Andrew Clavin mocks the left’s selective outrage over January 6—dismissing it as a "kerfuffle" while ignoring racial violence—while accusing Democrats of weaponizing COVID mandates and suppressing dissent via tech platforms. He contrasts New York’s "oppression" with Tennessee’s freedom, then pivots to his son Spencer’s theological defense of same-sex relationships, arguing biblical condemnations targeted pagan abuses, not modern love. Listeners debate motherhood vs. career, sociopathic morality, and Pascal’s Wager, while Clavin insists objective evil proves God’s existence. The episode ends with a tease: vaccinated areas see Omicron surges with few deaths, exposing panic over data. [Automatically generated summary]
There have been new developments in the House investigation into the January 6th kerfuffle, now believed to be the worst kerfuffle in American history since the kerfuffle at Nancy Pelosi's house last Thanksgiving when Pelosi's nephew told her the Catholic Church actually opposes abortion.
As you no doubt recall, at the end of last year, Donald Trump claimed that the 2020 election had been stolen and thus committed a flagrant violation of the long-standing American tradition that no one should question the outcome of an election who is now gore.
Stacey Abrams, Hillary Clinton, Adam Schiff, Chuck Schumer, CNN, the three news networks, the New York Times, or the Russian intelligence agents who slip misinformation to the FBI, or of course the FBI.
As a result of the horrible Donald Trump's horrible actions of great horribleness, a disciplined militia of schizophrenics, vagrants, idiots, and loons staged a well-planned attack on the Capitol building in order to carry out their carefully laid plan of charging into the Capitol building and running around aimlessly.
For several hours, the seat of American government became almost as tumultuous and dangerous as a Walmart in San Francisco.
Or as Congresswoman Alexandria Occasional-Cortex put it, quote, this atrocity was an existential threat to the very fabric of my pantsuit.
If I wanted to live in that much fear, I would have moved someplace where my bail reform policies have been put into practice, unquote.
After long months of inciting racial violence by distorting and lying about isolated incidents that represented nothing, Democrats finally discovered a riot they didn't like and decided to form a bipartisan select committee of both Democrats and other Democrats in order to ensure that this country would never again experience political violence that Democrats didn't intentionally cause.
As part of the panel's testimony, soon-to-be former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney read into the record this portion of a transcript of a telephone call between Donald Trump and his one-time chief of staff, Mark Meadows.
Quote, Meadows, Mr. President, you must call for an end to the riot at the Capitol.
Trump, why would people riot at the Capitol?
Meadows, they think the election was stolen.
Trump, the election was stolen.
That's awful.
People should riot at the Capitol.
Meadows, the election wasn't stolen.
Trump, don't lie to me, Meadows, you traitor.
Meadows, you're destroying your legacy.
Trump, do you want fries with that?
Meadows, fries with a riot.
Trump, no, sorry, that was the kid at the drive-thru window.
His voice comes out of a Ronald McDonald face, so it looks like the clown is talking.
It's very cute.
By the way, do you want fries with that or not?
Unquote.
The transcript, never before made public, finally solved the mystery of how the J6 rioters managed to get fries with their fries with their kerfuffle, making it the worst kerfuffle with fries since the Civil War when McDonald's was offering a big kerfuffle in fries for only $1.99.
The House investigation will continue until CNN has no viewers left.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, a big kerfuffle with fries.
Who writes this stuff?
Oh, I do.
Sorry.
Anyway, this is it.
This is the last show.
Before the holidays, you're going into a clavinless two weeks.
Luckily, there'll be Jesus, so that's, you know, that's pretty good, too.
We're going to talk about the new COVID hysteria, plus more on that January 6th committee.
I have a lot to say about that.
We will talk to my son, Spencer Clavin, no relation, about worshiping God while gay, and then we'll, of course, sacrifice him to our dark conservative gods.
This is the last chance you will have until the next chance you have to get my new novel, When Christmas Comes.
Why We Need Trust00:15:44
If you haven't got it yet, please go out and get it.
Even if it comes after Christmas, it is a good read.
It's got over 1,000 reviews now, and it's at five, the average out to five stars, which is the highest you can get when Christmas comes.
I'm hoping it will be the, it's the, it's got already got a sequel coming.
I'm hoping it's going to be a series if we can keep it going.
Also, you want to subscribe to Apple Podcast.
Leave five stars if you like the show.
If you don't like the show, lie and leave five stars anyway.
It's an enormous help to the program.
It really is if you keep us elevated there.
And you can also subscribe to my personal Andrew Clavin YouTube channel.
And if you hit that little bell, you'll hear a little ping and that'll just continue until you're so annoyed you don't know what to do.
If you leave a comment and the comment is sufficiently ugly and distasteful, we will read it on the show because it'll be a perfect part of the show.
Alexander Carter says, I used to tell my daughter she wasn't allowed to quit a sport she signed up for.
Now I sign her up for every sport and encourage her to quit so maybe she too can become athlete of the year.
That is how you become athlete of the year.
And of course, you do want her to have a sex change as well so she can beat all the other players.
All right, we're going to talk more about government overreach in a minute, but this is a good time to think about the way you use the internet.
Did you know that your internet service provider knows every single website you visit?
And what's worse is they can sell that information to ad companies and tech giants who will use your data to target you.
ExpressVPN puts a stop to this.
It creates a secure, encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet so that your online activity can't be seen by anyone.
I use ExpressVPN on all my devices.
It works on everything, phones, laptops, even routers.
So everyone who shares your Wi-Fi can still be protected, even if they don't have ExpressVPN.
The best part is using ExpressVPN is as easy as closing the door.
You just fire up the app, click one button, and you're protected.
So if you're like me and believe your online activity is your business, secure yourself by visiting expressvpn.com slash clavin today.
Use my exclusive link, exprsvpn.com slash clavin, and you can get an extra three months free.
That's expressvpn.com slash clavin.
I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, oh, you spelled express, but how do you spell clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no easing payments.
I was in New York most of the week, and I got it.
I just want to report to you from, it's like another planet.
If you do not live in New York or LA or San Francisco, you know, you are not going through it.
They are going through the mask mandates.
Every time you go into a restaurant, you have to show your vaccination card, which is crazy because you don't have to show it if you go into a drugstore or if you go into a clothing store.
That's fine.
But if for some reason a restaurant, you have to show your vaccination card.
Then in some of the restaurants, you have to show your ID so they know it's actually your vaccination card.
I mean, they are living under a regime.
Well, they have this mayor.
It's amazing.
Everybody hates this mayor.
Everybody hates Mayor de Blasio.
Everybody thinks he's a moron.
No matter how far left they are, they think de Blasio is a complete jackass.
But the Republicans don't put up anyone against him, so they can't beat him.
Here is de Blasio explaining, this is what he calls leadership.
This is what he thinks leadership is.
He's being interviewed on CNN, and the guy says to him, this is not happening with all these masks and stuff.
This isn't happening in the rest of the country.
But de Blasio tells him what he thinks leadership is.
People want to lead their lives.
I mean, the hard thing.
You know, I feel it here in New York City.
By the way, I'm from Philadelphia, so it's not like I live in a rural area.
But I feel it in every block that I walk in New York City.
But if I were in the middle part of the country with you, I don't think we'd see masks.
I don't think we'd be showing our vax cards anywhere.
So I come back to that point where unless everybody's on the same page in the country, we're kind of screwing.
You know how you get on the same page, people have to lead.
So look, I believe with enough leadership, enough mandates, we're going to get a hell of a lot more people vaccinated.
The more people vaccinated, the more we actually make the transition to a time when COVID is in the background, not the foreground.
And we know these mandates work, and we know people respond.
Look, human beings are pretty predictable.
If you say your paycheck depends on it or your ability to enjoy life and go do the things you want to do, people will make the practical decision overwhelmingly and they'll go get vaccinated.
But we aren't pushing hard enough.
We got to go farther.
That's actually the opposite of leadership.
Leadership is when people trust you so much that when you say, you know, maybe you ought to do this or maybe you ought to do that, they think, okay, well, we'll take that into consideration.
That's just forcing people to do stuff.
That's called tyranny.
He doesn't even know what leadership looks like.
What a clown.
And the city, I got to say, you know, I'm not a big New York fan to begin with, but the city just looks bad.
Everybody is grim.
There's not a lot of fun going on because of the masks and just the oppression.
And then you come to Nashville and you're in the free state of Tennessee.
It's like nobody cares.
And they don't know what's happening.
And when I explain to them that it's happening, their eyes glaze over.
When I say, you know, the numbers in Nashville are just, you know, no worse than yours.
And New York's are no better than they were before.
So none of it is working.
They just don't care because it's just a way of falling in.
The one thing I do want to report on, though, is that I was at, for instance, a party at the mysterious bookshop.
The mysterious press published my book, When Christmas Comes.
You can see in there, if you're watching, you can see the picture of the guy in the red shirt as the great Otto Penzler, who is enjoying life because he has to, because when he dies, he's going to hell for a lot.
He's like one of my closest friends, one of the worst people on earth.
As one woman said to me, he's a monster, but he's our monster.
I love the guy.
I really do.
But anyway, you know, so you're in a bunch of fiction writers, very, very left-wing people, a lot of them.
Two of them in two separate locations made the same joke to me where they said, I'm beginning to sound like you.
And I said, take two aspirin and you'll be liberal in the morning.
But they both made that joke to me because they are beginning to sound like me.
You know, they're just starting to realize that this is absurd and Joe Biden is absurd and the wokeness is absurd and the terror, constant terror about COVID is absurd.
You know, there's an article in the tablet by a guy named Lyle, I think it is, Leibowitz, called The Turn.
And he talks about, it's interesting because he's kind of a cliched character.
He describes himself as a clichéd kind of New York left-wing Jewish guy who suddenly starts to say, you know, this leftism is not good.
And he says that you don't get to be against the rich if the richest people in the country fund your party in order to preserve their government-sponsored monopolies.
You've heard that here too.
You are not a supporter of free speech if you oppose free speech for people who disagree with you.
You are not for the people if you pit most of them against each other based on the color of their skin.
And he goes on and on.
He talks about the pain of losing your community group because when you express these opinions at a dinner party on the Upper West Side, people call you names.
People say you are unacceptable.
Especially if you support Israel, which he does.
