Brandon and the host dissect 2021 as a Democratic "victory" marred by COVID mismanagement, Afghanistan’s dishonorable exit, and economic failures like $6/lb meat prices while mocking Biden’s leadership. They frame January 6th as media hysteria—no insurrection charges filed—while contrasting it with ignored BLM riots, accusing Democrats of exploiting the event to push election control via Schumer’s filibuster threats. The episode pivots to tech monopolies, calling for Google/Facebook regulation as "common carriers" to counter ideological suppression, and warns Republicans must unite against leftist cultural dominance or risk perpetual Trump-like figures. Closing with a moral defense of marriage over progressive decay, the show ends by urging conservative policy wins beyond symbolic battles like Roe v. Wade. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, here we are, and this seems like a good time to take a look back at the year in review.
Saturday was a holiday, so that really slowed things down.
And of course, there wasn't much going on Sunday.
Then Monday, it snowed.
Now, that's about it.
But we still have some time left, so maybe we should take a look back at some of the stuff that happened in 2021 as well.
2021 was a year of big successes for the Democrats.
They successfully took over the government.
Plus, they came to power at such a bad moment for the nation's health and economy that anyone with the brains of a tangerine or even a New York Times subscriber could have easily led the way to an era of massive recovery and widespread good feeling.
So that was pretty much a high point for them.
President and venal house plant Joe Biden successfully set out to fulfill his promise of bringing the Chinese virus under control.
One successful result of his actions was that after years of decline in classical education, Americans are now finally learning the names of the Greek letters that identify the virus variants that are killing them in higher numbers than during the Trump administration.
To be fair, White House spokeswoman Jen Pasakipa says that more people actually died during the Trump administration if you include all the terrorists Trump had killed while destroying the ISIS caliphate that took over much of Syria and Iraq the last time Joe Biden was in the White House.
So congratulations, Democrats.
The Democrats also successfully claimed to have won the election with a governing mandate because anyone who said they didn't was taken off YouTube.
So they successfully laid out an ambitious plan to successfully transform America, which had been mired for far too long in wealth, power, and freedom.
Although Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia initially showed some reluctance to support the ambitious plan, the administration successfully managed to browbeat and insult Manchin until he set his reluctance aside and replaced it with an iron determination to shove the plan so far down Chuck Schumer's throat that Schumer's head would explode, after which Manchin would use Schumer's splattered brains to paint Up Yours Joe Biden, you braindead son of a toad, on the Senate walls.
The White House says that negotiations with Senator Manchin will continue until the entire Congress is laid waste.
The Democrats successfully ended the war in Afghanistan, along with any lingering sense we might have had of honor and self-respect, and they successfully instituted a much greener environmental policy, successfully hobbling the nation's energy production, which in turn successfully strengthened and enriched Russia and China so they could successfully continue to fund their mission of successfully taking over the world.
And finally, while it is true that here at home, meat prices have skyrocketed, the administration has successfully raised the nation's respect for vegetables by having one of them run the country.
Discussing Rockauto.com00:04:38
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are wingy, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoora, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, happy new year.
I hope you all had a happy and healthy January 6th as you celebrated or solemnized or memorialized the tragic, solemn, tragic, and also solemn events of the solemn, tragic solemnity.
Today we're going to talk about the collapse of progressivism, which was taking place right in front of our eyes.
60 years of taking over the culture, and all they got was this lousy t-shirt.
Also, Rachel Bovard will join us.
She's the lady who made that great speech at the National Conservative Conference about what the right should do the next time we get our power back.
And I'll also discuss Don't Look Up if you miss this.
You know, our right-wing commentators on the culture, sometimes they just don't get things exactly right.
So I want to talk about that.
My new resolution, this is a big year.
This is a big, a promising year for me, a big year.
I've got a lot of stuff coming out that if you liked When Christmas comes, the sequel will be out at the end of the year.
I have my book, The Truth and Beauty, which is about the romantic poets.
That's going to come out in April.
And in May, I've got a play being put on in Ohio.
My first play ever.
It's based on my novel, The Uncanny.
It's being put on at the Stage Right Theatrics, which is, by the way, if you want to test out Stage Right Theatrics, they are having a conservative theater festival on January 28th and 29th and January 30th.
Just go on to the website of StageWrite Theatrics and you can get it.
Either go there in Dublin, Ohio, or you can get it streamed onto your devices and they'll send you on the day when you buy the ticket.
They'll send you the directions for how to get it streamed.
Also subscribe to Apple Podcasts and give us a five-star review.
Enormously helpful for the program.
Do not neglect to do this if you enjoy the show.
If you don't enjoy the show, do it anyway.
It's kind of like lying, but who cares?
Also, subscribe to the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel and you will get exclusive content that you will not get anywhere else.
And if you leave a comment and the comment is sufficiently racist and hateful and phobic and just if it's really, really disgusting, we'll read it on the air because it'll fit in with the rest of our content.
Today we have Tie My Shoe is his name.
And he says, Clavin, this is a question.
We'll answer questions.
It's Clavin, could you beat Knowles and Walsh in a theological debate?
And the answer to that is not if we were discussing, you know, the ins and outs of Catholic theology, but of course, if we were discussing what God actually wants from your life, I mean, look at them, look at me.
I think the question answers itself.
You know, we'll have the mailbag later on.
I hope you'll send in your mailbag questions if you're a subscriber.
And a lot of people ask me, you know, why do they have so much trouble with women?
A lot of guys ask me.
And the reason is, one of the key reasons is they're not going to rockauto.com.
If you're not going to rockauto.com, first of all, you don't get the chance to say rockauto.com.
That's the key.
That's the key right there.
Once you say that, women will swoon.
They will fall at your feet, their blouses, their dresses, you know, spreading out around them like flowers.
It's a beautiful, beautiful thing to see.
But you will also be able to get car parts that you need right off your computer instead of spending your time at the auto parts store where you're going to pay, who knows, 30, 50, 100% more for the exact same auto parts you could get right off your computer with rockauto.com.
Women see that.
They say, this guy doesn't know.
First of all, he never says rockauto.com.
I'm hungry to hear somebody say rockauto.com.
But he also doesn't know that he shouldn't be sitting there in his broken car pretending to drive to an auto parts car when he could just go inside, get out and out of the rain, go to rockauto.com and use their fantastic site, which is really easy to use.
Go to rockauto.com right now, see all the parts available for your car or truck, and write Clavin in there.
How did you hear about us box so they know we sent you, but also so you can say, Clavin, Clavin, I know how to spell Clavin's K-L-A-V-A-N.
That just drives the women nuts.
Another one of my New Year's resolutions was to try to speak more specifically about the kinds of things I think will help us personally, each one of us individually, live out the joy of being free and spiritual people.
Dinner Table Discussions00:11:51
And the reason I feel this is really important is because progressivism is actually collapsing in front of our eyes.
And there are a lot of different reasons.
Joel Kotkin, excellent political observer, wrote a piece at unheard.com.
He said, over the past several decades, the progressive left has successfully fulfilled Antonio Gramsci's famed admonition of a long march through the institutions.
In almost every Western country, leftist adherents now dominate the education system, media, cultural institutions, and financial behemoths.
But what do they have to show for it?
Not as much as they might have expected.
Rather than a Bolshevik-style assumption of power, there's every chance this institutional triumph will not produce an enduring political victory, let alone substantially change public opinion.
Even before Biden's botched Build Back Better initiative, says Kotkin, American progressives faced opposition to their wildly impractical claims about achieving zero COVID and zero emissions, confronting systemic racism, quote unquote, by defunding the police, regulating speech, and redefining two biological sexes into a multiplicity.
Increasingly, the march has started to falter.
Now, part of this is obviously true.
I mean, if you watch them, they are back on their heels in almost every way.
And part of it is just the fact that leftist ideas don't work.
And the right often lives off this fact.
We live off the fact that leftist ideas fail.
And so, you know, their cities are collapsing.
People are moving away by the hundreds of thousands.
I think over a million people have left the blue states to go to red states.
The crime, even the left is now forced to admit that crime is out of control in their cities.
The lockdowns accomplish nothing.
They damage children.
Masks are damaging children.
They're all starting to talk about this as if we haven't been saying it all along because they don't listen to us.
So they don't know that we've been talking about this all the time.
And the arguments with which they replace this, you know, you're racist, the sky is falling, Trump, Trump, Trump, those are not going to help people when they can't afford to buy meat.
You know, that doesn't work after a while.
People will be intimidated and insulted for a while.
But after a while, they want their kids in school.
They want their streets safe.
They want the economy to work.
And the left is incapable of doing any of those things because socialism doesn't work.
But, but more important and more long-lasting and more to the point in terms of what we want to do is that they are miserable.
I had this really interesting experience on New Year's Day.
I read most of my news like everybody on devices, but I do get the Wall Street Journal as a newspaper.
And it's really interesting.
Reading a newspaper is a much more immersive experience than using a device.
You can see different things.
It's like being in a bookstore.
You just get more of a sense of what's going on.
The Wall Street Journal doesn't print on federal holidays, so it didn't print.
And my news guy, the delivery guy, instead brought me the Washington Post and the New York Times.
So these, which I usually read on devices, I was completely immersed in.
I thought, no wonder these people are miserable.
This is insane.
This is a world that doesn't exist, a world of crisis after crisis after crisis, and a world with just no moral guidance on behavior.
You know, I've noticed now there is a genre in the press, in the left-wing press, of miserable people writing op-eds telling you that you can be miserable too.
Now, I'm sure you have this experience in your ordinary life.
I'm sure you have friends who come to you and say, you know, you ought to stop making your husband dinner.
It's like you're a slave.
