellation, we'll deal with the claim that the only way to save our planet is to stop having babies.
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