Ep. 1064 – Graveyard Spin skewers Biden’s presidency through satire, framing "President Venal" as a hypocrite mocking MLK while stoking division, then pivots to Andrew Clavin’s critique of GOP’s moral vacuum—blaming weak candidates and CRT for electoral losses. The episode weaves in a Christian reading of Macbeth, linking Lady Macbeth’s rejection of motherhood to dystopian gender ideology, before dissecting Hollywood’s DEI mandates as artistic censorship. A listener with BPD is urged to seek therapy over spiritual guilt, while Hawes’ resignation from a progressive church sparks a call for traditional worship over social activism, ending with a prophecy of faith’s revival through rejection of worldly trends. [Automatically generated summary]
In the news this week, President and venal house plant Joe Biden gave the first press conference he can remember, speaking in a White House broom closet he had convinced himself was a stadium during a Trump-style rally with actual cheering people in it instead of a small enclosed space crowded with mops and brooms that just vaguely looked like people if you kept the lights off and narrowed your eyes.
The president said he would quote, continue my work of uniting Americans with the snarling, bull Connor-like wannabe domestic terrorists who make up about 65% of this racist country's hate-filled population, unquote.
Answering questions asked by a bucket of dirty mop water in a corner of the closet, or possibly a reporter from NPR, it was difficult to tell the difference, the president said his favorite ice cream flavor was vanilla.
The last book he read was Goodnight Moon, and Russia could go ahead and invade Ukraine, as long as it wasn't one of those great big invasions, but just a little invasion where they burned down a couple of cities, killed some people, and went home, kind of like Black Lives Matter.
Russian President Vladimir Putin responded to the president while crushing a dissident's throat with his boot heel, saying, quote, this is either a reasonable president I can work with or a piece of furniture that looks like a human being.
I'm not sure which.
But while I will try to keep my invasion small, it is difficult to do anything small when you have rippling muscles like mine and can literally kill a man just by looking at him, especially if you step on his throat afterward like this, unquote.
Except for a long gurgling sound of death by strangulation.
Back in America, President Venal went on to tell mops or reporters that he had had a very successful presidency.
When one reporter asked why Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York now look like the aftermath of a train wreck or a nuclear strike with buildings in ruins, the earth blackened, and screaming people running through the smoke and flames, crying, oh, when, oh, when will Jesus or Donald Trump return to Earth to end this unbearable suffering?
The president said that was just a matter of messaging.
Winding up the press conference on a positive note, Biden gave one of his fake, vaguely nasty laughs, then leaned into the microphone with that terrifying, bug-eyed look of his and spoke in one of those bizarre whispers that just haunt your dreams for days afterward, saying, quote, wear a mask.
It's patriotic and it makes you look like those Muslim girls they have in some of these crazy countries everywhere.
And don't you just want to rip that covering off them and stick your nose in their silky black hair and make motorboat noises?
Of course you do.
We all do.
Or maybe just I do.
But when I was a younger man fighting with gangsters in the prison cell where I'd been put for marching with Martin Luther King, or maybe that's a fantasy I had, or possibly I'm just making crap up.
But in any case, how about those white women?
Are they bigots or what?
But they just smell so good.
Wait a minute.
Is this a broom closet?
Unquote.
In a later statement clarifying every remark Biden has made since 1957, White House spokeswoman Jen Pasaki said, Democrats were confident the country would be totally united as soon as the FBI finished hunting down anyone who disagreed with them.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boom.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dooky.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, the vast right-wing conspiracy known as Clavinon continues.
Let me begin by congratulating the Starbucks 350,000 employees who no longer are being held under the vax mandate since the Supreme Court overturned Biden's vaccine mandate when the Daily Wire sued them.
You don't have to thank us, but just, you know, if you want to send over a free vente half-calf lemon meringue latte with whipped cream, I'll sneak up behind Knowles and pour it down the back of his shirt.
Now we're going to talk about the hilarious first year of Joe Biden.
We will talk with the Daily Wire's own Megan Basham about some hair raising or in my case head raising stuff about the poisoning of our culture.
And I've got a lot to say about Joel Cohen's Macbeth starring Denzel Washington.
This would be a wonderful moment to go and subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcast.
Leave us a five-star review.
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And also you want to subscribe to my personal Andrew Clavin YouTube channel.
We have exclusive content there.
And if you push that little bell, we will deliver it to your house personally with a sleigh and eight tiny reindeer.
And when we leave, your silverware will also be gone.
Also, if you want to leave a comment on YouTube and it's disgusting in some moral way that really makes it just unacceptable in civilized society, we'll read it on the show because it'll fit right in.
This is from Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog.
He's a very good friend of mine, this guy.
He says, I wish Daily Wire slash Clavin would stop turning against Trump.
Don't assume that Trump voters will automatically jump to DeSantis.
I'm going to be talking about this on the show.
I'm not turning against Trump.
I just basically feel that politically, he may not be the best idea.
And I'll talk about that.
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Politicians and Mistakes00:14:56
You know, I took, I had a pilot's license for a while and I took flight lessons for many years.
And the reason it took me so long before I could take the pilot's test was because I was always moving around.
So I was never within reach of an airport and then I would move someplace where there was an airport and I'd have to start from the beginning.
And part of that time, I was living in England.
And I will tell you something about England.
At least this was true in the 90s when I lived there.
The hardest test I have ever taken in my entire life, including any test in college, any kind of test, was the driving test in England.
I mean, they were so hard on you if you made any kind of mistake, even like little mistakes, like you made a noise when you pulled up the parking brake, it had grinded, they would take points off and you would fail.
Similarly, when you trained for flying to get a pilot's license in England, it was so much tougher than American training that they would not accept in those days.
I don't know if this is true now, but they would not accept an American pilot's license in England because they thought our training was crap.
And one of the things that they did in British training that was actually illegal in America was you had to put the plane into a spin and then pull it out of the spin.
And you know what a spin is if you've ever seen the war movies, the World War I movies, where the guy gets shot down, he goes, you know, go spinning into the earth.
That's what you had to do to the plane, and then you had to pull it out.
Now, the way you pull out of a spin, and I'm going to shorten this so pilots don't write to me and say I left something out, but you know, you have to cut the speed.
But then, the most important thing is you have to, before you do anything else, you have to straighten the wings, right?
You have to straighten the wings, and then you can pull up the nose of the plane.
And this takes a certain amount of being calm, cool, and collected because the plane is going down toward the earth.
And that's what you're seeing through your windshield.
You are seeing the earth coming up at you in a circle, right?
And so, you have to first straighten out the wings and then lift up the nose, and then you can give it some throttling and get out of the stall.
Now, the problem with this is if you are in what pilots call IMC, which stands for instrument meteorological conditions.
So, that means it's cloudy or it's foggy, you can't see anything, right?
So, you're flying by your instruments.
It is very easy to feel that the wings are straight when they're not.
If you don't track your instruments, then you won't know that your wings are out of.
That's what happened to that Kennedy kid when he crashed because he didn't have an instrument rating.
If you are not reading your instruments right, you might think that your wings are fine, and then you pull up on the nose, and what happens then is you go into what's called a graveyard spin, and they call it that for exactly why that you think they call it that, because you are going to do what pilots call auger in.
And auger is not auger with a U, it's auger with an E. That's a kind of big drill that kind of screws into the ground.
You are going to go screwing right into the ground, kaboom.
If that is not a perfect double entendre metaphor for the Biden administration after a one year, I don't know what it is.
They are spinning down into the earth, but they don't know that their wings are out of alignment.
They think everything is fine, they're just going to pull up the nose, and it'll just go to fly.
And so, instead, they go on and they give Biden gives this press conference, which is all spin.
This is what he said about his administration in this moment.
This is cut five.
Did you over-promise to the American public what you could achieve in your first year in office?
And how do you plan to course correct going forward?
Why are you such an optimist?
Look, I didn't over-promise, but I have probably outperformed what anybody thought would happen.
The fact of the matter is that we're in a situation where we have made enormous progress.
He doesn't know his wings.
He's in instrument conditions and he can't read the instruments.
He doesn't know his wings are out of alignment.
He's just going to pull up on that nose and down and down he's going to go.
And remember, that reporter, some of the reporters were actually feisty.
They were actually going after him.
They're still friendly toward him, but they're going after him.
The guy didn't even mention the border.
He didn't mention the disastrous Afghanistan surrender.
There are Democrat talkers on the air, commentators on the air saying, Oh, we ended the war in Afghanistan.
And yes, they did, but they did it badly.
You can make an argument for staying in Afghanistan.
You can make an argument for leaving Afghanistan, but whatever you do, you don't do it badly.
And it was a disaster.
This is a disaster.
And this is the other thing that Biden said.
This is a guy who truly does not know his wings are out of alignment, cut six.
Around this time last year, when you were campaigning in Georgia, I think one of the things you told people was the power is literally in your hands.
You know, if voters give Democrats the House and the Senate and the presidency that all these big things can get accomplished.
And we've seen stalemate, we've seen things being stymied.
Why should folks believe you this time around?
Can you think of any other president who's done as much in one year?
Same one for me.
I'm asking you.
I'm serious.
I mean, you know, Gallup, this Gallup poll, you've probably heard about this, but they said that in the first quarter of 2021, Democrats had a nine-point advantage over Republicans.
I'm talking about registration.
People have registered as Democrats.
And it's very tough to get people to change their registration.
It stays, typically it stays very steady because it's your father's party and your father's father's party and people don't change it that much.
By the final quarter of this year, they started with a nine-point advantage.
Now Republicans have a five-point advantage.
People are getting off the Titanic.