And you say, well, how's your marriage?
Well, my husband left me for the nanny because she makes him dinner and takes care of the kids and he wants somebody to take care of them.
These miserable people want to spread their misery.
And so article after article after article in these papers and other left-wing venues, especially keyed in to attacking what is for most of us, the great consolation of life, which is love between a man and a woman, and usually expressed in marriage or most wholly expressed in marriage.
And I see article after article, especially by women, saying they've destroyed their marriage and what a wonderful thing this is, even though you can tell even by reading the piece that they're miserable.
I got to read just a little piece of this from a senior editor at the Atlantic named Honor Jones, How I Demolished My Life.
And what she says is she was rebuilding her house.
She was designing her house when suddenly she realized, I don't want to design my house.
I just want to divorce my husband.
And she says, I loved my husband.
It's not that I didn't, but I felt that he was standing between me and the world, between me and myself.
Everything I experienced was filtered through him before I could access the experience.
And the worst part, that it wasn't his fault.
It's what I asked him to do to shelter me from the elements, to be caring and broad-shouldered.
But now it was like I was always trying to see around him.
I couldn't see, but I could imagine.
I started imagining other lives that I might have.
I wanted to be thinking about art and sex and politics and the patriarchy.
How much of my life had I built around my husband?
Who could I be if I wasn't his wife?
Maybe I would micro-dose.
Maybe I would have sex with women.
Maybe I would write a book.
Now, this is a woman who then proceeds to destroy her marriage with little kids in the marriage.
So she blows up the planet that these children live on.
The children live on the planet of your marriage.
She throws her vows to her husband away and she deserts him.
And it's all about how now she feels raw and alive and she's obviously miserable.
And the one thing that just throughout this entire article I was reading, I was thinking at no point does she ever ask herself, did I do something wrong?
Did I do something immoral?
Did I do something that transgressed against a moral order?
And that is the thing that makes people unhappy, whether they like it or not.
If you feel incredibly alive by driving over somebody else, you will ultimately be miserable.
And the left has abandoned any kind of moral structure.
They don't have a moral structure because a moral structure is a supernatural thing.
And I know whenever I use this, people get, they think I'm talking about magic.
But what I mean is that when you take an act in nature, like giving a beggar bread or torturing a child, it has a meaning.
It has a moral meaning.
And that moral meaning exists above nature.
It is supernatural.
They don't have that.
They believe that we're motivated by sex, that we're motivated by money, that we're motivated by materialism.
And so what we have to do is we have to put forward a positive vision of what it means.
Every study shows the conservatives are happier than the miserable left.
The left is just increasingly miserable.
I know a lot of them.
I know they're miserable.
And when you're blowing your marriage up, when you're doing stuff that's wrong, when you don't really know it's wrong, when you don't have anyone to say, yeah, you're doing the wrong thing.
And instead, you got to do the right thing.
You have no guidance.
Morality is a kind of an allegory.
It is acting in a way that reflects a higher set of values.
You know, we had this conversation with my friend Liz Wheeler a while back.
And I said to her, you know, guys don't get as much out of marriage as they used to.
When I got married, I had a woman to make me a home, to make me dinner, to take care of my kids, to help me with my career, to actually be a sort of world for me to live in, which I didn't have because I'm a kind of itinerant, you know, artist type.
And I really didn't have a world.
And my wife built for me a world that I could live in and act in and have the life that I wanted to have.
She enhanced my life.
And I don't think guys get that as much.
And I asked Liz, well, what's the point now of getting married?
And for a guy, what's the point of a guy getting married?
And here is what she said.
Well, I think if you're coming at it from a Christian perspective, then you get to live out some of the mystical union between God and his church.
And I know that as a Catholic, as Christians, that's what we believe, that marriage is this peak, if you will, into this love that God has for his bride, which is his church, that we can't fully understand while we're here on earth.
And God gives us this union between man and woman and says, love each other the way that I love my church, whether that's the respect, whether that's the, you know, the all controversial term of submission, which we know does not mean subservience.
He tells us that this is a peek into the union between you, between us as God's children and God.
And so it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be a situation where you're talking about a 1950s housewife who cleans the house in her high heels and has her husband's dinner on the table for him when he comes home from work every day.
That's fine if that's what you want to do.
But it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be practically set up like that for you to have this really solid, and I'm talking about culturally solid in addition to spiritually, this really culturally solid institution that prevents a lot of societal ills.
You know, it's funny when she said that, I thought, you didn't answer the question.
You know, I love Liz and she's a great commentator, but I just thought, you know, that doesn't really tell me what a guy gets out of getting married.
But in a way, it also does, because it tells you what you're trying to do.
Those are big words.
It's big words to say, well, you're representing something godly.
When you represent yourself as a man, you're representing the male Godhead.
When you represent yourself as a woman, you're representing the female Godhead.
That is the real, when they talk about gender assignment, that's the assignment.
That's what you're supposed to do.
And everyone is different, but still, I don't think it hurts.
Not every man is a soldier, but I don't think it hurts every man to try and have the integrity and courage that go along with being a man.
Not every woman is a homemaker.
Not every woman is a mom, but I think it helps every woman to try and achieve the tenderness and generosity that go along with womanhood.
When you do not have that supernatural realm to act in, you don't know where you're going.
You don't know what's the difference if I dump my kids as long as I feel better.
When you do have it, you can sometimes get too restrained.
You can sometimes think that you start to pass judgment on other people and are they doing what they're supposed to do.
But each of us, I think, has an individual mandate, an individual command to fulfill, to fulfill our moral obligations and to fill our moral identity.
And that's a positive thing that we do with our lives.
Each one of us has to do it individually according to our calling.
If we do that, we're going to have the kind of joy, the kind of moral life, and the kind of good life, the kind of beautiful life that we can hold up to the left and say, you know what?
You don't have to live like this.
You don't have to live alone.
You don't have to destroy your marriage to find life.
You don't have to destroy your cities to be fair.
You don't have to destroy your economy to feel that you're being a generous person.
There is a way, freedom, capitalism, governed by moral values that we can put forward.
And this is the moment.
This is the moment as we come into the midterms, their system is falling apart.
And we have to understand how to represent the moral vision and the moral order, or we're not going to be able to take advantage of this incredible moment.
This hilarious clown show that went on yesterday to celebrate January 6th was an amazing moment, an amazing example of how you have to understand the moral order to act wisely politically.
If you're watching, you can see we put up a picture of the Capitol just so you would continue to have the solemn, tragic solemnity of the tragedy of January 6th in your mind as we're talking about this.
Nancy Pelosi did my favorite thing where she introduced, this is so solemn and so important and such a moment, you know, it was, it's 9-11 and the Holocaust and Pearl Harbor all rolled together.
And people actually were saying that.
I'm not just making it up.
And here's Nancy Pelosi introducing in order to celebrate this with the solemnity that we need, the guy who wrote Hamilton, his Cup 31.
We're privileged to have a contribution from one of the great creative talents of our time, Lynn Manuel Miranda.
May his beautiful words be an inspiration to us.
Among the words he said and in the music, we'll make it right for you.
If we lay a strong enough foundation, we'll pass it on to you and we'll give the world to you.
To me, I was expecting him to start singing Springtime for Hitler.
I mean, how ridiculous could you get?
Violent Riots and Rule Changes00:15:14
And then, you know, Biden came out and he gave this speech that essentially what they're essentially doing is they're using this to push their attempt to federally take over state elections, which I don't think is going to pass, but that's what they're basically trying to do.
They're basically saying that the Republicans are trying to prevent people from voting by asking for ID and other ways of making elections secure.
And they made this speech.
But these are the guys who rioted after Trump won, who refused to accept his victory, who ran the Russian collusion lie for years.
They corrupted the FBI to push that lie.
And listen, I've refused to let the rioters off the hook.
I'm not making up some story.
You know, Donald Trump was in a room watching on television as these clowns, these morons, stormed into the Capitol building, giving the Democrats the weapons they needed to do this.
And Trump screwed the poosh.
I told you this from the beginning.
I lost a lot of audience telling you.
I'm telling you again.
But, but you cannot talk about this outside the context of A, the stuff that the Democrats are trying to push on us, the stuff that they're trying to do to the country, which is utterly destructive and utterly authoritarian.
And you can't talk about it without the summer of BLM, Black Lives Matter riots that came off the George Floyd death, the death of George Floyd, who may have died from bad policing.
I thought that his arrest was bad policing, but he was a lifetime criminal, stuck a gun in a pregnant woman's belly while his friends ransacked her house.
He was a drug addict.
He had enough drugs in his body to have killed him anyway, to have died anyway.
It was not evidence.
It was not evidence that the police are racist.
There is no evidence.
Study after study shows there is no evidence that the police act in a routinely racist way.
So everybody who said they did, that's the media, that's the Democrat Party, started those riots, incited those riots, then told us the riots were justified, then told us the riots weren't happening.
Let's just take a look for a minute at the way they covered January 6th, the way the media covered January 6th.
Cop killers.
Cop killers.
Trump cop killers.
Some rioters were planning to murder lawmakers.
They were carrying zip ties, right?
A way that police used to detain people, people that showed up there with weapons and zip ties with clear intent to murder American legislators.
If they had gotten in there and gotten their hands on a congressman or senator, they would have slit their throats.
They would have hung them.
They would have shot them.
They would have beat them to death.
There was, my understanding, a functional gallows constructed in front of the Capitol.
So if you wanted to lynch somebody on the steps of the Capitol, you would bring those kind of zip ties to get them from their office to the hanging noose.
And here's how they covered the Black Lives Matter riots that they incited.
I want to be clear in how I characterize this.
This is mostly a protest.
It is not it is not, generally speaking, unruly.