Very interesting article.
And I got a whiff of that in New York.
Something is turning.
Something is changing.
However, however, having said all that, this new Omicron variant comes out.
And I want to make it clear.
I take this disease seriously.
I'm in the age group.
Most of the people who die are in my age group.
The older age group, if you're fat, it's very deadly.
And I have been vaccinated up the wazoo.
I've got my booster shot.
I've got all of that stuff.
And I believe that the vaccinations are helping, keeping people from dying.
They don't seem to keep you from catching the disease as much as they hoped.
This new Omicron variant comes out.
It doesn't seem to be very serious.
It seems like a bad cold.
It seems in a way like a good thing.
It's the virus saying, okay, it's better if I keep people alive so they can spread it to a lot of different people.
And so it spreads more easily, but people don't seem to be dying at the same, anywhere near.
I don't even think there was one guy who died with it.
Maybe there have been a couple of deaths, but very, very few.
Absolute panic from the government.
It's all being imposed by the de Belasio government and the government in Albany.
So, you know, I'm just looking at this and I'm thinking, you know, I think I mentioned last week at Thanksgiving, my daughter and husband and my two grandsons came and I got to see my little grandson take his first steps.
I got to be there while I was there.
And it was like, you know, I have a video.
I can't play the video because my daughter doesn't like her kids on media and she's the mama bear, so that doesn't happen.
But the video is hilarious because it's mostly me going nuts as I'm watching this happen.
The baby doesn't care.
The baby's just walking around.
But anyway, you know, I'm thinking about this and I went to the Daily Wire Christmas party and I went to a couple of parties in New York with friends that were just wonderful.
I got to spend time with my older grandson, who I just adore, and we were just taking long, long walks and all this stuff.
And I was thinking, you know, this is life.
This is life.
This is what life is.
And it goes away.
You don't get to see, your grandson doesn't take his first steps twice.
Your grandson isn't seven twice.
You know, your friends, you know, Otto, whom I love as an older guy, you know, I mean, people go away.
They die.
Nothing lasts.
I thought, this is life.
When I get to sit with my buddies and have a drink or smoke a cigar, that is what life is.
So what am I preserving if I'm not doing that?
What am I preserving?
I put a tweet out saying that.
I thought, would I have even lived if I didn't do these things, if I just sheltered in place?
And some lefties were saying, oh, you're selfish.
You're selfish because you might make other people sick.
And I thought, no, I don't owe people my life.
I don't owe them to stop my life.
You know, if they're worried, if they're fat, if they're old, if they're not vaccinated, let them stay home.
Let them stay home.
But don't tell me to stay home.
Don't tell me you're going to save my life by taking my life away.
That makes absolutely no sense.
A society that refuses to live because it might die is sick with something, but it's not the virus.
That ain't the virus.
We have a sick society.
A healthy society takes risks, but it understands consequences.
And we're exactly the opposite.
We hide away and wash our hands a million times and wear masks everywhere.
And then we defund the police.
So the crime goes up.
We send our children home from school so they have emotional difficulties and they have to wear a mask and that gives them emotional difficulty.
We put in social programs that encourage fatherlessness and wonder why communities fall apart.
We don't take risks, but we don't believe in consequences.
It's just amazing.
A healthy society has standards, but it's flexible enough to tolerate eccentricity.
But we do the exact opposite.
We have no standards and eccentricity is considered holy.
It's like fine to say, look, most people should get married, have children, have families.
That is a good way to live.
It will make you happy.
And all right, there's a gay guy over there and he's living in a different way.
We understand that.
But here it's like you've got to bow down to the rainbow flag because somehow being offbeat, being strange, being different has to be elevated to the position of a goal.
It's sick.
There's something sick about that.
It's reversing the actual way that healthy societies work.
A healthy society has an establishment which maintains the traditions and the values of the society.
And it has an avant-garde that puts forward crazy ideas and everybody thinks they're crazy, but sometimes one of their ideas turns out to be the future idea.
That's why they call them the avant-garde.
They're out in front.
We have the opposite.
declare a new radical notion every day, you know, men can become women and good government should care for our children, criminals should not, you know, should run free, should be set free.
And if you disagree, you're hateful.
You know, you've got to shout everybody down.
This is all a sickness.
There's something sick about our culture.
And you know, usually when people say something is sick about the culture, they want to diagnose the source of the sickness as something they don't like.
So if you're a religious person, you say it's atheism.
If you're a liberal, you say it's conservatism.
If you're a conservative, you say it's leftism, whatever.
And yes, I personally do believe that we would all be better off if we worshiped the living God instead of our own egos and money and our own sexual desires.
But the one thing that I'm absolutely sure of, the one thing I'm absolutely sure is hurting us, is that our systems of information and our systems of information interchange have utterly broken down, right?
The internet and human sin have made it so we can't trust anybody.
We have to end these lockdowns for that reason, because we have to start talking to one another because our elites are so corrupt, so failed, so outmoded, so 20th century, if not 19th century, that we need to talk to one another.
It was important that at this party I could talk to leftists so they could see me, they could look me in the eye and see like, no, I don't hate people.
And suddenly some of the ideas that they have are the same as the ideas that I have.
We have to be able to do this.
We have to have, life is flesh.
Life is flesh.
Children need to smell their parents.
They need to be close enough to their parents so that they smell them.
Smell is the sense of memory.
They have to be able to remember.
You know, all those divorce, they say, we'll still be a family.
No, you will not.
You have got to be there.
You've got to be there for your grandkids.
They have to know what you smell like so when you're gone, they can remember.
We need to look each other in the eyes.
And this is like, look, this is Republicans and Democrats, believers and atheists, conservatives and idiots.
We all have to be able to look each other in the eyes and exchange ideas without some jackass on NBC or MSNBC or the government telling us what we think and why we should hate one another.
It's got to stop, you know.
This is the generation in which the internet first appeared and we haven't processed it yet.
And there will be a generation that will process it better than we have.
But in order, you know, it's just like after the invention of the printing press, they had all the heresy burning and 30 years' war and the civil wars and the revolutions.
If we want to avoid that, we have to be able to talk to one another and trust one another even when we disagree.
It's got to start.
And it's going to have to start on the right because the left is pushing hatred much, much harder than we are.
And we are ready to listen.
We don't have to compromise.
We don't have to change our ideas.
We just have to look in one another's eyes and understand that there's a human being on the other side.
The culture is sick and there's no cure for it but courage.
It is time to stop this stuff.
Time to take off the masks.
It's time to get out of your house.
If you feel pretty certain that you will survive this thing, it is time to have courage and let this go.
So many people say to me, how can my workplace be as chaotic and incompetent as your show?
It's easy.
Just don't use ZipRecruiter.
If you want things to go well, though, you want to use ZipRecruiter.
There are over 10 million job openings, but only 7.6 million unemployed job seekers.
This issue is being worsened due to a mismatch of employers and qualified talent.
So employers are having to go above and beyond to entice people to want to work for them, such as offering pet insurance.
If you can relate to any of these challenges of growing your team, then you need to try ZipRecruiter.
ZipRecruiter uses powerful technology to find and match the right candidates up with your job.
then it proactively presents these candidates to you, and you can easily review these recommended candidates and invite your job choices to apply for your job, which encourages them to apply faster.
You can try ZipRecruiter for free at this exclusive web address, ziprecruiter.com slash clavin.
Fox News Threatens00:15:24
That's ziprecruiter.com slash clavin.
ZipRecruiter is the smartest way to hire, but you have to know the secret code, how to spell Clavin.
So very true.
If you want to see a perfect example of the way the elites are trying to separate us so we don't have that kind of healthy society that generates tolerance and new ideas, you have to take a look at this January 6th hearing, this House investigation into the kerfuffle at the Capitol.
And I want to be very plain about this.
I know you guys hate it when I say, some of you hate it when I say this.
I thought it was a disgusting display.
I thought Trump behaved badly.
People keep saying, well, he came out and called for it to stop.
He didn't come out fast enough.
He didn't come out strong enough.
However, however, if you incited a riot, a race riot over George Floyd, a piece of incompetent police work with no sign of racial malice whatsoever that did not represent the way the police behave, if you incited a riot from that and you covered up the riots, or if you said the riots didn't spread COVID where Trump rallies did, if you're a Democrat, another, if you're one of these guys, here are the Democrats doing this stuff.
I just don't even know why there aren't uprisings all over the country, and maybe there will be.
People need to start taking to the streets.
This is a dictator.
You know, there needs to be unrest in the streets for as long as there's unrest in our lives.
Enemies of the state.
Show me where it says that protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful.
Do something about your dad's immigration practices, you feckless.
They go low, we kill you.
How do you resist the temptation to run up and bring her neck?
The biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right.
I thought he should have punched him in the face.
I said, even if he lost, he insulted your wife on the escalator and called Mexicans rapists and murders.
He said, well, what do you think I should have done?
I said, I think you should have punched him in the face and then gotten out of the race.
He would have been a hero.
I'd like to punch him in the face.
I said, if we were in high school, I'd take you behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.
Punch some people in the face.
When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?
They're still going to have to go out and put a bullet in Donald Trump.
And that's a fact.
January 6th was a shame, but if you're one of these guys, which is almost all the Democrats, you don't get to say jack diddly squat about it.
You don't get to say, you've got to shut your pie hole till you die.
That's the problem with these hearings about January 6th, this kind of Reichstag fire about the whole thing, how it's the worst thing ever, and we need to investigate this and investigate that.
Mark Meadows, Trump's former chief of staff, was held in contempt of Congress because he asked for a delay in coming to speak to them about it, saying, you know, he believes that some of the information is protected by executive privilege and he wants to find out more about that.
And so they held him in contempt of Congress.
You don't get to say any of this.
And I keep hearing this stuff sometimes from our side, the guys at a national review, I love those guys.
They're smart guys.
They're good guys.
But Trump drove them a little bit insane.
Kevin Williamson, very, very bright man, who writes this piece saying that the January 6th riot was different than all these other riots because it was more politically motivated where these other riots were just looting a target store.
Well, no, those race riots that were started by the left and organized by Black Lives Matter and incited by all those people, they were political violence by remote control.
They were controlling people and getting them excited and ginned up over nothing, really nothing, and then intimidating people with that violence.