And Biden's favorability ratings are now down to, I think, 50 people who were in the movies during his press conference.
So with all this being true, with this administration being a complete disaster, I think it's time for Republicans to start thinking about how we can lose the next presidential election, because that's what Republicans do, right?
Republicans lose stuff.
Clinton was down like this, and when the elections came, he won.
When the Democrats ran a talented young politician like Obama, they put up John McCain because old days, I remember the president.
I was with Lincoln in the present, this angry little man.
And the worst, I think, was when people were ticked off at Obama.
Everything was going badly.
All his policies weren't working.
He was, you know, you forget this.
He was really, really down because he was doing such a bad job and everybody hated Obamacare.
It's still a terrible law.
Even left-wing doctors will tell you it has screwed up the medical community, no end.
They run Mitt Romney.
People were furious about Obamacare, and they run Mitt Romney, the one Republican who had actually endorsed an Obamacare-like program when he was governor of Massachusetts.
They just did, I mean, and when Hillary Clinton, who everybody hates, you know, is just one of the worst politicians ever, who do they run against?
If you had just given it to the GOP, they would have run a guy who actually needed an exclamation point at the end of his name so you knew he was alive, you know, because they didn't want people giving him CPR.
It's like, I don't think he's breathing.
Oh, there's an exclamation point next to his name.
There's a Jeb, right?
A Jeb exclamation point.
You know, you can't believe, you cannot believe the Dullards and the kind of rhinos that the Republicans keep putting up.
So there are two ways I think you can lose the next presidential election, even if it were held tomorrow.
One is Donald Trump, and the other is not Donald Trump.
Now, I know I put that comment up there from YouTube because I know that people get ticked off at me when I say things about Donald Trump.
And all through his presidency, I voted for him twice.
I celebrated the kinds of things he was doing.
But I also did talk about the things that were flaws in him that I said I thought it was tragic that the very things that got him elected are the things that are going to make it hard for him to get reelected.
That turned out to be true.
Nobody believes me.
They think the election was stolen.
But you can just agree with me.
It saves time.
Eventually, you're going to find out.
So the thing is, you shouldn't put your faith in princes.
This is from the Bible, right?
Do not put your faith in princes.
What we are here to defend is the country.
We are here to defend the freedoms of this country, the idea of this country, which is the greatest political idea anyone has ever had.
And that's what we're defending.
And in time, in any moment, in any context, you choose the person who is best to do that from the choices that you have, right?
I mean, this was the argument I got here at the Daily Why with a lot of people who didn't want to vote for Trump the first time.
I said, look, these are our choices.
You have Hillary Clinton and you have Donald Trump.
It's an easy choice, even though you might not like Donald Trump.
If Donald Trump hadn't have won, we would not have won that suit at the Supreme Court because there were three people who weren't going to, who voted against it, who dissented in the mandate case.
And there would have been three other justices who had been appointed by Hillary Clinton.
We would not have won.
It was important.
It was important in that moment.
But you don't put your faith in principle.
This is the thing I tell my Democrat friends, because I still know a lot of Democrats.
I have agents and things that I work with who are very far left.
And I tell them the mistake you're making is not about our politicians.
You can hate our politicians.
Politicians suck.
The mistake you're making is about your politicians because your politicians also suck.
I mean, I just want to play you a cut of what Nancy Pelosi said talking about the Democrats in the House.
It's cut 29.
I say to my members on a regular basis when we gather in caucus, and as you know, sometimes it's hybrid these days, but anytime we have gathered in caucus one way, actually, virtually or hybrid, I've said to them, under this roof, figuratively or actually, is the greatest collection of intellect, integrity,
and imagination for doing the right thing for the American people.
Democrats actually believe that.
If you believe that about your politicians, you're making the same mistake that they are.
Our politicians are just politicians.
I don't care who they are.
There may be a great one comes along every now and again, a Lincoln, you know, a Washington, a Reagan.
You don't get that many.
You do not get that many.
So you want to just play the cards you're dealt on the table that you're playing at.
Now, the point of American politics, or for us, is preserving the liberties that were left to us and that were described in the Declaration and the mechanism for preserving those liberties that is the Constitution and finding ways to adapt to a changing world.
The world is going to change in terms of social relations.
It's going to change in terms of technology.
You have to adapt to a changing world, keeping our traditions in order to preserve our liberties.
You know, when you see them taking down Teddy Roosevelt, I'm not even a Teddy Roosevelt fan, but when you see him taking down his statue from in front of the Natural History Museum in New York, where he has stood as an iconic statue for years, you know that they are out to wipe our entire history and traditions away.
We are trying to preserve those traditions because we know that they feed into the freedoms that they have.
If Donald Trump is the best person in a given scenario to do that, I will vote for him every time.
And obviously, if one scenario going forward is that we wind up again with Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton, I'll still vote for Donald Trump.
I will, but I don't think that is our best thing.
And I think he will lose.
I think his moment has passed.
I think he did what he came to do.
And that's why I say I think Donald Trump would lose, but I also think not Donald Trump would lose.
And what I mean by that is if we do not learn what Donald Trump taught us, then the Republicans will lose.
If you keep putting up guys who need exclamation points next to their name because they're so dull, they're so empty of moral qualities, they're so empty of vision, so empty of passion that they cannot move the nation.
We are going to keep losing.
Donald Trump taught us that.
You have to have a moral vision.
Now, some people will laugh and say, well, Donald Trump was not always a moral man, but that's not the point.
He ran with a moral vision, like Reagan did when he said, America first, make America great.
That's a moral vision.
When he talked about the West and the traditions of the West and how we have to defend the West, that's a moral vision.
The policies, the policies come out of that.
The strong borders and the strong defense and the tax cuts to let business thrive.
All those things come out of that.
They grow out of a moral vision, but it's the moral vision that moves the people.
The people know, oh yeah, I like this policy, I like that policy, but they want to have a vision that unites them and moves them forward.
And the Republicans are really, really bad about this.
Let me show you how important a moral vision is, okay?
I will literally prove to you that moral vision counts for something.
Capitalism.
Capitalism has changed the world.
It has turned the poor who used to starve to death are now obese.
That's how rich we are, right?
Capitalism, even the social programs that the left likes are paid for by capitalism.
That's what idiots like AOC, ignoramuses like AOC don't understand.
The money has to come from somewhere.
It comes from free industrial capitalism.
Let me read you something from Steven Pinker's book, Enlightenment Now.
Steven Pinker, a stone liberal of the old kind.
And he says, industrial capitalism launched the great escape from universal poverty in the 19th century and is rescuing the rest of humankind in a great convergence in the 21st century.
I won't get into the great convergence, but he's talking about the fact that hunger is being eliminated worldwide.
Poverty is being eliminated worldwide.
Everybody's boasts.
The poorest guy in the deepest corner of darkest Africa is being lifted up by capitalism at that moment.
He says, over the same time span, this is Pinker again, communism brought the world terror, famines, purges, gulags, genocides, Chernobyl, mega-death, revolutionary wars, and North Korea-style poverty before collapsing everywhere else of its own internal contradictions.
Yet, in a recent survey, 18% of social science professors identified themselves as Marxist, and the words capitalist and free market still stick in the throats of most intellectuals.
Well, why is that?
You can see it with your eyes.
You can see the difference between now and before capitalism.
And yet, people are still Marxists.
They still follow young people or following Bernie Sanders, a guy who I literally think is mentally ill.
When you are 80 years old and you've been following the same tyrants and murders and mass murders and failures all your life, something's wrong with you.
You have to be able to learn.
He is worse than Alexandria Ecazio-Cortez because she doesn't know anything.
I mean, she just doesn't know the truth.
She's been taught what she thinks.
But this guy has had time, 80 years, to see this, and yet the children follow him.
Why?
Because Marxism has a moral vision.
It's wrong, but it is there.
It gives, it says to you, you know, that it says to you, we're going to make things fair, we're going to make things equal, we're going to keep people from being oppressed.
And of course, it does all the wrong things to get there, right?
Greed Is Good?00:15:18
It is capitalism and freedom that does actually accomplish those things more, but it has a moral vision, and the kids love it.
The kids don't know anything.
They don't know any better.
They haven't lived through the Soviet Union.
They haven't lived through Nicaragua.
They haven't lived through Cuba.
They haven't lived through China.
They haven't lived through all the times that this stupid policy has failed.
Bernie Sanders says, it'll be like Norway.
And Norway is going, we're not socialists.
And the kids don't hear because they're cheering so loudly.
They're going, yeah, Norway will be like Norway.
They just don't know, but Bernie should know.
But that moral vision is compelling.
And on the right, we have fallen into a trap of our own making.
Capitalism, and really freedom in general, uses our own selfishness and greed and desire for things to go well for us to serve the good of all.
If I want to make money, I have to build something that you want.
And you pay for that thing and you get something that you want.
And we both really get a fair deal.
And everybody gets richer and everything gets better because now I got to beat out the guy next to me by making better products and all of that stuff.
You've heard it all before.
But this creates the illusion, right, that greed is good because greed is in some way powering the engine of our improvements, right?
And that became a catchphrase during the Reagan era.
It wasn't, Reagan never said that.
Reagan would never have been so stupid to say that.
It came from a criminal, a guy named Ivan Bowski, who was a Wall Street guy who got put in prison for insider trading.
And he made a speech about it.
And then Oliver Stone satirized that speech in the famous movie Wall Street with Michael Douglas playing the hilariously named Gordon Gecko.
He's a dishonest trader who draws people in and he makes this very famous movie speech, Cut28.
Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.
Greed is right.
Greed works.
Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
Greed in all of its forms, greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will not only save Telgar paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.