That ain't a riot, what we're seeing right now in Minneapolis.
Excuse me, any reasonable person would say we shouldn't be destroying other people's property, but these are not reasonable times.
And please, show me where it says that protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful.
The beautiful thing is we're seeing citizens who are caring and concerned.
They're hitting the streets.
Heartwarming to see so many people turn out peacefully.
You know, Brooke, I think this is a march, really.
But as they're coming off, it's peaceful.
They're saying peaceful protest.
Across the country, it's bringing people together, community with unity.
People are risking COVID to explain to this country that we're fed up.
So here's real clear investigations.
The summer 2020 riots resulted in some 15 times more injured police officers, 23 times as many arrests, and estimated damages in dollar terms up to 1,300 times more costly than those of the Capitol riot.
Authorities have pursued the largely Trump-supporting Capitol rioters with substantially more vigor than suspected wrongdoers in the earlier two cases, and prosecutors and judges alike have weighed Capitol riot defendants' political views in adjudicating their cases.
Dozens of accused Capitol rioters have been held in pretrial detention for months where they have allegedly been mistreated.
In the summer 2020 riots, the vast majority of charges were dismissed as they were in the inauguration 2017.
Unrest prosecutors have dropped a single Capitol riot case.
And that's not even to mention the time that protesters breached the White House and Trump and Melania had to be taken into a secure bunker to protect them.
And they criticized Trump for running away at the time.
I mean, it's just the coverage is just so different and the approach is so different.
And the reason is they want to demonize you.
And if there were no corruption in the media, if the media weren't so corrupt, all of this would just be hilarious.
I mean, you'd just be seeing they do it.
They're so over the top.
You know, when you compare this kerfuffle, these thousands of people who went into the, and again, they were morons, and Trump should have stopped them on the dime.
I'm not justifying them in any way, shape, or form, but still, when you compare this to 9-11, when you compare it to the Holocaust, I mean, it would be absurd if it weren't for the media.
And this is the point.
The whole purpose of this is to make you completely out of court, to take away your standing as a political entity in the world.
Here's how the media covers you and what they want you to think about Republicans.
Right-wing domestic violent extremism is the single greatest threat facing this country.
Domestic terrorism is our number one threat.
There are elements of the GOP that are starting to look like the jihadists.
What I would call MAGA terrorists.
Domestic Trump terrorists.
The Republican Party is basically a domestic terrorist cell at this point.
If we can go after international terrorists, why can't we do it at home?
MAGA and the domestic terror threat is much more worrisome than any foreign threat.
Violent-looking, angry, spewing parents.
We've never seen anything like we're seeing at these school boards now.
What on earth has happened in this country?
You look at the rage, the anger, you think, what is this doing to the children in those homes?
They want to shut down our schools and move kids over to charter schools and private schools without the oversight of the state.
And that's wrong.
You're either with them or with us.
Take your choice.
You don't want to be a violent-looking, especially the violent, it's the violent-looking people.
I don't mind the violent people, but the violent-looking people I'm really against.
So I don't want to pick on Senator Ted Cruz.
And the other thing I don't want is I don't want the clownish absurdity of this melodrama that they're playing out about January 6th.
I don't want it to divide us.
I think that's letting them win a little bit.
I don't think we should be yelling at each other so much.
We should be yelling at them.
We should remember who the problem is.
We're going to need moderate Republicans.
I know people love to call them rhinos and all this, but we're going to need everybody to strike back against this absolute attack on the country that is being staged from the left for some reason.
It's not like they won by that many votes, but they still think they have this mandate to transform the nation.
So I don't want to pick on Ted Cruz, and I like Ted Cruz a lot, and he represents things that I believe in, and he's been a really good senator.
But he got up and he made this statement, which people on the right have been reasonably attacking him for.
We are approaching a solemn anniversary this week, and it is an anniversary of a violent terrorist attack on the Capitol, where we saw the men and women of law enforcement demonstrate incredible courage, incredible bravery, risk their lives to defend the men and women who serve in this Capitol.
Okay, that was Ted Cruz talking about this.
It wasn't a terrorist attack.
We know what a terrorist attack looks like.
You know, most people, even on the left, most Democrats, even most Democrats, believe this was what it was.
It was a protest that got out of control.
People just kind of lost their heads a little bit and they acted stupid and they did stupid stuff.
These are a lot of people, when I heard the quotes from them, there were people who believed that Twitter was real life.
They believed that this was the revolution and everything was on the line and we had to stop this election and all this stuff.
You don't stop an election until you have proof that you can bring into court that the election was stolen.
When you have that proof, you go into court.
But until then, you got nothing.
You know, that is the thing.
That's the way it works.
And if it was going the other way, and believe me, the Democrats would love it to go the other way.
If it was going the other way, you would understand that.
And you do understand it.
You would protest against it.
But let's listen to a way Ron DeSantis, who is just killing it in Florida, just doing a great job in Florida.
Listen to the way he reacted to this January 6th nonsense.
Today is going to be, I mean, honestly, I'm not going to watch any of it, but you're going to see the DC New York media.
I mean, this is their Christmas, January 6th, okay?
They are going to take this and milk this for anything they could to try to be able to smear anyone who ever supported Donald Trump.
If you obstruct a proceeding, all about hold people accountable.
If you're rioting, hold accountable.
But let's just be clear here.
When they try to act like this is something akin to the September 11th attacks, that is an insult to the people who were going into those buildings.
And it's an insult to people when you say it's an insurrection.
And then a year later, nobody has been charged with that.
So, and that's true, by the way.
Nobody's been charged with an insurrectionary activity.
To act morally, you have to understand the situation that you're in.
And this is why.
This is the exact example of why Donald Trump was the man of the moment and why I feel that he's not the man of the future.
First of all, I'm so sick of 70, 80-year-old men running the country.
It's time for younger people to come in with a new vision, with a new way of looking at the world.
People who were born under the star of the internet, who understand what's going on.
It's just time to move on.
But Donald Trump is the first guy to understand and speak in a way that took into account this media corruption that has completely alienated at least 50% of the country, and I think a lot more.
When for 50 years, you've got the media telling people you're sexist, you're racist, your country stinks, your religion is crap, you know, everything about you is miserable.
Bow your heads, you homophobic rats, you Islamophobic.
You know, when people are just telling what they see, what they see is they see terrorists.
What they see is they see schools being run badly, their children not being educated.
They're seeing this stuff and they say, this is wrong.
This is against my moral code.
And they've been insulted and just slapped around.
That's the first order of business.
The first order of business is to clear these lying scum out of the way.
And then we can talk about it, just like DeSantis did.
He said, this is Christmas to them.
This is politics.
This is garbage.
But, you know, I'm not supporting the riot and I'm not supporting people who break the law.
That's not the point.
The point is that in the context, the moral thing to do is to go after the people who incited and then forgave the riots, the incredibly destructive Black Lives Matter riots that have destroyed the neighborhoods of people who can't afford to build those neighborhoods back.
One more thing.
I got one more cut I just want to play.
Chuck Schumer, the whole point of this is to get this federal takeover of election law passed, and they can't do it with the filibuster in place.
So Schumer has been talking about getting rid of the filibuster.
And here he is on what apparently is going to be the former Joy Reid.
Apparently, Joy Reed's going to be taken off the air, sources say, which will allow her to pursue her vocation of being a blithering crazy woman.
But he goes on Joy Reid's show and he says, yeah, we're going to, we're studying getting rid of the filibuster.
Here's what he says.
If we can't get Republicans to join us, we are exploring a variety of different rules changes.
And we are working and trying to get all 50 Democrats, including Senators Mansion and Sinema, to go along with those rules changes.
Because if we don't change the rules, the Republicans will block this and our democracy could be at risk and even wither in very real, in real ways.
All right, so the democracy at risk, if we don't get rid of the filibuster, this is Chuck Schumer, same guy in 2005 when under George W. Bush, they were talking about getting rid of the filibuster.
The ideologues in the Senate want to turn what the founding fathers called the cooling saucer of democracy into the rubber stamp of dictatorship.
We will not let them.
They want, because they can't get their way on every judge, to change the rules in midstream, to wash away 200 years of history.
They want to make this country into a banana republic where if you don't get your way, you change the rules.
Are we going to let them?
It'll be a doomsday for democracy if we do.
So what I love about this is the passion with which he says both things.
He says completely contradictory things.
When that's the level of dishonesty, and of course, in a politician, that's fine.
It's the fact that the press echoes whatever Chuck Schumer, whatever the left is saying, the press just echoes it.
That's what creates the problem.
It wouldn't be bad if NBC and ABC and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were all attacking the Washington Post.
We're all attacking this and saying, oh, here's this guy lying.
But they don't do it.
They hide it.
They go along with it, just like they are with this January 6th nonsense.
When that is the level of dishonesty, you have to start there.
You have to start by saying, hey, before we talk about the filibuster, let's talk about the lies.
Before we talk about January 6th, let's talk about the BLM rise.
And before we talk about whether we're going to kowtow to the left and kow-tow to the press and hope the press likes us if we say what they want us to say, let's talk about what the Democrats are trying to do to the country, because that, that is actually an atrocity.
The other place where you're seeing this collapse, of course, is with this COVID thing.
You know, COVID is here to stay.
People are going to get COVID.
You're going to get it whether you're vaccinated or not.
I do believe the data shows that the vaccinations do prevent hospitalization.
They do prevent a lot of the worst case scenarios.
I've told you from the beginning, I think people, especially older people and people at risk, should get vaccinated.
However, however, let's not forget, let us not forget that this was Joe Biden's campaign.
I'll put in place a plan to deal with this pandemic responsibly.