So it's all, and all this stuff about a racial reckoning.
I mean, this is the thing that drives me crazy.
I don't know if you, I love living in a multi-ethnic country.
I'm proud of my country that it has such great values, that it brings people in and they want to adopt those values and join the American gang.
I love that about it.
I have no problem with that.
But it's still mostly white, you know.
And I think when I watch television commercials and there's no longer allowed to be a white couple, every couple has to be mixed race.
When I watch movies, and even if the movie takes place in 18th century London, there's some black lord or something like that.
And I just think like I'm being preached to by people in Hollywood, right?
And so I'm thrilled that they have taken time off from molesting child actors and chasing their interns around the room and kowtowing to the genocidal slave state in China to lecture me about morality because some people turn to Jesus, some people turn to Socrates.
But when I want to know about ethics, I turn to a movie star who just got out of rehab before marrying her third husband, before declaring she's actually a man.
That's who I want to hear my ethics from.
It's all fake.
It's all fake.
This country does not have a problem with racism.
The human heart has a problem with racism, but this country doesn't.
It's all about this violence and power.
So when I see this January 6th hearing, I feel the same way.
I feel the same way.
Yeah, okay, I get it.
It wasn't a good thing.
Trump should have handled it better.
It was wrong.
But you have no right to say it.
So they had this moment where Liz Cheney, who, you know, I feel that she acted, she wanted to impeach Trump.
I think she started out acting in conscience, but now she's stuck.
And so she's stuck in this party where she's obviously not going to remain.
And she had this moment where she reads from material that Mark Meadows had handed over, she reads text messages from Laura Ingram and Brian Kilmead and Donald Trump Jr.
Here's just a little excerpt of this.
According to the records, multiple Fox News hosts knew the president needed to act immediately.
They texted Mr. Meadows, and he has turned over those texts.
Quote, Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home.
This is hurting all of us.
He is destroying his legacy, Laura Ingram wrote.
So Laura Ingram was texting that at the time, by the way.
I think she was tweeting it at the time.
I also, I love the dangerous phrasing of Fox News hosts.
Multiple Fox news hosts.
And you know how evil Fox knew that Fox knows hoes.
It's like the exorcist.
I don't even know what the message was.
I really don't.
I mean, I guess what they were trying to say was that Fox has said, has kind of played down the January 6th kerfuffle, but they knew at the time that it was disgraceful.
But that's not, I don't think what they're doing.
I don't think they're playing it down.
They're putting it in the context of this summer of riots that the press supported, that the left supported.
And now when a riot threatens them, it's like, oh my, that's not so good.
That's not good.
If it threatens us, then it's not good.
If it ruins your business, if it kills an off-duty cop, if it ends up with people dead, the little people, they don't matter.
But if it threatens us, then it's serious.
That's what I think the Fox News people are saying.
We all knew this should go.
Donald Trump Jr. was texting Meadows saying, tell that to get those people out of there.
And it shows at least that on the right, we don't like any of the riots.
We're against all the riots.
So they're doing all this stuff.
And I'm thinking, you know, how far are they going to push this?
Don't they think people see what they're up to?
But here's something that's really interesting.
At the same time this is happening, there's suddenly a spate of news stories, all with the same theme.
And they're like, you know, in places like the New York Times, a former newspaper, in the Atlantic, the press is like Renfield.
Do you remember Renfield from the movie Dracula?
He becomes Dracula's slave and he eats flies and spiders because he's trying to imitate Dracula, sucking the blood out of people.
And when he's in his madhouse, eating little creatures, and then he hears Dracula's voice calling to him to tell him what to do.
And here's a little bit of that.
Master, you've come back.
That's what they're like.
After Trump was gone and Biden was in, it's like, Master, you come back.
What should I write in my newspaper?
Suddenly, as this hearing is going on, there are all these pieces like how to tell, this is from the New York Times, a former newspaper, how to tell when your country is past the point of no return.
And what he says is he talks about eight articles published by the National Academy of Sciences.
And he goes down the articles, and every single one of them is about the Republican threat, the threat by the Republican Party against democracy.
Barton Gelman in The Atlantic, he has Trump's next coup has already begun.
He says technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup.
It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place.
If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024.
Thousands of votes will be thrown away or millions to produce the required effect.
The winner will be declared the loser.
The loser will be certified president-elect.
In other words, they're telling you ahead of time, we're not accepting the results of the election if we lose.
Now, these are the guys, the same guys who changed all the rules for voting because of COVID after years of telling us that mail-in votes allowed more fraud in the New York Times.
They said it repeatedly.
Suddenly, oh no, mail-in votes are the safest possible votes you can have.
And of course, NBC, which is MSNBC without the Ms., has John Heilman on Face the Nation, and he says, oh, every word of this article is absolutely true.
There's cut three.
The strength of this Gelman piece is it lays out, first of all, the extraordinary reality that there's this research that shows that something like at least 8% and maybe as many as 12% of the American people now say that Joe Biden was illegitimate and that violence is an appropriate tool to removing him and restoring Donald Trump.
That's somewhere between 20 and 30 million people.
That's a mass movement in America in favor of political violence, which is a new thing.
We've had political violence in America before, lynching, many things over the course of time that African Americans suffered from.
But this is 30 million people right now who are ready to take up arms.
You put that together with what the president, the former president, I should say, and his allies are doing in the political realm.
State houses, state legislatures, and the party apparatus to be able to engineer a situation where they are in a stronger position to pull off a coup in 2024 than they were in 2020?
That's not hyperbolic at all.
Those are all facts.
So the people who are telling you that the next election is going to be stolen, who told you that the last election when Trump won was stolen by the Russians, was engineered by the Russians.
But the threat to America, the threat to America is Republicans who think this election was stolen.
I mean, it's almost the self-blindness of these people is almost hilarious.
The people who ran Russian information paid for by Hillary Clinton to tell us that Trump's election was illegitimate are now telling us that the danger, the danger is from the right.
These are the people who started riots and then covered them up saying they were mostly peaceful.
They don't like it when riots threaten them.
The danger is from the right.
The people who have Twitter and Facebook and Google manipulating information to silence half the country are afraid that that half is plotting against democracy, like for instance, free speech.
You know, again, these people cannot be trusted.
They cannot be trusted.
They mean this to happen.
They mean to make the left afraid.
They mean to make liberals afraid of us.
And I think we have to start talking.
I think we have to get down on the ground and start saying, you know, host, if you host conversations, let's host conversations between people who will talk to one another and won't use these stupid talking points and use words like phobia and racist and sexist, but will actually talk about the ideas and what's going on.
Because I'm telling you, I'm hearing this more and more, and I'm hearing from other people who talk to liberals that liberals or leftists are pulling people aside and saying, you know, this has gone too far.
This is out of control.
It's gone too far.
They are just as afraid of these guys, of the left, as they are of the right.
And that's what they're fighting against.
They want to make sure that we're afraid of one another because they don't want us talking to one another because once they do that, this country will no longer be sick.
And when we get rid of the virus, the virus is these guys.
All right, you all know about the Ring video doorbell.
That's the one where people come to your door and you can talk to them no matter where you are on the Ring app.
But did you know that Ring also makes an award-winning alarm?
Ring Alarm is a powerful, affordable home security system that you can easily install yourself.
So whether you're running across town or across the country this busy season, you and your loved ones can rest easy knowing that your home is protected.
It's more than just security.
Ring Alarm protects your home from flood, freeze, and fire too.
It's so easy to set up.
I've done it myself.
It really is simple.
And again, it covers you no matter where you are.
This holiday season, deck the halls, walls, doors, and windows with the best deals of the year on the award-winning Ring Alarm.
Go to ring.com forward slash Clavin to get a great deal on a Ring Alarm security kit today.
That's Ring.com forward slash Clavin.
The thing I love about these Ring things is you don't even have to be traveling.
You can see inside your house what's going on outside your house and feel safe if you know how to spell Clavin.
What you do is if somebody comes to your door, you say to them, how do you spell Clavin?
If he knows that's a giveaway, call the cops.
And of course, this Chinese flu plays right into this.
And I don't believe this is a conspiracy.
I mean, it may have been in Wuhan.
They may have invented the virus.
It may have been a conspiracy that far, but I don't think this was planned.
I don't think big pharma, I mean, I don't think big pharma is sitting around, you know, I'm sure they're happy to be making all this money, but that's what they're there for.
They're there to make money by curing diseases or helping to cure diseases.
You know, I don't think, I don't even think that a lot of the people in government, like the Blasio and people who are overreacting and being oppressive, are actually thinking like, yes, we can destroy American freedoms.
I don't think they believe in American freedoms.
I think they believe like the Blasio that this is what leadership looks like.
It's crushing people until they do what you want them to do.
And I think a lot of them are also covering their backsides.
I think that that's a big part of this.
But it does play in to keeping us apart and separating us and creating an atmosphere of fear.
And I think it's good to take a minute and remember what they did, okay, and why people don't trust them and why their information is not reaching a lot of people.
Because I do think we should get vaccinated.
I actually do.
And I'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute.
But I understand why people don't want to get vaccinated.
And the people telling, you know, spreading the information think, why don't they trust us?
Why We Should Get Vaccinated00:04:36
There was a wonderful deep dive on a Substack page called Maximum Truth, which is run by a guy named Maxim Lott.
And he was trying to get at the best data and without fear or favor about COVID.
And he starts out by saying the medical establishment deservedly lost Americans' trust.
And he lists the way in which the medical establishment became unworthy of our trust.
He says more than 1,000 medical professionals signed a widely publicized open letter arguing that protesters should be advised differently about COVID based on their race and policy views.
This is what they wrote.
This is a thousand guys, and these are guys from Harvard.
I mean, these are big medical poo-based.
They wrote, a public health response to Black Lives Matter demonstrations is warranted, but this message must be wholly different from the response to white protesters resisting stay-home orders.
Many of the medical experts said, we do not condemn, we do not condemn Black Lives Matter gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission.
We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of black people.
This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders.
So if you're protesting stay-home orders, you're going to spread COVID.
But if you're protesting Derek Chauvin's bad policing, you know, then everything's going to be tickety-boo.
So basically, they're sending black people out.
And by the way, black people are getting hit very hard because a lot of them are poor.