So this is the kind of thing you get from Ayn Rand.
And there's a truth buried in it.
There's a truth buried in it, but it is only a little bit of a truth, and that makes it a lie, right?
That's why I'm always picking on Ayn Rand, another thing people yell at me about, but I've read almost all of Ayn Rand, and I'm telling you, she is making a major mistake.
If you get stuck on greed is good, selfishness is good, money is good because it fuels this wonderful capitalist improvement, you are making a moral error, right?
Look at the fact that the Republicans, we gave them everything.
We gave them the Senate.
We gave them the House.
We gave them the presidency.
What's the one thing they did?
They cut taxes.
You know, that does help business.
That's a good thing.
But we're also incredibly in debt, right?
You have to do other things as well.
They have no moral vision.
And whenever they try to speak morally, it's negative.
It's about the left is evil.
Gays are evil.
Transgenders are evil, whatever it is.
That's why Biden can get away with a comment like this as Cut 17.
I did not anticipate that there'd be such a stalwart effort to make sure that the most important thing was that President Biden didn't get anything done.
Think about this.
What are Republicans for?
What are they for?
They mean one thing they're for.
See, now, of course, we know we're for strong borders.
We know for lower taxes.
We know we're for freedom or for the Constitution and all that stuff.
But he can get away with that.
And that resonates with a lot of Democrats because we don't express these things as a moral vision.
We express them as individual things that are helpful, that are useful, that work.
And they do work, but they are also part of a moral vision, which we will not state because we're afraid and because our politicians suck.
And that's one of the things that Trump did.
He did do it.
And it's one of the reasons the intellectuals hated him so much because they didn't do it.
And he did.
And he was obviously a guy, like I said, with a lot of moral problems in his past.
But still, he made that case.
And all the right-wing intellectuals had failed to make it.
Greed is bad.
Greed is a sin.
Selfishness is a sin.
Why?
Well, never mind why.
They ruin your life.
Greed ruins your life.
If you live your life for money, your life is going to be drab.
If you become a consumerist, that's going to help the economy if you're always buying stuff.
But that's not a good life.
It is not a good life.
You know, Jesus said you can't serve God and money.
You can't serve both God and money.
He didn't say that because money is icky, or he didn't want you to be rich, or he didn't want you to succeed in life.
That's not why he said it.
He said it because the value of money is the value of popularity.
The value of money is the value of the world.
You do things that the world likes and the world rewards you with money.
But the world is a place that has good things and bad things in it.
So you have to decide whether you're doing the right thing.
The value have to come first.
Porn is excellent capitalism.
Porn makes a fortune.
Is it a good?
Is it a good that young boys are being addicted to porn and can't even understand a real woman's body or a real woman's personality, can't even see it anymore because of this toxin that's being pumped into their minds?
But it's making money.
It's good capitalism, right?
So it's not obviously the capitalism.
It's not the greed.
People who make cars that blow up, they hold meetings and they say, well, it'll be cheaper to pay for the lawsuits in the car than to recall all those cars and fix them.
So they let people die.
That really has happened, right?
And if you live to buy things, well, you know what it's like.
It's like drugs.
It gives you a little goose.
So this idea, it's a moral error.
We make a moral error when we think that, oh, capitalism has lifted everybody and capitalism is run by greed.
So what is it?
What is it?
When I hear a conservative say, I'm not ashamed of making money, I think, well, maybe you should.
It depends how you made it.
It really depends how you made it.
A moral vision, how do you build a moral vision?
A moral vision is based first and foremost on a proper idea of the self, a proper relationship with yourself, right?
Love your neighbor as yourself.
You don't know what that means unless you love yourself.
That's what I talk about, the great speculation.
The great speculation is that other people have a self that is as important to them as yours is to you and that both their self and yourself is as important to God.
as equally important to God.
That is what it means that we're all created equal.
Not that we're all equal in talents or skills, but that we all have a humanity that is important to God and should be important to one another.
The left's vision of the self is distorted.
One of the things COVID has taught us is how distorted their vision of the self is because they say, if you want to come out of your house and you don't want to wear a mask and you don't want to get vaccinated, you're selfish, as if you owe it to people to not live.
Don't drive your car.
That's selfish.
No, no, you want to be able to thrive.
You know, what Jesus said, see, that's the Christless Christianity of the left.
Jesus said, lose your life in order to find your life, but he said, lose your life for me, in me.
That is how you find your life.
Each of us knows that there is a God-given John or Jane that they're supposed to be that they aren't.
And when you surrender yourself to God, when you give that up to God, when you look to God's desires instead of yours, you begin to find that person.
So what do we deduce from this?
The great speculation that other people are as important to themselves as you, we deduce that women should be free so that they can make the choices that will bring that self into fruition, will move that self closer and closer to God.
We know that some of them won't do it.
And Edmund Burke talked about this.
He said, I'd rather have people do the wrong thing but not be made robots by being forced to do the right thing.
And that is what freedom is all about.
So when we are talking about the things we love, we should be talking about them from a moral point of view.
In our multi-ethnic world, right, we can't let the state choose among religions.
We can't say that, you know, other religions are worse than the true religion, Christianity, right?
We're not allowed to say that.
But as Antonin Scalia said, we can choose, the state can choose between religion and atheism.
That's an important distinction.
We can say, you know, and a religion is worshiping God.
It's not worshiping stones.
It's not burning incense.
It's not worshiping Satan in the Illinois statehouse.
They allowed them to put up a Satan statue over Christmas just to be fair.
Well, that's fair in Illinois because Satan is already running Chicago.
But no, you know, that is not the same thing.
We can support the belief in God.
We can support the love between the two sexes without being unkind to gay people or transgender people.
And we can say that human thriving and freedom and the kind of personality that can thrive and can be free is formed by a mother-father family and have government support and cheer on the procreation, you know, the creation of the human race in mother and father families.
And we can oppose racism, racism wrong.
You know, I heard Glenn Young and Glenn Youngkin is doing great.
I hate to criticize him, but he said we've got to get rid of CRT.
It's divisive.
It's not divisive.
It's racism.
It's wrong.
Let us talk in moral terms.
The capitalist system and the free system is good, not because greed is good, not because selfishness is good, but you need to be free in order to make the choices that you want.
If we don't have to condemn people to express morality, to express a moral vision, but if we don't express a moral vision, you are going to need an awful lot of exclamation points next to the names on the ballot, and they are not going anywhere, and we are going to lose.
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So I want to take a look at this speech because it really does show you what a graveyard spin this administration and unfortunately with it the country is in.
But before I do, I just want to remind you of the way the press greeted Biden after they had rigged the information flow during the election to make sure that they would get rid of Donald Trump, right?
They were going to get rid of Donald Trump.
And then they had to celebrate the clown, the obviously ancient clown that they had gotten into office.
This is cut one.
To watch Joe Biden today, it was such a stark reminder of how as a country, we do seek out whatever we think we were missing.
Whatever it is we thought we were missing in the previous president.
He is the better angel president.
Joe Biden is a forgiver.
And it's going to frustrate some Democrats at times because I think some of the, he is going to be more, he is going to want to figure out a way to put his arm around some of these folks in a way, even frankly, when they don't deserve it.
Unity the theme of the day, the theme of this inaugural ceremony, the theme of Joe Biden's presidential campaign, clearly going to be the early theme of his presidency.
He said, my whole soul is in this, bringing America together.
In the inaugural address, the beginning had a little bit of soaring rhetoric, a teeny bit at the end.
In the middle, it sounded almost like a homily.
But like a priest explaining something from the Bible or something, I'm breaking it down for you so we can all have a common language and a common understanding.
Kill me now.
He's a priest.
He's unity friendly.
Here is Joe Biden in reality, cut seven.
I ask every elected official in America, how do you want to be remembered?
At consequential moments in history, they present a choice.
Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace?
Do you want to be the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor?
Do you want to be the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?
This is the moment to decide.
And as I told you last week, this has always been who Biden is.
He's always been this nasty little man, and he's always been a bigot, and he really is a bad guy.
This is the other thing, was Trump's lies.
Remember the Washington Post, oh, thousands of lies.
Here is, what is her name?
Cecilia Vega.
I guess this is ABC during the inauguration.
He also used this moment to attempt to reclaim truth.
We just saw an outgoing president who, by count, issued more than 33, some odd thousand assaults on the truths, myths, truths, and this was about taking truth and reclaiming facts, George.
I mean, Trump spoke in hyperboles, but he himself said, I speak in hyperboles to express the truth.
And that was very, very often true.
Here's a montage Sean Hannity made of just this one press conference, The Lies In It.
This is cut three.
Why are you trying so hard in your first year to pull the country so far to the left?
Well, I'm not.
If you notice, I haven't attacked anybody publicly, any senator, any congressman.
My Build Back Better plan will address the biggest cost of working families face every day.
And it will do all this without raising a single penny in taxes on people making under $400,000 a year.
And for the first time in a long time, this country's working people actually got a raise.
We've seen record job creation, record economic growth in the past year.
Anybody listen to the speech?
I did not say that there were going to be a George Wallace or a Bull Connor.
You know, one of the clues, by the way, that your moral vision is wrong is when you have to distort reality to defend it.
I mean, you know, obviously, reality can be a little bit fuzzy sometimes, and sometimes you're not sure where reality lies.
That's true for every single human being.
But when you're absolutely lying and distorting reality and saying, I didn't say what I said and I didn't do what I did, that's a hint that your moral vision may be wrong.
I mean, that you're operating against the actual morality that you think you're expressing.
The rest of the press conference was a combination clown show and train wreck.