I've already done it.
I've said it before.
I'm not going to shut down the economy.
I'm not going to shut down the country, but I'm going to shut down the virus.
I'm not going to shut down the economy.
I'm not going to shut down the country.
I'm going to shut down the virus.
What I'd say is I'm going to shut down the virus, not the country.
I'm not going to shut down the country.
I'm going to shut down the virus.
I'll shut down the virus, not the economy.
I'm going to shut down the virus.
Once we shut down the virus, I'm going to shut down the virus.
You're going to shut down the virus.
I'm not going to shut down the country, but I'm going to shut down the virus.
I'll Shut Down The Virus00:04:05
So that was a campaign.
Here's Biden talking to governors a couple of days ago.
There is no federal solution.
This gets solved at a state level.
Wah, wah, wah, wah.
So the whole thing was a lie.
The whole thing was, you know, just empty, empty promises.
You can't, you know, you can't, there's no federal solution to a virus.
It's a virus.
That's what it is.
It's tragic.
It's sad that people are dying.
But all of the, aside from the death and aside from the sickness, every other misery has been caused by government action.
The lockdowns that have done nothing, that have just made people miserable, the masks especially, which are just making people miserable, the closing of schools, which is causing mental illness in children.
All of that didn't have to happen.
It doesn't have to happen now.
And the blue states can't let go of it.
And people are moving to the red states.
And people are moving out just to be free.
Among them, Alexandria Occasional-Cortex, who was photographed.
I love this story.
She was photographed in Florida without a mask, hanging out with drag queens and stuff like this and with her boyfriend and drinking and socializing, all that.
While in New York, New York is shut down because of Omicron.
And while people are being, I was just in New York before Christmas.
You got to show your vaccination card.
Wherever you go, you got to wear a mask.
It's all government.
So AOC goes there and the right starts to make fun of her.
The right starts to say, hey, why aren't you in your district where you can't go out without a mask?
You can't do what you're doing in Ron DeSantis' Florida, right?
And she says, well, Republicans are just criticizing me because they want to date me.
That's what she said.
Now, a lot of people attacked her for this, but of course, she's only saying what I've been saying all along, right?
I mean, you know, people, of course, people want to date her, right?
She's an airhead with a great body.
Bubble-headed women with great racks are a big deal in the male imagination.
This is a big thing for us, right?
I mean, if you go in, if you go into the holy of holies of the male imagination, you know, you have to go past the court of the Gentiles and past the, you know, where the altar is and then go into the holy of holies.
At the center of the male imagination is a stupid woman with a terrific body like AOC.
Now, I know I'm talking and a lot of wives and girlfriends are talking, turning their husbands and boyfriends are saying, is that true?
Are you really dreaming about like a dumb woman with a great body?
And the guys are like, oh, honey, I love intelligent women like yourself.
I know you think I'm being sexist.
You think I'm being ridiculous.
Let me ask one question.
All I have to do is answer this one question honestly.
Who is the greatest sex symbol, the most enduring sex symbol of all time?
If I were like a psychiatrist doing one of those things where you give somebody a word and you have to come back with the first word that comes into your mind and I said sex symbol, what would you say?
You would say Marilyn Monroe.
Who is Marilyn Monroe?
And I'm not talking about Marilyn Monroe, the human being, obviously.
I'm talking about her persona in every single movie she made, except for one or two, every movie she made.
She is the dumb blonde with an incredible body.
Of course, of course we want to date AOC.
She is a dumb babe with a terrific body.
But you don't take that girl home to mom and you don't put her in the federal government.
See, this is the thing.
We all know this, right?
We all know this.
You want to date the girl who's dumb with the hot body, but you don't elect her.
Don't do that.
It's a mistake.
All right.
I loved, again, Ron DeSantis has the perfect response.
This is cut 21.
Well, I mean, look, I think if I had a dollar for every lockdown politician who decided to escape to Florida over the last two years, I'd be a pretty doggone wealthy man, let me tell you.
I mean, congress people, mayors, governors, I mean, you name it.
And it's interesting, though, the reception that some of these folks will get in Florida, because I think a lot of Floridians say, wait a minute, you're bashing us because we're not doing your draconian policies.
Lockdown Politicians Flee Florida00:06:07
And yet we're the first place you want to flee to to basically to be able to enjoy life.
And so I'm not surprised to see that continue to happen.
So, you know, it's not just the pandemic narrative that is collapsing, the narrative that I'm going to shut down the vibe.
I'm not going to shut down the government.
I'm going to shut down.
It's the whole narrative machine is collapsing.
And I don't, you know, I don't often say stuff like this because I know this narrative is powerful.
I know the institutions are powerful.
But something has changed.
Some dynamic has changed.
Something in the algorithm has changed.
The Wall Street Journal had a devastating op-ed.
And I know op-eds aren't devastating because nobody reads them but me.
But still, if you paid attention to it, it was a devastating op-ed just before the New Year's about what they called conformity reporting and its failures.
And people do notice this.
They don't need the journal to tell them.
So they just had a list.
The Wuhan Virology Lab Origin Theory of COVID-19.
In the early days of the pandemic, even raising the possibility that this was manufactured in a lab in Wuhan was taboo.
Senator Cotton was vilified for doing so.
The Lancet, a supposedly open-minded scientific journal, published a letter to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.
This year, we learned that the Lancet letter was part of a coordinated effort to quash the lab theory.
We learned about the conflicts of interest of Anthony Fauci and others who provided funding for the Wuhan lab.
Eventually, even the press noticed that China had blocked an honest inquiry.
So all of this was blocked.
You know, the left wants to make Donald Trump irrelevant.
They want to get rid of him and they want to ban him from ever running again.
They want to do anything they can because they're so afraid of him.
This is the exact wrong way to go about it.
When you throw people off Twitter, when you throw people off YouTube, when you cancel people for speaking what may be the truth and may not be just an opinion, an open opinion, and when you silence them, that's how he got Trump in the first place.
See, this is, and this on the right too, the people who, the Never Trumpers on the right, and I'm not going to name them because I don't think we should be fighting among ourselves, but the Never Trumpers on the right, this is what they don't understand.
They do not understand because they have a platform, because they can speak, because the guys that I love over at National Review have a way of speaking.
They don't understand what it's like to be out in the middle of the country, to have a low-level or a mid-level job and have no way of getting your opinion out there.
It's just be hammered for years and years and years by the press.
That's how Donald Trump got elected and why he got elected and why he was the man of the moment and why he should have.
If every single Republican did not hear what he did and did not understand what he did and doesn't imitate what he did in attacking this incredible institutional assault on ordinary Americans' lives and thoughts and understandings, if they don't understand this, they are going to lose and they're going to keep losing.
And then this horrible left-wing system that just destroys our cities, destroys everything is going to go on.
You know, now we were the ones who said don't close the schools.
We said, you know, you got to reopen the schools.
It was one thing, 15 days to slow the spread a year and a half ago was one thing.
But when kids are still not going to school in Chicago and Chicago, they're closing the schools again.
Even Biden now is saying close the schools.
You know, it's amazing.
Nobody ever says conservatives were right.
They simply changed their opinions to sound conservative.
So now in New York, all this defund the police stuff.
Crime is skyrocketing.
Record murders, record murders in Philadelphia, record murders.
New York skyrocketing, right?
And they've just elected Eric Adams, the one, a left-wing Democrat, but the one guy who said he's going to take care of this.
And he's talking about why he doesn't want New York to shut down.
Listen to what he says.
He doesn't want New York to shut down.
And they made fun of him for this because he says, you know, low-level workers don't have anywhere to go.
And he says he put himself through college as a dishwasher.
And this is what he says.
When you talk about closing down our city, if you are a dishwasher, you can't remotely do your job.
And if we don't have an accountant in the office space coming to a restaurant.
To occupy that space.
Exactly.
Then you're not going into that restaurant.
That dishwasher is not going to have a job.
And the accountant can do his job right now.
Exactly.
And the goal is we need to open the city so low-wage employees are able to survive.
If no one came into that restaurant when I was paying my way through college, I would not have been able to survive.
And families can't survive.
And that's the message.
Were you listening to that?
That's trickle-down theory.
If the accountant, the guy who's making a lot of money, doesn't go out to a restaurant, then the guy who's washing dishes doesn't have a job.
That's the Reagan, that's the supply side thing that Obama kept saying.
It never worked.
It's the only thing that works.
It's the only thing that works.
Listen, I understand that there can be obscene inequalities in capitalism.
I've said before, I think it's obscene when Jeff Bezos is making a gazillion dollars and the guy who works for Jeff Bezos can't take a bathroom break.
You know, I think that's the kind of thing.
I'm in favor of legislation for that.
I don't think George Washington would oppose legislation for that.
Those are some of the things that have to be, all human systems have to have borders and bookends and all this stuff.
But if people don't make money, capitalism has made more people rich all across the, at every level, than any other system.
And if the accountant who makes a lot of money doesn't go out to eat, you know, remember when they were talking about, oh, it's terrible.
These people have private planes.
Every private plane is being serviced by somebody at the private airport where it gets taken care of.
Every private plane has a crew.
Every private plane creates a million jobs.
What is it to me if some guy has a private plane?
He's not taking anything away from me.
He's giving jobs to other people.
So now you have Eric Adams, the left-wing Democrat mayor of New York, talking about this.
He's talking about Stop and Frisk, which the New York Times destroyed, which cost hundreds of black lives because what the cops were doing is they were taking guns off thugs.
And if you've ever talked to a cop, a cop can tell you a guy's carrying a gun from 50 paces away.
He knows exactly who's got an illegal gun.
Tea Party Divide00:15:47
And so they were going up.