A lot of the poor are obese and they don't want to take the vaccine.
And so black people are getting hit very hard.
But if you're a doctor, you're not supposed to tell them that they shouldn't get together for a friendly riot because you support what they stand for.
The American Medical Association recently released a guide calling on doctors to use politicized Orwellian language with patients.
Instead of telling patients that low-income people are more likely to get heart disease, which is true, doctors should instead tell you people underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies, real estate developers gentrifying neighborhoods, and corporations weakening the power of labor movements, among others, have the highest level of heart disease.
Can you imagine your doctor saying that to you?
It would be like, thanks a lot, Doc.
And, you know, I'll see you later.
Like, never again.
The medical, media, and tech establishments told a noble lie that COVID-19 was naturally occurring and not the result of a lab leak in Wuhan and on and on until we no longer believe them.
So now we have to get our own information.
And listen, I know a lot of people get their medical degrees on Twitter and they think that like now they know stuff, but it's hard to know stuff.
Like my doctor, who I think is a brilliant guy, you know, first of all, all doctors, almost all doctors, are hypochondriacs.
I think that's one of the reasons people become doctors.
And I think it becomes exacerbated.
It gets worse because they see so much horror and they see so much sickness that they become highly sensitive to it.
And, you know, I actually, I saw him when I was in New York and I said to him, you know, people have got to live.
People have got to live.
And he said, well, the data says this and the data says that.
And I said, I understand.
I understand.
And death is a terrible thing.
But, you know, people died for freedom because they thought you have to live free.
And people can risk their lives for this because you have to live.
You have to live.
It's no good dying, staying alive by hiding and hunkering in your house unless you're terribly, terribly at risk.
But it's hard to parse the information.
Here's Senator Ron Johnson.
He's saying the vaccines don't work because he has seen some figures from England, from the UK.
This is very unfortunate.
It doesn't look like the vaccine's holding up very well against Delta.
The most recent technical brief by Public Health England shows that overall in 2021, 70% of deaths are in partially or fully vaccinated individuals.
30% are in the unvaxed.
Over the most recent time, August 2nd to September 21st, it's about 74% in fully vaccinated versus 26% in the unvaxed.
So again, that's unfortunate.
I wish, God, I wish the vaccines were 100% effective, 100% safe, but it doesn't appear they are.
You know, and that's actually a wrong interpretation of those figures.
In that area, 95% of the vulnerable population is vaccinated.
So if 70% of the deaths are of vaccinated people, 5%, the 5% of the unvaccinated, are accounting for 30% of the deaths, which means the vaccine is something like 86% effective in preventing deaths.
And that's pretty much what it shows here.
You're about 11 times more likely to die in the U.S. if you're unvaccinated.
So people should get vaccinated.
Vaccines and Freedom00:02:26
And by the way, people talk about long-term effects and long-term side effects.
There's no record of a vaccine showing long-term side effects after, say, a year.
But there are indications, for instance, the Spanish flu that came after World War I, about 10 years after that, a lot of the people who had the Spanish flu also got Parkinson's.
So there were side effects of the actual disease.
So personally, I think if you're betting, if you're a betting man, you should bet on the vaccine.
So I'm not playing down any of this.
What I'm playing down, what I'm mocking, what I'm tired of, is things like Francis Collins, the evangelical guy who's the outgoing NIH director, he gave us a little goodbye song.
Here it is.
Somewhere past the pandemic, masks will come off.
No more need for a nose swab every time we cough.
I mean, no, no.
All right, as you know, I never sleep.
I never sleep, but I do drink a lot of coffee.
I've got coffee with me all the time right here.
If you'd like a new way to start your day, why not try Super Beats Heart Chews?
They're a tasty treat that give you the energy you need, and they're good for you.
No more afternoon coffees or energy drinks and candy for a quick pick-me-up.
Add two delicious plant-based Super Beats heart chews to your morning routine and promote heart-healthy energy for your day without the caffeine crash.
The grapeseed extract used in Super Beats heart shoes has been clinically shown to be two times as effective at supporting normal blood pressure as a healthy lifestyle alone.
Do more for your heart and treat yourself with Super Beats Heart Chews.
Join over 1 million customers and get free shipping and returns, a 90-day money-back guaranteed.
And right now, you can get a free 30-day supply with your first purchase at superbeats.com slash clavin, superbeats.com slash clavin.
And you'll be so awake, you'll think, wow, how do you spell Clavin?
It is so.
By the way, in New York with this Omicron panic, lines for the free test just all over the place.
And at some point, you just think, you know, I mean, again, I don't want people to get sick.
I really don't.
But you have to balance that against other things.
Freedom's Balance00:08:53
For instance, Joe Biden talking about people saying, you know, hey, I don't want you to force me to get vaccinated because I value my freedom.
And here's CUP 13 is Biden response to that.
Everybody talks about freedom and not to have a shot or have a test.
Well, guess what?
So how about patriotism?
How about making sure that you're vaccinated so you do not spread the disease to anybody else?
What about that?
What's the big deal?
You know, when you're the president of a country conceived in liberty, I think liberty is a big deal.
You know, call me crazy.
People died for that liberty.
People might want to take a risk for that liberty as well, to live in liberty.
And again, again, I think you should be vaccinated.
I think this government should stop telling people if they would lead, if they would lead by telling us the truth.
Think about that for a minute.
If you had heard the truth from the medical profession, if you had heard the truth from Tony Fauci, if you had heard the truth from Joe Biden when he said, oh, if Donald Trump weren't competent, all the people would be alive when his numbers are actually worse than Trump's now.
If you had heard the truth from them and they came out and said, guys, take the vaccine, hear the facts, hear the numbers, this is what we believe.
There are some risks.
There are always going to be side effects for some people, but they're rare.
I think a lot more people would go out and take the vaccine.
Instead, when you're twisting arms like Bill de Blasio, ultimately people are going to tell you where to get off if they're true Americans.
Here's the thing.
One half knoweth not.
These people do not know how anybody else lives.
There was a piece in the New York Times by Jane Koston.
And I've talked to Jane several times, and I like her, and I don't want to pick on her, but she says, why do we ignore how the other half lives?
And she says the most watched television series in America from last fall to this spring was Sunday night football, followed by Thursday night football, and in third place was the CBS procedural NCIS.
Now, I can tell you that no elite person has ever seen NCIS.
They're all watching secession or something, which, by the way, gets a recap in the New York Times, but not NCIS.
It's like it doesn't, Blue Bloods doesn't exist.
The shows that people are actually watching.
And she goes on to say, what matters to the most powerful Americans is important, and you can watch all the prestige television you want, but what matters to most Americans, period, matters too.
Now, that could get her fired from the New York Times.
And so Jane makes all kinds of like kowtows to the elite saying, oh, it's all Donald Trump's fault and Donald Trump is the one to criticize.
She makes sure she gets that Trump criticism in there because without that, you know, you can't talk at the New York Times.
But the fact is, they don't know.
The Atlantic Monthly ran, it's no longer called that, the Atlantic, ran a piece by Matthew Walther where he said, outside the world, inhabited by the professional and managerial classes in a handful of major metropolitan areas, many, if not most, Americans are leading their lives as if COVID is over and they have been for a long while.
He's living in rural southwest Michigan.
Now, compare that to a lady named Anna North writing in the hyper-liberal Vox, okay, the hyper-leftist vox.
I shouldn't call them liberals because there's nothing liberal about them.
She says, the world as we know it is ending.
Why are we still at work?
The world as we know it and it's ending.
She says, from the pandemic to climate change, Americans are still expected to work no matter what happens.
It's a crisis.
It's an emergency.
It's death.
The planet is ending.
The New York Times runs this almost every day.
Here's what the end of the planet looks like in Siberia.
Here's a snowstorm in Siberia.
Whoever heard of such a thing?
There's a dust storm in Saudi Arabia, in the desert.
This is incredible.
She goes on to say, for a moment in early 2020, it seemed like we might get a break from capitalism.
Overall, surviving the disasters of the 21st century will require a new kind of strength from Americans, not the dogged persistence to keep doing our jobs while the world falls down around us, but the empathy and generosity to come together to stop the collapse.
We have to share.
We have to care.
But, you know, there's nothing to share if you don't work.
The wealth of America comes from work.
It comes from people working.
It comes from this capitalism she hates so much.
Anna North's problem is she should probably have kids and stay home and do something really useful with her life.
And she should get out of Brooklyn because it's a mysterious thing, an amazing thing.
If you get out of Brooklyn and move to Florida, move to Nashville, move to Texas, the world stops ending.
The world is not ending in those places.
And this is the kind of thing that has, you know, again, it's what I call a conspiracy of interest.
It's not necessarily like everybody got together and said, let's panic everybody about climate change.
It's that the panic serves them.
The crisis serves them.
We all remember the left saying, you know, never let a crisis go to waste.
It's because in a crisis, people are willing to surrender their freedoms.
And in a crisis, people are willing to let the government, you know, the government must act.
You hear that from people in a crisis.
People are getting fed up.
I mean, the polls show this, the polls show that Biden is tanking, and they keep saying he's got to fix his messaging.
It's not the message.
It's not the message.
It's the programs.
It's the takeover of everything by government.
It's the idea.
You know, thank heavens for now this Build Back Better plan, this gazillion dollar plan that they keep saying is only going to cost a mere $2 trillion, which is clearly going to cost many, many more times that.
You know, it's now been stalled because Joe Manchin has actually held the line, which is good for him, but who knows if it'll continue to stall.
But how is it these people with 50%, they have 50% of the votes, they have 50% of the Congress, they have no mandate whatsoever.
But because they are wrapped in this little cocoon, because they have made sure, because it serves them to keep you away from me, to keep left away from right, to keep black away from white, to keep men and women at each other's throats, because it serves them to do that.
They have put themselves in this bubble and they're shocked.
They are shocked when suddenly it turns out that parents don't want you teaching racism to their children.
And parents are not going to back down when you call them racist.
And those, now they call them mama bears.
I love that.
You know, these mama bears who come out to protect their children are not going to back down.
This is still America.
This is still America.
This is still the place where people will tell you to get stuffed if you get in their face long enough.
It's sad to me, who grew up very close to New York and was always considered himself kind of a New Yorker.