It was if clowns were driving a train and they crashed the train and then there were just a bunch of clowns running around in the wreckage.
Negotiating With Putin00:10:39
The big one, obviously, was this crisis with Putin, who's amassed over 100,000 troops on the border of the Ukraine, and they're negotiating, trying to see if they can get him not to invade Ukraine.
And this was what Putin said.
This is Cut 16.
That's what Biden said, this is Cut 16.
Russia will be held accountable if it invades.
And it depends on what it does.
It's one thing if it's a minor incursion, and then we end up having to fight about what to do and not do, et cetera.
But if they actually do what they're capable of doing with the force amassed on the border, it is going to be a disaster for Russia if they further engrate you.
I wanted to follow up briefly on a question asked by Bloomberg.
You said that Russia would be held accountable if it invades, and it depends on what it does.
Are you saying that a minor incursion by Russia into Ukrainian territory would not lead to the sanctions that you have threatened?
Or are you effectively giving Putin permission to make a small incursion into the country?
Good question.
That's how it did sound, didn't it?
Give him every chance.
He can't get out of it.
You know, the next day he's trying to, what Brett Baer on Special Report always calls cleanup on aisle four.
They're trying to clean it up.
Biden comes out and says, oh, you know, like the three stooges, I'll mortalize him.
You know, if he even thinks about invading, I'll mortalize him.
You know, Ninjin Pisaki says this.
I can assure you that our allies and partners know exactly what the president's position is.
They knew what it was yesterday.
They knew during the press conference.
They knew after the press conference because we have been engaged closely and working in lockstep with them for weeks on the rising military incursion or threat posed by Russia.
Say they know exactly where they stand.
They always have, and they certainly do today.
And meanwhile, the president of Ukraine is tweeting, no, you know, there are no minor incursions.
They'll kill us.
They're coming in.
So, you know, I knew this story, but I was reminded of it watching Hugh Hewitt on Special Report.
He brought it up in the 1950s when the Cold War is 1950 exactly.
I think the Cold War is starting.
It's just getting started.
And Truman's Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, made a famous speech at the press club about this Cold War.
And he said, you know, we have a defensive perimeter that the U.S. will defend if it's attacked.
And it runs through Japan and the Philippines.
And he didn't mention Korea.
And six months later, China invaded Korea because if we're not going to defend it, why shouldn't they invade it?
And that's the start of the Korean War.
You know, Eisenhower made hay out of this, but he had a point.
Now, Putin, Putin is a mastermind.
He's a criminal mastermind.
I really hate it on the right when people say, why are we all down on Putin?
We're down on Putin because he's a monster.
He uses nerve gas on his critics.
He assassinates journalists in other countries.
It stirs up anti-Semitism.
He's a bigot.
And he's a tyrant.
He's a czar.
He's a czar.
But he's also a mastermind.
He is a brilliant, brilliant player on the field, right?
And nobody knows what his motives are at any given moment.
And he makes sure that that's true.
So some people think he's going after the Ukraine because it bolsters his popularity at home because Russia feels very humiliated by the fall of the Soviet Union.
And not only did they fall, did the Soviet Union fall, but they fell.
I mean, their GDP is like Spain's at this point.
I mean, it's nothing.
And so they fell as a world power, and they feel humiliated.
And when just like the Germans did after World War I, that's what gave Hitler so much power.
And so Putin is kind of going by that playbook.
Hitler knew that the West did not want to go back to war after the trauma of World War I.
And so he knew he could push them and push them and push them.
And they didn't have the guts to stand up.
Putin knows the same thing.
Putin is no Hitler.
I don't believe he's as bad as Hitler, but he is playing that exact same game.
There's also the fact that Ukraine, he has said that the Ukrainians are Russians, that we are the same people.
And the Ukraine wants to go West, young man.
The Ukraine wants to become free.
They believe in democracy.
They want to be part of NATO.
And he's trying to say you can't take them into NATO.
These are his negotiating points.
He's negotiating.
He's got a million points.
So obviously the negotiations don't mean anything to him.
If we wanted to stop them, if we wanted to stop them, we would do the exact opposite of what this goofball president of ours is doing.
We would basically ramp up our energy production so that Europe does not become dependent on Russia, which is what's going to happen if they open up this new pipeline.
And we would say no to the pipeline.
We say no to our pipelines, but not to his pipeline.
It makes no sense.
And now we're in a situation where we are really in trouble because if he marches in there, I don't think we're going to go to war with him.
And I think, you know, it's one of those things.
You never know with going to war whether you're defending Belgium or stopping Hitler.
You know, you don't know whether it's Belgium or Poland because they defended Belgium and all of Europe died and they didn't defend Czechoslovakia and basically all of Europe died again.
So we never know when we should go on, but this is an important, important error.
And it's not funny.
It is not funny.
This guy, Putin, knows exactly what he's doing and Biden has no clue what he's doing.
And that's a very, very dangerous thing.
And people, you know, they say that people were taken by surprise.
You know, here's the other thing.
They hit Donald Trump on Russia all the time because Trump kept saying, you know, Putin and I get along, that's a good thing.
They hit him on this all the time.
Oh, he's in league with Putin.
This is worse.
This is much worse than anything, anything Trump did.
And Trump did all the things that he needed to do to hurt Putin.
He ramped up energy production.
He went into Europe and he said, you know, you've got to keep your alliances with us, not with them.
He did all the right things, even though, you know, Trump had a big mouth and he didn't always say what he was supposed to say.
Then his other big goof was on this, was on the elections.
He was asked whether the elections, you know, because he made this big fuss about this lie, this lie that Republicans were trying to keep minorities from voting, which is just a lie.
And then he was asked whether that means the elections won't be legitimate.
Here's cut 12.
Speaking of voting rights legislation, if this isn't passed, do you still believe the upcoming election will be fairly conducted and its results will be legitimate?
Well, it all depends on Whether or not we're able to make the case to the American people that some of this is being set up to try to alter the outcome of the election.
They gave him a chance.
They gave him a chance to take this back, by the way, because the press was still friendly to him, even though they're getting a little bit feisty, but they're almost like journalists now.
That's a little too much.
Here's cut 12.
13.
I'm sorry.
They gave him another chance.
Do you think that they would in any way be illegitimate?
Oh, yeah, I think it easily be illegitimate.
Imagine if, in fact, Trump has succeeded in convincing Pence to not count the votes.
Imagine if.
In regards to 2022, sir, the midterm.
Well, 2022.
I mean, imagine if those attempts to say that the count was not legit.
You have to recount it, or we're not going to count.
We're going to discard the following votes.
I mean, sure.
I'm not saying it's going to be legit.
The increase in the prospect of being illegitimate is in direct proportion to us not being able to get these reforms passed.
Once again, Jen Pasaki comes up to clean up on aisle four.
And just to summarize what she said, she basically couldn't get out of it.
There's no way out of it because they're still pushing this idea that Republicans, evil Republicans are destroying the electoral system.
They can't get out of what he said.
So now you've got he's appeasing Russia.
He's telling Russia that they can invade Ukraine just a little bit.
You can invade a little bit.
So they're giving Ukraine to Putin.
So that was the big point about Trump.
And now they're saying the elections could be illegitimate.
We just got through the horrible, tragic memorial of January 6th, the tragic, horrible, it was like the Civil War and the Holocaust rolled together just for AOC, just for Alexandria Cashmill-Cortex herself.
It was like living through the entire Holocaust while the Civil War was happening because Donald Trump was so evil as to question the outcome of the election.
He's doing the same thing.
He's doing the same thing.
I mean, every single thing, and oh, how divisive and how the rhetoric, the comportment.
I mean, this is something I hit Trump for, the comportment, the way he spoke and all this stuff.
But Donald Trump never said all the American people who disagree with me are Jim Crow 2.0.
He never said that.
He was rude to people who deserved respect and all people deserve respect.
And he was a bad statesman.
That's my big problem with him.
He lost things.
He lost the repeal of Obamacare because he was unkind to John McCain, whatever you think.
That's just bad politics.
It doesn't matter whether John McCain deserved it or not.
It's still bad politics.
But he never came out and insulted the American people at the level this guy does.
So all of this stuff, and remember, they bragged about rigging this election.
This is not just me saying they stole the election.
I'm not saying that.
I'm saying they rigged the election by keeping the Hunter Biden story off Twitter and keeping it off the air, keeping all these stories away, covering Joe Biden, who remember was hiding in his cellar, covering him like he was an actual viable candidate.
They did all this stuff, and now they're left with a guy who is doing worse things than Donald Trump.
There's just no question about it.
So this is why I always say to Democrats, if you just treated your own politicians like you treat our politicians, you'd be a lot closer to the truth.
I think that's true of us too.
We should treat all politicians with suspicion.
We should treat all politicians with suspicion.
You know, the left gets into power because of their moral vision, and then they lose because their programs don't work.
This is the thing.
This is why he can't fix the wings.
This is why he's in the graveyard spin, because they cannot accept that their programs do not work.
And that's why they get voted out, because the programs ruin everything.
But we don't get voted in and we get voted out because we don't express a moral vision and we have one.
It's a little bit more complicated.
It's a little bit more difficult to understand.
But we have to begin to learn how to speak in moral terms if we want to take this country back.
And boy, oh boy, we better take this country back.
Moral Vision Needed00:06:28
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So today I want to talk about one of my favorite plays by some guy named William Shakespeare, Macbeth.
This is a new movie directed and written by Joel Cohen or rewritten by Joel Cohen, starring Denzel Washington as Macbeth and Frances McDorman, Cohen's wife, as Lady Macbeth.