And of course, it's black people.
So they're saying it's not fair because they were stopping black people.
Well, look, life is unfair.
It's black people who are also being killed by those guns.
They've got this DA in New York who says he's not going to put anybody in prison unless he committed a murder, basically, unless he committed a felony.
He's going to let all these other people go.
What do you think is going to happen then?
So now you're going to have this clash between a guy, Eric Adams, former cop, who knows that crime has to be controlled for the city to thrive, who knows the city has to stay open.
And then you've got the Soros prosecutor who's going to let all these people go.
Leftism is collapsing.
It is eating itself.
It's going to destroy itself.
We have to be there.
We have to be there.
And we have to be there with a positive vision.
We can't be tearing at each other's throats.
We cannot be tearing at each other's throats.
We cannot be supporting the insupportable.
We can't be agreeing that something is good just because we did it and bad just because they did it.
However, a truly moral vision, a truly moral vision will bring us joy and will advertise our policies to a system and a group of people who have screwed the pooch entirely.
They spent 50, 60 years taking over every institution.
Now they have all the power in the world and they've blown it.
And this is our moment.
So I'm really thrilled to have my first guest of the year, Rachel Bovard.
You heard me talk about her before when she gave a spectacular speech.
She's the senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute, which she helped found in 2017.
And before that, she spent a decade on Capitol Hill in various roles, including as legislative director for Senator Rand Paul.
But we just brought her on because she's a wine expert and we just thought we'd talk about booze.
No, Rachel, thank you for coming on.
It's great to meet you, actually.
Yeah, likewise.
I'm happy to be here.
And, you know, booze is my one transferable life skill.
So I'm happy to talk about that too.
Yes, yes, it is very dear to my heart.
You know, before we just talk about your speech and what you're seeing on the political landscape, how did you get where you are?
I mean, what was your background that made you go into conservatism, which is guaranteed unpopularity?
Nobody told me that.
I think that's how I came up here.
Ha ha, that explains everything.
Yeah, the joke's on me.
In reality, I had no plan to end up in politics.
I wasn't involved in it really as a high schooler or even as an undergraduate.
I did my undergrad work at Grove City College outside of Pittsburgh.
And I had a professor there named Paul Kangor, who I was a research assistant for him on a number of books.
And he was like, you know, I know you're thinking about law school, but you might like DC.
You should try it out.
And so he set me up with an internship and I really never looked back.
I came right out of college, stayed for 10 years on Capitol Hill, which the best way to do Capitol Hill, I think, is if you don't have another job beforehand because you don't realize how terrible it is.
So that's how you end up staying for 10 years.
Got it.
So, yeah.
And so it's been a wild ride since then.
I've seen a lot of stuff.
Well, you're producing great content.
And the speech, again, at the National Conservatism Conference was a game changer.
I think a lot of people felt that way, probably for good.
And some people probably felt that way for ill, but I thought it was a really terrific speech.
But we're going into the year with the midterms here.
All the polls are in our side, on our side, but Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit is always quoting Hans Solo saying, don't get cocky.
What are you afraid of?
What are you worried about as the year begins?
You know, I think that there is a little bit of hubris from the Republican Party going into the midterm elections.
They don't seem to understand that if they sweep in Twino this year in 2022, it's not because they're awesome necessarily.
It's because Democrats are insane.
And I think that, you know, we never, this has happened before, right?
In different midterm suits, we never actually learned this lesson.
But I think there is, again, this dangerous distance growing between the Republicans or congressional elite and the base of the party, something I think that has been manifested since the Tea Party, honestly.
And I don't, you know, at different periods of time, I think it's gotten better.
And I think it's approaching the worst scenario again, where they don't really understand, you know, if they're given a mandate, what it's for.
And that's what I tried to make clear in that speech.
It's not for necessarily, you know, a big tax cut package, as great as that is, right?
I'm not against tax cuts, but we are facing new and emerging threats that I think demand a congressional response.
And I still think there's people in Washington, especially in the Republican Party, who are just not aware of that fact or think it's completely overblown.
It's amazing in a way that Donald Trump, who was, I feel, like the man, the necessary man for his moment in that he brought that fight forward.
They've learned, they seem to have learned nothing from him.
They don't understand that the cultural fight is the fight.
Yeah.
And it's very dispiriting.
On the other hand, are there people you see that you're really happy about?
Are there trends that you see that make you hopeful?
Yeah, I think we have a younger generation of lawmakers who are interested in thinking differently about these questions, who really understand that the appeal of Donald Trump was that he didn't avoid the culture war, which was sort of conventional GOP orthodoxy, as you point out, for 20, 30 years, but he waded right into it.
And I think on everything people care about, the more modern emerging threats, from big tech to critical race theory, to even long-standing concerns like the pro-life movement, Donald Trump got more done on that front than Congress has done in the last 15 years.
And I think that really should speak to, you know, the posture that we need to take.
And I do think that there are younger legislators that see this.
And I think even, you know, someone like Mike Lee, you know, it's interesting.
I talk about the Tea Party wave versus, or the Tea Party era versus the MAGA era.
I think they're two different ones legislatively.
And you even see people who were Tea Party Party senators like Mike Lee, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, starting to make that shift, starting to recognize that it's not just fiscal concerns anymore, it's those and.
And what are those?
And I think you're starting to see them pivot, which gives me a lot of hope that people are actually listening.
You know, it's interesting.
I think because of the pervasive media bias toward the left, it's not even bias, it's just corruption toward the left.
And the fact that in Washington, you're surrounded by this media bubble, and you start to think that that's actually the country.
One of the things you hear about is if the Supreme Court comes back on Roe v. Wade and either overturns Roe or limits it to the extent where the states have a lot of latitude in abortion law, that that's going to hurt Republicans at the voting booth because women will show up and say, you know, oh, you've done this terrible thing to us.
Do you think that's true?
I don't.
I think it's a lie that's been perpetuated by people who are very invested in maintaining the status quo.
And there's a lot of those people on the right.
Do not mistake me.
You had in 2018, the Wall Street Journal editorial board reassuring its readers that Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominees would never overturn Roe because they want to protect the reputation of the court.
And I think when we've gotten to a place where people in Washington think that the peak of the conservative legal movement is preserving the reputation of the court and not just overturning bad law, then we really need to rethink what we're doing here.
I actually wrote a long essay about this, that if Roe goes the wrong way and our justices cannot overturn bad law because it's bad law on its face, then we need to rethink the experiment because this is just, we've failed at this point.
But I also think the second piece of evidence for why I don't think this is true is the fact that you have the Texas abortion law and claim, you know, it's different in scope, right?
It's just statewide, but you had claims made to that effect that, oh, this is going to change, you know, everything.
The fact that citizens are hunting each other is going to change the whole narrative of the pro-life and abortion movement.
And it really hasn't.
You know, it caught, it was a tempest in a teapot for a couple of weeks, but it really hasn't lingered.
You know, even when the Supreme Court sort of made its passing statement on it, it didn't become a national issue.
So, you know, this is what we fought for as conservatives.
And if we can't stand behind it now, then, you know, there needs to be some soul searching and honestly some honest conversation, because if people on the right don't agree with the pro-life movement anymore, they should just say so.
Wow.
Yeah, no, I completely agree.
You said in this speech, you said that wokeness is a totalitarian cult of billionaires and bureaucrats, of privilege perpetrated by, perpetuated, sorry, by bullying, empowered by the most sophisticated surveillance and communications technology in history.
You said basically that anyone who doesn't understand that wokeness is the threat should be basically cashiered as a as a Republican candidate.
I guess my question is this.
Does the Republican Party understand this?
Because it's obviously true, Rachel.
It is one of the most obvious things out there.
And does the party that ran Jeb Exclamation Point understand that this is a problem?
And is there anybody that you look at and think, yeah, these are the guys who might do the right thing?
So it's been an evolution.
I think there are a few, a handful of lawmakers that seem to understand this, but it's still rhetorical hand waving for a lot of them.
And I think there's also a big distinction between people who understand it and people who are prepared to do something about it.
Because you see a lot of lawmakers who are like, well, I don't like critical race theory, but there's nothing that we can really do.
You know, local government should just be able to mandate it.
You know, schools should be able to do it because we believe in states' rights.
And it's like, well, yes, but also no.
States are not allowed to inflict tyranny on their students.
And also children are not mini adults.
They don't have the brains to encompass, you know, their brains are still developing.
They can't encompass the nuances of critical theory.
This is wrong.
And so I think you're in a moment where the Republican Party for a long time has just had this hands-off approach and expected that all of our media editing institutions would handle the threats that we face.
And I think that's right.
That's what our conservative philosophy espouses in a lot of ways.
But it didn't account for and it doesn't account for now the fact that the left has taken over all these institutions of power.
And they themselves do not feel beholden to any sort of norm or self-restraint in imposing their worldview.
And to actively push back on that, you have to take actionable steps.
And that's the gulf.
We have people who I think cognitively and rhetorically may understand what's happening, but who are not yet comfortable taking the steps necessary to just create the space for people to exist with their beliefs anymore, because that's really where we're at, I think.
Yeah, yeah.
I have to ask this.
I mean, do you think that Trump is a good thing for the future or a bad thing or a threat?
Where do you stand on his political position?
I think Trump is a symptom of where the base is.
People are like, you know, are always asking me, do you think he should run again or not?
It's like, well, I have no control over that.
So I'm not going to spend a lot of time wringing my hands over this question.
But Trump is a symptom of the Republican Party, I think, not listening to their base.
I think the Tea Party was, yeah, the Tea Party was a shot across the bow to this, right?
And I think a lot of lawmakers recognized it, but then failed to recognize the Tea Party wasn't just about spending.