It's sad to say, to look at Brooklyn, for instance, and find everybody huddled with the masks and everybody afraid and all the Black Lives Matters posters.
Brooklyn used to be famous for being the guys who said, screw you.
The famous joke about the natives who capture a guy from Brooklyn and they tell him he has one last wish and then they're going to skin him and turn his skin into a canoe.
And the Brooklyn guy's last wish is for a fork and he sticks himself with a fork and he says, there, screw your canoe.
That used to be Brooklyn.
Now Brooklyn is a little enclave of fear.
New York is a little enclave of fear.
Yes, you can bully people into doing what you want, but if you lead them, if you lead them, they can remain free.
Our leaders have failed, but we don't have to fail.
This is the thing.
We don't have to fail.
We don't have to hate one another.
We don't have to be at each other's throats.
We don't have to condemn one another.
We need to talk to one another because let's face it, there are all kinds of issues that people on the left worry about that we could worry about too.
The state of the poor, you know, the state of race relations, the fact that so many poor people are black and that is very difficult if you're a black person trying to get up and get out.
You know, I think these are things that we can all talk about, but we cannot talk when it serves the elite to keep us at each other's throats, to keep us in order to silence ideas, in order to keep this country sick with the virus.
That is them.
You know, window treatments are not the sort of thing you would think I think about a lot, and I probably don't think about them a lot, but I have noticed over time, I've been forced to notice that they really do change the way a room looks and the way you feel in that room.
If you want to be perfectly at ease and comfort and style, Hunter Douglas can help you do it with their innovative window shade designs, gorgeous fabrics, and control systems so advanced they can be scheduled to automatically adjust to their optimal position throughout the day.
It may be the way the shades diffuse harsh sunlight to cast a beautiful glow across the room or being able to enjoy the view outside the window while protecting your privacy inside.
Maybe it's the superior insulation the shades provide keeping you warmer in winter, cooler in summer, and lowering utility bills.
Or it might be that Goldilocks moment when you walk into a room and everything about it looks and feels just right.
When you tap into Hunter Douglas' PowerView technology, your shades can be set to automatically reposition for the perfect balance of light, privacy, and insulation.
God in Translation00:04:44
Visit hunterdouglas.com slash Clavin today for your free style, get smarter design guide with fresh takes, creative ideas, and smart solutions for dressing your windows.
That's hunterdouglas.com slash clavin for your free design guide.
You will walk into a room right away, say, how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-E-N.
So a lot of the parties I was going to go to in New York were canceled out of fear of Omicron, but one that wasn't was the party at Reason.
And I was there at the Reason party, and I introduced myself to someone.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
They said, oh, you're Spencer Clavin's father.
A lot of people make that mistake because our names sound so similar, but my son, Spencer Clavin, No Relation, has one of the best podcasts out there, The Young Heretics.
If you're not watching it, it is the Ivy League Education You Never Got But Can very Easily.
He is also an editor at Claremont Review of Books, just about one of my favorite magazines, one of the few magazines, journals, whatever it is, that I read from cover to cover.
Spencer, how you doing?
It's a pleasure to be here, and I aim with every appearance on this show to make you want less to be associated with me.
So after this one, I think you're really going to want to say no, no, or completely unrelated to one another.
Nobody's ever heard of this.
It's a work in progress, actually.
Yes, it's gradual.
So speaking of the Claremont Review of books, you wrote a piece in this Claremont Review of books.
I think it's one of your best pieces called God in Translation.
And I just want to talk about it briefly because I want to get into one of the things that's been happening on the show is I've mentioned you several times as an excellent exegete of the Bible.
I should also mention on your locals page, you're doing an Advent calendar of translations of the Nativity story.
I've only read two of them, but they're just absolutely beautiful.
And I've mentioned several times that you are a great exegete, a man of God, a man of faith, and that you are gay and you are engaged.
What?
Yeah, no, that's slander.
And you are engaged to our own Josh from Legal.
I've been wondering if you were actually going to change your name to From Legal.
From Legal.
This is going to be hyphenated.
Spencer Clavin from Legal.
And a lot of people get very angry that I say this, but I want to talk briefly, just before we get into that, I want to talk briefly about this piece you wrote for the Claremont Review about God in translation, pointing out, it starts with a description of Pentecost when the flames, tongues of flame came down on the disciples and they could suddenly speak the gospel in different languages.
And you point out that the Bible actually accepts translation in a way that, say, the Quran doesn't.
That's right.
No, I mean, this began as a review of some new translations of the New Testament and the Gospel.
And I realized that there's something quite remarkable.
You know, I've been translating these texts for a while.
I've been reading and studying Greek and Hebrew and trying to faithfully read the Bible as much as possible.
And there's a strange thing about the New Testament, which is that it already contains translation within it.
It's a Greek account of interactions and relationships and stories that can only have happened in Hebrew.
Jesus was an observant Jew.
He spoke Hebrew and Aramaic.
And a lot of those conversations are already translated.
And what this means is that when Jesus says, go and make disciples of all nations, he actually has empowered them to do that.
The Holy Spirit empowers them to do that in a radically new way so that you don't actually have to learn biblical Hebrew in order to be a faithful Christian, to get the full message of the gospel.
I mean, of course, it's very edifying, and of course, it's possible to communicate parts of Judaism and parts of Islam in English.
But those texts are really kind of understands themselves as the word of God in the sense of, you know, jot and tittle, this word and that word and that word.
Whereas at Pentecost, of course, the disciples start spreading the gospel in every possible language that they can think of without ever having learned them.
And this is what's meant actually by speaking in tongues.
And so we actually have this incredible resource in the Bible to preach without fear that the word of God is going to be lost in translation or something like that.
And it's important because each language is different.
I mean, you have shown me how no language actually contains the exact same concepts, and people actually think differently because they have different languages, which means we are always interpreting the Bible.
And obviously, you can't interpret it out of existence.
You can't make it say what it doesn't say.
You can't make it say the opposite of what it says.
But we should move forward with a little bit of humility when we interpret things.
And one of the things that happens, especially when I mention you, is I get a lot of letters from people who absolutely know what the Bible says about certain things that I, who have read the Bible many, many times from beginning to end, I'm not that sure about it.
Intuition And Scripture00:05:14
So this is why I want to talk to you about this.
I keep mentioning that you're a man of God and a gay person who is in a faithful, hopefully loving, I hope loving relationship.
And people get very upset about this.
First of all, how did you get into a situation like this?
I mean, how did you get there to begin with?
Well, I mean, I'm glad that you've asked me on to talk about it.
I want to emphasize at the outset that I really do come in peace on this.
I know this is an issue that raises really intense emotions on basically all sides.
Anybody that talks about it is touched very deeply by it.
And on top of that, pro-gay activists are such grasping sociopaths at the time that it's very easy to feel as if this is just a movement to tear the church apart, to tear tradition apart, to tear the Bible apart.
And I don't want to do any of those things.
I don't want to condemn anybody for interpreting the text differently than I do.
But yeah, I do want to explain how I got here.
And as you said, it's really a story of my youth.
I have always known, as soon as romantic feelings or love, sexual love awakened in me, as soon as I went through puberty, as we all do, it was very clear.
It was just an obvious fact about me that I was drawn to and falling in love with men.
And I think sometimes we talk about, especially in the church, we talk about homosexuality as if it's a kind of lust, as if it's just about the people you happen to want to have sex with.
But that wasn't my experience at all.
What I found is that all the things you start, all the exciting and scary feelings that you start to have when you go through puberty, I was directed toward men.
I loved men.
I, yes, had sexual feelings toward them, but it was simply part of my nature to long for commitment and belonging and romantic relationship with men.
And nobody abused me.
This wasn't a choice that I made.
I wasn't groomed.
As you know, you were around when I was growing up.
I was simply gay.
That's just always been the case for me.
And so it was something that was an immutable fact about my nature.
And it was also something that didn't seem to me evil and wrong.
It seemed like a potential source of joy in need of careful cultivation and moral instruction.
But at the same time, something that I've always also known is that I believe in and want to love God.
I was just lucky this way.
I was just born into the world with a definite intuition that there's a creator of the universe, that he had a personal interest in me.
I've talked to him since I was a little kid.
You mentioned in your memoir, I think, that I used to thank the sun for shining on me.
That was a great moment.
Yeah, and so this has always been true.
And as I became aware that I was gay, I started to talk to God about that too, and to say, you know, is this something that you condemn?
That's evil, it's going to lead me down a path away from you.
And again, in prayer, and as you say, with humility and not feeling like I definitely know all the answers, but I was receiving in prayer a sense that actually, no, there was a way for me to live this out that could be faithful and God-honoring and committed and monogamous and all the things that we expect also out of heterosexual relationships.
And so, yeah, that's, you know, that was where I was when I came to the Bible on this.
You know, that was my sort of position, just how I was born, what developed as I grew up naturally.
And I, again, have no desire to pervert scripture or to impose my own, you know, faulty moral intuition onto it.
But I did want to come to scripture, you know, because I think it's the book God wants us to have, to check our intuitions and to ask, you know, is there a way forward for me that doesn't mean cutting off this part of myself, that doesn't mean closing that off and letting it wither.
Because I also knew that celibacy was not something I was called to in the way that, say, St. Augustine was.
And so, yeah, that's where I ended up.
That's where I come from when I come to the Bible.
So that's a story.
I mean, certainly in my coming to God, I realized there are parts of my life that might be in conflict and some parts of my life that I wasn't sure.
I still feel that way.
I still feel that way.
I mean, I'm a very ambitious person.
I want to use my gifts.
And it's changed the way I think about it, but it hasn't changed that part of me.
I mean, I now am ambitious less for myself and for my name than I am to use the gifts that were given.
But that was something that happened in my engagement with Scripture.
So you were having an engagement as a young man over this thing.
Now, here's the thing that I think bothers a lot of people, and I think is really worth questioning.
I think it was Yuval Harari in his book, Homo Deus, who says, anybody who looks at the Bible, he says, people look at the Bible trying to find a way out of its condemnation of homosexuality, and Harari is also gay.
Engagement with Scripture00:11:17
He says, but what they're really doing is imposing Foucault on the scripture.
Sure.
Now, you are an actual master, at least, I think, five languages, maybe more.