Before I get into it, you know, I'm going to do this from time to time because you told me to.
You, the audience, told me to.
I want to plug the book that's coming out in April and ask you, if you're interested, if you would please go on and pre-order it, which will help me get more orders.
The book is called The Truth and Beauty, a fantastic title, no matter what Ben Shapiro says.
And it's available for pre-order.
And it's about the Romantic poets and how reading the Romantic poets can inform the way you read the Gospels, can actually change the way you understand the words of Jesus Christ.
And the reason I mention it here is because many of the ideas that come into these cultural segments come from the things that are in this book.
And so if you like these cultural sentences, these cultural segments, you're going to really like the truth and beauty.
I just, just now, just this moment, I got a letter from the editor at Zondervan, actually is the publisher of Zondervan, telling me that the Barnes ⁇ Noble representative read it and wrote him a fan letter, which almost never happens.
He said this book is unique and it delivers large on Clavin's brilliant thought processes.
And that's pretty good from Barnes and Noble.
So please go on and pre-order The Truth and Beauty if you would.
And like I said, a lot of the things I'm going to be talking about originate in this book.
Macbeth, it's a tremendous film.
And Denzel Washington, who I've always thought was the best movie star actor we had, not the best actor we had, who may be like Anthony Hopkins possibly.
But I always thought he was the best movie star who was also an actor.
And he outdoes himself.
He just goes beyond anything I've ever seen him do on this.
He is Francis McNorman, a sensational actress, does a sensational job as Lady Macbeth, but Denzel blows this thing away.
He was in another Shakespeare, one of my other favorite Shakespeare, my favorite Shakespeare movie.
This may be up there now, but Henry V by Kevin Branag, but Kevin Branag also made much ado about nothing.
And Denzel is in that too and does a good job, but not like this.
I mean, obviously the depth of his part and that was not anywhere near as big.
This is just, he speaks beautifully.
His language is clearer than I've ever heard it be before.
His understanding of the part is very, very deep.
There are some brilliant touches by Cohn as well.
You know, he uses this one character, Ross.
Somebody else did this in an older movie, but he uses him as a kind of mysterious historical figure who actually makes the action of the play go on beyond the play itself.
But his greatest innovation in this is that he makes the three witches who are the servants of the devil, he makes them played by one actress who sometimes comes together as one person and sometimes divides into three people.
So we're reminded of the Trinity, that they are the opposite of the Trinity.
And I've talked about Macbeth before, and I'm not going to go over it before, just to touch on the fact that Macbeth is about a man who detaches himself from the moral order.
And because he detaches himself from the moral order, this supernatural level of meaning that means that torturing a child is bad and giving charity is good that we all attach, that we should attach ourselves to, because he detaches it, life becomes meaningless to him.
And he makes this famous speech, the tomorrow, tomorrow speech.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.
Out.
Out with candle.
Life is but a walking shadow.
A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.
It is a tale told by an idiot.
Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
And of course, and I've talked about this before, and this is also something I cover at length in the Truth and Beauty.
This speech, this famous nihilistic speech, makes no sense because he is, in fact, a player strutting and fretting on the stage.
He is delivering a meaning into the play, and he's saying the meaning of life is that life is meaningless, which is a nonsense.
Nihilism is a nonsense.
It is a thing he has done to himself by making choices.
The play starts with the witches, the witches saying fair is foul and foul is fair, that the morality of the world has become reversed, possibly through sin.
They don't say that, but that's possibly what he means.
And Macbeth enters the play.
His first line is, he's coming from a battle which he has won.
And he says, so foul and fair a day I have not seen.
So there's a choice.
There's a choice that can be made between foul and fair.
And he is going to make that choice, make a moral choice.
And in Macbeth, and again, this is in the Truth and Beauty at length.
I talk about this at length.
Source Of Moral Choice00:12:46
The source of that moral choice comes from women's bodies.
Now, that seems like a strange thing to say.
I'll tell you a funny, quick, funny story.
I sent out the Truth and Beauty 4 blurbs for endorsements.
They'd go on the cover, you know, this is a wonderful book, and got some wonderful endorsements from some intellectuals I respect very highly, including Ben Shapiro, but excellent endorsements.
But one famous Catholic guy would not endorse it, wrote me a very sweet, lovely letter, not mean at all, but he said he couldn't endorse it because it was heretical about the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Because in the book, I point out that in scripture, it's very hard to make the case that Mary was a perennial virgin, right?
And what I revere about Mary is that I don't think she was a perennial virgin.
I think she performed this miracle of giving birth in her virginity and then became a wife and had other children.
And that means that she was a woman.
And that's, to me, so much more beautiful.
You know, I was in the National Gallery in D.C. the other day, and I was looking at the pictures of the Madonna one after another, each one with a different face, because each one was a different model.
And you could see that they were real people because they had real human faces.
They were brilliantly painted models, and the effect of watching one after another was to understand that each woman in herself has the Madonna in her and is in some way the Madonna.
And Mary was, in fact, the Madonna.
And that is a beautiful, beautiful thing to see.
And as you go through the gallery and you see the Renaissance move on, suddenly they begin painting classical subjects and there's a great deal of nudity and women's sexual beauty comes across in this in those paintings.
But the thing about that is, if that's all you see of a woman, then a woman's body is simply about men.
It is simply about men's reactions to her.
Whereas a woman who has given birth and who is feeding a child out of her body has gone beyond her relationship with men to her relationship with creation, which actually brings that Madonna aspect of women into play.
Healthy men love women's bodies both as attracting them, but also as this incredible machine of creation that is in part a godly thing.
And mothers, as I've talked about this before, but it's worth going back.
They do more than create bodies.
They create minds and souls through their interaction.
The mirror neurons in the baby's mind are not separate.
And a baby is not an individual until it has interacted with its mother, hopefully in love.
And this is one of the things that Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, the poet talked about, that love helps create a human being who can interact with creation, can interact with creation in alliance with what Wordsworth calls the one great mind, with God.
And so woman just creates this connection to the moral order in nature.
And she is also, which is a collaboration with God.
We don't say, oh, you know, like, I have a man's body, but now I'm a woman because I feel like a woman.
No, we say, I have a man's body.
That creates certain moral ideas in me and certain moral responsibilities in me.
And then you start to play out that string.
So you're in collaboration with reality all the time.
That's how you get to morality.
That's how you get to a moral vision, not on your own, not the way you feel, not whether you care or not, not whether you're happy to do it.
You do it by reasoning and feeling your way in a relationship with God and with God's creation.
We're men and women.
We can't change that, but we have latitude in what kinds of men and women we become.
So just as the three witches are the mirror image, the evil image of the Trinity, Macbeth's marriage is the mirror image of creation.
In creation, God takes woman out of man to create blood, flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone in order to give him companionship, in order to give him an other self that he can relate to, which creates the moral world.
In that relationship, that one relationship, the only human relationship there is, that is where the moral world on earth is created.
Morality is about the way we treat each other.
Lady Macbeth fears that her husband is not man enough to kill his way to the throne, to murder his way to the throne.
And she says, you know, he's too full of the milk of human kindness.
Now, this is cut 25, and before Macbeth comes home, where she's going to convince him to do the murder, she says, unsex me here.
So listen to this speech, Francis McNorman.
Come, you spirits, attend on mortal thoughts.
Unsex me here and fill me from the crown to the toe top full of direst cruelty.
Make thick my blood.
Stop up the access and passage to remorse.
That no compunctuous visitings of nature shake my felt purpose, nor keep peace between the effect and dead.
Come to my woman's breasts and take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers.
Wherever in your sightless substances, you wait on nature's mischief.
So this very, very physical thing, right?
Because even though life in some sense is allegorical, and that is that we, our lives are physical, but there is this supernatural meaning that we are actually playing out in life.
There's no separating the meaning from the life.
There's no separating the flesh from the spirit.
It is all one thing.
This is good Christian theology.
It is all flesh.
You're not a little can with a ghost inside.
You are actually an expression of spirit.
Your body is like the word that expresses the idea.
You cannot express the idea without the word.
So the way you live matters.
And this is what Christianity is.
It is a way of living.
It is a way of making that connection with the supernatural world.
And so she is trying to take that out of her nature.
Turn the milk in my breast, which is made for nurturance, which is made for life, turn it into gall.
And notice she's talking to the spirits that tend on mortal thought.
She is saying there is this other world, this invisible world, but it has to act on the flesh.
This is a world filled with spiritual meaning, but she's replacing the better angels of our nature with the bad angels of our nature to get rid of what she calls a natural remorse.
Shakespeare is saying that there is a natural connection to this, that we have, we are given a moral mind.
This is one of the things, this is a very important point.
The philosopher Kant makes this point, that scripture would not work.
Everybody says, well, it's in scripture.
There it is right there.
The morals are right there in scripture.
Scripture wouldn't work if we didn't recognize morality when we saw it, right?
There are things in scripture that we explain away.
If you take them absolutely literally, they would make no sense.
But we understand that there's an interchange between us and God, that even when God communicates with us, we are part of that communication.
And later, Macbeth comes home and he's already said, all right, I'm going to kill the king.
But then he talks to the king again and the king's kind of a nice guy and he says, you know what, I'm not going to do this.
You know, he's going to promote me.
And if the witches have predicted that I'll become king, but if chance is going to make me king, let chance make me king.
And Lady Macbeth immediately, and this is what's the opposite of creation, she immediately starts to bring him into her realm instead of separating from him as she does as the woman does in the Garden of Eden and becoming his companion and the mirror of himself and the beginning of moral relations.
Here's that interchange between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.
I dare do all that may become a man who dares do more is none.