It was about Obamacare.
It was about mass amnesty.
It was about all these burgeoning threats that were not responded to.
And so when John Boehner led the House away from all of those things, Republicans responded by firing a nuclear missile, and that was Donald Trump.
And if we are unable, I think, to, again, repair that breach between our elected representatives and their base, we will be getting Donald Trump and Donald Trump and Donald Trump for the foreseeable future.
And on the culture war, maybe that's not a bad thing.
I don't know.
Yeah, no, I mean, my problem with Trump has always been that he wasn't a statesman.
He couldn't get laws passed.
And ultimately, that's how that's you, as you said in your speech, that's where we have to go.
It has to be.
And he had a lot of personnel problems too, to your point, that added to that.
I'll say, yes.
And even he and his people admit that.
One of the things you said in the speech that was very dear to my heart was your attack, and I can't call it anything else on big tech.
Every time I bring this up, I mean, I personally feel that big tech should be crushed underfoot and then the dust swept up and thrown into like a volcano somewhere at this point.
Salted the earth with their ashes.
Exactly, exactly.
But the minute you say this, the minute you say that an organization that can ban the former president of the United States from speaking directly to people has too much power, I immediately get this kind of libertarian pushback that somehow I'm destroying free speech by attacking the people who are in fact destroying free speech.
Do you have a specific approach to what needs to be done about big tech?
Well, I just totally disagree with the talking point.
And this gets hurled at me a lot too, that like, you know, these are private businesses.
They can have free association.
They can ban whoever they want.
And I just think that's such a, it's, you know, it's a myopic talking point that I think neglects the reality of what these technology firms are, which is sort of essential corridors are our discourse at this point.
If you consider the fact that Google filters information for 90% of the world, okay, what Google suppresses or amplifies changes behavior.
It changes votes.
It changes opinions.
It changes.
I mean, we have never seen speech control of this magnitude.
And it's not just speech control.
It's market access.
Google and Facebook in particular are the market access points for millions of small businesses.
You can wipe out someone's industry simply for banning them over ideological reasons.
We have not taken that into account.
And so from a policy perspective, I think you have to address both those things.
You have to address the economic competition, which I think represents a monopoly.
You have a lot of competition policy problems with Google and Facebook.
And then on the speech side, I align myself with the greatest sitting Supreme Court justice of all time, Clarence Thomas, who has speculated that these may actually represent common carriage.
These are avenues of our discourse that need to be regulated as such, where everyone has to have some kind of access to them the same way everybody has access to the telephone companies.
And the telephone companies cannot ideologically suppress speech.
So because they're changing, I mean, we have a long, and I said this in the speech, but we don't wait in America to, we don't sit back and let ourselves be reformed in a woke corporate image, right?
Innovation has a place in America, and we are the freest country in the world for that.
But when it gets to the point that it is now where it's changing our values and our discourse and our society and how we live together, we then take that innovation and we position it into our values and traditions, as opposed to what's happening now, which is allowing them to reform us, which is not the correct balance in a self-government.
That's an excellent point.
I mean, whenever there's new technology, when there were factories, you had to pass laws keeping children out of factories.
You can't just say, oh, it's a private business.
If they want to let a child work in an assembly line, they can do that.
That's not regulation to crush freedom.
That is regulation to keep freedom alive.
It makes no sense.
The other thing you talked about in your speech, and this is something that I think the right is having a lot of difficulty with, there is a real divide on the right about how to approach moral problems, which basically comes down to sexuality and family formation and things like this.
Regulation To Keep Freedom Alive00:04:32
I don't think anybody wants to go back to a world in which a gay person can be arrested for being gay.
That's the world I grew up in, that a guy, a cop could walk into a gay bar and if somebody propositioned him, he could take them away.
I don't think people want to go back to that.
And at the same time, I think that our families and our genders are under attack.
And women, especially, I think, are in danger of being erased as a political entity.
What's our best way forward here?
You know, this is sort of where the maximalist position of the libertarians fails, which is like, everybody just gets to do what they do.
Well, no, not anymore, because as you point out, women as a class are under assault.
Like we don't even can't even compete on sports teams anymore, right?
We can't.
The most winning woman on jeopardy is a man.
Like we're living in the upside down in this reality.
So yeah, I do think that like, you know, basic, we're not dealing with, this is such a far cry from gay marriage.
And I think a lot of conservatives have woken up to the fact that we are just dealing with the basics of gender.
And so yeah, I do think that conservatives, especially social conservatives who are always ignored in the conservative majority, whenever there's a Republican majority, you know, in Washington, the social conservatives are like the bastard stepchild that nobody wants to talk to.
But their cause now matters because everything that we, the conservative movement is built on, which is the family, which is the mediating institutions which flow from the family, which is the communities that are built around the family, that is under assault.
And if we cannot, I think, step forward and speak for the truth of biology, to respect people who believe in traditional marriage or who want to build the nuclear family that way, then we don't have the self-government of our founders anymore.
And so I do think we have to get more aggressive about these questions, not necessarily mandating our view, but just protecting the space in which those views exist.
And I think especially in schools and on sports teams, protecting women, you know, just the basic biology of women.
And there's a lot of Republicans who don't seem to be able to do that, which is very distressing.
It is.
I mean, is there, does the state have an interest in preserving the mom and dad family?
Does the state have an interest in saying we're going to privilege this family because it is the best production of social good?
You know, as a conservative, I would say yes.
I think our entire philosophy is built on the family.
I think our form of government is built on the family.
Now, we can differ about what we think the family may look like, right?
But I think the nuclear family as such is a building block of our republic, a building block of our self-government.
And I think you have a government policy right now that sort of privileges the opposite.
You know, there is, it is, and I pointed this out in the speech, but as a policy matter, it is very difficult, you know, to tell, you know, two individuals, a boyfriend and a girlfriend who have had a child, that they are now going to lose their federal benefits if they get married, right?
That's completely backwards.
You know, when we have a debate in Washington right now about whether when you're on welfare, you know, should you be actively looking for a job or should there be work requirements on able-bodied adult men?
That's a debate right now.
And to me, yes, there should be work requirements.
These things that we know support moving ahead in America, which are marriage and work and family and strong communities, we should be incentivizing these things through our public policy.
I do think the state has an interest in that.
And do you think that there's anybody in the Republican Party who has the nerve to put that forward as policy?
You have seen some of this proposed by people like Senator Josh Hawley.
Interestingly, you saw this iterated on by Senator Mitt Romney, who put forward a family assistance plan that began at conception, began with the child in the womb and had no work requirements whatsoever, which a lot of us took issue with, but is beginning to recognize, I think, it's the Republican Party sort of creeping toward a recognition of the fact that, you know, we haven't done enough, I think, or that our policy right now deprivileges the things we've always said we stand for.
And so how do we actually encourage family formation instead of just talk about it, right?
But encourage the formation of the family in ways that, you know, I would say conservatism has supported for a long time.
Rachel Beauvard, a senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute.
Barney Frank's Legacy00:07:10
Rachel, really interesting talking to you.
I hope you will come back as the midterms get closer and talk again and give me your idea of what you're seeing in the political world because you really, you really have an interesting take.
And I wish more conservatives were talking the way you talk.
Well, thank you.
And thank you for having me.
I'd love to come back.
All right.
I'll talk to you again.
Thanks.
You know, I told you at the beginning of the show that there's a lot of stuff I'm going to want to be talking to you about this year, my new book, The Truth and Beauty, which comes out in April, but you can already pre-order it, and I hope you will.
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So I want to talk about this Netflix film, Don't Look Up.
Partly because of the film itself, which was pretty interesting, but also because of the reaction from the right.
A lot of people, a lot of right-wing.
One of my big complaints is that the right has not created an infrastructure for dealing with the arts.
There are plenty of talented people on the right, plenty of good artists, but we don't have any kind of infrastructure, review structure, no think tank that deals explicitly with the arts, no award that goes to the arts created in a patriotic or traditionalist manner, nothing like that.
And the left, of course, has all that kind of stuff.
They give awards to each other endlessly.
And we sit around and go, well, why don't they give them to us?
Because they're them.
That's why they don't give them to us.
And it disturbed me that a lot of people, some people I really like, came out and they turned on Don't Look Up in order to hate it and then found themselves entertained and they really liked it and they kind of gave it a good review and it deserves some of that good review, but not all of it.
And I just wanted to take maybe a little deeper look at what this film was.
It's a film by Adam McKay, written, produced, and directed by Adam McKay.
Fantastic cast, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence star, Leonardo DiCaprio looking exactly like Jonah Goldberg.
I would never, it was never on my bingo card, but still, and then it just has this incredible array of very, very talented people from Meryl Streep, Kate Blanchett, Ariana Grandi does a funny turn on herself, Tyler Perry, and the great, great, great Mark Rylance and Jonah Hill is in it.
So it's really, you know, got a terrific cast.
Now, Adam McKay is a climate crazy, and he is a really talented comic writer.
He started on Saturday Night Live and he worked with Will Farrell.
He co-wrote Anchorman, which is a very funny film.
Talladega Night's pretty funny.
But he also is a socialist and he backs Bernie Sanders, which means he's politically a child.
I mean, anybody who at this point hasn't figured out that socialism has a moral aura, but as a working economic system, it destroys everything it touches.
You cannot find a socialist economy that hasn't been destroyed by socialism.
What you can find is capitalism being so successful that certain socialist programs like welfare can be included in it because it's just created so much wealth.
Capitalism has created so much wealth that they can afford to spend some of it on socialist style programs.
But you can't find any place where socialism has not destroyed the economy.
And people like Bernie Sanders keep saying, well, it's like Norway.