I lose count sometimes, but yeah, I have always loved languages, and I've always loved reading the Bible and its original.
And I think I engage with it in that way.
So we have the quote, I guess, in Leviticus, we shall not lie with men as with women.
It's a, what's the word they use?
An abomination.
Abomination.
And then you have Paul saying, these are the people who will not get into the kingdom of heaven.
I always laugh at that because, by the way, in that list, there's an adulterer and a male prostitute.
And those are the only two that I haven't been, you know?
Like the rest of them.
I've done all that stuff.
Oh man, many such cases.
So I'm now learning to play.
This is absolutely true.
I'm learning to play Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas on my keyboard.
And I'm really, really glad I'm sitting on an X chair while I do it because it is so comfortable.
It feels great.
And I'm sitting there a long time practicing.
So it really is excellent to have an X chair.
Give yourself the gift of an X chair.
I love mine.
It's by far one of the most comfortable and ergonomic chairs I have ever used.
It's also probably one of the coolest looking pieces of furniture I own.
Not only is XChair the world's greatest office chair, but with its patented LMAX technology, it doubles as a massage chair and can either cool or warm your back.
It's a perfect time to purchase an X chair by early, buy now.
And here's XChair's holiday gift to you.
save 100 bucks off your XChair just by purchasing it at xchairclavin.com now.
That's the letter X, chairclavin.com.
XChair has a 30-day guarantee of complete comfort, and you can finance your purchase for as little as 30 bucks a month.
Go to xchairclavin.com and save xchairclavin.com.
And I know, I know, you think like, yeah, I know how to spell X, but how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
No easy.
I just make it look easy.
So what do you find?
What do you find without interpreting it away, without trying to dodge the bullet?
What do you find when you look at these passages?
Yeah, I mean, maybe it's best to start with Paul, actually, because a lot of people are particularly worried about what Paul says.
And it's 1 Corinthians 6, it's 1 Timothy 1, and Romans, the letter to the Romans, chapter 1.
And all of these vice lists, which you named, they come up in the context of Paul writing advice to the new fledgling Christian church.
And what's interesting about these particular passages that have to do with same-sex attraction or same-sex sex is that they all have to do with how the church is supposed to resist the sins of the world, and especially the sins of the pagans, right?
The sins of the Romans and the Greeks, because writing to Corinth and Rome.
And in the context of those warnings, he says, look out at the world.
Look at how terribly people go wrong.
And obviously people go wrong when they deny God or they ignore God.
So thieves, adulterers, liars, right?
And in the context of this list, he uses these two words, the malachoi and the arsenicoetai.
And this is the, literally, the softies and the man-bedders.
So these are the words that everybody's fighting over, right?
This is the, you know, when many people think that when Paul says arsenicoetai, he's reaching back to that Leviticus text and saying, you know, there's a combination of man and bed.
So they think he's, you know, reaching back to the Septuagint and the Levitical rules, thou shalt not lie with man as with woman.
It is an abomination.
And to me, and again, I say this in sincerity, but acknowledging that others may disagree, to me, that's not a persuasive argument in part because Paul's whole project in all of these letters is to stress that Christians are no longer under the laws of the Old Testament.
He says this in Colossians over and over again, right?
You know, you shouldn't get circumcised because circumcision puts you under the law, and that's what we're passed.
This has been fulfilled in Christ.
And I don't think at all that Paul wants to therefore just like toss the Old Testament out the window.
But I also think that one of the things he's saying is these laws in Leviticus are no longer a list of rules that we can just pick up one-to-one and drop into our lives as a list of things we have to do.
And so that makes me wonder, so what is he talking about, right?
What are the sins that he's identifying in the outside world?
As Leviticus also was hedging off the Jews from their outside world.
And I think about my study of the ancient world and the classical world, and it's very clear to me that there would have been a lot of things that Paul was looking at.
A lot of same-sex interactions that Paul was observing in, for example, the imperial court, in war.
I mean, they would do terrible things in the ancient world.
They would rape boys as an act of humiliation, pederasty, pedophilia.
And actually, this is Martin Luther, the great translator, the German translator of the Bible and originator of the Protestant Reformation, translates arsenicoitai that way.
He translates it as pedophiles.
And so for me, this is something that makes more sense and also sort of corresponds with my experience of the world.
Augustine tells us match up the book of nature with the book of scripture and understand them in that light.
And then the next thing that I then do is I say, well, a good thing to do is to take an unclear passage of scripture or a less clear passage of scripture and understand it by a more clear passage of scripture.
And Romans 1 is actually, I think, a more extensive description of what Paul is talking about.
He goes on at some length there.
He says, these pagans, these Romans, and the temple of ISIS, the court, I mean, I'm assuming now that this is what he's talking about.
They abandoned God so much that they even gave up their nature.
They resisted nature and men abandoned natural relations with women and turned even to relations with men.
And that's an exact description of what I know happened in pagan societies.
I mean, men who were otherwise perfectly happy in marriages would rape slaves and do all sorts of things as a show of dominance or what have you.
But it's actually not a description of what happened to me.
And so this is where that experience comes back.
I never gave up any natural intercourse with women.
It was never natural to me to desire women in that way.
And as I say, I don't think of it as a, I can name or think of no perversion or abuse that twisted me in the way that Paul is describing away from one natural thing toward another natural thing.
And so the more I think about these things, the less it describes what's going on with me and in my life.
So you're, as I am, I hope, in a personal relationship with Christ, and you're working out, as we all are, our own salvation in fear and in trembling.
I go to a very conservative church in its theology, where they love you, by the way.
They love you.
They love you.
So is their poor taste, but there we are.
I mean, they passed your articles around and all this stuff.
But very conservative on these issues.
And the priest said to me, you know, gay people come into the church saying they just want to be accepted, and then they begin to act as agents of change.
And we are here to change them.
They are not here to change us.
We are here to change not just gay people, but our parishioners.
We are not here to take parishioners in and be changed because we are the wisdom of the ages.
Of course.
I understand that, especially with the activists, gay activists who, as you say, I think they're fascists.
I mean, I think they're just awful, awful people doing awful things.
So how do you deal with that?
As you work out your salvation, what do you expect of the church?
That's a great question.
And I think your pastors are describing a very real phenomenon.
I mean, just as Paul is describing a phenomenon that still exists, right?
The abuse of power relations.
All of these things are still real, still condemnable.
And your pastors are right, unfortunately.
I mean, we talked last time we talked about this issue.
I mentioned that, you know, we look at BLM in the streets.
We look at the summer of 2020 and the terrible riots and the arson and the looting.
And we say a lot of things about that.
But one thing we don't say is, well, this must mean that we should condemn black people.
Because we know that this group of people has now been weaponized politically for this radical agenda to tear down all that is good, true, and beautiful.
And I think that there's a lot of that going on with gay people.
It's useful to the left to treat gay people like these kind of radical agents of destruction of all basic truths.
And this is something, of course, another thing that people talk about all the time is Genesis, right?
Doesn't Genesis give you a basic description of all human nature?
And this is the procreative relationship between a man and a woman.
And it's kind of a Catholic natural law argument.
And my feeling about that is that's, I absolutely agree that as a description of human nature and the center of it, at the center of it, you have this joyous union between man and woman.
And what I would say to your pastors is I don't want to touch that.
In fact, I want to join you in affirming that as at the center.
But I also want to suggest that sometimes natural law theorists forget that races have a nature, as in the human race has a nature, species have a nature.
But within that nature, individuals also have variation, right?
And what I think is true of me is basically that I'm a variant.
I'm a literally marginal variant on the side.
And that, you know, as I work out my salvation in fear and trembling, one thing I ask is, does my relationship with Josh from Legal and my commitment to him for life to never desert him, does that produce in me the fruits of the Spirit?
This is a diagnostic test that Paul gives us, right?
Does it produce love, joy, patience, goodness, charity, all of these things?
And I think I can say, and those who know me can also say that, you know, in fact, this has been an enormous flowering for me in my life.
You know, his sorrows are my sorrows, his joys are my joys, and I wish to be faithful to him until the day that one of us dies and probably thereafter.
And I think that we could ask whether there's a place for that in the church without demanding that that replace what is obviously at the center of the church's sexual ethic, which is straight people.
Right, right, right.
Well, I got to stop there.
We're out of time.
But that's at least for me an excellent description of where you're coming from, because as I always say, I don't actually need a theology about this because my business is to look at my problems and my relationship with God.
But I think that that is as clearly explained as it can possibly be.
Subscribe Now!00:02:54
I hope you have a great Christmas because you'll be at my place.
I'll see you there.
So, you know, we'll do our best.
It's great to see you, Spencer Clavin.
His podcast is called The Young Heretics.
You really have to listen to it.
It is absolutely terrific.
And if you're not reading the Claremont Review of books, you are missing out.
What's your position there now?
I'm the associate editor.
Associate Editor of the Claremont Review.
It's great talking to you.
We'll talk again, I hope.
Let's have a cigar.
We are going to talk about the deeper meaning of the song White Christmas in just a minute.
But first, My Pillow.
They want to give back to our listeners.
And you can get great discounts on all MyPillow products if you go to mypillow.com right now and click on the Radio Listeners specials.
Get deep discounts on MyPillow's mattress toppers, towels, and so much more.
MyPillow is offering buy one, get one free offer on Giza Sheets, top quality sheets that you will love.
All my pillow products come with a 60-day money-back guarantee and a 10-year warranty.
Go to mypillow.com and click on the radio listeners specials for the buy one, get one free offer on the Giza Sheets and use promo code DAILYWIRE at checkout or call 1-800-651-1148.
You'll also get deep discounts on all my pillow products, including pillow, which I love, slippers, which I love like crazy, the my pillow mattress topper, I also love, and my pillow towel sets.
That's mypillow.com and enter daily wire or call 1-800-651-1148 and tell them DailyWire sent you.
That's 1-800-651-1148.
These deals won't last forever, so call now.
You know, not only was the Daily Wire the first in the nation to sue the Biden administration for their unconstitutional mandates, we're less than 100,000 away from hitting our goal of 1 million signatures on our Do Not Comply petition.
Reaching 1 million signatures will provide a major boost to our legal challenge.
We have over 900,000 signatures so far, but we need your help to cross the finish line.
Please sign the petition at dailywire.com slash do not comply and then share our petition with all of your friends and family.