What beast was then made to break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you are a man.
And to be more than what you were, you would be so much more the man.
I have given suck.
I know how tender it is to love the babe that milks me.
I would, while it was smiling in my face, have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums and dashed the brains out.
Had I so sworn as you had done to this.
That's pretty powerful stuff.
I have given suck, and I would take the baby from my breast and dash his brains out if I had given my word as you have given your word to kill the king.
So we know that Lady Macbeth has had a child, and one of the great mysteries in literature is we don't know where that child is.
We don't know whether he died, which would be an interesting psychological idea.
Is that why she feels, is that why she feels so bitter about her womanhood?
Is it because her child has died that she feels cheated, that she feels she poured her love into this creature and it was taken away and now she does not want to be a woman anymore.
She wants the milk of her breast to turn to gall.
We just don't know.
We don't know the answer to that question, but it is, you know, maybe that's what's destroyed her heart.
But the idea, she doesn't want to turn Macbeth into a man.
What she wants to do is turn herself into a woman, a femininity-less woman, and she wants to turn him into the same thing.
It is the opposite of creation.
The creation of woman is supposed to, it makes a man out of a man, right?
Because a man is nothing without comparing himself to a woman, right?
If you don't have those two things, then you're just something.
You're just human.
But it is the separation, this beautiful separation into two sexes that she is putting an end to.
Macbeth is driven mad by the idea.
The children in Macbeth are very important.
I mean, he's driven mad by the idea that Banquo's child, the witches predict that Banquo's child will inherit the crown.
So the crown is useless to him if he can't pass it on.
And this is another reason that we wonder what happened to Lady Macbeth's child.
And he then starts to murder children.
One of the scenes, I mean, it actually, in this film, actually brought me to tears.
This scene was so powerful that he actually wipes out one of the characters.
I don't want to give too much away, but it's a famous play.
He wipes out one of the characters' children, which then empowers that character to come after Macbeth.
And finally, the witches predict that he will be safe because no man born of woman, no man born of woman can kill him.
But the character who finally comes after him was delivered by Cesarean, so he wasn't born of woman.
He was taken out of woman.
So the entire thing, the entire nature of a woman's creative power, this incredible thing, generates the morality of the play and generates by taking away that creative power and taking away that womanliness, the world becomes, foul becomes fair and fair becomes foul.
Have you ever thought about the fact that if you read dystopian fiction, think about like the most famous dystopian fiction.
I won't count 1984 because that's really about politics.
But if you take Brave New World, if you take Gray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, if you take Lois Lowry's The Giver, all of them create these kind of horrible dystopian worlds.
And all of them, all of them begin with the idea that you have to do something about women giving birth.
The government has to take control of this or render it meaningless or render it impossible.
And the giver, they give people pills to kill their sexual drive.
And they only have a few women who create it.
And Brave New World, of course, they create them through machines.
It always is this birth thing that has to be taken away, taken over by the government.
And this is the world we live in today.
I just searched The Atlantic about having children.
And this Google page comes out, a world without children, The Atlantic.
What becoming a parent really does to your happiness?
It ruins your happiness.
Two reasons parents regret having kids.
Why women choose not to have children?
The left, just like the devil, is trying to separate us from this most important part of humanity.
One day they will do it.
One day you will be able to have a child in a big toaster.
And women will then cease to be women and human beings will cease to be human beings.
That's not the science we want.
That's not the science we want to support.
We want a human science.
If we do not, if we do not honor this thing in women, if we do not respect it and elevate it and support it, we will lose our humanity.
And I guarantee you it's going to happen, but it may not happen to all of us because some of us will not accept it.
That's the story of Macbeth.
And I think Macbeth is a play you can talk about endlessly, but I did want to talk about this.
And again, I'm going to ask you, please, to go on.
Rockauto.com And Beyond00:03:06
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Write Claven.
You got to say it the same way, Claven in there.
How did you hear about us box?
So they know we sent you.
That's K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no easy things.
All right, very exciting.
I want to announce the release of the final trailer for our first original production, Shut In, a gripping thriller that'll be available to stream in early February.
The film follows the story of a young mother who's barricaded inside a closet by her violent ex-husband as she's trapped inside.
She uses nothing but her voice to guide her children on the other side of the walls to safety, all while the threat of her dangerous ex looms.
Here's a clip.
Your daughter, she's very pretty.
All right, if you're interested, go to shutinfilm.com to watch the full trailer and get ready for the film's release on February 10th.
The film is exclusive to the Daily Wire.
So if you're planning on adding this terrifying thriller to your queue and want us to keep making content to combat the over-politicized mainstream entertainment streaming on major platforms, head to dailywire.com slash subscribe to become a member today.
And I don't know if you saw Matt Walsh go viral for his clip on Dr. Phil debating gender identity activists.
It was great.
Matt asked one activist to define the word woman, and it goes about how you would expect.
That's a question I would like to throw out to other members of the panel.
Actually, because just like the four-year-old can't answer, what is a girl?
Well, this is one of the problems with this left-wing gender ideology is that no one who espouses it can even tell you what these words mean.
It's like, what is a woman?
Woke Narratives Divide Industry00:15:44
Can you tell me what a woman is?
No, I can't.
Because it's not for me to say.
Womanhood looks different for everybody.
What do you define a woman as?
An adult human female.
And what does a female mean?
How do you define it?
Someone with female reproductive organs.
Okay.
Someone who's, you know, here's the thing.
When you're a female, it goes right down to your bones, your DNA.
So that's why if someone dies, we can dig up their bones 100 years from now.
We have no idea what they believed in their head, but we can tell what sex they were because it's down in, it's ingrained in every fiber of their being.
You stood up here and said trans women are women.
Yes.
Tell me what you mean.
What is a woman?
Womanhood is something that, just as Ethan explained, I cannot define because I am not myself.
You used the word.
So what did you mean when you said trans women are women if you don't know what it means?
So here's the thing.
So I do not define what a woman is because I do not identify as a woman.
Womanhood is something that is an umbrella term.
It includes people that describes what?
People who identify as a woman.
Identify as what?
As a woman.
What is that?
The response has been enormous.
Matt trended on Twitter for almost 24 hours after this clip went viral.
Matt has spoken out against transgender ideology, especially when it comes to children.
He recently became a best-selling children's author with his new book, Johnny the Walrus, about a boy who believes he's a walrus and the internet tells his mother to respect his trans walrus identity.
Johnny, the walrus sold out in 48 hours when it was released.
But don't worry, more copies are on the way.
Reserve yours now at Amazon.com.
So I wanted to talk today to Daily Wire's own Megan Basham because of an article she wrote called How Hollywood's New Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Executives are Shaping What's on Your Screens.
This is a Reader's Pass article.
So you've got to be a Reader's Pass member to get it.
But I met Megan when she interviewed me.
She was with World Magazine, a Christian outlet, and she interviewed me.
And I immediately called up the Daily Wire and said, wow, I just met this really talented young culture reporter.
And what I meant by that was that she was a good on-air personality, had obvious poise and charm.
And I thought she would do well, but I had no idea that she was a journalist at this level.
This is a terrific article, and you should get a Reader's Pass and take a look at it.
Megan, are you there?
I am here.
Thanks so much for having me.
It's a real pleasure.
It's a pleasure to talk to you again.
And I was really taken with this.
You know, I should mention, I didn't actually give you a full introduction.
I should just mention that you have a book called, what is it called?
Beside Every Successful Man.
Yeah, it's been a few years Beside Every Successful Man.
It was actually about how wives, women, moms, I stayed home for some years, can help their husbands get ahead in the workplace so that they have a little more flexibility with their life choices.
That's a big theme on the show of the importance of wives and moms and homemakers as well.
You know, there was a piece going around this week that was on Barry Weiss's substack or whatever it's called called Hollywood's New Rules by Peter Kiefer Kiefer and Peter Savodnik.
And everybody sent me this, like everybody and his mother sent me this article.
And I was laughing at it because I lived through this.
I mean, I didn't need them to send me the article.
I said, you know, I told Jenna Ellis, she sent it to me.
I said, this is like me sending you an article saying there's such a thing as a constitution.
And it was talking about the new iron fist of diversity that has entered Hollywood.
Can you describe it a little bit for people who don't know?
Well, yeah, you know, and I think when people hear that, I quoted David French in the article because he sort of represented what people think of when they hear about diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace.
They're like, oh, it's just a seminar you go to.
It's just some of this, in some cases, you know, really upsetting training, but it's just some training you have to listen to.
When you actually dig down into it, you go, no, it's not just some training.
It is now hard racial quotas.
And it's not coming from the outside.
They are now hiring DEI executives.
So then again, that stands for diversity, inclusion, equity.
So these executives are now the fastest growing title with chief in the title.
So if it's chief job title, if it's C-suite, if it's, you know, that high-level executive, they're now the fastest growing in the market.
And in the middle management, they are the second fastest growing behind vaccination specialist.
So you go, I mean, this is just worming its way into every element of corporate America, but we're also especially seeing it in Hollywood because in Hollywood, you see the immediate impact.
You go, I can tell what's happening based on what I'm seeing on my screen.
So, you know, I spoke to some people who work for various studios at Disney.
I spoke to an entertainment lawyer just trying to get a sense of, okay, so how far gone is this?
And the answer is, it's really far gone.
You know, one of the best agents I ever had retired recently because the only client, he was a hugely successful agent.
And the only client he had who was still working was me because I was being hired by like the Daily Wire and other right-wing outlets to do screenwriting.
But all his other clients who were mostly white and male were suddenly out of work despite their incredible talent.
So this is not, I mean, this is a real thing that they're telling you.