And Norway goes, we're not socialists.
We tried that.
It's stank.
You know, Scandinavia, not socialist.
None of it is true.
So he's obviously Hollywood ignorant when it comes to politics.
And you could see this in a film he made called The Big Short, which was based on a wonderful book by Michael Lewis about the 2008 crash.
And it's all about how Wall Street sold subprime mortgages, bad loans, into the economy so that when the housing market went down, the economy crashed in 2008.
And not to go over this forever, but just to point out that all of it is true, but it's half true.
Those bad loans were instigated by the government, by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac saying, oh, you know, we have to give loans to people who basically to minorities who've been underserved.
And you think, well, maybe they were underserved because they couldn't pay back the loans.
Doesn't matter.
We're going to give them the loans and the government will essentially guarantee the payment of the loans.
Now, George W. Bush warned again and again that this was going to crash the economy.
This is on record.
George W. Bush kept saying, if we keep doing this, it's going to crash the economy.
And Barney Frank, who was the guy who was most in charge of this, and Christopher Dodd, the senator who was also in charge of it, kept saying, no, no, no.
Barney Frank said, we'll roll the dice.
We'll roll the dice.
So now you have all these banks who have made loans they know cannot be paid back and are just depending on the fact that the value of homes keeps going up going to Wall Street and saying, what do we do with these loans?
These loans are going to back up.
And so Wall Street starts selling the loans into the economy.
They start packaging them and then burying them into all kinds of products.
And was it wrong?
Yeah, it was.
But they didn't start it.
So in other words, they were to blame.
It's true they were to blame.
But the start, as almost always in these things, the start was with the government.
Now, the crash happened.
Obama took control of the country.
It was one of the reasons he took control of the country because the crash happened.
Who was punished?
Nobody.
Nobody went to jail for anything.
And who wrote the reform law to answer the crash?
Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd.
It's called Dodd-Frank, right?
And it is an absolute boondoggle, which does nothing but put government intrusion into businesses and basically protect Too Big to Fail.
It makes Too Big to Fail part of the law.
It was a complete boondoggle.
So in other words, it's not that Adam McKay is a bad guy.
It's not that he's wrong about the things that he's saying.
He just has the Hollywood political vision, which is the vision of a child.
He does not see the whole story.
You know, I have no problem with knocking Wall Street.
After the crash, I went after Wall Street for saying, you've got to bail us out because I thought like, well, what's the difference between them and a welfare queen?
What's the difference between a guy who says, you know, like, yeah, I blew my business, but now the government has to bail me out because I'm too big to fail.
And somebody saying, yeah, I don't want to work.
How about just sending me some welfare?
Same guy.
They're the same guy.
As far as I'm concerned, I went after them all, but he only goes after one side.
And that is the problem with Don't Look Up.
Panic Over Fake Crises00:08:57
So, all right, don't look up.
DiCaprio plays an astronomer and Jennifer Lawrence plays a PhD candidate who finds a comet headed toward Earth.
And they realize they have to spread the word because this thing is going to destroy the Earth.
And here's just a part of the trailer showing you how things go.
I hear there's something you don't like the looks of.
We discovered a very large comet.
Oh, good for you.
It's headed directly towards Earth.
This comet is what we call a planet killer.
At this exact moment, I say we sit tight and assess.
Sit tight and assess?
Sit tight and then assess.
The sit-tight part comes first, and you got to digest it.
That's the assessment period.
This is the worst news in the history of humanity.
He just blew us off.
So that was them going to the president, who was played by Meryl Streep, and telling him what's going on.
And she is more worried about her Supreme Court nominee and her polls and all that stuff.
She doesn't pay any attention.
So they decide they have to go to the press and they go to one of the morning shows that is run by Kate Blanchett and Tyler Perry.
And here's a little bit of that also from the trailer.
Our guests today have made a pretty big discovery in space.
How big is this thing going?
I can't destroy my ex-wife's house.
Is that possible?
There is a 100% chance that we're all going to die!
Well, the handsome astronomer.
You can come back anytime, but the yelling lady not.
It's funny stuff.
I mean, it really is funny.
You recognize the morning people.
You recognize the president.
You recognize all of these people.
And at the center of the whole thing is Mark Rylance, who is, I just think, one of the most spectacular, he's a British actor, just spectacular actor.
And he plays whoever you want, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, he plays Silicon Valley millionaire.
We meet him.
He is introducing his new program.
It's called Bash Life, I think it's called.
Here's just that scene, which I just love because Rylance is so terrific.
All my life's work, really, I see, has been driven by an inexpressible need for a friend who would understand and soothe me.
And, you know, now all those years of work have come to fruition with Bash Life.
Our new Bash 14.3 phone is fully integrated into your every feeling and desire without you needing to say one single word.
If I feel sad, afraid, or alone, the BASH 14.3 phone, when set to the life setting, instantly senses my mood through blood pressure, heartbeats, and...
Your vitals show that you are sad.
This will cheer you up, Peter.
You are my best friend.
You are my best friend and I really like you for making a happy best friend.
That's wonderful.
Just absolutely brilliant playing this childlike but also murderous capitalist.
So the first half of the film, the first hour of the film, it's a long film, is really good because it skewers people we recognize.
We recognize that vapid press.
We recognize a government that only, Meryl Streep could have been anybody, could have been a Democrat or a Republican, only caring about her polls, only caring about her image and her, you know, whatever political thing she's doing.
You know, we recognize the Silicon Valley guy who's apparently spiritual but is actually a capitalist down to his soul.
All of that we recognize, and it's funny, and how Ariana Grandi plays the vapid Ariana Grandi's life, basically, who wants to promote her album by bringing her sex life or love life onto the screen.
All of it is just perfectly good satire, perfectly funny, and absolutely fair and recognizable.
And then it ends on a faintly Christian, family-friendly note, basically saying that family and God are really what makes life worthwhile and we had everything.
We should have been paying attention to all the things that we had.
Between those two points, something goes terribly wrong with the film.
And I'm saying this, here is a place where my politics and the quality of the film link up.
That's not always true.
Sometimes you can make a great film that offends my politics.
This is not the case.
Suddenly, Meryl Streep turns into Donald Trump.
She didn't have to be.
She didn't have to have any party whatsoever.
We all recognized her as basically an American politician, but suddenly she's Donald Trump and suddenly capitalism destroys any chance we have of survival.
And the left is still kind of gently ribbed as the people who understand that death is coming but are too vapid, too full of Ariana Grandi songs to actually do anything about it.
So it's kind of saying the left is right, but they're just too ineffectual.
But it is saying that the right doesn't deal with a crisis.
Now, is that true?
Of course not.
Of course it's not true.
I mean, if you look at Donald Trump, you can hate him all you want.
And he did many, many things that really offended me, but he took care of ISIS.
He wiped the ISIS caliphate off the face of the earth.
He restored the economy.
I don't think the Republican record of dealing with crises is any worse than the left's.
I think it's actually better than the left's, unless it's a metaphor for climate change, which it is.
And we know it is because McKay gave an interview after he made the big short saying he was going to deal with climate change next.
And Leonardo Capio says the movie is about climate change.
I've often in my career looked for a film that had an environmental undertone to it.
But much like the inundation of news on climate change, a lot of people don't want to hear it.
And making a film about it is an even more difficult task to take on.
And Adam, who's an incredibly outspoken individual on the climate crisis, really wanted to do a film that brought, you know, an element of dark comedy to what seems to be a daunting issue.
So what the film is saying is that a comet heading toward Earth, which you can see, is the same level of threat as a computer program that predicts something is going to happen.
And even when honestly looked at, is not predicting anything that terrible.
It's predicting stuff that can be dealt with.
If the climate, if the computer model, which is a predictive thing made by human beings, is true.
It's not the same thing.
It is not the same thing, which raises a question.
It's a big trick on the left to criticize things.
That's why they have critical theory, which makes you feel that their solutions are right.
But ask yourself this question.
We get it.
Our politicians are corrupt.
Our media is vapid and stupid.
Our rock stars are idiots.
We get it.
Nobody listens to the science.
Nobody cares about what the science says on either side.
But do we actually feel there's not enough panic in American culture?
I mean, it seems to me we go from one fake crisis to another.
The climate crisis, racism is a crisis.
Remember, racism was a health crisis.
We needed to give the, and it's all about the crisis is always about giving the powerful more power.
Because there's another story that we could tell that's the opposite of Don't Look Up, which is the story of Henny Penny, or sometimes we call it Chicken Little.
Remember, Chicken Little thinks the sky is falling because an acorn hits her on the head and she runs and says the sky is falling.
And all the other animals, you know, the goosey loosey and cocky locky and ducky daddles, they all follow her in a panic saying the sky is falling.
And Foxy Woxy says, oh, you know, come this way.
And you can tell the king that the sky is falling and leads them all one by one into his den where he bites their heads off and kills them.
And only Henny Penny or Chicken Little, only Chicken Little escapes because she's so vapid, she forgets what the hell she was panicked about in the first place.
Foxy Woxie is socialism.
Foxy Woxy is why they want you to panic.
We don't need more panic in this country.
And this film telling us to panic, essentially, over climate change is leading us into the fox's den.
And Adam McKay is fine with that because he says he's a Bernie Sanders socialist supporter.
He's a Hollywood child when it comes to politics.
He's a talented man.
He is a talented, intelligent individual who can do good stuff, but he is a child.
And when the right looks at this, to ignore that it is a metaphor for this fake climate panic and to ignore that it is, in fact, part of the media that is skewering is to miss the entire point.
We need better artistic commentators.
We need better cultural observers.
And we need more of a presence in the culture so we can just respond to talented people, but misguided people like Adam McKay and to films like this one.