And if you haven't heard, Ben Shapiro is hosting a new series exclusively for the Daily Wire.
It's a voyeuristic view of his conversations with his closest and most influential friends, including Jordan Peterson, who stopped by on a recent trip to Nashville to be his first guest.
They head to one of Ben's favorite local coffee spots to discuss big ideas in their private lives as if the cameras aren't even rolling.
The premiere episode drops tonight and will be available only at DailyWire.com.
So if you're not a member yet, now is the perfect time to sign up.
Head to dailywire.com slash subscribe to sign up today.
Clips of the show will be available on YouTube, but I can promise you these are meaty conversations and you'll be missing out on a lot if you don't subscribe right now.
Yearning for Dickens' Nostalgia00:14:24
This sort of gives me a chance to keep a little promise I made to myself.
I said I was going to sing this song at the end tonight.
I'm dreaming of a white Christmas.
Just like the ones I used to know.
That's obviously White Christmas by the great Bing Crosby.
One day I'm going to do a segment on Bing Crosby.
But I want to talk a little bit about the ideas that are communicated by White Christmas.
That's the film Holiday Inn, where it got its start.
He actually, Crosby has sung it on one of his radio programs, but that's where it became popular.
It sold 50 million copies.
It remains the world's best-selling single in terms of physical media, with Crosby's other versions that have sold 100 million altogether.
When Irving Berlin wrote it, obviously one of the greatest of the great songwriters, when he wrote it, he was at a hotel in California where there was no snow, and it begins with a lyric about how it's a perfect day.
You've never seen such a day in Beverly Hills, LA, but I'm dreaming of a white Christmas.
And he said to his secretary, I want you to take down a song I wrote over the weekend.
Not only is this the best song I ever wrote, it's the best song anybody ever wrote.
And a lot of people agreed with him.
And people often talk about what's so appealing about this song.
Why this song above all others to be the best-selling single?
And one of the things everybody talks about is the melancholy of it, the nostalgia, the White Christmas, just like the ones I used to know, this kind of yearning for something in the past.
And I can't help but wonder, by the way, if some of this Irving Berlin was Jewish and if some of the tone of it comes from an outsider wistfully looking at this beautiful holiday and making it his own because it was one of the first secular Christmas carols ever to become as popular as it was.
But also, of course, it was written in 1942 when a lot of guys were overseas and missing home and feeling that yearning for home.
And according to Crosby's nephew, Howard Crosby, he says, I once asked Uncle Bing about the most difficult thing he ever had to do during his entertainment career.
And he said in December 1944, he was in a USO show with Bob Hope and the Andrews sisters, and they did an outdoor show in northern France.
And he had to stand there and sing White Christmas with 100,000 GIs in tears without breaking down himself.
And of course, right after that, they all went to the Battle of the Bulge, where many of those boys never got to see home again.
And during the war, this kind of song became very popular.
Have yourself a merry little Christmas.
Next year is in olden days, happy golden days of yore.
Faithful friends who are dear to us will be near to us once more, yearning again for something that was in the past.
I'll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.
And a lot of nostalgia, that yearning for home.
But the interesting thing is that a white Christmas, the fact of a snowy Christmas, also has its origins in nostalgia.
Charles Dickens, who's sometimes called, I think there's even a movie about Dickens called The Man Who Invented Christmas, he is said to have brought Christmas back into fashion in the Victorian era because after the Industrial Revolution broke up families, it broke up traditions.
It moved people out of the country into the cities.
It took children into and women into workplaces where they hadn't been before and it diluted traditions.
And Dickens tried to bring some of those back and to remind people of what they were back.
And when he started writing his famous Christmas stories, obviously including a Christmas carol, he was already harkening back to an older time.
There was already an atmosphere of nostalgia to it, and there was a lot of snow in his stories.
Whereas in England, in late December, you don't really see a lot of snow, especially in London where a lot of his stories take place.
You almost never see snow.
But interestingly, for the first eight years of Dickens' life, there was a huge cold snap.
You know, it was climate change.
I'm sure there were Democrats running around complaining about it, but there was a huge cold snap.
At one point, the River Thames froze over and people were skating on it.
And there was a white Christmas every year for the first eight years of Dickens' life.
And when Dickens was 12 years old, his father was sent to debtor's prison.
His father was a spendthrift, and he was sent to debtor's prison that broke up the family.
And Dickens, who was his father's wife, his mother, and the little children went into debtor's prison with the father, which was the tradition at the time.
But Dickens had to go to work in a factory pasting labels on pots of bootblacking.
And this was a really, really traumatic experience.
It appears in his books throughout, the children being made to work, how bad debtor's prison is, and Mr. Macauber and David Copperfield as the spendthrift kind of based on his father, whose famous phrase is an annual income of 20 pounds and an annual expenditure of 19 pounds, 19 and 6 result happiness, annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 20 pounds, naught and 6 result misery.
In other words, if you live within your means, you'll have a happy life.
So it's not too far off to speculate that those snowy Christmases that show up in Dickens harken back to his idyllic childhood before the trauma of his father's arrest, before the trauma of his father being in prison.
Those white Christmases were the ones he used to know when things were going well.
And it's interesting that now, because Dickens sort of did invent our modern notion of Christmas, we associate Victorian England with Christmas.
When you send a Christmas card, it might have a Bible scene on it, it might have a modern scene, but oftentimes when it'll have a scene of England or a scene of men in top hats and women in Victorian dress.
And so we now think of Christmas as associating it with that part of the past.
We're nostalgic for that part of the past.
But here is the joke.
Even in Victorian England, the people in the olden days were harkening back to the olden days.
Like I said, the Industrial Revolution had broken up a lot of their customs and they were thinking backward.
And their Christmas carols were written to sound old.
There is a wonderful article, I read it about 10 years ago, by Joseph Bottom, who's the editor of the wonderful magazine First Thing, the other one with Claremont Review, that and City Journal and First Things are the magazines I get.
And he wrote an article called Here We Come a Wassoling.
And he starts out by quoting some carols.
He says, Little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes, and what the gladsome tidings be, and we three kings of Orient are, to say nothing of, if thou knowst it, telling.
He says, have you ever noticed just how weird the grammar and syntax of Christmas carols are?
Or I guess I should say, the songs of Christmas, notest thou the strangeness filled with are and how.
And he points out that even the title of God rest ye merry gentlemen is misunderstood.
It's not God resty, comma, merry gentleman.
Rest means keep.
This means keep merry.
Stay merry, gentlemen.
So it's God rest ye merry, comma, gentlemen.
And Bottom says, you know, there are all these odd phrases there like the witch's mother Mary did nothing take in scorn, which you'd think would make you say like, was his mother a witch?
That carol is actually old.
It dates to the 17th century, but most of the other Victorian carols are written to sound more old-fashioned than they are.
So this brings up a really interesting question, which is why is Christmas a nostalgic holiday?
Why does it come with that sense of loss and yearning to be as we were before?
And it's interesting to note that the word nostalgia is an invention of the late 18th century.
It was coined in the late 18th century as a medical term by a Swiss physician named Johannes Hoffer, who was trying to tell what Swiss mercenaries felt when they were in the service of other monarchs when they were far away from home.
They suffered from a morbid homesickness, a morbid yearning for home, which he called nostalgia.
So that white Christmas idea, I'll be home for Christmas of only in my dreams, is almost the definition of nostalgia, that yearning for home.
And it's interesting that nostalgia, both personal and societal, is something we all feel all the time.
Even people who have had bad childhoods think back that there was a moment in their childhood that was not bad.
There was something they lost in their childhood.
And even people in a society that's going well, always, there is never a time when people don't think that the golden age of a society was in the past.
People are always saying, oh, the golden day.
Now we think about the 1950s.
And obviously, there are good times and bad times for a country.
As I say, I think this is a very unhealthy, a very sick time for our country.
But the idea that before now, everything was serene and everything was fine.
This is a country that has always, always been roiling and tumultuous and revolutionary.
And people have always been saying, you know, George Washington was accused of wanting to be king, the man who basically pulled liberty out of the ground and gave it a local habitation and a name.
But, you know, when we talk about the greatest generation, they went through depression, they went through World War.
What makes them the greatest generation is the hardships they faced, which make ours look like nothing.
So when we yearn to live in the past, you know, it's a little bit fake.
Like I always think like I'd love to live in 18th century, early 19th century England, right around the Napoleonic Wars, if I could have penicillin with me, because otherwise you get a cold and that's it.
So we're always yearning for something in the past.
This is a steady state.
And why is this?
And why is that steady state of nostalgia associated with Christmas more than any other holiday?
There's a famous painting by a Belgian surrealist named René Magritte.
You've probably seen it.
It's a picture of a pipe.
And it has a caption in French.
Magritte was French.
It says, Céci, no, I'm sorry, he was Belgian.
It says, Céci nest pas un pipe, right?
This is not a pipe.
So the picture of a pipe.
This is not a pipe.
And the picture is called The Treachery of Images.
And his point is being that this is not a pipe.
It is a representation of a pipe.
And I think really, you know, I've talked about this a lot, but I think the entire world is like that.
It is the work of God, his creation.
So like a work of art, it is a representation of something else.
It is a representation of God's kingdom and God's nature and God's mind, because we create out of our mind and out of our heart.
So this world that we live in, this is not a world.
This is a representation of something deeper.
And that deep thing is what I think we are all looking for.
We are looking for the thing behind the thing.
I think this is true of all our desires.
Our desire for sex, our desire for love, our desire for fame, our desire for money.
I think are all yearnings to get in touch with God, to be at one with the mind of creation.
C.S. Lewis called this yearning joy.
He said, joy is always a desire for something long ago or further away or still about to be.
It is never there in the moment.
It is always a longing for something far away.
He says, if I find myself, if I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.
And it's that other world that this world is just a broken, faulty representation of.
That memoir that he wrote that in is called Surprise by Joy.
And surprise by joy is taken from a poem by William Wordsworth.
And William Wordsworth wrote one of the greatest, possibly the greatest poems on this subject about the past and what it means to people.
It's a poem called Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.
And he talks about how when he was young, and this is what defines Wordsworth, is he felt at one with nature.
He felt at one with nature.
He had a visionary feeling about it.