I have just one more anecdote.
I have another friend who has been forced to put a female, a black woman on his project, even though she's not going to do anything.
She's going to get credit on the film, but she's not going to do anything.
It's just for cover.
It is just, what do they call it?
Cosmetic.
So one of the points, though, about your piece is that this is not a Hollywood thing.
Hollywood is just, as you said, just the tip of the spear, but this is everywhere.
So why is it spreading so fast?
Why is corporate America so enamored of this idea?
Well, you know, one, I think they're being sold a bit of a bill of goods by some of these activist groups that are, you know, I mean, look, it's a bit of a shakedown.
They're going, either you do this or we come after you and say that you are not allies of BLM.
You are not allies of diversity.
You do not want to see black success.
So that's one thing.
They don't want that at their doorstep.
And they'll do just about anything to avoid that type of charge.
But I also think, you know, there's also some real murky dollars and cents angles to this.
If you look at how these investor groups, there's been some really interesting reporting on BlackRock and how they are pushing for if you don't meet a certain metric of showing that you care about DEI, then they will steer investors away from you.
And look, companies don't want to lose investors.
They don't want shareholders pulling out.
So, I mean, it gets really deep in the weeds and really complicated.
So, I mean, to answer just one of your question, there's that.
But I don't think it's just that.
I think you have a lot of true believers also in lower levels, and they are bullying the executive class.
And that's a little hard to understand, but you've got a lot of older guys who are like, I don't want it to be me.
I don't want to be the guy who's at the podium next, having to lose my job and make a speech about this.
Wow.
You know, I kind of wonder, too, when you talk about the economic aspect of this, there was that guy, the woke billionaire Shamath Pala.
I don't even know how to pronounce his name, but but he was on a tie.
They're very excellent.
But he was on a podcast and he said, I don't really care about the Uyghurs.
Nobody really cares about the Uyghurs.
What he was saying was, I do care about supply chain issues, climate change, America's crippled healthcare system.
But all those things actually help his bottom line, you know, to basically consolidate power, to go global, to become globalist, all of that stuff helps his bottom lines.
We're actually worrying about the Uyghurs doesn't help his bottom line because it means he can't do business in China for moral reasons.
And so it really, a lot of this kind of is being portrayed as morality, but seems to me to be dollars and cents.
Well, and I think, right, that was such a perfect illustration of what's really going on because you go, here is one of the starkest moral crises of our time.
And he doesn't see that.
But on the flip side, you go, look, I don't think anyone could argue before now that people were not interested in promoting minorities in any business, right?
I mean, Jordan Peterson had a great piece on that this week when he spoke about his reasoning for resigning from the University of Toronto.
And he said, we had done everything reasonably possible to promote minority candidates.
And I think you see that in every field.
So now you're just creating this sort of fake spectacle of, well, minorities can't get ahead.
By what metric?
There's no actual hard evidence that a minority candidate who is qualified cannot compete in any industry.
So we're creating just sort of fake narratives.
On the flip side, you have something very real.
And they're going, we don't want to talk about that because, yeah, just like his company, Disney also goes, man, we stand to lose a lot of money if we say anything negative about China.
NBA stands to lose a lot of money if they say anything negative about China.
So when it actually is a real moral question, they don't care.
You know, it really is interesting.
When you mentioned that Jordan Peterson piece, which is just a heartbreaking piece because he gives up a tenured professorship at a job he loves.
He has quit the University of Toronto where he was a tenured professor, which is one of the most valuable kind of positions you can be in because it's, you know, it's unassailable.
And he gave it up because he simply could not promise a talented white protege that he had that he would get a job, you know, anytime he would hire people.
And the other thing that he says, and being very honest, is there's a shortage.
There's a shortage of qualified, what do they call them, BIPOCs, right?
They're black, indigenous, people of color.
There you go.
Thank you very much.
I would never, it always sounds like a robot from a Star Wars film as the BIPOC, you know.
But he said there's a shortage of qualified BIPOCs who can do the job.
So they're actually hiring people who are not qualified.
The other thing about this, now you're one of the very few conservative journalists who actually does have an understanding of the culture and the understanding of certainly the arts.
There is a line from a prominent director in this Barry Weiss piece where he says the fear is that the audience stops trusting us.
They begin to see us as a community twisting ourselves into a pretzel to make every movie as woke as possible, every relationship mixed racially, every character sexually fluid, and they decide that we are telling stories set in a fantasy land instead of a world they know and live in.
And if that happens and they decide to throw themselves instead into video games 24-7, we'll lose them.
Netflix just had opened with a terrible, terrible year that has really cost them in the stock market.
Netflix has turned me into a into made me racially aware for the first time in my life in a negative way.
I never used to care who was the hero.
I like action films.
It's Wesley Snipes, Denzel Washington.
Who cares?
I never even thought of it.
But now I turn to Netflix and says the Black Lives Matter collection, I think, well, I'm not watching that, you know, because I hate those guys.
This may really hurt the bottom line in Hollywood.
It may actually destroy the film industry.
Well, I think we can show that from some really hard metrics, it is.
Like we've talked about on the Daily Wire, go read it.
What's happening with Marvel that you go, Spider-Man was the first non-overtly woke MCU production in like the last few years, and it blew everything else out of the water.
Everything that they marketed as very specifically woke, Eternals, Shang-Chi, those movies did not perform as well.
But I think, you know, having come out of the Christian world and having listened to you a lot on this topic, Andrew, I've seen a lot of bad Christian movies, right?
Because they're moralizing, they're platitudes, they're inauthentic.
And you look at this woke stuff and you go, it's the same thing, just coming from a different direction.
It's inauthentic.
It's moralizing.
It's trying to teach the audience how to be a good person rather than telling them an authentically artistic story.
You know, that's a brilliant point.
That is a really good point.
No, I hadn't actually thought of that, that actually they're making the exact same mistake and they're going to find that maybe they can make money off that niche audience, just like the Christian filmmakers do.
But they are not going to create an industry that, you know, the movie industry for many, many years was actually the American art form.
Was actually doing something that spread the American values everywhere because everybody wanted to be Gary Cooper.
Everyone wanted to, I talked, I was talking to a Danish director two days ago who was interested in a script of mine.
And he was saying, I just love the Western.
All I want to do is make Westerns.
This is the kind of thing that inspired me to be a filmmaker.
That was a great power.
They're not going to have that kind of power anymore.
They're just going to be a corporate stooges, basically.
And it's a really good point that they're falling into the same, well, because it is a religion, I guess.
You know, the other thing, you talk about this a little bit in your piece, How Hollywood's new diversity, equity, and inclusion executives are shaping what's on your screens.
And one of the things I really liked about this piece is that it broadens out the subject beyond Hollywood and it talks about all of this.
You say that there's starting to be some pushback.
Yeah.
Well, it's been interesting because you're seeing the pushback in the same sector that sort of brought this to everyone's doorstep, which is, you know, big tech, crypto, these sort of very on-the-cutting-edge industries.
So, and I also earlier last year reported on this, Coinbase, one of the very first companies, it's a crypto company, to say, we're not going to do this anymore.
We are not going to bring politics into the workplace.
We are not going to be interested in furthering your political views through this stakeholder capitalism.
We're not doing that anymore.
We're a mission-focused company, and our mission is providing crypto to the whole world.
I can't remember what their mission is, but it's something very crypto focused.
It doesn't care at all about progressive politics.
And so you've now seen that company and a few others in this very cutting-edge tech world, they've already been through it.
They've already come through the other side and gone, here are the major problems that this causes.
It causes division in the workforce.
People were spending all their time on Slack arguing about politics and not getting their jobs done.
It causes distrust among team members.
You go, I don't want to work with someone who I am afraid is always looking to be offended by slightly off phrasing that I might use or something I might say that is totally innocuous, but they've decided that there is racial intent.
Who can get their jobs done like that?
You know, I started off the show today talking about having a moral vision and being able to explain a moral vision and not just getting caught up in making money.
But one of the things about capitalism is that doing your job, doing the job that you set out to do, if it is a good job, is actually the moral thing to do.
Antonin Scalia said people would ask him what it means to be a Christian judge, and he would say it means being a really good judge.
That's what it means.
You know, if you're a Christian cook, it means making really good meals.
That's what it means.
And doing your job first and not trying to change the world is actually the best way to change the world.
One of the things in this Jordan Peterson article that really stopped me cold, and I did not know this, is Jordan finds a speech by Vladimir Putin at Memory, where they translate speeches so they don't slip by.
Healing Through Jesus Mind00:11:35
Here's what Vladimir Putin was telling people.
He says, the advocates of so-called social progress believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness.
Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead.
The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all.
It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already.
And he talks about the failures of Stalinist communism and how this is exactly, they're going down exactly the same road.
Do you think that there's a way in which our fascination with this, our kind of religious cult-like following of this, is actually hurting America in a broader way?
Is that too big a question?
Or is that a fair question given that speech?
No, I think it's absolutely hurting America in some really clear ways.
I go, look at the hostility and distrust you're seeing amongst groups now.
I go, I don't remember that.
I mean, you know, I'm a child of the 90s and I just don't remember having these discussions where people, it is not good to be a culture where people are, one group is constantly on the lookout for offense, to be offended, to be told that you should always be suspicious that something that happens to you that may be common to humanity is because of your race.
And the other side is completely terrified to have authentic conversations, to ask real questions, to how can you have a friendship with someone when you're living under this kind of fear?
Yep.
You can't.
There's no real relationship there.
It's terrible.
No, it's true.
It's also true that when it's a power thing, you know, and who wants to be friends with a guy who's always pulling a power play on you?