Confronting Temptations Together00:04:52
So all through this holiday, I've been wondering, how did you survive without the mailbag?
How did you survive without me solving all your problems for you?
You just had the problems.
They just kind of collected.
They got more and more as kind of like the tribbles in Star Trek, you know, just kind of climbing up all over you.
But now it's the time.
Now is the time.
Gather your tribbles around you or your troubles or your triple troubles or whatever and prepare to bid them goodbye because it is time for the mailbag.
Let's go, Brandon.
Let's go, Brandon.
I agree.
Let us go, Brandon.
All right, from Anonymous.
Dear Hot Gandalf and Wordsmith Extraordinaire, I'm writing to you with a heavy heart and confused brain.
I'm a born-again church-going Christian with a lovely wife and daughter, both of whom I adore.
Recently out on a business trip, I went alone.
One thing led to another.
I ended up in a strip club multiple times during the course of the trip.
I'm back and feel like crap.
I don't know if I should tell my wife or not.
Also, I had a problem with porn, which I've overcome for the last two years, and I thought I was over this, but of late, the temptations have been increasing, and this has really led me to despair and wonder if there's even a point to fighting this.
And does it not make more sense to leave my wife and submit myself to my flesh because it is looking more and more like a lost battle?
I don't even know how I can touch my wife now without feeling the guilt.
And I think if I tell her, she'll blame herself for it, feel guilty, and make matters worse.
I pray, read the Bible, etc.
Nothing is helping regards a regular despairing listener to your show.
So that's your plan?
Your plan is to destroy your marriage and children and just go to strip clubs and watch porn.
That's the strategy.
That's not a good strategy.
Just saying, strategies go, that's not a good strategy.
Should you tell your wife?
Yes, you should.
I mean, if it were I, I would definitely tell my wife.
And the reason is not because you're wrong.
She may well blame herself for it.
But, you know, you're a team, you're a couple.
You've got a problem in your marriage that is better shouldered by both of you together as a team working together.
I mean, that's why these things happen.
I mean, whenever something threatened to intrude, whenever something threatens to intrude on my marriage, even if it's threatening to intrude through my heart, I do tell my wife about it because then we can face it together.
So you want to tell her, and it's going to be painful.
You did a dumb thing, you know, you went to a strip club.
You know, look, it's not the, if that's all you did, it's not the end of the world, but it's very disrespectful to your wife, very disrespectful to your marriage, and kind of disrespectful to yourself.
And, you know, she is going to feel bad about it.
She is going to feel that she has failed you in some ways.
Very likely that that's the way she's going to feel.
And you're going to have to explain to her that, no, this is something that comes out of you.
Then, if this is truly an addiction, now, if you stayed off the porn for two years, that means you can stay off the porn forever.
If you stayed off it for two years, you can keep staying off it and you should keep staying off it.
But that doesn't mean you shouldn't get help for this.
You know, a lot of what they call sex addiction is just being a guy.
Guys are addicted to sex.
Guys think about sex all the time.
I frequently joke that if I had every minute back that I spent thinking about sex, I would be 24 years old.
You know, I mean, this is like what guys spend a lot of time thinking about.
And what you want to do with those thoughts is you want to do your best to behave in the way that is in keeping with your moral standards.
You know, it's tough.
It's tough for all guys, especially younger guys in their marriage.
It is one of the things we confront in marriage that I think guys don't get enough credit for.
We are always picking out the guy who cheats.
And yeah, he's a louse.
But we don't think about all the faithful husbands who have frequently looked in the mirror.
Not only, what's so insidious about it is not only do you feel like cheating, you feel like there's something wrong with not cheating.
You know, you feel like you're violating some kind of life force.
So, so yeah, you know, you got a problem, you did something wrong, you got to talk it out with your wife.
You know, you've got, you want to, the idea that you just abandoned your children in order to go to script clubs is just a dumb idea.
Come on.
You know, you're going to be so miserable.
I will tell you this on the other side of this, though, because, you know, as you get older, things calm down a little bit and your urges get easier to deal with.
I will tell you this.
If you remain faithful to your wife, if you remain in this marriage, you will get a tremendous benefit from it, a tremendous benefit in self-esteem, a tremendous benefit in love and trust.
Your wife will be able to look at you and your children will be able to look at you and know that you are who you say you are.
And that is a beautiful, beautiful thing.
If your word is good, if your vows are good, if your behavior is as good as you can make it, you do get incredible dividends about that over time.
So, yeah, listen, get some help.
Get a therapist, get a pastor.
Great Books, Hard Language00:04:43
Believe me, if you have a pastor, he's heard this story before.
He's not going to say, what?
You know what?
I've never heard of anybody doing it.
This is not an uncommon thing.
But yeah, despair is for cowards.
What does despair get you?
Man up and do the right thing and work through with your wife.
From Andre, how do you read better?
What a great question.
I've always been a rotten reader, at least in the English lit sense.
I can read Ray Bradbury and C.S. Lewis, but I feel sometimes I have a total mental block.
If I pick up something like Dostoevsky or Shakespeare, it's like a foreign language.
He says, I should mention that I'm a doctor.
I'm not a bad reader.
Is there a way I could become a better reader?
Yeah, you know, the difficulty with this, you know, a lot of people have this problem.
They come to, you know, I've recommended Charles Dickens and people go to Charles Dickens and go like, it just goes on forever and he just keeps talking and there's no shooting.
And, you know, there's, I mean, I always tell my wife, I'm not going to watch a movie unless it contains the line, let the girl go.
You know, and Charles Dickens doesn't contain the line, let the girl go.
And Shakespeare is particularly difficult because he's almost writing in another language.
He's writing in old English, so it's very, very difficult.
Sometimes when you watch Shakespeare, he's easier to understand than when you read him.
However, if you really want to do this, and I think it's so worthwhile, I think there's so much wisdom in Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky.
It changed my life.
It's a great, great book.
You don't want to be deprived of it by just a mental glitch.
And you're obviously a bright person, so you shouldn't be deprived of it.
It takes a certain amount of discipline and work.
And the problem is, is we look at reading, it's not a problem, but we look at reading as entertainment, and we want it to move, and we want it to go forward.
And so you don't want to actually work at reading.
But maybe if you could give 15 minutes a day to reading a work like Dostoevsky out loud, read it out loud so you can hear the words and so that you're forced to pay attention.
Your mind can drift while you're reading out loud, but it doesn't, it's a little more difficult for your mind to drift while you're reading out loud.
If you have a spouse or somebody who do it with you, that's also really helpful.
So you can just talk about what these words mean.
Because Dostoevsky, there's a new translation by a husband and wife team.
I can't remember their names offhand, but you might want to look that one up.
It's a better translation than the old Constance Garnett one.
And Dostoevsky is so rewarding and his story is so great, but he is a thick, dense, psychological writer.
He follows his characters through every psychological twist and turn, and it's in a foreign culture.
The names are hard to pronounce.
So there's a lot of stuff in the way.
Personally, if I were going to start with somebody, I would start with Dickens.
I would start with Dickens because he is so entertaining once you get used to the language.
David Copperfield, incredibly entertaining.
Belikhaus, incredibly entertaining.
You know, he just wrote really fun books.
And you could start with a Christmas Carol, which is entertaining and short.
And once you get used to the kind of Victorian language, it really starts to roll pretty easily.
You started with very hard people.
Shakespeare, again, is almost writing in a foreign language.
Dostoevsky is one of the most difficult writers to read.
Tolstoy, by the way, if you read Annikarina, is a much easier writer to read.
So, you know, pick your spots.
You know, don't go to the hardest place first.
Don't go from A to Z. You know, go to B, go to harder C, you know, and start to deal with some of the great, great literature that is out there.
You know, very few great books are written.
If I had to list great books, I could probably stop at about 100.
Very few great books are written.
It is a shame to miss out on them because they were written before your time and because they're not written in immediately understandable English.
All right, one quick one from Andre.
I really like the argument you make for the moral order based on evolution, namely the eye evolved to see light because there is a thing called light.
So why is it not the same with the moral order?
Do animals have a moral order?
Why does it appear so different from ours?
What is going on here?
Do you think?
I'm sure I get deep into the weeds here by asking other questions, but why do we have a sense of the moral order?
And animals do not.
Animals have a moral order.
They have an order of good and bad.
They have an order of assignment of roles.
Who's the leader?
Who's not the leader?
What food do they want to eat?
Nietzsche talks about this quite a lot, actually.
But I think that if we consider ourselves right now, at least the pinnacle of nature, it is because we have a consciousness that can perceive morality not just through our senses and our passions, but also through reason.
And that is the excitement of being a human being.
People who think everything is reason, the kind of Kantian idea that you can reason your way to morality, are wrong.
We are a machine for feeling out the moral order.
Connection and Humility00:02:15
This is how the show began.
This is how the show can end.
We understand.
We have a connection to the God who made us in his image to the moral order that God also created.
It's a very difficult connection.
It is not an exact connection.
We can never get it exactly right, but we can always move toward it.
We have to move toward it with humility.
We have to move toward it with forgiveness.
We have to move toward it in ourselves without judging other people and condemning other people too quickly for their journey to the moral order.
Animals do not have that level of consciousness.
They just don't.
And so they have moral order in keeping with the world that they're living in.
I got to stop there, but we're back.
The new year is here, 2022.
It's going to be a really fascinating one along the way.
I hope you will stick with us and stay with us if you survive the Clavenless Week, which is, I'm giving you about, I don't know, 30% chance.
If you're here, I'll be here.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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, executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
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And our production assistant is Jacob Falash.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production, Copyright Daily Wire 2022.
John Bickley here, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief.
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