And now that visionary feeling, as he gets older, is starting to pass away.
And he says, whither is fled the visionary gleam.
Where is it now?
The glory and the dream.
And this is his conclusion about what's happened to him.
He says, our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.
The soul that rises with us, our life star, hath had elsewhere its setting and cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come from God who is our home.
And so what he's saying, if you get that image that our birth is asleep and a forgetting, what we sleep is where we come from.
And the star that rises, our life star, sets somewhere else and comes from somewhere else.
And we don't come utterly naked.
We come with a memory of that.
We come trailing the glory from God, who is our home.
That poem, which is written in the early 19th century, and the word nostalgia, which is invented in the late 18th century, are hearkening back to something that I think people felt had been lost in the Middle Ages, a unity with the spiritual fact of nature, a greater comfort with the fact that nature is a creation and nature is a representation of a world beyond nature.
And I think that in Jesus' birth, what we see is that nature, us, the pinnacle of that nature, which is humanity, and God coming together in the birth of Jesus Christ.
And it is a memory that we have that this is right, this is true.
This is telling us something that we already know.
We already know.
We are coming from God, who is our home, and our nostalgia is the yearning for that home.
And so nostalgia and Christmas go together because we are yearning for something we have yet to see.
But in the birth of Christ, we realize we will see it someday.
All right, before I release you into a clavenless Christmas and New Year's, I want to make sure that I know what you want to gather your family about you, but I want you to make room for your family by getting rid of all your problems.
So here we have the mailbag.
Somewhere!
Nostalgia and Christmas00:09:28
Paris, the pandemic!
Masks will come off.
Yeah!
Our elites, ladies and gentlemen, there they are.
From Lydia.
I'm a 28-year-old recovering lefty that spent many years eating up the propaganda about women needing to have successful careers and looking down on women who chose family over work.
I have a PhD in physics.
I set myself up for a career as an engineer in aerospace defense, but then she married a conservative husband and began to value the beauty of motherhood.
Now she has a child, and she has a dilemma.
She says, I have a beautiful baby girl, and while I now have been convinced that being a full-time mother is an honorable choice and that I am the best person on the planet to raise my own child, I do sincerely miss working.
I can't imagine giving up a career I work so hard for, but I also can't imagine spending a day away from my little one.
Do you have any advice?
Sincerely stay-at-home mom janier.
Well, yes, I do have some advice.
I can't make your decisions for you and I can't run your life for you, but I can tell you that, and this is really important.
I mean, this is important for all parents, I think, that not everything happens at once.
We tend to think outside of time.
You know, not everything has to be at the same time.
This is the moment when your child needs you most.
I'm not telling you how to live.
I'm not telling you not to go to work.
I'm just telling you this is the moment when your child needs mom, needs mom in the home and will for about five years, I would say, and then will start to need less as she goes off to school unless you decide to homeschool.
And so what I would say is like, have some patience.
You know, have some patience.
Careers will come back.
You know, stay in touch.
You can do things at home.
You can work at home.
There's no reason why, even though your child needs you there, there's no reason that she needs you there every minute or that you can never do any work.
You don't want to overload yourself and make your life so busy that it's a misery to you.
But, you know, there's room to do different things.
There's room maybe to take some part-time work and have somebody come in once a week or whatever.
You know, just have patience.
Have patience and understand that life is short, but life is long.
Life is short, but it has room for a lot of things in it.
And since every moment is its own eternal moment, you want to do the thing that you're doing with a full heart.
You know, I'm prejudiced in favor of moms.
You know, I'm prejudiced in favor of moms.
I've seen the difference moms make in life and in society.
And I have nothing, as I think many of you can hear, I have nothing but respect for them.
You're an individual.
There's not one size that fits all.
You have to work out your own life and what your life should look like.
Don't work it out according to what other people tell you, including me.
Work it out according to what is in your heart to do.
But don't overload yourself.
Just do what you really deeply want to do.
And remember, there's time for more things later on.
From Andre, he says, I have a question that's been begging me for a while.
I wanted to ask you since crime and punishment was so critical in your conversion to Christianity.
There's a moral order and there's a conscience.
And we see in crime and punishment that Raskolnikov commits a murder and then is troubled by his conscience.
But what about people who are not troubled by their conscience?
I don't think it disproves a moral order or conscience, but then again, I believe in a God who is a just judge.
I guess the question is, if you are truly a social sociopath, then don't the rules apply?
So you're not being tormented by your conscience.
You're a serial killer who sleeps like a baby and feels great about it and actually is having a good time.
You know, you're absolutely right.
And Woody Allen makes films about that.
Crimes and misdemeanors and Match Point are films where he basically tries to answer Dostoevsky saying, well, if you don't have a conscience, then the moral order ceases to exist.
And of course, that's nonsense.
That's like saying if you're colorblind, red and green cease to be what they are.
That's not true.
If you don't have a conscience, you have a deficit.
But you're also right that you are not suffering the way that Raskolnikov suffers or that we, you know, people like you and me probably suffer when we accidentally walk away with a dollar or more in change and we think, oh no, I've stolen a dollar from that person where the guy who tortures and kills sleeps like a baby.
And that seems unfair.
This is one of the reasons that we believe in an eternal world, an eternal world with justice, because we know for a fact this world is not just.
We know that the evil thrive and the good suffer.
We know that.
And yet, and yet the very fact that we have the concept of justice suggests that our Creator is justice and has justice.
And so because we were made in God's image, we have to speculate that justice takes place over a longer period of time.
You cannot say that because a sociopath does not suffer for his crimes, those crimes are right.
That's basically Woody Allen's argument, and it's a nonsense.
And one of the problems with his movies for me, even though they're entertaining, is that he doesn't have the depth to really deal with these questions as far as I'm concerned.
But you have to believe that justice takes place in an eternal world because it clearly does not take place on this mortal plane.
And you just have to understand that.
Michael says, Drew Drudeau, I'm disappointed.
I've long considered you my ideological counterpart in the Daily Wire crew, but you have crossed the line recently.
I had the misfortune of hearing you slander the greatest show of all time, Lost.
It's not a good show.
It doesn't make sense.
And he says there's this existentialism and religious aspect that's more important than the story.
You should be able to put that stuff in a story that works.
But I forgive you, and you're allowed to enjoy it.
I'll just look the other way.
From David as a Christian, I want to know if you've heard this scenario.
Chet and Leon.
Chet is a Christian, while Leon is an atheist.
They get into an argument about what happens when you die.
And Chet says, if I'm wrong, then nothing happens.
But if you're wrong, then you spend an eternity in hell.
Do you think that's a valid argument?
Or do you think it shows that you don't have enough faith?
I don't think that's usually called Pascal's wager, although that's not quite an accurate description.
But the idea is that why not believe because the consequences for not believing are so bad.
But no, I don't think it's a good argument.
Your argument is that the moral world only makes sense with God in it.
That's a fair, it's not a proof, it's an argument.
And the leap of faith that you take is that there is a moral world, that it actually is wrong to torture a child for your own pleasure.
And if every person on earth says it's right, it's still wrong.
And that's the leap of faith you take.
Once you believe that, you have to believe in God.
Even if you think you don't, I'm saving you 30 years here because I worked out every scenario over 30, 35 years.
I'm saving you a lot of time.
Just believe me, if you believe it's wrong to torture a child for your own pleasure, but it's right to give a beggar bread, you believe in God.
You just don't know it yet.
So the other argument is silly.
I mean, it's just saying that because if God doesn't exist, nothing is worth believing in him.
I mean, you shouldn't believe in a falsehood just on an off chance.
One more.
Dear Clavin, I just found out yesterday that my grandmother passed away.
It all happened very suddenly.
She had a very close relationship with Jesus.
I know she's in heaven yet.
I feel this horrible feeling I cannot explain.
I came to Christ in large part because of reading your memoir and listening to all the Daily Wire shows.
This is the first loved one I ever lost, and I do not know what to do.
He's in college.
He's far away.
What you should do is you should grieve.
You should grieve for your grandma.
I understand that your grandmother is with Christ and that is a good thing, but she is also gone and that is a bad thing.
And here we are on this earthly plane in this veil of tears.
And we have to be sorry and sad for the things that make us sorry and sad.
I always hate when people say, why are you grieving?
You should celebrate.
No, this life is unique.
And when it ends, it is uniquely over.
And though there is something beyond, we have faith that there is something beyond.
This is uniquely over.
The grandma that you knew in this life is gone.
Be sad.
You know, be sad for her.
Mourn her and then and keep your eye on God, and God will bring you through that plain, that desert of mourning, to a deeper, richer place, not necessarily a happier place, but to a deeper, richer place, a more compassionate place for having lost someone you love.
You know you're, you're far away, you're feeling alone.
That's natural.
Get involved with your college, get involved with where the people where you are make friends, join clubs, do all the things that you have to do to get over your loneliness.
But grieving your grandma is not a bad thing.
That is a good thing.
It is part of life and suffering is part of life and it deepens us and makes us uh, more compassionate and brings us closer to God.
I hope your Christmas season brings you closer to God.
It should have faith.
There is absolutely no reason not to.
It is a beautiful, beautiful thing that Christ was born, and born to relieve us of our guilt, born to relieve us of our sin, born as a star, like the star that led the wise men to the Manger.
Christ is the star that will lead you through your life to something beautiful while you're here and something even far and unimaginably beautiful after you're here.
It is a clavenless two weeks, but I think it will be the only time when you can have a beautiful, clavenless two weeks, celebrate christmas, get together with your family and remember the lord who made you and be grateful and be merry.
Vaxed Areas Struggle With Omicron00:01:17
I will see you in the new year with the Andrew Clavin show.
am.
Andrew Klavan, Merry Christmas.
We're available on Apple podcasts, on spotify, basically wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also, remember to check out the other Daily WIRE podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro show, the Matt Walsh show and the Michael Knoll show.
Thank you for listening.
The Andrew Clavin show is produced by Lisa Bacon.
Supervising producer Mathis Glover.
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Our technical director is Austin Stevens.
Production manager Pavel Wadowski.
Editor and associate producer Danny D'amico.
Lead audio mixer, Mike Kormina.
Animations are by Cynthia And Gulo.
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 Ben Shapiro Show, heavily vaxed areas are overwhelmed by Omicron.