I mean, I know guys like this in the writing business, novelists who are black and they just, every word out of their mouth is to remind you that their life is hard because if they get in an elevator, women clutch their purses.
And my feeling is, you know, all God's children got problems.
You know, I'm not telling you mine.
Don't tell me yours.
Megan, I got to tell you something.
I'm really glad you came on.
I forgot why I called the Daily Wire after I talked to you, but I hope you will come on regularly and talk about these issues.
I think they're really important.
And I think you're doing great work.
The article is great.
It's called, again, How Hollywood's New Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Executives Are Shaping What's On Your Screens.
Good reason to get a reader's pass at Daily Wire.
Megan, thank you.
I'll talk to you again.
Thanks so much, Andrew.
So this is the moment you've all been fearing.
You know, you're guarding your troubles.
You don't want your problems to go away.
You love them.
You've gotten used to them.
They're like your children.
You just want to hold your troubles to you.
Unfortunately, you can't because you have to say goodbye to them because it is time now for the mailbag.
It is time for us to do what we have been doing in that time as every day.
A little wisdom from our vice president.
I'm going to put that over my desk, you know, because I have no idea what it means.
All right, from Anonymous, I was recently listening to a sermon and the pastor was talking about how we shouldn't ask God for healing, but instead we should thank him that he has already healed us.
And if we truly believe that he already has, that we will be healed.
He also mentioned in the Bible it says that by his stripes you are healed, not by his stripes you will be healed.
So all we have to do is declare that God will do it and he will because he wants what is best for us and is just waiting for us to say it.
I'm curious about how you feel about this as I worry that it seems a little too similar to the New Age manifestation mantra and prayers.
It is.
I think it's nonsense.
I got to be honest with you.
You know, if you think about it for a minute, like a lot of times, a lot of pastors and priests, I find, speak as if God isn't real.
I mean, God is real.
God is real.
And he is, you know, we are created in his image.
So there's some kind of communication available between us.
You think you're going to like trick him?
You think he's saying, ah, you know, you didn't say X, you said Y.
So sorry, you know, you don't get your bread.
You didn't put it this way.
You didn't put it that way.
I mean, would you treat somebody like that?
I mean, Jesus compares God to a father and says, you yourselves who are wicked, give your children good things.
Do you think God is going to give you, if your, you know, your child asks for bread, would you give him a stone?
So, you know, you think God is going to sit there.
It just doesn't make sense that God is going to sit there and say, ah, you know, he asked to be healed.
He didn't thank me for healing him.
Sorry.
You know, you're screwed.
It's ridiculous.
You know, when I first started to pray, I stumbled into praying, as I tell in my memoir.
And I thought, like, well, I better not lie about my motives because obviously you're trying to look to God like you're a good person, but really you just want him to give you the car, the brand new, you know, you get a car, you get a car, you know, you just want to get the good things out of life.
And so I would start to explain that I understood that my motives were selfish and all those prayers would go on forever before I ever got to the point.
And finally, I thought, you know, it's just possible that God knows every single thing I've ever thought, you know, and possibly what I will think.
I don't have to explain to him that I know that I'm, you know, selfish and that I know that I'm a sinful person.
I just have to talk to him.
And that really helped what they call my prayer life.
So don't play games.
Go talk to God.
Go talk to God and pray to him.
Tell him what you need.
Tell him what you fear.
Tell him what you love.
The one thing that I would say that I would say to myself is don't forget to be thankful because that reminds you.
It's more important almost to you than it is to him.
It's not like you have to thank him or he's going to hit you with a bolt of lightning.
It's that when you thank God, you start to realize what God has done for you, including giving you a life, which is a very beautiful gift.
And you should remember that.
I mean, I think it's just common decency to thank someone who has given you something like life and the universe for it.
But other than that, don't play games.
Don't play games.
Just say your prayers.
From John, in August, I admitted myself to the hospital after my ninth attempt at suicide failed.
I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.
I can go from happy to suicidal in moments.
I desperately wish to change.
I want to get married and start a family.
But the thought that I might kill myself and abandon my wife and children terrifies me.
The shame I feel over my sins is unbearable.
I know in my head that Jesus paid in full the punishment as people deserve and offer forgiveness to all who turn to him and believe, but I can't bring myself to believe in my heart that he's saved a wretch like me.
I fear that if I don't fundamentally change soon, I'll be stuck doubting and I'll very likely end up.
So I'm not sure.
I've got a lot of letters like this from a single guy, and maybe this guy is sending me this letter under a pseudonym.
This thing about the Jesus and I can't accept, that's all a dodge.
You don't have a theological problem.
You have a psychological problem.
Personality disorders, borderline personality disorders are very, very difficult to deal with.
They're very painful.
They usually come from, I think they originate in some kind of horrific trauma in your life.
You're not having problems accepting God's forgiveness.
You're having problems because you're either not getting proper treatment or not taking the treatment you're being given.
Some drugs may help on this.
I mean, I wouldn't say that, except for borderline personality, is so incredibly intractable that you want to clear it.
There is a new kind of therapy that I was just reading about.
It's called dialectical behavior therapy, and it was invented by a lady at the University of Washington.
I kind of like this because it includes counseling and group training sessions and skills like meditative skills that help you to deal with the problems that you've got.
But don't confuse, don't obsess over the religious aspects of that.
You can't see the religious aspects clearly because the psychological aspects are in the way.
What God wants you to do is he wants you to treat this personality disorder, which is killing you, and it might well kill you if you leave it untreated.
Stop worrying about your sins.
That's not what this is about.
This is about a mental disorder you have.
Go to a good doctor, go to a good therapist and deal with this.
And don't get off if they tell you that you need drugs in this particular case.
Don't get off and do what you have to do.
From Hawes, dear ageless and sleepless keeper of the Clavenless Weekend.
I've listened to your show for about four years.
It's given me great comic relief during the fall of the Republic.
I'm a young Christian in the Reformed Church and have been very discouraged by the Protestant Church's strange desire to please the progressive left in areas of racial essentialism and equity, not equality, after serving on a draconate, diaconate, I'm sorry, for almost two years trying to resist the guilt-driven push of racial essentialism and Christian practice.
I felt convicted to resign and find a more sane place of worship.
Do you see the church battling this neo-racism in a meaningful way in the future?
I would love your take on this.
Well, here's the thing.
It's God's church.
Eventually, whether the church that stands now is going to do what has to be done, because this is destroying the church.
It is the end of the church.
I mean, this nonsense has nothing to do with Christianity, has nothing to do with Christian worship.
But leaders, because it's God's church, when a church abandons Christianity, a church will arise that reclaims Christianity because God's church is not going to go away.
It's going to be here till the end of time.
It's going to require leadership.
Maybe you're one of the leaders.
I mean, you've had the integrity to leave.
I think that's the right thing to do.
And it may mean abandoning some beloved traditions.
Because one of the things about, you know, I personally think, I personally think we have to return to a church that focuses on the Mass, which is a ritual that is a spiritual psychological practice of seeing God's body in matter, seeing the holiness of the material world, making that essential connection.
It's a rite and it's a ritual.
When a ritual can become idolatrous, you can think that the Mass is more than it is, but I think it's an important way of seeing that teaches you how to see.
And, you know, it's like marriage, as marriage has become less binding and less holy and less God-directed, weddings have become spectacular.
And so people can make a fetish out of the Mass because they're no longer trying to see the thing that's there because they don't believe in God.
But the point of Christianity is to give you a Jesus mind.
And that's what charity is about.
That's what loving your neighbor is about.
That's what the Mass is about.
That's what the rituals should be about.
It is about teaching you how to have a Jesus mind because that will give you an abundant life and joy.
It will give you those things.
I guarantee it because I have had the experience.
I'm not saying I have a Jesus mind.
I'm saying I have more of a Jesus mind than I did before I became a Christian.
And every step I take toward that mind gives me more joy and more life in abundance.
And so that's what you want to do.
You want to get to that place.
And that's what the church should be doing.
And you do that through ritual and meditation and praxis like charity and service and through prayer.
And that's what the church should be about.
It's not here to make the world a better place.
There is nowhere, nowhere in scripture, nowhere in scripture that Jesus says, make the world a better place.
What he tells you is the world is going to suck.
The world is going to give you problems.
The world is going to hate you.
The world may even kill you for my sake.
But I have overcome the world.
A church that is preaching Black Lives Matter or gay pride or anything else is not overcoming the world, not because those things are right or wrong.
It has nothing to do with that.
It is simply accepting the world and saying that their mission is to make the world a better place and be relevant.
It's a power thing.
It is because people are losing their faith that the church is desperately trying to become relevant and people are losing their faith because the church is becoming relevant.
So it's a vicious circle.
You could almost say it's a graveyard spin.
Church's Vicious Circle00:01:59
It is going like down.
It is augering in to the ground because they do not correct their way.
The minute the church says, no, we're not about the world.
We are about something other than the world, something bigger than the world, something that has overcome the world, namely giving you a mind like the person who created you, like the God who created you.
The minute it says that, people will start flocking back and the church will heal.
May happen in Africa.
It may not happen here.
It may happen in some other place, but it will happen because it's God's church.
I got to stop there.
And that means that you yourself are now being plunged into an unfathomable darkness that is called the Clavenless Week.
There'll be wailing, gnashing of teeth, fires, glad.
It's like crawling over glass just to get to the next week.
Are you going to make it?
Probably not.
But if you do, we will be here again with the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm Andrew Klavan.
Hey, if you enjoyed this episode and want to spread the word, give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe too.
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The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Lisa Bacon, executive producer Jeremy Boring.
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